Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  ‘A most civilised drawing room,’ he then told us in French, ‘to find in such a far place.’

  He still had a few pieces even now, in the last of the daylight, being carried up to The Briars, but he said they were very rustic by comparison, apart from his washstand. He stuck his hands behind his back and made his paunch notable. ‘Very rustic pieces,’ he declared, frowning at my mother, his eyes lustrous.

  My mother pointed to an inlay and said, ‘Rosewood. Bois de rose.’ She was doing her best, and as well as I could have done, but I don’t know to this day if she got the name of rosewood right in French. At that moment the desire formed in her to offer him that dresser, too, and so an ordinary item from The Briars became part of the furniture of his life. But so did we, and that’s the tale.

  After soup, Sarah and Le Page brought roast lamb to the table, and Sarah’s twin boys in their white gloves carried around the accompanying dishes. The Emperor sat back and admired the elegant progress of Alice to mid-table with a gravy boat. He took a modest amount of cauliflower and beans and told my mother, talking while he chewed, that his confiseur, one of the best in France, would come up from the Porteous house tomorrow at the latest. ‘He is a great toymaker too,’ said the Emperor of his pastrycook. ‘He will make toys for your children.’

  The idea seemed improbable.

  The pudding was rich with a dozen eggs but the Emperor merely tasted it, a few mouthfuls. He had also drunk only two-thirds of a glass of his wine.

  My uneasy mother had about her a combined air of striving and shyness which I found unsettling. She could not let her features settle themselves into those of my confident mother of the household, and I wanted her to achieve that level of ease, and found that her skittishness put a distance I did not desire between her and me.

  The admiral rose and asked would the General think it improper if he proposed a toast to the King? The Emperor nodded assent. He did so from the sitting position though; the admiral and my father and the colonel and the rest of us stood.

  The admiral proposed a toast to the General.

  The Emperor waved his hand.

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ said the Emperor briskly. ‘I do not drink to generals. Even a marshal like my friend Bertrand must be fortunate to find me raising my glass to him.’

  Cockburn arched his shaggy eyebrows in the direction of the colonel, who shrugged.

  ‘I hope you understand, sir,’ said the admiral, ‘that is as far as we can take the toasts, in that case.’

  ‘I have never been fond of drinking toasts,’ said the Emperor, quite pleasantly.

  Suddenly he stood. There was no time for my father to begin the passage of the port around the table, nor had the time arrived for my mother and my sister and me to withdraw. My mother said fretfully that had we known we would have such eminent company she would have contrived to serve something more delicate, but the Emperor said the meal had been all delicacy. He noticed the piano and turned to me, and said with a sort of playfulness that he assumed I had not managed to learn the piano.

  ‘You are mistaken, General Emperor,’ I told him. ‘I have six songs over which I have utter control.’

  ‘Six songs?’ he asked, his eyes glimmering and his mouth moving into a Gallic rictus that was mildly satiric. When his name had frightened us in our babyhoods, we had not imagined this whimsy of the eyes, nor the particular way the corners of his mouth operated as the most subtle foreign machinery for a smile.

  ‘Is it possible that I should hear one of these six songs?’

  The adults laughed with him, as they would not have laughed for an older woman. I would come to be irked by that indulgent laugh, the indulgent smile. I looked at my mother, who nodded too urgently, sitting straight-backed still, every muscle clenched. Jane said, ‘“Ye Banks and Braes”. That is your most accomplished.’

  I took to the piano seat and raised the lid and began. My father and the officers politely suspended their conversation and I let go of the doleful lyrics, as if laying down flowers on a current, strewing them freely, learned lines that had no real connection to me, the plangent tune and the rhymes of loss. Since I did not know of what I sung, the poet’s lyrics served the undeniable vanity of a thirteen-year-old girl, as well as providing a means for her to assert herself in the face of that smiling magisterium.

  Ye banks and braes o’ Bonnie Doon

  How can ye bloom, say fresh and fair?

  How can ye chant, ye little birds,

  And I say weary, fu’ o’ care.

  Thou breakst my heart,

  Thou warbling bird,

  That wantons thro’ the flowering thorn.

  Thou minds me o’ departed joys,

  Departed never to return …

  The Emperor spread his hands as if exhorting the world to listen as I made a smooth passage between verses and raised the register. When he stood at sudden song’s end, the admiral did too, and the other men, and all applauded. I explained, ‘Those are the words of Robert Burns. Have you heard of him?’

  Laughs, brief. Then the Emperor declared that this was the prettiest English air he had ever encountered, and he did not believe that it could come originally from them, since their songs were all about the military.

  ‘The reason may be,’ I said, standing, ‘that it is Scottish.’

  ‘Now that explains it,’ he told me. ‘Not that I dislike martial songs. Do any of you here know “Vive Henri Quatre”?’

  ‘You test our limits, General,’ said the admiral amiably, his cheeks a little aglow by now since my father had contrived to get the port circulating.

  ‘He does test them,’ my father said, nodding in the early stages of tipsiness. ‘All of our limits. He does that. No fool, he.’

  Napoleon raised his hand and keeping time began to deliver, in an off-key series of la-lahs, the burden of ‘Vive Henri Quatre’. It was an unaccustomed French song, ancient, and I heard Henri referred to as a demon four times over. It was also heavy, turgidly military, but the Emperor rose and marched around the room keeping time with his hand. The tune was so mauled by him that all this should have been comic, not least because the song showed the very faults with which he had labelled English music. But I think we were too astonished. Only my mother ventured a little and uneasy heh-heh at the end.

  Then he stopped and lowered his heavy cheeks over his stock. ‘I know it sounds bad,’ he admitted, ‘because French music at its worst is nearly as bad as English. For the true songs let us all go to Italy! Madame de Montholon will at some happy time perform them for us.’

  He began to sing a theme from Orpheus and Eurydice, something so lyrical from the hand of Glück that it was difficult to understand how he could maul it. But he managed it, and subverted Glück’s divine melody.

  He declared tiredness now. He said the Count Las Cases, would come up tomorrow to the Pavilion, and that Las Cases’ son would be good company for Jane and me, being just thirteen. Admiral Cockburn clucked almost like a nanny and agreed that he must be tired, and then in the corridor and on the verandah we made an informal guard of honour and Captain Poppleton and Le Page accompanied him out of the house and down the steps, across the lawn and up through a rockery towards his glittering cage. Poppleton was required to sleep near him to make sure that on his first night on St Helena there should be no escape. Gourgaud accompanied his Emperor, too, a step behind.

  I could see the glow of a pipe at the end of the carriageway where sentries were placed, but the admiral did not seem too anxious that the prisoner might flit – certainly not a prisoner who had laid down the ponderous sounds of ‘Henri Quatre’ in our drawing room.

  Contemplating what person he was …

  We now knew that the Emperor was not the sort of monster who in fact and deed devours a person in the night. This again did not make us sleep easier. Indeed, I was awake to a late hour contemplating what person he was. This conundrum who liked ‘Ye Banks and Braes’, and who spoke to girls and slaves!

  As well as t
hat he was down there, in unimaginable sleep, entertaining unimaginable dreams in the Pavilion, which was as close as the stables. There had been two servants waiting for him to return there – we had seen their shadows – Cipriani and Marchand. It was a heartbreaking scene, his sauntering to his camp bed in the Pavilion. No wife with him, no son. His little sister Pauline, Queen of Naples, having surrendered of her own accord to the Allies with her husband Murat, in hope she would be allowed to keep the throne he had put her on – that’s something we would hear about. And his brothers scattered across the world from America to Italy.

  As for his mother, Madame Mère, the matriarch of such a brood of generals and conspirators and princes, I realise now that she lived in the Roman hills, as the admiral himself had mentioned, where she could be visited often enough by her friend the Pope, about whom – of course – our family as decent Protestants felt an ambiguity. But the admiral said that the Pope’s friendship with Mother Bonaparte was all the more interesting because her great son had kept the Pope nearly a captive, and thus a victim, and now the Pope, who was no longer a captive, visited the elderly Corsican mother of the man who, on an Atlantic island and as a prisoner now had made his way alone (let us not count the one young slave that lit his way) across the lawn to our Pavilion.

  We were awakened the next day by the sound of sailors and soldiers on the lawn and found them erecting a vast marquee on the sward below the Pavilion. The morning air was full of their curses as they struggled to get the marquee up and blamed each other for its failure to ascend. Count Las Cases and his son, both in brown suits, emerged and the Count began, with an air of uncertainty, to assess the men, and then to wander about the parts of the garden.

  The son, having dressed appropriate to a man over fifty years of age, looked like the paragon of courtliness the Emperor had promised us.

  ‘What a foolish little boy,’ I said impotently, and my sister Jane replied, ‘But you don’t know him.’

  We watched him taking exaggerated notice of the limits of our garden. I could tell I would not find him a welcome presence. On the edge of womanhood, when one is capable of becoming interested in certain men, it is also easy to have an enhanced revulsion. I felt that revulsion for the boy, who prowled the garden wearing the same scholarly frown as his father.

  I was the kind of child, no longer fully a child, old enough but not too old, to whom visitors addressed the sort of tale they wanted the entire company to hear and respond to with jollity. It was as if I were the necessary medium or filter that justified the irony in what they were saying.

  ‘Well, imagine this, Betsy,’ the Irishman Surgeon O’Meara told me at dinner one night, the Emperor being over in his Pavilion, a circumstance we were still amazed by. I was clear that the matter Surgeon O’Meara was addressing was not merely for my sake but for the full table’s. ‘Imagine a French doctor surrendering such a choice! For there was a young surgeon called Maingaud to do the job, a florid young fellow, thin-lipped and priestly in appearance, and dressed like it in a tight black suit. He had come with the Emperor from France and foresaw a life as an English gentleman’s physician. But he had this horror of the tropics, you see.’

  We were used to maritime narratives at my father’s table, for he entertained every store ship captain that put into Jamestown Roads, but even by those highly coloured standards, the Irishman, himself tickled by his own tale, had the table thoroughly tickled as well.

  ‘So picture your humble servant taken to the cabin of Admiral Keith, where the pale little French surgeon told the big-nosed English admiral that he had a terror of tropical diseases and that he was not so certain of his allegiance to the Emperor anyhow that he didn’t want to follow him into the torrid zone.’

  ‘Yes, but don’t call him the Emperor, surgeon,’ said our admiral leniently. ‘Remember to call him “the General” – according to Cabinet instructions.’

  O’Meara, as would become apparent, was determined to call his patient ‘the Emperor’. It was not out of contrariness, it would turn out. It might have been vanity. Anyone could have generals as patients, but who had ever had an Emperor? However, it may have been his semi-radical Irish politics. Even when ‘the General’ surrendered the first time, before repenting of exile and un-surrendering, the British had still addressed him as ‘Emperor’. So how could they now demote him from that omnium compendium of a name to the title of a mere officer?

  ‘There must have been many unattached Frenchmen who would have taken the job in this little fellow’s place,’ the Irishman went on to assert. ‘But this young man was ready to go back to the France that would come after the Emperor … or the General. The France without colour, or fraternity, or imagination.’

  The admiral was willing to laugh and say, ‘By God, O’Meara, you sail close to the wind. You may call him by that name for the rest of this anecdote but then change, and for good.’

  The Irishman bowed to Admiral Cockburn and finished his glass of port, uttered a little, ‘Um’ of sugary appreciation, and continued. ‘So I inherited France’s dying colour, and I inherited the care of its imagination.’

  Admiral Cockburn wasn’t as happy now.

  ‘You ought to look out for subtlety, my boy. There’s no promotion in it. Is “the General” the earth’s imagination? And does the rest of the world now lack imagination because that quality has been concentrated in this island in the person of the Emp– the General?’

  ‘Aha!’ cried O’Meara, ‘I had you nearly say it, sir! That wee British Cabinet has to be informed straight off, wouldn’t you say, Balcombe?’

  My mother and my sister Jane laughed as merrily too, but looking as women do for confirmation and almost for licence from the convulsions of the men. In matters of hilarity, though not in all matters, my mother always bowed to my father. Men owned laughter, it seemed. I always liked if not envied the way Jane laughed, without artifice, generously but not just to please. It ran like a warm flame beneath the skin of her face.

  Admiral Cockburn shook his big, meaty head, a head that appeared to have become more reinforced by the habit of command. ‘You see that United Irishman there,’ he said, pointing at O’Meara further down the table. ‘He is a serpent from the wrong end of the garden! You understand the Irish pretend to be with us when they need a post. But their impulses run to dangerous spirits!’

  O’Meara was delighted to be thought of in such complimentary terms and felt entitled to continue. ‘So, after the little French surgeon had bolted, my superiors came aboard Bellerophon and asked me would I consent to leave the ship and come aboard Northumberland and do the duty of physician to … well, to him … to the Great Ogre and the Savage-in-Chief. I should serve here as well, with regular naval emolument. “Milord,” says I to Admiral Keith, “an O’Meara may speak to an emperor.” At that stage I was ignorant of the great policy regarding names, and I used the word for the sake of historic accuracy. And then Lord Keith said to me, “I’m afraid, O’Meara, he has great contempt for your profession.”’

  ‘Sensible man!’ said my cherub-cheeked father, genial lover of the table and of all these naval fellows.

  ‘Indeed, Billy,’ O’Meara familiarly told my father. ‘If he didn’t despise surgeons he would have accepted neither the little priestly Frenchman nor myself, both of us men worth avoiding and far from the apogee of our profession. The upshot, in any case, was that I transferred to the Northumberland to accompany the Ogre and his entourage to this place. The man’s servants were already aboard, but I saw the Ogre himself and his suite ascend the gangway, and engage in energetic and jovial talk with the admiral, who showed him round the ship and brought him at his own insistence back to the poop deck. Then … “All right now, surgeon,” Captain Ross of this ship-of-exile told me. So I went up myself to the poop. Below us, I could hear all the Great Ogre’s retinue settling into their quarters. And I could hear the lovely Countess Bertrand, as Irish as me, calming her three questioning children, and General Bertrand calming her. And Madame d
e Montholon, quieter but as bewildered as she was entitled to be! Until then they had thought they were to be exiled to, at the worst, Scotland. I heard her husband tell her, “Fear not, my darling. I shall write a book on our desert island life and it will make us wealthy.” I should have laughed, but it made me sad – that it was all he had to offer.’

  The table grew wistful.

  ‘Madame de Montholon had a little boy with her, but it was to Fanny Bertrand and her sons, my heart went out, big sturdy whack of a woman as she is. Yes, her father was Irish – did I say that? – name of Dillon. But he lost his literal head years ago, in old Robespierre’s day, after earlier fleeing Ireland because … well, you know why men flee Ireland!’

  ‘To escape embezzlement charges,’ suggested one of the other guests, Mr Ibbetson, a newly arrived military commissary.

  ‘Yes,’ said O’Meara, rushing to get his riposte out of his mouth. ‘Embezzlement that should so frequently be charged against Dublin Castle! There, I uttered sedition and am guilty, milord!’ O’Meara offered his wrists for cuffing. ‘The charge of United Irishman proven! Yet before I go to my death for the Rights of Man and of the Great Ogre, may I finish the story?’

  Permission was granted.

  ‘So onto the poop went I, Mrs O’Meara’s witless son, and saluted the little portly man standing there alone. I reintroduced myself under the new species of being his personal physician. I was aware that this fellow on the poop had tried twice to send armies to bring revolutionary principles to my homeland, and that is no small gesture to my mind. Come now, rally yourselves! No sour English mouths there!’

  He looked around comically – like an inspector – to ensure we were obeying him, and laughter again abounded.

  ‘Says O’Meara,’ as O’Meara told us, ‘“It has been suggested, sire, General, Your Imperial Effulgence, that I might have the honour to be your surgeon on board, and if you choose, on shore.” Says the Effulgence in reply, “Are you a chirurgien-major?” Says I, “I am that very object.” He asked what country I was a native of – was it Scotland? Perhaps the fact that we were speaking Italian at the time might have excused his mistake. I replied that I was from …’