Sir William (35 page)

But not this winter. But not just yet.

“Ah, Mrs. Cadogan, how extremely kind of you,” he said, not noticing what she had brought, but she was the only visitor he had had that day. A thoroughly respectable little person, Mrs. Cadogan, no fool, but she knew her place.

“Would you like me to stoke the fire up for you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It never does any harm to drowse in a cosy room,” said Mrs. Cadogan, and vigorously stoked it up.

“I put another log on,” she said, surveying the bed and the old man in it in his stocking cap, and his face still the color of bronze. At the door she paused with her hand on the handle, peering through the shadows anxiously. “Good night, Sir William,” she said, with almost a smile, and left.

It was not until then that he realized he had been waiting for her to come in. She sometimes did at this hour, these days. The stuff she had brought was tea, a sovereign remedy, so they said, for snow blindness.

“Ah well,” he said, rather touched on the whole, and picking up his Seneca again, plowed firmly through the night, whose lapping about the bed no longer bothered him. Once past midnight, and he was safe for another day, and the maid would be in soon enough, to draw the curtains and exchange the tea for fresh.

The permutations of the affections are peculiar, devious, reassuring and odd, Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh had married his housekeeper, and not a peep out of him since.

*

“Sir William’s feeling poorly.”

“Who is not?” demanded Emma, surveying, between spasms, a bowl of hot water, some towels, pillows stuffed against the crack under the door, and other signs of imminence.

“It’s a good thing for you I was the victim of a diverse youth,” said Mrs. Cadogan grimly. “Here it comes, so push!”

*

“Curious,” said Sir William, “it is well past Christmas
Eve, and yet methought I heard one crying ‘Child.’” But since it was cold and he was not really awake, he went back to sleep again.

Over the mantel was a mirror for company, but not being awake, he could scarcely look for the reassurance of seeing himself in it. So the room was completely empty. He had decided to lie low.

*

Nelson, who had known him for years, found that he knew very little about Mr. Thompson, really, except that since he had had a child, then he must indeed be married, and a fig for Josiah. Poor Fanny had written to say that the only offense she could imagine herself guilty of was pushing Josiah forward, and very well, if that was what had come between them, Josiah was of age now to fend for himself, so she would cast him adrift if Nelson would but return. That she should make so scandalous a proposal merely showed her for the monster that she was; as Mrs. Thompson said, What mother, no matter what the provocation, would desert her own child?

Nelson chanted to himself as he capered around the cabin.

“And what’s all that about?” asked a swobber.

“He has his moods, but it looks to me like an extra round of rum, though who Thompson is, I’m damned if I know.”

For the Vice-Admiral of the Blue was dancing a lopsided jig before a portrait on the cabin wall and singing himself hoarse with:

Which put him in mind at once of cryptograms, anagrams and peacock pie.

By eight and a half pounds.

A child. A child. “Oh, you are kind and good to an old friend with one arm, a broken head and no teeth,” he said. Since Horatia could not be recognized as his in England, she should have the revenues of Bronte instead, if not—in time—somehow, the title too. She had been begotten in the South. Bronte was hers by natural right.

*

“Never before,” said Sir William, encountering Emma and Mrs. Cadogan on the stairs, “have I known you to return a bonnet.” For Mrs. Cadogan had by the strap a brown leather traveling hatbox, bearing the Hamilton crest, and punched on the lid, oddly enough, with a series of small holes.

“Never before,” said Emma, “have I been put to the necessity of doing so,” and out she swept into the snow, toward a town hack which had been summoned for her, apparently.

Sir William was relieved. He had had no desire to add
a Hamiltonian to the Harleian miscellany, and applauded the discretion, while deploring the need for it.

*

“They say,” said Greville, “that the King is about to go to the Pagoda again.”

In his set, the King’s infirmity was referred to in this way, its being well known, though never to be publicly mentioned, that when George III was about to go mad, the Chinese Pagoda at Kew fascinated him so much that he was apt to behave in such unseemly ways—from the ground floor to the top, and in the sight of all—that the doors had to be barred against him.

“They have been locked,” said Greville, “for a week.” Sir William, who had once diverted the Society of Dilettantes with a description of Priapian worship fifty miles from Naples, was prudent not to draw a parallel.

“If the Prince of Wales is made Regent, perhaps he can be persuaded to do something about Milford Haven,” Greville persisted. “And since he likes his women plump, and Emma is now plump, why should he not be charmed into it?”

It was worth considering.

When Sir William got home, he found Emma just returned, with the hatbox open beside her, trying on a bonnet before the mirror.

“There,” she said. “Is that not much better?”

“I cannot judge. I do not know for what it is a substitute,” said Sir William, and in passing, got a whiff either of starched muslin, newly ironed, or of baby, the two smells being similar. “I wonder if we could not have the Prince of Wales to dine, for he has always wanted to hear you sing duets with the Banti creature.”

Emma gave him what is commonly called a long look, but since it is well known that the best way a woman may put a devoted lover at his ease is to make him jealous, wrote off to Nelson at once, to announce the event.

“Sir William,” came the answer right back, “should say to the Prince, that situated as you are, it would be highly improper for you to admit H.R.H. I know his
aim is to have you for a mistress. The thought so agitates me that I cannot write.” Which is what we always say when we are about to write ten pages.

A thoroughly accomplished woman, Emma went on to the next reassuring gesture, which is to accuse the dotard of infidelity.

“Suppose I did say,” he snarled back, “that the West Country women wore black stockings, what is it more than if you was to say what puppies all the present young men are? Sir William ought to know his views
are
dishonorable
.” He longed for the day when, her “uncle” dead, he and Emma might retire to Bronte. “My longings for you, both person and conversation, you may readily imagine. What must be my sensations at the idea of sleeping with you.”

In the next day’s post, he felt horrible.

“All your pictures are before me [they had a low cunning dishonest look]. What will Mrs. Denis say, and what will she sing [the Banti had not been available, Mrs. Denis was the next best thing]—Be calm, be Gentle, the Wind has changed? Do you go to the opera tonight? They tell me he sings well.” He threatened to drop her unless she dropped H.R.H.

Well, that had gone exceedingly well, thought Emma, and as the third step is reassurance by
indirection,
wrote off to Mrs. William Nelson to say she was so ill that she could not have His Royal Highness to dinner on Sunday, which would not vex her.

“I glory in your conduct,” said Nelson. “As to letting him hear you sing, I only hope he will be struck deaf and you dumb, sooner than such a thing should happen.” He made two enclosures, the one the draft of his will, providing handsomely for Horatia (it was a second draft); the other the news that “that person has her separate maintenance, let us be happy, that is in our power; for mine is a heart susceptible and true.”

All of which was all very well, but as everyone knows, even the most susceptible heart has to be tuned occasionally; to screw it up to concert pitch requires some
effort, and an aptitude for female arts was never known to work any woman ill.

“My God,” thought Emma, with that emotion unique to the born artist who finds that something he has done easily for the first time has at the same time been done exceeding well,
“I
am
professional.
” She might now look out upon the female creation with a scorn that hitherto had been limited to their lips, not hers. “I may do what I will.”

Alas, money was still a problem, for the fine never pay so well as the fashionable arts, which in their turn are the more expensive. But never mind, she was a woman, and if getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, why then it was only just that the labor should be evenly divided—the one half to the one sex, the other to the other. And any woman who has just lost eight and a half pounds, why of course she must have new dresses; it is a saving really, for they cost only a little more new than the price of altering the old ones. Frills, furbelows and bows do more to rock the human heart than vases.

The first-floor library was a litter of bits and pieces ripped from the walls of the Palazzo Sesso, and vases everywhere, a few fresh barnacled, that Greville had managed to salvage from the wreck in the Scilly Roads, so it was only civil not to notice in Greville’s bedroom a small, late-Roman bronze that had been packed, he was sure, in the
Colossus
cargo. Just as civilly, Greville did not mention it either. However, better there than gathering water weeds in twenty fathoms, and he had been honest about the vases, anyhow. Not one of a wet provenance had come recently upon the market.

One was only in England temporarily, to visit friends, but all the same, Sir William was aware that that walk through the weeds at Segesta had been the last one, though there were signs of hope, for the snow in Green Park was thawing into slush, and the sun did not set now until as late as 4:30 in the afternoon.

On a vase the color of chicken bone, a piper played pan pipes, a woman danced, and in an invisible meadow, flowers bloomed.

*

Nelson arrived suddenly, on leave of absence. He wanted to see the child.

“But it is quite safe. It is with a wet nurse in Marylebone,” said Emma, puzzled. “And since you have only three days …”

“I wish to go there now.”

“But I can’t go now. Sir William will need me when he comes in.”

“Damn Sir William. What is the woman’s name?”

“Gibson,” said Emma. “Oh how my heart cries out to see it! But as you see, I cannot come.” And she began to do her hair.

*

It was a small, mean, respectable house with a worn
scrap of drugget on the parlor floor. He would sit on the floor and play with the child by the hour, or rather, since the toys he had bought were too big for it, he would play with the toys while he watched the child. When it began to howl, he was dismayed.

“You must forgive me,” he said. “I have never before been alone with a baby.”

“And what is the mother like?”

“The mother like?” He blinked. “Oh, Mrs. Thompson. She is dead, poor lady. She died of joy.”

Mrs. Gibson accepted this without a quiver. “Well, I’ll say this for the dead, they do pay regular,” she said. “And Mr. Thompson?”

“Oh he’s a shabby fellow,” said Nelson happily, experimenting with small fingers soft as seed pearls.

Mrs. Gibson, who had been found by Mrs. Cadogan, liked no-nonsense better than fine words, and tips on top of salary best of all, but now she had seen both bottles, so to speak, curiosity was gratified; she was willing to keep mum.