Life Mask

by Emma Donoghue

  Oh M., looking back over this arduous year (wh. I have survived only because of your aid), it seems more and more unjust that you and I should have to turn the other cheek to evil gossip, & be careful how often we meet & how we behave. Why, between oldfriends, need any excuses be made for fervency of affection? Does the warm partiality of two united hearts need to be justified to those who would interpret it with the basest cynicism?

  Yours,

  A.D.

  26 North Audley Street

  Dear A.,

  I do believe we know each other better now—and trust each other more—than before those monsters attacked us. Our lives must be our honest answer. Surely when the World finds that our blameless connection continues with a steady, equal grace, year after year, it won't suppose it founded on the weakness of passionate engouement? So I conclude, after these many months, that I must put aside my trembling qualms & drop the mask of discretion, showing myself publicly to be what I will always be, your loving friend.

  Your own,

  M.B.

  DERBY AND Sheridan sat yawning in a pew in the Chapel Royal at St James's. The crowd had been in their places for two hours.

  'So it doesn't bode well,' Sheridan continued in a husky murmur.

  'Prinny really said that to the Earl of Malmesbury? I'm not well, pray get me a glass of brandy?'

  'He was overwhelmed, I tell you, with the stench that rose from his bride's armpits.'

  Derby covered his mouth, trying not to laugh. 'But Malmesbury's escorted the Princess all the way from Brunswick. Surely he could have found a moment to have a word?'

  Sheridan rolled his eyes. 'He swears he told her maids, he told her dressmakers, he told Caroline herself as bluntly as he dared: said the English and the Prince in particular were very strict on the niceties of feminine hygiene. She'd nod and say ja,ja, oui, oui, and call for more music.'

  'Do you think Prinny will manage to consummate the marriage?' Derby whispered.

  'He'd better. He must get a legitimate heir on her,' muttered Sheridan wrathfully, 'or what's the whole charade been for?'

  'Now, about his latest round of debts, Sherry—all £630,000 of them—'

  'A deal's a deal,' said Sheridan shortly. 'He marries and Parliament pays the lot.'

  Derby was exasperated by his friend's desperate attempts to maintain his grip on the Prince's favour, while staying the darling of the radicals. Sherry and Fox both seemed to cling to the slim hope that the obese and increasingly conservative debauchee, somehow outliving his tough old father, would suddenly remember his fondness for the Foxites.

  He gazed around the chapel. English fashions were more and more severe these days; the men were all in black or navy, the women almost inevitably in round-necked straight white dresses, only relieved by little jackets or shawls. He missed the bright silks and vast hats of the '80s. The one improvement, in his view, was that there were more bosoms on show—some of them pushed up as hard as apples. There were many cropped heads on daring young men and more dark heads all round, like his own, he noticed with interest; the tax Pitt had slapped on hair powder in the January budget was having its effects. It wasn't that these people couldn't afford a guinea apiece for a licence, God knew—more that it seemed somehow tasteless to parade one's wealth by wearing wheat powder when the poor were starving because, in the worst winter in living memory and with all trade stifled by the war, a quartern loaf had doubled in price to 12 pence.

  He curled his lip, glimpsing 'Citizen' Stanhope, the Earl who'd recently found himself in a minority of one on some vote—having alienated his fellow Foxites—and announced that he was seceding from the Lords. Derby had no patience for principle when it was pushed to the edge of absurdity. If one wasn't doing anything concrete to help one's fellow beings, what was the point of being in politics?

  'Did you hear,' Sheridan murmured in Derby's ear with a kind of manic zest, 'our former friend Portland has cashiered Fitzwilliam as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland after a mere two months, for supporting Catholic emancipation?'

  'Fitzwilliam was too hasty,' said Derby, shaking his head. 'The King will never let a Catholic sit in Parliament.'

  'Fine, so let's embitter every countryman of mine and push him into the hands of the French,' snapped Sheridan. 'Now Holland's fallen to the Patriots, Pitt's talking of an alliance with Russia and Austria, which will bring on war with Prussia, Sweden, Denmark and Turkey. What a truly diabolical character we're showing to the nations of the world—and how they must detest us. I suspect that if we left them alone they'd all be at peace by now.'

  'Lower your voice, there's a good fellow.'

  Sheridan made a face at him. 'Don't worry, they'd hardly arrest me in the middle of a wedding. Speaking of which,' he added in an odd tone, 'I'm getting married next Tuesday and I thought of honeymooning in a sloop off Southampton—if you could see your way to a loan.'

  Derby stared at his friend.

  'I know it's sudden, but Miss Ogle's a wild girl, she hates to waste time.'

  'Why, congratulations!' Derby tried to remember what little he knew about Miss Hecca Ogle, daughter of the Dean of Winchester. She was radical in her sympathies, he thought he remembered, and not twenty years old, with strange clothes and a taste for headstrong horses. Really, Sherry was a force of nature; in a matter of years he'd broken his heart for one wife, then lost it to another. While Derby moved as slowly as some iceberg.

  'I'll write you a draft on my bank,' he said with a noiseless sigh as he reached for his pocketbook. His investments were suffering this year, as everyone's were, but he'd never had to turn down a friend yet. At Brooks's last night he'd had to pay up the stakes he'd laid a year and a half ago, that Fox would have toppled Pitt and brought in Reform by now. It wasn't the 1500 guineas that stung so much as the humiliation; he'd never made such rash bets before, or caused such widespread amusement.

  'You're the soul of decency, you really are,' said Sheridan. 'Especially after my piggish behaviour at Epsom—'

  Derby cut off the apology: '—of which I don't care to be reminded.'

  There was a bustle at the back of the Chapel. The great surge of organ music made Derby, on impulse, double the sum on the draft before he folded it and handed it to Sheridan. The Archbishop of Canterbury entered in full regalia and the crowd rose like a wave.

  Princess Caroline was pleasant-looking enough, though rather too free with giddy smiles that showed her bad teeth. She wore silver tissue and lace, with a robe of velvet lined with ermine; Derby found himself memorising the details to tell Eliza afterwards. The Prince looked like some immense creamy-furred seal. Unsteady on his feet—ill, Derby wondered, or just drunk?—he was helped up the aisle by two dukes, like a man going to his execution.

  MAY 1795

  This year Eliza let Derby escort her to the Royal Academy's exhibition at Somerset House. She walked on his right, because his left arm was in a sling; at Newmarket last week his carriage had been involved in a tangle with those of the Duke of Bedford, Lord Egremont and Old Q. (She suspected brandy was to blame.)

  'There was a terrible kerfuffle at the Academy's annual dinner,' he remarked. 'Fox hadn't remembered to reply to the invitation, so when he turned up late there was no seat for him. He lost his temper and finally Farington wangled him a place at High Table. Now the papers are claiming it was a deliberate slight by Tory artists, the hallowed Academy has succumbed to party spirit, that sort of thing!'

  'The paintings are a poor lot this year,' said Eliza under her breath. 'I see apocalypse and morbidity are all the rage'—gesturing towards Fuseli's Odysseus Between Scylla and Charybdis and his Nightmare, in which a demon squatted on the arched bosom of a sleeping woman.

  Derby shrugged. 'Bella, horrida bella, as Virgil says of horrid wars. There's Prinny,' he added, waiting for the royal eye to fall on him before he made his bow.

  Eliza dipped into a curtsy. 'He hasn't brought his wife.'

  'Oh, they see nothing of each other since he managed to make her
enceinte on the first night,' Derby assured her. 'The verdict's in: Caroline's incorrigibly vulgar as well as dirty, and barely speaks English.'

  Eliza had heard worse: that on the wedding night in question the Princess's manners had not been those of a novice. But that might only be a rumour spread by the machinating Lady Jersey, royal lady-in-waiting, who boasted of having picked a bride Prinny would loathe so that disgust for the wife would ensure constancy to the mistress. Did the Prince regret his bargain? Eliza wondered. Was it true that he'd wept for his betrayal of his Mrs Fitz, his true wife, all the way to his wedding? That lady had gone abroad, they said.

  Eliza had no right to judge the Prince harshly; she knew all too well that to survive one would trample anyone underfoot. He was being punished already and not just by the flaws of his wife. Though he'd done his duty, the Commons had proved so resistant to the idea of paying off all his debts again that Pitt had been forced to reduce the Prince's income to less than it had been before the marriage.

  'Look, there's Lawrence,' she said, nudging Derby. 'He hasn't really lived up to his youthful promise, has he?'

  Tom Lawrence, his face toughened into adulthood, nodded at her and Derby as they approached. Eliza wondered whether he was thinking of the day in his studio, the day he'd molested her. These events loomed large in a woman's life, but often they meant little to men; he might have had scores of sluts since then. 'Mr Lawrence,' she said with a bright smile, 'I saw an interesting advertisement in the Oracle the other day, claiming that you're the best painter in England.'

  The line had a most satisfying effect; the young man went the purple of dried meat. 'I hope I need not assure you, Miss Farren, that it was none of my doing.'

  'Some rash but well-intentioned friend?' asked Derby.

  'My father,' said Lawrence, very low. 'He'd formed a notion that I was unfairly neglected by this Academy and by the public at large.'

  Lawrence Senior was a publican, Eliza remembered. How mortifying! For all the private battles she and her mother had had over the years—and the last had been the worst—Eliza knew she could trust her absolutely.

  When Derby excused himself for a few minutes, to have a word with a fellow horsebreeder, Eliza let herself wander into the small sculpture and prints room. She'd intended to avoid it, but it drew her like an itch.

  There, not an arm's length away from her, was Anne Damer, deep in conversation with a small lady with dark hair. Eliza froze. The room was crowded; there was no space to escape at her back. The piece which stood in front of her she recognised now; it was the young lady, Miss Berry. A superb piece in terracotta, Eliza could see that; the lines were quiet and strong.

  It wasn't the sculptor who felt her gaze and looked up, it was Miss Berry. 'Miss Farren, I believe?'

  Eliza nodded once. It was so rare in the World to be accosted by someone to whom one hadn't been introduced—yet she couldn't accuse this woman of vulgar forwardness. Miss Berry had the air of some fierce bird, rather. And after all, they knew enough of each other not to behave like strangers. 'I recognise you by your portrait,' said Eliza with automatic sweetness, gesturing at the bust.

  Anne Damer stood there like a statue. Her eyes moved between them, but she made no attempt to speak. Oh, come, let's have a civil greeting, since we must, thought Eliza. But no; the older woman's dignity was absolute. She won't say a word to me.

  The alarming Miss Berry was making some pertinent remarks on the art of sculpture as practised by the ancients. Eliza managed to contribute something about the Gallic virtuosity of Roubiliac. No doubt she'd picked that up from Anne, she thought with a stab of unease. But the sculptor continued to listen to the whole conversation as if it were taking place on the other side of a window and the rules of the game seemed to require that neither Eliza nor Mary Berry refer to her.

  Miss Berry had moved on now to the experience of being sculpted; its many pleasures and its uncomfortable qualities.

  'You mean the plaster?'

  A look of incomprehension.

  Eliza saw she'd made a mistake. 'I only meant ... I believe it's sometimes a practice, of ... it can happen that a sculptor begins by pasting a thin layer of plaster all over the subject's face.' She soldiered on, aware she was blushing, and hoped the face powder would hide it. As she described the technique she remembered from seven years ago, it sounded mildly obscene. 'Pastes it on so as to form a sort of mask, don't you know.'

  'Oh?'

  'I believe it's called a life mask,' stammered Eliza. 'To distinguish it from—'

  'A death mask. Yes,' said Miss Berry.

  Eliza felt extremely stupid.

  'But of course, Miss Farren, you've had the experience of sitting for your portrait on many occasions. Do you enjoy it? The being looked at, studied, interrogated, as it were?'

  'I ... That depends.'

  'Do you own any of your portraits?'

  Eliza thought of the bust called Thalia that was now in a trunk in the garret at Green Street, wrapped in an old sheet. 'One or two,' she said as coolly as she could.

  'And do you find them true to life?'

  She didn't know how to answer these unsettling questions. 'Less so, as the years go by,' she quipped, 'the marble lasts, but the face ages.'

  'On the contrary, I believe that in a portrait like this one'—and Miss Berry suddenly turned to contemplate her own bust—'something is captured, the very essence of the woman, the soul. A part of her that becomes clearer, perhaps, as the charms of girlhood fall away. When I look at this I'll always recognise myself till the day I die.'

  'How nice for you,' said Eliza faintly.

  Miss Berry gave her a long look before Eliza muttered a farewell and turned to fight her way back into the great saloon. It wasn't a withering glare, Eliza thought, there was more to it than that. There was scorn in it and perhaps a hint of jealousy—but something else as well. Could it be pity?

  JULY 1795

  Anne ran across the hall at Park Place and Lady Ailesbury fell against her. They were both thickly swaddled in black lustring; it was like a battle of crows. 'Oh, Mother.'

  Only sobs for an answer. Anne glanced over her shoulder; Mary was directing the servants about the baggage.

  'Dearest Mother. How are you bearing up?'

  'Oh, Anne. Such a saint I've lost! I tell you, living and dying he thought only of me!'

  Something about the Countess's remark set her daughter's teeth on edge. Field Marshal Conway hadn't been a saint, but a decent man who cared for many things: his wife, yes, but also his daughter, his dogs, his estate, his country and his dinner.

  Lady Ailesbury's whole weight lay across Anne's collarbone. Anne staggered slightly and helped her mother into a chair, which one of the men had pulled out for her. She looked up to thank him. The face had more lines in it, but its broad contours were the same. 'O'Hara!'

  The General smiled, then remembered the occasion and sobered again. 'I'm here to pay my respects.'

  'Oh, but I'd no idea—I thought you were still in France—' And at the image Anne began to cry. She hadn't wept last night when the news of her father's death had come; she'd only felt a dull ache in her chest and an unreasonable irritation with him for sitting around in wet clothes, at seventy-five, and catching a chill. But now the thought of Charles O'Hara shackled in a French gaol for all this time—with his friends sparing him only the occasional thought—made her sob like a child. She was gripping his hand like a rope that could save her. Even when he sat her down on a chair beside her mother she didn't let go. She heard him talking to the servants, giving firm instructions. And here's the. lovely Miss Berry,' he remarked, 'who's changed not a whit in the ten or more years since we met in Italy. Do you by any chance recall my face?'

  'Of course,' Anne heard Mary say distractedly, 'of course, General; ten years isn't long enough to forget.'

  Walpole, who hadn't felt up to visiting Park Place in such a long time, had managed it today. His valet Philip carried him in from the Richmonds' coach, wrappe
d in a blanket. 'I'm afraid we're a party of invalids,' muttered Lady Mary to her sister, 'with our pills and potions and foot warmers...' Richmond and Walpole were both suffering from gout, and Lady Mary from some of her vague and mysterious ailments; she looked sallow about the eyes.

  After the funeral service in the chapel, and the burial, they all drove back to Park Place. The Duchess of Richmond escorted her mother straight to her room. Anne hoped Lady Ailesbury wouldn't take too many drops of laudanum.

  She sat downstairs with the few guests who were staying at Park Place. She felt more tired than anything else. Mary's anxious dark eyes sought her out and Anne gave her a small smile. Whatever would she have done without her friend's support and decisiveness, ever since she'd got the news?

  Charles O'Hara was looking no less handsome for all his sufferings; he joked about having strained the hospitality of the French nation by eating twice a day at their expense for a year and a half till his gaolers finally tired of him and exchanged him for General Rochambeau. Anne felt a pang of relief that she'd never told anyone about his hinted proposal to her, back in the summer of '91. Imagine how embarrassing it would have been to sit beside him here at Park Place in front of people who knew.

  Walpole, looking more pink-cheeked after an unaccustomed glass of wine, was bringing the General up to date on British politics. 'Ireland's said to be on the brink of eruption,' he said with melancholy relish.

  Richmond broke in. 'My sister Louisa complains that her lifetime of kindness to the local Catholics has been rewarded with the basest ingratitude—they join secret societies behind her back, and she and my other sisters Emily and Sarah have taken to sleeping with pistols under their beds.'

  'Even here in England,' Anne told O'Hara, 'there've been bread riots all this summer—attacks on grain carts, burning of flour mills—and one Reform meeting in London is said to have attracted a crowd of 100,000!'

  'I heard they gave out biscuits,' mentioned Mary.

  'Biscuits?' asked the General.