Life Mask (44 page)

She knew half of it must be hyperbole, but she wept anyway. She even thought of going home early—but then she might never see Spain. And besides, she knew hers wasn't the face Walpole longed for.

Yes, he misses you & his other Berries sorely,
she wrote to Mary,
but I can't believe he'd want you to curtail this Grand Tour of yours; he only needs to relieve his woes on paper. Those of us who pinefor you, know there are good reasons to bear it.

The strange thing was she felt even closer to Mary than when she'd been round the corner in Mayfair. By now there was no subject their correspondence hadn't covered, from their notions of the afterlife to their failure to love their families enough, to their hopes of Reform (Anne wanted MPs elected annually to make them more accountable and houses of refuge for impoverished spinsters; Mary wondered if the death penalty could be lifted from petty crimes of theft). Each knew the other's income, hat size, digestive troubles and bad habits. (Mary wrote in the margins of books she didn't agree with; Anne picked her teeth with her thumb.) Anne's writing was tighter than Mary's and heavier. She sealed her folded pages with a rectangular mark like a chisel bite, on rfed wax; Mary with a circle on black wax.

In Walpole's next letter he seemed somewhat revived by having so much bad news to communicate. Not only had a hurricane burst the Thames's banks and smashed chimneys (including Anne's at Grosvenor Square), but the collapse of a share syndicate had rocked the Stock Exchange. Georgiana was said to have lost the unimaginable sum of £50,000 and her Devonshire relatives were so furious they'd taken to cutting her in public.

Your friend F-x calls every budget, treaty or amendment Pitt proposes 'untimely, ill-advised, ill-begotten or unconstitutional'—which achieves little, but provides entertainment, & keeps everyone on their toes. Of your sister's husband I must say that R—m—d seems ever more unhappy in the Cabinet. His latest hobby-horse is an Ordnance Survey for the better defence of the realm, which he claims will map out the whole island at the minute scale of one inch to one mile!

Anne put the page down, half read. Fidelle wasn't herself, hadn't been for several days now. She'd stopped running, jumping and eating; she lay listlessly under her mistress's skirts, her tail between her legs. Her eyes seemed cloudy, her pointed hose too dry. Anne stroked the warm silvery throat, felt for the irregular pulse. Was it the change of climate, or could she have eaten poison? The dog was only nine; she should have another half-dozen years ahead of her.

The next day Fidelle was no better and barely lapped at a saucer of water.
Not here,
Anne said in her head,
not now, not while I'm away from everyone and everything! know.
She wrote to no one but Mary.
You'd hardly credit what a desperate state I'm in; I sent a note to the Minister, but all he told me was that lapdogs don't thrive out here. Fidelle is entirely dependent on me, & I can do nothing for her.

That night she lay down on her bed fully dressed and curled round the tiny dog. She stayed very still. She didn't expect to sleep, but fatigue caught up with her and pulled her down into the dark.

A little before dawn the screeching cocks woke her and Fidelle was cold.

Anne didn't cry. She swaddled the corpse in her best Kashmir shawl and considered what to do. She couldn't bear the idea that the dog's grave would be here in Portugal, where Anne might never come again. She knew the words for
fire
and
burn;
she consulted her dictionary for
ashes.

Against the fierce morning light
of
the cabinet's doorway a dark bear. Anne jumped with fright.

'Have I the right house for Mrs Damer?'

It was the voice that brought him back to her—a rough, amused tone from long ago. 'O'Hara!'

'The very man.' The General stepped in, stooping a little so as not to hit his head on the door frame.

She sprang up. 'My dear old friend. What on earth are you doing here?'

'I've been three years posted at the fortress of Gibraltar,' he said, 'just been made colonel of the 74th Regiment of Foot, quite a promising bunch—but now I'm on my way home for a spell of leave. The ship was passing Lisbon and I'd heard from your father that you planned to be here till February, so I gave the captain a barrel of brandy to stop in for half a day.'

'I can't imagine a better surprise.' Anne seized his hands in hers; the skin was warm, scored leather. General O'Hara had to be fifty by now, but he was looking well. 'It's been years. How many years?'

He grinned. His teeth were as startlingly white as ever, or was it only that his face was bronzed? 'I've been knocking around the world so long I can't keep track. And you, you're here for your health?'

'Oh, the southern sun has done me good already,' she said, waving him to a chair. 'I'm an idle tourist, really.'

'I can't believe that the Muse of Sculpture is ever idle. Have you your scrapers and gougers with you?'

'Always,' she said, smiling back at him.

'And little Fidelle, I assume. Where is she, have I scared her under the table?'

Anne put up her hand but not in time to catch the tears.

'My dear Mrs Damer.' His hand touched her sleeve.

'I do beg your pardon. She ... she happened to die this very morning, I don't know of what, there was no one to consult and it happened so fast.'

'Oh, gad, I'm fearfully sorry.'

'That's quite all right,' she said, wiping her face with her handkerchief. 'I mean to have her cremated and put her ashes in a little japanned box to take home with me.'

'Splendid notion,' said O'Hara.

Anne cleared her throat and tried to remember how to play the hostess. 'Shall we have some wine on the terrace, with the local marzipan cakes?'

Under the shady trees he told her about being Lieutenant-Governor of Gibraltar, a tiny and chaotic peninsula that was home to 4000 people. Though Charles O'Hara was a natural son of Lord Tyrawley (or so Anne's father had always said), there was nothing of the aristocrat about the man and somehow Anne liked him better for it. He'd served in Germany, Portugal, Africa and India; underneath that military uniform, just above his heart, she knew he carried the pitted scar of an American bullet from Yorktown. She was remembering what she liked best about O'Hara: he never made her feel as if her femininity was a distracting mosquito—not even when she burst into tears. Walpole had the same knack, it struck her now, and Derby too—though her favourite men were all so different as to seem as if they belonged to distinct species.

'Is there much art to look at here?'

Anne made a little face. 'More architecture. The best pictures were swallowed up in the earthquake, or stolen or sold off long ago. At the home of a marquis I was shown a Raphael, but it'd been wretchedly painted over. I gained much credit for finding this out and cleaning off the overpainting—and I a mere woman,' she added ironically. She was about to pour herself some more wine, when she remembered her English manners and let O'Hara do it.

'So you've made friends among the Portuguese gentry?'

'Oh, I wouldn't claim that; it's difficult for foreigners. Such strange tribes! The ladies are round as barrels by twenty-five, and live strictly separate from the gentlemen among herds of servants, foundlings and dwarfs. They aren't supposed to talk to their own brothers, even.'

'So your hosts will think you scandalous for entertaining me tête-à-tête?' he asked, jerking his head towards the inn.

'We English are known for eccentricity,' Anne said with a shrug, 'and at least we're outdoors, not shut up in my cabinet together! Oh, and a girl must never so much as look at her
futur
—her intended,' she glossed. 'I heard a story about a young man who'd courted his cousin with all due form at a respectful distance. One evening she looked him in the eye and asked him how he did, from which the distraught suitor knew that the match had been broken off!'

'Imagine how that would go down in Mayfair, where both sexes casually discuss the latest adulterous intrigues,' he said with a guffaw. 'It just proves that all rules of behaviour are arbitrary conventions, whether ours or the Redskins'.'

'Oh, don't you think you go rather too far there?' Anne asked, uneasy. 'Surely the values of civilisation—'

'Yes, but which civilisation? The Hindu one is far more ancient than ours and they'd be shocked to see me butcher a cow! I tell you frankly, Mrs Damer, the more I see of different nations, the less sure I feel about the pre-eminence of my own.'

'Well,' she said, rather overwhelmed, 'why else travel, I suppose? If our journeys aren't going to change us we might as well stay at home.'

'You understand me,' said the General, draining his wine.

The pause was oddly intimate. 'Speaking of other nations,' said Anne briskly, 'Walpole's sent me Burke's remarkable
Reflections on the Revolution in France.'

'I must be the only Englishman or woman who hasn't read it yet.' O'Hara laughed. 'But didn't your father tell me you were quite the democrat?'

She flinched from the word. 'Oh, General, not a
democrat.
But as a Whig, my sympathies are naturally with the cause of liberty and I wish the French well. I must admit, though, that Burke's eloquence has shaken me somewhat. He goes too far—he has these exaggerated fears of a tide of revolution sweeping across Christendom, even to our own shores!—but his catalogue of the mistakes and crimes of the French leaders is rather damning.'

She waited for O'Hara to reveal his own views, but he only nodded and said, 'You must have a great deal of correspondence to keep you busy, too.'

'Oh, yes, my parents, of course, and Walpole—and a newer friend, a Miss Berry.'

'Which one?'

She blinked at him.

'The sketcher, or the beauty? I met them in Italy many years ago when I was travelling with your father, as it happens—unless there are other Berrys in the world?'

'The beauty,' she told him, disconcerted. Conway had mentioned something about encountering the Berrys long before Walpole had discovered them, now she came to think of it. 'Though Miss Berry would rather be known for her intellect.'

He grinned and she was suddenly afraid. In all his travels, in rough company, could the rumours of her dreadful subject have reached O'Hara? 'I'd no idea you were acquainted with that family.'

'Oh, the girls may not remember me; one brute of a soldier among many,' he said with a roar of laughter.

But looking into his sparkling eyes, Anne doubted that the Berrys could have forgotten him.

M
ARCH 1791

At Elvas she crossed the Spanish frontier and presented a letter of introduction to the governor from his brother (an old friend of her father's), so her baggage would be let through. He mortified her by insisting that the Honourable Miladi Damer should be received with full honours of war, including an escort of thirty horsemen, drums, trumpets, cannons firing and a vast banquet to follow. Anne made a private vow that from now on she wouldn't use her letters, she'd take her chances as an ordinary traveller. Lying awake with heartburn that night, she realised how much she'd changed with the years; as a newlywed of nineteen, she'd been delighted by ostentation and all-night balls. Now she'd much rather be lodging in one of the quiet villages that looked to have been crumbling into the landscape since before Columbus set sail.

From now on Anne spent fifteen hours a day in the carriage. She bumped along through sandy plains, pine woods, craggy gorges riddled with streams, spring flowers, cork trees and ilex groves.
For shame, sir, the Iberian peninsula is more than 'backward, governments & primitive economies
, she wrote to Walpole, the potholes making her words jerk along the paper.
Spain is indeed wild—no route for mere tourists—but sublimely picturesque & I have complete trust that my
calessiere
(who combines Spanish dexterity with almost English caution) & his seven skinny mules will bring me safe through the mountains.

The carriage was a little world of its own; it smelt of food and musty clothes. Anne and Bet relieved themselves in the pot, averting their gaze. For breakfast they dipped their stale rolls in oil,
tostadas con aceite,
or had a cold egg tortilla from the hamper. When they stopped for dinner Anne never could tell what was in the paella, but sometimes suspected it was rabbit, she preferred the fishy zarzuela. She couldn't help but notice that Bet and Sam seemed on more intimate terms these days. The footman sat up top with the driver, and he and the maid never touched each other in front of their mistress, but their eyes rested on each other during meals and the two of them tended to wander off during the long midday siesta, while Anne sat under a tree and read
Don Quixote
to brush up her Spanish.
The private lives of servants are a mystery,
she wrote to Mary. And Bet had seemed such a sensible, stolid girl. Anne eventually decided that, unless this affair produced some disaster such as a mulatto baby, she'd pretend she hadn't noticed.

For a country steeped in ancient tradition, untouched by what Walpole called the
French infection
, Spain had an oddly democratic spirit. Everybody Anne encountered, high or low, haid an air of languid dignity and seemed to expect to be spoken to, rather than being satisfied with a mere nod.
Condeos,
the labourers resting among their stony terraces blessed her as she was driven by and Anne, who would have been shocked at such cheek in her native Berkshire, called back,
Condeos, Condeos!
This always made them grin, though whether out of a sense of being honoured or in derision of her accent she couldn't tell.

At inns—or what passed by that name—Bet always smoked the room with thyme to chase out the fleas. Anne slept on the straw pallet from her own carriage, wrapped up in the vast cloak she'd bought in Lisbon, or shared a bed with a female stranger, exchanging no more than a few civil words. The sagging bed might be the only piece of furniture in the room. There were always small yipping dogs that were nothing like Fidelle but reminded her painfully of the box of ashes at the bottom of her dressing case.