Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  For his posture was that of a papist in front of a saintly statue, not of a sensible man.

  My father murmured, ‘Always odd,’ and then, after a while, ‘but erudite.’

  No one came up to trouble Old Huff for his excessive reverence and try to drag him upright. The silence, if anything, intensified and one heard the bump of the cutter against the buffers of the stone dock, and after a few seconds, feet could be heard ascending the step of the dock. A banal British naval officer and coxswain were seen first. We had beheld figures like these two all day and so were disappointed.

  But then the Ogre appeared, revealing himself step by step, a fellow of unremarkable or even diminutive height, but with a marked ceremonial walk. He wore the same hat that was depicted in all the cartoons of Boney, his green coat with white facings, and over his vest a sash with one single vast star-like decoration, its symbols and validity as mysterious as, say, a headdress of the Incas. And he had a paunch. His breeches and knee boots were unremarkable. He stood on the stone dock and looked about at Jamestown’s architecture and the cliffs that so aggressively contained the modest town. Thus he read the geography we already knew by heart. How we all wished in that second that we had something vaster, something of metropolitan or imperial scale, to present him with.

  He waited in that spot with the naval officer standing by, and the old admiral, his dog at his heels, greeted him and bowed to him, even though they knew each other so well from the voyage, and they exchanged salutes, and the admiral moved his hand towards the inland, offering the Emperor the hospitality of the place.

  Others arrived on the dock. There was a serious-looking man wearing a brown morning suit. His combed black hair did not quite cover his brow. At his shoulder was a boy about my age, a miniature version of the unimpressive father, dressed identically in brown, outfitted by the very same tailor with the very same cloth. The father led his son and they stood with purpose by the admiral, as though the father – Las Cases? – perceived himself to be an intermediary between the big naval Englishman and the Great Ogre. Then a tall, well-fleshed woman with her little boys, and a diminutive, plump woman also with a young son appeared and stood gracefully on the dock after the months they had been at sea since their capture. No sooner did they reveal themselves than we saw they were dazzling, long-necked women, the diminutive one in a gown of russet roses on white and with a vivid green shawl on her shoulders, the taller, apparently the half-Irish woman Fanny of whom O’Meara had spoken, in blue and saffron. ‘They are court dresses,’ my mother whispered with assurance and uncertainty at once. Both wore about their shoulders long necklaces of cameo and gold. Veils framed their faces, but I could tell that Madame de Montholon’s was oval and dark. Their husbands, one neatly made (Bertrand, the Marshal, as it turned out) and his colleague de Montholon, wore uniforms of a bluer hue, their jackets severely cut away from higher than the navel and long-tailed behind, all of it saying most emphatically, ‘French, French! Alien!’ A fussy young officer in frogged green jacket and the hat they called a ‘shako’ was the last and manoeuvred himself amongst the others till he was close to the Emperor.

  ‘He wore that coat to Moscow and back,’ whispered O’Meara, pointing to the Emperor’s uniform.

  Women in the crowd were voluble, but in whispers, discussing the exiled women’s clothes, full-bosomed, high-waisted, sweeping down, a cut which, they told each other, as we did at the warehouse, as if to exempt ourselves from competing, only the French could achieve. This mixture of the natural and the elegant even in their hairstyles seemed beyond the skills of the island. They were exquisite. The smaller one seemed the more classically so and had that gift women talk about of ‘carrying things off’. The strangeness of the newcomers was such that they might have come not from another country but from another star.

  It was time to begin some progress from the dock, and Admiral Sir George Cockburn, accompanied by his dog, and the senior officers of the regiment, raised their hats to the Emperor with a broad gesture. The Emperor, frowning, unsettled his own black hat on his brows. The regiment was stridently ordered to present arms, and did it.

  They, the powers of the earth, still allowed the Ogre to wear his sword, my father observed, and we were astounded, since that sword had dominated the Continent and could easily dominate eight miles by five. ‘That is the sword he wore at Waterloo,’ the Irishman told us.

  I wondered was it so or if the surgeon was exaggerating his intimate knowledge of the man’s garments and accoutrements.

  ‘We look upon the habiliments and the implements of great histories,’ O’Meara reminded us, though he did not need to.

  We all gazed. ‘You see that little man in the green uniform, the young one with the exceptional hat atop?’ O’Meara hissed. ‘That fellow would volunteer to be the Demon’s literal shadow if the laws of physics permitted such a thing. And like most French generals he’s scarcely a year my senior. A general named Gourgaud! Could you imagine a fellow like that, that size, that age, a restricted intelligence for that matter, commanding thousands?’

  My mother said, ‘He is not much smaller than the Emperor.’

  O’Meara conceded, ‘Yes, that is acutely observed, madam.’ He beamed as if proud of her. ‘But the Emperor is the Emperor. Sure, this crowd around the Emperor are baby generals – you see Bertrand, a man now of decent age but a general when a child, and de Montholon – generals before they were out of their swaddling clothes. It’s the way the Emperor’s always done things.’

  I could make out Gourgaud manoeuvring to be close to his master, with the tall figures of the Bertrands bulking behind him.

  For those of us who had waited the entire day, it was an exotic procession that now took place. The Emperor was escorted by Admiral Cockburn and that gentleman’s huge dog, and the colonel of those who wore the number 53. The slight general, Gourgaud, followed as close to Napoleon’s spine as if he actually wished to assassinate him or prevent someone with the imminent intent to do so. Behind them trod the trim figure of Bertrand with their little girl, Hortense, and his wife with her hands out to their two little boys, using no nursemaid for the purpose this afternoon, for surely no nursemaid would be adequate to the experience of these children. The chamberlain and his son followed, the son with his head thrust forward as if to study the earth now he had been reunited with it. General de Montholon supported his wife by the elbow as if she were lame. A French maid followed, holding by the hand the son of Madame de Montholon − Tristan, a handsome boy of five or six.

  Our curiosity was endless and the procession had not satisfied it when the admiral and the colonel stood by the door of the Portions to allow the Ogre the first entry into that honest but very ordinary establishment.

  From our position we could see, just inside the door, the gleam of Mr Porteous’s bald head, and it rose and fell, rose and fell again, doing the Great Ogre serious honour, more than he would later be instructed by the representatives of the British government to offer. The Emperor vanished from sight. So did the rest of his stately and fashionable suite, and Miss Porteous was now reduced to waving to the crowd. A sergeant’s guard moved in to the doorway of the boarding house, but it did seem that their task was not to keep the Ogre in but the crowd out.

  We fell back again on the gossip of the surgeons, O’Meara and Warden, and they were willing to rehearse various scenes aboard Northumberland. Previously the Emperor had been on another vessel of war, named the Billy Ruff’n or more correctly the Bellerophon. It was there that he wrote his appeal to the Prince Regent asking that he be let live as a private person in the English countryside. He received no response. Aboard the Northumberland, the news about his being consigned to our island had become definite. The Emperor had straightaway sickened and it had taken him a week of seclusion in his cabin, with his valet Marchand as his chief company, to recover.

  There was some talk between my mother and Mrs Solomon about Countess de Montholon’s magnificence and the statuesque appearance of Counte
ss Bertrand and the dignity with which she had progressed with her two children, looking over the heads of the populace, refusing to be weighed by the eyes of the Saint Helenes and the yamstocks. But the only new thing that was added was an aside by O’Meara, addressed to Jane and myself. He welcomed us into an exchange of views by extending his arms. ‘Be careful of General Gourgaud,’ he warned us. ‘He kept on asking me whether the island has any femmes jolies, and I am delighted to say that you Balcombe girls are as jolie as would be required by any island or, I do not flatter you, any continent.’

  O’Meara did flatter us, of course, and we were both flustered and excited by this compliment. He withdrew his arms and stood straight and returned to conversing with our parents. We noticed Huff was still on his knees, though somehow he had moved around to face the Porteous place, into which the object of his veneration had passed. No one disturbed him, the soldiers thinking he was the town’s problem, and the town the soldiers’.

  We thanked the Solomons for their hospitality. They were people who were careful of their repute and in a way kept separate from us, to give no offence. They would never have paraded on a balcony like Miss Porteous, or like, had I been Porteous’s daughter, I must admit I would have.

  Expiring at the first sight …

  Returned up the terraces to The Briars in late light, and eating a modest dinner, we slept once more fitfully. That squat giant lying in his room at Mr Porteous’s house was on our mind. The tension of seeing him and not expiring at the first sight had tired us. I slept late. At breakfast my father said it was as if the entire town were exhausted, for he had already been down there and seen but a gathering in the street watching the window behind which, it had been decided by someone, the Ogre lay and now began to engage himself in preparing for his first island day. Yet no blind was raised; indeed Porteous’s entire upper floor refused to open its blinds to look down upon the avid, restive towns-people. And as during yesterday there was more than a vulgar curiosity in the crowd, though there was that as well. Above all, there was an attempt to work out the great cipher, the small man in the boarding house who was somehow taller than pyramids. They had been set by God or the heavens or the British Cabinet a puzzle beyond their means to resolve, and yet they felt they must not evade the duty.

  My father rode over to Deadwood, an area grazed clean by the island’s goats and subject to high trade winds, where the regiment had its tented cantonment. Wagons were dangerously creeping up the terraces to reach inland and turn for Deadwood, and behind them came a string of Chinamen and slaves carrying the high-priced goods of the East India Company provided from the warehouse of Fowler, Cole and Balcombe. As we watched the wagons crest the escarpment in unfamiliar profusion, we felt the same puzzling burden as my father had observed in people in town. My mother said we should not go to town at all that day. She meant to keep us at home for obvious fear that in some way our brains might be disturbed and an eternal restlessness set in. Old Huff came along and taught my brothers some Latin vocabulary and my sister and I some French and a little Greek. He had been warned not to talk of the Phenomenon, the Great Ogre, but to keep us on the plain fare of pedagogy. My mother knew Huff needed too, for his own sake, to avoid the burden of the imagination that had made him drop to his knees on the pier, an action I had somehow understood. I was rather pleased someone had done it, as shockingly venerating a posture as it was.

  Afterwards, as Old Huff was fed refreshments by Sarah, my mother sat us down to sew on the verandah, but the endless passage of wagons, slaves and Chinamen in the middle distance distracted us. In late morning we saw a group of horsemen come over the saddle and keep on towards us under a great inland cliff and in bright sunshine. We could see scarlet in there amongst the file of horsemen and were sure, even at that distance, that a darker one was Admiral Cockburn, for we could see his dog, Pipes, running behind his horse. It must be remembered that we were girls unaccustomed to seeing such traffic, for until now we could remain at The Briars for days without our vision being teased by any distant human movement.

  We went inside and combed our hair and washed ourselves from a basin of cold water brought in by Sarah and a new younger maid, Alice. She had been granted to us by Plantation House in view of the pressures about to be put upon our family. Her slightness and delicacy of movement contrasted with the heavier household tread of Sarah. As the admiral’s caval cade neared the crossroads below The Briars, navy blue manifested itself more clearly, and my mother decided for certain it must be the admiral. They passed on eastwards.

  At my mother’s insistence, we went to our rooms to rest and we swooned away and woke at an hour when hints of a blue dusk were being spread eastwards from Plantation House to Deadwood. When I went out to the verandah, my mother and Jane were already there and they were standing as the cavalcade, seemingly the one we’d seen that morning, picked up the main track that ran down to Jamestown and, instead of taking it, turned to The Briars. Then we saw a preposterous streak of green hedged in amongst the rest of the horsemen, in a position of imprisonment or at a centre of honour.

  Nearing our carriageway, the individuals became discrete from each other. Green there – beyond dispute! As the party turned into the carriageway amongst the trees, I felt an impulse to flee. At the gate, most of the gentlemen of the party dismounted and Toby and Ernest ran from our stables to take the bridles. One presence remained on its horse.

  I, supposedly the bolder and crasser of the Balcombe girls, reputed to be willing to say anything and to ride astride horses, stood on the balls of my feet and took a half-step sideways like a restive animal, and my mother could read the urge in me to be gone, to flit under the pressure of the fear that this man would take my air away from me.

  My father had emerged from the house now, and indicated with some urgency that we should line up with him on the lawn. A young officer was opening the gate and it was apparent that old Admiral Cockburn and the regiment’s Colonel Bingham were amongst those who had dismounted. But the Emperor was not required to, and when the gate was open, Cockburn and Bingham accompanied him through, one at either stirrup. The mountings on his horse were crimson and gold, as was the saddle cloth, on which stood an embroidered golden bee, which I would discover was the Emperor’s most admired creature – small and effective, I suppose you could say of him and the bee both.

  The Ogre was rendered grander by the men who accompanied him at his stirrup, and by those who followed. The jet, imperial horse, big-hoofed, was tearing the family’s cultivated lawn and my father was advancing warily, an Englishman ready to defend his home, beginning with his turf and his wife and daughters.

  Sarah and my three brothers also broke from the house now. The boys, too young to be impressed by omens or to know the man’s record, were unafraid, as if, on a dull day, they had discovered that there was a sort of fête in the garden. The bulky admiral with his huge face shook hands with my father first and his great shaggy dog grew familiar with my father’s scent and gave his left boot a lick. Next the admiral removed his hat ceremoniously in our direction, as did the colonel.

  There was an awful gravity in the two of them still and in the party, as if they wondered whether the green man would deign to debouch from his saddle and need to be seduced by courtliness. He did not. I could see his eyes were dark and feminine and with them he took in the scene and weighed it and only then – with a surprising equestrian agility and in one fluid movement – did he descend from his saddle.

  He did not seem happy nor, once his feet hit the ground, as grand anymore, but I still suspected that a predator might have been let loose, a man who could disorder the world from a height of five feet five inches.

  ‘May I introduce you, Mr Balcombe,’ the admiral ground out, ‘to the General Bonaparte.’

  My father would of course find out, as we all would, that Cockburn’s orders from the home government were such that the detained Ogre on the island should be called ‘General’ and never addressed at a higher rank, and certai
nly not as ‘Emperor’ or ‘Majesty’. For that reason, in my account I will use the contrarian ‘Emperor’, unless I remember slights, in which case I will fall back on the term ‘the Ogre’.

  I watched my father reach out and shake the small hand and engulf its tapered fingers. The Emperor’s complexion, I now saw, was sallow, perhaps from the sea journey.

  ‘I have heard of you, sir,’ said the visitor with great conviction, directness and glittering eyes. The interesting thing was that I could tell he meant it. The bestrider of worlds had been on the island less than a day, there were many inhabitants to hear about, yet he had heard of my father. Other than that my father might supply groceries and candles to him, the question was: why?

  With an embarrassment he covered by adopting a basso voice, the admiral stated, ‘In company with the General, we have been to see Longwood and it is – as you no doubt know, Balcombe – neither fit nor ready. It will need to be rendered suitable but that will take months. I have already instructed the ships’ carpenters to get to work on it. In the meantime, the Emperor … the General … would like to be accommodated at The Briars.’

  As my parents exchanged looks, I raised my chin towards the man and felt immediate resentment. His dark, gravid eyes rested on mine, and despite their fame – I had seen them depicted in journals as the eyes of a tyrant or of a hero martyring himself for gloire – I would not look away. This was characteristic, of course. I would not let my sight slew off to uncontested ground. He who had sought to seize Russia now wanted us to surrender the whole Briars to him, not simply the Pavilion. Of course he would expect that. Let him bring up his cannon, I thought. But I feared him too, just as much as I had earlier. To have him on the island was peril enough for me. To have him at The Briars was beyond tolerance.

  My father must have felt the same because he was left muttering in a numbed voice, ‘Of course the Emperor is welcome to The Briars. When would he care to take occupation?’