Life Mask (55 page)

'At first I brushed it aside; after all, I never do whole-lengths. And men aren't my forte; I haven't tried one since my mask of Thames for the bridge at Henley. As for King George—well, I think I can say without treason that he's never been the object of any personal devotion on my part.'

Mary nodded.

'But now it occurs to me that his merits aren't the point,' said Anne, struggling to find the right words without sounding sentimental. 'He's our king. Last night I was lying awake, worrying about the spread of violent insurrection across Europe. Is it beyond the reach of possibility that it might erupt here? There was that riot of footmen in May, and so many strikes and bread protests ... Could a Cockney mob break into Newgate and hack the prisoners to bits?'

'Oh, surely not.'

'Well,
surely not
is what we'd have said about Paris a few years ago. Look, I found this on the floor of my carriage the other day and it's not the first—' Anne reached into her pocketbook and smoothed out a folded handbill. She'd read it over and over last night; the blurred print seemed to haunt her.

PROCLAMATION by the People, to the People.

The peace of Slavery is worse than the war of Freedom. Our Ministers are oppressive, our Clergy parasitical, our Royals profligate, our Taxes outrageous. Let Tyrants beware! The time is at hand when the sovereign People of Great Britain will no long suffer themselves to be duped by the lukewarm apostasy of their sham Representatives, but will depend on their own exertions to produce a truly Reformed Parliament.

GOD SAVE THE PEOPLE!

'You're right,' said Mary with a shudder, 'that has more than a whiff of sedition about it. Their
truly Reformed Parliament
must mean a revolutionary assembly.'

'Imagine if our sovereign were to be reduced to
Georgie Hanover
at the tip of a pike!' said Anne. She remembered her point. 'So in the middle of the night it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to take on this statue after all.' She folded up the handbill and put it away, so the servants wouldn't see it. 'At times like these, one should overcome personal prejudice. Whatever my political views may be, I'm a loyal subject; I'm no republican. Perhaps my uncle's request is a sort of sign that I should take up this mighty task and see what I can do with it?'

O
CTOBER 1792

Walpole didn't just approve of the proposed statue, when Anne mentioned it to him after a blackberry breakfast he held at Strawberry Hill for his seventy-fifth birthday. He took it as proof that his goddaughter had seen sense at last, like the Prodigal Son. 'What a splendid idea of your uncle Campbell's,' he crowed. 'What better moment to thank providence for the tranquillity we enjoy in this kingdom, in spite of the republican serpents we harbour in our bosom—the demon Paines, horned Tookes and harpy Barbaulds and Macaulays and Wollstonecrafts!'

'Is Miss Wollstonecraft a harpy?' put in Mary.

'Well, consider her tide:
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
indeed! What's next, the rights of mice?'

Anne kept, her expression neutral. She'd lent Mary the book and they'd both found much in it that stirred them, especially the protest against the mire of triviality in which most women were caught. 'Vis-à-vis this statue,' she said, 'I'm inclined to think that catching a likeness of the King is unnecessary.'

'Quite so; unhelpful, even,' said Walpole, leafing through his engravings and tapping a print of George Ill's face with one horny fingernail. 'The man doesn't matter; the Crown's the thing. And what better time for such a project, now the rabid French are swarming over their borders—annexing Savoy and Nice, the Rhineland and the Netherlands, and calling it
reunion\
I expect to hear they've seized Rome and Madrid any day now.'

Though Anne's opinions had been altered by the horrors of September, she still found Walpole irrational on the subject of France. 'I plan to make the King rather young, slim, upright,' she said, 'but not an Adonis, more like Saint George the dragon killer.'

'Excellent,' he crowed.

'I wish there were any other topic of discourse than politics,' put in Robert Berry from the corner.

'Oh, I know, Papa Berry, I know,' cried Walpole, 'but who can hear, talk or think of anything else?'

Anne went home early, dropping the Berrys off at North Audley Street, and began some sketches for her statue. She knew that old friends would be amused, at best, and at worst appalled, by her sudden display of loyalty to the Crown, but she didn't care—at least, not enough to be put off. It was time to test her talents; otherwise she'd carve dogs and ladies' faces till the day she died and never know whether she could have done anything more.

She made a series of little maquettes on a little wire doll-man, trying out the pose, the balance of forms. Her King would hold his arm across his body, with a lance in his hand, she decided. He would wear long, heavy robes; every line would say
mastery.
The next day she started constructing the armature. Life-size wasn't enough; she wanted her creation to tower, to awe. The armature turned out to be eight feet high; she had to use a stepladder, and take Sam away from his duties for two days to hand rods and tools up to her. The clay model, on which the marble would be based, would be a few inches more than that.

Anne thought of that shabby fellow called Smith whom she'd made occasional use of at the start of her career. When he kept offering to mend cracks and finish polishing for her she'd mistaken it for gallantry—thought Smith remarkably mannerly for a member of the middling-to-lower orders, with little education except in pot making—but gradually, as she became more sure of herself and her vocation, she realised that the fellow was hungry for power. She could see it was humiliating for a man approaching middle age, who would have liked his own workshop, to be general factotum to a lady artist. Smith was always loitering and offering to rough out sections of the model for her:
Save you the labour,; madam.
As if Anne had ever been afraid of hard work! When, after a few years of terracottas, she'd gathered her nerve and taken up marble carving, Smith had fretted over the weight of the hammer and muttered about her doing herself an injury ... but by then Anne didn't care what he thought and she'd forbidden him to so much as move her tools except to scrape and wash them at the end of the day. In the end she'd let the man go and had never taken on a replacement.

Smith's revenge had come a few years later, when a snide article on the state of British art had referred to
a certain Sculptress whose best busts owe much to the skills of a Subordinate.
This from a rogue who used to leave blocks out in the yard to be streaked by rain or shattered by frost, and would excuse himself with
It's only stone, madam, what harm?.
The memory of Smith's lies filled Anne with rage even now. She looked down at Sam, who stood below the stepladder, his dark face expressionless, and never said a word, which allowed her to forget he was. there until she needed a section of pipe or a length of wire.

N
OVEMBER 1792

Eliza sat watching the sculptor high on her scaffold, at work on her
Kings
left ear. The clay figure was still primitive, except for the head and sober face, which was emerging slowly from the gigantic armature of wires and rods. There was a smear of grey clay on Anne's left cheekbone. Such patience the woman had, such tireless hands. Eliza remembered sitting in this workshop four years ago, having her eyelids pasted with plaster.

'Funnily enough,' remarked Derby, snapping his snuffbox shut, 'I thought you loathed the man. Don't we all?'

'It's not about the man,' said Anne, looking down owlishly. 'It's an abstraction.'

'Of what?' He paused for a pleasurable sneeze. 'The power of the Crown?'

'Oh, Derby, not in that sense, not the undue influence of King and PM on Parliament; we've always opposed that.'

She's still saying we, meaning Whigs,
noted Eliza.

The sculptor folded her arms, holding a small muddy hook. 'What I want to express, I suppose, is that we English change and reform ourselves by degrees, not by pikes and gunpowder. I want to carve a symbol of ... firmness.'

Eliza felt slightly embarrassed for her friend and looked away.

'Couldn't you call it
Albion
, then?' suggested Derby. 'Or do a lovely
Britannia
on a chariot?'

Anne chuckled. 'I doubt I could carve a chariot.'

'Well, an armchair, then.'

'For all your flippancy, Derby,' said Anne, 'don't you think the idea of kingship is a sacred tradition, something to cling to in these strange times? Why, your own noble title derives from it, as a stream from a river!'

Instead of answering he asked Eliza, 'Have you told her about Louis?'

Her stomach sank. 'He's to be put on trial for treason,' she told Anne, who stared. 'A strongbox was found in the Tuileries, full of his secret correspondence with foreign powers.'

'How very convenient,' said the sculptor, gouging at the clay. 'Just when they want an excuse to put their lawful king in the dock, they happen to come across a strongbox full of evidence.'

'It's a sad business,' Derby conceded.

'It's not some necessity of fate, Derby, it's an appalling crime.'

'Well. The French are making dire mistakes, but one wouldn't wish them the cowed serfs of Versailles again.'

'Oh, please. I
knew
Versailles.' Anne's head snapped round. 'You never go any farther than Liverpool.'

'As I was saying to Fox the other day,' he continued, unruffled, 'we must stand by the new Republic, because when it comes down to it we're on the same side. It's a crusade against the unchained power of kings'—and his eyes flicked upwards to Anne's clay model.

Eliza shifted uneasily in her seat.

The sculptor glowered down at the Earl. 'Perhaps you wouldn't speak so casually and naively about bloodshed if you'd ever been to war yourself.'

His eyebrows soared up.

Eliza had to speak. 'But my dear Anne,' she began as winningly as she could, 'while one deplores tragedies like the September massacres, one can still applaud the founding principles of the Revolution, can't one? Remember that day we read the
Declaration of the Rights of Man
together?'

'Barely,' said Anne, her face blank. 'So many more distressing memories have overlaid it.'

Was the older woman talking about politics, Eliza wondered, or the hiatus in their friendship? Her pulse began to throb in her throat.

'Tom Paine's arguing that Louis should be allowed to retire to America,' remarked Derby to Eliza, as if they were alone, 'since Louis helped the Americans win their war of independence—but I can't quite imagine the Capets settling down as good citizen farmers! Sherry heard that from Lord Edward, who's in Paris, staying with Paine. Only I shouldn't call His Lordship that—since he's solemnly renounced his tide and now goes by
le Citoyen Edouard Fitzgerald.'

'You'd never go that far, would you?' Eliza asked. 'I can't imagine you as plain
Mr Ned Derby.'

'I'd rather fall on my own sword, frankly. Oh, another funny thing: Fitzgerald's married that girl Pamela, what's her name, Pamela Égalité.'

'But I thought she was engaged to Sheridan?'

Derby shrugged. 'There's a certain neatness to it, a poetic justice on Sheridan for his rakish years. Fitzgerald seduces Sherry's wife, then weds his fiancée and they're still the best of friends.'

'People are running quite mad these days,' said Anne from her scaffold.

'Yes,' said Derby with a hard look at the formless statue.

'There's been a terrible run on the banks, Walpole tells me. Unrest all over the British Isles, reports of cargoes of arms smuggled in, not to mention the 3000 daggers ordered in Birmingham. And what of last month's declaration by the French that they'll aid any revolutionaries in
any land
who long for liberty?'

Eliza fanned herself. She'd witnessed a very comical scene in the Commons, when Burke had produced one of the famous daggers from his pocket and hurled it down, and Sheridan had hopped up and asked politely for the fork to go with it. She was beginning to wish she and Derby had taken their leave half an hour ago; they might have been on the Strand looking at prints of thoroughbreds and fashions by now.

Derby's lips twisted. 'That was a bit of Gallic hyperbole. And as for
arms
and
unrest,
that's all puffed up by the ten scaremongering papers Pitt finances.
Fama nihil est celerius,
as Livy would say. Nothing's faster than rumour,' he glossed for Eliza, apologetically. 'Take it from me, Mrs Damer: there are no English revolutionaries.'

Anne came to the edge of the scaffold and her jaw was sharp. 'I heard that one of these Societies tried to set up a Tree of Liberty on Kennington Common.'

'Yes, and the 15th Dragoons were marched all the way from Maidenhead to stop them,' drawled Eliza, 'which seems an excessive reaction to a tree planting!'

Her delivery would have raised a great laugh at the King's Theatre, but it was wasted here. 'I tell you,' said Derby in the urbane voice that told Eliza he was struggling to hold on to his temper, 'I know the kind of earnest, bespectacled tradesmen who fill the Re-form Societies, and all they do is make speeches and draft petitions. Yes, there's occasional ranting by maverick preachers, or window smashing by the out-of-work, but on the whole this is a prosperous nation, run by a responsible aristocracy—and nothing like France.'

'Then why, when I ride to Hyde Park,' said Anne in a shaking voice, 'do I pass scribbles on walls that say
Damn Richmond, Damn Pitt, Damn the rich, Damn the King?'