A chamber orchestra still sawed away in an upper gallery, just as they had through the levee and the supper. Light, airy, delightful stuff-sonatas by Giovanni Gabrieli, Giovanni Bat-tista Fontana and Marco Buccolina. Or so he'd been informed.
If Naples was not indeed Heaven, it was very close to it, Alan determined. With a traitorous snifter of French Armagnac in his hand, he let go a more than gentle burp of contentment.
The supper was over, the ecarte and music was winding down, and it was too late for the last guests to stay and dance. Sir William and the prime minister were gone somewhere. King Ferdinand had spoken some brief last words to him and had plodded off, too.
Have their three heads together over the treaty, I expect, Alan thought; thankee, my boy, but we'll take it from here. Oh, well.
"Scusi, signore tenente Lor… L… Liri," a white-wigged footman announced by his side. He was holding a six-armed candelabra.
"Lewrie," he muttered, barely glancing at him, searching for Emma Hamilton, who had also scampered off somewhere.
"Si, signore tenente Liri," the servitor persisted, "you ple-seah toa follah me, signore tenente? I lighta you… up… toa bed, signore."
Well, shit, he sighed to himself. Right, then… I should have known better.
His chambers were magnificent. The night was warm and fragrant; the two pairs of doors which led to a wide, fret-stoned balcony were open. The suite was as large as an admiral's great-cabins. There were side tables bearing cloisonne, gilt and silver gewgaws, a writing desk of tortoise-shell mottled wood, heavily inlaid with ivory, urns filled with fresh-cut flowers everywhere he looked, an expansive wine cabinet big as a duke's sideboard, an intricately carved armoire big enough to hold a corporal's guard, and a bedstead as wide as a quarterdeck, with silk sheets and satin coverlet already turned down, the two pair of pillows plumped up invitingly.
"Willa they bea anythin' elsea youa wan', signore tenente?" the footman intoned, sounding both hesitant and grim. Lewrie glanced at him and noted his lips moving after his statement; probably in rote rehearsal of his little English over the most probable statement he might next make.
"Anything else?" Lewrie grinned.
"Si, signore tenente Liri," the man answered, then repeated with effort: "Willa-they-bea-anythin'-elsea-youa-wan', signore?"
"Dancing girls," Lewrie bade, tongue in cheek, just to see how the poor fellow might handle the unexpected. "A string quartet. Some courtesans. And magic. I insist on magic."
"Uh, scusi, signore tenente…" Sweat popped on his upper lip as he flummoxed. "Willa-they-bea-anythin'-elsea, signore tenente?" he reiterated, sounding a bit desperate.
"No, nothing else," Lewrie relented. "Thank you. Goodnight. Or how you say…? Uhm. No, grazie. Buona notte."
"Ah, si, tenente!" the man bobbed with relief, bowing himself out quickly. "Si, grazie. Buona notte, signore. Buona notte!"
"Call me at first light," Lewrie insisted. " Sunrise. Giorgno? First sparrow fart? Bloody…" He pointed at an ormolu clock, struck his hands in his armpits, and crowed like a rooster. The footman came back, pointed to the Roman numeral V and shrugged quizzically. Alan pointed to the VI, mimed shaving and washing.
"Ah, si, signore. Awakea you… 'ota wat'r. Buona notte!"
"Damme, another bloody foreign language I have to learn," he groused softly as he stripped off his own coat and waistcoat, ripped his laced stock from his throat and unbuttoned his shirt collar. A peek into the various chambers of the suite revealed that his kit was already stored in the armoire. He hung his things up, found the necessary closet and, much eased, padded in bare feet to the wine cabinet. It may have been French, but there was Armagnac, sweeter and mellower than any brandy or cognac. With his snifter topped up he went out onto the balcony, not feeling treasonous at all to drink it.
Heaven, Naples might seem, but it reeked, as did any city with a large population. Night soil dumped out chamber windows, animal ordure, rotting garbage, and too many people who bathed too infrequently crammed into too small an area. But the palace's flower gardens atoned for all.
There was something else, too, as if antiquity had a scent, dusty and sere, as if a thousand years of living, breathing history, and aeons of Mediterranean sunshine could have a mellow, dry-old-wine aroma. Alan could identify woodsmoke, sour, water-staunched charcoal cooking fires. Wine and laundry, tanneries and hot iron, the aftertaste of succulent spices. The wind off the sea…
Naples lay spread at his feet, beyond the palace grounds and the protective walls. Vesuvius was over his left shoulder, gently fuming a thin, indistinct pipesmoker's pall. Dark slopes tumbled to the fields where Pompeii and Herculaneum once stood, and from Torre del Greco, all ephemeral with dusky blue moonlight. Umber walls and terra-cotta roof tiles shone icy with moonlight, rendered snowy blue white or black now. Tiny amber sparks on the hills, on the flatlands far away, in the town, marked country crofts, villages or late-night taverns. To the west, the Bay of Naples shimmered on the moonglade, in silver and black, and ships lay still as discarded playthings on a nursery room floor below him, bare-poled and silent, with only faint glims by belfries and taffrails. H.M.S. Cockerel lay off to his right, silhouetted ebony on flickering argent waters which reflected pale yellow cat's-paws on a quicksilver moon trough, brushed by the light night breeze. Squinting, he almost thought he could espy a pattern to it, a chimera about to rise, like an ever-pirouetting dancer. To the sou'west, there was a darker hump on the sea's horizon, the steady, measured flick of a lighthouse. Capri. Tucked like an apostrophe near the tip of a finger of distance-greyed land, at his angle of view.
"Punta Campanella," Lewrie murmured with pleasure in the novel and alien, savouring the taste of its strange wonder on his tongue as he recalled the peninsula's name. Along with the heady fumes and bite of the Armagnac. And that tiny smear of light, that sleeping village on the peninsula's north shore which faced his balcony?
"Damme, I had a squint at the chart. So what's the bloody place called? Sam… Ser… S, something."
" Sorrento," a soft voice said behind him.
He started with alarm, spun about to spy out who his tutor was.
" Sorrento," Lady Emma Hamilton whispered as she emerged from the darkness of the far end of his balcony. Came near enough to take the snifter from his nerveless fingers and drink deep. "A lovely town, is Sorrento. There are some who like the Bay of Salerno, beyond the Punta Campanella. But I much prefer the Bay of Naples. Don't you?"
"Immensely," he assured her, getting his poise back.
"When Goethe was here, not long ago, he told me…"
"You met Goethe?" Lewrie marveled.
"But of course, Alan," she laughed low in her throat. "Everyone comes to Naples, sooner or later. Goethe said, ' Naples is a Paradise. Everyone lives, after his manner, intoxicated in self-forgetfulness.' Languid… romantic beyond words… tolerant and accepting. I've been here for years. I cannot imagine living anywhere else."
"In self-forgetfulness," he prompted and smiled.
She lifted the snifter, drained it to heel-taps, and set it on a marble-topped wrought-iron wine table beside her. Then slipped into his embrace boldly. She turned her face up to his, pressing her lips first warm and inviting, then fierce, turning her head and groaning as their mouths parted, as eager breaths
mingled.
"How did you manage…?" he murmured against her throat, as he lifted her dark, curling hair to kiss her below her ear, to devour her neck and soft bared shoulder.
"Palazzi…" she chuckled, with more than amusement, writhing against him. "Passages, vacant adjoining suites… unseeing servants. Hurry!"