As Sarah Churchill had said when old—that first best and worst of the Marlboroughs, but the woman showed shrewd sense—in this life there is nothing to be done but to make the best of what cannot be helped; to act with reason oneself and with good conscience toward others. And though that may not give all the joys some people might wish for, yet it is sufficient to make one very quiet.
In March, he went up to town for the second time that year, to present to the Society of Antiquaries a mutilated stone head bearing traces of gilding on its coronet, a piece of the ancient walls of Merton Abbey. It was, he hoped, the last piece. Then, not caring to cause distress, he had himself moved from Merton to 23 Piccadilly. Not caring to cause him any, Emma and Nelson came along.
“He is very very bad. He can’t, in my opinion, get over it, and I think it will happen very soon,” said Nelson. “You will imagine Lady Hamilton’s and my feelings on the occasion. Indeed, all London is interested in the fate of such a character.”
Though willing to be obedient, his sister Bolton could not imagine them, quite.
On the 6th of April he died, with Nelson to hold one hand and Emma the other. For dying is very like giving birth: in either event, one has to brace one’s self.
“Gone?” asked Emma.
“Gone,” said Nelson, looking down at that face which had always been a mask but now had nobody to look out through it any more. He closed the eyes.
Straightening up like conspirators once the act is done, they caught in each other’s eyes an expression which said both too little and too much. It disconcerted both of them. The body lay between.
*
“Our dear Sir William died at ten minutes past ten this morning,” said Nelson, and careful of the proprieties, moved in with Greville for the time being; and then, even more carefully, out.
“Unhappy day for the forlorn Emma. Ten minutes past ten dear blessed Sir William left me,” wrote Emma. She was finding the air a little thin, but had taken a house in Clarges Street, for she had to have some place in town. Greville had evicted her from 23 Piccadilly at once.
“Sir William Hamilton died on Sunday afternoon, and was quite sensible to the last,” said Captain Hardy. “How Her Ladyship will manage to live with the Hero of the Nile now, I am at a loss to know—at least in an honorable way.”
The body was taken off for burial in Wales, and Emma was left alone with Mrs. Cadogan. “They have taken away something that belonged to me,” she said. Which was true; they had.
“Are you my mummy?” asked Horatia, who was three now, and like the other one, precocious.
“Your mother is a woman Too Great to be Named,” said Emma, and began to weep.
*
The will was not read until the beginning of May.
To his dearest loyal and truly brave friend Nelson, a copy of Madame Lebrun’s picture of Emma in enamel, by Bone. “God bless him and shame fall on those who do not say amen.”
To Emma, £300 in cash and an annuity of £800—£100 of it to go to Mrs. Cadogan during her lifetime.
The rest to Greville, who was also to administer the estate.
“My dear Emma,” said Greville, with a small smile he had been saving now for twenty years and could at last let out. “I shall see to everything.”
And charged her interest, fee and tax.
*
“Eight hundred pounds a year. It is not enough money to throw at a cat,” said Emma. Her expenses had risen. Her standards had changed. It was a worry.
She spoke to everyone. She petitioned for a pension.
“She talked very freely,” said Lord Minto, “of her situation with Nelson, but protested that their attachment had been perfectly pure, which I declare I can believe, though I am sure it is of no consequence whether it is so or not. The shocking injury done to Lady Nelson is not made less or greater by anything that may or may not have occurred between him and Lady Hamilton.”
So pension she got none.
Nelson, who had been ordered to the Mediterranean, allowed her £100 a month housekeeping money. He made no bones about going. “If the devil stands at the door, the Victory shall sail tomorrow forenoon,” he wrote to St. Vincent. But neither did he make any bones about his intention to come back.
“That dear domestic happiness,” said Codrington fondly, “never abstracted his attention.” Their hero was himself again. “He has sighted Gibraltar. He will be a bachelor beyond it.”
So it was all not quite the way Emma had imagined it would be, though she might have Horatia at Merton as much as she pleased, and see Old Q in town, and of course the Matchams were coming on Thursday and the William Nelsons for the weekend, and there were always some of Nelson’s naval friends to entertain; they were good boisterous boys, there was no harm in them. Something was always happening. And so … And so …
*
Madame Vigée-Lebrun was in London, so Emma went calling, in a black dress, a black cloak, black gloves, a black bonnet. Since she must wear mourning for a year, it was well that black suited her. Her hair was done in the new fashionable Titus cut.
Time had not altered the Great Refugee, but she was running out of royalties to paint, and since she shrank from the thought of penciling a parvenu, was here to do the peerage.
The two women consoled each other.
“In Sir William I lost both a friend and a father,” wailed Emma, noble in grief, like Adrienne Le Couvreur, but showing no signs of having swallowed poison. “And how do you find England?”
“Eh bien,” said Madame Lebrun—with a philosophical shrug—in that engaging way which so endears her countrymen to all. “C’est curieux. En Angleterre, l’esprit public est plus sain; en France, l’esprit particulier vaut mieux; de sorte qu’en Angleterre vous trouverez plutôt un meilleur peuple, et en France, un meilleur homme. Mais,” she added graciously, if without conviction, “c’est toute la même chose.”
Commissions were not going well.
Through the window, Emma glimpsed a white lilac nodding beyond the glass. Wishing to smell it, she went to the window to let the fragrance in, to refresh her. Unfortunately the window would not budge.
“It sticks,” said Madame Lebrun in flawless but contemptuous English. It was a word she had learned recently.
Emma was baffled. Was she supposed to weep again? she wondered.
She is playing a part, thought Madame Lebrun, beady-eyed as ever. The English always play a part.
“I too have lost my little all,” she said. “The house in Paris, you know. Confiscated.” Not a bacchante, she thought, a veritable Bacchus, like that horrid Italian one in the Boboli Gardens. Or is that a Silenus? However, she managed to look sympathetic. She wished to hear more.
“I can never be consoled,” said Emma experimentally.
“Évidemment,” said Madame Lebrun, watching Emma’s hands from force of habit as that so sad lady wandered around the room. Lady Hamilton she might be, but Madame Lebrun did not care for commoners.
At the piano, Emma’s eye was caught by a sheet of music, Richard Bloomfield’s “A Visit to Ranelagh.” “‘As performed,’” she read, “‘by Miss Randles, aged three and a half, the Wonderful Musical Welsh Child.’”
“Whatever is this?” she asked, curious.
“Something a friend brought to amuse me,” said Madame Lebrun, and added kindly, “I have not heard it. C’est épatant, elle dit, mais ce n’est pas le tonnerre.” She had the Gallic weakness for linguistic bead stringing, if not the ability. Her black little eyes clicked like an abacus.
But Emma sat down at the piano and rattled away.
“To Ranelagh once in my life,
By good-natur’d force I was driv’n;
The nations had ceas’d their long strife,
And PEACE beam’d her radiance from Heav’n.
What wonders were there to be found
That a clown might enjoy or disdain?
First we trac’d the gay ring all around,
Ay—and then we went ro
und it again.
It was jolly.
“’Tis not wisdom to love without reason,
Or to censure without knowing why:
I had witness’d no crime, nor no treason,
‘O life, ’tis thy picture,’ said I.
’Tis just thus we saunter along,
Months and years bring their pleasure or pain,
We sigh midst the RIGHT and the WRONG;
—And then WE GO ROUND THEM AGAIN!”
“Oh I like it,” she said. And forgetting her costume, she was radiant and smiling.
Madame Lebrun was not impressed. “On ne gagne pas plus à ennuyer un Francais qu’à divertir un Anglais,” she said in her shrewd, kindly way, totaling up her mental sum.
“Oh but I do like it,” said Emma, for it had a cheerful ducking and bobbing rhythm. It had quite put her in spirits again. “May I have it?”
“Of course, dear child. Why not? If it suits you, take it,” said Madame Lebrun, who had never heard such a vulgar low song in her life; so typically English, and besides, now curiosity was satisfied, it would be well to get rid of her. They are canaille.
So out Emma sailed with it, into the bright, fresh, crisp spring air—feeling ever so much better for having done her duty and paid her respects—humming the tune happily, with an occasional glance at the words, and delighted, considering what the recent past had been, to be out in the present tense again, where the sun still shines. It was a lovely, lovely day, and off she drove, beguiled and beguiling.
Life is a dream.
Cranbrook—Paris—Walnut Creek
June—November 1962
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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All rights reserved
© David Derek Stacton, 1963
The right of David Derek Stacton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–32259–6
Sir William Page 36