Sir William (27 page)

“Turn him out. Turn him out! Or I will turn him out myself,” squealed the King, standing above the rising
floods upon a bench, and glowering with the glum resignation of a Cnut.

Lock waited upon Sir William next day with a handwritten memorial of the incident.

“It is unfortunate,” said Sir William,
and
made
no
apology.

Emma came in to say she had talked the Queen around, but since she was as clumsy to move as a barge, it had taken two hours.

“Lock,” said Sir William, “that you should be agreeable perhaps transcends reason, but could you not confine yourself to common sense? The King trounced a whiskered Portuguese officer out of the theatre pit only last night. Unfortunately his fellow officers rose, pointed to their own whiskers, and burst into a horse laugh. As a result, His Majesty smarts. The punishment for side whiskers is three months’ imprisonment. So shave.”

Sobbing with indignation, Lock shaved. “So well does this artful woman know how to create herself a merit by this ostentation of what she terms doing
good
for
evil,
” he wrote home, after Emma had once more gotten him received at Court.

“I always heard she was a harmless creature, boisterous perhaps, but not bad,” said Fox. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s there.”

“Well, so’s my cousin by marriage or whatever you call ’im. I must say he does not write a pretty letter.”

“But he writes often,” said Lord Grenville. “Where is Elgin now?”

“In Vienna.”

*

Not only would the King not return to Naples, he would no longer listen to the advice of the Queen. He said he preferred to die where he was, and that not soon, rather than go where she proposed to send him.

“I have always foreseen that as I grew older my power would diminish,” said the Queen. “If I knew where to find the River Lethe, I would travel there on foot in order to drink its water.” Lethe’s exact whereabouts being unknown, she toyed instead with the idea of a trip to
Vienna, which has always been on the Danube, a chartable stream. “I shall ask for a few months’ leave to distract my mind, restore my health and marry my daughters,” she told Emma. If she had not an army, she had daughters, and there are more ways than one of getting aboard a throne.

The King had commissioned Canova to do an heroic portrait, which loomed larger in Naples, where it was set up, than ever it did in the master’s
oeuvre.

“He allowed himself to be scaled the wrong way,” said Sir William. “Nothing taller than eight feet has any aesthetic merits whatsoever. It is the same with any microcosm; multiply the field of vision, and you can see the flaws.”

Lord and Lady Elgin arrived in October, he sending home the male, or serious, recommendations; Lady Elgin, being a woman, preferring to report upon the unforgivable, and hence irremediable, flaws.

Nelson was seen with Emma everywhere, most often drowsing beside her at the gaming table, and the public display of devotion must ever be an offense against the well-regulated decorums of society.

“Captain Morris went to Sir William to deliver some dispatches he had for Lord N. He read them and then called Lady Hamilton out of the room. When she came back, she said, ‘Sir William, we shall not go to the country today; you must dress yourself and go to Court after breakfast.’ ‘Why?’ asked Sir William. ‘Oh, I will tell you presently,’ said Lady Hamilton, flounced her head, and went on talking. Is it not a pity a man who had gained so much credit should fling himself away in this shameful manner?”

Lady Elgin was indignant. No matter who she was now, they all remembered what Lady Hamilton had been. And Nelson, to speak plain, had not come from a background much better, though Lady Nelson was understood to be, whatever her other faults, quite respectable.

Lord Elgin recommended that Sir William be recalled. Emma had grown too high-flown. If tampering with His Majesty’s Navy was, on a low sensual level, explicable,
tampering with His Majesty’s Mail Pouch was beyond excuse.

“She runs everything,” said Lock.

Having made their several reports, the Elgins went off to Athens: he to play marbles; she to entertain.

*

On October 5th, Nelson was forced to sail to the blockade of Minorca, with nothing to entertain him on the voyage but some letters from Fanny.

Brother William was still snuffling after the possible succession to Bronte. He was plump for a trufflehound. Josiah had sent home a description of the estate, and so—like Lord Falmouth in greater extremity—had given “last first proof that he had brains.” “The dampness occasioned by the constant rain was beyond description.” And worse than that, beef was 9/4 the stone. She was to go and brace her nerves in Devonshire.

*

In Palermo, they could not brace their nerves at all. “I wish it could be pointed out to the King that there should be an amnesty,” said a courtier, “but who could do so?” He had already caused so much, that there was no one willing to risk his further displeasure.

Nelson returned from Minorca.

On the 9th of November, which was called the 19th Brumaire, there was a
coup
d’état
in France. The Directory fell. Napoleon was in, and therefore the revolutionary calendar was out. He had better things to do than rename streets and confuse poesy with politics. In Germany, Goethe—as benign and mechanical as ever—saluted the dawn of a new age, but had no desire to beckon to it; a salute should suffice. In Palermo, Emma, who knew nothing of Cardano on Cards or the medieval versions of Fortuna, went gambling to celebrate. Her favorite game was faro. The word means lighthouse, specifically that beacon built in Ptolemy’s day to guide the mariner home. Nelson dozed beside her. When his eyes were open, she dazzled him with a glance. When his eyes were shut, she wondered why he dazzled her. They were a noticeable couple, for both had been born
egregious, a quality which cannot be concealed and so naturally provokes the ill-will of those who have everything to conceal themselves, mostly their own mediocrity.

Nelson was a little man neither to his followers nor his friends. It was only his superiors who diminished him, as best they were able. He forgave the admonition, for gambling did not bore him.

“Why do you interest yourself in such things?” he asked.

“I don’t. They interest me,” said Emma, and shoved another pile of ducats down. “Besides, it is the fashion,” she explained, lost, and paid up—with his money.

She paid up with a good deal of it, and there were other drains upon his pocket, which in optimum case was not so deep as a well but more like a cistern, being replenished from above when he rained money into it, rather from below by the cool crystal springs of a private income. Graffer, having no English garden to play with any more, Nelson sent him off to Bronte to organize an English farm as an example to the Sicilians of the singular excellence of nonvinous agriculture.

“I hope the news of the Dukedom,” wrote Fanny, “is true, if you have money given to support the rank.” Since he had not, he planted seven hundred acres to corn and watched Emma gamble.

“They have everything in common,” said Damas, a
damned Frenchman, “money, faults, vanities, wrongdoing of every kind.”

“Her rage is play, and Sir William says when he dies she will be a beggar,” reported Lady Minto.

*

For New Year’s there were fetes, but it was New Year’s of 1800, and a century is more solemn than a year, for it is a kind of swivel which allows us to whirl either way, forward or back. A number of attitudes were permissible, so long as they were neither shown nor voiced and so long as they were not Emma’s.

A little solemnly, like guests at a ball, waiting for the doors to the supper room to be folded back, perspiring from the crush of their exertions, they watched to see what would be given them as room and reward. For they expected empty rooms, prepared for them to enter. They would saunter in at the proper time:

—and, a little solemnly, having defended themselves stubbornly thus far, they prepared to fall back upon the ultimate room, the chamber in which they would die;

—or, securely, from boxes of rank and station, they waited, like grandparents, to see the new child, who might or might not be worth a christening mug;

—or, anyhow, the guns in the harbor fired a salute, the churches, despite the snows, were warm inside—the glass in their windows steamy—and there were midnight masses as well as singing in the streets.

A yellow rocket arched, sprang into bloom, and with the century it died. A cold wind blew through the gardens, like change, and roused thereby a whirl of snow and dead leaves, a sort of fetch.

Clocks chimed. There was a pause. The doors to the supper room were folded back. But there was no change, and, a little stiff, Miss Knight, who had been asked to the party, shook out her skirt and let out her breath and said “Well!”

It was over with. The world was still there. The millennialist must change his plans. And yet his defeat did not make them that more the festive. The night was cloudy and dark, the rockets now seemed to explode
anticlimactically, and the Hamiltons and Nelson went home early.

At the rear of the Palazzo Palagonia, a terrace overlooked the sea, which was black but empty except for the flare of a single fishing boat rocking up and down not far out.

“Well, what will it bring?” asked Nelson as they stood there peering toward the horizon, each looking ahead from a different age, a different altitude; each having climbed a different height in time.

“Oh all sorts of good things, I expect,” said Emma. “Doesn’t it always?” She was thirty-five and now faced life head on, for now neither profile was the better one; they had both aged, so she favored neither side.

“I meant what will it be like?” said Nelson, taking her hand. He was forty-two, little had been granted him in the human way as yet, and New Year’s is a lonely time. He felt cold.

Emma, who had an impulse to turn back, and who was besides both compassionate and sorry, took one of Sir William’s hands in her free one and squeezed it confidingly.

But Sir William, who was seventy and could see farther than either of them and had taken Nelson’s question seriously, looked out over the sea and said, “Whatever else it will be, it will be vulgar.” New children are always vulgar, for if they are not vulgar, they are not children—and an old man will put up with much for the pleasure of congenial company—and besides, it would not be for long.

Emma, who had felt the sudden chill, asked to withdraw indoors.

“Take her,” said Sir William. “I would like to remain outdoors a while.” For though the society of others enhances our knowledge of them, if we would know ourselves, we must isolate the beast and contemplate him, enlarged, at our leisure.

He stood respectfully before the view, his hands folded, his legs apart, at rest, and realized—as soon as his thoughts had roiled up into some temporary identity
before scattering again—that he had been remembering that in Apollonius of Tyana, and other authors, we may read that sometime in the late spring, the beginning of the old Pagan year, a voice had been heard across these waters, crying, “Great Pan is dead,” and that the sound of that lament had lingered over the sea for a long time. Indeed, he could hear it now; and that when Anthony was at last put down by Octavian’s favorite, there was heard in the streets of Alexandria the ghostly music, the sistrums and the tambours and syrinxes of the old gods, deserting him.

Yes, it would be a vulgar century.

Nelson, who had been gone for no little time, came out to join him. Sir William had thought he would. Poor man, no doubt he was puzzled, for he needed them both, a quite natural thing but not to the morality of a clergyman’s son, for to the clergy, nothing is natural.

Since Nelson did not speak, it occurred to Sir William to wonder what he saw out there. Not Great Pan or the gods of Alexandria leaving, certainly. But he might very well be catching a glimpse of the glitter of the fairies moving off down the trod, for he was a Norfolk man, and Norfolk folk were often fey.

Sir William did not know whether it was the irreality or the reality of the world which pleased him more, but since the two alternate so rapidly as to form what seems a continuous image, perhaps it did not matter. He was by no means dissatisfied. We admire the whole, accept both, and pick our own way to our own death, though it is possible to wave to each other through the trees. It is an autumn ramble. The leaves are marvelous colors. The air is bracing. So why hurry?

But a glass of brandy at three in the morning would, on this occasion, do no harm.

*

New Year’s, it is worse than a birthday, thought Emma. One does not
always
wish to sleep alone.

“Would you ever,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “and I thought it was to be only a sketch.” She was pleased as punch and just as jocular. She had attained to the quality;
she had had her portrait done, proper, in a miniature.

It was Sir William’s New Year’s gift. He had had all four of them done: Nelson in profile, plump, hideous, in the Sicilian taste; Emma all Sir Peter Lely—for it was a provincial place, Palermo, and the old styles die hard—with blue skin, breasts like honeydews, pretty in the face, and fashionably tousled hair; himself, well—“Ah yes,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “that’s himself”—a face which in Reynolds’ day had been thrifty but dreaming and sad, was now sad but certain. It was odd. Mrs. Cadogan and he, they were dissimilar, but they both had the same look. They had both been watchers.