THE NEWS TOOK LONGER to travel than did the cause of it. He was lost; he was dead; he was missed; he had won; he had failed; he was at Syracuse; no one knew where he was.

Emma was on the terrace of the Palazzo Sesso, looking out over the bay, which she did not notice. Like most beautiful people, she had no eye for beauty unless it be edible, wearable, or capable of being viewed in a mirror. Memory sometimes lends a grace to past scenes, which develop a pretty vignette quality, but here she was in the eternal present, which suited her, and the eternal present had no scenery. She sighed.

Miss Cornelia Knight—to whom Sir William had given house room—an arch and pained poetess, in flight from Napoleonic Rome, the orphaned daughter of Rear Admiral Knight, who traveled nowhere without her telescope, was the first to see a sloop grow larger on the other side of Procida. It was flying Our Flag. The flag grew larger. The sloop grew larger. It halted, put down a longboat, and two gentlemen dressed as captains prepared to come ashore.

In dumb show the sailors, feeling the eyes, or at any rate the telescope, of Rear Admiral Knight upon them, acted out the pantomime of something being blown up and going down for the last time. They were uncouth and unshaven, but from a distance their whites looked white, and their ill-bred gestures adequately conveyed the news.

“The Battle of the Nile has been fought and won,” said Sir William. “He has accomplished it.” And whisked Captain Capel (Captain Hoste was too hearty an English sea dog to be quite so presentable) to the palace.

Emma went too. After the anxiety of the times and the ho-hum of marriage, this excitement made a pleasant change, and she intended to make the most of it. She had discovered a new Attitude: she would Support the Fleet. What Englishman would see a moral flaw in an enthusiasm so essentially patriotic? Were they not all in Naples themselves these days, eager to catch the next boat out, and every one of them baying for the Navy?

It was the beginning of the Romantic Age. The neoclassical was fade. Coleridge was at that moment engaged in adjusting the albatross. Large, dirty, white, and hanging beak down, he had seen it once, in passing, in the window of a bird-stuffer, and ever since had longed to hang it somewhere. It haunted him. Erasmus Darwin had had his day. Wordsworth was the fashion now, alternately swooning over a daffodil and beating the pantheistic bushes with his cane, when he was able, which is to say when he was unobserved, for the impiety of bearing—without first posting the marriage bans—seed. Emma did not propose to lag behind.

The King and Queen were at dinner with their children, for since they expected daily to be crucified, they dined early. Each supper was their last. Waiting, as was only courteous, until Sir William had finished his preamble, the King, spontaneously and without prompting, rose from his seat and embraced the Queen, the Princes, the Princesses and Captain Capel, in an affecting, if perhaps affected, scene.

“Oh, my children, you are now safe!” he cried. “The throne”—and here he sat down once more in a chair that ominously creaked—“is secure.”

The Queen fell into one of the new fashionable faints, and Emma, not to be outdone, swooned away to such effect that she badly bruised her side. The Queen then brought herself to kiss her husband, whereupon both women burst into tears. Then, since fashions may come and fashions may go but the same things are always expected of royalty, she sent Captain Hoste a diamond ring from her own finger (she had put it on in order to take it off; it was one of the gift rings), six butts of wine, and to every man on board a guinea each, from an anonymous donor, since though France was not yet at war with Naples and the British Fleet could be counted on, armies unfortunately approach by land.

The populace, as usual unpredictable, or rather that nine-tenths of it which in French opinion represented a tyrannous minority, applauded the event. Captain Capel did not care for that. To date he was acquainted only with a small, self-regulating joy—an emotion as carefully to be kept in order as a repeating watch or any other expensive and exquisite gewgaw. He was an Englishman. Scenes of excessive public joy are not well-bred.

In Naples, however, the concept of breeding seemed chiefly restricted to the bloodline of a horse that comes in first. The gazettes were incandescent with sonnets, and the streets with gas. The city was illuminated for three days, the candles filched even from the altars, for surely, under the circumstances, the Virgin would not begrudge the loan. Was she not Our Lady of Victory?

Sir William and Emma received well-wishers at the Embassy door, like officiants at a rediscovered shrine. It was better than the liquefaction of St. Januarius; it meant the liquidation of the French.

“Come here, for God’s sake, my dear friend,” wrote Sir William to Nelson, “as soon as the service will permit you. A pleasant apartment is ready for you in my house, and Emma is looking out for the softest pillows to repose the few wearied limbs you have left [that is, one eye, one arm, two legs, a torso and a head, and all of it Stalky Jack].”

“My dress is from head to foot alla Nelson. Ask Hoste. Even my shawl is Blue with gold anchors all over. My earrings are Nelson’s anchors; in short, we are be-Nelsoned all over,” urged Emma.

A resourceful woman, she had flung herself upon her dressmaker instantly, for rank and file are all very well, but first things come first. Not only did she intend to call the tune (she was at the moment humming it), she would orchestrate it too. This was to be her long-awaited apotheosis. She had no time to think of any but practical things. Angels attended her, carried her muff and corrected the lines of her shawl.

As for Sir William, not only did he look ten years younger, but he had shaved.

Nelson, however, was reluctant. He was ill and little inclined toward ovation. A patent of nobility (indeed it was patent to everyone), delivered by mail, to please his wife, would suffice. He had no longing for processions. Nor did he wish to stay with Sir William, for the finances of sudden eminence confused him, and he was out of pocket as it was. He could not make the proper gestures (tipping the servants and such), for he had but one arm and very small pay. Also, he had been wounded on the forehead, had a fever, and was not a pretty sight. He would rather have appeared in public from the safety of an engraving or in a platonizing portrait, Government House style.

Nonetheless, he had to go. It was his duty. The populace seemed stirred, but just as clearly the King needed stirring up, for he seemed more apt to sulk than fight the foe.

In short, Nelson was shy. He had never been made much of. It made him feel as though he had done something wrong; the neglected child must ever be suspicious of a sudden adulation.

On the 22nd of September the Vanguard lurched into Naples Harbor, in bad repair and with a list. For the Neapolitans, it had been a long wait; for Nelson, too short a voyage. The bay shimmered like a blue sun, radiant with small boats. In the distance he could see small white images cavorting on the shore, and when the wind blew right, hear an immense banging of tubs, boatswains’ whistles and a faint hooray.

“It is like the shark come home,” he said. “Here are the pilot fish, and here is the family,” and looked alongside where some rusty seaweed did certainly eddy, almost like blood.

*

Mrs. Cadogan entered Emma’s dressing room without knocking. It was well past curtain time. She saw Emma and recoiled. Emma, who had been dressing for days, was pinning a small diamond, sapphire and ruby Union Jack to a kerchief tied around her neck in a naval manner. Where now was Attic simplicity? It had flown and left the gauds behind.

“Even for a snuffbox cover,” said Mrs. Cadogan, removing the brooch, “it would be excessive.”

Emma, who had managed the Lady superbly, had needlessly elaborated the simplicity of a Sailor’s Girl. On this subject Mrs. Cadogan felt herself competent to say little, while removing much.

“But now I look much as I looked before,” wailed Emma, whose enthusiasm had at last transgressed the boundaries of taste.

“Indeed, that is just what a sailor looks for,” said Mrs. Cadogan tactfully. “There must be no hint that anything has occurred in the interim.”

“Emma,” called Sir William from the hall below. He was resigned that ladies were dilatory to dress, but not when matters pressed.

However, Emma was at last ready, half Grecian urn, half Jolly Polly on a Toby jug, mature, wise, understanding, sympathetic, motherly—or anyhow sisterly—but with something perennially youthful about her too, and sincere, for sincerity was easiest of all; sincerity was but the work of a moment. Down to the harbor they went; the small boats parted from the prow of their barge, for England took precedence now, since she had won it back again, and therefore, so did they.

“How pretty are the boats,” said Emma, who had encouraged local industry. What with wreaths and garlands and freshly painted Madonnas and ex-votos without number, it looked more like Xochimilco at festival than their dear familiar Bay. “Will he be disfigured?”

“Dismembered,” said Sir William automatically, and leaned forward eagerly as they drew alongside the Vanguard, but sent Emma up the ladder ahead of him, as was only civil.

“Oh God. Is it Possible?” cried Emma, singling Nelson out. In the full-dress uniform of a Vice-Admiral, the effect of the pinned sleeve was not bad; she fell into his arms, or rather arm, and fainted away. Nelson staggered back. Arms lifted her. She was restored. As always happened when she was acting, her affectations fell away; she had no time for them—she was taken up by the thing itself. From being more dead than alive, she became on the instant more alive than dead. Pink-cheeked, rosy, nubile and none the worse for a little sun, she was a perfect Sailor’s Lass.

Sir William beamed approval. They made, he thought, a truly effective couple.

To get the King aboard was more difficult, for there was so very much more of him. It took an hour. But once aboard, he was his expansive, genial self. Out of several to choose from, that had seemed the most suitable. He could not have been more paternal, more benign.

“Nostro liberatore!” he boomed. Three cheers, hip and hooray.

“What, are there to be only three?” inquired the King, anxious that the thing be done properly, and then stooped, shattered by a grapeshot of applause. He received it, though it was not for him, with folded hands, before continuing.

“Oh had I been able to serve under you at the Battle of the Nile. But I, too, had my duty. I, too, stood at the helm of state.”

“What does he say?” asked Nelson, and looked nonplussed when he was told. Why, the great clumsy man would scarcely have been of service in the galley.

Since he could not refuse with grace, he consented without it, and was carted off to the city.

“Viva Nelson! Viva Hamilton!” the crowds shouted, pressing forward for a glimpse of him, and then, at the second carriage’s approach, in a less festive because more familiar tone, “Viva il Re!” For never before had so many lion tamers derived such heartfelt applause from the tousled appearance of one solitary, shabby lion.

“Sit down, Emma, pray do.”

“Rather stand up,” said Emma, “and be seen. For they demand it.”

Sir William would not. He was mistrustful of the plaudits of crowds, for they cannot last forever. A mere murmur of private admiration is far easier to sustain. He noticed a curious thing. Nelson, like Emma, never looked the same part twice. Like her, his only stable feature was his will. He could admirably reflect other men’s fires. In complexion, too, he was similar, white skinned, but with a variable pink flush—not strawberries and cream exactly, but the very best butter when he was feeling jaundiced.

Since this observation did not match the usual range of his experience, Sir William, with his customary horror of nonconformity, put it away.

*

“I do not care for the Neapolitans,” said Nelson. “It is a country of fiddlers and poets and scoundrels.”

“You have struck upon the very reasons we prefer them,” said Sir William delightedly. “Though from the other side. It is like two men digging one tunnel: one may blow cold and the other hot, but in the nature of the task, they are bound—if you view the thing in cross section—to meet. We may at any rate be the first to shake hands through the conjunctive hole.”

Nelson, who never felt the compulsion to hold his telescope the wrong way around, found this sort of chatter disconcerting. Still, for near seventy, Sir William was undoubtedly remarkable, a plain straightforward fellow after his own heart—as long as you attended only to every other word. Nelson felt at home here.

“I am sitting opposite Lady Hamilton as I write,” he informed his wife. As he was. She came in just as you began to miss her, and sometimes, frequently, before.

“Are you writing dispatches?” she asked.

“Only to my wife. It does not matter.”

“And what is she like, your wife?”

He could not immediately say. She was a little colorless; she resembled no one. He could not hit upon a comparison. “Oh, she is a young lady much like yourself, much concerned with country affairs, gossip and peach bottling in the proper season.”

“I do not gossip,” said Emma, “though I have, it is true, occasioned much, and besides, you are wrong—I have never bottled a peach, in or out of season. Though spiced, with meat, they are often served here.”

“I am devoted to my wife,” said Nelson, whom young ladies made nervous, particularly the older ones. “Indeed, if I had more time …”

“You would be about your devotions,” said Emma.

Nelson blushed. When he thought of Fanny, it was to see her always fully clothed and far away. She was a distant woman.

As for Emma, had she been a lady, he would not have thought her one, but as she was not, he did. His view of the aristocracy was highly colored. So was she, and Fanny’s views of eminence were so discreetly washed out as to seem unreal and colorless. He must say he liked the upper classes better colored in. King Parrot has more to say than King Sparrow, a wider range of vocables, says please and thank you, and is less monotonous. He does not peep.

Fanny peeped. So did her letters. Mr. Ramsey was ill. Mr. Squire was ill of a thorough scouring, after a stoppage of two days and a night. Mr. Bolton had sent fine lobsters and a hare, but the fish and poultry were deplorable. The other four pages were about the advancement of her son Josiah. She did not seem to realize he had stepped into a larger room. It was all most muddling.

Emma bent over him, uncorseted, solicitous, high-bosomed and warm.

“It is evening,” she said. “I thought perhaps you would care to admire the lights.”

“What lights?”

“Why, the lights of the evening,” she said, and led him to the balcony, which overlooked the main façade of the Palazzo Sesso. Three thousand self-feeding lamps spelled out his name across the front of the building. Sometimes their flames blew all one way, sometimes another, according as the breeze blew. They were like stars put in their proper order. It was the fame for which he had burned, and now it burned for him. He was moved.

She had been watching his face with the wary amusement of a good cook watching a guest test a pie. She is so sure of the outcome that she does not require to be thanked.

In the city, a rocket arched, broke, and descended into nothingness. It was followed by another, even more abundant; its color jostled in the air, like dew on an invisible leaf, and then bounced off into darkness. Squibs went off like cannon, the rockets in volleys.

Turning to look over the bay, he saw his name there, reflected backward from a set piece—anchors, wreaths and stars, in white, red, green, and yellow—writ in water, twenty feet across, and there was no tide. He shivered, gooseflesh all over, and backed away.

“There will be more,” she said as the rockets faded, thinking him disappointed. “Nelson’s name is now eternal.”

The sky, empty for the moment, reminded him of the lull in any night battle, with the sea full of jetsam and burning, and here and there a scream, a curse, a burst of light.

“You must forgive me,” he said, startled not to anger but to sadness. He felt as a man feels who has gotten with difficulty to the head of the stairs only to discover there is yet another flight to the attic above. “I have not been famous long. I must get used to it.”

“You will,” she said, with a confidence which startled him even more. No patient is soothed by being told he has a common ailment. He looked down. The street was full of people, waiting down there in the earthy obscurity, like bulbs. When he smiled, they burst noisily into bloom. They applauded.

“Emma,” Sir William had said once, “you must never look down on royalty. They are not meant to be seen from above.” But she had forgotten it. She bowed. Nelson bowed. What else was he to do? To retreat, rigid, would have been discourteous. And having bowed once, he must do so again. So he did so again.

Emma was delighted. To play Britannia suited her so well that you could almost hear the ophidian slither of her corselet when she did not so much move as shift her trident for a little while and gather in her shield.

*

“Poor man, he looks undernourished. He wants a fortifying jelly,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

“Bring one and I will take it to him.” Emma was trembling.

“That I can do myself. He’s scarcely fit to be seen.”

“What is all the noise downstairs?”

“That Miss Knight,” said Mrs. Cadogan, without pleasure. “Not only has she moved in kit and caboodle, but now it seems she has written an ode. She is reciting it.”

Emma had isolated her astonishment. “You know, I do not mind the stump one bit.”

“Ah well, he’s famous now. It’s not his fault, poor lamb,” said Mrs. Cadogan, and since she loved a hero even more than a gentleman, went off happily to the kitchens to supervise the exact perfections of a mutton broth and skim the scum.

*

“The British Nelson rivals Caesar’s fame,” declaimed Miss Knight, in her best leno, looking somber, as a sibyl should.

If no good at Attitudes, she could at least make the proper gestures, and did. There was applause, and even Sir William favored her with a smile. She was content. She had done well. She was a poetess and an admiral’s daughter. For the rest, she could do no more than Pope and lisp in numbers till the numbers came.

*

“Lady Hamilton has been an angel,” said Nelson.

“She has her moods,” said Sir William easily, and because his leg was tapping, crossed it the other way.

“A ministering angel.”

“The mother has much to do with it. She is an excellent plain cook,” said Sir William, echoing, without knowing it, the Greville of fifteen years before. He liked the boy exceedingly.

“She is really delightful.”

Not wishing to see too much, Sir William looked away, and sure enough, when he looked back again the expression had gone. Sensing itself to be unwelcome, it had vanished utterly. It would have been foolish to notice it when the boy, he was sure, was unaware of it himself. So many things vanish if we do not notice them. However, here and there Sir William had managed to save a few, for he saved appearances from habit, like bits of old string. You never knew when they might come in handy.

*

The 29th was Nelson’s birthday. Emma, in a mood of austerity suitable to war, had formerly restricted herself to small intimate dinners for eighty, but this time decided to do the thing properly. She enjoyed to play hostess and did it well, and would have asked the world to dine had she been able to procure so large a table, or borrow enough plates. While she arranged the guest lists, Nelson, propped up in bed, was posing for his portrait, which had been commissioned by the Queen. The artist was one of a corps which did the royal children in relays, a man called Guzzardi.

“It is not necessary to rise,” said Guzzardi. “The body, I can make up from stock.”

Nelson felt irritably the absence of an arm. The best that could be said for the fellow was that he worked rapidly. The result was a flounder in uniform.

Sir William was displeased. “It will do very well, but it should not be given the currency of an engraving.”

“My wife has had my portrait of Lemuel Abbott,” said Nelson. “I own it is a better likeness.” Abbott had shown him—if not as a member of the aristocracy, as an aristocrat—a most clubbable portrait, when the fleet engaged in battle at the rear.

“Abbott?”

“Some English painter.”

“The only English painter was Reynolds, but he is dead and so beyond compare. Lawrence will do in a pinch. If you were County, it would be different. There a certain stiffness in the modeling does no harm.”

Nelson felt graveled. In this house, where everything was what it seemed to be, except the people, he began to perceive that appearances were not only everything, but had nothing in common with Fanny’s perpetual keeping up of them. To reach fame we must move rapidly and travel light. We grow oppressed by boiled pudding and turnip tops, for they retard us. There can be no butterfly without a metamorphosis, and the butterfly is the emblem of the soul. We must pupate into immortality, rest, exchrysalate, move on, and all on a diet of mulberry leaves and water, and leave each dish untasted, merely to touch them all.

“I like Sir William much,” he wrote his wife. It was what a schoolboy would have said of a master who did not whip him, explained the logarithmic tables of society, and told one frankly why one was not popular; it was because one was unique. One could move easily and be welcome, therefore, only among one’s peers, of which there are not many, and those not always Peers.

“When people say they want something new, what they mean is that they want the same old thing, only different. To something new, they are inevitably hostile until it has had the edge taken off it by being imitated at least twice. This is why we admire equally the old genius and the young fop, and prefer, naturally enough, the latter,” said Sir William. “So Sir Thomas Lawrence, I think, would do very well.” And he looked around proudly at his vases, which had been imitated at least twice by Mr. Wedgwood at Etruria, so their value had soared enormously. The best place to achieve novelty is to rummage in an old closet or down a stopped-up well.

“We must be going,” he added, for they were to visit the Royal Porcelain factory that afternoon.

“The King might better,” said Nelson, who found all this dilatory when there was fighting to be done, “visit the armory.”

“Ah well,” said Sir William. “Did you know that one of the designers has had made a porcelain cannon, provided with a caoutchouc breech, which shoots hard candy a distance of six feet? For a while he diverted himself with that. He is concerned with ends, not means. He is ugly and likes to be flattered. Talk up victory to him until he can see it as a self-portrait, all apotheosis and very little blood, and he will soon enough gallop off to pose, once he has chosen the right uniform.”

“Battles are not conducted that way.”

“No, but they may be composed so, after the event.”

“He likes to hunt, so I hear. Why can he not like to hunt the enemy?”

“You have not attended a royal hunt,” explained Sir William. “It is not here a tallyho over hedges after hounds. He is a large man, difficult to move. It is three hundred years since anyone in Italy has had the skill to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds. Now they sit motionless in a tent, the game is paraded before them, and then they fire. They like to be sure of their trophies, you see. I assure you, for I have often tried, it is no easy thing to flush a King. They may seem mad, but now and again they lapse into sanity. Besides, he has a most extensive warren.”

“Warren is the word for it.”

“Nelson,” said Sir William, “you have seen too much water. You are indifferent to wool. I have been here thirty years, and have yet to tire of it.”

The boy had his limitations, he feared: he had ability. That blinkered him.

*

At the China manufactory, where Nelson wished to buy the similicra of the King and Queen, hard-glazed, as a gesture, the King prevented it. His own image was within his gift. He might bestow it where he would.

“Let him bestow it upon Rome,” said Nelson as they came away, his eye caught by the rustle of the trees which met above their heads, a species he had never seen before. “What trees are these?”

“Mulberry,” said Sir William. “There is a manufactory for silk, too. We are fair to rival China, though not in bulk.”

*

“Nelson,” said Emma, titivating, “is curiously attractive.”

“Oh, Em,” said Mrs. Cadogan—who had eyes in her head, though it is difficult to be Argus with but two, and those drowsy—“can you never leave well enough alone?”

“I only meant a title will suit him. Why does it not come?”

“A picture must dry before it is varnished,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “Such things take always a year. Besides, he has a wife.”

“So had Sir William,” said Emma idly, meaning no harm.

“Em, you are wicked.”

“If Sir William is a father to him, it is only natural I should be motherly,” said Emma, and for the instant had an image of her unacknowledged daughter, wandering bleakly along the northern coast in a sea fog, rattling the shale underfoot and doing—what? There had been a letter from her, too painful to answer, which she had mentioned to no one. “It might have been happy for me to have forgotten the past and to have begun a new life with new ideas; but for my misfortune, my memory traces back circumstances which have taught me too much, yet not quite all I could have wished to have known,” the poor thing had said.

It is neither true nor fair to say that women have no memory. What they do have is a series of bulkheads and watertight compartments by means of which they manage to stay afloat. The image of Emma Carew gurgled and went under; despite this collision with fact, what Emma did not remember kept her afloat. In the gorgeous staterooms of dream and illusion above deck, there was no awareness—except for a slight shudder along the frame—that anything untoward had occurred.

Acknowledge her, never; but help to get her settled, yes.

“You will be adding Jocasta to the Attitudes next, I expect,” said Mrs. Cadogan, far from pleased. Having not much employment these days, she too, like the rest of them, now read a lot.

It was the day of the birthday party.

*

Over a drink beforehand in the green room, so to speak, Sir William gave the private toast, Tria juncta in uno, in allusion to both the motto of the Order of the Bath and that total immersion called Christianity. He did not mind. Besides, a mild flirtation at thirty-four, what was the harm in that? He should be uncle to both of them—husband to the one, and intimate with the other. Why not?

*

“I wonder you could live here so long and so seldom go back,” said Nelson, exacerbated by so much light, who, when he was at sea, had usually the comfort of a British ship.

“My friends drop off from life, like satiated leeches, and my parents are long dead,” said Sir William. “I would as soon return to an orphanage.” He had been plagued recently by a pestilence of childhood images, gray fields, stone walls and green summer rain. Since to be so is a symptom of old age, he refused to accept his own diagnosis. If we cannot deny the disease, we can at least conceal the symptoms.

*

Emma, her life until now singularly sheltered on the leeside of a variable but solid male rock, and by the absence of any female friend, from those little gusts of affection which presage the usual jealous storm, had foolishly taken up Miss Knight as a protégée, who had as foolishly, her life hitherto sheltered from the great world by exclusion from it, allowed herself to be taken up. If someone admires our little effusions, it would be tactless of us to question their probity, so Miss Knight added her small stone to the mound of Emma’s adulation both willingly and well, and waited now only to hear her own praises.

*

The British Embassy, like any church, had been better designed for the extraordinary crush than for the occasional visitor, so this time Emma had asked everyone. They sat down eighty to dine, and when they rose there were a thousand more.

In the ballroom, in a costume militant in intent but millinery in detail, she stood waiting while the national anthem played. The guests fingering, if males, their Nelson buttons, if females, their Nelson ribbons, awaited the entertainment. The anthem had additional verses by Miss Knight:

Miss Knight looked about her. Whose were these new words? They had been written by a talented young lady, a Miss Knight, the daughter of Admiral Knight (known as good Admiral Knight, actually). She was over there.

“I know you will sing it with pleasure,” Nelson wrote his wife. “I cannot move on foot or in a carriage for the kindness of the populace, but good Lady Hamilton preserves all the papers as the highest treat for you.”

And out fell the disgusting things, in her handwriting, when the letter arrived.

*

A curtain parted before the rostrum.

Lady Hamilton, a Boadicea in white muslin, Greek sandals, a tinsel corselet, a helmet borrowed from the Household Cavalry, and a light blue shawl embossed with gold anchors—carrying in one hand a trident (an exact copy of one found at the Gladiatorial School at Pompeii)—was discovered sitting on a pasteboard rock. Her right elbow was languid to the edge of a replica, in papier-mâché, of the shield of Achilles, the rim surrounded by the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense picked out in glitter. She held the pose, rose majestically (it was her new Attitude) and drew apart an inner curtain to reveal a rostral column, beneath a canopy, emblazoned with the words Veni, Vidi, Vici (a translation, also by Miss Knight, was available) and inscribed with the names of Nelson’s captains.

It was never to come down while they were there, Lady Hamilton said, and went offstage to change, though not much.

“What precious moments the Courts of Naples and Vienna are losing. Three months would liberate Italy,” said Nelson.

At the supper given immediately after the performance, they sat eight hundred.

*

“If the Queen would receive me,” complained Nelson, “one could perhaps accomplish much. They say she can make the King do as she wishes, and surely she, at least, wants war. But they say she is ill.”

“She is not ill,” said Sir William. “She is pregnant. She will get over it. Emma, my dear, it is time for you to intercede.”

Like a goddess of victory, Emma went off to oblige, wreath in hand and at the ready.

“I know,” said the Queen. “But he will not budge. It is not so much that he is unwilling as that he is inert. However, I will try. If he cannot follow, he can at least be led. But it is not an effort I look forward to, my dear. It calls for kid gloves.”

And, ringing, she called for the longest procurable, and, like a surgeon, pulled them on and set to the revolting task.

*

“It is done,” she said afterward. “He slobbered more than usual, but it is done.” And stripping off the wetted things, she flung them away into a basket set beside the table, and granted an interview to Nelson, who though a foreigner, impressed her favorably.

However was it managed? Nelson wondered.

But royalty is a trade, like any other, and like any other has its guild secrets. The Queen would not say, and even Sir William did not seem to know.

“She must handle him with gloves,” he said. Oedipus with the Sphinx could have said no more.

*

“The King, I hear, has ordered a set of china with all my battles painted upon it,” snapped Nelson. “I will not speak of the impropriety of the Vanguard upon a gravy boat, but what battles will he have to set forth when he comes to order his own, or do I have to fight them for him? Or should I suspect him of a taste so simple as to prefer his dishes plain?”

Impatient with Naples, he sailed off to Malta, his departure all Dido and Aeneas at the dock. Lady Hamilton said she would write frequently.

*

She was annoyed he had not yet gotten his title. “If I were King of England, I would make you the Most Noble Puissant Duke Nelson, Viscount Pyramid and Baron Crocodile,” she wrote Nelson. And to his wife: “Sir William is in a rage with the ministry for not having made Lord Nelson a Viscount, for sure, this great and glorious action ought to have been recognized more. Hang them, I say.”

Nelson’s brother William was also displeased. Though the title had been granted, he had written with an anxiety fresh minted, to ask who might—for Nelson was childless—inherit this honor next. “I have no doubt but Parliament will settle the same pension upon yourself and the two next possessors of your title which they have done upon Lord Vincent,” he wrote, for if he were to inherit the loaf, he wished it buttered.

*

They are in love with each other, I suppose, thought Sir William, driving back from the dock, and himself affected by the parting. I wonder if they know it?

No, they did not. For though Nelson was a good husband, and Emma an excellent wife, fond, affectionate and scrupulous, to love is quite another thing. Since neither of them ever had, they had not the means to make comparisons and so identify the feeling.

I wonder if I should know it? Sir William further inquired of himself, and decided, with some relief, the answer was no. There is a limit to the number of things a man may reasonably be expected to know, and in this matter, at any rate, he had no desire to play the pedant. Grateful that the oracle had spoken, he shut his eyes and basked, a lizard, in the sun.

“I am glad, my dear, that you have had this diversion,” he said to Emma, out of his voluntary darkness. “It has improved your appearance tenfold.”

As so it had, for appearance and attitudes, if not everything, are all we have left, so it behooves us to take care of them.

“It is wonderful how the old man keeps up,” said someone in the crowd as their carriage rolled by.

Aware that he was also called “verde antico,” Sir William opened his eyes and gave the woman who had spoken a look to wither stone.

*

On the plain at San Germano, the Queen, in a blue riding habit with gold fleurs-de-lis at the neck, was reviewing both the troops and Ferdinand previous to the promised invasion—which is to say, relief—of Rome.

On the 22nd of November, the army marched out, its progress interrupted only by a river—the existence of which it had not been informed—and by the seasonal rains which had come down all at once. A declaration of war against France (then occupying Rome) was not thought necessary. Ferdinand was a liberator, not an aggressor, and intended that his action should be considered as well meant.

*

It went on raining. Sir William had gone to bed, but not to sleep, for downstairs Emma was singing, and the sound buzzed about like a fly in an acoustical trap. It was a piece called “The Maniac.”

Repeat ten times. It was her preferred piece these days. No doubt she found it fraught with meaning, though he wondered how. Eventually the sound ceased. The rain did not. It was a fluid portcullis beyond the window, caught and sparkling in the rays of his lamp. He did not extinguish the lamp. He liked one these days, for company.

When he woke, the rain had momentarily ceased. The room was motionless, the lamp low. He lay just beneath the surface of consciousness, as though under a wet sheet, unable as yet to move. The lamp cast bizarre reflections. At home in Scotland, as a child, he had at this point always demanded a glass of water, because there were funny animals on the walls. And though Lady Archibald had never been there herself, the nanny had always provided one and never denied the existence of the animals; it was an old house—of course they were there. With a charm against dragons, human company and a glass of water, we may achieve much.

“When you grow up,” his nanny had said, “you may ride them to Jerusalem.”

Curious, she was so pleasant, though of course no gruff and nonsense, that he had forgotten her until now. Though he had been riding to Jerusalem ever since, through pleasant enough country, except for high jinks in the 3rd Guards, and a few moments early on in both his marriages. Now he was in a single bed, in an empty room—as he preferred—with no one to tuck him in, but with a jug of water and a tantalus of brandy near his reach.

Sitting up, he poured himself a jigger, neat.

In the country house of a great-aunt, he had once asked what the rings in the wall were for, along the stairs. Were they for prisoners? Where was the dungeon?

“Your aunt is old and infirm. They are to pull herself to the top of the stairs by.”

“And what is at the top of the stairs?”

“All sorts of good things, but there was never a dungeon here, you silly boy. This is quite a recent house.”

Since his aunt had died—or as they said, gone to Heaven—shortly afterward, it had always seemed to him that that was where Heaven was, at the top of the stairs. Himself he hauled along by another method, by certain crampons driven in the rock walls of time, called appointments and events. He had the route marked out for him well in advance, in his agenda. If he had not, he might well have lost his way or taken a turning downward.

“Oh well,” he said, “there is nothing to be done about it.” He listened to the silence meditatively for a moment or two, and brandy being a soporific, dropped back into sleep.

To dress in the morning was more difficult, for to dress marble is an art and requires both strength and skill.

*

“I wish you would not sing that song again,” he said.

“Why ever not?” asked Emma, astonished, after so long without one, to be handed an order, even if tied up quite prettily as a request.

“Because I do not like it,” said Sir William.

She gave it up. She had still the will to please, if not any longer the constraint.

I do believe she is still quite attached to me, thought Sir William kindly—who up to this moment had never doubted it, but liked to believe the best of everyone, though his thoughts were his own—and gave her money for the household accounts. If we stay on long enough, we all become our own paying guests in time. Besides, he had no real desire to move on.

What he did have was a very real desire for male company. There is this to be said for vases: they do not change their shape.

*

On the 29th of November came the momentous news that Ferdinand had entered Rome to the pealing of bells and the plaudits of the populace. Two weeks later came the no less momentous news that he was scampering back. Though he had not declared war against France, he had at least provided the French with an excellent excuse to invade him. Nelson returned two days before he did, bearing starch.

“Let the people arm; let them succor the Faith; let them defend their King and father who risks his life, ready to sacrifice it in order to preserve the altars, possessions, domestic honor and freedom of his subjects,” proclaimed the King. “Let them remember their ancient valor.”

Surprisingly enough, they did, with the exception of a few Jacobins—too busy planning a republic to attend to the collapse of the kingdom—and such of the nobility as were off in the Augean stables, to curry favor. The people rose.

The King cowered and sank. From now on, white gloves or no, he would run no risk. He was a reflective man, even though in his case the trick was done with mirrors. He knew very well what faith to put in the unpredictability of crowds.

It was a hubbub.