Losing Nelson (5 page)

“All right? Good God. He had received a shrapnel wound in the battle that opened his forehead to the skull. He was suffering from attacks of breathlessness due to stress and fatigue, he had—”

“She was alone, she was frightened for him. You would think he would know what it is like to be frightened.”

“But he did,” I said. “He never showed fear himself, but he understood it in others, and he was always gentle with those who—”

“But that is among men, isn’t it?”

I had no idea what she meant by this, but I could not escape the feeling that she was getting the upper hand in this discussion. And she was daring to criticize him, Horatio. The skin on my face felt tight with the efforts I was making not to let my fury show. I was afraid it would show in my eyes, which tend to get suffused with blood when I am upset. I moved round behind her to the other side of the table, where she could not see me without swivelling right round in her chair. The screen was facing me now, but I took care not to look at it. At a distance of about three feet, I found myself studying the back of Miss Lily’s head. Her dark brown hair was caught up behind in a
ponytail, exposing the nape of her neck, naked, palest cream in colour, surprisingly sturdy-looking, with a tender, faintly gleaming down on it, just below the hairline. Her earlobes looked pink and waxy seen from this angle, somehow improbable; ruby-coloured drops of glass dangled from them and seemed to shiver in the light. Words continued to issue from the front part of this head: “It’s just like Scott of the Antarctic, he left his wife alone for months and years while he went looking for the South Pole …”

One moment the words were there, in the space before her. Then, quite suddenly, the sound of them diminished, receded. A sort of throbbing hush descended on me, as if something had been pressed over my ears. I was still looking intently at Miss Lily’s undefended nape and the shape of her skull under the hair. Then she turned in her chair a little, as if to glance round. I had a moment of giddiness and the hush was broken, sounds started coming again, occupying all the room. I moved round to the side of the table. I felt no anger at all now, only a sort of surprise.

“I read about it in the paper,” Miss Lily said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “what was it you read about?”

“This rumour that she had an affair while he was away in the frozen wastes. His son was asked about it and he said it was absolutely untrue and slanderous because his mother was not that sort of woman. What sort of woman did he mean?”

Her voice had risen. I looked at her face and saw that she was flushed. “What did he
mean
?”

This sudden annoyance over an issue so trivial seemed absurd to me and went a good way to restoring my feeling of being altogether on a higher plane than Miss Lily. I could not understand how I had allowed myself to get so upset. After all, from Avon Secretarial Services, what could one expect? She was light-years from appreciating that for a bright angel like Horatio, praise was manna, it was essential
nourishment, essential combustion, he fed and blazed, like the sun. No good trying to explain this to her, she was still talking about the wretched explorer. Where did Scott come into it, a person only remembered for the manner of his death? Scott was not a hero. Heroes
succeed
.

“He probably didn’t know what he meant himself,” she said, more quietly. “Years ago I read it, and it always sticks in my mind.”

I decided to let her go early. It was too late now to start dictating. Besides, the mood was wrong. This time when I went to get her coat, the parallels stayed in place: she was still busy when I returned, putting her things into the bag. I waited until we were at the door. Then, quite casually, I put the question to her. “How did you know I had been in the basement?”

“In the basement?” She looked puzzled, but this could well have been a pretence.

“When you arrived this evening, when I came to answer the bell, you said I had come up the stairs too quickly. I have been wondering—how did you know I had come up the stairs? Was it just because I seemed out of breath?”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Well, yes, you did seem a bit breathless as a matter of fact, but I would have known anyway. These dark evenings, before you come to answer the door you always put the light on in the passage, and anyone standing on the top step outside, if they look up at the glass panel over the door, they can see a sort of shadow passing over it. If the shadow comes from the right—my right as I am standing there—it means you must have come up from the basement. If it comes from the other side, you have been in your study or the sitting room.”

She was standing immediately below me, on the bottom step. Light from the passage behind fell upon her face. She was smiling as she looked up at me. Not a broad smile, just a sort of deepening of her
usual expression. “How funny you should remember,” she said. She seemed pleased, I couldn’t quite see why.

“You are quite a Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “Female version, I mean.” I realized now, as I looked down at her, that Miss Lily had been tested back there in my study, that she had passed, and that her success had changed things between us.

A
fter Miss Lily had gone I found in the fridge a covered dish that proved on investigation to contain ravioli with a filling of spinach and cream cheese, which I then remembered buying at a delicatessen near Chalk Farm station two, or perhaps three, days earlier. I sniffed it but could detect no trace of taint. Cold from the fridge like that, it didn’t taste of anything much. I washed it down with some claret, about half a bottle, all I had left.

After the various upsets of the day I felt exhausted, but I had no inclination to sleep, in spite of the wine. I returned to my study and began to leaf through the loose pages of my manuscript, coming soon—as invariably happened in those days—to Horatio’s fateful arrival at Naples in September 1798 and subsequent events, in particular those of the following June, from the tenth to the thirtieth. I was enmeshed in those twenty summer days.

The preliminary events are not in dispute. I knew them by heart,
without needing to look at the pages before me. Horatio arrives in Naples on September 22, some two months after his resounding victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile. He is given a hero’s welcome by King Ferdinand, the Bourbon ruler of the Two Sicilies, and his queen, Maria Carolina, who regard him as their saviour. They are terrified of the French, and with reason—Queen Marie Antoinette, Maria Carolina’s sister, was guillotined in Paris five years previously. Horatio, though gratified by his reception, is far from well. He is still suffering from battle stress and the effects of a bad head wound received during the action. He needs rest and nursing, and this is provided by Lady Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton, connoisseur and collector, thirty-five years her senior.

The danger of a French invasion by land is not over; in fact, it grows daily greater. Their armies have occupied northern and central Italy; they have taken Rome, expelled the pope, and declared the city a republic. There is a treaty in existence between France and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. However, from Rome to Naples is only a few days’ march, too close for comfort. Horatio, supported by the queen, urges the irresolute Ferdinand to assume command of the Neapolitan army and march on Rome as defender of the faith against the atheist French. After much hesitation, he is prevailed upon to do so. At the head of thirty thousand troops, under the direction of the Bavarian general Baron Karl Mack von Leiberich, he sets off.

What an army. Described by Mack as the finest in Europe, it consists mainly of peasants in uniform, with an admixture of bandits and released convicts. Mack himself proves both obstinate and hesitant, not the best of combinations in a general. The king shares with his soldiers a strong distaste for personal risk.

At first there are successes. The French withdraw to concentrate their forces. Rome is recovered; Ferdinand rides in triumph through
the streets, mounted on a white horse, accompanied by dragoons in glittering uniform. But then comes the counterattack. The Neapolitans break and run, both officers and men; Mack conducts a disorderly retreat; the king bolts back to Naples in civilian disguise, groaning with fear, beseeching his aides not to desert him.

Horatio, it has to be said that your advice was disastrous. The king is humiliated, Naples is left defenceless, the French have been given a pretext for breaking the treaty. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies will be plunged into civil war, the royal family obliged to quit the mainland and flee to Palermo in order to avoid falling into the hands of the French.

Not Horatio’s fault, of course. I was intent on making that absolutely clear in my book. Other biographers have called it a blunder, but this is to misunderstand completely his character and temperament. Attack came naturally to him; he was all fire. How could a man so noble of soul comprehend the baseness of his instruments—a king who had nothing of the kingly, a commander who could not command, an army that melted away?

He is now all that stands between the royal family and the advancing French. The ships are ready to embark the monarchs if need be. He has already vowed British support to the queen; now he is drawn into a personal promise not to desert her. A very different thing … I had noted the reference, it was there on the page before me, taken from a letter to his wife, Fanny, dated December 11, 1798:
The poor Queen has again made me promise not to quit her or her family until brighter prospects appear than do at present
.

This promise was troubling to me. Why did you make it? Why did you tie yourself down in that way? Your orders from the Admiralty were to protect the whole Adriatic coast as well as those of Naples and Sicily and to supervise the blockade of Malta, then in French hands.

Ten days later the situation has become impossible. The French are approaching Naples, and many will welcome them with open arms—the educated classes, the liberal aristocracy, united in their hatred of Bourbon cruelty and oppression, ardently possessed with the spirit of reform and republican ideas.

On the night of the twenty-first of December, the royal family is embarked, together with the Hamiltons and various Neapolitan notables. Bad weather prevents them from sailing until the twenty-third. At two on the morning of Boxing Day they anchor at Palermo. It is here, in the following February, that Horatio and Emma become lovers. And it is here that the news is received from Naples that the French army has taken the city, aided by the Neapolitan republicans, crushing an uprising of the
lazzaroni
, the fearsome Naples mob, who are devoted to their king and queen. The royalist forces have been expelled from the castles of Sant’Elmo, Nuovo, and dell’Ovo, and a republic, known as the Parthenopean Republic, has been set up.

Meanwhile, King Ferdinand is approached in Palermo by Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, a warrior cleric of ancient lineage, who offers to go to Calabria, where his family’s estates are, appeal to the patriotism and religious faith of the peasantry, and lead them in a holy war to recover Naples for the monarchy. The offer is accepted. Ruffo enlists a force of Calabrese irregulars, murderous, ill disciplined, avid for loot. Holding this horde by force of personality under precarious control, he marches on Naples.

This Christian Army of the Holy Faith, as Ruffo calls it, has astonishingly rapid success. By the end of May the French have been forced to withdraw, leaving only a garrison in the castle of Sant’Elmo to support the Neapolitan republican militia—patriots, as they regard themselves; traitors, as Horatio regards them—who now take refuge from the bloodthirsty vengeance of the
lazzaroni
in the fortified castles of Nuovo and dell’Ovo.

So far, so bad. I took up my papers again. We were approaching the last week of June, the days that were causing me so much perplexity. By now Naples is in chaos. Ruffo’s troops are out of control, plundering, raping, and killing unchecked. Mobs of
lazzaroni
are roaming the streets, murdering and mutilating anyone, man or woman, suspected of Jacobin sympathies. For the details of this terrible period I was mainly relying on the account of Constance Giglioli, who quotes an eyewitness, Giuseppe di Lorenzo. I glanced over his words now in the calm of my study, which, however, still seemed to have something of Miss Lily’s argumentative presence in it.
Heads and mutilated limbs were scattered in the street corners … A great number of victims were shot, one after the other … This done those butchers, not caring whether they were alive or dead, proceeded to cut off their heads, some of them were borne in procession on the ends of long poles and others served them to play with, rolling them along the ground like balls
.

It is to avoid an indefinite continuation of this bloodshed that Cardinal Ruffo, on June 23, makes terms with the enemy. He accepts the surrender of the French garrison and their Neapolitan allies in the city’s forts. The French will be shipped home, the Neapolitans given the option of accompanying them or returning to their homes under a general amnesty. The treaty is also signed, in the name of His Britannic Majesty George III, by the senior British officer in Naples, a certain Captain Foote, Horatio having sailed to the west coast of Sicily in an attempt to intercept the French fleet. The other cosignatories are Baillie and Achmet, for Russia and Turkey, respectively.