SIR WILLIAM HUDDLED into his lovat greatcoat, if anyone so tall, if slightly stooped, can be said to huddle, and stood on the balcony of the Wrestlers Arms at Yarmouth, behind Emma and Nelson. The weather was not good. At Palermo, the snow fell on oranges; here it fell on offal. Naples had left him with a distaste for balconies; he had always had a distaste for crowds. In his view, crowds come when they are bidden, as to the hustings. When they come unbidden, we may do well to feel that we have lost our grip. This enthusiasm for Nelson was no more than hysteria, and the balance of hysteria is uncertain: it is mounted on a swivel; it can turn either way. If we are to understand politics, we must regard the emotions of men as natural phenomena, like the weather. So at any rate Spinoza advises us, and we would do well to take his advice. A mob is like a natural catastrophe, a flood or a storm, the one a flood of water, the other, a brainstorm, though without a brain. Each blows over us, to do the same irrational damage, and can be predicted only after it has appeared, which is usually too late. These cheering people had a lazzaroni look. But no doubt Emma was pleased.

*

She was delighted. She need not have worried. They had done the right thing by traveling together, for whatever her reception might have been had they returned in a private station, Nelson was a public figure, so the return was a triumph. It was delightful to be the known inspiration of so great a man, share and share alike.

Their reception was a parade, but where does a parade go once it has passed the reviewing stand? It breaks up in the back streets, and she had not returned to England in order to return to its back streets. Therefore the parade must continue.

*

In London, Fanny was perhaps at last aware of the ultimate inconveniences of a marriage of convenience, and prepared to despond. If Nelson did not write, and he did not, the newspapers did. An unintelligent woman whose attention wandered easily, she had always read between the lines by preference, but she preferred those spaces blank. They were not blank now. They caught the highlights of innuendo. They shimmered nastily.

Nelson informed the Admiralty that his health was now reestablished and that he wished to serve immediately. It was true. Flattery had put new roses in his cheeks.

“Oh dear,” said Lord Spencer to Lord Grenville, “it is that woman.” Captain Hardy threatened to go fetch Nelson at once.

“It is evident,” said Lord St. Vincent, “from Lord Nelson’s letter to you, that he is doubtful of the propriety of his conduct. I have no doubt he is pledged to getting Lady Hamilton received at St. James’ and everywhere, and that he will get into much brouillerie about it.”

He had no doubts about his conduct. He was sensible always of an inner rectitude. Therefore whatever he did, he could not be wrong, so what others said of his conduct must be. That would have to be set right. He saw no reason why Fanny should not present Emma at Court, though the devil he knew how to ask her to do so. Fanny was sometimes difficult of approach. Her graciousness was circumscribed, it embraced only the sick, and seldom other women, of whom she was habitually shy. However, Emma had the art to put a dromedary at its ease, let alone a drudge.

It was ridiculous to take this low moral view; the freedom of cities is not presented to the criminous, and this they had received not only at Yarmouth, but at every hamlet along the way, for everyone was out to see the man who had bottled up Old Boney, and who, though he had also let him escape, would assuredly soon have him corked again, for there was no one else to do it, which was both his own opinion (based upon experience) and theirs (soundly grounded upon terror). He foresaw no difficulty.

At Ipswich (flags, bunting, contentious yeomen, the apple-cheeked poor, the mayor, the syndics of the city, a rostral column, and dear Emma; also, Yorkshire pudding, elastic as a Rhodian sponge, soaked in bitumen gravy and surrounded by beef half raw and turnip mash half cooked; they were home; in what other country but one’s own would a badly boiled onion be considered a personal attention from the host? It is not true to say the English eat only to survive; on the contrary, they survive what they eat, an altogether different thing, which builds character. Only the Prince of Wales, ulcerous and greedy, had added to his boyish vices the essentially adult peccadillo of a French chef, as Sir William pointed out), Nelson could stand the strain no more. Round Hill was not far away, and forgetting—he had sent so many and those so contradictory—his instructions, but remembering that Fanny had offered them all a bed, if not the same one, he decided with exasperation to put his head upon the block, confront the two women with each other, and get it over with.

Besides, since he had none, he wanted to show the Hamiltons that he, too, had a home.

But Round Hill was closed. The servants had to let them in. The rooms were bare, the ceilings too low, and everything was tricked out with that total absence of the esthetic which is what the genteel mean by taste: the furniture respectable, the wallpaper discreet, the rugs reserved, and nothing vivid anywhere except perhaps in the pantry—the vibrant colors of possets and jellies put up to be carried to the sick. The rooms were chilly. His stump hurt. The £2,000 the estate had cost would not have sufficed to furnish Sir William one room, and Norfolk has no Herculaneum, merely barrows.

The house reeked of rain water in a stone crock, a patchouli jar of moldy rose petals, rubbed gillyflowers, lavender in sachets, the odor of benzoin against the cough, and the burnt stench of mutual misunderstanding. For Fanny was willing always to be understanding, given only she never be put to the effort of actually having to understand. In short, the world had shrunk. Round Hill was too small for him. He did not belong here.

Sir William, who had no objection to small rooms if there was anyone in them he wished to see, was politely admirative. But Emma looked affronted that the parlor ceiling was so low (it was twelve feet), hesitated, and then made her way to the small desk in the window, the sort of useless escritoire at which a woman perches when she wishes to scramble her domestic accounts.

“So this is where you sat when you made your great, great plans, before you came out to us,” she said.

Glad somebody had said something, Nelson joined her. Watching them from the doorway (of course she had to touch him: it was his wife’s house), Sir William, who had read Rochester upon Nothing, as well as Longinus on the Sublime (in Boileau), found himself repeating to himself:

The memory sometimes presents us with some mighty curious labels for some even more peculiar jars.

“So this,” said Miss Knight, with the unerring accuracy of the truly insensitive, “was his home.” She had to say something; it was the penance exacted for participation.

There was nothing for it. Fanny was in London. They must proceed.

She was with the Reverend Edmund, Nelson’s father, at Nerot’s Hotel in King Street, clothed in those two suits of flannel it was her custom to wear in the winter, and not feeling, as she had hoped, any the better for it. Even the dear Reverend Edmund had suggested titivation, in his clumsy, unworldly way, but at forty-two that was plain nonsense.

From time to time she was brought news of Nelson’s advance, but did not feel in the least like a general. She was not campaigning. She had neither strategy nor tactics. What she did have was rights. She had done her duty. She had come to town. Her cause was just. That sufficed.

And though she would have liked to have been pleasant, though she would have liked to appear spontaneous, that would not have been seemly at her age (earlier it had merely been impossible or gauche or unbecoming or, for that matter, buried with her first husband where it had died); and a brief flutter of hope, arising from anticipation as from a dovecote, had turned soon enough to exasperation and the proper bearing suitable to her new station in life, with every day—and now with every hour—that he did not come.

A step in the corridor, laughter, subdued suddenly, the turn of a doorknob, a man in hotel livery to announce him, and the little man stepped into the room at last. At first all she noticed was that, as she had feared, he was overdressed. Fanny was restricted to the phenomenal. She saw only a man, tired and worn, who had been naughty, but that need not be mentioned. As for the nimbus of greatness, she did not perceive it. It was not phenomenal. It was merely irrelevant and would die down soon enough, thank goodness, if they ignored it.

“My dear boy,” said the Reverend Edmund, choked up, and was embraced. Naturally the old man was affected, for he was very old—it was a miracle he had lived long enough to see his son—and as naturally he was gratified, for Nelson had undoubtedly been most successful. Though the emotion was perhaps excessive, it helped to smooth the transition to quieter, more matter-of-fact joys.

“Good morning, Fanny,” said Nelson.

“Good day, Nelson. It is a pleasure to see you so well.”

And they both stopped where they were, tingling as though pulled erect by invisible wires.

“You look well.”

“I cannot complain.”

Would it were so, thought Nelson, wondering what to say next.

Fanny was wondering what not to say. Though seldom at a loss for a phrase, when it came to fitting them together, she was quite hopeless. Usually she kept them in a drawer, against the arrival of some clever person.

“No doubt you will want to rest after your fatiguing journey [he did look peaked].” Fanny for want of anything else to do, plumped up a goosedown pillow on the divan.

“I have brought you some lace trim from Hamburg,” said Nelson, bringing the package out.

She took it and went with it to the window. The Reverend Edmund said, tactfully, that he would withdraw.

“That is not necessary,” said Fanny. She had nothing to say he could not hear her say. “Father, you must rest. You must remember your age [Gaudy stuff. What on earth was one to do with it? Her taste, probably].”

Nelson, who was forthright to the point of being either quarrelsome or affectionate, depending upon the situation, could have screamed. One always hopes to find them changed. They never are. He watched the clock.

“We have taken you a separate room,” said Fanny. “Does your arm pain you?”

It did, but the woman’s ruthless solicitude was too much like being stripped by a Fury. Five minutes, and there they were piled up around you, your teeth (bad or missing), your eye (missing or bloodshot or strained), your arm (missing), your cheeks (quite sunk in), your life’s blood (thin, it was winter), your temper (apt to lose it anyway), your all and everything defective, found wanting, and just the way she wanted it. The damned woman had never seen a spring.

“Admiral Parker,” said Fanny, in her thin resolute voice, clearly making conversation, “fell downstairs again last week. Apparently he is very bad.”

“He was never good,” said Nelson, who could not stand the man, “but I am sorry it had to come out on the stairs.” Why did women have this passion for shrinking everyone to merely normal stature (that is, smaller than themselves)? No wonder one wanted to escape, always. He found Fanny confining.

The clock struck. He could go away.

After a short hesitation, the result of a prolonged inner debate, Fanny stretched her neck out, head to one side, to be pecked, looking mighty like a mole that has blinked in the light. It was one of her concessions. It would please his father.

Nelson kissed the proffered cheek and left, and damn, damn, damn, damn down the corridor.

*

“A most affecting meeting,” said the Reverend Edmund. “He has gone to see his friends settled in, I suppose.”

“Most affecting,” agreed Fanny, and meant it. It had been all her nerves—which was to say, her emotions—could bear. They were not up to much, but they had risen to the surface, all the same. Now, with a plonk, they darted back to safety. Yes, vulgar stuff, the lace, and what was worse, like him.

“You can see he has no one to take care of him,” she said. “He used to be so careful in his dress, and now he looks gaudy.”

“Ah well, he’s a famous man now, Fanny,” explained the Reverend Edmund happily, warmed by his son’s appearance, but like a man toasting before a fire, feeling a cold blast on his shins from the other side. “He must dress the part, you know.”

Fanny did not know. Position she could understand, even if the uncertainties of her present exalted one (though the Herberts of Nevis were of very good family) fretted her; but fame was vulgar.

“He has changed,” she said.

“I did not find him so. He was always the genius of the family.”

“Genius, fiddlesticks!” snapped Fanny. “He has behaved most ill.”

The Reverend Edmund decided not to press. It was one of her indispositions, he supposed. When a bad-tempered woman persists in never showing it, naturally from time to time she will be indisposed, to ease the strain. She was a good woman. One had to bear with her. She could not find all this agreeable. All the same, he would have been grateful for a little more ease and a little less care. But since he needed the care, he would try to help her.

“Ah!” said the Reverend Edmund, “just as I thought,” and passed the paper to Fanny to comfort her.

*

“You wanted to see me,” said Miss Cornelia Knight (a person of no importance: Miss Cornelia Knight, the poetess). “I am so flattered.” This was her way to put him at his ease.

Sir Thomas Troubridge was not put at his ease. It was not the poetess he had come to see, but the daughter of Admiral Sir Joseph Knight, for the Navy looks after not only its own, but their own as well. This is called tradition. Though badly wounded, Troubridge was a handsome man, still youthful in manner. He wished he were anywhere else but here. There was not only loyalty to Nelson to be thought of, but also loyalty to a naval widow’s child.

“I do not know how to put the matter delicately,” he said.

“Then put it as best you can!” snapped Miss Knight, who knew what was coming, for she had eyes in her head even if she had learned to close them. “Though living a sheltered existence, I have been much upon the Continent. I may be offended, but I shall not be shocked.”

Her little game was about up. Though a resident in this household in all innocence, she could hardly stay on once she had been offered a bite of the apple. She would have to move out, and what then of the autobiography? She would be no better informed than any other informer.

“Surely you have heard some rumor of what goes on in this house,” said Troubridge unhappily.

“Sir, I am too grateful to Sir William and Lady Hamilton to lend credence to rumor,” said Cornelia, in her haughty manner.

“Well,” countered Troubridge, still more unhappily, eyeing a bowl of apples on the sideboard. They were Gravensteins, he noticed. “One does not have to lend credence to fact. It is just there. Whether you believe in it or not.”

“Oh!” gasped Cornelia. It was quite a fine little gasp. It was followed by an equally fine little silence, devised to simulate startled enlightenment. “It is true that things have become very unpleasant.” Emma had caught her sighing over poor Lady Nelson, about whom it really was too bad.

“I am sure you would not wish to lend your support to the, so to speak, insupportable,” said Troubridge, not wanting to come right out and say the thing.

“Oh no,” said Cornelia, who had been housed, fed and feted for a twelvemonth now, and felt suddenly the need of support herself.

“I think it would be better that you move out at once. After all, we do not want you smirched,” Troubridge said heartily.

There was a pause.

“The Nepeans have suggested that, until you can find some otherwhere, perhaps you would like to take refuge with them. Your retreat could be disguised as a visit.”

Cornelia brightened. The Nepeans were not only rich but well connected; they were quite respectable.

“I shall pack my few things,” she said. “This cannot be easy for you. I know your loyalty to our dear Lord Nelson, who is a fine man, no matter what people say. I am much in your debt.”

Once she had packed, Troubridge showed her to her carriage, shut the door on her, and waved her solemnly away. And that, he thought, makes one gossip the less. Though Nelson might be an excellent strategist, at tactics Troubridge was not bad; so off rode the dickeybird, weight eight stone, and would that there were two of her, clack, clack, clack.

*

As Vice-Chamberlain, Greville had chambers for nothing at St. James, which was fortunate, for freehold grew more expensive every day; Edgware Row was built over; and if he could save on nothing else, he was always prepared to save on his own expenses. So he received them there, that red-brick relic of times past being as close to Court as Emma was ever to get.

Though by no means resembling that highly polished shiny pink object, the Banker Rogers, Greville had become equally octopoidal. His hair was now thin; in compensation, his manner had become more weighty; he had a small pink mouth adapted for sucking; he had a beak; and since he still minced upon his toes, he had a pouter pigeon look. In short, people found him charming, charming, charming—even sometimes when he was out of the room. The years of talking to Towneley had left their mark, and so had Taste. He was fifty-one (Towneley was well-nigh dead).

“How nice it will be to see him again,” said Emma. “I am quite curious.” And meant it. She expected to enjoy herself, and it was her suggestion that they go all three, Tria juncta in uno, for that she would enjoy even more.

His rooms, though paneled up in the best Regency (it was expected any day—the King was once more coasting down toward the dark winter ponds of insanity, on which the ice was again thin) style, were at the same time dark and damp, in the good old English tradition. They had an old-boy donnish air about them, down to the bowl of winter flowers which no woman could have arranged. Otherwise there was no change. The Honorable Emily Bertie, only a little cracked, and dirty-blue brown because of Sir Joshua’s passion for asphaltum as a medium, her skin turned milk glass, her nose inalterable, balanced from one wall the Paulus Potter cow, the size of a Shetland pony, which still munched mellifluously above the mantelpiece on the other. There was a good old English sideboard, and two very bad new French chairs, neither of which Emma remembered, and a console with legs in the new Egyptian taste, sphinxes with brass faces, mahogany bodies, and below, slipping in and out beneath their petticoats, brass feet.

Charles himself, all hospitality, had half an empty tantalus out and four very small glasses, their glass thick and sparkling, their capacity, unlike Emma’s (of which he had been warned), small.

Nor, though he had heard she had gained weight, had he expected to find her so huge. It was as if someone had moved in the Farnese Hercules and changed the sex. The floorboards creaked.

“Charles,” she purred, “how very pleasant to see you again.” And with every evidence of pleasure (all neatly labeled and laid out upon a table: it might not look like much, but it would hang him), she pumped his hand.

“My dear Emma,” he shrilled, with some emotion. “What, no kiss for Greville?”

“Why no,” she said, shaking her parasol. “Not now. Whatever would dear Lord Nelson think?”

What dear Lord Nelson was thinking was that Sir William merely played the flute; he did not sound like one. Why must these men of taste grow shrill with age? A capon, to Nelson, belonged where it belonged, upon a plate.

Greville, casting a roguish eye upon the company, clinked stopper against tantalus and proposed a small drink.

“It is so long,” he said, “since we have all been together. My goodness, it has been nine years.” And he regarded Emma critically. “If you were younger, I could say, My, how you’ve grown. But as it is, I know not what to say.”

“Good,” said Emma.

“The sherry is indeed excellent,” pronounced Nelson, venturing out into the silence first, warily, but with his best foot forward.

Greville giggled. “It is one of my little economies,” he said. “Number 452. You will not get it any other where, but Figgis is a reliable man.”

“Figgis?”

“My wine man.”

(He knows not what he does.)

“Ah, then you like it?”

(“No.”)

“You are to be complimented, Charles.”

“A most tastefully appointed room,” said Nelson, who hated everything in it down to the last famille verte vase and Dutch Delft ginger jar. It was a clutter. It was too hushed. He had never before drunk sherry in chapel. The décor would have profited for being dusted by a poltergeist. He wanted air.

“Well,” said Emma, “I don’t mind if I do.”

Greville looked as though he had been struck.

“Don’t fuss, Charles,” said Sir William. Immediately Charles modulated to a manly tone, sincere, concerned, responsible—even considerate—and poured Emma some more. The upper registers for art, the lower for commerce, and in between a calm and level purr.

Sir William felt at his ease, for there were tidbits here from his own collections as well as the Correggio, the barterable bargain of a lifetime which had turned out to be a Cambiasi, though Mr. Vandergucht had offered half. To date, the Correggio had been his only error. In short, they were all so delighted to see each other again that they felt quite uncomfortable.

*

“That man is a scoundrel,” said Nelson to Emma privately. “He would want to talk, but I put a stop to the damned gabble, gabble, gabble. We are used to speak our mind of kings and beggars and not fear being betrayed, but Judas himself was never such a tattletale. He is too old to be a piglet any longer. I hope Sir William feeds him turnip tops.” But later, as he usually did, he cooled down. Though he wasted no oil, Greville understood to perfection the fine art of water smoothing, and was down on his knees with a trowel instantly, a fellow Mason, the better to cement (the metaphor is mixed—so were his motives) relations.

*

“What is this story she spreads about, about a previous secret marriage?” asked Greville of Sir William. “It will accomplish nothing. It did not take place. And if it did, the rules of society are never retroactive. She cannot be received at Court.” He was in a temper.

“I believe she has some hopes of creeping in under Lady Nelson’s pinfeathers,” said Sir William, amused by all this, though sadly so.

“Lady Nelson is nothing but an elevated commoner. There is a limit to the number of people you can pull up by your own boot strings.” Having no children of his own, Greville was much taken up these days with genealogies, as is the way with disappointed men.

It was not Sir William’s. No, he is not at all like me, he thought, and felt a warm glow of self-gratulation and also a twinge of neuralgia, a complaint he had for years forgot.

“Pray tell me, Charles, in what month do you finally bring yourself to light a fire?”

“January,” said Charles, without thinking.

“Good,” said Sir William gravely, rising to his feet to ease the stiffness in his joints. “I shall return.”

*

On Sunday the 9th, Nelson paid his respects to the Admiralty Board, and afterward was so amiable as to show himself to the people. When the curiosity of his grateful countrymen became inconvenient, he ducked into Somerset House, was smuggled out a back way, and that evening entertained the Hamiltons at Nerot’s Hotel, which gave the two ladies a chance to make comparisons, if not conversation. On Monday, Nelson moved to a house in Dover Street; the Hamiltons to Beckford’s house in Grosvenor Square, for the house they had taken in Piccadilly would not be ready until New Year’s. On the 12th, Nelson and Sir William were presented at Court, where they got a cool reception. His Majesty merely asked if Nelson had recovered his health, and did not wait for a reply. This rudeness was not the result of moral indignation—the Queen looked after morals—but of etiquette, Nelson having used his Sicilian title without asking English permission. He must mind his manners, apply for permission, and mend his signature. Nelson had not known. In Palermo, there had been no end to personal display; but England is a limited monarchy. He put in his petition and signed himself Nelson and Bronte from then on.

That same day he and Lady Nelson went alone to Lord and Lady Spencer’s.

Across the table, Fanny, who had talked both left and right until she was dizzy, drew to herself some walnuts, peeled them, put them in a glass and offered them to Nelson, who was sitting opposite her. The gesture would prove to all that they were not estranged by anything more serious than a healthy, natural reserve.

Nelson swept the glass aside so roughly, for he was a little in wine, that it shattered against a set dish, and glass and walnuts flew everywhere.

Fanny was startled into tears. Lady Spencer rose and suggested that the ladies retire. And then, since she was hostess and so had first grab, descended majestically upon Fanny, so that with one thing and another, in three hours—once the gentlemen had come upstairs and the ladies had gone downstairs and the last carriage had departed through streets spread with invisible straw—it was possible for her to burst into her husband’s dressing room with her dramatic announcement.

“She has told me how she is situated. She now knows all.”

“Well, now she has seen what she says; no doubt she knows what she thinks,” said Spencer, unhelpfully. “But I wish she did not.”

“The poor thing had to talk to someone or burst.”

“I should say her bubble was burst already. It is a damned shame. The man is too indispensable to be dispensed with. Why could he not remain a bachelor beyond Gibraltar, like the rest of them, and leave his reputation intact? What else do we have brothels for?”

“Spencer, that is a man’s view.”

“Well, now it seems it is a woman’s business,” said Spencer with a reminiscent sigh, for he had not himself been abroad for some time. “But what is to be done?”

“Why, send him off to be a bachelor,” said Lady Spencer, “and when he returns they will both be that much the older.” For she knew by experience that though a marriage can survive a long separation, passion cannot.

“Ummm,” said Lord Spencer. “Ummmm.”

*

“I cannot live without you,” said Nelson, who was, alas, sincere.

“You silly boy, you do not have to,” said Emma, who was, alas, now not. “We can all four visit back and forth.” It was still her hope that Fanny might be induced to sponsor her at Court.

“For a woman who says nothing, she kicks up the devil of a row,” said Nelson. “How I long to embrace you. Has Sir William returned?”

“Ah so do I,” Emma agreed hastily. “No, he went out, but will be back shortly.”

“I must return to her.”

“Nelson,” enjoined Emma, who thought Fanny a frail stick of a woman, but one never knew. “Be true unto yourself. Do nothing vile.” For a woman eight months pregnant, she did not show it. She looked a virgin still.

“I shall not. Besides, she is in her flannels.”

“In her what?”

“Pink. Two suits. She feels the cold.”

Well, let her, thought Emma, as so do I, despite a fire smoking green in the chimney, with cord wood 2/6 the basket, wet. It is a characteristic of the English winter that so few of the trees seem to have been felled in time.

“My own dear wife,” said Nelson, who had figured out this way of regularizing both their union and their child, for he meant the thing to be legitimate, no matter how. “If only it were not for her.”

He found the situation trying.

*

On the 13th, Fanny was presented at Court, in the presence of Nelson, to the Queen, who gave him a cursory nod and Fanny a most warmhearted, but at the same time shrewd, smile; for not since Soemias had so many women gathered together in one room to legislate so much upon a subject so severe. She had been got at.

All of which Greville reported to Sir William with a wealth of, to himself, gratifying detail. Aristotle informs us that justice is wisdom without desire; but if there is to be justice in this world, there must also be tit for tat, and Greville was not one to forgive easily anyone who had used him as a ladder up. Now she should have a ladder down, and moreover, it should be the same ladder, but better placed.

*

The Morning Herald, though cautious of the libel laws, presented its readers with a sketch of Lady Hamilton’s character which left her none.

“The lady of Sir William Hamilton, K.B., who with her husband has lately accompanied Lord Nelson to England … in her 49th year … figure … now on the wane … conversaziones are at least sprightly and unceasing … the chief curiosity with which that celebrated antiquarian Sir William Hamilton has returned to his native country …”

“William, I am not a curiosity,” said Emma, at her most wrathful. “Sue.”

“What about, my dear?”

“I am not forty-nine.”

“If it is not a misprint, you most certainly would be by the time the case was settled, in or out of court,” said Sir William. “It is only a newspaper.”

“But it is read.”

“Only by the quasiliterate,” said Sir William. “Do not distress yourself. The better part of the world has yet to learn to spell.”

*

His favorite niece, Mary Dickenson, had paid him a visit.

“William, she is an enormity.”

“Large, Mary, merely large.”

“Uncle, we call because we are fond of you, not because we wish to hear your wit. I own I feel responsible, for I condoned the match. But she must not be seen with this man.”

“This man is my close friend, Mary.”

“Then so much the more reason he should see her less.”

“We will not talk about it.”

“Then ours will be the only silent tongues in London,” said Mrs. Dickenson, gathering up her gloves. “I am truly sorry. Come to see us when you can, but do not bring her.” And out she swept.

Though the visit had made him angry, he discovered that Mary’s advice, when followed, gave him such peaceful moments as were permitted him. As usual, it was sound. So when he went to visit her, he did not bring Emma.

*

“If we are to go to Ranelagh, I insist that Greville come, too,” said Emma.

“But, my dear child, why?”

“Because he does not get out enough. Besides, it is Bannister’s benefit.”

*

“But if she wants you to come, why not?” asked Sir William, bewildered.

Charles was indignant. “Very well, if we must go through this dumb show, why we will.”

So to Ranelagh they went and promenaded themselves in the approved manner and were gawked at and heard Nelson praised; and with a little coaxing from the audience, Emma was prevailed upon to sing, which she did most affectingly, a ballad about Nelson, of course. Once the song was ended, she seemed content to go home, and Greville equally eager to hand her into the carriage.

“You have the memory of an elephant,” snapped Greville, which was only half of what he wished to say, a perfectly balanced phrase, but he dared not complete it.

“Yes,” said Emma. “I am so glad you could come with us after all. Good night, dear Greville.”

There was nothing he could do. He must bide his time.

*

On the 18th, both couples went to Covent Garden, as an example of solidarity. The applause was deafening. Nelson bowed, as to a sea surge, which considering what the sea had washed his way, was only courtesy. The Reverend Edmund burst into tears. The orchestra played “Rule Britannia,” with Miss Knight’s extra verses sung by all.

Everyone then sat down: Lady Hamilton on Nelson’s right, Lady Nelson on his left, so that he was wedged between them; and the two older men behind. The performance was that last new comedy called Life. Lady Nelson wore white, with a violet satin headdress (the color of mourning), and Lady Hamilton a blue satin gown with black plumes on her head (to adorn the coach).

*

At night, now, Nelson often walked the streets, in that winter weather both an eccentric and an eerie occupation. Sometimes he would get as far toward the haunts of Tyburn Hill as Shepherds’ Market, there to sip grog at midnight among ruffians and go unrecognized. Sometimes he went into Hyde Park and let the snow whirl around him, as though he were inside one of those glass balls they give to children which, when overturned, produce a flurried flocculence around a central figure, though the flakes settle in time and must be shaken up again. Putting his hands in his pockets, he trudged on, a small, compact rage, intensely cold.

It was a nightmare, and as in a nightmare, these white expanses were sometimes crossed by fugitive and curious shapes. He did not notice. By this time in his walk, he had entered the immense silences of Grosvenor Square, to stare up at a few dimly lighted windows in Beckford’s house, at number 22. Since he could not enter this door at this hour, back to Dover Street he went. He did not look well.

On the 25th, they went, all of them, to see the play Pizarro, with Kemble, who had never been better. The animals go in two by two, but stop at four. The heat was so great that Lady Nelson fainted, had to be carried from the box, and was therefore applauded when she rallied sufficiently to be supported back into it again. She returned the applause with a bow, and sat down.

Lady Hamilton, who had not fainted, but who felt the heat, also bowed.

Nelson was leading too social a life. Lord St. Vincent wrote to warn him of its dangers, for there was much risk of illness in going out of a smoking hot room into the damp, putrid air of London streets. Nonetheless, out he went, for he could not abide to stay in. Lady Nelson was debarring him from his station, if not at the side of his child, at least at the side about to produce it.

“The reason why Lady Hamilton has not been presented at Court,” explained The Morning Herald, in its mendacious way, “is her not having received any answer from Her Majesty to the letter of recommendation of which her Ladyship was the bearer from the Queen of Naples.”

*

“We are going to Beckford for Christmas,” said Emma. “Would you like to come along?”

It was one of those evenings when Nelson had come in out of the snow.

“Yes, I should.”

*

“Do you mean you are going there without your wife?” demanded Fanny.

“Sir William is a very old man and a very close friend. He may not see many more Christmases.”

“I dare say not.”

“It is useless to argue. I am going.”

Beaten brass is one thing; beaten putty quite another. Neither was wax in the other’s fingers, but the process is called cire perdu. It is impossible to argue with a public monument. He went.

*

They stayed at Salisbury overnight, in order to observe the prospect first by day, for though Beckford had called Horace Walpole’s Twickenham a Gothic mousetrap, his own folly towered like a Gothic guillotine and was accounted thereby a considerable spectacle.

And there it was, all 276 feet of it, casting a sundial shadow through the light sprinkling snow, a sight for sore eyes, and those rubbed in disbelief.

“O tu severi religio loci,” said Nelson (for he had had Latin as a boy). “By God, the thing is real.”

“On the contrary, it is principally plaster of Paris,” corrected Sir William. “But that, I grant you, of an inspiring cast.”

Getting out of the carriage between two rows of remarkably handsome footmen, all carrying candelabra in broad daylight, they ascended a flood of stairs if not into the warmth of the nave, at least toward the source of warmth, for the draft of frozen air which swept down the hall had some heat caught on its fore edge, like fluff on a broom. The footmen advanced ahead of them, to illumine the Gothic gloom.

“My goodness, where does he find them all, and all so alike?” said Emma, whom Aprile had taught tolerance, and since she was that rare thing, a sexually satisfied woman (her only passion was guttling), she did not mean it ill.

Behind them clanged (it had taken four months and two acoustic tinkers to produce that clang) the immense, authentic but copied doors.

“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” piped a small still voice a hundred feet away, “to the Halls of Vathek.”

Unfortunately the building shook in the slightest breeze and snow on the roof was always a problem. The floor was stone. It was not Emma who set the hall in motion with majestic tread.

For the last sixty feet of the hall, they were entertained by a medley of “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” “Green Grow’th the Holly” and “The Hero of the Nile,” pealed from the bells in the belfry, though by the time they reached the crossing, this had modulated reassuringly into “Hearts Stout as Oak,” and the weather was warmer.

Here a butler met them and led them around a statue of Antinoüs and a sleepy immovable St. Bernard called, to judge by the cellaret around her neck, Lucy, toward the parlor. Beckford was waiting to meet them—surrounded by a few friends, all glittering, all young—himself garbed in Court costume, a Turkish pelisse bound with fur, and a velvet smoking cap.

They found there an assembly of all that was best in the worlds of title, rank and glory, which is to say, people like themselves, who were not acceptable to the proper cadres of polite society, and therefore had to accept each other; who instead of discussing dogs, the public schools, their children, the weather and each other, prattled about Kant, Kemble, Coutts, and the intimate, archly delineated lives of people they had met perhaps once and would never know. Always by first name and of course knowingly, with that simper to be found nowhere but in a chafing dish—the soft simper of a freshly coddled egg. Take away the daily duchess of which each cognoscente has but one, and he would dwindle at once, without a head to stand on.

“Molly …” “Fred …” “Old Q …” “The most divine …” “… the sidling, effeminate nonesuch came ogling across the lawn, and poor Paddy was in a dither, not knowing how to address him …” “Grant her at least the wit to choose a good banker.” (The future Duchess of St. Albans had just come up for the last time.) “Such an ordinary little man.” “Overdressed.” “The last bagwig in London.” “… Lady Conyngham.” “Of course, absolutely impossible.” “Dicky said …” “A fetishist. Largest collection of Delft wig stands in Cumberland … Bald as an egg and likes her to paint his pate with Chinoiserie designs in robin’s-egg blue.” “Which was wicked of him, really …” “… is a clergyman’s son, I suppose she appeals to his sense of sin, which as you can see, is enormous.” “Then the wig is lowered and that’s all there is to it. She takes her guinea and goes. Most odd.” “… but ten years ago, when she could not only reach the note to which she now aspires, but swung there like a monkey …” “His mother is furious of course, because the property is entailed, and who could beget a child upon a wig stand?” “Very sad.” “… so I said, call him Mr. It is a courtesy title merely.”

*

“Who’s Molly?” asked Nelson.

There was a short scurrying whirr back into the wainscot. He was an outsider. He came from where the world’s work is done. “Who’s Molly?” they asked blankly, unwilling to face the implications of such a question. For who was Molly when you came right down to it? A mere nobody who had been so fortunate as to marry, some thirty years ago, the second son of Lord Ipswich, who had then no possible pretensions to the title …

*

“You must remember that the world, according to the Brahmins and Warren Hastings, is supported by an elephant which stands on a tortoise. If you have not eyes in your head, neither is this the time to explain the exquisite symbolism of the device. But you have only to look to see which one is which …” “Of course genuine. Angerstein almost bought it, though true, how would he know …”

With that unerring instinct for hindering the actual performance of the sexual act which women do have, Emma sat down between two young Honorables who had been looking at each other speculatively, and did not get up again until one of them had seen, hopelessly, the other drift away.

*

“Such a nice quaint old man. A perfect period piece.” “A museum of the tastes of yesterday.” “Related to everybody.” “Well, I can quite see they hold her up. But what does the tortoise stand on?” “Water, you silly thing. So you see, it all works out.” “Schlüter, in his work on Claude, cites it nowhere, but of course the index is bad.”

*

“Emma!” cried Beckford, whose sincerity was apt to be intense, led her forward, as though on a string, and presented her to the company. “You superior being. You Madonna della Gloria. You unique and marvelous creation. So glad you could come, for a few days repose, uncontaminated by the sight or prattle of drawing-room parasites.”

(Not at all delicate, ill-bred, often very affected, a devil in temper when set on edge. She affected sensibility, but felt none—was artful—he wrote in his memoirs.) And casting over her a beady eye, he made her welcome. He was a true friend.

Emma enjoyed herself. Christmas is a dour time for the childless, but they were all quite jolly, though the only mistletoe discoverable hung in the butler’s pantry, and the guests had a habit suddenly to disappear in ambiguous pairs.

As for Fanny, who was on both their minds, let her go sailing to sea in a bedpan, since that was all she understood. Nonetheless, Nelson looked forlorn and proved difficult to cheer.

On Christmas Eve, Emma did the Attitudes, “not the ruin of their former glory,” as Master Godfrey (one of the more anomalous guests, but a most talented boy soprano) said, “but the tumulus,” and was rewarded with a ravished glance. He had found a variation on a joke grown thin. He had earned, if not their gratitude, at least a moment of their attention. He promised well.

Since it was not prudent at this late date to move about, she did Agrippina with the Ashes of Germanicus, with the assistance of a chair. In a dim light, she was most affecting and most applauded.

“Master Godfrey,” said Beckford. “Show us your soprano.”

So Master Godfrey did.

“So artless,” said Emma. “So wonderful.”

Afterward they were compelled to admire the Claude, all £4,000 of it, and since it was neatly labeled, found it admirable.

“And these?” asked Sir William, glancing at some views of the house framed nearby.

“A young man called Turner, but Sir Francis Beaumont swears by him,” said Beckford. “Lovely, ain’t they?” At 40 guineas each they seemed poor value, but he was a coming man, so one had to have them. “Angerstein has one.”

“They are all new people,” said Sir William. “But since I am not vain, I shall let the young admire them, and pass on. Since whatever you do, once you are old, will be considered old fashioned, you need no longer make the effort to keep up. Which is, in any case, futile. You cannot conceive how restful I find it to be at last out of date. It has taken years off my age. Indeed I find it makes me feel quite contemporary again.”

*

Mrs. Cadogan heard someone snuffling down the Gothic corridor, and when she opened the door there was Nelson. A natural love of intrigue had conquered an acquired moral sense, but not the display of it. Tight-lipped and mendacious, Mrs. Cadogan let him in.

Nelson was not in a good mood.

“And do you like these people?” he asked Emma.

“What people?”

“Beckford’s friends.”

“They are not friends. They come to gawk.”

“And gabble,” he said. “You should not have done the Attitudes. You might lose the child.”

“Well, I haven’t lost it yet,” said Emma, who was fed up with carrying the thing, and wondered which he would miss the more, the child or her.

“We are never alone.”

Ah, that was better.

“These people tell you all about your own business, and could not sail a paper boat on Round Pond,” he said bitterly. “I assure you it is no rest.”

“They mean well.”

“They mean nothing. Why the devil are we here?”

Emma’s voice dropped to a reverent conspiratorial hush. “Business,” she said.

“What, to hawk bibelots?”

“Not exactly.”

“Ye Gods! Then what is going on behind my back?”

Emma examined his back. It was too narrow. There would never have been enough room, and had the matter not been so serious, she would have giggled.

“If you won’t tell a soul, Beckford wants a peerage, and we need money, and he is William’s cousin, so he said that if William could get one, because he couldn’t himself you know—there was a scandal, it was hushed up, but of course everybody knows about it—and be able to give the reversion to Beckford, well …”

“Well what?”

“Well, I should have five hundred pounds for life, and William two thousand. And we do need the money.”

“You need not worry. I shall not tell it to a soul, for no one here has a soul to tell it to,” said Nelson. To him, it sounded a sordid, stupid business. “A peerage is either the recognition of merit or the inheritance of favor,” he added, thinking about his own.

“Don’t be so stuffy. What did your brother William ever do? And yet he is bound and determined to have yours, and what is more, he will.”

“That’s an intolerable thing to say.”

“I don’t say he isn’t very nice,” said Emma, explaining patiently, as to a child. “But if it weren’t for that, we’d not see hide nor hair of him, and that’s the way the world is.”

“It’s not the way I am.”

“Oh well, it’s easy for you. You’re different. But when most people know each other, it’s for a reason.” And with the busy look of an apprentice who has just involuntarily let slip a guild secret, Emma began industriously to buff her nails. “Besides, he has a very nice house, and it’s not everybody who’s asked here, you know.” For people may talk about principles all they please, but who has the moral force to refuse an invitation? Men are so silly.

“Damn,” said Nelson, who wanted his fury dampened by romance.

“Patience,” said Emma gaily. “Patience.” Though she was worried herself, what with one thing and another, and the furniture not yet in the Piccadilly house.

“My little wife is tired,” said Nelson, gurgling with emotion, though even to him that phrase sounded cottagey and absurd in these surroundings.

“You mustn’t brood,” soothed Emma, who wanted her plots to hatch, though nothing would incubate in this cold. “Besides, it’s only for a day or two more.”

On the 29th of December they returned to London.

*

On the 1st, Emma and Sir William moved into their new house at 23 Piccadilly, with the bow windows overlooking Green Park, which was quite pretty, the mound of the icehouse picturesque as an old Gothic barrow among the trees.

“I have had a wine bill this day,” said Sir William, shuddering, “for four hundred pounds.” She had the Midas touch. Whatever she put to her lips, she drank money.

“I don’t understand it.” Emma frowned. “We have had no more to dinner than usual, though of course in Italy the wine is a little cheaper. Besides, I don’t drink wine. The men do that, when we go upstairs.” So it wasn’t her fault. She was not extravagant.

“If you could be a little more careful, my dear.”

“I sold my diamonds to pay for the furniture, didn’t I?” demanded Emma, who had indeed done her part. “William, what are we to do, for the dining room won’t seat more than forty, and with old Q and someone for him to goggle at, the list comes to forty-two?” And she looked around at the furniture, the deed to which reposed snugly in a dresser drawer upstairs. Not only had she made her sacrifice, but even worse, one of the snuffboxes had turned out to be paste brilliants only. What was the use of living if you could not do it properly?

Lord Nelson was announced.

Today, thought Emma, who could not live without him—but sometimes men have to be led—I will be cold, and primped a little.

*

“On this day His Majesty was conducted from the Presence Chamber to the Throne in the House of Lords by the noble Admirals Nelson and Hood,” reported The Morning Herald.

Taking his seat among his peers, Nelson could not but realize for the first time and with some sense of shocked enlightenment, that one’s peers are, of course, men. How many of them, he wondered, have my problems to conceal?

*

“I shall call her Tom Tit,” said Emma, watching from the window Lady Nelson leaving after having paid her first, last, and as it was to turn out, only call. “For she walks like a tomtit, hopping and jerking about, one shoulder higher than the other, out into the snow, and pecking away all the time at a vast invisible lump of suet dangling before her nose.”

“Emma, that’s quite enough,” said Mrs. Cadogan, though peering over her shoulder, she saw the resemblance, too.

It had not been a cordial meeting. Tria juncta in uno cannot be four. The Knighthood of the Bath is an exactly limited order and cannot be added to until one of its members dies.

*

On the 1st of January, Nelson had been promoted Vice-Admiral of the Blue; Lord Spencer having taken Lady Spencer’s advice. On the 2nd, the Nelsons had breakfast with William Haslewood, their solicitor, for there was always someone there these days. Lady Nelson preferred witnesses.

“Lady Hamilton,” said Nelson, with that irresistible impulse to fit the name of one’s beloved into the conversation of those who do not happen to share one’s affection, “was most gratified with your call, and I am glad you brought yourself to make it. You will find her, as I have found her, an affectionate friend, a true compan—”

Lady Nelson soared from the breakfast table. “I am sick of hearing of dear Lady Hamilton this and dear Lady Hamilton that and Lady Hamilton the devil knows what, and I am resolved that you shall give up either her or me!” she snapped. She had no doubt of the decision, and had her marriage bond to prove it.

Ah, at last, thought Nelson, she has forced the choice upon me, and with calm—since it was her fault—said, “Take care, Fanny, what you say. I love you sincerely, but I cannot forget my obligations to Lady Hamilton or speak of her otherwise than with affection and admiration.”

“Apparently not. If you cannot, others can. And what is more, do,” said Fanny. And turning to Mr. Haslewood, for she never forgot her social obligations, she added, “Mr. Haslewood, I bid you good day, good-bye and short shrift,” and galloped from the room, leaving the enemy in the field, but able to call her soul her own and every inch of her intact, in fighting trim.

“Ha!” said Nelson. “A rift. Haslewood, no matter what has passed in this room, I would assure you that Lady Nelson has always my esteem.” He sounded much as though he had just left her his second-best bed.

The front door slammed. A carriage clattered off. They waited until the sound had died away.

“I must be going, myself,” said Nelson. “I am due at twenty-three Piccadilly. May I drop you on the way?”

“Ah well, if we’re all going,” said Haslewood, who had not the pleasure of Lady Hamilton’s company, but knew the address. “Why not?”

*

“William,” asked Emma, gazing out at Green Park, “what do swans mean?”

“Twins,” said Sir William succinctly.

Emma, who had been about to say “How pretty,” averted her gaze.

“Leda, and Castor and Pollux, and Helen and Clytemnestra, you know, because Jupiter, as Lemprière so felicitously puts it, availed himself of his situation,” Sir William explained kindly. “In some versions, however, it is Nemesis, not Leda, who spawns the brats.”

*

“I have been told to hoist my colors at Plymouth,” said Nelson. “We must devise a code.”

“Can you not put your departure off?”

“It is Duty,” said Nelson, not altogether vexed to be at sea and have firm ground beneath his feet again and know where he stood, that is, on deck, and no women anywhere. “I shall never desert you, of that you may be sure.” He was eager to be off. William was waiting downstairs, at his favorite game of estimating what the plate would fetch if there should be a sale, and could the initials be shaved. It was curious how seldom you came across a used teaspoon on the cheap, monogrammed N. Though now, with a B in the offing, the chances would be doubled, which cheered him up.

Nelson was a boy. It was years since he had devised a code, not since he had been courting Fanny and made up one so elaborate that she had had to use a code book. For an instant he saw the bay at English Harbour and felt once more the vast relief of leaving, for the last time, her Uncle Herbert’s house.

“It is necessary,” he explained, “that when we correspond, you shall be the protectress of a Mrs. Thompson, who is about to have a baby, and Mr. Thompson will be one of my seamen.” He warmed to his tale. It was romantical.

“Nelson,” said Brother William, materializing in his shapeless, ectoplasmic way, “we shall be late to Lord St. Vincent’s for luncheon.” Lord St. Vincent had influence, and where better to pass the long wait than in a choir stall at some not too provincial cathedral, and then hoist up to the peerage from there?

William got his luncheon; Emma was left in the lurch; and Nelson’s flag was hoisted at Plymouth to the plaudits of the multitude and to his own vast annoyance, for Lady Nelson had taken a liberty permissible in a mistress, but unforgivable in a wife, and packed his things all wrong.

“If I want a piece of pickle, it must be put in a saucer, and I have six silver bottle stands but not one decanter to fit them,” he snarled. “I could have done all in ten minutes and for a tenth part of the expense.” To Emma, he added, “I long to get to Bronte, for believe me this England is a shocking place. A walk under the chestnut trees, although you may be shot by banditti, is better than to have our reputations stabbed in this country.” As for his wife: “She is a great fool and thank God you are not the least like her.”

Emma would have thought little fool the more appropriate description, but otherwise had no objection to the letter, particularly as it enclosed provision for the child, in the draft of his will.

*

“Emma,” said Mrs. Cadogan, “is indisposed.”

“More than usual?” asked Sir William, with instant sympathy.

“It’s her stomach,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “She will stuff herself, you know.”

“Yes,” said Sir William—he was finding it quite a useful phrase these days—“I know.” For truly there is no end to learning; it can occupy a man a lifetime. One may not know everything, but one ends by knowing all.

*

Yet it was pleasant to have the downstairs’ rooms to oneself and no more than six to dinner. That saved the walk to one’s club, which in January, in town, was no small saving.

This sky, always the color of dirty, dusty, sleazy prolapsed silk on the ceiling of a deserted ballroom, was getting on his nerves. One always forgets while one is away that the little discomforts of home are the loathsome unendurable ones, for anyone can lump it on campaign, but who can bear to rough it in his own drawing room? His fingers ached. His eyes smarted. He had a chilblain. He felt like Louis XV, dying panicstricken but resigned at Versailles, for how can you get to the top of the hill when the road you are on leads down? He meant to survive this winter, but to the old, winter is a siege. Open the window, and the drawing room choked with vast gray monsters made of sea-coal soot. Four old ladies, six cows and two Barbary apes had coughed to death in the late fog, said The Morning Herald. In St. James Park, an elderly female petitioner had been hit in the stomach by a disoriented, low-flying and agitated duck, fallen, and broken her hip. At Palermo, no matter what the weather, at least it had been possible to see your way about, whereas here, candles made the world the darker and you could hear the thing snuffling in the wainscoting at night, while the fire in the bedroom grate got lower and lower, and the consolations offered us by Cicero and Seneca did not help.

But not this winter. But not just yet.

“Ah, Mrs. Cadogan, how extremely kind of you,” he said, not noticing what she had brought, but she was the only visitor he had had that day. A thoroughly respectable little person, Mrs. Cadogan, no fool, but she knew her place.

“Would you like me to stoke the fire up for you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It never does any harm to drowse in a cosy room,” said Mrs. Cadogan, and vigorously stoked it up.

“I put another log on,” she said, surveying the bed and the old man in it in his stocking cap, and his face still the color of bronze. At the door she paused with her hand on the handle, peering through the shadows anxiously. “Good night, Sir William,” she said, with almost a smile, and left.

It was not until then that he realized he had been waiting for her to come in. She sometimes did at this hour, these days. The stuff she had brought was tea, a sovereign remedy, so they said, for snow blindness.

“Ah well,” he said, rather touched on the whole, and picking up his Seneca again, plowed firmly through the night, whose lapping about the bed no longer bothered him. Once past midnight, and he was safe for another day, and the maid would be in soon enough, to draw the curtains and exchange the tea for fresh.

The permutations of the affections are peculiar, devious, reassuring and odd, Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh had married his housekeeper, and not a peep out of him since.

*

“Sir William’s feeling poorly.”

“Who is not?” demanded Emma, surveying, between spasms, a bowl of hot water, some towels, pillows stuffed against the crack under the door, and other signs of imminence.

“It’s a good thing for you I was the victim of a diverse youth,” said Mrs. Cadogan grimly. “Here it comes, so push!”

*

“Curious,” said Sir William, “it is well past Christmas Eve, and yet methought I heard one crying ‘Child.’” But since it was cold and he was not really awake, he went back to sleep again.

Over the mantel was a mirror for company, but not being awake, he could scarcely look for the reassurance of seeing himself in it. So the room was completely empty. He had decided to lie low.

*

Nelson, who had known him for years, found that he knew very little about Mr. Thompson, really, except that since he had had a child, then he must indeed be married, and a fig for Josiah. Poor Fanny had written to say that the only offense she could imagine herself guilty of was pushing Josiah forward, and very well, if that was what had come between them, Josiah was of age now to fend for himself, so she would cast him adrift if Nelson would but return. That she should make so scandalous a proposal merely showed her for the monster that she was; as Mrs. Thompson said, What mother, no matter what the provocation, would desert her own child?

Nelson chanted to himself as he capered around the cabin.

“And what’s all that about?” asked a swobber.

“He has his moods, but it looks to me like an extra round of rum, though who Thompson is, I’m damned if I know.”

For the Vice-Admiral of the Blue was dancing a lopsided jig before a portrait on the cabin wall and singing himself hoarse with:

Which put him in mind at once of cryptograms, anagrams and peacock pie.

By eight and a half pounds.

A child. A child. “Oh, you are kind and good to an old friend with one arm, a broken head and no teeth,” he said. Since Horatia could not be recognized as his in England, she should have the revenues of Bronte instead, if not—in time—somehow, the title too. She had been begotten in the South. Bronte was hers by natural right.

*

“Never before,” said Sir William, encountering Emma and Mrs. Cadogan on the stairs, “have I known you to return a bonnet.” For Mrs. Cadogan had by the strap a brown leather traveling hatbox, bearing the Hamilton crest, and punched on the lid, oddly enough, with a series of small holes.

“Never before,” said Emma, “have I been put to the necessity of doing so,” and out she swept into the snow, toward a town hack which had been summoned for her, apparently.

Sir William was relieved. He had had no desire to add a Hamiltonian to the Harleian miscellany, and applauded the discretion, while deploring the need for it.

*

“They say,” said Greville, “that the King is about to go to the Pagoda again.”

In his set, the King’s infirmity was referred to in this way, its being well known, though never to be publicly mentioned, that when George III was about to go mad, the Chinese Pagoda at Kew fascinated him so much that he was apt to behave in such unseemly ways—from the ground floor to the top, and in the sight of all—that the doors had to be barred against him.

“They have been locked,” said Greville, “for a week.” Sir William, who had once diverted the Society of Dilettantes with a description of Priapian worship fifty miles from Naples, was prudent not to draw a parallel.

“If the Prince of Wales is made Regent, perhaps he can be persuaded to do something about Milford Haven,” Greville persisted. “And since he likes his women plump, and Emma is now plump, why should he not be charmed into it?”

It was worth considering.

When Sir William got home, he found Emma just returned, with the hatbox open beside her, trying on a bonnet before the mirror.

“There,” she said. “Is that not much better?”

“I cannot judge. I do not know for what it is a substitute,” said Sir William, and in passing, got a whiff either of starched muslin, newly ironed, or of baby, the two smells being similar. “I wonder if we could not have the Prince of Wales to dine, for he has always wanted to hear you sing duets with the Banti creature.”

Emma gave him what is commonly called a long look, but since it is well known that the best way a woman may put a devoted lover at his ease is to make him jealous, wrote off to Nelson at once, to announce the event.

“Sir William,” came the answer right back, “should say to the Prince, that situated as you are, it would be highly improper for you to admit H.R.H. I know his aim is to have you for a mistress. The thought so agitates me that I cannot write.” Which is what we always say when we are about to write ten pages.

A thoroughly accomplished woman, Emma went on to the next reassuring gesture, which is to accuse the dotard of infidelity.

“Suppose I did say,” he snarled back, “that the West Country women wore black stockings, what is it more than if you was to say what puppies all the present young men are? Sir William ought to know his views are dishonorable.” He longed for the day when, her “uncle” dead, he and Emma might retire to Bronte. “My longings for you, both person and conversation, you may readily imagine. What must be my sensations at the idea of sleeping with you.”

In the next day’s post, he felt horrible.

“All your pictures are before me [they had a low cunning dishonest look]. What will Mrs. Denis say, and what will she sing [the Banti had not been available, Mrs. Denis was the next best thing]—Be calm, be Gentle, the Wind has changed? Do you go to the opera tonight? They tell me he sings well.” He threatened to drop her unless she dropped H.R.H.

Well, that had gone exceedingly well, thought Emma, and as the third step is reassurance by indirection, wrote off to Mrs. William Nelson to say she was so ill that she could not have His Royal Highness to dinner on Sunday, which would not vex her.

“I glory in your conduct,” said Nelson. “As to letting him hear you sing, I only hope he will be struck deaf and you dumb, sooner than such a thing should happen.” He made two enclosures, the one the draft of his will, providing handsomely for Horatia (it was a second draft); the other the news that “that person has her separate maintenance, let us be happy, that is in our power; for mine is a heart susceptible and true.”

All of which was all very well, but as everyone knows, even the most susceptible heart has to be tuned occasionally; to screw it up to concert pitch requires some effort, and an aptitude for female arts was never known to work any woman ill.

“My God,” thought Emma, with that emotion unique to the born artist who finds that something he has done easily for the first time has at the same time been done exceeding well, “I am professional.” She might now look out upon the female creation with a scorn that hitherto had been limited to their lips, not hers. “I may do what I will.”

Alas, money was still a problem, for the fine never pay so well as the fashionable arts, which in their turn are the more expensive. But never mind, she was a woman, and if getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, why then it was only just that the labor should be evenly divided—the one half to the one sex, the other to the other. And any woman who has just lost eight and a half pounds, why of course she must have new dresses; it is a saving really, for they cost only a little more new than the price of altering the old ones. Frills, furbelows and bows do more to rock the human heart than vases.

The first-floor library was a litter of bits and pieces ripped from the walls of the Palazzo Sesso, and vases everywhere, a few fresh barnacled, that Greville had managed to salvage from the wreck in the Scilly Roads, so it was only civil not to notice in Greville’s bedroom a small, late-Roman bronze that had been packed, he was sure, in the Colossus cargo. Just as civilly, Greville did not mention it either. However, better there than gathering water weeds in twenty fathoms, and he had been honest about the vases, anyhow. Not one of a wet provenance had come recently upon the market.

One was only in England temporarily, to visit friends, but all the same, Sir William was aware that that walk through the weeds at Segesta had been the last one, though there were signs of hope, for the snow in Green Park was thawing into slush, and the sun did not set now until as late as 4:30 in the afternoon.

On a vase the color of chicken bone, a piper played pan pipes, a woman danced, and in an invisible meadow, flowers bloomed.

*

Nelson arrived suddenly, on leave of absence. He wanted to see the child.

“But it is quite safe. It is with a wet nurse in Marylebone,” said Emma, puzzled. “And since you have only three days …”

“I wish to go there now.”

“But I can’t go now. Sir William will need me when he comes in.”

“Damn Sir William. What is the woman’s name?”

“Gibson,” said Emma. “Oh how my heart cries out to see it! But as you see, I cannot come.” And she began to do her hair.

*

It was a small, mean, respectable house with a worn scrap of drugget on the parlor floor. He would sit on the floor and play with the child by the hour, or rather, since the toys he had bought were too big for it, he would play with the toys while he watched the child. When it began to howl, he was dismayed.

“You must forgive me,” he said. “I have never before been alone with a baby.”

“And what is the mother like?”

“The mother like?” He blinked. “Oh, Mrs. Thompson. She is dead, poor lady. She died of joy.”

Mrs. Gibson accepted this without a quiver. “Well, I’ll say this for the dead, they do pay regular,” she said. “And Mr. Thompson?”

“Oh he’s a shabby fellow,” said Nelson happily, experimenting with small fingers soft as seed pearls.

Mrs. Gibson, who had been found by Mrs. Cadogan, liked no-nonsense better than fine words, and tips on top of salary best of all, but now she had seen both bottles, so to speak, curiosity was gratified; she was willing to keep mum.

“It is such a pretty child,” said Nelson, utterly confounded.

It was in truth a healthy, tugging, fat-rolled, simpering brat, a little solemn and given to crying, But then, we always enjoy the sound of children crying, so long as they don’t keep it up long enough to annoy; their grief, though genuine, is transient and therefore meaningless. We like to hear that grief is so.

Mrs. Gibson picked it up fondly. It was worth three guineas a week to her.

*

It was worth a good deal more than that to him.

And as Emma Hamilton, the wife of the right Honorable Sir William Hamilton, K.B. has been the great cause of my performing those services which have gained me honours and rewards, I give unto her in case of the failure of male heirs, as directed by my will, the entire rental of the Bronte estate for her particular use and benefit, and in case of her death before she may come into the possession of the estate of Bronte she is to have the full power of naming any child she may have in or out of wedlock or any child male or female which she, the said Emma Hamilton … may choose to adopt and call her child … diamonds … snuffbox … sword to be delivered on her coming to the estate … and as Emma Hamilton is the only person who knows the parents of this female child … and to this female child I give and bequeath all the money I shall be worth above the sum of twenty thousand pounds, the interest of it to be received by Lady Hamilton for the maintenance and education of this female child …

“I shall now begin and save a fortune for the little one …”

*

Love letters, even from our lovers, do not make agreeable reading. The emotion imbalances the understanding, so that we cannot describe, we can merely show, our symptoms. Such letters may be scanned to make a prognosis, that is all. Whereas, in his better moods, he was not only capable of an amusing turn of phrase, but also made sound sense. Only think, all that just for a child.

“Josiah is to have another ship and go abroad if the Thalia cannot soon be got ready.” “Lady Nelson is to be allowed £2,000 a year subject to the income tax, which I will pay.” “Lord Nelson gives Lady Nelson the principal of the £4,000 mentioned above to be at her disposal by will [it was her dowry].” When the followers of Mahomet put off a wife for barrenness, the dowry is returned.

“We must manage till we can quit this country or your uncle dies.” “Now, my own dear wife, for such you are in my eyes and in the face of Heaven, I can give full scope to my feelings. We are one heart in three bodies.”

*

“I suppose they share it around,” said Captain Hardy, an honorable man, but a partisan of Lady Nelson and so an indefatigable reader of blotting paper, “when they feel the need of one. I wonder who has it now?”

On March 4th, Nelson wrote his letter of dismissal to his wife. “My only wish is to be left to myself, and wishing you every happiness, believe I am your affectionate, Nelson and Bronte.” A draft was sent to Emma.

She had won.

*

“Well, William?” asked Mrs. William Nelson, having shown him the following note:

Brother William, slipping into the better of his two public roles, gave a clerical cough.

“Well, which way does the cat jump?” demanded Mrs. William, who, as a future Countess, deferred in everything to her husband, the future Earl.

William gazed at the ceiling for guidance, but saw only the lath distinctly showing through the plaster, like ribs.

“I do not propose to go mousing for the pleasure of it,” said Mrs. William. “Where is duty?”

Abandoning the Cloth as inappropriate, William descended to his other role, that of doting brother.

“I think, considering the circumstances—and I have considered them—that I must enjoin you to comply with my dear brother’s wishes. He has always been a kind and generous friend, within his limited comprehension of those terms, and although, even indeed because, his conduct is beyond human understanding, we must ever strive to be humane. Though not quite a lady, she is none the less bereft. It is our Christian duty to console.” And with a bland, forgiving, understanding smile (Nelson had warned him not to see the Hamiltons too often himself, as they found him a bore), all glow and no heat, he added: “At least she is not an uppity woman. Lady Nelson was. If we cannot condone irregularity, it is our duty to overlook it. All the same we must not lend it color, so I shall leave my clerical collar at home.”

Indeed not: they had no color to spare. But it had been a moral struggle, which is always a physical strain, so William looked extremely pale.

*

On the 12th of March, Nelson sailed for Denmark under the command of Sir Hyde Parker, to blockade Copenhagen.

“It is your sex that makes us go forth; and seems to tell us—‘None but the brave deserve the fair’! And, if we fall, we still live in the hearts of those females who are dear to us. It is your sex that rewards us; it is your sex who cherish our memories.”

Which was only true. There was not a woman in England who would not wave her husband good-bye, to see her nation defended, though when it came to sons, the matter was more serious. After that, war was a simple matter of waiting to Applaud the Hero and Hail the Conquering Brave. We are not amazons, but parades are exciting. A woman likes things uniform.

“I feel sorry for Sir Hyde,” said Lady Malmesbury, “but no wise man would ever have gone with Nelson, or over him, as he was sure to be in the background in every case.”

“Sir Hyde Parker had run his pen through all that could do me credit or give me support; but never mind, Nelson will be first if he lives, and you shall partake of all his glory. I hate your pen-and-ink men: a fleet of British ships of war are the best negotiators in Europe,” wrote Nelson to Emma.

*

Greville, whose life had been ho-hum and chagrin, had quite by chance stumbled upon ah-ha and laughter, for he had bought for a penny Gillray’s new cartoon of “Dido in Despair.” On a window seat lay open Academic Attitudes and a dirty stocking. On the floor lay a ribbon and a book of antiquities. On the dressing table, a pincushion and a bottle of Geneva. In the middle sat an Emma with elephantiasis, roaring pudgy with despair, and through the window the British Fleet could be seen retreating.

“And left me with the old Antique to lay me down and Cry,” he read, memorized it—which was not difficult—and then, being an unselfish man, decided to share his pleasure in the work of so eminent an English draftsman by the common device of mailing Emma a copy of it, in a wrapper, plain.

*

“Whether Emma will be able to write to you today or not is a question, as she has got one of her terrible sick headaches,” wrote Sir William.

But Greville was in a whistling mood, for if you cannot pay the piper just yet, you can at least hum the tune.

*

Not all the family followed Brother William over to the winning side at once. “I hope in God one day I shall have the pleasure of seeing you together as happy as ever. He certainly, as far as I hear, is not a happy man,” wrote Sister Bolton to Lady Nelson. And the Reverend Edmund asked if he could contribute anything to the further increase of her comfort.

On April 2nd, Nelson won the battle of Copenhagen, as usual, by disobeying orders, since battles are as often won that way as lost. News of the victory reached England on the 15th.

*

“It will mean advancement to a viscountcy at the least, I expect,” said Brother William, rejoicing—with his usual universal sympathy—in the welfare of another. “We must monogram the sheets.”

This was done, and very handsome they would look when eventually it proved possible to bring them out for an airing.

In London, the news went down less well and there was unusual emphasis upon the casualty lists. Public illuminations were forbidden, the money for them given to the bereaved, for preventive war prevents nothing and obliterates more than it saves. To fight Napoleon was one thing—for everyone dreams of being Napoleon, and yet has no desire to be one of his dreams—but to fight the Danes to help bottle up Napoleon was not popular.

However, 23 Piccadilly burned with lights. Old Q was there, Brother William danced the tarantella with Emma, a simple innocent dance in which a satyr chases a nymph rather than a title. But Sir William, at seventy-one, had been obliged to drop out.

“Your brother was more extraordinary than ever,” wrote Sir William to Nelson. “I have lived too long to have ecstasies, but with calm reflection I felt for my friend having got to the very summit of glory. God bless you and send you soon home to your friends.” He meant what he said, for women and what they do need not impinge upon what we are among ourselves; and if one has retired from the competition, one cannot very well feel defeated by a mere movement backstairs.

Emma, having exhausted William, the Duke of Noia, her own maid and finally Quasheebaw, was forced to dance alone.

“It would be difficult to convey any adequate idea of this dance, but it is certainly not of a nature to be performed, except before a select company,” said Wraxall, the historian, who had looked in and then as promptly popped out again. “The screams, attitudes, starts and embraces with which it is intermingled give it a peculiar character.”

*

In July, Nelson came home.

“I have sometimes a hope of receiving you once more surrounded not with public honors alone, but what must add pleasure to every other gratification, a return to domestic joys, the most durable and solid of all others. Be it so O God,” wrote the Reverend Edmund.

“You will at a proper time, and before my arrival in England, signify to Lady Nelson that I expect—and for which I have made such a very liberal allowance to her—to be left to myself, and without any inquiries from her; for sooner than live the unhappy life I did when I last came to England, I would stay abroad forever,” wrote Nelson to his man of business; since he was in the wrong, he intended to act with firmness from now on.

On the 27th, as Earl Nelson, he landed at Great Yarmouth, and he and the Hamiltons went to Staines, to fish.

*

“Would that he had the command over himself which he exerts over others,” said Lord Spencer. “And if Lady Nelson were half the woman Lady Hamilton is …”

“Lady Nelson is not a woman, but a reputation, though it is marvelous how she keeps up. She wishes to save her good name much more than she wishes to save him,” said Lady Spencer impatiently. “And since to her that name is Herbert of Nevis, not Nelson, there is nothing to be done either for or with her. She must go be glum at some provincial watering place, as she prefers.” Happy the woman who has at last found her grievance.

“But it is irregular, and the crowd loves him all the same,” said Spencer.

“If he were sent to sea again, the irregularities would be less and the public would love him the more,” said Lady Spencer, who had given the same advice before, for she was dependable. “You have only to move him about a bit.”

So that was settled; all that was needed was a new emergency.

Unfortunately the crowd loves an irregular liaison, given it may read about it in the papers rather than be scandalized by it next door. For what are the great for, if not to do the same as we, if we but dared?

*

At Staines, they stayed at the Bush Inn, the whole lot of them: William Nelson to guzzle and grope for favor; Emma to guttle; William’s wife, to be company; their daughter Charlotte, to clack; and Sir William and Nelson to fish at Shepperton, nearby.

It is pleasant to fish.

They were in one of those ideal landscapes which the English achieve by their usual combination of weeding and leaving well enough alone. The view had aplomb. Water spilled over a stone shelf into a still pool, and from there rippled clear and cool over small stones. The sky was blue, but flocculent with clouds, so that the light alternated, varied, and then came out again. The grass was green and sappy. Under a boulder grew a nibbled crop of violet flags. The nearest sound was a cowbell two fields over. The trees did not stir. It was one of those landscapes which transcend themselves—so exactly the symbol of what they are, that they enter the mind forever; eternal moments, every one of them.

In this dingle, he was far from wishing his uncle dead, for Uncle had disappeared, as so had he. They were merely two men fishing—Sir William, the older; and Horatio, the favorite and favored friend.

In the evening they were together at the inn, which had a garden down to the Thames. Since it was a benevolent summer that year, this meant that they had supper outdoors in the long northern twilight, with lanterns in the shadows and such a scent from the bushes as would make you believe yourself in some better, well-managed, genteel Italy. Other men have wives who shut you out. Sir William, who had only Emma, let you in. Nelson found the party congenial. Brother William might be a timeserver, his wife a rattle, and their daughter a clack, but at least they were all together, which they would not have been had Fanny been there, for Fanny would never have countenanced the informality of supper on the lawn of a public inn, and was both too shy and too proud to put guests at their ease until she left them, while the port went around. With Sir William as a counterweight, the world regulated itself.

And yet Nelson felt sad. It was the twilight, perhaps. Or the fact that they did not live here; that it was only an inn; that there was not much time left—for he felt this these days; that life passes like that white swan out there, floating along the river, in this dim light no more than a blur and a beak. A thought more suitable to Sir William than to him.

I would rather be nibbled by sharks than by time, he thought. Had Emma not persisted to go at such a gallop, they could have jogged along quite well.

*

He was ordered to Deal, to prepare against the rumored French invasion being mounted at Boulogne. It was the worst scare the English had had since the Dutch sailed up the Medway a hundred and fifty years before, though he suspected it was no more than a ruse whereby Troubridge, Hardy and the rest of the Admiralty Board planned to keep him away from Emma. Well-wishers have no private lives; that is what makes them so concerned for the public good.

“I came on board,” he wrote, “but no Emma. I have 4 pictures, but I have lost the original. Will you come down? It might grieve me to see Sir William without you, but if you approve, I will ask. Send to some good wine merchant for three dozen of the very best champagne and order to the Downs by waggon, or I shall have nothing to give you.”

It was an inducement. Sir William and Emma went. But what was the use of that, if the old man was always there?

“Emma,” said Nelson, “I want you to find me a house. Any house.”

“But what about Sir William?” asked Emma, alarmed and astonished, and just as everything was going so smoothly, too.

“You and Sir William will, of course, come on visits. We will always have a room for him. But I want nothing of his in the house except him. For this is to be our house.”

“But we are going away!” wailed Emma. “Sir William with Greville, and I to the seashore.”

Nelson had not been told. “Very well, then, when you return.”

*

“Recollecting that Sir William and Lady Hamilton seemed to be gratified by the flavour of a cream cheese, I have taken the liberty of sending 2 or 3 of Bath manufacture,” wrote the Reverend Edmund.

“I have a letter from Troubridge, recommending me to wear flannel shirts. Does he care for me? No.”

“Here we are, my dear Emma, after a pleasant day’s journey. No extraordinary occurrence. Our chaise is good and would have held the famous Tria juncta in uno very well, but we must submit to the circumstances of the times!”

“Sir Joseph Banks we found in bed with gout and last night his hothouse was robbed of its choicest fruit, peaches and nectarines …”

And that exhausted the day’s letter bag, thought Emma, who while Sir William went to Wales, had come to Margate with Horatia, and now sat upon the sands, or rather in a wicker bath chair, sheltered from the wind, in quite her old Ariadne attitude—the one Romney had drawn, though styles in hats had changed. Emma Carew was settled for life, thank goodness, and besides, Emma herself was here by choice. Horatia was a favored child, so it was safe to encourage her. Her parentage held no ambiguities, she was an adopted daughter, the child of the poor defunct Thompsons. And on the whole it was warm; the day was fine. If I cannot hold him, the child can; it is all over, so no more scheming, and so I can at last be myself again.

Getting up somewhat heavily, Emma laughed like a girl and turned her face, cast her eyes down in quite the old Romney manner—even if nowadays the loose flesh on her neck made wrinkles—and skipped a stone across the surface of the sea, secure to play the mother now, since it was only play.

Horatia was such a pretty child, flaxen haired, well dressed, and very like a pet rabbit with a pink nose. Emma looked down at her fondly, and then, sensing something, rose to her feet.

“Winklewoman, go away!” she snapped.

But there was nobody there. It was just that sometimes, in the twilight, things hover so.

*

“I do not understand it,” said Sir Joseph, very decrepit, very gouty, his foot done up in bandages and propped upon a gout stool, but delighted to see a friend still portable. “My exotica do well enough in the winter, in the glasshouse, but they do not seem able to grow accustomed to the summers here. They seldom bud.”

The servant finished fussing with the grate and retired. They heard her pause to listen outside the door and then, discouraged that she had been detected, squeak across the hall floorboards and so away.

“William, I am concerned,” said Sir Joseph. “The Jerboa has swelled to Jeroboam size.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I speak only as a friend. A Jerboa is a sort of little rat that gets along by leaps and bounds. Do you understand me? Not only is your family concerned, families are always concerned with what does not concern them, but your friends take it very much to heart.”

Unfortunately Sir Joseph really was a friend; he would have to have an explication.

“I have the consolation,” said Sir William, “that those invisible horns you are at this moment endeavoring not to admire as they sprout from my forehead, though inevitable, were at least placed there by a friend. They are the laurels I look to.”

“A curious sort of friend.”

“Yes, quite curious. I will grant that that he has seduced my wife does not altogether seduce me. But he is a fine fellow, it is not his fault, and at seventy-two one gets a little lonely, particularly if one prefers the company of the young.”

“Yes,” said Sir Joseph, “I know.”

“It is the very phrase I use myself,” agreed Sir William. “And since we both so clearly mean the same thing by it, then since we both know, discussion is unnecessary.”

“But—”

“No but. The things that make us happy at one age are not the same as those which make us happy at another. If she makes him happy—which I doubt, for he seems in the torments half the time, poor fellow—then I feel he is amply repaid for so far forgetting himself as to be affectionate toward and considerate of the feelings of a very old man. He is to be pitied, not censured; it seems he can still feel passion.”

“Seventy-two is not so old as all that. That’s merely seasoned timber,” said Sir Joseph, and added an ouch! for he himself had remained flesh.

“Perhaps, but I need glue.”

“And Charles?”

“My nephew can always be depended upon to look after his own, whether it is his yet or not,” said Sir William shortly.

*

Two days later he was at Milford Haven, sailing a boat on the bay, as he had done in his youth, and listening to Charles’ eternal explanations about money and the lack of it and his own poverty; and how, though there was no income, yet in time there would be some, of that he was sure, but at the moment not, for he was out of pocket himself.

“‘Great worth, by poverty oppressed, is slow to rise,’” said Sir William, who greatly enjoyed to tease Charles. “As Johnson says. But could you not try?”

“I am trying.”

“You must remember, my body is not dead yet,” said Sir William impersonally. “No doubt you will succeed in time, but I have not much time.” And since this was true, he dragged Charles off to the Newmarket races, and enjoyed himself hugely, borrowing fifty pounds from the boy and losing it rapidly.

Though an admirer of horseflesh and pretty women, as became his station, Greville did not gamble.

*

Emma thought Nelson’s unexpected suggestion of a house, though it had taken a hint here and there, an excellent idea, for who knew where she would live if Sir William were to die? He could not leave her much, and what woman of the world would want to sit on an obscure chicken farm, for so she had heard Bronte described, out of favor at court (the dear Queen had never written), out of office, and one’s sole companion a retired one-armed Admiral? Besides, Nelson must have some place to entertain his friends.

After some hunting about, she found Merton, “Paradise Merton” as she called it, a small estate in Surrey, an hour’s drive from the Piccadilly house, for of course that could not be given up. It was too important to Sir William to retain a house in town. The house and all its contents, said Nelson, were to be hers by deed of gift. So truly, with a light heart, she could set about to make him a home.

Sir William, of course, would be equally welcome there. “I assure you every study of mine shall be to make you happy in it. I shall buy fish out of the Thames to stock the water, but I bar barbel. I shall never forget the one you cooked at Staines.”

*

Emma and Sir William were about to go down to Merton for the first time.

“What is that plant doing in the hall?” demanded Sir William.

“Lilac,” said Emma, who was excited. “I thought it would look pretty peeping over the wall, and I like the scent so. Both white and mauve.”

But though she fussed over it and watered it and even asked the gardener what to do, the lilac was one of her failures. It would not grow.

Sir Joseph sent exotica, the zinnias from Mexico in particular successful, though a little strange. It was a plant the Bishop of Derry (released from French captivity at last, thank goodness) had once admired.

The house and grounds had been a bargain at £9,000, complete with furnishings and a private stream. The duck close and field needed to complete the prospect could be bought later. Nelson was helping support some fifteen people, what with Charlotte’s singing lessons, Fanny’s allowance, pin money for Emma, a loan to Sir William, an annuity to his brother Maurice’s widow, another to Graffer’s widow in Italy, Josiah to look after, his sister Bolton’s children in need of a boost up, and a few more. Duck Close would have to wait.

As so would he, for he could not come ashore just yet. “You will make us rich with your economy,” he wrote Emma. As so she would, but there were initial expenses of course. It was necessary to have the carpenters in.

The house was actually two cottages side by side, joined Siamese-twin fashion in the middle. A new eating room and a kitchen had to be added; the south wing had to be revamped for the accommodation of the servants (with a pleasant big bow-windowed downstairs sitting room for Mrs. Cadogan, who would be housekeeper).

When the alterations were complete, the result was a pleasant two-storied red brick house with a white woodwork entrance capped by urns—of the sort that Anthony Devis had enjoyed to paint fifty years earlier—with bedrooms in each wing, a gallery between, and auxiliary staircases so that everyone could be private.

As Beckford—who had dropped by, for gossip must be gathered if it is to be dispensed—had said, it had five bedrooms, most conveniently arranged, a strong room, a dining room for guttling. In short, it was like the Halls of Eblis, cottage-ornée style; “there was a room for every vice.” Vanity and pride were scattered indiscriminately throughout in the form of portraits of Emma interspersed with Nelson’s souvenirs and trophies. The house was to be a shrine, not only to the Hero of the Nile, but also to his inspiratrix, his presiding genius, his goddess, she—as he said these days himself—who made his victories possible. The Angelica Kauffmann went in the eating room, the Vigée-Lebrun in the withdrawing room, the Romney of “The Ambassadress” in the front hall—as was only proper—and in the breakfast room, sketches only, but twenty or thirty of those. It was a pity Sir William had never had her sculpted, for a few busts in Nelson’s library would have done no harm. However, a Sophocles, a George III, a Homer, a Voltaire and a Burke did quite well. Since perhaps women do not belong in a library—except for an “Alope with Child,” by Romney (a graceful allusion to Horatia) to balance the Hoppner of Nelson wearing everything—she left the library alone. Sloth was represented by a sofa, elegantly upholstered in gold and white sateen.

“To be sure, we shall employ the tradespeople of our village in preference to any others in what we want for common use, and give them every encouragement to be kind and attentive to us,” advised Nelson. “I expect that all animals will increase where you are.” She was a Circe, too. “Have we a nice church at Merton? We will set an example of goodness to the under-parishioners.” He thought to have Horatia christened there, but gave the idea up, since the rector would want the parents’ names for the register, which would be awkward.

“You are to be Lady Paramont of all the territories and waters of Merton, and we are all to be your guests and to obey all lawful commands.” He wanted all his family and naval friends made welcome. It was to be a home. He dreamed of it incessantly.

*

Lady Paramont was building a chicken coop.

Sir William sat in a wicker chair on the lawn, a rug across his knees, steeped in that autumn tea called sun, and marveled. He was also faintly shocked, for of course one does nothing with one’s own hands. One orders it done. This reversion to type at the age of thirty-seven appalled him. She was a daughter of the people after all.

But Emma, with Mrs. Cadogan, was happy, oblivious and full of laughter. She was having a lark.

A white hen flew up into a tree, and Emma was after it, calling “Cupidy, Cupidy,” and shaking her skirts. It was certainly droll, he had to admit that. A cock stalked the gravel path. And when Emma and Mrs. Cadogan lined up along the canal and gravely took two mallards and three mandarin ducks out of squawking baskets—their orange feet folded up under them, held them out and dumped them in, whereupon they righted themselves self-righteously and paddled about, reassured if mystified, with the hauteur of animals recently picked up but now themselves again—he had to admit he was amused. He laughed outright. It is true: as we get old, we return to simple things and take comfort from the very shrubs; and if we are just waiting, it is pleasanter to sit on the lawn in the pale sun to wait, than to lurk indoors.

He wrote to Nelson that night, on a smooth-polished mahogany table, while the crickets cracked away outside in purely aural constellations,

When the purveyor arrived, he was as good as his word and even peered into the baskets while the man dumped the minnows into the canal, a slithery, silvery mass.

“Probably the child will be lodged at Merton, at least in the spring when she can have the benefit of our walks. It will make the poor mother happy I am sure,” said Nelson, and sent off for his father, who was still seeing that woman, to ask him to pay a visit. On October 23rd, he arrived himself, at dusk, the cold air pungent as the odor of apples in winter store, and paused outside the gate, as overwhelmed, as frightened and as delighted as a child at its first pantomime.

There was the house; there was the steeple; open them out, and there were the people; though he had requested privacy and not to be annoyed by visitors or strangers, for it was retirement with his friends he wished for.

A low autumnal mist hung over the river, and from the invisible garden came the smell of leafmold and compost heaps. Light from the windows shimmered on the mist; and then there he was, ringing at his own door like any beggar, for there being no carriage drive, he had walked up the path—as Sir William would have said, had the season been later and so appropriate to such a remark—to view the Presèpio.

It was Sir William, tall and gracious, who opened the door.

“My dear Nelson,” he said, like a father with a marriageable daughter, who quite approved the match but knew why the guest had called, “Emma will be down directly.” We need an intermediary to our joys. Sir William was a male confidant through whom it was possible to explain the offstage action and yet keep the unities intact.

It was a charade; and if it lacked an Italian opera-buffa passion, well, this was England, which was jollier. In England, we do the same things, in our own way, but we give them different names, for if the wasp is missing, so is the sting.

On the wall of the entryway, “The Ambassadress” held Romney’s dog in her lap. Things dragged about for years now stood on tables or hung from walls which did not creak in a high gale. The chandeliers did not sway. Everything had come to rest.

And when Sir William bowed himself upstairs at 10:30 and Emma, devoted as ever, followed him, Nelson had a final tipple at the port while listening to Sir William walk to the south wing, where his bedroom was, while Emma’s lighter tread returned to the north one.

Although he had no acquaintance among those of the upper gentry the next moral stage over—who were always careful to ask Y when Lady X came, and Z because otherwise Lord W. wouldn’t, and so did not recognize his feelings for what they were—his emotion on hearing the creaking in the corridors above was much the same as theirs. He had seen to everything. The weekend would go.

*

In the housekeeper’s room, Mrs. Cadogan, who had heard the same sounds, listened to Sir William mutter his way to bed, and thought that though no doubt some folk found it all very odd—and indeed she found it so herself—being snug and warm inside an anomalous situation was by no means as bad as the way it looked when you were outside looking in; in fact, once you had caught your breath, it was only natural. She also considered that Merton (and this snug little room with the Lowestoft plate, locked trunk, pottery bust of George II, and Sir William’s gift miniature in a velvet frame on the dresser) suited her. It was all very well for dear Emma to write of her in Palermo that “she has adopted a mode of living that is charming, lives with us, dines &c, &c, onely when she does not like it, for example, great dinners, she herself refuses & as allways a friend to dine with her & La Signora Madre dell’ Ambasciatrice is known all over Palermo,” but it was agreeable not to have to refuse great dinners and not to have to speak Eyetalian.

Tomorrow she was looking forward to that excellent lifetime game of keeping the tradespeople in their place, and “Of course in Cheshire we never heard the likes of that, well I never!”; and in other words (her Eyetalian was nothing much, but her French was fair) la vie commence demain.

*

In her room, Emma, who had had almost twenty years to learn that desires once satisfied do not have to be satisfied too often—though what do men get out of it, that makes them like it so?—was primped, primed and waiting, and so not at all surprised (though she affected it) to see the handle of her door turn.

But the next day was better. She was a little girl. She wore white.

*

They went for a tour of the grounds, both the mile of dry path and the streams which crossed the property.

“It is our Nile,” said Nelson to Emma.

“It is the Canal,” said Sir William, with familiar memories of Stowe.

It was in truth the Wandle, a minor tributary of the Thames. A wattled fence prevented the escape of the fish, but one of the royal swans had hopped over from the other side and now sailed about, to the vast annoyance of the ducks, who were commoners.

Brother William had arrived with his daughter Charlotte. He was always cordial to Emma. She could have no legal children, and for so long as Nelson lived with her, neither could Fanny. He was a loving brother.

When Sir William went fishing, Charlotte tagged along. She had taken a fancy to the old gentleman, even if he did bark at her when all she had done was to upset his creel, shout a bit, and throw rocks in the Wandle.

“Child, I do not propose to stoop to the height of a dwarf at my age. You must let me mind my own coat,” said Sir William tautly, trying to grab it away from her. But the sly child was not only a great clack, she had hooks for hands, and if she fancied herself injured, put up an enormous fuss.

“Dammit!” he snapped. “Give it back.”

So off she went, wailing, toward the kitchen quarters.

“But she likes you,” said Emma, bewildered.

“She is a self-centered, willful, murderous, cacophonous monomaniac,” said Sir William. “And, moreover, I am pleased to say, no relative of mine.”

“Her mother doesn’t know how to dress her, poor thing, that’s all; her armpits bind,” said Emma.

“Nonetheless, if she is not discouraged from screaming along the canal, I shall strike her with the next pike I strike,” said Sir William, and took himself upstairs.

“Charlotte,” said Emma, “I am afraid, child, that fishing is something men do.”

“Daddy doesn’t.”

“Daddy is not …” began Emma, and paused to consider. “Daddy is a clergyman,” she decided finally, but it had been a close thing.

Next day it was she who had to interrupt him. She had been gardening, for though women have no hobbies beyond meddling, marrying off and needlework, when they get past the childbearing age and begin to ape the Graiae, they turn either to gardening or public works. Gardens have no menopause; there is always the hope of something new; one can bully a bulb as well as a baby. As for public works, they are only a form of the higher meddling, and so gratifying in the extreme.

“William,” she said, “will you fetch Charlotte from her music lesson for me?”

“No,” said Sir William, who so far today had not caught a thing.

“But I can’t go. My hands are too dirty.”

“Indeed they are, my dear.”

“Now don’t make a scene,” she coaxed. “Someone has to fetch her; she can’t trill away all night.”

“Why not? There would then be hope that by the morrow she might trill no more,” snapped Sir William, but he fetched her.

However, even Charlotte went home in time, all eagerness and adenoids, and life flowed on, or would have had not Emma followed her usual custom of silting up the time with guests, to form some diversion in this backwater.

“The whole establishment and way of life are such as to make me angry as well as melancholy,” said Lord Minto after a visit. “The house is covered with nothing but pictures of her and him, and the love she makes to Nelson is not only ridiculous but disgusting. To make his own house a mere looking glass to view himself all day, is bad taste.”

“The complaint my dear son has felt,” said the Reverend Edmund, “is, I know, very painful. He must not venture without a thick covering, both head and feet, even to admire your parterres of snowdrops which now appear in all their splendor. The white robe which January wears, bespangled with ice, is handsome to look at, but we must not approach too near her.” He, too, had been brought around, though he had pangs about deserting Fanny.

“Let everything be buried in oblivion; it will pass away like a dream,” wrote that lady, making her final effort to overcome the inevitable.

But Nelson had found oblivion elsewhere.

Sir William had not. The chickens squawked. The rooster crowed. And Charlotte had come back for a visit.

“It is but reasonable,” he wrote to Greville, “after having fagged all my life, that my last days should pass off comfortably and quietly.” He was beginning to discover that a paying guest has no home. He minded the infidelity far less than the noise, the disturbance, the drinking, and Emma more Wild Polly of Portsmouth than still and perfect as a vase, unraveling her Attitudes at Portici.

Also, there were the almost quarrels.

“My man of business says you told him to tell me not to send you any more advice about seeing company,” wrote Nelson to Emma, having escaped to town.

“Nothing at present disturbs me but my debt and the nonsense I am obliged to submit to here to avoid coming to an explosion,” wrote Sir William to Greville, “which wou’d be attended with many disagreeable effects, and would totally destroy the comfort of the best man and the best friend I have in the world. However I am determined that my quiet shall not be disturbed, let the nonsensical world go on as it will.”

*

“Has she been working on you?”

“Working on me? What about?”

“About the will,” said Greville.

“No, of course not,” said Sir William, realizing he must look as ill as he felt, which would never do. But he managed to sound thoroughly shocked—convincingly, too, for of course she had been. Since they had done nothing to earn it, naturally his relatives would feel they had a right to his money. Not that there would be much.

Greville came neither to 23 Piccadilly nor to Merton these days. It would be indelicate of him to do so, he said, by which he meant that the situation there was too indelicate for him to stomach. “And as Vice-Chamberlain to His Majesty, I could not allow it even to be suggested—as my presence would suggest—that Their Majesties lent color to … ah … um … em … well, any irregularity.”

*

“But I am his wife. Why should Greville have everything?” demanded Emma. She was indignant.

“What signifies the dirty acres to you?” shouted Nelson right back. “You’ve not even seen them.”

“I haven’t seen the income either,” said Emma. “Nor has Sir William. And you yourself said Greville was a scoundrel.”

“Then there is no need to keep him company.”

“But I don’t like Greville!” wailed Emma. It was always so difficult to make men understand that a woman has so little to fight with, to protect her little all, that a scrupulous choice of implements is seldom in her power.

*

“My partiality to you, and the thorough confidence I have in you, despite of any attempts that have been made to disturb them, remains, and will, I am confident, to my last moment, in full force,” wrote Sir William to Greville. “My visit to Milford last year convinced me of the propriety of all your operations there, which may still operate in my favour during the short time I can expect to live, but must be attended with immense profit to my heirs hereafter….”

Emma was a Hamilton by marriage, not by character, and there is an entail of the heart as well as of land. There was, perhaps fortunately, only one of her. But there were many Hamiltons, and that they be provided for was no more than Roman piety. In each generation, the same couple play out the same inevitable drama—it is only the circumstantial details that change—and for this they will need the family costumes, props and properties.

“I admit she is sometimes difficult,” said Nelson.

“Always admit what cannot be denied,” agreed Sir William, “but only to yourself; never to others. That way you save both the appearance and the reality.”

He was not bitter. Nonetheless, he knew that an old man must never ask for anything he cannot pay for; so much for candles, so much for wine, and a lien against the estate in order to bribe a proper funeral and an affectionate regard.

Alone in the house at 23 Piccadilly, he found himself trying to remember when emotion in him had died. It was difficult to detect the exact moment, since he had been a dutiful son, an affectionate husband, a fond uncle, a passionate connoisseur of the antique, a kindly lover, an obliging husband the second time, a warm friend upon occasion; there was no chink anywhere, therefore it must have been at some other time—when he was a child perhaps. He had thus come equipped to maturity, for it is true, the absence of consideration allows us to be considerate; the death of loving, to be affectionate; the irrelevance of hope, to be cheerful; death by slow social strangulation, to be sociable; and if we can hold our liquor, so much the better—we shall be clubbable fellows to the end. So we become the fetches of ourselves, always beckoning, but no one comes, because we are not there. We are only an appearance. We have become realists.

Dear me, this won’t do at all, said Sir William to himself, rather hoping Mrs. Cadogan would appear with one of her loathsome cups of beef broth, but she was at Merton. It is my body is depressed, not I.

Though he had been sensible of its inevitability, even as a young man, Sir William had seldom pondered the decline itself. There are only two forms of decay available to us: either one dies surrounded by one’s loved ones, or else one goes off to the graveyard in a weary rage, like a bull elephant, all by oneself. Which is to say, the cleaning woman finds you the next morning dead, with a book fallen off the coverlet and the candle snuffer never used. All of which was unavoidable and therefore could be accepted. What he could not accept, and had never envisioned, was that one should sit dying surrounded by loved ones who not only paid you no heed whatsoever, but screamed their heads off besides.

The ancient Romans, when simulating that civilization to which they aspired but for which they would make no effort beyond the borrowing, were saved from the horrors of decay—if eminent enough—by the social discipline, legal benefits and imperial sanction of suicide. When they could not kill each other, they calmly (we are told calmly) killed themselves. But that was before Christianity imposed dalliance upon even the post-Augustan mind and went fishing for souls with the sky hook of salvation, jerking us ashore whether we wished to be landed or not.

The next best thing, I suppose, thought Sir William, since I am about to leave England for the last time, is to pay the obligatory round of courtesy calls and farewell visits. And indeed it will be agreeable to do so, for people are always at their pleasantest just before you leave. And since I do not like this house empty, back to Merton Place I suppose it must be.

*

Nelson had bought two cows, two calves, the back pasture and the duck close, too. He proposed a farm.

“Emma, do you like what you have become?” asked Sir William, thinking of Greville’s Paulus Potter and perhaps of his Honorable Emily Bertie, too.

“Become?” she asked, astonished. “Why, I am what I have always been.” She went on feeding the chickens.

That was perhaps true, yet for a brief moment fifteen years ago she had given promise of becoming somebody else. It seemed to him curious that Nelson should like her for what he thought to be her polish, whereas he—who had supplied the polish—had liked her best for something polish can never give.

If only it were not for the noise, thought Sir William, who was beginning to find the bosom of a family as bumpy as that of Diana of Ephesus (whom, indeed, in other ways, Emma was coming to resemble).

It was spring. Charlotte came and went, an adolescent timeserver, like her father. The apple trees were in early bloom and there was now a beehive. Emma turned around and around in the kitchen garden, like an old winklewoman, to choose an icebox lettuce which, since there was still frost at night, had the feel of a pickled brain in an anatomy school. Charlotte, all ink and vivacity, was translating one of Madame Sevigné’s letters, not well. The Reverend Edmund was to arrive and would be company, or at any rate, a coeval.

Sir William, who could not bear it, went up to town. When he returned, it was to find still another child there. Horatia was now over two.

“She is the daughter of one of my cadets, a man named Thompson,” said Nelson. “I propose to adopt her, and Emma has kindly offered to assist.”

A great deal of his time was spent sitting on the grass with the child. Emma, in her best little-girl manner, also played with it. It was a docile child. Sir William had no complaints to make of it, but the whole household now seemed organized around it. You caught glimpses of it being dandled somewhat every time you went for a walk or tried to use the library. Even Mrs. Cadogan had taken to hovering.

The apple blossoms came wandering down, cast loose by an afternoon shower.

“And the dish,” said Emma, with a glance at Nelson, “ran away with the spoon,” playing with Horatia’s toes.

“Fork,” said Nelson.

“Not in this case.” Emma gave him one of her more dazzling smiles. It was their love pledge, was it not?

Sir William, who had gone to the orchard for a stroll, turned back and did not know why he was so angry, except that the child so clearly had the Nelson nose.

Was Greville to be disinherited to the benefit of that? He was not ravished by the appearance of little Miss Thompson. And if he wished to take the carriage to town, why should he not do so? It was his carriage.

I have passed the last 40 years of my life in the hurry and bustle that must necessarily be attendant on a public character [he wrote angrily]. I am arrived at the age when some repose is really necessary, and I promise myself a quiet home, and altho’ I was sensible, and said so when I married, that I shou’d be superannuated when my wife wou’d be in her full beauty and vigour of youth. That time is arrived, and we must make the best of it for the comfort of both parties. Unfortunately our tastes as to the manner of living are very different. I by no means wish to live in solitary retreat, but to have seldom less than 12 or 14 at table, and those varying continually, is coming back to what was become so irksome to me in Italy during the latter years of my residence in that country. I have no connections out of my family. I have no complaint to make, but I feel that the whole attention of my wife is given to Ld. N. and his interest at Merton. I well know the purity of Ld. N.’s friendship for Emma and me, and I know how very uncomfortable it wou’d make his Lp., our best friend, if a separation shou’d take place, and am therefore determined to do all in my power to prevent such an extremity, which wou’d be essentially detrimental to all parties, but wou’d be more sensibly felt by our dear friend than us. Provided that our expences in housekeeping do not encrease beyond measure (of which I must own I see some danger), I am willing to go on upon our present footing; but as I cannot expect to live many years, every moment to me is precious, and I hope I may be allow’d sometimes to be my own master, and pass my time according to my own inclination, either by my fishing parties on the Thames or by going to London to attend the Museum, R. Society, the Tuesday Club, and Auctions of pictures. I mean to have a light chariot or post chaise by the month, that I may make use of it in London and run backwards and forwards to Merton or to Shepperton, etc. This is my plan, and we might go on very well, but I am fully determined not to have more of the very silly altercations that happen but too often between us and embitter the present moments exceedingly. If really one cannot live comfortably together, a wise and well concerted separation is preferable; but I think, considering the probability of my not troubling any party long in this world, the best for us all wou’d be to bear those ills we have rather than flie to those we know not of. I have fairly stated what I have on my mind. There is no time for nonsense or trifling. I know and admire your talents and many excellent qualities; but I am not blind to your defects, and confess having many myself; therefore let us bear and forbear for God’s sake.

If it was querulous, he could not help it. Rage without either the will or power to punish is always querulous.

*

Of this even-tempered epistle, Emma caught only the next to last phrase.

“Horatio, he knows about the child!” she yowled. She was both indignant and frightened.

Nelson took the letter, read it, and became solemn. He did not reassure her.

“It is his way to hint. He says he is not blind to my defects.” She could think of no others.

“He is right. There is no call to shout at him. He is not in his grave yet, you know,” said Nelson soberly.

“I shout at Sir William?” She was outraged.

“Up and down the stairs again.”

“But he’s so difficult sometimes.”

“He is an old man. And though you are not, thank goodness, his wife, he is your husband. And for mention of that, I do not like these incessant dinner parties either.”

“I only ask your friends.”

“What friends? Does Troubridge come? Does Hardy come?”

“But we cannot afford two carriages, and the one is always in use. Charlotte uses it. Your brother William uses it. All the Nelsons use it. And something must be available if Horatia is to be fetched. Besides, it is not my fault. They have been asked.”

“Let the old man have his chariot,” said Nelson. “And let him also have his evening quietly till it be out.”

She did not understand. She was deeply hurt. He did not seem to sympathize.

*

With Mrs. Cadogan she fared no better.

“But why? Indeed I am not conscious of any fault. What have I done?” she demanded, and threw a scene and roared like a lion, who in times past would have shivered like a mouse.

Mrs. Cadogan folded her hands. “You’ve been yourself and it won’t do,” she said. “If you tumble him down, you will tumble right after him. Sir William means exactly what he says.”

Emma pouted, a thing she had never done when young, when misfortune had slimmed her down and made her acceptable. But being at bottom a good-tempered creature with no malice in her—only a little necessary tendency to plot—she said,

“Very well, he shall have his chariot if he wants one. I suppose we can economize somewhere.”

And off she went to Sir William’s room, to say she was sorry; and sat on the floor and rested her head against the arm of his chair and confessed that, yes, she had been bad, though this twenty years later, she did not cry, but watched a branch sway outside the window instead.

“Oh, William, do forgive me, do,” she said. “It is all so difficult to manage.”

“It is too late in the evening for Greek Attitudes,” said Sir William. “It is not a matter of forgiving or forgetting either. It is simply a matter of learning how to control yourself. Now go to bed. I am tired.”

So Emma gave him a filial kiss on the forehead, and since contrition had made her hungry, went downstairs and ate two slices off a saddle of mutton in the larder, and a bunch of haws; puzzled, while cracking them, with the feeling that she had done all this before.

But she would try. If he wanted to go up to town, very well, they would all go up. It was some time since they had had a week in town.

*

In April, Nelson’s father died at Bath, on the 26th, which was Emma’s birthday. Nelson was himself too ill to attend the funeral.

“My poor, poor Horatio,” said Emma, compassionately. She was still his little wife. But Nelson had had a wife before.

“I should like to sit a while with Sir William,” he said. “Alone.”

Emma went off, just as relieved as not. She did not understand silent grief. In Cheshire, one held a wake and beat the walls. She could remember that from childhood. For one must do something, and there is nothing to say. They are just dead, that’s all.

Whereas as far as she could overhear, Nelson and Sir William sat in the library and said nothing whatsoever; she was relieved when at last she heard the stopper to a tantalus chink.

Nelson was standing at the window, looking out at a gray day.

“I tried to make her sensible,” he said, “that she must modify her ways, since she cannot mend them. She has a loving heart. It is merely that it takes these overexuberant forms.”

Sir William said nothing. There was nothing to be said. If they could not share the same wife in the same ways, it was nonetheless evident that they had come to share the same burden.

“She has many virtues,” said Nelson doggedly.

“Yes, many,” said Sir William, also loyal.

The devil of it was, they were both fond of her.

“I am glad you are here,” said Nelson. “Which is odd, for I have been jealous sometimes.”

Sir William refilled their glasses. “Strong brandy never did any man ill,” he said. “And you, too, I think, feel often much alone.”

“He was a nice old man toward the end. He did his best, according to his lights.”

“Yes, he was,” agreed Sir William. But the property should go to Greville, all the same.

*

“The dear Queen has returned to Naples,” said Emma, reading The Morning Herald. “I wonder why she does not write.”

“Ah yes,” said Sir William equanimously. “I wonder.”

“And she pledged eternal friendship,” said Emma scornfully.

“And so did you, my dear,” said Sir William, who had heard that Maria Carolina now made much of a Countess Razoumovski, a perfect unique friend, and like the Russian lady on the boat, no doubt all sensibility.

“Well, I can’t write letters to everyone,” said Emma, but she looked put out, all the same. However, that was in the past, and as for the present, they were off for a journey to Wales tomorrow and she was looking forward to that, for things had been dull at Merton recently, with so few guests; she had felt constrained.

*

The trip was a triumph, barring a temper tantrum and an incident along the way.

Oxford bestowed its freedom on Nelson and made both him and Sir William Honorary Doctors at Civil Law. From there they went to Woodstock Manor and up to Blenheim, a damp and soggy pile, admirable for the connoisseur of pictures, since the landscape combined Salvator’s wildness, Claude’s enlivening grace, and cascades and lakes as good as anything in Ruisdael.

Unfortunately the Duke would not receive them, though they might survey the grounds if they so wished.

“Nelson,” shouted Emma, as they left, “shall have a monument to which Blenheim shall be but a pigsty!” She was outraged.

At Gloucester, they met the tailor and ate the cheese while the crowd cheered and church bells rang, which was more as things should be. And at Tenby, their reception was equally exhilarating.

“I was yesterday witness to an exhibition which, though greatly ridiculous, was not wholly so, for it was likewise pitiable, and this was in the persons of two individuals who have lately occupied much public attention,” said Mr. Gore of that town to his family. “I mean the Duke of Bronte, Lord Nelson, and Emma, Lady Hamilton. The whole town was at their heels as they walked together. The lady is grown immensely fat and equally coarse, while her ‘companion in arms’ has taken to the other extreme—thin, shrunken, and to my impression, in bad health. They were evidently vain of each other, as though the one would have said ‘This is Horatio of the Nile,’ and the other, ‘This is the Emma of Sir William.’ Poor Sir William, wretched but not abashed, he followed at a short distance, bearing in his arms a cucciolo and other emblems of combined folly.”

The cucciolo was a recent acquisition. It was a little dog, the progress from overeating to dramming to little dogs being not unknown among women bigger than they used to be.

The small company went up the street and Mr. Gore went home, not unsympathetically, for since Sir William was an old man—among a people noted for their almost Chinese reverence for age per se—public censure had decided merely to pity him; to feel for Nelson (he was a Hero but had been much abroad where life was notoriously unhealthy, so no doubt he had caught the Passion there. But then, our health is not our own fault); and to loathe her.

The fourth anniversary of the Battle of the Nile was spent with Greville at Milford Haven. There was a Welsh fair, a rowing match, a cattle show and a banquet. Nelson, struck by the possibilities of the harbor, recommended to the Admiralty that a dockyard be established there. So, thought Greville, he is a fine fellow led by the nose, that’s all.

At Hereford, the Duke of Norfolk bestowed the city’s freedom in an applewood box and afterward gave them cider. Unfortunately Sir William insisted she smile at the crowds when they laughed at her and that he be allowed to fish, when what she wanted was that he come with her, to lend her support. Afraid to speak out in her own defense, she left a note on his pillow instead and retired to her room with audible groans.

“Emma,” said Sir William, “get up.”

“I will not attend the dinner. I have one of my sick headaches.”

“If you persist in parading about like small German royalty, you must learn the discipline and smile until they stop booing,” said Sir William. “Now come along and do not spoil our banquet. As for my desire to fish, it is an excellent stream, I shall not see it again, and I propose therefore to fish it.”

“Fish and be damned. I will not go.”

He fished, and what was more, presented the catch to the innkeeper, who served up a small fry for dinner, with a most excellent salmon as the centerpiece.

Bah.

*

But on a good day she was still agreeable, and at Downton, where Richard Payne Knight entertained them, consented to impersonate a few antique coins—in short, more Attitudes, but this time from the neck up only.

At Worcester, the freedom of the city came in a porcelain vase rather than an applewood box, and Nelson ordered a dessert service with his arms all over it. At Birmingham, fittingly enough, there was a performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor. At Warwick, as usual, the Earl talked too much, and at Althorp, they stayed with Lord and Lady Spencer.

*

“It still goes on,” said Lady Spencer.

“Most clocks do until they run down,” said Lord Spencer, who had been shocked by Nelson’s appearance. “We must get him to sea again. I do hope war breaks out before it is too late. If not, some other pretext must serve.”

Fortunately war, like Emma’s elbows, was always breaking out, and if she found sea bathing efficacious, so would the fleet, no doubt. It was only a matter of time. All that was necessary, was that Bonaparte go first, to break the ice. This time, however, Bonaparte seemed a little slow to commence, sensing it, perhaps, to be thin.

*

By September, they were back at Merton. “We have had a most charming tour which will Burst some of THEM,” said Emma. “So let all enemies of the GREATEST man alive perish. And bless his friends.”

In November, Romney died. “Why fancy that!” said Emma. “I wondered what had become of him. And I was going to write a letter to him, too.” Which was true enough. She had been meaning to write it now for the past ten years. And looking at “The Ambassadress” with a wistful expression, she added, “Poor George.”

And then it was winter again.

*

Once more Sir William looked out into the garden at that parterre of snowdrops—lovely, nodding, insubstantial things which the Reverend Nelson had not lived to see again, but had admired. He looked at them from a rapidly increasing distance. He had tired of life, as one does of everything in time, unless it tire of us first. It is but civil to make the first move. One must put the world at its ease. But the snowdrops merely nodded good-bye affably, or else they were shaky on their pale green sappy stalks. Like them, he had pulled through, and yet it could not be too long now. For though the snows had half melted and the woods were full of floral processions—all moving off, all circling back, all fugitive, all part of faërie—it was time for him also to say good-bye.

He turned to the fire in the grate, and watched water bubbles hiss at the end of a log, with the peristaltic movement of a centipede.

Well, what have I done? he thought. I have published some excellent engravings after the antique. I have detected Vesuvius in an eruption. I have forced the British Museum to pay handsomely—a thing not easily done. I have finally unloaded a spurious Correggio; and I have undergone Emma.

I shall be remembered, I suppose, for that. Alas, I can deal only with the esthetic; the inesthetic is beyond me. So since there is nothing I can do about it, all I can do is to sit still in the midst of it, looking at an old volume of landfalls, of almost identical coasts, wistfully. Indeed it is a blessing to be a little deaf.

“Nuncle,” said Horatia, who had been brought in to visit him.

“No,” said Sir William; but yes, she was a docile creature, and it was not Nelson’s fault.

As Sarah Churchill had said when old—that first best and worst of the Marlboroughs, but the woman showed shrewd sense—in this life there is nothing to be done but to make the best of what cannot be helped; to act with reason oneself and with good conscience toward others. And though that may not give all the joys some people might wish for, yet it is sufficient to make one very quiet.

In March, he went up to town for the second time that year, to present to the Society of Antiquaries a mutilated stone head bearing traces of gilding on its coronet, a piece of the ancient walls of Merton Abbey. It was, he hoped, the last piece. Then, not caring to cause distress, he had himself moved from Merton to 23 Piccadilly. Not caring to cause him any, Emma and Nelson came along.

“He is very very bad. He can’t, in my opinion, get over it, and I think it will happen very soon,” said Nelson. “You will imagine Lady Hamilton’s and my feelings on the occasion. Indeed, all London is interested in the fate of such a character.”

Though willing to be obedient, his sister Bolton could not imagine them, quite.

On the 6th of April he died, with Nelson to hold one hand and Emma the other. For dying is very like giving birth: in either event, one has to brace one’s self.

“Gone?” asked Emma.

“Gone,” said Nelson, looking down at that face which had always been a mask but now had nobody to look out through it any more. He closed the eyes.

Straightening up like conspirators once the act is done, they caught in each other’s eyes an expression which said both too little and too much. It disconcerted both of them. The body lay between.

*

“Our dear Sir William died at ten minutes past ten this morning,” said Nelson, and careful of the proprieties, moved in with Greville for the time being; and then, even more carefully, out.

“Unhappy day for the forlorn Emma. Ten minutes past ten dear blessed Sir William left me,” wrote Emma. She was finding the air a little thin, but had taken a house in Clarges Street, for she had to have some place in town. Greville had evicted her from 23 Piccadilly at once.

“Sir William Hamilton died on Sunday afternoon, and was quite sensible to the last,” said Captain Hardy. “How Her Ladyship will manage to live with the Hero of the Nile now, I am at a loss to know—at least in an honorable way.”

The body was taken off for burial in Wales, and Emma was left alone with Mrs. Cadogan. “They have taken away something that belonged to me,” she said. Which was true; they had.

“Are you my mummy?” asked Horatia, who was three now, and like the other one, precocious.

“Your mother is a woman Too Great to be Named,” said Emma, and began to weep.

*

The will was not read until the beginning of May.

To his dearest loyal and truly brave friend Nelson, a copy of Madame Lebrun’s picture of Emma in enamel, by Bone. “God bless him and shame fall on those who do not say amen.”

To Emma, £300 in cash and an annuity of £800—£100 of it to go to Mrs. Cadogan during her lifetime.

The rest to Greville, who was also to administer the estate.

“My dear Emma,” said Greville, with a small smile he had been saving now for twenty years and could at last let out. “I shall see to everything.”

And charged her interest, fee and tax.

*

“Eight hundred pounds a year. It is not enough money to throw at a cat,” said Emma. Her expenses had risen. Her standards had changed. It was a worry.

She spoke to everyone. She petitioned for a pension.

“She talked very freely,” said Lord Minto, “of her situation with Nelson, but protested that their attachment had been perfectly pure, which I declare I can believe, though I am sure it is of no consequence whether it is so or not. The shocking injury done to Lady Nelson is not made less or greater by anything that may or may not have occurred between him and Lady Hamilton.”

So pension she got none.

Nelson, who had been ordered to the Mediterranean, allowed her £100 a month housekeeping money. He made no bones about going. “If the devil stands at the door, the Victory shall sail tomorrow forenoon,” he wrote to St. Vincent. But neither did he make any bones about his intention to come back.

“That dear domestic happiness,” said Codrington fondly, “never abstracted his attention.” Their hero was himself again. “He has sighted Gibraltar. He will be a bachelor beyond it.”

So it was all not quite the way Emma had imagined it would be, though she might have Horatia at Merton as much as she pleased, and see Old Q in town, and of course the Matchams were coming on Thursday and the William Nelsons for the weekend, and there were always some of Nelson’s naval friends to entertain; they were good boisterous boys, there was no harm in them. Something was always happening. And so … And so …

*

Madame Vigée-Lebrun was in London, so Emma went calling, in a black dress, a black cloak, black gloves, a black bonnet. Since she must wear mourning for a year, it was well that black suited her. Her hair was done in the new fashionable Titus cut.

Time had not altered the Great Refugee, but she was running out of royalties to paint, and since she shrank from the thought of penciling a parvenu, was here to do the peerage.

The two women consoled each other.

“In Sir William I lost both a friend and a father,” wailed Emma, noble in grief, like Adrienne Le Couvreur, but showing no signs of having swallowed poison. “And how do you find England?”

“Eh bien,” said Madame Lebrun—with a philosophical shrug—in that engaging way which so endears her countrymen to all. “C’est curieux. En Angleterre, l’esprit public est plus sain; en France, l’esprit particulier vaut mieux; de sorte qu’en Angleterre vous trouverez plutôt un meilleur peuple, et en France, un meilleur homme. Mais,” she added graciously, if without conviction, “c’est toute la même chose.”

Commissions were not going well.

Through the window, Emma glimpsed a white lilac nodding beyond the glass. Wishing to smell it, she went to the window to let the fragrance in, to refresh her. Unfortunately the window would not budge.

“It sticks,” said Madame Lebrun in flawless but contemptuous English. It was a word she had learned recently.

Emma was baffled. Was she supposed to weep again? she wondered.

She is playing a part, thought Madame Lebrun, beady-eyed as ever. The English always play a part.

“I too have lost my little all,” she said. “The house in Paris, you know. Confiscated.” Not a bacchante, she thought, a veritable Bacchus, like that horrid Italian one in the Boboli Gardens. Or is that a Silenus? However, she managed to look sympathetic. She wished to hear more.

“I can never be consoled,” said Emma experimentally.

“Évidemment,” said Madame Lebrun, watching Emma’s hands from force of habit as that so sad lady wandered around the room. Lady Hamilton she might be, but Madame Lebrun did not care for commoners.

At the piano, Emma’s eye was caught by a sheet of music, Richard Bloomfield’s “A Visit to Ranelagh.” “‘As performed,’” she read, “‘by Miss Randles, aged three and a half, the Wonderful Musical Welsh Child.’”

“Whatever is this?” she asked, curious.

“Something a friend brought to amuse me,” said Madame Lebrun, and added kindly, “I have not heard it. C’est épatant, elle dit, mais ce n’est pas le tonnerre.” She had the Gallic weakness for linguistic bead stringing, if not the ability. Her black little eyes clicked like an abacus.

But Emma sat down at the piano and rattled away.

“Oh I like it,” she said. And forgetting her costume, she was radiant and smiling.

Madame Lebrun was not impressed. “On ne gagne pas plus à ennuyer un Francais qu’à divertir un Anglais,” she said in her shrewd, kindly way, totaling up her mental sum.

“Oh but I do like it,” said Emma, for it had a cheerful ducking and bobbing rhythm. It had quite put her in spirits again. “May I have it?”

“Of course, dear child. Why not? If it suits you, take it,” said Madame Lebrun, who had never heard such a vulgar low song in her life; so typically English, and besides, now curiosity was satisfied, it would be well to get rid of her. They are canaille.

So out Emma sailed with it, into the bright, fresh, crisp spring air—feeling ever so much better for having done her duty and paid her respects—humming the tune happily, with an occasional glance at the words, and delighted, considering what the recent past had been, to be out in the present tense again, where the sun still shines. It was a lovely, lovely day, and off she drove, beguiled and beguiling.

Life is a dream.

Cranbrook—Paris—Walnut Creek

June—November 1962