Sir William (20 page)

*

The British Embassy, like any church, had been better designed for the extraordinary crush than for the occasional visitor, so this time Emma had asked everyone. They sat down eighty to dine, and when they rose there were a thousand more.

In the ballroom, in a costume militant in intent but millinery in detail, she stood waiting while the national anthem played. The guests fingering, if males, their Nelson buttons, if females, their Nelson ribbons, awaited the entertainment. The anthem had additional verses by Miss Knight:

Miss Knight looked about her. Whose were these new words? They had been written by a talented young lady, a Miss Knight, the daughter of Admiral Knight (known as
good
Admiral Knight, actually). She was over there.

“I know you will sing it with pleasure,” Nelson wrote his wife. “I cannot move on foot or in a carriage for the kindness of the populace, but good Lady Hamilton preserves all the papers as the highest treat for you.”

And out fell the disgusting things, in
her
handwriting, when the letter arrived.

*

A curtain parted before the rostrum.

Lady Hamilton, a Boadicea in white muslin, Greek sandals, a tinsel corselet, a helmet borrowed from the Household Cavalry, and a light blue shawl embossed with gold anchors—carrying in one hand a trident (an exact copy of one found at the Gladiatorial School at Pompeii)—was discovered sitting on a pasteboard rock. Her right elbow was languid to the edge of a replica, in papier-mâché, of the shield of Achilles, the rim surrounded by the motto
Honi
soit
qui
mal
y
pense
picked out in glitter. She held the pose, rose majestically (it was her new Attitude) and drew apart an inner curtain to reveal a rostral column, beneath a canopy, emblazoned with the words
Veni
,
Vidi
,
Vici
(a translation, also by Miss Knight, was available) and inscribed with the names of Nelson’s captains.

It was never to come down while they were there, Lady Hamilton said, and went offstage to change, though not much.

“What precious moments the Courts of Naples and Vienna are losing. Three months would liberate Italy,” said Nelson.

At the supper given immediately after the performance, they sat eight hundred.

*

“If the Queen would receive me,” complained Nelson, “one could perhaps accomplish much. They say she can make the King do as she wishes, and surely she, at least, wants war. But they say she is ill.”

“She is not ill,” said Sir William. “She is pregnant. She will get over it. Emma, my dear, it is time for you to intercede.”

Like a goddess of victory, Emma went off to oblige, wreath in hand and at the ready.

“I know,” said the Queen. “But he will not budge. It is not so much that he is unwilling as that he is inert. However, I will try. If he cannot follow, he can at least be led. But it is not an effort I look forward to, my dear. It calls for kid gloves.”

And, ringing, she called for the longest procurable, and, like a surgeon, pulled them on and set to the revolting task.

*

“It is done,” she said afterward. “He slobbered more than usual, but it is done.” And stripping off the wetted things, she flung them away into a basket set beside the table, and granted an interview to Nelson, who though a foreigner, impressed her favorably.

However was it managed? Nelson wondered.

But royalty is a trade, like any other, and like any other has its guild secrets. The Queen would not say, and even Sir William did not seem to know.

“She must handle him with gloves,” he said. Oedipus with the Sphinx could have said no more.

*

“The King, I hear, has ordered a set of china with all my battles painted upon it,” snapped Nelson. “I will not speak of the impropriety of the
Vanguard
upon a gravy boat, but what battles will he have to set forth when he comes to order his own, or do I have to fight them for him? Or should I suspect him of a taste so simple as to prefer his dishes plain?”

Impatient with Naples, he sailed off to Malta, his departure all Dido and Aeneas at the dock. Lady Hamilton said she would write frequently.

*

She was annoyed he had not yet gotten his title. “If I were King of England, I would make you the Most Noble Puissant Duke Nelson, Viscount Pyramid and Baron Crocodile,” she wrote Nelson. And to his wife: “Sir William is in a rage with the ministry for not having made Lord Nelson a Viscount, for sure, this great and glorious
action ought to have been recognized more. Hang them, I say.”

Nelson’s brother William was also displeased. Though the title had been granted, he had written with an anxiety fresh minted, to ask who might—for Nelson was childless—inherit this honor next. “I have no doubt but Parliament will settle the same pension upon yourself and the two next possessors of your title which they have done upon Lord Vincent,” he wrote, for if he were to inherit the loaf, he wished it buttered.

*

They are in love with each other, I suppose, thought Sir William, driving back from the dock, and himself affected by the parting. I wonder if they know it?

No, they did not. For though Nelson was a good husband, and Emma an excellent wife, fond, affectionate and scrupulous, to love is quite another thing. Since neither of them ever had, they had not the means to make comparisons and so identify the feeling.

I wonder if I should know it? Sir William further inquired of himself, and decided, with some relief, the answer was no. There is a limit to the number of things a man may reasonably be expected to know, and in this matter, at any rate, he had no desire to play the pedant. Grateful that the oracle had spoken, he shut his eyes and basked, a lizard, in the sun.

“I am glad, my dear, that you have had this diversion,” he said to Emma, out of his voluntary darkness. “It has improved your appearance tenfold.”

As so it had, for appearance and attitudes, if not everything, are all we have left, so it behooves us to take care of them.

“It is wonderful how the old man keeps up,” said someone in the crowd as their carriage rolled by.

Aware that he was also called “
verde
antico
,” Sir William opened his eyes and gave the woman who had spoken a look to wither stone.

*

On the plain at San Germano, the Queen, in a blue riding habit with gold fleurs-de-lis at the neck, was reviewing
both the troops and Ferdinand previous to the promised invasion—which is to say, relief—of Rome.

On the 22nd of November, the army marched out, its progress interrupted only by a river—the existence of which it had not been informed—and by the seasonal rains which had come down all at once. A declaration of war against France (then occupying Rome) was not thought necessary. Ferdinand was a liberator, not an aggressor, and intended that his action should be considered as well meant.

*

It went on raining. Sir William had gone to bed, but not to sleep, for downstairs Emma was singing, and the sound buzzed about like a fly in an acoustical trap. It was a piece called “The Maniac.”

Repeat ten times. It was her preferred piece these days. No doubt she found it fraught with meaning, though he wondered how. Eventually the sound ceased. The rain did not. It was a fluid portcullis beyond the window, caught and sparkling in the rays of his lamp. He did not extinguish the lamp. He liked one these days, for company
.

When he woke, the rain had momentarily ceased. The room was motionless, the lamp low. He lay just beneath the surface of consciousness, as though under a wet sheet, unable as yet to move. The lamp cast bizarre reflections. At home in Scotland, as a child, he had at this point always demanded a glass of water, because there were funny animals on the walls. And though Lady Archibald had never been there herself, the nanny had always provided one and never denied the existence of the animals; it was an old house—of course they were there. With a charm against dragons, human company and a glass of water, we may achieve much.

“When you grow up,” his nanny had said, “you may ride them to Jerusalem.”

Curious, she was so pleasant, though of course no gruff and nonsense, that he had forgotten her until now
.
Though he had been riding to Jerusalem ever since, through pleasant enough country, except for high jinks in the 3rd Guards, and a few moments early on in both his marriages. Now he was in a single bed, in an empty room—as he preferred—with no one to tuck him in, but with a jug of water and a tantalus of brandy near his reach.

Sitting up, he poured himself a jigger, neat.

In the country house of a great-aunt, he had once asked what the rings in the wall were for, along the stairs. Were they for prisoners? Where was the dungeon?

“Your aunt is old and infirm. They are to pull herself to the top of the stairs by.”

“And what is at the top of the stairs?”

“All sorts of good things, but there was never a dungeon here, you silly boy. This is quite a recent house.”

Since his aunt had died—or as they said, gone to Heaven—shortly afterward, it had always seemed to him that that was where Heaven was, at the top of the stairs. Himself he hauled along by another method, by certain crampons driven in the rock walls of time, called appointments and events. He had the route marked out for him well in advance, in his agenda. If he had not, he
might well have lost his way or taken a turning downward.

“Oh well,” he said, “there is nothing to be done about it.” He listened to the silence meditatively for a moment or two, and brandy being a soporific, dropped back into sleep.

To dress in the morning was more difficult, for to dress marble is an art and requires both strength
and
skill.

*

“I wish you would not sing that song again,” he said.

“Why ever not?” asked Emma, astonished, after so long without one, to be handed an order, even if tied up quite prettily as a request.

“Because I do not like it,” said Sir William.

She gave it up. She had still the will to please, if not any longer the constraint.

I do believe she is still quite attached to me, thought Sir William kindly—who up to this moment had never doubted it, but liked to believe the best of everyone, though his thoughts were his own—and gave her money for the household accounts. If we stay on long enough, we all become our own paying guests in time. Besides, he had no real desire to move on.

What he did have was a very real desire for male company. There is this to be said for vases: they do not change their shape.

*

On the 29th of November came the momentous news that Ferdinand had entered Rome to the pealing of bells and the plaudits of the populace. Two weeks later came the no less momentous news that he was scampering back. Though he had not declared war against France, he had at least provided the French with an excellent excuse to invade him. Nelson returned two days before he did, bearing starch.

“Let the people arm; let them succor the Faith; let them defend their King and father who risks his life, ready to sacrifice it in order to preserve the altars, possessions, domestic honor and freedom of his subjects,”
proclaimed the King. “Let them remember their ancient valor.”

Surprisingly enough, they did, with the exception of a few Jacobins—too busy planning a republic to attend to the collapse of the kingdom—and such of the nobility as were off in the Augean stables, to curry favor. The people rose.

The King cowered and sank. From now on, white gloves or no, he would run no risk. He was a reflective man, even though in his case the trick was done with mirrors. He knew very well what faith to put in the unpredictability of crowds.

It was a hubbub.

“I
SHALL AWAIT THE FRENCH
surrounded by my loyal subjects!” roared Ferdinand, a royal boom, by now hysterical.

“Of course you shall,” said Sir William reassuringly—who had known the King for thirty years—and then himself went home to pack. Or rather, since he had never tied so much as a parcel in his life, sat anguished in a chair while around him his entire life so far was wrapped up and hustled away. Even Emma in fifty versions came down from the walls, was crated and jostled off through the midnight streets in a cart, to be flung into the hold with who knew what indifference.

“We must save your collections at all costs,” she had said, but since she supervised the packing herself, naturally made her own choice of what must go first. Nelson had given them the use of two bottoms, one bound for England, the other for wherever they were to go. Though he did not value such things, he valued Sir William. He had been most civil.

Emma, twenty years younger, as Impudence, was carried out past Sir William. He did not notice. Vase after vase went into crates. Even the six over-door panels by Brill, depicting the four seasons and then two more, had been stripped from his rooms.

Emma when young was being carted away. The whole
world when young was being carted away, down to the napery and the silverware. He felt sacked. Even if he got it back, it could never be put up again the same way. In a few days nothing would be left of him except what was left to him, which would not be much: a small Hellenistic bronze for the ship’s cabin; a code of honor, a willingness to oblige, and a worn suppleness at how to do it; a hand, some ink, a pen; and what was left of Emma; and Nelson, now and again, he supposed. With his old friends dead or in England, he had forgotten how pleasant it was to make a new one. Even the Bishop of Derry had been impounded in Milan, by the French, and the devil knew how he would get out again.

Nelson, though deficient in manners, was what Greville should have been, who had too many but was compounded of nothing else.

Indubitably sacked, but no massacre is ever complete. Somewhere in the dust and rubble there is always someone to stir and struggle to his feet again, dazed perhaps, but not dead. Odd that it is more often an old woman than an old man, an old either than a child or a youth, but there it is: if you have survived so far, you can survive more.

“Hamilton,” he said, “don’t be a fool. Get up.” Obediently Sir William rose to this, as to most occasions. He had come to depend upon it. An autocrat is the puppet of himself: he obeys, as why not, for it is he who gives the orders. If there is nobody else to love, we look around, make our only choice, and love ourselves. Sir William had no emotions of that comfortable sort. What Sir William loved was order. So rather than sit about like a numbskull, that is what he set himself to achieve.

But Emma had been invaluable. A country girl, she had laid her hands to everything, in a manner in which the aristocrat, socially constrained from birth to pretend he was born without any, cannot. For that he was grateful; it excused much.

Nelson’s new coat of arms had come, properly inscribed at the top of letters patent.

“Is it not pretty?” she asked, having scarcely time to look at it herself.

Sir William saw a shield with a Maltese cross, surrounded by the
Tria
juncta
in
uno
of the Order of the Bath, surmounted by an open helmet, a bar, and a man of war seen from the captain’s cabin end. The motto was
Faith
and
Works
. The supporters were, over
Works
, a Lion with a pennant in its mouth, the staff of which stuck into space like a secretary’s pen; and over
Faith
, a comely, clean and graceful sailor boy.

“All too appropriate,” he said, and handed it back.

A message arrived from the Queen. She sent one whenever she was depressed, so these days they arrived almost hourly.

“She is worried about her head,” said Emma. “Whatever will it be next?”

“Her head?”

“Of having it cut off.”

“It is too long and square in the face,” said Sir William. “Give her my compliments and say I doubt that it would roll.”

He was snappish these days.

“I can’t say that. I suppose I shall have to fit her in somewhere,” said Emma, who had risen not only superior to events, but to the cause of them.

When she returned, she felt no better. The palace had had a boarded-up look, and since the Court was in mourning, you saw black figures at the end of empty corridors, standing about like frightened nuns, or with the naked look of defrocked priests. The Queen talked of death as though it were an experience she had just been through, and the King, though he was taller than six feet, ran back and forth like a little dog already left behind.

“I am making ready for the eternity for which I long,” shrieked the Queen, supervising two ladies in waiting who were packing a trunk. “Take only summer dresses,” she said, and supervised the jewelry herself. “The King decides to stay. The King decides to leave. If we stay, we shall need nothing; if we are leaving, we shall be packed. You see, I prepare.”

But she did not know how. Removing, tactfully, a tiara from a dress hoop, Emma took charge. These movables, when crated, were stenciled
HIS
BRITANNIC
MAJESTY’S SERVICE, NAVAL STORES, BISCUIT AND BULLY
BEEF
, smuggled to the British Embassy, and then taken aboard Nelson’s ships at night. The
Vanguard
was being repainted and refitted for the royal refugees. The smell of white lead was strong.

*

“The King has had the Minister for War arrested,” said Sir William.

“Good Lord, why?”

“For treason. It is ever the fault of the losing side.”

“The poor King,” said Emma feelingly.

“It cannot be denied that he cuts a very poor figure.”

*

“No time should be lost,” urged Acton, “if the wind does not blow too hard.” Inclined to be seasick, he would have preferred an overland journey, but, alas, Sicily cannot be reached that way. Yet the King, who had had a toy altar as a child—as well as toy soldiers—could not make up his mind, and still hoped for Divine intervention, though they were running low on candles.

In the end, it was made up for him.

*

Defense of the Realm, to the
lazzaroni
, meant slitting the throats of Jacobins up an alley, disemboweling a Frenchman, and the looting of an unprotected store. Undeniably they were picturesque, but to combine irregularity into the picturesque—as the Reverend Gilpin says—requires taste, and they had none. They had surrounded the palace. The King was their father, who dwelt in Caserta, a man exactly like themselves who sold fish in the market and when he went hunting did his own butchery. He was tall, virile and ugly. They worshiped him in their own image. But they would not let him go.

“If I run away, they will think I have abandoned them,” said the King. “I will never abandon them. They are my people. Besides, how can we get away?”

He had to present himself daily on the balcony, to prevent their storming the palace.

“Give us arms,” they shouted, “to defend ourselves and you!” Alas, there were no arms. They had been flung into ditches to rust, by the fleeing army.

“Death to the Jacobin!” they screamed.

“Now what?” said the King, and though afraid, could control neither his legs nor his curiosity, and crept back to the balcony again.

The crowd was tearing apart one of his own messengers, mistaking, or pretending to mistake, him for the enemy. The man had time for one scream before his hands and face were booted to a pulp, his clothes ripped off, his penis and testicles knifed out like spilt, his belly slit, his intestines allowed to dangle and his corpse held up in the air—an offering still smoking because it was still warm.

The King himself, after the hunt, could have done the job no better and had done it a hundred thousand times just as well. It took no time. It was highly enjoyable. And it did not matter what the carcass was.

He went back indoors.

“His Majesty,” said Maria Carolina in a hand note to Emma, “has graciously consented to flee.”

“I am disappointed in him. He has been inconsistent. One would have expected him to have waited until too late,” said Sir William. “But how the devil is it to be done?”

“There is a tunnel,” said Emma.

*

Ferdinand had at last remembered it, a bugaboo from childhood, the family escape hatch, to be opened only in case of dire peril, like Joanna Southcote’s chest, which was packed providentially with pistols, rather than advice; for even the wildest and most hysteric dreamer is practical about his nightmares. His father, the King of Spain, had once told him it was there, and he had workmen in the cellars for a week, searching the chthonic dark till at last they found it. It was the way out of the labyrinth. After they had
marked it with rags, he had them securely locked up. He was indeed a minotaur. Even the horns had come with time.

It had been a disagreeable afternoon, with Miss Knight and her mother practicing hysterics like scales, until let into the secret. Even Emma was at a loss for words, though she had had the finesse, in the card-playing sense, to order a cold supper laid out against their return from a visit to the Turkish Embassy, since no public event could be canceled lest public confidence be alarmed. She then dismissed the servants, a reassuring act in itself; Rome is always burning to have a holiday, and no one dismissed for good is ever given the evening off first.

The streets were sullen, except for the chanting of invisible priests and a shriek now and then up a dark lane.

“Why must they wail both before and after the event?”

“They are a histrionic people. If one feels nothing, one must show much,” said Sir William, huddled in the carriage.

Out in the bay the lights of Nelson’s hurriedly gathered fleet twinkled and receded although at anchor, desolate as a carnival in the rain.

The King and Queen arrived at the Embassy together.

“Consistent in everything, ignoble to the last,” said Sir William, but only because he was sad. It was too much like a play on the last night; it may not have been good, but the actors will never act in it again and we will never again see it this way. And yet the action was the same as any other night, the scenery the same, the lights the same, the lines the same.

The Ambassador presented the chelengkh, a frost of diamonds, a plume of honor taken from the turban of the Grand Signor himself, a star surrounded by thirteen sprays of the same adamantine material. It was to honor Nelson.

“It is watchwork,” said Kelim Effendi carefully. “You wind it up. Then when you press this”—and he did so—“the star revolves. It is amusing, no?”

It was a whirligig. It ran down.

*

A little man rose up at Emma’s elbow. It was Aprile.

“It is the dawn of a new age, my friends say. But do not vex yourself. I shall neither give you away nor get away. I was adapted to the old one. I only want to say that it was a pleasure once more to hear you sing. The effect is not good, but you do it so well. Whereas with us, it is the other way,” he said, and before Emma could stop him, with a twitch, he had wriggled away.

The King and Queen returned to the palace. Emma and Sir William drove to the quay, where a launch awaited them.

Sir William had to be lifted down, and what was more, did not seem satisfied with his seat. The boat rocked. The gunwales were but two inches from the water.

“Be still, William, do,” snapped Emma, for it was only a city she was leaving. Sir William these days, to tell the truth, was difficult to manage.

“I must sit in the prow,” he said. “I must sit in the prow.” And like a blind man, he groped his way there and sat there alone, an hour’s journey to the ships, while the lamps of the festive city burned low, and unreplenished, went out, his eyes steady, watching Vesuvius, a dark hulk, moored against the sky.

It was not for some time that he realized she was not with him.

*

She had gone to the palace. If she had snapped at him, she had cause. In order not to alarm the servants, they had taken only the best things, the vases and pictures, and so been forced to abandon three houses elegantly furnished, all their horses and seven carriages.

There was no reason for William to sit there unique. She had loved Naples, too. But Palermo (it must be kept a secret that that was their destination) was said to be a fine city, and she had never seen it. Sir William had often spoken of Sicily with approbation, as of a place full of interest. Therefore why sit so glum?

Nelson, standing alone on the marble floor of the grand staircase, waited in the almost dark. The palace when empty gave him the shudders. It was too much like going into St. Paul’s of a weekday, when God is not there but the thing we are really afraid of is, and skulks in the walls.

The stairs went up into infinity. “Nelson,” he said, to reassure himself, and from every undusted corridor came the hollow answer back.

A white figure swirled out of the shadows.

“Emma,” he said, astonished.

“I could not desert the dear Queen,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

There was a snuffle on the stairs, and a fox fire on the other one, of candles. A sconce moved toward them, and a great boar’s head appeared out of nowhere. It was Ferdinand. The snuffling materialized into the Queen, a hatbox and all eight children, one of them in arms.

Somewhere above them a chair fell, a glass smashed.

Ferdinand giggled. “We have left only the heavy things. Heavy things will be difficult to loot,” he said, and followed Nelson, Emma and the Queen down a landscape of empty picture frames, moving through rooms he had never known existed, kitchens, storerooms, wine bins, cellars, vaults, and down stairs that were damp and dripped, and no one anywhere. On the walls the shadow of his own enormous nose marched on ahead of him. He followed it.