Losing Nelson Read online

  News to bring you back to life. Time for my third glass. Your brow stitched and bandaged, you are settled in the bread room in the hold, below the water line, as far removed as possible from the din of battle. You send for your secretary to take down a despatch to Earl Spencer, the first lord of the Admiralty. But the secretary is in a state of nervous collapse; at the sight of you, blinded by bandages and working the stump of your arm in a fury of impatience, he loses his nerve altogether and cannot write. There and then I dismiss him from my service. I push up the bandage, take the pen myself. My Lord, Almighty God has blessed His Majesty’s arms in the late Battle …

  I am interrupted again by Berry, this time to report that the Orient is on fire. The surgeon has ordered me to stay quiet, but with the usual disobedience I demand to be helped up on deck. The night is soft and warm, thickly hung with smoke. A reddish glow is creeping over the expanse of the bay. My head throbs and aches, it hurts me to focus my eye, but as the glow strengthens I can distinguish the colours of the ships, make out the situation of the battle, see the leaping flames on the poop of the French flagship. I tell Berry to do what he can to save as many as possible of the crew. At the same time I give orders that our shot should be concentrated on the blaze so as to hinder the enemy from bringing it under control. Many of the Orient’s guns are now disabled, but some on the lower deck are still firing, the French gun crews serving them until the fire gets too close and they are driven off. I see the flames begin to race up her tarred rigging, flare blue along her newly painted sides. I know that the flames will be seeking paths downward, towards her powder magazine.

  What I do not see—what no-one in the British fleet sees—is the appalling fate of the French wounded, trapped belowdecks with their surgeons, all burned alive together. Or Admiral de Brueys, who had made all the wrong assumptions, with both his legs shot away and tourniquets tied around the stumps, seated on a chair on his blazing deck, still facing his tormentors, still shouting orders to maintain fire, until another shot cuts him in two and puts him out of his misery.

  A competent commander—not brilliant, not like you. The end he made has been a recurrent nightmare since I first read of it at the age of fifteen. Thoughts of it now wrenched me from the action. I was here, this was me in the basement, reaching for my glass. You were there on the deck of the Vanguard, pushing up your bandages for a sight of your beautiful, desolate victory.

  The cannonade continues. Our ships aim their guns at the heart of the blaze. Swarms of sparks fly over the face of the water and in among the anchored ships. The British captains nearer the blaze cut their cables to get clear. At five minutes past ten, just at this moment, with a stunning detonation and a great flash of light, the Orient’s powder magazines explode. A fiery wreckage is flung high into the night sky, hangs in its own light for some moments, then descends in a rain of masts, yards, red-hot ammunition, charred fragments of corpses, thudding on the decks of the neighbouring ships or falling back into the sea in a hiss of mingled smoke and steam.

  This mighty bang is heard in Alexandria, fifteen miles away. After it, for several minutes, an utter silence lies over the bay. Then the guns start up again. The French van and centre have been destroyed, it is now the turn of their rear. By sunrise, the full extent of our victory is apparent. Of the thirteen French warships lying at anchor the day before, ten have been captured, one has been blown up, and two have escaped. Aboukir Bay is a scene of utter desolation, with listing, smoking ships and scorched bodies drifting in the shallows. As you truly said, Victory is not a name strong enough for such a scene. Once again we rule the waves, control of the Mediterranean is restored to us. Bonaparte is stranded on shore, the threat to India is removed, the French losses are six times ours. The remains of the Orient are in the depths of the bay, together with her butchered admiral and her treasure—the enormous sum of £600,000 in gold bars and diamonds wrested from the Swiss republic and the Roman state to finance Bonaparte’s eastern expedition, along with the irreplaceable treasures of the Knights of St. John.

  A great action, demonstrating yet again the truth of Grigson’s words to us so long ago and those of Bobby’s teacher so recently. He would be with his mother now, in Derbyshire. I thought of the boy’s face looking fixedly at me in the dim light of the Victory’s gundeck, a light similar to that here in my ops room, where shadows lay on all sides beyond the arena of the table. He says our sailors were the best in the world and we had better officers. Quite right, my boy, quite right. It wasn’t the ships, it was the men. They were better trained, more disciplined; they had superb morale. They cheered when they saw the Orient go up. What would Miss Lily say to that? She would go round it, she would find a question to which there was no answer. Something outside the records. Did a single one of them, officers or men, at the time or later, express pity for the crew of the Orient? Not as far as we know. The men cheered. The officers of course did not cheer, but they did nothing to check the men.

  I couldn’t help it. All these years of celebrating the Battle of the Nile and now I had to listen to questions from Avon Secretarial Services, try to understand the way this woman associated things together. She had soured his great victory with this talk about pity. Now, because of her, I was obliged to remember the way he talked about the battle himself in Palermo a few months later, as related by Captain Gordon, a Scot who was there as travelling tutor to the invalid Lord Montgomerie. I could not remember the words in detail, but Gordon’s memoirs were up there in my study, on the shelf. It was only twenty to eleven, much too early to go to bed. I slept badly at night in any case, and I was stimulated now by the battle and the wine. I decided to go up and check the reference.

  I was moving towards the wall, towards the light switch. I think I had begun to reach towards it, actually extended my arm. I glanced aside—some sense had come to me that I was being watched, that my movements were being noted, registered. I looked to the right, where I sensed this interest lay—looked through the open door of the ops room to the larger room beyond, my gallery of Nelsoniana so lovingly assembled over the years.

  All the light there was came from the lamps at either end of my table. The farther of these cast a white pool, fringed by the pattern of the raffia lampshade, over the threshold of the door. The fringes seemed to shift, to eddy very slightly, as if prey to some remote disturbance. Beyond the door they drew together, made a narrow, wavering shaft into the next room, touched the straight outer side of the porcelain tankard commemorating Trafalgar, slid round the convex curve of the Copeland loving cup with the handpainted full-face portrait of him in one of its panels.

  At the dim limits of this faint plank of light was the huge papier-mâché bust of him, roughly twice life-size, that stood in the centre of the floor. The face was turned directly towards me. Despite the dimness I was aware of the features, though I did not know whether I was seeing or remembering the yellowish complexion, the look of moisture given by the pulped and oiled paper, the heavy sweep of the cocked hat, the garish emblems painted on the breast. Whether seen or remembered, tonight he had a different, crueller face. That thick curl of the mouth … He looked like a god glutted with sacrifice. The eyes were not visible, they were shadowed by the hat as they always were in my dreams, but I knew that they would soon be levelled at me, that they would contain a deadly reproach. You have let me down, the eyes would say, you have failed to clear my name. An angel’s displeasure is horribly dangerous. I knew I had to get out before he showed his eyes.

  I put the light on now, and that helped. My heart thumped and my breath caught as I passed him. I felt a feverish heat in the glands at the sides of my neck. But I did not look. At the top of the stairs I remembered that I had left the lamps on in the ops room, but I could not look behind me, let alone go back.

  24

  The lights in the basement burned for three days before I could bring myself to go and switch them off. And then I went almost at a run and didn’t look at him, not at the bust, not at the portraits on t
he wall. If Miss Lily had been there, I would have asked her to do it, on some pretext or other. She would not have been afraid.

  I told myself I needed more time. But the time did not come. The basement stayed locked. Those few hours at the table moving my ships about, celebrating our victory, drinking perdition to the damned French, before I felt him watching me—they were the last I could remember with any pleasure, and they left me only bad dreams. Soundlessly the Orient went up again. Fiery fragments rained through my nights. A featureless figure in a cocked hat bobbed on the tide, then dived and sported like a dolphin among the spars and corpses, still with his hat on. de Brueys sat bolt upright in his chair among the flames, the stumps of his legs sticking out before him. His face was melting in the heat … I would wake to find my whole body rigidly braced, as if in expectation of some blow.

  Habit is strong, however. It can hold you against terror, at least for a while; it can run parallel, a parallel track. In that time of my nightmares I made another trip to Seldon’s in Sloane Street to buy a Staffordshire group depicting the moment of the fatal wound. No date on it, but typical of the mid-nineteenth century. Horatio has fallen, his lung pierced and his back broken. He is supported by Doctor Scott, the chaplain, and Hardy, both very pink in the face to contrast with the stricken admiral’s pallor. A curiosity, no value much, crudely made, with Horatio wearing an eyepatch, something he never did. But I had an open-fronted cabinet in the basement containing a small collection of such pieces, and I thought I would add this one to it.

  Strange to relate, while I was buying this piece and all the time I was bringing it home, my purpose remained clear: I would put it with the other things in the cabinet. I was sustained by the years of happy acquisition, by the prospect of that healing peace that used to descend on me when I was down there, moving about among my exhibits.

  It was only when I got home and the piece was on my study table that the first doubts came to me. However, I tried. I tried to pretend, to trick myself. I went with it in my hands to the basement stairs. I went halfway down, more than halfway. The door was there, deeply familiar, varnished brown, with the brass knob and the neat little slot of the lock waiting for my key. But already I was gulping and sweating. I began to feel that same hotness at the sides of my neck. Almost before I knew it, I was back at the top of the stairs.

  I never tried again. I remember sitting for a long time, back there in my study, looking closely at pale Horatio with his eyepatch, at his florid, tight-trousered helpers. He was not frightening here, he had no gaze. But down below there, in the basement … You, who rescued me from fear!

  So it was that in the days following the Battle of the Nile, I was obliged to face the fact that the basement was effectively out of bounds—that picture gallery, exhibition cabinets, ops room, were all closed to me. I was reduced to the bedroom, the armchair in the sitting room with my mother’s rug, the desk and walls of my study. Added to this was the fact that I could not get on with my book and could not believe Miss Lily would come back.

  These were terrible days. I neglected to eat. I neglected to wash. I left a note for Mrs. Watson asking her not to come anymore and enclosing a cheque for a month’s money. Without her ministrations the spiders thrived, the dust collected, the sink got clogged, and little balls of fluff began to creep about in the passages. There was one hope, and it kept me moving through the hours. If I could solve the problem of Naples 1799, if I could show how wrong they were who accused you of treachery and falsehood, everything would fall into place again, everything would start functioning. You would look kindly at me; you and I would be together again as always before, the bright and the dark. Miss Lily would come back, we would work on the book, we would go for outings to the Maritime Museum at Greenwich and further afield to Burnham Thorpe, your birthplace, perhaps even someday abroad—Palermo, for example, where you and Emma became lovers. I would not worry about being among so many foreigners; she would keep everything safe in her handbag.

  I tried to write my thoughts in the left-handed journal. My writing had improved by now, it was much firmer. But no thoughts of my own ever came to me when I took up the pen in my left hand. The pages were covered by your words, not mine, snippets from the letters and despatches, written at different times and in different circumstances. They came to me without any searching, any effort of recollection. Vacant, pen in hand, I would let my eyes and my mind skim over them.

  It was my good fortune to have under my command some of the most experienced officers in the English Navy, whose professional skill was seconded by the undaunted courage of British sailors … I have brought home a faithful and honourable heart … I shall return—if it please God—a victor; and it shall be my study to transmit an unsullied name …

  An unsullied name—that was his wish, his dearest wish. Tears came into my eyes at the simplicity of it, at my failure so far to deliver it to him. I had been clinging during these last few days to the Fatal Misunderstanding Theory, which has been advanced by various of his biographers over the years. According to this, on that morning of June 26, both parties were labouring under a misapprehension: the rebels came out believing in the treaty, Horatio believed they had understood that the treaty no longer applied. Could this be possible? The trouble with it as a theory is that only the rebels’ view of things had any circumstantial support. They had come out with their belongings packed and ready—books, linen, plate. They had embarked. Surely this meant they believed in the treaty. For what Horatio believed, there is only the evidence of his own statements, and these are sometimes confusing. His letter to Lord Spencer some fortnight later, for example: The rebels came out of their forts with this knowledge, without any honours, and the principal rebels were seized and conducted aboard the ships of the squadron.

  The knowledge that they were surrendering unconditionally, you meant. But it looks from your words as if the seizure followed immediately on the surrender, whereas the rebels were allowed to embark before the ringleaders were seized. Haste? A careless oversight? How could one know? I was in chase of meanings and motives gone forever, fishing in the past with nets always too coarse for the agile fish I was after, never getting more than the flash of a tail. It seemed like an ocean to me, and I went down into it with my crude equipment day after day. Ruffo and Hamilton, the subtle priest and the wily diplomat—could they have contrived between them to keep you in ignorance? But it must have struck you as odd. You saw the rebels come out. Through your telescope, from the deck of the Vanguard, you saw them come out through the sea gates of their forts. You must have thought it was odd that people who knew they were going to be seized, put in irons, and handed over to the tender mercies of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina would embark with their luggage. The real trouble with the Fatal Misunderstanding Theory was that it made you seem incredibly dense.

  Such problems did not trouble Mahan, of course. He did not see them as problems at all. His view of things was admirably clear. Ruffo was the trickster; he had taken advantage of the sailor’s simplicity. A man such as Nelson, totally honourable and honest, does not suspect duplicity in others. He had promised not to hinder the embarkation and he did not do so; but he had never wavered in his refusal to accept the treaty. He would not stand by and see those miscreants go unpunished. They were traitors, friends to the cursed French, vapid theorizers, full of airy-fairy ideas, not an ounce of true grit among them.

  Irish accent, faint but attractive. A bluff and likable fellow, Mahan. He flings his long legs out before him when he sits. Nothing mean or cramped about him. Laughter lines in that weather-beaten face. A man whose conversation is frank and far-ranging, who exacts nothing from you. A man to repose in, have a drink with.

  Badham comes into view, skulking behind, narrow-shouldered and dark-suited. A bitter smile of disbelief. Nelson wasn’t that stupid, nobody could be. Those conflicting signals, all the confusion—it worked in his favour. Armistice and treaty, embarking and sailing—these are words we play with when vagueness suits us.
He wanted them out of the forts, he wanted them hanged, let them think what they liked. Badham’s glasses shine, he is wearing a wing collar, he raises one evil, black-gloved hand. I wait for Mahan to get up and give him a straight right to the jaw, but he seems not to have heard. If I could get round to the other side, get within range of that narrow skull … I found myself looking round the room for a weapon. It was at that moment of desperate impulse that the idea came, a kind of call. And it was associated from the first with the name of a man I had never met but whose five-year-old notepaper I still had, a man named E. L. Sims, a resident of Naples.

  It was appalling, but it was undeniable. There was nothing more that I could do here. If I wanted to keep Horatio with me, I would have to go in person to that city. Naples must contain him still, must contain the truth of those June days. The rooms he ate in, slept in, the streets and buildings he knew—they were still there. Take a trip, Miss Lily had said—advice I had never intended to act on. Dread mounted within me. I was going to act on it now.

  25

  The salient facts about Sims were that he was an honorary member of the Nelson Society and that he had lived in Naples for a good many years and so must know the city well. He would be just the person to give me some tips, set me on the right track. That he was an honorary member was largely due to me, which I thought might give me some claim on him. Five years before I had seen an article of his in the Historical Review entitled “Four Days in Naples,” which dealt with Horatio’s first brief visit to the city in the September of 1793, when he was thirty-four years old, a mere captain still and a faithful husband, and had both eyes and all his limbs and was in proud command of his spanking new ship, the Agamemnon.