Sir William (18 page)

“Greville has redoubled his efforts. From half the income we could expect from Milford Haven, he has so built upon the thing that now we may expect none. No doubt he has my best interests at heart, but thank God he cannot touch my capital. Nelson has lost an arm and been made a Rear Admiral of the Blue. I told you he was the coming man.”

Sir William looked as pleased as though he had achieved that goal himself. “He will be out to us soon, I expect, for Bonaparte is in Nice.”

“There is but one course open to us,” said the Queen when she heard that. “We must prepare for war and sue for peace.”

*

The Bishop of Derry arrived, on his way to Milan.

“Now, William,” he said, “how do you come on?”

“We jog along.”

“It is not the pace I would have chosen for you.”

“I choose my own pace,” said Sir William. “I do not intend to creep my way down to death.”

“Cannot you see how she has seized control? She has grown into a managing wife.”

“Well, she is a wife, and someone must manage,” said Sir William.

“I own I liked her better as a mistress than a wife.”

“Ah well, so did I. I must own, for the matter of that, that I liked myself much better as a lover.”

“You are not a husband; you are only a bachelor with a wife,” chided Derry admiringly.

Sir William did not care for this. “I must congratulate you,” he said, “upon your turn of phrase. You still put things very well.”

“I do not criticize. I commiserate,” said the Bishop. “Taken as herself, she is all very well, as I once noted. Take her as anything else, and she is vulgar. It seems to me that I took note of that before, too.”

“Ah well, if you commiserate. That is different. But I have never taken her as anything but herself, and very seldom then.”

“She will not go down in England.”

“I daresay not. She is remarkably resilient,” said Sir William.

“Moreover,” said the Bishop, “she is getting fat.”

“Fat?”

“Buxom.”

Sir William was appalled. He saw her every day. He had not noticed, for she had still the same airs and graces, and in the evening the lights were sometimes bad.

“Diet,” said the Bishop benevolently, as though to say, Go, my child, and sin no more.

*

Emma was struggling with a new dress and cursing the dressmaker.

“It is not the dressmaker,” said Mrs. Cadogan, speaking out at last. “I fear, poor Em, it is you.”

“I am a married woman. I shall eat what I like,” snapped Emma. “A body has to eat.”

“Not night and day, and most certainly not everything in sight,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

“Oh leave me. Leave me!” shrieked Emma, and when she had been left, consulted her image. Juno was plump. Aspasia was plump. Venus was plump. The world itself was plump enough to fall. So what was the harm in it? Though it cannot be denied that ripeness weakens the
stem. Current royalty, though not detached as yet, was manifestly globular.

Emma, seeing a triple fold between her breast and armpit, burst into tears, but after some thought, got over it.

Mrs. Cadogan returned to find her munching sweetmeats, and made a dart to snatch them from the burning.

“You have filched my reward,” said Emma. “I have consented to maturity.”

“Oh well, in that case,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “perhaps just one. You have been both brave and sensible. I knew you would be.”

*

Napoleon invaded Italy.

“The Queen says,” reported Emma, “that we must admire ability where we find it, and were he any other man, she would admire him.”

“Admire, yes, but there is no need to seek it out,” said Sir William. “As you can see by the dispatches, it comes to us.”

“But he is only twenty-seven,” said Emma, from her new and older podium.

“Nonetheless, he means to sack us. We must get the King to act.”

They got the King to act. A new uniform was designed for the Royal Corps of Nobles, and a service was held in the Cathedral. He had decided to ask for aid.

“I can answer for the King and the Ministry and of course for myself, but the country makes me tremble,” said Maria Carolina.

“Napoleon has spared Rome, for thirty million French francs and the Apollo Belvedere,” said Sir William, and looked bleakly at his art collection. Napoleon, like his uncle the Cardinal, was a collector. In his collection a man shows his taste, and Napoleon, being a universal genius, had a taste for almost everything. Perugino or Perugia, it was all the same to him.

The portraits of Emma in her prime were safe, at any rate. English art is not popular upon the Continent. My heavens, in her prime, thought Sir William, and
looked guiltily across the table, but there she was, a drowsy cabbage rose, full and beguiling. If one had not seen her first in the bud, one would never have known.

“The Queen says that the late French King’s aunts are at Caserta, having had to flee Rome, and that they are dreadful. Is it true?”

Fresh arrived from dingy lodgings in Caput Mundi, they had had everybody turned out and kept the same pomp at Caserta as they had once done at Versailles, though, if the truth be known, on a larger scale.

“Improbable, I should have said myself. They treat inconvenience as though it were a historical event.” And he paused, like a dog with one paw up, to indicate a change of statement. “Nelson has been made a Knight Commander of the Bath. That makes him technically my superior.”

“How nice for you,” chanted Emma. “You always said the man would rise.”

“Yes,” agreed Sir William, “but not above me. It shows a want of tact.”

“You mean that pleasant young man,” said Emma, who had been keeping Nelson’s various distinctions in an old drawer, and it was amazing, if you put them away one at a time, how rapidly they began to add up. For fame is very like thrift: it may not make one rich, but at least it makes it possible when the time comes to gamble or invest, or both, depending upon one’s skill, and of course the outcome.

“On the part of George Third,” said Sir William, who in the last decade had scanned the yearly honors’ list with mounting chagrin. Though a title may be an expense, it adds that final embellishment to a tombstone which catches the eye of the future epigrapher. It confers a nominal renown, and a nominal renown is much. If one is to have no other, that is all that counts. There is much to be said for a name.

From whichever end you sighted down it, 1798 was not a good year. Acton talked of retiring to England. Worse than that, he had had the Queen’s favorite banished to Vienna.

“Is it true?” asked Emma of the Queen, who by some whim had dressed in violet.

“You see me in mourning. My youth has flown. At any rate,” she added, with her passion for accuracy, “he has been sent.”

Emma was shocked. She had regarded the Queen as a pillar, true, a stout pillar with a pronounced miniscus, of rectitude.

“My dear,” said the Queen, quick to sniff an audience and pressing the condoling hand, “think of me, forced to marry at sixteen, against my wishes, without love, as is indeed only proper; the years of emptiness, with no diversion but the King. Cannot you find it in your experience,
somewhere
, to pardon me? Some little transgression of your own, perhaps, in early youth?” Her eyes were beady. She could not abide criticism.

“Surely there were others,” said Emma meditatively.

The Queen misunderstood. “What is memory,” she said, “if there are to be no more! The King has been most annoyed. I do not worry about that. He has only two moods—the annoyed and the annoying. It is his customary mood. But Acton!”

They could hear the creak of a wooden merry-go-round in the park outside the window. It was one of those days when the public was let into the grounds.

“He was a simple, harmless diversion, nothing more,” said Maria Carolina. “He did not even want to hold office—at least, only a little one. So what was the harm in him? Even Josephine Bonaparte has her favorites, and does her husband throw them out? He does not. He is above such things. He asks them in.”

From now on, Acton was her enemy.

*

“Napoleon is in Egypt,” said Sir William. “Nelson, they say, is to bottle him up. And high time, too, for he is a man much in need of bottling. The French have gone too far.”

*

It was their fashions. He had been to a dinner for the French Envoy. Madame Canclaux had worn a chemise
with nothing under it, and her arms bare. Mademoiselle Canclaux had dined with a blue silk bonnet on her head. Monsieur Canclaux had worn a dark blue coat buttoned to the chin, black leather buskins laced with gold, a broad black leather belt and a scimitar down to his toes; it had clanked every time he sat back from sipping his wine. They had looked disgusting.

“Perhaps,” said Emma indecisively, but with her mind made up, “with a flesh-colored underslip …” The bonnet she would have liked to have seen.

*

“I told you they would not last long in those clothes,” said Sir William. “We are to have a new envoy. They were going to send Gasse, but discovered he had been Acton’s cook. Canclaux told them, so he must now go home to face charges of snobbery, which is the new high treason. It is to be a man called Trouvé.

“But if Nelson can destroy the French Fleet, we may all hold our heads up again. And so, I dare say, will he—higher than the rest of us.”

In common with his favorite mountain, Sir William was apt, from time to time, to send up little puffs of steam, and the Knight Commander of the Bath, though it no longer rankled, still itched.

Like all Europe, he held his breath.

T
HE NEWS TOOK LONGER
to travel than did the cause of it. He was lost; he was dead; he was missed; he had won; he had failed; he was at Syracuse; no one knew where he was.

Emma was on the terrace of the Palazzo Sesso, looking out over the bay, which she did not notice. Like most beautiful people, she had no eye for beauty unless it be edible, wearable, or capable of being viewed in a mirror. Memory sometimes lends a grace to past scenes, which develop a pretty vignette quality, but here she was in the eternal present, which suited her, and the eternal present had no scenery. She sighed.

Miss Cornelia Knight—to whom Sir William had given house room—an arch and pained poetess, in flight from Napoleonic Rome, the orphaned daughter of Rear Admiral Knight, who traveled nowhere without her telescope, was the first to see a sloop grow larger on the other side of Procida. It was flying Our Flag. The flag grew larger. The sloop grew larger. It halted, put down a longboat, and two gentlemen dressed as captains prepared to come ashore.

In dumb show the sailors, feeling the eyes, or at any rate the telescope, of Rear Admiral Knight upon them, acted out the pantomime of something being blown up and going down for the last time. They were uncouth
and unshaven, but from a distance their whites looked white, and their ill-bred gestures adequately conveyed the news.

“The Battle of the Nile has been fought and won,” said Sir William. “He has accomplished it.” And whisked Captain Capel (Captain Hoste was too hearty an English sea dog to be quite so presentable) to the palace.

Emma went too. After the anxiety of the times and the ho-hum of marriage, this excitement made a pleasant change, and she intended to make the most of it. She had discovered a new Attitude: she would Support the Fleet. What Englishman would see a moral flaw in an enthusiasm so essentially patriotic? Were they not all in Naples themselves these days, eager to catch the next boat out, and every one of them baying for the Navy?

It was the beginning of the Romantic Age. The neoclassical was
fade.
Coleridge was at that moment engaged in adjusting the albatross. Large, dirty, white, and hanging beak down, he had seen it once, in passing, in the window of a bird-stuffer, and ever since had longed to hang it somewhere. It haunted him. Erasmus Darwin had had his day. Wordsworth was the fashion now, alternately swooning over a daffodil and beating the pantheistic bushes with his cane, when he was able, which is to say when he was unobserved, for the impiety of bearing—without first posting the marriage bans—seed. Emma did not propose to lag behind.

The King and Queen were at dinner with their children, for since they expected daily to be crucified, they dined early. Each supper was their last. Waiting, as was only courteous, until Sir William had finished his preamble, the King, spontaneously and without prompting, rose from his seat and embraced the Queen, the Princes, the Princesses and Captain Capel, in an affecting, if perhaps affected, scene.

“Oh, my children, you are now safe!” he cried. “The throne”—and here he sat down once more in a chair that ominously creaked—“is secure.”

The Queen fell into one of the new fashionable
faints
, and Emma, not to be outdone, swooned away to such effect
that she badly bruised her side. The Queen then brought herself to kiss her husband, whereupon both women burst into tears. Then, since fashions may come and fashions may go but the same things are always expected of royalty, she sent Captain Hoste a diamond ring from her own finger (she had put it on in order to take it off; it was one of the gift rings), six butts of wine, and to every man on board a guinea each, from an anonymous donor, since though France was not yet at war with Naples and the British Fleet could be counted on, armies unfortunately approach by land.

The populace, as usual unpredictable, or rather that nine-tenths of it which in French opinion represented a tyrannous minority, applauded the event. Captain Capel did not care for that. To date he was acquainted only with a small, self-regulating joy—an emotion as carefully to be kept in order as a repeating watch or any other expensive and exquisite gewgaw. He was an Englishman. Scenes of excessive public joy are not well-bred.

In Naples, however, the concept of breeding seemed chiefly restricted to the bloodline of a horse that comes in first. The gazettes were incandescent with sonnets, and the streets with gas. The city was illuminated for three days, the candles filched even from the altars, for surely, under the circumstances, the Virgin would not begrudge the loan. Was she not Our Lady of Victory?

Sir William and Emma received well-wishers at the Embassy door, like officiants at a rediscovered shrine. It was better than the liquefaction of St. Januarius; it meant the liquidation of the French.

“Come here, for God’s sake, my dear friend,” wrote Sir William to Nelson, “as soon as the service will permit you. A pleasant apartment is ready for you in my house, and Emma is looking out for the softest pillows to repose the few wearied limbs you have left [that is, one eye, one arm, two legs, a torso and a head, and all of it Stalky Jack].”

“My dress is from head to foot alla Nelson. Ask Hoste. Even my shawl is Blue with gold anchors all over. My
earrings are Nelson’s anchors; in short, we are be-Nelsoned all over,” urged Emma.

A resourceful woman, she had flung herself upon her dressmaker instantly, for rank and file are all very well, but first things come first. Not only did she intend to call the tune (she was at the moment humming it), she would orchestrate it too. This was to be her long-awaited apotheosis. She had no time to think of any but practical things. Angels attended her, carried her muff and corrected the lines of her shawl.

As for Sir William, not only did he look ten years younger, but he had shaved.

Nelson, however, was reluctant. He was ill and little inclined toward ovation. A patent of nobility (indeed it was patent to everyone), delivered by mail, to please his wife, would suffice. He had no longing for processions. Nor did he wish to stay with Sir William, for the finances of sudden eminence confused him, and he was out of pocket as it was. He could not make the proper gestures (tipping the servants and such), for he had but one arm and very small pay. Also, he had been wounded on the forehead, had a fever, and was not a pretty sight. He would rather have appeared in public from the safety of an engraving or in a platonizing portrait, Government House style.

Nonetheless, he had to go. It was his duty. The populace seemed stirred, but just as clearly the King needed stirring up, for he seemed more apt to sulk than fight the foe.

In short, Nelson was shy. He had never been made much of. It made him feel as though he had done something wrong; the neglected child must ever be suspicious of a sudden adulation.

On the 22nd of September the
Vanguard
lurched into Naples Harbor, in bad repair and with a list. For the Neapolitans, it had been a long wait; for Nelson, too short a voyage. The bay shimmered like a blue sun, radiant with small boats. In the distance he could see small white images cavorting on the shore, and when
the wind blew right, hear an immense banging of tubs, boatswains’ whistles and a faint hooray.

“It is like the shark come home,” he said. “Here are the pilot fish, and here is the family,” and looked alongside where some rusty seaweed did certainly eddy, almost like blood.

*

Mrs. Cadogan entered Emma’s dressing room without knocking. It was well past curtain time. She saw Emma and recoiled. Emma, who had been dressing for days, was pinning a small diamond, sapphire and ruby Union Jack to a kerchief tied around her neck in a naval manner. Where now was Attic simplicity? It had flown and left the gauds behind.

“Even for a snuffbox cover,” said Mrs. Cadogan, removing the brooch, “it would be excessive.”

Emma, who had managed the Lady superbly, had needlessly elaborated the simplicity of a Sailor’s Girl. On this subject Mrs. Cadogan felt herself competent to say little, while removing much.

“But now I look much as I looked before,” wailed Emma, whose enthusiasm had at last transgressed the boundaries of taste.

“Indeed, that is just what a sailor looks for,” said Mrs. Cadogan tactfully. “There must be no hint that anything has occurred in the interim.”

“Emma,” called Sir William from the hall below. He was resigned that ladies were dilatory to dress, but not when matters pressed.

However, Emma was at last ready, half Grecian urn, half Jolly Polly on a Toby jug, mature, wise, understanding, sympathetic, motherly—or anyhow sisterly—but with something perennially youthful about her too, and sincere, for sincerity was easiest of all; sincerity was but the work of a moment. Down to the harbor they went; the small boats parted from the prow of their barge, for England took precedence now, since she had won it back again, and therefore, so did they.

“How pretty are the boats,” said Emma, who had encouraged local industry. What with wreaths and garlands
and freshly painted Madonnas and ex-votos without number, it looked more like Xochimilco at festival than their dear familiar Bay. “Will he be disfigured?”

“Dismembered,” said Sir William automatically, and leaned forward eagerly as they drew alongside the
Van
guard
, but sent Emma up the ladder ahead of him, as was only civil.

“Oh God. Is it Possible?” cried Emma, singling Nelson out. In the full-dress uniform of a Vice-Admiral, the effect of the pinned sleeve was not bad; she fell into his arms, or rather arm, and fainted away. Nelson staggered back. Arms lifted her. She was restored. As always happened when she was acting, her affectations fell away; she had no time for them—she was taken up by the thing itself. From being more dead than alive, she became on the instant more alive than dead. Pink-cheeked, rosy, nubile and none the worse for a little sun, she was a perfect Sailor’s Lass.

Sir William beamed approval. They made, he thought, a truly effective couple.

To get the King aboard was more difficult, for there was so very much more of him. It took an hour. But once aboard, he was his expansive, genial self. Out of several to choose from, that had seemed the most suitable. He could not have been more paternal, more benign.

“
Nostro
liberatore!
” he boomed. Three cheers, hip and hooray.

“What, are there to be only three?” inquired the King, anxious that the thing be done properly, and then stooped, shattered by a grapeshot of applause. He received it, though it was not for him, with folded hands, before continuing.

“Oh had I been able to serve under you at the Battle of the Nile. But I, too, had my duty. I, too, stood at the helm of state.”

“What does he say?” asked Nelson, and looked nonplussed when he was told. Why, the great clumsy man would scarcely have been of service in the galley.

Since he could not refuse with grace, he consented without it, and was carted off to the city.

“
Viva
Nelson!
Viva
Hamilton!” the crowds shouted, pressing forward for a glimpse of him, and then, at the second carriage’s approach, in a less festive because more familiar tone, “
Viva
il
Re!
” For never before had so many lion tamers derived such heartfelt applause from the tousled appearance of one solitary, shabby lion.

“Sit down, Emma, pray do.”

“Rather stand up,” said Emma, “and be seen. For they demand it.”

Sir William would not. He was mistrustful of the plaudits of crowds, for they cannot last forever. A mere murmur of private admiration is far easier to sustain. He noticed a curious thing. Nelson, like Emma, never looked the same part twice. Like her, his only stable feature was his will. He could admirably reflect other men’s fires. In complexion, too, he was similar, white skinned, but with a variable pink flush—not strawberries and cream exactly, but the very best butter when he was feeling jaundiced.

Since this observation did not match the usual range of his experience, Sir William, with his customary horror of nonconformity, put it away.

*

“I do not care for the Neapolitans,” said Nelson. “It is a country of fiddlers and poets and scoundrels.”

“You have struck upon the very reasons we prefer them,” said Sir William delightedly. “Though from the other side. It is like two men digging one tunnel: one may blow cold and the other hot, but in the nature of the task, they are bound—if you view the thing in cross section—to meet. We may at any rate be the first to shake hands through the conjunctive hole.”

Nelson, who never felt the compulsion to hold his telescope the wrong way around, found this sort of chatter disconcerting. Still, for near seventy, Sir William was undoubtedly remarkable, a plain straightforward fellow after his own heart—as long as you attended only to every other word. Nelson felt at home here.

“I am sitting opposite Lady Hamilton as I write,” he informed his wife. As he was. She came in just as you
began to miss her, and sometimes, frequently, before.

“Are you writing dispatches?” she asked.

“Only to my wife. It does not matter.”

“And what is she like, your wife?”

He could not immediately say. She was a little colorless; she resembled no one. He could not hit upon a comparison. “Oh, she is a young lady much like yourself, much concerned with country affairs, gossip and peach bottling in the proper season.”

“I do not gossip,” said Emma, “though I have, it is true, occasioned much, and besides, you are wrong—I have never bottled a peach, in or out of season. Though spiced, with meat, they are often served here.”

“I am devoted to my wife,” said Nelson, whom young ladies made nervous, particularly the older ones. “Indeed, if I had more time …”

“You would be about your devotions,” said Emma.

Nelson blushed. When he thought of Fanny, it was to see her always fully clothed and far away. She was a distant woman.

As for Emma, had she been a lady, he would not have thought her one, but as she was not, he did. His view of the aristocracy was highly colored. So was she, and Fanny’s views of eminence were so discreetly washed out as to seem unreal and colorless. He must say he liked the upper classes better colored in. King Parrot has more to say than King Sparrow, a wider range of vocables, says please and thank you, and is less monotonous. He does not peep.