Life Mask (3 page)

The punch had loosened Bunbury's tongue. 'Come, Derby, haven't we shared enough days in the saddle to speak man to man? Dorset's a damn rogue; why has no one ever called him out and speared him like an eel?'

Derby didn't comment. Any grudge he'd borne against the seductive Duke of Dorset had worn off years ago. Men would always take what women didn't refuse them; Derby was a man himself, so he knew. No, the unforgivable crime had been the lovely Lady Betty Derby's, for running off with the Duke like some cheap harlot. No discretion, no dignity. For the last nine years Derby had refused to answer her maudlin letters except through his lawyers, refused to see her, even though her lodgings in Marylebone were only five minutes the wrong side of Oxford Street. The Countess's descent into invalidism had caused him a secret gratification. She lived in a sort of social twilight; she'd clung on to much of her acquaintance, especially the old rakes, but Queen Charlotte still barred her from Court and of course she'd lost her children. That generally hit women hard. It was different for men; Derby was perfectly fond of Edward, Charlotte and Elizabeth, and liked to think of them doing well up at Knowsley, but it wouldn't cause him pain not to lay eyes on them for a year at a time.

Bunbury was wagging one finger. 'But what puzzles me is for a fellow like you—still much the fresh side of forty, aren't you?'

'Thirty-four,' Derby conceded.

'Is that all?—to spend so long in thrall, in bondage, damn it, to one member of the female persuasion without the slightest reward for his efforts.'

'I can afford to wait,' said Derby. 'The company of a brilliant and beautiful lady offers other pleasures. There are many forms of
reward,
as you put it.'

'What, you mean she pays you?' asked Bunbury, innocent. 'You're a hired
cicisbeo,
kept on to remind the World of the lady's charms?'

Derby let out a roar of laughter and drained his glass to the sugary dregs. 'I don't think I'm handsome enough to get that job.'

'As a foil, then?' suggested Bunbury.

'That's more like it.
La Belle et la Bête!'

T
HE
T
HAMES
was high with melt-water and along the fashionable strip of villas at Twickenham gardens were flooding. The ten miles from Mayfair took Anne's carriage less than an hour, since the road had been improved. She drew up outside the wall of Strawberry Hill. The first glimpse through the trees of Horace Walpole's little castle always made her smile: the quatrefoil windows, spires and pinnacles, twin towers and battlements. She'd been coming to stay with her godfather since before she could walk, before she could remember; Strawberry Hill felt not so much like home as a place of perpetual holiday. 'We're here, Fidelle,' she murmured to the miniature Italian greyhound asleep in her lap.

As the courtyard already held Walpole's carriage and phaeton, Anne got down outside the gate, under the coat of arms and curious Latin motto, which she translated in her head:
The skies above the traveller change, but not the traveller.
She brushed down the cloth skirts of her travelling costume. In the courtyard a gilded angel stood in his niche; she looked through the arches into the tiny cloisters, where a blue-and-white bowl sat on a pedestal, inscribed with Mr Gray's poem on the occasion of Walpole's cat Selina drowning in it. Fidelle was the weight of a baby in Anne's arms; she stirred and scrabbled a little.

One of Walpole's footmen opened the door with a bow. The hall always reduced visitors to silence; it was the most startling space in the building, a sort of set for a Gothic novel. (Well, after all, her cousin had written the first, Anne thought, and had
The Castle of Otranto
ever been bettered in the twenty-year craze?) A single candle glimmered in a japanned lantern and the grey walls were smeared with the coloured light that came through roundels of painted glass. The wooden balustrade was a fretwork of giant flowers and, on the posts, small golden antelopes holding shields seemed to watch Anne as she climbed the steps. In a high niche on her left François Is suit of armour stood sentinel, visor down, spear ready; as a child she'd scared herself with the idea that it came to life at night. Walpole had designed Strawberry Hill to have an immemorial gloom—not melancholy, but the gloomy warmth of cathedrals,
gloomth,
as he called it. It was all pretence and
trompe l'oeil,
she knew—wallpaper painted to look like stone, papier mâché shaped like wood—but it still worked its spell on her.

In the armoury, with its pointed arches and cases of scimitars and quivers, Anne almost tripped over some workmen; the place was never free of them. She found Walpole in his favourite room, the library, in a tizzy. Tonton had jumped into the Thames, 'like one of the mad Gadarene swine,' lamented his master, then raced up the meadows through some cow-pats, run all over the house, and finally lain down and rubbed filth into the Louis XIV carpet in the library. 'Why I ever accepted such a trying legacy from my dear Madame du Deffand I cannot recall.' Walpole lay on the sofa like a shrivelled mannequin, watching his housekeeper towel down the fat black spaniel by the fire.

Anne had often wondered the same thing. 'Tonton's done worse in his youth,' she pointed out. 'That time he bit Richmond's favourite hound—'

A shaft of merriment lit up Walpole's face. 'Ah, that was different, my dear. Every dog has his day of battle. What is their life if not a struggle for ascendancy?'

'Fidelle's isn't,' she said, looking down at the tight coil of silvery grey in her lap.

'That's true, she's a perfect gentlewoman. But how these creatures tyrannise over our hearts! Madame du Deffand used to tell a good story about a lady whose poodle bit a piece out of a gentleman's leg and ate it.'

Anne had heard this one before, but still smiled.

Walpole's face was a mask of anxiety. 'The lady cried, "I do hope it won't make her sick!'"

His delivery was impeccable. Her cousin would have brought the house down at Drury Lane, Anne thought, if his destiny had ever required him to earn a living. He'd been pleasing enough, in his youth, as the portraits on the walls proved, even if by now he was a morsel of a man with a monkey's face, all skin and nose. He wore the limp remains of his own hair, curled into little old-fashioned rolls at the sides, with a queue at the back.

'There,' said the housekeeper, releasing the spaniel.

'But is he quite warm and dry?'

'Quite, sir.' Margaret Young was on her knees mopping up the puddles.

'Come to Papa.' Walpole flung his arms open, but Tonton ran straight out of the door of the library to bark at the workmen. His master sighed like a lover. 'Well, at least there are no droves of visitors today to burst in upon us,' he told Anne. 'Such constant requests for tickets as I've had this winter! My toy castle is not my own. Margaret shows them round, as long as the daylight lasts; I hide in here and take the odd peep down at them through the balusters. Though it must be said that they give her a guinea apiece,' he added, watching the housekeeper carrying off the wet towels. 'She earns far more from the visitors than from me. I've a good mind to marry the woman myself,' he whispered, wriggling upright on his sofa so spasmodically that Anne thought he might dislocate something, 'to get back all the monies I've sacrificed to this silly house.'

Anne looked round at the pierced and pointed arches filled with leather volumes, the oval portraits above them, the fantastical ceiling inset with scenes of Walpole's ancestors fighting the infidels and a repeated heraldic device of a Saracen's head. (He'd always amused Anne by claiming, on no evidence, to be descended from Crusaders.) The library was choice; there were only about 7000 volumes. Out of unrepentant snobbery, he kept all those written by royal or noble authors in a bookcase of their own. Her godfather was a magpie; he collected as easily as breathing. In a locked case in the corner he kept Pope's own copy of Homer, a Second Folio Shakespeare, some obscenities that Anne had never been allowed to look at and two rare works on the marking of swans' bills. The library was full of her own work: an early bust of the young Paris, and the terracotta models of her masks of Thames and Isis for the bridge at Henley, as well as one of Dick Cosway's sketches of her at work.

'Speaking of monies,' she said, 'Richmond's having to spend very high on our theatre.'

'Ah, yes, you never told me who else is involved in
The Way to Keep Him,
apart from Farren's unalterable Earl? Faithful as the east wind, Derby is, like his family motto.'

Anne looked puzzled.

'Sans changer,
don't you know. You must study your heraldry,' he scolded.

'As well as Derby, we have Dick Edgcumbe—'

'Dear fellow,' cried Walpole, 'but an insect, like myself. You'll have to pad his calves.'

'He plays Sir Brilliant Fashion; tries to force me in Act Four.'

'Politely?'

'Feebly.'

Walpole nodded in approval.

Fidelle shifted in her lap, coming undone like a sash; her tiny pointed paws chopped at the air. Anne released her and she jumped down. 'Major Arabin plays Sir Bashful Constant, who's pretending not to love his own wife, since it's out of fashion; he's a marvellous mimic of Garrick. We—Derby and I—would have loved to invite Fox to take a role, but we knew there was no point.'

Walpole was wearing a lopsided smile. 'My dear, will you never give up your hero-worship? As a Minister in Pitt's Cabinet, Richmond has to put up with constant harrying from his slovenly rake of a nephew; he shouldn't have to suffer Fox in private too.'

'Oh, come, you're not fair,' protested Anne. 'Slovenly, I'll grant you, but to my mind that's better than those gaudy costumes Fox used to sport in the '70s, with the high heels, velvet frills and blue wigs.'

Walpole snorted reminiscently.

'And he lives a very settled life with Mrs Armistead.'

Walpole pursed his dry lips. 'Since when has devoting oneself to one very shop-soiled courtesan been a domestic virtue?'

'My point is that he's hardly a rake at all these days.'

'Less of a puddle still muddies one's boots. I'd imagine Fox has no time for private theatricals, anyway.' Walpole yawned. 'Probably too busy giving his creditors the slip!'

Anne decided to change the subject. Fidelle was sniffing at Tonton's traces on the carpet. 'Come on to my lap,' Anne called. She didn't need to make a gesture; the dog leapt up her skirts.

'What a clever creature,' remarked Walpole. 'Italian greyhounds aren't noted for their intelligence, but Fidelle understands English perfectly.'

'Well, she knows
lap,
at least, and
dinner
:' Anne rubbed the narrow head with her thumb and cupped the pointed jaw.

'The two essentials of a dog's life. Now, whom have we on the distaff side of the Richmond House cast?'

'Mrs Hobart—'

'Fat as ever?' asked Walpole.

'Fatter. She keeps advising Miss Farren to eat more whey, the cheek of her! Oh, and she's got her own faro table these days, so she can fleece her friends without going out in the cold.'

'Back in the knife drawer, Miss Sharp,' cried Walpole with a shiver of enjoyment.

Anne grinned at him. 'Then there's Mrs Blouse and a Mrs Bruce—'

'Who's that?'

'You don't know her.'

'I know everyone,' he said reprovingly.

'A cousin of Lady Mary's,' Anne told him, 'from Wales.'

'Oh, well.
Wales.'

'And I forgot Sir Harry Englefield.'

'Many do,' said Walpole regretfully. 'I believe he's taken up astronomy.'

'Has he really? Where did you hear that?'

He extended one swollen-knuckled finger towards his mahogany bureau. 'I write twenty letters a day, or dictate them to Kirgate; I spin my web from Boston to St Petersburg.'

'Very well, I bow to your authority,' said Anne.

He shifted to move his right foot higher on its cushion.

'Have you the gout very badly today?' she asked.

'Of course not, my dear; the gout has me. Now let's drink some tea'—reaching for his silver bell. '
The Way to Keep Him's
a hackneyed thing, don't you find?'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Anne, who'd sat up late last night rereading it with a rapid pulse. 'Isn't Mrs Lovemore a rather splendid creature, the way she falls into melancholy and rage, and then refashions herself to win back her husband's love?'

Walpole shrugged. 'How many plays do we need about the
longueurs
of marriage? The point is proven, surely! Oh, my dear, I'm as weak as small beer today'—with a yawn that split his face.

T
HE SPRING
Season was in full flow, now, and the tiny diamond that was Mayfair (tucked between Hyde Park, Oxford Street, Bond Street and Piccadilly) was criss-crossed every night with carriages lit up like fireflies, taking their occupants to routs, drums and assemblies, ridottos of 10,000 or musical evenings for a dozen. There were alfresco breakfasts (everyone still in their furs) and calls to pay from afternoon into evening. The World watched a balloon ascent in Hyde Park, and kept an eye out for the sumptuously dressed Prince of Wales and his pink-cheeked Mrs Fitzherbert dashing by in an open phaeton with a pair of bays. Mayfair residents roamed outside their preserve only for certain purposes: the gentlemen to debates at the Lords or Commons in Westminster Palace, or to gamble at their clubs on St James's, perhaps to buy a hat at Lock's, or wine at Berry's; the ladies to shop on the Strand or admire the crocuses at Kew. And, of course, everyone drove east to attend the Opera House and the two patent theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane.

Every few days, now, the Richmond House Players (as they affected to call themselves) made their way south-east, on horseback, in sedan-chairs or carriages, from their Mayfair homes to the great house in Whitehall. Already they were experiencing that united delusion, that derangement of the senses known as theatre. On waking, or during the tedious hours it took for them to be dressed for dinner, they muttered their lines, sketched their gestures on the air. They'd never worked so hard in their lives, or felt so necessary.