Sir William

by David Stacton

“Then where will he stay?”

  “For all I care, he can stay with Lock, and they can with profit extract the wax from each other’s ears—the better to enjoy the mutual din,” said Sir William, who did not mean to be unfair, merely unkind.

  Nelson, who wished to help, without a word to anyone gave orders to detach two line-of-battle ships from the investment of Malta—for he was given to these sneaky streaks of kindness—so that at least the Hamiltons might leave Palermo in appropriate state. A cruise was what they needed to take their minds off the terrors of departure.

  Sir Alexander Ball bade Emma make herself free of Malta. “We could make up a snug whist party every evening for Sir William, but we should fall very short in our attempts to amuse you, when we consider the multiplicity of engagements and amusements you have every day at Palermo,” he wrote.

  So it was arranged. Nelson had only one favor to ask. Could they not leave Miss Knight behind this time? There was no harm in her, but she had a habit to spring out at you from unexpected places, tablet in hand, to add to her memoirs.

  Paget arrived at Lock’s. Whatever there might or might not be for supper (Mrs. L. was a frightful housekeeper), you could always count on at least an earful there.

  There was no direct communication between the Embassy and the Consulate. Lock had grown his side whiskers again. Apart from that, he was good for nothing but to curry favor and stamp passports.

  “And even at that, he is not frank.”

  Paget, entrusted with an errand upon the successful outcome of which his future depended (to see Ferdinand bullied back to Naples, where he belonged), was eager to take up the reins of office, in order to put the horse before the cart. He would not, Sir William thought, be popular for long, if this was the line he meant to fish with, for the King preferred to stay where he was. One must always distinguish between the man and the office, however, and Sir William was almost prepared to do so.

  “The Queen calls him ‘the fatal Paget,’” said Emma.

  “No, not fatal. Merely terminal,” said Sir William. “But even the condemned have yet some time to live between the order and its execution, and I do not intend to be carried out the Appian Gate in a litter. I shall await the boat at Ostia instead.” He proposed to hem and haw until the Foudroyant arrived and he could make his departure with some pomp. Paget should not get in until he was assured of getting out.

  “Sir William cannot help adding that his sincere attachment to Their Majesties, their royal family and their Kingdom is such,” he wrote to Acton, “that if he was not fully persuaded that in a very few months he may have the satisfaction of returning again, he should at this moment be in the utmost despair.”

  Persuaded, but not convinced.

  “Lady Hamilton is busy crying you up as a Jacobin,” said Lock. “It is the line she hews to.” And he eyed Paget’s lack of side whiskers. “It is what she calls all of us, so if that is what we are, we gain no distinction thereby. She could not endure to remain at Palermo shorn of her rays in the capacity of a private individual.”

  “Lady Hamilton is none of your damn business,” said Nelson, who had been asked to intercede.

  “I am sorry to say that Lord Nelson has given more or less in to all this nonsense. His Lordship’s health is I fear sadly impaired [he had noticed a bloodshot eye], and I am assured that his fortune is fallen into the same state in consequence of great losses which both his Lordship and Lady Hamilton have sustained at faro and other games of hazard,” Paget wrote home. Paget did not believe in games of hazard. He believed only in a sure thing, except of course for politics, where no money is involved—at least above the table—so it is a game of skill only.

  “I merely wish to present my credentials, in order to proceed upon the business with which I was charged,” he told Sir William.

  “I shall present them when it is convenient.”

  “Your convenience or mine?”

  “I fear you will have to wait upon mine, since I have no intention of waiting upon yours. I do not wish to remain here as a private individual. Unless you show me your instructions and there is something in them which obliges me to present my own letters of recall immediately, I do not intend to do so until the day before my departure. I cannot be guided by what you say enl’air.”

  “You have left me dangling enl’air. I can speak no other way,” said Paget crossly.

  “Ha! Wit!” said Sir William. “What you do with your life is your own affair, but I presume you have been given enough rope.”

  For the next two weeks the Hamiltons went to those parties the Pagets did not and to none of those parties to which the Pagets did, which is to say, parties at Lock’s. However, Lock had time to explain his pet project—the raising of beef cattle on the island in order to improve the local agriculture.

  “But where would you sell the meat?”

  “Oh I wouldn’t dream of selling it,” said Lock, with some horror. “It is an experiment, merely.”

  “A pity. Our garrison on the island must miss their beef, not to mention the Navy,” said Paget.

  “My dear, we have failed in patriotism,” said Lock to his wife. “Upon my soul, I had not thought of their need.”

  *

  On the 21st, the Foudroyant entered harbor, all gun ports open, and flying Lord Nelson’s flag.

  “It is not exactly a yacht,” he said apologetically as they stared up at the massive bulk of His Britannic Majesty’s Second-Best Battleship. “But then, these are not precisely peaceful times.”

  Paget presented his credentials.

  “Paget,” said the Queen, “who replaces the kind, devoted Hamiltons, has made a bad beginning, advising us in a hard, abrupt manner and almost enforcing the King’s prompt return to Naples. The King was offended.”

  “These people are so insensitive to all principles of honour and loyalty,” wrote Paget to the Foreign Office, “I am of opinion that nothing useful or good can be effected but by the introduction and direct interference of Foreigners.”

  “Io ne devo rispondere,” said the King. “Io sono Re, Padrone.”

  On the 22nd, Sir William presented his letters of recall.

  “I shall abdicate,” said the King, “rather than return to Naples with the Queen.”

  “I shall go to Vienna,” said the Queen, “with my dear Lord Nelson, rather than remain alone with the King.”

  They were a compatible couple. They had much the same feelings about everything.

  “I shall abdicate and leave the throne to Paget, and he can return to Naples,” said the King.

  “His Serene Majesty has a very proper sense of Danger,” reported Paget. “In other words, he is a sad poltroon. With Acton, I am on the best of terms, save that we quarrel and spar nearly every time we meet. The Queen of Naples is certainly going to Vienna.”

  That was simply not true. He was not sad. He was on the whole very happy here. The climate suited him.

  *

  The Foudroyant sailed on the 23rd. The sails billowed out. The brass shone. The woodwork creaked. Sir William stood on deck, watching himself being pulled away from the harbor, like a broken toy on a frayed string. The sailor boys were all up in the rigging, to catch a glimpse of Emma.

  “Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable, sir?” asked an orderly.

  “Why yes. If you would, it would be civil if you would tell the gun crew to pepper Palermo before we go.”

  “You are not to be taken seriously, sir,” said the orderly, halfway between a joke and doubt.

  “So it appears,” said Sir William, and went below. Paget would make a hash of things, which was perhaps not his fault, he had ingredients for nothing else, but Sir William did not happen to care for hash. He did not, at that moment, care for much of anything.

  However, the breeze freshened, the ship had an amiable roll, everything about a boat is so busy you cannot help but be caught up into the rhythm of it, and by the time they had reached Syracuse, Sir William had resigned himsel
f and was eager to enjoy the freedoms of being out of office for a while.

  Syracuse cheered him: we go back to the Greek to refresh ourselves. It quite revives us. There will therefore always be Greek revivals; though Bonaparte had brought back from Egypt with him a momentary fashion for everything from furniture to frills “à l’Egyptienne,” or at any rate, had made the Sphinx quite popular, which took brass (particularly on the furniture).

  “Do you never tire of being Greek?” asked Emma, who was tired of it.

  “We never tire of aping them. It is because our politics are Roman, I suspect,” said Sir William, who, like the sibyl, used his knowledge to confound the suppliant, and as a diplomat, had often to maintain his reputation by providing riddles. He felt perky.

  At Segesta, he asked to go ashore, if possible, alone. He wanted, he said, to make one last pilgrimage.

  From the rail they watched the white longboat head for the beach, a parley for a donkey, and then a small figure bouncing up to the tableland.

  “Do you suppose he will be all right?” asked Emma.

  “He may well be all wrong, but he can take care of himself,” said Nelson. The weather was warm. They went into the Captain’s cabin, alone, for Mrs. Cadogan had been left behind at Palermo, to supervise the final packing.

  “I can no longer contain myself,” said Nelson, and fell upon her like a thunderbolt.

  Emma felt reassured. She had been wondering now for some time how infinite was his capacity. She was an Armida, a Dido, a Santa Monica, and mostly Nike, in a windblown dress, with pleasure at the prow. But though his men adored him, this was scarcely time for interlopers at the shrine.

  “Dear, dear Horatio,” she said, rumpling what was left of his hair, “but we had far far better bolt the door,” and leaned an arm around to do so.

  *

  Sir William strolled idly through a field brittle with flowers and dusty with pollen, the donkey and the guide behind him. The air was crystalline as high as the nearest lark, who merely scratched, but did not break, the silence. Piranesi had been here before him, but no one else. Like a small figure in a Piranesi, he raised the astonished arm to point the view, though his thoughts were less of a deeply bitten shadow than of a fresco, new found at Herculaneum, of a well-bred woman, wandering to gather flowers in an Elysian Field—his own view of what the underworld should be. Though the Greeks had chthonic deities, they wasted no time on the basement, but—sure it was solid—let the column soar.

  Before him on a knoll stood the temple. It had never been finished. The pediments lacked sculpture; the cella stood, but lacked a roof. The pillars were unfluted and perhaps too plump in the miniscus. He went into the cella as into the shrine of a god familiar but unknown, the god who is always there because he is not there. His place is ready but we could not wait for him.

  Weeds swooped out from the walls high up, like sconces, quivering with the candle flames of green fire. Lichen mottled the rocks, the oldest living thing, tenacious, colored rust and cadmium and verde antico. It was cooler within than without. A drum rested in a bunch of poppies, where it had fallen, and the air, though drowsy, had the freshness of a pleasing dream. New winds might be blowing, but they could not move stone, carry the spring seed everywhere though they might. A piece of fecund fuzz, dried already by the sun, took off in flight and hovered not far away from his nose.

  He stood in the portico and looked out over the warm fields which sloped down to the sea, full not of ghosts, but of a decorous crowd which was quite alive—only not now—and which would always be alive—though not now. Over the fields rippled the crosscurrents and streams of the wind’s direction, a little shudder, like that of flesh when you touched it first; and over the sea, the same.

  “Il faut que la raison rie et non se fâche. We can at least smile. Quand Neptune veut calmer les tempêtes, ce n’est pas aux flôts, mais aux vents, qu’il s’adresse.” It was something worth remembering, he thought, as he gazed out toward the ship. Emma must be discreet.

  But the only rumor here was of quite different things. It is as well, he thought, that in my century religion came under the heading of philosophy, for in my age it did indeed make one philosophical, which is as good a reason as any for not venturing too far out into this century; whatever the powers of philosophy, still it does not encourage us to walk upon the waves.

  And, placing his hand carefully against a column, he felt the stone so warm, so soft, so golden beneath his hand, and so cold and immutable within, that it refreshed one on the hottest day; it cooled the passions while it moved beneath the affections of the hand, more resilient than could be any flesh. He had done well to put his faith in marble, for faith had made him marble in return, warmed by the sun, like honey, and grateful to the fingertips. He rested his cheek for a moment against the cool stone, and then, warmed, went away. Could he have crumbled to an ash right then, ambition slaked, he would have done so. But since it is given unto all men to die, not crumble, back to the boat he must go. There had been only a moment of blancmange. The stone is by its nature discipline.

  And yet: good-bye. I am a very old man and I love you very much. I find you moving. When I was young, I knew that that would be so, in the end. So now that, too, must have its end. Ed è subito sera.

  Had there been an altar, he would have burned salt and wine and oil. As there was not, he went down through the fields again, with no need to look back, for he knew the temple stood firmly behind him, while in the fields ahead of him a woman wandered, gathering flowers.

  *

  It was her first experience of a physical man; her first, at any rate, in years. It was, to tell the truth—bar a Negress or two—his first experience of being one. He had married for respectability, and respectability does not encourage the male.

  His body was that correct British color which, in jade, the Chinese call mutton fat—translucent and mottled as an oyster.

  So this was love, she thought. Like hate, it was a most sustaining emotion. It buoyed you up.

  “My God,” sobbed Nelson, who wanted both his pleasure and to be punished for having it, too. “I have betrayed my best friend.”

  For the life of her, Emma could not see how. “Don’t be silly. If he knew he’d be pleased. He’s very fond of you, you know. We both are.”

  Nelson groaned.

  “I shall tell him all.”

  “What! And cause your best friend pain?” asked Emma, not only shocked but alarmed.

  “It is true that I should hate to cause him pain.”

  “Should you tell him, that would of course mean giving up both of us,” said Emma evenly.

  Nelson held his head in his hand. He felt all at sea, which is not surprising, since that was where he was.

  “Besides,” she consoled, “everyone thinks this happened ages ago, and so, I am sure, does he. So why distress him by acquainting him with the delayed date of a fact to which he has already had the time to grow accustomed through rumor?”

  “I cannot live with it,” said Nelson simply.

  “Then you had far better live with us. On the whole, under the circumstances, I think perhaps that would be the best thing to do.”

  “But how can I live with my conscience?”

  “It would be far better, in that case, if you were to separate,” said Emma, who had been thinking about Lady Nelson and wondering what to do about that.

  Nelson sulked. Without the rosy glow of possible damnation, he felt both naked and cold. What is the use of enjoying yourself, if there is no harm in it? He had been raised a Puritan.

  “If I was not sure—if we were both not sure—that you were his true friend,” Emma said, reasoning with a child, “I assure you I would never have permitted it.”

  “But what do we do?”

  “Why, the same things over and over again, like everybody else. What else is there to do?”

  Nevertheless, conversation at dinner seemed a little forced.

  Oh well, I suppose she has fallen in love, t
hought Sir William, noticing the sudden improvement in her complexion. She has already abandoned one child, and now I suppose she wishes to abandon herself to a second. But it is too bad. I am afraid Nelson will take it very hard. And this is one instance in which I am impotent to help him. But then, the spectator is always impotent; he is no longer the victim of himself, and can therefore be kind without expecting kindness.

  She was still there—they were both still there—so a few days of grumpiness, and everything would be all right, he supposed, though Emma’s transports might be tiring.

  So he ate with appetite, unhindered by made conversation; it is true, we dine unless the blow comes very near the heart indeed. It sounds French, though neither Rochefoucauld nor Vauvenargues could be called a glutton, and Rivarol died so young, it is hard to believe he had the time to eat at all. Unless, of course, it was Chamfort. Chamfort may not have lived very long either, but somehow one does have the impression that for as long as he could, he lived well.

  There is much to be said for living well.

  “What most afflicts a Noble Mind

  Is manly Resignation,”

  Emma sang, at the piano, which had been hauled aboard.

  “For shou’d the maiden prove Unkind,

  There’s always ad-mir-ashun.”

  “Emma,” said Sir William. “Don’t bang.”

  “It is only a popular ballad.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Oh,” said Emma, and thought that over. “Well, if you like, I shall play something else.”

  “It is necessary only to pay lip service to both sides of the repertoire,” said Sir William. “I shall go fetch my flute.”

  So over the evening water there soon floated a flute sonata by Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a little sad, a little gay, for that is the nature of the flute. The Gods were not leaving Alexandria. The Gods were going, a little wistful, home.

  “My God!” shouted Nelson, reading his mail. “Do you know how many people I am obliged to support in a station to which they have become accustomed only because I raised them to it? They queue up for the succession and then inquire anxiously about my health. It is not kind. I am surrounded by pilot fish, and Brother William sucks the strongest. Only my sister Matcham is agreeable.”