Read Breaking the Line for Free Online Page B

rumoured to be keen. Emma knew how her husband wavered, depending on his increasingly volatile moods. One minute he would proclaim his intention to stay in harness till the Grim Reaper took him, the next that if Naples ever again became a place of peace he would live out his life there in retirement. At other times he would damn Italy and all its works, then declare that he would go home to England within the month.
    Good manners forced Sir William to accommodate Lock, along with his wife, two children and dog. As a guest in the house Lock picked up on his host’s indecision, and interrogated the servants for their views. The vagaries of this left him in an agony of frustration, which manifested itself in attempts at irony so inept that Emma found him tiresome. Less diplomatic than her husband, she made it very plain that she did not like him.
    The wife was sweet-natured enough, but rather feeble and prone to faint at the sight of blood. An envoy arrived from the Sultan and, on seeing Nelson’s Chelenk, immediately prostrated himself, as was the custom at the court to which he belonged. A gross, ugly fellow he was subsequently persuaded by a flirtatious Emma that rum was not barred by his religion. In his cups he claimed to have cut off the heads of twenty Frenchmen with one blow, a feat so impossible as to be humorous. Encouraged by a laughing Emma, the weapon was produced, stained with dried blood, and Cecilia fainted when Emma, to the delight of the Turk, kissed it.
    What to Emma had been a jest became, in the letters penned by Charles Lock that night, a sybaritic rite, one in which the evil Emma Hamilton, not content with an outrageous attempt to seduce the Mussulman, had communed with powers no decent Christian could abide. He also added that Lord Nelson seemed under the spell of this depraved creature, and that Sir William was an old, doddering fool, well past the labours required of his office.
    Surveying his handiwork, Lock could take comfort in a good hour’s work. No harm could be done to his prospects by tarnishing, at home,reputations that shone in the Mediterranean. And he could rely on his correspondents to share with all they met what they read from a good and trusted friend.

3
    The arrival in early spring of two regiments of British soldiers took Sicily by surprise. Nelson had their commander parade them through Palermo, the men marching crisply in their bright red coats to show the populace the look of proper soldiers. He ordered them to garrison at Messina, the port and city nearest the Italian mainland, where the French would most likely seek to land, should they have the strength.
    That looked increasingly unlikely. For all that Nelson thought Cardinal Ruffo ‘a swelled up priest’, the prelate was proving effective, commanding an army that now numbered some seventeen thousand. Ragged and disorganised they might be, but such a host struck terror into the hearts of the Republican sympathisers who had taken over the towns and cities of Ferdinand’s domains. It was also an army that the French, much weaker in numbers, declined to meet in open combat, so it became a war of thrust and parry.
    The whole of southern Italy was blood-soaked – little quarter was given by either side. The Army of the Holy Faith would take a Republican stronghold and exact horrendous revenge on those suspected of Jacobinism. Mass rape was common, as were hangings, quarterings, crucifixions, beheadings and burning, all the terrors of ancient sack. If they took those towns back, the French army then inflicted even worse punishment on those loyal to the King, leaving behind a desert devoid of human life. Needless to say, any Frenchman caught by the insurgents suffered a fate that rendered death a welcome release.
    Elsewhere, the effects of Nelson’s Nile victory were beginning to be felt. The Russians and the Turks had taken Corfu and were now masters of the Adriatic. In northern Italy Austria had moved, and the armies of the