Life Mask (38 page)

'Yes, what of me? As you don't know me yet, how can you guess how you should please me?'

'I know you've suffered.'

Anne narrowed her eyes at her. How could the girl have any idea—

'Being widowed so young.'

'Ah, yes.' She ducked under a low branch and turned to hold it up for Miss Berry. 'Candid. That's how you should be with me.'

The young woman nodded, as if making a note of it.

'And what's your chief pastime, as we've discussed mine already?'

'I have none. None that are meant to pass the time, that is; the time passes too quickly already,' said Miss Berry. 'Self-education is all that interests me. I'm still trying, at the advanced age of twenty-seven, to fill the dreadful gaps in knowledge left by my sporadic schooling.'

She seemed younger than that, thought Anne; there was a clean, unworldly air about her. But also wiser than her years. 'An admirable aim. So it wasn't at a tutor's knee that you read Hobbes?'

'No, it was in your cousin's library, not a fortnight ago.'

Anne laughed. 'Strawberry Hill's a treasure chest, isn't it?'

'A small but perfect paradise!'

'I'm delighted that you and your sister have the run of the place, now poor Horry is so often confined to his chair.'

'Horry?'

'My father and Mr Walpole were always great friends, they used to call each other not Horace and Henry, but Horry and Harry.'

'Were
great friends?' Miss Berry had a penetrating way of repeating a word, as if nothing could slip past her. 'But I believe your father's still alive.'

'Well, you know what advancing age does.'

'You think all friendships fade, Mrs Damer?'

The blunt question was unsettling. Could the girl read her mind? That was exactly what she'd been wondering this summer, every time she'd woken up and remembered the friend she'd so inexplicably lost; every time she'd driven past the Bow Window House on Green Street. Could affection last, could it bear one's weight, or was one better off relying entirely on one's own strength? 'In my experience,' she said a little hoarsely, 'many intimacies shrivel like daisies because of some inherent weakness, rather than the passage of time. But in the case of my father and Walpole, I'd call it a strong devotion that has lost some of its brightness. They rarely meet, these days, you see, and meeting is the lifeblood of friendship.'

'What about correspondence?' asked the girl. 'Can't two people become almost closer through a frank exchange of letters than in the shallowness of social intercourse?'

Anne looked at her hard. 'I suppose so. But my father and Walpole don't write to each other much either; I think their friendship lives on in their heads like a memory of youth. Sometimes I feel they've carried on their great intimacy through me.'

'Quite a responsibility,' said Miss Berry, nodding. 'For my poor father I think sometimes I'm my mother come back to life, to soothe and organise him. Each generation is the page on which the last one writes.'

'Whom are you quoting now?'

'No one,' said the girl, a little pink.

When the Berrys had gone home, Anne stayed on by an evening fire in the library. '
Now
you understand,' said Walpole triumphantly.

'Oh, I do, I do,' said Anne. 'I renounce all my prejudice. I should have let you introduce me the day after you'd met them.'

'My dear,' he said, seizing her hands in his. 'It's like discovering a mutual taste for some obscure branch of art.'

'Miniature still lives, on ivory,' she suggested.

'Yes, something with fruit in it!'

'Is Miss Berry—Miss Mary Berry—your favourite?' she asked, sure she knew the answer.

'Oh, I have no favourite,' he protested with a fey expression. 'The girls are equally meritorious.'

Walpole was deluding himself, Anne thought, but that was a common activity of humankind.

He leaned forward. 'I sometimes address them as my
daughters,
or even my
Rachel
and
Leah.
I'd hate to be suspected, at my age, of the affectation of playing the gallant.' He tittered. 'But I believe I'm safe from that charge, since I divide my devotion so evenly between the two. I assure you, if there were but one Berry girl I should be ashamed to be so strongly attached, but being quite in love with both my
little wives
I glory in my passion!'

Anne smiled, unsettled. She'd known his feelings for the Berrys were warm, but not that they were so flirtatious. It seemed rather bizarre, in a septuagenarian gentleman, to fix on two impoverished girls in such a besotted way. Something else was troubling her: she'd never thought of her cousin as a woman's man exactly. Womanish in some ways, yes, with his fussy habits and shrill laugh, and a great friend to women, of course. But hadn't the finest feelings of his heart been expended on friends of his own sex? Gray, the poet, for one, in their youth; and of course Anne's father. There'd never been any question of marriage for Walpole, or none that she knew of. Surely he wasn't thinking of it now, with his jokes about
little wives
? The other day he'd seemed troubled at the idea of Miss Berry having suitors; could it possibly be jealousy? Had Walpole's heart, so long wrapped up in cotton wool in his miniature castle, been won by a woman at last?

'You know,' she remarked, looking up at the painted crusaders on the ceiling, 'when I was very small and came here for summers while my parents were abroad I used to think you were my father.'

He yelped with laughter. 'Nothing is certain in this life—except that I've never begotten a child.'

'Well, I felt more yours than theirs. I had the impression that you'd given me to them to raise—'

'What lurid storybooks had you been reading?'

'—and it was a secret between us all. Every now and then you'd wink at me, or put your finger to your lips, and I'd
know!

Making her way to the red bedchamber that night, through the succession of narrow rooms crammed with
objets de virtu,
Anne thought that in some ways this was her true home—far dearer to her from her earliest childhood, far more magical, than Park Place. She tried to imagine Strawberry Hill run by a mistress, a young Mrs Walpole with brown eyes. Surely her cousin wouldn't be so defiant of the World, so reckless of propriety, as to try to marry his Elderberry? The thought choked her, somehow.

S
EPTEMBER
1790

26 North Audley Street

Being eager to leave our names at your door, Mrs Darner, I took the liberty of asking Mr Walpole where you lived. This card will tell you where you may find the undersigned, your humble servts,

Miss Berry
Miss Agnes Berry
Robert Berry, Esq.

Every few days, now, Anne had herself driven or rowed up the Thames to Strawberry Hill. Walpole remarked teasingly that he hadn't seen so much of her since she was three years old.

Though the Berrys had moved back to town at the end of the summer, when Miss Berry found them some lodgings on North Audley Street, Anne preferred to see them in the countryside where they were all more at ease. At Strawberry, Mr Berry seemed less intimidated by the Honourable Mrs Damer and Miss Agnes didn't risk being frightened into silence by a swooping visit from the Duchess of Richmond. They all spent many afternoons together strolling in the meadows that sloped down from the terrace to the river, or (if the skies darkened) looking through Walpole's collections of prints, drawings and curiosities. Anne kept a covert eye on her cousin, wondering how this new hobby of his twilight years would play itself out. Her initial alarm had calmed; she was fairly sure now that he wouldn't joke about Miss Mary being his
amour
or his
rib
if he had any serious intentions.

Anne hadn't yet had what she'd call a conversation with Mr Berry, but she didn't take it personally. He preferred to sit on the edge of the group, buried in Gothic novels from a circulating library, looking up occasionally to nod at a joke he hadn't quite heard. In private, Anne and Walpole laughed over the fellow's tastes; a more harmless connoisseur of the morbid and macabre could not be imagined. His tragic history of disinheritance and widowerhood didn't seem to have subdued his spirits at all, but there was a certain smiling fatalism about him that suggested he was incapable of being the real head of the family.

Miss Agnes didn't speak very much either, but what she did say was intelligent enough; she deferred to her sister Mary on any knotty point. Anne encouraged her in her sketching and offered some small suggestions about the framing of a composition, which Agnes accepted immediately.

'If it came to it,' Miss Berry told Anne one day when they were alone in the orchard, 'my sister could go to work for an engraver, colouring in prints.'

Anne was startled. 'If it came to what, may I ask?'

'A visit by the bailiffs to carry away the sofa and writing desk and beds. All we have is our £800 a year,' the girl said bluntly.

'Couldn't Mr Berry...' Her voice trailed off.

'Mrs Damer, my father is the best of men, but providence hasn't granted him any connections, nor marketable talents. No, Agnes will have to use up her sight in an engraver's studio and I—perhaps I'll be a governess.'

A bubble of laughter escaped from Anne's lips. 'I do beg your pardon,' she said through her fingers, 'it was just the tone of intense bitterness with which you said that word! I suddenly pictured you
growling
at some viscount's children.'

Miss Berry's face broke into a smile. 'You're right. I'd certainly hate them and might prove a tyrant. Perhaps I should think of another job.'

'Perhaps,' Anne suggested, tossing her a little scarlet windfall, 'you shouldn't think so much.'

'Impossible, I'm afraid.' Miss Berry polished the apple on her linen sleeve. 'It's the only real talent I seem to possess. I can fret in English, French, Italian, Latin and somewhat in Greek.'

'Why borrow trouble?' asked Anne. 'Unless there are terrible debts? You mentioned the bailiffs—'

'They're hypothetical. I'm just fearful for the future; we've bought nothing we can't afford, yet.'

'What a refreshingly honest attitude! And all too rare, I'm afraid. Though Eliza—' Anne stopped herself just in time. Miss Berry was looking at her. 'A former friend used to say the same thing,' she went on awkwardly. 'I'm not quite so scrupulous myself, but I pay all my bills in the end. In the Beau Monde, you know, money's a sparkling liquor that's poured from cup to cup, with a great deal of spillage. Why, the Duchess of Devonshire once asked me for £50 at an assembly, lost it on the faro table and never remembered the matter afterwards!'

Mary Berry's eyes were round. The sum had actually been £100, but Anne had halved it to shock the girl less. After a minute she bit into the apple. 'My sister Agnes doesn't brood as I do; her mind is more cushioned. She doesn't even dread thunderstorms!'

'I love them,' Anne told her.

'No!' The girl was pale.

'It's nature's concerto and all performed free,' Anne told her. 'In fact, don't those dark clouds in the west look promising?'

Mary spun round to examine the afternoon sky, which was quite clear. 'Mrs Darner,' she said, turning back, 'that was a lie.'

Anne laughed. 'And not the last you'll ever hear from my lips.'

Later on, when Agnes was drawing some cows—her father by her side, armed with a sharp stick—Walpole hobbled out to join Anne and Miss Mary on the terrace in the shade of his great oak. 'The slaves of Martinique are engaged in a bloody uprising,' he announced with grim relish, waving a letter. 'I blame this
levelling
infection that's spreading from France. For instance, one of my Paris correspondents tells me that the Assembly has decreed women are to testify in court, just like men, and inherit equally from their fathers!'

'Now that sounds eminently sensible,' murmured Anne, to make trouble.

Walpole goggled at her. 'If you cast aside distinction between the sexes, Frenchwomen will lose all the protection, all the special status their English sisters enjoy.'

'I don't see why I shouldn't testify in court,' she remarked. 'After all, I'm better educated than nine-tenths of the men who presently do. So is Miss Berry, for that matter,' she said, to draw her in, but the girl kept her eyes on the grass.

Walpole looked uneasily between them. 'As for the Marquis de Condorcet, with his call for the suffrage to be extended to women—now, that's an assault on nature!'

'Well, yes, there Condorcet exceeds himself a little.' Anne laughed. 'But his theory of the equality of the sexes is a refreshing one. Miss Berry, are you aware of the Marquis's writings? He says that if we suppose human beings to have natural rights, we must grant them to
all
human beings.'

'Rights to eat and sleep, perhaps,' cried Walpole, 'but would he extend the franchise to savages and make naked Hottentots line up to elect their own Member?'

'You've chosen the most absurd example you can find,' Anne protested. 'But with regard to women, Mrs Macaulay argues that we've no proof of any real difference between the sexes except the physical, and we should try the experiment of educating boys and girls the same way.'

A snort from Walpole. 'The historian you cite is best known for eloping with a man twenty-six years her junior!'

'Perhaps,' said Anne, nettled, 'but her point stands. For instance, Miss Berry and I both care more for Latin than for needlework; that's an assault on tradition, perhaps, but hardly on nature. What do you say?' she asked the young woman.

'Nothing, till I'm better informed on the subject.'

Anne felt unaccountably irritated. 'Condorcet asks why exclude women from politics for their liability to ... to feminine indispositions,' she said, hoping the phrase was discreet enough, 'when men aren't barred by their tendency to gout, say.'