Life Mask (82 page)

'No, no.'

'She never came home from Lisbon. Her nose was shockingly broken.' His voice was a tiny insect in the stuffy room. 'I am neglected and deserted by the only friends I have left.'

'But dear Walpole,' said Mary on the other side of him, 'I'm Mary, the broken nose was mine. We're here, right here by your side; we haven't left you.'

'Abandoned,' he insisted, 'by those to whom I unwisely clung. Hedged about with cruel strangers!'

'We were only out of your room for five minutes,' Anne told him.

'With the brave General, I fancy,' he wheezed, spitting a little.

That took her aback. Did he mean O'Hara?

He paused for so long she thought he'd fallen asleep. 'Conway, the bravest of them all,' he said at last, very faint. 'Brave Harry. Horry and Harry.'

Anne was overwhelmed with exhaustion. She sat down. Mary settled herself beside her and gripped her hand. Anne was too tired to squeeze back. Walpole was like a wailing baby; nothing could satisfy him.

In his sleep he looked a trifle healthier; there was a warmer tinge to his cheeks.

M
ARCH 1797

A mild breeze came over the meadow to Strawberry Hill. 'I wonder might I see the death mask?' asked Richmond.

'Certainly.' Anne led him upstairs to the library where it lay, very white and hard, on a black velvet cushion. Richmond approached it with the firm look of the connoisseur. The face was an extraordinary one, narrow and alien; Anne took no credit for it. 'I can't imagine why I never sculpted him while he was with us. Somehow it never occurred to me.' But the only man she'd ever immortalised was King George; that was a strange thing. 'This is only the plaster cast of the mask, of course. I'll have to begin the marble version as soon as I have some time.'

'There's no hurry, surely,' said the Duke.

'Plaster's more brittle than it looks,' she told him, 'the slightest thing could chip or crack it.' Then all at once she was blinded by tears, staggering. Richmond pressed her face to his shoulder. She sobbed harshly. 'It was the abscess in his throat that finished him; he couldn't swallow a thing for the last week. He starved to death.'

Her brother-in-law patted her back stiffly. Anne remembered that she hadn't cried like this at her sister's funeral; did Richmond resent it? It seemed impossible not to hurt people with every step, every word. The world was bruised all over. Richmond had been wearing mourning for four months now and he seemed lost without Lady Mary; who else had ever really known him? Despite the rumours that he might propose to Lady Bess Foster—who'd recently been freed to remarry by the death of her long absent husband—he'd made no moves to put the
affaire
on any official footing.

And Georgiana, Anne wondered, downstairs in the milling crowd again, what did the poor disfigured Duchess think about her beloved Bess's new liaison? Was it possible to love someone without jealousy? 'You seem much better these days,' Anne told her in a murmur, not quite honestly.

Georgiana produced her famous smile. 'I'm half blind and as dependent as a child, but Bess makes the best of mothers. One's glory days can't last for ever, I suppose. Did I ever tell you about the Irishman who came to Devonshire House once?
By Gob, your la'ship,
he said,
I could light me pipe at dem gorgeous eyes!'

Anne laughed with her, wanting to cry.

They talked about the surreal prospect of invasion, as everybody did these days. Every attic was rumoured to conceal quantities of arms and gunpowder, every sullen servant in London was watched for signs of membership in a secret army, like the United Irishmen that were causing such alarm across the water. (Richmond's nephew and Sheridan's bosom friend, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was said to be on the brink of arrest for treason.)

Mary detached herself gently from her waiting, red-faced sister and came over to take Anne's elbow whispering, 'It's time for the reading of the Will.'

Oh, God, Anne had forgotten the last part of the ritual. She and Mary walked along the corridor slowly, arm in arm. She didn't worry how it might look; she couldn't care less if their manner was too intense. 'Your letter, last night, was the only thing that did me any good in the absence of your healing hands,' she whispered in Mary's ear. 'I thought I'd go mad, all alone in that melancholy house in Berkeley Square.'

Mary smiled faintly. 'We were both born to suffer in this world—but at least we may suffer together.'

Anne caught herself looking at the painted glass, memorising the angles of arches. This might be the last time she would ever be at Strawberry Hill. She barely knew the Duchess of Gloucester, the favourite niece who was to inherit the house; besides, would she ever want to visit it with its creator gone?

The crowd squeezed into the dark refectory, making a commotion. There weren't enough chairs; Reynolds's paintings of the dead man's friends looked down on the crowd. Anne sat on a bench and tried to concentrate on the droning voice of the lawyer, Mr Blake.

The deceased Earl of Orford (how strange to hear him called that) had left his estates in Norfolk and Houghton to Lord Chol-mondeley, and £10,000 to the Duchess of Gloucester. Mr Berry was to inherit his manuscripts, the Berry sisters £4000 each—
bless him,
thought Anne—and the use, for as long as they remained unmarried, of the building, grounds and furniture of the house known as Little Strawberry Hill. Sir Horace Mann got £5000, Lady Ailesbury £4000, nineteen nieces and nephews got £500 each, Philip the valet got £1500, and for some reason the poor secretary Kirgate received only £100. There were inconsistencies and omissions; some of his best friends were not mentioned in the Will.

'The sum of £6000 outright, and the buildings, grounds and furniture of the house known as Strawberry Hill, for her lifetime, is bequeathed to Mrs Anne Seymour Conway Damer.'

She jerked in her seat. 'What?' she said. 'No, that's a mistake.'

'It goes to you first, Mrs Damer, until your death,' explained Mr Blake, 'and only then does it pass to the Duchess of Gloucester.'

The Duchess nodded at her civilly.

'Did the deceased not mention the matter to you?'

Anne shook her head. She looked to Mary; the younger woman's dark eyes were glittering with tears.
Strawberry Hill?
Anne was too bewildered to begin to understand this gift. Walpole had been angry with her ever since Bognor, or before; hadn't she betrayed him, over and over, and hadn't he known it?

We regret to announce the departure from this life, atforty-four years, on the fourteenth of this month, at her home on Gloucester Street in the parish of Marylebone, of that famous beauty of a former age, the Countess of Derby.

'She's not buried yet,' Mrs Farren told her daughter with an awful fascination.

Eliza didn't look up from the letter she was writing. 'Why on earth not?'

'Debts. It says the Countess asked to be buried with all the pomp of her rank, but her corpse can't be released till her family discharges what's owing, which amounts to £5000.'

'That's not so very much for a citizen of the Beau Monde,' said Eliza, trying for a light tone. 'Why, Georgiana's never owed less than £50,000.'

She wasn't acting that night;
Much Ado
had closed and she'd begged Wroughton to give her some breathing space before her next role. The truth was that since the news of her rival's death Eliza had felt strangely sunken, unequal to the task of stepping on stage.

Her mother was sitting very close to her; Eliza curved her arm to make sure her writing couldn't be read.

My Lord,
I hope it won't seem hypocritical of me to offer you my sympathies. The death of a person with whose life yours has been so long
£sf
so intimately connected must be a shock to the nerves.

Was Derby feeling guilty now, she wondered, or relieved, or a peculiar mixture of the two? Were his friends congratulating him, or teasing him for his readiness to jump from one trap to the next? A bitter resentment bubbled up in Eliza. It would be said that the actress had reeled in her big fish at last. She couldn't stop the gossip, and the paragraphs, and the caricatures, but she could at least keep things absolutely clear between herself and Derby.

Don't be injured by my enclosure of the Document you were gallant enough to present me with at Knowsley three Christmases past. I make no claim on you. It may strike you that I've kept you waiting too long & I'm no longer in my first youth.

No, that line sounded pathetic; she inked it out.

You've given me no reason to suspect that your feelings have changed, but perhaps I've lived among actors too long to have any faith in my power to read a face. Which of us in this World never wears a disguise, for kind reasons as often as cruel?

The pen skidded and the page flew out of her hands. 'Mother!'

Margaret Farren backed away, peering at the letter, her furious lip jutting. 'I knew it. You mean to throw it all away in the last act.'

Eliza was on her feet. 'Give it back.'

'What devilish little fool is this that calls itself my daughter?' cried Mrs Farren. 'Such a troublesome and wanton spirit you've always had, Betsy, behind that smooth face!'

Eliza reeled at the accusation. 'Wanton?' she repeated. 'I've lived like some anchoress. You've chaperoned my every waking minute since I was a child.'

'Wanton, I say,' ranted the old woman, 'because the best of men's not good enough for you. What, would you throw the Earl's signed promise back in his face? Hasn't he waited on you longer than Jacob in the Scripture?'

'The long delay, that's my point exactly—'

But Mrs Farren stormed on. 'So Derby's plug-ugly; what's that in a man? Is it so dull to be adored and worshipped? Who are you pining for, some fierce Oriental sultan on a flying carpet?'

Eliza stared.

The woman's face was darkening to purple. 'Or maybe it's not a man you want at all.'

As Eliza stepped closer—while her arm was flying up of its own accord to backhand her mother across the cheek hard enough to raise, a green bruise for a week—she already knew how it would go. She acknowledged in her bones that she was going to marry Lord Derby and spend the rest of her mother's life silently begging her pardon. But she hit her anyway.

...Which of us in this World never wears a disguise, for kind reasons as often as cruel? This is why I'm returning your Promise. If you wish you may destroy it & we'll not speak of it again. I will always be glad to call myself
your friend,
E.F.

Derby, halfway through breakfast, crumpled the letter and its enclosure in his fist.
Christ, how long does she mean to torment me?
But he didn't want the servants to read the letter, or, God forbid, sell it to a newspaper; he never liked to leave temptation in their way. He walked over to the fire and stuffed the paper ball in, watched till it was ash.

'But M'Lord, the carriage—'

'I don't need it, I'll walk.'

The man goggled at him. It seemed to fill him with shame that his master, a peer of the realm, would be seen walking down the street. Derby could have explained that he was only going round the corner to Green Street, but there was just one person in this world to whom he was willing to explain himself today. He knew he shouldn't be doing this at all—approaching Eliza Farren's house in the broad light of day not a week after his bereavement—but he was beyond such scruples.

The butler was instructing the footman to fetch His Lordship's mourning greatcoat, the one with the black squirrel trim. 'I'm very well as I am,' said Derby with vast impatience and opened the front door himself.

The April day wasn't as mild as it had looked from the window; the breeze tightened Derby's calves as he walked and got in under his black cloth frock coat. He felt a twinge of gout in his elbow. He told himself to stop thinking like an old man.

Up North Audley Street and left on to Green Street. He stood outside the house for a moment, catching his breath, and became aware that a carriage had slowed to a halt. He'd been seen; would this be in the evening papers?
A certain widowed Peer was glimpsed on G——n St today, panting outside the Bow Window of his theatrical Inamorata...
It didn't matter.

He turned; the face in the window was framed in a handsome black hood trimmed with fur. 'Mrs Damer,' he said with a bow. 'My commiserations on your loss,' he added, remembering Walpole.

'And mine on yours.' Were those eyes ironical or merely grave? She held his gaze a moment longer, then said a word to the driver. She pulled the curtain across and the carriage surged on down the street towards Grosvenor Square.

He was rattled; he was thrown. Was Anne Damer some kind of witch to haunt him so? Behind him the door scraped open and he spun round. It wasn't Mrs Farren but the manservant, who muttered something about the mistress inviting him to step up.

Eliza was waiting for him in the parlour. She was alone, for once, thank Christ. Derby came in the door full of wrathful recriminations, but they all fell away at the sight of her face. It was the same perfect oval as it had always been, but there was something uncertain in her azure eyes. She hadn't meant her letter to be cruel, he realised, she was only nervous; a filly shying at the big jump. Her face was like a child's, but it also gave him some hint, for the first time since he'd known her, of what she would look like when she was old. He felt irritable with tenderness. He got down on one cold, aching knee.

She didn't say a word.

'Will you marry me?' Having rehearsed the line for sixteen years, Derby thought he knew how to say it so it would express everything he felt. But it came out quite formal.