“I SHALL AWAIT THE FRENCH surrounded by my loyal subjects!” roared Ferdinand, a royal boom, by now hysterical.

“Of course you shall,” said Sir William reassuringly—who had known the King for thirty years—and then himself went home to pack. Or rather, since he had never tied so much as a parcel in his life, sat anguished in a chair while around him his entire life so far was wrapped up and hustled away. Even Emma in fifty versions came down from the walls, was crated and jostled off through the midnight streets in a cart, to be flung into the hold with who knew what indifference.

“We must save your collections at all costs,” she had said, but since she supervised the packing herself, naturally made her own choice of what must go first. Nelson had given them the use of two bottoms, one bound for England, the other for wherever they were to go. Though he did not value such things, he valued Sir William. He had been most civil.

Emma, twenty years younger, as Impudence, was carried out past Sir William. He did not notice. Vase after vase went into crates. Even the six over-door panels by Brill, depicting the four seasons and then two more, had been stripped from his rooms.

Emma when young was being carted away. The whole world when young was being carted away, down to the napery and the silverware. He felt sacked. Even if he got it back, it could never be put up again the same way. In a few days nothing would be left of him except what was left to him, which would not be much: a small Hellenistic bronze for the ship’s cabin; a code of honor, a willingness to oblige, and a worn suppleness at how to do it; a hand, some ink, a pen; and what was left of Emma; and Nelson, now and again, he supposed. With his old friends dead or in England, he had forgotten how pleasant it was to make a new one. Even the Bishop of Derry had been impounded in Milan, by the French, and the devil knew how he would get out again.

Nelson, though deficient in manners, was what Greville should have been, who had too many but was compounded of nothing else.

Indubitably sacked, but no massacre is ever complete. Somewhere in the dust and rubble there is always someone to stir and struggle to his feet again, dazed perhaps, but not dead. Odd that it is more often an old woman than an old man, an old either than a child or a youth, but there it is: if you have survived so far, you can survive more.

“Hamilton,” he said, “don’t be a fool. Get up.” Obediently Sir William rose to this, as to most occasions. He had come to depend upon it. An autocrat is the puppet of himself: he obeys, as why not, for it is he who gives the orders. If there is nobody else to love, we look around, make our only choice, and love ourselves. Sir William had no emotions of that comfortable sort. What Sir William loved was order. So rather than sit about like a numbskull, that is what he set himself to achieve.

But Emma had been invaluable. A country girl, she had laid her hands to everything, in a manner in which the aristocrat, socially constrained from birth to pretend he was born without any, cannot. For that he was grateful; it excused much.

Nelson’s new coat of arms had come, properly inscribed at the top of letters patent.

“Is it not pretty?” she asked, having scarcely time to look at it herself.

Sir William saw a shield with a Maltese cross, surrounded by the Tria juncta in uno of the Order of the Bath, surmounted by an open helmet, a bar, and a man of war seen from the captain’s cabin end. The motto was Faith and Works. The supporters were, over Works, a Lion with a pennant in its mouth, the staff of which stuck into space like a secretary’s pen; and over Faith, a comely, clean and graceful sailor boy.

“All too appropriate,” he said, and handed it back.

A message arrived from the Queen. She sent one whenever she was depressed, so these days they arrived almost hourly.

“She is worried about her head,” said Emma. “Whatever will it be next?”

“Her head?”

“Of having it cut off.”

“It is too long and square in the face,” said Sir William. “Give her my compliments and say I doubt that it would roll.”

He was snappish these days.

“I can’t say that. I suppose I shall have to fit her in somewhere,” said Emma, who had risen not only superior to events, but to the cause of them.

When she returned, she felt no better. The palace had had a boarded-up look, and since the Court was in mourning, you saw black figures at the end of empty corridors, standing about like frightened nuns, or with the naked look of defrocked priests. The Queen talked of death as though it were an experience she had just been through, and the King, though he was taller than six feet, ran back and forth like a little dog already left behind.

“I am making ready for the eternity for which I long,” shrieked the Queen, supervising two ladies in waiting who were packing a trunk. “Take only summer dresses,” she said, and supervised the jewelry herself. “The King decides to stay. The King decides to leave. If we stay, we shall need nothing; if we are leaving, we shall be packed. You see, I prepare.”

But she did not know how. Removing, tactfully, a tiara from a dress hoop, Emma took charge. These movables, when crated, were stenciled HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S SERVICE, NAVAL STORES, BISCUIT AND BULLY BEEF, smuggled to the British Embassy, and then taken aboard Nelson’s ships at night. The Vanguard was being repainted and refitted for the royal refugees. The smell of white lead was strong.

*

“The King has had the Minister for War arrested,” said Sir William.

“Good Lord, why?”

“For treason. It is ever the fault of the losing side.”

“The poor King,” said Emma feelingly.

“It cannot be denied that he cuts a very poor figure.”

*

“No time should be lost,” urged Acton, “if the wind does not blow too hard.” Inclined to be seasick, he would have preferred an overland journey, but, alas, Sicily cannot be reached that way. Yet the King, who had had a toy altar as a child—as well as toy soldiers—could not make up his mind, and still hoped for Divine intervention, though they were running low on candles.

In the end, it was made up for him.

*

Defense of the Realm, to the lazzaroni, meant slitting the throats of Jacobins up an alley, disemboweling a Frenchman, and the looting of an unprotected store. Undeniably they were picturesque, but to combine irregularity into the picturesque—as the Reverend Gilpin says—requires taste, and they had none. They had surrounded the palace. The King was their father, who dwelt in Caserta, a man exactly like themselves who sold fish in the market and when he went hunting did his own butchery. He was tall, virile and ugly. They worshiped him in their own image. But they would not let him go.

“If I run away, they will think I have abandoned them,” said the King. “I will never abandon them. They are my people. Besides, how can we get away?”

He had to present himself daily on the balcony, to prevent their storming the palace.

“Give us arms,” they shouted, “to defend ourselves and you!” Alas, there were no arms. They had been flung into ditches to rust, by the fleeing army.

“Death to the Jacobin!” they screamed.

“Now what?” said the King, and though afraid, could control neither his legs nor his curiosity, and crept back to the balcony again.

The crowd was tearing apart one of his own messengers, mistaking, or pretending to mistake, him for the enemy. The man had time for one scream before his hands and face were booted to a pulp, his clothes ripped off, his penis and testicles knifed out like spilt, his belly slit, his intestines allowed to dangle and his corpse held up in the air—an offering still smoking because it was still warm.

The King himself, after the hunt, could have done the job no better and had done it a hundred thousand times just as well. It took no time. It was highly enjoyable. And it did not matter what the carcass was.

He went back indoors.

“His Majesty,” said Maria Carolina in a hand note to Emma, “has graciously consented to flee.”

“I am disappointed in him. He has been inconsistent. One would have expected him to have waited until too late,” said Sir William. “But how the devil is it to be done?”

“There is a tunnel,” said Emma.

*

Ferdinand had at last remembered it, a bugaboo from childhood, the family escape hatch, to be opened only in case of dire peril, like Joanna Southcote’s chest, which was packed providentially with pistols, rather than advice; for even the wildest and most hysteric dreamer is practical about his nightmares. His father, the King of Spain, had once told him it was there, and he had workmen in the cellars for a week, searching the chthonic dark till at last they found it. It was the way out of the labyrinth. After they had marked it with rags, he had them securely locked up. He was indeed a minotaur. Even the horns had come with time.

It had been a disagreeable afternoon, with Miss Knight and her mother practicing hysterics like scales, until let into the secret. Even Emma was at a loss for words, though she had had the finesse, in the card-playing sense, to order a cold supper laid out against their return from a visit to the Turkish Embassy, since no public event could be canceled lest public confidence be alarmed. She then dismissed the servants, a reassuring act in itself; Rome is always burning to have a holiday, and no one dismissed for good is ever given the evening off first.

The streets were sullen, except for the chanting of invisible priests and a shriek now and then up a dark lane.

“Why must they wail both before and after the event?”

“They are a histrionic people. If one feels nothing, one must show much,” said Sir William, huddled in the carriage.

Out in the bay the lights of Nelson’s hurriedly gathered fleet twinkled and receded although at anchor, desolate as a carnival in the rain.

The King and Queen arrived at the Embassy together.

“Consistent in everything, ignoble to the last,” said Sir William, but only because he was sad. It was too much like a play on the last night; it may not have been good, but the actors will never act in it again and we will never again see it this way. And yet the action was the same as any other night, the scenery the same, the lights the same, the lines the same.

The Ambassador presented the chelengkh, a frost of diamonds, a plume of honor taken from the turban of the Grand Signor himself, a star surrounded by thirteen sprays of the same adamantine material. It was to honor Nelson.

“It is watchwork,” said Kelim Effendi carefully. “You wind it up. Then when you press this”—and he did so—“the star revolves. It is amusing, no?”

It was a whirligig. It ran down.

*

A little man rose up at Emma’s elbow. It was Aprile.

“It is the dawn of a new age, my friends say. But do not vex yourself. I shall neither give you away nor get away. I was adapted to the old one. I only want to say that it was a pleasure once more to hear you sing. The effect is not good, but you do it so well. Whereas with us, it is the other way,” he said, and before Emma could stop him, with a twitch, he had wriggled away.

The King and Queen returned to the palace. Emma and Sir William drove to the quay, where a launch awaited them.

Sir William had to be lifted down, and what was more, did not seem satisfied with his seat. The boat rocked. The gunwales were but two inches from the water.

“Be still, William, do,” snapped Emma, for it was only a city she was leaving. Sir William these days, to tell the truth, was difficult to manage.

“I must sit in the prow,” he said. “I must sit in the prow.” And like a blind man, he groped his way there and sat there alone, an hour’s journey to the ships, while the lamps of the festive city burned low, and unreplenished, went out, his eyes steady, watching Vesuvius, a dark hulk, moored against the sky.

It was not for some time that he realized she was not with him.

*

She had gone to the palace. If she had snapped at him, she had cause. In order not to alarm the servants, they had taken only the best things, the vases and pictures, and so been forced to abandon three houses elegantly furnished, all their horses and seven carriages.

There was no reason for William to sit there unique. She had loved Naples, too. But Palermo (it must be kept a secret that that was their destination) was said to be a fine city, and she had never seen it. Sir William had often spoken of Sicily with approbation, as of a place full of interest. Therefore why sit so glum?

Nelson, standing alone on the marble floor of the grand staircase, waited in the almost dark. The palace when empty gave him the shudders. It was too much like going into St. Paul’s of a weekday, when God is not there but the thing we are really afraid of is, and skulks in the walls.

The stairs went up into infinity. “Nelson,” he said, to reassure himself, and from every undusted corridor came the hollow answer back.

A white figure swirled out of the shadows.

“Emma,” he said, astonished.

“I could not desert the dear Queen,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

There was a snuffle on the stairs, and a fox fire on the other one, of candles. A sconce moved toward them, and a great boar’s head appeared out of nowhere. It was Ferdinand. The snuffling materialized into the Queen, a hatbox and all eight children, one of them in arms.

Somewhere above them a chair fell, a glass smashed.

Ferdinand giggled. “We have left only the heavy things. Heavy things will be difficult to loot,” he said, and followed Nelson, Emma and the Queen down a landscape of empty picture frames, moving through rooms he had never known existed, kitchens, storerooms, wine bins, cellars, vaults, and down stairs that were damp and dripped, and no one anywhere. On the walls the shadow of his own enormous nose marched on ahead of him. He followed it.

The air turned warm. They were underground. A rat’s eyes gleamed. A spider ran across the dirt floor. A white rag formed up out of darkness. And there was the tunnel, so well concealed there had been no need to hide its opening. It was just a tunnel. It led to the underworld. It was not frequented.

The King held back. The Queen pushed on, with no one to aid her, stumbled, and was angry with everything. The darkness closed behind them against an animal rush of fetid air. Though it had a main gorge, it was not just one tunnel but a maze of bronchial passages through which the sluggish wind breathed itself in and out. There was nothing to see ahead but a small white rag, and then another, until at last there was a bend and ahead of them an alternating glitter, as from off the points of spears.

The passage, which was not paved, became muddy and slippery, and there, two steps down, lay the water. They had been fortunate that the tide was at its ebb. It was, so Nelson said, the Vittoria landing stage.

When he flashed his lantern, a longboat appeared out of the low mist which now clung to the waters. Two hours later, for they had to move cautiously, they reached the Vanguard, where Sir William was reading Epictetus in bed:

Quite so.

But Emma had left him.

In the bay, little dark shapes everywhere along the fringes of the city put out into the bay.

“Before we reach Palermo,” said Sir William to Emma as she came in, “we must remember to hoist a white sail. As usual, your Theseus has done well.”

“My Theseus?”

“Horatio, but the legend is confused,” said Sir William, who would rather have rescued himself, and went to sleep.

*

Others had to wait longer for their dormitive. Lady Knight and her daughter drew alongside.

“I am sorry, but we are already full. There is no room,” said Captain Hardy. “You must go to the Portuguese man-of-war.”

“My mother is the widow of Admiral Sir Joseph Knight,” said Miss Cornelia, the poetess, her nerves frayed to the point of a beseeching ostentation.

“I am sorry, but there really is no room,” said Hardy, “but the Portuguese man-of-war has an English captain.” He meant it kindly.

So off into the dark they went, all Virgil and Dante and no room at the inn.

In the large, airy and freshly painted state cabin—the smallest, most wretched chamber she had ever seen—the Queen peeled off her own stockings and looked at her first pair of dirty feet. Also it was unpleasant to discover that rumor was no invention: Ferdinand snored. Not even in the Temple had her sister known such squalor or suffered such indignity, of that she was sure. Lady Hamilton was asleep, and as for water, she knew not whom to ask for it. It was intolerable.

*

“It is disgusting,” said Maria Carolina, “to sleep in the same squalid chamber with a man, and that one your husband. It is too promiscuous.”

Having had to linger at Naples for two days because of contrary winds, they were now at sea, or rather up to their waists in it, for they had encountered the worst storm in Nelson’s experience. There was nowhere to lie down. A Russian gentlewoman, known to none of them, had with the blunt but polite intransigence of that singularly mysterious race commandeered the only bed available below deck, and lay there, clutching an icon, while ladies in waiting no doubt better born than she slithered and sloshed about on soggy mattresses. She was heavily bejeweled. If sink she must, she meant to sink well.

Sir William, in whom age had suddenly revealed the Scot, with a Calvinistic cunning both atavistic and autochthonous, stirred nowhere without two pistols at his belt, determined to shoot rather than drown. He did not intend to die with a guggle, guggle, guggle in his throat, he said.

Every time you called a cabin boy, he had been swept overboard; it was another one. Every bowl in the boat had been puked in, but to look on the cheerful side of things, since no one had appetite, there was little chance of their running short on stores. The mainmast had already gone, the mizzenmast could scarcely wait, and “wild to the blast flew the skull and the bones.”

Emma, however, who had had to master her stomach quite early on in life’s woes, felt no affliction, and was everywhere to tend to those who did. Nelson was proud of her. And she of him. They spoke companionably when they met. The barriers were down. In that weather, they could not long have stayed up.

Count Esterhazy, the Austrian Ambassador, in a religious fit had tossed his snuffbox overboard, for it had his mistress painted nude on the lid and would not look well in Heaven. Prince Carlo Alberto had convulsions and died in Emma’s arms, though that was no great loss. He was only six, he could scarcely be considered a personage as yet, and there were royal heirs aplenty still remaining.

The wind changed to a tramontana. The King, quickly recovered and excellently well, condescended to say that there would be plenty of woodcocks in Sicily—this wind always brought them—and that he and Sir William might therefore look forward to splendid sport.

“Well,” said Mrs. Cadogan, that sensible deity, “why not? The dear man only looks upon the good side of things. I would not myself object to a woodcock pie.”

“Entombez-moi,” said the Russian lady, in desperate French, “à Odesse. C’est une petite jolie ville en Crimée, le pays de ma naissance, òu sont situées nos domaines hérèditaires. Tcheripnin doit faire la gisante. C’est mon désir.”

“Elle pousse un cri,” said the ladies in waiting, wringing out their mattresses. It was Christmas day. At two in the morning they dropped anchor in Palermo Harbor.

The Queen insisted upon going ashore at once.

“I have lived long enough,” she said gloomily, “even two or three years too long,” and disappeared into the darkness, bound for the Colli Palace, where nothing had been aired for sixty years, nobody expected her, and everything was uninhabitable.

“My God,” she said at dawn, her fate made visible, “it is Africa. Am I to be plagued by the blackamoor as well?” She needed laudanum.

But the King refused to budge until he had slept, risen, been shaved, and consumed a lengthy breakfast. Then, calling his favorite dogs to him (they had slept in the cabin, though refusing to go near the Queen), he ambled out into the cold but southern sun, determined to make the best of it. If he had not burned his boats behind him, he had at least left orders that they should be burned lest they fall into the hands of the French, so he did not fear pursuit. He was King of the Two Sicilies, and if he had lost one, here was the other, and one would do.

“Viva il Re!” shout the populace. “Viva il Re!” It was all quite customary.

“The King,” wrote Emma admiringly, “is a philosopher.” So he was, but Pliny the Elder was laid up with a bilious fever, the Queen had near died, and lodgings were exceedingly hard come by.

The Knights, with that heroic skill to which the incompetent sometimes unimaginatively rise, had seized the only habitable apartment on the Marina.

“It was the most tremendous good fortune,” said Cornelia, but it was not a good fortune she was prepared to share. She and her mother were quite civil; they even nodded to Captain Hardy, but there was no room. Poor Sir William, accustomed as he was to palaces, must feel quite cast out.

“Accustomed as I had been to the lovely and magnificent scenery of Italy,” wrote Miss Knight, “I was not less surprised than delighted at the picturesque beauty of the Sicilian Coast. Then, when the prospect of the city opened upon us with the regal elegance of its marble palaces and the fanciful singularity of its remaining specimens of Saracenic architecture, it was like a fairy scene.” And, dipping unobserved a wedge of panettone into her morning coffee, she giggled like a girl. In the general gallop and galumph ashore, she had for once come out first. She admired the beauties of nature and drank her slops.

But it was cold. It was bitter cold. The stark trees and naked twigs were rimed and icicled, and stuck up all over the landscape like bleached coral on a surfaced barrier reef.

“Light a fire,” said the Queen.

“But why? It is only winter. There is no wood. It is always like this.”

“I demand fire!” shouted the Queen.

“Let her go to the devil, then,” said the King when he heard of it. He would not see her. He blamed her for everything. He ordered a chinoiserie casino built on the seashore, and moved into that. He wanted no more of her.

Deprived not only of her creature comforts but of her creatures as well, there was nothing for Maria Carolina to do but shiver, shake, tremble, freeze, steal wood, eat cold porridge, and write letters, with a small oil lamp on the table over which to thaw her fingers every time they froze. Death, suicide, shame, decline, woe, weeping and despair—it was all the same to her. She had a facile pen. She made them vivid.

“The King,” she wrote to Vienna, “feels nothing but self-love, and he hardly feels that.”

On the contrary, though insensible to cold, he was keenly aware of the pleasures of the chase, as always, and went daily through the Breughel woods. “Do come, Sir William,” he said.

Lese majesty is not a crime with which to charm any but complacent princes. As soon as he could move, Sir William went. Emma and Nelson could manage between them, though what was between them, he knew not.

Emma, without sleep for twelve days, was plainly hysterical; but soon enough, brushing the cobwebs away, she was herself again and able the more articulately to lament.

“We miss our dear, dear Naples,” she said, thinking of wardrobes adequately hung, a row of surrogate selves, all swaying, all waiting to be put on.

Nelson, together with the Hamiltons, for want of any other where and to save money, had set up mutual housekeeping in the Palazzo Palagonia. One splendid chamber opened out into another, and the wind blew through and dusted everything. As for the chambermaids, all they did was track in the snow.

Emma enjoyed herself. It was like Cheshire in the winter, but with palm trees.

“On the contrary,” said Sir William, “it is worse than Kent, damned cold, damned damp and damned dull.”

The King kept their larders stocked with venison, woodcock, partridge, boar and rabbit, but there was a shortage of sallets. Finances were difficult. Greville had triumphantly reduced the income of Milford Haven to nothing and was now endeavoring to borrow against the capital. His efforts might be unremitting, but he himself would remit nothing. Their Naples incomes were confiscate. Sir William had to borrow £2000 from Nelson, and what man likes to borrow money from his own protégé? It was demeaning.

Emma made him marvel. Sentimental people are like volcanic springs: they merely gush, close up, and open for business unimpaired some otherwhere. She seemed to miss Naples not at all. Yet he had to admit that when she had the time she took as good care of him as ever. Only she had not often the time. They none of them had. All naval business was conducted from the house, which meant Emma must act interpreter, since Nelson eschewed Italian and refused French, out of a towering patriotic incompetence. Worst of all, that pewling, mewling heap of diffident disapproval, Josiah Nisbet, was back, soliciting his stepfather’s interest.

“He has his nice side,” said Emma, about whom he gossiped day and night. She believed in being kind.

“Like the dark side of the moon, no doubt, but we can scarcely expect in our lifetime to see it. Apparently no effort has been spared to bring him here. I would prefer no stone were left unturned to send him back.”

“But where can he go?”

“Constantinople,” snapped Sir William. “It is the farthest place. He should do well there; he has already manners to rival the Terrible Turk. He will blend.”

“You must pardon me, Father, if I speak out,” said Josiah to Nelson, “but though never one to impugn your motives or to question your matter, in manner it has been said your attentions to Lady Hamilton approach more nearly those appropriate to our mother than to another man’s wife. And though I shall not myself speak of it, I feel it my duty to inform you that I have frequently heard it spoken of.”

To Constantinople he went.

What people say, what people say, thought Nelson angrily. She is as pure as the driven snow.

Though perhaps a little more driven. Like Paolo and Francesca, she was caught up into the whirlwind. Emma found the movement exhilarating and Palermo a rum-tumtiddle sort of place. Given both men were close by, she was content.

*

At Kendal, for he had gone home to his wife, Romney—having first retreated to an echoing studio in Hampstead and then here—sat alone in a room, throwing ink blots at a piece of paper, a method he had despised in the Brothers Cozens when younger, but his fingers could find no shapes any more; he had to wait for the shapes to emerge.

The ink spread, the shapes emerged in roaring waves, in clouds, in intangibles, twisted and turned, and before he could catch them, ebbed away again. Each wave crested into Emma before it broke and fragmented into its disparate selves and receded with a hiss, before he could capture it. He was alone on a gray beach, with no other figure in view but an old winklewoman, turning around and around as she bent over blowholes in the sand. Then even she was no longer there. Unlike his monarch, Romney did not retreat into insanity to rest, but managed to get out of it from time to time, for the same purpose. From the next room, as always, came the hum and treadle of the spinning wheel, except that nowadays it was really there; it was his wife’s employment.

Then it stopped.

Where is youth? For the matter of that, who was youth? When he was shown the newspapers, his mind clouded with a clawing crowd, baying silent down stuccoed corridors. They had been invaded. They had been forced to flee.

“So are we all,” he said, and drew upon a sheet of paper the same incessant fading face. For a few years it had had specific features. Now it had none. As before, so afterward, though what it is we never quite know.

Across the fields, from somewhere, a church bell tolled. It is a great burden to believe and never to know in what. A small boy vanished down a remembered lane on a remembered day, but who was the boy, and where was the lane? He could not see them. The man walking toward you is the man walking away.

“It was a wonder to the lower orders throughout all parts of England to see the avenues to the churches filled with carriages,” he read in the Annual Register. “This novel appearance prompted the simple country people to enquire what was the matter.” The column adjacent stated that at Paris, luxury had at last attained to absolute pitch and was recherché in dress as well.

But what is absolute pitch? If we cannot hear it, we shall never have it. So better, though wistful, never to see her again.

“So this is my life,” said George, looking around at it. “What went wrong?”

*

He was their dear Nelson. He never questioned that. Neither did they. He was also their palladium. This pillared hall was very like a temple, but he had never been in a temple. Being narrowly devout, he questioned no gods but his own. Being inaesthetic, he took no comfort from the mere design of the plinth.

But Emma was an attitude, and that he could admire. She was a lady, one who knew how to keep the conversation mild, address a duchess properly, deal with precedence, and jollify a bishop in a manner that his brother William, that sacerdotal climber, had not, nor had his brother William’s wife. As for deportment, should that not always be easy and natural? Here he saw it so.

They were at Sir William’s table. Sir William sat propped at the head of it. Emma cut up Nelson’s meat for him. She wrote his letters. They had grown intimate.

Yet he was always relieved when Sir William came back into any room in which the two of them had just been left. When Sir William came back, something that had been lacking was again complete. Alone with either of them, he waited for the other. That should not have puzzled him. He should have been used to triads: when he had married his wife, she had already had a son.

*

At Naples, on the 8th of January, the Neapolitan Fleet was burned, like Cortez’ at Vera Cruz, with this difference: the actual torch had been applied by an Englishman, and yet the English Fleet could be seen in the harbor, out the window of the breakfast room at Palermo, complete and waiting. The English Fleet cannot burn.

Sir William was distressed to be parted from his collections. “I am desirous of returning home by the first ship that Lord Nelson sends down to Gibraltar, as I am worn out and want repose,” he said. “And as the house wants chimneys.” He was beginning to feel the chill.

Nelson kept Emma by him constantly. “My public correspondence,” he explained irritably to his wife, “besides the business of sixteen sail of the line and all our commerce, is with Petersburg, Constantinople, the Consulate at Smyrna, Egypt, the Turkish and Russian admirals, Trieste, Vienna, Tuscany, Minorca, Earl St. Vincent and Lord Spencer. This over, what time can I have for any private correspondence?” He was devoted to her. From time to time he took out her miniature, in an effort to recall what she looked like.

There was said to be fighting in the streets of Naples. The lazzaroni were rioting. The painter Tischbein reported that he had seen a crucifix with the body shot away so that only the legs and arms hung from the nails, like washing. He had been able to indulge the German passion for the beauties of a young, handsome and freshly shot military corpse. They have their poetry, and as models, the advantage that they cannot move. The Royal Palace had been looted, for why should the French have everything? The mob smashed what it could not carry off, as is its way.

“I wonder,” said Emma, “whatever became of that strange Russian gentlewoman on the ship. The one who said she was from Odessa.”

“No doubt she went home to wait upon events,” said Sir William.

On the 22nd, so they heard, the Parthenopean Republic was declared at Naples, while Eleonora Pimentel, another poetess, but more au courant than Miss Knight, declaimed an “Ode to Liberty.” The blood of St. Januarius had been induced to liquefy for the event.

“He is a saint,” Sir William explained. “He is indifferent to political changes. And as for the Republic, what could be more natural, for the locusts have no king.”

“What does Parthenopean mean?”

“It is the name of a siren who lured men to their doom in these parts. She is in Virgil. Afterward, her body was found on the seashore.”

But Emma neither knew Latin nor was listening. She was reading the Gazette.

“They have renamed the San Carlo and put on Nicaboro in Jucatan. Why, we saw that on the King’s birthday, exactly a year ago. Only here they say it was to celebrate the expulsion of the tyrant.”

“They will rename everything,” said Sir William. “It is their way.” But yes, it was exactly a year ago, so here it was, the King’s birthday again. The city twinkled with lamps which glittered, as lamps do on a frosty night, not with hospitality but a marshfire absence. Since there is nothing to hunt at night but owls and mice, the King attended the opera. Afterward there was a gala reception at court, for even in extreme cold, if you huddle together, you can keep a little warm.

The machinery of government had begun to whirl again, like a spinning jenny in an empty room, with a vast grinding of gears, for want of wool. Treaties were signed with both the Turk and Russian, though Nelson trusted neither, for the one was an infidel and the other as certainly not British. Sir William smoothed him down.

“Though we are on an island, this is not the time to be insular,” he said, and looked at the mountains without affection. Etna was not only invisible from here, but had nothing to offer but hiccups and Empedocles. It was a second-class mountain. He missed Vesuvius. He missed his peace and quiet.

Greville wrote to say that Emma’s heroic conduct during the voyage was on the lips of all, like jam tomorrow. “Tell her that all her friends love her more than ever, and those who did not know her, admire her.”

Ah fortunate few, thought Sir William, but handed the message on.

He was not the only courtier who did not care for Palermo much. Admiral Caracciolo, his fleet burned to the water line, asked permission to return to Naples to save his personal property at least. This was granted him. In February, there were food riots; and Cardinal Ruffo, the former director of the Royal Silk Factory at San Leucio, stepped forward with a velvet swoosh to ask permission to cross to Calabria and raise a rebellion.

“I know the Calabrians. They sleep with a crucifix on one side of the bed and a gun on the other. We shall use both,” he said.

“What does he propose, that we should bombard them with mulberry leaves from a rowboat?” demanded Nelson, but the King allowed him to go.

Surprisingly, by the middle of February he had raised an army of 17,000 men, banded together as the Christian Army of the Holy Faith.

“All very well,” sniffed Nelson, who had been brought up to regard Catholicism as neither holy nor a faith, and so mistrusted both camp followers and the Whore of Babylon. “But how do you reload a crucifix, pray tell me that? I would as soon fight cannon with an arquebus.”

But the King, who as a hunter knew all about the legend of St. Hubertus, and therefore saw nothing incongruous in a crucifix mounted between fighting antlers, began to hum to himself and to lift the carpets to look on the brighter side of things, for he proceeded always by parallels. Not only was that what Frederick Hohenstaufen had done, it was what Cardinal Ruffo was doing.

It continued to snow.

*

“Still und blendend lag der Schnee,” said the Austrian Ambassador. “Isn’t it curious that both the English and the French should have such an ugly word for such a lovely thing?”

In the courtyard of the Palazzo Palagonia, orange trees stood set in tubs. From the room in which they were working, Nelson and Emma could see the snow whirling outside, dissolving from the leaves, for the day was not as cold as it looked, and therefore the sun must be shining somewhere. They watched.

“Such a pretty word, snow,” said Emma. “And the snow is pretty too, on the oranges.”

Nelson considered. “When I was quite young, I made a polar voyage and shot a polar bear. We were almost crushed in the ice. My father used the polar bear as a hearth rug. Our boat was called the Carcass. And Northern Canada, too, for that matter, Quebec and Newfoundland …” His voice trailed away. He had become infatuated with an American young lady in Quebec, and had almost jumped ship to marry her. It was the only infatuation he had ever suffered. He had forgotten, until now, both her and the feeling.

“But there were no oranges,” he said disapprovingly, and went back to work.

Emma, who had caught a glimpse of icebergs if not of the American lady, dipped her pen in ink somewhat guiltily, as though she had evoked a crime. Icebergs were outside her experience. She did not care for the sound of them. Nelson, she thought, was too closely married to his work; but then, everyone she knew was married, even dear Greville, to his inefficiency.

“Why do you never speak of your wife?” she asked, having come out into the verbal estuary of her meander.

“There is not much to say,” said Nelson. She saw that her question had been a mistake.

*

On the mainland, Cardinal Ruffo was remitting taxes to pay his army. In Naples, the French were levying them to accomplish the same end. “We tax opinions,” the tax collector said to a Royalist lady. “If you have your own, you must pay double. If you share ours, you need only pay half.”

Everything movable had been shipped to France. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” caroled the Republic, with Eleonora Pimentel to lead the chorus.

“Tu rubbi a me, io rubbo a te,” said the people. The liberated did not seem to understand their liberators; it was necessary to translate.

In Palermo, the King went about like a scarecrow, for his income had shrunk. The Prince Royal had opened a dairy. Apart from consuming vast quantities of the best butter, Ferdinand had grown stingy and would not grant so much as the purchase of a new mattress.

“I like neither to see nor be seen,” said the Queen. “Circumstances are too painful.” So was her mattress. “I see Acton very seldom, to avoid his ill-humor,” she told the Hamiltons.

“She has hit upon the very reason,” cried Acton, “why I do not see her.”

“What is a cicisbèo?” Nelson asked Sir William.

“Why do you ask?” inquired Sir William, whom the question, coming from this source, had startled.

“It is what they call me here, so I am told.”

“It is a local institution,” said Sir William. “You see, they have taken you to their hearts, just as we have.” And he smiled benignly at Emma, who smiled, very rapidly, back.

“Though I am almost blind and worn out,” wrote Nelson to his wife, “I am quite revived by Sir William’s wit and inexhaustible pleasantry and Lady Hamilton’s affectionate care.” He would have said more, but checked his pen.

“What is a cicisbèo, Hardy?” he asked.

“A local institution,” said Hardy promptly.

“Ah, but what institution? Or must I ask Troubridge?”

“A man who is seen everywhere with another man’s wife,” said Hardy. “And what they do in private, God alone knows. But,” he added, seeing the expression on Nelson’s face, “it is quite harmless. It is the recognized thing.”

“Apparently,” said Nelson, “and damn.”

“Sir?”

“I have broken my pen.”

*

“He seems infatuated with her.”

“Good, then he will stay here,” said the Queen, whose fondness for dear Emma, though not essential to her politics, hinged upon them. Let them play as they would, so long as the fleet stayed here. About Sir William she did not vex herself one particle; he was her own kind of man. He would survive.

*

Cardinal Ruffo had swept as far north as Salerno. He was so clearly the stuff out of which heroes are made that there had been attempts to assassinate him already.

“Cardinal Ruffo,” said Sir William, quite in his old style, “has taken all the provinces for his knowledge.”

If he felt better, Nelson felt worse. His wife had asked if she might join him. “Sir William and Lady Hamilton and I are the mainspring by which the whole machinery of government turns,” he explained. And as for coming out, she would not like it and he would not have it. The mere thought made him ill, and when ill he was not altogether agreeable, for far worse than a hypochondriac is a hypochondriac with real complaints, and of these he had many.

Emma nursed him. Poor Fanny, he doubted if she would understand a man’s having a female friend, for she herself had none. Yet Emma was a friend. A squeeze of the hand, by way of gratitude, in those circumstances was only civil. Besides, Sir William was always, and better, there.

“I must say that there was at that time, certainly no impropriety in living under Lady Hamilton’s roof,” wrote Miss Knight. (If nothing in particular has happened to us, we can always fill up our autobiography with other people’s lives, and hers now made a considerable pile.) “Her house was the resort of the best company of all nations, and the attentions paid to Lord Nelson appeared perfectly natural.” As indeed they had, but looking at the manuscript a little later, she could not but marvel at how time flies.

There was trouble with Charles Lock, the new British Consul. Neither Nelson nor Sir William would recognize his right to provide the navy with dried beef at a profit merely marginal, and a consul has to live somehow. He took it ill. Besides, the middle classes never approve of those either above or below them, for does the meat in a sandwich, when it has been bitten, approve of the bread?

At dinner a Turk, in graphic French, entertained Lady Hamilton with an account of his atrocities, dismemberment, mutilation and such, mostly. “With this weapon,” he said, and drew his shabola, the better to explain with the English of his body, “I cut off the heads of twenty. There is the blood.”

“Oh let me see the sword that did the glorious deed!” cried Emma, and clapping up the shabola, she kissed it and handed it to the Hero of the Nile.

Mrs. Charles Lock, who was far gone in pregnancy, produced a faint and had to be removed from the room.

“She is either affected or a Jacobin,” said Emma. “She wore green ribbons.”

“Shame,” said the Lock relations.

“Bravo!” shouted the mere cousins-german.

“Oh God,” said Sir William. “She is Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s sister, and besides, he is distracted about the beef.”

“Well, she is affected, and green does not suit her at all.” A statement not only true, but like most truths, beside the point.

Emma had discovered the top-heavy joys of gambling. It was what the local aristocracy did—all Sicily was one lottery—and never fainted when they lost, but stepped away like gentlemen to blow their brains out. It was exactly like Carlton House, except that the rooms were bigger. One had merely to play one’s hopes and hunches, and no nonsense about remembering complicated things like cards.

She was so proud when she won, and when she lost, only a little sorry, for that meant that Nelson had to go fetch more money, and it was a pity to make him walk—he did limp so.

Gambling sucked her in.

*

In Naples, General MacDonald, head of the occupying forces, issued a proclamation to the effect that cardinals, archbishops, abbots, parish priests and all ministers of public worship should be held responsible for rebellion in the places where they resided and be punished with death if rebellion there occurred; and that every accomplice, whether lay or clerical, should be treated as a rebel.

“Cardinal Ruffo is a remarkable man,” said Sir William. “He was wasted making silk.”

“But if they are going to hang him …”

“It is precisely because they cannot catch him that they say they will. A proclamation is like a diplomatic protest: it means that nothing can be done, but says what we would do if it could. It is the beginning of the end.”

*

In March, Nelson sent Troubridge to blockade Naples. He could not go himself. His duty, he said, lay here.

That’s all very well, so long as he does not himself lie with it, thought Troubridge, but was loyal enough not to listen when others said the same thing. On the third of April he had the royal colors hoisted over a recaptured, which is to say, a liberated, Procida.

“Send me some flour and an honest judge,” he wrote to Palermo. “The people are calling for justice, so eight or ten of them must hang.”

“Send me word some proper heads are taken off; this alone will comfort me,” said Nelson, who had quite taken up the royal cause.

But Troubridge, who had that morning received a man’s head in a basket of grapes—the grapes fresh, the head not—sent the grapes only. The weather was too hot to keep heads.

If the thoughts of the loyal ran to grapes, the King’s ran to cheeses—to be precise, to càciocavalli, the local cheeses which were always strung up by the neck to dry.

“Democracy and true liberty render people gentle, indulgent, generous and magnanimous,” wrote Eleonora Pimentel, the Egeria of the Republic, and then said what she thought of the King and Queen. She did not mince words. She did wish to mince them. Since it was time for extreme measures, she decided to rename the streets, perhaps in the hope of confusing Cardinal Ruffo’s advancing troops. They were to be called Fortune, Success, Triumph, Victory, Hope, Fertility, Pleasure, Fecundity, Hilarity, Security, Felicity, Valor, Glory, Honor, Prudence, Faith, Concord, Modesty, Silence, Peace, Vigilance, Grace, Love, Hospitality, Innocence and Frugality. The people, who could not tell the difference between Philip V and Neptune, must find their way home as best they could.

“It sounds like a list of your Attitudes,” said Sir William, “but without the neoclassical trimmings. I notice they say nothing of Fortitude. We must add a Stratonice to the repertoire, my dear.”

It was some time since they had done the Attitudes; life had been too rushed.

“Caracciolo must go first,” said the Queen. “He has turned traitor and heads their navy.”

He had made an injudicious choice, therefore he should be punished, not judged. Choice is beyond the law.

At Naples, the doors of the theatre were walled up after a performance of Monti’s Aristodemo, because it portrayed a dethroned monarch recovering his crown. The Republic was taking no chances.

*

“They are putting on Alfieri at the San Carlo,” said Emma, who had the fashion, birth, death and cultural pages of the newspaper Sir William was reading. “Only it is called the National Theatre now, and nobody goes.”

“Alfieri is a very fine writer,” said Sir William.

“All the same, you didn’t have to sit through him when we were there.”

We, Sir William had noted now for some time, no longer meant Emma and himself, but Emma and the Queen. He was amused. For of course when Maria Carolina said We she meant only herself. Like a ship in dry dock, she needed these human props only until she was mended and could float in her natural element again. Indeed, to knock them away would be necessary, were she to be relaunched. But he saw no reason to explain that to Emma.

Besides, Alfieri was dull. He had set out to revolutionize the stage, and now the revolution had staged him. Sir William found these small games of tit for tat entertaining, but never explained them, for your born raconteur can be amused only by his own private jokes; they are the only ones he ever listens to.

*

Nelson, alone and staring at the ceiling, was listening to his conscience, a small voice that would not be still, speaking—plainly, but from far away—in the tones of the American lady from Quebec.

“Naturally I show affection. It is merely gratitude, but more intimate, for after all, we know each other well,” said Nelson.

The image of Lady Nelson, crossing his mind as she would cross the front parlor at Round Wood, where she was staying with his father (she was good about staying with the ill, though that diminished her acquaintance), said nothing.

“Oh God, I cannot go back to that existence,” he groaned. “The rooms are too small. The ceilings are too low.”

Lady Nelson looked singularly like Sir William’s first and dead wife. She was a sick-room and small-gossip wife. She had no other interests. Her face disdained vivacity, which she felt, instinctively, either to be ill-bred or beyond her, and in either event, no concern of hers. Speak of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and she merely said gently, “Yes, but after all, he is a prince,” hushed the discussion, and went on to talk placidly of the new mangle and St. Vincent’s disease. St. Vincent was precious to Nelson, being an elder man who had admired him. His diseases were equally precious to Fanny. Their symptoms were all her contacts with the great.

St. Vincent liked Emma extraordinarily well.

It was intolerable.

“Besides, we are above all that,” he said. “For I am Lord Nelson now.”

Lady Nelson was called suddenly away (a neighbor had croup), stopped to tie her bonnet strings before the hall mirror, made a small cautious Christian smile at her own image, and all neat and tidy, went out. The room was, thank heavens, empty. Empty it looked much the same as before her departure. The ceiling was too low.

*

“And where is Lord Nelson?”

“In his room, resting.”

“He looks worn out these days,” said Mrs. Cadogan approvingly. Whatever they did among themselves was their own affair. She was too astute ever to risk a quarrel. Criticism was not among her pleasures. She preferred Sir William, but Sir William was failing. If no one else could see that, she could. She did not wish to discuss the matter with Emma, ever.

*

“You may judge, my dear Charles, what it is to keep a table for all the poor British emigrants from Naples, who have none, & for the officers of the fleet, as Lord Nelson lives in the house with us, & all business, which is immense, is transacted here,” Sir William wrote to Greville. It was time to chase down his finances, which Charles seemed to have scattered like paper through the woods. The King had granted him leave to go back to England sufficiently long to do that. He would come as soon as possible.

Alas, to go was not possible.

*

On the 17th of April, the French abandoned Naples.

“The Republic is now established,” said the Monitore, “and to her enemies nothing remains but jealousy, desperation and death.”

The blood of St. Januarius refused to liquefy.

The President of the Republic walked up to the Cardinal Archbishop and cocked a pistol. “Unless a miracle takes place, you are a dead man,” he said.

The Cardinal Archbishop could see this for himself. “Warm it,” he said, handing it to an assistant. The miracle took place, but never before had it been greeted with catcalls and public booing. It was necessary to remove the tax on flour and fish.

the lazzaroni shouted, which was not the effect intended, though there seemed no way to put the tax back on again.

*

Nelson finally brought himself to put to sea, in order to pursue a part of the French Fleet which had been reported in the Mediterranean again. He did not catch it.

“To tell you how dreary and uncomfortable the Vanguard appears, is only telling you what it is to go from the pleasantest society to a solitary cell, or from the dearest friends to no friends,” he wrote Emma. “I am now perfectly the great man—not a creature near me. From my heart I wish myself the little man again. I love Mrs. Cadogan. You cannot conceive what I feel when I call you all to my remembrance.”

“He loves you,” said Emma to her mother.

“Let us hope it stops there,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“If you don’t know, then my heart is at rest,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who was prone to regard innocence as nothing more than the absence of evil. And who is to say she was wrong? In self-knowledge there is certainly much evil.

“I can assure you that neither Emma nor I knew how much we loved you until this separation, and we are convinced your Lordship feels the same as we do,” wrote Sir William.

“I give and bequeath to my dear friend, Emma Hamilton, wife of the Right Hon. Sir William Hamilton, a nearly round box set with diamonds, said to have been sent me by the mother of the Grand Signor, which I request she will accept (and never part from) as a token of regard and respect for her very eminent virtues (for she, the said Emma Hamilton, possesses them all to such a degree that it would be doing her an injustice was any particular one to be mentioned), from her faithful and affectionate friend,” wrote Nelson, adding a codicil both to his current last testament and his latest letter. He had begun to banter wills.

“Isn’t that sweet?” asked Emma.

“No one has ever said anything against your virtues,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “But then, it is the vices people like to gab about these days.”

*

Sir William had discovered that to feel weary is not the same as to feel tired. One can be quite restored and energetic, and yet feel weary. However, with Nelson gone, the house had settled down so that it was possible to hear Emma singing from the center of silence, rather than merely as the upper stave of any general uproar.

“What is it, my dear?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I just opened the score in the middle.”

Sir William leafed to the frontispiece. “‘Il Matrimonio Segreto,’ by Cimarosa,” he said. “Why yes, that’s rather what I thought it was.”

“Don’t you care for it?”

“Oh it’s an extremely amusing work,” he said. “Pray continue.” An inability to give way to those sudden irritable bursts of steam which others call deep feeling—a mere superficial eruption upon the surface of things—does much to make life bearable. If we do not itch, we need not scratch. The deeper emotions are motionless, though currents eddy through them seventy fathoms down. Since there is no light down there, fortunately for us, we cannot see them. But they are there and they do sustain us. The facile emotions must be very like the feeding grounds in Baron Humboldt’s current, off the coasts of South America, where sea life teems so numerous it eats itself up, or else the surface is startled by the hurtling eruption of giant squid, eager to feed and then sink down again to digest its memories. Though living, these grunion and sea scavenge are not the source of life. Their source of life is the depth that sustains them, whose currents run cold below, to keep them warm above.

What sustains them, thought Sir William, is me.

He did not mind that. But he did hope they had at least done something guilty enough to excuse the look on their faces, though knowing Nelson, and Emma too, for that matter, he suspected not.

That Nelson would take the plunge (swift like the eagle from yon lofty tow’r), he did not doubt, for he was a man plagued merely by conscience, which is no substitute for a sense of responsibility, alas.

I must remember, he told himself, that this is something I know nothing about, and went to bed, and anticipated no trouble. To give her credit, it was remarkable how little she neglected him.

*

On the 29th, Nelson returned to Palermo, and Cardinal Ruffo reached Melfi, carrying a banner embroidered by the Queen herself, with her own arms on one side and God’s on the other so no matter how the wind blew, one of them would be on the winning side. God may not be there, but it is wise to keep on the good side of where He once was, for though nobody has seen Him for years, He may be there.

At Naples, a Te Deum was sung in San Lorenzo, to celebrate the possibility of victory, and a priest was arrested for shouting “Long Live the King.” He pleaded drunkenness as his excuse.

“In vino veritas,” said the judge, and nodded to the shooting squad. “You may fire.”

“It would be better to have prayers said for our own safety,” said the diarist de Nicola.

The Cardinal entered the city, and the Republicans walled themselves up in the Castelli d’Uovo and Nuovo. That is, the glorious liberators—which is to say the traitors—went there to protect themselves from the reactionary oppressor—which is to say, the liberator. They returned to the egg, while the mob—which is to say, the loyal lazzaroni—held carnival out of season, roasted human flesh on spits, played football with the heads, posed women nude as Liberty, had their liberty of them, dragged their victims to the Cardinal, and when he would not slaughter them, they did.

The Cardinal wrote asking the King to return, and granted a truce to the Republicans in the castles. “What is the use of punishing?” he asked. “How is it possible to punish so many persons without an indelible imputation of cruelty?”

The King explained how. “As a Christian, I pardon everybody, but as he whom God appointed, I must be a strict avenger of the offenses committed against Him and of the injury done to the State.”

“Hang them all,” said Nelson. We need discipline to keep afloat. We must trim the sails and calk the seams if we are to have calm seas and a prosperous voyage.

*

If there was to be liberty, the Queen wished it supervised.

“The Queen is miserable and says that although the people of Naples are for them in general, yet things will not be brought to that state of quietness and subordination till the fleet of Lord Nelson appears off Naples. She therefore begs, intreats, and conjures you, my dear Lord, if it is possible, to arrange matters so as to be able to go to Naples.

“Sir William is writing for General Acton’s answer.

“For God’s sake consider it, and do! We will go with you, if you will come and fetch us.

“Sir William is ill; I am ill; it will do us good,” wrote Emma.

Nelson consented to go. Emma was overjoyed. “We shall see Naples again—our dear old unchanged Naples,” she said.

“Will we?” Sir William had his doubts. Though it was his duty, as it is the duty of every man, to see justice done, that is not the same as being compelled to watch it being done. This excursion smacked too much of an outing to Tyburn Hill.

He liked the prospect even less when Nelson took him below and showed him a warrant the King had issued for the arrest of Cardinal Ruffo, who had become too popular. (Is there not always something treasonable about another man’s success?) It was to be used if needed.

“Lock it up and tell no one,” said Sir William, who preferred Blackstone to Chief Justice Coke, and had no love of the Star Chamber.

Nelson locked it up, but they both knew it was there.

*

“Look,” said Emma, who had been trying to read Lessing’s School for Honour, or the Chance of War, which she found dull. “A dolphin has followed us from port. It is like an opera.”

Glancing at the casement, Sir William noticed that it had once been struck by a bullet and that the wood was newly joined around a patch. That is the trouble with a restoration: it may look the same, but it is not.

It would not be like an opera. It would not even be like an opera buffa. He went into the cabin to wash his hands.