Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  I should tell you something about Jane. She was an earnest girl and would never achieve guile in her lifetime. That she had a more solid and admirable character than mine was obvious to me from my infancy and helped colour my definition of my flawed state. Jane was a child from before the Fall. I seemed to be one from after that event. But once a vein of questioning was opened up for Jane, she was as willing to take advantage of it as any child would be.

  ‘Oh, my dear young lady, the nightwatchmen themselves are frightened of ghosts and of the coming and going of the supposed priests and priestesses of the Malay and African religions.’

  ‘But why are there myrtle leaves?’ I wanted to know. There were myrtle trees behind the house, but I had not suspected them of any magic.

  ‘The myrtle tree is beloved by God since he grew it miraculously in the middle of the desert and the Israelites used it to make shelters. But the Devil claims the myrtle tree too. He will always be defeated, yet he favours its leaves as if he needed them for very life. Through Christ, God has won the battle in your souls, since you have been baptised, and have a desire for the light. But there are those who seek salvation in myrtle leaves.’

  And so The Briars took on for me a dual condition. I wondered if Sarah and the two boys, and Toby and Ernest, believed in the myrtles as belonging to God or the Devil, as trees to be contested for, a battlefield unto themselves. I watched the slave boys at dinner, watched their white gloves, inspected Sarah’s smile. There was no evil in them, and they did not go to the yamstock school anymore, and I hoped that when they saw the myrtle grove, they saw God.

  I liked the doleful Reverend Jones, but while his counsels concerning myrtle made me merely careful, and obscurely excited me, they weighed on Jane in a way which began to interfere with her appetite and her dreams. The casual tap of the ebony stick against furniture could bring tears to her eyes, and to the Reverend Jones’s credit, he saw this.

  ‘Why are you distressed, my child?’ he asked.

  We began to notice that our mother paced outside the window of the classroom, seemingly back and forth on some adult duty, but I realise she wanted to hear what Mr Jones was saying. Perhaps Jane had confided her terror of the myrtle to her mother.

  Soon he had us reading aloud sections of the New and Old Testaments, which were a more useful form of education, for the measures of the Bible were eloquent and of exquisite structure, and of use to a person for life (at least in conversation). We had begun by reading Revelations, a book that seemed to suit the Reverend Jones’s melancholy. ‘… wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men, and the fruits that thy soul lusted after, are departed from thee.’

  ‘Ah,’ he interrupted softly with a tap of his ruler, ‘why are slaves and horses and beasts equated together, when horses are especial animals and slaves are as human as are we?’

  Of course neither Jane nor I could answer.

  ‘Believe me,’ he told us, ‘it is God’s irony. The rich man will be deprived of slaves because he sins by lusting after them. I must baptise the children of slave women. Where are their fathers? That is what I ask. Where are their fathers?’

  He spoke as if to himself now, his conversation was a private one in which Jane and I were eavesdroppers.

  ‘You should thank God that your boy servants here were born before your father arrived, that they are some other man’s sin …’

  At this point my mother appeared at the classroom, or parlour, door.

  ‘Mr Jones,’ she said with a severity we could not understand. ‘I think you have strayed into areas that are not of use to my daughters’ education. I wonder, could I speak to you?’

  The Reverend Jones looked at us with infinite sadness in his eyes. He turned to my mother. ‘Dear lady, please realise that if you report me to the Council of the East India Company, you will not be the first to have done so.’

  ‘I am not interested in reporting anyone,’ said my mother. ‘But I have noted a decline in at least one of my daughters.’ And she stepped back into the hallway, and he squared himself off manfully and walked out into the corridor. I have been all my life a passionate overhearer, but did not want to be – for reasons I could not understand – that day.

  The upshot was that Mr Jones was dispensed with, said a polite goodbye to us and rode away with his ebony ruler in a satchel hanging from the saddle of his rough-coated island horse.

  My parents redoubled their efforts now to find a tutor, and advertised in Cape Town, and in the meantime my mother took up the task. She said, ‘I do not say that everything the Reverend taught you was wrong. But the Hebrew alphabet is more appropriate to students at Oxford and Cambridge than to you.’

  ‘And Arius?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that too. If you remember it all, well and good, but what he told you about slaves is rubbish. Look at Sarah! Does she seem unhappy or debased?’

  We both agreed she didn’t.

  No one responded to my parents’ advertisements, and we began our reading and mathematical tasks and occasional sums involving pennies and shillings, which my mother demonstrated with items of family revenue, showing us modest bills from Solomon’s store in Jamestown and counting out the shillings and pennies in front of us. She began on French grammar, having enough French of her own to make it credible. I loved the language and used its words in the midst of my conversation. When my mother took us on rides, I called out to Robert and Roger, about whom Mr Jones’s remarks had been incomprehensible to me, ‘Bring round mon cheval aussi.’

  We had biblical readings but poetical ones as well, and I think my mother was rather a good teacher, but with a small boy to attend to, her classes became more and more haphazard.

  Lack of educational and social polish …

  My mother’s concerns about our lack of educational and social polish led to a bitter result. It was decided that Jane and I must return to England to attend an academy for young ladies.

  My father wrote to a patron of his, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt. Sir Thomas, of whom I came to hold certain conclusive but unprovable theories, was a fellow whose name was occasionally mentioned in our house because he had helped my father get his present position as superintendent of the East India Company stores and sales. He would run it by way of an entity in which two islanders, Messrs Cole and Fowler, had invested. They were sleeping partners and rarely contacted my father. Sir Thomas had once been the secretary to the Prince Regent himself and thus was wisdom incarnate on every aspect of the social life of Great Britain. He was also, mysteriously, the supervisory and benign figure in my father’s childhood and youth. He was like a potent deity, or interventionary saint, and we children accepted his distant and unseen power as a given of our lives. Apparently a reply came from Sir Thomas recommending an academy for the polishing of girls. It was located in distant Nottingham.

  When I reached eight years and Jane ten, we were put aboard a ship under the care of a wife from the East India garrison who was returning to England permanently. I enjoyed the journey because I was the sort of child just forward enough to be the object of teasing affection. I liked to imagine I was one of them, a girl sailor: I began ascending the mainmast rigging on a bright, calm day, and was swiftly brought down and spoken to severely by the first mate, who nonetheless wore a suppressed smile.

  I was a sea urchin by day, but became a frightened child at dusk and spent the nights at sea in Jane’s arms in her narrow bunk, while my own was abandoned and grew cold. I had heard the woman who minded us speaking to other passengers about the prospect that we might encounter the French, but the blockade by our navy was so severe that they considered it an extreme unlikelihood. But for a child extreme unlikelihood had no force compared to the power of the imagination.

  I barely remember London – we must not have put into the East India Dock, for I think it did not exist then. I remember a brisk departure from the city of London by coach with a young gentleman who worked for Sir Thomas and had a letter
of welcome and advice written by our uncle, my father’s brother, who worked as a clerk in the city somewhere. It became apparent that we lacked much of a Balcombe family in England – at least no grandparents had presented (nor did we expect them), and no flow of aunts. And it seemed perfectly reasonable that a fellow of such importance as our uncle shouldn’t appear.

  I had not been sick at sea, but was ill twice during the three-day journey to Nottinghamshire, where we arrived at last on a hill above a pretty market town named Mansfield. Here was the large, draughty house called the Academy for Young Ladies, owned by a woman named Miss Clarke. What wisdom had chosen this place for our betterment, we did not know. Miss Clarke, who was warm towards her pupils, believed that it was good for a girl’s constitution to be acquainted with cold, and in the dormitories we became well acquainted with it. Since the academy was a large building with plentiful grounds – in which Miss Clarke took some pride – we were sent outside in all weathers to run and play. She believed in outlets for a girl’s energies as being essential to enabling decorum at the times it was required. We were aware her theories were considered experimental by some.

  My misery was illimitable, and was more intense as I could not comprehend the necessity my parents felt to subject me to all this. In the first night I crept across a hallway from my dormitory into my sister’s bed, but one of the young lady instructors discovered me on her patrol on our third night. I was taken to a cupboard with a blanket and locked there for the rest of the night and, to emphasise the matter, for the next night as well. That second night I spent in the closet seemed to stretch ahead infinitely. I had no light, and for consolation had to concentrate on a small gap at the bottom of the door along which a slightly bluer and more amiable form of darkness could be seen. I had whimpered the first night and began to whimper again the following night, and then I had a revelation, an angelic visitation – though I would not like to name which angel – that whimpering was not the right tack for me. It would satisfy the expectations of the dormitory mistress. The right ploy was not to creep and seek caresses or bleat. The right ploy was defiance. This was so obvious that I found it hard to understand why it had not occurred to me sooner.

  It would be unjust, however, to depict Miss Clarke and her teachers as monstrous beings, though the principal and proprietor herself was contradictory. I saw her, with an air of practical and forthright kindness, bind up the chilblains which girls had acquired through play in the cold gardens and, during sleep, in the arctic dormitories. Whether it was kindness to keep the girls of the academy in conditions encouraging to chilblains was a question she never asked.

  So we began our introductory classes in scripture and the basic principles of mathematics – algebra and trigonometry would have cost my parents more, and they had decided we would not need them – and fine needlework. My father had paid a premium on our fees to ensure we received instruction in French, dancing and music. These three happened to provide the chief consolation of my days. My tendency to substitute French words for English ones amused the other girls. I was not subjected to mockery since they could tell I would exact a notable, unpredictable price for it.

  I became a determined and cunning delinquent, though more subtle than unruly. I would ask questions with feigned innocence. I once asked our scripture teacher, was it true that Miss Clarke intended to let her go? The – in all senses – poor woman was angry, but above all fearful, and I was malignly satisfied. I was careful to sit in chapel by the sort of girl who in sombre situations could be set off into hilarity by a mere dig in the ribs. I was a watchful rebel, took what I could and, for the rest, kept myself warm with contempt. I did not evade complete censure and was frequently asked why I was not more like Jane. The question seemed to cause her more pain than me. Yet she was the one who seemed to be able somehow to sustain herself calmly through the chilled nights of the academy, whereas I still shed secret tears.

  Miss Clarke and her ladies read our letters home and became aware that mine was a continual plea to my mother and father to let me come back. The delay with letters was not too great since many ships on their way to Cape Town and India put into Jamestown in those days. I could play the piano, I told my mother. I could read. I knew French, which was partly true, and by the time they received the letter, would have become even more of an accomplished fact. So I was ready to resume my island life.

  As in any history of misery there were hopeful moments. We were permitted to march down to the town in two columns like troops, as if to check on its defended condition in this era of war. We would proceed by the Buttercross market and on past the new weaving mills by the River Maun to the village of Market Warsop or to a hill nearby, from which we could see the grandeur of Newstead Abbey. Boney in Dieppe had his eye on such wonderful structures, said Miss Clarke; his heart yearned to get his troops to Nottinghamshire, but he was prevented from doing so by the merciful God of the Anglican Church and the valour of the Royal Navy. When some companies of the Nottingham Regiment paraded on the market square with their baggage train, I was quite surprised to be told that they were bound not for Dieppe, the centre of the Bonaparte evil, but for Spain.

  Old Boney was an immanence that did not frighten us much when we stood in daylight above the collieries and the threatened opulence of Newstead Abbey, but the thought of him was sufficient to raise night anxieties. If we were back on the island, I wrote to my parents, we would be far from Dieppe where old Boney was.

  Miss Clarke called me to her spartan office, where the fire-place was unlit, and told me that my parents deserved more than to hear me plead for a return. It is a normal thing for girls who write letters to their parents, she told me, to comment on their studies, the subjects in which they are doing well, and the respect they have for their teachers. My next letter was fulsome and declared these things to excess and declared also that I did not know what I would do when the time came to leave the academy. I then sprinkled some water mixed with a little salt onto the letter and was confident my mother would realise that I had written it under coercion, and while in tears, and the lies I told were a measure of my distress, not of my happiness.

  Jane, meanwhile, was put into the clinic twice with congestive illnesses and I was allowed to miss certain classes to sit with her and hold her hand. She would always be susceptible in this regard. I was happy for this form of sanctuary after making other girls laugh at the French mistress, and being caught and roughly shaken for satirising the steps of the dance master. I rejoiced in the anguish in a strange way, as if I were proving to myself how uninhabitable the academy was. I was ordered into the closet again and told myself in its unique air and coldness that I was a night closer to liberation. The closet was meant to reduce me, but I would not be reduced.

  Jane sometimes interceded for me and was allowed to take me into the garden and beyond, to the height above the river, so that she could remonstrate with me, beg me to show respect and remind me of the family honour. All that should have coerced a child but didn’t coerce me. I did not want to placate the academy; I wanted to escape it. In that objective, I wrote my parents other letters than the ones I sent through official channels, and paid the gardener to post them.

  ‘Mama, I am crying to you out of a deep pit,’ I told my mother in one such.

  Christmas was a terrible day, spent at Miss Clarke’s table with girls whose parents were in India and teachers who had no other home. Our uncle, whom we never met, sent us a brief message of greeting and a florin each.

  How long, oh Lord, how long? All through the residue of winter and the first buds of hawthorn – that was how long! Then a cold spring emerged and the promise of a lukewarm summer. An astonishing thing happened one day in late June when the young man representing Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, the same one we’d met all those months before at the boat, appeared. He seemed rather more tubercular than he had been before, which explained why, when dozens of his countrymen were risking themselves against Old Boney in Spain, or Dieppe, or wherever Old Boney
was (Boney was in fact in Germany most of this time), he was able to pursue a non-military life.

  He told me that Sir Thomas and my uncle were rather disappointed in me. The irony was that as he informed me of this, my mother was nursing a new baby brother of mine on the island and had christened him Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe, to honour the known and unspecified services that this great man had done my father at some stage. ‘And,’ the young clerk or aide told me, drawing in a breath, ‘there may be men of far greater eminence even than Sir Thomas who will hear of your behaviour and be disappointed in you – those who are interested only in your education and yet have seen you behave like a Mohammedan towards it.’

  This proposition, that I offended men on high, was appalling. Yet there was in me a calm level at which I did not care as long as I was back on the island, where distance would reduce their voices to nothing. They had not tasted the island, the earth’s centre, the yardstick of what was to be desired. Nor were they here at Miss Clarke’s. They did not understand what it was like. Above all, words break over an unhappy child like surf above a drowning person. They become irrelevant to her condition. She is below them, gasping and gulping.

  ‘So,’ he ended, ‘I expect you to promise –’

  ‘I will not promise, sir,’ I told him in a fury. ‘I do not make promises.’

  This was an impudence that so far exceeded any measurable scale that he asked, ‘Are you saying that to me? In saying that to me you are saying it to Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, patron to your uncle and your own father!’

  I had tears stinging in their ducts but maintained my drastic intention that they shouldn’t flow even for such augustness. I told him I didn’t want this level of education. I wanted to go home. Thank God he left then, after some negative remarks, and I let my tears fall down on the books open before me, on the Hittites and the Persians, on Darius and the great runner Pheidippides.