'Hearts are trumps, dear,' murmured her mother.
'Yes,' said Eliza, meaning I know.
'I've never seen Miss Farren forget the trump,' joked Fox. 'After all, she can hold so many thousands of lines in her memory.'
He was scratching inside his collar; Eliza felt a moment's anxiety that the Man of the People might have fleas. 'Pass,' she said, folding her cards together with a tight smile.
Derby slid in another shilling, and gazed up at the Lawrence portrait of Eliza, which—she happened to know—he'd finally had to pay £100 to secure. Still, he didn't seem to consider himself the loser. He'd got the thing he wanted, as he always did.
'The game would be so much livelier if we were playing for real money,' Fox complained as he flicked through his cards.
Their host snorted. 'No doubt it would make Mrs Farren's fortune if you were to be allowed to play for high stakes'—this prompted a shocked giggle from Eliza's mother—'but as your friend I can't allow it. Derby House shall remain the only premises in London from which you escape unfleeced.'
'I do sometimes win, you know,' Fox protested.
'Of course you do,' murmured Eliza, 'just as you sometimes wash.'
The little foursome fell about laughing. 'Oh, la belle Farren, she has stabbed me to the heart!'
'During the closure of the theatres she's taken on a new job as one of Pitt's secret agents,' Derby told Fox in a stage whisper. 'It's the Boy Eunuch's latest plot: the fair sex are to be the Whigs' downfall.'
'Then we'll die happy,' said Fox, tossing two shillings into the middle of the table.
Eliza smiled, but she was preoccupied. Anne Damer must have received the epigram by now, unless she was out all day. What would she do when she read it? Nothing, Eliza hoped. She'd written it out unrecognisably with her left hand. The last thing she wanted was any kind of confrontation; if Anne Damer rushed round the corner to Green Street to rail against the unknown enemy who'd composed the epigram—well, Eliza would just have to instruct the manservant to say she wasn't at home.
On the whole she was glad she'd sent it. Ever since last April's Exhibition, when she'd seen Anne Darner's wrecked face and been unable to offer her any explanation, she'd been brooding. Finally it seemed only fair to her to let the sculptor know—anonymously—why a respectable woman might suddenly drop her like an infected handkerchief. Eliza meant the sending of the epigram as a sort of warning, but also as an act of kindness to a woman who was in all probability innocent. It gave a reason for the death of friendship, after all; it made some dark sense of it. I must hurt you now, one last time, for your own good, she said in her head. She met the eye of the gold ring on her little finger and looked away, her guts knotted with guilt.
'Eliza, my dear,' whispered Mrs Farren.
She put down a card pretty much at random and Fox's furry eyebrows shot up. 'You're full of surprises, Miss Farren.'
She smiled as if she had some cunning strategy.
'So how were they all at Devonshire House?' Derby asked.
'Oh, well enough,' said Fox. 'The long-longed-for heir's a jolly little thing, already nicknamed Hart, short for the Marquis of Harrington. Georgiana nearly died of the birth in Brussels, but she's come home rather fatter—which is all to the good,' he added with relish. 'Grey was there, hanging around like a puppy and picking quarrels...'
Significant nods all round.
'Oh, and they've brought back an orphan of the French troubles, one Mademoiselle St Jules, about whose parentage there's ... some mystery.'
Eliza met her mother's eye; this must be one of the Duke's children that Lady Bess was rumoured to have had abroad.
'Lady Spencer's launching one of her periodic campaigns to root out her daughter's companion,' Fox went on, his eyes flickering over his cards before he threw two down.
'A foolish policy,' murmured Eliza, 'because it's Lady Bess who's saved that marriage.'
Derby nodded, taking up a card. 'People invent all sorts of arrangements for their happiness.'
Eliza kept her eyes on her hand. Well, she supposed this was one of those arrangements. How domestic she and Derby were, with their daily greetings and their card games—like a husband and wife who'd never so much as kissed.
OCTOBER 1790
For a full fortnight Walpole raged and wept. He wrote daily to Anne in a script so trembling she could hardly make it out. He railed against the fever-breeding miasmas of Tuscany and the even greater risks posed by a journey across a continent where riot and anarchy kept breaking out—not just at Paris, but in Flanders, at Florence itself—like a forest fire.
'You can't keep two such girls cocooned in your little Arcadia for ever,' Anne told him gently at his house in Berkeley Square. 'You know they'll travel sensibly. As for France, the Assembly and the King are now said to be working peaceably together; Miss Crawford and Miss Lockart met with no disturbances on their recent tour.'
He snorted. 'The radicals of the Jacobin Club could unleash chaos at any moment.'
Anne sighed. 'And the house in North Audley Street could be carried off in a tornado, or the girls die of getting their feet wet after a London ball!'
His hand was over his mouth. 'Why do you torture me with these dreadful possibilities?'
'Because if we love the Berrys we must let them go,' she said, as much to herself as to him.
'But why now, of all ill-starred times?'
'These times are the most exciting,' said Anne with a shrug. 'History's in the making.'
Walpole goggled at her. 'You mean this wild, uncomfortable plan is all due to a roving humour? A volatile itch to see sights? I've been a witness to history,' he protested, 'three reigns, countless changes of government, the Jacobite Rising of 45, the Seven Years War, the American War ... and I've done it all from the comfort and privacy of my own library.'
'I've never regretted a day of my own travels,' she told him, 'and I don't believe you have either.' She smiled, thinking of the time at Spa she'd woken up livid with flea bites, or her packet boat to Jersey, ten years ago, that had been temporarily captured by a charming French capitaine.
He turned his head away, like a moping dog, and mentioned that he'd sent the girls to a Miss Foldstone to have their portraits taken in miniature.
'For you to gaze upon, in case they die during their trip?'
Walpole gave her an injured look. 'In case I do.'
'Oh, coz—'
'You toy with my feelings.'
'Only to lighten their load.' But was that true? To lighten her own more like.
'The friendship of these girls has become the great solace of my declining life,' Walpole said stiffly. 'If, as seems all too likely, I find myself on my deathbed this winter I would like to have their sweet faces to hand.'
Anne had to restrain herself from snorting. Yes, he'd just turned seventy-three and his fingers were knotty with chalk stones, but he'd all the vital energy of a man who would live for ever. 'Let's have no more sad songs. They'll go and come back rich in health and experience, and we'll all spend countless happy days together at Strawberry Hill.'
He shuddered, eyes on the ceiling, as if the spiteful gods were listening.
'So, my dear Strawberries, my precious Both,' he began his lament on the day of departure, standing outside the narrow house on North Audley Street, 'since you persist in your determination to throw your friends into fretful agonies—'
'Dear Mr Walpole—' Mary's voice was constricted.
'Cousin,' whispered Anne in his ear, 'the horses are restless.'
Harnessed to the hired carriage that would take them as far as Brighton, the bays snorted in the cooling autumn air. The sisters were looking very smart in their travelling costumes, with their hair curled and a little line of pearls round each throat. They were more of the World every day, Anne thought, with a twinge of absurd regret. 'You'll remember not to wear scent in Italy?' she asked Agnes.
'Oh, yes, they don't like it, do they?'
'I'll remind her,' said Mary,
her dark eyes burning through the veil of her bonnet. 'Thanks for the loan of your Bet and Mrs Moll; we'd never have finished packing otherwise.'
'And don't be shocked to see Parisian ladies riding astride, in breeches.'
Mr Berry let out a giggle.
'Mes chères fraises! You must watch over each other tenderly,' said Walpole, weeping now like a biblical patriarch, and squeezing Mary's right hand and Agnes's left together with one of Mr Berry's into a sort of bouquet of fingers.
'We will, we promise,' cried Agnes.
Two gentlemen walked by arm in arm and gave the group a curious glance.
The command performance was winding up. 'You know I wouldn't love any one of you so much did you not love each other so well. Wife the First, and Wife the Second, and Papa Berry! No, I mustn't call you my wives any more, my Rachel and my Leah,' Walpole said, tears dropping from his nose. 'Gone are those playful days. Now I can only think of you as darling children of whom I am bereaved.'
Agnes let out a ragged sob and her father had his face in his handkerchief. But Mary, Anne noticed, was watching Walpole with a pale, strained expression, more like a mother's than a child's. The girl leaned forward and spoke a few words in his ear.
He kissed them all again. Anne, feeling peculiarly upstaged, did the same. 'Cara anima,' she murmured in Mary's ear, but the endearment was swallowed up in the clatter of a passing hackney.
'Don't change in your feelings to us, Mr Walpole,' cried Agnes from the window.
'If I live to see you again,' he pronounced with tragic amplitude, 'you will then judge whether I have changed!'
ANNE WALKED straight home to Grosvenor Square and sharpened half a dozen quills. My dear M.—
She stared at the words. She'd been about to write a cheering letter of good wishes for a safe sea crossing. But her hand wouldn't move that way, her brain refused to form those harmless words. Truth was knocking in her head like the beak of a chick, cracking the egg from the inside.
If not now, when? If she and Mary weren't to speak the truth to each other, to fling open the doors of their hearts, then what was the point of this abstraction called friendship? If Anne seized the moment—if she took the risk and unburdened herself—then she might lose, but wasn't a rapid loss better than a postponed one? She couldn't bear to watch another friendship strangled by degrees.
And after all, the chance to explain might be taken from her; Mary might learn the terrible secret from someone else, in an envelope from England, a whisper at a party in Florence...
The draft took her three hours; she sweated over every line. Mrs Moll came to ask whether to serve supper in the parlour or bring it up on a tray, but Anne rubbed her forehead with inky fingers and said she wasn't hungry.
My dear—if I may use that phrase?
I hardly know how to begin this letter. How to broach this dreadful subject? That's how I think of it, on the rare occasions when my guard is down & I find myself admitting it to consciousness: my dreadful subject. Though how it ever came to be called mine I still can't tell.
I'm writing to let you know that my virtue is what you believe it, but my reputation is not. (Would that the two were the same, or that only the former mattered.) You think me unimpeachable & unassailable, a widow of scholarly tastes who lives for her art. lam these things, but I am also the subject—the unwitting object, rather—of a terrible libel.
After my husband's rash self-murder in '76 I went to Italy for my health, just as you're doing. On my return I learned that the most appalling rumours were circulating about me: not only that my frigid character was to blame for my husband's act of despair, but that in Italy I had indulged in—consoled myself with—intrigues of the most unnatural nature. Oh dear, that phrase sounds like a contradiction. Perhaps if you were more of the World I wouldn't need to spell this out, my dear M„ but at the risk of embarrassing you I will explain that I was, in several scurrilous doggerel pamphlets, accused of liking my own sex in a vile way.
I was too stunned to take this seriously. My friends responded with perfect loyalty by laughing off all such fantastical inventions. It turned out that the lies could be traced back to one William Combe (I won't grant him the veil of initials). His is a curious and instructive story of intelligence sold to the D—I. Though educated like a gentleman, Combe soon ran into such dreadful debts that he had to turn to miscellaneous writing & calumny to earn his bread; dear G—g—a was frequently his target. At Eton hed known my fathers nephew, Viscount B—ch—p, & he now took a violent grudge against him for a squalid reason: Combe decided to marry a common woman whod been kept by Lord B—ch—p, & got it into his head that His Lordship would reward him for taking her off his hands by an annuity. When no money proved forthcoming Combe felt that his friends in high life had taken advantage of him & decided to wreak vengeance by inventing obscenities about the Viscount's sisters, aunt and cousins (who happen to include W. & my unfortunate self).
Dear W. shrugged off the abuse & I, following his lead, ignored it as best I could. Perhaps that was reckless of me. But I assure you, it seemed as if the evil shadow was easily shaken off; the rumours soon forgotten; no one of my acquaintance has ever mentioned them in the past dozen years.
I'd almost scrubbed this dreadful subject from my mind until just a few weeks ago, when I was sent an anonymous epigram that called my friendship dangerous to ladies (how it burns me to write that). So it seems as if the baneful seed hasn't withered away after all but flourishes in secret.
But I wouldn't have you too alarmed, my dear M. It's only a matter of a scribbled rhyme, which may not have circulated at all; nothing (as far as I know) has appeared in print and I have no reason to believe Combe involved this time.
Anne paused, puzzled by how to go on. Why did she feel guilt hang round her neck like an albatross?
If I've been at fault—and somehow, for the first time, as I unburden my heart on paper, I dread that I have—it was only in responding too carelessly to that first malice all those years ago, too lightly, or rather, too squeamishly, too disdainfully. It's possible that the judicious payment of £50 or so might have killed off the many-headed dragon in its infancy; should I not have paid that tax to the World? Perhaps I was too confident, too proud.
You & I are now to be parted for so long, dear M., you may well ask, why haven't I told you as a true friend would, face to face? To which lean only reply that my courage failed me; these things are more easily committed to paper. Though I know this letter will frighten and mortify you.
Oh, God. Anne didn't want to beg. What should she say now, what could she ask for?
I only hope, when you've reflected on the matter, that the goodness of your heart & the valour of your spirit will still let you count among your correspondents & friends
your servant,
(I need not risk signing;you know my hand well)
THE POST brought her notes twice a day, but they were all from Walpolfe, and irritating. I long for a line from Dieppe & then Rouen, Paris, Lyons & Turin, he scribbled. Not till the family are settled in Italy & I have confirmation of the fact will my anxiety subside into steady, selfish sorrow. When two days had passed without word, he became convinced that the little sloop had foundered in the Channel. Finally he wrote to let Anne know the joyful news that he'd got a brief note from Agnes announcing their safe arrival in Dieppe after a twenty-four-hour crossing that had been only slightly rough. Anne, who'd heard nothing, had other terrors. Why didn't Mary reply to her letter? Put another way, why had she written of such terrible things to a young woman with eyes as stern as a hawk's?
She was so shaken that afternoon that she took four drops of laudanum. She hadn't touched the stuff since a very bad headache a year before; she'd almost forgotten what a magic elixir it was. It only sent her to sleep if she was tired already; on a restless day like this one it lifted her spirits and smoothed them out like a hot iron. She didn't feel drunk, only blissfully at ease; for hours on end she read Dante. That night, though, she was pull
ed back into turgid nightmares; she walked through gigantic pagan temples, looking for something, she couldn't remember what.
The next morning the letter arrived. It was postmarked Paris.
Oh, my dear A.—
How very honoured I feel that you've trusted me—as a friend of such recent date, though boundless affection—with your dreadful subject, as you call it. I'd never heard a word of this appalling libel, but that's not surprising, considering what restricted circles I've moved in until recently. The ways of the Beau Monde are still strange to me £s? its language a harsh one.
I can assure you, you still have my friendship, for as long as you want it.
You don't ask for my advice in this matter of the recent revival of the rumours, but somehow I feel inspired to offer it; forgive me this forwardness. Perhaps you were atfault, as you say, in taking the first battle too lightly instead of forcing a retraction from Combe. (Though I know, of course, that for rumours to be publicly denied is for them to be repeated.) It's as a friend that I say, now, don't let your reputation go undefended; it (I mean any woman's) is afrailfortress. Though you can't fight an invisible enemy (this latest epigram), you can keep watch.
I suspect it wasn't only the circumstances of your widowhood that left you open to thefirst dreadful accusation, but your splendid and enviable prominence in the masculine field of sculpture. My own unhappy circumstances in life, which have made me dependent on the kindness of my superiors, have impressed on me the necessity of holding on to people's approval. Perhaps you, too, should err on the side of pleasing the World rather than always following your own inner guide?