Sir William (28 page)

“Ma, you do look a perfect badger,” said Emma.

The badger is a neat and tidy animal, and what is past is past. “It was my best dress,” said Mrs. Cadogan. It had been her best mobcap, too.

The thing they had in common, Emma saw, was that they could both outstare you. She became evasive. “Nelson looks shocking, and I look a fright,” she said. “Would packed ice help, do you suppose?”

“Silly girl, where would you get ice here?” Mrs. Cadogan took her own miniature and said good night, put the miniature away, took it out, went to bed, blew the candle out and went to sleep assuaged. Sir William, when he thought of it, always did the right thing, which was more than she could say for some she knew, even if sometimes it did take him twenty years.

*

Unfortunately the future is soon enough that imaginary time, the present, which is neither here nor there, but painted on the fore edge, and so, unless you know the trick, invisible. The present is only a riptide between two seas, a consequence of the past, dangerous, given to froth, or else invisible. The present looks placid, but has the strength to drag us down.

Sir William was in a jitter about finances. No sense could be made of Greville, and since teeth cannot be extracted at a distance, it was necessary to return to England to procure cash. But that was a voluntary excursion. This was worse.

“I have been recalled,” said Sir William bleakly; he could face ingratitude, but not impertinence. “How can they? I have been here for thirty-six years.”

He had not only become Italianized, but
italicized.
And now, to be dismissed with bad spelling, without so much as a
nota
bene.

“I shall protest to the dear Queen,” said Emma, who felt herself suddenly cast out again, a feeling she had forgotten for years.

“My dear, I am still a British subject. I can be subjected to any indignity my government pleases. That is all the term means.”

“But we could stay on here.”

“We are people of position. What sort of people do you suppose we would become, if position we had none? We should not exist. We should be nonentities.”

Emma went to the Queen. “She is half dead with grief,” she said, when she came back.

“How unlike her. She so seldom does anything by halves.”

“She says she will try to persuade the King to write to England on our behalf. Who are they sending out?”

“A young man named Paget. He is the son of Lord Uxbridge.”

“It is Lock, depend upon it,” said Emma. “He has been our undoing. I should never have caught him with all that furniture, and he should never have grown side whiskers.”

The King, however, would do anything to thwart his wife, and so did nothing to help. Sir William did not come to hunt often enough these days, and when he did he was such a shambles there was no fun in him any more.

“Yesterday, on your departure,” wrote the Queen, “I endured a scene of frenzy, shouts, and shrieks, threats to kill you, throw you out the window, call your husband to complain you had turned your back. I am extremely unhappy, and with so many troubles I have only two alternatives, either to go away or die of sorrow. The accursed Paget is in Vienna.”

It was where Lord Elgin had paused earlier; it seemed to be where the devil stopped to change horses. Maria Carolina had even tried the kid gloves, but to no avail. Sir William was old. He did not shoot with a steady arm. He must go. And besides, Lady Hamilton had turned her back on His Majesty as recently as the last time he had pinched her, which was eight years ago.

“Furthermore,” said Ferdinand, “I am no longer moved by white kid gloves,” and flung them in her face.

“Den
Dank,
Dame,
begehr’
ich
nicht!”
For of course he knew the literature of his fetish and had been saving this for years. At last he had spoken German to her. He was not deceived. Sir William was used up, that woman now ran everything, and what was worse, was a friend of the Queen. So let her leave. It was one of those periods when Ferdinand’s affections for his wife were in their waning phase.

“Und
verläβt
sie
zur
selben
Stunde,”
said the Queen, her worst fears realized.

Sir William was not surprised. The last three
battu
had been held without him.

“But what are we to do?” wailed Emma.

“Why, make the best of things,” said Sir William. “We were going home for a visit anyway; and perhaps when the fishing season comes around again, so will he, for I can still fish.”

He had no desire to show his chagrin, which was scarcely in a fit state to be shown. It is so with all our emotions: when we feel them is not the time to show them, for they are not then at their best. They are then as useless as a shriveled balloon. It is only inflation makes them presentable.

“We will return,” he said, with absolute certainty, since he did not believe they would. “Do not fret. And as for that, we are not yet gone. But I wish Nelson were not at Malta.”

So did Nelson. He applied for leave to return to Palermo. His health demanded it, he said. Troubridge called him a fool direct. Ball wrote to Emma. But go he
must. If it was not his health, it was the Goddess Hygeia, demanded him back.

“All I shall say is to express my extreme regret that your health should be such as to oblige you to quit your station off Malta,” said Keith, his superior, who knew all about the Goddess Hygeia and did not like her. Health, to a well-bred Englishman, is always an unwholesome thing.

“She sits at the councils and rules everybody and everything,” reported Lady Minto.

Lord Spencer, the Admiralty Lord, was plainer. “Having observed that you have been under the necessity of quitting your station off Malta on account of your health—which I am persuaded you could not have thought of doing without such necessity—it appeared to me much more advisable for you to come home at once than to be obliged to remain inactive at Palermo. I am joined in the opinion by all your friends here that you will be more likely to recover your health and strength in England than in an inactive situation at a foreign court, however pleasing the respect and gratitude shown to you for your services may be.”

“It does not seem clear whether he will go home,” said Lord Minto. “He does not seem at all conscious of the sort of discredit he has fallen into, or the cause of it, for he still writes, not wisely, about Lady H. and all that. But it is hard to condemn and use ill a hero, as he is in his own element, for being foolish about a woman who has art enough to make fools of many wiser than an admiral.”

“Gossip makes the same ripples, no matter what the stone,” wrote Fanny to her son Josiah, who had written to her about Nelson.

Josiah should be beaten with his own broomstick, on his own behind. Could none of them understand
friend
ship
?

Apparently not.

“Our private characters are to be stabbed in the dark,” said Emma, denying everything, and besides, nothing had happened yet. She had been given the Cross of Malta and
was now a Chanoiness of that order. Nelson had arranged it, and the Queen was having the order itself set in diamonds for her.

“Mr. Paget is to come by land,” wrote Fanny. “I have seen some of his plate, which is fine, but there is not much of it.”

“Give my love to Lady Minto and kiss the children for your sincere and attached Emma,” wrote Emma, to Lord Minto.

“Indeed you shall not,” said Lady Minto, who had a horror of disease. “She is a hussy. It would not be safe. Who knows whose lips those lips have touched? It would be better to burn the infected thing.”

Minto smiled and filed the letter away.

*

“Is it a letter from your wife?” asked Emma. “What does she say?”

“That everyone is ill,” Nelson told her, with a grimace. “It is what she always says. She is a born nurse. She haunts the wards. Lord St. Vincent has the stone; Susannah has fever in the bowels. My father is not well. Captain Pearson has died on his way home from Honduras, of yellow fever; and she has even been to Admiral Bligh, who says that yellow fever is indeed dreadful. He is the breadfruit tree man. She writes these notes to cheer me.”

“One would expect her to dwell upon the cheerful side of things.”

Nelson should not have spoken so of his wife, but he felt bitter. “Oh, she dwells there, all right, but her visits are paid to the other side of the house. It is about her visits she writes principally.”

“I believe Mrs. Walpole will give me up for being too humdrum,” wrote Fanny. It was damnable. To love another man’s wife is, in the proper circles, customary; to love one’s best friend’s wife reduces her to Bathsheba at once. Why did Emma have to look at him that way?

*

She was only idly wondering. She could not be called scheming, ever. It was merely that, a starfish, she had
been born with an instinct as to which rock to cling to and in which storm, so as not to be overwhelmed. A spume of indignation might flare forty feet into the air, but still, there she was, clinging, snug and safe. In calmer seas she swam pleasantly, involuntarily, with the tide, which drew her on.

She dropped her eyes. She had been worrying about whether or not Sir William could survive an English winter. If he could not, what then?

“Do you realize,” she said, “that Acton has married his thirteen-year-old niece, during Carnival. Why on earth would he do that? He is sixty-four.”

“Why, to save appearances, I expect,” said Sir William luxuriously. “He had been a bachelor too long, a phenomenon imperfectly understood in this country, but finally tumbled to. No doubt people were beginning to talk.” To be twice Emma’s age was bad enough; to be five times as old as one’s wife could scarcely admit of comment.

“He says he wishes to retire with her to England.”

“Now whyever would he do that?” asked Sir William, genuinely surprised, “when he can quite easily go into hiding here until the girl is of age and the whole thing looks respectable?”

“It will make the Queen feel her age.”

“No doubt it makes Sir John feel his,” said Sir William, speaking from certainty. “Paget has arrived in Naples and wants my house here. I told him he could not have it, as I meant to return next winter.”

“Then where will he stay?”

“For all I care, he can stay with Lock, and they can with profit extract the wax from each other’s ears—the better to enjoy the mutual din,” said Sir William, who did not mean to be unfair, merely unkind.

Nelson, who wished to help, without a word to anyone gave orders to detach two line-of-battle ships from the investment of Malta—for he was given to these sneaky streaks of kindness—so that at least the Hamiltons might leave Palermo in appropriate state. A cruise
was what they needed to take their minds off the terrors of departure.

Sir Alexander Ball bade Emma make herself free of Malta. “We could make up a snug whist party every evening for Sir William, but we should fall very short in our attempts to amuse you, when we consider the multiplicity of engagements and amusements you have every day at Palermo,” he wrote.

So it was arranged. Nelson had only one favor to ask. Could they not leave Miss Knight behind this time? There was no harm in her, but she had a habit to spring out at you from unexpected places, tablet in hand, to add to her memoirs.

Paget arrived at Lock’s. Whatever there might or might not be for supper (Mrs. L. was a frightful housekeeper), you could always count on at least an earful there.

There was no direct communication between the Embassy and the Consulate. Lock had grown his side whiskers again. Apart from that, he was good for nothing but to curry favor and stamp passports.

“And even at that, he is not frank.”

Paget, entrusted with an errand upon the successful outcome of which his future depended (to see Ferdinand bullied back to Naples, where he belonged), was eager to take up the reins of office, in order to put the horse before the cart. He would not, Sir William thought, be popular for long, if this was the line he meant to fish with, for the King preferred to stay where he was. One must always distinguish between the man and the office, however, and Sir William was almost prepared to do so.

“The Queen calls him ‘the fatal Paget,’” said Emma.

“No, not fatal. Merely terminal,” said Sir William. “But even the condemned have yet some time to live between the order and its execution, and I do not intend to be carried out the Appian Gate in a litter. I shall await the boat at Ostia instead.” He proposed to hem and haw until the
Foudroyant
arrived and he could make his departure with some pomp. Paget should not get in until he was assured of getting out.

“Sir William cannot help adding that his sincere attachment to Their Majesties, their royal family and their Kingdom is such,” he wrote to Acton, “that if he was not fully persuaded that in a very few months he may have the satisfaction of returning again, he should at this moment be in the utmost despair.”

Persuaded, but not convinced.

“Lady Hamilton is busy crying you up as a Jacobin,” said Lock. “It is the line she hews to.” And he eyed Paget’s lack of side whiskers. “It is what she calls all of us, so if that is what we are, we gain no distinction thereby. She could not endure to remain at Palermo shorn of her rays in the capacity of a private individual.”

“Lady Hamilton is none of your damn business,” said Nelson, who had been asked to intercede.

“I am sorry to say that Lord Nelson has given more or less in to all this nonsense. His Lordship’s health is I fear sadly impaired [he had noticed a bloodshot eye], and I am assured that his fortune is fallen into the same state in consequence of great losses which both his Lordship and Lady Hamilton have sustained at faro and other games of hazard,” Paget wrote home. Paget did not believe in games of hazard. He believed only in a sure thing, except of course for politics, where no money is involved—at least above the table—so it is a game of skill only.

“I merely wish to present my credentials, in order to proceed upon the business with which I was charged,” he told Sir William.