Sir William

by David Stacton

  But Emma had been invaluable. A country girl, she had laid her hands to everything, in a manner in which the aristocrat, socially constrained from birth to pretend he was born without any, cannot. For that he was grateful; it excused much.

  Nelson’s new coat of arms had come, properly inscribed at the top of letters patent.

  “Is it not pretty?” she asked, having scarcely time to look at it herself.

  Sir William saw a shield with a Maltese cross, surrounded by the Tria juncta in uno of the Order of the Bath, surmounted by an open helmet, a bar, and a man of war seen from the captain’s cabin end. The motto was Faith and Works. The supporters were, over Works, a Lion with a pennant in its mouth, the staff of which stuck into space like a secretary’s pen; and over Faith, a comely, clean and graceful sailor boy.

  “All too appropriate,” he said, and handed it back.

  A message arrived from the Queen. She sent one whenever she was depressed, so these days they arrived almost hourly.

  “She is worried about her head,” said Emma. “Whatever will it be next?”

  “Her head?”

  “Of having it cut off.”

  “It is too long and square in the face,” said Sir William. “Give her my compliments and say I doubt that it would roll.”

  He was snappish these days.

  “I can’t say that. I suppose I shall have to fit her in somewhere,” said Emma, who had risen not only superior to events, but to the cause of them.

  When she returned, she felt no better. The palace had had a boarded-up look, and since the Court was in mourning, you saw black figures at the end of empty corridors, standing about like frightened nuns, or with the naked look of defrocked priests. The Queen talked of death as though it were an experience she had just been through, and the King, though he was taller than six feet, ran back and forth like a little dog already left behind.

  “I am making ready for the eternity for which I long,” shrieked the Queen, supervising two ladies in waiting who were packing a trunk. “Take only summer dresses,” she said, and supervised the jewelry herself. “The King decides to stay. The King decides to leave. If we stay, we shall need nothing; if we are leaving, we shall be packed. You see, I prepare.”

  But she did not know how. Removing, tactfully, a tiara from a dress hoop, Emma took charge. These movables, when crated, were stenciled HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S SERVICE, NAVAL STORES, BISCUIT AND BULLY BEEF, smuggled to the British Embassy, and then taken aboard Nelson’s ships at night. The Vanguard was being repainted and refitted for the royal refugees. The smell of white lead was strong.

  *

  “The King has had the Minister for War arrested,” said Sir William.

  “Good Lord, why?”

  “For treason. It is ever the fault of the losing side.”

  “The poor King,” said Emma feelingly.

  “It cannot be denied that he cuts a very poor figure.”

  *

  “No time should be lost,” urged Acton, “if the wind does not blow too hard.” Inclined to be seasick, he would have preferred an overland journey, but, alas, Sicily cannot be reached that way. Yet the King, who had had a toy altar as a child—as well as toy soldiers—could not make up his mind, and still hoped for Divine intervention, though they were running low on candles.

  In the end, it was made up for him.

  *

  Defense of the Realm, to the lazzaroni, meant slitting the throats of Jacobins up an alley, disemboweling a Frenchman, and the looting of an unprotected store. Undeniably they were picturesque, but to combine irregularity into the picturesque—as the Reverend Gilpin says—requires taste, and they had none. They had surrounded the palace. The King was their father, who dwelt in Caserta, a man exactly like themselves who sold fish in the market and when he went hunting did his own butchery. He was tall, virile and ugly. They worshiped him in their own image. But they would not let him go.

  “If I run away, they will think I have abandoned them,” said the King. “I will never abandon them. They are my people. Besides, how can we get away?”

  He had to present himself daily on the balcony, to prevent their storming the palace.

  “Give us arms,” they shouted, “to defend ourselves and you!” Alas, there were no arms. They had been flung into ditches to rust, by the fleeing army.

  “Death to the Jacobin!” they screamed.

  “Now what?” said the King, and though afraid, could control neither his legs nor his curiosity, and crept back to the balcony again.

  The crowd was tearing apart one of his own messengers, mistaking, or pretending to mistake, him for the enemy. The man had time for one scream before his hands and face were booted to a pulp, his clothes ripped off, his penis and testicles knifed out like spilt, his belly slit, his intestines allowed to dangle and his corpse held up in the air—an offering still smoking because it was still warm.

  The King himself, after the hunt, could have done the job no better and had done it a hundred thousand times just as well. It took no time. It was highly enjoyable. And it did not matter what the carcass was.

  He went back indoors.

  “His Majesty,” said Maria Carolina in a hand note to Emma, “has graciously consented to flee.”

  “I am disappointed in him. He has been inconsistent. One would have expected him to have waited until too late,” said Sir William. “But how the devil is it to be done?”

  “There is a tunnel,” said Emma.

  *

  Ferdinand had at last remembered it, a bugaboo from childhood, the family escape hatch, to be opened only in case of dire peril, like Joanna Southcote’s chest, which was packed providentially with pistols, rather than advice; for even the wildest and most hysteric dreamer is practical about his nightmares. His father, the King of Spain, had once told him it was there, and he had workmen in the cellars for a week, searching the chthonic dark till at last they found it. It was the way out of the labyrinth. After they had marked it with rags, he had them securely locked up. He was indeed a minotaur. Even the horns had come with time.

  It had been a disagreeable afternoon, with Miss Knight and her mother practicing hysterics like scales, until let into the secret. Even Emma was at a loss for words, though she had had the finesse, in the card-playing sense, to order a cold supper laid out against their return from a visit to the Turkish Embassy, since no public event could be canceled lest public confidence be alarmed. She then dismissed the servants, a reassuring act in itself; Rome is always burning to have a holiday, and no one dismissed for good is ever given the evening off first.

  The streets were sullen, except for the chanting of invisible priests and a shriek now and then up a dark lane.

  “Why must they wail both before and after the event?”

  “They are a histrionic people. If one feels nothing, one must show much,” said Sir William, huddled in the carriage.

  Out in the bay the lights of Nelson’s hurriedly gathered fleet twinkled and receded although at anchor, desolate as a carnival in the rain.

  The King and Queen arrived at the Embassy together.

  “Consistent in everything, ignoble to the last,” said Sir William, but only because he was sad. It was too much like a play on the last night; it may not have been good, but the actors will never act in it again and we will never again see it this way. And yet the action was the same as any other night, the scenery the same, the lights the same, the lines the same.

  The Ambassador presented the chelengkh, a frost of diamonds, a plume of honor taken from the turban of the Grand Signor himself, a star surrounded by thirteen sprays of the same adamantine material. It was to honor Nelson.

  “It is watchwork,” said Kelim Effendi carefully. “You wind it up. Then when you press this”—and he did so—“the star revolves. It is amusing, no?”

  It was a whirligig. It ran down.

  *

  A little man rose up at Emma’s elbow. It was Aprile.

  “It is the dawn of a
new age, my friends say. But do not vex yourself. I shall neither give you away nor get away. I was adapted to the old one. I only want to say that it was a pleasure once more to hear you sing. The effect is not good, but you do it so well. Whereas with us, it is the other way,” he said, and before Emma could stop him, with a twitch, he had wriggled away.

  The King and Queen returned to the palace. Emma and Sir William drove to the quay, where a launch awaited them.

  Sir William had to be lifted down, and what was more, did not seem satisfied with his seat. The boat rocked. The gunwales were but two inches from the water.

  “Be still, William, do,” snapped Emma, for it was only a city she was leaving. Sir William these days, to tell the truth, was difficult to manage.

  “I must sit in the prow,” he said. “I must sit in the prow.” And like a blind man, he groped his way there and sat there alone, an hour’s journey to the ships, while the lamps of the festive city burned low, and unreplenished, went out, his eyes steady, watching Vesuvius, a dark hulk, moored against the sky.

  It was not for some time that he realized she was not with him.

  *

  She had gone to the palace. If she had snapped at him, she had cause. In order not to alarm the servants, they had taken only the best things, the vases and pictures, and so been forced to abandon three houses elegantly furnished, all their horses and seven carriages.

  There was no reason for William to sit there unique. She had loved Naples, too. But Palermo (it must be kept a secret that that was their destination) was said to be a fine city, and she had never seen it. Sir William had often spoken of Sicily with approbation, as of a place full of interest. Therefore why sit so glum?

  Nelson, standing alone on the marble floor of the grand staircase, waited in the almost dark. The palace when empty gave him the shudders. It was too much like going into St. Paul’s of a weekday, when God is not there but the thing we are really afraid of is, and skulks in the walls.

  The stairs went up into infinity. “Nelson,” he said, to reassure himself, and from every undusted corridor came the hollow answer back.

  A white figure swirled out of the shadows.

  “Emma,” he said, astonished.

  “I could not desert the dear Queen,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

  There was a snuffle on the stairs, and a fox fire on the other one, of candles. A sconce moved toward them, and a great boar’s head appeared out of nowhere. It was Ferdinand. The snuffling materialized into the Queen, a hatbox and all eight children, one of them in arms.

  Somewhere above them a chair fell, a glass smashed.

  Ferdinand giggled. “We have left only the heavy things. Heavy things will be difficult to loot,” he said, and followed Nelson, Emma and the Queen down a landscape of empty picture frames, moving through rooms he had never known existed, kitchens, storerooms, wine bins, cellars, vaults, and down stairs that were damp and dripped, and no one anywhere. On the walls the shadow of his own enormous nose marched on ahead of him. He followed it.

  The air turned warm. They were underground. A rat’s eyes gleamed. A spider ran across the dirt floor. A white rag formed up out of darkness. And there was the tunnel, so well concealed there had been no need to hide its opening. It was just a tunnel. It led to the underworld. It was not frequented.

  The King held back. The Queen pushed on, with no one to aid her, stumbled, and was angry with everything. The darkness closed behind them against an animal rush of fetid air. Though it had a main gorge, it was not just one tunnel but a maze of bronchial passages through which the sluggish wind breathed itself in and out. There was nothing to see ahead but a small white rag, and then another, until at last there was a bend and ahead of them an alternating glitter, as from off the points of spears.

  The passage, which was not paved, became muddy and slippery, and there, two steps down, lay the water. They had been fortunate that the tide was at its ebb. It was, so Nelson said, the Vittoria landing stage.

  When he flashed his lantern, a longboat appeared out of the low mist which now clung to the waters. Two hours later, for they had to move cautiously, they reached the Vanguard, where Sir William was reading Epictetus in bed:

  As a true balance is neither set right by a true one, nor judged false by a false one; so likewise a just person has neither to be set right by just persons, nor to be judged by unjust ones. As it is pleasant to view the sea from the shore, so it is pleasant to one who has escaped, to remember his past labors.

  Quite so.

  But Emma had left him.

  In the bay, little dark shapes everywhere along the fringes of the city put out into the bay.

  “Before we reach Palermo,” said Sir William to Emma as she came in, “we must remember to hoist a white sail. As usual, your Theseus has done well.”

  “My Theseus?”

  “Horatio, but the legend is confused,” said Sir William, who would rather have rescued himself, and went to sleep.

  *

  Others had to wait longer for their dormitive. Lady Knight and her daughter drew alongside.

  “I am sorry, but we are already full. There is no room,” said Captain Hardy. “You must go to the Portuguese man-of-war.”

  “My mother is the widow of Admiral Sir Joseph Knight,” said Miss Cornelia, the poetess, her nerves frayed to the point of a beseeching ostentation.

  “I am sorry, but there really is no room,” said Hardy, “but the Portuguese man-of-war has an English captain.” He meant it kindly.

  So off into the dark they went, all Virgil and Dante and no room at the inn.

  In the large, airy and freshly painted state cabin—the smallest, most wretched chamber she had ever seen—the Queen peeled off her own stockings and looked at her first pair of dirty feet. Also it was unpleasant to discover that rumor was no invention: Ferdinand snored. Not even in the Temple had her sister known such squalor or suffered such indignity, of that she was sure. Lady Hamilton was asleep, and as for water, she knew not whom to ask for it. It was intolerable.

  *

  “It is disgusting,” said Maria Carolina, “to sleep in the same squalid chamber with a man, and that one your husband. It is too promiscuous.”

  Having had to linger at Naples for two days because of contrary winds, they were now at sea, or rather up to their waists in it, for they had encountered the worst storm in Nelson’s experience. There was nowhere to lie down. A Russian gentlewoman, known to none of them, had with the blunt but polite intransigence of that singularly mysterious race commandeered the only bed available below deck, and lay there, clutching an icon, while ladies in waiting no doubt better born than she slithered and sloshed about on soggy mattresses. She was heavily bejeweled. If sink she must, she meant to sink well.

  Sir William, in whom age had suddenly revealed the Scot, with a Calvinistic cunning both atavistic and autochthonous, stirred nowhere without two pistols at his belt, determined to shoot rather than drown. He did not intend to die with a guggle, guggle, guggle in his throat, he said.

  Every time you called a cabin boy, he had been swept overboard; it was another one. Every bowl in the boat had been puked in, but to look on the cheerful side of things, since no one had appetite, there was little chance of their running short on stores. The mainmast had already gone, the mizzenmast could scarcely wait, and “wild to the blast flew the skull and the bones.”

  Emma, however, who had had to master her stomach quite early on in life’s woes, felt no affliction, and was everywhere to tend to those who did. Nelson was proud of her. And she of him. They spoke companionably when they met. The barriers were down. In that weather, they could not long have stayed up.

  Count Esterhazy, the Austrian Ambassador, in a religious fit had tossed his snuffbox overboard, for it had his mistress painted nude on the lid and would not look well in Heaven. Prince Carlo Alberto had convulsions and died in Emma’s arms, though that was no great loss. He was only six, he could scarcely be considered a personage as yet, and
there were royal heirs aplenty still remaining.

  The wind changed to a tramontana. The King, quickly recovered and excellently well, condescended to say that there would be plenty of woodcocks in Sicily—this wind always brought them—and that he and Sir William might therefore look forward to splendid sport.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Cadogan, that sensible deity, “why not? The dear man only looks upon the good side of things. I would not myself object to a woodcock pie.”

  “Entombez-moi,” said the Russian lady, in desperate French, “à Odesse. C’est une petite jolie ville en Crimée, le pays de ma naissance, òu sont situées nos domaines hérèditaires. Tcheripnin doit faire la gisante. C’est mon désir.”

  “Elle pousse un cri,” said the ladies in waiting, wringing out their mattresses. It was Christmas day. At two in the morning they dropped anchor in Palermo Harbor.

  The Queen insisted upon going ashore at once.

  “I have lived long enough,” she said gloomily, “even two or three years too long,” and disappeared into the darkness, bound for the Colli Palace, where nothing had been aired for sixty years, nobody expected her, and everything was uninhabitable.

  “My God,” she said at dawn, her fate made visible, “it is Africa. Am I to be plagued by the blackamoor as well?” She needed laudanum.

  But the King refused to budge until he had slept, risen, been shaved, and consumed a lengthy breakfast. Then, calling his favorite dogs to him (they had slept in the cabin, though refusing to go near the Queen), he ambled out into the cold but southern sun, determined to make the best of it. If he had not burned his boats behind him, he had at least left orders that they should be burned lest they fall into the hands of the French, so he did not fear pursuit. He was King of the Two Sicilies, and if he had lost one, here was the other, and one would do.

  “Viva il Re!” shout the populace. “Viva il Re!” It was all quite customary.