Page 58 of Life Mask


  Mary stopped chewing plum cake and put down her fork.

  'I don't mean to alarm you,' said Anne, opening her memorandum book, 'but I feel you should make this decision—the most serious of all decisions—with open eyes.'

  Mary nodded fervently. 'Tell me. Tell me everything you know.'

  Anne consulted her list. 'Well. In many ways, at first, it looks like a good match. You must know about O'Hara's birth.'

  'Yes, that it was illegitimate,' said Mary bravely, 'but his father has always acknowledged him.'

  'Nothing's known about the mother; you'll have to ask him that yourself.'

  Mary's teeth held her small red Up.

  'In all justice, the sins of the fathers shouldn't be visited on the children, but it's ever been so.' Anne sighed. 'O'Hara must feel it very much, of course, poor fellow—since your own parentage is impeccable. Now, as to his education...'

  'He's a soldier,' said Mary. 'One can't expect him to have the manners or tastes of a gentleman of leisure.'

  Anne nodded. 'The question is whether his intrinsically good character has been tarnished by a life in the army.'

  'He's told me he used to be careless about money,' Mary volunteered, 'that's why he went abroad in the early '80s.'

  'I'm thinking more of ... private matters.'

  The euphemism made Mary look away.

  'Apparently his nickname in Gibraltar is Old Cock of the Walk,' Anne pronounced squeamishly. 'Of course, a man of his years can't be expected to come pure to his wedding, but it's to be hoped that the General isn't as steeped in vice as the average soldier. I couldn't bear to think of your health, as well as your happiness, being put at risk.'

  Mary nodded, faintly purple.

  'Also, there was one incident I heard of, I hate to mention it to you and perhaps it's unfair—'

  'What? What incident?'

  She sighed. 'O'Hara beat a man. The fellow nearly died.'

  Mary put her hand over her mouth.

  'I'm sorry to be the one to tell you.'

  'Perhaps it was a punishment, one he was ordered to give,' she said shakily.

  'I wish the General nothing but good and I like him immensely,' Anne told her, tasting treachery sharp on her breath. 'I simply feel it's important for you to know the man you would be marrying.'

  'Not would he, but will,' Mary reminded her. 'I've given him my word.'

  Anne kept her mouth shut.

  'What else have you got there in your little book?' She was trying to read Anne's handwriting upside down.

  Anne snapped it shut. 'The other factors you need to consider are peculiar to your own situation. Are you confident that your father and sister will be able to manage their affairs without you in England, and do without your encouragement and your daily care?'

  Mary shook her head and a tear spangled in her eye.

  'Then there's Walpole.'

  'I fear he'll have an apoplexy when I tell him,' said Mary. 'The very thought of me settling so far off, in a tiny British colony, a fortress really, in wartime

  'My dear Mary,' Anne said tentatively, as if stroking a wild animal, 'I suspect from your tone that you begin rather to regret having accepted O'Hara's proposal? It was somewhat impulsive,' she rushed on, forestalling an answer, 'some would even say rash; you might have asked him for the usual period to consider the matter. But nothing's quite settled yet, you see. You mustn't feel trapped.'

  Mary kept shaking her head.

  'Don't let your exquisite scruples lead you astray on this occasion,' Anne urged her. 'Just because you were prevailed upon, hurried into saying yes, it doesn't mean you're honour bound to go through with it. If, after mature reflection, your heart shrinks from this engagement—'

  'But it doesn't.' Mary spoke very firmly. 'Anne, you misunderstand me. I admit to qualms—to downright terrors. But I love the man.'

  The silence stretched out like a web.

  'If this is the worst of him'—she gestured at the notebook—'then it makes no difference. He's won me. You've never asked if I love him,' said Mary with a curious smile. 'We've talked about every other aspect of the thing. Perhaps you know me so well that you haven't needed to ask. Does my face betray me when I speak of him?'

  'Your eyes,' said Anne, barely audible. 'And when you sit beside him listening to his stories you look like Desdemona.'

  THAT NIGHT Anne sat at her toilette, brushing out her hair, which still hadn't a single streak of grey in it. She met her own gaze. And she thought, That's what's changed since I was a girl: my forehead is harder. She would have to put that in her sculpture. Also, her jaw had a leaden angle to it these days; it looked like desperation.

  Sick of the sight of herself she turned away and went to sit on the edge of the bed. She heard it like a voice in her head: lam what they call me.

  It was strange how quickly these revelations could strike when they came at last after years, after decades, after a lifetime. Like the Greek philosopher in his bath, crying out Eureka, I have found it. Or no, more like Monsieur Marat in his bath of blood, stabbed to death by a girl. That was what Anne felt like now; one sudden blow and a helpless draining away.

  Consider the facts, she told herself like her first tutor, Hume; never be afraid to expose your ideas to empirical observation. Fact: she had spent the last several weeks plotting against the happiness of her best friend. Fact: she was motivated not by concern or caution, but by panic and greed. Anne couldn't bear Mary to go off to Gibraltar and leave her behind. She didn't want her to marry at all, come to that, not even a gentleman who lived in Mayfair. She realised now that for years she'd assumed Mary was a natural-born spinster who'd never change her condition. Assume nothing, ordered the philosopher in her head. The thought of Mary's wedding filled Anne with a sort of nauseous, shaking chill. It's all wrong—but she knew what she really meant was Don't go. Stay with me, be by my side. What can he give you that I can't?

  She pressed her fingers into her bony forehead. There were words for women like her, women who saw all the natural attractions of a man like Charles O'Hara and were left cold. Women who asked for more than had been allotted to them. Women who became fixated on shallow, glamorous actresses. Women who loved their female friends not generously but with a demanding, jealous ruthlessness; women who got in the way of good marriages and thwarted nature. There were words for such propensities—hidden inclinations—secret tastes—and she knew them all, had heard them all already.

  What was it Walpole had murmured after the Field Marshal's funeral? These sensibilities seem to run in families. Was that a sort of confession? Did he mean that Anne wasn't just his cousin and his godchild, but his daughter under the skin?

  She was very cold. She shed her shoes and got under the blankets, still fully dressed; she shuddered. Was she ill, she wondered, could knowledge act like a poison, throwing the whole body out of joint? Oh, God, it can't be true. But how could she deny it? She'd only ever loved women. Such warmth as she'd felt for men—Walpole, O'Hara, Fawkener, Derby even—had been purely comradely. She'd never loved John Damer, nor seriously considered marrying again. It had always been women who stirred her imagination. How ab-jectly she'd clung to Eliza for all those years. How fierce her grip on Mary now. This wasn't friendship, it was its darker shadow. It had all the qualities of passion; it was as selfish, as unstable, as dangerous as what men felt for women.

  No, not that. She rolled over violently, tangling her legs in the sheets. What she felt was unreasonable, but it wasn't carnal. Anne had never done the things the journalists said of her, never gone further than a kiss; she'd never even dreamed of doing them. It wasn't a matter of urges of the flesh, not for her, at least; it wasn't the sordid, simpering thing they hinted about in the papers. But this much she knew: she was experiencing something terrible. She was trying to hold on to Mary, to bind her, to possess her. And for this she would be punished.

  THE KING was going to open Parliament today and Derby wanted to park his carriage outside the Banqueting House
to get a good view of the procession from St James's as it came down Whitehall. But the traffic was already so clogged that he told the driver to let him off at Charing Cross and pick him up again in an hour.

  'Shouldn't you take both the footmen, My Lord?'

  'No, no, one will do,' said Derby, stepping down.

  Even with the man clearing the way, oak staff in hand, it took Derby some time to walk down Whitehall and he began almost to wish he'd stayed at home in Mayfair. Graffiti spattered every other wall; it was like being trapped in a printing press, he thought absurdly. The streets seemed filthier than ever. Already his white stockings were spattered and these shoes would have to be donated to his valet. The crowd had a sullen and mutinous air, considering they were gathered to watch a procession. But then, this had been the second dreadful harvest in a row, and Derby had had to set up soup kitchens at Preston and Liverpool. A handbill was pushed into his fingers and he glanced at it—our Commons is corrupt, our Lords useless, our Judges murderous—before letting it join the muddy morass underfoot. The thing was, he would have difficulty rebutting any of the charges.

  Derby's footman found him a prime position on the steps of a corner house on Parliament Street, just in time. Already the glinting string of vehicles was making its way down Whitehall. The usual chants were starting to rise: 'Peace not war!' 'Bread not famine!' As the royal carriage turned its golden mass, with difficulty, and rolled into Parliament Street at a snail's pace, the narrow head of George III could be seen in the window, nodding stiffly to his subjects. Derby's ears could pick out some new slogans now: 'Down with tyrants,' roared a man behind him, making him jump. 'No Pitt, No George!'

  Come, this is going rather too far, he thought uneasily. It was more like a Parisian crowd than a London one. Where was the usual outpouring of loyal sentiment? he wondered.

  'Down with George! Off with his head!' A woman beside Derby was screaming the words at regular intervals, as if in labour. Some clods of mud and miscellaneous turds smacked the royal carriage. Derby's footman cast him an anxious look, but he ignored it; best to sit tight till the fuss was over. He reminded himself of an insight of Fox's, the other night, over a bottle of sherry: freedom of speech could sound alarming, but it was a great valve for releasing pressure in hard times like these. The English liked to have their say, loudly and sometimes rudely, but there was no harm in them.

  And then it happened. Quite soundless, or rather, the tiny sound was drowned in the noises of the crowd. All Derby saw was the window of the gold carriage implode. First one pane starred, then another and the puppet profile had disappeared; the King was down.

  God Almighty, what have we done?

  Derby only had time for that thought before the mob surged like a dirty river bursting its banks and he was knocked to his knees. When he got up from the bottom step, with painful effort, he couldn't find his footman. He brushed vainly at the mud crusted on his breeches. He pushed through the bodies, beginning to panic; he was too short to see his way. Where could his footman have got to? A man with stumps in dirty bandages for arms shoved Derby out of the way. A fat woman spat on his lapel. Assassination, the word hissed in his head till it was meaningless. His knees hurt. The Republic of Britain.

  Argh!' Derby reeled, almost fell. His hand flew up to his cheek and came away bloody. He couldn't tell who'd struck him, or with what weapon. The pain was staggering; he thought part of his face had been stove in. His blood was as shiny as holly berries. So real. Not cock's blood or horse's blood but Edward Smith-Stanley's, dripping down his cravat, marking the cobbles.

  Shock gave way to terror. It could have been anybody who'd hit him. You're an aristocrat, for Christ's sake, he told himself, what are you playing at? You've no friends here. He spun round desperately, looking for a way out, but ragged coats and red faces hemmed him in on all sides. Chaos smelt of bodies and fish and shit, tasted metallic as his own blood. Get out, get out, said a voice in his head, before they string you from a lamp-post.

  NOVEMBER 1795

  'It wasn't even an airgun pellet,' said Sheridan, swigging the vintage brandy like small beer, 'only a few pebbles. And I have it on good information that it wasn't Reformers who threw them, anyway, but Pitt's agents provocateurs.'

  'Oh, Sherry, you always blame government agents,' Fox teased him.

  Derby sat mutely beside them in the library at Derby House, nursing his drink. The bandages were gone; his cheekbone was navy-blue and green. Grosvenor Square was dark through the gap in the curtains.

  'Apparently he reacted with marvellous calmness,' remarked Fox, 'and picked up a pebble from the floor as a souvenir, before being driven on to the Commons. I suppose the old rat quails at nothing, having survived wars, madness and thirty-five years on the throne already!'

  'I don't know; I heard he told Lord Eldon he suspects he'll be the last king of England.' Sheridan smirked.

  Derby was finding his friends' flippancy revolting. The whole city was the same. Habeas corpus had been suspended again and cavalry brought in from Cornwall, but it made little difference to the cacophony that was London. All down Whitehall boys were selling fragments of what they claimed was the royal carriage's window glass for sixpence apiece.

  'But now to business, my lads,' said Fox, pulling a bundle of papers out of his pocketbook. 'These Gagging Acts of Pitt's, to preserve what they're calling homeland security—I've obtained the gory details. The Seditious Meetings Bill will be introduced in the Commons and what it boils down to is that if you hold a meeting of more than fifty, a magistrate can send in the troops to shut it down, and it specifies that he'll bear no responsibility for any deaths that may result!'

  'That's a licence to kill,' said Sheridan, wild-eyed.

  'Then, Derby, in the Lords it'll be up to you and Bedford and the others to tackle the Treasonable Practices Bill, which allows transportation or execution for anyone who publishes anything that possibly could incite discontent against King or government. I want you to start by proposing a rake of amendments—and meanwhile we'll be organising a national campaign of petitions—'

  'I don't think so,' said Derby quietly.

  Fox blinked at him. 'You're dubious about our strategy?'

  'I'm dubious about letting traitors go free.'

  The silence in the study was thick, like smoke.

  'Uh-oh,' murmured Sheridan. 'How's that scratch, Derby? Stinging, is it?'

  Derby stared at him. 'You weren't there.'

  A comical shrug. 'What can I say? Young wives are demanding.'

  'Neither of you was there.'

  'The King wasn't hurt,' Fox put in gently.

  Derby swatted that away like a wasp. 'You didn't see the anarchy, the utter rabid madness of that crowd. It was—what's that new word?—terrorism. We've always boasted that there couldn't be an English revolution. Well, let me tell you, we've been fools!'

  'For a famous cocker your stomach's not so strong after all,' said Sheridan mildly. 'One little riot and you're Torified overnight. I've attended operas where more blood was shed!'

  Fox held up his hands to keep the peace. 'Sherry, no need for insults. My dear Derby, I respect your views, now as always.'

  A snort from Sheridan.

  'But we can't let Pitt take advantage of this distressing incident to turn the country into one great prison. He's the true terrorist, he rules by the politics of threat and panic.'

  Derby looked into his glass, exhausted.

  'I need every man I've got, especially in the Lords. All I ask,' said Fox with a trembling lip, 'all I entreat is that you consider—'

  The footman announced Mrs and Miss Farren. The men jumped up to take their leave and Derby didn't stop them.

  He tried to rouse himself enough to make chit-chat with Eliza and her mother; they discussed the new comedy she was starring in, opposite Mrs Jordan (quite harmoniously, to her surprise), and his daughter Charlotte's protracted courting by a cousin in Westmoreland. (If the wedding went ahead, Miss Farren was to be bridesmaid; t
he girl had made the suggestion herself.) He thought he was doing rather well when Eliza broke a brief silence to ask, 'Did we interrupt a quarrel? Fox and Sheridan were scowling on their way out.'

  Derby sighed. Her bright eyes waited.

  'My dear,' murmured her mother, 'perhaps you shouldn't interfere with the gentlemen's business.'

  'Alas, Mrs Farren,' he said, 'politics has become everyone's business.' As briefly as he could he explained what the matter was.

  'Your injury's changed you,' observed Eliza.

  'Oh, it's only a bruise,' he said, feeling foolish as he scratched his cheek.

  'I meant the blow to your pride.'

  Derby wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. 'To be caught up in that frenzied attack on the King's carriage,' he said unsteadily, 'was one of the most ghastly experiences of my life.'

  'Oh, I believe you,' said the actress. 'That's my point. It seems to have done what all the French horrors never managed: scared you out of your love of liberty.'

  Sometimes, he thought, this woman could do with a good smack.

  'Eliza,' said Mrs Farren, getting to her feet, 'His Lordship must be tired...' Her daughter ignored her.

  'What I love,' he said hoarsely, leaning his elbows on his knees, 'I don't cease to love. No matter what.'

  She nodded gravely.

  'I'm Fox's man and I'll fight these damned Gagging Acts, but I don't know. I don't know what'll become of us all.'

  She was still nodding as she rose to her feet. 'You'll do what's right. Good night, My Lord.'

  'Good night, ladies.'

  ANNE AND MARY were walking in the orchard at Strawberry Hill, the last fallen leaves like splashes of bright paint on the brown layers beneath. 'These are such uncertain times, what can one trust but one's own heart?' asked Anne. 'Yes, there are obstacles, but such a deserving love will sweep them all aside.'

  'Oh, my dear, you've been such a help to me and to the General—Charles—as well,' said Mary. 'Letting us correspond discreedy via your house, and kéeping my spirits up and soothing all my worries about the future...'