Though this and other Vices may be as old as our race, the present era is marked by a reckless scorn for all laws of God, Nature and Reason. Too many are the Englishmen now drowning in the stagnant pool of Atheism or the poisoned well of Sodom. Women demand their Rights, including the right to rival the other sex in debauchery. While their husbands defend our Empire on the high seas, how many have set up housekeeping with lovers, or dropped fatherless children?
The dreadful example of France suggests that when the bonds of tradition are untied, a whole Pandora's box of crimes is shaken into the air: have the streets of Paris not been stained by Torture, Rape, Cannibalism and Satanic rites? Some prophesy that we are approaching the Millennium and that when every offence that can be committed has been committed the World will burn.
But enough of such serious stuff. Any Correspondents with an opinion on the gentlemanly craze for Pantaloons are invited to write to the Editor.
—BEAU MONDE INQUIRER, August 1794
DERBY WAS BENT DOUBLE OVER THE HORSE. HE PULLED UP the eyelid and examined the milky surface. 'Good lad,' he murmured, 'good lad.'
'You agree, M'Lord?'
'I suppose there's nothing else for it.' He straightened up, his back aching. A pearl button had fallen off his new braces; he picked it out of the straw.
'I've tried everything on the hoof, but it just won't mend,' said the stable master who ran the Earl's five stalls at Epsom.
'Very well,' said Derby, too sharp. He could smell the rot from where he stood, by Sir Peter's head. This was the best mount he'd ever run—his Derby winner of '87—and the stallion deserved a long and profitable career at stud, before being put out to grass. Not this, an agonising disintegration on damp straw. 'I'll do it myself,' he said, before he could shrink from the task.
'The muskets are already primed,' the stable master assured him, letting out a whistle.
A boy ran in, two firelocks under his arm. 'You,' snapped Derby, 'never run with a gun.' The fellow looked barely thirteen; he went purple in the face. 'Beg pardon, M'Lord.'
'You don't want to trip and be blown to bits,' said Derby, trying to sound kinder.
The boy shook his head violently.
Derby cocked a firelock. Please let the first one work. He was feeling a peculiar squeamishness; he couldn't bear the idea that Sir Peter would hear the dull click of a misfiring gun at his skull and know what his master meant to do. Such sentimentality, at forty-two! A sob welled up in the back of his throat. He put his boot on the long muscular neck—there was no resistance—and set the nose of the gun to Sir Peter's head. At the last moment he let himself look away. The shot was deafening; it sounded as if the whole stable had exploded.
Face to the wall, Derby wiped his spattered boots with a handkerchief.
'Funeral tomorrow?' asked the stable master.
He nodded, speechless, and walked out of the stall.
This had been the worst summer he'd had since his wife had eloped with Lord Dorset sixteen years before. In some ways it was even harder. Being cuckolded by a fellow nobleman could happen to anyone; despite Derby's rage and shame on that occasion, he'd felt himself to be enduring the common fate of modern husbands. Whereas this fantastical scandal that had sent the actress he loved stumbling from the stage of the Haymarket last month stuck under his skin like a splinter of glass.
He sometimes thought he was losing his wits. He felt he'd been an utter dunderhead, that was the thing. In all his life it'd never occurred to him to feel jealous of a woman. Of women, rather; of all of them, the infinite variety of cooing intimacies that went by the name of female friendship. Was it a Trojan horse, a mere toy that men never thought to fear? If Sapphists couldn't easily be identified by their mannishness—if any lady might be hiding twisted desires behind a smooth face—all England might be riddled with this rot. Why, if women were a danger to each other then what bedroom, what parlour, what tea shop was safe?
One of the chief attractions that Eliza had always held for Derby was her virginity. She was one of the only women he knew who'd held on to it past girlhood. He'd never doubted it; it was like a pool of shining light about her. Between her and men—himself included—there'd always been a shimmering, unbreakable veil. But what of women? What mysterious carnalities could they indulge in and still preserve their reputations, still carry that virgin shine like a shield? He'd never thought to watch Eliza in that way, never wondered what her letters contained, how she spent all those private hours with a friend like Anne Damer.
To suspect her would drive Derby mad. But after the events of last month—the humiliation at the Haymarket, the hints in newspapers, the explicit details in Pigott's pamphlet—he could no more control his thoughts than a wasps' nest. Those old rumours about Mrs Damer; how could he ever have been such an idiot as to laugh them off? He didn't know what to believe about Eliza's relations with her, but he knew this much: there was no going back to innocence.
When he walked into one of Epson's smaller inns, his nostrils still Ml of the stink of Sir Peter Teazle's blood, all he wanted was a brandy. But he found a table full of his Party friends, all sozzled; they must have come down for the King's Cup. 'Derby, me old fellow-me-lad,' roared Sheridan in a fake brogue, 'I haven't seen you in an age.'
'I only came down yesterday,' said Derby, not mentioning Sir Peter.
Fox edged his bulk along the bench to make room and clasped Derby's neck with a fond look. He knows, then. Everyone knew. Stories travelled fast, especially disgusting ones. 'Any news from Paris?' he said, for something to say.
'All good,' said Grey. 'Since the fall of Robespierre the city's come awake, like the Sleeping Beauty. Thirteen theatres have reopened—papers are rolling off the press again—people are coming out of hiding—'
'Oo, yes,' said Fox, 'I'm vastly reconciled to the French. Now's the perfect time for Pitt to sue for peace.'
The man's optimistic spirits always rebounded, even when circumstances didn't justify it, thought Derby.
'We can't even maintain peace in London, let alone achieving it in Europe,' snorted Bedford. 'Take these crimping riots—' The war was dragging on so long that there was a shortage of able-bodied men and heavy-handed recruiting agents had sparked off protests from Holborn to Southwark.
'I heard a young man fell to his death while escaping from the crimpers,' remarked Grey.
Derby felt his arm being poked. 'How's the lovely Eliza?' Sheridan was slurring a little.
He thought of saying Don't you dare call her that.
'Farren broke her summer contract after she got hissed at the Haymarket last month,' Sheridan explained to the circle. 'Now I hear she's off touring Ireland, where they're less au fait!'
Fox tried for a flippant tone. 'Drop it, would you, Sherry?'
'Drop what?' asked one of the youngsters. 'What's the joke?'
'There is none,' said Derby.
'Oh, come on, even you must admit it's rather hilarious,' said Sheridan, his eyes hazy with drink.
'Shall we have some cold ham?' asked Bedford, looking for a waiter.
'I say, drop it,' Derby barked at Sheridan.
The Irishman's eyebrows soared. 'Don't come the despotic aristo with me.'
'But what's the joke?' repeated the youngster.
'Really, men, don't you think—' started Bedford.
'It's more of a riddle than a joke, really.' Sheridan played a mischievous drum roll on the table. 'Question: if one's inamorata is scandalously linked with a fellow female, can one be said to be a cuckold?'
Derby's teeth were clamped together.
'Sherry,' protested Grey and Fox in chorus.
'Oh, I mean no slur; we're almost all cuckolds here, aren't we, gentlemen? But I persist in asking that old question, do Sapphic seductions, mere tribadic toyings, fricatrice fondlings,' he pronounced with relish, 'count as infidelity? I seem to remember that no less an authority than Brantôme claims they only amount to wantonness, since ladies who dabble in female flesh are merely washing the e
dges of a cut, not truly lancing the wound!'
Derby's head was clanging like a saucepan. His limbs refused to move him out of this ring of staring faces.
'And there's a further difficulty,' Sheridan lectured on, holding up one finger in parliamentary style. 'To be crowned with horns, surely a gentleman has to have possessed the inamorata in the first place? After all, in this case we're talking about the most famous virgin in England, or at least in the annals of the theatre. So perhaps her platonic lover hasn't been technically cuckolded, gentlemen, merely ... beaten to the finish?'
In one lunge across the table Derby had him by the throat.
Somebody screamed.
'For God's sake,' Fox roared as he pushed between them. Hands tugged at Derby's wrists, wrenched him away. Sheridan's face was shocked, his nose scarlet.
'I demand satisfaction,' said Derby, very fast, before Sheridan could; his tongue tripped over the words.
'My pleasure,' said Sheridan hoarsely.
Fox clapped his arm round Derby and half dragged him away from the table. They leaned against the wall of the inn, heads together. 'You've every right, of course, but think, for a moment,' Fox whispered in his ear. 'Sherry fought several duels in his youth and lived to boast of them. You've never fought one.'
'That's neither here nor there,' growled Derby.
'My Party's small enough,' said Fox, 'without the loss of a fool like you or a rogue like him. You're both entirely necessary to me. I won't have it!'
'You hold my political allegiance,' Derby told him, 'but my honour is my own.'
'Oh, come now—'
Derby felt a tap on his shoulder. He spun round.
Grey was wearing a grave expression. 'Our colleague has something to say.'
Behind him, Sheridan stood with arms crossed. 'I beg your pardon, Derby. I'm rather the worse for some bottles of brandy,' he drawled. 'I believe I got somewhat carried away. No offence intended to you, My Lord, or to the unimpeachable Miss Farren.'
The adjective stuck in Derby's craw. But he'd received a formal apology in front of witnesses—so the matter had to end there.
'Won't you stay?' Fox asked him on his way to the door, but Derby said no, he had a horse to bury.
He stood out in the street, shaking, blinking in the harsh light. He felt as if he'd had a week without sleep. He would have gone ahead with the duel, he told himself, if he hadn't received satisfaction. It was the only time in his life that he had ever issued a challenge, but he'd been ready; everything in his, upbringing had prepared him for it. One didn't decide to fight a duel based on one's chances of winning. Derby remembered explaining it to young Edward years ago, as his own father had explained it to him: to be a gentleman means to be ready to face death on the field of honour at any time. He'd never forget the child's petrified, wooden face.
ANNE WAS sitting on the floor of a bedroom at an inn, somewhere in Oxfordshire, or possibly Berkshire. She pressed her back against the door; that way, nobody could open it from the outside. The boards were cold through her muslin skirt; her knees were drawn up and her chin rested between them. Her stomach growled.
What have I done?
She hadn't left a forwarding address for her parents when she'd fled from Park Place. She'd gone at first light, the morning after getting Mary's note of rejection. She knew Conway and Lady Ailesbury would be as kind as ever—they'd never believe anything bad of their daughter—but she couldn't bear to stay; she dreaded a soft word as much as any rebuke. Anne couldn't stand to be written to, spoken to, looked at, even. It made her shudder to think that she was being gossiped about, at this moment, by people she'd never met. All England was covered with delicate webs of tittletattle: Mrs Damer this, people were whispering, Mrs Damer that, Mrs Damer did you ever?
She ached all over from the carriage's jolting progression through the countryside. When she wasn't upstairs in an inn, she always wore a veil. Incognito: it was such a glamorous word, but behind the choking layers of gauze Anne's face was sallow and shapeless. She wore a long travelling coat, buttoned up despite the heat of August; it was getting stained under the arms. Her limbs were heavy; she moved like a sleepwalker, or lay face down on the bed and didn't move at all. She hadn't stayed more than two nights anywhere; she didn't want to have to give an account of herself. She avoided the servants' eyes. She kept her trunks locked, to hide the name and address printed inside; when she noticed that one of her handkerchiefs was monogrammed she put it in the fire. The coals were damp; the A.D. took a while to burn.
What have I done? Anne asked herself when she woke up every day, and sometimes the question was rhetorical and sometimes it was literal. She hadn't eaten for a couple of days now; that could explain how strange she felt and the way her head seemed to split in two whenever she tried to decide anything. In her dreams she began to wail, but when she woke up her eyes were bone dry.
She had no occupations. She'd brought no books, not even paper and pen. Mary Berry had cut her off in four lines; Mary, the best friend she had in the world. Nothing was safe from the filth, it leaked in everywhere. There was nowhere to hide her face, no refuge left in the world.
Anne thought of suicide. Oddly enough, the idea hadn't struck her before. Perhaps it was the music, rising from the taproom downstairs, that made her think of it now. It was eighteen years since her husband had gone upstairs in the Bedford Arms with the two whores, the two pistols and the blind fiddler. (It sounded like a joke, didn't it?) Anne wondered what was the last tune he'd asked the fiddler for. Something merry—but she hadn't known John well enough to guess the tide. She found herself thinking of him almost fondly. He hadn't even been thirty when the bullet had gone into his head and out again. She'd never understood how he could have done such a shocking thing, with so little consideration for his family and friends—for her. But now it came to her with the force of a blow that his miserable wife had not been in his mind the day he'd killed himself; she hadn't been real to him at all. John Damer had gone beyond such mortal connections; he was on his own, in deep water, going down.
Anne understood that, now, because she was the same way. There were no parents watching over her any more, no sister, no godfather, no friends. They'd floated out of her grasp. Here she was, nameless and faceless, on the roads of England and not a soul knew where she was or how to bring her home.
She crawled from the floor to the bed, and sat up half the night thinking of ways and means. She'd never owned a pistol. (John's pair had been sold, together with all his other valuables, to set against his debts.) The knives that came with her dinner tray were blunt and in her reticule she had only tiny scissors. These things were so much easier for men. But then it came to her: laudanum. Anne weighed the bottle in her hand; still almost half full. Surely if she drank the lot at once that would do the trick?
It wasn't the sinfulness of these thoughts that stopped her; her conscience was quite mute these days. It was the idea of John, meeting her in the underworld and laughing with his snide, silly laugh. No, Anne had never stooped to his level while they'd been married and she'd be damned if she was going to now.
Walking in the woods behind the inn the next morning, Anne considered going abroad. That was the traditional recourse for outcasts, after all. William Beckford, for instance, to pick a famous monster; hadn't he been living in one warm climate or another ever since his banishment? His only problems were with English diplomats, it seemed; foreigners were more tolerant. But how strange it would be to leave England, Anne thought, knowing one could never come back again. Would she find shelter somewhere, and oblivion, for the rest of her life? Would she sculpt foreign faces, and foreign cats and dogs, and would her pieces never go on show at the Royal Academy again? Anne almost laughed, catching herself out in a paradox; here she was, trembling at the thought that a chambermaid might recognise her face, yet still hoping for fame and glory at the annual Exhibition!
No, she wouldn't flee to Italy or Switzerland and for one good reason. To go was to proclaim tha
t what was said of you was true. She'd never give her accusers that satisfaction.
She pictured Charles Pigott, smirking over his inky work. She assumed he was out of gaol by now; perhaps he'd scribbled the lines about her in The Whig Club—the work of two minutes—in some garret off the Strand. Was he munching on a pork pie, or scratching a flea bite, as he chose his words, as he rained down destruction on a woman he'd never met?
He'd been in gaol when she'd written him that scornful letter, but wasn't this travelling a gaol too, of a sort? Could she be any more imprisoned behind bars? Anne thought of the eagle caught by Lord Melbourne's gamekeeper, the eagle she'd sculpted. How shocked, how furious his eyes had been as they'd shackled him. He hadn't eaten, she remembered; he'd pined away and died of a moult.
Pigott was a radical, of course; a leveller, a Jacobin anarchist, probably an atheist. It wasn't just Anne's downfall that he longed for, or Eliza's or Mary's or Walpole's, but the complete annihilation of the World. Whoever had enough money to keep his hands clean Pigott would libel as a compound of all vices. When Pigott had finished his dark work there'd be no more kings or countesses, no paying calls or thirty-dish suppers, no painted fans or marble statues. If he and his conspirators had their way they'd turn Anne's homeland into one vast, brutal, democratic camp. She argued with Pigott in her head; she said plain, foolish things: I'm innocent, she told him, I've done nothing.
But that was hardly the point. Anne leaned against a tree and bit her thumb. Of course she'd done something to arouse Pigott's rage. She'd been a woman of privilege, rank and some fame. And she had loved; she wouldn't deny that, not if her life depended on it. She'd loved Eliza Farren, and lost her in a matter of hours and thought it the worst pain she'd ever felt. She'd loved Mary Berry, too, differently, and had never thought that anything could come between them. It was difficult to tease out the strands of misery but it seemed to Anne, surprisingly, that this second loss was worse.