Too Great a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  Several of the sails were ripped to shreds and Nelson wasted not a moment in sending his men scampering up the rigging, hatchets in hand, to cut away the damage, even hack down a mast if need be. He surveyed every inch of deck himself to be certain that everything was properly lashed down to prevent its being washed overboard.

  Swearing it was the worst storm he had seen in thirty years at sea, Nelson ordered all available hands to batten the hatches and place deadlights over the windows to prevent water from sloshing into the ship, but even Nelson was no match for Nature, and the angry waves washed over the decks and down into the corridors. The few heads on board had become unusable; even in normal sea conditions, there was only one seated lavatory per one hundred men. All manner of detritus could be found floating about the decks in more than six inches of water. Nearly every one of the royal party had taken seasick. Although poor Sir William was dreadfully unwell, he gamely roused himself to help Mam belowdecks in the wardroom, tending to the king and the crown prince as well as seeing to Acton and the Neapolitan noblemen. The entire ship smelt of vomit, urine, and feces; it was horrid. I don’t know how any of us managed to inure ourselves to the stench. Weeping and shivering despite her furs, the queen was sure we would never make Palermo. Most of her children were now ill; I soaked rags in vinegar and pressed them to their royal temples, to cool their fevers.

  The wind kicked up something fierce, tossing the Vanguard about as though she were a toy. The hull creaked and groaned. I had no stomach for food nor time for sleep, besides which, there were no more beds to be had. Fragile little Clementina, the Princess Royal, was recovering from the exigencies of childbirth; the six-week-old future King of Naples was at his wet nurse’s breast, prompting the squeamish Acton to remark that “a suckling child makes a most dreadful spectacle to the eyes of the servant-women and in the rest of the family.”

  Shrieks filled the air with every pitch and swell, yet they could not drown out the deafening howling of the wind through the tattered sails, and the terrifying crunch when a mast cracked and snapped like a twig. So concerned was I for the welfare of others that I hadn’t a thought to spare for myself. I found Nelson inspecting the damage on the quarterdeck, wearing a tightly laced broad belt stuffed with a horsehair pad over the belly, a remedy for seasickness. He had once confided to me that he was prone to such bouts, despite his profession and his passion for the sea. “You stride the deck like a heroine, Lady Hamilton. I should call you ‘Santa Emma.’ Forgive me if a simple sailor cannot conceal his admiration.” The spray hit my face and nearly knocked me against the bulwark. “But I must ask you to go below, your ladyship.”

  “People need me.”

  I began to slip and he clasped my arm before my knee reached the sodden deck. He was stronger than I ever would have expected. “They need you below. There is nothing for you on the deck but danger, and God help me should you suffer any injury. I know I should never sleep again.”

  I gazed into his intense blue eyes, the one seeing everything, the other pretending to. At that moment I wanted to clasp him to my breast.

  “Lady Hamilton . . . I—”

  I swallowed hard. “I must obey the captain.” His lips were trembling. “I ’ave not seen to Sir Willum in hours. Please excuse me.” I turned to leave, then turned back to him again. “Nelson—” I realized I dared not voice my thoughts and changed the subject. “That tree in your day cabin—I noticed it when I was seeing to the queen.”

  “That ‘tree,’ Lady Hamilton, is a piece of L’Orient’s mainmast. One of my Nile captains, Ben Hallowell of the Swiftsure, lifted it off his deck, where it had landed after the French flagship exploded, and made a gift of it to me. I intend to have my coffin made of it. Crowned with laurel or covered with cypress, madam.”

  “I ’ate it when you say that.” Another fierce gust of wind blew my feet out from under me. Rubbing my arse, I looked up at Nelson. “You’ve got much to live for—not least of which is getting us through this storm.”

  “And I have been wondering,” he said, helping me to stand, “whether I wasn’t intended to die in’t.”

  “I won’t let you! And anyway, your cabin is so crowded, you couldn’t get to that piece of driftwood if you tried.”

  “My God, what are you about?!” I found Sir William, wigless, in our tiny cabin, his elegant form balled up into a corner, a loaded pistol in each hand. “Give me those,” I demanded, trembling with fear that he might really fire them. “Please.”

  He raised the pair of pistols to his temples. “My dear, I am determined not to have salt water go guggle-guggle down my throat. Being a former military man and a lifelong diplomat, I fully comprehend the importance of being prepared for every eventuality.”

  Tentatively, I stepped toward him, my palms open and outstretched. “Please give me the firearms, Sir Willum. I could not survive it myself if I lost you.”

  “I am aging and exhausted, wife. And you never know, widowhood might become you,” he added wryly.

  Tho’ in truth there was naught for me to be ashamed of, a pang of guilt stabbed at my heart, for I had been thinking affectionately of Nelson. “I shan’t countenance such absurdity. The pistols, please.” Reluctantly, he relinquished them into my hands. I found their box and locked ’em up again. “Your fever is back,” I said, kissing his forehead. “I’ll get some rags and vinegar to cool you off and a dose of Dr. James’s Powder to bring it down.”

  “You look a sight, Emma. You must get some rest.”

  “I’ll sleep in Palermo, if we ever get there.” I gave Sir William his medicine and mopped his sweating brow with the vinegar-soaked rag. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I must see to the queen.”

  In Nelson’s day cabin, Her Majesty’s spirits were terribly low. The Princess Royal, three of the young princesses, and young Prince Leopold had rallied about her as she held a shivering Prince Albert in her arms. Sweet-natured little Albert, only six years old, was my favorite of all of Maria Carolina’s children.

  “I cannot stop the cough, miledi. I don’t know what to do. He was all right when we began the voyage, I am certain of it. But the air and who knows what else . . . something has settled in his chest. I tried to offer him some food, but he has had no stomach for it.”

  I examined the boy, yet I was no medico. Perhaps Mam would have a remedy. I found her in the wardroom and together we managed to brew some tea for the child. The prince rallied for a while, but soon his little body was overtaken by convulsions. “Sing to him, miledi,” commanded the queen. “It always soothes him when you sing.”

  I held Albert in my arms and rocked him as though he were an infant, singing all the lullabies I recalled from my own childhood, one after another, and when I exhausted my repertoire I began again. At seven p.m. on Christmas Eve, the queen’s youngest son died in my arms.

  Land was sighted just after dawn on Christmas morning. Of the entire flotilla of twenty, only the Vanguard had suffered severe damage in the storm. Her three topsails had been split, her staysails had been torn to shreds, and her foreyard, mainmast, and rigging badly damaged. The flight from Naples had been a most dreadful ordeal. As we limped into Palermo, I found it difficult not to enumerate our losses and the tremendous personal price we had paid for our passage.

  The tumultuous welkin saw fit to welcome us with a gift of its own. It was snowing.

  Thirty

  Palermo

  A lthough he had never visited his second capital in the nearly four decades he had ruled it, the king refused to disembark until a cheering crowd of Sicilians could be amassed to formally greet him as he stepped ashore. Maria Carolina was too distraught to leave the Vanguard, despite the unpleasant shipboard conditions. Although she had lost a daughter a year earlier, the death of little Prince Albert, so swift and unexpected, had hit her terribly hard.

  It was rather an ordeal to unload the Vanguard in the snow, and one of the first and greatest difficulties to surmount was the matter of where everyone was going to stay.
Two thousand souls had endured the storm-tossed journey from Naples to Sicily, and Palermo—a rustic village compared with its glittering sister capital—boasted but a single inn and some two dozen religious houses, hardly enough to accommodate even a fraction of the refugees.

  Upon reaching dry, though icy, land, the royal family, Sir William, Nelson, Mam, Miss Knight, and I made first for the Colli Palace. Its highly unusual and exotic exterior did not hint, however, of the distinct lack of creature comforts to be had within its walls, for every room was dreadfully drafty, lacking both fireplaces and carpets; and none of the windows and doors would close properly, the wooden sashes and frames having suffered from the extreme shifts between sultry heat and icy cold. In short, the Colli Palace, as cold and damp as a Welsh winter morning, was entirely unsuitable for the present climate, let alone a place where convalescing invalids might heal properly.

  Within the week, our party démenaged to the Villa Bastioni, a large house in the Moorish style with a magnificent view of the sea, but it, too, wanted the requisites for a comfortable domicile, lacking chimneys as well. Poor Sir William, suffering a relapse of bilious fever, was chilled to the marrow by the villa’s dampness. Nelson wrapped him in the sable pelisse from Kelim Effendi, with instructions to sleep in it, if need be, to keep the cold at bay.

  Nelson, too, was suffering, but it was his pride that was wounded. He despaired over the loss of Naples and a victory for the republicans. He was a man of two minds that January, one moment vowing like his hero Henry V to thrash the French, and in the next dolefully saying that perhaps it was time for him to consider becoming a country squire after all. He would return to England and die in peace and obscurity.

  I refused to let his spirits flag so. “What ’appened to ‘Death or Glory’? Though if it was up to me, we shouldn’t think about the first part. If you was to return to England, I should miss you every hour,” I added softly. “I wish with every breath I have that I could soothe away your pain. Could you sleep at night if I was to tell you that I think you’re the greatest son England ever produced? Sir Willum thinks so, too. He predicted it from the first time you met, back in ’ninety-three, and damme if he wasn’t right!”

  A few weeks after our arrival I made arrangements to let the Palazzo Palagonia, a glorious fifty-room villa nestled into the terraced hillside, with commanding views of the sea. Nelson and Sir William had agreed to evenly share the expenses, for the hero adamantly refused to be thought of as our guest.

  I returned to the Villa Bastioni with news of our new residence, to find Sir William in his library, collapsed in his chair with a few sheets of paper clutched in his hand. His shoulders were heaving with sobs. He looked so old and fragile without his elegant wig, his hair so sparse he resembled a plucked guinea fowl. We had been married for years, and I scarcely thought of the vast difference in our ages, yet I now saw before me the image of a battered and defeated Pantaloon.

  I raced to his side and knelt at his feet. “What is it, Sir Willum?”

  He fluttered the pages in his hand. “Everything. Gone. Everything. Sunk.” He had not spared his silk banyan from his copious tears.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Here. From Greville, dated the tenth of January. ‘It pains me greatly to inform you that I received the news of the destruction of the Colossus on 10 December, 1798, off the Scilly Isles en route to England. . . . It would appear that all of your crates were lost to the wreck, although a local inhabitant managed to salvage a particularly large box. Believing it contained some of your treasures, he pried it open, only to discover the corpse, preserved in alcohol, of a man later identified as one Admiral Shouldham, whose body was being transported back to England in a crate marked ‘Statues.’ ” And this letter, written back on November twenty-sixth, from a Major Bowen, explains that the Colossus was wrecked half out of the water at low tide, and several of my boxes were rescued by Scilly islanders. But Bowen adds that as soon as they pried open the crates, the ancient vases disintegrated in the water. A few were recovered, he says, and for these he gave the islanders a guinea apiece for their efforts. Seawater, Emma, will not harm a piece of glazed pottery. It is impossible that the vases turned to wet clay in their hands. Either they stole what they were able to salvage, or else the whole lot is sitting at the bottom of the sea. In either event, I shall never see any of it again. Oh, Emma!”

  Sir William threw his arms about my neck. “Years. It took years of painstaking perseverance to amass those collections. Not to mention the money I spent in acquiring each vase, each painting—all of it. And now no way to eliminate my debts, for there is nothing to sell. All has been lost forever.”

  I gazed into the tearstained face of my husband, a man who had turned sixty-eight just a few weeks earlier, and who had been dealt one of the severest blows of his long life. For Sir William, losing his meticulously nurtured collections to the deep was equivalent to Maria Carolina’s losing a child to the icy grip of death.

  He took my chin in his hands. “My life’s work. Gone. Including more than a dozen of you, my sweet, sweet wife.”

  I kissed his long tapered fingers. His hands had remained elegant, despite the slow deterioration of the rest of his body. “You still ’ave the original, Sir Willum,” I murmured with a smile.

  “Do I?” He looked into my searching face. He was far too much the gentleman to give voice to what he might suspect.

  “Yes,” I replied truthfully. “Yes, you do.”

  By then, we had become a nearly inseparable threesome, Sir William, Nelson, and I. Both men were Knights of the Bath, whose motto was Tria juncta in uno—“Three joined in one”—and that was how we began to refer to our interrelationship and our ménage. Truly, Nelson and Sir William lived like brothers, each completely devoted to the other. We were a study in amity. Sir William even commissioned the Palermitan artist Guzzardi to paint a full-length portrait of the hero of Aboukir—though I never thought it was flattering. Privately, however, I was tormented by my growing passion for Nelson, and I knew the Baron of the Nile felt the same way. Our gazes held for that extra moment in which a million things remained unsaid. Melting smiles gave way to furtive and embarrassed glances. Proximity begot knowledge of each other’s true character and achievements, with knowledge came admiration, and from admiration it was but a hop, skip, and jump to love.

  “Your Excellency, Lady Hamilton appears quite devoted to the admiral,” observed Charles Lock, the chargé d’affaires at Palermo.

  “Have you had occasion to visit Vesuvius whilst you were in Naples?” Sir William inquired smoothly, and before Lock could reply, my husband added, “Truly, it is an uncommon phenomenon. But of course, to fully acquaint oneself with the volcano, it takes a complete appreciation of the changing of the Neapolitan climate, her shifting topography, her geology, and so forth. It’s terrifying at times, to be sure, but nothing can compare to its beauty and awesome magnificence. I speak of Naples, of course, sir. Thus, despite the dangers, of which I remain fully sensible, I could never think of what my life would be like if I were never to see the city again after devoting so many years to it—or abandoning my attraction to the volcano.”

  Lock, who could not have mistook Sir William’s meaning, was rendered speechless.

  On the last day in January 1799, Maria Carolina summoned me to the Colli Palace, where the royal family remained in residence. “What is happening?!” she raged before I could rise from my curtsy. She brandished an official communication from Naples. “I learn now that just after we departed, my kingdom’s ships in the Bay of Naples were torched—and on January twelfth, that fool of a viceroy, Pignatelli, signed an armistice with the French! The French! An armistice! Who gave him this authority? Not I, I can assure you, miledi. I do not even think my husband could have been so stupid. Now it is Paris all over again, but Paris inside out, where the rebels come from the educated classes and the mob defends the throne. The lazzaroni stormed the palace, demanding weapons to protect themselves against the
French. Then they used them to attack the Jacobins. Read this!”

  The queen thrust the documents into my hands. They included a litany of brutalities against the rebels. The royalists had broken into the prisons and slaughtered anyone suspected of Jacobinism, beginning with those sporting short hair or wearing trousers. I trembled as I silently read on. Women had been dragged naked through the streets; numerous acts of rape, murder, arson, dismemberment, and even cannibalism were enumerated. It took all of one day for Naples to fall to the French. Of the fifty thousand lazzaroni in Naples, that day two thousand were killed. The French then stitched up a brand-new flag, a tricolor of red, blue, and yellow, made of fabric looted from the churches, and declared the birth of the Parthenopean Republic, Parthenope having been the ancient name for Naples.

  Ferdinand blamed their situation on Maria Carolina’s fondness for the English. “Had Naples remained neutral, none of this would have happened,” he sulked.

  “Now you want to play king?!” she railed at him. “You be the king, then. Take back our kingdom so you have someplace to be the king!”

  Throughout the spring, the tria juncta in uno met with Their Sicilian Majesties to determine the best course of action. The queen—and Nelson, a fervent royalist—was adamant that Naples be retaken at any cost and the French, as well as the Neapolitan rebels, be given no quarter.

  As summer loomed, with no respite from the heat, the desultory air turned the daylight hours into a purgatory. At night, the entire city, it seemed, was gripped by a passion for gambling, and at every house party the gaming tables were filled well into the wee hours of the morning.

  “Fanny has written to me,” Nelson confided one afternoon as we strolled amid the arcades of citrus trees in the Flora Reale, my parasol offering little protection from Palermo’s omnipresent flies.