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By Root 1342 0

but she was determined to help. Earl Nelson refused to give them their installment of the Bronte allowance before it was due in spring. Horatia begged him for an advance of £10 on the interest due on the sum Nelson left for her, and beseeched a loan of £20 from a friend, probably James Perry or Joshua Smith. She also attempted to give her mother some comfort by writing to the Matchams to ask if she could live with them after her mother's death. The flat resounded to Emma's coughing and sickness, and it was difficult to sleep. As she later confessed, the period of her mother's decline was "too indelibly stamped on my memory ever to forget."5

Nelson had died in glory in an afternoon, but Emma gasped out her life in long terrible weeks, drifting in and out of consciousness. Toward the end, she asked for her priest, but she was soon too delirious to speak. "Latterly she was scarcely sensible," Horatia recalled.6 On January 15, 1815, at one in the afternoon, she breathed her last.

Emma had wished to be buried in England, in the vault next to her mother in Paddington Green, but there was no money to transport her body back home. Henry Cadogan planned a modest funeral in the Roman Catholic church: £28 compared to Nelson's £14,000. Emma's faithful friend Joshua Smith reimbursed Cadogan for both the funeral costs and the price of an oak coffin. England's mistress was buried on January 21 in the land of her lover's enemies, in the public ground outside town. The Gentleman's Magazine reported that "all the English Gentlemen in Calais" attended her funeral. It was said that the captains and masters of the many vessels in the harbor also joined the procession behind her coffin to the grave, out of respect for Nelson's Emma. Journalists across Europe fought to be first to announce her death.

CHAPTER 57

Horatia Alone

Henry Cadogan cared for Horatia in the aftermath of Emma's death. Presumably he bought her a mourning dress and paid to liberate the trinkets that her mother had pawned. After persuading Emma's creditors in Calais to allow Horatia to leave, he gave her the money to travel as far as Dover. The deeply traumatized teenager had a miserable fourteenth birthday under his protection at Calais, and then, accompanied by Dame Francis and probably Mary Cornish, set off home on January 28,1815. It was just in time: hostilities resumed with France at the end of February, and the gay tourists who had danced in the ballroom at Dessein's Hotel were stranded in Calais. Emma's creditors had insured her life, and they were paid off (solicitors pursued Mary Cornish for an affidavit to prove Emma had actually died). Horatia was now free of debt, but she had inherited little from her mother. Mr. Matcham met Horatia at Dover and took her to their home.

At the Matchams', after a week or two of pampering, she took up her new life. No longer the benefactress's daughter, she was a dependent relation and had to earn her keep by caring for the younger children, eleven-year-old Horace, nine-year-old Charles, and four-year-old Nelson. Horatia tried to fit in with her new family and their demands, quelling her grief for her mother and trying to forget the despair of her final days in Calais. She had to work hard to maintain her composure when Mr. Matcham decided to take the whole family to Calais for a holiday in July 1815 and again the following year. After Emma's careful tutoring, she could speak five languages and sing and play well, but she had little chance to practice her gifts while working as a glorified upper servant. No longer able to enjoy so much fine meat or perform for the Prince of Wales, she became a voracious reader and, unlike her mother, an excellent needlewoman.

Two years later, at the age of sixteen, she was sent off to live with the Boltons, deemed old enough to act as housekeeper for her uncle, whose wife, Susanna, had died in 1813. Anxious to escape her position as poor relation, she married her neighbor, the Reverend Philip Ward, at the age of twenty-one. With her husband, she found a happiness she had not experienced