by Tom Keneally
‘Ireland,’ we all shouted, as he had invited us to do by a choir-masterly sweep of both hands.
‘Indeed. And he asked where I had studied my profession.’
‘“In Dublin and London both,” I replied.’
O’Meara’s part-foxy, part-bearlike brown eyes still held mine. I remained the filter and the conduit.
‘“Which of the two is the best school of physic?” the Great Ogre asked me. I told him Dublin was best for anatomy, but London was the better for surgery. He smiled at me with the smile that had captivated Europe but not, of course, our admiral. You will be a captive of that smile too, little Bet.’
My face blazed. I would not let myself be written off as an easily dealt-with child. That was, to too great an extent, the law of my blood.
‘Only if I choose to, Surgeon O’Meara,’ I told him.
‘That’s true,’ cried my father. ‘That’s Betsy. Only if she chooses. Believe me, believe me.’
He’d learned that much. I looked at my father’s large, flushed and very trusting face. It tended to sunburn, but he wore big straw hats on the island and his cheeks were nearly as rosy and untouched by sun as they would have been in England. They shone so genially that he would have excelled anywhere on earth as a host in those days, before doubleness and tripleness in men and women had not become as apparent to him as later they would.
O’Meara continued. ‘“Anyhow,” says the Grand Ogre, “you praise Dublin for anatomy just because you’re an Irishman.” I begged his pardon but insisted I’d said it because it was true, and that there was a reason for Dublin’s anatomical prowess. The poor of the Liberties in Dublin dug up buried bodies for us every night for a living, and there was a queue of disinterers and their wares each morning outside the School of Anatomy at Trinity College. A corpse for dissection could be obtained in Dublin at a quarter of the price you had to pay in London. A case of market price favouring scholarship!’
For some reason the idea of cheap Irish corpses made the entire table break out in merriment. Even I let loose a small stutter of laughter, though I thought the story horrible. But at least now O’Meara dropped the affectation of addressing the story as if entirely to me. He raised his eyes to take in the entire table.
He recounted how the Grand Effulgence had asked him about his service – navy and, before that, it seemed, army, because O’Meara was talking about his time in a regiment of foot in Egypt days. ‘I told him that the officers of the old 62nd messed in a house that had formerly been a stable for his cavalry. He was hugely amused at this. From Egypt we moved onto the topic of bleeding as a remedy, which the Great Ogre considers a laughable English fashion, and soon we were interrupted by Count Bertrand, the grand maréchal of the palace, which at this stage had shrunk down to a number of small cabins on a British seventy-four. And to accommodations no better than mine.’
‘Hmm,’ said my father, turning philosophic, and now all at table seemed to pause, and to reflect on shrunken majesty.
That same night Count Las Cases was invited to the table. He arrived late since he read to his son each evening. Las Cases seemed externally a dry man but when he began to speak in his careful English, he could not be called a bad narrator.
‘Yes, I lived in London for nearly twelve years,’ he explained; the Las Cases were ancestral nobles and thus he’d had to flee the Terror, but ultimately he had renounced the title so he could return to France. ‘Then the revolutionary government gave us an amnesty and back went my wife and I, to make something out of our estates, after the – forgive me – poor quarters we had lived in in London. I know Wapping, I know Shoreditch and I can still smell Thames mud. It was all better than death.’
This was not much of a compliment but in fact the English officers did not seem offended and uttered comradely groans to think that such a fine man had been excluded from his inheritance until the revolutionaries came to their senses and allowed his return. Then it was revealed that he had written while in England a renowned historical and geographical atlas that most of the officers at the table had studied, and that explained the reverence they had shown when he entered. I was now torn between scorn and reverence for him.
‘Then, sir,’ a lean officer named Major Fehrzen politely asked him, with an unmilitary sensibility, ‘your devotion to the Emperor …? It is true, isn’t it, that early in your English exile, you were encouraged to take part with others at the landing of émigrés and British soldiers at Quiberon, by which you hoped to restore the French Monarchy? Yet now the Monarchy is restored, you are here, not with your monarch but with the deposed man, and determined to serve him. I simply wondered …’
‘Because I chose in the end to take my oath to him – to your guest, Mr Balcombe. Yes, when I was an émigré and fled to England, I hated the Revolution and the poverty it had reduced us all to. But being reduced to the masses by the confiscation of my estates, I knew that the Revolution, though brutal … well, I must admit I could see where it arose from. Just the same, I felt that it was right for me to end the Terror some twenty years past, indeed. So, not knowing that the cure already lay in the heart and intentions of an obscure officer named Napoleon, we all set off for Quiberon, that debacle of a landing in which I was involved as a former French naval officer on one of Lord Hawke’s ships. Being of naval background I was able to escape when our troops ashore were encircled. It was a sad business. There were betrayals within.’
They showed an interest in his being a former naval officer, and he said that, yes, as a young officer, he had been considered for the role of assistant astronomer on the expedition of La Perouse, whose ship had been last sighted by the officers of the convict station at Botany Bay, New South Wales, and which had then, on the eve of the revolution they could not have foreseen, disappeared utterly in the South Seas.
It was thus from the mouth of dour Las Cases that I heard the name of one place, Botany Bay, which would appear in my later history.
‘I am the ghost of that expedition,’ said Las Cases. ‘I was chosen but was then serving in the waters off San Domingo. I missed La Perouse’s departure! If I had not, I would have been amongst the dead, and we do not even know whether they were drowned or massacred. So to me it is no hardship to be here, since I am not in that sense entitled to be on the earth. Back in France, I could see the signals of coming savagery and got away to Koblenz and then to your country and thus averted my appointment with the blade. I say this because no more than you, gentlemen, do I believe I am entitled, having made an oath, to abstain from observing it when affairs become difficult. I was his chamberlain when he returned from Elba, and I am his chamberlain still. For he redeemed us from the Terror, and he became a monarch, yes, but one whose reign encompassed the masses. I cannot resign from my undertakings. I do not advance that proposition as if it were one of remarkable virtue. I do so in the awareness that you are fulfilling similar undertakings.’
There was applause after this declaration, and it made Las Cases uncomfortable. He made apologies and rose, saying that he had to attend the Emperor early. He departed in a cloud of general approval. But I still felt there was something too mechanical in him, too dry and inhuman.
No one had asked him why he had insisted on bringing his son into exile.
Two French ladies down in Jamestown …
It became known that the two French ladies down in Jamestown, Albine de Montholon and the Countess Bertrand, were both anxious to meet well-disposed islanders. My mother dispatched a formal and nervous invitation to them at their quarters in the Portions, and acceptance, written in English by Countess Bertrand, came as easily and punctually as if my mother had invited Mrs Solomon or Miss Knipe of Horse Pasture Farm to visit. Even though we were making an attempt at treating the Emperor as a normal person – I certainly deludedly thought that I was doing my best, even though I now see I was overreaching in my impudence as others overreached in their efforts of hospitality – this advance of the two elegant women, whom of course we saw as unanimou
s in intent and fashionable sisterhood, created total ferment amongst us. On the morning of their visit we spent a great deal of vain time having Sarah and Alice set our hair according to instructions, and then resetting it according to our vapid revisions of intent.
Warned that the French women’s barouche was visible topping the saddle out of Jamestown, we were tormented by spasms of inferiority. Mine centred on the English pantaloons I wore, according to custom, not being yet a woman, those satin stovepipes of immaturity in which my legs were encased. At the news of their approach, Jane and I both energetically moved the shoulders of our dresses down, to expose as much throat and collarbone as possible, in a final attempt to answer the invading French elegance.
The French women were helped from their carriage by two young liverymen, French brothers, who had ridden the horses that had dragged the ladies here. I was pleased to see the women wore ordinary bonnets, that they could not, any more than we could, transcend the reality of tropic sunlight. My mother rushed too effusively to the gate, opened by Ernest, and the women entered, the lofty Madame Bertrand in white, and the small, full-bodied Madame de Montholon in a magnificent white bodice intersected with lines of blue, and a dazzling blue sort of reversed apron with a bow falling behind her.
‘Mesdames,’ fluted my mother, ‘bienvenue à chez Balcombe.’
I blushed at this, for my mother was trying to please them, but to an embarrassing degree. Here before these elevated French personages, décolletage looked all-conquering, and my mother’s simpering could not steal any of that away and endow us with it.
‘Mrs Balcombe,’ said Countess Bertrand in English only faintly accented with Irish, ‘I am Fanny Bertrand, and this is Albine de Montholon, and we would seek to be your friends.’ She opened her arms to the sky above The Briars. ‘You look upon two exiles.’
Madame Bertrand’s eyes moistened and she explained what she had said to her smaller companion, who nodded and bowed sagely, and in a form of gratitude took my mother’s hand, and then Jane’s and mine in both of hers, one after another, and declared in French that she was delighted to be in our house.
‘Please,’ said my mother. ‘I don’t know where the Emperor is at the moment – perhaps in the grape arbour, dictating to the Count Las Cases.’
‘Don’t disturb him,’ said Fanny Bertrand, fairly promptly. ‘He is well used to our company.’
The women crossed the lawn and ascended to the verandah, Albine looking around her with genuine interest as if entering a much more elevated habitation. It was hard not to like her for making the effort. She was trying to trim herself, as they all must, to her island. We drank tea in the drawing room, and Albine seemed a model of reticence while Fanny Bertrand discussed with us the fact that the sea voyage had worn her children down – she had seen her sons’ arms, little Henri’s – he was three – and the seven-year-old Napoleon’s arms get thinner, she said. And young Tristan, his arms too. Fanny Bertrand’s five-year-old daughter, Hortense, must have been robust, for she was not included in the lament. To be the mother of boys is to be by nature in a special position, and Madame Bertrand and my mother discussed their sons, their raucousness and charm, at considerable length. Madame de Montholon did not seem to think having a male child was such an enchanting thing and spoke only occasionally, nodding in a seemly way, and contributed a few words on Tristan.
I had until now been taken by the serenity in Madame de Montholon. She glowed with it, and I was of a mind by then to wonder whether such a seamless emanation was reliable or a mere trick. I knew it gave her advantages over the big, plain-boned and frankly passionate Fanny Bertrand.
There came a time when, after various signals by her to her maid, Madame de Montholon needed to withdraw. She disappeared into the house. Suddenly the décolletage front of Madame Bertrand and Madame de Montholon was unexpectedly split.
Madame Bertrand leaned forward, so vast that she seemed to cast a shadow over all three of us Balcombe women.
‘She is enceinte, you know,’ said Madame Bertrand. ‘It doesn’t show yet. She is an adventurous woman, but this time it is certainly her husband, since it was conceived on board, without latitude for adventures.’
Jane and I looked at each other beneath the startled demeanour of our mother. Did women away from the island normally speak like this? Was it a matter of comment if a child was the child of a woman’s husband? Madame Bertrand’s eyes settled on us and she could sense at once that she had created a sensation, at least by our standards. It was clear she was fairly pleased she had.
‘I have to say,’ Madame Bertrand pressed on, ‘that she has taken to this business of exile very bravely. We have been on the road together in France, and then at sea, wracked with anxieties day by day. And then the thunderclap as the gods announced we could not enter England! And then at sea yet again … You know, we never quarrelled, but in all the indignities that usually make women sisterly, we never became close friends of each other either. She is … she is careful. She is very careful in movements, and in what is said.’
‘She is very contained,’ my mother agreed.
Fanny at least lowered her voice. ‘And she has a power over men I cannot understand. She’s such a little rump of a thing. Yet de Montholon went crazy for her, and she’s three years older than him! Her boy Tristan is from an earlier marriage … She came here with a better grace than I. It should make us sisters. But it hasn’t.’
How could we not be grateful for gossip frank in a way island English gossip was not? It was not all gossip, of course. That was the thing. It was open confession as well. About the time of Russia, she said, confident that we knew what ‘the time of Russia’ was, Madame de Montholon’s first husband, a banker, had sought a divorce because she was already living with de Montholon, then in the Duchy of Wurzburg, which is some sort of German principality where de Montholon was the Emperor’s legate. The Emperor had made it known to de Montholon, so said Madame Bertrand, that he didn’t think it was a wise marriage, but when he passed through Wurtzburg on his way to Russia, de Montholon had asked him would it be all right to marry a niece of one President Séguier of the Supreme Court. The Emperor agreed it would be. This was a trick – for the niece was Albine. ‘De Montholon married Albine then, as if it could not wait a day. Such fools we are. Indeed even in Moscow that October, when the Emperor had better things to think of, he wrote very angrily to de Montholon about this trick of his and sacked him from his post. But things would narrow down, and de Montholon, like my husband, would rally to the Emperor in the last days. I don’t want my husband and I ever to become as close as they are to the Emperor, or in the same way, for there’s a sort of pretence in it. The Emperor became the Emperor so that people would not have to go through that sort of slavishness they bring to their behaviour around him. I don’t want us to be an imitation of them or of that fool Gourgaud.’
And then not aware that she had in any way startled us, she threw her head back and became pensive, looking west towards High Knoll, on top of which a garrison, who could scan the entire island and semaphore their observations to Deadwood, had been placed.
‘Third marriage,’ confided Madame Bertrand of her absent friend, drawing her large head back to us and gazing at us one after the other for emphasis. ‘What do you think of her earrings?’
We are to comment? I asked Jane with a look. I had noticed the earrings as I had noticed everything. They were confections of gold and a good-sized pearl was attached to both.
Fanny Bertrand lowered her voice. ‘The Emperor’s gift. He doesn’t give me any gifts, but then I tell him the truth about himself.’
So already it was obvious, the women who had come up here in their fabrics and their shoulder scarves, their bonnets and under their parasols, were not the right and left of the united French line. They were, Jane and I were astounded to find, set against each other by a margin of doubt. In twenty minutes, Fanny Bertrand had given us her map of the divided French entourage. She would continue to supply us e
ver afterwards with amusing supplements. I admit I looked across the garden to the grape arbour, where the Emperor might be, and at the marquee and up to the Pavilion itself, deserted this time of day. It was hard to see how this grand scale of gossip could continue in such confident voice within the shadow of the Emperor. Yet, as she said, she was not afraid of him.
‘Now, I think she’s probably being sick, poor thing.’ Fanny Bertrand said suddenly, as if remembering an oversight, ‘Call me Fanny. Do you Balcombes have any Irish connections? I must say I was charmed on the ship by Surgeon O’Meara, whom I consider my countryman and fellow United Irishman. I think it is there, under the skin – the republican fervour. And the Emperor did send two armies to Ireland, you know – for the great uprising seventeen years back.’
My mother’s eyes widened at this treason talk about Ireland and the United Irishmen. O’Meara had made a joke of it some nights before. But it was no joke to Fanny. I’m sure that is why the Irishman and the Emperor got on well from the start.
Madame de Montholon returned and bowed to my mother. There was a strong whiff of rosewater about her as she approached. My mother and Madame Bertrand got up and made sure her seat was pulled out from the tea table, and Fanny Bertrand was a paragon of sisterhood.
Madame de Montholon nodded her head contentedly, though after all this time of shared change and difficulty she must have known that her co-exile was an artiste at nuance. She turned a half-smile to us, a smile that was like a secret, for it conveyed something Fanny Bertrand, beside her, could not quite see. A smile of complicity, a smile that said, ‘I know you know how much to believe.’
