The Volcano Lover (27 page)

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Their trio seemed so natural. The Cavaliere had a new young man in his life, more son than nephew. His wife had someone she could admire as she had never admired anyone before. The hero had friends such as he had never had; he was genuinely flattered by the admiration of the elegant old Cavaliere, overwhelmed by the warmth and attentiveness of his young wife. And, beyond the exaltation of ever more intense friendship, they were united in feeling themselves actors in a great historical drama; saving England, and Europe, from French conquest and from republicanism.

The hero felt quite recovered and was preparing to go back to sea. There were dispatches and letters to write, to ministers and influential titled friends in England and to other British commanders in the Mediterranean. There were meetings with Neapolitan ministers and with the royal couple and with the deposed but still powerful anti-French prime minister. The Bourbon government was perpetually in council about whether to stand up to the French, with the Cavaliere urging them to send an army to Rome and the hero eager for Naples to enter the fray, thereby becoming an open ally of (that is, military base for) England, adding his influential support to the plan. And once this ill-judged expedition had been approved, there were army maneuvers to review, and all this in an emotional brew of patriotism, feelings of self-importance, frustration, anxiety, and lively contempt for most of the local actors on the scene … as agents of a world empire always feel when struggling to have their way in a far-off southern satrapy rich in traditions of corruption and indolence, where they are trying to inculcate martial virtues and the necessity of resisting the opposing superpower.

His superiors sent word that he was expected with his squadron in Malta. Returning from a fruitless meeting with the Council of State, he had written Earl St. Vincent that he could hardly wait to sail away from this country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels. But he didn't want to leave the Cavaliere and his wife.

After three weeks of convalescence and adulation, in mid-October, a few days after the
Colossus
left for England with the Cavaliere's vases, the hero sailed for Malta in search of new engagements with the enemy. The King, knowing that he was expected to head an army and spend some time in his palace in the middle of stony Rome, went to Caserta to get some hunting in first. The Cavaliere removed to Caserta, too, after giving orders for the packing of his pictures to begin—just in case, just in case. And from the great lodge his wife wrote each day to the hero, telling him how much he is missed. In the evening the Cavaliere returned from a long day of exercise and the contemplation of gore, and added his postscript.

The daily killing of many animals raised the King's spirits, and he was looking forward to riding at the head of an army in a handsome uniform. The Queen, some of whose intelligence had survived the gradual wearing down of her spirits, began to have doubts about the wisdom of the expedition. It was the Cavaliere's wife, as she related to the hero in her letters, who persuaded the Queen not to lose heart. She had vividly evoked the alternative to taking the offensive now: the Queen, her husband, and her children led to the guillotine, and the eternal dishonor to her memory for not fighting bravely to the last to save her family, her religion, her country from the hands of the rapacious murderers of her sister and the royal family of France. You shood have seen me, wrote the Cavaliere's wife. I stood up & put out my left arm like you & made a wonderfull speach & the dear Queen cryed & said I was right. She often spoke frankly of his missing arm, for the hero was not one of those people who involve you in the obstinate ignoring of a mutilation or a disablement: the blind woman who tells you how well you look and admires your red blouse, the one-armed man who exclaims that he couldn't stop applauding last night at the opera. In the letters the hero retired to his cabin to write every evening, addressed jointly to both his friends, he spoke of it too. I have enough correspondence for two arms, he said. And it often fatigues me to write. But apart from the ultimate happiness of seeing you both again, there is nothing I can look forward to each day but the pleasure of writing you. He thanked the Cavaliere's wife for raising the martial spirits of the Queen. And he repeated how much he missed them both, how grateful he was for their friendship, his gratitude is more than he can express, how they had honored him beyond what he deserved—it's as if no one had ever before been kind to him—and that having lived with them and known their affection had spoiled him for any other company, that the world now seems a barren place when he is separated from them, that his dearest wish was to come back and never leave them. I love Mrs. Cadogan too, he added.

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Ill again and in need of nursing, the hero returned three weeks later and joined his friends in Caserta. From there he and the Cavaliere's wife each sent letters to the hero's wife. She wrote about the hero's health, and sent more poems, more presents. He, in his weekly letter, told his wife that, with the exception of herself and his father, he counted the Cavaliere and his wife as the dearest friends he had in the world. I live here as the son of the house. The Cavaliere is kind enough to undertake my instruction in many interesting scientific questions, and his wife is an honor to her sex. Her equal I never saw in any country.

In another two weeks everyone was obliged to return to Naples, from which an army of thirty-two thousand inexperienced men—commanded by an incompetent Austrian general, nominally headed by the King, and including among its conscripts the Cavaliere's one-eyed guide, Bartolomeo Pumo—marched north to Rome. The Cavaliere and his wife are down at the quay with the cheering crowds seeing off the hero, who is to take four thousand more troops to seize neutral Leghorn and interrupt communication between Rome and the French armies occupying most of the northern part of the peninsula.

The hero noted with some concern that the Cavaliere looks rather frail, his back is stooped, and his wife is pale and clearly trying to be very brave. Come back to us soon, says the Cavaliere. With more laurels on your brow, says his wife.

A few hours ago she had given him a note which she'd made him promise he would not read until he was aboard the
Vanguard.
He had kissed the note and put it next to his heart.

He opened it a few moments after he stepped into the boat that would bring him out to his flagship.

There it was in her adorable hand: a torrent of wishes for his safety, protestations of eternal friendship, expressions of gratitude. But he was becoming greedy. He wanted more—something more. That she would tell him she loved him? But she told him that all the time, how much she, she and the good Cavaliere, loved him. Something more. Avidly he reached the last page, clasping the sea-sprayed pages he'd already read between his knees, as his men rowed him toward the
Vanguard.
Something more. Ah, there it was.

Do not spend time ashore wile in Leghorn. Forgive me dear frend if I say their is no comfort for you in that citty.

He winced. So she had heard the story of his only dalliance in all the years of his marriage; he knew it had been much remarked on. In Leghorn four years ago with the
Captain,
he had met a charming woman married to a cold, neglectful husband, a naval officer, and felt sorry for her, and then admired her, and then thought he might be in love with her—for five weeks.

He smiled. If his dear friend was jealous, then he knew he was loved.

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Fools! Fools! That he had been a fool did not enter the Cavaliere's mind. Though he had been the first to believe the Bourbon government could create and field an army competent enough to take on the French, the Cavaliere was not used to blaming himself.

The hero had done his part, depositing his troops at Leghorn, where he remained for a chaste three days. But how could the hero have thought that France would permit Rome to fall to the Neapolitans?

Having signed a treaty of peace with France two years ago (Farce! Shame! Ignominy! raged the Queen), officially the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was neutral, and the King and his advisers—astutely, as they think—have not declared war on France. This expedition, they announce, is not directed against France. It is only a fraternal response to an appeal from the people of Rome—suffering under the republican government imposed on them nine months ago by Jacobin fanatics—to restore law and order. The French general who had occupied Rome since February and under whose aegis the Roman Republic has been declared, prudently withdrew his soldiers to a few miles outside the city. After the Neapolitan army took Rome without needing to fire a shot, the King entered with the pomp he considered his due, went to his residence, the Palazzo Farnese, issued a call for the Pope, who had been banished by the republic, to return, and started to enjoy himself. Two weeks later France declared war on the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the French army started back toward the city.

The evening of the day that the King heard the French were returning, he changed from his royal garments into an ill-fitting disguise of commoner's clothes several sizes too small for his corpulent figure and left for home. That ignominious fiasco, the Neapolitan occupation of Rome, lasted barely another week. The hero had predicted that if the march on Rome failed, Naples was lost. His prediction was correct.

When most of the chapfallen Neapolitan army had reached home, after the King but ahead of the French, who were heading south in an orderly fashion, the Cavaliere sent for Pumo. He had worried about him. Had he survived his stint as a soldier, or was he lying somewhere in a ditch with a bullet in his head? Word came back that his guide had not returned. The Cavaliere was more incredulous than distressed. It was unthinkable that Tolo, his lucky Tolo, should not have known how to cope with this peril, as he had coped with so many others, but the rest of what was happening was exactly what he had feared.

The King was cursing and whining and crossing himself. The Queen, in fierce reaction against her fling with enlightened views, had lately become almost as superstitious as her husband, and was writing out prayers on small pieces of paper, which she stuffed in her stays or swallowed. To all about her, she declared that only an army of Neapolitans would flee from an enemy they outnumbered six to one, that she'd always known that these shiftless Neapolitans never had a chance to hold Rome. Antiroyalist slogans appear each morning on walls: the French are coming and, anticipating their protection, the kind of protection they had given the patriots in Rome, the Jacobin sympathizers were making themselves visible. The King's fiercely loyal subjects, the city's poor, paint the republican slogans out and gather in the great square before the palace to demand a denial of the rumors circulating that the royal family is about to flee to Palermo. They care nothing about their foreign Queen, but they want their beloved King to stay, he must promise them he will stay. Come out, show yourself, Beggar King! And the King was obliged to appear on the balcony, the Queen at his side, to show the mob that they are still there—that he will stay and fight the French and protect them—while the Queen, gazing out at the square, blinked back her visions of the guillotine rising where the
cuccagna
used to be erected. The hero, to whom everyone looks for salvation, must evacuate them immediately. Life and death is in the hero's hands.

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The Queen would not hear of entrusting the crown jewels and her diamonds and nearly seven hundred casks filled with bar and coined gold (worth about twenty million pounds) to anyone but the Cavaliere's wife. These were conveyed by night to the British envoy's residence, repacked with British naval seals, and then brought down to the port where they were taken out to the hero's flagship. And it was the Cavaliere's wife who found and explored a forgotten tunnel leading from the royal palace to the nearby small harbor, through which the rest of the portable royal assets, including the choicest paintings and other valuables of the palaces of Caserta and Naples and the best objects of the museum at Portici, as well as the royal clothes and linen, were carried on the backs of British sailors in trunks and crates and coffers, each consignment accompanied by a note from the Queen, and stowed on board the merchant ships in the bay.

The Cavaliere's wife, a torrent of energy and courage, was shuttling between the Queen and home, where she and her mother are supervising the sorting of clothes and linen and medicines—what women are supposed to know how to pack—while the Cavaliere gave orders for the crating of the cultural goods: his correspondence and papers, instruments and music scores, maps and books. Those servants who could be spared from the packing were sent off with notes in the hand of the Cavaliere's wife to all the British residents, telling them to start their own packing and be ready to leave on a day's notice.

The Cavaliere has retired to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him—one of the principal uses of a book.

Luckily, he had sent off all the vases two months ago, and most of the three hundred and forty-seven paintings were already packed. All of collecting Italy lived in terror of that insatiable art predator, Napoleon, who had obliged the cities he conquered to surrender paintings and other works of art as a kind of war tax. Parma and Modena, Milan and Venice, each had been assessed twenty selected masterpieces, and the Pope ordered to furnish one hundred of the Vatican's treasures, all for a “Triumphal Entry of Objects of the Sciences and Arts Collected in Italy” into the French capital staged this past July, two weeks after the Cavaliere had made his inventory, when a long procession of priceless artifacts, including the Vatican's
Laocoön
and the four bronze horses of San Marco, was paraded through the Paris boulevards, presented in an official ceremony to the minister of the interior, and then conveyed to the Louvre.