Life Mask (65 page)

'I don't know,' said Anne desperately. 'It happened in a blink, it was over and it's shadowed my life ever since.'

Eliza wanted to shake the truth out of her. 'You and she must have recognised some hidden bias in each other somehow. Kisses don't just happen.'

'But they do.' Her eyes were as warm and bewildered as a dog's.

'Not to me,' said Eliza, fierce. 'Not like that. I've spent a lifetime in the theatre—the most decadent of professions, they say—and kisses don't happen to me.'

'It was only a moment,' Anne pleaded. 'I was confused—the girl was confused—'

'Yes, but what confused you?'

'Oh, it's not as simple as that,' said Anne impatiently. 'Not so black and white. There are strange moments in life.'

Eliza's arms were folded tightly. 'Not in mine.'

Anne let out a yelp of laughter. It sounded incongruously loud in the little parlour. 'Your whole life is strange.'

'What on earth do you mean?'

'Well, you've kept a good man waiting thirteen years so far.' The older woman was on the attack now. 'You walk through the corridors of Drury Lane like a nun in a bordello; you're as hard and chill as marble. You please all and satisfy none; you like to be looked at and desired, but never ever touched—wouldn't you call that strange?'

'Denial is a habit,' said Eliza furiously, 'and a necessary one in my case. I've always had men fawning around me; I know how to deal with their crude overtures and yes, I'll die a virgin if I must, at least it has a certain dignity.' Her lips were wet; she wiped her hand across her mouth. 'But a fawning, secretly lascivious
woman
—now that's peculiar.'

Anne's face was white and red, as if she'd been slapped.

'What did I ever do or say or seem, to make you single me out?'

'How dare you?'

'You've been hanging around me for so long,' Eliza reminded her. 'I tried to push you away five years ago, I thought I'd successfully ended the friendship—then you came back from Spain, swore blind the scandal was buried and Derby told me not to be afraid of you—so I was stupid enough to take you up again.'

'You must have had your reasons,' snarled Anne. 'I've never forced my friendship on anyone.'

'I can't remember why I risked it. I'm not like you,' Eliza told her, 'there's nothing in me that resonates with your peculiarities. I couldn't be a Sapphist if I lived to be five hundred.'

'Who asked you?'

'I'm not like you, I tell you. One kiss wouldn't change
my
life.' And Eliza seized Anne by the throat and kissed her, held her in a kiss that was long enough so that when they moved apart they staggered a little. She tasted rouge. 'So,' she said, for something to say.

The other woman had two patches of hectic red high on her cheekbones. She sucked in her lips as if to hide them. 'I never asked for that.'

Eliza managed to laugh. 'I was just giving you proof.'

'Proof of what?'

'Proof that you leave me cold.' And blindly she made for the door.

T
HE TORPOR
of late July had settled over Grosvenor Square. Most of the houses were empty by now. Anne stayed indoors, out of sight, brooding over what she should have said to the actress, what she might have done. There was still no message from Derby, which could only mean that he, too, blamed Anne for the catastrophe.

An answer finally arrived from Mary in Yorkshire.

My dearest!
Without telling my family what the matter is I can't set off at once, but I've obtained leave to meet you at Park Place at the end of the month. Till then, don't give way to despair. Haven't you often told me that things can't be as bad as they seem?

Anne couldn't remember ever saying that, or what she'd thought she meant by it. Mary's words read like a faded message from a distant world. Anne would read the rest of it later. She lay face down on her bed and the brocaded counterpane pressed her eyes shut

Her mind was working oddly. She supposed it was the broken sleep and the laudanum; she couldn't stomach most of what her cook sent up. The servants sometimes seemed to look at her strangely; she hardly ever rang for them and she flinched when one of them knocked. She found it hard to endure Bet coming in to dress her every morning and undress her every night; she kept her eyes shut and shrank from the warm, humid hands. She wasn't working, was barely reading, read no letters and wrote none, didn't wash.

Her calves ached, and her shoulders. It was probably the lack of exercise; she hadn't had her daily ride in a week. She'd sent to the stables for her horse, once, on the third morning after Eliza's visit, and managed to get into the saddle and turned its head towards Hyde Park as always—but then the thought of being pointed out by strangers made her start to shake all over. Her foot had jammed in the stirrup; she'd needed the groom's help to get down.

Doctor Fordyce had turned up at Mrs Moll's behest—was it yesterday, or the day before?—and tapped on her bedroom door, but Anne had held her breath and pretended not to be there. What was wrong with her was not something that Fordyce could cure with his powders, liniments or bleedings. Before he left he spoke through the door, urging her to take some nourishment at least. The maids put trays outside her door at intervals, she could smell their sickening trail.
Did Clarissa eat,
she wanted to ask the doctor? Did any woman ever eat after she'd been ruined?

Mrs Moll could read and Sam as well, Anne knew; they probably studied the newspapers. Rumour passed like an infection from servant to servant, house to house. She imagined the staff down there in the housekeeper's room, right now, drinking her tea.
There was always something queer about madam, wasn't there?

That's right, vastly peculiar in her habits, and such strong hands, for a woman.

She tried to read a newspaper herself, to fill up her brain's yawning vacancy, but once she'd skipped all the doom and gloom about war and sedition, the first item she came across was about betrayal. The Prince of Wales had finally succumbed to Pitt's offer of a higher income if he'd break with Mrs Fitzherbert and marry a princess. Her hold on him had already been weakened by that fascinating serpent, Lady Jersey. Apparently Mrs Fitzherbert—his wife of nine years—had received, with no warning, a note from Prinny made up of three words:
Tout est fini.
Did he think it sounded more graceful in French?

Mad thoughts came to Anne in the hot afternoons. Sometimes she looked out of the window through a crack in the blinds, watching the empty street. Once she saw the carriage with the Derby crest go by and thought she counted two heads. Perhaps she'd misjudged Eliza Farren all these years by giving her
the benefit of the doubt,
she thought viciously. That kiss the woman had pressed on Anne's lips had been so lewd, so violent. Could the whole World have been taken in by the actress's performance of chastity?

Eliza and Derby lived just round the corner from each other, after all, and she used his carriage; what could be easier for the couple than to enjoy themselves in secret and laugh behind their masks?
Niminy-Piminy
and her
Noble Dwarf
romping behind their screen of platonic love;
Miss Tittup
and
Lord Doodle,
skirts up and breeches down, bouncing together in a well-sprung coach under the watchful leer of the old procuress who called herself a mother. Perhaps the actress had been the Earl's mistress all these years and dropped several pups while pretending to be
on tour,
and all in magnificent hypocrisy!

Anne pressed the heel of her hand into her forehead. She didn't know what to believe. Life was a whirl of impossibilities and there was a foul slug stuck to the back of every flower. Honest men proved traitors and liberty meant heads in a bucket of blood; virgins played whores on stage, whores played virgins off stage, and French ships might land in London any day. Her brain was addled, her cheeks were so hot that it felt as if they were peeling off. She had no skin anymore; if she stepped out of her house she'd be exposed to the burning gaze of the World.

M
ARY,
A
NNE THOUGHT
, one afternoon, to force herself out of bed;
Mary wrote that she'd meet me at Park Place.
She caught a glimpse of a grey face in the glass, but looked away. She rang for Bet and asked for her dark-brown travelling costume. Her voice came out faint and mumbling. 'I'll need a trunk packed. And tell Sam to fetch the coachman with the carriage.'

'Where are you off to, madam?'

It's none of your business,
Anne would have liked to say, seizing the girl by the ruffle round her neck. 'Park Place.'

'Very good,' said Bet, dropping a casual curtsy.

When Anne got to her childhood home at the end of the long day's drive, her parents treated her as if she'd been ill: gently and asking no questions. They must have heard from Walpole about the resurrection of her
old trouble.
(As if it were gout, or lunacy.) They let her sit in the garden for hours, a book motionless in her lap. They said of course they'd be delighted to have dear Miss Berry visit, she could stay as long as she liked. The wafting scent of the lavender harvest stuck in Anne's throat.

One twilight there was a knock on her bedroom door and she thought it must be Mary, though there'd been no letter announcing her arrival. But it was only the footman with a tightly folded note, sealed with messy black wax. There was no salutation at the top.

I've been sent a copy of a paragraph from a newspaper, in which my name is linked to yours in a manner I need not describe. You'll understand that this changes everything. I'm sorry but I can't come to you now.
M.B.

Anne felt the most peculiar sensation, like a heavy blow cleaving her ribs in two.
This changes everything.
The servant came back to announce supper, but she didn't go down.
Tout est fini.
She sat on the edge of the bed and watched the dark thicken on the Berkshire hills.
Praxiteles
, Anne thought,
Praxiteles help me now. I smell burning. My house is on fire and what can I save?

VIII. Armature

An internal skeleton, usually of wood or metal,
in a sculpture of clay, plaster, or wax. The armature
bears the weight during hardening and
adds strength to the finished work.

I
T IS
now grown common to suspect Impossibilities (as some call them) whenever two Ladies live too much together. The late Queen of France was so accused and so was Raucourt, the famed Actress on the Paris stage. In our own Metropolis it is now a joke to say that such-a-one takes Tea with Mrs D—r. We wish to inform our Correspondents that this horrid practice—though veiled in silence in British Law—is nothing new; do we not sniff it out in Martial's epigrams and in Ovid's Epistle in which Sappho the poet renounces her guilty love for the maidens of Lesbos?

Though this and other Vices may be as old as our race, the present era is marked by a reckless scorn for all laws of God, Nature and Reason. Too many are the Englishmen now drowning in the stagnant pool of Atheism or the poisoned well of Sodom. Women demand their Rights, including the right to rival the other sex in debauchery. While their husbands defend our Empire on the high seas, how many have set up housekeeping with lovers, or dropped fatherless children?

The dreadful example of France suggests that when the bonds of tradition are untied, a whole Pandora's box of crimes is shaken into the air: have the streets of Paris not been stained by Torture, Rape, Cannibalism and Satanic rites? Some prophesy that we are approaching the Millennium and that when every offence that can be committed has been committed the World will burn.

But enough of such serious stuff. Any Correspondents with an opinion on the gentlemanly craze for Pantaloons are invited to write to the Editor.

—B
EAU
M
ONDE
I
NQUIRER,
August 1794

DERBY WAS BENT DOUBLE OVER THE HORSE. HE PULLED UP
the eyelid and examined the milky surface. 'Good lad,' he murmured, 'good lad.'

'You agree, M'Lord?'

'I suppose there's nothing else for it.' He straightened up, his back aching. A pearl button had fallen off his new braces; he picked it out of the straw.

'I've tried everything on the hoof, but it just won't mend,' said the stable master who ran the Earl's five stalls at Epsom.

'Very well,' said Derby, too sharp. He could smell the rot from where he stood, by Sir Peter's head. This was the best mount he'd ever run—his Derby winner of '87—and the stallion deserved a long and profitable career at stud, before being put out to grass. Not this, an agonising disintegration on damp straw. 'I'll do it myself,' he said, before he could shrink from the task.

'The muskets are already primed,' the stable master assured him, letting out a whistle.

A boy ran in, two firelocks under his arm. 'You,' snapped Derby, 'never run with a gun.' The fellow looked barely thirteen; he went purple in the face. 'Beg pardon, M'Lord.'

'You don't want to trip and be blown to bits,' said Derby, trying to sound kinder.

The boy shook his head violently.

Derby cocked a firelock.
Please let the first one work.
He was feeling a peculiar squeamishness; he couldn't bear the idea that Sir Peter would hear the dull click of a misfiring gun at his skull and know what his master meant to do.
Such sentimentality, at forty-two!
A sob welled up in the back of his throat. He put his boot on the long muscular neck—there was no resistance—and set the nose of the gun to Sir Peter's head. At the last moment he let himself look away. The shot was deafening; it sounded as if the whole stable had exploded.

Face to the wall, Derby wiped his spattered boots with a handkerchief.

'Funeral tomorrow?' asked the stable master.

He nodded, speechless, and walked out of the stall.

This had been the worst summer he'd had since his wife had eloped with Lord Dorset sixteen years before. In some ways it was even harder. Being cuckolded by a fellow nobleman could happen to anyone; despite Derby's rage and shame on that occasion, he'd felt himself to be enduring the common fate of modern husbands. Whereas this fantastical scandal that had sent the actress he loved stumbling from the stage of the Haymarket last month stuck under his skin like a splinter of glass.

He sometimes thought he was losing his wits. He felt he'd been an utter dunderhead, that was the thing. In all his life it'd never occurred to him to feel jealous of a woman. Of women, rather; of all of them, the infinite variety of cooing intimacies that went by the name of
female friendship.
Was it a Trojan horse, a mere toy that men never thought to fear? If Sapphists couldn't easily be identified by their mannishness—if any lady might be hiding twisted desires behind a smooth face—all England might be riddled with this rot. Why, if women were a danger to each other then what bedroom, what parlour, what tea shop was safe?

One of the chief attractions that Eliza had always held for Derby was her virginity. She was one of the only women he knew who'd held on to it past girlhood. He'd never doubted it; it was like a pool of shining light about her. Between her and men—himself included—there'd always been a shimmering, unbreakable veil. But what of women? What mysterious carnalities could they indulge in and still preserve their reputations, still carry that virgin shine like a shield? He'd never thought to watch Eliza in that way, never wondered what her letters contained, how she spent all those private hours with a friend like Anne Damer.

To suspect her would drive Derby mad. But after the events of last month—the humiliation at the Haymarket, the hints in newspapers, the explicit details in Pigott's pamphlet—he could no more control his thoughts than a wasps' nest. Those old rumours about Mrs Damer; how could he ever have been such an idiot as to laugh them off? He didn't know what to believe about Eliza's relations with her, but he knew this much: there was no going back to innocence.

When he walked into one of Epson's smaller inns, his nostrils still Ml of the stink of Sir Peter Teazle's blood, all he wanted was a brandy. But he found a table full of his Party friends, all sozzled; they must have come down for the King's Cup. 'Derby, me old fellow-me-lad,' roared Sheridan in a fake brogue, 'I haven't seen you in an age.'

'I only came down yesterday,' said Derby, not mentioning Sir Peter.

Fox edged his bulk along the bench to make room and clasped Derby's neck with a fond look.
He knows, then.
Everyone knew. Stories travelled fast, especially disgusting ones. 'Any news from Paris?' he said, for something to say.

'All good,' said Grey. 'Since the fall of Robespierre the city's come awake, like the Sleeping Beauty. Thirteen theatres have reopened—papers are rolling off the press again—people are coming out of hiding—'

'Oo, yes,' said Fox, 'I'm vastly reconciled to the French. Now's the perfect time for Pitt to sue for peace.'

The man's optimistic spirits always rebounded, even when circumstances didn't justify it, thought Derby.

'We can't even maintain peace in London, let alone achieving it in Europe,' snorted Bedford. 'Take these crimping riots—' The war was dragging on so long that there was a shortage of able-bodied men and heavy-handed recruiting agents had sparked off protests from Holborn to Southwark.

'I heard a young man fell to his death while escaping from the crimpers,' remarked Grey.

Derby felt his arm being poked. 'How's the lovely Eliza?' Sheridan was slurring a little.

He thought of saying
Don't you dare call her that.

'Farren broke her summer contract after she got hissed at the Haymarket last month,' Sheridan explained to the circle. 'Now I hear she's off touring Ireland, where they're less
au fait!'

Fox tried for a flippant tone. 'Drop it, would you, Sherry?'

'Drop what?' asked one of the youngsters. 'What's the joke?'

'There is none,' said Derby.

'Oh, come on, even you must admit it's rather hilarious,' said Sheridan, his eyes hazy with drink.

'Shall we have some cold ham?' asked Bedford, looking for a waiter.

'I say, drop it,' Derby barked at Sheridan.

The Irishman's eyebrows soared. 'Don't come the despotic aristo with me.'

'But what's the joke?' repeated the youngster.

'Really, men, don't you think—' started Bedford.

'It's more of a riddle than a joke, really.' Sheridan played a mischievous drum roll on the table. 'Question: if one's inamorata is scandalously linked with a fellow
female,
can one be said to be a cuckold?'

Derby's teeth were clamped together.

'Sherry,' protested Grey and Fox in chorus.

'Oh, I mean no slur; we're almost all cuckolds here, aren't we, gentlemen? But I persist in asking that old question, do Sapphic seductions, mere tribadic toyings, fricatrice fondlings,' he pronounced with relish, 'count as infidelity? I seem to remember that no less an authority than Brantôme claims they only amount to wantonness, since ladies who dabble in female flesh are merely washing the edges of a cut, not truly lancing the wound!'

Derby's head was clanging like a saucepan. His limbs refused to move him out of this ring of staring faces.

'And there's a further difficulty,' Sheridan lectured on, holding up one finger in parliamentary style. 'To be crowned with horns, surely a gentleman has to have possessed the inamorata in the first place? After all, in this case we're talking about the most famous virgin in England, or at least in the annals of the theatre. So perhaps her platonic lover hasn't been technically cuckolded, gentlemen, merely ... beaten to the finish?'

In one lunge across the table Derby had him by the throat.

Somebody screamed.

'For God's sake,' Fox roared as he pushed between them. Hands tugged at Derby's wrists, wrenched him away. Sheridan's face was shocked, his nose scarlet.

'I demand satisfaction,' said Derby, very fast, before Sheridan could; his tongue tripped over the words.

'My pleasure,' said Sheridan hoarsely.

Fox clapped his arm round Derby and half dragged him away from the table. They leaned against the wall of the inn, heads together. 'You've every right, of course, but think, for a moment,' Fox whispered in his ear. 'Sherry fought several duels in his youth and lived to boast of them. You've never fought one.'

'That's neither here nor there,' growled Derby.

'My Party's small enough,' said Fox, 'without the loss of a fool like you or a rogue like him. You're both entirely necessary to me. I won't have it!'

'You hold my political allegiance,' Derby told him, 'but my honour is my own.'

'Oh, come now—'

Derby felt a tap on his shoulder. He spun round.

Grey was wearing a grave expression. 'Our colleague has something to say.'

Behind him, Sheridan stood with arms crossed. 'I beg your pardon, Derby. I'm rather the worse for some bottles of brandy,' he drawled. 'I believe I got somewhat carried away. No offence intended to you, My Lord, or to the unimpeachable Miss Farren.'

The adjective stuck in Derby's craw. But he'd received a formal apology in front of witnesses—so the matter had to end there.

'Won't you stay?' Fox asked him on his way to the door, but Derby said no, he had a horse to bury.

He stood out in the street, shaking, blinking in the harsh light. He felt as if he'd had a week without sleep. He would have gone ahead with the duel, he told himself, if he hadn't received satisfaction. It was the only time in his life that he had ever issued a challenge, but he'd been ready; everything in his, upbringing had prepared him for it. One didn't decide to fight a duel based on one's chances of winning. Derby remembered explaining it to young Edward years ago, as his own father had explained it to him:
to be a gentleman means to be ready to face death on the field of honour at any time.
He'd never forget the child's petrified, wooden face.

A
NNE WAS
sitting on the floor of a bedroom at an inn, somewhere in Oxfordshire, or possibly Berkshire. She pressed her back against the door; that way, nobody could open it from the outside. The boards were cold through her muslin skirt; her knees were drawn up and her chin rested between them. Her stomach growled.

What have I done?

She hadn't left a forwarding address for her parents when she'd fled from Park Place. She'd gone at first light, the morning after getting Mary's note of rejection. She knew Conway and Lady Ailesbury would be as kind as ever—they'd never believe anything bad of their daughter—but she couldn't bear to stay; she dreaded a soft word as much as any rebuke. Anne couldn't stand to be written to, spoken to, looked at, even. It made her shudder to think that she was being gossiped about, at this moment, by people she'd never met. All England was covered with delicate webs of tittletattle:
Mrs Damer this,
people were whispering,
Mrs Damer that, Mrs Damer did you ever?

She ached all over from the carriage's jolting progression through the countryside. When she wasn't upstairs in an inn, she always wore a veil. Incognito: it was such a glamorous word, but behind the choking layers of gauze Anne's face was sallow and shapeless. She wore a long travelling coat, buttoned up despite the heat of August; it was getting stained under the arms. Her limbs were heavy; she moved like a sleepwalker, or lay face down on the bed and didn't move at all. She hadn't stayed more than two nights anywhere; she didn't want to have to give an account of herself. She avoided the servants' eyes. She kept her trunks locked, to hide the name and address printed inside; when she noticed that one of her handkerchiefs was monogrammed she put it in the fire. The coals were damp; the
A.D.
took a while to burn.