Sir William

by David Stacton

  “Master Godfrey,” said Beckford. “Show us your soprano.”

  So Master Godfrey did.

  “So artless,” said Emma. “So wonderful.”

  Afterward they were compelled to admire the Claude, all £4,000 of it, and since it was neatly labeled, found it admirable.

  “And these?” asked Sir William, glancing at some views of the house framed nearby.

  “A young man called Turner, but Sir Francis Beaumont swears by him,” said Beckford. “Lovely, ain’t they?” At 40 guineas each they seemed poor value, but he was a coming man, so one had to have them. “Angerstein has one.”

  “They are all new people,” said Sir William. “But since I am not vain, I shall let the young admire them, and pass on. Since whatever you do, once you are old, will be considered old fashioned, you need no longer make the effort to keep up. Which is, in any case, futile. You cannot conceive how restful I find it to be at last out of date. It has taken years off my age. Indeed I find it makes me feel quite contemporary again.”

  *

  Mrs. Cadogan heard someone snuffling down the Gothic corridor, and when she opened the door there was Nelson. A natural love of intrigue had conquered an acquired moral sense, but not the display of it. Tight-lipped and mendacious, Mrs. Cadogan let him in.

  Nelson was not in a good mood.

  “And do you like these people?” he asked Emma.

  “What people?”

  “Beckford’s friends.”

  “They are not friends. They come to gawk.”

  “And gabble,” he said. “You should not have done the Attitudes. You might lose the child.”

  “Well, I haven’t lost it yet,” said Emma, who was fed up with carrying the thing, and wondered which he would miss the more, the child or her.

  “We are never alone.”

  Ah, that was better.

  “These people tell you all about your own business, and could not sail a paper boat on Round Pond,” he said bitterly. “I assure you it is no rest.”

  “They mean well.”

  “They mean nothing. Why the devil are we here?”

  Emma’s voice dropped to a reverent conspiratorial hush. “Business,” she said.

  “What, to hawk bibelots?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Ye Gods! Then what is going on behind my back?”

  Emma examined his back. It was too narrow. There would never have been enough room, and had the matter not been so serious, she would have giggled.

  “If you won’t tell a soul, Beckford wants a peerage, and we need money, and he is William’s cousin, so he said that if William could get one, because he couldn’t himself you know—there was a scandal, it was hushed up, but of course everybody knows about it—and be able to give the reversion to Beckford, well …”

  “Well what?”

  “Well, I should have five hundred pounds for life, and William two thousand. And we do need the money.”

  “You need not worry. I shall not tell it to a soul, for no one here has a soul to tell it to,” said Nelson. To him, it sounded a sordid, stupid business. “A peerage is either the recognition of merit or the inheritance of favor,” he added, thinking about his own.

  “Don’t be so stuffy. What did your brother William ever do? And yet he is bound and determined to have yours, and what is more, he will.”

  “That’s an intolerable thing to say.”

  “I don’t say he isn’t very nice,” said Emma, explaining patiently, as to a child. “But if it weren’t for that, we’d not see hide nor hair of him, and that’s the way the world is.”

  “It’s not the way I am.”

  “Oh well, it’s easy for you. You’re different. But when most people know each other, it’s for a reason.” And with the busy look of an apprentice who has just involuntarily let slip a guild secret, Emma began industriously to buff her nails. “Besides, he has a very nice house, and it’s not everybody who’s asked here, you know.” For people may talk about principles all they please, but who has the moral force to refuse an invitation? Men are so silly.

  “Damn,” said Nelson, who wanted his fury dampened by romance.

  “Patience,” said Emma gaily. “Patience.” Though she was worried herself, what with one thing and another, and the furniture not yet in the Piccadilly house.

  “My little wife is tired,” said Nelson, gurgling with emotion, though even to him that phrase sounded cottagey and absurd in these surroundings.

  “You mustn’t brood,” soothed Emma, who wanted her plots to hatch, though nothing would incubate in this cold. “Besides, it’s only for a day or two more.”

  On the 29th of December they returned to London.

  *

  On the 1st, Emma and Sir William moved into their new house at 23 Piccadilly, with the bow windows overlooking Green Park, which was quite pretty, the mound of the icehouse picturesque as an old Gothic barrow among the trees.

  “I have had a wine bill this day,” said Sir William, shuddering, “for four hundred pounds.” She had the Midas touch. Whatever she put to her lips, she drank money.

  “I don’t understand it.” Emma frowned. “We have had no more to dinner than usual, though of course in Italy the wine is a little cheaper. Besides, I don’t drink wine. The men do that, when we go upstairs.” So it wasn’t her fault. She was not extravagant.

  “If you could be a little more careful, my dear.”

  “I sold my diamonds to pay for the furniture, didn’t I?” demanded Emma, who had indeed done her part. “William, what are we to do, for the dining room won’t seat more than forty, and with old Q and someone for him to goggle at, the list comes to forty-two?” And she looked around at the furniture, the deed to which reposed snugly in a dresser drawer upstairs. Not only had she made her sacrifice, but even worse, one of the snuffboxes had turned out to be paste brilliants only. What was the use of living if you could not do it properly?

  Lord Nelson was announced.

  Today, thought Emma, who could not live without him—but sometimes men have to be led—I will be cold, and primped a little.

  *

  “On this day His Majesty was conducted from the Presence Chamber to the Throne in the House of Lords by the noble Admirals Nelson and Hood,” reported The Morning Herald.

  Taking his seat among his peers, Nelson could not but realize for the first time and with some sense of shocked enlightenment, that one’s peers are, of course, men. How many of them, he wondered, have my problems to conceal?

  *

  “I shall call her Tom Tit,” said Emma, watching from the window Lady Nelson leaving after having paid her first, last, and as it was to turn out, only call. “For she walks like a tomtit, hopping and jerking about, one shoulder higher than the other, out into the snow, and pecking away all the time at a vast invisible lump of suet dangling before her nose.”

  “Emma, that’s quite enough,” said Mrs. Cadogan, though peering over her shoulder, she saw the resemblance, too.

  It had not been a cordial meeting. Tria juncta in uno cannot be four. The Knighthood of the Bath is an exactly limited order and cannot be added to until one of its members dies.

  *

  On the 1st of January, Nelson had been promoted Vice-Admiral of the Blue; Lord Spencer having taken Lady Spencer’s advice. On the 2nd, the Nelsons had breakfast with William Haslewood, their solicitor, for there was always someone there these days. Lady Nelson preferred witnesses.

  “Lady Hamilton,” said Nelson, with that irresistible impulse to fit the name of one’s beloved into the conversation of those who do not happen to share one’s affection, “was most gratified with your call, and I am glad you brought yourself to make it. You will find her, as I have found her, an affectionate friend, a true compan—”

  Lady Nelson soared from the breakfast table. “I am sick of hearing of dear Lady Hamilton this and dear Lady Hamilton that and Lady Hamilton the devil knows what, and I am resolved that you shall give up either her or me!�
� she snapped. She had no doubt of the decision, and had her marriage bond to prove it.

  Ah, at last, thought Nelson, she has forced the choice upon me, and with calm—since it was her fault—said, “Take care, Fanny, what you say. I love you sincerely, but I cannot forget my obligations to Lady Hamilton or speak of her otherwise than with affection and admiration.”

  “Apparently not. If you cannot, others can. And what is more, do,” said Fanny. And turning to Mr. Haslewood, for she never forgot her social obligations, she added, “Mr. Haslewood, I bid you good day, good-bye and short shrift,” and galloped from the room, leaving the enemy in the field, but able to call her soul her own and every inch of her intact, in fighting trim.

  “Ha!” said Nelson. “A rift. Haslewood, no matter what has passed in this room, I would assure you that Lady Nelson has always my esteem.” He sounded much as though he had just left her his second-best bed.

  The front door slammed. A carriage clattered off. They waited until the sound had died away.

  “I must be going, myself,” said Nelson. “I am due at twenty-three Piccadilly. May I drop you on the way?”

  “Ah well, if we’re all going,” said Haslewood, who had not the pleasure of Lady Hamilton’s company, but knew the address. “Why not?”

  *

  “William,” asked Emma, gazing out at Green Park, “what do swans mean?”

  “Twins,” said Sir William succinctly.

  Emma, who had been about to say “How pretty,” averted her gaze.

  “Leda, and Castor and Pollux, and Helen and Clytemnestra, you know, because Jupiter, as Lemprière so felicitously puts it, availed himself of his situation,” Sir William explained kindly. “In some versions, however, it is Nemesis, not Leda, who spawns the brats.”

  *

  “I have been told to hoist my colors at Plymouth,” said Nelson. “We must devise a code.”

  “Can you not put your departure off?”

  “It is Duty,” said Nelson, not altogether vexed to be at sea and have firm ground beneath his feet again and know where he stood, that is, on deck, and no women anywhere. “I shall never desert you, of that you may be sure.” He was eager to be off. William was waiting downstairs, at his favorite game of estimating what the plate would fetch if there should be a sale, and could the initials be shaved. It was curious how seldom you came across a used teaspoon on the cheap, monogrammed N. Though now, with a B in the offing, the chances would be doubled, which cheered him up.

  Nelson was a boy. It was years since he had devised a code, not since he had been courting Fanny and made up one so elaborate that she had had to use a code book. For an instant he saw the bay at English Harbour and felt once more the vast relief of leaving, for the last time, her Uncle Herbert’s house.

  “It is necessary,” he explained, “that when we correspond, you shall be the protectress of a Mrs. Thompson, who is about to have a baby, and Mr. Thompson will be one of my seamen.” He warmed to his tale. It was romantical.

  “Nelson,” said Brother William, materializing in his shapeless, ectoplasmic way, “we shall be late to Lord St. Vincent’s for luncheon.” Lord St. Vincent had influence, and where better to pass the long wait than in a choir stall at some not too provincial cathedral, and then hoist up to the peerage from there?

  William got his luncheon; Emma was left in the lurch; and Nelson’s flag was hoisted at Plymouth to the plaudits of the multitude and to his own vast annoyance, for Lady Nelson had taken a liberty permissible in a mistress, but unforgivable in a wife, and packed his things all wrong.

  “If I want a piece of pickle, it must be put in a saucer, and I have six silver bottle stands but not one decanter to fit them,” he snarled. “I could have done all in ten minutes and for a tenth part of the expense.” To Emma, he added, “I long to get to Bronte, for believe me this England is a shocking place. A walk under the chestnut trees, although you may be shot by banditti, is better than to have our reputations stabbed in this country.” As for his wife: “She is a great fool and thank God you are not the least like her.”

  Emma would have thought little fool the more appropriate description, but otherwise had no objection to the letter, particularly as it enclosed provision for the child, in the draft of his will.

  *

  “Emma,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “is indisposed.”

  “More than usual?” asked Sir William, with instant sympathy.

  “It’s her stomach,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “She will stuff herself, you know.”

  “Yes,” said Sir William—he was finding it quite a useful phrase these days—“I know.” For truly there is no end to learning; it can occupy a man a lifetime. One may not know everything, but one ends by knowing all.

  *

  Yet it was pleasant to have the downstairs’ rooms to oneself and no more than six to dinner. That saved the walk to one’s club, which in January, in town, was no small saving.

  This sky, always the color of dirty, dusty, sleazy prolapsed silk on the ceiling of a deserted ballroom, was getting on his nerves. One always forgets while one is away that the little discomforts of home are the loathsome unendurable ones, for anyone can lump it on campaign, but who can bear to rough it in his own drawing room? His fingers ached. His eyes smarted. He had a chilblain. He felt like Louis XV, dying panicstricken but resigned at Versailles, for how can you get to the top of the hill when the road you are on leads down? He meant to survive this winter, but to the old, winter is a siege. Open the window, and the drawing room choked with vast gray monsters made of sea-coal soot. Four old ladies, six cows and two Barbary apes had coughed to death in the late fog, said The Morning Herald. In St. James Park, an elderly female petitioner had been hit in the stomach by a disoriented, low-flying and agitated duck, fallen, and broken her hip. At Palermo, no matter what the weather, at least it had been possible to see your way about, whereas here, candles made the world the darker and you could hear the thing snuffling in the wainscoting at night, while the fire in the bedroom grate got lower and lower, and the consolations offered us by Cicero and Seneca did not help.

  I shall go quietly,

  merely shutting my eyes:

  I am beyond surprise,

  but not beyond feeling.

  Art is only a sigh

  a few are remembered by.

  Joy is a thing felt once.

  I am a fool. I am a dunce,

  but not beyond feeling:

  I shall go quietly,

  merely shutting my eyes.

  But not this winter. But not just yet.

  “Ah, Mrs. Cadogan, how extremely kind of you,” he said, not noticing what she had brought, but she was the only visitor he had had that day. A thoroughly respectable little person, Mrs. Cadogan, no fool, but she knew her place.

  “Would you like me to stoke the fire up for you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It never does any harm to drowse in a cosy room,” said Mrs. Cadogan, and vigorously stoked it up.

  “I put another log on,” she said, surveying the bed and the old man in it in his stocking cap, and his face still the color of bronze. At the door she paused with her hand on the handle, peering through the shadows anxiously. “Good night, Sir William,” she said, with almost a smile, and left.

  It was not until then that he realized he had been waiting for her to come in. She sometimes did at this hour, these days. The stuff she had brought was tea, a sovereign remedy, so they said, for snow blindness.

  “Ah well,” he said, rather touched on the whole, and picking up his Seneca again, plowed firmly through the night, whose lapping about the bed no longer bothered him. Once past midnight, and he was safe for another day, and the maid would be in soon enough, to draw the curtains and exchange the tea for fresh.

  The permutations of the affections are peculiar, devious, reassuring and odd, Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh had married his housekeeper, and not a peep out of him since.

  *

  “Sir William�
�s feeling poorly.”

  “Who is not?” demanded Emma, surveying, between spasms, a bowl of hot water, some towels, pillows stuffed against the crack under the door, and other signs of imminence.

  “It’s a good thing for you I was the victim of a diverse youth,” said Mrs. Cadogan grimly. “Here it comes, so push!”

  *

  “Curious,” said Sir William, “it is well past Christmas Eve, and yet methought I heard one crying ‘Child.’” But since it was cold and he was not really awake, he went back to sleep again.

  Over the mantel was a mirror for company, but not being awake, he could scarcely look for the reassurance of seeing himself in it. So the room was completely empty. He had decided to lie low.

  *

  Nelson, who had known him for years, found that he knew very little about Mr. Thompson, really, except that since he had had a child, then he must indeed be married, and a fig for Josiah. Poor Fanny had written to say that the only offense she could imagine herself guilty of was pushing Josiah forward, and very well, if that was what had come between them, Josiah was of age now to fend for himself, so she would cast him adrift if Nelson would but return. That she should make so scandalous a proposal merely showed her for the monster that she was; as Mrs. Thompson said, What mother, no matter what the provocation, would desert her own child?

  I believe poor dear Mrs. Thompson’s friend will go mad with joy. He cries, prays and performs all tricks, yet does not show all or any of his feelings, but he has only me to consult with. I cannot write, I am so agitated by the young man at my elbow. I love, I never did love anyone else. I never had a dear pledge of love till you gave me one, and you, thank my God, never gave one to anybody else. I would steal white bread sooner than my godchild should want.

  “And white bread is the best bread,

  For the English poor eat rye,”

  Nelson chanted to himself as he capered around the cabin.

  “And what’s all that about?” asked a swobber.