The Divine Lady: A Romance between Nelson and Emma Hamilton
Lily Adams Beck
9781465657213
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
During the next few days Greville watched her with ever-growing interest, and diagnosed her with the cool precision but discriminating admiration which he brought to his cabinets of rarities. It was easy to understand why and how Sir Harry had picked her up and easy also to judge that her lease of his affections (if they could be so called) would be brief and terminable on the resolve of the principal party. Sir Harry would have the submission of a whipped dog, and try as she would (and she tried her best by fits and starts) the girl could not crawl to his feet. She was too full of abounding animal energy, not to speak of force of character, to be tame, and, like most women of the uneducated classes, saw no reason for controlling her tongue. Out it all came with a burst when she was moved either to anger or pleasure. “Fetherstone can’t control her, for her awe must be founded on respect and she has no respect for him. He is too much a man of her own class in essentials. She fathoms him through and through and don’t see anything superior to herself. If she met her superior, and he with a firm hand over her, she could be modelled into something to astonish the world—the only world she can ever move in.” So thinks Greville and in the reflections which occupied him believed he knew where that superior could be found. She was meanwhile a fascinating study. Not by any means the woman of pleasure, so he decided—not mercenary, far more impassioned on the heart than the physical side; candid to danger-point when moved; defiant to her own hurt. Rather, she impressed him as one snared far less through temperament than by circumstance and the fact of her astonishing beauty. Such a girl would be attempted, persecuted, bribed wherever she went, and not only so but condemned to something very like starvation if she refused. For instance, what wise woman would take such a Helen into her service; and if she did, how otherwise than as the merest drudge, for the girl was nearly as ignorant and untaught as the wild rabbits in the park. He ascertained that she could read and, after a fashion, write, but no more. Then what choice had she? Who could blame this poor butterfly blown down a chill wind out to sea? All her glorious gifts were natural. It would be a pursuit as interesting as any collecting to pass them in review, catalogue them, and see what they were worth in the market—a better market than the mere sale of her body to the first comer. She was capable of other reaches of beauty than this, he believed. He watched her always. She came out with the guns sometimes, a thing no lady of breeding would have done, and tramped the deep fallows along with them, and through the copses and spinneys and the dry fern where Sir Harry’s tall deer showed branching antlers. And the hard exercise that would have made a fine lady swoon did but bring the divinest flush to the cheeks of this daughter of the hedgerows, and brightened her great limpid eyes until they beamed like stars. Greville would have given much to know what she herself made of her life, what her hopes were. The best he could see was the chance that one of Sir Harry’s boon companions might take a liking for her when the Up Park episode should finish and so start another connection. Meanwhile he was witness to the queerest scenes, in which he tried to comprehend the girl’s personality and found it baffling.
