Life Mask

  'When, not if.' Derby grinned at her. 'Georgiana will whip our votes in, Pitt will topple like an obelisk and we'll toboggan into power on Prinny's spangled coat-tails.'

  Of course, it wasn't quite that simple; as Anne worked on the slim eyebrows of the bust, Derby started describing the squabbles the Foxites were having about the place each would hold in their new government. When Eliza had to rush off to a rehearsal he stayed on, watching Anne's fingers shape the clay throat. 'What we really need are allies, great lords who can bring a swathe of votes with them; someone like Richmond, for instance.'

  Anne stiffened.

  'He's never been a real Tory, you know, just a lapsed Whig. I wonder,' Derby murmured, 'once Prinny is Regent, would there be any chance of your brother-in-law ... crossing the floor?'

  Anne decided to pretend the question was rhetorical.

  Derby laughed a little, as if at his own cheek. 'I can tell you in confidence that Lord Chancellor Thurlow knows which way the wind's blowing, he might well come over to our side. But only on condition of keeping his office—which is causing fury in our own ranks. It's always been this way among the Whigs, I'm afraid; like that terrible summer at Coxheath.'

  'When was that?'

  'Oh, didn't you come down? This was in '78, when it looked like the French would invade England in support of the Americans,' he said. 'There was a huge military camp, it was all very jolly at first; lots of us went to Kent to drill our battalions. That was the summer Coleraine sold Lady Melbourne to Egremont, and Lady Clermont took up with a local apothecary. And, of course, there was my own wife and Dorset,' he added grimly.

  Anne's head was whirling. It was very rare for him to refer to Lady Derby, but that was not the detail that had shaken her. 'What can you mean, sold? I'm aware, of course, that Baron Coleraine was ... linked with Lady Melbourne at the time.'

  'I'm terribly sorry, didn't you know?' asked Derby sheepishly. 'I oughtn't to be raising these matters with a lady at all, of course.'

  'Oh, Derby, don't lady me.'

  'Well, since you insist. Coleraine and your friend were ... a little tired of each other, but there'd been no breach. Then Egremont comes along that summer, mad for her, rich as Croesus, that sort of thing. A deal is struck and Egremont agrees to pay a certain sum.'

  'How much?' Anne couldn't stop herself.

  After a second's hesitation Derby said, 'Thirteen thousand.'

  'Pounds?'

  'Oh, guineas, of course.'

  Yes, she thought, gentlemen always pay each other in guineas, an extra shilling on the pound. 'Did Lady Melbourne have any idea?' she asked huskily.

  Derby blinked at her.

  'Or did these dreadful machinations take place behind her back?'

  'Mrs D.,' said Derby fondly, 'you're too unworldly. Why, your friend brokered the deal; she and her husband were full parties to the contract and they split the fee.'

  Anne put her hand over her mouth.

  'I do truly apologise for shocking you,' he told her, nibbling his thumb. 'The point I was trying to make,' he went on after a minute, 'is that Fox has to rule a team of flamboyant, mettlesome characters—whereas Pitt has only a set of dull clerks to manage. But, of course, just as our Party's been damaged by quarrels over women, it's been strengthened by the efforts of your sex, too, and I don't just mean Georgiana,' he went on more cheerfully. 'For creatures without a vote, you have an immense power; I've always thought my fellow politicians underestimate it. Do you go to Goodwood this Christmas as usual?' he asked, as if changing the subject.

  'Probably.'

  Derby's eyes were fiery little marbles. 'Perhaps you might ... sound out the Duke?'

  'Oh, Derby,' she wailed.

  'You're practically Richmond's sister. He has an enormous respect for you. I'm only asking you to probe him gently,' Derby pushed on. 'You might hint that we'd let him stay on as Master-General of the Ordnance, since he finds sandbags so absorbing and it's the one job none of our lot want. Just dip a toe in the waters.'

  'They're full of pike,' she snapped. 'You put me in a very delicate position.'

  His grin had something unbalanced about it. 'And aren't we all in a very delicate position? Isn't the whole country adrift in dangerous waters?'

  'Very well, very well, but only for your friendship's sake, and Fox's,' she said, scrubbing her hands on her apron.

  FOX'S ILLNESS was pure pleasure to the Tories. They kept him on his feet as much as possible, entangled in legal complexities; several times he had to excuse himself and rush out of the Chamber, clutching his belly. The government-funded papers quipped that the lining of Fox's stomach had been eaten away by the regular necessity of eating his own words.

  When he was too weak to leave his dear Liz's country house at St Anne's Hill, his followers drove down there. Georgiana wasn't with them, of course; the Duchess could hardly call on a former courtesan. Derby remembered his last visit to St Anne's Hill in September, before this regency crisis had ever been dreamed of. He and Fox had played battledore and composed epitaphs for Dick Fitzpatrick's terrier in six languages. (Derby was only able to help in English, Latin and French.)

  Today was gunmetal grey and the avenue was hard with packed snow. In Mrs Armistead's neat parlour the Foxites talked in low voices, as if at a funeral. Sheridan was in the process of extracting a bank draft for £500 from Derby to buy up the whole print run of an obscene pamphlet about the Prince's secret marriage, when the door opened and Fox staggered in on Mrs Armistead's arm. She was still marvellously voluptuous, Derby thought, and her face showed no sign of being nearly forty. Her lover was black with bristles and his shaggy, matted chest showed through the limp opening of his shirt. 'Huzza,' cried Derby and the others joined in.

  Fox dropped into a chair and begged for a cup of tea.

  'Now, Charlie, I think some wine'd fortify you better,' said Mrs Armistead, pouring him a glass; her voice still had a strong Cockney slant to it.

  'Good of you all to come. Sherry, how's our royal friend?'

  'Very steady,' Sheridan said. 'He's quietly promising offices, pensions and peerages all over the place, and our support is growing.'

  'I want numbers. I've promised Liz we'll be in power by New Year, haven't I, dearest?' He patted her plump knuckles. 'Who's false, who's staunch, who may be deceiving us about their plans to vote? Oh, and any fresh word of the King?'

  Loughborough shrugged. 'He's said to be in a comfortable state, meaning, not quite violent in his lunacy.'

  'Apparently he's now convinced that London lies underwater,' said Charles Grey.

  'Solid ice, more like it,' said Fox with a shuddering glance out of the window.

  'The only, ah, complication,' said Portland, 'is a new physician. Named Willis, I believe; a certain Doctor Willis. He hails from, ah, from Lincolnshire.'

  Sometimes Derby couldn't stand the Duke's tentative delivery. 'His methods are rough, but they call him a miracle worker,' he said. 'Lord Harcourt says Willis cured his wife's mother, the way you might break a horse; whenever she threw her food at the wall, or spoke obscenely, Willis brought out the straitjacket and it calmed her down at once.'

  They all considered the revolting image.

  'Can we settle this matter of places, once and for all?' Grey broke in. 'I won't take a Lordship of the Treasury, it's beneath my capacities. If you won't give me the Exchequer, I'll accept Secretary at War.'

  Fox frowned sadly at him. 'My young friend—'

  'I'll surrender the Exchequer to you, sir, or Lord John Cavendish, if I must, but not to lesser Pelhams or Norfolks or Windhams.'

  'Lesser, you cocksure puppy?' barked Sheridan.

  'Windham is a, ah, most brilliant Greek scholar and mathematician,' Portland pointed out.

  'So?' asked Grey.

  Fox spoke hoarsely. 'The good of the Party, of the country—'

  'Oh, so other men may have their eyes on the prize they fight for, but not me?' asked Grey. 'We know Sherry will be Treasurer of the Navy and Head of
the Board of Trade, with £4000 a year!'

  Derby caught Liz Armistead's eye and wished they were outside, walking along the frozen terrace. Oh, the wearisome ambition of landless men.

  'For my own part,' said Loughborough, 'I demand an assurance that the Chancellorship will go to me, not to Thurlow or any other rat from Pitt's sinking ship.'

  Fox clapped his hands with surprising vigour. 'Listen to yourselves, you squabbling vultures! Do you consider yourselves fit to take up the reins of power? After fretting in opposition for fifteen of the past eighteen years we Whigs are going to have our day at last! Don't you see a new England on the horizon?' He pointed out of the window like a mystic.

  In the leaden silence Derby spoke. 'Did you ever hear of Lord Thomond's Irish feeder?'

  'Is this a joke?' snapped Sheridan.

  'A fable, rather. The feeder was entrusted with some cocks that were to be matched with another lord's for a considerable purse. Thinking that Lord Thomond's birds were all on the same side and so wouldn't disagree, the feeder shut them up together in one shed. The next morning...' He looked at Fox for the punch line.

  The leader didn't smile. 'All dead.'

  'Quite so. We must drop these petty feuds, we can't afford them,' said Derby, sweeping his eyes over the whole group. 'The readiness is all.'

  'Well said, quite so,' murmured Portland.

  'More tea, gentlemen?' asked Mrs Armistead.

  Fox's eyes were pained. 'Excuse me, m'bowels,' he said, lurching towards the door, his stockings sagging like an old man's skin.

  And it occurred to Derby for the first time: We're going to lose him.

  CHRISTMAS AT Goodwood was as elegant as ever, with the addition of a candlelit fir tree, a fashion that Queen Charlotte had imported from her German principality. The topic of the nation's parlous state was banned. Despite his fatigue and toothache, Richmond took his many guests hunting. Anne always hung back from the kill; she knew it was absurd, but she preferred it when the fox got away. In the saloon she stood absorbed in an early Stubbs of the Duke riding to hounds; really, no painter had ever made dogs look more alive than Stubbs, though she had no rivals in sculpture.

  Walpole arrived from Strawberry Hill enveloped in furs; 'quite the Canadian trapper,' he said with a giggle. To everyone's relief he had left Tonton at home. Ensconced in the seat closest to the fire in the gallery, he murmured politics to Anne. 'Inasmuch as George III is the despotic monarch who waged war on America—and incidentally, threw your dear father out of office for standing up to him back in '65, or was it '64?—I loathe and execrate him. But inasmuch as His Majesty's a feeble and feeble-minded man in his declining years, subjected to brutal treatments in the name of medicine, whose wastrel of a son is openly plotting against him—how can I but pity him and wish him a swift recovery?'

  'Do you really think there's any chance of that?' she asked uneasily.

  Walpole tapped his bulging nose. 'I have my sources at Kew.'

  Anne discounted all such rumours as Pittite lies.

  There was a great celebration for the sixteenth birthday of Henriette Le Clerc, an orphan ward of the Richmonds" who was generally assumed to be the product of the Duke's liaison with some French lady. Lady Mary, who had no children of her own, called her our darling fosterling. Either her sister was a singularly tolerant wife, Anne thought, or a consummate actress. And if one acted a role for the length of one's days, in all company, who could say the role was untrue?

  The girl was a sweet thing, if rather spoiled; she sang often (somewhat out of tune) and chattered constantly in her French way. Lady Mary was teaching Henriette the embroidery stitches she'd learned from her own mother. 'My sister Anne's never had any skill with the needle,' she said, laughing; 'I suspect she despises it, as the pastime of ordinary women.'

  'That's not true,' Anne protested, 'it's just that my hands are more accustomed to hammers and chisels.'

  Walpole piped up from the fireside, 'Mrs Damer was no older than you are now, Henriette, when she discovered her vocation.'

  'Oh, not that old story—'

  'Old men must be let tell their old stories,' he informed her, 'for what else is left to us? It happened like this. Conway had for his secretary a wise Scot of the name of Hume; Philosopher Hume, many called him. This chit of a girl was tagging along with him on a walk through the woods of Park Place when they met an Italian urchin.'

  'He was selling little manikins he'd made out of mud,' Anne supplied and Henriette made a face. 'Hume bought one as an act of charity and I'm sorry to admit that I sneered at the beggar's work. So Hume dared me to do better.'

  Walpole broke in gleefully, 'She took some wax, locked herself up in her room for a week—'

  Anne shook her head at his exaggeration.

  '—and came out with the most charming little ébauche of her cat!'

  'I wasn't cured of my arrogance, I'm afraid.'

  'But at least now it was grounded on skill and effort, rather than sheer snobbery.'

  'I'd like to be an artist, or maybe an actress,' Henriette said suddenly.

  Lady Mary blinked at her. 'Oh, I don't think so, not an actress.'

  Anne looked away. Really, the prejudice against Eliza's profession was ineradicable.

  'You won't need to be anything, darling,' said Lady Mary, 'because you'll be some lucky man's wife and have dozens of little Henriettes to look after.'

  Anne's mind was still on the past. 'Hume was a shocking sceptic, poor fellow; he wouldn't believe anything without the evidence of his eyes. He once said to me, "The sun may not rise tomorrow.'"

  'Whatever did he mean?' asked Lady Mary.

  'That we'd no firm reason to believe it would rise, it was just an assumption. Whin the next day I saw him and pointed out that the sun had indeed risen, he smiled gloomily and said, "Ah, but what about tomorrow?'"

  Henriette whooped with laughter.

  In the Duchess's room later that day, Anne was looking through some family jewels her sister wanted to give her—a thick choker of pearls on black velvet and a ruby parure. She took the opportunity of their being alone and murmured, 'Don't you mind at all about Henriette?'

  'Mind?' Lady Mary stared at her. 'I dote on the girl. If the Duke's ever under the influence of the blue devils I send in Henriette. He lets her sit beside him while he's working and he helps her with her spelling; she's made quite the nurse of him.'

  'Not so much her, then, as Richmond's ... straying.' She held her breath.

  Lady Mary was smiling oddly. 'How does it threaten my position? He's always genteel and discreet about it, for I couldn't abide scenes. Oh, and the party must be of good birth; I wouldn't like it if he entangled himself with anyone vulgar.'

  Anne shrugged in bemusement. 'If I had a husband—a husband I loved,' she corrected herself—'I think I'd be just as hurt whether it was a kitchen maid or an empress who made me feel I wasn't ... the dearest object of his heart.'

  The Duchess's handsome throat caught the light. 'That should be a speech in a play. You're such a creature of sensibility, Anne; I think I inherited all our mother's sense. I am the dearest object; Richmond treasures me, consults me on everything, from Pitt's orders to the enclosure of a field. Since I hold his prime affection, why should I mind his lifting his spirits with little flirtings and the occasional scrape?'

  The morning after Christmas Anne was in the library, reading Sophocles, only two tables away from the Duke of Richmond. Her eyes rested on his shiny, smooth head.

  A woman's role in life was often to play go-between. Tact, suggestion, encouragement, delving—Anne was not ignorant of these feminine arts. But this was politics, where women had to tread carefully. Damn Derby for asking this. This was harder than chanting slogans on a hustings; this was private, tricky, embarrassing. She was being used. No, she was being useful to Fox and to the cause of Reform, and a bright future for Britain. She cleared her throat.

  Richmond looked up from a volume of parliamentary precedents, owlish.

&nbs
p; All Anne's prepared lines fled away and she spoke simply. 'What's going to happen to us?'

  'Our family?'

  She smiled; what a paterfamilias he was, for a man with no acknowledged heirs. 'No. Our nation.'

  'Ah.' Richmond let out a long breath. 'I suppose you mean, will the greatest rake in the kingdom become regent, and your friend Fox and his motley crew shoo us out of Cabinet?'

  She winced. 'You were once in the vanguard of the Whigs, the champion of Reform,' she reminded him.

  'Reform's a dead duck,' he said flatly. 'And besides, it's not the issue at stake now. Your precious Foxites are behaving with a shocking hurry and lust for power; they're even trying to poach some of our key men.'

  This at least raised the topic for Anne. 'Perhaps Fox is trying to extend the olive branch—form a coalition of talents, you know, for the good of the nation.'

  Richmond snorted. 'Form a ladder of bodies, you mean, and climb up it.'

  'Are there no possible circumstances under which you'd join in the new government?' she asked, trembling at her own nerve.

  Her brother-in-law looked at her hard. 'Don't meddle, Anne.'

  A blush began to rise from her throat. She looked down and pretended to be engrossed in her Sophocles.

  JANUARY 1789

  When Derby turned up at Fox's lodgings in South Street at half past one the table was awash with papers. He bowed to the Prince, who was curled up on the sofa in an uncharacteristically sober brown coat, then shook Fox's hand. His friend looked pale and sweaty, but no longer dying. 'I came as soon as I received your note.'

  'Thank God somebody knows the meaning of punctuality!'

  Derby's eyebrows went up. Fox wasn't known for this virtue himself. 'What's the matter?'

  Fox was a hungry bear woken out of hibernation. 'Pitt's been good enough to supply the Prince with a list of the proposed restrictions on the regent's power and Sheridan's got it. He promised me he'd bring it over at nine this morning.' Fox stabbed his finger at a note propped against the mirrored mantelpiece.

  'Pitt's to wait on me at Carlton House at three,' said Prinny, 'and the devil of the thing is I can't remember more than one or two points.'