Losing Nelson by Barry Unsworth Read Free Book Online

ground like balls
.
    It is to avoid an indefinite continuation of this bloodshed that Cardinal Ruffo, on June 23, makes terms with the enemy. He accepts the surrender of the French garrison and their Neapolitan allies in the city’s forts. The French will be shipped home, the Neapolitans given the option of accompanying them or returning to their homes under a general amnesty. The treaty is also signed, in the name of His Britannic Majesty George III, by the senior British officer in Naples, a certain Captain Foote, Horatio having sailed to the west coast of Sicily in an attempt to intercept the French fleet. The other cosignatories are Baillie and Achmet, for Russia and Turkey, respectively.
    A regular treaty then, signed by accredited representatives of all the forces opposed to the French. Horatio, when he hears of it on the twenty-fourth, is violently opposed, not to the terms offered the French but to an amnesty for the Neapolitan Jacobins. There are heated arguments. The cardinal has given his word; the treaty must behonoured. For Horatio the republicans are vile traitors who have supported an invading force. They must surrender unconditionally and throw themselves on the royal mercy.
    Could they have had any faith in this? Surely they must have known what to expect. Maria Carolina was frightened and ferocious; Ferdinand’s vindictiveness was notorious. Yet on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, the rebels came out of their forts. The fate that befell them was predictably atrocious.
    So why did they do it?
In this question lay all my trouble. It was as far from solution that February night as it had been when I first stumbled on it three months before. Until I found an answer, an
acceptable
answer, I could not proceed. I had been over the events hour by hour, as far as I had been able to find reliable authority for them, especially the forty-eight hours between Horatio’s arrival in Naples and the rebels’ quitting of the forts. I had puzzled so long and so earnestly that it had all gathered to a sort of bruise in my mind; touched even gently, it would throb and hurt me, driving me always to seek refuge in the less ambiguous triumphs of his career.
    Refuge I found now, as I sat there, in thoughts of his splendid arrival in the city just ten months before, the conqueror, still a seabeing, still untouched by this corrupt and sensual place. Already, off Stromboli, in early September, his squadron has been joined by the
Mutine
, bringing from Naples the first letters of congratulation on his victory. Sir John Acton, the prime minister of Naples, expresses the felicitations of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina addressed to the Saviour of Europe. Sir William Hamilton, on behalf of himself and his wife, Emma, addresses him as “bosom friend.”
You have now made yourself, my dear Nelson, immortal
. In fact, the acquaintance at that point was slight; they had met briefly five years previously, when Horatio was a young captain, still whole and unmutilated. Since then there had been Corsica and the blinding of his right eye, there hadbeen his exploits at Cape St. Vincent, the fiasco of Tenerife and the loss of his right arm. Now this astounding victory at Aboukir Bay.
    In the same batch of letters are two from Emma. All of Naples is mad with joy, she is walking on air with pride at having been born in the same land as he, she is dressed from head to foot
alla Nelson
—even her shawl has blue-and-gold anchors all over it. She urges him to write or come soon. He has written already, expressing the hope that his mutilations will not make him the less welcome.
    The British ships are sighted at dawn on September 22 off the island of Capri. A Saturday. I had then never looked across that most famous of bays, but I had imagined it often, that dawn advent of the hero, that slow approach to the jubilant city … I knew what it would have been like to see it from the quayside, the faint sails in the half-light, now seen, now lost, drawing