Sir William (24 page)

I must remember, he told himself, that this is something I know
nothing
about, and went to bed, and anticipated no trouble. To give her credit, it was remarkable how little she neglected him.

*

On the 29th, Nelson returned to Palermo, and Cardinal Ruffo reached Melfi, carrying a banner embroidered by the Queen herself, with her own arms on one side and God’s on the other so no matter how the wind blew, one of them would be on the winning side. God may not be there, but it is wise to keep on the good side of where
He once was, for though nobody has seen Him for years, He
may
be there.

At Naples, a
Te
Deum
was sung in San Lorenzo, to celebrate the possibility of victory, and a priest was arrested for shouting “Long Live the King.” He pleaded drunkenness as his excuse.

“In
vino
veritas,”
said the judge, and nodded to the shooting squad. “You may fire.”

“It would be better to have prayers said for our own safety,” said the diarist de Nicola.

The Cardinal entered the city, and the Republicans walled themselves up in the Castelli d’Uovo and Nuovo. That is, the glorious liberators—which is to say the traitors—went there to protect themselves from the reactionary oppressor—which is to say, the liberator. They returned to the egg, while the mob—which is to say, the loyal
lazzaroni
—held carnival out of season, roasted human flesh on spits, played football with the heads, posed women nude as Liberty, had their liberty of them, dragged their victims to the Cardinal, and when he would not slaughter them, they did.

The Cardinal wrote asking the King to return, and granted a truce to the Republicans in the castles. “What is the use of punishing?” he asked. “How is it possible to punish so many persons without an indelible imputation of cruelty?”

The King explained how. “As a Christian, I pardon everybody, but as he whom God appointed, I must be a strict avenger of the offenses committed against Him and of the injury done to the State.”

“Hang them all,” said Nelson. We need discipline to keep afloat. We must trim the sails and calk the seams if we are to have calm seas and a prosperous voyage.

*

If there was to be liberty, the Queen wished it supervised.

“The Queen is miserable and says that although the people of Naples are for them in general, yet things will not be brought to that state of quietness and subordination till the fleet of Lord Nelson appears
off
Naples.
She therefore begs, intreats, and conjures you, my dear Lord, if it is possible, to arrange matters so as to be able to go to Naples.

“Sir William is writing for General Acton’s
answer.

“For God’s sake consider it, and do! We will go with you, if you will come and fetch us.

“Sir William is ill; I am ill; it will do us good,” wrote Emma.

Nelson consented to go. Emma was overjoyed. “We shall see Naples again—our dear old unchanged Naples,” she said.

“Will we?” Sir William had his doubts. Though it was his duty, as it is the duty of every man, to see justice done, that is not the same as being compelled to watch it being done. This excursion smacked too much of an outing to Tyburn Hill.

He liked the prospect even less when Nelson took him below and showed him a warrant the King had issued for the arrest of Cardinal Ruffo, who had become too popular. (Is there not always something treasonable about another man’s success?) It was to be used
if
needed.

“Lock it up and tell no one,” said Sir William, who preferred Blackstone to Chief Justice Coke, and had no love of the Star Chamber.

Nelson locked it up, but they both knew it was there.

*

“Look,” said Emma, who had been trying to read Lessing’s
School
for
Honour,
or
the
Chance
of
War,
which she found dull. “A dolphin has followed us from port. It is like an opera.”

Glancing at the casement, Sir William noticed that it had once been struck by a bullet and that the wood was newly joined around a patch. That is the trouble with a restoration: it may look the same, but it is not.

It would not be like an opera. It would not even be like an
opera
buffa.
He went into the cabin to wash his hands.

I
T WAS THE DAWN OF
J
UNE
24, 1799. There were woodwinds in the rigging, and the creak of a piccolo in the timbers. The whole orchestra was starting up: it was becoming day. There was no curtain to be drawn this time, no cherubs, but merely a scrim through which it would be possible to perceive that comedy called Justice. The pumiced decks were swabbed down. As the first light hit them they began to steam. An aureole of sea gulls came out to meet the boats, wailed, and whirled back again. The ship’s bell rang for the chorus to come in and take its places. That excellent piece, Monti’s
Aristodemo,
or
The
Monarchy
Restored,
was about to be put on again, though Ferdinand was still in Palermo, pulling at his lower lip and starting hares.

Emma had risen early. In a shovel bonnet
alla
mari
nara,
trimmed with daisies made of cockleshells, a white princess dress
à
la
Régence
with an exceptionally high bodice, and yellow slippers patterned after a man’s evening pumps, she had given some thought to her
tournure,
and so had no doubts, but drew about her in flattering folds an expansive cashmere shawl. The shawl was designed to suggest Mercy. She knew what Justice was.

In the fifth act, the King, struck by a dramatic change of heart, a
deus
ex
machina,
ascends his throne, casts
out the Grand Vizier, unites the lovers—one of whom always turns out to be his long-lost son or daughter—strips the villain, enriches the rest, and it doesn’t matter, because afterward everybody comes out to accept the general applause. Since you have seen it all a hundred times before, there is no need to worry. There is time to bow to one’s friends and drink hot chocolate. It will come out right in the end. Or, if the performance is English, and therefore
The
Beggar’s
Opera,
it is only play-acting; at the last moment, the King’s messenger will arrive with a pardon. She had seen that, too.

She had known they would see Naples again. That’s why she had been so impatient at Palermo, for some operas are a
little
long.

Just the same, they had lost their houses, she had been cast out, so let them hang; it was such a dreadful thing to have done to Sir William at his age.

She stood at the rail and watched the waves, so small they might have been theatrical rollers, the sun a magnesium flare, and the splendid spectacle of eighteen ship of the line, gun hatches open, moving through silence with implacable certainty as they began to enfilade the gap between Capri and Ischia, in order to invest the city.

It was not scenery. It was décor. There were shadows on the sea. The scrim became transparent. Vesuvius became visible, and all the villages along the shore sprang up like footlights.

Nelson stood watching her. On board ship, he was the great man. Anywhere else, he was all at sea. Rather shyly—like a boy at his first ball—he went forward to say good morning, a thin, pale, jaundiced, bilious, one-eyed, one-armed, balding little man with a limp.

Emma, turning, saw neither this puny creature, a mere human, nor the genius inside, but instead that more imposing object, the Hero of the Nile, the friend of the Duke of Clarence, Admiral Nelson,
their
Nelson, Baron Nelson, and who knew what further distinctions were to come.

“Isn’t it exciting!” she said.

He thought she meant the deployment of the ships. “Oh yes, it always is.” She had a feeling for these things. She understood him.

He felt at his ease, a thing he seldom felt with women. “Dear Emma,” he said. He had himself become plummy. He was ripe to fall.

“For a moment you startled me,” she said, putting him at a distance and watching Mother Carey’s chickens come home to roost.

She had become a mistress of the forms. For harmless boyish moments when they were together, she called him Horatio; for public scenes, Lord Nelson; for intimate dinners, My dear Lord Nelson; when he seemed dangerous, Our dear Lord Nelson, which reminded him of Sir William.

Poor Nelson, thought Sir William, who had just come topside. He has not the sophistication for Emma’s simplicity, overlooking that these vain creatures can do anything with mirrors, whether they realize it or not.

It was Emma, first, who spotted the white flags flying on the castles.

“Haul down that flag of truce!” she shouted. “There can be no truce with rebels!” It was her military mood, borrowed from Maria Carolina, who, though she had all Maria Theresa’s habits of mind, lacked the mind itself. Maria Theresa, like most commanding women, had produced a nursery of noddles and sticklebacks. Impotence, neglect and a foolish husband had left Maria Carolina with an insatiable craving for glitter and revenge. So Emma must have these things, too.

Sir William and Nelson looked glumly at the flags. They must send a messenger to Cardinal Ruffo.

*

It was two in the afternoon before the fleet could drop anchor, in battle formation, before the city. “Forty-three fathoms!” shouted the boy with the lead, yet it looked as though they were in deeper than that. The bay was a litter of small boats, for everyone had come out to pay his respects, fling garlands, and cuddle up to the winning side, though until the forts fell the city
had not yet fallen. Through a telescope, Sir William could see that the statue of a giant opposite the palace had a large red-flannel liberty cap on its head.

A cutter came alongside with the mail pouch, containing news from both England and Sicily.

“The
Colossus
is foundered,” said Sir William, got up, looked dazed, and lurched below.

“It is the heat,” said Emma.

But Nelson had paused in his own correspondence. The
Colossus
had indeed foundered, off the Scilly Roads, when almost home.

“It was the transport ship,” he explained, “with his antiques and pictures.”

“Oh well,” said Emma, as though to say, Is that all? “He can buy more. They dig more up every day.” She was absorbed in the dear Queen’s letters, and some gazettes had come with the new French fashions in them. She did want to look at those.

“Perhaps I should go down to him,” said Nelson.

Emma said she would go herself.

*

Sir William was standing in the wardroom, alone.

“I am so sorry, William,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. It could not be helped.” His eyes seemed out of focus.

“When we are settled again, you can collect more. There does always seem to be more,” said Emma. “The French cannot have taken everything.”

“Damn the French!” snapped William, who looked pasty. Poor old gentleman, apparently it was a shock, “Damn them I say.”

It seemed so much emotion from so peripheral a cause. “Shall I stay?” she asked.

“No, I’d rather be alone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure,” said Sir William bitterly.

She went away. He would be better after a while. And really, there was so much to do.

*

That night the city, or those parts of it not still in
rebel hands, burned with thousands of lanterns, which made almost enough light to have supper by.

“Where is Sir William?” asked Emma. She wanted to cheer him up.

Nobody knew.

She half rose, but Nelson, with an odd look, said that he would go instead. She was much relieved. What was going on was far beyond her, though to be sure, it had no doubt been a very hard blow. Sir William was quite right: damn the French. But it was not an irreparable loss.

*

He was still sitting in the wardroom. Someone had lit a lamp, but he seemed not to notice it.

“Greville has been able to salvage only a box with the body of Admiral Lord Sheldam in it. What business had he there? He was not a vase. Why should he be shipped as a vase?” demanded Sir William.

“Sailors are superstitious about bodies aboard ship. He died in Lisbon and had to be sent home.”

“Nonetheless, he was not a vase,” said Sir William idiotically. He had loved the world. To him there was only one tragedy: that one day very soon—no matter how long from now, it will be very soon—we shall be dead and unable to see it any more. But that is a slow tragedy, and this news was sudden. A man of almost seventy can do nothing suddenly.

“I do not understand,” said Nelson, coming closer. “But sir, I am sorry. Truly sorry.”

Sir William shot an angry, defensive look at him, and then saw that, by God, he was. This so startled his natural reserve, that despite himself, he leaned up against this most unexpected present male friend and wept.

What can be worse than an old man’s tears? They are so beyond the hour uncorked; the wine is vinegar, no matter what the year.

With that almost female sensibility with which he could sometimes smooth life’s rougher moments, Nelson reached over and blew the lantern out, and while he waited for Sir William to take hold of himself again, thought most
oddly of the Reverend Edmund, his father, at Round Hill, who must be almost eighty now.

*

“Is he all right?”

“Of course he’s all right,” said Nelson irritably, totally unaware that he had just earned carte blanche, for there was nothing he wished to do.

Emma, who had noticed a look in his eyes which she had sometimes caught in Sir William’s when she knew she had done nothing wrong, looked at the lights in the bay and said, “Oh dear”—and after a while—“but he wants no supper?”

“No, he wants no supper,” said Nelson, perplexed, he did not know by what. He did not like this bay. It was too sensuous. It had ghosts in it.

Aware of Emma waiting for him to speak again, he turned to look at the headlands instead.

*

The next day Sir William was himself again in so far as appearances go, which are perhaps intents. The tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, so we are told, wrote history as well as tragedy, and besides, his tragedies won no prizes. So Sir William sensibly sat in the sun and wrote dispatches home.

Nelson countermanded the armistice by signal. He would give no quarter to the French. They were a greedy, mangy, vainglorious and more than usually time-serving self-seeking race. There are races which cannot help their not being English. He understood that and could even sympathize. But the French seemed not to care. In short, he did not like them.

“Who is that lout?” he demanded.

That lout was Pallio, a disreputable scoundrel of fifty odd in tattered tight candy-stripe pantaloons, a blue military coat, and curiously enough, an immaculately frilled and well-starched shirt front with jeweled studs.

“He says he can keep order,” said Emma proudly.

“He does not look as though he could keep the Sabbath.”

“But everybody knows Pallio. He’s head of the
lazzaroni.
He says he has ninety thousand men. All they need is arms.”

“Why can’t he come in the daytime, like anybody else?”

“He sleeps in the daytime.”

“Humph,” said Nelson. “What do you say, Sir William?”

“He is head of the
lazzaroni,
certainly,” said Sir William, who, if he would not condone needless slaughter, was not in the mood to prevent it.

As far as Nelson could see, a few less Neapolitans would do no harm, no matter what side they were on. Palermo had taught him to Sicilify his conscience. Either the fellow would maintain order, or by morning there would be fewer among whom it would have to be maintained. “I shall give the fellow his guns,” said Nelson.

*

“As Lord Nelson is now telling Lady Hamilton what he wishes to say to the Queen, you will probably know from the Queen more than I do of Lord Nelson’s intentions,” said Sir William smoothly, writing to General Acton. The less they knew of each other’s intentions the better, since they all intended, except for poor muddling Emma, the same thing.

Emma, half wakened by the sounds of shooting and a wail or two across the midnight water, at first alarmed, thought drowsily, It must be Pallio maintaining order, and went to sleep again. In the morning there was no one to tell her otherwise. We maintain order by telling others to do it. How they do it has nothing to do with the maintenance of order, any more than the maintenance has anything to do with order itself. And we, of course, are concerned with order only.

Next morning the Cardinal came aboard, dressed not in his robes—which he had left in the Cathedral vestry after having discovered that he had celebrated unnecessarily a Godgiven truce—but in a purple, which is to say a red, soutane, brown riding boots, and spurs. Nelson was annoyed. He did not like to have his decks scratched.

The man did not look like a proud prelate. What pride
he had arose from family, not faith. He looked like a soldier, sore tried, saddlesore and weary.

There were words.

However, since the Cardinal did not understand English, and Nelson could not understand the Cardinal’s French, and the subject of their debate was Italian, Sir William hoped not so much to bring them together as to keep them apart, and needed all his phlegm to do it; odd though it is that that term which among the poor means only oysterhocking, in a gentleman—if not a by-product of that weather which we emigrate to avoid—denotes swallowing hard.

According to Galen, the faculties of the soul follow the temperaments of the body. Perhaps so. Sir William coped. Phlegm was as inbred in him as ennui is in a Frenchman, or
terribilità
in an Italian, qualities which gave the first jurisprudence, the second wit, and the third lawsuits. God not only tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, he shears the lamb.

So though the Cardinal left in a temper, to debate with his allies; and Pallio had torn down the Cardinal’s edicts and eviscerated whom he pleased; and though the Queen had written to say that a general massacre would cause her no pain; even though men might be savages, there must be no Mohawks here. The consul at sunset, who has sacked whole provinces, must still maintain the Pax Romana. To do so is both his duty and the source of his year’s wealth.