Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  Yet he was not an evil man, Huff argued. Not in his deep heart. He had imprisoned himself here as a penance, and with his mutilated lips and sucking breath he prayed by our streams and our mountains and rendered the island holy. Fernando Lopez bathed himself in the streams and cleansed himself in a repeated form of christening. Lopez foreshadowed the Emperor, said Huff, as St John the Baptist foreshadowed the Lord. The Emperor, as tormented within as was Lopez, was also confined to this island and had the power to give it, said Huff, a new weight. This latter, prophetic detail barely touched the boys. They had been satisfied by nose-mutilation and were now ready to move on to other arresting tales of that kind. So plain meanings, let alone unspeakable ones, were beyond Tom and Alex, and noise from Huff’s classroom was riotous, and William was distracted by trying to act as a conscientious prefect, as Jane would have done.

  Yet there was for me some mental stimulation in hearing Lopez depicted as St John the Baptist, making straight the way, and holy the streams and mountains. For the One to Come.

  Day for translations …

  So again it was a day for translations. My father had gone to his little library and extracted a copy of Thomas West’s Guide to the Lake District and marked a passage for Jane to translate into French and then allocated another one to me. The passages were never longer than a page, and with ordinary application I could have made a fair rendering in twenty minutes. But it was the application of the perverse soul that failed me. My father had his fixed and simple idea about what was needed of young ladies. He had randomly decided to express all his sense of parental duty into this damned daily exercise.

  As we worked at the table under the tree in the garden – the very ambience should have made me more amenable – my father’s horse was brought to him where he waited by the gate to the carriageway. At this second the Ogre emerged down the rock steps from his breakfast in the Pavilion, in a hurry, bearing down on the table, where he snatched my paper and with a rogue’s smile said he would show my father how much or how little progress I had made. He took the page up to my father and seemed almost to expect shared amusement. He looked at its scatter of ill-framed phrases and dismounted. He advanced on me with the translation in his hand and told me there would be trouble if the exercise was not adequately done by the time he returned from the town. He bowed august thanks and respects to the Emperor, then was helped by Ernest into the saddle, raised his large hat and was gone.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ the Ogre, returning, said to me, ‘I did not expect your father to be so very serious about this. But perhaps he understands we cannot have a young woman of your station in life unable to make a lively translation. You can express lively sentiments to me. Why can’t you simply write down what is there?’

  He then leaned over and murmured, ‘Do not forget your French is better than your Papa’s, so you have that advantage if you simply make it neat.’

  ‘Was it your place to interfere?’ I asked him.

  He made a squeak with his lips and a little shrug, very Gallic, and said, ‘Marchand must shave me now that I have created sufficient disorder.’ And he was gone, fast on his thin legs, his plump feet.

  This intervention by the Emperor summoned up a spritely riposte in me. Suddenly I could work with a will, because I was doing so to defy the Ogre. That afternoon, with the translation done and approved by the Emperor, all the Balcombe children were invited into the marquee to be served some of Pierron’s refreshing ices.

  Without our knowing, Alexander brought his own pack of cards, hoping the Emperor would play snap with him but also unabashed that on the back of each card the Emperor himself was depicted, his head rising upwards and wearing a tricorn, but connected at the neck to another Emperor head, upside down and wearing a Turkish turban. I could not work out the purpose of this device but it was clearly not meant to flatter.

  ‘See, Boney,’ said Alexander, breathless. ‘This is you on the cards.’ To Alex, this made the Emperor a figure of true fame.

  ‘Bony?’ asked the Emperor in mock reproof, and did what had become in a week or two the standard joke of showing his hand to prove that he lacked boniness. I found it a fascinating hand and wanted to be able to hold and study it at length – something that was socially impossible – for it seemed to possess a martial strength and yet was dimpled at the knuckles like the hand of a healthy child of two years.

  I said, ‘I know your hand has held a sword. Yet it’s hard to imagine you wielding such a heavy cavalry weapon as the one you were wearing on the day you first came to the Pavilion.’

  It was a harmless remark by the standards of my normal discourse with the Emperor. But with that Gourgaud drew his sword, the one with which he had attempted to repel the Cape Holstein. Did he think I had insulted the Emperor and now intended to impale me? If so, I would die laughing, for Gourgaud’s steel brought out more whimsy than fear in me. I was once more amazed by this man who had managed to find more than one hundred cannon and put them in place at the frozen Berezina River, and yet had no more idea of how to behave in company than I did.

  ‘It is not about the size of a hand or its form,’ he declared. ‘The sword glides. The sword emerges like a viper.’ And then, inspecting it, he became more absurd still. ‘You see those tarnishes? They are acidity from the blood of men I have impaled.’

  Again, was this meant to be a warning?

  The Emperor laughed, ‘Sheath the thing, Gaspard, for dear God’s sake. By heaven, you really never have lived anywhere except in a barracks or a field camp, have you?’

  This chiding, added to the one given in the field when Gourgaud ridiculously faced the Cape cow, brought the darkness of rejection to his face. We were getting used to this expression. Jane, who was comfortable with him now that he had been reduced to an integer in her life and affections, declared, ‘I doubt it would glide and emerge like a viper for me.’

  ‘Run in behind the screen, and get mine then,’ the Emperor instructed Gourgaud. Gourgaud sheathed his sword and proceeded with a military degree of ceremony behind the screen and came back, with a face hard to read, carrying a long embossed case with a golden ‘B’ on it. He laid the case ceremoniously on the table, and backed away from it as from a bier on which lay the corpse of ambition. The Emperor approached the case, opened it and lifted with two hands a glittering sword in a gold and blue scabbard. I looked again at the tortoiseshell scabbard in his left hand, all studded with golden bees, his plain and subtle symbol. The handle in his right hand was shaped as a gold fleur-de-lis.

  After holding it aloft, he suddenly withdrew the blade from the scabbard, and began flicking it about in his hand and lunging with it as if to satisfy theorems of swordsmanship, and as if the friction of the thing in his hand was like a form of memory.

  ‘It is very heavy, nonetheless, Betsy,’ he said, ceasing to feint, fluidly reversing the sword and passing it handle first towards me.

  I felt that in receiving it I was oafish amongst masters. I was dragged forward by its very weight. In the sweaty fold of my plain hand it was a rich implement, perhaps the most valuable, for symbolism as well as for cash, that had ever entered the island. The gravity of the blade threatened to tear the gold handle out of my hand.

  ‘I do not want to tarnish the handle,’ I said with some awe and in the hope they’d take it from me.

  ‘No, Betsy,’ the Emperor said. ‘You are designed for such implements. Or it is their duty to be designed for you.’

  And so my awe gave way, as he had intended it should. He wanted some gesture from me. I knew what it was: that I would threaten him with this tool of war. He wanted the craziness of such a scene. I took full possession of the handle then. ‘It is a matter of honour, sir,’ I shouted then, ‘that my French translation shall not be mocked!’

  He barked with excited laughter and began to back away as I gestured. I lunged towards him, careful not to strike him but to find empty space with the point of the thing, with which I felt an increasing contact through the haft and st
eel and tip. Even so, given my lack of skill, this was possibly the most dangerous thing I could do. The idea of accidentally impaling the Universal Demon excited me, and him too.

  I saw Gourgaud go for his own sword and have it in his hand, half-drawn, willing to tarnish it with further gore of the Emperor’s enemies.

  ‘No, General Gourgaud,’ yelled the Emperor, and returned to braying with hilarity.

  The measure of excited fear in the Emperor’s voice made me understand it was not merely play with him. It was all to test the terms imposed on him by the island, to see if one of its daughters could be ill-spirited or accidently exact enough to kill him in play and thus render his escape. In the way he laughed was a sort of proposition, an invitation to give him from a risible and friendly hand what hostile hands had never been able to. And, after all, they would not hang me for transfixing the Great Ogre and Universal Demon.

  So in frantic excitement I began to make slashes in the air either side of his body, and then, reaching the limits of my strength, swishes above his head, even while holding on in desperation so that the sword would not fall and harm him. A mere cut, as against a serious penetration, would reduce the scene to inanity. It wasn’t what he was looking for. He was looking for something ultimate, and that was marvellous.

  Not being a knowing participant in the whole gamble, Jane was raging at me in terror at the possibilities of my swordplay. The boys were cheering me on, of course, since they were creatures of mayhem. But with Jane there was the risk she would run and get Father. I was to put the sword away immediately, she screamed. I laughed in a particular manic way that made the Ogre laugh too, and I pointed the point to Gourgaud and yelled in English, ‘Come and take me!’

  And the Emperor still, within easy reach of my sword point – for it was my sword point now – and in the midst of breathless laughter, kept telling Gourgaud to hold his place.

  I was aware of other presences in the room now, a gathering of forces. The Grand Chamberlain, old desiccated Las Cases, had entered with his solemn son. I took an instant to see if they were both as wide-eyed as I wanted them to be, the scholarly chamberlain and his mannequin.

  Jane was still screaming her energetic threats as Las Cases roared with surprising force, ‘Desist, mademoiselle! In the name of all reason, desist!’

  I had become exhausted by now from holding the thing. The madness that had kept the blade horizontal was passing from me. I stepped back and with a great gasp let the blade come down towards the earth, being careful not to dent it against the ground. I managed that by holding the hilt two-handedly. This permitted them to think I could still choose to prosecute further havoc. But then, not looking at the Ogre, and certainly more clumsily than he would have done, I presented the hilt to him.

  ‘Fair exchange, Boney,’ I told him without repentance, and confident that he was the only one who understood what I was talking about.

  The Emperor slowly took the sword and inspected it with love.

  He said, ‘It has not had such a flourishing in a long time, Betsy.’ He passed it unsheathed to Las Cases. ‘Please, Comte, have the blade and handle cleaned. It is so humid on this island, and Betsy so enthusiastic.’

  And then he turned to me with his eyes playful and waved his finger in front of my face as if to get my attention, and reached forward and chose an ear that had happened to have been pierced the day before. He knew it had been pierced too – it had been at his recommendation that my parents let Sarah attend to it. And now he squeezed it.

  Of course, I determined I would not show any pain. I gazed at him. The ear stung but it was less intense than being impaled by Gourgaud, who would have cherished more blood-acid on his blade.

  ‘I can’t believe what I have just seen,’ said Jane in what sounded more like shock than chastisement. ‘General, you must forgive my sister. She is sometimes out of all control.’ She lowered her voice. ‘She’s supposed to be nearly a woman.’

  I heard the soupy, regular piety of her voice and hated her for it.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I suppose that if I were a woman, I would be so much under my own control that I’d let Gourgaud paw my body!’

  She turned away, uttering a few more vapid, terse sentiments. She could not participate at the level of understanding the Ogre and I had reached. The Emperor himself was making reassuring waves of his hand. She did not understand the compact that existed between him and me; that I had particular knowledge of him, and of his impulse to play, fully as children play, inflicting pain as children do, and with the same fierce intent of children.

  Antic regions of the soul …

  The problem was that Jane, aghast and believing herself right, reported the scene to my father. Rare anger suffused his face. I began to argue my case well – or at least I thought so. ‘You don’t know and can’t judge. He wanted me to play with the sword like that. Ask him! Go to him and ask him!’

  My punishment, he prescribed, was to miss the proposed ball at Plantation House, envisaged as a levee of welcome for the Ogre. But even that did not stick in the end since Napoleon talked him round. The matter of the ball, however, would provide further asinine exchanges between the Emperor and me. If the reader believes that I am making some special claim over the antic regions of the Emperor’s soul, then be assured that is precisely what I am doing. I was utterly convinced I was the playmate from the childhood he had never had and which he now possessed the time to pursue. My father’s connection with him would be a far more substantial one in many ways, based on serious arrangements, and bearing serious consequences. And his connection to my mother … Well, that will be told.

  Nor did the madness between us end with the incident of the sword. One day we had the Count Las Cases and Emmanuel to tea, along with the Emperor, Pierron having provided the cakes even to our household and the Balcombes merely the china tea. I suggested a game of hide-and-seek, since that seemed best designed to discomfort the count, and the Emperor instantly agreed to it. There was no consultation with his chamberlain. There was no claim that he needed to get on with his history. As yet, it was rumoured, he lacked all the reference books that he required, and the bound Bulletins of the Imperial Army that would be of great guidance and act as an accelerator of the work, were still on their way to him. Thus if he might not in the future have time for us, the limitations of the library gave him the leisure now to play yet another child’s game.

  Later I would hear it argued, and above all see it written, that on the island the Emperor used his natural ease with other human beings as a means of gaining allies who could then plead his case in England, France and Austria. But what power did young Thomas, Will and Alexander have to speak for him before those high potentates? The truth was that a great deal of his ally-making was as natural to him as his own breath, and his power to win souls over had no higher purpose when they were the souls of children or slaves or servants or householders, none of whom had any management of the gales of opinion which swept the earth.

  ‘Come join us, Emmanuel,’ he called to Las Cases’ son, and the boy rose and did his best to be enthusiastic, ever desiring to be a good playmate.

  The Emperor began to count loudly to allow us to scatter, and I saw as I ran for the back of the grape arbour that Emmanuel looked around as if he lacked the capacity to conceal himself. At last he simply descended to his knees and crawled under the table on which we had had tea, where his best protection was the neutral face his father directed at the abandoned tea and cakes.

  It struck me that poor Emmanuel was no more to blame for his inability to play than the tone-deaf are for theirs to carry a song. An impulse to educate him in the automatic rituals of children rose in me as an urgent task, given his condition as a born adult and the competing fact that each morning now my mother quizzed me about whether anything had flowed from my body to signal that my childhood was over.

  But with the cruelty of my years and my uncertainty about what a friendship with a boy his age would mean, I decided in the end
not to give him the slightest merciful training in childhood. The Emperor, however, had plans to supply the lack. When he found me behind one of the maples he held me by the wrist and called to Emmanuel Las Cases, who crawled out from under the tea table like a summoned orderly, and at a nod from his father, ran to where we were.

  When he arrived, the Emperor demanded, ‘Kiss this young woman, Emmanuel. She is shy and pretends a lack of interest in you, my young count, even to the extent of feigned enmity.’

  I could think of nothing more obscene and struggled in his grasp, but he was determined to have it as a game. That was fine for him. It was an outrage for me. And with the heat of being so held, I felt at the same time the heat of rejection, in being defined as the object of kisses from a boy who had never known the gifts of childhood, when I had thought that I was somehow a freestanding votary of the Ogre himself, a votary who showed my devotion by repeated mischief. And now it was a child summoned to kiss me!

  The Emperor’s laughter filled the garden and as I struggled, I could smell his particular sweat, and the amalgam it made with his perfume water. I saw his teeth, darkened with liquorice, as he kept roaring in command and hilarity for pathetic young Las Cases, and in the end the strange boy did step forward and I could smell that he had had peppermint, and he lunged and laid his lips against my cheek, making a little squeak to go with it, and only to please his Emperor. The ninny was doing it like the Imperial Guards charging a redoubt, and his dutifulness made it all worse.

  I felt a sense of outrage once the kiss had been consummated and I heard the Emperor hooting, while I choked on the bile of this cruelty disguised as play.

  ‘Quick, Emmanuel, run,’ cried the Emperor. ‘Run, my boy!’

  The younger Las Cases’ face was flaming unattractively now. The Ogre pretended he was on the verge of losing hold of me. Whether he knew it or not, he had inflicted a scalding memory on both of us, and now the young count did turn and fled, taking to the steps, into the door of the Pavilion and up the ladder to his room, where he knew I was not permitted to enter.