“There’s not a lot he could tell me about folks, and that’s without ever leaving my own parish.”
Grandma Kidd was disposed not to like Sir William Hamilton, that was clear, but then she had not much good to say for Charles Greville either, even if he did foot the bills for Little Emma. To the old woman they were cut from the same cloth: the kind that had exploited the girls she had raised.
“Uncle Hamilton has undertaken to seek permission for Little Emma to move to Edgware.” Hearing her name, the child stopped talking to her doll, and raised a pair of large green eyes to stare at her mother. Emma addressed her directly. “You would like it there I am sure, for Mr Greville is a kinder person than he will at times let show. I’m sure a few of your smiles would melt his heart just as quick as they have mine.”
“Whatever’s best for the child,” said Grandma Kidd. “That’s all I care for. That’s all I ever cared for.”
Charles Greville was reading, silently, Emma’s first letter since their parting, as usual half amused, half despairing of the breathless way in which it had been composed. But the “Damn!” he hissed was loud enough to make Sir William Hamilton look up from his labours.
“She has given that old woman, her grandmother, near a full fifth of the money I allowed her for the month.”
“That is bad?” Sir William’s reply was halfway between a statement and a question. Greville was clearly displeased, but that didn’t signify since his nephew was prone to disapproval of many things, something he found trying at times.
“Apparently Mrs Kidd bought the child a coat she couldn’t afford.” He spoke brightly now, because he had read the words that followed. “Emma promises to make good the loss. She tells me she has taken cheaper seaside lodgings and is eating frugally.”
“Does she mention her health?” asked Sir William.
“Blooming, Uncle, as is that of the child.”
“Then that at least is good news.”
“Sea bathing, both of them,” Greville added, tossing the letter aside. He went back to his own set of books, the accounts for the present year that would have to be checked before being passed to his uncle. Greville was the man responsible for the stewardship of these Welsh estates, an obligation to which he devoted considerable time. “Do you really believe such immersion can be efficacious?”
“Not in these northern waters. But I have a small villa at Posillipo in the Bay of Naples. In summer, when the sea is warm and the body is robust enough to withstand the power of the waves, it does wonders for the ague.”
The voice drifted into silence, and the older man had a wistful look in his eyes. It was hard to compare in any favourable way this house, this dark, oak-panelled room and its musty, unoccupied smell with either Posillipo or his apartments in the Palazzo Sessa and the freshness of the Mediterranean sea breeze that wafted through them. Nor could he conjure up much affection for the green Pembrokeshire countryside that rolled away from the windows. He yearned for the warmth of the sun, and the smell of lemons and abundant flora that filled his rooms, for the sight of his collections, and the excitement of a dig when the first sign of some artefact emerged from the ash.
Absence kept him from recalling the smell of the city when the wind blew from the east, the beggars and the light-fingered, noisy inhabitants—the court, too, which was full of intrigues that seemed so petty they might be amusing, had they not been so deadly. Neapolitans loved to sing and dance the saltarella. They loved food, wine, and blatant carnality. But, most of all, they loved to hate. There were family feuds, political enmity, and a visceral hatred of all other nationalities: Spanish the most, Austrians the next. His duty was to ensure that Britannia retained if not affection at least no increase in animosity.
He had a duty here too: to pass the accounts with which Greville had presented him, books that covered the years he had been away. These showed he had well-managed assets that yielded him an income, without any effort on his part, of some five thousand pounds per annum. Not that he was unaware of the profit: spending it wisely was a major concern.
“I cannot bring myself to decide whether to be pleased or angry with Emma.” Sir William looked at the bent head, knowing that the face he could not see wore a frown. “I suppose I should be sanguine about the way she has behaved. I have to tell you, Uncle, there was a time, and not so very long ago, when she would not have shown the sense necessary to make good the loss.”
“Hardly a loss, Charles. It went to the child.”
“I make provision enough for the child. Little Emma wants for nothing.”
Sir William forbore to say that his nephew was clearly wrong, since the purchase of a coat, in a Cheshire winter, would be a necessity. “There is the matter of parental affection.”
That made Greville look up. “I didn’t have you as a lover of Rousseau.”
“The fact that I do not have children of my own …” His uncle had to pause and look away to avoid the avarice in Charles Greville’s eyes. “It does not mean that I do not ponder on the proper course of raising and educating them.”
“And?”
“I look to my own past. I was put out to a wet-nurse on the very day of my birth.”
“With a king for a companion on the other teat.”
“A prince then. But that is to digress. What I mean is that Rousseau has identified this as an unsatisfactory way of rearing infants. And it is not just he. The Duchess of Leinster I consider a friend, and she in her letters cannot be brought to think of child rearing in any other way than by the natural mother.”
Greville favoured him with a thin smile. “I sense a reason for the route of this conversation, Uncle William.”
“I doubt it is a secret to you that Emma herself inclines that way.”
“The books bore you, I fear.”
“They do, nephew, they do. You have carried out your stewardship in a splendid fashion. Were it not that you insist, I could scarce be brought to check the figures you produce.”
“A turn round the garden?”
There had been a shower earlier, so although the grass was damp, the air had a clear odour to it that was pleasing. Less engaging was the turn the conversation had taken, with Greville’s point blank refusal to consider that Little Emma should live with her mother. His reasons, though they sounded practical, were based on selfish motives. He was a fastidious man, a lover of order who would find the accommodation of a child’s needs, the sheer disruption, impossible to cope with.
“You only see Emma, Uncle, as she is now. You do not see the wild, untamed creature she once was. Keeping that which has been achieved intact is paramount.”
“If what you say is true, that is so.”
“Yet you admire her.”
“It would be hard not to, Charles. She is, even you admit, a rare creature. Were she not under your protection I doubt I could be saved from a foolish attempt at dalliance.”
“Hardly foolish, sir, and do not fear that any attentions you paid to Emma would evoke a jealous reaction in me.”
Sir William looked sideways at his nephew’s profile, the set of the jaw, the look into the far distance meant to convey sincerity. Perhaps he did mean what he said, but his uncle had seen him react to the presence of other men around Emma Hart, and nothing he had observed had led him to believe that he took kindly any form of attention to her.
“The foolishness would stem from my age. Besides, it would scarce be fitting. Suffice to say, Charles, that I consider the obligation of family.”
Greville tried to suppress the combination of anxiety and excitement in his voice. “Do you truly think of me as family, Uncle?”
“How can you doubt it, since you’re my blood nephew and I consider you my heir?”
That was an amusing moment for Sir William, who was too wise and urbane ever to be fooled by his nephew. He didn’t dislike Charles, quite the reverse, but there were traits in his character, the most notable his endless calculation, which he found reprehensible. As a younger son hims
elf he knew what it was to lack an inheritance. And there was the clear memory of his own marriage which, while founded on a degree of regard, had had as much, if not more, to do with the stipend produced by the very estates they were now inspecting, property that had come to him through his late wife.
Charles worried that he would not succeed to the income. He knew that his mother had been Sir William’s favourite sister, and that once she had realised her brother was childless, she had pleaded eloquently on behalf of her younger son. Sir William had been happy to oblige, with the caveat that should he predecease his wife the estates would not be in his gift. He considered it a point of honour that, having made that promise and having survived Lady Catherine Hamilton, he could not go back on it.
Yet he couldn’t help teasing his too-serious nephew with hints that he might remarry. Such talk, though Greville tried to disguise it, threw the young man into a frenzy of doubt. With a shaky concept of honour himself, he could not ascribe unselfish motives to others, and constantly saw barriers to his inheritance where none existed.
“There is some pity in the fact of our blood ties,” said Greville, holding up his hand to feel for the first spots of rain.
“In what way?” Sir William had already turned towards the house, thinking that the rain, a cause for some celebration in Naples because of its rarity, was all too commonplace here.
“I speak of Emma, of course. She is, I must tell you, the sweetest bedfellow a man could crave, as capable of gentility as she is of abandon. Had you been afforded a chance to discover her charms, I assure you, no barrier of age would have ruined your pleasure.”
Hurrying for shelter now, Sir William noted the words but not the expression that accompanied them.
However, over the next week, as the subject of Emma and her obliging nature came up again and again, it was not difficult to see which way his nephew’s mind was moving. Sir William was unsure whether to be offended or pleased, to anticipate delight or ridicule, to agree to what was being hinted at or scoff at it: the proposition that a man of his age should investigate the possibility of housing, and quite possibly bedding, a lively creature considerably less than half his age.
Trained as he was in diplomacy, Sir William did nothing to commit himself to any course of action. But he was not immune to imagination, and he had to admit that though the thought didn’t entirely please him, it didn’t appal him either.
A month with Little Emma had not only affected the child, it had had a deep impact on her mother as well. There were tantrums, of course, times when Emma’s patience was sorely tested, such as when she encountered her daughter’s reluctance to put more than one foot out of the bathing machine and into the sea, or to go to bed when the appropriate hour had struck. Hunger made the child fractious, as did tiredness, and it was plain that Grandma Kidd had overindulged her. But on the whole she was a joy to be with, a source of endless wonder with her chatter and her childish view of events and objects.
There were moments that would live with Emma for ever: the first voluntary taking of her hand, the morning when a sunny smile greeted her, the look in those green eyes, so like her own, when she read her daughter a story, the peals of laughter that accompanied a session on a swing. But, most of all, she loved that moment when Little Emma, tired after a day on the beach collecting shells or searching for crabs, fell sound asleep on her mother’s breast, the gentle pounding of her own heartbeat timed exactly to coincide with that of the child.
In Southport Emma was anonymous, just a mother with her child, a Mrs Hart whom everyone assumed had a Mr Hart in the background. Hints of a man serving at sea were accepted without question by the lady owners of the lodging house, who were too polite to enquire after an excess of detail. She was nodded to by strangers as a decent woman, and eventually engaged in conversation about matters domestic that had her falling back on her years in service. It was so long since Emma had experienced respectability that she was disinclined to give it up.
Against that she missed Greville, even his moods. She had sense to see that this seaside interlude was just that: a short break from the life she had chosen; a chance to play the part that might have been hers, had she not allowed her life to take the course it had. Having corresponded with her lover before, she knew better than to look for affection from his pen, but the coldness of his writing, especially on the subject of her daughter and Edgware, still wounded.
That absence of emotion served to rekindle her natural spirit, the need to challenge, rather than just accede to the wishes of others. Her growing attachment to Little Emma made the thought of giving up her daughter more and more difficult to bear. Emma swung between confidence in her own ideas and a fear of the reaction they would provoke, but finally, with no one present to check her, she determined to act as her conscience dictated. The first thing to do was to get both of them to London and installed before Greville returned.
“If she is already here, then it would be a stone heart that had the inclination to turn her out.”
Mary Cadogan watched her granddaughter playing on the floor with the same affection Emma had experienced at the Steps. It wasn’t just the blood tie either: the child had a winning way as well as an open, trusting gaze and ready smile that was heart-melting. The surprise of the child’s arrival had faded in her, but not the notion that Greville would ever stand for it. He was a man who liked the house tidy. You only had to look at his choice of furnishings, which inclined towards the dainty rather than the robust, and to observe how he checked them continually for position and cleanliness to understand how finicky he was.
Greville liked things just so, and however sweet Little Emma was, she was still a child, prone to speak when not asked, cry when hurt, demand attention when inappropriate and leave her playthings wherever they fell when she tired of them. Though Mary suppressed these thoughts in order not to spoil a happy interlude, she had good reason to feel vindicated when the master returned.
“If anything, Emma, I am more vexed now than I was when I read your letter.”
Greville was pacing back and forth, hands behind his back, in the master-of-the-house pose that had become an increasing feature of his behaviour since he had moved in. Emma sat, head down, careful to avoid adding an eye challenge to a domestic one.
“Did you tell your uncle?”
“How could I not when you’d engaged him as advocate on your behalf?”
“I believe he shared my view that it would do no harm.”
“A stand of which I would take more cognisance if he would be obliged to suffer the consequences of such an arrangement.”
“Suffer, Charles? She’s only a child.”
“The only is singular, Emma, given that her being an infant is the whole point of my objections. The household is simply not suitable …”
“She has her own room, and both my mother’s and mine when matters permit. She need never come downstairs at all when you are about. You won’t even know she’s with us.”
“Nonsense,” he replied, impatiently, his voice rising as he spoke. “And what I do and do not know is hardly the point. Do not tell me that in some crisis you will not put her needs as paramount. Do not tell me that when I have friends in my own house some act of the child will not be noticed.”
“Who can object to the sound of a child?”
“I can!”
Mary Cadogan was listening behind the door, and when she heard Emma reply to that, she noted there was real steel in her daughter’s voice. It wasn’t anger but determination, and for once her mother, who feared to be cast out on the street more than any other fate, was with her.
“I require you to indulge me in this, Charles.”
“Require? Am I to be required of?”
The answer to that was no. Pleading, tears, tentative intercessions from an uncle who knew the bounds placed on interference had had no effect. Charles Greville ordered his life just so, and would not stand to see it altered.
Returning Little Emma to Grandma Kidd w
as heart-wrenching for Emma and ultimately sad, too, for the old lady, given that Greville had decided that the child must be placed with some respectable family to secure her future. That his notion had wisdom attached did not detract from the melancholy such a suggestion provoked. If the child stayed at the Steps, she would grow up in the same manner as her mother and grandmother before her. Who was to say that she would not turn out to follow the same occupation? It was a notion that Greville, for very good reasons, could not countenance.
“The choice will be yours, Grandma,” said Emma, the offending letter in her hand, her eyes, like those of her grandmother, red with tears, “though Mr Greville’s approval will be most essential.”
“It should fall to you, Emma, not me,” croaked Grandma Kidd.
“I would not pick someone close by. You will, so that at least you can see her when you want. It sounds cruel I know, but I cannot abide the way I feel. I would send her to a family so far away that even should I come to visit you I would not have the chance to see Little Emma.”
“I never thought you’d turn your back on your own child.”
“I do it for her,” Emma sobbed, her eyes turning to the curtain behind which her daughter slept, “so that she will not see tears every time she beholds her mother’s face. Let her grow up thinking someone else her true parent.”
Grandma Kidd stood up, if her bent frame could qualify for such a description, and both her face and the tone of her voice showed her anger. “I was never one for falsehood, Emma, and I reckoned you the same. But all this ‘doing it for the little ’un’ is stuff and nonsense. You’se doing it like this for your own ends. It’s your heart that is uppermost, not the bairn’s.”
“I—”
“Say no more, Emma. Go to the Post House, where you took care to leave your possessions, and wait for your coach to London.”
“You speak as though I have a choice.”
“You do, child,” Grandma Kidd replied wearily. “You could stay put and raise your own. But you’re too like your own mother, always looking for others to fend for you.”
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