IT WAS NOT A JOURNEY HOME, it was a raree show, dragged around like Pompey’s triumph, or Bajazet in chains, to please Zenocrate, a most unfilial thing, for Emma babbled unrestrained. Concupiscence had quite uncorked her.

“Livorno! Livorno!” shouted the Queen when the ships dropped anchor there. “Thank God, for having given me the firmness to leave. I am no longer contradicted, tormented and threatened. This is a great boon, and I am happy and content.”

“I am no longer contradicted, tormented and threatened. It is a great boon. I am happy and content,” said the King to Acton, in Sicily, and in his solemn way, winked.

“It is not time for the Queen to be making visits and retarding public service,” snapped Lord Keith, and sent the Foudroyant to Minorca for repairs rather than allow her to travel on it. “Lady Hamilton has had command of the fleet long enough.”

“I am desperate!” shrieked the Queen. “I only aspire to repose. I shall go overland.”

“I hope it will not be long before Nelson arrives in this part of the world,” wrote Lord Spencer from the Admiralty. “His further stay in the Mediterranean cannot, I am sure, contribute either to the public advantage or his own.”

Nelson decided to make the journey overland. He could not desert the Queen in her hour of greatest need, which was, as usual, now. Napoleon’s troops were about. Their passage would not be easy.

“Sir William says he shall die by the way, and he looks so ill I should not be surprised if he did,” wrote Miss Knight, who was of course with them. “And Lady Hamilton wishes to visit the different courts of Germany.”

At Arezzo, the coach broke down and Mrs. Cadogan and Miss Knight stayed behind with it while the others posted ahead.

Miss Knight was neither good nor bad, but merely that very 19th-century thing, a lady. She had adapted to the times and would move with them. She took the desertion in good part, but tapped her feet.

Mrs. Cadogan, who did not move with the times and was unmoved by them, took the striped cloth off a picnic hamper and began to gnaw a chicken leg, which was no more than plain common sense.

There was a silence, Miss Knight, who had seen enough, observing, when the offer was made, that she felt no appetite.

“The way I look at it, it’s now or never,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “and though I cooked it myself, it’s not bad.”

This statement struck Miss Knight as being ungenteel, but quite rightly perceiving that to say so would be ungracious, she complained instead of a slight headache, and thus, having the excuse of illness, allowed herself to be consoled with a jar of meat jelly, delicately served, and some bread and butter, sliced very thin, while the postillion, under Mrs. Cadogan’s direction, boiled water for tea.

Social distinctions being thus properly upheld, they proceeded, morally reenforced, but short on troops, under the guard of some passing Austrian cavalry to Ancona, where Miss Knight went to her room, locked herself in, and fell upon a roast duck ravenously, her headache miraculously cleared.

“Poor dear, she does feel it so,” said Mrs. Cadogan obscurely.

“Feels what?”

“Faulty teeth,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “She cannot munch, you know.”

“You can form no idea of the helplessness of the party,” said Miss Knight.

If it was not one misfortune, it was another, but on they went, with gossip always a good league ahead of them, like a cloud of midges. No matter how fast they rode, they could not catch up.

The Adriatic was stormy, Trieste was indifferent, and the trip to Vienna an anticlimax, not because it fell below the standard of discomfort maintained during the rest of the trip, but because they could feel no more. Vienna itself was better. Nelson was received by all ranks with the admiration which his great actions deserved, notwithstanding—as Lord Minto said—the disadvantage under which he presented himself to the public eye.

He did not present himself to the public eye. The public eye presented itself to him, as to the keyhole of a bedroom door. He had been caught napping.

He wrote to Fanny to say they would arrive in England on October 2nd, and was delighted to hear from Sir William that this would not be possible. He believed in putting off the evil day. Alas, women do not believe in evil; having been the cause of so much of it, they know it is a matter of fact, not belief. They have no illusions.

“You must expect to find me a worn-out old man,” he added, and indeed recently there had been much to age him. He knew not how to act. His conscience had collapsed. He could only stagger up from his own ruins, a free man, to look upon his former chains. How had they held him for so long? He could but wonder.

“I don’t think him altered in the least,” said Lady Minto to her husband. “He has the same shock head and the same honest, simple manners. But why must he talk of Lady Hamilton as of an angel? She leads him about like a keeper with a bear. It is disgusting. Why must she sit by him at dinner to cut up his meat? Why must he carry her pocket handkerchief?”

Lord Minto shrugged. “Perhaps it is a form of tic douloureux.”

“He is a gig from ribands, orders and stars, but he is just the same with us as ever he was. If only it were not for her.”

“She is not so bad,” said Lord Minto tolerantly, to conceal that secretly he liked her. “It is just that she has been rubbed a little, so naturally the original superficiality shines through.”

*

On the contrary, she was in a bad way.

“My God,” she said, when the door was locked, “I am with child!”

“It would be better, dear, not to name the father,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who liked Nelson well enough but preferred a prosperous obscurity, and besides, how could it last?

“I could say much, but it would only distress me and be useless,” wrote Nelson to Fanny, having heard the news, which made him giddy. He had always wanted a child, though according to Fanny they already had a son, Josiah Nisbet: hers.

“My God!” he snapped. “I have only cuckolded the man thrice, and here already is the egg. I call that quick work indeed.”

He was unhinged, but proud. What did it matter now?

“At least now I am plump, it will not show,” said Emma, and burst into tears, just as she had finally burst her casing of refinement—the way a sausage splits when it is boiled. A kit-cat minx is no kitten when she weighs ten stone. If we come not from a good bloodline, die we must, or blood will tell. Alas, it tolled daily in the tocsin numbers of that trumpet voice. Emma had repossessed her native vowels.

In the next room, Sir William, resting in bed, put down his book. It should have lasted him the afternoon, but the closing chapters of any life read very rapidly, for we read them the faster, wanting to be in at the kill. The book was the letters of Horace Walpole, dead now, too, though never an intimate; none to him, a few to Minto. Though sometimes on trifling subjects, they were never dull. He preferred letters to biography these days, for he had caught himself in the tattletale habits of slowing before the ultimate death scene and computing their ages from their dates: those who had lived less long than he into one pile; those who would live longer, into another.

He had heard Emma’s shriek, though not its subject. It was true, she was wildly out of hand these days. Ah well, let her flaunt if flaunt she must, he thought, for once in England and she would be back in her cage for good, with a cloth over her. In England, brightly colored plumage is not admired.

“He must not know, for it would kill him,” said Emma.

“I should think the cause of it would have done that, if anything could,” said Mrs. Cadogan tartly.

“He shall not die. I need them both,” sobbed Emma. “I feel so soiled.”

“Ah ducks, now don’t take on. At least this time you have the consolation that it was your own dirt.”

“I’m fat and ugly and hold and ’orrible,” said Emma, in hysterics. “And look at my neck.”

“What’s wrong with your neck?”

“It’s wrinkling!” cried Emma. “I shall have to wear high collars or gorgetted net. Why did I not stay thin? Why must we all grow old?”

“At least it will help us fool the old man, if he wants to be fooled,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who had divided loyalties. “Besides, you are not old. It is just that you are not young any more, either.”

“Then I am neither one thing nor the other.”

“Well, you are thirty-five. Enjoy it while you can. And watch your vowels.”

“Oh poor, poor Sir William,” cried Emma.

“Nonsense, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s in the next room, the nice old gentleman, taking his siesta with a book, as so should you be,” said Mrs. Cadogan, allowing the Viennese curtains to descend. “And as for the end of the world, it’s a long way off. We shall none of us live to see it in our time, and that I can assure you for a fact. As for what happens to others, that’s their own affair.”

*

The Esterhazys gave a concert with—since Emma was known to be fond of music—old Haydn to play some of his own settings of the incomparable poetry composed by Miss Knight, all in praise of Nelson, all sung to his face while he stood there and beamed.

“In many points he is a really great man; in others a baby,” said Minto, applauding when the screech was done.

Emma forgot to pretend to listen, for she had seen a faro table. Since he was not only a great musician but had been in the service of their family for almost fifty years, the Esterhazys took this ill. She had affronted the best-loved servant in Vienna.

At the faro table, she won £300 by laying out Nelson’s cards for him. It was one of her better evenings.

Lord Fitzharris (who lost the same amount) could not disguise his feelings, and joined in the general abuse of her. Society will forgive you for having been a chambermaid if in return it feels free to refer to the fact in your presence from time to time. If you persist in but one eccentricity, eventually it will be granted you. But if you add to the first a second, that strains the cartilaginous exoskeleton of mutual tolerance to breaking, and down their gullets you go, boiled like a lobster, cracked like a crab and torn to shreds.

The Queen, surrounded by gemütlichheit, if tortured by piles, was in a better mood, for she had learned that His Majesty had requested Paget’s recall.

“I repeat, that at all times and places and under all circumstances, Emma, dear Emma, shall be my friend and sister, and this sentiment will remain unchanged,” she wrote in a farewell note, and then forgot all about her. The parting had been affecting, in the best Kotzebue style.

Sir William was better and evinced an interest in Prague. To Emma, the charms of that town seemed merely architectural, but if it pleased the old man, why not? So off to Prague they went, Napoleon crossing Europe in one direction, and they in another.

The next considerable halt was at Dresden, in Saxony, which was said to be quite a pretty little court, for a place so northern and obscure.

But to malice there is no end, it is a round robin, for people write to their friends, and then their friends write to us. From being a profitable commission for painters, Emma had swelled to become a set piece for female letter writers, all of them ajostle to get their adjectives in first. Besides, it is a truth universally acknowledged that we may most flatteringly light up the corners of our own rooms by burning down a neighbor’s house.

The Hamiltons would not care for Dresden, wrote Mrs. Elliot, whose husband was British Consul there, and so would be expected to put them up. The Court was closed down (it had shut upon receipt of the morning’s mail, for rather than receive that woman, the Electress would receive no one), so there would not be much amusement.

The Hamiltons engaged to provide their own amusement.

“Damn,” said Mrs. Elliot. “They are coming anyway.”

“Well, if you will put them up, I will put up with them,” said Mr. Elliot. “It will give Mrs. St. George employment for her pen.”

“I caught her sharpening quills this very morning,” said Mrs. Elliot, “and all her geese are bare.”

There were no people in Dresden not acquainted with Mrs. St. George’s pen, and few who had not received a little note. Her jaw was taut. Her eyes flashed. Her prose was firm.

*

“Sturgeon, dear Emma?” asked Nelson, at the buffet.

“Oh yes,” said Emma.

“Chicken Marengo?”

“Oh yes. And gobs of cream.”

“It is plain,” wrote Mrs. St. George, “that Lord Nelson thinks of nothing but Lady Hamilton, who is totally preoccupied by the same object. She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming and vain.”

“Russian salad?” asked Nelson.

“I can reach it,” said Emma, bending over the jellies an enormous bosom, and digging in with a spoon.

“No thank you,” said Sir William. “These days I do not eat. The only pleasure I have at table is in watching Lady Hamilton ah … er … feed.”

Sir William is old, infirm, and all admiration of his wife, and never spoke today but to applaud her, thought Mrs. St. George, framing a phrase.

“Who is that damned woman with the inky stare?” demanded Sir William.

“I shall now give you the pleasure,” said Emma, putting her plate on the piano forte, “of hearing one of little Miss Knight’s songs,” and plopped down on a chair.

Emma rattled away while the plate, by sympathetic vibration, seemed about to tip its remaining Russian salad into the Black Sea of the rug.

Her figure, thought Mrs. St. George, is colossal, but, excepting her feet—which are hideous—well shaped. Her bones are large, and she is exceedingly embonpoint. She resembles a bust of Ariadne. The shape of her features is fine, as is the form of her head, and particularly her ears; her teeth are a little irregular, but tolerably white; her eyes light blue with a brown spot in one, which, though a defect, takes nothing away from her beauty and expression; her eyebrows and hair are dark and her complexion coarse; her expression is strongly marked, variable and interesting; her movements in common life, ungraceful.

Emma’s voice triumphed over the clatter, for the plate had finally fallen to the floor. The others watched it settle.

“Her voice loud, yet not disagreeable.”

Nelson picked it up.

“He is a little man, without any dignity.”

Perceiving the evening to have turned squelchy, Sir William skated in graceful, distant, improvised curves around its incipient hole.

“Though the words are by our Miss Knight, the music, as you may have recognized, is by the incomparable Haydn,” he said.

Nelson shut his eyes. The warmth of the candles, no doubt, had rendered him faint. He could not, however, conceal a slight twitch of the nostrils.

She puffs the incense in his face, but he receives it with pleasure and snuffs it up very cordially, concluded Mrs. St. George. It was good enough to copy into her journal.

The party rose to retire.

Miss Cornelia Knight, added Mrs. St. George, shaking her hand, seems the decided flatterer of the two, and never opens her mouth but to shew forth their praise; and Mrs. Cadogan, she added, with a frigid bow, Lady Hamilton’s mother, is what one might expect.

Looking around to see if she had forgotten anybody, she saw that as usual she had not, and with quite a grateful smile went home to her writing desk and warmed to her task, though the night was chill, delighted to have a subject so worthy of her pen.

*

“She was framing phrases,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“One begins to see how she does it,” said her husband. “Or, at any rate, when.”

“It almost makes one wish one lived in another town,” said Mrs. Elliot wistfully. “To read them, you know.”

“If they are quotable, they will be quoted. One has but to wait,” Mr. Elliot assured her, and went to bed. Mrs. St. George, though unavoidable, was frequently fatiguing. He had toyed once with the thought of applying for a transfer to Magdeburg, despite the lesser stipend, but had discovered that she had cousins there and sometimes visited. So it could not be helped.

*

On the 4th, they all went to the opera, where the cast sang very badly and Emma all too well. On the 5th, Mrs. St. George was invited to inspect Lord Nelson in Court costume. If he could not go there, he could at least dress as though he could. She found him stuck all over with everything, like a galantine—diamonds, stars, decorations and chelengkh awhirr. On the 6th, there was a concert (instrumental only), and on the 7th, the Attitudes were displayed.

Emma showed signs of friendship at first sight. “Which I always think more extraordinary than love of the same kind,” said Mrs. St. George. “She does not gain upon me [few people ever did; Mrs. St. George was ever in the van]. I find her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped with the manners of her first situation. She shows a great avidity for presents, and has actually obtained some at Dresden by the common artifice of admiring and longing.”

And, with some irritation, Mrs. St. George paused to dip her pen in a plain glass cube which must serve until the large allegorical work depicting Mors and Thanatos bearing Eurydice back to the Cave of Night (the inkwell), which had stood there until recently, had been replaced.

The Attitudes had been admirable, however. “Several Indian shawls, a chair, some antique vases, a wreath of roses, a tambourine and a few children are her whole apparatus. Each representation lasts about ten minutes. She represented in succession the best statues and paintings extant. The chief of her imitations are from the antique, but her waist is absolutely between her shoulders. It is remarkable that, though coarse and ungraceful in common life, she becomes highly graceful and even beautiful during this performance. But she acts her songs, and she is frequently out of tune.”

It was vexing. There was actually something the woman did well.

On the 8th, there was an argument.

“I am sorry,” said Mr. Elliot. “The Electress will not receive Lady Hamilton because of her former dissolute life, her … ah, origins … so to speak. That is why there was no Court Sunday. And I understand there will be no Court while she stays.”

Nelson, who since the news of the child had begun to regard Emma as his true wife, was stung to the quick. “Sir, if there is any difficulty of that sort, Lady Hamilton will knock the Elector down, and damn me, I’ll knock him down, too.”

“Lord Nelson, you forget yourself. I should add that the Elector is a rather large man.”

“Lady Hamilton is a rather great woman.”

“The difficulty,” said Mr. Elliot despairingly, “is his wife.”

“A pumpkin eater, eh?” roared Lord Nelson, and charged from the room.

*

By the 9th, the Elliots had rallied sufficiently to give a farewell dinner, a thought inspiriting in itself, though never before had they sat down to dine in a bear garden. Mrs. Elliot suggested exposing the other guests only to the Attitudes, thus to save the Hamiltons from further exposure and keep the bear garden for the bears. So this was done, except that Mrs. St. George, being a precursor of the press, could not be kept away; and unfortunately the bears got drunk.

“I am passionately devoted to champagne,” said Emma, holding her second bottle by the neck. The velocity of her Attitudes had left her thirsty. “But where are the people? Sir William and I never seat less than sixty to dine.”

“We thought,” said Mrs. Elliot, “that this would be more intimate, and since we are about to lose you …”

“Lost,” said Emma, lifting her glass. “All lost. A toast to absent-minded friends.”

“Emma,” cautioned Nelson. “Perhaps tonight we should not drink quite so much.”

“Why not? We have a great many absent friends,” said Emma. “They went away half an hour ago, all sixty of them, home to their frugal suppers. They would be better nourished boiling a glass egg. It is like one of Greville’s imaginary meals.” And she surveyed the table with some bitterness, for in truth there was not much food to be seen. “The bottle’s empty.”

“Indeed,” said Nelson, “it is an empty bottle.”

“To think that she is a Chanoiness,” said Mrs. Elliot sotto voce. “It makes one doubt the probity of the Cloth. Though it was Lord Nelson, so I am told, who prevailed upon the Tsar to make her one.”

“Tsar Paul,” said Mrs. St. George, “though a very religious man, is not always in his right mind.”

Emma, having put down her bottle, was enacting Nina, with a tambourine, and doing it intolerably ill.

“Mrs. Siddons need not worry,” said Mrs. St. George.

“Mrs. Siddons be damned!” shouted Nelson, swept up into the meaning of the piece, though meaning it had none.

It was quite probable; she was a Catholic, so rumor had it.

“She will captivate the Prince of Wales,” said Mrs. St. George, following this line of thought to its inevitable terminus, “whose mind is as vulgar as her own, and play a great part in England.”

“I do not see,” said Mrs. Elliot, “how the part she is now playing could possibly be enhanced.”

Mr. Elliot was watching Nelson. “What is a pumpkin?” he asked.

“An American vegetable,” said Mrs. St. George, who knew everything, “but the seeds are edible. It looks rather like a hassock, and is orange. There are some in the Botanical Garden here.”

“Ah, that explains it,” said Mr. Elliot, “but how the devil did he know?”

“I want to be presented at Court,” said Emma, beginning to dance a tarantella.

“I assure you it would not amuse you. The Elector gives neither dinners nor suppers,” said Mrs. Elliot.

“What!” shouted Emma, astonished. “No guttling?” To judge by the dinner they had just eaten, it seemed a poor shaky vegetable sort of place. There was a marmoreal crash. The goddess had fallen, and sat upon the floor, let the chips fall where they may. The tambourine sailed through the silence and landed, quivering, in Mrs. Elliot’s lap.

“Good food constitutes the whole happiness of human nature,” said Emma. “I have slipped upon the damned Jacobinical rug.” And she giggled. “If the Queen is hoity-toity and will not receive me either, I care little about it. I had much sooner she settle half Sir William’s pension on me.”

And, astonishingly, she began to weep for her debts to society, though not quite for the same ones as her guests would have had her do. Her concept of society differed from theirs.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Elliot, and drew her feet together, one neat-shod little ankle against the other, with her hands in her lap. “Oh dear.”

Mrs. St. George herself had far outflown the raptures of mere composition. “When I called her colossal,” she said carefully, “I strove for the exact epithet. For she is not gross. She has swollen in proportion so that the effect is that of an heroic statue towering over the terrain. It is this which produces the toppled and horrendous effect, now that she has fallen down.”

“The exact epithet,” said Mrs. Elliot, from behind closed eyes (her fan was pierced ivory, it concealed the spectator, but not the spectacle), “eludes me.”

“Ah better so,” said Mrs. St. George. “It is not your métier.”

When Mrs. Elliot opened her eyes, it distinctly seemed to her that Sir William—his specific gravity shifted downward by desperation and postprandial port—was hopping around the room on his backbone, stars, ribbons, arms and legs all flying about in the air, while Emma, immense as Bona Dea, led him in that lascivious Viennese novelty, a peasant ländler.

It could not be true, however, for when she looked again, he was lying on a sofa, quite exhausted.

The floorboards sagged. The candles guttered. It was time to retire.

“Oh, Horatio, Horatio,” sobbed Emma. “I am so frightened.” And turning to look over her shoulder, she said, “Sir William, pray attend me.”

All three went down the darkened bedroom corridor, where Virtue called Oblivion to her aid.

She could not live within her allowance, so no one wanted her. If there is not room for one, how can there be room for two?

*

On the 10th, they departed by barge for Hamburg, which they would reach by drifting down the Elbe. The fine arts, the attitudes, the acting, the dancing and the singing were over.

“Where is Quasheebaw?” demanded Emma, missing her Negro maid, “I cannot possibly leave without her. She has a sentimental value. She was the first thing dear Lord Nelson ever gave me.”

Quasheebaw was on the barge, knackering in French about a parcel forgot. Feeling the pangs of hunger, Emma yowled for an Irish stew, while Mrs. Cadogan sat on deck with a pail, to peel potatoes for it.

To Mrs. St. George, it was exactly like that print by Hogarth, of “Actresses Dressing in a Barn.” They were on tour. They would guttle where they would.

How do you form the second person indicative of to guttle? wondered Mrs. St. George irrationally, gave it up as a quaint provincial verb, and went back to congratulate the Elliots on their deliverance, of which she found them very sensible.

*

There was a brief halt at Magdeburg, a small unrewarding place, and then ten days to rest at Hamburg, where the poet Klopstock, author of an ode to lost youth, admired the Attitudes. From Hamburg, they sailed across the North, or German, Sea to Norfolk.

Fanny had written to offer them a free bed.

“She does not mean it,” said Emma. “No woman could.”

“She meant to be civil, at any rate,” said Nelson, who had begun to see that, yes, there would be difficulties.

“Have you told her yet?”

“Told her what?”

“Tales out of school,” said Emma sadly. She did not like the thought of them.

The coast was looming up, if anything so flat as Norfolk can be said to loom. Sir William joined them at the rail.

“Isn’t it exciting?” said Emma, sure it would be. The sea voyage had quite restored her, for she was always at her best in an emergency.

“If you have lived to see it, yes,” said Sir William, who had been seasick again, and did not greatly care.