Sir William

by David Stacton

  “The King,” wrote Emma admiringly, “is a philosopher.” So he was, but Pliny the Elder was laid up with a bilious fever, the Queen had near died, and lodgings were exceedingly hard come by.

  The Knights, with that heroic skill to which the incompetent sometimes unimaginatively rise, had seized the only habitable apartment on the Marina.

  “It was the most tremendous good fortune,” said Cornelia, but it was not a good fortune she was prepared to share. She and her mother were quite civil; they even nodded to Captain Hardy, but there was no room. Poor Sir William, accustomed as he was to palaces, must feel quite cast out.

  “Accustomed as I had been to the lovely and magnificent scenery of Italy,” wrote Miss Knight, “I was not less surprised than delighted at the picturesque beauty of the Sicilian Coast. Then, when the prospect of the city opened upon us with the regal elegance of its marble palaces and the fanciful singularity of its remaining specimens of Saracenic architecture, it was like a fairy scene.” And, dipping unobserved a wedge of panettone into her morning coffee, she giggled like a girl. In the general gallop and galumph ashore, she had for once come out first. She admired the beauties of nature and drank her slops.

  But it was cold. It was bitter cold. The stark trees and naked twigs were rimed and icicled, and stuck up all over the landscape like bleached coral on a surfaced barrier reef.

  “Light a fire,” said the Queen.

  “But why? It is only winter. There is no wood. It is always like this.”

  “I demand fire!” shouted the Queen.

  “Let her go to the devil, then,” said the King when he heard of it. He would not see her. He blamed her for everything. He ordered a chinoiserie casino built on the seashore, and moved into that. He wanted no more of her.

  Deprived not only of her creature comforts but of her creatures as well, there was nothing for Maria Carolina to do but shiver, shake, tremble, freeze, steal wood, eat cold porridge, and write letters, with a small oil lamp on the table over which to thaw her fingers every time they froze. Death, suicide, shame, decline, woe, weeping and despair—it was all the same to her. She had a facile pen. She made them vivid.

  “The King,” she wrote to Vienna, “feels nothing but self-love, and he hardly feels that.”

  On the contrary, though insensible to cold, he was keenly aware of the pleasures of the chase, as always, and went daily through the Breughel woods. “Do come, Sir William,” he said.

  Lese majesty is not a crime with which to charm any but complacent princes. As soon as he could move, Sir William went. Emma and Nelson could manage between them, though what was between them, he knew not.

  Emma, without sleep for twelve days, was plainly hysterical; but soon enough, brushing the cobwebs away, she was herself again and able the more articulately to lament.

  “We miss our dear, dear Naples,” she said, thinking of wardrobes adequately hung, a row of surrogate selves, all swaying, all waiting to be put on.

  Nelson, together with the Hamiltons, for want of any other where and to save money, had set up mutual housekeeping in the Palazzo Palagonia. One splendid chamber opened out into another, and the wind blew through and dusted everything. As for the chambermaids, all they did was track in the snow.

  Emma enjoyed herself. It was like Cheshire in the winter, but with palm trees.

  “On the contrary,” said Sir William, “it is worse than Kent, damned cold, damned damp and damned dull.”

  The King kept their larders stocked with venison, woodcock, partridge, boar and rabbit, but there was a shortage of sallets. Finances were difficult. Greville had triumphantly reduced the income of Milford Haven to nothing and was now endeavoring to borrow against the capital. His efforts might be unremitting, but he himself would remit nothing. Their Naples incomes were confiscate. Sir William had to borrow £2000 from Nelson, and what man likes to borrow money from his own protégé? It was demeaning.

  Emma made him marvel. Sentimental people are like volcanic springs: they merely gush, close up, and open for business unimpaired some otherwhere. She seemed to miss Naples not at all. Yet he had to admit that when she had the time she took as good care of him as ever. Only she had not often the time. They none of them had. All naval business was conducted from the house, which meant Emma must act interpreter, since Nelson eschewed Italian and refused French, out of a towering patriotic incompetence. Worst of all, that pewling, mewling heap of diffident disapproval, Josiah Nisbet, was back, soliciting his stepfather’s interest.

  “He has his nice side,” said Emma, about whom he gossiped day and night. She believed in being kind.

  “Like the dark side of the moon, no doubt, but we can scarcely expect in our lifetime to see it. Apparently no effort has been spared to bring him here. I would prefer no stone were left unturned to send him back.”

  “But where can he go?”

  “Constantinople,” snapped Sir William. “It is the farthest place. He should do well there; he has already manners to rival the Terrible Turk. He will blend.”

  “You must pardon me, Father, if I speak out,” said Josiah to Nelson, “but though never one to impugn your motives or to question your matter, in manner it has been said your attentions to Lady Hamilton approach more nearly those appropriate to our mother than to another man’s wife. And though I shall not myself speak of it, I feel it my duty to inform you that I have frequently heard it spoken of.”

  To Constantinople he went.

  What people say, what people say, thought Nelson angrily. She is as pure as the driven snow.

  Though perhaps a little more driven. Like Paolo and Francesca, she was caught up into the whirlwind. Emma found the movement exhilarating and Palermo a rum-tumtiddle sort of place. Given both men were close by, she was content.

  *

  At Kendal, for he had gone home to his wife, Romney—having first retreated to an echoing studio in Hampstead and then here—sat alone in a room, throwing ink blots at a piece of paper, a method he had despised in the Brothers Cozens when younger, but his fingers could find no shapes any more; he had to wait for the shapes to emerge.

  The ink spread, the shapes emerged in roaring waves, in clouds, in intangibles, twisted and turned, and before he could catch them, ebbed away again. Each wave crested into Emma before it broke and fragmented into its disparate selves and receded with a hiss, before he could capture it. He was alone on a gray beach, with no other figure in view but an old winklewoman, turning around and around as she bent over blowholes in the sand. Then even she was no longer there. Unlike his monarch, Romney did not retreat into insanity to rest, but managed to get out of it from time to time, for the same purpose. From the next room, as always, came the hum and treadle of the spinning wheel, except that nowadays it was really there; it was his wife’s employment.

  Then it stopped.

  Where is youth? For the matter of that, who was youth? When he was shown the newspapers, his mind clouded with a clawing crowd, baying silent down stuccoed corridors. They had been invaded. They had been forced to flee.

  “So are we all,” he said, and drew upon a sheet of paper the same incessant fading face. For a few years it had had specific features. Now it had none. As before, so afterward, though what it is we never quite know.

  Across the fields, from somewhere, a church bell tolled. It is a great burden to believe and never to know in what. A small boy vanished down a remembered lane on a remembered day, but who was the boy, and where was the lane? He could not see them. The man walking toward you is the man walking away.

  “It was a wonder to the lower orders throughout all parts of England to see the avenues to the churches filled with carriages,” he read in the Annual Register. “This novel appearance prompted the simple country people to enquire what was the matter.” The column adjacent stated that at Paris, luxury had at last attained to absolute pitch and was recherché in dress as well.

  But what is absolute pitch? If we cannot hear it, we shall never have it. So better, though w
istful, never to see her again.

  “So this is my life,” said George, looking around at it. “What went wrong?”

  *

  He was their dear Nelson. He never questioned that. Neither did they. He was also their palladium. This pillared hall was very like a temple, but he had never been in a temple. Being narrowly devout, he questioned no gods but his own. Being inaesthetic, he took no comfort from the mere design of the plinth.

  But Emma was an attitude, and that he could admire. She was a lady, one who knew how to keep the conversation mild, address a duchess properly, deal with precedence, and jollify a bishop in a manner that his brother William, that sacerdotal climber, had not, nor had his brother William’s wife. As for deportment, should that not always be easy and natural? Here he saw it so.

  They were at Sir William’s table. Sir William sat propped at the head of it. Emma cut up Nelson’s meat for him. She wrote his letters. They had grown intimate.

  Yet he was always relieved when Sir William came back into any room in which the two of them had just been left. When Sir William came back, something that had been lacking was again complete. Alone with either of them, he waited for the other. That should not have puzzled him. He should have been used to triads: when he had married his wife, she had already had a son.

  *

  At Naples, on the 8th of January, the Neapolitan Fleet was burned, like Cortez’ at Vera Cruz, with this difference: the actual torch had been applied by an Englishman, and yet the English Fleet could be seen in the harbor, out the window of the breakfast room at Palermo, complete and waiting. The English Fleet cannot burn.

  Sir William was distressed to be parted from his collections. “I am desirous of returning home by the first ship that Lord Nelson sends down to Gibraltar, as I am worn out and want repose,” he said. “And as the house wants chimneys.” He was beginning to feel the chill.

  Nelson kept Emma by him constantly. “My public correspondence,” he explained irritably to his wife, “besides the business of sixteen sail of the line and all our commerce, is with Petersburg, Constantinople, the Consulate at Smyrna, Egypt, the Turkish and Russian admirals, Trieste, Vienna, Tuscany, Minorca, Earl St. Vincent and Lord Spencer. This over, what time can I have for any private correspondence?” He was devoted to her. From time to time he took out her miniature, in an effort to recall what she looked like.

  There was said to be fighting in the streets of Naples. The lazzaroni were rioting. The painter Tischbein reported that he had seen a crucifix with the body shot away so that only the legs and arms hung from the nails, like washing. He had been able to indulge the German passion for the beauties of a young, handsome and freshly shot military corpse. They have their poetry, and as models, the advantage that they cannot move. The Royal Palace had been looted, for why should the French have everything? The mob smashed what it could not carry off, as is its way.

  “I wonder,” said Emma, “whatever became of that strange Russian gentlewoman on the ship. The one who said she was from Odessa.”

  “No doubt she went home to wait upon events,” said Sir William.

  On the 22nd, so they heard, the Parthenopean Republic was declared at Naples, while Eleonora Pimentel, another poetess, but more au courant than Miss Knight, declaimed an “Ode to Liberty.” The blood of St. Januarius had been induced to liquefy for the event.

  “He is a saint,” Sir William explained. “He is indifferent to political changes. And as for the Republic, what could be more natural, for the locusts have no king.”

  “What does Parthenopean mean?”

  “It is the name of a siren who lured men to their doom in these parts. She is in Virgil. Afterward, her body was found on the seashore.”

  But Emma neither knew Latin nor was listening. She was reading the Gazette.

  “They have renamed the San Carlo and put on Nicaboro in Jucatan. Why, we saw that on the King’s birthday, exactly a year ago. Only here they say it was to celebrate the expulsion of the tyrant.”

  “They will rename everything,” said Sir William. “It is their way.” But yes, it was exactly a year ago, so here it was, the King’s birthday again. The city twinkled with lamps which glittered, as lamps do on a frosty night, not with hospitality but a marshfire absence. Since there is nothing to hunt at night but owls and mice, the King attended the opera. Afterward there was a gala reception at court, for even in extreme cold, if you huddle together, you can keep a little warm.

  The machinery of government had begun to whirl again, like a spinning jenny in an empty room, with a vast grinding of gears, for want of wool. Treaties were signed with both the Turk and Russian, though Nelson trusted neither, for the one was an infidel and the other as certainly not British. Sir William smoothed him down.

  “Though we are on an island, this is not the time to be insular,” he said, and looked at the mountains without affection. Etna was not only invisible from here, but had nothing to offer but hiccups and Empedocles. It was a second-class mountain. He missed Vesuvius. He missed his peace and quiet.

  Greville wrote to say that Emma’s heroic conduct during the voyage was on the lips of all, like jam tomorrow. “Tell her that all her friends love her more than ever, and those who did not know her, admire her.”

  Ah fortunate few, thought Sir William, but handed the message on.

  He was not the only courtier who did not care for Palermo much. Admiral Caracciolo, his fleet burned to the water line, asked permission to return to Naples to save his personal property at least. This was granted him. In February, there were food riots; and Cardinal Ruffo, the former director of the Royal Silk Factory at San Leucio, stepped forward with a velvet swoosh to ask permission to cross to Calabria and raise a rebellion.

  “I know the Calabrians. They sleep with a crucifix on one side of the bed and a gun on the other. We shall use both,” he said.

  “What does he propose, that we should bombard them with mulberry leaves from a rowboat?” demanded Nelson, but the King allowed him to go.

  Surprisingly, by the middle of February he had raised an army of 17,000 men, banded together as the Christian Army of the Holy Faith.

  “All very well,” sniffed Nelson, who had been brought up to regard Catholicism as neither holy nor a faith, and so mistrusted both camp followers and the Whore of Babylon. “But how do you reload a crucifix, pray tell me that? I would as soon fight cannon with an arquebus.”

  But the King, who as a hunter knew all about the legend of St. Hubertus, and therefore saw nothing incongruous in a crucifix mounted between fighting antlers, began to hum to himself and to lift the carpets to look on the brighter side of things, for he proceeded always by parallels. Not only was that what Frederick Hohenstaufen had done, it was what Cardinal Ruffo was doing.

  It continued to snow.

  *

  “Still und blendend lag der Schnee,” said the Austrian Ambassador. “Isn’t it curious that both the English and the French should have such an ugly word for such a lovely thing?”

  In the courtyard of the Palazzo Palagonia, orange trees stood set in tubs. From the room in which they were working, Nelson and Emma could see the snow whirling outside, dissolving from the leaves, for the day was not as cold as it looked, and therefore the sun must be shining somewhere. They watched.

  “Such a pretty word, snow,” said Emma. “And the snow is pretty too, on the oranges.”

  Nelson considered. “When I was quite young, I made a polar voyage and shot a polar bear. We were almost crushed in the ice. My father used the polar bear as a hearth rug. Our boat was called the Carcass. And Northern Canada, too, for that matter, Quebec and Newfoundland …” His voice trailed away. He had become infatuated with an American young lady in Quebec, and had almost jumped ship to marry her. It was the only infatuation he had ever suffered. He had forgotten, until now, both her and the feeling.

  “But there were no oranges,” he said disapprovingly, and went back to work.

  Emma, who had caught a glimpse of
icebergs if not of the American lady, dipped her pen in ink somewhat guiltily, as though she had evoked a crime. Icebergs were outside her experience. She did not care for the sound of them. Nelson, she thought, was too closely married to his work; but then, everyone she knew was married, even dear Greville, to his inefficiency.

  “Why do you never speak of your wife?” she asked, having come out into the verbal estuary of her meander.

  “There is not much to say,” said Nelson. She saw that her question had been a mistake.

  *

  On the mainland, Cardinal Ruffo was remitting taxes to pay his army. In Naples, the French were levying them to accomplish the same end. “We tax opinions,” the tax collector said to a Royalist lady. “If you have your own, you must pay double. If you share ours, you need only pay half.”

  Everything movable had been shipped to France. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” caroled the Republic, with Eleonora Pimentel to lead the chorus.

  “Tu rubbi a me, io rubbo a te,” said the people. The liberated did not seem to understand their liberators; it was necessary to translate.

  In Palermo, the King went about like a scarecrow, for his income had shrunk. The Prince Royal had opened a dairy. Apart from consuming vast quantities of the best butter, Ferdinand had grown stingy and would not grant so much as the purchase of a new mattress.

  “I like neither to see nor be seen,” said the Queen. “Circumstances are too painful.” So was her mattress. “I see Acton very seldom, to avoid his ill-humor,” she told the Hamiltons.

  “She has hit upon the very reason,” cried Acton, “why I do not see her.”

  “What is a cicisbèo?” Nelson asked Sir William.

  “Why do you ask?” inquired Sir William, whom the question, coming from this source, had startled.

  “It is what they call me here, so I am told.”

  “It is a local institution,” said Sir William. “You see, they have taken you to their hearts, just as we have.” And he smiled benignly at Emma, who smiled, very rapidly, back.

  “Though I am almost blind and worn out,” wrote Nelson to his wife, “I am quite revived by Sir William’s wit and inexhaustible pleasantry and Lady Hamilton’s affectionate care.” He would have said more, but checked his pen.