Sir William (21 page)

The air turned warm. They were underground. A rat’s eyes gleamed. A spider ran across the dirt floor. A white rag formed up out of darkness. And there was the tunnel, so well concealed there had been no need to hide its opening. It was just a tunnel. It led to the underworld. It was not frequented.

The King held back. The Queen pushed on, with no one to aid her, stumbled, and was angry with everything. The darkness closed behind them against an animal rush of fetid air. Though it had a main gorge, it was not just one tunnel but a maze of bronchial passages through which the sluggish wind breathed itself
in and out. There was nothing to see ahead but a small white rag, and then another, until at last there was a bend and ahead of them an alternating glitter, as from off the points of spears.

The passage, which was not paved, became muddy and slippery, and there, two steps down, lay the water. They had been fortunate that the tide was at its ebb. It was, so Nelson said, the Vittoria landing stage.

When he flashed his lantern, a longboat appeared out of the low mist which now clung to the waters. Two hours later, for they had to move cautiously, they reached the
Vanguard
, where Sir William was reading Epictetus in bed:

Quite so.

But Emma had left him.

In the bay, little dark shapes everywhere along the fringes of the city put out into the bay.

“Before we reach Palermo,” said Sir William to Emma as she came in, “we must remember to hoist a white sail. As usual, your Theseus has done well.”

“My Theseus?”

“Horatio, but the legend is confused,” said Sir William, who would rather have rescued himself, and went to sleep.

*

Others had to wait longer for their dormitive. Lady Knight and her daughter drew alongside.

“I am sorry, but we are already full. There is no room,” said Captain Hardy. “You must go to the Portuguese man-of-war.”

“My mother is the widow of Admiral Sir Joseph
Knight,” said Miss Cornelia, the poetess, her nerves frayed to the point of a beseeching ostentation.

“I am sorry, but there really
is
no room,” said Hardy, “but the Portuguese man-of-war has an English captain.” He meant it kindly.

So off into the dark they went, all Virgil and Dante and no room at the inn.

In the large, airy and freshly painted state cabin—the smallest, most wretched chamber she had ever seen—the Queen peeled off her own stockings and looked at her first pair of dirty feet. Also it was unpleasant to discover that rumor was no invention: Ferdinand snored. Not even in the Temple had her sister known such squalor or suffered such indignity, of that she was sure. Lady Hamilton was asleep, and as for water, she knew not whom to ask for it. It was intolerable.

*

“It is disgusting,” said Maria Carolina, “to sleep in the same squalid chamber with a man, and that one your husband. It is too promiscuous.”

Having had to linger at Naples for two days because of contrary winds, they were now at sea, or rather up to their waists in it, for they had encountered the worst storm in Nelson’s experience. There was nowhere to lie down. A Russian gentlewoman, known to none of them, had with the blunt but polite intransigence of that singularly mysterious race commandeered the only bed available below deck, and lay there, clutching an icon, while ladies in waiting no doubt better born than she slithered and sloshed about on soggy mattresses. She was heavily bejeweled. If sink she must, she meant to sink well.

Sir William, in whom age had suddenly revealed the Scot, with a Calvinistic cunning both atavistic and autochthonous, stirred nowhere without two pistols at his belt, determined to shoot rather than drown. He did not intend to die with a
guggle
,
guggle
,
guggle
in his throat, he said.

Every time you called a cabin boy, he had been swept overboard; it was another one. Every bowl in the boat
had been puked in, but to look on the cheerful side of things, since no one had appetite, there was little chance of their running short on stores. The mainmast had already gone, the mizzenmast could scarcely wait, and “wild to the blast flew the skull and the bones.”

Emma, however, who had had to master her stomach quite early on in life’s woes, felt no affliction, and was everywhere to tend to those who did. Nelson was proud of her. And she of him. They spoke companionably when they met. The barriers were down. In that weather, they could not long have stayed up.

Count Esterhazy, the Austrian Ambassador, in a religious fit had tossed his snuffbox overboard, for it had his mistress painted nude on the lid and would not look well in Heaven. Prince Carlo Alberto had convulsions and died in Emma’s arms, though that was no great loss. He was only six, he could scarcely be considered a personage as yet, and there were royal heirs aplenty still remaining.

The wind changed to a
tramontana
. The King, quickly recovered and excellently well, condescended to say that there would be plenty of woodcocks in Sicily—this wind always brought them—and that he and Sir William might therefore look forward to splendid sport.

“Well,” said Mrs. Cadogan, that sensible deity, “why not? The dear man only looks upon the good side of things. I would not myself object to a woodcock pie.”

“
Entombez-moi
,” said the Russian lady, in desperate French, “
à
Odesse
.
C
’
est
une
petite
jolie
ville
en
Crimée
,
le
pays
de
ma
naissance
,
òu
sont
situées
nos
domaines
hérèditaires.
Tcheripnin
doit
faire
la
gisante.
C
’
est
mon
désir
.”

“
Elle
pousse
un
cri
,” said the ladies in waiting, wringing out their mattresses. It was Christmas day. At two in the morning they dropped anchor in Palermo Harbor.

The Queen insisted upon going ashore at once.

“I have lived long enough,” she said gloomily, “even two or three years too long,” and disappeared into the darkness, bound for the Colli Palace, where nothing had
been aired for sixty years, nobody expected her, and everything was uninhabitable.

“My God,” she said at dawn, her fate made visible, “it is
Africa
. Am I to be plagued by the blackamoor as well?” She needed laudanum.

But the King refused to budge until he had slept, risen, been shaved, and consumed a lengthy breakfast. Then, calling his favorite dogs to him (they had slept in the cabin, though refusing to go near the Queen), he ambled out into the cold but southern sun, determined to make the best of it. If he had not burned his boats behind him, he had at least left orders that they should be burned lest they fall into the hands of the French, so he did not fear pursuit. He was King of the Two Sicilies, and if he had lost one, here was the other, and one would do.

“
Viva
il
Re!
” shout the populace. “
Viva
il
Re!
” It was all quite customary.

“The King,” wrote Emma admiringly, “is a philosopher.” So he was, but Pliny the Elder was laid up with a bilious fever, the Queen had near died, and lodgings were exceedingly hard come by.

The Knights, with that heroic skill to which the incompetent sometimes unimaginatively rise, had seized the only habitable apartment on the
Marina.

“It was the most tremendous good fortune,” said Cornelia, but it was not a good fortune she was prepared to share. She and her mother were quite civil; they even nodded to Captain Hardy,
but
there
was
no
room.
Poor Sir William, accustomed as he was to palaces, must feel quite cast out.

“Accustomed as I had been to the lovely and magnificent scenery of Italy,” wrote Miss Knight, “I was not less surprised than delighted at the picturesque beauty of the Sicilian Coast. Then, when the prospect of the city opened upon us with the regal elegance of its marble palaces and the fanciful singularity of its remaining specimens of Saracenic architecture, it was like a fairy scene.” And, dipping unobserved a wedge of
panettone
into her morning coffee, she giggled like a girl. In the
general gallop and galumph ashore, she had for once come out first. She admired the beauties of nature and drank her slops.

But it was cold. It was bitter cold. The stark trees and naked twigs were rimed and icicled, and stuck up all over the landscape like bleached coral on a surfaced barrier reef.

“Light a fire,” said the Queen.

“But why? It is only winter. There is no wood. It is always like this.”

“I demand fire!” shouted the Queen.

“Let her go to the devil, then,” said the King when he heard of it. He would not see her. He blamed her for everything. He ordered a
chinoiserie
casino built on the seashore, and moved into that. He wanted no more of her.

Deprived not only of her creature comforts but of her creatures as well, there was nothing for Maria Carolina to do but shiver, shake, tremble, freeze, steal wood, eat cold porridge, and write letters, with a small oil lamp on the table over which to thaw her fingers every time they froze. Death, suicide, shame, decline, woe, weeping and despair—it was all the same to her. She had a facile pen. She made them vivid.

“The King,” she wrote to Vienna, “feels nothing but self-love, and he hardly feels that.”

On the contrary, though insensible to cold, he was keenly aware of the pleasures of the chase, as always, and went daily through the Breughel woods. “Do come, Sir William,” he said.

Lese majesty is not a crime with which to charm any but complacent princes. As soon as he could move, Sir William went. Emma and Nelson could manage between them, though what was between them, he knew not.

Emma, without sleep for twelve days, was plainly hysterical; but soon enough, brushing the cobwebs away, she was herself again and able the more articulately to lament.

“We miss our dear, dear Naples,” she said, thinking
of wardrobes adequately hung, a row of surrogate selves, all swaying, all waiting to be put on.

Nelson, together with the Hamiltons, for want of any other where and to save money, had set up mutual housekeeping in the Palazzo Palagonia. One splendid chamber opened out into another, and the wind blew through and dusted everything. As for the chambermaids, all they did was track in the snow.

Emma enjoyed herself. It was like Cheshire in the winter, but with palm trees.

“On the contrary,” said Sir William, “it is worse than Kent, damned cold, damned damp and damned dull.”

The King kept their larders stocked with venison, woodcock, partridge, boar and rabbit, but there was a shortage of sallets. Finances were difficult. Greville had triumphantly reduced the income of Milford Haven to nothing and was now endeavoring to borrow against the capital. His efforts might be unremitting, but he himself would remit nothing. Their Naples incomes were confiscate. Sir William had to borrow £2000 from Nelson, and what man likes to borrow money from his own protégé? It was demeaning.

Emma made him marvel. Sentimental people are like volcanic springs: they merely gush, close up, and open for business unimpaired some otherwhere. She seemed to miss Naples not at all. Yet he had to admit that when she had the time she took as good care of him as ever. Only she had not often the time. They none of them had. All naval business was conducted from the house, which meant Emma must act interpreter, since Nelson eschewed Italian and refused French, out of a towering patriotic incompetence. Worst of all, that pewling, mewling heap of diffident disapproval, Josiah Nisbet, was back, soliciting his stepfather’s interest.

“He has his nice side,” said Emma, about whom he gossiped day and night. She believed in being kind.

“Like the dark side of the moon, no doubt, but we can scarcely expect in our lifetime to see it. Apparently no effort has been spared to bring him here. I would prefer no stone were left unturned to send him back.”

“But where can he go?”

“Constantinople,” snapped Sir William. “It is the farthest place. He should do well there; he has already manners to rival the Terrible Turk. He will blend.”

“You must pardon me, Father, if I speak out,” said Josiah to Nelson, “but though never one to impugn your motives or to question your matter, in manner it has been said your attentions to Lady Hamilton approach more nearly those appropriate to our mother than to another man’s wife. And though I shall not myself speak of it, I feel it my duty to inform you that I have frequently heard it spoken of.”

To Constantinople he went.

What people say, what people say, thought Nelson angrily. She is as pure as the driven snow.

Though perhaps a little more driven. Like Paolo and Francesca, she was caught up into the whirlwind. Emma found the movement exhilarating and Palermo a rum-tumtiddle sort of place. Given both men were close by, she was content.

*

At Kendal, for he had gone home to his wife, Romney—having first retreated to an echoing studio in Hampstead and then here—sat alone in a room, throwing ink blots at a piece of paper, a method he had despised in the Brothers Cozens when younger, but his fingers could find no shapes any more; he had to wait for the shapes to emerge.

The ink spread, the shapes emerged in roaring waves, in clouds, in intangibles, twisted and turned, and before he could catch them, ebbed away again. Each wave crested into Emma before it broke and fragmented into its disparate selves and receded with a hiss, before he could capture it. He was alone on a gray beach, with no other figure in view but an old winklewoman, turning around and around as she bent over blowholes in the sand. Then even she was no longer there. Unlike his monarch, Romney did not retreat into insanity to rest, but managed to get out of it from time to time, for the same purpose. From the next room, as always, came the hum and treadle
of the spinning wheel, except that nowadays it was really there; it was his wife’s employment.