Sir William (13 page)

Below her Sir William was receiving first the King, then the Queen.

“Caro
cavaliere!”
yelled the King. Since he refused to speak anything but Italian, and the Queen—except for an occasional guttural curse—restricted herself to French, the conversation had a worldly air.

“There are disturbances,” said the Queen, “in France.” To entertain royalty is not easy, for their attention tends to wander. Maria Carolina’s wandered.

Looking down, Emma saw a massy woman of about forty, with a long face, lovely arms, and a poached look about the eyes. In one hand she held a long white glove
negligently, as Pharaoh would hold a gold-and-lapis flail, the symbol of his office, though to use it, you flick the power itself, not its embodiment.

Looking up, the Queen saw a mobile creature who had the look of someone worth knowing, were she but knowable.

Sir William followed her glance. Emma ducked out of sight. The Queen and Sir William progressed to the salon, where they talked of France, to an obbligato from Ferdinand, who never talked of anything but hunting. He did not mean to be discordant, but having no other subject, he played always the same tune.

They stayed an hour.

“So that is Miss Hart,” said the Queen, leaving. “I should like to talk to her. It is a pity I cannot.” She needed a new confidante, for a new favorite is cheaper than an old one, if only because accounts have not been struck yet, and besides, she has the unique merit no old favorite can have, of being new.

Their carriage rolled sonorously away (because of the horns). Sir William went upstairs, where Emma was at her singing again.

“My dear child,” he said, noticing she was flushed. “You must never look down on royalty. They are not designed to be seen from above. It is they who belong on the balcony, not you.”

“Indeed I meant no harm,” said Emma carefully, but with a forgive-me look. It was a new attitude.

“I’m sure you didn’t.” She was a little minx. She was a most amusing creature.

*

At dawn, when he could get away, Sir William went out to fish in the bay alone, in a longboat. That is, he had two boys row him out, sent them back in the dory, and told them to return when he should wave.

Hot sun is good for old bones, and he was fifty-nine. However, since each good comes accompanied by its own evil, he had come prepared, and wore a large, floppy, disreputable hat.

He got nary a nibble, but there is a truth locked up in
every platitude—crisp as an almond none the worse for a frazzled shell—and one does not go fishing to catch fish.

The hobby is praised in Theophrastus, who also informs us that love is the passion of an idle mind, as no doubt it is. But Sir William did not have an idle mind. At most, he allowed it to idle at times in order to let it rest. Theophrastus further quotes the tragic poet Charaemon to the effect that Eros is variable, like wine; that when he comes in moderation, he is gracious, but when he comes too intensely and puts men in utter confusion, he is hard to bear.

Passion is ludicrous and vulgar (here there was a bite, but it turned out to be an orange grown drowsy with its own weight). To the English, vulgarity is an all-embracing concept that includes all living matter and most inanimate, with the exception only of themselves. Sir William did not except himself. He was quite willing to laugh at his own passions, given he might do so reminiscently (here he threw the orange at a pelican, who did not want it either).

“It is usually agreeable, all the same, to have her here,” said Sir William, himself a downy old bird, as becomes a diplomat. “I shall do nothing, but if she does, I shall not interfere.” And he went on fishing for no fish, contentedly.

*

North of Brescia, Goethe confronted the foothills with equanimity. They looked at him. He looked at them. Then, twisting in the saddle, he turned his face upward, for a last dose of the sun, and rode on with relief. It is necessary to make the Grand Tour, no doubt, but he was not sorry to be going home. He had gathered his impressions and made, on the whole, an excellent one on his late hosts. It was time to create.

Nonetheless, when the shadows began to fall and he drew rein for the night at Como, he found to his annoyance that he was humming “
Mein
’
junges
leben
hat
’
ein
End
’,” so he stopped. It was an old German pietistic parlor song from past time, written by the Norns.

Kennst
du
das
land
….

*

“You are growing up, my child,” said Mrs. Cadogan, doing Emma’s hair, which gave her pleasure. It was such an occupation as Fafnir would have enjoyed. It was like carding red gold. “Pray why?”

“It cannot be helped.”

“Of course it can be helped. It is certainly no reason to ruin your appearance.”

*

“No,” said Sir William, still out at sea. “It cannot be helped. But all the same it is a great shame.”

He was almost aware, these days, of the drawing about him of an invisible net. It was a silken net. Since he had tarried too long, he found himself being rowed to shore through the fishing fleet, which was putting to sea to cast out theirs.

It was New Year’s Eve of 1789; and then, just as suddenly, of 1790.

*

In 1789, there was a gala at Ranelagh, to celebrate the recovery from madness of His Most Gracious Majesty George III. That was how he solved his problems. When he became bored, he went away. When his interest was aroused again, he came back, to find everything much the same, except for the increasing difficulty each time of getting back. The orchestra played “Rule Britannia” (by the author of “Sally in Our Alley”) and the national anthem. We can all recover from madness in time; here was proof. At Posilipo, Sir William gave a dinner to celebrate the same event.

There was an earthquake in Calabria. Angelica Kauffmann painted Emma as the Comic Muse. Sir John Acton became the Neapolitan Prime Minister.

“Sir John Acton,” Sir William explained, “is a man of great character, most of it bad. But though of an
émigré
family, he is an Englishman. He is competent, which is the next best thing to ability, and far rarer. He plans to reorganize the fleet.”

Ferdinand assisted at the birth of a new age by founding
a silk factory. There was a revolution in France, and refugees began to arrive, among them Madame Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, who painted Emma, not very well.

Torn from her native Paris (it had seemed prudent to remove—she had no taste for painting commoners), Madame Lebrun did not care for much of anything. Indeed, even at home she had sometimes felt much the same way. She drew Emma as a bacchante. “As a bacchante,” she said tartly, “she is perfect.” The Queen, whom she also drew, did not speak
quite
flawless French, but was at least noble. Breeding counts. These things show, no matter what we do.

*

Emma decided to hurry things a little. Opposite her, Sir William was peeling a banana. She giggled reminiscently. Dressed and undressed, they are so different, which provides a key, but a key to a midnight lock only. To come and go freely by day, you need a skeleton key, and for this the best procedure is to take that wax impression called gossip, the one all-purpose key for all social occasions. The time and tide had come. It was to be taken at the flood.

It was indeed a flood. It beached the most amazing mail—for the net was now visible—in handwriting which ranged from the flaccid to an angry scrawl knotted with rage.

*

His family heard the gossip first, which is to say his uncles, cousins and aunts. There were several disapproving screeds from his favorite niece Mrs. Dickenson, Mary Hamilton that was. What did this talk signify? Did he mean to disgrace them all? Let him disavow the rumor at once.

“I am sorry,” said Sir William. “She is necessary to my happiness, and the handsomest, loveliest, cleverest and best creature in the world.”

“I confess I doat on him,” wrote Emma to England, feeding the flames. “Nor I never can love any other person but him.” She was not lying. She believed it.

As for the gossip, that was another thing. “I fear,”
wrote Sir William, dipping his pen in cold water, to douse them, “that her views are beyond what I can bring myself to execute, and that when her hopes on this point are over she will make herself and me unhappy. Hitherto her conduct is irreproachable.”

“It is said he has married her,” said Towneley.

“I was most happy to hear that he was
not
married,” wrote Heneage Legge, a friend of Greville’s then passing through Naples, a man with a modest talent for social espionage. “However, he flung out some hints of doing justice to her good behaviour, if his public situation did not forbid him to consider himself an independent man. She gives everybody to understand that he is now going to England to solicit the King’s consent to marry her. She is much visited here by ladies of the highest rank, but wants a little refinement of manners.”

“You need not be afraid for me in England. We come for a short time, to take our last leave,” Emma informed Greville.

“They
say they shall be in London by the latter end of May,” wrote Legge.

The Duchess of Argyll, a relative by marriage, her first husband having been a Hamilton—the woman Emma had watched leaving George’s door—had come to Naples. She was one of the Gunning sisters, who had gone to London years before to make a good match, and besides, the Anglo-Irish are not so strict in particulars as their English cousins.

“After all, William,” she said, “why not? She’s a likable creature, she does very well here, and we are not
there.”

Unfortunately the Duchess of Argyll died.

“You may think of my afflictions when I heard of the Duchess of Argyll’s death. I never had such a friend as her, and that you will know, when I see you,” Emma wrote Greville.

“Was I in a private station,” Sir William told Sir Joseph—that eminent botanist having asked, like everybody else—“I should have no objection that Emma should share with me
le
petit
bout
de
vie
qui
me
reste
under the solemn convenant yon allude to. I have more fairly delivered you my confession than is usually done in this country, of which you may make any use you please. Those who ask out of mere curiosity, I would wish to remain in the dark.”

In chains, on very thin gruel, preferably. It was the devil of a business, and how had it grown up round him so suddenly?

“I shall allways esteem you for your relationship to Sir William, and having been the means of my knowing him,” Emma wrote Greville, with what was quite a pretty wit, though veiled.

As a countermove, Mr. Legge persuaded Mrs. Legge to cut Emma dead, and sent the good news to Greville at once. (Now that the Duchess of Argyll was no more, the social maneuvers of Mrs. Legge might be assumed to loom large.)

Greville was gratified. “Mrs. L. has done the right thing,” he said.

“No doubt she has, but it does not seem to have been enough to raise her from the obscurity of middle-class life,” said Towneley. “Pray, who
is
Mrs. L.?”

“Mrs. Legge, of course.”

Towneley did not ask who Mr. Legge was. To establish
his
credentials, he felt sure, would have meant a rummage at least three generations back, and he had not the time.

The wife of the Spanish Ambassador paid a public call at the British Embassy, with as many
contessas
as
she could assemble. Honor was at stake, and nobody much liked the British colony anyway, except for Sir William, of course, who was a dear.

“I was staggered to hear them speak always in the plural, as we, us and ours,” wrote Legge.

The Bishop of Derry, who was in Ireland for one of his rare ecclesiastical visitations, asked them to come there for a breather if they found the English air too thin. “Take her as anything but Mrs. Hart, and she is a superior being,” he said privately. “As for herself, she is always vulgar.” But he meant to back them up.

“As I have experienced that of all women in the world, the English are the most difficult to deal with abroad,” wrote Sir William to his niece Mary, “I fear eternal
tracasseries,
was she to be placed above them here, and which must be the case, as a Minister’s wife in every country takes place of every rank of nobility.”

He was thinking it over.

Like all expatriates, Sir William found it necessary to go home from time to time, in order to re-establish the validity of his reasons for staying away. And Greville was making a mash of the Welsh estates. So since they were now inseparable, they both went.

*

“Are you going to marry her?” demanded Sir William’s sister-in-law, point blank.

“As a public character at Naples, I do not think it right to marry Mrs. Hart—from respect to my King.”

His sister-in-law gave him a sensible-matron look. They had known each other too long for that sort of evasion. “Very proper. But I hope you think there is something owing to
yourself
.”