Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  I imagined the yamstocks – you remember, the island-born? − processing through those rooms that were known to us, gawping at the maps on the wall, the books, the peepholes in the shutters he used for watching the garrison and to see me win the ladies’ race at Deadwood from which all the glory had long since been sucked. They must have known, those islanders, that their world was about to shrink. The garrison would go, the squadron would sail away, and all items would plummet in cost.

  A death mask had had to be made, and quickly. The first was not successful, so Novarrez, doorkeeper of Longwood, shaved him for a second mask undertaken with pulverised gypsum. But the processes of death were underway and by that afternoon the body had to be placed promptly in a coffin.

  Hearing this, we groaned and cast our eyes about. This was more of mortality than we could bear.

  ‘Enough, enough,’ said O’Meara, as if to himself. ‘You have made us,’ said my mother, ‘devour the entire bitter loaf.’

  ‘As we must,’ growled my father.

  One quick, abominable detail: they had removed the heart to send to his wife and now placed it in the room near the corpse, with a cloth over it. During the night, a rat emerged in the room and grabbed the heart half off its silver dish. ‘That rat, the very image of the Fiend, then went on to devour half the dead man’s ear … You see? You see?’

  And we did see. That representative of darkness, in eating heart and ear, passion and the senses, provided gruesome echoes of the cramping of ambitions of self-redemption on the Emperor’s part by a paltry and choleric Englishman.

  Finally it was easier to listen. So we heard that the soldiers of two regiments had carried him on their shoulders to the hearse, which had made its way into Geranium Valley, ever after to be called the Valley of the Tomb, with friends and servants weeping behind it. Name and Nature rampaged through Longwood, being free to do so at last, and looked at all that the Emperor had set aside before he died, including a gold snuffbox for his London friend Lady Holland. Then he rifled through papers to see if he could discover plans of escape which could be used to justify the strangulation process he had put in place. ‘And the fact that he could find nothing suggestive of it goes to explain the attacks which now appear upon him, Name and Nature, in all honest newspapers.’

  O’Meara spoke as if he were not himself one of the chief attackers.

  ‘Consummatum est,’ he sang conclusively. ‘It is consummated.’

  He helped himself to more punch.

  BEFORE OGF

  A deliberate exercise in dizzying cliffs …

  I came to our island, St Helena, which the Portuguese had prophetically named to honour the mother of the Emperor Constantine, as barely more than an infant; three years of age. I assume I can remember our arrival sharply, but I cannot say whether some of the details later relayed by my mother have been taken by me and labelled as memory. With that qualification, I can say that when I was brought up on deck to see the island, which had risen from the sea during the night and presented itself in a brilliant dawn, I stood holding the hand of one of the young sailors my parents liked and trusted, and the closer the island got the more it looked like a deliberate exercise in dizzying cliffs, and the more their sheer faces seemed to deny any chance of a safe landing. I stared up at the huge nose of terrifying rock rising behind inner mountains, and high saddles between them. The island began to seem less like a brief interruption of the Atlantic Ocean and to occupy a major part of the sky above. I imagined we would have to pass over those peaks and precipices to get to any habitation. And if that were not alarm enough, the young man told me that one mountain beyond the astounding cliffs consisted of the face of a Negro giant at rest.

  This man carried me down into the cutter which threw itself about madly on the writhing Jamestown Roads, as for some reason naval men called not quite secure harbours, and my mother assured me I would not be devoured. The island was not a resting giant after all. But for the Balcombes the time would come when the clumsy fable of the sailor would be made flesh, and the island would become the devourer.

  The chief port was a very narrow affair. Beyond the dock one crossed a stone bridge with a trickle of water below and, through an arched gate, entered the chief street. Jamestown sat in a slot that had tried its best to be a valley. But its wide Main Street and shallow cross lanes provided a narrow vista of sky and interior, a V of sea in a gun-sight of rock. Set on an island in the mid-Atlantic where all possibilities of wind existed, this town went for most of the year without more than an occasional breeze. Its main street was of white stucco but there was a serious fortification on a terrace above the port called the Castle. My father’s warehouse was here at the beginning of the town, but we did not have to live in this pocket, amongst immutable rocks, looking up at terraces where the fortresses and artillery stood. We would live in open space beyond. Meanwhile, the British cannon above us considered that strangulated town and the sleeping Negro giant worth keeping!

  The slaves of the island were mostly the children of people brought from Madagascar, East Africa or India by the ships of the East India Company. Even as we landed at St Helena, in London slavery as a trade was about to be enacted out of existence, but it would long continue on the island. We, who had never had slaves before, would have the use of them. The town major, a tall, dutiful sort of man from the East India Company infantry, named Hodson, had gathered the five that were our lot. Our house servants were Sarah, a sweet-faced African woman of perhaps my mother’s age, and two half-Malay, half-African twin boys of about ten, Roger and Robert. They were bare-footed and wore canvas trousers and a jacket but white gloves. If there was an assumption by folk other than myself that Sarah was the boys’ mother, she claimed to be their aunt, and they the children of her dead sister. A Cape Malay male, an older and scrawny man named Toby, was our gardener, and Ernest, perhaps thirty, limpid-eyed and with an air of caution about him, a second gardener and our groom.

  We were escorted by these slaves, and the clerks of the East India Company agency named Fowler, Cole and Balcombe, through the town. A horse waited for my father, and there was a narrow-axled carriage for my mother, Jane and me. I did not want to mount the carriage – I had already developed an unexplained fear of the things. The conveyance looked incapable of negotiating the long terraces of the track that led up the cliffs of rock to the broader place my mother had promised, where we hoped to breathe and spread our elbows more freely than the citizens of the port could. One of the clerks drove the trap and behind it walked our servants, free of baggage. But there was a string of perhaps thirty other Cape Malays following with burdens on their head and shoulders, supplies and items for our house.

  Jouncing along, I was carried by a talkative slave, a tall energetic one, in a basket on his shoulder. As I jolted my way up the heights he declared, ‘Oh, lady, I carry washing, I carry flour, I carry salt beef, I carry linseed. But you, my miss, are the finest load I carry. No one bake you, no one wear you, no one pour you out on the ground.’

  I think of slavery now and I wonder what gave this man the goodwill to say such soothing things to the child of his enslavers. The basket was hard-edged and the sky bounced above me and home did not present itself for more than an hour. I was heaved up into a notch in an escarpment and I saw behind me the caravan of people hauling bags and panniers. We walked in pleasant open country now but there were inland hills, a diaphanous forest to the right and a large white house visible beyond it. A waterfall fell into a heart-shaped bowl of rock to our right, and to our left was a wooded hill, and notable peaks lay ahead. But there was open space for gardens and orchards, pastures and slave huts, and for our house, on the level ground ahead. A nearby small stream was named Briars Gut.

  The carriageway running from the road into The Briars was made by canopies of huge banyan trees which imposed a sudden dusk on us, and then from the gate of the garden, a walk of pomegranate trees took us towards a long, low house with wide verandahs. I saw over the basket’s rim to
the side of the house a plentiful orchard running down the slight slope, and now Toby and Ernest peeled off to penetrate the fence and stand amidst the trees, the older man and his apprentice, making ready to go home to the slave shacks through a grove of myrtles at the back of the house.

  I did not understand then that this orchard was part of the family riches. It alone would earn my father some £200 a year, with its grapes, oranges, figs, shaddock – the biggest of the citrus – and two fruits many of the passengers on passing ships found exotic beyond their dreams, the guava and the mango, whose flesh was so overladen with syrup.

  Away to the left and before the house ran a well-ordered garden.

  While I assumed my fear was the only one at loose in that landscape, I now wonder how my mother had endured such a journey of ill-defined prospects before riding into this reassuring place. She was then less than thirty by some years. She was practical and sturdy but had a thin elegant neck, very marked lustrous dark eyes, what I always thought of as a wise and witty mouth, and brown hair done in the modern, seemingly informal way. She was not finished with childbearing and knew she must give birth here. But the sight of the orchard must have excited her and my father, and not just for its monetary power. They could not have imagined beforehand any of the tropic luxuriance of the vines and fruit trees as they stood beneath that vivid afternoon sky.

  Toby and Ernest had already placed tubs filled with fruit ready for collection by the porters on their return journey from The Briars to the port, specifically to the warehouse of Fowler, Cole and Balcombe, agents to the Company and superintendents of its sales. That fruit would be bought by the officers and passengers of our own ship and eaten during the passage to Cape Town. Sea breakfasts and evening desserts would be thus enlivened.

  The pannier containing me was let down and, strange fruit, I was lifted out in vast calloused hands and found my parents smiling at me by the trellis gate that led to the long, low bungalow. Its garden was full of beds of white, yellow and red roses, hence The Briars, spelled always with a capital ‘T’, like The Times of London!

  Told by so many that St Helena was a ‘desert island’, which we interpreted as meaning ‘barren’, as its huge bare cliffs had also suggested it was, this vale of orchards and roses on a high plain delighted us. On the African side of the island – to the east, that is – a plateau and a great block of rock, again imitating a human face, stopped the more unruly vigour of the trade winds from reaching us. Down an escarpment towards the South American, west side of the island fell a great thread of waterfall into a heart-shaped bowl of rock.

  Below the house stretched the lawn, which seemed to offer limitless play. I began to run on it. I could smell Jane near me – her child smell, enthusiasm and powder and fresh-laundered linen. We turned to each other and smiled. It was the simplest of communications on an island that would come to harbour complex ones.

  To the side of the long lawn …

  To the side of the long lawn of The Briars and atop a knoll approached by rock steps stood a cottage, built to charm with artful wooden fretwork. It was called the Pavilion and was a sort of summerhouse, with big windows on all sides so it could be opened up and rinsed through by the kindlier winds that favoured our little dale. It was ornate, a jewel of a place with a large room on the ground floor. Upstairs there were a few garret-style bedrooms. My father had already been told that people would want to rent this place. A naturalist from a ship had spent some time there, as had officers on short appointments ashore and any other visitors, military or official, to our island. Occupancy was intermittent though, since many preferred to live down in the town at Mr Porteous’s boarding house, the Portions, which rented small but comfortable rooms. It was a common axiom that the longer you spent in Jamestown, the less you felt cramped in by the great vices of rock either side of the town. I myself came to love the place. It was the only town to go to town to.

  The Pavilion would become the engine of Balcombe destiny, but one couldn’t have guessed to see it glimmer on its mound to the South American side of our garden. For now, the garden favoured my nature and gave me room for unruliness. Store ship captains who stayed in the Pavilion with their wives did not do so a second time, and that was probably because of me, my spying, my intrusion, my hectic and impudent nature. I was a child with the gifts to be decorative, but I did not sit still enough to adorn any scene, exterior or interior. The supposed wildness and taste for frank talk I was later accused of had shown its early signs.

  I accepted, as one unthinkingly accepts air for breathing, my parents’ making of their way on the island. My sister Jane was a wonderful playmate, since she lacked all unnecessary competitive spirit, all spitefulness, everything that I had in abundance. She was capable of firmness though, displayed only when essential. We were the Balcombes’ two girl children, and did not question why there was no son.

  Our brother William was delivered at the hands of the island’s English midwife a full four or so years after we came to the island. This birth seemed at least to me to occur with no fuss, no pain, no expectation of loss of mother or child. I had not then discovered for myself that giving birth is the equator, the dangerous passage between the poles of new life and death, which participates of, and can deliver, both.

  I knew nothing. I must have some form of education before I was too old. My parents had resolved that they would take a consistent line on this. No young tutor had answered our newspaper advertisement before we left England. Jane and I had an intermittent series of teachers but tutors were not native to the island and impossible to attract from England or the Cape. At some stage, it was set in stone: we would have to go back to England to pick up some of that commodity.

  In the meantime, to direct my energy and prevent me from mounting on dangerous horses, I was given a docile island-bred gelding unimaginatively, and like half the known world, named Tom. Jane got Augustus, a horse of similar bloodlines, whose ancestors had come from Arabia to Africa, that had first grown shaggy on the African plains and then uncouth on the island. My parents had brought two English horses, a black and a bay, with them, for island horses were considered crasser flesh. But horses like Tom were fair enough for teaching children.

  Until such time as we would be sent to England for our education, the Reverend Jones, the chaplain appointed to the island by the East India Company, who had a large family to support, would be our tutor.

  This Reverend Jones was considered slightly odd because he felt his Church of St Matthews, over in the direction of Plantation House, the governor’s residence, was a rock of certitude attacked from two directions – not just from the direction of insufficiently reverent white inhabitants of the island, but from the paganism of the slaves as well. Major Hodson complained that he never preached on the text ‘Wives, be obedient to your husbands’ or ‘Render under Caesar the things that are Caesar’s …’

  In any case, the Reverend Jones, at my parents’ invitation, rode over to The Briars to visit Jane and me and quizzed us on our catechism, a few answers to which my mother had primed us with, but not sufficient to do more than annoy a clergyman who knew the entirety of it.

  Reverend Jones had a strange way of showing his disappointment at the raw condition of our religious and civil education. He would sigh most frightfully and easily withdraw into sadness. Contradictorily, this little man with a furry head possessed eyes that blazed as if with evangelism in the midst of his resigned features. His only instrument of pedagogical violence was an ebony ruler he held, but it existed as a threat rather than an employed instrument of punishment. So it was the Reverend Jones who got us started on the Hebrew alphabet, beginning at the summit of scholarship and not in its foothills. I soon knew aleph, beth, gamel, before I properly knew A, B, C.

  Under the shadow of our Bible studies and our growing acquaintance with the Hebrew alphabet, we learned to read of our own accord. I kept my eye on that ebony ruler and never wanted to come in contact with it, and Mr Jones, having children of his o
wn, was not affronted by some of my more eccentric questions.

  ‘If you are teaching us, Mr Jones,’ I asked, ‘who teaches your children?’

  ‘My dear wife, of course,’ he said, but he did not want to enlarge on that grey, worn woman. He had been in the midst of telling us about the Council of Nicea and the great argument that had rejected a heretic named Arius. His appearance of disappointment became more intense as he continued, and loaded down his jaws, and he tapped his ebony ruler reflectively twice on the back of a chair. Meanwhile, I hoped he had explained all this shadowy theology to his own children and not imposed it on us alone. ‘But you have a school at the church,’ I said.

  ‘Aye,’ he admitted. ‘But for yamstocks, and the children of slaves and freed slaves. The islanders and the slaves are so sunk in heathenism I would not have young women such as you share a classroom with them, nor would I have my children do it.’

  This fascinated me. Heathenism was a word with a red glare of allure around it.

  ‘They believe, those others,’ Mr Jones told us, ‘in the powers not of the bread and wine and body and blood of Christ, but in the worship of the myrtle tree, the tree of rebellion as the American revolt shows us, and they believe too in the spreading of chickens’ blood. Even my sanctuary has been broken into and I see the signs, where they have placed their own pagan symbols, the blood, the leaves, and a pot in which a chicken’s head is buried facing towards Mecca, all around the bier of a dead man.’

  ‘You should put guards on the door at night,’ said Jane.