Sir William (30 page)

“Emma,” said Sir William. “Don’t bang.”

“It is only a popular ballad.”

“Yes,
I
know
.”

“Oh,” said Emma, and thought that over. “Well, if you like, I shall play something else.”

“It is necessary only to pay lip service to both sides of the repertoire,” said Sir William. “I shall go fetch my flute.”

So over the evening water there soon floated a flute sonata by Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a little sad, a little gay, for that is the nature of the flute. The Gods were not leaving Alexandria. The Gods were going, a little wistful, home.

At Malta, the island not being entirely subdued, they came in too close to shore, and were raked by shot.

“Get below!” shouted Nelson.

“I shall not get below. It is exciting!” shouted Emma.

“I said, get below.”

“I shall
not
,” said Emma, all patroness of the fleet, and every sailor’s eye upon her.

Nelson pulled her away, while she laughed at him. The sailors cheered.

“Emma will have her own way,” said Nelson later, “or kick up the devil of a dust.”

Since it was warm weather, the dust must be laid. No doubt it had been, for they had both remained below for some time. Sir William felt sorry for her. A role is not the same thing as an attitude. An attitude is the matter of a moment, whereas a role once taken up has to be played through. It cannot be dropped if it does not suit you or if you tire of it. So, inevitably, it lacks the vivacity of an attitude.

Their last night at Malta was also the last reunion of Nelson and his old officers. Being British, his officers were amateurs in the best sense, unlike the French, who were professionals in the worst. No doubt Nelson would miss them, for now he had finally had his experience of women, naturally he would prefer male company, and after tonight, his male cronies would scatter, despite a similar
preference, to homes of their own. Your amateur is rewarded with medals, titles and modest estates; your professional yearns for a throne, and so must play musical chairs with all Europe. But both of them long to be left in peace.

*

“I am sorry to find that Lord Nelson was thinking of returning to Palermo. I shall be afraid, if he does, that his
health
will grow worse and he will be obliged to come home,” wrote Lord Spencer to Lord Keith. “We have therefore left a discretionary power to your Lordship to permit him so to do, if he should for that cause think it necessary …”

“Double talk,” said Lord Keith, “but quite plain.”

“When Lord Nelson was here, I shewed him your Lordship’s letter, but I believe some arrangement with the Court of Naples to carry her Majesty to Leghorn has induced Lord Nelson to keep the
Foudroyant
and to take the
Alexander
with him,” wrote Sir Thomas Troubridge to Lord Keith.

“Damn,” said Lord Keith. “She shall not travel in my bottoms.”

“I have applied for sick leave. I am going back with you,” said Nelson.

Sir William looked relieved. It would be better so. Emma agreed. If she was not quite as sure of her own reception as she appeared to be, she was quite sure of Nelson’s, and both she and Sir William could shelter under that.

*

At Palermo, where they stopped to take aboard the Queen and their own household goods, nothing had changed. The King would not budge; the Queen was aching to go; and Paget could not disguise his contempt, so he would not last long. Emma made one final arrangement before departure, to settle her half-forgotten daughter here.

“I think I can situate the person you mention about the Court, as a Camerist to some of the R.F—y, if her education
is
good.
It is a comfortable situation
for
life.
The Queen has promised me. Let this remain
entre
nous,”
she wrote to Greville. Also, let her not come until Emma was safely gone.

There was a week of banquets, and the King proclaimed an amnesty, now there was no one left to hang.

“Ah well, it is nothing to worry about,” said Sir William. “There is a little greatness even in the best of us, and now he has gotten it out of his system at last, no doubt he feels purified.”

They set sail on June 10th, the King saying good-bye to them not at all like a sad poltroon, but with the satisfied air of a farmer who has finally seen the rooks dislodge themselves from the golden corn. He had weathered the storm. He might stay where he was. Indeed, since Napoleon had crossed the Alps, he might much better stay. So time had proved his statesmanship, even if he had not.

The Queen was gone. It was not only freedom, it was vindication.

I
T WAS NOT A JOURNEY HOME
, it was a raree show, dragged around like Pompey’s triumph, or Bajazet in chains, to please Zenocrate, a most unfilial thing, for Emma babbled unrestrained. Concupiscence had quite uncorked her.

“Livorno! Livorno!” shouted the Queen when the ships dropped anchor there. “Thank God, for having given me the firmness to leave. I am no longer contradicted, tormented and threatened. This is a great boon, and I am happy and content.”

“I am no longer contradicted, tormented and threatened. It is a great boon. I am happy and content,” said the King to Acton, in Sicily, and in his solemn way, winked.

“It is not time for the Queen to be making visits and retarding public service,” snapped Lord Keith, and sent the
Foudroyant
to Minorca for repairs rather than allow her to travel on it. “Lady Hamilton has had command of the fleet long enough.”

“I am desperate!” shrieked the Queen. “I only aspire to repose. I shall go overland.”

“I hope it will not be long before Nelson arrives in this part of the world,” wrote Lord Spencer from the Admiralty. “His further stay in the Mediterranean cannot,
I am sure, contribute either to the public advantage or his own.”

Nelson decided to make the journey overland. He could not desert the Queen in her hour of greatest need, which was, as usual, now. Napoleon’s troops were about. Their passage would not be easy.

“Sir William says he shall die by the way, and he looks so ill I should not be surprised if he did,” wrote Miss Knight, who was of course with them. “And Lady Hamilton wishes to visit the different courts of Germany.”

At Arezzo, the coach broke down and Mrs. Cadogan and Miss Knight stayed behind with it while the others posted ahead.

Miss Knight was neither good nor bad, but merely that very 19th-century thing, a lady. She had adapted to the times and would move with them. She took the desertion in good part, but tapped her feet.

Mrs. Cadogan, who did not move with the times and was unmoved by them, took the striped cloth off a picnic hamper and began to gnaw a chicken leg, which was no more than plain common sense.

There was a silence, Miss Knight,
who
had
seen
enough,
observing, when the offer was made, that she felt no appetite.

“The way I look at it, it’s now or never,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “and though I cooked it myself, it’s not bad.”

This statement struck Miss Knight as being ungenteel, but quite rightly perceiving that to say so would be ungracious, she complained instead of a slight headache, and thus, having the excuse of illness, allowed herself to be consoled with a jar of meat jelly, delicately served, and some bread and butter, sliced
very
thin, while the postillion, under Mrs. Cadogan’s direction, boiled water for tea.

Social distinctions being thus properly upheld, they proceeded, morally reenforced, but short on troops, under the guard of some passing Austrian cavalry to Ancona, where Miss Knight went to her room, locked herself in, and fell upon a roast duck ravenously, her headache miraculously cleared.

“Poor dear, she does feel it so,” said Mrs. Cadogan obscurely.

“Feels what?”

“Faulty teeth,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “She cannot munch, you know.”

“You can form no idea of the
helplessness
of the party,” said Miss Knight.

If it was not one misfortune, it was another, but on they went, with gossip always a good league ahead of them, like a cloud of midges. No matter how fast they rode, they could not catch up.

The Adriatic was stormy, Trieste was indifferent, and the trip to Vienna an anticlimax, not because it fell below the standard of discomfort maintained during the rest of the trip, but because they could feel no more. Vienna itself was better. Nelson was received by all ranks with the admiration which his great actions deserved, notwithstanding—as Lord Minto said—the disadvantage under which he presented himself to the public eye.

He did not present himself to the public eye. The public eye presented itself to him, as to the keyhole of a bedroom door. He had been caught napping.

He wrote to Fanny to say they would arrive in England on October 2nd, and was delighted to hear from Sir William that this would not be possible. He believed in putting off the evil day. Alas, women do not believe in evil; having been the cause of so much of it, they know it is a matter of fact, not belief. They have no illusions.

“You must expect to find me a worn-out old man,” he added, and indeed recently there had been much to age him. He knew not how to act. His conscience had collapsed. He could only stagger up from his own ruins, a free man, to look upon his former chains. How had they held him for so long? He could but wonder.

“I don’t think him altered in the least,” said Lady Minto to her husband. “He has the same shock head and the same honest, simple manners. But why must he talk of Lady Hamilton as of an angel? She leads him about
like a keeper with a bear. It is disgusting. Why must she sit by him at dinner to cut up his meat? Why must he carry her pocket handkerchief?”

Lord Minto shrugged. “Perhaps it is a form of
tic
douloureux.
”

“He is a gig from ribands, orders and stars, but he is just the same with us as ever he was. If only it were not for
her.
”

“She is not so bad,” said Lord Minto tolerantly, to conceal that secretly he liked her. “It is just that she has been rubbed a little, so naturally the original superficiality shines through.”

*

On the contrary, she was in a bad way.

“My God,” she said, when the door was locked, “I am with child!”

“It would be better, dear, not to name the father,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who liked Nelson well enough but preferred a prosperous obscurity, and besides, how could it last?

“I could say much, but it would only distress me and be useless,” wrote Nelson to Fanny, having heard the news, which made him giddy. He had always wanted a child, though according to Fanny they already had a son, Josiah Nisbet: hers.

“My God!” he snapped. “I have only cuckolded the man thrice, and here already is the egg. I call that quick work indeed.”

He was unhinged, but proud. What did it matter now?

“At least now I am plump, it will not show,” said Emma, and burst into tears, just as she had finally burst her casing of refinement—the way a sausage splits when it is boiled. A kit-cat minx is no kitten when she weighs ten stone. If we come not from a good bloodline, die we must, or blood will tell. Alas, it tolled daily in the tocsin numbers of that trumpet voice. Emma had repossessed her native vowels.

In the next room, Sir William, resting in bed, put down his book. It should have lasted him the afternoon, but the closing chapters of any life read very rapidly, for we
read them the faster, wanting to be in at the kill. The book was the letters of Horace Walpole, dead now, too, though never an intimate; none to him, a few to Minto. Though sometimes on trifling subjects, they were never dull. He preferred letters to biography these days, for he had caught himself in the tattletale habits of slowing before the ultimate death scene and computing their ages from their dates: those who had lived less long than he into one pile; those who would live longer, into another.

He had heard Emma’s shriek, though not its subject. It was true, she was wildly out of hand these days. Ah well, let her flaunt if flaunt she must, he thought, for once in England and she would be back in her cage for good, with a cloth over her. In England, brightly colored plumage is not admired.

“He must not know, for it would kill him,” said Emma.

“I should think the cause of it would have done that, if anything could,” said Mrs. Cadogan tartly.

“He shall not die. I need them
both
,” sobbed Emma. “I feel so soiled.”

“Ah ducks, now don’t take on. At least this time you have the consolation that it was your own dirt.”

“I’m fat and ugly and hold and ’orrible,” said Emma, in hysterics. “And look at my neck.”

“What’s wrong with your neck?”

“It’s
wrinkling!
” cried Emma. “I shall have to wear high collars or gorgetted net. Why did I not stay thin? Why must we all grow old?”

“At least it will help us fool the old man, if he wants to be fooled,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who had divided loyalties. “Besides, you are not old. It is just that you are not young any more, either.”

“Then I am neither one thing nor the other.”

“Well, you are thirty-five. Enjoy it while you can. And watch your vowels.”

“Oh poor, poor Sir William,” cried Emma.

“Nonsense, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s in the next room, the nice old gentleman, taking his siesta with a book, as so should you be,” said Mrs. Cadogan, allowing the Viennese curtains to descend. “And as for
the end of the world, it’s a long way off. We shall none of us live to see it in our time, and that I can assure you for a fact. As for what happens to others, that’s their own affair.”

*

The Esterhazys gave a concert with—since Emma was known to be fond of music—old Haydn to play some of his own settings of the incomparable poetry composed by Miss Knight, all in praise of Nelson, all sung to his face while he stood there and beamed.

“In many points he is a really great man; in others a baby,” said Minto, applauding when the screech was done.

Emma forgot to pretend to listen, for she had seen a faro table. Since he was not only a great musician but had been in the service of their family for almost fifty years, the Esterhazys took this ill. She had affronted the best-loved servant in Vienna.

At the faro table, she won £300 by laying out Nelson’s cards for him. It was one of her better evenings.

Lord Fitzharris (who lost the same amount) could not disguise his feelings, and joined in the general abuse of her. Society will forgive you for having been a chambermaid if in return it feels free to refer to the fact in your presence from time to time. If you persist in but one eccentricity, eventually it will be granted you. But if you add to the first a second, that strains the cartilaginous exoskeleton of mutual tolerance to breaking, and down their gullets you go, boiled like a lobster, cracked like a crab and torn to shreds.

The Queen, surrounded by
gemütlichheit
, if tortured by piles, was in a better mood, for she had learned that His Majesty had requested Paget’s recall.

“I repeat, that at all times and places and under all circumstances, Emma, dear Emma, shall be my friend and sister, and this sentiment will remain unchanged,” she wrote in a farewell note, and then forgot all about her. The parting had been affecting, in the best Kotzebue style.

Sir William was better and evinced an interest in
Prague. To Emma, the charms of that town seemed merely architectural, but if it pleased the old man, why not? So off to Prague they went, Napoleon crossing Europe in one direction, and they in another.

The next considerable halt was at Dresden, in Saxony, which was said to be quite a pretty little court, for a place so northern and obscure.

But to malice there is no end, it is a round robin, for people write to their friends, and then their friends write to us. From being a profitable commission for painters, Emma had swelled to become a set piece for female letter writers, all of them ajostle to get their adjectives in first. Besides, it is a truth universally acknowledged that we may most flatteringly light up the corners of our own rooms by burning down a neighbor’s house.

The Hamiltons would not care for Dresden, wrote Mrs. Elliot, whose husband was British Consul there, and so would be expected to put them up. The Court was closed down (it had shut upon receipt of the morning’s mail, for rather than receive
that
woman,
the Electress would receive no one), so there would not be much amusement.

The Hamiltons engaged to provide their own amusement.

“Damn,” said Mrs. Elliot. “They are coming anyway.”

“Well, if you will put them up, I will put up with them,” said Mr. Elliot. “It will give Mrs. St. George employment for her pen.”

“I caught her sharpening quills this very morning,” said Mrs. Elliot, “and all her geese are bare.”

There were no people in Dresden not acquainted with Mrs. St. George’s pen, and few who had not received a little note. Her jaw was taut. Her eyes flashed. Her prose was firm.

*

“Sturgeon, dear Emma?” asked Nelson, at the buffet.

“Oh yes,” said Emma.

“Chicken Marengo?”

“Oh yes. And gobs of cream.”

“It is plain,” wrote Mrs. St. George, “that Lord Nelson
thinks of nothing but Lady Hamilton, who is totally preoccupied by the same object. She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming and vain.”

“Russian salad?” asked Nelson.

“I can reach it,” said Emma, bending over the jellies an enormous bosom, and digging in with a spoon.

“No thank you,” said Sir William. “These days I do not eat. The only pleasure I have at table is in watching Lady Hamilton ah … er … feed.”

Sir William is old, infirm, and all admiration of his wife, and never spoke today but to applaud her, thought Mrs. St. George, framing a phrase.

“Who is that damned woman with the inky stare?” demanded Sir William.

“I shall now give you the pleasure,” said Emma, putting her plate on the piano forte, “of hearing one of little Miss Knight’s songs,” and plopped down on a chair.

Emma rattled away while the plate, by sympathetic vibration, seemed about to tip its remaining Russian salad into the Black Sea of the rug.

Her figure, thought Mrs. St. George, is colossal, but, excepting her feet—which are hideous—well shaped. Her bones are large, and she is exceedingly
embonpoint.
She resembles a bust of Ariadne. The shape of her features is fine, as is the form of her head, and particularly her ears; her teeth are a little irregular, but tolerably white; her eyes light blue with a brown spot in one, which, though a defect, takes nothing away from her beauty and expression; her eyebrows and hair are dark and her complexion coarse; her expression is strongly marked, variable and interesting; her movements in common life, ungraceful.