by Tom Keneally
My father said, ‘That is very kind of you, sir,’ but his voice was confused. The blood had come to my mother’s face and my gaze was fixed on her to see how long it remained. I did not like to think of her in any conjugal terms, even by comparison, in relation to the Emperor. Now that the Emperor had unduly elevated my mother to an imperial connubial beauty, what did not embarrass me sickened me.
The Emperor began to look around the table and smile at each one – his way of returning the guests to a more easy state of the kind my father relished, and to encourage the resumption of normal talk. At last I turned my eyes away from my mother – it was too painful to watch her slow accommodation of both the compliment and the distracted profundity it had come from.
So I stared at the Emperor and hoped vengeance was legible on my face. But his eyes reached me neutrally and his smile was mild and then broadened. If he was trying to win me to the proposition of my mother’s beauty, it was a proposition no thirteen-year-old girl wishes to hear: that her mother is the object of some lonely and confused desire. I had by then read two things of Josephine – that her teeth were very bad and her breath rank, and that she had many lovers, and thus was a participant in the game of desire, a game, again, no young girl wishes her mother to take part in.
‘Your present wife, the Empress Marie Louise … she is a handsome woman too,’ my mother bravely said, though the valiant impulse seemed to trip over itself.
‘The most exquisite classic features,’ said the Emperor in French, obviously speaking of his living wife and no longer trying to deflect quality sideways onto any other woman in the room.
In English he said with difficulty, ‘They had not letted Marie Louise to join with me here. Your government has not letted …’
But like everyone on earth I knew the gossip about this and was tempted to get even with him by saying, ‘Would she have come if they had?’
I am pleased on reflection that I did not utter the words. Such a statement would have been a grenade pitched into the middle of the dinner table – the company would not have survived. Besides, my father seemed to have recovered, seeing no peril to his hearth in the Emperor’s compliments.
‘I must say,’ he said, choosing to seem utterly at peace with himself, ‘after such a handsome compliment, you must forgive the boys for calling you Boney. I am afraid they have heard it from their elders, whom I shall not name, and it has become their usage.’
‘Boys?’ asked the Emperor, struggling with the term in English. And then in French he said, ‘Your daughters call me that as well. Well, one daughter does.’
‘Betsy,’ said my mother, happy to fall back into the habitual stance of maternal reproof, feigned or real.
‘You must understand,’ said my father to the Ogre, confident that the commandant or the admiral or one of his daughters would translate, ‘that “Boney” is a usage for your name that we English have raised our children with. Likewise, “Prinny” for the Prince Regent. In the case of “Boney” it is half-affectionate, but a corruption for which I apologise on behalf of all British parents and children.’
The entire table laughed, we were back to normal, and the Emperor redeemed himself by saying, ‘And a pretty child you are, Mr William Balcombe!’
And as everyone laughed I knew that it was true my father still had a schoolboy face, broad and cherub-like and only half-instructed.
The contradictions of the Emperor’s nature …
I had heard many discussions concerning the contradictions of the Emperor’s nature, and these were argued at the heart of our family on the night he mentioned how my mother looked like Josephine. I think my mother was still in a sort of fever about it, the casual way he had landed such a huge burden of resemblance upon her. On the one hand she was mother, a goddess of the home by my lights, but her godhead extending only to the domus, and on the other the supposed copy of a woman who transcended all home, and whom the Emperor had himself presumed to crown in the presence of a Pope, a woman whose name was more than her dutifulness, more than the colour of her hair or eyes, more than the scale of her shoulder measurements, the lengths of limbs.
I believe my mother had begun by finding the comparison a sort of violation, as I wanted her to. But I think that she was contradictorily disturbed by the idea it was something he said to all the wives of all the men who gave him dinner in his fallen state – that it was like passing a coin to them, ennobling them, since he could no longer endow them with titles.
I have said there was a fever in the house. My sister Jane, I think, slept fitfully, teased by the admiration of Gourgaud. In the meantime, I purposefully did not sleep. The Emperor’s thrown-out remark had caused a shadow to fall between my parents, given my father’s fraternal habit of indulgence towards other men. I wanted to hear my parents speak in the shadow of that preposterous comparison the Emperor had made; I wanted to hear the outcome, the argument, or the plain fare of final reconciliation.
There was a panel in our small parlour that I knew, because it was the sort of thing I made sure to know, could be removed from the wall. It had in the past enabled me to secrete myself in a space between the parlour wall and the one adjoining my parents’ bedroom. The panel removed, I left it leaning in place, for I was terrified of the inner cavities on which the island rats had taken a lease. To deal with them I carried an ebony ruler, like the one the Reverend Jones had used. I let my first footfall in the wall cavity be firm, to scatter the beasts, and indeed I barely heard any scurry, as if this were no longer a popular place with them.
I entered, and appreciated the small light from a parlour candle I had lit, and knelt in that musty cavity, ready to brain rodents from whichever side they came at me. I was aware that I must be accurate in doing this – a thud through the walls would not disturb my parents, since they were used to animal activity in the space, but the impact of my bludgeon on stones and wood would certainly cause them to be suspicious and to search.
I attempted to follow the line of their conversation. It was like finding out how the gods spoke amongst themselves when they were not busy directing thunderbolts at our heads. They were talking of a fellow I’d heard a lot of recently – one Duke d’Enghien, of whom I had been utterly ignorant ten days before, and yet whose ghost ran beneath our astonishment at the Ogre and whose name was muttered as an argument against too much awe. To reduce the Emperor to scale before sleeping, d’Enghien had to be invoked.
There had been conspirators against the Emperor, I knew or had heard my parents say – the Chouans, the silent ones, the self-proclaimed Owls, wise and discreet and seeing. In my infancy, and with my country’s money behind them, they had been employed to land in France to kill the Universal Demon. Our prayers and those of the girls of Miss Clarke would have accompanied the Owls had we known what they were engaged in. A man named Georges Cadoudal was a Chouan leader, and he had helped plan an attack on the Ogre on Christmas Eve in 1800 when the Emperor was on his way to the Paris Opera. An explosive apparatus had detonated by the Emperor’s coach, dealing death to dozens in the street but not to Boney himself. But then, four years later, a plot involving a more direct assassination of Bonaparte was in play. The blow would be intimately delivered, by blade as in the killing of Caesar, or by that modern-version blade, the pistol. But the conspirators were arrested after they landed and, it was said, tortured.
At this time a young, urbane Frenchman, the Duke d’Enghien, was living in a German town just seven miles from the French border and receiving a British pension. It seemed that after the Chouans were severely questioned, on the basis of their confessions French soldiers illicitly crossed the border, captured d’Enghien in his house and took him to the fortress of Strasbourg, where a French court martial was held. The story was that the Duke’s grave had already been dug before he faced his judges. In court, d’Enghien was a model of resolution, at least according to the views of our side of the wars. He declared to his questioners and persecutors that he had requested from England a commission
in our army and was told that he would not be given it but should remain on the Rhine where he would shortly have a part to play. He had not yet undertaken that part when the French apprehended him, though he was not ashamed to say to the court that he hoped one day to bear arms against the Ogre’s France. He was sentenced to be shot, this honest saint, an émigré becoming by valour an honorary Englishman.
We had all seen engravings of d’Enghien, his chest stuck out in defiance, standing in a fosse in the torch-lit fortress of Vincennes, looking upwards into the barrels of a firing squad on the morning of his martyrdom.
Now, as my mother raised that name, I could hear her brushing her hair, which was a little wiry, like mine. She chastised it with her brush. She declared, ‘We all forget in his presence what we remember out of it. Don’t we? We remember once we’re away that he had been guilty of that young Duke’s death.’
My father was sighing, presumably with the comfort of getting his boots and breeches off.
‘Well,’ he said, and I could hear a bubble of wine-built wind punctuate his speech, ‘as I’m sure he would have said, it was a court that killed the Duke. Besides, say, my dear, just say that an infernal machine had been exploded near the Prince Regent as he was proceeding to Covent Garden, or that Frenchmen had landed with butcher’s knives to carve him, and say as well …’
‘Say, say,’ repeated my mother. She was angry at his turgid equanimity and wanted him to help her dispel the enchantment by listing the Ogre’s sins. She would rather have had a murderer in the Pavilion than someone who complimented her in such threateningly intimate terms!
‘Well,’ my father said, still equable. ‘Perhaps. But a further question for you! Would you not have applauded any of our valiant soldiers who raided France to capture one of the radical conspirators against our Prinny, to take hold of a man who was a traitor and conspirator self-confessed as well, to bring him back from that foreign place and punish him? And if he, the conspirator, were retrieved to England, would not he be subject not simply to a firing squad but to having his body torn apart by horses? – I mention merely what the treason statute calls for – after being hung from a scaffold first, cut down before he choked, eviscerated then, and his bowels displayed to him while the horses … well … And when those four sections were taken to the four corners of the kingdom, would we not consider that adequate and just treatment?’
‘I would not,’ said my mother, ‘at this stage of human enlightenment, rejoice in the barbarity of rendering a man harmless by having him tugged apart.’
My father sighed again. ‘Oh, I think we would,’ he persisted. ‘And if our prince then called out for clemency and allowed him the sweeter death by firing squad, we would cry, “Oh, clement Prince.”’ There was another little rumble of indigestion. And my father said, as if to himself, ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ And then, ‘All I say is, let us see it from the point of view of matters of state.’
‘There are courts higher than the courts of Europe,’ my mother warned, invoking heaven’s court.
I was both titillated and engrossed by this parental argument. The very fact that they said things not meant for children to hear teased me, and made a strange sensation of pleasurable intrusion swell in my skull and press up against the inside of my forehead.
I know now, and even knew from Gourgaud’s narration then, the thousands – the tens of thousands, the hundreds of them – this little man across the garden had led into vastnesses in Egypt and Russia, and it was curious that he was not condemned as much for that as he was for d’Enghien. My mother did not raise Egypt or Spain, Prussia or Poland or the Steppes. She raised this one slim, fashionable martyr.
I heard my father gasp again as he lowered himself down – a certain recurrent pain in the sternum or else in his foot, or in both, the penance he did for the pleasure he took at table and while he conversed. He drank with naval and maritime men so much, and the navy in particular was well known for its leisurely meals and its circulation of the port and conversation; and the army, I would soon enough notice, were not behind-hand in those same enthusiasms.
I listened to my mother, still upright as I could tell from the timbre of her voice, discuss his costiveness and gout, and then she approached the bed and lay down and, prone, her voice was different. There was a particular piquancy to listening to them speak as they were recumbent.
A dull fellow by the name of Dr Kay was my father’s favourite physician – not so much my mother’s. It was Dr Kay’s theory that kidneys and other offal should not be eaten by a sufferer of the gout, and though my mother thought that rubbish, she obeyed the stricture on the chance that he was right. Though she loved a kidney pie, she dutifully did not have it prepared for meals at The Briars. As already clearly stated, my affable father did not cooperate by renouncing port. On one occasion the Emperor had raised his own little glass of port and toasted my father, ‘Cinq Bouteilles,’ he cried. ‘My friend, Five Bottles Balcombe.’
‘Do you know,’ I heard my mother say, though not too waspishly anymore, seemingly ready for sleep. ‘I believe that, with half of Europe, you, Billy, are infatuated with that fellow! Like half our Whigs, too! Yes, yes, you might have wanted to see him defeated in the end. You might have wanted armies to move against him. But all the time you were enthralled, and you were secretly saddened when he fell, and now that you’ve laid eyes on him, you’ve forgiven him everything!’
My father, yawning, said that he could accommodate both thoughts at once in his head – charm and the fact that the Emperor had been the enemy. These were not contradictory things, he suggested. Did my mother think that it was essential to making war that one side should be considered laudable and wise and the other brutish and lacking in allure?
‘He certainly has allure for you,’ my mother said. ‘Even in Cockburn, too, there’s something that nearly wishes our visitor would escape and run loose again. Because he offers you something that you don’t find in being English.’
‘No, no, my darling,’ my father protested. ‘Everything is available to Englishmen.’ His voice had softened and I heard him kiss her.
My mother muttered, ‘No, I believe that from China to Russia to Spain there are people who pity us for our plainness.’ There was a rustling again, and no conversation occurred, and I was about to vacate my space when I heard her say, ‘There!’, as if to conclude a conversation, and heard her kiss him in return and at that, feeling a sudden warm onset, an amalgam of bewilderment and a sort of disgust, I covered my ears and backed out of my hiding place.
A few evenings after the day of this indecorous dinner, the Emperor himself sent a message that he would welcome a stroll along the route we had taken with Gourgaud. I had seen the Ogre in the morning in his dressing-gown and turban, striding the floor of the Pavilion and dictating to Las Cases, with Emmanuel as reserve amanuensis and clerk. Now, in late afternoon, the Emperor presented himself in his breeches and green coat. Gourgaud was of course close by him.
We went out by the carriageway, where two sentries, the victors of Toulon, presented arms and gawked at the Emperor as he passed. Then we turned left, before the road, onto a rough track that took us past Toby’s sacrosanct garden. As the Emperor looked into the orchard, he told us, ‘I have spoken to your father. I wish to see Toby the slave liberated. I have never seen such slaves as you have here. Aren’t slaves Africans? And Toby is not African. He seems as Malay as that pretty young maid of yours, Alice.’
Pretty maid? How many women was he open to admiring? ‘But many Malays are slaves in Cape Town,’ said Jane earnestly, wanting to clear up unwarranted assumptions.
‘Mention it to your father, as I have already done. That I shall pay the East India Company what they ask and we shall put Toby on a ship as a free man, to return to the Cape.’
‘But who will look after the orchard then?’ I asked the Ogre, given the pronounced appetite for fruit he had shown.
‘His younger assistant might fill that role. Toby has served long enough.’
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‘But you are not a man accustomed to freeing slaves,’ I argued.
‘The Republic freed them,’ he said, ‘And I represented the Republic in its highest form.’
‘But,’ I argued, ‘you sent soldiers to your slave colony in Dominica to defeat the slave army there.’
That, I hoped, punished him adequately for his outburst about my mother. Sadly he was amused. ‘My heaven,’ he said. ‘You have come armed with all the arguments, have you not, Betsy? We sent an army against General l’Ouverture because he refused to ally himself with us, not because his troops were former slaves.’
‘You always have an answer,’ I accused him. ‘You’re always blameless, aren’t you?’
Gourgaud shook his head and Jane gasped. The Ogre said, ‘It is Toby I wish to free in any case, not the entire world of slaves, whom, after all, your government has not been persuaded yet to free. Of course, as they would say, one can make an excellent argument that slavery is one of the conditions of humankind, particularly if one studies certain verses of the Old Testament. But one can also make an even more excellent argument that it is the worst injustice in the world.’
I had failed again, of course, in ambition or instinct which sought to make him lose his temper so thoroughly with me that all would change, and I would never be called on to be an ally, and I would never be teased or tease him back. I did not even want to be treated with the courtliness that was his manner towards Jane. But then I wondered sometimes whether Jane was a person as was I, or a construction of easily learned attitudes and mannerisms.
In any case, I wanted to be free and back to my old self, and I knew now it could only happen if he renounced friendship with me.
By this time, we were beyond the wall of the orchard and the stone-walled pasture with the dairy cattle was seen, dairy cattle from the Cape, since an English Jersey or Guernsey would have found the life difficult and the pasture inadequate. These Cape cattle were, however, hardy, and the omnivorous Ogre quizzed us about them and the incomparable Jane answered in her well-schooled and earnest manner.
