Sir William

by David Stacton

  “I will tell you what the French have done, they have made me weep for a King of France, which I never thought to do; and they have made me sick of the very name of Liberty, which I never thought to be,” said the poet Cowper, who was gently mad, saw God in the garden, was fond of playing with hares—though not of starting them—and could usually be returned to sanity by his companion, Mrs. Unwin.

  Sir William and Emma were quite acceptable to what was left of the French Court, for the snobs had been the first to leave, and those left behind, needing British aid, could scarcely afford to be snobbish. But Emma was disappointed.

  This large-jawed foolish woman with the inane blue eyes could look regal when she wished. Such was her childhood training. At the moment she was trying to impress upon Maria Carolina, her sister, by means of her sister’s envoy, that she, too, could sway whole empires if she chose, no matter what went on outside the window. If she had learned to tremble, she did not show it, for it is France is the plum, not the Two Sicilies. She presented a letter, her last, to her sister, and a jewel or two, and went away.

  Besides, nothing was wrong. It was only that the gardeners had been overworked recently, and underpaid. There had been a famine somewhere. And chambermaids who do not come are merely feckless creatures, not amazons who storm the barricades and, once they have lost their looks, put their daughters out for hire. If trees were chopped down in Versailles park, the weather was cold, it was done for kindling wood, because they knew no better. One did what one could to help. One encouraged industry. One ordered a new necklace from one’s jeweler and tried to show that one was not afraid. One did one’s duty.

  *

  “Did you notice their stockings?” asked Sir William as they came away. His face in repose did not look reposed.

  “Whose stockings?”

  “Everybody’s. They had runs and they stank. There is either something wrong with the laundresses, or else they have at last learned that the Sun King is dead, and the sooner out of France, the better.”

  He directed the coach to Naples as fast as they could get there, for Naples is backward and out of date, and so life is still pleasant there, forgetful that even those notoriously indifferent travelers, the French, may also leave France, if they so choose, in that latest and most convenient of conveyances, the world’s first modern conscription army.

  However, when Gaeta came in view, he cheered up. Nothing had changed. The farther south you go, the less it does. It might even be wise to plan a visit to Sicily.

  “But why were they shut up like that, like prisoners?” asked Emma.

  “Because they were caught,” said Sir William, and looked out the window at the lustrous shores of what might very well be the last large private kingdom in the world, run down perhaps, but still in the possession of the original owners; not farmed for profit, not a pantisocracy, not anything really, except what it was.

  “I wonder how Graffer and the English garden are coming,” he said, for you cannot explain politics to a woman. She merely looks sympathetic and tells you what to do. She will not listen.

  The English garden was doing excellently. Not only was it suddenly popular—for with France gone we will need allies—but it had taken root.

  “After knowing Naples, it is impossible not to wish to live in order that one may return to it,” Sir William had said, in bed in England with a cold. “If I were compelled to be a king, I would choose it for my kingdom. The storms which desolate Europe pass over his head without injury.”

  Though there certainly seemed to be more English visitors about than usual.

  “It appears to me that education in England does not improve. They lead here exactly the same life they lead at home. But since they are here, I suppose they must be given dinner.”

  “Yes, Hamilton” said Emma, addressing her husband for the first time with the form suitable to her new station. In her lap was a silver bowl full to the brim with cards left on the Embassy. The more elegant among them had engraved on them in purple or black ink small views of their owners’ estates, which was the current fashion and so much taken up by the swollen fop, the lesser gentry and nobodies, if rich. She was still wearing the gown in which she had been presented at Court.

  “My dear,” said Maria Carolina, stretching out both hands, “you made it. I am so proud of you. And my congratulations, by the way, on the clever skill with which you brought it off.”

  Emma curtsied. But of course it had not been like that. That was just a fantasy. What the Queen had actually said was, “How pretty. My dear, you must come to see me soon, and we will talk.”

  It had been a levee. Levees are impersonal. She and Sir William moved away, but Emma carried herself with quite a different air now. In England, either one was defiant or else one stooped. But to enter Naples again was to enter the world from a tunnel—a little higher in France than England, but not much—and at last to see the sun ahead and then stand upright in it.

  The Queen wished a new alliance, as did Acton, so of course Emma would be made much of. To the Queen, politics was still an intimate affair, akin to recreation, but with the enhanced annoyance of dealing with people when what you needed were pawns.

  *

  Greville had sent Sir William a letter, sending in the bill for the upkeep of Emma’s child. It came to £65/6/8. He had promised Emma to see that it was taken care of.

  I have taken a liberty with you, and I communicate it to you instead of Lady H. because I know it would give her some embarrassment and she might imagine it unkind in me so soon to trouble you about her protégée … I do not mean this necessary step to be concealed from Ly. H…. I know Lady H. will consider your attention on this subject as additional proof of your kindness.

  “I think,” said Sir William, “you had best read this, my dear.” And watched her while she did.

  “Is it true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it yours?”

  Emma hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Is it his?”

  She shook her head. In some cases it is better to lie with the head, and the Lord grant it was no lie.

  “Then there is some hope for it,” said Sir William, paid the bill, and dropped the letter into the wastepaper basket. “However, since we must pay for our mistakes in this world, the sum will be deducted from your pin money. To which,” he added, with a crinkle of amusement, “I will now compound the yearly sum of sixty-five pounds, six shillings and eightpence.”

  But he made no break with Greville. He merely became more observant.

  Emma decided to make Greville her commission agent. “Sir William has asked me that you buy five yards of the new grosgrain ribbon for a hat.” “Dear Greville, will you send out, please, a hip tub, for Sir William’s bath?” Greville detested errands, but as a dutiful nephew, would feel compelled to run them.

  Sir William watched these commissions pile up with some awe. “My dear, what will you think of next?” he asked mildly.

  “Oh I don’t know. Something impractical to deliver, difficult to carry, and wellnigh impossible to procure, I expect,” said Emma, whose pin money was now five times the household expenses at Edgware Row, and her private apartments the size of the house.

  “I see,” said Sir William, thoughtfully. It was a new Attitude, but as usual, she forgot it. You never saw any of these facets for long. Who cares whether it be forgetting or forgiving, so long as the subject is not brought up?

  The Chevalier de Seingalt came through, his sleeves a mass of dirty lace, already accumulating his memoirs. “A clever man marrying a young woman clever enough to bewitch him,” he noted. “Such a fate often overtakes a man of intelligence when he grows old. It is, always a mistake to marry, but when a man’s physical and mental forces are declining, it is a calamity.” The first part of this dictum was taken out of any comedy by Gozzi, the second was the current wisdom of the day and therefore his own apothegm. It had to be owned, however, that the physical and mental forces did not seem to have declined
much. Unlike his nephew, Sir William had not the art of running dry. He hoped to die a mortal, not bleached wood.

  He was assembling the catalogue of his new Etruscan vases. In the morning, he looked at the vases; in the afternoon, he received the engravers; in the evening, those who would provide the letter press. “I do not mean to write a book, but to furnish matter for many,” he said. What he did plan to do, in time, was to sell the collection, for if you have a real enjoyment of such things, it is best to explain that you indulge the interest only for commercial reasons, so that, thinking you tasteless, the connoisseur will leave you free to enjoy your tastes instead of trying to overwhelm you with his own, which are, of course, superior.

  Nothing must be allowed to impinge upon taste, though the King was an exception, since he arrived only to take Sir William away. The impingement took the form of a grand battu. Hunting alone interested him. And hunting wants taste. “Those acts and functions which are never mentioned in England, here are openly performed,” Sir William reported in a dispatch home.

  Ferdinand shot from the safety of a pavilion toward which the game was driven, so the only exercise he got was butchering the meat, a chore he relished and therefore one at which he was competent.

  To the left stood a pile of bowels and offal, high as a man, and constantly added to. It was made up of the innards of on the average a thousand deer, a hundred wild boar, two or three wolves and as many foxes. At a trestle table stood the King, stark naked except for a brown-leather butcher’s apron, his white skin splattered with blood. Two lackeys slung a carcass on the table. The King slit open its guts, flung the viscera to the offal heap, disjointed the corpse and called for another one. The Queen, who was sometimes forced to attend at these rituals, did her best to ignore them, but had no lady in waiting to talk to. No lady in waiting could stand it. Flop down on the trestle table went the next corpse. Over the offal pile hovered a buzzing corona of bluebottles. From time to time, finding his hands too slippery to hold the knife, Ferdinand would wash them in a bowl and call for a towel. This entertainment went on from dawn till dusk, unless he went fishing instead. He was an enormous man with a powerful chest.

  At intimate dinners, which Sir William had to attend three or four times a week, the conversation was of the day’s hunt. But Ferdinand was a most popular sovereign. Among the people his nickname was il Nasone. And it must be confessed that though a frightful coward, he meant no harm.

  The Queen’s sport was Government. If the King objected, Maria Carolina put on her white kid gloves. They were the means to power. Ferdinand was a fetishist. No one knew why. The condition had merely arisen. She had only to don elbow-length gloves, and he would slobber, grow affectionate, and do as she wished. If he seemed reluctant, she slapped him with them, and that invariably made him behave.

  She marveled at this singular weapon sometimes. She would have liked to know the cause of it. It is often wise to know on what foundations the power we wield rests. But possibly he did not know himself. Needless to say, the wearing of white kid gloves at Court was the prerogative of the Queen. The possession of a pair, particularly on the part of any current mistress, was tantamount to treason.

  Usually she had the gloves sent from Vienna, paid for out of the Secret Fund. “Never forget,” Maria Theresa had told her, “that you are a German.” She never had. She did not cheat in an Italian way. An English alliance seeming advisable, she sent for Emma daily.

  “The Queen,” said Sir William, “receives her most kindly. Emma very naturally told her the whole story and that all her desire was by her future conduct to show her gratitude to me, and to prove to the world that a young, beautiful woman, though of obscure birth, could have noble sentiments and act properly in the great world.” One’s best suit is the truth, so long as one does not lay down all of it.

  I have been with the Queen the night before alone en famille laughing and singing, but at the drawing-room I kept my distance, and payd the Queen as much respect as tho’ I had never seen her before, which pleased her very much. The English garden is going on very fast.

  My God, thought Greville, whose eye had caught the word Queen, I have given shelter to a fiend, but since Sir William could not live forever, pushed on with improvements at Milford Haven and told him as little as possible, except that cash would be short this year.

  The revolution in France, which did not concern any of them, continued to revolve.

  *

  “Lady Hamilton has nothing to do with my public character,” Sir William reassured the Foreign Office. “She knows that beauty fades & therefore applies herself daily to the improvement of her mind.”

  *

  “‘… trimmed with three rows of black lace, interspersed with rosebuds,’” read Mrs. Cadogan. “‘Dresses this coming season will have a simpler, purer line, and the bodice, to use so indelicate a term, will rise almost to the armpits. A wide sash of peau de soie, completely plain, tied below the bust, forms the only adornment. Its colors may be Cornish pink, vert de nez,’ whatever that is, ‘and cerulean.’ Shall I go on?”

  “Yes, but first hand me the skin cream. And I shall need another jar of rain water if I am to make myself proper.”

  And looking in the mirror, Emma thought, I am twenty-six, whoever would believe it? Certainly not Sir William, who is sixty-two.

  “‘… in the new Grecian mode,’” Mrs. Cadogan continued. ‘“Ladies of the ton will be delighted to learn that Mr. Humphreys, the fashionable fanmaker, has received an assortment of light Kashmiri shawls, fresh shipped from India, both handsome and suitable to our crisp, early English autumn.’”

  “I am the happiest woman in the world,” said Emma. “We must ask Greville to send out some. Take note of the address.”

  It was true enough. Not only did she have the world in her grasp, she had grasped it.

  But there was serious study, too. They had worked their way to Volume IV of Dr. Burney’s History of Music:

  It may be asked, what entertainment is there for the mind in a concerto, sonata, or solo? They are mere objects of gratification to the ear, in which, however, imagination may divert itself with the idea that a fine adagio is a tragical story; an andante or grazioso an elegant narrative of some tranquil event; and an allegro, a tale of merriment.

  Imagination diverted itself, though not with Dr. Burney. It was what she had observed herself. He was an author admired perhaps more for his truth than his felicity.

  As Goethe said, the dangers of life are infinite. It almost slipped her grasp.

  *

  Sir William was ill, at Caserta.

  “Oh my God!” shrieked Emma, and had she not instantly fallen into the role of loyal and faithful nurse, would have thought herself as instantly undone, cast out, rejected and a widow. “You must come with me. I shall need you to make possets.”

  She was a good nurse: she could act out anything. And Mrs. Cadogan had a flair for fortifying jellies, beef broth, sliced cucumber rind on the forehead during fevers, and enough common sense to damn the doctor. Though no substitute for it, these things sometimes assist Grace.

  Undeniably he was ill. Looking at him, Emma felt that “chastity of silent woe” first phrased by Falconer. For long periods of time he stared only at the ceiling, which was a high one.

  “He does not know poor Emma,” said poor Emma.

  Nor did he. In so far as he was conscious of anything, it was of being on his back like a turtle, unable to make his body move, a posture demeaning to a man of active habit. As the fog cleared he could see the clouds on the ceiling. They parted to show eternity. Out of that space appeared a fly which, circling, grew and became a bustard, and gyred and grew red in the wattles, and was a vulture sloping over a parched plain. At all costs it must not get into the Tiepolo, for that meant death.

  Sir William heaved at his shell, but could not budge it. He could scarcely make it rock. He could only look deep down into the ceiling.

  The doctor came and went, a gossip and a busy
body at the pinnacle of his profession.

  “After knowing Naples, it is impossible not to wish to live, in order that one may return to it.”

  The doctor made his inspection, and the good word went around. The man was immortal. He still had his own teeth, so he must be.

  “He will live,” said the doctor to Emma. “But if you like, you may call in a second opinion.”

  “My God, why?” asked Emma. “Is not certitude enough?”

  “Ah, dear dear lady. Ah, bellissima signorina,” said the doctor. It was enough.

  Mrs. Cadogan sniffed at the bottle he had left behind. “Elm tea,” she said, “with laudanum,” and poured it out.

  The crisis passed in eight days. The vulture began to recede. In ten, it was no more than the Host, hovering in the approved manner over the approved Tiepolo crowd, a white dove.

  “I have been as ill as him with anxiety, apprehension and fatige; the last, indeed, the least of what I have felt,” reported Emma. Her world had pulled through. It was enough of a miracle to turn one Catholic, and a candle would do no harm.

  Sir William, who had been wandering and had almost reached the sulphur shades—for the odor of which he did not care—began to rearrange himself and became aware that he was weak. Next he felt himself being fed. Then he smelled an arm. His hearing was restored. At the end of the garden was a stout iron door. With some effort, he got it open and stepped out into the garden beyond and heard a bird again. Also footsteps. Also that familiar sound, the turning of a page. Since the sun was on his eyes, he opened them, dazzled to be alive.