Too Great a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

“You forget my horrid weak chin. There are mornings I make my toilette and I can see nothing else in the glass before me.”

  “Ah, but my dear Emma, it is by such flaws that we become our fullest selves, for what is man without the vulnerabilities that make him truly human? Now, find me another whose eyes convey the vivacity of yours as well as the depth of the soul behind them. The sorrows and pain that have made you vulnerable to injury, my poor girl, can be read in your eyes as easily as one can read your enthusiasm and exuberance. Even to the dispassionate observer, the combination of these qualities in a single charming body make you an uncommon beauty, whom not even Lady Betty Foster or the Duchess of Devonshire herself can rival. Add to that your expressive voice, your talent for drama, your zest for life, your generous nature, and your gift for making everyone you speak to feel as though you admire them and care deeply for their welfare.”

  “But I do!”

  “Even more uncommon!”

  “Lud, Romney, I can scarce recognize myself; you take my breath away with such compliments! My own father, ’ad he lived, could not have been so proud of his daughter.”

  My sweet, dear friend smiled wistfully. “You said yourself that the Empress of Russia has commissioned a cameo of your head. Do you think everyone would want to own an ‘Emma’ if I were just flattering you up?”

  We began to spend much of our time at Sir William’s charming summerhouse in Posillipo, just three rooms and a kitchen, practically jutting into the sea. From May to September the heat in the city was oppressive, so we would drive out from Naples, arriving at the villa in time for lunch, lingering until sunset, when we were obliged to return to Naples to attend the opera or to entertain at the Palazzo Sessa. In my honor, Sir William christened the little house Villa Emma, and in truth it was always my favorite of his three establishments. I would bathe every day there, and sometimes go sailing with Sir William, for fishing was another of his passions. I also loved to dive among the rocks in the piscina he had built, swimming underwater to admire the sea flora and fauna that dwelt in this special pool. Sir William was nearly as fascinated with marine life as he was with vulcanology. To him, every one of Nature’s formations represented a laboratory.

  At night, the sky was ablaze with fireworks, ignited from the balconies of the Posillipo grandees. They burst into the heavens like fiery blooms, cresting like fountains before falling into the purple darkness of the bay.

  Of course I told Greville that his uncle had named his little coastal cottage for me, but still I received no word from him. I told him about all the servants we had at the Palazzo Sessa as well as at Sir William’s capannina, his hunting cabin in Caserta, where he routinely went with the king on their massive hunts, excursions that Sir William described as wholesale slaughter. The king employed thirty-two hundred beaters to chase the poor beasts into a pit just within range of His Majesty’s rifle. Dressed like a tradesman in a leather apron and hat and standing in a roofless sentry box, he could kill dozens in a day, hundreds in a weekend, and enjoyed repulsing his guests by plunging his muscular bare arms up to the elbow in gore and cutting up the animals himself with his coarse brown hands. “If only he were as good a monarch as he is a butcher, no one need despair about the future of the kingdom,” sighed Sir William.

  Our servants numbered nowhere near the thirty-two hundred beaters, but we did employ many, as wages were so low. And I was surprised to see men handling such ordinary household chores as changing the bed linens, but this was the Neapolitan way. At least changing the linens was not dangerous business. Other servants daily risked their lives for us. Sir William’s volanti were employed solely to run in front of his carriage shouting and waving their arms to shoo away the freely roaming cows, chickens, street vendors, and lazzaroni.

  Not too long after Mam and I arrived, Sir William asked us if we should like to see Vesuvius.

  “I can see it right from where I’m sitting,” Mam replied pragmatically.

  “I meant climb it, Mrs. Cadogan.”

  “I know you did, Sir Willum. I was just quizzing you. But my hip i’nt what is was but a few months ago, so I think I’ll admire the view from this chair. And if I feel like stirring, your cook or chef or whaddyecallim ’as promised to show me ’ow ’e makes his salt cod. Back-allow, ’e calls it.”

  Naturally I was mad to climb the volcano, but my first visit was to be no ordinary day trip. Sir William chose to show me his precious Vesuvius at midnight, which he vowed was even better sport. ’Twas a good thing my feet was big, because I had to don a pair of Sir William’s thick-soled boots. No dainty slippers for picking your way amid the changing topography, now crunchy as gravel, now spongy where the lava had begun to cool, now ashy as a massive pile of cinders. Even through the boots I could feel the heat beneath my feet.

  “ ’Ow I wish Greville was here to share this with us!” I exclaimed into the night as I gazed at five miles of flame. The light of the moon was nothing to the lava, the finest fountain of liquid fire.

  “It may spoil your opinion of my nephew, but I must tell you, Mrs. Hart, that he was less intrepid than your imagination would have you believe. In fact, when he was here some years ago, he was terrified to climb the volcano.”

  “ ’E wouldn’t be affrighted if I was to ’old ’is ’and,” I insisted.

  “Look!” Sir William cried as an enormous cloud of smoke belched forth from the crater. “Now do as I do!” I crouched down and turned my body toward the foot of the volcano, shielding my head with my arms. A moment later, we were pelted with a shower of stones, as though the sky were raining black hail and soot. I crept closer to Sir William, who struck a flint and glanced at his pocket watch. Several minutes later, he helped me to my feet. “Give me your hand. It’s safe to go all the way up to the crater now. We are between eruptions.”

  How thrilling it was! Slowly and carefully, we picked our way to the summit. The breeze had caught the smoke and was blowing it westward, yielding us a better look at the crater itself.

  “It looks like a bowl of steam now,” I remarked, trying to hold my breath so I shouldn’t have to hold my nose against the sulfuric gases.

  “It’s coming from the numerous fissures inside the crater,” Sir William explained. “I’m afraid that’s the best view we’re going to get tonight.”

  “O, I shall never forget it! Thank you, Sir Willum.” I leaned toward him to press my lips to his cheek.

  Well into our descent, we met none other than the Prince Royal with his tutor, who evidently had shared the same thought we did. “What did you think of the sight?” I asked him in my rudimentary Italian.

  “Bella, ma poca roba,” the youth replied, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Not such great stuff?!” I could not believe my ears. Then I learnt that at the urging of his tutor, they had stopped well below the lip of the crater. No wonder he had been less than impressed. “Did you hear that, Sir Willum? Five hundred yards ’igher and ’e could ’ave watched the noblest, sublimest sight in the world. But the poor frightened creatures beat a scared retreat. O, I shall kill myself with laughing!”

  After three months in Naples, I had not received so much as a single word from my beloved Greville. Sir William had begun to appear once more as though he desired to break something to me, yet he always changed his mind moments after the cloud had darkened his usually placid brow.

  Let me have onely one line from your dear, dear hands, I begged Greville in July.

  I find life is insupportable with out you.

  I have a language master, a singing master, musick, etc, etc, but what is it for; if it was to amuse you I should be happy, but Greville what will it avail me. I am poor, helpless & forlorn. I have lived with you 5 years & you have sent me to a strange place & me thinking you was coming to me; instead of which I was told to live, you know how, with Sir W. No, I respect him, but no, never, shall he peraps live with me for a little wile like you & send me to England, then what am I to do, what is to become of me.

  I
told him that an Austrian prince was besotted with me, and the King of the Two Sicilies himself fawned over me like a cicisbeo over his married mistress! But all I desired was Greville. His silence had broken my heart and rendered me miserable, despite the warm reception I had received in this foreign, faraway land. I endeavored to be cheerful for Sir William’s sake, for he was being so kind to me, but in truth, my smiles were naught but a mask that concealed my real distress.

  Meanwhile, Sir William continued to tutor me in local history. If King Ferdinand was the “King of the Lazzaroni,” the Queen of the Two Sicilies, Maria Carolina, was known as the “Queen of the Illuminati” for her support of the freethinking societies formed by the intellectuals of the Neapolitan noble and middle classes.

  A daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Maria Carolina had the cream and rose and gold coloring of the Hapsburgs. I found her a great beauty, for she was uncommon intelligent, and this can go a long way to turning a plain woman into a striking one. But no one would compare Her Sicilian Majesty to a statue of Venus. Her watery blue eyes were red-lidded, small, and too close together. Her forehead was too high, her mouth too small, and the Hapsburg jaw too prominent, with too great a distance between the mouth and chin. And her unfortunate underbite had a way of strangling her speech so that the Neapolitans nicknamed her polpett mbocca, for they thought she sounded like a gobbling turkey when she spoke.

  The king possessing neither the head nor the stomach for governing, it was Maria Carolina, along with Sir John Acton—the kingdom’s English-born secretary of war and minister of the marine, and also rumored to be the queen’s lover—who were the true sovereigns of the Two Sicilies. After the crown prince was born in 1775, Her Majesty claimed the prize she had coveted upon her wedding and which had been inserted into the marriage contract: her seat in Parliament and a controlling interest in the government. And it was the queen who, during the Bourbons’ long and fruitful reign in Naples, had instigated the creation of libraries and the opening of universities, as well as freeing the roads from tolls and enacting reforms to encourage industry and agriculture. How I wished that I might come to know this fascinating creature!

  According to many, the queen and I could boast of the best complexions in the kingdom; our milk white skin was much admired by the swarthy Neapolitans, who slathered so much paint upon their faces that they resembled oil portraits and covered their pox marks with patches. After I attempted to duplicate the Neapolitan fashion, Sir William kindly suggested that my true beauty would be better revealed were it not so masked by prodigious quantities of paint and powder. At his insistence I wore my hair completely natural, too. And in his amiable, diplomatic way, Sir William also suggested that I refrain from trying to dress like the ladies of high society, who reeked of pomade and perfume, piled copious amounts of false curls upon their heads, girdled their necks, wrists, and fingers with heavy, precious stones, and over their numerous petticoats and underskirts wore gowns trimmed with tinsel and spangled with sequins. The men were no less gaudy. And the grander the rank, the more colorful the picture. One aspired to be vastly overwhelmed by one’s accoutrements.

  “Their heads will turn, Mrs. Hart, if you looked markedly different from them. Should you emulate their style, you will run the risk of fading into the crowd. Simplicity is all. You will flaunt your beauty the most, my dear, when you least appear to do so.”

  Finally, at the end of July I received a letter from Greville, which at least was warm, if not effusive, but then that was never his way. Yet he scolded me for not being receptive to Sir William, which sent me into a panic. On the first of August, I replied hysterically, admitting that I had always harbored a dark foreboding that our connexion would come to no good end, then threatened to return to England and descend into dissipation, as an example to other women of what can befall an innocent country girl who is betrayed and abandoned by her lover. Then I grew contrite, offering to do anything to secure his love, and by the time I penned my postscript, I was desperate:P.S.

  Pray write, for nothing will make me so angry & it is not to your interest to disoblidge me, for you dont know the power I have hear, onely I will never be his mistress. If you affront me, I will make him marry me. God bless you for ever.

  I kept my word: it was indeed the last letter I wrote to Greville in which I groveled for his love.

  A few days later, just after breakfast, Sir William asked if he might speak with me quite candidly on a subject that he confessed had been troubling his mind for some time.

  “It pains me no end to see you in distress, Emma. You may believe that you are concealing the ache in your heart, but the vivacity of your smile cannot conceal the sorrow in the depths of those dark eyes. I have struggled with my conscience night and day for several weeks now, and I have come to the conclusion that it is for the best that you know all.”

  I felt my knees begin to tremble and placed my hands upon ’em to disguise their wobbling.

  “What has been hinted at—or perhaps more than hinted at—by Greville and myself ever since your arrival is not meant to tease you, or suggest an alternative to your situation, but has been a way of informing you, by degrees, that things have changed.”

  “Wh-what do you mean ‘things ’ave changed’? Is not my Greville coming for me in October?”

  “I think you take my meaning, Emma, but your trusting heart is too devoted to believe it. Greville will not be coming for you in October, nor in any month in the future. I regret that my nephew was too craven to say it outright, for his obfuscation has caused you no end of anguish these past three months. However, I cannot remain insensible to your distress. Chuse to hate me if you will, but someone must tell you the truth.”

  “Greville means to give me up?” The realization settled upon my bones like a funeral shroud. I went numb. “But don’t ’e know I love ’im and would go to the end of the earth to please ’im?”

  “You poor child,” Sir William said, handing me his handkerchief, for I had forgotten mine. “Sweet, beautiful, loving Emma, you could turn yourself into calcified amethyst if you thought that’s what Greville desired, and still you could not regain him.”

  I sobbed noisily into the embroidered cambric square. “What’re you about, saying such falsehoods about my Greville?”

  Sir William shook his head sadly. “For your sake, though not my own, I wish it were a hoax, but it is the unvarnished truth, Emma. My nephew and I came to a gentleman’s agreement some months ago. He needed enough capital to set about getting a wife—”

  “But Miss Middleton refused ’im! That is, Lord Middleton did, for Greville ’adn’t enough in the banks!”

  “Which is precisely why he recognized the gravity of his situation. My nephew was also overextended on his credit to the tune of several hundred pounds, particularly indebted to those who had procured the newest additions to his mineral collection.”

  “ ’Twere better ’e ’ad lost me in a game of whist, only ’e don’t frequent the gaming tables.”

  “If I would secure Greville’s debts, and name him in my last will and testament as my heir—which you are aware I have indeed done—then I would inherit Emma Hart, placing her under my full protection in every way, and the matter would be concluded, to the mutual benefit of all concerned.”

  “Yes, Greville is a great one for ’is arrangements of ‘mutual benefit, ’ ” I cried. “If I’ve ’eard ’im use the words once, I’ve ’eard ’em an ’undred times! But ’ow could ’e be so cold? So cruel?! No, I shall not believe it! Tell me you are lying to me, Sir Willum. Tell me my Greville is true to me!”

  Sir William sighed. “My dear child, it sits ill with me to make apologies for my nephew—or to make excuses, either. I can express the wish that the matter was handled in a better manner—”

  “There is no ‘better way’!” I blarted. “You tell me that you and Greville ’ave treated me just as you did the Barberini Vase or any one of your other precious jougs or dead rocks. Sir Willum, did you and Gr
eville think nothing of taking me into your confidence before you engaged in your cloak-and-dagger transaction? I am no piece of pottery to be sold off or bartered away in order to satisfy debts! I am flesh and blood, as Greville is keenly aware, my ’aving been no stranger to ’is bed these past five years. I cannot conscience ’is . . . ’is manipulation. That ’e should stoop to such machinations to deceive me.” My face was wet with tears.

  “In the only words I can offer—not in his defense, but perhaps by way of explanation—I believe that Greville misjudged you. It is no compliment. I believe he was certain that you would find Naples so much to your liking that you would desire to stay of your own accord, should the opportunity be presented to you. And the happier you became in your new surroundings, the more acquiescent you would become to receiving the inevitable blow.”

  “ ’Ow could he ever expect that of me, when I ’ave offered him proof upon proof of my devotion? I cannot understand it.”

  “It was, I fear, yet another way in which he misjudged your character. You have a temper, Emma, and knowing my nephew, it is likely that he took your pledges of undying devotion with as much salt as he took your histrionics on other occasions.”

  “I ’ate the both of you!” I railed.

  “Precisely my meaning. For you don’t hate either one of us, at least not beyond the present moment.” For what seemed like several minutes, Sir William respectfully remained seated in his chair, whilst I remained in mine, too stunned to stir, weeping as though my heart had been demolished into tiny shards, as irrevocably shattered as one of his priceless ancient vases.

  Seventeen

  Moving On

  “Though it would sadden me greatly to see you depart, naturally I remain true to my word to settle an income of a hundred pounds a year on you and your mother, matching a pension of a hundred pounds to come from Greville. The funds would be held in a trust administered for you by Romney, whether you chuse to remain here in Naples, or whether you decide to return to England.”