THOUGH AMORAL in important matters, Greville was strict in trifles, and insisted upon a duenna, so Mrs. Cadogan went along.

As the sittings progressed, and there were to be more than three hundred of them, she spent most of her time reorganizing the kitchen. Romney came from their own part of the world. The three of them understood each other at once. No matter what their vices, they were all innocent in a most venal town, and if Mrs. Cadogan was perhaps less innocent than they were, why that only improved her cooking, which was a blessing, considering what Romney generally ate. Within the confines of the studio they were quite gay, like prisoners in Bedlam, who do not care where they are.

“And where is your wife, Mr. Romney?” asked Mrs. Cadogan, a woman’s first question to any seemingly single man.

“At home where she belongs, I trust.” Romney liked women well enough. It was only their company he could not abide. Their company fell short of the ideal. And answering a woman’s second question before it was put, with a glance at the stack of portraits in the corner, waiting for delivery, he added: “She is well provided for.”

“And your children?” Mrs. Cadogan persisted.

“With my wife. I would prefer that in their younger years they had some experience of the country, which is wholesome, so I am told.” Though it was all very well for Reynolds to do the Honourable This or That as the Infant Samuel, that was by no means the same as having the pudgy things pewling about underfoot. No doubt Reynolds loved children, but Reynolds was a bachelor, and so could well afford the sentiment. Sentiment is not the same as rocks in one’s best asphaltum, and three pounds’ worth of chrome yellow expended upon the funeral of a dead cat.

“Sir, you need a woman’s care,” said Mrs. Cadogan, unimpressed.

“The char comes in every second Wednesday. I also need peace and quiet.”

Neither one of them had won. It was therefore necessary, as it is after inconclusive battles, to declare an entente cordiale. Mrs. Cadogan sailed off to the kitchen. He was, she confided afterward, a dear old gentleman.

He was nothing of the sort. He was merely a boy tortured by a vision he could not even see, who drew very badly, and who was forty-eight; in short, as lonely as a genius, even if he was not one.

“Ah,” he said, “the music of the spheres,” for he had heard a kettle boiling. Inside of two weeks the studio reeked of boiled cabbage, shepherd’s pie, jam tarts, Yorkshire pudding, brown Windsor soup, baked widgeon, jugged hare, blood pudding, venison patty, suet roly-poly, and all those other treats of the commonalty which in Edgware Row could be served only on the sly.

“She is a wonder,” Romney said to Hayley. “She can sit for hours immovable, and yet her face is never still. In the face she can be anything. In short, she is so vivacious that, tell me, what does Greville see in her?”

“He reads to her.”

Which he did. He hoped, by example, to rid her of her native Doric, or failing that, of those tones in it which made the Boston Stump sound like a dance. He instructed her as one would address oneself to the elocution of a parrot, but his voice was a drone, and do what she would, Emma could not drone. She was too happy. Mr. Romney had asked her to come back again.

“It is useless,” said Greville. “But her French is not too bad.”

It was better than his own, since the proper English always speak that tongue as though groping around in a hip tub for the soap they cannot find but on which they have no desire to slip when they get out to dry themselves with their native tongue.

Serena was disposed of, but Greville had commissioned a three-quarter portrait (that being the cheapest size). Romney proposed to paint her in a poke bonnet, with a toy spaniel in her lap.

“What are you looking for, dear child?”

“The spaniel,” said Emma, with a disappointed air.

“The spaniel is hypothetical,” he assured her gravely. She was the most entrancing personage, the ideal daughter, and he had produced mostly far from ideal, and solemn, if reverend, sons.

“You mean it isn’t here?”

“It isn’t here,” said Romney.

“It never is, is it?” said Emma, and gave him a quizzical look.

So the next Thursday there was a toy spaniel which yapped and barked and relieved itself against a full-length portrait of Lord North.

“The dear thing. How I wish I could take it home.”

“You may if you wish.”

“Oh no, I mayn’t. Greville has a rooted horror of the animate; he has never explained why. But it is part of his system, I expect.”

So the spaniel stayed in the studio, to its own vast relief, with a soft-boiled egg in the morning and kitchen scraps, until Emma forgot the pretty thing and he could give it away. Romney did not mind. It was a happy time for him, his only one.

It was a very happy time.

I am an old man, he thought, with a few cronies. The only part I play in their lives is the part I play when I am asking to visit them. I sit inside the dungeon of myself, a room as large as this studio and just as empty. I paint portraits the way a prisoner cards jute, and sometimes, if it is not always winter, there is a ray of pallid sunlight for a few minutes in the morning, before I cloud over again; though all the sun does is show the rings and shackles in the opposite wall, and the dust. I have waited in vain for the jailer’s pretty daughter to unbolt the door with a metallic clang, and open it. I was a young man once, but now my only visions are a purely physiological phenomenon occasioned by pressure when I blink in the dark, when the inchoate roils; the only light, the dead cells in the eye, for the inchoate is uncreatable, for I do not know where to begin.

But now the jailer’s pretty daughter comes regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and would come every day if she or I were free, and so the dark is light enough. I do not mind carding my jute.

She had become an obsession. He saw her everywhere, most clearly perhaps, because surrounded by a nimbus, where she was not.

*

Emma, too, seemed happier, more like her portrait, fresh painted, which had joined Paulus Potter and Thais in the library, with another ordered to balance it—Emma as Spinstress, half cottage ornée, half Graeae. But except for basking in the improved temperature, Greville scarcely noticed. Like Romney, he had been overwhelmed by a ray of hope. His uncle’s wife was dead.

“Good news, what, Charles?” said Towneley, in his best poke-a-stick-at-a-hedgehog way.

Greville curled into himself.

“I mean, since you are the favored nephew, no doubt you will inherit his wife’s estates, given he does not marry again and produce young.” Sir William was not only a doting uncle, he was also a childless man.

Greville did not consider this remark well-bred. It smacked of the frank.

“He is coming to England.”

“In that case you will be making a trip to Wales, I expect,” said Towneley. “Lady Hamilton’s estates are in Wales, are they not?”

Greville curled tighter than ever. Towneley was amused. When he was a boy, a gamekeeper had once given him a hedgehog which he had fed sweet milk from a tube, and in time it, too, had uncurled and eventually died. Towneley, who like most eunuchs, was afflicted with immortality, poured the sherry—a plump, complacent Jupiter, with money of his own.

“He is bringing, I believe, a vase.”

Greville was alarmed. “That is not a matter to be spoken of.”

“Like what song the Sirens sang, and what name Hercules took among women? Alcmene, I expect; he was a mother’s boy and stuck with the heel of memory, like a crust of old bread. But I would like to see the vase.”

He saw the vase. He always saw everything, for his principles were sound; when you cannot wheedle, threaten and—if possible—do both, for the best doors are not only closed, but have two locks.

So one day Emma saw from her window a tall, lean gentleman who looked very like Greville, but a Greville made out of some more durable material—say bronze—accompanied by Greville and a packing case, descend from a carriage in front of her door. Since she had been told not to come downstairs until summoned, all she knew about him for the time being was that the two men went into the library and closed the door.

She was late for Mr. Romney, and had no desire to linger; if that was Sir William, she already had heard enough about him to be terrified. He was, said Greville, a very grand personage: a Knight of the Bath, a Minister Plenipotentiary, a man of impeccable taste, a member of the Royal Society, an Intimate of Royalty, an expert alike upon Correggio and Vesuvius. He played the flute and ate young women raw, and what on earth was she to say to him, and should she curtsy?

*

“Oh, George, George, I do get so tired of nothing but ladies and gentlemen!” she said. If it was not a cri de coeur, it was most certainly a cri de cour. If one does not know French properly, one can form these puns.

“The expression is perfect; don’t budge,” said Romney, and sketched rapidly. He had discovered that the knowledge that she could hold a pose made it easier for him to work fast.

“And what am I to be this time, George?”

Romney looked at his canvas. “Cassandra,” he decided, “for no one would listen to her then, and I have not the time to listen to you now.”

It was a circular portrait, to fit Hayley’s wainscoting, and one of the best things he had ever done. And what was more, here he was right now, in front of the easel, doing it spontaneously, without the need to plan it in advance. It was a Cassandra, however, eager, dubious, young; without one prophecy as yet fulfilled; hurt by childhood perhaps, but not as yet, thank goodness, by life.

“Emma, may the Gods keep you as you are,” he said, brushing busily.

She seemed puzzled. She did not understand. It was just that added nuance needed to show Cassandra when young, for the young are always puzzled. He set it down.

Jumping from the dais, she came to watch.

“Why, George, that’s how I used to look. Now how did you ever guess that?”

He felt a pang, for it was true. She was growing up. She would never again look the way she used to look. He must hurry to catch it.

“And how do you think you look now?” he asked. “Look around and show me.” He waved a marl stick at the studio.

In thirty different attitudes, not counting sketches, which were littered everywhere, there she was, as a Bacchante, as Miranda, as Nature, as St. Cecilia, as Euphrosyne, as Cassandra again, as Sensibility, as Alope, as Circe, as Allegro, as every dream he’d ever had, and all the same imaginary woman, with a chaste body, and everything an attitude.

“As Ariadne, I think,” she said. “It does look so respectable, as though I’d never come from anywhere, as though I just was.”

He was disappointed. It was merely a pretty portrait. “My dear, you transcend the respectable. You are the thing itself.” he said. “And like the real, you can imitate anything.”

She giggled. “Did you know I was the goddess Hygeia once?”

He blinked. Warren Hastings had sent home from India some extracts from the ‘Bhagavad-Gita,’ with notes, and reincarnation had struck him as a wistful notion.

“Well, I was,” said Emma, and looked stubborn. “At Dr. Graham’s Temple of Health in Adelphi Terrace. It was ever so funny. I posed before old gentlemen up to their necks in hot mud—like this.” She struck an attitude. “I wore a real Greek costume, too.”

“You did what?”

“After I got tired of being pinched by Dr. Budd and selling apples, which wasn’t much better, and falling in love with Captain Knight …” She had forgotten about that. Love was not the same as gratitude or affection or security. Indeed it had been quite terrible, as she remembered. Then she forgot it again and laughed. At Mr. Romney’s she was allowed to laugh. Greville did not like it. So she did an imitation of one of Greville’s taut little smiles instead. The effect was startling. For a moment Greville flitted across her face, and then he was gone, as though he had never been, and the face was as placid as before.

“It was either sink or swim,” said Emma, “and they paid me a shilling a day. I left because he wanted me to demonstrate the Celestial Bed upstairs as well, and that was going too far. But he said he was sorry I did not find the work to my taste, which was nice of him.”

Romney found her better than a magic-lantern show, a hundred expressions, all different, all luminous. But he knew better than to ask what they meant. Besides, probably she did not know.

“Do you think,” he asked, “that you could manage a Grief?”

She was not sure. She ransacked mythology. “Who was Grief?” she asked.

Romney did not know mythology well, but had been commissioned by Alderman Boydell to do a fancy piece for the Shakespeare Gallery, and if that was successful, perhaps more than one. “Cordelia,” he said.

“Oh yes, of course,” said Emma, and without hesitation—now that she knew who had felt it—did Grief perfectly.

*

But when Romney was alone and Emma was gone and the fashionable or at any rate rich sitters had gone, and his work was done for the day, or after he had come home by himself after dinner at a tavern with friends, he lit a lamp in the echoing silence of the studio and went from picture to picture; and sometimes, instead of going to his narrow bed, would doze in a chair in the studio. When he woke, at foggy dawn, in the flannel light, there she was still, his niece, his inspiration, his company, his better self. For George Romney was an ugly, disappointed man. He could only draw beauty. And here, at last, after years of the most impeccable drudgery, was beauty to draw. Even those shapeless, desperate, blobby nightmares in sepia were now made bearable by taking on Emma’s gestures and Emma’s face.

He wept for joy. He had at last become a painter. She had transubstantiated him. Even his paid portraits now came to resemble Emma, in gesture, in expression, so that hers not theirs became the fashionable look and was bearable, since now she was the fashion. So when Alderman Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery opened and the “Cordelia” was shown, she performed that highest creative act of which woman is capable, and the only one she ever has any use for: she launched a new fad. You saw the Emma look everywhere.

Greville was annoyed.

“I told her to dress simply, and now simplicity has become the fashion, however am I to get her to return to her senses and dress plain?” he demanded, certain, in a woman’s world, of but one thing—that cheap muslin would rise in price and the cost of ribbon soar enormously.

Nor was he wrong.

*

Emma had come home to find Sir William standing before the mantelpiece, and had not been frightened one bit, for he had gone out of his way—which was not far—to please her. He seemed to know exactly what to say to a person, as though to give pleasure gave him pleasure and had nothing to do with the proprieties. She could romp with him when she chose, and called him Pliny the Elder, for fun; the Younger being Greville, though the Younger Pliny was an astute, pushy, contrived young man, far too concerned with the family properties at Stabiae.

*

They were in the garden, under the lilac tree, where the late summer sunlight was like pale tea not steeped long enough. Sir William was making invidious comparisons.

“… whereas in Naples the sun shines every day, and if there is a cloud, it is out of Tiepolo,” he said.

Emma did not know who Tiepolo was.

“Like Canaletto, except that he paints well,” explained Sir William. “You must see one. You have the Tiepolo look.” He was wrong. One cannot have the Tiepolo look without a cicisbèo, which requires maturity of outlook, and Emma was not yet eighteen.

The sky lacking Neapolitan consistency, they went indoors to open the packing cases, from one of which Sir William extracted the Barberini, the Byres, the Hamilton, and he hoped what was to be next, the Portland, vase, a squat, ugly jar of indeterminate color, cluttered with shrubbery and figures of white glass in cameo.

“Not only is it unique, but it may well have contained the ashes of Alexander the Great,” said Sir William firmly. “We may expect eighteen hundred guineas, at the least.”

“But where shall we put it?” wailed Emma, who did not altogether feel at her ease in a house where everything was beautiful but nothing ever stayed put for long, except the furniture, though she always put Mrs. Cadogan’s gin bottle in a good safe place, in case the sideboard should be moved in the night.

“In a good collection, I hope,” said Sir William. “We have saved it for England, and no doubt at a tidy profit, too. But Greville must see to that.” He was in a good mood. He had taken the death of his wife Catherine with equanimity, for not only was he gracious to others, but—a man who lived up to his own principles—he saw no point in causing himself undue pain.

With Emma he was pleased and agreeably surprised, since he was slightly deaf in the right—or woman’s side at any table—ear. She was a living statue. He was not without his human side, but then, he did not happen to find statuary inhuman. No matter what incongruous instrument she might be at, Emma fell into marmoreal poses naturally, as though Niobe had been pushed before a harpsichord; her breath had the soft cool freshness of marble, and all in all, she was a creature worthy the approbation of Winckelmann or Mengs. He went away delighted.

*

“My nephew,” he said next day at the Royal Society, to Sir Joseph Banks, “has got himself a pretty miss.”

“My God, how?”

Sir William looked put out. He was fond of his nephew. Charles was one of his hobbies, and one gets fond of any toy. Unfortunately he was also fond of the truth, so long as that deity could be kept at a distance, discreetly draped. Truth he saw always as a garden statue—the best procurable copy, maybe even an original, something at any rate with a pedigree dating back to Lord Arundel’s collection—at the end of an allée, backed by box, to improve the view. It had to be there, but on the other hand, one seldom went down that way. Sir Joseph and he, however, were old cronies.

“I do not know,” he said. “She is naïve. She has yet to learn ingratitude.”

“Some of us don’t, you know,” said Sir Joseph.

“Perhaps not. But they throw scenes.” He was thinking of his wife, a conformable heiress whose career of discreet invalidism had so recently been rounded off by the appropriate distinction of death. She had played the harpsichord well (he had played the flute), and sometimes he looked around to say something to her, in the late afternoon, and found she was not there. She had not thrown scenes, but she had made her presence palpable. Greville’s toy had made him lonely.

“She is called the Fair Teamaker of Edgware Row,” he explained, aware that that mincing, sneering tone proper to the ton did not always convey one’s true feelings.

“You must take me to meet her. At times one tires of botany,” said Sir Joseph.

“If I go, I shall.”

“You will go,” said Sir Joseph, grunted, and swiveling around to a large folio volume on a lectern, began to display something that interested him: a series of engravings of landfalls, all similar, all different, meticulously drawn by the cartographer. He would never travel himself. He was too happy at his club. He was too happy with the Royal Society. But he would very much have liked to see a landfall one day from the sea; and when he looked at dried botanic specimens, he did so as a modern man would wistfully examine travel brochures. These are the places I shall never go. They are the more beautiful for that.

As for Sir William, no matter how he might ape the pococurante, he was only waiting to be interested in something, for there was something wild, hurt and congenial about him. Though distant, he was a good man to drink with, and no fool.

“The Little Teamaker of Edgware Row,” said Sir Joseph. “It sounds like one of Michael Kelley’s songs.”

“It is like that, and when the performance flags, they actually wave real flags, to perk you up, like street buskers.”

“Who, Charles and his doxy?”

“She is not a doxy,” said Sir William, determining to take a carriage to Edgware Row. His curiosity was piqued, as it would have been by any odd animal in a raree show. One goes because it is a novelty, but puts up with it for ten years because it is a pet. He looked out the window at nothing in particular and fidgeted to get back to Naples. I am an Englishman. I find England congenial. Nothing else is quite so congenial. And yet I miss the sun. I miss the bay. I miss the inconsequence of their quarrels. I miss the fruit.

“And what is that one?” he asked, pointing to one of Sir Joseph’s series of almost indistinguishable coasts.

“They have yet to be lettered, but I believe it is Mooréa. An island in the South Seas. She is an English beauty, all peaches and cream, and speaks her native Doric still, so they say.”

“Oh her native Doric,” said Sir William. “It is strange, we get these phrases from Greece and Rome, and yet I have never been to either. As a matter of fact, it is a light and coarse voice, but singularly pleasing.”

“Charles would destroy the world, out of the foible that he is competent to save it,” said Sir Joseph. “But fortunately he does not know how to begin. I have imported some breadfruit trees.”

“Breadfruit trees?” Sir William had been thinking.

“Oh, they do not bear loaves, like something out of Sir John Mandeville, but their fruit is edible, and the leaf beautiful. No matter what we do to harm them, there are still a few harmless creatures in this world. Why not go to see her?”

“She belongs to Charles.”

“Nothing belongs to Charles but a few pieces of pinchbeck, and nothing ever will,” said Sir Joseph. “He is himself pinchbeck, and besides, if she pours tea and you drink it and it is good tea, what’s the harm in it?”

“You must come to Italy; the strawberries are delicious. Small, and feral and bitter. The trouble is, I like her. It is much more dangerous than a passion, for a passion soon ends.”

“In that case, I shall travel with my own sugar,” said Sir Joseph, “in a castor.” And he shut up his portfolio of landfalls. “I doubt if she gets much female company, poor dear, so perhaps the male will do. Take me along.”

Sir William took him along.

*

It occurred to Greville that he had seldom seen so many pawky gentlemen in such congenial circumstances. The Teamaker of Edgware Row was invaluable. But though he had told her to flirt with his uncle, he had not told her to flirt with him that much. The girl was forward. She presumed. One tires of every toy in time. A rest from each other would do them both good, but it must be an inexpensive rest. And what is cheaper than home? She should go to Park Gate, where her grandmother kept the child. Sir William and he were off to inspect the family property in Wales.

*

Emma burst in upon Romney, her eyes sparkling with fright. He always marveled at her eyes. Only when sleepless did they have that poached-cod look inevitable to the lower classes from which she had sprung.

“I am to be cast out. Abandoned!” she cried. “I need your help.”

“What you mean is, you need to talk,” he said. Her emotions were too fluid. For this he would need water color. Where the hell was a pliable brush?

It was what always happened. As soon as you settled comfortably in, once the nasty part was over, to be the hoyden younger sister, the favorite niece, even at last the wife, once you had relaxed, they flung you out. But that was not something she wanted to say to George.

“I am to be sent to Chester while they go to Wales.”

“In that case you can visit your daughter.”

She had forgotten she had told him about that. She wished she had not.

“And your grandmother, too. You are fond of your grandmother.”

“Oh that was a world away, and I shall never be allowed to come back,” cried Emma, and sobbed away with a will.

“Of course you shall,” said George, but wondered, with panic, if she might not be right. He had hundreds of sketches of her. He could work from those. But that was by no means the same thing as being able to work with Emma there.

He proposed a game of blindman’s buff, for he was a selfless man, so what with sticking his left foot through the hands of Mrs. Hope Devis (due Thursday) and one thing and another, he soon made her forget her woes, which was just as well, for she would be left alone with them soon enough.

As so would he. Mrs. Hope Devis was too much the parvenu to put up with patching, and so the whole thing would have to be fresh done tonight.

Emma took a look around the studio, as though for the last time, which is what she always did in any house, surprised, if she came back, not to find that it was still there but that she was, and went to Chester.

*

“The chief peculiarity of Wales,” said Greville, stumbling on a piece, “is the prevalence of igneous rock.”

“When you have conquered Vesuvius with a hired guide, Cadr Idris is an inferior peak, though Wilson, except for his portraits, is a wrongly neglected painter,” said Sir William. “There is his view of Tivoli. There is his view of this. Though it is a pity,” he added, peering round at the fog, “that this so seldom has a view.”

“If you put money into the property instead of taking money out, we could make Milford Haven a port and double the revenue.”

“No doubt,” said Sir William. “But for whom, lad, for whom?”

Greville blushed.

“By the way, my niece Mary has sold the vase,” said Sir William mildly. “You are a good boy, Charles, but you dawdle overmuch.”

“Mary gossips.”

“And what does she say?”

“That you have been seen too much with Emma and have taken her to Reynolds to have her portrait done.”

“Well, so I have. So where’s the gossip now?”

“She is as perfect a thing as can be found in all nature, I will not have her traduced.”

“She is better than anything in nature; in her particular way she is finer than anything to be found in antique art. So why should I not have her portrait by Reynolds if I wish? In his own way, he, too, transcends art. Indeed, he has very little to do with it. In those circumstances I consider the painter and the subject felicitously matched.”

“Then you do like her?”

“I like her appearance,” Sir William said cautiously. “Just what was it vou and Mary had in mind?”

“Her voice is shrill.”

“Her voice, fiddlesticks. There’s nothing wrong with her voice. She’s a country girl, that’s all. The world is not Middlesex, Charles, even though the world, for some inscrutable reason, chooses to live there. It is all very well for Towneley to speak of prunes and prisms, but a large, generous mouth is worth it all.”

“Then you do like her.”

“I was speaking of your cousin Mary,” said Sir William, with dignity, “who has not only accomplished the matter of the vase with her customary combination of finesse and dispatch, but has deposited eighteen hundred guineas in Coutts’ bank, sans peur, sans reproche and sans fee. I think we will now descend.”

So down into the mizzling clouds beneath their feet they went. In Wales, as usual, it was cold.

In Cheshire it was no warmer. Emma was in seaside lodgings, left to contemplate that ocean which Fanny Burney informs us is cold but pleasant, but which as far as she could see, was merely wet and damnably dull. Fanny Burney, however, had had a bathing attendant to divert her, whereas here the only human creature was an old winklewoman with a large basket and a very small catch, all grumble, beard and scratch.

“Mama?” asked Emma Carew—for so the child had been named—aged two, but nagging happily, for children are as impervious to the weather as to most things. Emma seized it with a mixture of maternity and revulsion, for the child was damp.

“Poor motherless lamb,” she said evasively, and cursed them all. It would be necessary to seat the child upon a horse to be certain of its paternity: Sir Harry had a most individual seat, whereas Greville resembled nothing so much, up there, as a pedestrian grown weary.

She bent down, all Ariadne, to inspect the child. Two years ago she had wept inconsolably to give it up, and here it was, a stranger. Tentatively, she leaned over and made noises at it.

Overhung by such generous glamor, the child smiled. Contact had been established. The terms of the treaty had been signed, including the secret clause. Whatever else happened, they would know each other now, which was harmless, delightful and no more innocent than snakes and ladders, skip the stone, Troytown, or any other game.

Forlornly, she took the child away from the beach, through the late, low sun. There had not been any letter from Greville as yet.

Once she had gone, the sandpipers rushed their invisible prayer rug up the beach, and just as incontinently, rushed it back down again. It was the hour of muezzin.

In bed that night, Emma heard no familiar sound, whereas in Edgware Row there was at least the bell-ringer who gathered people together at late hours, in order to conduct them through Hyde Park at sixpence the head, so they might not encounter footpads, shrub-lurkers and common highwaymen. That we should sleep young and alone is so shameful a waste of a perfectly good body, that despite all resolution—in the absence of any cuddly animal—she took the child to bed with her.

“Would you think it, Greville,” she wrote in the morning, “Emma—the wild, unthinking Emma—is a grave, thoughtful phylosopher. For endead, I have thought so much of your amiable goodness, when you have been tried to the utmost, that I will, endead I will, manege myself and try to be …”

Greville always skipped those bits.

“And how is she?”

“Abergale is too expensive, two and a half guineas a week; Hoylake has but three houses, not one of them fit for a Christian; they are now at Parkgate, fed by a lady whose husband is at sea, for a guinea, ten and six a week,” said Greville.

Sir William had inquired after her emotional condition, but then, Charles would not know that.

“She adds, ‘Give my dear kind love and compliments to Pliney and tell him I put you under his care and he must be answerable for you to me wen I see him. I hope he has not fell in love with any raw boned Scotch whoman.’”

Sir William smiled. “Yes,” he said. “She would add that.”

*

“I have had no letter from you yett, which makes me unhappy … My dear Greville, dont be angry but I gave my Granmother 5 guines, but Emma shall pay you,” wrote Emma. And again went out to confront the empty sea.

Mrs. Cadogan had struck up a raillery with the winklewoman, condescension in every line, but Emma preferred not. She was too disconsolate. She watched the child. She did not think she had ever been in so large and bleak and lonely a place before. Even the slight surf was surreptitious here, as though not to disturb the silence, and nowhere could she glimpse so much as the green sign of a tree. The beach was a dirty gray receding plane across which the child crawled like a white grub. In all that desolation, only the winklewoman turned around and around.

Oh God, abandoned, thought Emma. He has abandoned me.

This was unfair to Greville. Though he had thought of doing so, he had taken no action yet. Whether it was a matter of screwing his courage up, or his emotions down, Greville was always slow to act.

“If you are in bad case, you must marry; or if not marry, stand for Parliament; or failing that, do both,” said Sir William. “In any event, you must do something. You have been eligible too long. Why, at your age I had already married this.” With a wave of his hand, he indicated three flooded collieries, the family farms, Milford Haven and £5,000 a year, all he had left of a kind and loving wife’s tender solicitude, but no doubt in time it could be made to pay better.

He felt sad. Life’s larger emotions are so destructive that it is better to restrict oneself to the smaller ones. With a little effort and discipline this can be done, and they are far pleasanter. It may be submitted, however, that those restricted to the reticences of mere feeling perhaps ache the longer for it. And Sir William ached. He was tired of going home to an empty hall, and though a kept woman does well enough, she seldom knows how to keep house.

“I must say, your young woman keeps an excellent house,” he said.

“It’s the mother does that.”

“I see.”

“They are inseparable. That’s why I shall ask them to return before we do, to get the house in order.”

Sir William turned on him a look of blinding benevolence, slightly more searching than the Eddystone Light. “Charles, you plan.”

After all, I am his favorite nephew, thought Greville, gratified. He wished to manage his uncle’s estates, but how to ask?

Sir William, it appeared, was willing to hand over some, if not all. In the matter of ready cash, however, though doting, he was no fool, and would do no more than to go surety for a loan—enough to disinherit him, should he be unable to repay it promptly, but still, a loan.

“It is the best I can do. Marry, Charles. At least we know it will not be a runaway match, unless the hostler has learned how to harness a snail; but marry, do. My father married twice, and the family is none the poorer for it.”

“I would have to be unencumbered.” Athene, the goddess of wisdom, was, as we know, born full-grown from the forehead of Jove, but being a dutiful daughter, may be presumed to fly back home again when needed. Greville had just been visited by an idea.

His uncle did not appear to have heard him.

“I have always believed that Milford will rival Portsmouth and Plymouth in its time,” said Sir William, contemplating with affection two stranded dories—one with a staved-in bottom, a bit of broken rope twisted in a rusted ring—tidal ooze in the estuary, two broken-down tenements, a grogshop, half a barn, and a horse whose Creator, though an excellent colorist, had clearly had no knowledge of anatomy.

“It would be necessary to suborn the Members for Pembroke,” said Greville. Just as a painter keeps certain works by him, so was he most unwilling to part with Emma. She was not merely the best, she was also the only thing he had ever done. Nonetheless, with a little prodding here and there, the idea had been born.

He decided to be kind. He wrote to her.

*

She was holding her elbows in warm salt water to cure a rash she got when she was nervous. The letter was kindly and asked after the child. Greville’s prose was based upon the absence of concrete nouns, but by repeatedly avoiding his subject, he did in time succeed in making his meaning plain. Whatever he did not say was what he was talking about.

Emma, who had hoped to take the child back to Edgware Row, answered at once. No one, he had said, must know that it existed. But he would pay for it, all the same.

You dont know, my Dearest Greville, what a pleasure I have to think that poor Emma will be comfortable & happy. Now Emma will never expect what she never had, so I hope she will be very good, mild & attentive & we may have a deal of comfort. All my happiness is now Greville & to think that he loves me makes a recompense for all …

*

Emma prepared to leave, if sadly. It was better to give the child up.

And yet … and yet….

*

“A very proper sentiment, too,” said Greville, putting the letter aside.

“As for the form of this surety,” said Sir William, who was not only a shrewd Scots bargainer, but also at times a tease. “It shall consist of a lien against my estates, collectable only after my decease. So unless you wish to feel the pinch, manage the properties well.”

*

At Parkgate it was the end of the season, so the weather had at last turned fine. But the beach, voided of its happy families, now contained no one but the winklewoman, with here and there the soft, sudsy suspiration of a living winkle—for she was not so sharp-sighted as she used to be—and in the distance one dirty vagrant King Charles spaniel, joyously on the prowl.

*

Emma, though sprung from the people, did not happen to be trapped in the cages of their philosophy. There is something to be done, not nothing, so one need not put up with it. Nothing will turn out for the best unless we give it a good shove in the right direction. Though things will turn out for the best in time, it would be much better if they did their turning now. And though clouds may contain a silver lining, that is not where a silver lining belongs; a silver lining belongs in an opera bag.

At Cavendish Square she watched the Duchess of Argyll, with a cramp in one elbow and a strained, painted look, descend to her waiting carriage, and then herself ran up the steps.

“I’m back, George,” she cried. “I’m back!”

George came out of the shadows and took a look at her. There was nothing to see but beauty. She was a resilient girl. The rash on her elbows had disappeared.

“I missed you,” he said, and sounded as though he had, which made her look serious, for so far he was the only person in her life who ever did.

“The Duchess of Argyll has a most inconstant nose,” he said, feeling happy. “No matter where you put it, it is always either too high or too low.”

“I saw her leaving. You gave her a cramp, George, in the arm.”

“I also gave her a pleasant expression, which she did not have before. Have you time to pose? If so, whom shall you be?”

Yes, she had time to pose. To read, to sing, to pose for Romney were her only recreation. “Helen,” she said, “brought home again.”

“Cheshire is not Troy. No, today you shall be Miranda.” Humming, he set a fresh canvas up, for it had been one of his Caliban days, and Prospero was not one to prefer Ariel to his own daughter.

Greville was writing to Sir William: “Emma is very grateful for your remembrances. Her picture shall be sent by the first ship. I wish Romney yet to mend the dog.” He hoped negotiations would not be protracted.

But they were.

Sir William’s existence had been made agreeable by two excellent decisions: one within his control, the other not. He had married a woman afflicted by both fortune and delicate health. He had been made ambassador to the unimportant Court of the Two Sicilies by George III, who understood him to be a connoisseur, so no doubt he would be happier in virtuland.

He was, and had been now for twenty years. One thing that kept him there was a most un-English aptitude for eating fruit; not the woodchuck delights of apples, medlars and those austere Kentish cherries with the texture of nipples and the taste of warm blood sausage, but enormous mounds of melons, oceans of oranges, pyramids of Sicilian lemons stuffed with sherbet and then chilled, and the Arabic intensity of coarse green limes. Another was the climate. And most important was that only there could he afford to live as a Hamilton, if only a collateral Hamilton, should.

So he had managed to retain his post, by what means was unknown. Sir William preferred the strings he pulled to be invisible, an illusion at which he was vastly skilled, since the only thing he had brought with him from childhood—a condition from which he had escaped as quickly as possible—was the art of being the puppet-master of himself. He was of course unmistakably an Englishman of the better sort, which is to say, a Scotsman. He never forgot that. But still, every time he returned to Naples he felt as though a curtain had gone up. The stage was bathed in light, the figures ranted on, the music was agreeable.

He was delighted with the Romney. It would match the Reynolds he had already, and true, she was a Greek statue to the life, but he did not particularly care for sculpture in the round. He preferred his art restricted, like his life, to two dimensions, and those to be seen from in front. In these emotional matters, it cannot be denied, distance brings relief.

But neither could it be denied that he was lonely, and the mother both knew her place and how to cook a decent meal in it.

But why hurry?

*

Now everything was as it was before. Emma had gotten over her scare and was content. Sometimes Greville was there. Sometimes he was not. When she was bored, she could visit George.

But Mrs. Cadogan smelled something in the wind, and stuck her little nose up, like a groundhog at its burrow, and listened for reverberations and watched shadows. She did not like what she saw.

“Lazy girl, you have had two offers of marriage and one to be set up, on more liberal terms than here, from Greville’s friends already,” she grumbled.

“They are not friends. They come to gawk.” She would not leave Greville. It was useless to argue.

“But why? He does not even sleep with you any more.”

“Ah I know,” said Emma, snuggling farther down into the enormous bed, incurably virginal. “He is considerate even in that.”

“But have you no desire to better yourself?”

“Myself, yes; my position, no,” said Emma, and after her mother had gone, jumped up to examine herself in the mirror—all that lovely flesh, and every inch of it untouched by anyone since goodness only could remember when. She wondered what she could wear today that would please dear Greville. Something old, she supposed, for there was very little that was new.

*

“I cannot endure the poor creature. She is always there,” said Greville.

“Ah, then your uncle did take a fancy to her,” said Towneley.

“I must marry or burn, he says.”

“If I may venture to add a textual commentary, what he means is that if you marry your debts will be burned. It looks similar, but it is by no means the same thing. I know this, and yet, as you can see, I am by no means a Bible man.”

“There is the younger daughter of Lord Middleton,” mused Greville. “But I shall need thirty thousand pounds at least.”

“If you take the advice of an experienced man, you will ask for more and settle for less. It is amazing, on the whole, what you can acquire in that way, and the other way round is seldom possible.”

In Cavendish Square, George groaned, stirred, and woke into an atmosphere of roiling darkness, linseed oil and turpentine. The walls were lined with faces he could not even see. His night vision was nonexistent. A sound was what had waked him. It was the constant purring irregular motion of a spinning wheel, wettened fingers, and bobbin and thread. There was a quick, brisk, metallic snip.

“I have cut the thread,” said a voice in the dark.

“The thread is too short,” the old woman whined.

“It is always short,” said the voice in the dark.

“The next is his,” the old woman whined.

“It is long but short,” said the voice in the dark.

“Aye, it always is,” said the old woman’s whine.

Out of the darkness came a wave of breasts and arms and thighs and heads and draperies, crashed down on him, and ebbed and sobbed away again. It would be back. It always came back, and each time more featureless than before. It had already caught its only light.

George put the pillow over his head, but the spinning wheel whirred on anyway.

In Edgware Row, Emma smiled, stretched, snuggled into the comforter, and went to sleep again.

*

Not everyone matures; some have maturity thrust upon them, like a package no one else will carry. Greville, in the library downstairs, was writing letters again, for he had heard an alarming thing. Sir William was seen much these days in the company of Lady Craven, a woman apt to marry almost anyone (eventually she married the Margrave of Brandenburg-Anspach, who, whatever else might be said for him, was certainly not an Englishman), and who was still fecund. “If you did not choose a wife, I wish the Teamaker of Edgware Row was yours,” he suggested. He had been flushed. The question with Lady Craven was not whom she should marry, but who would take her. She was a dangerous, fortune-hunting woman.

*

Well, thought Sir William, why not? I am fifty-four, my position is secure, so why should I not? I need not remarry. I am a widower, and a widower is acceptable in all those places where a bachelor is not, and so need not go to the inconvenience of a wife. I do not need money. And besides, it would be agreeable to have the house well run.

Though garish in England, in this climate the Romney lacked color. However, as he remembered, its subject did not. He smiled.

*

Greville did not care for the terms. If she was merely to be packed off, where went his bargaining? He wrote Sir William:

My brother does, my nephew does not, thought Sir William. And which brother, by the way, Charles, or the Archdeacon of Raphoe? He wrote right back:

In half of that suggestion, Greville saw a solution, a way to get her out there without scenes. How pleasant of his uncle to have thought of it. He was now down to the fine work of bargaining, which is best done in the darkness of privacy, so he packed Emma off to the seaside again.

She found it much the same in Cornwall as it had been at Parkgate, except that this time there was not even a winklewoman to disrupt the view. The only grumbling here was done by the sea itself, in the motion of the tides against the pebbles, and her elbows itched again.

*

“I told you in my letter of thanks for the signed bond, that sealing and signing was nothing without a witness’s name; you will, therefore, be so good as to send it back with that addition,” wrote Greville, but raised the figures on the bond. Emma’s traveling expenses would be thirty guineas, payable in advance, and “If Lord Middleton was made sure that I was your heir, then my proposal for his daughter might meet with more favourable a reception than,” concluded Greville lamely, “if not.”

*

“Very well, have done with it,” snapped Sir William, and sent fifty pounds and signed the bond as well. Greville was too particular in his terms, as well as stingy.

*

“You must tell her,” said Greville to Mrs. Cadogan, “that all she is asked to do is to spend six months with my uncle, with yourself as chaperone.” And went to the country for the weekend. He hated scenes.

*

“George, I am to be sent to Italy for six months. It is a holiday. And Greville is to join us later.”

George broke his brush. He would have believed it if she had not said it all at once, but a woman with a joyous secret is a cautious animal and only shows you a bit of it at a time, hints at it, nags at it, brings it into the conversation, and drives you crazy until at last she consents to wear the new dress and show it to you. He heard the spinning wheel.

“We shall come back very different, I expect,” she said, with a slight quaver at the mouth.

George did not look at her, but at his easel. That was how she had looked six weeks ago.

“You have been to Italy,” she said.

“To Rome. You will see Raphael. He is a very great painter, Raphael.”

“And he will paint me too?”

“He is dead.”

“I am sorry. I forgot. There is so much to remember.” She could not sit still. “Oh, George, I am distracted. Please hold on to me.”

He held on to her.

*

Towneley stretched lazily his immaculate and silken legs, and his eyes were soft with a kind but contemptuous glow.

“You have brought it off,” he said, as though to say, Now you are locked in with me.

With a glance at the door, which was open to an empty room beyond, Greville reached for the decanter, which was half full.

*

George sat alone and wrote:

Certainly Greville did not want it; as certainly, he did not wish to let it go. It was the same with everything. He replied:

There are circumstances which force the natural bias of character and render it prudent to change the scene of action to train them to the necessary sacrifices. The separation from the original of the Spinstress has not been indifferent to me [on the contrary, it had forced him to go away for the weekend], and I am but just reconciled to it [it was now Tuesday] from knowing that the beneficial consequences of acquirements will be obtained, and that the aberration from the plan I intended will be for her benefit. I therefore can have no reason to value the Spinstress less than I have done, on the contrary the just estimation of its merits is ascertained by the offer from a person who does not know the original [though our conduct needs no justification, the world is unjust, so it behooves us not only to cover our tracks, but to explain: it was his apologia], yet I find myself daily so much poorer, that I do not foresee when I can pay for it, and I am already too much obliged to you to avail myself in any degree of your kindness to me—perhaps Mr. Christian might accept my resignation of it and pay for it, and give me the option of repurchasing if the improbable event of my increase of means [a most improbable event, for though he had quite civilly informed Lord Middleton that he thought the family amiable and the daughter interesting, his politeness had not been returned] shall enable me to recover what I now lose with regret [and so on] … I shall thus multiply the objects of expectation from better times by keeping hold of the Spinstress without postponing the payment.

As indeed he had.

But then, if we are not so fortunate as to be born of tempered steel, why then we must do the next best thing and temporize.

Indubitably he would die a bachelor.

*

They were upon the Continent. Emma had been at her most superbly theatrical. If the heart stops, beat the breast and it will soon start up again, like a turnip watch. They sat in a coach with Gavin Hamilton, the painter, a connection of Sir William’s, up on the box for company as far as Rome, though so far they were only in Dijon, opposite a charcuterie.

“Just look at the lovely sausages!” cried Mrs. Cadogan. “Pray stop.”

“My heart is broken. How can you be so cruel? I am oblivious to scenery. I am indifferent to the picturesque.”

“Ah, ducks, how can you say so?” asked Mrs. Cadogan, leering out the window with the pursy eyelids of a born cook, and she banged on the roof until the coach stopped, and then scuttled into the charcuterie, though she was back soon enough, empty-handed.

“An écu for a Polish sausage,” she said indignantly. “It is not to be borne. It is too much.”

Gavin Hamilton leaned down obligingly from the box. “Indeed, madam, it is,” he said. “Nothing is cheap in France except the people.”

So on they drove, past Avignon, past Arles, past Marseilles, Nice, Savoy, Milan, and finally Rome, where Hamilton left them and they were turned over to a Mr. Graffer, who had been sent out to Naples to install an English garden there. But he was delayed, so they continued alone until at dusk they reached Gaeta, where the air shimmers and is all overture until the babble and chatter cease, and the first arioso is there to be listened to.

It was a simple lesson in pedagogy: if the child cannot learn the lesson, supply it with an easier, more agreeable one, and thus—learning that learning is not to be feared—it may be guided through the most intricate curriculum, insulated by its ignorance, and so escape unscathed, not having learned a thing at all.

But before that it must sleep while its elders make the classroom agreeable by erasing traces of imminent toil, removing advanced pieces from the piano, and pinning funny animals on the walls.

It is the gateway to Naples, Gaeta.