Sir William (15 page)

*

“Lady Hamilton has nothing to do with my public character,” Sir William reassured the Foreign Office. “She knows that beauty fades & therefore applies herself daily to the improvement of her mind.”

*

“‘… trimmed with three rows of black lace, interspersed with rosebuds,’” read Mrs. Cadogan. “‘Dresses this coming season will have a simpler, purer line, and the bodice, to use so indelicate a term, will rise almost to the armpits. A wide sash of
peau
de
soie,
completely plain, tied below the bust, forms the only adornment. Its colors may be Cornish pink,
vert
de
nez,’
whatever that is, ‘and cerulean.’ Shall I go on?”

“Yes, but first hand me the skin cream. And I shall need another jar of rain water if I am to make myself proper.”

And looking in the mirror, Emma thought, I am twenty-six, whoever would believe it? Certainly not Sir William, who is sixty-two.

“‘… in the new Grecian mode,’” Mrs. Cadogan continued. ‘“Ladies of the
ton
will be delighted to learn that Mr. Humphreys, the fashionable fanmaker, has received an assortment of light Kashmiri shawls, fresh shipped from India, both handsome and suitable to our crisp, early English autumn.’”

“I am the happiest woman in the world,” said Emma. “We must ask Greville to send out some. Take note of the address.”

It was true enough. Not only did she have the world in her grasp, she had grasped it.

But there was serious study, too. They had worked their way to Volume IV of Dr. Burney’s
History
of
Music:

Imagination diverted itself, though not with Dr. Burney. It was what she had observed herself. He was an author admired perhaps more for his truth than his felicity.

As Goethe said, the dangers of life are infinite. It almost slipped her grasp.

*

Sir William was ill, at Caserta.

“Oh my God!” shrieked Emma, and had she not instantly fallen into the role of loyal and faithful nurse, would have thought herself as instantly undone, cast
out, rejected and a widow. “You must come with me. I shall need you to make possets.”

She was a good nurse: she could act out anything. And Mrs. Cadogan had a flair for fortifying jellies, beef broth, sliced cucumber rind on the forehead during fevers, and enough common sense to damn the doctor. Though no substitute for it, these things sometimes assist Grace.

Undeniably he was ill. Looking at him, Emma felt that “chastity of silent woe” first phrased by Falconer. For long periods of time he stared only at the ceiling, which was a high one.

“He does not know poor Emma,” said poor Emma.

Nor did he. In so far as he was conscious of anything, it was of being on his back like a turtle, unable to make his body move, a posture demeaning to a man of active habit. As the fog cleared he could see the clouds on the ceiling. They parted to show eternity. Out of that space appeared a fly which, circling, grew and became a bustard, and gyred and grew red in the wattles, and was a vulture sloping over a parched plain. At all costs it must not get into the Tiepolo, for that meant death.

Sir William heaved at his shell, but could not budge it. He could scarcely make it rock. He could only look deep down into the ceiling.

The doctor came and went, a gossip and a busybody at the pinnacle of his profession.

“After knowing Naples, it is impossible not to wish to
live,
in order that one may return to it.”

The doctor made his inspection, and the good word went around. The man was immortal. He still had his own teeth, so he must be.

“He will live,” said the doctor to Emma. “But if you like, you may call in a second opinion.”

“My God, why?” asked Emma. “Is not certitude enough?”

“Ah, dear dear lady. Ah,
bellissima
signorina,”
said the doctor. It was enough.

Mrs. Cadogan sniffed at the bottle he had left behind.
“Elm tea,” she said, “with laudanum,” and poured it out.

The crisis passed in eight days. The vulture began to recede. In ten, it was no more than the Host, hovering in the approved manner over the approved Tiepolo crowd, a white dove.

“I have been as ill as him with anxiety, apprehension and fatige; the last, indeed, the least of what I have felt,” reported Emma. Her world had pulled through. It was enough of a miracle to turn one Catholic, and a candle would do no harm.

Sir William, who had been wandering and had almost reached the sulphur shades—for the odor of which he did not care—began to rearrange himself and became aware that he was weak. Next he felt himself being fed. Then he smelled an arm. His hearing was restored. At the end of the garden was a stout iron door. With some effort, he got it open and stepped out into the garden beyond and heard a bird again. Also footsteps. Also that familiar sound, the turning of a page. Since the sun was on his eyes, he opened them, dazzled to be alive.

“God’s masterpiece, a silly woman,” he muttered indistinctly, the end of a thought he could no longer trace back to its source.

“He knows me. He lives!” shouted Emma. “Sir William lives!” Taken up by the echoes, the cry went around the corridors and down the stairs. He lived.

It is reliably reported that goslings fix their affections upon the first object they see that moves. Sir William opened his eyes and smiled at Emma. As why not? She had nursed him. Whatever else she was, that astounded him. In the polite world, when we fall ill, we lie alone upstairs until either we are fit again to receive those visitors, our friends, or have been removed in a wicker basket by the back door. At the very most, those who are courageous enough to risk contagion leave their cards downstairs. For the rest, the elephant must find his own way to the boneyard, or stop inconveniencing the world and get well, for one more canceled dinner at short notice and he will be dropped. Illness is in the worst of taste.

Nonetheless, they seemed delighted to have him back. The King gratulated him upon his recovery. The Queen sent word that she was pleased. Graffer, though begrudging each one of them, as is a gardener’s way, sent eight perfect roses.

Sir William was once more, now that Horace Mann was dead, the oldest living continuous Minister, and so a rarity worth visiting, though true, he had put many people to the cost of black silk, who must now store it away against the next occasion.

“The fundamental trouble was a liver complaint, long threatening,” explained Emma. Like Sir William, she, too, had fallen into the convention of writing to Greville as to a friend.

*

Sir William, alienated by illness, looked around him, with the curiosity of a poor cousin, at the possessions of that now defunct personage, his recent self. He had never before seen them as a stranger would. Here they were, the rational possessions of a gentleman of limited though extensive means who had lived in this house for twenty-eight years. Not the richest tomb in Roman Nola contained so much. If I cannot be buried with it, I can be buried from it, he thought, so in that sense it comes under the head of funeral furniture.

The most finished of these possessions was of course—as it had always been—the view, the bay, the city, and Vesuvius beyond. That, too, must be left behind, but not yet.

“I wonder if all of us who could not bear to leave the world behind are not somehow still here,” said Sir William aloud, and began to cheer up; foolish fancies always cheered him up. On the desk was a Roman phallic flute on which he found he could still lip a note or two. The notes sounded dusty and faraway. He put the flute down.

A bust of Marcus Aurelius, vulgar but sumptuous, the tunic porphyry, the neck and face white marble, stared at him with inlaid eyes. He preaches resignation in his works, but in person looks buffeted, assured and smug. If
a little learning is a dangerous thing, what then are we to say of too much?

He picked up a theatre mask from Herculaneum and held it to his face. Peering through the eyeholes, he was in truth a noble ancient Roman, his only view, to look out through the eyes, his only air, two breathing holes, and the whole thing musty. He laid it down. It was a tragic mask. It did not suit him. Though we all come to it in time, who would choose to see the world with dead men’s eyes? Yet he did agree with Lady Holland, a woman experienced in the emotions in every way and so an authority upon this subject, in wishing that it were sometimes possible to indulge in a serious mood.

Nor had he realized before (it was all he had been able to see through the mask) how cluttered up these walls had grown with Emma. She was everywhere: by Reynolds, consonant with the best interiors, so that did no harm; by Romney, all innocence and bad drawing, so that was no harm either; by Beechey; by Angelica Kauffmann (in a spindrift huddle against a wall); by Masquerier, a
portrait
d’apparat,
since, though Sir William was not shown, Vesuvius in the background hinted at his existence; by Westall, R.A. (looking rather cross), as St. Cecilia; as an analphabetic but obliging sibyl by Vigée-Lebrun; by W. Bennet (
pénible
); and dancing, by Lock (rather fetching). All in all it was too much Emma, and more to come, since he had commissioned Rethberg to pencil the Attitudes. And never the same look twice, although among so many—if one could be sure of none of them—one could at least choose the mien that one preferred.

He was too old. From now on she must be his youth. He could observe youth by observing her, and that way perhaps somehow enjoy it.

Looking out the window at Vesuvius, he was himself again. “I shall climb you once more,” he said. “Then twice. Then a hundred times.” It would be good to feel solid, if smoking, ground beneath one’s feet again. The old man is not, after all, so very old.

Rather civilly, Vesuvius erupted in his favor, like a
playful captive whale that spouts, or a prize child, performing for the Board of Governors. They were old friends, he and she, and she had been dormant for too long. He felt restored. Like his friend Walpole (who also found it impossible to indulge in a serious mood), he had a partiality for professed nonsense.

Meanwhile, there was the mail to read.

“The French National Assembly,” he said, “has declared war against Bohemia, Hungary and Sardinia. It is a large island, somewhat to the north of here.”

Emma looked distressed.

“There is no need for alarm. We have ships. And so, for the matter of that, have they,” he said, looking out at the harbor, where some rotten Neapolitan brigantines were soaking at anchor.

“The Queen is back from Austria,” reported Emma, “and has asked us to a ball.”

Sir William had rather thought she might.

*

The chief architectural felicity of the palace at Naples was a double staircase—which is to say one flight poured suavely down from one end, the other from the other—meeting a few feet apart in a landing elevated a few steps above the marble flooring. One led to the King’s apartments, the other, to the Queen’s. Not only did they maintain separate establishments, they maintained separate doors. Though they lived with pomp, neither one of them was precisely formal.

The stair hall itself was vast and drafty and never lit with candles enough. What candles there were had flames which blew all one way, like willis in a ballet. The wall opposite the stairs was mirrored.

“And did Your Highness enjoy your stay in Vienna?” Emma asked the Queen.

“It was heavenly. I made two marriages.”

The doors were opened, not an inch too soon, by a most dilatory footman who had misgauged the royal trajectory.

“I am struck by your
tournure,
” said the Queen, without flinching.

“Oh, do you admire it?”

“I admire what there is of it,” said the Queen, who was apt, having bad shoulders, to be a prude; though having good arms, never a puritan. Out onto the
piano
nòbile
landing they went.

The King appeared on the other one, with Hamilton and Acton.

“It is a considerable source of pleasure to me,” said Acton, “as Prime Minister, to discover that as Minister for War, I had improved the troops, and that as Minister of the Marine, constructed a navy against just such an emergency as—as Prime Minister—I found myself confronted with. But of what use are the Army and the Fleet, you have seen for yourself. And though Admiral Caraccioli, my successor, is an excellent man, it does not seem to me that he has the knowledge to continue those reforms which, as his predecessor, I could always count on myself, so to speak, to push through.”

“Most certainly,” said Sir William, who had been confused not so much by the multiplicity of office, as by the rapidity of succession to it.

“… an enormous boar, five feet six in length, confronting me,” said the King, “ambushed behind a rather large statue of Ptolemaeus IV Philopater, which my curator had relegated to that remote spot, hoping to weather it into some semblance of antiquity, for it had been an injudicious purchase …”

“To think,” said Lady Dunmore, surveying in the far distance Emma and the Queen across the gulf that separated them, “that I knew her when she was a mere nobody.”

“Nonsense,” snapped Lady Webster, who was not Lady Holland yet, and did not know her either, “you knew her when you thought she was a mere nobody. She herself has never had any illusions of any kind.”

“My husband feels,” said the Queen smoothly, “that we might best send our fleet to blockade the French at Toulon,” and looked down at the roses on her dress, which were made of pink satin and were full-blown. She
had achieved maturity. It was a time of national crisis. It was too late for rosebuds now.