Life Mask

by Emma Donoghue

  'Ah. How very thoughtless of me.'

  That'll remind him how old I am, Anne thought vindictively, rubbing her eyes. She glanced around. It might be all over town by dinner: Mrs Damer and Mr Fawkener riding together in Hyde Park, yes, and he made her cry—that's a sure sign! 'Thank you,' she said, almost grabbing her reins from him, and she rode on.

  When he caught up, she felt obliged to clear her throat and make conversation. 'I suppose they might banish her.'

  'Except that they're not banishing anyone,' said Fawkener. 'There's only one verdict these days and seven thousand prisoners awaiting it.'

  'Seven thousand? That's mass murder. The whole French race has gone mad!'

  'And they've banned Christianity, did you hear? Notre-Dame's become a Temple of Reason. They say Paris is silent these days, as if the plague's abroad; the loudest sound is the chop, chop, chop of the Guillotine.' Fawkener spoke as if telling a terrible fairy tale.

  Anne blinked furiously, so she wouldn't have to use the borrowed handkerchief tucked into her cuff.

  IN BOND STREET, Eliza was staring into a window at a small clockwork device in shining brass. The blade was drawn up and then fell, over and over, a little more slowly every time. A shopman picked it up to wind the toy and gave Eliza a civil nod through the glass—then beamed and bowed properly.

  'He recognises you,' said Mrs Farren with satisfaction.

  Eliza reread the neatly printed sign in front of the machine: To satisfy curiosity, an ingenious and perfect Model of Dr Guillotine's swift and humane Invention, £2. She thought for a moment she might be sick. Was there nothing the World couldn't turn into a game?

  But then, look at her: was she any better? In these strange times, foreign news was as involving—but ultimately unreal—as a play. Like everyone else, she read of horrors, then turned the page to learn whether the Prince of Wales had been seen in the latest mad fashion, pantaloons; while prisoners slipped in each other's blood in Paris, Eliza searched for the most elegant headband in London.

  She'd adopted a policy of refusing to discuss France with Anne, since it always made them quarrel—but she could hear it, like a high-pitched hum, behind their and every other conversation these days. What she would have liked to say, if it wouldn't have plunged them into deep water, was that the daily litany of atrocities appalled her as much as anyone, but it couldn't change her mind. She had to trust that this Terror would end, and the French would remember who they were and what their Revolution was for. In the meantime she was still for liberty and against this damnable war.

  The real reason Eliza was shopping today was boredom. Kemble had finally lost his temper and resigned as manager, so the company-in-exile had given up their lease of the King's Theatre. What could they do until the new colossus rising on Drury Lane was ready to house them? Drowning in debt, Sheridan had discharged more than forty second- and third-rate players to save on salaries—including Jack Palmer, who'd taken offence and sailed to America in hopes of founding a company there. Eliza missed her colleagues, and her work, more than she could have imagined. Is this what it would feel like, she wondered, to be a former actress?

  The Derby carriage was waiting at the corner and the driver jumped down to lower the steps. Eliza sometimes suspected Derby of riding his horse around town so that the carriage would be available for the Farrens all day. Well, never mind, it was good for his health; she'd been alarmed by his recent attack of gout.

  On their way home, on impulse, she dropped into Mrs Darner's to see how the King was coming along. When Eliza and her mother came in, Anne looked down from her vast scaffold, her features lit up with a smile. She was looking unusually respectable today; she'd swapped her stained smock for a draped jacket pinned loosely on her bosom and a white apron, and tied up her hair with a Grecian-looking bandeau. Her guests were so numerous these days that it appeared she'd founded a sort of salon despite herself. 'Lady Ailesbury, Lady Mary, Field Marshal Conway, how nice to see you all,' said Eliza, making her curtsies. Anne's mother was knotting, just as Eliza's mother did but in finer silk, and her father was reading a newspaper. Eliza was always amused at how little interest the visitors took in the techniques of Anne's work. They liked the idea of watching art in the making, but they were incurious. It was the same with theatregoers, she supposed; they wanted to be dazzled by a performance, rather than learn about the dogged preparations that lay behind it.

  Eliza accepted a glass of wine and Mrs Farren was persuaded to her usual half-glass of ratafia. (To Eliza's relief, her mother appeared to have got over her silent grudge against Mrs Damer, since the actress's reputation was clearly no longer in any danger from the connection.) 'Mr Fawkener,' murmured Eliza, nodding to the Clerk of the Privy Council. He was here so often, he really must be courting the sculptor, despite her denials. Eliza found the prospect of her friend making such a late second marriage rather incongruous.

  'How His Majesty grows,' Fawkener remarked, walking round the gigantic scaffold. The face and upper robes of the slim young man were emerging from the creamy marble and Eliza recognised the faint pointing marks with which the sculptor was transferring the proportions from the plaster model.

  The monkey-faced dandy Dick Cosway was bent over his sketch pad. (Eliza had let him paint her several times, before realising that he made all his fluffy-haired ladies look exactly the same; according to Derby, the fellow made his real money from obscene snuffboxes.) 'Mr Cosway, how's your delightful wife, and may I peek?'

  'I'd be honoured, Miss Farren.'

  So far he'd only done Anne's face, she saw; he'd shortened the nose and shrunk the cloud of curls in line with fashion. 'Mrs Damer,' he called now, 'I wonder could I trouble you—just to catch the pose—'

  'Oh, yes, Mr Cosway, where do you want me?' Anne looked down, wiping some stone dust off her face.

  'Hm, I usually like to have a lady leaning on something, but you can hardly put your elbow on our sovereign,' he said, raising a little laugh from the group. 'Chisel in one hand, I suppose, and hammer dangling from the other.'

  'But this is a rasp; I'm smoothing the cheek.'

  Her right arm must be hurting again if she's not chiselling today, thought Eliza.

  Cosway nodded eagerly. 'The thing is, the public understands hammers and chisels to be the insignia of your trade.'

  Anne exchanged a tiny, impatient smile with Eliza. 'Sam,' she called to the footman standing against the wall, 'if you'd be so good as to hand me up the big hammer and a flat.'

  If you'd be so good, that amused Eliza. She'd noticed that people of liberal sympathies sometimes spoke more politely to their black servants than their white ones—though they didn't pay them more.

  'My dear girl, it just strikes me, you've forgotten the crown,' said the Field Marshal, blinking in dismay.

  'The crown and the sceptre can't be of marble,' she explained, 'cut that thin it would snap. I've found a Monsieur Vulliamy to forge them for me.'

  'His workmanship is exquisite,' her mother commented, 'and it's good to give the pathetic émigrés some work when one can.'

  Her husband snorted. 'We stumble over too many of them in Soho. Could be Jacobin spies for all we know.'

  'Oh, Father,' protested Anne, holding her pose.

  'Nonsense, Conway,' Lady Ailesbury told her husband, 'spies would look better fed.'

  'My mother and I were just at Ackermann's Repository of Arts,' Eliza put in.

  'Yes, we bought some card racks and a fire screen,' ventured Mrs Farren.

  'Made up on the spot by several vicomtesses,' Eliza added. She didn't actually know the rank of the haggard red-eyed Frenchwomen she'd seen there, but she thought that would hit home. 'And Lord Derby has sent a former abbesse and a widowed marquise up to Knowsley to educate his wards.'

  'Splendid,' said Lady Ailesbury, yawning behind her fan.

  'Many think the French should all be deported, even the ones who arrived before the Revolution,' remarked William Fawkener.

  Eliza stared at him.
He likes to stir things up.

  'Oh, but how would we do without them?' protested Lady Mary, stirring. 'Think of the loss of lady's maids, milliners, hairdressers and pastry chefs. The Beau Monde would fall into chaos!'

  The talk turned to some family friend called General O'Hara, who seemed to have been involved in the British claiming of Toulon in the name of the Dauphin. 'Or young Louis XVII, we should say,' Conway put in heavily.

  Eliza said nothing. The execution of the last Louis had been indefensible—he should have been merely exiled—but she found it hard to weep for one bloodletting among so many tens of thousands. 'Is it true that the Duke of York has had to give up the siege of Dunkirk?' she asked, just to keep the conversational shuttlecock in the air.

  There was a strained silence and she knew at once that she'd said the wrong thing.

  Lady Mary spoke up in a drawl. 'I'm afraid Richmond's been made the scapegoat of the matter, Miss Farren, as Master-General of the Ordnance. The guns never arrived at Dunkirk, you see, and York's had the gall to blame it on the neglect—or even malice—of my husband.'

  There was much shocked tut-tutting. Eliza's mother gave her a private scowl for her faux pas.

  'We were away shooting partridge at the time, as it happened, but Richmond had given the orders,' Lady Mary assured the group, 'so it's hardly his fault if the guns were accidentally packed on to a different vessel and never turned up.'

  'I had a most eloquent visitor yesterday, let's dub him Dumby,' said Anne, smoothly changing the subject to Eliza's relief. '"Lord! what a charming, clever scaffold," he remarked, paying no attention to the statue itself. "What a delightfully constructed contrivance, and so sturdy and high!"'

  There was much laughter. 'My dear girl, you're being harsh,' Lady Ailesbury objected. 'I know the party in question, because I brought him, and he's simply too shy to comment on matters artistic.'

  'Is he a carpenter, since he's such an expert on scaffolds?' asked Fawkener.

  'He must be French,' quipped the Field Marshal.

  'That's right, Mrs Damer,' Dick Cosway chipped in, 'it's one of the rights of woman to mount a scaffold, but be sure you don't lose your head!'

  That raised a general groan and Anne gave the painter a cold look.

  Strange, thought Eliza, what tasteless jokes were doing the rounds these days. It was as if the news from France was so lurid, so excessive, that satire was the only possible response.

  WHEN DERBY arrived at St Anne's Hill, on a warm afternoon, he found Fox recumbent on the lawn, 'trying to fool the birds into thinking me dead'.

  'Any luck?' He held out his hand to pull up his bulky friend.

  'I believe so, till you roused me, and now they think I'm Jesus Christ.' Fox squeezed Derby's hand between his two paws. 'Ravished you could come down. I thought of Italy this summer, but Liz persuaded me we wouldn't be safe on the Continent, because I'm known to be such a friend of the French—and I must confess, it's been so Arcadian here that I'm glad we stayed at home.'

  They tracked Sheridan to a stump in the woods, where he sat grinning over a pamphlet by some clever radical called Pigott who was charged with toasting the French Republic in a coffee house. 'You're rather merry,' Derby pointed out.

  'Because my manager's come back,' explained Sheridan. 'I smoothed Kemble's ruffled pinions by reminding him that we're brothers in the ranks of Thespis, promising to reform my ways—oh, and a roof on the new Drury by Christmas.'

  'Christmas?' asked Fox, brightening.

  'That bit was a lie,' Derby guessed. 'Our Sherry's a monster of deceit.'

  'One has to be to run a theatre,' Sheridan pointed out.

  The three of them played battledore, not to win but to keep the shuttlecock in the air; they got up to 1239 strokes before Mrs Armistead had them called in for a delicious dinner. (For a former courtesan, Derby noted, Liz was remarkably good at housekeeping on little or no money.) Then the men lounged on the terrace, filling the little pipes that were all the rage. Smoking was considered much manlier than snuff these days—probably because of the wartime atmosphere, Derby thought, but privately he still preferred a pinch of good Masulipatam.

  Fox reported on Devonshire House, where the blind windows had finally brightened again on the return of Georgiana, Bess and the other ladies.

  'And Grey's child?' asked Derby. 'Left abroad in fosterage, I assume?'

  Sheridan supplied the information. 'She's been sent to his parents in Northumberland to raise under the fiction of being his little sister.'

  'How bizarre!'

  'Georgiana's distraught about it, obviously. But she's quite changed by her exile,' said Fox. 'Penitent, and grateful to the Duke for having forgiven her and allowed her to leave war-torn France after a full year! Altogether cowed.'

  'Oh, dear." A chill breeze flapped their neckerchiefs. 'It's almost November, isn't it?' said Derby. 'Time to screw our courage to the sticking place for another Session.' He spoke energetically, but all he could think of was forty-one to two hundred and eighty-two. That had been the division on Sheridan's and Grey's Reform bill back in May: forty-one Foxite Members, fifty on a good day, with only a leaderless handful in the Lords since Portland's desertion; did that still count as a Whig Party? There was a silence, and he almost wished he'd stuck to gossip.

  'Yes, I must begin, like some fat, wheezing Sisyphus, to roll the stone up the hill again,' murmured Fox. 'Though weak, we are right and that must be our comfort.'

  'I think most people are sickened by the war, even if they daren't say so,' Sheridan argued, 'and Pitt's repression is doing a better job of making the country hate him than we could do. Those Scottish judges are more rabid than any Jacobin committee; imagine, fourteen years in Botany Bay for advising a man to read a book! Remember Holt?'

  Fox nodded.

  'He was sent to Newgate in July for reprinting a harmless old article about Reform from '83. I just heard he died there.'

  Fox shuddered. Derby wished Sheridan hadn't mentioned such a depressing thing—then told himself not to be ridiculous; they couldn't treat their leader like a child.

  'But it's hard to sail on when half the crew have mutinied and rowed off the other way,' said Fox with a pained grin. 'There's Loughborough gone over to Pitt, to be Lord Chancellor, and Porchester bribed with an earldom, Carlisle with a Garter...'

  'Better this way,' barked Sheridan. 'Now you know who your friends are and we know what you stand for.'

  'We may be few,' Derby said huskily, 'but every one of us would go to the gallows for you, old Fox. And I'm quite convinced the tide will turn.'

  'Tell him about your bets,' said Sheridan.

  Derby grinned. 'At Brooks's the other night, I staked 500 guineas that some measure of Reform will be passed by March '95—that gives us a year and a half—and another 1000 that by the same date Pitt will be toppled and you'll be Prime Minister.'

  'If he hasn't—Pitt, I mean,' said Sheridan, deadpan, 'we'll have to assassinate him.'

  'Oh, my dear fellow,' said Fox, shaking his head at Derby, 'you used to be such a cautious guardian of the family fortune! Bet on knowledge, not chance, that's what you used to preach.'

  'But I do know this, in my bones,' said Derby, trying to convince himself.

  'We're not meant to reveal this before the ceremony,' said Sheridan suddenly, 'but—'

  Derby nodded.

  'To hell with it, this is as good a time as any. The fact is, old Reynard, we all know you're on the brink of bankruptcy.'

  'You'll end up in debtor's gaol before me, Sherry,' said Fox, trying for flippancy.

  'Undoubtedly,' said Sheridan, 'but it seems your friends love you more than mine do me. All this summer a committee at the Crown and Anchor has been collecting funds from your well-wishers.'

  'Let me tell you, it couldn't have been easier,' Derby broke in. 'Not just gentlemen but shopkeepers, farmers, country clergymen have all sent in their mites—even many of Portland's followers have subscribed, out of old affection.'


  Sheridan was businesslike. 'It amounts to £61,000—which we calculate should defray your debts and give you and Liz an annuity of £2000 a year for the rest of your life.'

  'My dear friends! I—' Fox's ripe face seemed about to burst. He crushed Sheridan to him and then seized Derby.

  'You're wetting my lapel,' Derby joked after a minute, but his eyes were brimming too.

  I won't pretend to you, Anne wrote to Mary,

  that this intense effort of carving my King doesn't fatigue me—but moderation is impossible, from my nature & that of the work. Besides, seven hours in my bed cures me & when I think of the sleepless nights I constantly passed, in the misspent years before I took up sculpture seriously, I realise I owe much composure of body & mind to this very occupation.

  High on her scaffold, she set her flat to the stone robes again. Strike for seven, rest for four. Her right hand ached as it took the hammer's impact. Strike for seven, rest for four. She was trying not to think about the news of the execution. Marie Antoinette had gone to her death without a single friend to comfort her, and with dignity. Would Anne have that much strength in her?

  The important thing in such times, she told herself, was to concentrate on one's own duty. And hers was to finish this huge statue this year. She felt a little faint; she'd lost count of her blows. The blade of the flat slid, gouging a line; she made a little growling sound and bent to correct it. Her back ached. She'd have to get the car penters in to lower the scaffold so she could finish the hem of the robes.

  'Madam?'—Sam, with a note on a silver salver, picking his way through the carpet of white dust.

  'The post can wait,' she said a little impatiently.

  'But this came by messenger from Mr Walpole.'

  She put down her heavy tools and her hands felt curiously floating. She knelt and stretched down to pluck the note from the tray. It was probably another five-page eulogy of the late Queen of France. The footman slapped the dust from his shoes at the door on his way out.

  My dear,