Sir William (16 page)

“… charged, with gleaming tusks,” said the King. “Leaning toward my musket, which stood in a prepared position, I pulled the trigger which my gamekeeper had cocked for me—my heavens, there’s a pretty creature.”

It was only Lady Plymouth, seen from behind.

“Lady Hamilton seems to have been taken up recently by the Queen,” said Lady Plymouth. “I wonder why.”

“That is an assumption which I can only regard as deriving from defective observation,” said Sir William. He and Acton were now discussing the new Guido Reni in the Cathedral.

“And what, Sire, was the outcome?”

“The outcome?” asked Ferdinand suspiciously. “Why, the same as usual, a little butchery and an excellent dinner. Pray, sir, do you fish?” It was always his second topic with a stranger. If they did not hunt, they must surely fish, otherwise what else was there to do in life?

“We will now,” said the Queen, in her easy German way, “turn to lighter things.” It was an order.

There was wenching, of course.

Lady Plymouth drew herself up rather sharply, but then—remembering that these were troublous times, that royalty had its problems like the rest of us, and that any incident, no matter how trivial (The War of Jenkins’s Ear was in her mind: she seemed to remember that Jenkins had been a Fowey boy), might lead to serious consequences—patriotically ignored the pinch and continued down the stairs.

The company reached the ground floor and processed to the ballroom, which was the theatre refurbished.

“There is no precedence observed here,” said Lady Anne Miller, disapprovingly. She had complained too soon, for the Queen, who these days left no Englishman unturned, for the aid that might be under him, made for her at once.

The musicians were seated in a pyramid, with the kettledrummer on top, riding out the noise like King Mausolus in his chariot, or more appropriately (he was a
German) Thor, thumping away on the Last Day of His Wrath. Since it was suppertime, there were no tables. Royalty is supposed to dine alone at table—it is an unbearable rule of etiquette—so the Queen, who hated to eat alone, had solved her dilemma by removing the tables. Food was lapped.

Lady Anne, who had dished herself a saucer of tay, found it difficult to rise at the Queen’s approach without spilling her tay as she did so.

“Pray sit down,” said the Queen benevolently. Down went Lady Anne again, saucer aquiver.

The Queen, a woman of intellectual capacity, seeing the tay about to spill, with her usual resource pretended to avert her glance until Lady Anne was once more safely seated. Could our own dear Queen have managed the matter more graciously? Lady Anne became a partisan.

“Ferdinand,” said the Queen. “I think the time has come to display approval of the English garden.”

The King, whose only motion was to allow himself to be pushed by contraries, had taken it up as soon as she had dropped it.

“We have approved,” he said, “daily.”

“The times are bad. It is necessary to make a show of force. We will approve together,” she told him. “Tomorrow.”

Inspired by a second marriage, and at last uninhibited, Graffer had done well. Some Botany Bay plants, despite the stubbornness of Captain Bligh, had beached here and shot up to forty feet, mangling the culverts with tenacious roots. In summer, the camphor tree spread over the groves a most colonial fragrance. No horticultural cliché had been neglected. Green lawns constructed the sloping scene and guided the sparkling rill. The trees were tufted; some lofty towers were imbosomed; the roof of the cottage
ornée
was covered over with weeds. No gaudy flowers were permitted to bloom around the artificial cave, and the adjacent waters had a pearly gleam. Not only was Graffer well-read, he had a large, roomy and extensive budget. It was not merely a garden; it was a green anthology.

Unfortunately, to enjoy an English garden requires some previous education, and no one can be sensible of the beauties of Homer when coming to them direct from a reading of Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant Killer.

“Where is the English garden?” asked the King.

He was in it.

“Lord,” he said, “there is nothing here but grass, and trees that bear no fruit.”

“Send our compliments to Sir Joseph Banks,” the Queen said graciously to Graffer, who was a hireling, nothing more, whereas Sir Joseph had patronized the piece. “And tell him we will reward his efforts suitably, though not, I fear, soon. We are not,” she explained,
“immediately
pleased.”

What he got, during a lull in life’s incipient battles, boxed, crated and sent the long way around, to avoid Napoleon, was a set of Capodimonte dinnerware, a most suitable gift; as she pointed out, even a philosopher must dine.

*

Sir William had had some of Emma’s portraits taken down. At first she did not notice. She was a narcist: mirrors were what she used. But then at last she did.

“I’m gone,” she said, dismayed.

“Only for restretching,” said Sir William uneasily. “And who could miss them in the presence of their bright original? They were but cold copies.” “The Ambassadress,” by Romney, he had left in a tactfully obvious position. It was the one she would have preferred, he thought. It showed her now.

He was wrong. “Even George’s other Cassandra?” she asked.

“Cassandra is not, perhaps, tactful to the times.”

“But that was such a happy day,” she wailed obscurely.

He restored the Cassandra. It was a Cassandra young and doubly burdened with a gift of tongues. Emma spoke Italian better after five years than he did after twenty.

She could think of only one reason for her banishment.

“Is the war going that badly?” she asked. “Must we pack so soon?”

“It is not going well,” said Sir William, and went off to fish in troubled waters.

It had not occurred to him before that a mistress may have charms anterior to those of a wife—a state of affairs not only unique, but in this case, it seemed, unavoidable.

*

Aware, though not consciously, of a certain coolth in the air, Emma, in order to share her pleasures with Sir William, went to the trouble of having her songs arranged for viola and piano, so that they might be musical together. A flute would have been too like in tone to her voice, and the viola was his only other instrument.

Sometimes she sang duets with the King. “It was but bad,” she said,
“as
he
sings
like
a
King.”

Her newly gained assurance, or the show of it, was too recent as yet for her to be as unaware of it as Sir William was of a good suit of clothes.

*

“She cannot be totally indifferent to the facts of life,” said the Queen, exasperated, “for from all accounts she seems to have lived one.” And went graciously in to visit Emma.

“Do you and Sir William never discuss politics?” she asked cooingly.

“He prefers not.”

“A pity. It is the proper vocation of princes,” said the Queen, “but sometimes an expert opinion does no harm.”

“It is the very thing he says himself!” cried Emma, radiant with compliance. “I will speak to him.”

“Pray,” said Maria Carolina, and took the creature’s paw in a jeweled hand, “do. You will gratify thereby”—and here she attempted to totter, but alas, her iron stays were too rigid; no matter how she tried, they kept her upright—“an old woman’s whim [she was a healthy, bouncy forty-three] and do yourself no harm.”

“Send me some news,” Emma wrote Greville, scarcely-daring to disturb Sir William with her prattle, “political and private, for against my will,
owing
to
my
situation
here
I am got into politics and wish to have news for our dear much-loved Queen.”

“You neglect your handwriting rather too much, but as what you write is good sense, everybody will forgive the scrawl,” said Sir William approvingly, over her shoulder.

“Since we have formed an alliance with Great Britain,” said Lord Acton, “I see no reason why we should not now recognize the French Republic, promulgate the British alliance, and receive thereby a somewhat smaller contingent of the French Fleet for a shorter period than we had expected to do.”

“Never!” shouted Maria Carolina.

Being the son of an émigré, Acton had developed a most Italian shrug of the shoulders. “Oh well,” he said, “perhaps for a little while. First we entertain them, then we let the English chase them away.”

*

But the French ships were already in the bay.

“They have come to overawe Us,” said Maria Carolina, quivering. “We are not overawed.”

“We are your friends, good people,” shouted the French. “We are your friends. Destroy your King and Queen. Turn out your priests, listen to our legate, and accept liberty.” They spoke in French, for they had been given to understand that tongue was everywhere understood, as it must be, for it had always been the language spoken anywhere they had been.

“Long live the King!” shouted the oppressed populace.

The French Legate, Citizen Hugou de Bassville, though the Queen refused to receive him, was not discouraged. He had the escutcheon on the French Embassy repainted. What he had in mind was a beauteous Minerva with a lance in one hand and a cap of liberty in the other. No, the cap of liberty should be upon her head, for Liberty should have at least one hand free.

It was beautiful escutcheon. Looking out the window
the next morning, he was pleased to see a peasant kneeling before it in the street. One had only to show the ignorant the image of enlightenment and they revised their ways at once.

“Bring that man to me,” he said.

The man, picturesque as a
sans
culotte
but a lot cleaner, was hustled upstairs. He seemed frightened, or perhaps what he felt was awe—for the two are similar—and having heard of awe only by hearsay, Hugou de Bassville could not be accurate in his diagnosis.

“Ask him if he knows the name of the goddess he is worshiping,” he told the interpreter.

“He says, ‘Why were you down on your knees down there?’” explained the interpreter.

“It was such a beautiful madonna,” said the
lazzarone.
“Such a pretty hat.”

“Madre
mia!
” said the interpreter.

“Minerva, by whom we mean Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom, was the daughter of Zeus, by whom we mean Jupiter. She had no children,” said Bassville, struck by the implications of what he had just said, but only lightly, as in passing.

“The French are very funny,” said the
lazzarone.
“The Virgin Mary was the daughter of St. Anne, everybody knows that.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” roared Bassville, who had begun to catch the drift of this, “that the man thought he was worshiping the
Madonna?
What ignorance. What impiety.”

“No, I didn’t,” said the interpreter, “but, sir, I couldn’t think of anything.”

“Throw them out,” said Bassville. It was a thankless task. You asked for a stone, and they gave you bread. So often the downtrodden could be liberated only by calling in reinforcements. It would mean war.

Everything means war, but for the moment there were no reinforcements, so Bassville went on to Rome and the more congenial boyish task of burning the Pope in effigy.

The King buried the silver and gave up three hundred and ninety-two of his dogs. He had the menagerie killed.
He had the chandeliers taken down. If the Queen wished to scribble, she could do so by the light of a storm lantern. He had made his preparations and went off to hunt and fish with his customary courage. Acton could take care of the rest.

Lady Elizabeth Foster arrived.

“Lady Elizabeth has expressed an interest in Vesuvius,” said Sir William.

“Oh the good kind lady,” said Emma, whose temper was not always quite perfect. There were many English ladies to present to the Queen these days. Had Emma not been of so forgiving a disposition, this duty would have given her a singular and exquisite pleasure. Here she was their only entry, whereas in England they would not have let her in at all. She was beginning to discover the joys of being affable from a superior position. Her standards were improving. She began to hold opinions, a task not difficult, for they weighed light and were soon gotten rid of. One had merely to pass them on.

In August, the King of France was executed. This made the King of Naples conciliatory. He agreed to receive the French delegates.

“To avoid war, we caress the serpent which will poison us,” said Maria Carolina, returning, unopened, the gift of a basket of fruit.

“He would have danced a minuet upon the mole, had the French requested it,” said Acton.

Apart from that, the sun shone and there was nothing wrong. Nonetheless, into each life a little rain must fall, though not much.

*

“His Britannic Majesty’s government,” said Sir William, “has been pleased to declare war against France.” His face, which was generally marble, was for the moment blancmange.

“I suppose that means we may not travel, that the mails will be delayed, and that the Bishop of Derry may not come out to us,” said Emma, grasping the consequences with her usual sagacity.

“Not even as Lord Bristol. They have pulled down the
pillars of society. They respect neither the Ermine nor the Cloth. So it would not be safe.”

“Still, we need not delay this Thursday’s dinner, need we?”

“I fear it is too late now to delay anything.”

Greville, too, had sent stirring news. With his customary pertinacity and financial flair, he had managed to cut the revenue of the Welsh estates by half.

They both considered this. It could not be denied: Greville was a remarkable man, astute, perspicacious and easily defeated. There are times when even banter fails.

“Truly they are vile creatures,” said Sir William.

“The French?”

“Estate managers of all sorts,” said Sir William. “You had better dress. The Queen has sent for us.”

*

As so she had. She was a commanding woman, restless, peremptory and prompt. Though she abhorred to meddle, when there was a decision to be made, she made it. This habit of mind showed in her face, for had she not been a Queen and therefore a beauty, people would have found her
jolie
laide.
Her religious beliefs never wavered, her convictions were firm: the former, that the survival of herself, the House of Hapsburg and the Neapolitan Throne were essential to Him; the second, that this could be done. A scale model of decorum, but able in everything, she believed in enlightened self-interest, employed her own spies, and literate to a fault, had read both the “Social Contract” and the Manual of Arms. Though not a snob, she insisted on her own precedence as a matter of principle, and in any other time or place would either have implemented a new age or have been struck down by it. Her husband, who had begun by loving her, would nowadays as soon accost the Sphinx.