Stealing Athena

by Karen Essex

  “Lady Elgin is in a delicate way, and I do not wish her health to be taxed any more than it has been on this wretched voyage,” Elgin said, whereupon everyone knew that no argument could or should be made against him.

  As the staff and crew retired below, Elgin held Mary’s arm, pulling her toward him.

  “A word, Mistress Poll.” It was not a question, and it was the first time he had used the affectionate name he invented for her without a trace of playfulness.

  “Whatever my Eggy wishes,” she said, using the name she had invented for her husband. She always had a secret thrill using such a silly name for such a formidable person as Elgin, and at present she was in an inflated mood for having so visibly raised the spirits of Elgin’s staff. She turned her face to her husband’s waiting to accept his praise, but none was forthcoming. She continued: “I had no idea that our sourpusses could transform into such jovial fellows. And all over the songs Nanny sang to me in the nursery. Are you not proud of your Poll?”

  “Did you not think your behavior with my subordinates a bit festive?”

  “It did not occur to me that singing songs meant to soothe babies to whining, grown men was unseemly.”

  “Then we must revise your concept of appropriate behavior for the wife of an ambassador in His Majesty’s service.”

  Mary felt herself shrinking from within. “But I only tried to raise their spirits for your sake.”

  “My sake? What do their spirits have to do with me?”

  “Do you not think that a contented staff will work more efficiently and with greater enthusiasm and loyalty than a disgruntled one? You must believe that my motivations were entirely on your behalf and for the sake of the mission.”

  Elgin took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. “I do not like the way that men look at you.”

  “And how do they look at me, my lord?”

  “As if they are hungry.”

  “That is the way you look at me, Lord Elgin,” she said, willing her own spirits to rise. It would not do to submit to this silly jealousy. Elgin had courted and married a spirited girl. The longer she knew him, the more intimidating he became. She must recover the saucy lass he had won. “That is why I married you. Because you looked at me as if you were the hungriest of them all.”

  He laughed, pulling her toward him. Thank God he laughed, because she was afraid that she might have angered him further.

  “You are correct, Mistress Poll, and I am hungry still. I am hungry for so many things.”

  “What might I feed my lord that shall satiate him?” Mary asked coyly, nuzzling against him.

  Elgin sighed. “An artist for the Greek project,” he said flatly. She had hoped that he would ask for a taste of her lips or tongue or more. The nausea and choking during the voyage—in addition to the lack of privacy—had caused a state of disgust in her whenever she thought about sex, but now the sea was calm and the darkness enveloping them gave the illusion that the two of them were the only people in the world. She wished he would take her into his arms and kiss her while they had the chance, not begin another discussion of replicating the artifacts of Greece.

  “My mind will not rest until we have hired an artist to make the illustrations we need. Damnation to Bonaparte. He not only raped Italy of all its treasures, but of its artists as well. He courted them. The ones who did not leave Italy with him had to flee the country because they had cooperated with him. No one is left! A good illustrator is nowhere to be found.”

  “Is it absolutely necessary? Why can we not make use of the craftsmen who will make the molds? An artist is going to be a great expense.”

  “We might have had Mr. Turner. He is the only English artist worthy of the mission.”

  “Mr. Turner holds an opinion of himself worthy of Mr. Romney or Sir Joshua Reynolds. His price was absurd.” Mary thought Mr. J. M. W. Turner an insolent young puppy. They had interviewed him in London, but he’d demanded twice the salary that Elgin had offered, and then balked when he understood that he was also to give Mary painting lessons. He had behaved in a very conceited manner, Mary thought, for a man just twenty-four years of age. She was delighted when Elgin informed him that he would not be hired. “We are better off without Mr. Turner.”

  Elgin backed away from his wife, one hand on his hip and another on his brow. He looked like an actor, she thought. He was certainly handsome enough to appear on the stage.

  “Napoleon took a staff of one hundred sixty-seven artists and scholars to Egypt, and I must make do with these few grumbling men. I cannot abide the lack of foresight that Lord Grenville has shown. He refused even the most meager sum to help pay for the art campaign. The state of the arts in Britain will be an embarrassment compared to that of France.”

  “I did not realize that we were in competition with Napoleon himself,” Mary said.

  “Not we, Mary, but our nation. A great empire must produce great artists in order to build great monuments. The Greeks knew that, as you will see.”

  Sometimes Mary thought that her husband believed his campaign to improve the arts of Great Britain more important than the ambassadorship, which seemed to her an overwhelming task in itself. Elgin was charged with persuading the Sultan to open trade routes and to establish a postal station at the Red Sea, and with a thousand small things, in addition to keeping the Ottoman Empire on good terms with Great Britain. She had complained to her mother, allowing herself to wonder aloud if Elgin’s judgment was correct in further burdening his ambassadorship with these grandiose plans to have all of ancient Greece copied for the benefit of the English arts. She had been excited about these ambitions until she realized that once the government had refused to fund them, Elgin thought it was up to her to provide the money. The costs would be enormous. They would have to pay the salaries of a crew of artists to live and travel throughout Greece to paint, draw, and cast the colossal monuments of that country. Transportation alone for the men and the materials would cost a fortune.

  “I may have a wealthy father, but I do not have the resources of Napoleon!”

  Mary had shared her concerns with her mother, who delivered a surprising perspective. Mary had thought that her mother would bring Mary’s concerns to Mr. Nisbet, who would have a sobering talk with his son-in-law. Instead, Mrs. Nisbet told Mary that it was now her job to help her husband become the great man he aspired to be. She owed it not only to Elgin, but to herself and to her children.

  “A smart wife completes her husband’s ambitions,” Mrs. Nisbet had said. “His fortune, his reputation, and his legacy are now yours.”

  Those words loomed large in Mary’s mind. Her mother knew what a woman’s duties were. Mr. Nisbet had thrived inside his marriage, and as a result, Mrs. Nisbet and Mary had too. She must remember at all times to be the good and supportive wife her mother had groomed her to be.

  “We must dock at Palermo, Poll,” Elgin said. “I would like to consult with Sir William Hamilton, one of the world’s great antiquarian scholars and collectors. He will advise us correctly, I am sure.”

  Mary recoiled from Elgin. “Are you suggesting that we stay in the home of a courtesan?” It was the most polite word she could conjure in the moment. Sir William’s notorious wife, Emma Hamilton, was simultaneously Admiral Lord Nelson’s mistress, and the three of them were living under some strange arrangement in Sir William’s Sicilian palazzo, where the lovers were known to cavort under the aging husband’s nose. “Unthinkable! What would my parents say? And your mother?”

  “We are married now and we must be our own persons and not bother so much about what the previous and more conservative generations think of our behavior, Mary. I have a mission to fulfill, and you are my wife and must assist me.”

  “I do not think it wise or proper to associate with that class of female,” Mary said, feeling the indignation rise.

  “Sir William is a gentleman and England’s long-standing envoy to Naples, and Admiral Lord Nelson the premier hero of Britain. I do not think it uns
eemly that we visit with men of that caliber. Sir William and his wife are exiled from Naples at the moment, along with the Neapolitan king and queen whom the French chased away.”

  “But that woman!”

  Elgin laughed at Mary. It was almost a sneer, she thought, his look mocking her protestations. He took her chin into his hand and with his other arm crushed her against his chest, holding her tight so that she could feel his arousal. “Mrs. Hamilton merely enjoys in the open that which you only acknowledge in the dark,” he whispered into her ear. She wanted to rebuke him, to repeat the rumors that Emma Hamilton had worked her way up from a scullery maid and a streetwalker to marry into the aristocracy and take as a lover a war hero who was regarded as a national treasure.

  Gossip held that Emma’s first rich lover, the playboy Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, sloughed her off on the more stern Sir Charles Greville, who got tired of her expenditures and traded her to his wealthy uncle, Sir William Hamilton, in exchange for debt relief. How could Mary possibly agree to be in such company? But she knew that what Elgin was saying had a certain spirit of truth, at least in this moment, so she gave in to his embrace, letting him lift her face so that she could kiss him, taking his wet, brandy-laced tongue deep into her mouth, and abandoning any concern of being seen. Perhaps she had a bit of Emma Hamilton in her, as Elgin was suggesting.

  He let her lick and suck on his tongue, which he knew she liked, and then took her by the hand, leading her to where the night sky met with the darkness around them in the shadow of the sail, sheltering them from the sight of the ship’s lookout. He pushed her against something hard and cold, which she quickly realized was one of the ship’s cannons. He pulled her dress and chemise high above her hips, and she felt the clammy sea air hit her thighs. The unfamiliar feeling of the wet night air made her tremble.

  “Will we be seen?” She thought that she should at least, in the name of decency, raise the possibility, but Elgin answered by slipping himself inside her so quickly that she gasped. He covered her mouth with his hand, pushing himself deeper and deeper into her, but slowly now, patiently, waiting for her to rise to his level of excitement, rocking in perfect rhythm with the ship as it lolled over the sea. She was losing herself in the motion when she began to worry if the force of his thrust would harm the tiny unborn creature growing inside her. But she remembered that one of the old cooks at Archerfield used to joke that all ten of her babies had been born with sperm on their heads. Surely the babe would be safe, she thought, as she wrapped one leg around her husband and slid into that empty space where nothing else existed but her pleasure.

  The town of Palermo, on the island of Sicily

  FOR THREE HOT AND seemingly airless days, they sailed toward Palermo without sight of shore. The morning after the erotic interlude, Mary, mortified by the lustful act in the ship’s shadows, clothed herself most primly and attended Sunday services on deck. The sailors, dressed in their best, showed no sign of having witnessed the nocturnal antics of the ambassadorial couple, but listened with great decency and attention to Reverend Hunt’s sermon. Mary, too, listened, with feigned concentration. She was ill again, reduced pitifully from the glory of the previous evening, having spent the morning gasping in her quarters, nauseous and dizzy, while Masterman bathed her face with vinegar water. Mary did not know if she could survive the service, but felt that she had to make amends to God for last night’s brazenness.

  After two more punishing days spent in her quarters, the ship finally docked, but into weather yet more stifling than what they had experienced at sea. The thermometer read ninety degrees at seven o’clock in the morning, and when Mary emerged on deck, the heat hit her face as if she’d stepped into an oven. Captain Morris complained that Sicily was the only place where he ever was plagued by rheumatism. In her condition, would she be able to tolerate a climate that defeated a rugged sea captain accustomed to every discomfort? Why had she insisted upon accompanying Elgin? She should have stayed at Archerfield and spent her pregnancy being cared for, and then joined him when the baby was old enough to travel. She was imagining herself at Archerfield, sitting under her favorite sycamore’s dome of shade in the fresh air wafting in from the Firth, sipping tea with her mother, when she was brought a message from “Her Ladyship, Emma Hamilton.”

  As she read the note, Mary felt her ire rise. “‘Her Ladyship,’” Mary began, waving the letter and inflecting her speech with as much sarcasm as her diminished spirits allowed her to conjure, “sends her respects, with regret that she cannot greet us today for she is ‘sent for by the king.’”

  Mary lowered her voice so that only her husband might hear her. “I wonder, is she his mistress too?”

  Elgin shrugged.

  “She will do us the honor of calling tomorrow morning on the ship.” Mary fumed. “How dare she? It is against all protocol to neglect to meet the ambassador and his family. It is rude and inhospitable.”

  Elgin’s look made her conscious that she was overreacting. Rather than concede, she decided to defend. “They say that ‘Her Ladyship’s father was a blacksmith in the coal mines. I would not be surprised. Ill breeding always demonstrates itself in the end.”

  “I do not disagree with you, my dear, but a message has also come from Sir William offering us his home for lodging,” Elgin said. He looked to Mary as if he were about to accept the invitation. “In your pitiable condition, you would be better on steady ground in a comfortable palazzo, no matter how wicked the hostess.”

  Did her husband think that because she made daring love with him in the darkness she would stoop so low? He had implied last night that she and Emma Hamilton were of the same nature—one overt and one covert in her desires. Because Mary was anxious for his love and to please him, she had not protested. She must reorient his thinking now.

  “This good Christian girl will not stay in the home of a strumpet. Character must prevail over comfort, Elgin.”

  “As you wish. I will send Duff out to search for more suitable lodgings. But if he is unable to find them, be prepared for another long night in Hades.”

  “I would prefer to spend one night in Hades rather than the eternity to which I would be sentenced for sharing a roof with that woman.”

  Mary fired off a curt reply telling Lady Hamilton that Lady Elgin would not be receiving any guests on the ship, but might encounter her this evening, as she intended to disembark. “And do not shrink from demonstrating my peevishness when the missive is delivered,” she told Duff.

  The next day, when Mary was introduced to her quarters in Palermo, she wondered if God was seeking further retribution, either for her nocturnal indiscretion with her husband on deck or for her reluctance to imitate Christ’s charity toward prostitutes. The ancient, dilapidated palazzo was to be shared with their entire staff. The grand salon, though spacious, was home to dirty plaster, broken-down chairs, and tables with no tops. Upon entry, Reverend Hunt began to pace off its dimensions, hands behind his back, taking deliberate, measured steps. “The room is seventy-six feet long and twenty-five feet wide,” he said. “I estimate the ceiling height at twenty-two, perhaps twenty-four feet.” He stared at the winged, painted putti hovering above as if they held the answer to his speculation.

  Mary sighed. “Reverend, please go measure the kitchen, for that is where I am afraid you shall sleep this evening.”

  They had carried their traveling beds from the boat because the palazzo, despite its lavish dimensions, had none. Once magnificent, with finely painted ceilings and great gilded mirrors on the walls, the home seemed long abandoned by its owners. Dust covered every surface, gathering on Mary’s skirts as she swept along the tile floor, trying to set up a comfortable room for herself and Elgin. She watched the particles of age-old dirt fly into the air, illuminated by the sun shining through the tall windows; she feared that the dust would bring on her chokings, which inevitably brought on vomiting, which brought on headaches. She made a quick promise to God to be more charitable in the future if He would spa
re her for a few evenings so that she might get some much-needed rest.

  Which was how she found herself—having accepted an invitation to dinner from Emma Hamilton—standing at the door of Sir William Hamilton’s bizarre Sicilian home, Palazzo Palagonia, a vast, rambling mansion decorated with a jumble of grimacing gargoyles and unidentifiable monsters that Mary was sure anticipated the iniquitous happenings inside.

  “Conspicuous indication that the devil resides within,” she whispered to Elgin, as an elderly woman in a faded bonnet and what looked to be little better than an old white bed gown over a black petticoat slowly opened the heavy wooden door. Her hunched shoulders were draped in a tatty black shawl. Mary was stunned when the woman announced herself as Lady Hamilton’s mother.

  “She employs her mother as a servant?” Mary asked Elgin.