Sir William (19 page)

Fanny peeped. So did her letters. Mr. Ramsey was ill. Mr. Squire was ill of a thorough scouring, after a stoppage of two days and a night. Mr. Bolton had sent fine lobsters and a hare, but the fish and poultry were deplorable. The other four pages were about the advancement of her son Josiah. She did not seem to realize he had stepped into a larger room. It was all most muddling.

Emma bent over him, uncorseted, solicitous, high-bosomed and warm.

“It is evening,” she said. “I thought perhaps you would care to admire the lights.”

“What lights?”

“Why, the lights of the evening,” she said, and led him to the balcony, which overlooked the main façade of the Palazzo Sesso. Three thousand self-feeding lamps spelled out his name across the front of the building. Sometimes their flames blew all one way, sometimes another, according as the breeze blew. They were like stars put in their proper order. It was the fame for which he had burned, and now it burned for him. He was moved.

She had been watching his face with the wary amusement of a good cook watching a guest test a pie. She is so sure of the outcome that she does not require to be thanked.

In the city, a rocket arched, broke, and descended into nothingness. It was followed by another, even more abundant; its color jostled in the air, like dew on an invisible leaf, and then bounced off into darkness. Squibs went off like cannon, the rockets in volleys.

Turning to look over the bay, he saw his name there, reflected backward from a set piece—anchors, wreaths and stars, in white, red, green, and yellow—writ in water, twenty feet across, and there was no tide. He shivered, gooseflesh all over, and backed away.

“There will be more,” she said as the rockets faded, thinking him disappointed. “Nelson’s name is now eternal.”

The sky, empty for the moment, reminded him of the lull in any night battle, with the sea full of jetsam and burning, and here and there a scream, a curse, a burst of light.

“You must forgive me,” he said, startled not to anger but to sadness. He felt as a man feels who has gotten with difficulty to the head of the stairs only to discover there is yet another flight to the attic above. “I have not been famous long. I must get used to it.”

“You will,” she said, with a confidence which startled him even more. No patient is soothed by being told he has a common ailment. He looked down. The street was
full of people, waiting down there in the earthy obscurity, like bulbs. When he smiled, they burst noisily into bloom. They applauded.

“Emma,” Sir William had said once, “you must never look down on royalty. They are not meant to be seen from above.” But she had forgotten it. She bowed. Nelson bowed. What else was he to do? To retreat, rigid, would have been discourteous. And having bowed once, he must do so again. So he did so again.

Emma was delighted. To play Britannia suited her so well that you could almost hear the ophidian slither of her corselet when she did not so much move as shift her trident for a little while and gather in her shield.

*

“Poor man, he looks undernourished. He wants a fortifying jelly,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

“Bring one and I will take it to him.” Emma was trembling.

“That I can do myself. He’s scarcely fit to be seen.”

“What is all the noise downstairs?”

“That Miss Knight,” said Mrs. Cadogan, without pleasure. “Not only has she moved in kit and caboodle, but now it seems she has written an ode. She is reciting it.”

Emma had isolated her astonishment. “You know, I do not mind the stump one bit.”

“Ah well, he’s famous now. It’s not his fault, poor lamb,” said Mrs. Cadogan, and since she loved a hero even more than a gentleman, went off happily to the kitchens to supervise the exact perfections of a mutton broth and skim the scum.

*

“The British Nelson rivals Caesar’s fame,” declaimed Miss Knight, in her best leno, looking somber, as a sibyl should.

If no good at Attitudes, she could at least make the proper gestures, and did. There was applause, and even Sir William favored her with a smile. She was content. She had done well. She was a poetess and an admiral’s daughter. For the rest, she could do no more than Pope and lisp in numbers till the numbers came.

*

“Lady Hamilton has been an angel,” said Nelson.

“She has her moods,” said Sir William easily, and because his leg was tapping, crossed it the other way.

“A ministering angel.”

“The mother has much to do with it. She is an excellent plain cook,” said Sir William, echoing, without knowing it, the Greville of fifteen years before. He liked the boy exceedingly.

“She is really delightful.”

Not wishing to see too much, Sir William looked away, and sure enough, when he looked back again the expression had gone. Sensing itself to be unwelcome, it had vanished utterly. It would have been foolish to notice it when the boy, he was sure, was unaware of it himself. So many things vanish if we do not notice them. However, here and there Sir William had managed to save a few, for he saved appearances from habit, like bits of old string. You never knew when they might come in handy.

*

The 29th was Nelson’s birthday. Emma, in a mood of austerity suitable to war, had formerly restricted herself to small intimate dinners for eighty, but this time decided to do the thing properly. She enjoyed to play hostess and did it well, and would have asked the world to dine had she been able to procure so large a table, or borrow enough plates. While she arranged the guest lists, Nelson, propped up in bed, was posing for his portrait, which had been commissioned by the Queen. The artist
was one of a corps which did the royal children in relays, a man called Guzzardi.

“It is not necessary to rise,” said Guzzardi. “The body, I can make up from stock.”

Nelson felt irritably the absence of an arm. The best that could be said for the fellow was that he worked rapidly. The result was a flounder in uniform.

Sir William was displeased. “It will do very well, but it should not be given the currency of an engraving.”

“My wife has had my portrait of Lemuel Abbott,” said Nelson. “I own it is a better likeness.” Abbott had shown him—if not as a member of the aristocracy, as an aristocrat—a most clubbable portrait, when the fleet engaged in battle at the rear.

“Abbott?”

“Some English painter.”

“The only English painter was Reynolds, but he is dead and so beyond compare. Lawrence will do in a pinch. If you were County, it would be different. There a certain stiffness in the modeling does no harm.”

Nelson felt graveled. In this house, where everything was what it seemed to be, except the people, he began to perceive that appearances were not only everything, but had nothing in common with Fanny’s perpetual keeping up of them. To reach fame we must move rapidly and travel light. We grow oppressed by boiled pudding and turnip tops, for they retard us. There can be no butterfly without a metamorphosis, and the butterfly is the emblem of the soul. We must pupate into immortality, rest, exchrysalate, move on, and all on a diet of mulberry leaves and water, and leave each dish untasted, merely to touch them all.

“I like Sir William much,” he wrote his wife. It was what a schoolboy would have said of a master who did not whip him, explained the logarithmic tables of society, and told one frankly why one was not popular; it was because one was unique. One could move easily and be welcome, therefore, only among one’s peers, of which there are not many, and those not always Peers.

“When people say they want something new, what they
mean is that they want the same old thing, only different. To something new, they are inevitably hostile until it has had the edge taken off it by being imitated at least twice. This is why we admire equally the old genius and the young fop, and prefer, naturally enough, the latter,” said Sir William. “So Sir Thomas Lawrence, I think, would do very well.” And he looked around proudly at his vases, which had been imitated at least twice by Mr. Wedgwood at Etruria, so their value had soared enormously. The best place to achieve novelty is to rummage in an old closet or down a stopped-up well.

“We must be going,” he added, for they were to visit the Royal Porcelain factory that afternoon.

“The King might better,” said Nelson, who found all this dilatory when there was fighting to be done, “visit the armory.”

“Ah well,” said Sir William. “Did you know that one of the designers has had made a porcelain cannon, provided with a caoutchouc breech, which shoots hard candy a distance of six feet? For a while he diverted himself with that. He is concerned with ends, not means. He is ugly and likes to be flattered. Talk up victory to him until he can see it as a self-portrait, all apotheosis and very little blood, and he will soon enough gallop off to pose, once he has chosen the right uniform.”

“Battles are not conducted that way.”

“No, but they may be composed so, after the event.”

“He likes to hunt, so I hear. Why can he not like to hunt the enemy?”

“You have not attended a royal hunt,” explained Sir William. “It is not here a tallyho over hedges after hounds. He is a large man, difficult to move. It is three hundred years since anyone in Italy has had the skill to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds. Now they sit motionless in a tent, the game is paraded before them, and then they fire. They like to be sure of their trophies, you see. I assure you, for I have often tried, it is no easy thing to flush a King. They may seem mad, but now and again they lapse into sanity. Besides, he has a most extensive warren.”

“Warren is the word for it.”

“Nelson,” said Sir William, “you have seen too much water. You are indifferent to wool. I have been here thirty years, and have yet to tire of it.”

The boy had his limitations, he feared: he had ability. That blinkered him.

*

At the China manufactory, where Nelson wished to buy the similicra of the King and Queen, hard-glazed, as a gesture, the King prevented it. His own image was within his gift. He might bestow it where he would.

“Let him bestow it upon Rome,” said Nelson as they came away, his eye caught by the rustle of the trees which met above their heads, a species he had never seen before. “What trees are these?”

“Mulberry,” said Sir William. “There is a manufactory for silk, too. We are fair to rival China, though not in bulk.”

*

“Nelson,” said Emma, titivating, “is curiously attractive.”

“Oh, Em,” said Mrs. Cadogan—who had eyes in her head, though it is difficult to be Argus with but two, and those drowsy—“can you never leave well enough alone?”

“I only meant a title will suit him. Why does it not come?”

“A picture must dry before it is varnished,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “Such things take always a year. Besides, he has a wife.”

“So had Sir William,” said Emma idly, meaning no harm.

“Em, you are wicked.”

“If Sir William is a father to him, it is only natural I should be motherly,” said Emma, and for the instant had an image of her unacknowledged daughter, wandering bleakly along the northern coast in a sea fog, rattling the shale underfoot and doing—what? There had been a letter from her, too painful to answer, which she had mentioned to no one. “It might have been happy for me to have forgotten the past and to have begun a new life
with new ideas; but for my misfortune, my memory traces back circumstances which have taught me too much, yet not quite all I could have wished to have known,” the poor thing had said.

It is neither true nor fair to say that women have no memory. What they do have is a series of bulkheads and watertight compartments by means of which they manage to stay afloat. The image of Emma Carew gurgled and went under; despite this collision with fact, what Emma did not remember kept her afloat. In the gorgeous staterooms of dream and illusion above deck, there was no awareness—except for a slight shudder along the frame—that anything untoward had occurred.

Acknowledge her, never; but help to get her settled, yes.

“You will be adding Jocasta to the Attitudes next, I expect,” said Mrs. Cadogan, far from pleased. Having not much employment these days, she too, like the rest of them, now read a lot.

It was the day of the birthday party.

*

Over a drink beforehand in the green room, so to speak, Sir William gave the private toast,
Tria
juncta
in
uno
, in allusion to both the motto of the Order of the Bath and that total immersion called Christianity. He did not mind. Besides, a mild flirtation at thirty-four, what was the harm in that? He should be uncle to both of them—husband to the one, and intimate with the other. Why not?

*

“I wonder you could live here so long and so seldom go back,” said Nelson, exacerbated by so much light, who, when he was at sea, had usually the comfort of a British ship.

“My friends drop off from life, like satiated leeches, and my parents are long dead,” said Sir William. “I would as soon return to an orphanage.” He had been plagued recently by a pestilence of childhood images, gray fields, stone walls and green summer rain. Since to be so is a symptom of old age, he refused to accept his
own diagnosis. If we cannot deny the disease, we can at least conceal the symptoms.

*

Emma, her life until now singularly sheltered on the leeside of a variable but solid male rock, and by the absence of any female friend, from those little gusts of affection which presage the usual jealous storm, had foolishly taken up Miss Knight as a protégée, who had as foolishly, her life hitherto sheltered from the great world by exclusion from it, allowed herself to be taken up. If someone admires our little effusions, it would be tactless of us to question their probity, so Miss Knight added her small stone to the mound of Emma’s adulation both willingly and well, and waited now only to hear her own praises.