IT SEEMED TO THEM ODD—they had always thought to go home to Naples, their stay in Palermo had been temporary, but now they had seen their houses in ruins, they had that home-coming feeling about Palermo instead. Once they reached Palermo, everything would be all right. It could certainly not be all wrong. The King, who in Naples had stayed in his cabin as much as possible, here walked about quite confidently on deck.

The ships processed into warmer air, scented with limes and oranges. It was siesta. Sir William gave himself up to a happy contemplation of melons, peaches, grapes, prosciutto con fighi, and other emblems of maturity. Nelson wrote letters. Emma, admirably posed, admired the view.

“I’ve told Lady Nelson all about you,” said Nelson, startling her. He seemed these days to approach her each time from a different direction and always rapidly.

“All?” she asked blankly, with an inner thump. “But you do not know all.”

“I mean I sang your praises.”

“Oh those,” said Emma, who knew all of them, for when nervous she sometimes sang them to herself. She was relieved.

Platonic as ever, he gave her hand a grateful squeeze. He was incorrigible.

“The Queen has prepared a fete in our honor,” she told him.

*

At noon they dropped anchor in Palermo Harbor and the Queen came aboard, embraced Emma and clapped a necklace around her neck—the royal portrait surrounded by diamonds, suspended by a chain—stepped back to admire the effect, trod in the scupper and went wet-soled to dinner. Sir William received a similarly mounted portrait of the King. The Queen, who was sentimental about everything, gushed.

“It is a false bottom,” said Sir William. “Take it out, and you can see the solid bedrock of indifference underneath,” but only to Nelson. He was polite as other men are skeptical—that is, from habit rather than from any lack of conviction. He did not wish to spoil Emma’s triumph.

They went ashore at a gilded stucco stage, emblematical of everything and nothing, where the local senators awaited them, robes flapping in the breeze. The city was drunk but not disorderly. The Te Deum sung in the Cathedral was long but uplifting. In the evening there was not one pyrotechnic display, but several.

“Pinchbeck,” said Sir William, fingering his royal medallion, “but neatly mounted, all the same.”

Nelson’s gift was to be a title, a thing not only to be prized above diamonds, but considerably less costly to have made up, though an estate was included with it, as was also a diamond sword. The sword he accepted. About the title, he was wary, for titles, he had learned, are apt to become an expense.

Emma implored him to accept. Where else would he be offered a dukedom? “You consider your honor too much,” she said, “if you persist in refusing what the King and Queen consider theirs.”

“Lord Nelson,” said the King, his tone elevated, his manner not, “do you wish that your name alone should pass with honor to posterity, and that I, Ferdinand Bourbon, should appear ungrateful?”

“Of course not,” said Nelson brusquely, deeply moved. “I shall accept.”

Glad to get rid of it, for it had gone begging, the King embraced him.

“Where the devil is it?” asked Nelson afterward.

“At the foot of Mount Etna, near Syracuse. The name Bronte means thunderer.”

“The Queen has sent me two carriage loads of dresses!” shouted Emma, bursting in with the most splendiferous a hasty rummage could provide. “If I have fagged, I am more than repaid.”

As the Austrian Ambassador said, no one but his master was forgotten here.

“He has done nothing worth remembering,” snapped the King, who had hoped the Holy Roman Emperor would send a few troops.

“We are dying with the heat, and the feast of Santa Rosalia begins this day. How shall we get through it?” demanded Nelson. “Even our dear Lady Hamilton has been unwell.”

It was the excitement; it did fair do her in.

Santa Rosalia was made of more durable stuff. A cave-dwelling ascetic, she had been so intent upon her devotions as not to notice that the stalactites dripped calcium and had solidified in the act of turning the penultimate page of a volume of the Church Fathers. God, in this case, had offered not bread, but a stone, and her handsomely chiseled features were trotted about yearly, carried aloft in procession by sturdy peasants with the biceps to manage her.

Between popery and propinquity, Charles Lock was not happy.

“That infamous woman,” he wrote home, “is at the bottom of all the mischief which has rendered my stay so uncomfortable for the last six months. We have in Lady Hamilton the bitterest enemy you can imagine.” He had no doubt of it; he had been seated incorrectly at dinner, according to his precedence as British Consul rather than his presumption as the husband of a relative of Lord Fitzgerald. It rankled.

What he complained of was true. Emma was without malice, and so, unsuited to the polite usages of society. As the Duchess of Devonshire had discovered years ago, though respectable enough in other ways, she had no small talk. Lock complained to Sir William.

“The Court has the impression you are a Jacobin,” said Sir William. “You must be on your guard.”

“She has insinuated my wife’s principles are Republican,” said Mr. Lock. This was quite untrue: as everybody knew, his wife had no principles.

“The Queen says that our not going about in society more shows we condemn it. But how can we go, if we are not asked?”

“I shall have Emma put you down on the list,” said Sir William.

“No doubt Your Excellency means well, but what can you do, when there is a person so able and so bent upon counteracting you?” said Lock, forced to speak plainly.

“You will have the goodness to refer to my wife by her correct title,” said Sir William. “She is not from Porlock. I do not haul you out of your own mire for the joy of being besplattered by it. You may go.” He was not a man who reacted favorably to the use of force.

“She has poisoned his mind against me,” wrote Lock. “His health is very much broken and his frame is so feeble that even a slight attack of bile, to severe fits of which he has lately been subject, may carry him off. With all this malice, her Ladyship maintains every appearance of civility with expressions of goodwill to us both.” He had no patience with appearances, which was odd, since he had so much difficulty in keeping his own up that surely he might be expected to realize that others did not always find their maintenance easy.

“Public opinion should be formed, but never followed,” said Sir William wearily, telling Emma about Lock. “But since it is our duty to others to do the former, and to ourselves, to avoid the latter, could you not be more discreet?”

“But I am discreet,” wailed Emma, in some bewilderment, for in her lexicon—since she had compiled it from oral evidence—this word had a merely sexual meaning. She then went off with Nelson to play faro. They would have gone all three, but Sir William these days had to retire by ten.

*

Nelson’s brother William had been baying after succession to the title, and now there were two would bay twice as loud. “Ambition, pride, and a selfish disposition are among the various passions which torment him,” wrote Fanny, who knew nothing of Palermo, where even the heat was passionate. She added that Lord Minto’s eldest son was deaf.

Nelson was not. Nor did he care for the high moral tone to which Admiralty correspondence seemed recently to have risen. “Do not, my dear Lord,” he asked Lord Spencer, “let the Admiralty write harshly to me—my generous soul cannot bear it.”

With that indifference to sensibility which is the chief characteristic of states sensible of the proprieties, the Admiralty wrote harshly anyway, and as he had warned, he could not bear it. He was accused of dalliance.

He scarcely knew what to do. He had had a sound Christian upbringing, which tells us what we shouldn’t do, not what we should. Smiting the heathen is always allowable, but what does one do when one is smitten? For the Song of Solomon, as we know—for we have been told, if the subject must be brought up—is a purely allegorical work. It describes the soul’s union with God. It settles for less.

And though universal applause can drown out the hypercritical, it cannot, alas, drown them outright. When the applause dies down, they become once more audible, like crickets at evening—like Consul Lock.

*

On the 3rd of September, the Queen concluded the display of her gratitude with a fête champêtre, the palace, the city, the gardens illuminated, and a counterfeit of the French flagship Orient blown up in fireworks and then allowed to sink through the black waters of the sky, still one more allusion to the Battle of the Nile.

Emma, disguised as the Genius of Taste, but she had risen above mere taste and that showed, led the party forward across the lawn toward a Temple of Fame, on the roof of which squatted Fame herself, blowing a trumpet. Inside the temple stood three wax statues, Nelson in the middle, with Lady Hamilton on one side of him and Sir William on the other. Prince Leopold, a boy of nine, dressed as a midshipman, mounted a stepladder behind the middle statue and placed on its brow a crown of laurel, the dew on its leaves counterfeited in diamonds.

Nelson then embraced the Prince. “You are the guardian angel of our papa and my dominions,” said Leopold, who had been rehearsed, but not enough.

Since wax dissolves in warm weather, the statues were then removed to a lumber room.

*

“Entre nous, I fear their Sicilian Majesties will not follow our advice, which is to return immediately to Naples,” said Sir William. Certainly the King had no mind to. What with venery and Venus, the palace and piscator, and the theatre in the evening as well, he found nothing lacking. Like Charles II—but with the advantage of one more kingdom, if far less brains—he did not propose to go upon his travels again.

“I have wrote you lately but short letters,” Nelson explained to his wife, and it was quite true they got no longer, “for my time is fully occupied that I never set my foot out of the writing room, except now and then in the evening with Sir William and Lady Hamilton to the palace.”

That there was a large state bed in the writing room nagged at him. These palaces, though sumptuous, were apt to be furnished in harum-scarum taste. The bed had been too large to move. It stood at the far end of the writing room, on a dais, and neither had been nor would be occupied.

He had been disappointed in Bronte, for though he had not seen it, he had hoped to see some ready money from it. Expenses had been heavy.

“In Sicily, money is never ready,” explained Sir William. “And if it is, there is a hand there all the sooner to take it.”

Nelson had been informed that though His Sicilian Majesty’s Government would be delighted to clear the title, this would cost £1000.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” Sir William piously consoled. “They are a literal-minded people, being devout.”

Once, when alone in the room, Nelson had been unable to resist the impulse to look under the embroidered coverlet of the bed, to see if it had sheets and blankets upon it. It had not.

“I have one piece of news to tell you which causes a few is it possible?” reported Fanny. “Admiral Dickson is going to marry a girl of 18 years, surely he has lost his senses. All true, the Admiral saw Miss Willings (a daughter of one of the minor canons at Norwich) not quite three weeks at Yarmouth. He fell desperately in love, gave balls on board ship, then on shore, in short was quite desperate … I heard Admiral and Mrs. Nugent have separated, a difference of temper she says is the cause … Miss Susanna I took to the concert last Thursday. We were entertained by seeing an old nabob make love to a very rich porter brewer’s daughter … she must marry one of the most unpleasant-looking men in the world for the sake of driving four horses.”

“Oh God,” said Nelson. There was a ball to be given on ship that night. The arrangements he had left to Emma.

“Emma who looks as well and as blooming as ever talks of death every day,” wrote Sir William to Lord Minto, with complacency and amusement. “I believe it is the heat and sirocco winds that depress us all for Lord Nelson complains too.”

“I think you had better ask, in strict confidence, that Lord Elgin stop on his way out to Constantinople and investigate,” said Lord Minto to Lord Grenville. “It seems there is something in the wind.”

“Fox has shown me some most odd letters,” said Lord Grenville to Lord Minto, “from a young relative of his by marriage, a Mr. Charles Lock, who is our Consul at Palermo.”

*

Mr. Lock’s dandiacal addiction to facial hair had resulted in an incident. The King could not abide facial hair, and in particular not side whiskers, which he associated with the Jacobin.

Despite a warning, Lock attended a court ball disguised as a Thames fisherman, though changing the red bonnet for a blue, for fear of giving offense.

“The King says your dress is indecent,” said Sir William, in a flap out of nowhere. “You had better retire, put on a domino, and return.”

Offended, Lock drew himself up to his little height, an acrobatic feat akin to the exertions of a macaw beaking its way back onto its perch.

“I have only to observe to Your Excellency that I wore this identical dress at a masquerade when several of our royal family were present; it could therefore never enter my head that it would be offensive here. If the character of my costume is economical, I have spared no expense in that of my wife, so it cannot be supposed that I intended any disrespect to this Court thereby.” Mr. Lock was a typical member of the new middle classes and exhibited their morality in the same sense that a bitch in heat would have exhibited herself. “My wife,” he added, “is the Peruvian over there. The one with the fruit on her head.”

“Il n’était pas nécessaire que Monsieur Lock vint ici nous braver dans un costume sans culottes pour demontrer ses principes!” roared the Queen, though French is not a gusty language and she always shook like an old bridge when she clattered across it.

“Turn him out. Turn him out! Or I will turn him out myself,” squealed the King, standing above the rising floods upon a bench, and glowering with the glum resignation of a Cnut.

Lock waited upon Sir William next day with a handwritten memorial of the incident.

“It is unfortunate,” said Sir William, and made no apology.

Emma came in to say she had talked the Queen around, but since she was as clumsy to move as a barge, it had taken two hours.

“Lock,” said Sir William, “that you should be agreeable perhaps transcends reason, but could you not confine yourself to common sense? The King trounced a whiskered Portuguese officer out of the theatre pit only last night. Unfortunately his fellow officers rose, pointed to their own whiskers, and burst into a horse laugh. As a result, His Majesty smarts. The punishment for side whiskers is three months’ imprisonment. So shave.”

Sobbing with indignation, Lock shaved. “So well does this artful woman know how to create herself a merit by this ostentation of what she terms doing good for evil,” he wrote home, after Emma had once more gotten him received at Court.

“I always heard she was a harmless creature, boisterous perhaps, but not bad,” said Fox. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s there.”

“Well, so’s my cousin by marriage or whatever you call ’im. I must say he does not write a pretty letter.”

“But he writes often,” said Lord Grenville. “Where is Elgin now?”

“In Vienna.”

*

Not only would the King not return to Naples, he would no longer listen to the advice of the Queen. He said he preferred to die where he was, and that not soon, rather than go where she proposed to send him.

“I have always foreseen that as I grew older my power would diminish,” said the Queen. “If I knew where to find the River Lethe, I would travel there on foot in order to drink its water.” Lethe’s exact whereabouts being unknown, she toyed instead with the idea of a trip to Vienna, which has always been on the Danube, a chartable stream. “I shall ask for a few months’ leave to distract my mind, restore my health and marry my daughters,” she told Emma. If she had not an army, she had daughters, and there are more ways than one of getting aboard a throne.

The King had commissioned Canova to do an heroic portrait, which loomed larger in Naples, where it was set up, than ever it did in the master’s oeuvre.

“He allowed himself to be scaled the wrong way,” said Sir William. “Nothing taller than eight feet has any aesthetic merits whatsoever. It is the same with any microcosm; multiply the field of vision, and you can see the flaws.”

Lord and Lady Elgin arrived in October, he sending home the male, or serious, recommendations; Lady Elgin, being a woman, preferring to report upon the unforgivable, and hence irremediable, flaws.

Nelson was seen with Emma everywhere, most often drowsing beside her at the gaming table, and the public display of devotion must ever be an offense against the well-regulated decorums of society.

“Captain Morris went to Sir William to deliver some dispatches he had for Lord N. He read them and then called Lady Hamilton out of the room. When she came back, she said, ‘Sir William, we shall not go to the country today; you must dress yourself and go to Court after breakfast.’ ‘Why?’ asked Sir William. ‘Oh, I will tell you presently,’ said Lady Hamilton, flounced her head, and went on talking. Is it not a pity a man who had gained so much credit should fling himself away in this shameful manner?”

Lady Elgin was indignant. No matter who she was now, they all remembered what Lady Hamilton had been. And Nelson, to speak plain, had not come from a background much better, though Lady Nelson was understood to be, whatever her other faults, quite respectable.

Lord Elgin recommended that Sir William be recalled. Emma had grown too high-flown. If tampering with His Majesty’s Navy was, on a low sensual level, explicable, tampering with His Majesty’s Mail Pouch was beyond excuse.

“She runs everything,” said Lock.

Having made their several reports, the Elgins went off to Athens: he to play marbles; she to entertain.

*

On October 5th, Nelson was forced to sail to the blockade of Minorca, with nothing to entertain him on the voyage but some letters from Fanny.

Brother William was still snuffling after the possible succession to Bronte. He was plump for a trufflehound. Josiah had sent home a description of the estate, and so—like Lord Falmouth in greater extremity—had given “last first proof that he had brains.” “The dampness occasioned by the constant rain was beyond description.” And worse than that, beef was 9/4 the stone. She was to go and brace her nerves in Devonshire.

*

In Palermo, they could not brace their nerves at all. “I wish it could be pointed out to the King that there should be an amnesty,” said a courtier, “but who could do so?” He had already caused so much, that there was no one willing to risk his further displeasure.

Nelson returned from Minorca.

On the 9th of November, which was called the 19th Brumaire, there was a coup d’état in France. The Directory fell. Napoleon was in, and therefore the revolutionary calendar was out. He had better things to do than rename streets and confuse poesy with politics. In Germany, Goethe—as benign and mechanical as ever—saluted the dawn of a new age, but had no desire to beckon to it; a salute should suffice. In Palermo, Emma, who knew nothing of Cardano on Cards or the medieval versions of Fortuna, went gambling to celebrate. Her favorite game was faro. The word means lighthouse, specifically that beacon built in Ptolemy’s day to guide the mariner home. Nelson dozed beside her. When his eyes were open, she dazzled him with a glance. When his eyes were shut, she wondered why he dazzled her. They were a noticeable couple, for both had been born egregious, a quality which cannot be concealed and so naturally provokes the ill-will of those who have everything to conceal themselves, mostly their own mediocrity.

Nelson was a little man neither to his followers nor his friends. It was only his superiors who diminished him, as best they were able. He forgave the admonition, for gambling did not bore him.

“Why do you interest yourself in such things?” he asked.

“I don’t. They interest me,” said Emma, and shoved another pile of ducats down. “Besides, it is the fashion,” she explained, lost, and paid up—with his money.

She paid up with a good deal of it, and there were other drains upon his pocket, which in optimum case was not so deep as a well but more like a cistern, being replenished from above when he rained money into it, rather from below by the cool crystal springs of a private income. Graffer, having no English garden to play with any more, Nelson sent him off to Bronte to organize an English farm as an example to the Sicilians of the singular excellence of nonvinous agriculture.

“I hope the news of the Dukedom,” wrote Fanny, “is true, if you have money given to support the rank.” Since he had not, he planted seven hundred acres to corn and watched Emma gamble.

“They have everything in common,” said Damas, a damned Frenchman, “money, faults, vanities, wrongdoing of every kind.”

“Her rage is play, and Sir William says when he dies she will be a beggar,” reported Lady Minto.

*

For New Year’s there were fetes, but it was New Year’s of 1800, and a century is more solemn than a year, for it is a kind of swivel which allows us to whirl either way, forward or back. A number of attitudes were permissible, so long as they were neither shown nor voiced and so long as they were not Emma’s.

A little solemnly, like guests at a ball, waiting for the doors to the supper room to be folded back, perspiring from the crush of their exertions, they watched to see what would be given them as room and reward. For they expected empty rooms, prepared for them to enter. They would saunter in at the proper time:

—and, a little solemnly, having defended themselves stubbornly thus far, they prepared to fall back upon the ultimate room, the chamber in which they would die;

—or, securely, from boxes of rank and station, they waited, like grandparents, to see the new child, who might or might not be worth a christening mug;

—or, anyhow, the guns in the harbor fired a salute, the churches, despite the snows, were warm inside—the glass in their windows steamy—and there were midnight masses as well as singing in the streets.

A yellow rocket arched, sprang into bloom, and with the century it died. A cold wind blew through the gardens, like change, and roused thereby a whirl of snow and dead leaves, a sort of fetch.

Clocks chimed. There was a pause. The doors to the supper room were folded back. But there was no change, and, a little stiff, Miss Knight, who had been asked to the party, shook out her skirt and let out her breath and said “Well!”

It was over with. The world was still there. The millennialist must change his plans. And yet his defeat did not make them that more the festive. The night was cloudy and dark, the rockets now seemed to explode anticlimactically, and the Hamiltons and Nelson went home early.

At the rear of the Palazzo Palagonia, a terrace overlooked the sea, which was black but empty except for the flare of a single fishing boat rocking up and down not far out.

“Well, what will it bring?” asked Nelson as they stood there peering toward the horizon, each looking ahead from a different age, a different altitude; each having climbed a different height in time.

“Oh all sorts of good things, I expect,” said Emma. “Doesn’t it always?” She was thirty-five and now faced life head on, for now neither profile was the better one; they had both aged, so she favored neither side.

“I meant what will it be like?” said Nelson, taking her hand. He was forty-two, little had been granted him in the human way as yet, and New Year’s is a lonely time. He felt cold.

Emma, who had an impulse to turn back, and who was besides both compassionate and sorry, took one of Sir William’s hands in her free one and squeezed it confidingly.

But Sir William, who was seventy and could see farther than either of them and had taken Nelson’s question seriously, looked out over the sea and said, “Whatever else it will be, it will be vulgar.” New children are always vulgar, for if they are not vulgar, they are not children—and an old man will put up with much for the pleasure of congenial company—and besides, it would not be for long.

Emma, who had felt the sudden chill, asked to withdraw indoors.

“Take her,” said Sir William. “I would like to remain outdoors a while.” For though the society of others enhances our knowledge of them, if we would know ourselves, we must isolate the beast and contemplate him, enlarged, at our leisure.

He stood respectfully before the view, his hands folded, his legs apart, at rest, and realized—as soon as his thoughts had roiled up into some temporary identity before scattering again—that he had been remembering that in Apollonius of Tyana, and other authors, we may read that sometime in the late spring, the beginning of the old Pagan year, a voice had been heard across these waters, crying, “Great Pan is dead,” and that the sound of that lament had lingered over the sea for a long time. Indeed, he could hear it now; and that when Anthony was at last put down by Octavian’s favorite, there was heard in the streets of Alexandria the ghostly music, the sistrums and the tambours and syrinxes of the old gods, deserting him.

Yes, it would be a vulgar century.

Nelson, who had been gone for no little time, came out to join him. Sir William had thought he would. Poor man, no doubt he was puzzled, for he needed them both, a quite natural thing but not to the morality of a clergyman’s son, for to the clergy, nothing is natural.

Since Nelson did not speak, it occurred to Sir William to wonder what he saw out there. Not Great Pan or the gods of Alexandria leaving, certainly. But he might very well be catching a glimpse of the glitter of the fairies moving off down the trod, for he was a Norfolk man, and Norfolk folk were often fey.

Sir William did not know whether it was the irreality or the reality of the world which pleased him more, but since the two alternate so rapidly as to form what seems a continuous image, perhaps it did not matter. He was by no means dissatisfied. We admire the whole, accept both, and pick our own way to our own death, though it is possible to wave to each other through the trees. It is an autumn ramble. The leaves are marvelous colors. The air is bracing. So why hurry?

But a glass of brandy at three in the morning would, on this occasion, do no harm.

*

New Year’s, it is worse than a birthday, thought Emma. One does not always wish to sleep alone.

“Would you ever,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “and I thought it was to be only a sketch.” She was pleased as punch and just as jocular. She had attained to the quality; she had had her portrait done, proper, in a miniature.

It was Sir William’s New Year’s gift. He had had all four of them done: Nelson in profile, plump, hideous, in the Sicilian taste; Emma all Sir Peter Lely—for it was a provincial place, Palermo, and the old styles die hard—with blue skin, breasts like honeydews, pretty in the face, and fashionably tousled hair; himself, well—“Ah yes,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “that’s himself”—a face which in Reynolds’ day had been thrifty but dreaming and sad, was now sad but certain. It was odd. Mrs. Cadogan and he, they were dissimilar, but they both had the same look. They had both been watchers.

“Ma, you do look a perfect badger,” said Emma.

The badger is a neat and tidy animal, and what is past is past. “It was my best dress,” said Mrs. Cadogan. It had been her best mobcap, too.

The thing they had in common, Emma saw, was that they could both outstare you. She became evasive. “Nelson looks shocking, and I look a fright,” she said. “Would packed ice help, do you suppose?”

“Silly girl, where would you get ice here?” Mrs. Cadogan took her own miniature and said good night, put the miniature away, took it out, went to bed, blew the candle out and went to sleep assuaged. Sir William, when he thought of it, always did the right thing, which was more than she could say for some she knew, even if sometimes it did take him twenty years.

*

Unfortunately the future is soon enough that imaginary time, the present, which is neither here nor there, but painted on the fore edge, and so, unless you know the trick, invisible. The present is only a riptide between two seas, a consequence of the past, dangerous, given to froth, or else invisible. The present looks placid, but has the strength to drag us down.

Sir William was in a jitter about finances. No sense could be made of Greville, and since teeth cannot be extracted at a distance, it was necessary to return to England to procure cash. But that was a voluntary excursion. This was worse.

“I have been recalled,” said Sir William bleakly; he could face ingratitude, but not impertinence. “How can they? I have been here for thirty-six years.”

He had not only become Italianized, but italicized. And now, to be dismissed with bad spelling, without so much as a nota bene.

“I shall protest to the dear Queen,” said Emma, who felt herself suddenly cast out again, a feeling she had forgotten for years.

“My dear, I am still a British subject. I can be subjected to any indignity my government pleases. That is all the term means.”

“But we could stay on here.”

“We are people of position. What sort of people do you suppose we would become, if position we had none? We should not exist. We should be nonentities.”

Emma went to the Queen. “She is half dead with grief,” she said, when she came back.

“How unlike her. She so seldom does anything by halves.”

“She says she will try to persuade the King to write to England on our behalf. Who are they sending out?”

“A young man named Paget. He is the son of Lord Uxbridge.”

“It is Lock, depend upon it,” said Emma. “He has been our undoing. I should never have caught him with all that furniture, and he should never have grown side whiskers.”

The King, however, would do anything to thwart his wife, and so did nothing to help. Sir William did not come to hunt often enough these days, and when he did he was such a shambles there was no fun in him any more.

“Yesterday, on your departure,” wrote the Queen, “I endured a scene of frenzy, shouts, and shrieks, threats to kill you, throw you out the window, call your husband to complain you had turned your back. I am extremely unhappy, and with so many troubles I have only two alternatives, either to go away or die of sorrow. The accursed Paget is in Vienna.”

It was where Lord Elgin had paused earlier; it seemed to be where the devil stopped to change horses. Maria Carolina had even tried the kid gloves, but to no avail. Sir William was old. He did not shoot with a steady arm. He must go. And besides, Lady Hamilton had turned her back on His Majesty as recently as the last time he had pinched her, which was eight years ago.

“Furthermore,” said Ferdinand, “I am no longer moved by white kid gloves,” and flung them in her face.

“Den Dank, Dame, begehr’ ich nicht!” For of course he knew the literature of his fetish and had been saving this for years. At last he had spoken German to her. He was not deceived. Sir William was used up, that woman now ran everything, and what was worse, was a friend of the Queen. So let her leave. It was one of those periods when Ferdinand’s affections for his wife were in their waning phase.

“Und verläβt sie zur selben Stunde,” said the Queen, her worst fears realized.

Sir William was not surprised. The last three battu had been held without him.

“But what are we to do?” wailed Emma.

“Why, make the best of things,” said Sir William. “We were going home for a visit anyway; and perhaps when the fishing season comes around again, so will he, for I can still fish.”

He had no desire to show his chagrin, which was scarcely in a fit state to be shown. It is so with all our emotions: when we feel them is not the time to show them, for they are not then at their best. They are then as useless as a shriveled balloon. It is only inflation makes them presentable.

“We will return,” he said, with absolute certainty, since he did not believe they would. “Do not fret. And as for that, we are not yet gone. But I wish Nelson were not at Malta.”

So did Nelson. He applied for leave to return to Palermo. His health demanded it, he said. Troubridge called him a fool direct. Ball wrote to Emma. But go he must. If it was not his health, it was the Goddess Hygeia, demanded him back.

“All I shall say is to express my extreme regret that your health should be such as to oblige you to quit your station off Malta,” said Keith, his superior, who knew all about the Goddess Hygeia and did not like her. Health, to a well-bred Englishman, is always an unwholesome thing.

“She sits at the councils and rules everybody and everything,” reported Lady Minto.

Lord Spencer, the Admiralty Lord, was plainer. “Having observed that you have been under the necessity of quitting your station off Malta on account of your health—which I am persuaded you could not have thought of doing without such necessity—it appeared to me much more advisable for you to come home at once than to be obliged to remain inactive at Palermo. I am joined in the opinion by all your friends here that you will be more likely to recover your health and strength in England than in an inactive situation at a foreign court, however pleasing the respect and gratitude shown to you for your services may be.”

“It does not seem clear whether he will go home,” said Lord Minto. “He does not seem at all conscious of the sort of discredit he has fallen into, or the cause of it, for he still writes, not wisely, about Lady H. and all that. But it is hard to condemn and use ill a hero, as he is in his own element, for being foolish about a woman who has art enough to make fools of many wiser than an admiral.”

“Gossip makes the same ripples, no matter what the stone,” wrote Fanny to her son Josiah, who had written to her about Nelson.

Josiah should be beaten with his own broomstick, on his own behind. Could none of them understand friendship?

Apparently not.

“Our private characters are to be stabbed in the dark,” said Emma, denying everything, and besides, nothing had happened yet. She had been given the Cross of Malta and was now a Chanoiness of that order. Nelson had arranged it, and the Queen was having the order itself set in diamonds for her.

“Mr. Paget is to come by land,” wrote Fanny. “I have seen some of his plate, which is fine, but there is not much of it.”

“Give my love to Lady Minto and kiss the children for your sincere and attached Emma,” wrote Emma, to Lord Minto.

“Indeed you shall not,” said Lady Minto, who had a horror of disease. “She is a hussy. It would not be safe. Who knows whose lips those lips have touched? It would be better to burn the infected thing.”

Minto smiled and filed the letter away.

*

“Is it a letter from your wife?” asked Emma. “What does she say?”

“That everyone is ill,” Nelson told her, with a grimace. “It is what she always says. She is a born nurse. She haunts the wards. Lord St. Vincent has the stone; Susannah has fever in the bowels. My father is not well. Captain Pearson has died on his way home from Honduras, of yellow fever; and she has even been to Admiral Bligh, who says that yellow fever is indeed dreadful. He is the breadfruit tree man. She writes these notes to cheer me.”

“One would expect her to dwell upon the cheerful side of things.”

Nelson should not have spoken so of his wife, but he felt bitter. “Oh, she dwells there, all right, but her visits are paid to the other side of the house. It is about her visits she writes principally.”

“I believe Mrs. Walpole will give me up for being too humdrum,” wrote Fanny. It was damnable. To love another man’s wife is, in the proper circles, customary; to love one’s best friend’s wife reduces her to Bathsheba at once. Why did Emma have to look at him that way?

*

She was only idly wondering. She could not be called scheming, ever. It was merely that, a starfish, she had been born with an instinct as to which rock to cling to and in which storm, so as not to be overwhelmed. A spume of indignation might flare forty feet into the air, but still, there she was, clinging, snug and safe. In calmer seas she swam pleasantly, involuntarily, with the tide, which drew her on.

She dropped her eyes. She had been worrying about whether or not Sir William could survive an English winter. If he could not, what then?

“Do you realize,” she said, “that Acton has married his thirteen-year-old niece, during Carnival. Why on earth would he do that? He is sixty-four.”

“Why, to save appearances, I expect,” said Sir William luxuriously. “He had been a bachelor too long, a phenomenon imperfectly understood in this country, but finally tumbled to. No doubt people were beginning to talk.” To be twice Emma’s age was bad enough; to be five times as old as one’s wife could scarcely admit of comment.

“He says he wishes to retire with her to England.”

“Now whyever would he do that?” asked Sir William, genuinely surprised, “when he can quite easily go into hiding here until the girl is of age and the whole thing looks respectable?”

“It will make the Queen feel her age.”

“No doubt it makes Sir John feel his,” said Sir William, speaking from certainty. “Paget has arrived in Naples and wants my house here. I told him he could not have it, as I meant to return next winter.”

“Then where will he stay?”

“For all I care, he can stay with Lock, and they can with profit extract the wax from each other’s ears—the better to enjoy the mutual din,” said Sir William, who did not mean to be unfair, merely unkind.

Nelson, who wished to help, without a word to anyone gave orders to detach two line-of-battle ships from the investment of Malta—for he was given to these sneaky streaks of kindness—so that at least the Hamiltons might leave Palermo in appropriate state. A cruise was what they needed to take their minds off the terrors of departure.

Sir Alexander Ball bade Emma make herself free of Malta. “We could make up a snug whist party every evening for Sir William, but we should fall very short in our attempts to amuse you, when we consider the multiplicity of engagements and amusements you have every day at Palermo,” he wrote.

So it was arranged. Nelson had only one favor to ask. Could they not leave Miss Knight behind this time? There was no harm in her, but she had a habit to spring out at you from unexpected places, tablet in hand, to add to her memoirs.

Paget arrived at Lock’s. Whatever there might or might not be for supper (Mrs. L. was a frightful housekeeper), you could always count on at least an earful there.

There was no direct communication between the Embassy and the Consulate. Lock had grown his side whiskers again. Apart from that, he was good for nothing but to curry favor and stamp passports.

“And even at that, he is not frank.”

Paget, entrusted with an errand upon the successful outcome of which his future depended (to see Ferdinand bullied back to Naples, where he belonged), was eager to take up the reins of office, in order to put the horse before the cart. He would not, Sir William thought, be popular for long, if this was the line he meant to fish with, for the King preferred to stay where he was. One must always distinguish between the man and the office, however, and Sir William was almost prepared to do so.

“The Queen calls him ‘the fatal Paget,’” said Emma.

“No, not fatal. Merely terminal,” said Sir William. “But even the condemned have yet some time to live between the order and its execution, and I do not intend to be carried out the Appian Gate in a litter. I shall await the boat at Ostia instead.” He proposed to hem and haw until the Foudroyant arrived and he could make his departure with some pomp. Paget should not get in until he was assured of getting out.

“Sir William cannot help adding that his sincere attachment to Their Majesties, their royal family and their Kingdom is such,” he wrote to Acton, “that if he was not fully persuaded that in a very few months he may have the satisfaction of returning again, he should at this moment be in the utmost despair.”

Persuaded, but not convinced.

“Lady Hamilton is busy crying you up as a Jacobin,” said Lock. “It is the line she hews to.” And he eyed Paget’s lack of side whiskers. “It is what she calls all of us, so if that is what we are, we gain no distinction thereby. She could not endure to remain at Palermo shorn of her rays in the capacity of a private individual.”

“Lady Hamilton is none of your damn business,” said Nelson, who had been asked to intercede.

“I am sorry to say that Lord Nelson has given more or less in to all this nonsense. His Lordship’s health is I fear sadly impaired [he had noticed a bloodshot eye], and I am assured that his fortune is fallen into the same state in consequence of great losses which both his Lordship and Lady Hamilton have sustained at faro and other games of hazard,” Paget wrote home. Paget did not believe in games of hazard. He believed only in a sure thing, except of course for politics, where no money is involved—at least above the table—so it is a game of skill only.

“I merely wish to present my credentials, in order to proceed upon the business with which I was charged,” he told Sir William.

“I shall present them when it is convenient.”

“Your convenience or mine?”

“I fear you will have to wait upon mine, since I have no intention of waiting upon yours. I do not wish to remain here as a private individual. Unless you show me your instructions and there is something in them which obliges me to present my own letters of recall immediately, I do not intend to do so until the day before my departure. I cannot be guided by what you say enl’air.”

“You have left me dangling enl’air. I can speak no other way,” said Paget crossly.

“Ha! Wit!” said Sir William. “What you do with your life is your own affair, but I presume you have been given enough rope.”

For the next two weeks the Hamiltons went to those parties the Pagets did not and to none of those parties to which the Pagets did, which is to say, parties at Lock’s. However, Lock had time to explain his pet project—the raising of beef cattle on the island in order to improve the local agriculture.

“But where would you sell the meat?”

“Oh I wouldn’t dream of selling it,” said Lock, with some horror. “It is an experiment, merely.”

“A pity. Our garrison on the island must miss their beef, not to mention the Navy,” said Paget.

“My dear, we have failed in patriotism,” said Lock to his wife. “Upon my soul, I had not thought of their need.”

*

On the 21st, the Foudroyant entered harbor, all gun ports open, and flying Lord Nelson’s flag.

“It is not exactly a yacht,” he said apologetically as they stared up at the massive bulk of His Britannic Majesty’s Second-Best Battleship. “But then, these are not precisely peaceful times.”

Paget presented his credentials.

“Paget,” said the Queen, “who replaces the kind, devoted Hamiltons, has made a bad beginning, advising us in a hard, abrupt manner and almost enforcing the King’s prompt return to Naples. The King was offended.”

“These people are so insensitive to all principles of honour and loyalty,” wrote Paget to the Foreign Office, “I am of opinion that nothing useful or good can be effected but by the introduction and direct interference of Foreigners.”

“Io ne devo rispondere,” said the King. “Io sono Re, Padrone.”

On the 22nd, Sir William presented his letters of recall.

“I shall abdicate,” said the King, “rather than return to Naples with the Queen.”

“I shall go to Vienna,” said the Queen, “with my dear Lord Nelson, rather than remain alone with the King.”

They were a compatible couple. They had much the same feelings about everything.

“I shall abdicate and leave the throne to Paget, and he can return to Naples,” said the King.

“His Serene Majesty has a very proper sense of Danger,” reported Paget. “In other words, he is a sad poltroon. With Acton, I am on the best of terms, save that we quarrel and spar nearly every time we meet. The Queen of Naples is certainly going to Vienna.”

That was simply not true. He was not sad. He was on the whole very happy here. The climate suited him.

*

The Foudroyant sailed on the 23rd. The sails billowed out. The brass shone. The woodwork creaked. Sir William stood on deck, watching himself being pulled away from the harbor, like a broken toy on a frayed string. The sailor boys were all up in the rigging, to catch a glimpse of Emma.

“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable, sir?” asked an orderly.

“Why yes. If you would, it would be civil if you would tell the gun crew to pepper Palermo before we go.”

“You are not to be taken seriously, sir,” said the orderly, halfway between a joke and doubt.

“So it appears,” said Sir William, and went below. Paget would make a hash of things, which was perhaps not his fault, he had ingredients for nothing else, but Sir William did not happen to care for hash. He did not, at that moment, care for much of anything.

However, the breeze freshened, the ship had an amiable roll, everything about a boat is so busy you cannot help but be caught up into the rhythm of it, and by the time they had reached Syracuse, Sir William had resigned himself and was eager to enjoy the freedoms of being out of office for a while.

Syracuse cheered him: we go back to the Greek to refresh ourselves. It quite revives us. There will therefore always be Greek revivals; though Bonaparte had brought back from Egypt with him a momentary fashion for everything from furniture to frills “à l’Egyptienne,” or at any rate, had made the Sphinx quite popular, which took brass (particularly on the furniture).

“Do you never tire of being Greek?” asked Emma, who was tired of it.

“We never tire of aping them. It is because our politics are Roman, I suspect,” said Sir William, who, like the sibyl, used his knowledge to confound the suppliant, and as a diplomat, had often to maintain his reputation by providing riddles. He felt perky.

At Segesta, he asked to go ashore, if possible, alone. He wanted, he said, to make one last pilgrimage.

From the rail they watched the white longboat head for the beach, a parley for a donkey, and then a small figure bouncing up to the tableland.

“Do you suppose he will be all right?” asked Emma.

“He may well be all wrong, but he can take care of himself,” said Nelson. The weather was warm. They went into the Captain’s cabin, alone, for Mrs. Cadogan had been left behind at Palermo, to supervise the final packing.

“I can no longer contain myself,” said Nelson, and fell upon her like a thunderbolt.

Emma felt reassured. She had been wondering now for some time how infinite was his capacity. She was an Armida, a Dido, a Santa Monica, and mostly Nike, in a windblown dress, with pleasure at the prow. But though his men adored him, this was scarcely time for interlopers at the shrine.

“Dear, dear Horatio,” she said, rumpling what was left of his hair, “but we had far far better bolt the door,” and leaned an arm around to do so.

*

Sir William strolled idly through a field brittle with flowers and dusty with pollen, the donkey and the guide behind him. The air was crystalline as high as the nearest lark, who merely scratched, but did not break, the silence. Piranesi had been here before him, but no one else. Like a small figure in a Piranesi, he raised the astonished arm to point the view, though his thoughts were less of a deeply bitten shadow than of a fresco, new found at Herculaneum, of a well-bred woman, wandering to gather flowers in an Elysian Field—his own view of what the underworld should be. Though the Greeks had chthonic deities, they wasted no time on the basement, but—sure it was solid—let the column soar.

Before him on a knoll stood the temple. It had never been finished. The pediments lacked sculpture; the cella stood, but lacked a roof. The pillars were unfluted and perhaps too plump in the miniscus. He went into the cella as into the shrine of a god familiar but unknown, the god who is always there because he is not there. His place is ready but we could not wait for him.

Weeds swooped out from the walls high up, like sconces, quivering with the candle flames of green fire. Lichen mottled the rocks, the oldest living thing, tenacious, colored rust and cadmium and verde antico. It was cooler within than without. A drum rested in a bunch of poppies, where it had fallen, and the air, though drowsy, had the freshness of a pleasing dream. New winds might be blowing, but they could not move stone, carry the spring seed everywhere though they might. A piece of fecund fuzz, dried already by the sun, took off in flight and hovered not far away from his nose.

He stood in the portico and looked out over the warm fields which sloped down to the sea, full not of ghosts, but of a decorous crowd which was quite alive—only not now—and which would always be alive—though not now. Over the fields rippled the crosscurrents and streams of the wind’s direction, a little shudder, like that of flesh when you touched it first; and over the sea, the same.

“Il faut que la raison rie et non se fâche. We can at least smile. Quand Neptune veut calmer les tempêtes, ce n’est pas aux flôts, mais aux vents, qu’il s’adresse.” It was something worth remembering, he thought, as he gazed out toward the ship. Emma must be discreet.

But the only rumor here was of quite different things. It is as well, he thought, that in my century religion came under the heading of philosophy, for in my age it did indeed make one philosophical, which is as good a reason as any for not venturing too far out into this century; whatever the powers of philosophy, still it does not encourage us to walk upon the waves.

And, placing his hand carefully against a column, he felt the stone so warm, so soft, so golden beneath his hand, and so cold and immutable within, that it refreshed one on the hottest day; it cooled the passions while it moved beneath the affections of the hand, more resilient than could be any flesh. He had done well to put his faith in marble, for faith had made him marble in return, warmed by the sun, like honey, and grateful to the fingertips. He rested his cheek for a moment against the cool stone, and then, warmed, went away. Could he have crumbled to an ash right then, ambition slaked, he would have done so. But since it is given unto all men to die, not crumble, back to the boat he must go. There had been only a moment of blancmange. The stone is by its nature discipline.

And yet: good-bye. I am a very old man and I love you very much. I find you moving. When I was young, I knew that that would be so, in the end. So now that, too, must have its end. Ed è subito sera.

Had there been an altar, he would have burned salt and wine and oil. As there was not, he went down through the fields again, with no need to look back, for he knew the temple stood firmly behind him, while in the fields ahead of him a woman wandered, gathering flowers.

*

It was her first experience of a physical man; her first, at any rate, in years. It was, to tell the truth—bar a Negress or two—his first experience of being one. He had married for respectability, and respectability does not encourage the male.

His body was that correct British color which, in jade, the Chinese call mutton fat—translucent and mottled as an oyster.

So this was love, she thought. Like hate, it was a most sustaining emotion. It buoyed you up.

“My God,” sobbed Nelson, who wanted both his pleasure and to be punished for having it, too. “I have betrayed my best friend.”

For the life of her, Emma could not see how. “Don’t be silly. If he knew he’d be pleased. He’s very fond of you, you know. We both are.”

Nelson groaned.

“I shall tell him all.”

“What! And cause your best friend pain?” asked Emma, not only shocked but alarmed.

“It is true that I should hate to cause him pain.”

“Should you tell him, that would of course mean giving up both of us,” said Emma evenly.

Nelson held his head in his hand. He felt all at sea, which is not surprising, since that was where he was.

“Besides,” she consoled, “everyone thinks this happened ages ago, and so, I am sure, does he. So why distress him by acquainting him with the delayed date of a fact to which he has already had the time to grow accustomed through rumor?”

“I cannot live with it,” said Nelson simply.

“Then you had far better live with us. On the whole, under the circumstances, I think perhaps that would be the best thing to do.”

“But how can I live with my conscience?”

“It would be far better, in that case, if you were to separate,” said Emma, who had been thinking about Lady Nelson and wondering what to do about that.

Nelson sulked. Without the rosy glow of possible damnation, he felt both naked and cold. What is the use of enjoying yourself, if there is no harm in it? He had been raised a Puritan.

“If I was not sure—if we were both not sure—that you were his true friend,” Emma said, reasoning with a child, “I assure you I would never have permitted it.”

“But what do we do?”

“Why, the same things over and over again, like everybody else. What else is there to do?”

Nevertheless, conversation at dinner seemed a little forced.

Oh well, I suppose she has fallen in love, thought Sir William, noticing the sudden improvement in her complexion. She has already abandoned one child, and now I suppose she wishes to abandon herself to a second. But it is too bad. I am afraid Nelson will take it very hard. And this is one instance in which I am impotent to help him. But then, the spectator is always impotent; he is no longer the victim of himself, and can therefore be kind without expecting kindness.

She was still there—they were both still there—so a few days of grumpiness, and everything would be all right, he supposed, though Emma’s transports might be tiring.

So he ate with appetite, unhindered by made conversation; it is true, we dine unless the blow comes very near the heart indeed. It sounds French, though neither Rochefoucauld nor Vauvenargues could be called a glutton, and Rivarol died so young, it is hard to believe he had the time to eat at all. Unless, of course, it was Chamfort. Chamfort may not have lived very long either, but somehow one does have the impression that for as long as he could, he lived well.

There is much to be said for living well.

Emma sang, at the piano, which had been hauled aboard.

“Emma,” said Sir William. “Don’t bang.”

“It is only a popular ballad.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Oh,” said Emma, and thought that over. “Well, if you like, I shall play something else.”

“It is necessary only to pay lip service to both sides of the repertoire,” said Sir William. “I shall go fetch my flute.”

So over the evening water there soon floated a flute sonata by Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a little sad, a little gay, for that is the nature of the flute. The Gods were not leaving Alexandria. The Gods were going, a little wistful, home.

At Malta, the island not being entirely subdued, they came in too close to shore, and were raked by shot.

“Get below!” shouted Nelson.

“I shall not get below. It is exciting!” shouted Emma.

“I said, get below.”

“I shall not,” said Emma, all patroness of the fleet, and every sailor’s eye upon her.

Nelson pulled her away, while she laughed at him. The sailors cheered.

“Emma will have her own way,” said Nelson later, “or kick up the devil of a dust.”

Since it was warm weather, the dust must be laid. No doubt it had been, for they had both remained below for some time. Sir William felt sorry for her. A role is not the same thing as an attitude. An attitude is the matter of a moment, whereas a role once taken up has to be played through. It cannot be dropped if it does not suit you or if you tire of it. So, inevitably, it lacks the vivacity of an attitude.

Their last night at Malta was also the last reunion of Nelson and his old officers. Being British, his officers were amateurs in the best sense, unlike the French, who were professionals in the worst. No doubt Nelson would miss them, for now he had finally had his experience of women, naturally he would prefer male company, and after tonight, his male cronies would scatter, despite a similar preference, to homes of their own. Your amateur is rewarded with medals, titles and modest estates; your professional yearns for a throne, and so must play musical chairs with all Europe. But both of them long to be left in peace.

*

“I am sorry to find that Lord Nelson was thinking of returning to Palermo. I shall be afraid, if he does, that his health will grow worse and he will be obliged to come home,” wrote Lord Spencer to Lord Keith. “We have therefore left a discretionary power to your Lordship to permit him so to do, if he should for that cause think it necessary …”

“Double talk,” said Lord Keith, “but quite plain.”

“When Lord Nelson was here, I shewed him your Lordship’s letter, but I believe some arrangement with the Court of Naples to carry her Majesty to Leghorn has induced Lord Nelson to keep the Foudroyant and to take the Alexander with him,” wrote Sir Thomas Troubridge to Lord Keith.

“Damn,” said Lord Keith. “She shall not travel in my bottoms.”

“I have applied for sick leave. I am going back with you,” said Nelson.

Sir William looked relieved. It would be better so. Emma agreed. If she was not quite as sure of her own reception as she appeared to be, she was quite sure of Nelson’s, and both she and Sir William could shelter under that.

*

At Palermo, where they stopped to take aboard the Queen and their own household goods, nothing had changed. The King would not budge; the Queen was aching to go; and Paget could not disguise his contempt, so he would not last long. Emma made one final arrangement before departure, to settle her half-forgotten daughter here.

“I think I can situate the person you mention about the Court, as a Camerist to some of the R.F—y, if her education is good. It is a comfortable situation for life. The Queen has promised me. Let this remain entre nous,” she wrote to Greville. Also, let her not come until Emma was safely gone.

There was a week of banquets, and the King proclaimed an amnesty, now there was no one left to hang.

“Ah well, it is nothing to worry about,” said Sir William. “There is a little greatness even in the best of us, and now he has gotten it out of his system at last, no doubt he feels purified.”

They set sail on June 10th, the King saying good-bye to them not at all like a sad poltroon, but with the satisfied air of a farmer who has finally seen the rooks dislodge themselves from the golden corn. He had weathered the storm. He might stay where he was. Indeed, since Napoleon had crossed the Alps, he might much better stay. So time had proved his statesmanship, even if he had not.

The Queen was gone. It was not only freedom, it was vindication.