Sir William (40 page)

“She has many virtues,” said Nelson doggedly.

“Yes, many,” said Sir William, also loyal.

The devil of it was, they were both fond of her.

“I am glad you are here,” said Nelson. “Which is odd, for I have been jealous sometimes.”

Sir William refilled their glasses. “Strong brandy never did any man ill,” he said. “And you, too, I think, feel often much alone.”

“He was a nice old man toward the end. He did his best, according to his lights.”

“Yes, he was,” agreed Sir William. But the property should go to Greville, all the same.

*

“The dear Queen has returned to Naples,” said Emma, reading
The
Morning
Herald
. “I wonder why she does not write.”

“Ah yes,” said Sir William equanimously. “I wonder.”

“And she pledged eternal friendship,” said Emma scornfully.

“And so did you, my dear,” said Sir William, who had heard that Maria Carolina now made much of a Countess Razoumovski, a perfect unique friend, and like the Russian lady on the boat, no doubt all sensibility.

“Well, I can’t write letters to everyone,” said Emma, but she looked put out, all the same. However, that was in the past, and as for the present, they were off for a journey to Wales tomorrow and she was looking forward to that, for things had been dull at Merton recently, with so few guests; she had felt constrained.

*

The trip was a triumph, barring a temper tantrum and an incident along the way.

Oxford bestowed its freedom on Nelson and made both him and Sir William Honorary Doctors at Civil Law. From there they went to Woodstock Manor and up to Blenheim, a damp and soggy pile, admirable for the connoisseur of pictures, since the landscape combined Salvator’s wildness, Claude’s enlivening grace, and cascades and lakes as good as anything in Ruisdael.

Unfortunately the Duke would not receive them, though they might survey the grounds if they so wished.

“Nelson,” shouted Emma, as they left, “shall have a monument to which Blenheim shall be but a pigsty!” She was outraged.

At Gloucester, they met the tailor and ate the cheese while the crowd cheered and church bells rang, which was more as things should be. And at Tenby, their reception was equally exhilarating.

“I was yesterday witness to an exhibition which, though greatly ridiculous, was not wholly so, for it was likewise pitiable, and this was in the persons of two individuals who have lately occupied much public attention,” said Mr. Gore of that town to his family. “I mean the Duke of Bronte, Lord Nelson, and Emma, Lady Hamilton. The whole town was at their heels as they walked together. The lady is grown immensely fat and equally coarse, while her ‘companion in arms’ has taken to the other extreme—thin, shrunken, and to my impression, in bad health. They were evidently vain of each
other, as though the one would have said ‘This is Horatio of the Nile,’ and the other, ‘This is the Emma of Sir William.’ Poor Sir William, wretched but not abashed, he followed at a short distance, bearing in his arms a
cucciolo
and other emblems of combined folly.”

The
cucciolo
was a recent acquisition. It was a little dog, the progress from overeating to dramming to little dogs being not unknown among women bigger than they used to be.

The small company went up the street and Mr. Gore went home, not unsympathetically, for since Sir William was an old man—among a people noted for their almost Chinese reverence for age per se—public censure had decided merely to pity him; to feel for Nelson (he was a Hero but had been much abroad where life was notoriously unhealthy, so no doubt he had caught the Passion there. But then, our health is not our own fault); and to loathe her.

The fourth anniversary of the Battle of the Nile was spent with Greville at Milford Haven. There was a Welsh fair, a rowing match, a cattle show and a banquet. Nelson, struck by the possibilities of the harbor, recommended to the Admiralty that a dockyard be established there. So, thought Greville, he is a fine fellow led by the nose, that’s all.

At Hereford, the Duke of Norfolk bestowed the city’s freedom in an applewood box and afterward gave them cider. Unfortunately Sir William insisted she smile at the crowds when they laughed at her and that he be allowed to fish, when what she wanted was that he come with her, to lend her support. Afraid to speak out in her own defense, she left a note on his pillow instead and retired to her room with audible groans.

“Emma,” said Sir William, “get up.”

“I will not attend the dinner. I have one of my sick headaches.”

“If you persist in parading about like small German royalty, you must learn the discipline and smile until they stop booing,” said Sir William. “Now come along and do not spoil our banquet. As for my desire to fish, it is an excellent stream, I shall not see it again, and I propose therefore to fish it.”

“Fish and be damned. I will not go.”

He fished, and what was more, presented the catch to the innkeeper, who served up a small fry for dinner, with a most excellent salmon as the centerpiece.

Bah.

*

But on a good day she was still agreeable, and at Downton, where Richard Payne Knight entertained them, consented to impersonate a few antique coins—in short, more Attitudes, but this time from the neck up only.

At Worcester, the freedom of the city came in a porcelain vase rather than an applewood box, and Nelson ordered a dessert service with his arms all over it. At Birmingham, fittingly enough, there was a performance of
The
Merry
Wives
of
Windsor
. At Warwick, as usual, the Earl talked too much, and at Althorp, they stayed with Lord and Lady Spencer.

*

“It still goes on,” said Lady Spencer.

“Most clocks do until they run down,” said Lord Spencer, who had been shocked by Nelson’s appearance. “We must get him to sea again. I do hope war breaks out before it is too late. If not, some other pretext must serve.”

Fortunately war, like Emma’s elbows, was always breaking out, and if she found sea bathing efficacious, so would the fleet, no doubt. It was only a matter of time. All that was necessary, was that Bonaparte go
first, to break the ice. This time, however, Bonaparte seemed a little slow to commence, sensing it, perhaps, to be thin.

*

By September, they were back at Merton. “We have had a most charming tour which will Burst
some
of THEM,” said Emma. “So let all enemies of the GREATEST man alive perish. And bless his friends.”

In November, Romney died. “Why fancy that!” said Emma. “I wondered what had become of him. And I was going to write a letter to him, too.” Which was true enough. She had been meaning to write it now for the past ten years. And looking at “The Ambassadress” with a wistful expression, she added, “Poor George.”

And then it was winter again.

*

Once more Sir William looked out into the garden at that parterre of snowdrops—lovely, nodding, insubstantial things which the Reverend Nelson had not lived to see again, but had admired. He looked at them from a rapidly increasing distance. He had tired of life, as one does of everything in time, unless it tire of us first. It is but civil to make the first move. One must put the world at its ease. But the snowdrops merely nodded good-bye affably, or else they were shaky on their pale green sappy stalks. Like them, he had pulled through, and yet it could not be too long now. For though the snows had half melted and the woods were full of floral processions—all moving off, all circling back, all fugitive, all part of faërie—it was time for him also to say good-bye.

He turned to the fire in the grate, and watched water bubbles hiss at the end of a log, with the peristaltic movement of a centipede.

Well, what have I done? he thought. I have published some excellent engravings after the antique. I have detected Vesuvius in an eruption. I have forced the British Museum to pay handsomely—a thing not easily done. I have finally unloaded a spurious Correggio; and I have undergone Emma.

I shall be remembered, I suppose, for that. Alas, I
can deal only with the esthetic; the inesthetic is beyond me. So since there is nothing I can do about it, all I can do is to sit still in the midst of it, looking at an old volume of landfalls, of almost identical coasts, wistfully. Indeed it is a blessing to be a little deaf.

“Nuncle,” said Horatia, who had been brought in to visit him.

“No,” said Sir William; but yes, she was a docile creature, and it was not Nelson’s fault.

As Sarah Churchill had said when old—that first best and worst of the Marlboroughs, but the woman showed shrewd sense—in this life there is nothing to be done but to make the best of what cannot be helped; to act with reason oneself and with good conscience toward others. And though that may not give all the joys some people might wish for, yet it is sufficient to make one very quiet.

In March, he went up to town for the second time that year, to present to the Society of Antiquaries a mutilated stone head bearing traces of gilding on its coronet, a piece of the ancient walls of Merton Abbey. It was, he hoped, the last piece. Then, not caring to cause distress, he had himself moved from Merton to 23 Piccadilly. Not caring to cause him any, Emma and Nelson came along.

“He is very very bad. He can’t, in my opinion, get over it, and I think it will happen very soon,” said Nelson. “You will imagine Lady Hamilton’s and my feelings on the occasion. Indeed, all London is interested in the fate of such a character.”

Though willing to be obedient, his sister Bolton could not imagine them, quite.

On the 6th of April he died, with Nelson to hold one hand and Emma the other. For dying is very like giving birth: in either event, one has to brace one’s self.

“Gone?” asked Emma.

“Gone,” said Nelson, looking down at that face which had always been a mask but now had nobody to look out through it any more. He closed the eyes.

Straightening up like conspirators once the act is done,
they caught in each other’s eyes an expression which said both too little and too much. It disconcerted both of them. The body lay between.

*

“Our dear Sir William died at ten minutes past ten this morning,” said Nelson, and careful of the proprieties, moved in with Greville for the time being; and then, even more carefully, out.

“Unhappy day for the forlorn Emma. Ten minutes past ten dear blessed Sir William left me,” wrote Emma. She was finding the air a little thin, but had taken a house in Clarges Street, for she had to have some place in town. Greville had evicted her from 23 Piccadilly at once.

“Sir William Hamilton died on Sunday afternoon, and was quite sensible to the last,” said Captain Hardy. “How Her Ladyship will manage to live with the Hero of the Nile now, I am at a loss to know—at least in an honorable way.”

The body was taken off for burial in Wales, and Emma was left alone with Mrs. Cadogan. “They have taken away something that belonged to me,” she said. Which was true; they had.

“Are you my mummy?” asked Horatia, who was three now, and like the other one, precocious.

“Your mother is a woman Too Great to be Named,” said Emma, and began to weep.

*

The will was not read until the beginning of May.

To his dearest loyal and truly brave friend Nelson, a copy of Madame Lebrun’s picture of Emma in enamel, by Bone. “God bless him and shame fall on those who do not say amen.”

To Emma, £300 in cash and an annuity of £800—£100 of it to go to Mrs. Cadogan during her lifetime.

The rest to Greville, who was also to administer the estate.

“My dear Emma,” said Greville, with a small smile he had been saving now for twenty years and could at last let out. “I shall see to everything.”

And charged her interest, fee and tax.

*

“Eight hundred pounds a year. It is not enough money to throw at a cat,” said Emma. Her expenses had risen. Her standards had changed. It was a worry.

She spoke to everyone. She petitioned for a pension.

“She talked very freely,” said Lord Minto, “of her situation with Nelson, but protested that their attachment had been perfectly pure, which I declare I can believe, though I am sure it is of no consequence whether it is so or not. The shocking injury done to Lady Nelson is not made less or greater by anything that may or may not have occurred between him and Lady Hamilton.”

So pension she got none.

Nelson, who had been ordered to the Mediterranean, allowed her £100 a month housekeeping money. He made no bones about going. “If the devil stands at the door, the
Victory
shall sail tomorrow forenoon,” he wrote to St. Vincent. But neither did he make any bones about his intention to come back.

“That dear domestic happiness,” said Codrington fondly, “never abstracted his attention.” Their hero was himself again. “He has sighted Gibraltar. He will be a bachelor beyond it.”

So it was all not quite the way Emma had imagined it would be, though she might have Horatia at Merton as much as she pleased, and see Old Q in town, and of course the Matchams were coming on Thursday and the William Nelsons for the weekend, and there were always some of Nelson’s naval friends to entertain; they were good boisterous boys, there was no harm in them. Something was always happening. And so … And so …

*

Madame Vigée-Lebrun was in London, so Emma went calling, in a black dress, a black cloak, black gloves, a black bonnet. Since she must wear mourning for a year, it was well that black suited her. Her hair was done in the new fashionable Titus cut.

Time had not altered the Great Refugee, but she was running out of royalties to paint, and since she
shrank from the thought of penciling a parvenu, was here to do the peerage.