Sir William (26 page)

“It would be charity to send me some things, for in saving all for my royal & dear friend I lost my little all,” she added. “Never mind.”

*

The 1st of August was the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile. The centerpiece of the celebration was to be a barge fitted up as a Roman galley.

“And the sailors want me to sit in it, what shall I be?” asked Emma.

Sir William considered. Cleopatra would be inappropriate; Dido, for the same reasons, seemed far from wise; no one knew the name of Pompey’s wife; and Bellona seemed uncalled-for, Britannia an anachronism. “I am afraid there is not much left but Calypso. You must do the best you can.”

“What did she feel?”

“The barge will be forty yards away at least. Feel what you like, it will not be visible,” said Sir William kindly, following the myth, and so encountering Penelope, a prudish young woman with a taste for tapestry. She came from Nevis. “Be something classical. It does not matter.”

She was something classical. It did not matter.

There was a twenty-one-gun salute from all the ships at anchor, a general illumination, and the barge went by with lamps fixed on the oars, a rostral column, and two angels at the stern to hold Nelson’s portrait up. Looking through his telescope, Nelson saw dear Emma; he had wondered where she was.

Feeling the eyes of the world upon her, Emma impudently waved. An orchestra sang his praises.

“I relate this more from gratitude than vanity,” he said, writing to his wife, which was only the truth. Vanity was assuaged. It was now only gratitude that ached.
In his second draft, he thought it wiser not to mention Emma. “The beauty of the whole,” he added, “was beyond description.”

*

Having condemned 105 to death, 200 to life imprisonment, 322 to shorter terms, 288 to deportation and 67 to exile, the King made ready to depart. He was constitutionally timid. Confront him with a
fait
accompli,
and he merely looked around for the accomplices. He would be glad to get back to Palermo.

Conditions were still savage in the streets. You could see the glitter of eyes just beyond the clearing made by torchlight. The tyranny of the minority will always perish; the tyranny of the mob survives.

*

In the Cathedral, the Cardinal was up to the end of his oration:

“The King is in great spirits, and he calls me his
grande
maitresse,”
said Emma.
“Mais
il
est
bonne
d’être
chez
le
Roi,
mais
mieux
d’être
chez
soit.”

So off they sailed, with everything done and nothing
settled, back to Palermo again, for Naples, like Ireland, was now no place for pleasure or recreation.

“The wind,” said Nelson, “is rising.”

But justice was done; that left only injustice, surely, to be dealt with.

*

In Weimar, Goethe, who upon his return from Italy, emboldened by the looser morals of warmer climes, had taken a woman of the people as his mistress, was drawing up a will in favor of Christiane Vulpius, so she should be provided for in case the French came. She was no Emma. She was a
Kinder,
Küche,
and
Kirche
sort of woman. But she satisfied him and presented no fewer social problems than did Sir William’s excellent living gallery of sculptures. If the French came too close, he was even prepared to marry her, as the banker Récamier had married his illegitimate daughter to provide for her and then, since he had not been guillotined, had been forced to live with her rather than acknowledge her irregular birth, get an annulment, and so besmirch his name.

He was not, however, prepared to marry her just yet.

I
T SEEMED TO THEM ODD
—they had always thought to go home to Naples, their stay in Palermo had been temporary, but now they had seen their houses in ruins, they had that home-coming feeling about Palermo instead. Once they reached Palermo, everything would be all right. It could certainly not be all wrong. The King, who in Naples had stayed in his cabin as much as possible, here walked about quite confidently on deck.

The ships processed into warmer air, scented with limes and oranges. It was siesta. Sir William gave himself up to a happy contemplation of melons, peaches, grapes,
prosciutto
con
fighi
, and other emblems of maturity. Nelson wrote letters. Emma, admirably posed, admired the view.

“I’ve told Lady Nelson all about you,” said Nelson, startling her. He seemed these days to approach her each time from a different direction and always rapidly.

“All?” she asked blankly, with an inner thump. “But you do not know all.”

“I mean I sang your praises.”

“Oh those,” said Emma, who knew all of them, for when nervous she sometimes sang them to herself. She was relieved.

Platonic as ever, he gave her hand a grateful squeeze. He was incorrigible.

“The Queen has prepared a fete in our honor,” she told him.

*

At noon they dropped anchor in Palermo Harbor and the Queen came aboard, embraced Emma and clapped a necklace around her neck—the royal portrait surrounded by diamonds, suspended by a chain—stepped back to admire the effect, trod in the scupper and went wet-soled to dinner. Sir William received a similarly mounted portrait of the King. The Queen, who was sentimental about everything, gushed.

“It is a false bottom,” said Sir William. “Take it out, and you can see the solid bedrock of indifference underneath,” but only to Nelson. He was polite as other men are skeptical—that is, from habit rather than from any lack of conviction. He did not wish to spoil Emma’s triumph.

They went ashore at a gilded stucco stage, emblematical of everything and nothing, where the local senators awaited them, robes flapping in the breeze. The city was drunk but not disorderly. The
Te
Deum
sung in the Cathedral was long but uplifting. In the evening there was not one pyrotechnic display, but several.

“Pinchbeck,” said Sir William, fingering his royal medallion, “but neatly mounted, all the same.”

Nelson’s gift was to be a title, a thing not only to be prized above diamonds, but considerably less costly to have made up, though an estate was included with it, as was also a diamond sword. The sword he accepted. About the title, he was wary, for titles, he had learned, are apt to become an expense.

Emma implored him to accept. Where else would he be offered a dukedom? “You consider your honor too much,” she said, “if you persist in refusing what the King and Queen consider theirs.”

“Lord Nelson,” said the King, his tone elevated, his manner not, “do you wish that your name alone should pass with honor to posterity, and that I, Ferdinand Bourbon, should appear ungrateful?”

“Of course not,” said Nelson brusquely, deeply moved. “I shall accept.”

Glad to get rid of it, for it had gone begging, the King embraced him.

“Where the devil is it?” asked Nelson afterward.

“At the foot of Mount Etna, near Syracuse. The name Bronte means thunderer.”

“The Queen has sent me two carriage loads of dresses!” shouted Emma, bursting in with the most splendiferous a hasty rummage could provide. “If I have fagged, I am more than repaid.”

As the Austrian Ambassador said, no one but his master was forgotten here.

“He has done nothing worth remembering,” snapped the King, who had hoped the Holy Roman Emperor would send a few troops.

“We are dying with the heat, and the feast of Santa Rosalia begins this day. How shall we get through it?” demanded Nelson. “Even our dear Lady Hamilton has been unwell.”

It was the excitement; it did fair do her in.

Santa Rosalia was made of more durable stuff. A cave-dwelling ascetic, she had been so intent upon her devotions as not to notice that the stalactites dripped calcium and had solidified in the act of turning the penultimate page of a volume of the Church Fathers. God, in this case, had offered not bread, but a stone, and her handsomely chiseled features were trotted about yearly, carried aloft in procession by sturdy peasants with the biceps to manage her.

Between popery and propinquity, Charles Lock was not happy.

“That infamous woman,” he wrote home, “is at the bottom of all the mischief which has rendered my stay so uncomfortable for the last six months. We have in Lady Hamilton the bitterest enemy you can imagine.” He had no doubt of it; he had been seated incorrectly at dinner, according to his precedence as British Consul rather than his presumption as the husband of a relative of Lord Fitzgerald. It rankled.

What he complained of was true. Emma was without malice, and so, unsuited to the polite usages of society. As the Duchess of Devonshire had discovered years ago, though respectable enough in other ways, she had no small talk. Lock complained to Sir William.

“The Court has the impression you are a Jacobin,” said Sir William. “You must be on your guard.”

“She has insinuated my wife’s principles are Republican,” said Mr. Lock. This was quite untrue: as everybody knew, his wife had no principles.

“The Queen says that our not going about in society more shows we condemn it. But how can we go, if we are not asked?”

“I shall have Emma put you down on the list,” said Sir William.

“No doubt Your Excellency means well, but what can you do, when there is a
person
so able and so bent upon counteracting you?” said Lock, forced to speak plainly.

“You will have the goodness to refer to my wife by her correct title,” said Sir William. “She is not from Porlock. I do not haul you out of your own mire for the joy of being besplattered by it. You may go.” He was not a man who reacted favorably to the use of force.

“She has poisoned his mind against me,” wrote Lock. “His health is very much broken and his frame is so feeble that even a slight attack of bile, to severe fits of which he has lately been subject, may carry him off. With all this malice, her Ladyship maintains every appearance of civility with expressions of goodwill to us both.” He had no patience with appearances, which was odd, since he had so much difficulty in keeping his own up that surely he might be expected to realize that others did not always find their maintenance easy.

“Public opinion should be formed, but never followed,” said Sir William wearily, telling Emma about Lock. “But since it is our duty to others to do the former, and to ourselves, to avoid the latter, could you not be more discreet?”

“But I am discreet,” wailed Emma, in some bewilderment, for in her lexicon—since she had compiled it
from oral evidence—this word had a merely sexual meaning. She then went off with Nelson to play faro. They would have gone all three, but Sir William these days had to retire by ten.

*

Nelson’s brother William had been baying after succession to the title, and now there were two would bay twice as loud. “Ambition, pride, and a selfish disposition are among the various passions which torment him,” wrote Fanny, who knew nothing of Palermo, where even the heat was passionate. She added that Lord Minto’s eldest son was deaf.

Nelson was not. Nor did he care for the high moral tone to which Admiralty correspondence seemed recently to have risen. “Do not, my dear Lord,” he asked Lord Spencer, “let the Admiralty write harshly to me—my generous soul cannot bear it.”

With that indifference to sensibility which is the chief characteristic of states sensible of the proprieties, the Admiralty wrote harshly anyway, and as he had warned, he could not bear it. He was accused of dalliance.

He scarcely knew what to do. He had had a sound Christian upbringing, which tells us what we shouldn’t do, not what we should. Smiting the heathen is always allowable, but what does one do when one is smitten? For the Song of Solomon, as we know—for we have been told, if the subject must be brought up—is a purely allegorical work. It describes the soul’s union with God. It settles for less.

And though universal applause can drown out the hypercritical, it cannot, alas, drown them outright. When the applause dies down, they become once more audible, like crickets at evening—like Consul Lock.

*

On the 3rd of September, the Queen concluded the display of her gratitude with a
fête
champ
ê
tre
,
the palace, the city, the gardens illuminated, and a counterfeit of the French flagship
Orient
blown up in fireworks and then allowed to sink through the black waters of
the sky, still one more allusion to the Battle of the Nile.

Emma, disguised as the Genius of Taste, but she had risen above mere taste and that showed, led the party forward across the lawn toward a Temple of Fame, on the roof of which squatted Fame herself, blowing a trumpet. Inside the temple stood three wax statues, Nelson in the middle, with Lady Hamilton on one side of him and Sir William on the other. Prince Leopold, a boy of nine, dressed as a midshipman, mounted a stepladder behind the middle statue and placed on its brow a crown of laurel, the dew on its leaves counterfeited in diamonds.

Nelson then embraced the Prince. “You are the guardian angel of our papa and my dominions,” said Leopold, who had been rehearsed, but not enough.

Since wax dissolves in warm weather, the statues were then removed to a lumber room.

*

“
Entre
nous,
I fear their Sicilian Majesties will not follow our advice, which is to return immediately to Naples,” said Sir William. Certainly the King had no mind to. What with venery and Venus, the palace and piscator, and the theatre in the evening as well, he found nothing lacking. Like Charles II—but with the advantage of one more kingdom, if far less brains—he did not propose to go upon his travels again.

“I have wrote you lately but short letters,” Nelson explained to his wife, and it was quite true they got no longer, “for my time is fully occupied that I never set my foot out of the writing room, except now and then in the evening with Sir William and Lady Hamilton to the palace.”

That there was a large state bed in the writing room nagged at him. These palaces, though sumptuous, were apt to be furnished in harum-scarum taste. The bed had been too large to move. It stood at the far end of the writing room, on a dais, and neither had been nor would be occupied.

He had been disappointed in Bronte, for though he
had not seen it, he had hoped to see some ready money from it. Expenses had been heavy.

“In Sicily, money is never ready,” explained Sir William. “And if it is, there is a hand there all the sooner to take it.”

Nelson had been informed that though His Sicilian Majesty’s Government would be delighted to clear the title, this would cost £1000.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” Sir William piously consoled. “They are a literal-minded people, being devout.”

Once, when alone in the room, Nelson had been unable to resist the impulse to look under the embroidered coverlet of the bed, to see if it had sheets and blankets upon it. It had not.

“I have one piece of news to tell you which causes a few is it possible?” reported Fanny. “Admiral Dickson is going to marry a girl of 18 years, surely he has lost his senses. All true, the Admiral saw Miss Willings (a daughter of one of the minor canons at Norwich) not quite three weeks at Yarmouth. He fell desperately in love, gave balls on board ship, then on shore, in short was quite desperate … I heard Admiral and Mrs. Nugent have separated, a difference of temper she says is the cause … Miss Susanna I took to the concert last Thursday. We were entertained by seeing an old nabob make love to a very rich porter brewer’s daughter … she must marry one of the most unpleasant-looking men in the world for the sake of driving four horses.”

“Oh God,” said Nelson. There was a ball to be given on ship that night. The arrangements he had left to Emma.

“Emma who looks as well and as blooming as ever talks of death every day,” wrote Sir William to Lord Minto, with complacency and amusement. “I believe it is the heat and sirocco winds that depress us all for Lord Nelson complains too.”

“I think you had better ask, in strict confidence, that Lord Elgin stop on his way out to Constantinople
and investigate,” said Lord Minto to Lord Grenville. “It seems there is something in the wind.”

“Fox has shown me some most odd letters,” said Lord Grenville to Lord Minto, “from a young relative of his by marriage, a Mr. Charles Lock, who is our Consul at Palermo.”

*

Mr. Lock’s dandiacal addiction to facial hair had resulted in an incident. The King could not abide facial hair, and in particular not side whiskers, which he associated with the Jacobin.

Despite a warning, Lock attended a court ball disguised as a Thames fisherman, though changing the red bonnet for a blue, for fear of giving offense.

“The King says your dress is indecent,” said Sir William, in a flap out of nowhere. “You had better retire, put on a domino, and return.”

Offended, Lock drew himself up to his little height, an acrobatic feat akin to the exertions of a macaw beaking its way back onto its perch.

“I have only to observe to Your Excellency that I wore this identical dress at a masquerade when several of
our
royal family were present; it could therefore never enter my head that it would be offensive here. If the character of my costume
is
economical, I have spared no expense in that of my wife, so it cannot be supposed that I intended any disrespect to this Court thereby.” Mr. Lock was a typical member of the new middle classes and exhibited their morality in the same sense that a bitch in heat would have exhibited herself. “My wife,” he added, “is the Peruvian over there. The one with the fruit on her head.”

“Il
n’était
pas
n
é
cessaire
que
Monsieur
Lock
vint
ici
nous
braver
dans
un
costume
sans
culottes
pour
demontrer
ses
principes!”
roared the Queen, though French is not a gusty language and she always shook like an old bridge when she clattered across it.