Too Great a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  “I promise to steal away again as soon as I can, my love.” We shared a last embrace before Sir William climbed into his carriage. It was not yet dawn. Still Christmas, to my mind.

  “Wait!” I tugged at his sleeve. “Do they celebrate Boxing Day ’ere? For tho’ they are robbed of your absence tomorrow, I should not wish the servants to be deprived of their gifts.”

  “What a girl you are! And an angel to remind me, for you have so addled my brain, I can think of nothing but the past few hours of unimpeded bliss.” Sir William imparted his instructions concerning the servants, urging me to ask his valet, the dapper Abraham Cottier, for help should I require it, and with a final parting kiss, he was off to the countryside.

  It gave me such pleasure to see our servants so delighted with their Boxing Day gifts and the rare holiday for themselves. Mam and I were quite content to make do without them for the day, our having been long accustomed to taking perfectly good care of each other without the necessity of a retinue. We supped in the kitchen, enjoying one of her Irish stews: good home cooking in a faraway fairy-tale land.

  That night, I seated myself at my escritoire to compose a letter to Sir William. I wrote so many drafts that the floor was littered with crumpled pages.

  Yesterday when you went a whey from me, I thought all my heart and soul was torn from me, and my greif was excessive I assure you. I saw Graefer yesterday and he said he would come this evening to play wist, but I would rather play this evening at all f ours with you; oh! I forgot, cribige is our game, it’s all the same, you like crib.

  Adio, my dear Sir William; laying jokes aside, there is nothing I can assure you can give me the least comfort tell you come home. I shall receive you with smiles, affection and good humer, & think had I the offer of crowns I would refuse them and except you, and I don’t care if all the world knows it. I know you mind temper more than beauty, so if sometimes I am out of humer, forgive me, tell me, put me in a whey to be grateful to you for your kindness to me, and believe I will never abuse your kindness to me, and in a little time all faults will be corrected. I am a pretty whoman, and one can’t be everything at once; but now I have my wisdom teeth I will try to be ansome and reasonable. God bless you, my ever dear friend, etc, etc, etc, etc, and believe me yours and onely yours for ever sincerely.

  And to think that not a half year previous, Greville was the sun, moon, and every star in the firmament of my heart! Now that resilient organ beat only—and most devotedly—for my dear Sir William.

  Nineteen

  The Attitudes

  All through an astoundingly cold January Sir William and I remained parted, yet we corresponded nearly every day. And our love for each other deepened with each letter.

  The boar-hunting season ended with the bitter weather. The lazzaroni emerged from the catacombs, and the royal court returned from Caserta. Sir William came back to Naples with a most unusual proposal. “I have not been able to shake the image from my mind,” he confessed, “from the moment I saw you standing in your bath, with your shift clinging to your body like the drapery on a Grecian caryatid: a statue come to life. Think on’t, Emma! What if we was to have you act the part of a living statue, a modern piece of virtu, as ’twere.”

  I puzzled over it. “You mean imitate the classical figures like I did when I sat to Romney? Medea and Cassandra and Niobe and all? And at Dr. Graham’s Temple of Aesculapius, I sometimes wore draperies and stood-stock still just like that while ’e gave his lectures on ’ealth.”

  “What do you say, my dear Emma?”

  “I can’t see why not—so long as my draperies isn’t wet when I’m performing. I ain’t shy, mind you, but there’s certain things that are for your eyes only!”

  Sir William clasped me to his heart. “Oh, Emma, you are a dear!”

  We set to work on it right away. A thorough grounding in the classics became a mainstay of my schooling. Sir William read to me from all the Greek and Roman myths and legends, from the histories of the Caesars, from Ovid and Catullus, from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. I came to know Lucretia and Antigone, Echo and Andromache, Calpurnia and Dido, as if they had been my playmates back in Hawarden. The men, too—Achilles and Pythias, Orestes and Adonis—for Sir William was convinced that my height, combined with my depth of feeling and empathy for the personages he coached me to portray, would enable me to play man or woman with equal dexterity and compassion.

  Below the ground floor of the Palazzo Sessa lay a number of storage rooms, filled with crates and statues and paintings and assorted curios that there was no place upstairs to display. Among these assets was a lidless sarcophagus, as large as a hip bath. In the dark of night, illuminated only by torches and tapers, the sarcophagus and the other haphazardly arranged artifacts would lend an unearthly feel to the ambience.

  One night, we descended the staircase to experiment with the concept amid these ancient treasures. I was wearing a sheer Grecian tunic of my lover’s designing, flowing like gossamer about my body and down to my ankles. “Every time you assay a new pose, hold up the Kashmir shawl, and then draw the curtain again, as ’twere, when you are ready to assume the next role,” Sir William proposed. He thought that I should not depict just one personage, but move from character to character with seemingly effortless grace.

  “And ’ow long do you want me to ’old each . . . each attitude?”

  “How long can you manage it without moving a muscle?” He glanced at his pocket watch and began to count the minutes.

  “You’ve turned Pygmalion, Pliny,” I teased, when in raptures Sir William described the Attitudes to the assembled guests at Casa Coltellini.

  “Quite the reverse, my dear,” corrected my lover. “For Pygmalion desired that a statue should become a real woman, whereas I am turning the flesh-and-blood woman into the statue.”

  “And remember the besotted Pygmalion’s fate,” warned my frequent admirer, the Austrian Prince Dietrichstein. “His ungrateful Galatea left him for another man.”

  We were attending one of the Coltellini sisters’ famed musical soirees, and I had been asked to sing, an honor not to be taken lightly, given the illustrious nature of the company. I gave them one or two Scottish airs, performing them with such passion and gusto that though the Neapolitans had not our language, there was no mistaking the ebullience of their approbation. And then I favored them with a bit of Paisello’s Nina, which I had been working on with my singing master, Galucci. The finest judges of musical talent in Naples could not have been more impressed.

  The following day the rooms on the ground floor that Mam and I had been occupying since our arrival the previous April were swiftly transformed into an entire academy for music and voice, while we moved our things upstairs to the rooms that had belonged to Lady Hamilton. To my immense delight, I would now sleep in her late ladyship’s boudoir with its charming balcony and magnificent views.

  Within the week, Sir William had invited each of my admirers from Casa Coltellini to visit the Palazzo Sessa and witness the debut performance of my Attitudes.

  Enacted in the palazzo’s supernatural subterranean gloom, that first presentation became an overnight sensation. Word quickly spread throughout Naples that Sir William’s young and beautiful English protégée, Mrs. Hart—she of the charming voice and passionate interpretations, both comic and dramatic—was equally deft with her silences, needing but a few hand props, such as a dagger and a goblet, to achieve her flawless mimicry of the greatest personages of antiquity.

  However, the morning after our great triumph, Sir William, in his ever-diplomatic way, delivered his own review of the performance. A straight razor was left on my dressing table.

  “I ’ope to God ’e doesn’t mean for you to kill yourself with this!” Mam exclaimed, puzzling over the message.

  I bosted out laughing. “I think I know what ’e means. Did you watch me last night?”

  “Well, of course I did,” Mam replied, much affronted.

  “And could you see my qu
im through that little slip of a frock?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, Emy, gal . . .”

  “Look at the Venus,” I said, pointing to a foot-high marble effigy on the mantelpiece.

  “I’m looking.”

  “What do you notice about ’er? All right then, I’ll make it easy for you. Can you see ’er quim through ’er draperies?”

  My mother squinted, then approached the statue, peering at the juncture between its thighs. “Well, she don’t ’ave any ’air on it, so it’s hard to tell—no! Do you think Sir Willum wants you to shave your cunny?”

  I nodded my head. “Though ’e don’t quite know what he’s saying. Or not saying. If I take a straight razor to my quim, I’m liable to do myself some lasting injury, to be sure.” I examined the razor. “These was never designed for curves.”

  “What will you do, then? Sure, ’e wants you to do it because it looks vulgar to be seeing through your draperies when you’re supposed to be a statue and all. Given that girl statues ’ave no ’air down there. And ’e don’t want prying eyes to be getting the wrong idea, as you’re giving ’em something high-tone and artistic.”

  Once again, my dubious past provided the key. “Warm honey and lemon juice, Mam,” I said, recalling how the “nuns” at Mrs. Kelly’s took care of business in order to achieve the same result. “It’s called sugaring and they’ve been doing it ever since Cleopatra was a girl.”

  Together, we mixed the concoction, and ripped numerous strips of muslin as I had seen Sophia do all those years ago. “Might as well make the other parts resemble marble as well,” I sighed, raising my arm. I yelped in surprise, not having considered how painful the process would be. “Shite, Mam! That smarts like a raft of bee stings.”

  My mother gazed at me, her expression one of bemusement and sympathy rolled into one. “In that case, my girl, you’d better stuff a bunch of these muslin strips in your mouth so the servants don’t ’ear you cry out and think you’re being tortured by your own mam.”

  “But I am!”

  However, the pain soon passed and was outweighed by many rewards, both within and beyond the boudoir. In short order it became clear that the original venue for my Attitudes was too cramped to accommodate such a large audience, even though the performances were intended to be offered only to favored guests. Sir William and I abandoned the gilded frame and the sarcophagus and reconfigured the presentations, offering them in the salon upstairs, where there was significantly more room. I performed on a low platform—ten to twelve Attitudes in succession—whilst the chairs were grouped before me in a semicircular arrangement. Sir William, ever my cavaliere, stood off to my right and held the torch as though it were a greater honor than the Order of the Bath. We entertained foreign travelers as well as local artists and dignitaries, and a performance of Mrs. Hart’s Attitudes at the Palazzo Sessa soon became known as an imperative for anyone of note passing through Naples.

  One such visitor was a celebrated author from Germany. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a rather humorless man in his late thirties, who could not for the life of him comprehend the English fascination with tromping up Vesuvius—for Sir William, being his host, was naturally keen to show the writer the sights immediately upon his arrival. Goethe had arrived in Naples with the painter Tischbein, who was eager to immortalize me in oils.

  “How are you enjoying Italy?” I asked the writer.

  “Ach! In Rome I have found myself for the first time,” he replied, his command of English far better than my German. “I have made many drawings—there and here—and found myself moved beyond comprehension by the classical form. An ancient temple I visited—modeled on the Greek—left me in tears; its power was so primitive I could scarce imagine such a thing existed in the modern world. And Naples.” He clutched his heart. “Naples is a paradise. In it everyone lives a sort of intoxicated self-forgetfulness.”

  “And the people?” I smiled as charmingly as possible.

  “You English are such a strange mixture, Frau Hart,” Goethe said. “You are both coarse and refined all in one. What a treat for a student of human nature! You and the ambassador are . . . lovers?” Blushing, I nodded. “Fascinating!” exclaimed the writer. “And he is . . . how many years do you have between you?”

  “A bit more than thirty-four, mein Herr.”

  “Fascinating! Your eternal beauty keeps him eternally young. What a wonderful way to become an immortal.” Goethe made a polite bow. “I am very much looking forward to your performance this evening, Frau Hart.”

  Months later, Goethe sent me a copy of the thoughts he had recorded in his diary after witnessing my Attitudes.

  The Chevalier Hamilton, so long resident here as English Ambassador, so long, too, connoisseur and student of Art and Nature, has found their counterpart and acme with exquisite delight in a lovely girl—English, and some twenty years of age. She is exceedingly beautiful, her figure fine and pleasing. He has a Greek dress made for her, which suits her wonderfully well. She undoes her hair, takes a couple of shawls and goes through such a changing succession of poses, gestures, looks etc, that really in the end you think you are dreaming. You see what so many artists would have been glad to achieve, here perfectly finished in movement and change. Standing, kneeling, sitting, lying, serious, sad, teasing, extravagant, penitent, seductive, threatening, fearful etc, one flows into and out of the next. She suits the folds of her shawl to every expression and with the same two or three of them can invent a hundred different dressings for her hair. The old lord holds the lights for it and has given himself wholeheartedly to his subject. He finds in her all the statues of antiquity, all the lovely profiles on the coins of Sicily.

  I—Emma Hart, the once-impoverished daughter of an illiterate farrier from North Wales—had become the most talked-about woman in southern Italy! That same season, the Society of Dilettanti in London published Sir William’s letters on “The Feast of St. Cosimo or Priapus in Isernia” within a compendium that included numerous illustrations of wax, clay, and bronze effigies of “the Organ of Generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its functions.”

  What a pair we made!

  Twenty

  A King Unwittingly Plays My Hand

  As the months passed, Sir William and I grew more and more inseparable. We traveled about the town and countryside together, explored the ancient ruins of Pompeii, even studied botany together. Arm in arm we attended conversazioni, nodding our greetings to the hobnobbing nabobs by torchlight. In order to improve my Italian, I challenged myself not to utter a word of English, and my proficiency increased with astonishing rapidity. Frequently invited to perform with the orchestras at a conversazione, I favored the guests with solos, and sometimes a duet or two with the finest opera singers of the day. Even the Banti, la prima donna at the Teatro San Carlo, a woman jealous of her reputation, singled out the nuances of my phrasing and the passion of my interpretation. How terrified I had been that night to follow her performance, for she was universally considered to own the finest voice in the kingdom. An army of butterflies invaded my stomach. This was no giddy balladeering on a wobbly wooden crate in Southwark. But—to my immense relief—how well my songs were received! I was floating on air. From that night on, I had no fear of singing before such a discerning crowd.

  On occasion, prince and commoner alike would sidle up to me, their flirtatious remarks often no more than frank propositions. “Mi scusi, signori, ho solamente uno cavaliere servente,” I told them, beaming proudly at Sir William. My lover was the only man I needed.

  One evening I was approached by the maestro of the Italian opera in Madrid, offering me a three-year contract at the rate of two thousand pounds a year to be the first woman there. It was an enormous sum, nearly two-thirds as much as Sir William’s annual stipend after twenty-two years as His Britannic Majesty’s envoy to Naples. But as I gazed across the room at Sir William, I heard myself decline the engagement. “I know no one in Spain
, nor do I know the language,” I told the maestro. Sure, I had gained a passable proficiency in both Italian and French in a matter of months; learning Spanish would not have presented many difficulties, but the truth was that I could not leave Sir William. I had grown to adore him and could not bear to be separated. Accepting the offer to perform in Madrid would have put an end to our arrangement, I am certain of it. And one thing I had always known about myself was that I was not made to walk the world alone—happiest always when I was half of a loving couple.

  Also visiting us at the time was Gallini, the commissioning dancing master of the London Opera House. “Please, Mrs. Hart,” he pleaded, “permit me to engage you for a series of subscription concerts back home in Hanover Square. It will be very ladylike, I assure you.” This, too, was a tempting suggestion, and difficult to ignore.

  “Begging your pardon, Maestro,” Sir William said affably, “but I have engaged Mrs. Hart for life.”

  My heart sang at his words.

  A few years earlier I would have jumped with alacrity at these offers. To be paid—and handsomely—to do nothing but sing? Had that not been one of my girlish dreams when Jane Powell and I warbled and trilled our young hearts out at the Southwark fairgrounds?

  Despite my popularity in certain circles, my presence was still not accepted at the royal palaces, nor was it tolerated by some of the other English hostesses in the city, who, for all the amorous intrigues that infested the ranks of the upper crusts, made an elaborate show of refusing entry to the ambassador’s mistress. To these hypocrites, my low birth and unfortunate past rendered me a pariah; and in a world where a woman’s reputation was a far greater asset than her beauty, her virtue a more valuable commodity, shame on Sir William for parading me in public! Not to be outdone, the Neapolitan ladies of quality—the very same women who sought to emulate my English complexion of roses and cream—also barred their doors to me.