Tested by Fate

by David Donachie

  Emma leant back and yawned, slightly more elaborately than was necessary to express her tiredness. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, girl, where you have just spent the last two hours.”

  “With Sir William.”

  “Your husband called for his carriage about an hour and a half ago. He left a message to say that he had gone to spend the night at Posillipo.”

  Emma was upright now. “In the name of heaven, why?”

  “I daresay it’s because he has a fair idea of where you were, Emma.” Mary Cadogan’s face softened in the face of her daughter’s confusion. “Do you realise what you have done, girl? You have gone and thrown away whatever chance we had of peace and happiness in the future. And for what? For a couple of hours with a passing sailor, and not even a whole one at that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  HOW CAN YOU CONTINUE TO FIGHT with a cutlass blade through your heart? Horatio Nelson knew it was there, just as he knew that it caused him no pain, and did nothing to impede him in the assault on the enemy frigate. The approach had been made in silence; guns run out, lower sails taken in and boarding nets rigged, the usual rush of clearing for action—bulkheads knocked out, furniture broken down, delicate plate and glassware packed into boxes, the gunner filling charges that the ship’s boys raced to deliver to the gun captains. He had seen mouths move, understood requests made and orders given, but had heard no sound.

  Even the enemy cannon, eighteen-pounders firing off the first salvo, had belched smoke but no noise. It lasted throughout the long gunnery duel. Wooden bulwarks were smashed on both vessels, guns dismounted, masts wounded, and rigging ripped asunder until the ships closed for the final act of boarding. Jumping from one bulwark to the next Nelson felt as though he was floating. But cleaving with the sword that had belonged to his naval ancestor Captain Gadifrus Walpole, he cut down those who appeared before him with heavy blows.

  Somehow, instead of landing on the enemy quarterdeck, he had slid through the scantlings on to the maindeck as if the great timbers that made up the side of the ship did not exist. That meant he had to fight his way up the companionway towards the daylight of the quarterdeck, just as he had at the battle of Cape St Vincent. Familiar faces surrounded him, swimming in and out of focus, but he could not recall a single name. The fight to remember began to seem more important than keeping himself alive or taking the enemy ship. Yet ahead of him, drawing him onwards and upwards, was a light so blinding it seemed the sun itself was at the head of those open stairs.

  Nelson felt fear then; the terror that something not human lay beyond that light, whose heat penetrated the heavy cutlass blade that protruded from his upper body. Suddenly pain seared through him and shapes formed in the radiance ahead. Faces appeared, but this time he could identify them: his father, his brothers, William, Edmund, Suckling, and young George; his sisters Susanna, Ann, and Catherine, all waving, as if in farewell.

  Those images dissolved into another. The next face to appear was that of his dead mother, which melted into a tableau vivant he had seen as a child, a representation of the death of his hero, General James Wolfe. Only this time it was Nelson lying in the arms of a fellow officer. The image was shattered by a great explosion, which halted his intended flight, as the French ship L’Orient, a mass of orange and red light against the night sky, blew up in Aboukir Bay. Darkness turned to daylight, to reveal behind the falling debris not an Egyptian shore but a calm, sandy Norfolk beach dotted with the red brick houses of the North Sea coast. And behind that the green undulating slopes that led to his home at Burnham Thorpe.

  He swooped in like a seagull over All Saints, his father’s church, still showing an open damaged face to the world at the south nave, still chilly inside even on a summer’s day. The trees that shaded the passage down to the Parsonage were in full leaf, reflected in the still waters of the reed-fringed pond that lay foursquare in front of the house. From inside he heard pealing laughter, and knew that he was its object, but try as he might he could not enter to share in the happiness that lay inside.

  His eyes opened, one good, the other opaque, and he was faced with a blank expanse of white linen. Someone, probably his servant Tom Allen, had opened both shutters to flood the room with light. He registered that he was lying on his side, the stump of his right arm trapped and numb beneath him. The bed in which he lay was wider than his cot and there was none of the normal swaying motion, nor the creaking of timbers and cables, the smell of pitch, wood and corruption that went with sleeping aboard ship. Instead a familiar perfume, mingled with the smell of his own warm body, rose from under the heavy coverlet.

  The vivid dream was still with him: the faces of long-dead shipmates, the family he had not seen for years and the mother who had died when he was seven. The action he recalled was that with the Spanish frigate the Santa Sabina, a bloody affair, in which the Dons had lost over a hundred and fifty men dead and wounded, their ship left with not a mast standing.

  He recalled the name and dignity with which the captain had surrendered. Nelson had taken in his hands the sword of Don Jacobo Stuart, great grandson of King James II, who claimed to be the rightful king of England and Scotland. Nelson glanced at the mantel above the fireplace, over which hung a portrait of his own sovereign: heavy jowls, hooded eyes, and the thick, disapproving Hanoverian lips of King George III. In Nelson’s memory the Stuart pretender had looked so much more princely than his King.

  His head sank back to the pillow and again the scent filled his nostrils. It had all begun last night under that portrait. He had spent the night with his benign host Sir William Hamilton, King George’s ambassador at the court of Naples, and his wife, the beautiful and accomplished Lady Emma. She had sat by his right hand, wafting that scent, while she led the plaudits at the banquet held to celebrate his victory at the Nile.

  Later she had flitted into his room and Nelson recalled the passionate, lascivious creature who had introduced him to a depth of passion and accomplishment he had never before experienced. He felt as if, for the first time in his life, he had truly made love to a woman. He could still feel every touch of her hand as she helped him to remove his clothes; he had an ache in his groin as he remembered their frenzied and prolonged love-making and blushed when he thought of the way he had sinned.

  Worse, he had dishonoured a man he considered a friend and supporter. How could he face Sir William Hamilton after he had, under the man’s own roof, made love to his wife?

  Emma threw the umpteenth draft of the letter she was trying to write at the basket. It missed its target. She and Sir William often wrote to each other, even though they were man and wife and shared the same establishment. But Emma was more than his spouse: she had become the British Ambassador’s helpmate at the Neapolitan court. A close friend of Queen Maria Carolina, Emma had proved invaluable at communicating to the queen her husband’s ideas, thus easing his task.

  At times their letter writing was a way of clarifying their thoughts, at others a record that would show, should an action be questioned at some future date, proof of proper intentions, and sometimes a way to resolve a disagreement, or express affection.

  This letter was of a type that Emma had never penned before. In all the years she had lived with Sir William, both as mistress and wife, she had never strayed in her fidelity, although she had received innumerable offers from potential lovers, including King Ferdinand of Naples. The list of dukes, counts, earls, lords and knights, artists, writers, wits—English, German, Austrian, and Italian—who had tried to bed her was endless. Sir William had taken as much pleasure from observing them fail as Emma did from their flattering attentions.

  Emma put her quill to another piece of paper to try again. What to write? That she had always held him in the highest esteem, that they had a bargain which, though unspoken, was obvious to both, that if an attraction proved potent enough, neither party was debarred from the pursuit of pleasure? That she had not exercised such a right did nothing to dent its potency. E
mma knew that Sir William was no prude: now in his sixty-eighth year, he had grown to manhood in an age when the present British predilection to rectitude was deemed unseemly in a gentleman. That was why Naples, with its hot sunshine, warm waters, and febrile sensuality, suited him better than gloomy Georgian London.

  Part of Emma wanted to pretend that last night had not happened. How could she be sure her husband knew the truth? Her mother, guardian of her bedchamber, who had alerted her, might have been wrong. Sir William might have left the house to go to their seaside villa at Posillipo for any number of reasons—he had done so before. A bilious feeling after the banquet, to fish perhaps, a pursuit he loved, the need for some solitude or a desire to bathe in the warm waters of the Bay of Naples.

  The door creaked, and Emma fixed her eyes on the paper. She knew who it was: only two people would enter this room unannounced—her maid, Francesca, and Emma’s mother. However, if it had been Francesca, Emma would have heard her since she never stopped singing. Her mother, with a key to every room in the palazzo at her hip, moved silently.

  Mary Cadogan examined the back of her daughter’s bent head. Her hair, which good Sir William called “Titian,” had not been combed and the loose strands picked up the light from the open windows overlooking the bay, making it seem golden. The furious scratching of the quill, she knew, was intended to shut her out. But Mary Cadogan had interfered often in her daughter’s life, always—in her own mind—to the good.

  “Is that a letter to Sir William?” she asked.

  “It is,” Emma replied, her voice far from welcoming.

  “What will you be telling him, girl? That your time spent in the Admiral’s bedchamber was all innocence, or that you gave your Nile hero a fitting reward for thumping the French?”

  “I think, Mother, that what I write to my husband is my business.”

  “That be true, Emma,” Mary Cadogan replied, easing herself into a chair beside her daughter. “But I wondered if you might want to speak of it first, seeing as how in the past, you have done yourself more harm than good by flying off the handle.”

  “Don’t you mean you have, Mother?”

  There was venom in that, since both women knew that Emma was in Naples due to her mother’s influence. It was she who had seen first that her daughter’s liaison with Sir William’s nephew, Charles Greville, was over; that after six years as his mistress, the man Emma claimed to love had traded her off to secure his inheritance from an uncle he knew to be besotted with her. Maternal persuasion, aided by deliberate coldness from her previous keeper, had convinced Emma that her love for Greville was wasted; that security lay with a man over thirty years her senior.

  Mary Cadogan had one overriding concern; that after a life of ups and downs, of widowhood, being a kept woman so that her family would not starve, and a near descent into prostitution, the only thing that mattered was the comfort of a good roof over both their heads. She thought her daughter too romantic to be sensible, too fanciful to see where danger lurked or advantage lay. She had done everything she could to prevent Emma falling into the same traps in which she herself had been snared, only to fall short too often.

  There was a child, now grown to womanhood, who had no idea that Emma was her mother. Any number of folk could recall that the present Lady Hamilton had once been a lowly housemaid named Lyons, and as Emma Hart that she had been at best a lady of easy virtue, at worst a whore. She might be at the top of the social pile in Naples, but back in England her title brought mockery not respect. Received at court here, she was debarred from audience with the King and Queen of England and shunned by those who took from them their social cue.

  “If you are thinking of penning a confession, girl, I feel I am bound to advise against it,” she said.

  “I’m old enough to make my own decisions, Mother.”

  “Old enough, for certain, and you’ve been that for many a year. But I hazard if you look back and examine some of the decisions you have made, and how I’ve aided you from being foolish, you might see fit to pass by me what it is you’re planning to do.”

  Emma turned to face her mother, her curling uncombed hair framing what was still a beautiful face. In shadow Mary Cadogan could not see the green eyes and the flawless skin, but she knew them well—indeed the twelve years they had spent in Naples were hardly reflected in Emma’s features, certainly not the miserable look of the first year. Good fortune, some hard maternal truths, and Sir William’s ease of manner had combined to turn her first into his mistress, then into his wife, gifting them both that life of ease Mary Cadogan so desired. That Emma did not love her husband was of no account: to Mary Cadogan’s way of thinking, more attachments survived through mutual respect than ever endured on a diet of connubial bliss.

  She could not believe that Sir William would respond to Emma’s first lapse by sending her and her daughter packing. Emma was his wife: he would respect that—and not just to avoid public embarrassment. But he was getting on in years and for a woman who prided herself on being longsighted that was a consideration. Old men were as prey to jealousy as the young, sometimes more so. And Mary Cadogan knew that they were entirely dependent on Sir William, even after he was dead and buried. Starting hares that might affect the future was a bad idea if you had no idea to where they would run, so silence was likely to be a better option than confession.

  For the tenth time since she’d woken up, Emma was examining her own actions, which seemed to her to have been caused by some force of nature. But to say so to a woman as practical as her mother was impossible.

  “All Naples,” she insisted, “indeed the whole of Europe, fêtes Nelson as a great hero, a saviour, the man who has finally checked the French abomination. He is the most famous man in the world. Am I to be immune from such …” Emma was unable to find the concluding word. “I’m sure Sir William will understand the nature of what has happened.” She could not say that the attraction she felt for Horatio Nelson was one that had been with her ever since their first meeting five years previously. He had been a captain then, and whole, with both arms and two good eyes. She had written numerous letters to him from this very desk, never once allowing her feelings to surface in her correspondence.

  But then he had returned a hero. Instead of the bright-eyed man she remembered, Emma had encountered a wounded, weary one in need of comfort. At the sight of him her repressed feelings had burst out, multiplied tenfold by tenderness. Every time she touched Nelson she felt an electric charge run through her. She could not tell her mother that what had happened between them last night was no mere fancy. It had been inevitable, and right now she would rather be back in Nelson’s suite of rooms than here.

  “Then you don’t fear that Sir William will be agitated?” Mary asked.

  “Why should he be?” Emma replied with an assurance she did not feel. “My husband has hinted often enough that he considers it impolite to enquire into such matters.”

  “Then why alert him to it?”

  “How can you say that, Mother?” Emma snapped. “It was you who told me last night that he …”

  “Knew you bedded the Admiral? Well, that’s as maybe, Emma, but I can’t see what good it will do to go rubbing it in. From what I know of Sir William you’re right. He won’t say a peep. Nor will you know by his face what he’s thinking. Being deep is what he’s good at. Let him be I say.”

  She was tempted to add that Nelson would sail off soon, as all sailors did, ending something that her daughter should never have started, and that once that happened, provided a discreet silence was observed by all, life could return to normal.

  Naked and without his wig, Sir William Hamilton lay in the warm shallow waters of the Bay of Naples, one hand gently fondling the loose wrinkled skin of his scrotum, ruminating on past scrapes. Like any young aristocrat he had whored his way around London and Europe in the company of like minded individuals, including the present King George, a riotous prince then, a dull-as-ditchwater prude now. Hamilton’s first marriage
, a sensible match, had been made more to secure his wife’s income than for any notions of love—as a younger son of a ducal family he had had little in the way of an inheritance.

  He could hardly say that the same sentiments applied to Emma. He had been smitten by her the first time he had seen her at his nephew’s house in London: her beauty, her vivacity, her innate kindness and natural wit. As the past lover of many women he had seen every facet of their behaviour: false affection, outrageous infatuation that could not last, naked greed for a man who had a good post, a reasonable unearned income, a palazzo, servants, carriages, and access to the highest society. Emma loved these things, as any sensible woman would, but her enthusiasm was based on innocent enjoyment not calculation.

  It was enlightening to compare his first marriage to his second, his Lady Charlotte to his Lady Emma. The former had been refined, reserved, dutiful, the very epitome of the English rose abroad, a companion of the mind more than the body. The latter, over thirty years his junior, was more Italian than the Italians, high spirited, often gauche, intelligent, instinctive, and an unrestrained delight in the bedchamber.

  It was hard to recall the ingénue who had arrived here all those years ago, with her comparative lack of refinement. Yet even then Emma had charmed Naples: the peasants hailed her as the living embodiment of the Madonna, while the aristocracy admired her as akin to a Greek goddess, more so when she learned, in four years, to speak Italian, French, and German. Emma sang with gusto if not refinement, while her beauty and theatricality attracted the admiration of every visitor who called upon Sir William at the Palazzo Sessa. An invitation to watch her perform her “Attitudes” was much sought after: her renderings of classical poses were sensual and greeted with much applause. But in the privacy of the bedchamber, he was girted with attitudes that owed much to pagan rites. And yet, for all the abandon of which Emma was capable, she had been faithful.