Captain Nelson looked grave, disturbed. For such counsels of war the Fleet was no training.
Sir William saw the look and smiled in his easy heart-hiding way.
“My dear sir, in diplomacy we fire no broadsides, we utter no defiances. We glide, insinuate, compliment, and thwart—all with delicacy. And you will thus find the ladies invaluable in my profession. Her Excellency, though I say it of my wife, has the brain and energy of a man; coupled with the finesse and patience of a woman. You and I will now go and pay our formal visit at the Palace. If you follow my advice you will confine yourself to presenting the Admiral’s letter with compliments alike to King and Queen—more especially the former. At two o’clock Her Ladyship will meet you with me, and if you will then be plain with us as to the situation of the Fleet, I will engage for it that she shall see the Queen. The matter of the transport of the troops you will arrange later with General Acton.”
To say that Captain Nelson was astonished is to say little. Yet what to do but submit to the man on the spot—the British Ambassador? He bowed and signified obedience and the two set off, properly attended, amid the cheers of the crowding populace, for the news of Toulon had fled through the city, and rainbows of bunting were a-flutter from every stick and height.
The Agamemnon lay ringed about by the bringers of Her Excellency’s bounty. He mentioned this with gratitude to Sir William.
“She has a passion for the glory of England, and therefore for the Fleet that is its instrument,” says the Ambassador, “and an excellent heart behind it. I have seen her so worked up in these French horrors, and our action against them, that ’tis not too much to say I believe she would sell the gown off her back to provide for the meanest Jack ashore if he came to her.”
It sank in, but on the whole Captain Nelson was occupied with his presentations to Royalty of the foreign order, and how best to carry himself in honour of the Flag. True he had a Royal friend of his own, His Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence, but he was a sailor like himself, a rough and tough take-it-or-leave-it Jack afloat—by no means a guide to Queens and their fripperies.
Yet she was not affrighting after all. The presentation to the pantaloon King was brief. He shook the Captain by the hand, introduced him himself to Acton, and commended the Toulon work and the speed of the Agamemnon for the benefit of the quick-eyed Neapolitan grandees who stood about him. They affected Captain Nelson unpleasantly—grimacing, gesticulating foreigners. Was this the stuff the Admiral counted on for Toulon? Give him a thousand bull-headed big-lunged Norfolk men for choice to take his chance with, sooner than a million like these monkeys. And then the King himself conducted him to the Queen, with her ladies in waiting.
Here, too, he was unfavourably impressed. Handsome, no doubt, but lined, haggard, with too-bright eyes, worn to fiddle-strings with her political and private anxieties. He noted the fine diamonds about her throat and swinging beside her sallow cheeks—that brooch would buy half Norfolk. He must tell his Fanny these fine doings; she would like to hear. But her grimace was surface, he believed—what was in her shifty foreign heart?
The Austrian Hen, as her husband politely called her behind her elegant back, was formally gracious, no more. It was unfortunate that she could not express herself in English, and to use French, the language of the Ghouls, was impossible in present circumstances, not to mention that Captain Nelson’s French was the last of his achievements. Therefore Sir William interpreted in mellifluous Italian.