Life Mask Read online

  Anne had finally noticed the mother, an odd, limp-jowled creature who sat behind her magnificent daughter like a shadow. She kept her head too low to catch anyone's eye and sipped her weak peach ratafia as if it were medicine.

  'I've often seen you at Drury Lane,' Miss Farren assured the Richmonds, 'and been grateful for your patronage.'

  'I've always wondered that very thing,' Anne jumped in, rather too loud, 'whether, caught up in the flow of the play, the players are oblivious?'

  'It would be hard not to notice an audience so visible and audible,' said Miss Farren, with a hint of laughter.

  'They press too near, to my way of thinking,' complained Derby.

  'It's true,' said the actress, 'the amateur critics in the pit frequently lean on the edge of the stage to get a closer view, so one has to take care not to tread on their fingers. As for the more distinguished inhabitants of the boxes, I do recognise faces, but I'm often far from sure whether they notice me, since they arrive so late and keep so busy with nods and bows and quizzing glasses that I wonder how they follow the plot at all.'

  She's satirising us, Anne thought, and we're lapping it up. Does she see this as an audition? Eliza Farren had all the sparkling enunciation of the ladies she played in comedies; she was the real thing. She sat with her closed fan balanced between her index fingers, with never an awkward glance at the Rubens hung behind her or the Titian to her left, as if she'd been brought up in great reception rooms just like this one, instead of ... well, squalid inns, Anne supposed with an inward shiver; barns, even.

  'Yes, Richmond and I eat so late and entertain such shocking numbers, ever since he's been Master-General of the Ordnance, we rarely get to Drury Lane before the third act,' said Lady Mary with a sigh.

  'But I dine at four, on a few plain dishes, to be in the box by five,' Anne admitted, 'since an unfashionable widow can consult her own pleasure.'

  The others laughed at her description of herself.

  'Luckily,' said Richmond, 'the stage is so clogged with old plays these days, we know the plots by heart. Is your proprietor ever going to write you a new part?'

  'Ah, Mr Sheridan's a busy man,' said Miss Farren. 'He was our best playwright since Shakespeare, but now—'

  'I admit, it's all the fault of us Foxites,' said Derby with a chuckle. 'The theatre engrossed Sherry's talents long enough and now they're required for a higher stage.'

  'The Party?' Anne asked.

  'The country, I should say.'

  A little snort from Richmond. Anne was suddenly reminded that by inviting a Foxite politician like Derby to take part in these theatricals her brother-in-law was making a rather gracious gesture across Party lines.

  'But I live in hope,' Miss Farren added, smoothly filling the gap in the conversation. 'Perhaps Sheridan will write me a new role by the time I'm forty.'

  At that they all broke out laughing again. Was it the delivery that gave the simple joke such a glittering spin? Anne thought, This girl will never be forty.

  It had been an uncomfortable moment between Richmond and Derby, though. Anne was only too aware that these men shared a painful history. Derby, Richmond and his nephew Fox, her father Conway, they'd all been idealistic Whigs in the glory days of the Party, protesting against the King's misbegotten war, wearing the 'buff and blue' of the brave Americans. Anne remembered feeling so proud of her eloquent friends and relations, united in the most noble of causes: Reform. To her, the word was a shining banner; it meant reform not just of Parliament—the broadening of the franchise (which currently let only one man in a hundred vote), the freeing of the Commons from bribery and bullying by the Crown—but also the end of all oppressions, such as censorship, poverty and slavery. Then, five years ago, the Whigs had got their moment in the sun, swept into government ... and after three months of wrangling, Fox had resigned, taking half their Members with him, and the Party had broken like a china plate.

  These days Richmond served in young Pitt's Tory Cabinet, which grieved Anne when she let herself think about it; how could he have discarded his passion for Reform? But it touched her that he held no personal animosity towards the Foxites (well, except for Fox himself). These theatricals were a proof of something she'd always believed: that political differences shouldn't be allowed to strain the delicate fabric of social life.

  'Now in a few months, Mrs Damer,' said Miss Farren, her voice deepening as she began to take charge of the little group, 'it's you who'll have to brave the lights as Mrs Lovemore in the Richmond House Theatre.'

  Anne's pulse skidded; she drained her wine. 'Is that my role?'

  Derby grinned at her. 'Among my whole acquaintance I'd pick no other leading lady.'

  So it was to him that she owed it. 'But I'm the least experienced of our number—'

  'If it comes to that,' said Richmond, 'I've trod the boards more than any of you, but forty-one is high time to retire gracefully.'

  'Besides, it's character that matters,' Derby told her.

  'And your face, which promises much,' said Miss Farren with a slowly ripening smile. 'Besides, you're already so celebrated for your sculpture, you can't shrink at the prospect of a little more fame.'

  'Oh, I can, I assure you,' said Anne, laughing.

  THE EARL OF DERBY and Sir Charles Bunbury were roasting their boots at the Green Hawk in Croydon. After riding all this way to see a promising two-year-old—as prominent members of the Jockey Club, they vied with each other to buy up good stock—they'd found the road cut off by snowdrifts. 'But how can you stand it?' asked Bunbury, thumping his punch glass down on the table.

  Derby gave a languid shrug.

  'You love the fair damsel. Am I right? I'm right. I know it, even an old sportsman like me.' Approaching fifty, the Baronet still had broad shoulders, a strong mouth and plenty of short wiry hair. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. 'Every scandal sheet from Land's End to John o'Groats knows it. How long's it been? Five years?' The caricaturists were cruel to Derby, the latest print on display in a shop window showed him as a swollen toddler on a horse, floundering along behind his carriage in which Miss Farren sat with elegant, averted head, her mother a grim-faced duenna at her side.

  Derby allowed his mind to float back. 'I first saw her walk on stage in the role of Lady Teazle in Sherry's School for Scandal.'

  'I mean when did you and she start—or rather, when did you start not—'

  To forestall him Derby said, 'I've been on visiting terms since '81.'

  'Six years. Gad,' said Bunbury, ladling some more punch into his glass and topping up Derby's with a splash, 'that's a long stretch to waste. A man never knows how long he has left.'

  'I wouldn't call it a waste,' objected Derby. 'I see a great deal of the lady; she often dines with me and stays to play whist. She uses my carriage.'

  'Sounds much like being married.'

  'Except that we never quarrel.'

  Bunbury let out a bark of laughter.

  That wasn't quite true, Derby reflected. He and the actress never spoke in heat, but there were significant silences. He was still smarting from yesterday's mistake. He knew the unspoken rules—that they were never to be alone without Mrs Farren, nor use first names, and that Eliza wouldn't accept anything from him but fruit sent down from his greenhouses at Knowsley in Lancashire, or an occasional brace of partridges after the annual Foxite shooting party in Norfolk. But in celebration of her successful début at Richmond House (where it was clear to Derby that everyone had adored her at once), he'd taken the risk of ordering a little basket of hothouse white currants and hiding a string of pearls among their translucent beads. He'd convinced himself that Eliza might let it pass, on this special occasion, if she were amused by the visual joke. Her mother, though often an irksome presence to Derby, never seemed to oppose his cause—he sometimes thought her a mute supporter of it—and might she not clasp the pearls round her daughter's slim neck and hush her protests? But last night, after dinner, Derby had been shaken out of the warm haze o
f brandy by the return of the untouched basket. He'd realised how fatuous his self-delusion had been when he read the note: Mrs Farren & Miss Farren are much obliged, but don't find white currants agree with them.

  'So you get nothing from her, you swear?' Bunbury was banging on. 'The famed Farren remains icy—'

  'No names, please,' said Derby with a glance through the fug at the other customers: only a handful of farmers and tradesmen sucking their pipes, or playing quoits in the corner, but one never knew.

  Bunbury was trying to annoy him. But in the long years of their friendship Derby had learned not to rise to the bait. He flicked some mud off his leather breeches, and reached into his pocket for his snuffbox. He used to be a smoker till it went out of fashion; he found snuff so much handier and more elegant.

  'So what does she say when you put it to her—as it were?' Bunbury let out a filthy chuckle. 'What possible argument can she have against a good settlement?'

  'I've never asked her.' Derby flicked open the little ivory lid, which bore a memorial painting of his best gamecock and put a pinch on the back of his hand. It was a strong Maltese variety; when he snorted, he felt that delicious burning in the back of his nose and throat.

  'I don't quite know how to put this,' said the Baronet, 'but is the little sword of the Smith-Stanleys of Derby by any chance rusted in the scabbard?'

  Derby felt a pang of nostalgia for the days of his youth when they'd still worn swords with full dress; he could have put his to Bunbury's throat. 'Would you like to say that a trifle louder?' he growled.

  'No disrespect intended.' Bunbury took a long swig of punch.

  Relenting, Derby put away his snuffbox and told him, 'There are easier ways of meeting that particular need; London's full of amenable females.' He knew he was making it sound as if he had these females driven to his house in Grosvenor Square every night, whereas the truth was he very rarely resorted to that trade. 'As for offering the young lady in question a settlement—I've never found a suitable moment.'

  'In six years?'

  'She's not like other women; she has remarkable powers of turning the conversation. And of course I've never been alone with her,' said Derby, wondering if he sounded tragic or only pathetic. 'I once hinted that I'd something important to say and she suddenly remembered a rehearsal.'

  'Gad, remarkable staying power, that filly! But what you get out of the exchange is harder to see,' said the Baronet.

  'Oh, come, man. You know yourself that in the middle years one can take a calmer attitude than when one was a young stallion, galloping around the Continent.'

  'You don't need to tell me that,' said Bunbury, frowning down at his old deer-hide breeches, sticky with spilled punch. 'Believe me, I didn't trouble Lady Sarah much that way—but then, we were married! And the cheek of her: when I offered to give the baby girl my name and say no more, she turned me down and ran away with her paramour ... No, that divorce was the best £300 I ever spent, even if I had to sell two good stud-horses to pay for it. Not that I meant to marry again,' he added with a snort, 'I just wanted to be done with the business, in spite of Richmond begging me not to cast off his little sister. No, the whole sex is null and void to me these days.' The Baronet held up his glass as if making a toast. 'Cuckolding whores, the lot of them! And blueblood wives are the worst. I've never understood why you went no further than separation from Lady Derby yourself—'

  'On that subject we can't agree,' snapped Derby, 'so let's drop it.' Whenever someone dared to mention the Countess in his hearing, he felt his heart contract to a little chip of ice. It would be nine years this summer since he'd had his wife's portrait taken down from over the fireplace, at Knowsley, and put on a bonfire. It had been quite a fine picture—a Reynolds—but there were times when art wasn't worth a farthing.

  The punch had loosened Bunbury's tongue. 'Come, Derby, haven't we shared enough days in the saddle to speak man to man? Dorset's a damn rogue; why has no one ever called him out and speared him like an eel?'

  Derby didn't comment. Any grudge he'd borne against the seductive Duke of Dorset had worn off years ago. Men would always take what women didn't refuse them; Derby was a man himself, so he knew. No, the unforgivable crime had been the lovely Lady Betty Derby's, for running off with the Duke like some cheap harlot. No discretion, no dignity. For the last nine years Derby had refused to answer her maudlin letters except through his lawyers, refused to see her, even though her lodgings in Marylebone were only five minutes the wrong side of Oxford Street. The Countess's descent into invalidism had caused him a secret gratification. She lived in a sort of social twilight; she'd clung on to much of her acquaintance, especially the old rakes, but Queen Charlotte still barred her from Court and of course she'd lost her children. That generally hit women hard. It was different for men; Derby was perfectly fond of Edward, Charlotte and Elizabeth, and liked to think of them doing well up at Knowsley, but it wouldn't cause him pain not to lay eyes on them for a year at a time.

  Bunbury was wagging one finger. 'But what puzzles me is for a fellow like you—still much the fresh side of forty, aren't you?'

  'Thirty-four,' Derby conceded.

  'Is that all?—to spend so long in thrall, in bondage, damn it, to one member of the female persuasion without the slightest reward for his efforts.'

  'I can afford to wait,' said Derby. 'The company of a brilliant and beautiful lady offers other pleasures. There are many forms of reward, as you put it.'

  'What, you mean she pays you?' asked Bunbury, innocent. 'You're a hired cicisbeo, kept on to remind the World of the lady's charms?'

  Derby let out a roar of laughter and drained his glass to the sugary dregs. 'I don't think I'm handsome enough to get that job.'

  'As a foil, then?' suggested Bunbury.

  'That's more like it. La Belle et la Bête!'

  THE THAMES was high with melt-water and along the fashionable strip of villas at Twickenham gardens were flooding. The ten miles from Mayfair took Anne's carriage less than an hour, since the road had been improved. She drew up outside the wall of Strawberry Hill. The first glimpse through the trees of Horace Walpole's little castle always made her smile: the quatrefoil windows, spires and pinnacles, twin towers and battlements. She'd been coming to stay with her godfather since before she could walk, before she could remember; Strawberry Hill felt not so much like home as a place of perpetual holiday. 'We're here, Fidelle,' she murmured to the miniature Italian greyhound asleep in her lap.

  As the courtyard already held Walpole's carriage and phaeton, Anne got down outside the gate, under the coat of arms and curious Latin motto, which she translated in her head: The skies above the traveller change, but not the traveller. She brushed down the cloth skirts of her travelling costume. In the courtyard a gilded angel stood in his niche; she looked through the arches into the tiny cloisters, where a blue-and-white bowl sat on a pedestal, inscribed with Mr Gray's poem on the occasion of Walpole's cat Selina drowning in it. Fidelle was the weight of a baby in Anne's arms; she stirred and scrabbled a little.

  One of Walpole's footmen opened the door with a bow. The hall always reduced visitors to silence; it was the most startling space in the building, a sort of set for a Gothic novel. (Well, after all, her cousin had written the first, Anne thought, and had The Castle of Otranto ever been bettered in the twenty-year craze?) A single candle glimmered in a japanned lantern and the grey walls were smeared with the coloured light that came through roundels of painted glass. The wooden balustrade was a fretwork of giant flowers and, on the posts, small golden antelopes holding shields seemed to watch Anne as she climbed the steps. In a high niche on her left François Is suit of armour stood sentinel, visor down, spear ready; as a child she'd scared herself with the idea that it came to life at night. Walpole had designed Strawberry Hill to have an immemorial gloom—not melancholy, but the gloomy warmth of cathedrals, gloomth, as he called it. It was all pretence and trompe l'oeil, she knew—wallpaper painted to look like stone, papier mâché shaped l
ike wood—but it still worked its spell on her.

  In the armoury, with its pointed arches and cases of scimitars and quivers, Anne almost tripped over some workmen; the place was never free of them. She found Walpole in his favourite room, the library, in a tizzy. Tonton had jumped into the Thames, 'like one of the mad Gadarene swine,' lamented his master, then raced up the meadows through some cow-pats, run all over the house, and finally lain down and rubbed filth into the Louis XIV carpet in the library. 'Why I ever accepted such a trying legacy from my dear Madame du Deffand I cannot recall.' Walpole lay on the sofa like a shrivelled mannequin, watching his housekeeper towel down the fat black spaniel by the fire.

  Anne had often wondered the same thing. 'Tonton's done worse in his youth,' she pointed out. 'That time he bit Richmond's favourite hound—'

  A shaft of merriment lit up Walpole's face. 'Ah, that was different, my dear. Every dog has his day of battle. What is their life if not a struggle for ascendancy?'

  'Fidelle's isn't,' she said, looking down at the tight coil of silvery grey in her lap.

  'That's true, she's a perfect gentlewoman. But how these creatures tyrannise over our hearts! Madame du Deffand used to tell a good story about a lady whose poodle bit a piece out of a gentleman's leg and ate it.'

  Anne had heard this one before, but still smiled.

  Walpole's face was a mask of anxiety. 'The lady cried, "I do hope it won't make her sick!'"

  His delivery was impeccable. Her cousin would have brought the house down at Drury Lane, Anne thought, if his destiny had ever required him to earn a living. He'd been pleasing enough, in his youth, as the portraits on the walls proved, even if by now he was a morsel of a man with a monkey's face, all skin and nose. He wore the limp remains of his own hair, curled into little old-fashioned rolls at the sides, with a queue at the back.

  'There,' said the housekeeper, releasing the spaniel.

  'But is he quite warm and dry?'

  'Quite, sir.' Margaret Young was on her knees mopping up the puddles.