England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [124]
Sir William tried to ignore Emma's growing intimacy with Nelson. His relations with her had been fraternal for some time, and they had long slept in separate apartments, so he could shield himself from the evidence that—as everybody knew—his wife was on the brink of having an affair. He focused his resentment on Maria Carolina for encouraging her friend to charm the hero, and most of all on his ill health. As he grumbled to Joseph Banks, everybody suffered from the “thick air” of Palermo and had frequent bilious attacks, but “owing to my age, I do not recover as soon as they do.” Suffering from a “shattered constitution,” he informed the Foreign Office that the “whole confidence” of the king and queen “entirely reposes on… Lord Nelson.”1 Sir William was devastated when he heard in early March that the ship carrying his collection to England had been wrecked near the Isles of Scilly in December, off England's southwest coast. Although some good pieces and his best paintings were on another ship, the collection, into which he had poured so much devotion and money, had sunk to the bottom of the sea. As his ill health worsened under the weight of depression, he lost his influence over Ferdinand. Leaving the entertaining and political caballing to his wife, he tried to retain some semblance of authority at court by implying that he influenced Nelson, which living with him suggested. He boasted that he had the “temper to stem the torrent of his impetuosity, even against his best Friends, and in that respect he is just enough to own that I have been of infinite use to him.”2 He lied. As one shrewd visitor reported, “the little consequence he retained as ambassador was derived from his wife's intrigues; but as long as he could keep his situation, draw his salary, and collect vases, he cared little about politics; he left the management of them to her Ladyship.”
Emma had remained faithful to Sir William to this point, but she could no longer resist her feelings. Nelson had been true to Fanny in the way that his contemporaries defined male fidelity: he had used only courtesans and prostitutes. Although we have definite proof that the relationship between Nelson and Emma had become physical by early 1800, the affair must have begun in the Palazzo Palagonia. Sir William would never have allowed Nelson to pay Emma's expenses unless they were having an affair. At some point early in 1799, Emma and Nelson began a full-blown sexual affair. They were so close that he began to address Mrs. Cadogan as "Sig-nora Madre" (pleasing Emma greatly, for Sir William had never been able to treat her as a mother-in-law). The exhilaration of having survived the journey to Palermo, the anxiety induced by the fraught political situation, the long nights of gambling and drinking, and the close living arrangements transformed a mutual sexual obsession into love. They were hopelessly caught up in each other, swept away by a passion neither of them had ever felt before. They were like two lovers who had lost their virginity to each other, constantly touching and staring at each other, swapping pet names and secret anecdotes, talking endlessly, desperately seizing every chance to be together.
In the warm Sicilian spring, the royal gardens sprang into bloom and men, women, and children came to Palermo from all over Sicily to sell handicrafts, perfumes, and fine foods to the flocks of rich, leisured refugees from Naples. Emma was the center of attention, pursuing what a traveling Scotsman dubbed her "attitudinal celebrity." She welcomed him by a display after dinner in which, as he wrote, she "dropped from her chair on the carpet" after having removed the "comb which fastened her superabundant locks." He decided "nothing could have