Sir William

by David Stacton

  “So this is where you sat when you made your great, great plans, before you came out to us,” she said.

  Glad somebody had said something, Nelson joined her. Watching them from the doorway (of course she had to touch him: it was his wife’s house), Sir William, who had read Rochester upon Nothing, as well as Longinus on the Sublime (in Boileau), found himself repeating to himself:

  Kiss me, thou curious miniature of man,

  How odd thou art, how pretty, how Japan!

  The memory sometimes presents us with some mighty curious labels for some even more peculiar jars.

  “So this,” said Miss Knight, with the unerring accuracy of the truly insensitive, “was his home.” She had to say something; it was the penance exacted for participation.

  There was nothing for it. Fanny was in London. They must proceed.

  She was with the Reverend Edmund, Nelson’s father, at Nerot’s Hotel in King Street, clothed in those two suits of flannel it was her custom to wear in the winter, and not feeling, as she had hoped, any the better for it. Even the dear Reverend Edmund had suggested titivation, in his clumsy, unworldly way, but at forty-two that was plain nonsense.

  From time to time she was brought news of Nelson’s advance, but did not feel in the least like a general. She was not campaigning. She had neither strategy nor tactics. What she did have was rights. She had done her duty. She had come to town. Her cause was just. That sufficed.

  And though she would have liked to have been pleasant, though she would have liked to appear spontaneous, that would not have been seemly at her age (earlier it had merely been impossible or gauche or unbecoming or, for that matter, buried with her first husband where it had died); and a brief flutter of hope, arising from anticipation as from a dovecote, had turned soon enough to exasperation and the proper bearing suitable to her new station in life, with every day—and now with every hour—that he did not come.

  A step in the corridor, laughter, subdued suddenly, the turn of a doorknob, a man in hotel livery to announce him, and the little man stepped into the room at last. At first all she noticed was that, as she had feared, he was overdressed. Fanny was restricted to the phenomenal. She saw only a man, tired and worn, who had been naughty, but that need not be mentioned. As for the nimbus of greatness, she did not perceive it. It was not phenomenal. It was merely irrelevant and would die down soon enough, thank goodness, if they ignored it.

  “My dear boy,” said the Reverend Edmund, choked up, and was embraced. Naturally the old man was affected, for he was very old—it was a miracle he had lived long enough to see his son—and as naturally he was gratified, for Nelson had undoubtedly been most successful. Though the emotion was perhaps excessive, it helped to smooth the transition to quieter, more matter-of-fact joys.

  “Good morning, Fanny,” said Nelson.

  “Good day, Nelson. It is a pleasure to see you so well.”

  And they both stopped where they were, tingling as though pulled erect by invisible wires.

  “You look well.”

  “I cannot complain.”

  Would it were so, thought Nelson, wondering what to say next.

  Fanny was wondering what not to say. Though seldom at a loss for a phrase, when it came to fitting them together, she was quite hopeless. Usually she kept them in a drawer, against the arrival of some clever person.

  “No doubt you will want to rest after your fatiguing journey [he did look peaked].” Fanny for want of anything else to do, plumped up a goosedown pillow on the divan.

  “I have brought you some lace trim from Hamburg,” said Nelson, bringing the package out.

  She took it and went with it to the window. The Reverend Edmund said, tactfully, that he would withdraw.

  “That is not necessary,” said Fanny. She had nothing to say he could not hear her say. “Father, you must rest. You must remember your age [Gaudy stuff. What on earth was one to do with it? Her taste, probably].”

  Nelson, who was forthright to the point of being either quarrelsome or affectionate, depending upon the situation, could have screamed. One always hopes to find them changed. They never are. He watched the clock.

  “We have taken you a separate room,” said Fanny. “Does your arm pain you?”

  It did, but the woman’s ruthless solicitude was too much like being stripped by a Fury. Five minutes, and there they were piled up around you, your teeth (bad or missing), your eye (missing or bloodshot or strained), your arm (missing), your cheeks (quite sunk in), your life’s blood (thin, it was winter), your temper (apt to lose it anyway), your all and everything defective, found wanting, and just the way she wanted it. The damned woman had never seen a spring.

  “Admiral Parker,” said Fanny, in her thin resolute voice, clearly making conversation, “fell downstairs again last week. Apparently he is very bad.”

  “He was never good,” said Nelson, who could not stand the man, “but I am sorry it had to come out on the stairs.” Why did women have this passion for shrinking everyone to merely normal stature (that is, smaller than themselves)? No wonder one wanted to escape, always. He found Fanny confining.

  The clock struck. He could go away.

  After a short hesitation, the result of a prolonged inner debate, Fanny stretched her neck out, head to one side, to be pecked, looking mighty like a mole that has blinked in the light. It was one of her concessions. It would please his father.

  Nelson kissed the proffered cheek and left, and damn, damn, damn, damn down the corridor.

  *

  “A most affecting meeting,” said the Reverend Edmund. “He has gone to see his friends settled in, I suppose.”

  “Most affecting,” agreed Fanny, and meant it. It had been all her nerves—which was to say, her emotions—could bear. They were not up to much, but they had risen to the surface, all the same. Now, with a plonk, they darted back to safety. Yes, vulgar stuff, the lace, and what was worse, like him.

  “You can see he has no one to take care of him,” she said. “He used to be so careful in his dress, and now he looks gaudy.”

  “Ah well, he’s a famous man now, Fanny,” explained the Reverend Edmund happily, warmed by his son’s appearance, but like a man toasting before a fire, feeling a cold blast on his shins from the other side. “He must dress the part, you know.”

  Fanny did not know. Position she could understand, even if the uncertainties of her present exalted one (though the Herberts of Nevis were of very good family) fretted her; but fame was vulgar.

  “He has changed,” she said.

  “I did not find him so. He was always the genius of the family.”

  “Genius, fiddlesticks!” snapped Fanny. “He has behaved most ill.”

  The Reverend Edmund decided not to press. It was one of her indispositions, he supposed. When a bad-tempered woman persists in never showing it, naturally from time to time she will be indisposed, to ease the strain. She was a good woman. One had to bear with her. She could not find all this agreeable. All the same, he would have been grateful for a little more ease and a little less care. But since he needed the care, he would try to help her.

  Lord Nelson [The Morning Herald informed its readers], the gallant hero of the Nile, on his arrival in town, was met by his venerable father and his amiable lady. The scene which took place was of the most graceful description, and is more easily to be conceived than described.

  “Ah!” said the Reverend Edmund, “just as I thought,” and passed the paper to Fanny to comfort her.

  *

  “You wanted to see me,” said Miss Cornelia Knight (a person of no importance: Miss Cornelia Knight, the poetess). “I am so flattered.” This was her way to put him at his ease.

  Sir Thomas Troubridge was not put at his ease. It was not the poetess he had come to see, but the daughter of Admiral Sir Joseph Knight, for the Navy looks after not only its own, but their own as well. This is called tradition. Though badly wounded, Troubridge was a handsome man, still youthful in manner. He wished he
were anywhere else but here. There was not only loyalty to Nelson to be thought of, but also loyalty to a naval widow’s child.

  “I do not know how to put the matter delicately,” he said.

  “Then put it as best you can!” snapped Miss Knight, who knew what was coming, for she had eyes in her head even if she had learned to close them. “Though living a sheltered existence, I have been much upon the Continent. I may be offended, but I shall not be shocked.”

  Her little game was about up. Though a resident in this household in all innocence, she could hardly stay on once she had been offered a bite of the apple. She would have to move out, and what then of the autobiography? She would be no better informed than any other informer.

  “Surely you have heard some rumor of what goes on in this house,” said Troubridge unhappily.

  “Sir, I am too grateful to Sir William and Lady Hamilton to lend credence to rumor,” said Cornelia, in her haughty manner.

  “Well,” countered Troubridge, still more unhappily, eyeing a bowl of apples on the sideboard. They were Gravensteins, he noticed. “One does not have to lend credence to fact. It is just there. Whether you believe in it or not.”

  “Oh!” gasped Cornelia. It was quite a fine little gasp. It was followed by an equally fine little silence, devised to simulate startled enlightenment. “It is true that things have become very unpleasant.” Emma had caught her sighing over poor Lady Nelson, about whom it really was too bad.

  “I am sure you would not wish to lend your support to the, so to speak, insupportable,” said Troubridge, not wanting to come right out and say the thing.

  “Oh no,” said Cornelia, who had been housed, fed and feted for a twelvemonth now, and felt suddenly the need of support herself.

  “I think it would be better that you move out at once. After all, we do not want you smirched,” Troubridge said heartily.

  There was a pause.

  “The Nepeans have suggested that, until you can find some otherwhere, perhaps you would like to take refuge with them. Your retreat could be disguised as a visit.”

  Cornelia brightened. The Nepeans were not only rich but well connected; they were quite respectable.

  “I shall pack my few things,” she said. “This cannot be easy for you. I know your loyalty to our dear Lord Nelson, who is a fine man, no matter what people say. I am much in your debt.”

  Once she had packed, Troubridge showed her to her carriage, shut the door on her, and waved her solemnly away. And that, he thought, makes one gossip the less. Though Nelson might be an excellent strategist, at tactics Troubridge was not bad; so off rode the dickeybird, weight eight stone, and would that there were two of her, clack, clack, clack.

  *

  As Vice-Chamberlain, Greville had chambers for nothing at St. James, which was fortunate, for freehold grew more expensive every day; Edgware Row was built over; and if he could save on nothing else, he was always prepared to save on his own expenses. So he received them there, that red-brick relic of times past being as close to Court as Emma was ever to get.

  Though by no means resembling that highly polished shiny pink object, the Banker Rogers, Greville had become equally octopoidal. His hair was now thin; in compensation, his manner had become more weighty; he had a small pink mouth adapted for sucking; he had a beak; and since he still minced upon his toes, he had a pouter pigeon look. In short, people found him charming, charming, charming—even sometimes when he was out of the room. The years of talking to Towneley had left their mark, and so had Taste. He was fifty-one (Towneley was well-nigh dead).

  “How nice it will be to see him again,” said Emma. “I am quite curious.” And meant it. She expected to enjoy herself, and it was her suggestion that they go all three, Tria juncta in uno, for that she would enjoy even more.

  His rooms, though paneled up in the best Regency (it was expected any day—the King was once more coasting down toward the dark winter ponds of insanity, on which the ice was again thin) style, were at the same time dark and damp, in the good old English tradition. They had an old-boy donnish air about them, down to the bowl of winter flowers which no woman could have arranged. Otherwise there was no change. The Honorable Emily Bertie, only a little cracked, and dirty-blue brown because of Sir Joshua’s passion for asphaltum as a medium, her skin turned milk glass, her nose inalterable, balanced from one wall the Paulus Potter cow, the size of a Shetland pony, which still munched mellifluously above the mantelpiece on the other. There was a good old English sideboard, and two very bad new French chairs, neither of which Emma remembered, and a console with legs in the new Egyptian taste, sphinxes with brass faces, mahogany bodies, and below, slipping in and out beneath their petticoats, brass feet.

  Charles himself, all hospitality, had half an empty tantalus out and four very small glasses, their glass thick and sparkling, their capacity, unlike Emma’s (of which he had been warned), small.

  Nor, though he had heard she had gained weight, had he expected to find her so huge. It was as if someone had moved in the Farnese Hercules and changed the sex. The floorboards creaked.

  “Charles,” she purred, “how very pleasant to see you again.” And with every evidence of pleasure (all neatly labeled and laid out upon a table: it might not look like much, but it would hang him), she pumped his hand.

  “My dear Emma,” he shrilled, with some emotion. “What, no kiss for Greville?”

  “Why no,” she said, shaking her parasol. “Not now. Whatever would dear Lord Nelson think?”

  What dear Lord Nelson was thinking was that Sir William merely played the flute; he did not sound like one. Why must these men of taste grow shrill with age? A capon, to Nelson, belonged where it belonged, upon a plate.

  Greville, casting a roguish eye upon the company, clinked stopper against tantalus and proposed a small drink.

  “It is so long,” he said, “since we have all been together. My goodness, it has been nine years.” And he regarded Emma critically. “If you were younger, I could say, My, how you’ve grown. But as it is, I know not what to say.”

  “Good,” said Emma.

  “The sherry is indeed excellent,” pronounced Nelson, venturing out into the silence first, warily, but with his best foot forward.

  Greville giggled. “It is one of my little economies,” he said. “Number 452. You will not get it any other where, but Figgis is a reliable man.”

  “Figgis?”

  “My wine man.”

  (He knows not what he does.)

  “Ah, then you like it?”

  (“No.”)

  “You are to be complimented, Charles.”

  “A most tastefully appointed room,” said Nelson, who hated everything in it down to the last famille verte vase and Dutch Delft ginger jar. It was a clutter. It was too hushed. He had never before drunk sherry in chapel. The décor would have profited for being dusted by a poltergeist. He wanted air.

  “Well,” said Emma, “I don’t mind if I do.”

  Greville looked as though he had been struck.

  “Don’t fuss, Charles,” said Sir William. Immediately Charles modulated to a manly tone, sincere, concerned, responsible—even considerate—and poured Emma some more. The upper registers for art, the lower for commerce, and in between a calm and level purr.

  Sir William felt at his ease, for there were tidbits here from his own collections as well as the Correggio, the barterable bargain of a lifetime which had turned out to be a Cambiasi, though Mr. Vandergucht had offered half. To date, the Correggio had been his only error. In short, they were all so delighted to see each other again that they felt quite uncomfortable.

  *

  “That man is a scoundrel,” said Nelson to Emma privately. “He would want to talk, but I put a stop to the damned gabble, gabble, gabble. We are used to speak our mind of kings and beggars and not fear being betrayed, but Judas himself was never such a tattletale. He is too old to be a piglet any longer. I hope Sir William feeds him turnip tops.” But later, as he us
ually did, he cooled down. Though he wasted no oil, Greville understood to perfection the fine art of water smoothing, and was down on his knees with a trowel instantly, a fellow Mason, the better to cement (the metaphor is mixed—so were his motives) relations.

  *

  “What is this story she spreads about, about a previous secret marriage?” asked Greville of Sir William. “It will accomplish nothing. It did not take place. And if it did, the rules of society are never retroactive. She cannot be received at Court.” He was in a temper.

  “I believe she has some hopes of creeping in under Lady Nelson’s pinfeathers,” said Sir William, amused by all this, though sadly so.

  “Lady Nelson is nothing but an elevated commoner. There is a limit to the number of people you can pull up by your own boot strings.” Having no children of his own, Greville was much taken up these days with genealogies, as is the way with disappointed men.

  It was not Sir William’s. No, he is not at all like me, he thought, and felt a warm glow of self-gratulation and also a twinge of neuralgia, a complaint he had for years forgot.

  “Pray tell me, Charles, in what month do you finally bring yourself to light a fire?”

  “January,” said Charles, without thinking.

  “Good,” said Sir William gravely, rising to his feet to ease the stiffness in his joints. “I shall return.”

  *

  On Sunday the 9th, Nelson paid his respects to the Admiralty Board, and afterward was so amiable as to show himself to the people. When the curiosity of his grateful countrymen became inconvenient, he ducked into Somerset House, was smuggled out a back way, and that evening entertained the Hamiltons at Nerot’s Hotel, which gave the two ladies a chance to make comparisons, if not conversation. On Monday, Nelson moved to a house in Dover Street; the Hamiltons to Beckford’s house in Grosvenor Square, for the house they had taken in Piccadilly would not be ready until New Year’s. On the 12th, Nelson and Sir William were presented at Court, where they got a cool reception. His Majesty merely asked if Nelson had recovered his health, and did not wait for a reply. This rudeness was not the result of moral indignation—the Queen looked after morals—but of etiquette, Nelson having used his Sicilian title without asking English permission. He must mind his manners, apply for permission, and mend his signature. Nelson had not known. In Palermo, there had been no end to personal display; but England is a limited monarchy. He put in his petition and signed himself Nelson and Bronte from then on.