Miss Lily’s attitude towards me had changed significantly in the two weeks since our disagreement over Horatio’s treatment of Fanny, as had mine towards her. She had survived something that night and it had brought her into a privileged zone. I could not think of her now merely as someone I was employing, not when I had looked with such passionate interest at the back of her skull. She registered the change, of course, though she could hardly have known the reason, and it made her bolder. She became somehow more personal, she felt free to interject, to express opinions. To the danger of her sleuthing was now added this irritant of her judgements. Then on Tuesday, March 11, she came bearing a circular tin with a design in tartan around the top. Her manner seemed less positive than usual. “These are for you,” she said.
The weather was still cold, and Miss Lily presented her usual chilled appearance. It was an accident, the date; she didn’t know or had forgotten that this was Horatio’s wedding day. Or so she was to maintain. I opened the tin and found to my astonishment that it was full of biscuits.
“Shortbread,” Miss Lily said. “They are home-made.” She was looking at me in a way that seemed almost apprehensive. Miss Lily is not pretty, but she has unusual eyes, a deep, soft brown and very steady, somehow undefended-looking, like a cow’s—they seem to have no means of concealment or retreat. But they are not timid, far from it; they do not flinch away. Miss Lily notes things. This gaze of hers, helpless and perceptive at the same time, makes it difficult to know whether what you see there is a disturbance of her feelings or a reflected disturbance of your own. “I put them in that tin,” she said. “Just to have something to carry them in, nothing to do with Scotland.”
I was sure at this point that she had schemed to make an effect by timing this gift of biscuits to coincide with his wedding day. I was on the point of handing back the tin, telling her I never ate biscuits, which was actually true, since it never occurred to me to buy them. I almost began to say this, then held back at the last moment. The fact is that I hate people giving me things under any circumstances; it is demeaning, it subjects you. But to show this openly looks like weakness. Something of an impasse. So I held back, I said nothing, I just looked at her.
This I was able to do as she was for the moment distracted, she was burrowing in her capacious handbag for something, a hankie as it turned out, so I had a short period of grace in which to regard her undetected. Tonight she was wearing her hair loose and she had on a dark blue woollen jumper and a rather narrow-fitting grey skirt which came down to just above the knees. She usually wore loose, smocky sorts of things, but the jumper, without being very tight, showed Miss Lily’s straight shoulders and the shape of her breasts. There was something I recognized as characteristic in her movements as she searched in the bag, a sort of total intensity of purpose, as if for these few moments nothing else existed in the world. She looked up and caught my eye on her. “I made a good lot,” she said, “and I thought, you know, why not take some round, he probably doesn’t get homemade shortbread all that often.”
“Well, that is quite true, he doesn’t,” I said. “The right day for gifts, in any case, on the anniversary of his wedding day.”
“I didn’t know you had been married.”
“Two hundred and ten years ago today he married Frances Nisbet at Nevis in the West Indies.”
“Oh, you were talking about him.” A silence followed, during which Miss Lily seemed to be considering or absorbing something. Then she said, “I didn’t know.”
“The whole thing is in my book. You have typed it out at my dictation and we have revised it at least once since then. Perhaps you knew subconsciously?”
Miss Lily had flushed, though this might have been owing to the warmth of the room. “People use that word a lot, don’t they?” she said. “In my opinion, you either know something or you don’t, and I didn’t. I knew they were married on Nevis, but I had forgotten the date.”
Of course, if she truly hadn’t known, it made the symbolism of the timing stronger. This gift to me, Horatio’s sharer … “Easy to forget dates,” I said. “He met her first in the May of 1785, when he was commander of the twenty-eight-gun frigate Boreas and posted to the West Indies.”
She was some months his senior, widow of a surgeon, with an infant son, Josiah. Slender and delicate, a daughter of colonial society, her father a senior judge on the island, her uncle president of the council. A product of her time and class, parasol-wielding, tea-dispensing, intensely proper. Not original or forceful or very clever but loyal and devoted. The other woman, who was not proper at all, was waiting in the wings. She would wait without knowing for thirteen years to release the joys and torments lacking in his marriage and to share in his fame. Seven years younger than the victim-wife, outstandingly beautiful, the daughter of an illiterate blacksmith named Henry Lyon, London maidservant at the age of thirteen, then some years of modelling and occasional whoring. At sixteen she was the mistress of a wealthy young baronet who cast her out when she got pregnant. When Horatio met Fanny on the island of Nevis, Emma Hart, as she called herself then, was living in a house on the Edgware Road, installed there by Charles Greville, second son of the Earl of Warwick and the nephew of Sir William Hamilton, at that time British ambassador to Naples. Later, wanting to marry well and recoup his fortunes, Greville passed Emma on to this elderly uncle, who had seen her on a visit to London and been smitten.
The graphs of these lives are fascinating to me, the parallels, the convergences and collisions. In the centre the glittering thread of Horatio’s life, with these others running alongside, above and below, some lightly touching the thread, some giving it a twitch, some clinging. That May, when Horatio met his wife-to-be, Emma was sitting for portraits to Romney, who painted her in a bewildering variety of attitudes; Hardy, who was to give the dying Horatio his last kiss, was a sixteen-year-old midshipman in the Channel Fleet; Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, had just been taken out of Eton on grounds of invincible stupidity; Napoleon Bonaparte was a sulky cadet at the Military School in Paris.
I did not speak to Miss Lily of these presences hovering over his wedding day. In fact, we did not talk much more about Horatio’s wedding. I mentioned—still clutching the tartan tin—that his “people,” the crew of the Boreas, gave him a silver watch, which they had clubbed together to buy. “A very handsome gift,” I said. “They didn’t have much money, you know. But then, he was always greatly loved.”
Miss Lily made no reply to this. She had never seemed much impressed by this quality of Horatio’s. Charisma, we would call it today, the devotion he inspired in crew after crew, the way his men would follow him wherever he led and be ready to lay down their lives for him. This great gift—for we must call it that—which I so much admired and which so moved me, seemed to leave Miss Lily quite cold. Perhaps a question of gender. All the same, in some obscure way I was disappointed. I wanted her to see how wonderful Horatio was. She smiled now, but it was not a smile that occupied much of her face. “Well,” she said, “it’s his wedding anniversary, not yours. You can’t expect silver watches.”
I could have said much to that: nothing that ever happened to Horatio did not also happen to me. I had stood with him that Sunday morning in the great drawing room of Montpelier House, the president’s mansion, where they were married; I had stood beside Fanny, who wore a gown of Irish lace. She was given away by Prince William Henry, son of King George III, a personal friend. Toasts and speeches, to which we replied with grace and wit and a likable sincerity. Arm in arm down the steps of polished teak, out into brilliant sunshine. Behind us the immaculate house with its white wood gables and verandahs. Arm in arm on the flawless lawns, kept trim and vivid by generations of faithful blacks. We assemble in the shade of the great silk-cotton tree. Popping corks. We are surrounded by well-wishers, all dressed in light colours, the men in satin suits, the ladies in summer dresses, smiling in the tinted shade of parasols. Beyond the terraced gardens and the parkland, as far as the eye can see, the smooth green sweep of the sugarcane fields …
“Nothing left of it now,” I said. “Someone was talking about it at the club.”
“The house they got married in, where Fanny lived with her uncle. Nothing left but a pair of stone gateposts. Thank you very much for the biscuits, I look forward to having them with my tea in the mornings.” I resolved as I spoke to find some way of reciprocating this gift and so cancelling it out, something on my part stronger, more lordly. For the moment, however, no ideas came to me.
I remember some degree of tension developing between us later on, during our session of work. I sensed that Miss Lily was dissatisfied, or disappointed rather, because I was proposing to bypass, for the time being, Horatio’s sojourn in Naples and Palermo, the period between September 1798 and June 1800. I told her I was not ready to deal with it; there were so many revisions of one sort or another, I could not even dictate it, I would have to make a fair copy. The real reason was that I could not yet determine the part Horatio had played in the surrender of the Neapolitan republicans, could not yet find a path for him out of that marsh. I knew that Miss Lily, though it was not in her character to admit it, had been looking forward to dealing with this period of his life. She did not care so much about Horatio’s triumphs at sea—to my mind the most essential part of him—but she took a close interest in his life on land. And of all Horatio’s land experience, his stay in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was by far the most colourful and dramatic, comprising his hero’s welcome in Naples, the love affair with Emma blossoming in the hothouse of the Bourbon court, the ménage à trois that resulted, the flight of the royal family as the French closed in, Horatio’s dealings with the republican rebels, and much else besides. And here was I, proposing to go round it and resume in the June of 1800, date of Horatio’s recall to England.
As I say, I could not tell her the true reason, could not explain how important it was for me to preserve his name and reputation, how the remotest suggestion of deceit on his part filled me with a sort of dread, as if it called my own existence into doubt, as if my being depended on his truth. However, we were able to go as far as the triumphant arrival, one of my favourite passages so far in the book. He anchored in the bay on September 22, just a week from his fortieth birthday, after a voyage of 1300 miles from the mouth of the Nile. I had decided to include extracts from Horatio’s letter of September 25, written to Fanny, in which he describes his arrival and the meeting with the Hamiltons. My own comments were interspersed with these extracts, so the whole thing had to be dictated.
Alongside came my honoured friends: the scene was terribly affecting; up flew her ladyship, and exclaiming, “Oh God, is it possible?” she fell into my arm more dead than—
“Did you say arm?” Miss Lily said. “Oh yes, I see, he only had one by this time, didn’t he?” She giggled a bit. “Sorry.”
I made no reply to this but observed a pause before continuing in order to mark my disapproval of the interruption. I hope some day to have the pleasure of introducing you to Lady Hamilton, she is one of the very best women in this world. How few could have made the turn she has. She is an honour to her sex …
I paused again here, as I wished to insert some speculations that I had written the evening before about Fanny’s reactions to these words. It was typical of Horatio’s frank and enthusiastic nature that he should write in such terms to a wife so conventional, so far away and lonely, who must have known Emma’s fame as a beauty, must have known too about her earlier career as mistress to the rich.
“One wonders,” I began, “what Lady Nelson would privately have made of—”
But Miss Lily was not typing. She was sitting inactive at the keyboard. After a moment she turned to me with an expression of perplexity I knew at once to be false. She said, “What does that mean, an honour to her sex?”
Now this was not, strictly speaking, a legitimate question for Miss Lily to ask; it did not arise from any difficulty in carrying out her task of typing. That she should ask it at all—and even more that I should attempt to answer it—was a mark of the changed relations between us and her talent for taking over the ground.
“He was paying her a compliment,” I said. “He thought she did credit to her sex.”
“No, but what does it mean?” Her face wore the same expression as when she had talked about Scott of the Antarctic.
I tried again. “He thought her a fine example of womanhood.”
“Nelson was a fine example of manhood, I suppose.”
The grotesqueness of this understatement almost made me laugh aloud. “Only the finest this nation has ever produced or ever will.”
“Could someone writing about him say he was an honour to his sex?”
I thought for a moment, Miss Lily’s eyes intently on me. “Well, not in so many words.”
“It is words we are talking about, isn’t it? Could it mean he was brave or had a good character or that there was something special about him, like he was very strong or …” Miss Lily’s indignation wavered a bit. “Something physical,” she said. “Could it be that?”
“No, I don’t think so.” I was growing weary of this conversation, for which, after all, I was paying at the rate of fifteen pounds an hour.
“It isn’t what you would call logical, that’s all I am saying,” Miss Lily said.
“It meant something to Horatio, and that is the point at issue, in my opinion. You have to think historically.” But this was something, I had already discovered, that Miss Lily never did. She used the past tense, but she had no sense of the past at all. Everything and everybody lived in a perpetual present in her mind.
She looked at me now in silence for a moment or two, compressing her lips as if considering how to reply. The expression gave an unaccustomed severity to her face, slightly increasing the prominence of her cheekbones, thinning out the rather full lower lip. “Well,” she said, “instead of talking about honour to her sex and so forth, he should have had the sense to see that she was just making a big scene of it. How long had she known he was on the way—three or four weeks, wasn’t it? She had plenty of time to get the act together.”
“Perhaps we could move on?” I said. I spoke rather coldly. It was true, of course, that Horatio was simple-hearted and devoid of guile, but I didn’t like Miss Lily’s tone; it reflected on his intelligence. She was not much taken with Emma, that was obvious—but I didn’t want to lose more time discussing the matter, I was keen to make the two-year hop, to reach the haven of June 1800, the departure from Naples.
All the same, we had not proceeded far when there was another interruption. I was dictating a passage very much altered and revised, describing the return to England of Horatio and the Hamiltons. A strange trio they must have seemed to those who met them at this time: the admiral so wizened, so decked with stars and medals, returning to popular applause and establishment disfavour; Sir William not far from his end, his face like parchment, his liver in ruins after thirty-six years at the Naples court; Emma large and flaunting and noisy, heavier now but beautiful still, facing an uncertain future in England, on affectionate terms with both husband and lover, as were these with each other. Tria juncta in uno, they called themselves: three joined in one. The motto of the Order of the Bath, to which both men belonged. Emma’s phrase, perhaps. Horatio could never have said it; he was joined with no-one, ever, he was unique. He travelled with them, yes; so much is true. As a trio they did not make a good impression, at least not on their compatriots. I was obliged to admit this, though it pained me that he could be so misjudged. It was not any fault of his. He was on land, he was in travesty. And he was envied. In my book I was intending to quote a passage from General Sir John Moore’s diary as typical of this prejudice against him. In the summer of 1800, in Leghorn, Moore made a brief note: Sir William and Lady Hamilton were there attending the Queen of Naples. Lord Nelson was there attending on Lady Hamilton. He is covered with stars, ribbons and medals, more like a Prince of the Opera than the Conqueror of the Nile. It is really melancholy to see a brave and good man, who has deserved well of his country, cutting so pitiful a figure.
Moore did not remark on the strangest fact of all: Rear-Admiral Lord Nelson of the Nile and of Burnham Thorpe was returning home overland. It was a decision that had always perplexed me. An admiral recalled after famous victories, his flagship waiting in the bay … I was arriving at this point now in my dictation.
“In Nelson’s life, as in all lives, there were concurrent paths, lines running in parallel, each characterized by a cluster of attributes particular to itself, appearing simple in stated form but complex and subtle in suggestion. The obvious broad division in Nelson’s case was between sea life and land life. At sea he was himself, he was performing the task for which he was gloriously fitted; on land he sometimes faltered, his faculties lost the concentration of genius they possessed at sea. Why then, in that June of 1800, did he choose to return home by land? Was it for the pregnant Emma’s sake, because she was unwilling to face the long voyage? Had Sir William some business to see to on the way? Or was it that Nelson himself was anxious to postpone—”
But Miss Lily had paused again. Without looking at me—she was regarding the screen of her computer—she said, “I have a good idea why they went by land.”
I became aware of needing patience, a considerable store of it. “Have you?”
“It was the obvious choice, really. I mean, they were a travelling show by this time, weren’t they?”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Everybody knew about them in advance, wherever they went. So the more places they went to, the better, that’s all I am saying. From the point of view of the spectacle, that is. It was like a tour. I mean, they took risks going by land, didn’t they? Napoleon had just defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo. He was invading Italy again. Their carriage passed within a mile of the French outposts. It would have been much safer by sea, but that way they wouldn’t have been able to put on the show, would they? Trieste, across Slovenia, then through the Alps to Klagenfurt and Vienna, then Prague and Dresden, then all those little courts in Germany, all the way to Hamburg. Everywhere they went, fireworks, bands playing, spectators by the thousand. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It was a show, they were stars—that’s all I am saying.”
For some moments, hearing her say these things about Horatio, hearing her compare this greatest of men to a travelling player, I felt a mixture of fury and distress that I was afraid might have drained the blood from my face. I turned away from her in a pretence of looking at the shelves of books, as if in search of some reference. I could not read the titles; agitation blurred my sight. But I felt no urge to move round behind her, no impulse to renew that terrible scrutiny. All I wanted was to hide my feelings. She was immune, and somehow she knew it. I cannot describe my sense of this more exactly. It was as if she had got inside my guard.
However, something else came now into mind, the disturbance in my feelings settled into a kind of curiosity. Still with my face turned away, I said, “How is it that you know so much about the circumstances of the journey, the route they took and so forth? We haven’t done this part before.”
“I got a book out of the library.”
At this I turned to face her. She was sitting quite composed, her hands resting quietly on either side of the keyboard. “What book?” I asked her.
“It’s about the three of them, Nelson and the Hamiltons. It’s by a man called Russell.”
“I know the book. I’ve got it here.” I made a gesture towards the shelves. I was touched, deeply, inordinately, that Miss Lily had shown this interest, had taken the trouble to borrow this book from the library. My rage was forgotten. “Quite good,” I said. “A bit on the chatty side.”
“That’s what I like about it.” She smiled suddenly, her first real smile of the whole evening. It occurred to me now that her sharpness of tone, her tendency to interrupt, those disrespectful remarks about Horatio, might have been due simply to wounded feelings at my seeming to doubt her word in the matter of his wedding date. (I was wrong about this, as it turned out. She continued to argue and interrupt on a regular basis.)
I don’t know how it happened—an accidental combination of circumstances, the smile, this moment of perception coming after my rage, a desire to trump the shortbread biscuits: before I knew it, I was asking Miss Lily if she would like to go to Portsmouth one of these days to visit HMS Victory, Horatio’s flagship, now permanently docked there.
“Well, that would be nice.” Miss Lily’s eyes were bright and helplessly steady and somehow relentless. “Get a bit of sea air,” she said. “It would have to be a Saturday.”