Life Mask (66 page)

What have I done?
Anne asked herself when she woke up every day, and sometimes the question was rhetorical and sometimes it was literal. She hadn't eaten for a couple of days now; that could explain how strange she felt and the way her head seemed to split in two whenever she tried to decide anything. In her dreams she began to wail, but when she woke up her eyes were bone dry.

She had no occupations. She'd brought no books, not even paper and pen. Mary Berry had cut her off in four lines; Mary, the best friend she had in the world. Nothing was safe from the filth, it leaked in everywhere. There was nowhere to hide her face, no refuge left in the world.

Anne thought of suicide. Oddly enough, the idea hadn't struck her before. Perhaps it was the music, rising from the taproom downstairs, that made her think of it now. It was eighteen years since her husband had gone upstairs in the Bedford Arms with the two whores, the two pistols and the blind fiddler. (It sounded like a joke, didn't it?) Anne wondered what was the last tune he'd asked the fiddler for. Something merry—but she hadn't known John well enough to guess the tide. She found herself thinking of him almost fondly. He hadn't even been thirty when the bullet had gone into his head and out again. She'd never understood how he could have done such a shocking thing, with so little consideration for his family and friends—for
her.
But now it came to her with the force of a blow that his miserable wife had not been in his mind the day he'd killed himself; she hadn't been real to him at all. John Damer had gone beyond such mortal connections; he was on his own, in deep water, going down.

Anne understood that, now, because she was the same way. There were no parents watching over her any more, no sister, no godfather, no friends. They'd floated out of her grasp. Here she was, nameless and faceless, on the roads of England and not a soul knew where she was or how to bring her home.

She crawled from the floor to the bed, and sat up half the night thinking of ways and means. She'd never owned a pistol. (John's pair had been sold, together with all his other valuables, to set against his debts.) The knives that came with her dinner tray were blunt and in her reticule she had only tiny scissors. These things were so much easier for men. But then it came to her:
laudanum.
Anne weighed the bottle in her hand; still almost half full. Surely if she drank the lot at once that would do the trick?

It wasn't the sinfulness of these thoughts that stopped her; her conscience was quite mute these days. It was the idea of John, meeting her in the underworld and laughing with his snide, silly laugh. No, Anne had never stooped to his level while they'd been married and she'd be damned if she was going to now.

Walking in the woods behind the inn the next morning, Anne considered going abroad. That was the traditional recourse for outcasts, after all. William Beckford, for instance, to pick a famous monster; hadn't he been living in one warm climate or another ever since his banishment? His only problems were with English diplomats, it seemed; foreigners were more tolerant. But how strange it would be to leave England, Anne thought, knowing one could never come back again. Would she find shelter somewhere, and oblivion, for the rest of her life? Would she sculpt foreign faces, and foreign cats and dogs, and would her pieces never go on show at the Royal Academy again? Anne almost laughed, catching herself out in a paradox; here she was, trembling at the thought that a chambermaid might recognise her face, yet still hoping for fame and glory at the annual Exhibition!

No, she wouldn't flee to Italy or Switzerland and for one good reason. To go was to proclaim that what was said of you was true. She'd never give her accusers that satisfaction.

She pictured Charles Pigott, smirking over his inky work. She assumed he was out of gaol by now; perhaps he'd scribbled the lines about her in
The Whig Club
—the work of two minutes—in some garret off the Strand. Was he munching on a pork pie, or scratching a flea bite, as he chose his words, as he rained down destruction on a woman he'd never met?

He'd been in gaol when she'd written him that scornful letter, but wasn't this travelling a gaol too, of a sort? Could she be any more imprisoned behind bars? Anne thought of the eagle caught by Lord Melbourne's gamekeeper, the eagle she'd sculpted. How shocked, how furious his eyes had been as they'd shackled him. He hadn't eaten, she remembered; he'd pined away and died of a moult.

Pigott was a radical, of course; a leveller, a Jacobin anarchist, probably an atheist. It wasn't just Anne's downfall that he longed for, or Eliza's or Mary's or Walpole's, but the complete annihilation of the World. Whoever had enough money to keep his hands clean Pigott would libel as a compound of all vices. When Pigott had finished his dark work there'd be no more kings or countesses, no paying calls or thirty-dish suppers, no painted fans or marble statues. If he and his conspirators had their way they'd turn Anne's homeland into one vast, brutal, democratic camp. She argued with Pigott in her head; she said plain, foolish things:
I'm innocent
, she told him,
I've done nothing.

But that was hardly the point. Anne leaned against a tree and bit her thumb. Of course she'd done something to arouse Pigott's rage. She'd been a woman of privilege, rank and some fame. And she had loved; she wouldn't deny that, not if her life depended on it. She'd loved Eliza Farren, and lost her in a matter of hours and thought it the worst pain she'd ever felt. She'd loved Mary Berry, too, differently, and had never thought that anything could come between them. It was difficult to tease out the strands of misery but it seemed to Anne, surprisingly, that this second loss was worse.

She'd loved her friends as many women loved each other, as many men loved men, as Derby loved Fox; wasn't friendship generally agreed to be the highest virtue?
I'm innocent,
she said again to the demon Pigott in her head, but it rang false. This didn't feel like innocence. This was like a dream in which she'd committed some terrible crime, but she couldn't remember what, or how. She hadn't done the things Pigott said of her, but what good was a clear conscience? Shame weighed as heavy as guilt. Shame wasn't brought on only by what one said or did—but by what was said of you, done to you.

And whether the accusations were true or not didn't make much difference, because people would believe them anyway. She'd first been called these names in print by William Combe sixteen years ago. The difference now was that people must be starting to believe it. She'd been abused, hissed and laughed at in a public theatre. The actress had accused her of being a
filthy Tommy.
And Mary, did Mary believe the latest dreadful accusations, or did she simply hate Anne for dragging her down? Perhaps it came to the same thing.

It was the end of August now, and Anne knew she should be sensible and go back to her refuge at Park Place. But she seemed to be floating a great way off from her life and she couldn't find the rope to pull herself back in.

She hadn't been to church all summer, but when she found a limp copy of the Psalms in a drawer at the next inn she opened it at random.

They gaped upon me with their Mouths, as a ravening and a roaring Lion. I am poured out like Water, and all my Bones are out of joint; my heart is like Wax.

Her heart contracting like a fist, she turned the page.

For Dogs have compassed me, the assembly of the Wicked have enclosed me; they pierced my Hands and my Feet. I may tell all my Bones; they look and stare...

S
EPTEMBER
1794

The Farrens arrived on the packet boat from Dublin after a very successful tour. 'Six nights in Cork,' Eliza told Derby, speaking fast, 'six in Limerick, fifteen in Dublin, clearing £1400 before two excellent benefits. I gave them Beatrice and Lady Teazle.'

He was examining the gold paintwork on the arm of his chair. 'You left London with no warning.'

'Yes.' Eliza's teeth set. For six weeks she'd only sent the most brief and bland notes from Ireland, and the Earl's replies had been the same. Perhaps he'd try to console her, now, or laugh it off. But she thought it more likely that they'd pretend this disastrous episode had never happened. Over the years the two of them had developed a knack of not speaking about delicate things—for instance, Lady Derby's health. Their harmonious relationship depended on a judicious measure of silence.

Derby surprised her. 'Mrs Farren,' he said, turning his head, 'I wonder, if you'd be so good, might your daughter and I have a moment in private?'

Eliza and her mother stared at each other. In all the long years he'd never asked for this.

'Oh, but—' Mrs Farren began.

'Please. You could sit in the long gallery at the end of the corridor.'

Eliza jerked her head, and her mother gathered up her knotting and went out, her shoulders stiff with offence.

'It seems to me,' said Derby into the silence, 'that there need to be changes.'

'Changes, My Lord?'

'Between us.'

She bristled at the pronoun.

'I wish you to break off all connection with Mrs Damer.'

Eliza rose to her feet. She thought of telling him that she hadn't spoken or written to Anne since their terrible quarrel at the end of July.

'I don't ask', he went on, raising one hand like a vicar, 'whether there's any truth in the noxious allegations.'

'How dare you!'

'I don't ask,' said Derby, 'because I've no desire to know.'

She realised something. 'You mean you wouldn't believe my denial.'

'I don't ask,' he repeated, almost snarling, 'and I will never ask. But I do demand that you break with Mrs Damer.'

Eliza's head was full of thunder. She twisted the ring on her little finger, rubbed at its ivory eye. 'And what about Lady Milner, my Yorkshire
connection,
according to Pigott,' she said sardonically, 'am I to cut her off too?'

'Don't be silly.'

'Oh, so you accept that the reference to her was pure invention—but you believe the worst of our old friend?'

'I can't tell what to believe, frankly,' said Derby, 'but smoke implies a fire, and Mrs Damer's reputation has been smoking on and off for half her life.'

Eliza pursed her lips at this hypocrisy. 'Three years ago you told me the story was ludicrous nonsense.'

'Everything's changed. There's a print in Holland's window that shows you dithering between a coronet and a
chisel
,' he said, pronouncing the word with revulsion. 'So I don't want you to see her, speak to her or correspond with her again.'

This was too much. 'For a man who has no rights—no claims on me—you go too far.'

'Miss Farren,' said Derby furiously, 'I am hardly an uninvolved party. Must I remind you that, virtuous as you may be, you have dragged me into the muck? I've been satirised in a best-selling broadside as an impotent old fool whose beloved is betraying him with not one, but two, Sapphic lovers.'

Eliza averted her face.

'To defend my honour,' Derby went on, 'I've quarrelled to the verge of bloodshed with a man I thought my friend.'

Whom could he mean?

'The situation is unendurable at every level, public and private. All I ask is that you resolve it by breaking with the woman whose reputation, rightly or wrongly, has stained both of ours.'

'Have you no mercy? You were Anne's friend long before I met either of you,' she reminded him. 'I tell you she never laid a hand on me.'

Derby's face was very pale, like some worm that never saw the light. 'You sound almost as if you regret that.'

Eliza boiled over. 'You disgusting little tyrant. Is there no end to your appetite for power?'

His eyes bulged.

'You speak of stained reputations, but Lady Derby told me you wouldn't give her a divorce, though she begged for it.' His small mouth opened, registering this hit. 'You've kept her and yourself in a ghastly limbo all these years from sheer begrudgery! And as for me, may I remind you I'm not one of your pedigree horses or dogs or cocks? You can't control me.'

There was a terrible pause. She thought he might stalk out of his own gilt-and-white parlour. 'It's true, the only claim I have on you is a future one,' Derby said in a low voice. 'It's a bet I'm offering, I suppose. If you do what I ask, on this one occasion, you have my solemn word that the moment the present Countess of Derby dies I'll ask for your hand.'

Eliza's heart was thudding. He'd never put it so formally before. This was a verbal promise which, when it came to marriage, was almost as good as a signed contract. This was the moment when a sensible woman should say
Yes, yes, yes, My Lord, thank you, whatever you wish.

'I don't care for ultimata,' she said, and walked towards the door.

O
CTOBER 1794

'We'd no notion where to send them on,' said Mrs Moll, pointing accusingly to the pile of letters.

'That's all right,' murmured Anne, sitting down at her
secrétaire.
She waited till the housekeeper had gone downstairs before she looked through the envelopes, sorting them by handwriting, playing for time. Nothing from Eliza, of course. And nothing in Mary's hand, nothing at all. Anne rested her cheek on her knuckles for a long moment.

It had to be done. She began cracking the seals.

Dearest Sister, I hope you're keeping well,
Lady Mary had written in late August.

Richmond and I haven't seen you in an age. Do grace us with your presence at Goodwood this month, won't you? Any day before the opening of Parliament is convenient, we're so confined here by our various Maladies.

What a trivial note, thought Anne—but then, her sister never did like to discuss painful or embarrassing subjects. Still, she and Richmond had clearly decided to stand by Anne in this as in former trials, and Anne ought to be grateful. Her father wrote more forthrightly.