Tested by Fate (8 page)

“And if she does?”

“Then I’d see it as my duty to help persuade her of it. And I might add that, given your nephew has gone to such lengths to create such a situation, no doubt he will take a mighty unkind view of a contrary outcome.”

“He will meet his obligations, madam, I will insist on it.”

“I know you will forgive me the liberty I take when I say that don’t reassure me.” She ignored his flash of irritation and carried on talking. “You know something of my life, sir, and can guess what you don’t, just as you know all about Emma’s. I want for her now what I have wanted from the day she was born. That she should not have to bend to the will of any man who—”

“I have no desire to bend her to my will,” he interrupted. “What I desire I would want to be surrendered willingly.”

“And having won that, what then?”

“Security and the knowledge that as long as I live Emma will be a charge upon my honour. And I would add this, I am not like my nephew.”

Mary Cadogan stood up. There was little more to say, except, “I will not assure you that all will work out as required, but if Emma is to be persuaded to see where her advantage lies, then I am the one she will listen to.”

Months of carefully dropped hints and allusions to betrayal did not dent Emma’s attachment to Greville. Throughout the summer and early autumn she still spoke of him as if he was just about to walk through the door, and in such an obsessive way that her mother sometimes wondered if the oppressive heat had addled her brain.

Mary Cadogan had experienced love in her own life, as well as infatuation and all the shades of regard in between. She had also been part of a society of women where the ability to hold on to a fantasy, despite ample contrary evidence, was endemic. But never had she come across something of the depth of Emma’s enthusiasm. It took the transfer from comfortable, warm Naples to cold, lonely Caserta, to bring matters to a head.

Sir William attended the King’s annual hunting expedition, for which he had been allotted what he liked to call his cottage near the Winter Palace, a stab at humour that had some merit since it could accommodate over forty souls. Occupied for two months of the year, it lacked any sense of permanence, but what was worse for those not engaged in blasting every living thing that crossed the landscape, was the lack of company.

Sir William would set off every morning clad in ample clothes to ward off the chill, weapons cleaned and gleaming with fresh oil, several flasks of ardent spirits in his servant’s saddlebags. The hunt would last all day, Ferdinand leading furious charges over his land in pursuit of wolves, foxes, bears, stags, and, when none of those larger creatures would oblige, any small bird demented enough to fly within the range of his weaponry.

At night they consumed the day’s bag, long feasts well oiled with drink, all-male affairs at which the hunters would eat to excess, drink bumper after bumper in endless toasts, sing vulgar songs, exchange lewd anecdotes, and end up in furious arguments regarding the claims of rival noble families. At some point several of Ferdinand’s courtiers, having watched him eat for four men, would be required to accompany him to the privy, there to wait patiently while he burbled on in his nonsensical way and eased the pressure on his bowels.

Back at the cottage, Emma and her mother were left with a few servants, to sit in a draughty house in which every doorway required a bolster, every room and passageway a blazing fire. During the day, if the sky was clear, the aspect of distant snow-capped Apennine peaks was pleasant, but there were rain-filled days, when the landscape seemed to close in on the royal enclosures, making the place feel like a prison.

There were few visitors for Emma, no teachers or aristocrats to sit at her feet and admire her beauty. Outdoors it was nothing like teeming Naples, where the
lazzaroni,
the peasant class of the city, on seeing her face would seek to touch her hem and hail her as the living embodiment of the Madonna. Good rider though she was, Emma was forbidden to join in the Royal Hunt, her status forbidding attendance at an event often observed by the Queen. With no recognisable social standing, she couldn’t be presented to royalty. Indeed, if she was out riding and saw the hunt heading in her
direction
, she had to turn and flee lest she cause a scandal. Accustomed to better treatment, this led to many a tantrum, stormy sessions during which Italy was cursed, the weather likewise, and Sir William castigated for his ill-treatment of a guest he often admitted as his favourite person.

“I shall tell him as soon as he walks through that door, Mother. I have had enough of his damned Italy.”

“And what d’you reckon his response will be, Emma?”

The surprise was genuine, the way she treated the answer seen as obvious. “Why, he will arrange for us to return to London, of course.”

In all the three months since that talk with Sir William, Mary Cadogan had tired of the game she had been playing with Emma. She was also irritated by the ague, brought on by the draughty residence she was forced to occupy. Her joints were stiff, and the morning and evening chill had her sniffing and wiping an almost constant drip from her nose. It was no preparation for a game requiring patience, and neither Sir William nor any of the endless
stream of guests who attended her daughter in Naples was here to restrain her.

“So you’ve finally given up on your Greville ever coming here to you?”

“No!”

“Then you’re a fool, girl. If you still hold a candle for Charles Greville you’re worse than that.”

“How can you say such a thing?”

“Cos it be right. How many letters have you penned these last months?” Eliciting no reply Mary Cadogan continued, in a harsh voice that had as much to do with her condition as it had with her daughter’s stupidity. “Dozens, and not so much as one word to say he’s even read them.”

“It’s his way. It was the same when he was with his uncle in Wales.”

“His way is to ignore you, then, lest you be right by his side.”

Emma threw herself into a chair, hand over her brow like a lovelorn stage heroine. “You cannot fathom how much I miss him.”

“Ain’t hard, girl,” Mary Cadogan replied, with scant concern to be polite, “since you never leave off telling me.”

“You must want to go home as well, Mother. This house, and this particular climate, little suits you.”

“Cold air suits better than cold charity,” Mary Cadogan snapped.

“What does that mean?”

That was the moment at which maternal patience fractured, for reasons numerous and manifest: but especially Emma’s blindness to the fact that Sir William was, and had been since their arrival, paying court to her. How could she not see his endless attention to her and her education, his occasional salacious sallies, for what they were?

Personal discomfort also played a part to shorten Mary’s temper, the aches and pains that racked her body, but most of all it was the weight of keeping a secret from someone who had every right to her support. It was as if a dam had been breached, and a torrent
of words told Emma just what arrangements had been made for her, and just how she stood in regard to the man she professed to love.

“She fled the room in tears.”

“I wish she had been made aware more gently,” Sir William replied. His voice was slightly slurred from the drink he had consumed in the King’s company and his face was flushed, but what was most striking was his air of depression.

“You’re more’n fond of her, aren’t you, sir?” asked Mary Cadogan gently.

“I won’t deny it,” he said sadly. “I made no secret to you or my nephew how attracted I was to Emma. But it was an appreciation of her beauty you saw in London. My doubts as to the wisdom of her coming to Italy you must be able to guess at, leaving the bed of a young and virile fellow to go to that of an old and somewhat diminished man.”

“That, I sense, has changed.”

“Do you look at her, Mrs Cadogan, and see what I see?”

“I see my girl, your honour. I see beauty and her lively nature. I see her make you and other men laugh. I see the look of lust that your friends take care you should not notice.”

“I notice, madam,” he replied, staring at the burning logs, adding a small, humourless laugh. “You have no idea how it pleases me to do so. I am flattered by it, especially since Emma seems so ingenuous as to positively encourage the notion that I am her lover.”

“She wants to touch often those she is fond of.”

“If I didn’t know better I would think she was teasing me, flattering my vanity as Charles did my mind, leading me towards an indiscretion so that she could play the shocked innocent and embarrass me.”

“My bones ache for the chill, Sir William. I am about to help myself to that ardent spirit you recommended. Might I be so bold as to suggest that you would benefit from the same?”

“Let it be so.”

Half of the bottle of grappa disappeared while they talked of the spectre in the background, a distraught young woman, who might at this very moment be sobbing herself to sleep. Mary Cadogan wiped a maudlin tear from her eye, then took another stiff drink to kill the temptation to weep.

“It just came out, what with her on yet again about going home.”

Sir William had a lump in his throat. The open admission that Emma had captured his heart had escaped suddenly.

“It is, you must understand, an expression of feeling I thought to leave behind in callow youth. To be moonstruck at my age is to be made ridiculous.”

“Only if it is not requited, your honour,” sniffed Mary Cadogan.

“What chance is there that it might be?”

“You must own that I know my Emma better than you, sir. She might seem to you just a flighty creature whose heart has been won by an undeserving knave. But she is far from that, albeit in her mind’s eye she has a vision of a future that cannot be.”

“What are you telling me, madam?” Sir William demanded.

Mary Cadogan drained her glass, as if by doing so she would fortify her train of thought. “You must offer her better, sir.”

“I cannot compete with Charles Greville.”

“I don’t mean in the bedchamber,” Mary Cadogan replied testily. “I will not say it is a place where Emma cares naught for who she’s with, but you must know that your nephew was not the first man to bed her.”

“I cannot hold that against her.”

“Nor should you, sir, never having had to make your way in our world. It’s not the same as yours.”

“It is not so very different, Mrs Cadogan.”

“Two things must be done, sir and the first is to persuade her that there is no future for her with your nephew.”

“That is not something of which I am certain.”

“But I am, sir,” Mary Cadogan protested. “The next thing to
do is to present her with a picture more rosy than the one she harbours now.”

“I have no assurance I can do that.”

“Then send us home.”

“What cruel alternatives.”

“Which be the lesser of twin evils?”

S
IR
W
ILLIAM
was out hunting again the following day, so was spared Emma’s ranting and the need to listen to the words used about him and his nephew, language so coarse that even her mother pretended to be shocked. It wasn’t the cursing that upset Mary Cadogan, so much as the effect of her daughter’s shouting on a head suffering from the previous night’s excess.

Greville was a lecherous, penny-pinching arse, his uncle a spavined old goat, her mother a snake in the grass. Rogue, scoundrel, villain, cheat were spattered about among swearwords that would have shamed a sailor, the whole tirade liberally sprinkled with bouts of weeping and demands to be taken back to the arms of the man she loved. There were endless dashes to the escritoire to start angry letters that ended up as balls of parchment on the floor. Mary Cadogan held her tongue, waiting for the storm to pass. But, with less of a sore head as the day progressed she offered some wise words regarding the good of flogging a dead horse, which reduced Emma to another bout of weeping.

Mary Cadogan was glad now that she had spoken out. The matter was in the open, there to be discussed when Emma calmed down. And she flattered herself that she understood her daughter, passionate and less versed in the application of wisdom to any predicament. When the time came to make a decision, she could rely on Emma’s good sense. In that she was too sanguine by half.

Even back in Naples, a less glamorous location in midwinter, Emma refused to give up on Greville, and brooding on that made her a less engaging companion for those who called at the Palazzo Sessa. Sir William was the first to drop away, happier at the gimcrack Neapolitan court—anything to be spared the accusatory looks of his beautiful young guest. Others who had that summer sat at Emma’s
feet found her sudden recourse to tears, without any indication as to what had triggered them, tiresome, especially since she made no move to enlighten them.

Matters were scarcely improved by the arrival of letters and gifts from Greville, finally stung into a response by Emma’s anguished pleas. The blue hat and a pair of gloves were well received. The enclosed cold missive, which advised Emma to “Oblige my uncle,” was enough to near break her heart.

It took the festivities of the Nativity, a weeklong orgy of celebration of the Birth of Christ, before even the glimmer of a chink showed in her longing. It was a time to be out in the streets, to see the endless processions with hand-carried tableaux—three wise men, the shepherds in the stable, the Virgin holding her child under a glowing star, made by rich clans determined to display their wealth. The singing of Christmas hymns in the crowded squares of Naples was uplifting to Emma, but not to Mary Cadogan, who dismissed it as Papist nonsense.

The effect on Emma was marked. She was much taken by the natural theatricality of the people, which lifted her mood. Perhaps it was the commemoration of that birth, when she had been denied a life with her own child, that finally made Emma realise the connection was broken: that a man who could sever so cruelly his relationship with a child who might be his daughter could steel himself to deny anyone.

Drink helped, and her mother encouraged her, knowing that wine-induced moods, though tending towards the maudlin, at least contained an acknowledgement of the facts. When she felt it would serve, Mary Cadogan encouraged Sir William to resume his courtship, glad to see that although Emma struggled she did so to accommodate not discourage him. Another man might have stumbled, but Sir William had the bedrock skills of his diplomacy. Emma gave silent acknowledgement, in mood not words, which indicated to Sir William that she was prepared to go further than mere gallantry.

All that was needed now was the moment.

“It is a rare thing, Mrs Cadogan, yet pleasant all the same.”

Mary Cadogan nodded to accept the compliment. It had been her idea that, after all the mad revelry of the last three weeks, masques, balls, and open-air festivities, a private supper would be a blessing. Thus, instead of the usual nightly throng that graced the Ambassador’s table, or a coach trip through the crowded streets to dine at another board, they were having a quiet, intimate meal, just the three of them, in his private apartments.

Soft candlelight played over the stone statuary and white porcelain vases, blue glass and red, the table a brighter pool in the centre. Servants came and went as silently as ghosts, as if they, too, knew what was afoot and were determined to ensure success. The paintings on the walls, each with a candle to illuminate them, seemed to aid the intention, being composed of cupids and nymphs, or lovers separated by a fate they longed to overcome. Even if she thought herself detached from what was happening, Mary Cadogan knew that she was part of the performance. Her role had been in organising this, her presence adding a veneer of innocence. It was pleasing to see the pretence played to perfection by the two other participants.

Emma was all gaiety, dressed in a gown of light muslin that betrayed the full flower of the figure underneath, drinking a little more quickly than she should, making occasional conversational gaffes that caused her to giggle and Sir William smile. It was the way she had worked for Kathleen Kelly. There was no intimacy of the kind that would occur between friends. It was as though Sir William and Emma had only just met. An unkind observer would say it was a tart’s performance but Mary Cadogan didn’t care, because it was a damned fine one, so fine that withdrawing, which she had to do, was painful. She longed to be a fly on the wall, to see how Sir William Hamilton would manage the final step from surrogate uncle and detached benefactor to lover.

He used his latest purchase, a large urn dug up by another collector from the ashen mud of Pompeii, to set the mood. It was
a vase that carried classicism to a point well beyond the borders of good taste, depicting an orgy of sexual couplings. Men and women were entwined, of course, but there were other images of guests consorting with a variety of animals or with their own sex. Standing behind her, Sir William slowly turned the vase to point out each detail of the frieze.

He was taller than Emma, and the scent of her body, rising on the heat from her skin, was overwhelming. The sight of her exposed shoulders, catching the candlelight, made breathing an effort. With his head by hers, as he leant forward to indicate another point of interest, he brushed her auburn hair. Emma leant back slightly, affording him an alluring view of her voluptuous breasts.

“I fear we are a sorry crew compared to the ancients, but they had their pagan gods as examples.” He pointed to a reclining female figure, naked, head back. Even with primitive art it was obvious that she was enjoying the attentions of her lover, on his knees, head between her legs. His voice was soft and hoarse, low enough to vibrate though her head and neck. “And this, Emma, this creature in profile, is so like you. All that is different is the adornment of the hair. I have often wished you would dress your hair like a Roman courtesan.”

Emma experienced none of the sensations she had enjoyed with Uppark Harry or Greville at his best, that racing of the blood that made every nerve end tingle. But she did feel flushed, and the languor induced by good food and wine made leaning into Sir William seem natural. Nine months of being denied the company of her lover also had an effect on her, since she enjoyed physical love as much as she longed for emotional security.

And though it was something of which she was unaware of, Emma Hart was honest. The road to this moment had been long and painful, streaked with nocturnal tears. Even though tonight had been a performance, she lacked the duplicity necessary to be a whore with an eye for a prize. The part of her being that longed for gaiety—singing, dancing, and drinking—was balanced against a need
to feel secure, to be loved for herself, not just for her accomplishments in the bedchamber. So, having finally acceded to the inevitable, she would not tease the man who offered her that.

There was no resistance as Sir William placed his hand flat on her belly, pulling her backwards so that she could feel him through her thin garment. She closed her eyes for pleasure’s sake, not disgust, as he leant to kiss her shoulder. This he did several times, each touch of the lips and gentle movement of his hand interspersed with paeans to her looks, her hair, her body, her accomplishments, and his deep regard for her. He pointed to the reclining courtesan again. “I would give much to see you thus.”

To oblige him, and slip out of a thin dress lacking undergarments, was easy. She didn’t turn right away, aware that he had stepped away and was silently admiring her back. After several seconds he moved forward, a hand on her elbow to spin her round. She stood, one foot slightly raised while his eyes ranged over her body. He cupped his hand under one breast, lifting it slightly so that the erect nipple pointed straight towards him.

“Truly, Emma, you are fit for an emperor.”

The touch had made her shudder, sending a clear signal to her putative lover that she could match his passion. He bent and kissed that same nipple, at the same time taking her hand, so that when he raised his head again he could lead her to his bedchamber. Accustomed to a man who was young and passionate, Emma was surprised and pleased by Sir William’s gentility. What he lacked in ardour he more than compensated for in patience and experience. He was adept with hand, tongue, and voice, mixing flattery and touch to achieve his purpose, which was to raise Emma Hart to a pitch of sexual expectation so high that the pleasure she craved must follow. In doing so he worked the same effect upon himself, leaving his new lover with the impression of a man not far from the full flush of youth.

Emma returned to her own apartments halfway through the night, wrapped in Sir William’s dressing gown, leaving him to his
slumbers. Her mother was asleep too, in a chair, head lolling forward, probably too anxious or curious to go to bed and intent on waiting up for her daughter to return.

Looking at her, mouth open, jaw slack, Emma went through a gamut of emotions: anger at her mother’s machinations, gratitude for the concern that had prompted them, a renewed stab of passion for Greville, swiftly followed by a feeling bordering on hate. What had happened tonight she knew was not enough. She could take pleasure from Sir William’s company both in bed and out, but one coupling did not make for a commitment. That expression nearly made her laugh out loud. She thought she had that very thing with Uppark Harry and Greville, only to see it snuffed out by indifference.

The balance of what was on offer had been spelt out, albeit with much circumlocution, by her mother. Fine bones and youthful mettle were all very well in a lover, but they did not keep you fed and clothed. Beauty, her only asset in the eyes of most men, was not going to last for ever. If she craved comfort, and she did, then any arrangement that provided it was better than one that promised only passion.

“I must be more like you, Ma,” she said, “and look out for what suits me in advance.”

Mary Cadogan opened her eyes and, seeing what Emma was wearing, Sir William’s patterned dressing gown, she smiled and nodded.

“Did I do right, Ma?”

Her mother’s voice had the croaky quality of one who had drunk too much wine and slept badly. “How’s to know, child. Only time will tell us that.” She heaved herself stiffly out of the chair, a hand going to ease her aching back. “But I will say that what went afore is dead and buried now, even if you find that hard to accept. Take it from one who knows, that pain don’t last for ever. A mind on what’s to come is worth a ton weight of memory. I take it the Chevalier didn’t disappoint?” she added, with arched eyebrows.

“No,” Emma replied softly.

She was unable to give the true answer; that however accomplished Sir William seemed, however kind and wise, she was not in love with him. For five years she had shared her bed with a man she loved, and nothing merely physical could compare. She felt empty.

“You do like him?”

“Yes.”d

Mary Cadogan hooked her daughter’s arm to lead her to her own bedchamber. “Then that is where the likes of us start from, Emma. We can ask no more’n a chance, and if what we are faced with ain’t too low to contemplate, then we can bear with it.”

“I want Greville to pay for this.”

“His type don’t suffer. Take what you can get and leave the rest to God.”

“There should be more.”

“Happen there is, girl. And happen you will find it.”