Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  My father raised his hand appeasingly, palm out. ‘You realise that for my part I am with you in the proposition that there does not exist sufficient ink in this world to supply an appropriate condemnation of Lowe by Name and Nature.’

  ‘The Fiend and Our Great Friend,’ murmured O’Meara, making the implicit contrast between the small, mean man with all his petty civil and military titles and the small, spacious man with all his flaws. ‘Do you know that when I left the island they gave him a Corsican horse doctor? You heard that?’

  ‘I had not in any detail,’ my father admitted. ‘We are far from reliable intelligence in this little town. I have had a few letters from islanders, and some intercepted by the powers of the earth, and some smuggled out by store ship captains of my old acquaintance. But even now these missives are a peril to them. Even here, I believe I am subject to a degree of scrutiny.’

  Barry O’Meara nodded ponderously and, with vividness typical of him, said, ‘I understand well the methods of those who clipped our wings but yet still want to be fully acquainted with what we do in the chicken yard!’

  ‘You mentioned the Corsican doctor,’ my mother reminded him.

  ‘I did. Now that Corsican, the supposed doctor Antommarchi, is a prosector, a cutter of corpses! Our friend Fanny Bertrand told me that he laughs wildly when the idea of death is mentioned because he has private theories about what death is and he won’t share them with others. Likewise pain. They are both some sort of human delusion, it seems. If the man would share the secret, it would bring a large saving in opiates.’

  Both men chuckled acridly while my mother frowned and let a shiver move through her.

  ‘In any case, this Corsican administered a blistering to Our Great Friend without first shaving the flesh. And to both arms simultaneously! When the man was limp with disease! That barbarous torture brought on a burning rash and OGF cried, “Am I not yet free of assassins?” But our Corsican quack – what does he do but get the giggles and call in Surgeon Arnott, of the infantry, a fellow I happen to know. Now Arnott was in Spain with the 53rd Regiment when they were more than decimated by OGF’s Polish cavalry, with only some fifty-two men left standing at the end. And thus, you see, that is his measure of an emergency, and though an amiable fellow, he is so sanguine a man that he is likely to stand right at the lip of a soldier’s grave and declare the poor fellow’s condition temporary. And so it was Arnott who was brought to see OGF and afterwards reported to Governor Lowe at Plantation House that the Emperor was surprisingly well, given all rumours to the contrary. He said that OGF was suffering from hypochondria. He assured Name and Nature that if a seventy-four-gun warship were to arrive from England suddenly to take the Emperor away from the island, it would instantly put him on his legs again.’

  My mother made a sound of incredulity and O’Meara went on.

  ‘In fact, even had such a mercy been considered by the grand Tories of the Cabinet, he would have died at sea before he reached this shore. Our friends at Longwood had long since written to the Cabinet via the Fiend to ask that the Emperor should be removed to another climate, and be permitted to take the waters at some health spa. But Sir Name and Nature refused to allow the letter to be transmitted, all under the old pretext that the suite had used the term “Emperor” in their appeal.’

  I remembered that the Dr Arnott O’Meara spoke of had once paid a visit to Longwood while my father was there, and OGF had greeted him with a jocose question: ‘How many patients have you killed so far, Mr Arnott?’ The surgeon replied, ‘Most of my patients happen to have been killed by you, General.’

  Already now I saw my sister beside me beginning to tremble. Her father’s daughter, she was overborne by the idea of the ruthless pain to whose ambush humanity was subject, and the onset of her own congestive ailments, signs of which had become visible in the past year, sharpened that. She was more at ease with death than she could ever manage to be with pain. She had become more given to tears, though she had never considered them an enemy or a self-betrayal, even in the years we were on the island. I heard the pace of her wheeze increase now, and I saw her habitual pressing of a handkerchief to her lips. I put my arm around her and enclosed her shoulders. They were almost as thin as they had been six years earlier, when OGF first descended on our garden on the island. Her undeserved affliction was settling in, and the Fiend and great men in England were guilty in part for that too, through the imperfectly sealed cottage we occupied by their implied desire.

  ‘And so,’ Barry O’Meara proceeded, ‘those great minds, Antommarchi the Corsican goat-doser, and Arnott the smiling fool, decided between them that Our Great Friend should be given a lavement. But OGF had never in sickness or health admired the suggestion that he be turned onto his stomach, which was so tender now, and be interfered with at all by surgeons with such indignity, even by those he tolerated, those he did not consider utter charlatans.’

  ‘Like you,’ said my father. ‘He trusted you.’

  ‘A lavement?’ asked my mother softly. It seemed a kindly word.

  ‘An enema,’ Barry rushed to say. ‘Certainly, something needed to be done. OGF had been sweating appallingly, and all his mattresses were drenched. My genial informants, Fanny and her husband Henri, also tell me that in the last months the Emperor was like a woman with child, and that everything he ate he vomited. So a lavement was chosen. It would never have been had I been there. It is like trying to erase a bruise from a fist by inflicting one with a mallet! It did nothing to ease his tender stomach. And having failed with one crass remedy, they proceeded to give him castor oil to temper stomach pain, as if he were a child who had eaten too much fruit. The treatment, of course, caused OGF to contort himself into a ball at the base of the bed. The pity of it, Balcombe! The pity! Knotted up like a child, at the base of his bed.’

  Jane let her most honest tears loose then – not that she had any other kind.

  ‘Do you want some more tea?’ I asked her, but she shook her head and was mute. I dared not look at her for fear now that she would start me on the same course as her, yet I did not want to give Dr O’Meara a cause to suspend his report for sensibility’s sake. Indeed, he asked my mother now, in a way that made me remember that he knew much about her from the island.

  ‘Should I perhaps pursue a different subject, Jane?’

  ‘No,’ said my mother (another Jane) in a breaking voice. ‘We seek to know all, Barry. We must go through our obsequies too. If there are moans here, it is no different from what we would have uttered had we been there to witness it all. We would like to have that death defined, for other wise our imaginations are tempted to think of infinite pain.’

  ‘But I fear it becomes more distressing yet,’ O’Meara warned my mother.

  ‘Even so …’ said Jane, my sister.

  ‘Yes,’ my mother agreed, ‘even so.’

  O’Meara drained his punch and my father poured him another ladleful to fortify him against our distress. Then he recommenced.

  ‘So the Corsican quack, who at least knew that things were more serious than Arnott did, sent a message to Name and Nature at Plantation House asking Short – the island’s civil doctor you’d remember – and a naval surgeon from the Vigo, Mitchell, to be called in. But sometimes, as I know so well, a congeries of surgeons may simply confirm the party in their worst and least advised opinions. And in any case, battalions of surgeons could not argue with a system so depleted by aggravation and hepatitis as OGF’s.’

  The committee of doctors, so O’Meara told us, reached a consensus that the Emperor should rise and be shaved. He told them he was too weak and that he preferred to shave himself but lacked the strength. When Antommarchi and Arnott prodded his liver, the Emperor screamed – it was like a stab from a bayonet – and began to vomit. ‘What did they all do? Why, nobody worried – they thought it a good sign. And when OGF told them, “The devil has eaten my legs,” they thought it was poetry, not an omen. Arnott reached the dazzling conclusion that the disease lay
entirely in the Emperor’s mind. And when Arnott saw Henri Bertrand and the butler Marchand helping OGF walk round the room, he told the others he thought the patient was improving. Arnott did not understand that it was raw courage itself that caused his patient to walk, that he was taking his last steps up Golgotha. So, the surgeons told Sir Hudson Fiend that his prisoner’s pallor and decline were deceits of a disaffected mind. Whereas OGF well knew what was wrong with him. For here, my dear Balcombes, was a great mind, vaster in gifts and power of imagination than the squalid little shambles of their intellects. Not one of them ever asked what the patient thought! For twenty days he told them that it was fegato, his liver. But what would he know?’

  ‘And was it the liver?’ asked my father, deeply invested in O’Meara’s narration and enduring it under his conflicting identities as a man befriended, a friend betrayed, a devotee – nonetheless – to the end. My mother was for now silenced by a similar order of grief and confusion. ‘I mean, entirely the liver?’

  ‘Oh no, it was sadly the stomach too.’ O’Meara grew thoughtful. ‘Oh, how lucky we were to ride forth with him in those earlier days! I remember watching you two young women accompanying him one day over the edge of the ravine and into that abomination of boulders known as the Devil’s Glen. It was a sight, the three of you, the balance of all he knew and, well, your unworldliness then, in that arena of chaos – that affects me now. As you see, I am close to tears. And to think that OGF reached a stage where he could scarcely bear the fatigue of a ride in the carriage for half an hour, with the horses at a walk, and then could not walk from the carriage into his house without support. Remember his confiseur Pierron, who made those fantastical delicacies for him? Towards the end all that was nothing to OGF – he could digest only soups and jellies, served in those Sèvres bowls on which were painted records of his glories. Both the contents of the bowl and the ornamentation inadequate, alas, to nourish him any further! Our Great Friend choked and gagged and starved for lack of a capacity to swallow, and like many desperate patients he said unkind things. And when he vomited it was black matter, alike to coffee grounds.’

  ‘How could that not have alerted Dr Arnott and the Corsican?’ my mother protested.

  ‘They were associated in denial,’ O’Meara explained. ‘You must understand that each time they saw Name and Nature, he ranted with all the energy he possessed that the illness was a trick to garner the world’s concern. A pretence. That has an influence on men’s thoughts, on the thought of surgeons of limited skill. Sir Hudson Fiend wondered about moving him into that newly built house near Longwood, but the Emperor’s suite knew his condition was terminal, and so did – in their own way – far better surgeons than the claque of asses assigned to the poor fellow. And so did Sir Hudson Fiend, because though he could not stop pretending that the Emperor was a malingerer, he knew in his waters that some fatal stage had been entered on. So he moved himself and his odious chief of police, Sir Thomas Reade, into the new house and waited there. His systems of persecution were close to bringing him a complete result.’

  Jane still nursed her tears. We were all pale. Even my little brothers listened soundlessly to O’Meara, to whom they had never in all our time knowing him extended that compliment before.

  ‘De Montholon told me in a letter – I give away no secret; it has been written in the French papers − that at four o’clock on one of those last mornings the Emperor called him and related with astonishing and desperate grief that he’d just seen his Josephine and that she would not embrace him. She had disappeared when he reached for her, he said, but not before telling him that they would see each other again, de nouveau. De Montholon reminded him that de nouveau did not mean bientôt. Then he and others set to change the Emperor’s soaked bedclothes and replace the sweat-drenched mattress. This is what it had come to. Better, wrote dear Bertrand to me, that he had been killed by a cannonball, obliterated at dusk on the day of that final battle six years past than die hunched in the bottom half of his bed.’

  We could see that O’Meara was nearing an end to his narration. Jane’s unpretentious and authoritative tears increased. My mother’s face held a blue pallor, and my father glowed with a revived unhealthy ruddiness made up of bewildered and conflicting thought and brandy.

  ‘So, OGF was persuaded to move to a new bed in the drawing room since that was more airy. He would let only de Montholon and Marchand the butler help him – a good man altogether, that Marchand. He permitted them to swathe his legs with hot towels.

  ‘Our dear friends had had an altar set up in the next apartment,’ O’Meara said. ‘An Italian priest had landed on the island after we went. Apparently he is a clodhopper, yet the Emperor liked him. If he were not irrational in his friendships, OGF, some of us would not be his friends, would we? And the priest was ordered to say Mass every day. Well, the Emperor had never renounced the Church of Rome, even if he had imprisoned the Pope himself.’

  ‘Mercy, Barry,’ my mother pleaded. ‘You must take us now to the point.’

  Yet O’Meara, with a sure instinct, was out to make us share in every detail, as relayed by friends on the island and by the French suite. So we heard how the surgeons decided next to give OGF calomel, mercury chloride, in a desire to make the poor man vomit more black grounds, as if these too were part of a mental attitude that must be corrected. But they had overdosed him with ten grains of the stuff, which he could barely swallow and which, when he did, caused him to vomit up both the black matter and blood. After that, he refused to see the corps of attendant doctors. He began to think O’Meara was still on the island, and kept calling for him.

  ‘He began thinking you Balcombes were still on the island too. “And Guglielmo Balcombe, where is he?” he asked. Honestly, he had such affection for you, William, and hoped he had never wronged you. “Has he really left? When did it happen? And Madame Balcombe too? How very strange. She really has gone.”’

  My parents lowered their eyes. They did not take equal joy in the Emperor’s confused remembrance. O’Meara recognised it – he had said something that meant more to the Balcombe parents, and indeed their children, than he could tell.

  ‘They moved him to the drawing room because there was less damp. On the day before his death, he had sunk into a coma and the shutters were opened to let the light and the island’s air in, which could not harm him now, it having done its damage. And off beyond the railings stood the new version of Longwood House, where the Fiend camped, biting his nails. He was so restless for it to happen that he rode across to the real Longwood and stood at the door listening for the advance of death inside, yet knowing he would not be admitted. He would ride off again, but be back within an hour or so. Meanwhile, my dear friends, OGF was on his camp bed, which sat so low to the ground, but which bore four mattresses to elevate him.’

  The green silk curtains which we remembered from his time in the Pavilion were now draped. A few seconds before the time of the evening gun from Ladder Hill, said O’Meara, OGF expired. Fanny Bertrand was in the room, half-Irish, half-imperial Fanny, a woman fit for ceremoniousness, and she remembered, as he breathed out and the breath was not succeeded, to stop the clock in his room, the one he’d always shown off to us, the alarm clock. It read eleven minutes before six.

  By the time O’Meara reached this stage, we women were choking and my father’s head was still down and the boys, William, Tom, Alex, were pale, old enough now to be awed out of boyishness. I thought how noble a man my father, Billy Balcombe –Cinq Bouteilles, as OGF called him – was. He blamed the Emperor for nothing, for no portion of the blight on our own lives.

  The tale was briskly finished. O’Meara seemed to know, he must get to an end if he did not wish to provoke some unpredictable contrary felling amidst my parents – for all he knew, a frantic quarrel was possible. Marchand and the other butlers had carried the body from the death bed to a new camp bed. The priest laid a crucifix on the breast of the corpse and left the room. Outside he recited the rosary. Name an
d Nature turned up at the door of Longwood but was denied entry by Bertrand, who told him the autopsy must proceed. This dissection took place in a room we acutely remembered – where the billiard table had once been, and the maps on which I’d stuck pins to represent the movement of hordes of men around the countryside near Jena and Auerstadt.

  Afterwards, Surgeon Short, one of the group, writing that the Emperor’s liver was grossly swollen, came under great pressure from Sir Hudson, Name and Nature, to alter his report. The Fiend thought he might somehow be blamed for that distended organ. Short refused and left the report in Sir Hudson’s hands, and according to Short, Name and Nature himself changed the words, crossing out Short’s verdict. Fortunately, Short had the final chance to write on the document that the words obliterated had been suppressed by the Fiend’s orders.

  Meanwhile, the autopsy over, the dead man was moved back to his bedroom, which had been set out in the manner of a mortuary chapel and draped in black. The next morning Name and Nature came in with a posse of fifteen officials, including Sir Tom Reade, and declared the corpse was ‘the General’, as he still called him even in death, and asked both his party individually and Marshal Bertrand to confirm it. Reade was not fully happy, for there was no achievable happiness in such a man. He appeared in part to believe that his enemy, OGF, had taken the game to the extreme now. In a bid for world sympathy, he had died. The soldiers, the sailors and the farmers, the Letts, the Robinsons, old Polly Mason, Reverend Jones, keeper of the sheep and goats, the Porteouses, the Solomons, the Ibbetsons, the Knipes, the Dovetons and all the rest were let in to see the chin-strapped corpse dressed in military style, lying on the old blue cloak from the great victory of his youth, Marengo, and dressed by Marchand and the others in the green coat of a colonel of the chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, with white facings, the sash, the Légion d’honneur, the cavalry boots, and with the bicorn hat across his lower stomach. Marshal Bertrand and Comte de Montholon stood by him, in their uniforms, and in a gown of mourning, inimitable Fanny, the best-dressed woman even in bereavement that the island had ever seen, and the most faithful.