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By Root 1422 0

same aristocrats were active in the “Pic-Nics,” an amateur dramatic society organized by Colonel Greville, at Tottenham Court in London, and it seems as if Emma was also a participant. The press declared their weekly meetings were excuses for giant orgies and extravagance.2 One commentator decided that if the “uncorrupted… did not oppose and overthrow [private theaters], decency would abandon Britain.”3 In Dilettante Theatricals, Gillray caricatured the party staging The Rival Queens, by Nathaniel Lee, with Emma singing at the back of the party behind Mrs. Billington. The gossips were wrong: the Pic-Nics' only excess was the inordinate sums expended on costumes, sets, and jewels, which was money Emma could ill afford.

Like all society women, Emma was trying to establish herself as a charitable patron. She had allied herself with a fashionable London orphanage, the Foundling Hospital, by standing as “godmother” to a child, which meant that she gave money and occasionally received updates on the child's progress. As Nelson indulged her, "Your purse, my dear Emma, will always be empty; your heart is generous beyond your means."4 Otherwise, she spent her time visiting Nelson's relations and bathing in the sea. A sharp-eyed lady spotted her in Ramsgate in the summer of 1804, lonely in the sea resort without Sir William.5 She was endeavoring to take the waters to improve her fertility, hoping to fall pregnant quickly when her lover returned.

Emma worried that her lover "seems to hope the rooms are done and has written a great deal about improvements." His designs to landscape the grounds, construct a driveway, and add new entertaining rooms and bedrooms were proving increasingly expensive. She was having a new entrance constructed on the north side of the house, and building stables, while planning a proper coach house. Thomas Cribb, the garden designer, had employed twenty men to turn the muddy grounds into a graceful and orderly garden. Ambitious to transform the first house that was truly her own into a handsome modern mansion, a lasting monument to Nelson's glory, and the equivalent of an aristocratic seat, she willingly paid the bills. "What I have done has been to make comfortable the man that my soul dotes on, that I would think it little to sacrifice my life to make him happy," she wrote. "Nelson and Emma can have but one mind, one heart, one soul, one interest, and I can assure you that if the nation was to give my beloved Nelson a Blenheim, Merton would be the place he would live in."

Nelson's family treated her homes like finishing schools for their adolescent children. The Boltons sent clodhopping Eliza and Anne on extended visits. Emma, who had once negotiated arguments between courtiers, now arbitrated between teenage girls. William Nelson's prickly, obstreperous son Horace stayed for his holidays from Eton, and he usually needed new shoes, new clothes, and coach fare back to his parents' home or he fell ill and required nursing with special food and expensive milky drinks. Sarah also asked if Emma could arrange a rich wife for him, even though Nelson had already claimed he hoped he would one day marry his Horatia (this was very unlikely since he would have to wait until he was at least thirty to do so). Charlotte Nelson was always at Emma's side. She was taken to hear Mrs. Billington perform, to parties and masquerades, and to dinners with aristocrats, and, after many music lessons, Emma organized a private concert so that everybody could hear her sing.6 Sarah commanded Emma subtly, "You and I want her to be every thing that is accomplished and to marry well."7 "How good you are to dress her so smart," she pressured.8 Sarah badgered her to hire dancing masters and buy Charlotte "Dumb-bells" and "make her use them," and Emma treated her new "foster daughter" to holidays by the sea and a gold watch.9 As Sarah admitted to Emma, "you have had the bringing her up."

The Duchess of Devonshire took notice of Charlotte, and Sarah suggested Emma might "think of having her presented this winter? Would she not be able to