'How alarming!'
'It seems they hoped to attract the locals to their standard,' Derby explained, 'having read exaggerated reports of the rebellious state of the Welsh. But they were quickly routed by a band of Pembrokeshire females! Can't you just picture the women, in their red cloaks and black top hats, waving pitchforks and reaping hooks?'
Walpole let out a gasp of mirth. 'Clearly the crimpers have been recruiting the wrong sort of Britons.'
'So the invaders surrendered on Friday,' Derby told him, 'all 1400 of them. They're to be jailed on the Isle of Man. Now there are outbreaks of panic all round the country whenever someone spots an innocent merchantman or fishing vessel on the horizon. It does seem as if only luck has protected us from invasion so far—luck and weather.'
'Of course, you and your radical friends might welcome such visitors.'
The sly line came out so faintly that Derby took a few seconds to recognise it for a quip; Walpole's famous delivery had deserted him. 'Aha,' said Derby, erring on the side of flippancy, 'but no one's safe in a revolution. Sheridan was just saying the other day that if the French landed in numbers, Pitt would declare martial law and start hanging all troublemakers—the remains of our Party included. And on the other hand, if General Bonaparte added these islands to his string of conquests, I suspect I'd be among the first aristos to face the Guillotine.'
'What a peculiar position you find yourself in,' commented Walpole pleasantly.
'Oh, but it'll never happen,' Derby said, as he always did. Despite the bad fright he'd had when the mob had attacked the royal carriage last winter, he'd clung to his Foxite principles; he couldn't afford to change his mind at this stage. As Lord-Lieutenant of Lancashire he steadfastly refused to supply the Home Office with details of seditious activities in the area. 'Pitt's new hobby-horse is a Loyalty Loan, as he calls it. There was a very persuasive story going round Brooks's that any man of property who didn't volunteer to lend the government vast amounts would find the same sum demanded in the form of a tax—so we all lined up to subscribe to the Loan on its opening day.'
Walpole chuckled feebly.
'And speaking of money, sir, have you heard that all our gold has turned to paper?'
'Whatever can you mean?'
'Well, cash has been running short and after the news from Pembrokeshire there was a frenzied run on the Bank of England. So the Cabinet decided—in the absence of a visit from King Midas—that the only solution was to suspend payments in gold. Anything above 20 shillings will now come in the form of paper. There've been shrieks of protest, of course, and some hoarding...'
'Gad, it's as bad as the French and their worthless assignats,' wheezed the old man. 'What, you mean that were I to have myself carried into the Bank to withdraw £3 of my own gold they'd refuse me?'
'They'd give you a banknote, which is worth the same.'
Walpole snorted disapprovingly. 'It doesn't feel like the same thing. Not at all as heavy in the pockets.'
'Well, then, you'd save on your tailor's bill,' Derby told him.
The old man let out a terrible cackle of mirth. 'Young man, I haven't had a new suit since 1779!' He coughed and struggled to catch his breath. Opening his mouth, he let out a long, strange sound; Derby thought it was a cry of pain, but it turned out to be a yawn. 'I'd best hurry up and die. All my gold is turned to paper, as it were. Being so bereft of all my forces and decayed in spirits and understanding, I naturally dread being a burden.'
'I'm sure no one thinks of you as one.'
'Things become apparent', whispered the old man, 'when one lies on one's back in the dark waiting for pains to approach or re-cede. My best friends are all dead; I cling to young people who try to shake me off. My servants think more of their own comfort than mine. I'm become a nuisance and a bore.'
'Mr Walpole!' Derby protested. 'Never a bore.'
'You're kind. Perhaps that could be my epitaph: Never a bore,' murmured Walpole with a sort of pleasure.
Standing in the hall, waiting for the footman to bring his greatcoat and hat, Derby heard light footsteps on the stairs. He turned.
She was looking very handsome in a simple blue wrapping gown; she seemed just as shocked as he was. 'Lord Derby.'
'Mrs Damer.'
'Are you here to—' She saw the servant come up with his things. 'Ah, your visit is over.'
'I arrived an hour ago,' said Derby, absurdly defensive.
'How good of you.' She sounded as if she meant it. 'He'll have appreciated it.'
Derby knew he should bow and leave. Considering how abruptly and coldly he had ended their friendship, almost three years ago, he had no right to expect a civil conversation. 'What's wrong with him?'
'Age,' said Anne Damer, 'simply the weakness of age. It's not the gout, not in itself, though that adds to his pain. He's losing strength all the time and his pulse is at eighty. He coughs and vomits violently, doesn't eat, and he has inflamed abscesses in both legs.'
Derby winced.
'You chose a lucky day,' she added, 'yesterday he had no voice at all and was suffering from delusions.'
'What kind of delusions?'
'He gets it into his head that we've all abandoned him,' she said, her face blank, 'myself, Miss Berry, all his intimates. We're here every day, but he speaks as if we've gone abroad. He complains that we never write.'
'BUT HOW did it feel, to meet the Earl again by accident?' In the parlour at Berkeley Square Mary examined her fingertips.
Anne shrugged. 'It doesn't matter any more.'
She was tired; they were both tired from staying up at night with Walpole and taking shifts in his dark bedroom all day. There were so many papers to go over; Mary (behind the cover of her father's name) was to be the literary executrix, and Anne and her uncle Lord Frederick Campbell were joint executors of the estate.
'All you can think of is Walpole. I know, I'm the same,' said Mary. 'It's a curious numbness. A suspension.'
'I want Walpole to survive this illness, I do,' insisted Anne, 'and he still may; if ever there was a man likely to defy his doctors and live out a whole century it's he. But in another way I suppose I'm ... waiting.'
'For it to be over,' said Mary, almost whispering.
'It's not the pain; I'm used to seeing him in pain. It's the confusion.' Walpole's or hers? she wondered. 'I can't stand his bitter reflections, the accusations of conspiracy. He looks me in the eye and tells me I've deserted him in his hour of greatest need.'
'Oh, my darling.' Mary's hand was warm on the nape of Anne's neck. 'He doesn't mean it; it's just his sickness talking, or the drugs.'
'I'm not so sure. I think he's beyond politeness. He knows about us,' Anne said, finally letting it out.
'How can he?'
'Not everything, perhaps—not the details—but he knows there's been some sort of contest and he's lost it. Lost you.'
She thought Mary would deny it, but the answer surprised her. 'And you, if it comes to that.'
Anne stared at her.
'It's true,' said Mary. 'You were his favourite long before I came on the scene.'
'There's no comparison,' she began irritably. 'The minute he met you—all you Berrys, come to that—he was besotted.'
'But Agnes and I are like children to him,' said Mary, 'whereas you're Walpole's peer, not in age but in other ways. I think he counted on you to stay unattached, the great artist, by his side.'
'Perhaps a little, but it's—'
Mary had put her face in her hands. 'Are we really arguing about whom a dying man has loved more?'
A dying man. The phrase froze Anne. How ridiculous of her to resent Walpole's preference. After all, wouldn't she choose Mary over Walpole? Hadn't she already? Love did that. It cut through everything else; it was the chisel that carved people into its own preferred shape. 'Come to that,' she said ruefully, 'we've only been the preoccupations of his later years. He loved and lost other friends before either of us was born.'
'THESE LAST few weeks,' remark
ed Walpole, 'I believe I may have mislaid my sense of humour. I do apologise.'
Anne looked up from her book, startled. Soon he was dozing again. She watched the hard wrinkles of his monkey face relax.
That morning Mary brought in Mr Lawrence, the King's painter, who wanted to take a sketch of the old man. Walpole slept right through it. The painter looked like any other busy gentleman in a navy-blue frock coat these days; so unlike the sulky boy who'd painted that remarkable portrait of Eliza Farren in her furs. 'What are you working on now, Mr Lawrence?'
'A vast canvas,' he told her shortly, 'Satan Calling up his Legions!'
'Where has all our gaiety gone?' she wondered.
Lawrence gave a small shrug and returned to his drawing.
After the painter had left, Walpole woke and murmured, 'I miss my treasure house.'
'As soon as the weather warms a little,' Mary said, 'we'll wrap you up and drive you down to Twickenham.'
He gave her a wry look, as if to say he knew she didn't believe her own words. 'I thought I heard booming, last night, unless it was some fancy or vagrant memory?'
'No,' Anne told him, 'the Tower guns were firing to celebrate Sir John Jervis having beaten the Spanish fleet at St Vincent.'
She thought this news might cheer him, but his face was neutral. 'I sometimes think I've lived a dozen lives,' he murmured. 'I knew James II's mistress, and the courtiers who served under King William and then Queen Anne. I've witnessed half a dozen wars, the Jacobite Rising and the loss of America. I spent thirteen months at Florence, seven months at Paris, twenty-five years in Parliament. As a child I was carried to the first opera performed in England and I kissed the hand of George I, and now I groan over the frolics of his great-great-grandson ... No, this can't all have happened in one life! All this and yet I'm not one fifth as old as Methuselah.'
'Not a dozen lives but one, lived fully,' Anne told him, watching Mary carry his untouched tray out of the room.
'Well, I've had to keep myself busy. I've been little loved,' he said suddenly.
'Walpole!'
'It's true, my dear, regrettably true. I've been the World's favourite acquaintance. A great fellow for rounding out a dinner.'
'But you've had so many priceless friendships—' she protested.
'Oh, I've loved, yes; I have a gift for it. Loved often and hard and long. But in return ... well, I've been liked, shall we say. Men and women have been vastly fond of me,' he said, 'but I'm not so easily fooled.'
She didn't know what to say. If that was how his life had seemed to Walpole then no arguing would change his mind. And after all, what evidence could she offer? No one had ever cleaved to him, as the Scriptures put it.
'Mind you, I've sometimes appreciated the pretence,' he went on, almost whispering. 'Everybody wears a mask. Hadn't you noticed? We put them on for one very good reason: we dislike our own faces.'
Anne stared at him, troubled.
'It's not hypocrisy so much as aspiration. We wear them to persuade ourselves as much as others.' A long noisy breath, taken in and released. 'Friendship, fairness, loyalty, dignity—what are they but lovely masks, which we wear till they begin to pinch and then let fall?'
An hour after that there was a long episode of coughing. When Philip the valet came in, Anne said she could deal with it herself, which seemed to annoy him. Walpole vomited into his basin, producing little but clear mucous. He was very weak. 'What a great deal of killing I'm taking. It's not so easy to die as it's commonly imagined.' Somehow he got to talking about his soul. 'To be perfectly honest, my dear, I have my doubts about its exact destination.'
'You can't fear ... descent,' said Anne, resorting to a flippant euphemism.
'I suppose not,' he murmured, 'but nor am I entirely confident of exaltation. And I wouldn't fancy harps and sofas made of cloud. In fact, though I have a great respect for Christian ethics, I must tell you in confidence that the more supernatural doctrines of the Church have always left me sceptical.'
'Oh,' she said, helpless.
'But I've always hoped that there might be ... somewhere, in some ineffable sense, perhaps, you know, somewhere that we all might meet again,' said Walpole. 'Well, not quite all of us, obviously, or it would be such a scrum. Worse than one of Georgiana's routs in the old days.'
Anne laughed weakly.
'A select company, a happy few, with our animals, of course; Fidelle chasing her tail by the door, Tonton asleep on the rug.'
'Oh, dear, do you suppose the celestial rugs already bear the marks of Tonton's little accidents?'
'No, no,' he assured her, 'all that will have been swabbed away by angels. I declare, it doesn't frighten me, when I think of those who've gone before me. They're all dead, you know, all my dear fellows,' he murmured, shutting his papery eyelids. The names came out one at a time, as if pulled up from a well. 'Gray, yes ... and Bentley, and Chute, who helped me build my fairy castle, and Littleton too ... and Montagu. West. Ashton. Lord Lincoln, who was famed for the biggest member in London.'
Anne blinked. Had she misheard the whispered words? Did Walpole know he was speaking aloud, did he even remember she was there, know who she was? Or was he casting off propriety at last?
'Harry, my dearest Harry Conway, gone before me,' he murmured. All the men are dead; there are only women left now. How can I still be here when the men are all gone?'
Anne wanted to weep.
'He was very sweet this morning,' she told Mary much later, when they passed in the corridor, 'we spoke of heaven and old friends.'
Mary was carrying a covered basin and her face was drawn. 'He's delirious again now.'
'Oh, no.' She'd hoped he'd emerged from 'that dark maze. Sometimes she thought souls were lazy, or befuddled; they didn't seem to know their way out. 'I'll go to him.'
'It's all right, my love,' said Mary, 'you need your rest.' A maid passed by just then and Mary handed over the basin.
Anne walked back with her. The room was fetid with sickness. 'It's Anne,' she said, stooping over him.
Walpole's crusted eyes looked back at her balefully. 'She's in Gibraltar.'
'No, no.'
'She never came home from Lisbon. Her nose was shockingly broken.' His voice was a tiny insect in the stuffy room. 'I am neglected and deserted by the only friends I have left.'
'But dear Walpole,' said Mary on the other side of him, 'I'm Mary, the broken nose was mine. We're here, right here by your side; we haven't left you.'
'Abandoned,' he insisted, 'by those to whom I unwisely clung. Hedged about with cruel strangers!'
'We were only out of your room for five minutes,' Anne told him.
'With the brave General, I fancy,' he wheezed, spitting a little.
That took her aback. Did he mean O'Hara?
He paused for so long she thought he'd fallen asleep. 'Conway, the bravest of them all,' he said at last, very faint. 'Brave Harry. Horry and Harry.'
Anne was overwhelmed with exhaustion. She sat down. Mary settled herself beside her and gripped her hand. Anne was too tired to squeeze back. Walpole was like a wailing baby; nothing could satisfy him.
In his sleep he looked a trifle healthier; there was a warmer tinge to his cheeks.
MARCH 1797
A mild breeze came over the meadow to Strawberry Hill. 'I wonder might I see the death mask?' asked Richmond.
'Certainly.' Anne led him upstairs to the library where it lay, very white and hard, on a black velvet cushion. Richmond approached it with the firm look of the connoisseur. The face was an extraordinary one, narrow and alien; Anne took no credit for it. 'I can't imagine why I never sculpted him while he was with us. Somehow it never occurred to me.' But the only man she'd ever immortalised was King George; that was a strange thing. 'This is only the plaster cast of the mask, of course. I'll have to begin the marble version as soon as I have some time.'
'There's no hurry, surely,' said the Duke.
'Plaster's more brittle than it looks,' she told him, 'the slighte
st thing could chip or crack it.' Then all at once she was blinded by tears, staggering. Richmond pressed her face to his shoulder. She sobbed harshly. 'It was the abscess in his throat that finished him; he couldn't swallow a thing for the last week. He starved to death.'
Her brother-in-law patted her back stiffly. Anne remembered that she hadn't cried like this at her sister's funeral; did Richmond resent it? It seemed impossible not to hurt people with every step, every word. The world was bruised all over. Richmond had been wearing mourning for four months now and he seemed lost without Lady Mary; who else had ever really known him? Despite the rumours that he might propose to Lady Bess Foster—who'd recently been freed to remarry by the death of her long absent husband—he'd made no moves to put the affaire on any official footing.
And Georgiana, Anne wondered, downstairs in the milling crowd again, what did the poor disfigured Duchess think about her beloved Bess's new liaison? Was it possible to love someone without jealousy? 'You seem much better these days,' Anne told her in a murmur, not quite honestly.
Georgiana produced her famous smile. 'I'm half blind and as dependent as a child, but Bess makes the best of mothers. One's glory days can't last for ever, I suppose. Did I ever tell you about the Irishman who came to Devonshire House once? By Gob, your la'ship, he said, I could light me pipe at dem gorgeous eyes!'
Anne laughed with her, wanting to cry.
They talked about the surreal prospect of invasion, as everybody did these days. Every attic was rumoured to conceal quantities of arms and gunpowder, every sullen servant in London was watched for signs of membership in a secret army, like the United Irishmen that were causing such alarm across the water. (Richmond's nephew and Sheridan's bosom friend, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was said to be on the brink of arrest for treason.)
Mary detached herself gently from her waiting, red-faced sister and came over to take Anne's elbow whispering, 'It's time for the reading of the Will.'
Oh, God, Anne had forgotten the last part of the ritual. She and Mary walked along the corridor slowly, arm in arm. She didn't worry how it might look; she couldn't care less if their manner was too intense. 'Your letter, last night, was the only thing that did me any good in the absence of your healing hands,' she whispered in Mary's ear. 'I thought I'd go mad, all alone in that melancholy house in Berkeley Square.'