Sir William (22 page)

Then it stopped.

Where is youth? For the matter of that, who was youth? When he was shown the newspapers, his mind clouded with a clawing crowd, baying silent down stuccoed corridors. They had been invaded. They had been forced to flee.

“So are we all,” he said, and drew upon a sheet of paper the same incessant fading face. For a few years it had had specific features. Now it had none. As before, so afterward, though what it is we never quite know.

Across the fields, from somewhere, a church bell tolled. It is a great burden to believe and never to know in what. A small boy vanished down a remembered lane on a remembered day, but who was the boy, and where was the lane? He could not see them. The man walking toward you is the man walking away.

“It was a wonder to the lower orders throughout all parts of England to see the avenues to the churches filled with carriages,” he read in the
Annual
Register.
“This novel appearance prompted the simple country people to enquire what was the matter.” The column adjacent stated that at Paris, luxury had at last attained to absolute pitch and was
recherché
in dress as well.

But what is absolute pitch? If we cannot hear it, we shall never have it. So better, though wistful, never to see her again.

“So this is my life,” said George, looking around at it. “What went wrong?”

*

He was their dear Nelson. He never questioned that. Neither did they. He was also their palladium. This pillared hall was very like a temple, but he had never been in a temple. Being narrowly devout, he questioned no gods but his own. Being inaesthetic, he took no comfort from the mere design of the plinth.

But Emma was an attitude, and that he could admire. She was a lady, one who knew how to keep the conversation mild, address a duchess properly, deal with precedence,
and jollify a bishop in a manner that his brother William, that sacerdotal climber, had not, nor had his brother William’s wife. As for deportment, should that not always be easy and natural? Here he saw it so.

They were at Sir William’s table. Sir William sat propped at the head of it. Emma cut up Nelson’s meat for him. She wrote his letters. They had grown intimate.

Yet he was always relieved when Sir William came back into any room in which the two of them had just been left. When Sir William came back, something that had been lacking was again complete. Alone with either of them, he waited for the other. That should not have puzzled him. He should have been used to triads: when he had married his wife, she had already had a son.

*

At Naples, on the 8th of January, the Neapolitan Fleet was burned, like Cortez’ at Vera Cruz, with this difference: the actual torch had been applied by an Englishman, and yet the English Fleet could be seen in the harbor, out the window of the breakfast room at Palermo, complete and waiting. The English Fleet cannot burn.

Sir William was distressed to be parted from his collections. “I am desirous of returning home by the first ship that Lord Nelson sends down to Gibraltar, as I am worn out and want repose,” he said. “And as the house wants chimneys.” He was beginning to feel the chill.

Nelson kept Emma by him constantly. “My public correspondence,” he explained irritably to his wife, “besides the business of sixteen sail of the line and all our commerce, is with Petersburg, Constantinople, the Consulate at Smyrna, Egypt, the Turkish and Russian admirals, Trieste, Vienna, Tuscany, Minorca, Earl St. Vincent and Lord Spencer. This over, what time can I have for any private correspondence?” He was devoted to her. From time to time he took out her miniature, in an effort to recall what she looked like.

There was said to be fighting in the streets of Naples. The
lazzaroni
were rioting. The painter Tischbein reported that he had seen a crucifix with the body shot
away so that only the legs and arms hung from the nails, like washing. He had been able to indulge the German passion for the beauties of a young, handsome and freshly shot military corpse. They have their poetry, and as models, the advantage that they cannot move. The Royal Palace had been looted, for why should the French have everything? The mob smashed what it could not carry off, as is its way.

“I wonder,” said Emma, “whatever became of that strange Russian gentlewoman on the ship. The one who said she was from Odessa.”

“No doubt she went home to wait upon events,” said Sir William.

On the 22nd, so they heard, the Parthenopean Republic was declared at Naples, while Eleonora Pimentel, another poetess, but more
au
courant
than Miss Knight, declaimed an “Ode to Liberty.” The blood of St. Januarius had been induced to liquefy for the event.

“He is a saint,” Sir William explained. “He is indifferent to political changes. And as for the Republic, what could be more natural, for the locusts have no king.”

“What does Parthenopean mean?”

“It is the name of a siren who lured men to their doom in these parts. She is in Virgil. Afterward, her body was found on the seashore.”

But Emma neither knew Latin nor was listening. She was reading the
Gazette.

“They have renamed the San Carlo and put on
Nica
boro
in
Jucatan.
Why, we saw that on the King’s birthday, exactly a year ago. Only here they say it was to celebrate the expulsion of the tyrant.”

“They will rename everything,” said Sir William. “It is their way.” But yes, it was exactly a year ago, so here it was, the King’s birthday again. The city twinkled with lamps which glittered, as lamps do on a frosty night, not with hospitality but a marshfire absence. Since there is nothing to hunt at night but owls and mice, the King attended the opera. Afterward there was a gala reception at court, for even in extreme cold, if you huddle together, you can keep a little warm.

The machinery of government had begun to whirl again, like a spinning jenny in an empty room, with a vast grinding of gears, for want of wool. Treaties were signed with both the Turk and Russian, though Nelson trusted neither, for the one was an infidel and the other as certainly not British. Sir William smoothed him down.

“Though we are on an island, this is not the time to be insular,” he said, and looked at the mountains without affection. Etna was not only invisible from here, but had nothing to offer but hiccups and Empedocles. It was a second-class mountain. He missed Vesuvius. He missed his peace and quiet.

Greville wrote to say that Emma’s heroic conduct during the voyage was on the lips of all, like jam tomorrow. “Tell her that all her friends love her more than ever, and those who did not know her, admire her.”

Ah fortunate few, thought Sir William, but handed the message on.

He was not the only courtier who did not care for Palermo much. Admiral Caracciolo, his fleet burned to the water line, asked permission to return to Naples to save his personal property at least. This was granted him. In February, there were food riots; and Cardinal Ruffo, the former director of the Royal Silk Factory at San Leucio, stepped forward with a velvet
swoosh
to ask permission to cross to Calabria and raise a rebellion.

“I know the Calabrians. They sleep with a crucifix on one side of the bed and a gun on the other. We shall use both,” he said.

“What does he propose, that we should bombard them with mulberry leaves from a rowboat?” demanded Nelson, but the King allowed him to go.

Surprisingly, by the middle of February he had raised an army of 17,000 men, banded together as the Christian Army of the Holy Faith.

“All very well,” sniffed Nelson, who had been brought up to regard Catholicism as neither holy nor a faith, and so mistrusted both camp followers
and
the Whore of Babylon. “But how do you reload a crucifix, pray tell me that? I would as soon fight cannon with an arquebus.”

But the King, who as a hunter knew all about the legend of St. Hubertus, and therefore saw nothing incongruous in a crucifix mounted between fighting antlers, began to hum to himself and to lift the carpets to look on the brighter side of things, for he proceeded always by parallels. Not only was that what Frederick Hohenstaufen had done, it was what Cardinal Ruffo was doing.

It continued to snow.

*

“Still
und
blendend
lag
der
Schnee,”
said the Austrian Ambassador. “Isn’t it curious that both the English and the French should have such an ugly word for such a lovely thing?”

In the courtyard of the Palazzo Palagonia, orange trees stood set in tubs. From the room in which they were working, Nelson and Emma could see the snow whirling outside, dissolving from the leaves, for the day was not as cold as it looked, and therefore the sun must be shining somewhere. They watched.

“Such a pretty word, snow,” said Emma. “And the snow is pretty too, on the oranges.”

Nelson considered. “When I was quite young, I made a polar voyage and shot a polar bear. We were almost crushed in the ice. My father used the polar bear as a hearth rug. Our boat was called the
Carcass.
And Northern Canada, too, for that matter, Quebec and Newfoundland …” His voice trailed away. He had become infatuated with an American young lady in Quebec, and had almost jumped ship to marry her. It was the only infatuation he had ever suffered. He had forgotten, until now, both her and the feeling.

“But there were no oranges,” he said disapprovingly, and went back to work.

Emma, who had caught a glimpse of icebergs if not of the American lady, dipped her pen in ink somewhat guiltily, as though she had evoked a crime. Icebergs were outside her experience. She did not care for the sound of them. Nelson, she thought, was too closely married to his work; but then, everyone she knew was married, even dear Greville, to his inefficiency.

“Why do you never speak of your wife?” she asked, having come out into the verbal estuary of her meander.

“There is not much to say,” said Nelson. She saw that her question had been a mistake.

*

On the mainland, Cardinal Ruffo was remitting taxes to pay his army. In Naples, the French were levying them to accomplish the same end. “We tax opinions,” the tax collector said to a Royalist lady. “If you have your own, you must pay double. If you share ours, you need only pay half.”

Everything movable had been shipped to France.
“Liberté,
Égalit
é
,
Fraternit
é
,”
caroled the Republic, with Eleonora Pimentel to lead the chorus.

“Tu
rubbi
a
me,
io
rubbo
a
te,”
said the people. The liberated did not seem to understand their liberators; it was necessary to translate.

In Palermo, the King went about like a scarecrow, for his income had shrunk. The Prince Royal had opened a dairy. Apart from consuming vast quantities of the best butter, Ferdinand had grown stingy and would not grant so much as the purchase of a new mattress.

“I like neither to see nor be seen,” said the Queen. “Circumstances are too painful.” So was her mattress. “I see Acton very seldom, to avoid his ill-humor,” she told the Hamiltons.

“She has hit upon the very reason,” cried Acton, “why I do not see her.”

“What is a
cicisbèo?
” Nelson asked Sir William.

“Why do you ask?” inquired Sir William, whom the question, coming from this source, had startled.

“It is what they call me here, so I am told.”

“It is a local institution,” said Sir William. “You see, they have taken you to their hearts, just as we have.” And he smiled benignly at Emma, who smiled, very rapidly, back.

“Though I am almost blind and worn out,” wrote Nelson to his wife, “I am quite revived by Sir William’s wit and inexhaustible pleasantry and Lady Hamilton’s
affectionate care.” He would have said more, but checked his pen.

“What is a
cicisbèo,
Hardy?” he asked.

“A local institution,” said Hardy promptly.

“Ah, but what institution? Or must I ask Troubridge?”

“A man who is seen everywhere with another man’s wife,” said Hardy. “And what they do in private, God alone knows. But,” he added, seeing the expression on Nelson’s face, “it is quite harmless. It is the recognized thing.”

“Apparently,” said Nelson, “and damn.”

“Sir?”

“I have broken my pen.”

*

“He seems infatuated with her.”

“Good, then he will stay here,” said the Queen, whose fondness for dear Emma, though not essential to her politics, hinged upon them. Let them play as they would, so long as the fleet stayed here. About Sir William she did not vex herself one particle; he was her own kind of man. He would survive.

*

Cardinal Ruffo had swept as far north as Salerno. He was so clearly the stuff out of which heroes are made that there had been attempts to assassinate him already.

“Cardinal Ruffo,” said Sir William, quite in his old style, “has taken all the provinces for his knowledge.”

If he felt better, Nelson felt worse. His wife had asked if she might join him. “Sir William and Lady Hamilton and I are the mainspring by which the whole machinery of government turns,” he explained. And as for coming out, she would not like it and he would not have it. The mere thought made him ill, and when ill he was not altogether agreeable, for far worse than a hypochondriac is a hypochondriac with real complaints, and of these he had many.

Emma nursed him. Poor Fanny, he doubted if she would understand a man’s having a female friend, for she herself had none. Yet Emma was a friend. A squeeze of the hand, by way of gratitude, in those circumstances
was only civil. Besides, Sir William was always, and better, there.

“I must say that there was
at
that
time,
certainly no impropriety in living under Lady Hamilton’s roof,” wrote Miss Knight. (If nothing in particular has happened to us, we can always fill up our autobiography with other people’s lives, and hers now made a considerable pile.) “Her house was the resort of the best company of all nations, and the attentions paid to Lord Nelson appeared perfectly natural.” As indeed they had, but looking at the manuscript a little later, she could not but marvel at how time flies.