The Volcano Lover (42 page)

Fatal Paget, as the Queen calls him, has arrived in Palermo, and after five days was received by the Cavaliere. Here is a young man—Paget is twenty-nine, a full forty years younger than the Cavaliere—to whom the Cavaliere felt no avuncular attraction whatsoever.

And you come from what post, said the Cavaliere coldly.

I was envoy extraordinary in Bavaria.

But not minister plenipotentiary?

That is correct.

I have heard you held this post only one year.

Yes.

And before that?

Bavaria was my first post.

Of course you speak Italian, said the Cavaliere.

No, but I will learn. In Munich I learned German quickly.

And you will need to learn Sicilian, for who knows when Their Majesties will return to their first capital. And the Neapolitan dialect as well, even if you never see Naples, for the King does not speak Italian.

So I have heard.

Some moments of silence followed, during which the Cavaliere inwardly berated himself for saying too much. Then, clearing his throat nervously, Paget found the courage to say that he was ready to present his credentials letter to the King and Queen as soon as the Cavaliere presented his letter of recall.

The Cavaliere replied that since he had no intention of remaining for even a single day in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as a private person, and has already made plans for a month's sightseeing trip, he will attend to the matter when he returns. And off he went with his wife, Mrs. Cadogan, and the hero on the
Foudroyant,
water-borne once again, this time not to engage with history (though the hero must make a stop at Malta) but to float out of history, out of the schedule of their lives.

His superiors and erstwhile friends at the Foreign Office had dismissed him? He would dismiss them for a while from his mind. Take a larger, more mobile view. Watching the coastline unfold, when majestic cloud-crowned Etna came into sight, thundering a little, the Cavaliere recalled the astonishing view from the summit in the blue-tinted dawn, with the whole island of Sicily, Malta, the Liparis, and Calabria outlined below him as on a map. Yes, I have done that. I am the only one here who has done that. What a rich life I have had.

Passing near Etna, the
Foudroyant
was not far from Brontë, the fief attached to the hero's new Sicilian title. The Cavaliere's wife was eager to go ashore, but the hero said he preferred to inspect the estate, whose volcanic soil yielded revenues, so he had been told, amounting to three thousand pounds a year, when his visit had been properly prepared for. The Duke of Brontë, he declared, should not simply appear, unheralded, on his own domain. The Cavaliere, who suspected some prankishness in the King's choice of a dukedom to bestow on his British savior, Brontë being the name of the cyclops who forges Etna's thunder, thought it best to keep this bit of information to himself. The one-eyed hero, who seemed so proud of being a Sicilian duke, might not be amused by the jest. The Cavaliere thought it rather droll.

The Cavaliere has reached the zero point of pleasure, where pleasure consists in being able to put unpleasant thoughts out of one's mind. His dismissal, Paget, his debts, the uncertain future awaiting him in England—these erupted in his mind and then were blown backward into the wind, like the sea birds over his head streaming from stern to prow. The relief of not dwelling on what preoccupied him was so pleasurable that he had the impression he truly was enjoying himself. This ship was his home. When they stopped in Syracuse for two days to visit the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter and the celebrated quarries and caverns, the Cavaliere's wife, despite her morning sickness, refused to remain on board with her mother. She did not wish to miss even one of the Cavaliere's enthusiastic on-site lectures, and she did not want to be separated for even an hour from the hero. His wife and his friend seemed so happy. Neither a naïve nor a complaisant husband, he really loved his wife and he really loved the man close to his wife's age, whom she now loved, and they really loved him, so he hadn't lost a wife but gained a son, isn't that how it was working out?

As in the palace in Palermo, as on the flagship during the six weeks anchored in the Bay of Naples, they behave with perfect correctness in the Cavaliere's presence. That is, they don't fawn on each other any more than they did before they became lovers. That is, they lie. He has no idea when or how often his wife goes to the hero's quarters late at night, or he to hers. Nor does he want to know. His wife, with her unassailable intestinal tract and proven resistance to seasickness, now complains at breakfast of having digestive problems and being made queasy by the movement of the ship. Of course, he would not want them to allude openly to their relationship or her to mention the nausea of pregnancy—that would be painful. And yet, perversely, he minds that they are playacting in front of him. It makes him feel excluded, condescended to. It makes him feel ignored, since he is the one with the weak digestion, he is the one who is sometimes seasick, though one could not hope for a more tranquil sea.

*   *   *

And what to wear now that they will almost immediately be traveling again, for the hero is eager to return to England, and the Admiralty is impatient for their greatest weapon against Napoleon to conclude his stint as the Bourbon paladin and yacht captain to the discredited, now former British ambassador and his irresistible wife; and of course, they will go with him. What to wear, for this will be a long, complex journey. First by sea, on the hero's flagship, as far as Leghorn; then overland in many wheeled vehicles (carriage, state coach, post chaise), going from south to north, heading from heat and long days into a more modest summer, traveling through many states, stopping for many festivities, for each of which one must appear at one's best.

There was never any question of their not leaving together. The only question was how many others would depart with the trio and Mrs. Cadogan, besides Miss Knight, who will not hear of being left behind, and Oliver, one of the Cavaliere's two English secretaries, who had been seconded to the hero, plus the usual passel of servants. How big the cavalcade would be.

Upon their return in early June from the month-long cruise, the Cavaliere submitted his letter of recall and Paget was allowed to present his credentials at court. The Queen ground her teeth and did not once look at him. Much more than the imminent loss of her loyal friends was on the Queen's mind, for she understood that the replacement of the Cavaliere with a new envoy signified British displeasure with
her.
Slighting Paget and showing solidarity with her friends is one of her reasons for resolving to leave Palermo, for Vienna, to visit her daughter (as well as her nephew and son-in-law)—her first-born, Maria Theresa, is now the Hapsburg empress. (The other reason for a departure: her bitter awareness of how much her influence over the King has waned.) The hero had hoped to return by sea to England with the Cavaliere and his wife, their entourage, and all their belongings, which would permit him to bring the Queen and her train of ladies-in-waiting, chaplains, doctors, and servants as far north as Leghorn. When his request to take the
Foudroyant
to England was refused, the hero saw no reason for them not to make it a long journey through Europe, and accede to the Queen's desire that her friends escort her all the way to Vienna.

When they arrived in Leghorn, where the irate Lord Keith at last recovered the wayward
Foudroyant
for the military purposes for which it was intended, and while arrangements were being made to continue the journey, there was news of an impending engagement of the Austrian forces with Napoleon at Marengo, and the Queen impulsively decided not to proceed to Vienna directly but to go for a short stay at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome (she sends word for Baron Scarpia to join her there) to await the outcome of the battle. She will join her British friends in Vienna in a few weeks.

On then, in seven carriages followed by four baggage wagons, onto which have been loaded all the Cavaliere's pictures and other possessions saved from Naples. The bone-bruising ride on the road along the Arno proves more strenuous than the Cavaliere anticipated. He was unable to read, he could only close his eyes and try to shut out the pain in his back and hips and knees, while Mrs. Cadogan held a damp cloth to his forehead. At Florence they stopped for two days of receptions and calls. The Cavaliere had wanted to stay longer. It was not only because he is not feeling well at all. He would like to visit the Uffizi again, whose treasures have unaccountably been spared by Napoleon—one can't stop in Florence and not see the pictures—but his wife and his friend will not hear of it. If you are so ill and tired, then surely you aren't strong enough to go around and look at pictures. I am always strong enough to look at pictures, he said weakly. How I feel does not matter. It gives me pleasure.

No, no, said his wife. You are ill. We are worried about you. You must rest. And then we will continue the journey. And so he rested dispiritedly, efficiently, without the stab of pleasure he had been anticipating. How boring just to be a body. And then in Trieste, where there are very few notable pictures, they stopped for almost a week. The Cavaliere could not understand the delay.

The disconsolate Queen arrived a week after they reached Vienna, having cut short her visit to Rome upon hearing the news of Napoleon's victory. The stay of the hero, the Cavaliere, and his wife was prolonged to another month of parties and balls in honor of the hero. The Cavaliere's wife has her triumphs, too. One night she won five hundred pounds at the faro table. Their four-day stay on the Esterházy country estate ended with a festivity for which the prince's celebrated composer-in-residence produced a musical tribute to the hero; the composer was at the keyboard, and it was sung by the Cavaliere's wife.

A few days later she sang Haydn's
The Battle of the Nile
again, accompanying herself, for her royal friend, who was living in resentful seclusion at Schönbrunn Palace. Très beau, très émouvant, exclaimed the Queen, who could not help recalling a voice she had heard in Rome almost as beautiful as that of the Cavaliere's wife. Unfortunately, describing this voice would mean mixing her opinion of the fortunate Haydn, author of a cantata celebrating a victory over the French that actually took place, with the memory of the boring Paisiello and
his
cantata. It might necessitate mentioning that the diva, a woman of great charm, had committed suicide under the most melodramatic circumstances the very morning after the performance, after murdering the clearly incompetent police chief.

Baron Scarpia est mort, Miledy, vous l'avez entendu.

How terrible, exclaimed the Cavaliere's wife. I mean, how upset you must be!

The Queen denied she was upset. After all these deaths, what was one more. And then she began to weep, and to say that all the terrible events she had had to endure had made her insensible to human feelings—that is, she felt she was no longer a woman. And then the whole story came out, backward. Apparently the diva was offended by the attentions of the highly sexed baron. Isn't it amazing, exclaimed the Queen, wiping her eyes, how these Italians overreact to everything? The Cavaliere's wife, as much a champion of the histrionic reaction as the Queen, said she knew all too well what the Queen meant. My husband has always said that Italians lack common sense, she said to the Queen, judging that disaffection with all things Italian would accord with the Neapolitan Queen's mood since she had returned to her native city.

The Queen, a distinctly lesser star in the Hapsburg firmament in Vienna, had been relegated by her nephew's ministers to quarters in Schönbrunn that she interpreted (not wrongly) as a slight, but the sympathies of the Cavaliere's wife were no longer as focused on the Queen's grievances. And the Queen was beginning to learn that her friends were not as esteemed in Vienna as she had thought. More than a few members of the Hapsburg court were relieved when the British party, having exhausted the entertainment and the ovations of the hero that Vienna could provide, had no further excuse not to continue their journey, though the Queen seemed quite distressed at the farewells, adding to the jewelry and portraits of herself she had already given to her friend, as well as presenting a gold snuffbox set in diamonds to the Cavaliere.

Then whorling through central Europe to Prague, the city where legends are told of statues that come to life, the city once ruled by that multi-obsessed collector Rudolf II, who purchased a long-coveted Dürer in Venice and then couldn't bear—the Cavaliere recalled as he jolted along in the badly sprung carriage—couldn't bear to think of his treasure being jolted and jarred across the Alps, and had the thickly sheathed painting walked through the mountains by four hardy young men taking turns holding it upright all the way. In Prague, the reigning duke, another nephew of the Queen, gave a tremendous party to celebrate the hero's forty-second birthday. Then along the Elbe to Dresden, where they viewed the Elector's porcelain collection and went to the opera, at which the hero and the Cavaliere's wife were reported as wholly enwrapped in each other's conversation; and where, at one of the balls given for the hero, he lost a diamond from the hilt of his gold sword (they advertise, offering a reward, but it is not returned). There, as on other stops, the hero's appetite for tributes, gifts, and fireworks was amply satisfied. In each city, the diplomatic community and resident English have enough gossip and malicious observations about the trio to enliven many diary entries and letters. He is covered with stars, ribbons, and medals, wrote one of their hosts, more like the prince of an opera than the Conqueror of the Nile. And no one failed to deplore the slavishness of his attendance on the Cavaliere's wife, whose own outsized presentation of herself, whether in the form of flamboyant performances, appetite for food and drink, or sheer girth, was also caustically noted.