Sir William

by David Stacton

  “So had Sir William,” said Emma idly, meaning no harm.

  “Em, you are wicked.”

  “If Sir William is a father to him, it is only natural I should be motherly,” said Emma, and for the instant had an image of her unacknowledged daughter, wandering bleakly along the northern coast in a sea fog, rattling the shale underfoot and doing—what? There had been a letter from her, too painful to answer, which she had mentioned to no one. “It might have been happy for me to have forgotten the past and to have begun a new life with new ideas; but for my misfortune, my memory traces back circumstances which have taught me too much, yet not quite all I could have wished to have known,” the poor thing had said.

  It is neither true nor fair to say that women have no memory. What they do have is a series of bulkheads and watertight compartments by means of which they manage to stay afloat. The image of Emma Carew gurgled and went under; despite this collision with fact, what Emma did not remember kept her afloat. In the gorgeous staterooms of dream and illusion above deck, there was no awareness—except for a slight shudder along the frame—that anything untoward had occurred.

  Acknowledge her, never; but help to get her settled, yes.

  “You will be adding Jocasta to the Attitudes next, I expect,” said Mrs. Cadogan, far from pleased. Having not much employment these days, she too, like the rest of them, now read a lot.

  It was the day of the birthday party.

  *

  Over a drink beforehand in the green room, so to speak, Sir William gave the private toast, Tria juncta in uno, in allusion to both the motto of the Order of the Bath and that total immersion called Christianity. He did not mind. Besides, a mild flirtation at thirty-four, what was the harm in that? He should be uncle to both of them—husband to the one, and intimate with the other. Why not?

  *

  “I wonder you could live here so long and so seldom go back,” said Nelson, exacerbated by so much light, who, when he was at sea, had usually the comfort of a British ship.

  “My friends drop off from life, like satiated leeches, and my parents are long dead,” said Sir William. “I would as soon return to an orphanage.” He had been plagued recently by a pestilence of childhood images, gray fields, stone walls and green summer rain. Since to be so is a symptom of old age, he refused to accept his own diagnosis. If we cannot deny the disease, we can at least conceal the symptoms.

  *

  Emma, her life until now singularly sheltered on the leeside of a variable but solid male rock, and by the absence of any female friend, from those little gusts of affection which presage the usual jealous storm, had foolishly taken up Miss Knight as a protégée, who had as foolishly, her life hitherto sheltered from the great world by exclusion from it, allowed herself to be taken up. If someone admires our little effusions, it would be tactless of us to question their probity, so Miss Knight added her small stone to the mound of Emma’s adulation both willingly and well, and waited now only to hear her own praises.

  *

  The British Embassy, like any church, had been better designed for the extraordinary crush than for the occasional visitor, so this time Emma had asked everyone. They sat down eighty to dine, and when they rose there were a thousand more.

  In the ballroom, in a costume militant in intent but millinery in detail, she stood waiting while the national anthem played. The guests fingering, if males, their Nelson buttons, if females, their Nelson ribbons, awaited the entertainment. The anthem had additional verses by Miss Knight:

  Join we great Nelson’s fame

  First on the roll of fame,

  Him let us sing.

  Spread we his praise around,

  Honour of British ground,

  Who made Nile’s shores resound,

  God save the King.

  Miss Knight looked about her. Whose were these new words? They had been written by a talented young lady, a Miss Knight, the daughter of Admiral Knight (known as good Admiral Knight, actually). She was over there.

  “I know you will sing it with pleasure,” Nelson wrote his wife. “I cannot move on foot or in a carriage for the kindness of the populace, but good Lady Hamilton preserves all the papers as the highest treat for you.”

  And out fell the disgusting things, in her handwriting, when the letter arrived.

  *

  A curtain parted before the rostrum.

  Lady Hamilton, a Boadicea in white muslin, Greek sandals, a tinsel corselet, a helmet borrowed from the Household Cavalry, and a light blue shawl embossed with gold anchors—carrying in one hand a trident (an exact copy of one found at the Gladiatorial School at Pompeii)—was discovered sitting on a pasteboard rock. Her right elbow was languid to the edge of a replica, in papier-mâché, of the shield of Achilles, the rim surrounded by the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense picked out in glitter. She held the pose, rose majestically (it was her new Attitude) and drew apart an inner curtain to reveal a rostral column, beneath a canopy, emblazoned with the words Veni, Vidi, Vici (a translation, also by Miss Knight, was available) and inscribed with the names of Nelson’s captains.

  It was never to come down while they were there, Lady Hamilton said, and went offstage to change, though not much.

  “What precious moments the Courts of Naples and Vienna are losing. Three months would liberate Italy,” said Nelson.

  At the supper given immediately after the performance, they sat eight hundred.

  *

  “If the Queen would receive me,” complained Nelson, “one could perhaps accomplish much. They say she can make the King do as she wishes, and surely she, at least, wants war. But they say she is ill.”

  “She is not ill,” said Sir William. “She is pregnant. She will get over it. Emma, my dear, it is time for you to intercede.”

  Like a goddess of victory, Emma went off to oblige, wreath in hand and at the ready.

  “I know,” said the Queen. “But he will not budge. It is not so much that he is unwilling as that he is inert. However, I will try. If he cannot follow, he can at least be led. But it is not an effort I look forward to, my dear. It calls for kid gloves.”

  And, ringing, she called for the longest procurable, and, like a surgeon, pulled them on and set to the revolting task.

  *

  “It is done,” she said afterward. “He slobbered more than usual, but it is done.” And stripping off the wetted things, she flung them away into a basket set beside the table, and granted an interview to Nelson, who though a foreigner, impressed her favorably.

  However was it managed? Nelson wondered.

  But royalty is a trade, like any other, and like any other has its guild secrets. The Queen would not say, and even Sir William did not seem to know.

  “She must handle him with gloves,” he said. Oedipus with the Sphinx could have said no more.

  *

  “The King, I hear, has ordered a set of china with all my battles painted upon it,” snapped Nelson. “I will not speak of the impropriety of the Vanguard upon a gravy boat, but what battles will he have to set forth when he comes to order his own, or do I have to fight them for him? Or should I suspect him of a taste so simple as to prefer his dishes plain?”

  Impatient with Naples, he sailed off to Malta, his departure all Dido and Aeneas at the dock. Lady Hamilton said she would write frequently.

  *

  She was annoyed he had not yet gotten his title. “If I were King of England, I would make you the Most Noble Puissant Duke Nelson, Viscount Pyramid and Baron Crocodile,” she wrote Nelson. And to his wife: “Sir William is in a rage with the ministry for not having made Lord Nelson a Viscount, for sure, this great and glorious action ought to have been recognized more. Hang them, I say.”

  Nelson’s brother William was also displeased. Though the title had been granted, he had written with an anxiety fresh minted, to ask who might—for Nelson was childless—inherit this honor next. “I have no doubt but Parliament will settle the same pension upon yourself and the two next pos
sessors of your title which they have done upon Lord Vincent,” he wrote, for if he were to inherit the loaf, he wished it buttered.

  *

  They are in love with each other, I suppose, thought Sir William, driving back from the dock, and himself affected by the parting. I wonder if they know it?

  No, they did not. For though Nelson was a good husband, and Emma an excellent wife, fond, affectionate and scrupulous, to love is quite another thing. Since neither of them ever had, they had not the means to make comparisons and so identify the feeling.

  I wonder if I should know it? Sir William further inquired of himself, and decided, with some relief, the answer was no. There is a limit to the number of things a man may reasonably be expected to know, and in this matter, at any rate, he had no desire to play the pedant. Grateful that the oracle had spoken, he shut his eyes and basked, a lizard, in the sun.

  “I am glad, my dear, that you have had this diversion,” he said to Emma, out of his voluntary darkness. “It has improved your appearance tenfold.”

  As so it had, for appearance and attitudes, if not everything, are all we have left, so it behooves us to take care of them.

  “It is wonderful how the old man keeps up,” said someone in the crowd as their carriage rolled by.

  Aware that he was also called “verde antico,” Sir William opened his eyes and gave the woman who had spoken a look to wither stone.

  *

  On the plain at San Germano, the Queen, in a blue riding habit with gold fleurs-de-lis at the neck, was reviewing both the troops and Ferdinand previous to the promised invasion—which is to say, relief—of Rome.

  On the 22nd of November, the army marched out, its progress interrupted only by a river—the existence of which it had not been informed—and by the seasonal rains which had come down all at once. A declaration of war against France (then occupying Rome) was not thought necessary. Ferdinand was a liberator, not an aggressor, and intended that his action should be considered as well meant.

  *

  It went on raining. Sir William had gone to bed, but not to sleep, for downstairs Emma was singing, and the sound buzzed about like a fly in an acoustical trap. It was a piece called “The Maniac.”

  “When thirst and hunger griev’d her most,

  If any food she took,

  It was the berry from the thorn [trill]

  The water from the brook.

  From every hedge a flower she pluck’d,

  And moss from every stone,

  To make a garland for her Love,

  Yet left it still undone.

  Still as she rambled was she wont

  To trill a plaintive song [gurgle].

  ’Twas wild, and full of fancies vain,

  Yet suited well her wrong.

  Oft too a smile, but not of joy [ah, the last stanza]

  Play’d on her brow o’ercast;

  It was the faint cold smile of spring

  Ere winter [triumphantly] is past.”

  Repeat ten times. It was her preferred piece these days. No doubt she found it fraught with meaning, though he wondered how. Eventually the sound ceased. The rain did not. It was a fluid portcullis beyond the window, caught and sparkling in the rays of his lamp. He did not extinguish the lamp. He liked one these days, for company.

  When he woke, the rain had momentarily ceased. The room was motionless, the lamp low. He lay just beneath the surface of consciousness, as though under a wet sheet, unable as yet to move. The lamp cast bizarre reflections. At home in Scotland, as a child, he had at this point always demanded a glass of water, because there were funny animals on the walls. And though Lady Archibald had never been there herself, the nanny had always provided one and never denied the existence of the animals; it was an old house—of course they were there. With a charm against dragons, human company and a glass of water, we may achieve much.

  “When you grow up,” his nanny had said, “you may ride them to Jerusalem.”

  Curious, she was so pleasant, though of course no gruff and nonsense, that he had forgotten her until now. Though he had been riding to Jerusalem ever since, through pleasant enough country, except for high jinks in the 3rd Guards, and a few moments early on in both his marriages. Now he was in a single bed, in an empty room—as he preferred—with no one to tuck him in, but with a jug of water and a tantalus of brandy near his reach.

  Sitting up, he poured himself a jigger, neat.

  In the country house of a great-aunt, he had once asked what the rings in the wall were for, along the stairs. Were they for prisoners? Where was the dungeon?

  “Your aunt is old and infirm. They are to pull herself to the top of the stairs by.”

  “And what is at the top of the stairs?”

  “All sorts of good things, but there was never a dungeon here, you silly boy. This is quite a recent house.”

  Since his aunt had died—or as they said, gone to Heaven—shortly afterward, it had always seemed to him that that was where Heaven was, at the top of the stairs. Himself he hauled along by another method, by certain crampons driven in the rock walls of time, called appointments and events. He had the route marked out for him well in advance, in his agenda. If he had not, he might well have lost his way or taken a turning downward.

  “Oh well,” he said, “there is nothing to be done about it.” He listened to the silence meditatively for a moment or two, and brandy being a soporific, dropped back into sleep.

  To dress in the morning was more difficult, for to dress marble is an art and requires both strength and skill.

  *

  “I wish you would not sing that song again,” he said.

  “Why ever not?” asked Emma, astonished, after so long without one, to be handed an order, even if tied up quite prettily as a request.

  “Because I do not like it,” said Sir William.

  She gave it up. She had still the will to please, if not any longer the constraint.

  I do believe she is still quite attached to me, thought Sir William kindly—who up to this moment had never doubted it, but liked to believe the best of everyone, though his thoughts were his own—and gave her money for the household accounts. If we stay on long enough, we all become our own paying guests in time. Besides, he had no real desire to move on.

  What he did have was a very real desire for male company. There is this to be said for vases: they do not change their shape.

  *

  On the 29th of November came the momentous news that Ferdinand had entered Rome to the pealing of bells and the plaudits of the populace. Two weeks later came the no less momentous news that he was scampering back. Though he had not declared war against France, he had at least provided the French with an excellent excuse to invade him. Nelson returned two days before he did, bearing starch.

  “Let the people arm; let them succor the Faith; let them defend their King and father who risks his life, ready to sacrifice it in order to preserve the altars, possessions, domestic honor and freedom of his subjects,” proclaimed the King. “Let them remember their ancient valor.”

  Surprisingly enough, they did, with the exception of a few Jacobins—too busy planning a republic to attend to the collapse of the kingdom—and such of the nobility as were off in the Augean stables, to curry favor. The people rose.

  The King cowered and sank. From now on, white gloves or no, he would run no risk. He was a reflective man, even though in his case the trick was done with mirrors. He knew very well what faith to put in the unpredictability of crowds.

  It was a hubbub.

  VI

  “I SHALL AWAIT THE FRENCH surrounded by my loyal subjects!” roared Ferdinand, a royal boom, by now hysterical.

  “Of course you shall,” said Sir William reassuringly—who had known the King for thirty years—and then himself went home to pack. Or rather, since he had never tied so much as a parcel in his life, sat anguished in a chair while around him his entire life so far was wrapped up and hustled away. Even Emma in fifty versions ca
me down from the walls, was crated and jostled off through the midnight streets in a cart, to be flung into the hold with who knew what indifference.

  “We must save your collections at all costs,” she had said, but since she supervised the packing herself, naturally made her own choice of what must go first. Nelson had given them the use of two bottoms, one bound for England, the other for wherever they were to go. Though he did not value such things, he valued Sir William. He had been most civil.

  Emma, twenty years younger, as Impudence, was carried out past Sir William. He did not notice. Vase after vase went into crates. Even the six over-door panels by Brill, depicting the four seasons and then two more, had been stripped from his rooms.

  Emma when young was being carted away. The whole world when young was being carted away, down to the napery and the silverware. He felt sacked. Even if he got it back, it could never be put up again the same way. In a few days nothing would be left of him except what was left to him, which would not be much: a small Hellenistic bronze for the ship’s cabin; a code of honor, a willingness to oblige, and a worn suppleness at how to do it; a hand, some ink, a pen; and what was left of Emma; and Nelson, now and again, he supposed. With his old friends dead or in England, he had forgotten how pleasant it was to make a new one. Even the Bishop of Derry had been impounded in Milan, by the French, and the devil knew how he would get out again.

  Nelson, though deficient in manners, was what Greville should have been, who had too many but was compounded of nothing else.

  Indubitably sacked, but no massacre is ever complete. Somewhere in the dust and rubble there is always someone to stir and struggle to his feet again, dazed perhaps, but not dead. Odd that it is more often an old woman than an old man, an old either than a child or a youth, but there it is: if you have survived so far, you can survive more.

  “Hamilton,” he said, “don’t be a fool. Get up.” Obediently Sir William rose to this, as to most occasions. He had come to depend upon it. An autocrat is the puppet of himself: he obeys, as why not, for it is he who gives the orders. If there is nobody else to love, we look around, make our only choice, and love ourselves. Sir William had no emotions of that comfortable sort. What Sir William loved was order. So rather than sit about like a numbskull, that is what he set himself to achieve.