Sir William (23 page)

There was trouble with Charles Lock, the new British Consul. Neither Nelson nor Sir William would recognize his right to provide the navy with dried beef at a profit merely marginal, and a consul has to live somehow. He took it ill. Besides, the middle classes never approve of those either above or below them, for does the meat in a sandwich, when it has been bitten, approve of the bread?

At dinner a Turk, in graphic French, entertained Lady Hamilton with an account of his atrocities, dismemberment, mutilation and such, mostly. “With this weapon,” he said, and drew his
shabola,
the better to explain with the English of his body, “I cut off the heads of twenty. There is the blood.”

“Oh let me see the sword that did the glorious deed!” cried Emma, and clapping up the
shabola,
she kissed it and handed it to the Hero of the Nile.

Mrs. Charles Lock, who was far gone in pregnancy, produced a faint and had to be removed from the room.

“She is either affected or a Jacobin,” said Emma. “She wore green ribbons.”

“Shame,” said the Lock relations.

“Bravo!” shouted the mere cousins-german.

“Oh God,” said Sir William. “She is Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s sister, and besides, he is distracted about the beef.”

“Well, she is affected, and green does not suit her at all.” A statement not only true, but like most truths, beside the point.

Emma had discovered the top-heavy joys of gambling. It was what the local aristocracy did—all Sicily was one lottery—and never fainted when they lost, but stepped away like gentlemen to blow their brains out. It was exactly like Carlton House, except that the rooms were bigger. One had merely to play one’s hopes and hunches, and no nonsense about remembering complicated things like cards.

She was so proud when she won, and when she lost, only a little sorry, for that meant that Nelson had to go fetch more money, and it was a pity to make him walk—he did limp so.

Gambling sucked her in.

*

In Naples, General MacDonald, head of the occupying forces, issued a proclamation to the effect that cardinals, archbishops, abbots, parish priests and all ministers of public worship should be held responsible for rebellion in the places where they resided and be punished with death if rebellion there occurred; and that every accomplice, whether lay or clerical, should be treated as a rebel.

“Cardinal Ruffo is a remarkable man,” said Sir William. “He was wasted making silk.”

“But if they are going to hang him …”

“It is precisely because they cannot catch him that they say they will. A proclamation is like a diplomatic protest: it means that nothing can be done, but says what we would do if it could. It is the beginning of the end.”

*

In March, Nelson sent Troubridge to blockade Naples. He could not go himself. His duty, he said, lay here.

That’s all very well, so long as he does not himself lie with it, thought Troubridge, but was loyal enough not to listen when others said the same thing. On the third of April he had the royal colors hoisted over a recaptured, which is to say, a liberated, Procida.

“Send me some flour and an honest judge,” he wrote
to Palermo. “The people are calling for justice, so eight or ten of them must hang.”

“Send me word some proper heads are taken off; this alone will comfort me,” said Nelson, who had quite taken up the royal cause.

But Troubridge, who had that morning received a man’s head in a basket of grapes—the grapes fresh, the head not—sent the grapes only. The weather was too hot to keep heads.

If the thoughts of the loyal ran to grapes, the King’s ran to cheeses—to be precise, to
càciocavalli,
the local cheeses which were always strung up by the neck to dry.

“Democracy and true liberty render people gentle, indulgent, generous and magnanimous,” wrote Eleonora Pimentel, the Egeria of the Republic, and then said what she thought of the King and Queen. She did not mince words. She did wish to mince
them.
Since it was time for extreme measures, she decided to rename the streets, perhaps in the hope of confusing Cardinal Ruffo’s advancing troops. They were to be called Fortune, Success, Triumph, Victory, Hope, Fertility, Pleasure, Fecundity, Hilarity, Security, Felicity, Valor, Glory, Honor, Prudence, Faith, Concord, Modesty, Silence, Peace, Vigilance, Grace, Love, Hospitality, Innocence and Frugality. The people, who could not tell the difference between Philip V and Neptune, must find their way home as best they could.

“It sounds like a list of your Attitudes,” said Sir William, “but without the neoclassical trimmings. I notice they say nothing of Fortitude. We must add a Stratonice to the repertoire, my dear.”

It was some time since they had done the Attitudes; life had been too rushed.

“Caracciolo must go first,” said the Queen. “He has turned traitor and heads their navy.”

He had made an injudicious choice, therefore he should be punished, not judged. Choice is beyond the law.

At Naples, the doors of the theatre were walled up after a performance of Monti’s
Aristodemo,
because it
portrayed a dethroned monarch recovering his crown. The Republic was taking no chances.

*

“They are putting on Alfieri at the San Carlo,” said Emma, who had the fashion, birth, death and cultural pages of the newspaper Sir William was reading. “Only it is called the National Theatre now, and nobody goes.”

“Alfieri is a very fine writer,” said Sir William.

“All the same, you didn’t have to sit through him when we were there.”

We, Sir William had noted now for some time, no longer meant Emma and himself, but Emma and the Queen. He was amused. For of course when Maria Carolina said We she meant only herself. Like a ship in dry dock, she needed these human props only until she was mended and could float in her natural element again. Indeed, to knock them away would be necessary, were she to be relaunched. But he saw no reason to explain that to Emma.

Besides, Alfieri was dull. He had set out to revolutionize the stage, and now the revolution had staged him. Sir William found these small games of tit for tat entertaining, but never explained them, for your born raconteur can be amused only by his own private jokes; they are the only ones he ever listens to.

*

Nelson, alone and staring at the ceiling, was listening to his conscience, a small voice that would not be still, speaking—plainly, but from far away—in the tones of the American lady from Quebec.

“Naturally I show affection. It is merely gratitude, but more intimate, for after all, we know each other well,” said Nelson.

The image of Lady Nelson, crossing his mind as she would cross the front parlor at Round Wood, where she was staying with his father (she was good about staying with the ill, though that diminished her acquaintance), said nothing.

“Oh God, I cannot go back to that existence,” he
groaned. “The rooms are too small. The ceilings are too low.”

Lady Nelson looked singularly like Sir William’s first and dead wife. She was a sick-room and small-gossip wife. She had no other interests. Her face disdained vivacity, which she felt, instinctively, either to be ill-bred or beyond her, and in either event, no concern of hers. Speak of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and she merely said gently, “Yes, but after all, he
is
a prince,” hushed the discussion, and went on to talk placidly of the new mangle and St. Vincent’s disease. St. Vincent was precious to Nelson, being an elder man who had admired him. His diseases were equally precious to Fanny. Their symptoms were all her contacts with the great.

St. Vincent liked Emma extraordinarily well.

It was intolerable.

“Besides, we are above all that,” he said. “For I am
Lord
Nelson now.”

Lady Nelson was called suddenly away (a neighbor had croup), stopped to tie her bonnet strings before the hall mirror, made a small cautious Christian smile at her own image, and all neat and tidy, went out. The room was, thank heavens, empty. Empty it looked much the same as before her departure. The ceiling was too low.

*

“And where is Lord Nelson?”

“In his room, resting.”

“He looks worn out these days,” said Mrs. Cadogan approvingly. Whatever they did among themselves was their own affair. She was too astute ever to risk a quarrel. Criticism was not among her pleasures. She preferred Sir William, but Sir William was failing. If no one else could see that, she could. She did not wish to discuss the matter with Emma, ever.

*

“You may judge, my dear Charles, what it is to keep a table for all the poor British emigrants from Naples, who have none, & for the officers of the fleet, as Lord Nelson lives in the house with us, & all business, which
is immense, is transacted here,” Sir William wrote to Greville. It was time to chase down his finances, which Charles seemed to have scattered like paper through the woods. The King had granted him leave to go back to England sufficiently long to do that. He would come as soon as possible.

Alas, to go was not possible.

*

On the 17th of April, the French abandoned Naples.

“The Republic is now established,” said the
Monitore,
“and to her enemies nothing remains but jealousy, desperation and death.”

The blood of St. Januarius refused to liquefy.

The President of the Republic walked up to the Cardinal Archbishop and cocked a pistol. “Unless a miracle takes place, you are a dead man,” he said.

The Cardinal Archbishop could see this for himself. “Warm it,” he said, handing it to an assistant. The miracle took place, but never before had it been greeted with catcalls and public booing. It was necessary to remove the tax on flour and fish.

the
lazzaroni
shouted, which was not the effect intended, though there seemed no way to put the tax back on again.

*

Nelson finally brought himself to put to sea, in order to pursue a part of the French Fleet which had been reported in the Mediterranean again. He did not catch it.

“To tell you how dreary and uncomfortable the
Van
guard
appears, is only telling you what it is to go from the pleasantest society to a solitary cell, or from the dearest friends to no friends,” he wrote Emma. “I am now perfectly the
great
man
—not a creature near me. From my heart I wish myself the little man again. I love Mrs. Cadogan. You cannot conceive what I feel when I call you all to my remembrance.”

“He loves you,” said Emma to her mother.

“Let us hope it stops there,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“If you don’t know, then my heart is at rest,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who was prone to regard innocence as nothing more than the absence of evil. And who is to say she was wrong? In self-knowledge there is certainly much evil.

“I can assure you that neither Emma nor I knew how much we loved you until this separation, and we are convinced your Lordship feels the same as we do,” wrote Sir William.

“I give and bequeath to my dear friend, Emma Hamilton, wife of the Right Hon. Sir William Hamilton, a nearly round box set with diamonds, said to have been sent me by the mother of the Grand Signor, which I request she will accept (and never part from) as a token of regard and respect for her very eminent virtues (for she, the said Emma Hamilton, possesses them all to such a degree that it would be doing her an injustice was any particular one to be mentioned), from her faithful and affectionate friend,” wrote Nelson, adding a codicil both to his current last testament and his latest letter. He had begun to banter wills.

“Isn’t that sweet?” asked Emma.

“No one has ever said anything against your virtues,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “But then, it is the vices people like to gab about these days.”

*

Sir William had discovered that to feel weary is not the same as to feel tired. One can be quite restored and energetic, and yet feel weary. However, with Nelson gone, the house had settled down so that it was possible to hear Emma singing from the center of silence, rather than merely as the upper stave of any general uproar.

“What is it, my dear?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I just opened the score in the middle.”

Sir William leafed to the frontispiece.
“
‘Il
Matri
monio
Segreto,’
by Cimarosa,” he said. “Why yes, that’s rather what I thought it was.”

“Don’t you care for it?”

“Oh it’s an extremely amusing work,” he said. “Pray continue.” An inability to give way to those sudden irritable bursts of steam which others call deep feeling—a mere superficial eruption upon the surface of things—does much to make life bearable. If we do not itch, we need not scratch. The deeper emotions are motionless, though currents eddy through them seventy fathoms down. Since there is no light down there, fortunately for us, we cannot see them. But they are there and they do sustain us. The facile emotions must be very like the feeding grounds in Baron Humboldt’s current, off the coasts of South America, where sea life teems so numerous it eats itself up, or else the surface is startled by the hurtling eruption of giant squid, eager to feed and then sink down again to digest its memories. Though living, these grunion and sea scavenge are not the source of life. Their source of life is the depth that sustains them, whose currents run cold below, to keep them warm above.

What sustains them, thought Sir William, is me.

He did not mind that. But he did hope they had at least done something guilty enough to excuse the look on their faces, though knowing Nelson, and Emma too, for that matter, he suspected not.

That Nelson would take the plunge (swift like the eagle from yon lofty tow’r), he did not doubt, for he was a man plagued merely by conscience, which is no substitute for a sense of responsibility, alas.