Losing Nelson Read Online Free Page A

his sense of the natural order.
    Two faces side by side, two lives in parallel. I think I was fascinated by parallel tracks even then. Both plates were in colour, but for some reason the two men were depicted at quite different times in their lives, Pitt dark-suited, close to his end, ravaged by alcohol and the strain of government, Horatio the twenty-year-old captain, in the dark blue and gilt of his full dress uniform, his youthful face severe,intrepid. There was no comparison, none at all. I scarcely looked at the statesman, the architect of victory; my eyes were all for the splendid young fighter, so slender and small-boned, so different from me in physical form, even then. I am on the heavy side, with thick wrists and big hands. Not clumsy, though; I am good with my hands, good at making things.
    My interest in chess did not long survive that day; the lesson in humility proved the death blow to it. I continued to play during what was left of the term, but my heart was not in it, I lost the appetite for victory, my game fell off. In the autumn Monty and I were sent away to boarding school. I never saw Mr. Lyle again and I never played chess again.
    With Horatio it has been otherwise. My interest in him seemed altogether to disappear, but it had merely gone underground, waiting for another sign. This came when I was thirteen, during a history lesson, when I discovered that Horatio Nelson lost his mother
when he was nine years old
.
    It came with the force of revelation, like an assault of light. All the surrounding circumstances were lit up by it, as if by the arc of a flare in the night. The usual darkness descends again, but the print is there forever. My exact position in the classroom, the desktop mutilated by generations of idle inscribers, the look of the blackboard, the gestures of the master’s hands. These things were as present to me that afternoon last February as they had ever been. Undimmed, untarnished over the years, the lustre of the kinship so casually discovered then.
    I felt the need now to look again at the Rigaud portrait, the picture my father had shown me on my last effective day as a chess player, my first sight of Horatio’s face. I got up, went through to the next room. The plate I had bought that morning was still lying there on the floor, but I left it where it was. I crossed to the wall where theportrait hung above a narrow cabinet containing objects commemorating his death: a black silk bookmark with the date of Trafalgar on it, a piece of Staffordshire pottery that showed him dying in the arms of two officers, a model of his funeral car that I made myself when I got interested in Horatio again, after my illness.
    The original portrait, of course, is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, a three-quarter-length oil by John Francis Rigaud. My picture was a photograph, blown up to poster size, mounted, and framed. Horatio was an eighteen-year-old lieutenant when it was begun. It was commissioned by his commanding officer, William Locker, who must have seen his distinction even at that age. Before it was quite finished, Horatio had to sail for the West Indies. He didn’t return until 1780, three years later, still desperately ill with the yellow fever that nearly killed him and destroyed his youthful bloom forever. But Rigaud changed nothing in the face, merely touched in the background and added the insignia of Horatio’s new rank—he was a captain by then, one of the youngest in the navy.
    I stood before the portrait for a time I did not measure. He had been through the shadow of death, but the painter had allowed no hint of mortality. No sickness, no lines of pain, mar the confidence of his face. His sword is planted before him, his hands rest on the hilt. In the background, painted on his return, a view of Fort San Juan in Nicaragua, scene of the ill-starred expedition of the year before.
    Disasters, fevers, the great victories, and the heroic death—all this was before him,