Losing Nelson (32 page)

You never faltered in the belief that you had acted justly, that their punishment was deserved. At least you did not falter in asserting this, and with you there could be no discrepancy between assertion and belief. You could not, surely you could not, have had any slightest sense that those who went to their deaths had been deceived, betrayed.
Six times back and forth and I could return to my desk. I wanted to look again at a letter you wrote to Lord Spencer that same July, in which you sum up your own sense of what you had achieved in Naples:
It will be my consolation that I have gained a kingdom, seated a faithful ally of His Majesty firmly on his throne, and restored happiness to millions
 …

Certainly Ferdinand was grateful. On August 13, the Duke of Ascoli, one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, came bearing a truly regal gift: the king’s own sword. Made of gold, its hilt and blade set with diamonds, it is the sword Ferdinand was given by his father, Charles III, as a token of his duty to defend the kingdom, the same that Louis XIV gave his grandson Philip V when he succeeded to the throne of Spain. On the same day, Prince Lucci writes to inform us that we have been created Duke of Bronte, with an estate at the foot of Etna worth £3000 a year. Now we can sign ourselves Nelson and Bronte.

Then, not long after, there is the
fête champêtre
, held by the court in Palermo, to celebrate the first anniversary of the arrival in Naples, on September 3, of the news of our great victory at the mouth of the Nile. This is the last and most splendid of the court’s tributes to us.

Evening; the garden of the royal palace lit with fairy lights; a select company of courtiers, foreign ministers, and their suites, officers from the allied navies, British, Turkish, and Russian. We are greeted on our arrival by the king and queen and young Prince Leopold in his midshipman’s uniform. I am wearing the new sword; Emma is breathtaking in a white gown with aigrette, earrings, and bracelet of diamonds.

We begin with a magnificent firework display representing the battle of the Nile, culminating in the blowing up of the French flagship,
L’Orient
, and the ceremonial burning of the tricolor. This we watch from a balcony, with Emma on one side of me and Queen
Maria Carolina on the other. In attendance are also the Turkish and Russian admirals. To the former, Cadir Bey, the queen speaks a few words, pointing out to him how by this glorious victory I have saved his country and hers and all Europe. Cadir Bey smiles and bows. Then follows a cantata, specially composed for the occasion.

Preserving a modest impassivity, I take my bow. Then come the refreshments, ices and sweets. We saunter through the lamplit lanes of the garden, Maria Carolina on my arm. Now comes the climax of the evening. We pass between elegant pavilions. Before us rises a Greek temple, magnificently illuminated. A flight of steps leads up to a vestibule supported by columns. Inside, in a blaze of light, three life-size wax figures: myself, Sir William, and Emma. I am in full dress, the ambassador in Windsor uniform, and Emma in white, with a blue shawl embroidered with the names of all the captains who took part with me in the battle. Beyond, within the temple itself, is an altar surmounted by the allegorical figure of Glory. There before it, in the centre of the place, standing upright in a golden chariot, the figure of King Ferdinand. Picked out in lamps, running all round the inside of the temple above the columns,
BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES
.

The orchestra plays “God Save the King.” Little Prince Leopold places a laurel wreath on my waxwork figure. He has to stand on tiptoe to do it. I run forward up the steps. I kneel and kiss the prince’s hand. The boy throws his arms round my neck, he embraces me. I look into his face—it is a face I know, a face I have seen somewhere, long ago. I try to shout a warning but can make no sound …

The shock of this half-recognition brought me back from that spectacular evening to the daylight of my room, the littered desk before me. Why did he do it? It was not part of the programme, it was an impulse, nobody expected it. The people cheered and wept to see the maimed hero, so slight in frame, so haggard, kneel before the boy. It was a sight no-one there would ever forget—this man who had saved the kingdom, kneeling.

No mention of it in the
Times
report. The fireworks, yes, the paean of praise, the wax figures, Ferdinand in his chariot. All in that tone of solemn satire the newspaper had made its own: the beribboned admiral among the waxworks in the Temple of Fame. But no smallest reference to this one action, which brought warmth and spontaneous feeling to the pomp of the proceedings, broke the mould. That was it—you shattered the programme, you found again the grace you had found at Cape St. Vincent,
you broke the line
.

Leopold was wearing midshipman’s uniform. Was it because you saw yourself in the child? On the quayside at Chatham that cold March day, staring across the grey water at your first ship?

It was too young. You acknowledged as much four years later, at a dinner aboard the
Victory
celebrating the anniversary of the battle of Cape St. Vincent. A young midshipman named Parsons finds himself, as the youngest present, seated on the right side of the withered admiral. He will write about it later: the stateroom flooded with Mediterranean sunshine, the gleam of silverware on the table, his awe at the proximity of his famous commander. He is too shy to look up during the meal, but when the cloth has been removed you turn to him, as custom demands. “A glass of wine with you, Mr. Parsons.” By way of opening the conversation, you remark on his youth: “You entered the service at a very early age to have been in the action off Cape St. Vincent.” Parsons speaks his first words: “Eleven years, my
lord.” He sees the smile vanish from the admiral’s face and hears the muttered words: “Too young, much too young.”

That September evening when they cheered and wept to see you kneel, plaudits of a different sort were rising heavenwards in Naples. There on the lamplit square they were celebrating the three-headed beast that dangled and swung below the arm of the gallows. One after the other, day after day, week after week, republicans of a short-lived republic.

You never doubted that right was with you. Perhaps sometimes privately? How can we know? Publicly you never wavered.
When the rebels surrendered, they came out from the castles as they ought, without the honours of war and trusting to the judgement of their sovereigns
. You wrote that in 1803, four years later. I know what Miss Lily would say—she would say you couldn’t forgive them, that you dealt with them in the same way that you dealt with Fanny, you were still sitting up there, immobile, in your theatre box, while she suffered and they died.
He couldn’t be wrong, could he?
Strange how her remarks, which I generally at first thought flippant or ill-informed, lingered in the mind, persisted and strengthened, took over the ground, just as she herself, her whole person, had done in my thoughts of her.

I
continued my wrestling with the facts of those Naples days, or versions of the facts rather, though there was a growing sickness now in this travail, the sickness of anticipated knowledge or anticipated defeat. I think I must already have known then, as June drew to a close and summer green thickened the hedges of the gardens, known in my heart, that this issue would not be listed among the victories, for Horatio or me. I was trying to set him securely in bluff and hearty Mahan’s embrace, save him from the clutches of spiteful Badham, who addressed the preface to his
Nelson and Ruffo
from the Reform Club in Pall Mall in October 1904, a creature for whom preserving Horatio’s honour mattered little.

When Miss Lily arrived on Friday evening, June the twenty-seventh (the day Ruffo, under the illusion or in the pretence that the treaty was to be honoured, celebrated his mass of thanksgiving at the Carmine church in Naples), I was utterly weary with all these speculations.
Moreover, I had neglected to eat that day, although, knowing she was coming, I had shaved and made an effort to tidy myself up. The house was not in good order. Mrs. Watson, perhaps demoralized by the fact that I avoided communicating with her except in the form of notes, was not doing such a thorough job as she had in my father’s time; there was a dustiness and unkemptness about the place, which I was sure Miss Lily noticed, though so far she had not remarked upon it.

This evening she took one look at me and asked whether I felt all right. “You look exhausted,” she said.

“No, I am quite all right.” However, I stood up rather too suddenly in order to get some papers. A blackness came before my eyes; I staggered slightly and put a hand against the wall to support myself. I felt her hand under my forearm, had the sense of a strong support.

“What is it?” she said. There was alarm in her voice.

“Just a dizzy spell. I’m all right now.”

“Are you sure?” Her hand was still there under my arm. I felt the warmth of it. “Why don’t you sit down for a while?”

“I tell you, I’m all right.” Her hand was gone, but I felt the warmth of it still. “Can we get on?” I said.

But of course I had reckoned without her obstinacy. “I do think you ought to just sit down and take it easy for a bit. You would have fallen just now, if it hadn’t been for the wall and me holding you up.”

Once you have shown weakness, it is very hard to resist advice of this kind; there is somehow a psychological weight against you. She was trying to get power over me, I knew that. All the same, I capitulated; I made for the armchair and sat down in it. She remained standing before me, inquisitorial.

“Does it happen often, dizzy spells like that? I was frightened for a moment, I thought you were going to fall.”

“Just lately, now and again.”

Black specks before the eyes, sparse in the first moments, massing swiftly to form the darkness that threatened my balance. I did not go into these details with Miss Lily—the less you give away, the better. But about Horatio’s ailments I could talk.

“He suffered from something similar,” I said, “in Naples and Palermo, after the Battle of the Nile. Giddy spells. Also palpitations and attacks of breathlessness. As if a girth were buckled tight over his breast, as he described it. These are all symptoms of Da Costa’s syndrome.”

“And what may that be?” Miss Lily spoke in the tone she reserved for abstract concepts.

“It’s a disordered action of the heart. Sometimes called soldier’s heart, because there were so many cases during the First World War.”

“Are you telling me you’ve got a heart condition?” Her voice had sharpened; it sounded like reproach, strangely comforting to me.

“No, no. Horatio was afraid it was heart disease at the time, but modern medical opinion gives it out as disorder of the heart due to prolonged anxiety and physical strain. Don’t forget, it was only five months after the Battle of the Nile. That was a great victory, but it had taken weeks to find the French and bring them to action. His hours of sleep were short during all that time. He got a bad head wound in the battle; he thought at first his end had come. Then there was the affair with Emma—he was still under the Hamiltons’ roof, he was still writing home to Fanny, there must have been a lot of guilt. And think of the responsibility. He was the commanding officer. Napoleon was already in Egypt with an army, en route for India. The fate of our empire was in the balance, everything hung on this one man, thin, slight, maimed already in the service of—”

“He probably wasn’t very used to the food,” Miss Lily said. “I mean to say, southern Italy. The food is very rich, isn’t it? Especially in those days. They hadn’t been alerted to the danger of animal fats. Ignorance
is bliss, you might say, but it can’t have been good for them, can it?”

“Good God,” I said, “we are talking about his heart and mind, not his stomach.”

“They are all pretty well tied up together. Anyway, you can’t have this Costa thing, you haven’t been in any wars. I don’t suppose you have been hobnobbing with any ambassadors’ wives, either.”

In saying this, Miss Lily looked at me with the teasing expression that had been more and more common with her lately. I was at a disadvantage, sitting there—I did not know how to reply. Her words constituted another proof, if one were needed, of her pedestrian way of looking at things. Had I not gone with Horatio every step of the way? I had felt his anguish at the cowardly tactics of the French. I had suffered his head wound, felt the warm blood slide over my eyes, blinding me. I had lived through his hero’s welcome, his rescue of the royal pair, the love of the motherless boy for the sensual, ample woman. Was I not during these very days living through the terrible temptations of power, his negotiations with Ruffo and the Neapolitan Jacobins?

“I expect you haven’t been eating so well yourself,” she said now. “What did you have for lunch?”