England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [66]
"You have sent me to a strange place," Emma lamented to Greville. She arrived in Naples on her twenty-first birthday. Perhaps she first saw the city early in the morning as her carriage bounced through the streets, past the poor sleeping on the steps. To a girl used to London fog, the sky would have seemed inordinately bright: she could see not only the stars but also the red sparks exploding out of Vesuvius and the twinkle of the sea in the bay. Passing dilapidated Renaissance palazzos, baroque churches, and glossy shop windows, they turned into a quiet side street, Santa Maria a Cappella Vecchia. The coach slipped through the gate, and Emma and Mrs. Cadogan found themselves in the courtyard of their new home. In the dark, the Palazzo Sessa looked like a ramshackle ruin.
Emma struggled to appear composed. Sick and disoriented after six weeks on the road, she was unhappy to find no letter from Greville awaiting her.
You don't know how glad I was to arrive hear the day I did, as it was my Birthday & I was very low spirited. Oh God, that day that you used to smile on me & stay at home & be kind to me, then that day I should be at such a distance, but my comfort is I shall rely on your promise & September or October I shall see you.
Despite her homesickness, she was excited to see her old friend and admirer again and was won over by his gracious welcome. Ignoring Gre-ville's instructions to stow Emma in a suburban villa, he had prepared the splendid suite on the first floor reserved for his most distinguished guests. Mother and daughter were shown to their lovely quarters: a sitting room painted white with gold stars on the ceiling, two more rooms, and a luxurious bedroom with a fireplace. One window faced the Chiaia, the main promenade, and from the other they could see the sweep of bay all the way to Vesuvius.
Emma prepared for bed with her eye trained tremulously on the volcano. Everyone expected it to erupt within a few months. In recent years, six major eruptions had killed hundreds and devastated the countryside, and Emma had a bird's-eye view of it plotting and bubbling. At night, columns of flame the height of the mountain shot into the sky alongside exploding clouds of peacock blue or buttercup yellow lightning, covering the windowsill with ashes.2 She lay listening to the volcano's billowing sighs and the sound of rival gangs fighting in the caverns of rock under her window, trying to ignore the creaks as Sir William paced the floorboards in his upstairs room. Her new home was much more exciting than Edgware Row, in every way.
Next morning, there was a surprise: Sir William had a house guest, Mrs. Anne Darner, a respectable sculptress whose ornamental heads still adorn Henley Bridge over the Thames. Even though his nephew's mistress was on his way to him as—according to Greville—a willing bedmate, William had spent March debating whether to propose to Anne. She was disconcerted by the appearance of a sexy woman of poor reputation who was nearly half her age. But Emma, since she had no idea that she had been sent as a paramour, was curious about Anne: it was her husband who had set tongues wagging at Kelly's and the other brothels after he had lavished money on food, drink, and prostitutes before shooting himself dead.
Flirtation with Anne had inflamed Sir William, and he fell back into his old infatuation with Emma almost immediately. "The prospect of possessing so delightfull an object under my roof soon causes in me some pleasant sensations," Sir William wrote to his nephew on the day before Emma arrived. "You may be assured that I will comfort her for the loss of you as well as I am able."
"We have had company most every day since I came," wrote Emma proudly to Greville four days after her arrival. "Sir Wm is never so happy as when he is pointing out my beauties to them." Messengers on business, Ferdinand's courtiers, sellers bearing fragments of vases