Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  Meanwhile, the Emperor had begun to count to ten, and as he released his hold on me I lashed out at him with my elbows, and then ran across the lawn and up the stairs and entered the Pavilion. I was bewildered. This had been a serious ploy of the Ogre’s. Stealing his sword hadn’t been enough vengeance to balance it. But I could not pursue the younger Las Cases to his room. I ran out of the Pavilion again and up the lawn and into the house, aware at every step of my awful pantaloons. I went to my bedroom, calling on Sarah to help undress me. Later Jane came in.

  ‘Why were you so distressed?’ asked Jane. ‘It was only a bit of byplay.’

  It was as if she had been won over to the imperial side. I could not have explained to her, or even begin to explain to my mother, who came in to speak to me later and to solace me, the nature of my grievance. Nor could I understand my night tears and my sleeplessness, with that childish mark of the young count’s mouth on my cheek and with the itch of vengeance crackling away under my skin.

  In the morning Gourgaud was at the door with a note from the Emperor, a message of apology to my mother, saying that he had perhaps teased me too far, and in reparation he requested the company of Jane and myself that evening to play whist in the Pavilion, until now forbidden to us – though I had broken the prohibition the night before. Even so it was as if he were graciously opening up all his territory to the Balcombe girls. For though the Pavilion belonged to my father, or, more accurately, to the East India Company, it did not seem to do so under this new arrangement.

  I could refuse to go, but my mother kept asking me to explain why I was reluctant. I was unable then to clarify my chagrin. So off I went to the Pavilion, in a strange mood of vigilance and sense of recrimination, and in inner sullenness.

  As we entered, we were warmly greeted by the Ogre himself and by General Gourgaud. Gourgaud was happiest in the evenings, when General Bertrand and the Count de Montholon were down in the valley of Jamestown with their wives at Porteous’s boarding house. I noticed that Las Cases had been seated in a corner and given the job of maturing the cards at a side table, obediently spinning them out of his hand, taking the edge off them until they could be dispensed smoothly.

  ‘My partner will be Jeanne,’ announced the Emperor, ‘because I can depend on her not to impale with a sword.’

  He had already announced that we would play for money – for five francs Napoleons. He said he would have some brought to us if we needed them. But we had had a few of these coins presented to us a year before by a ship’s captain who knew my father, so I brought them out of my locket and plonked them on the table, I suppose, like a fishwife or tavern-owner’s daughter.

  We sat at table – I was teamed with the odious Gourgaud – as Las Cases delivered the cards.

  We were in the strange situation of gambling money which carried my adversary’s profile, a laurel wreath encircling his receding hair, thin in the years of power as it now was in exile. Our bets were placed and the Emperor declared, ‘Very well.’

  Gourgaud and I won the first game, and the Ogre must have considered that adequate reparation to me, for in the second game he began to peep under his cards as they were dealt here, held up his best ones for Jane to see, and distracted Gourgaud and me with small squeaks and moans, and sudden comic movements I did not find funny. They showed, however, that the tit-for-tat games were not done with, since in these situations the child’s play ends only in the emotional collapse of one infant and the chastisement of the other. Yet there was no one to chastise the Ogre.

  Now he revoked – that is, failed to follow suit, despite being able to, which I knew from having counted the cards so earnestly, like the young fool I was.

  I said to him, ‘You have cards in that suit. I know it and so do you.’

  He made the normal banal denials – ‘Me? I am a simple fellow, Betsy.’ He was so delighted with himself that his laughter came nearly to choke him, and amidst it he demanded in a throttled voice that I pay up my Napoleons to Napoleon. At last Cipriani entered and told us that refreshments were ready in the marquee below.

  Las Cases was still sitting at the table, observing the game with all the solemnity as if his master had been negotiating a treaty with the Tsar of Russia. I was sure that he blamed the Emperor’s frivolity on my influence.

  The Ogre sent his servant Ali St Denis to summon young Las Cases from his garret. ‘We can’t leave little Emmanuel out,’ the Ogre told me dolefully. ‘He yearns for his mother, as indeed do I for mine.’

  I was desperate that our reciprocal madness should now end, though I could not yet see how that could be managed. When everyone was gathered, we left the Pavilion and descended the steps towards the marquee. I hung back. I refused the courtly invitation of Las Cases and Gourgaud to precede them, and left the Pavilion sullenly, behind the young Las Cases who, with averted eyes, had invited me to go ahead. Since I would not accept this graciousness, he shrugged briskly and went out himself.

  The pathway down to the lawn level was of flat stones, and for decorative effect slaves had been persuaded to border the descent with the island’s boulders, black and pocked. These cooled lumps of lava channelled us into a descending single file, the Emperor leading, Gourgaud, Las Cases next, then Jane, Emmanuel and me.

  As Jane went, she lightly touched the rocks on either side with outstretched fingers. I now ran down a step and barged into the grey-clothed back of the young count. He fell with his hands out to protect himself, and thus pushed Jane, who collided with the back of the chamberlain, who involuntarily pushed and collided with Gourgaud, and so in that limited defile Gourgaud fell against the Ogre, achieving his normal wish of being as close to the man as possible, while I believed I had now made the conclusive gesture.

  Emmanuel, who had fallen heavily not only against Jane but also against one of the volcanic rocks, righted himself and turned on me and hurled me back against the boulders. Almost at once the boy’s father loomed up behind him, glowering at me. The impact with the rock had expelled all the air from my lungs. I thought breathlessly, I haven’t killed the Ogre but his stupid boy has killed me.

  Getting some air back, and being convinced of my own survival, I called out like someone who had suffered a mortal indignity,

  ‘Oh Boney, this Emmanuel creature has hurt me.’

  The mood of mischief had obviously not worn off the Emperor and he leaped up and climbed the stairs again in his normal agile way, the others, having recovered their balance, making way for him.

  ‘Who did the pushing?’ he asked. And then, his dark eyes not done with sport, he looked at young Las Cases. ‘This brute?’

  ‘It was all an accident,’ I told him. ‘I tripped, and Emmanuel turned on me.’

  He wrapped his arms around the young Las Cases and said, ‘Betsy, you may punish him.’

  And though I knew him somehow a victim too, I began to hit Emmanuel across the face, feeling his flesh like a shock, and then to slap him open-handedly across his body, liking the impact against his clothing better, doing him no harm but immensely damaging his dignity. By the lights from the Pavilion I saw tears on his face, and felt the urge to stop and make an alliance with him against all of them, but yet again swallowed. Behind me I heard Count Las Cases ask the Emperor, ‘Your Majesty?’ He wanted clemency for his boy.

  The Ogre let go and the young count made off to the Pavilion.

  His father came up and asked the Emperor to forgive him, and asked whether he could join his son. Before he left, he turned to me and said in English, ‘You are a disgrace, mademoiselle. My son is in delicate health.’

  I felt something within me break with a snap I was sure could be heard. ‘Am I to blame for your own child?’ I demanded.

  I walked away wordlessly back to the house, wanting them all dead and reduced to ashes, but not as passionately as I desired death for myself. It seemed to me that my life had become impossible since the Ogre had expanded to take up all its cubic volume, and there was no corner in which there was a re
maining habitation for me, merely the bed in which I desired to expire.

  I lay with a hot brow in my bed all that night, and did not sleep, and then lay there through a day in which I did, in a profound slumber, and then through another night, sticking determinedly to unconsciousness. I was confident, however, that I had broken the enchantment. My mother visited me regularly and stroked my brown hair, which I’d inherited from her. I would have been in trouble with her had my mental state, my collapse from the effort of removing my childhood from the Ogre’s, not been so grievous.

  It would be suitably dramatic to say that that night I received the first alarming signs of my womanhood, but it happened in reality a few nights after, and leaning over my bed at dawn, consoling me, my mother said, ‘Now you must start to behave like a woman, and less like a child.’

  She seemed close to being amused. My attempt to push the imperial party down the steps had by then become more a story along the lines of, ‘What a wild thing our Betsy is!’ rather than the scandal it had been on the night. My father also visited me and could be heard discussing my condition in mutters, and reached down to feel my brow with an ineffectual dry hand. My sister Jane brought me a plate of arrowroot, which I did not eat.

  On the second morning, when I lay mute and desolate, by now despairing at my inability to expire, General Gourgaud apparently visited our door with a letter for me from the Emperor.

  ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I protested.

  I stopped my ears as Jane read but of course I heard as well, because I wanted to hear. It was not beyond him to have included the formula to make survival tolerable. ‘My dearest Betzi,’ Jane said. ‘He spells it B-E-T-Z-I!’

  My mother laughed hopefully in the background as if this eccentric spelling might coax me out of my state.

  Jane read, ‘My dearest Betzi, I have gone too far and treated you as if you are a child and not a young woman. When I play with children I become flippant, because I did not have much chance of childhood myself – it was all serious, my father so solemn about Corsican independence and the great Pasquale Paoli, and I not being permitted to do anything but agree with my noble father. But enough of that! I am desolated that I have offended you, and thus hurt your kind parents too, who – with you – have given the exile a more generous home than many would have desired him to have. I ask you to forgive your friend, who has treated you too recklessly and will not make that mistake again. Young Las Cases apologises fluently for pushing you. This letter comes to you with my thanks, esteem and gratitude.’

  Jane studied me in an educative way, as if I were to learn something from her responsive face rather than she from mine. I turned my head, refusing her the illusion.

  ‘It is signed,’ I heard her say, ‘with a large N.’

  My mother said, ‘He apologises to no king, Betsy, but he apologises to you.’

  I was aware that nothing of ease or certainty had come from my playfulness with the Emperor, so I did not seek reconciliation and tolerance. Thus I accused Jane, of course, of caring more about the Ogre than about me. But this was just more of the business of childish retaliation. There were, it seemed suddenly obvious, hopes of adult equality in that sentence, ‘I ask you to forgive your friend …’

  ‘If you want to make a reply,’ suggested Jane, ‘I can transcribe it.’

  And though I had left my infancy, I had not left behind my bluntness, and I dictated to Jane a reply that read, ‘Though indisposed at the moment, Miss Elizabeth Balcombe acknowledges the correspondence she has received and accepts it as a full requital of any pain inflicted on her, and extends her concern for any offence she might have given, but does not choose any further to involve herself at the infantile level which seems to be the one her friend considers suitable for her, but which she does not!’

  ‘Do you really want to say that?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Yes,’ I howled at her.

  ‘But he writes a number of gentle sentences and you give him back a few blunt ones.’

  ‘He can write ornately,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t mean I have to.’

  Jane shook her head but then won me over by smiling, with a kind of gratitude, because I had in a way just proved that I had returned to my normal being. In that second I loved her and more than half-hoped that she would add some further softening sentiment in her own hand, which was very much like mine.

  I had achieved the status of one of the women towards whom he was regretful, and I knew it was time I gave up baiting him and let him get on with writing his account. And once more I put forward his letter as a sign that, being amenable to me, he was following his nature and could not possibly seek any advantage. He could not have, because I had no advantage to extend to him. If he would be simply a man to my woman, that would be enough and all would be well.

  Count Bertrand in uniform and with a sculpted face and the Count de Montholon, often in darker, statesmanly clothes, were frequently at the Pavilion. I was pleased to see them walking on the lawn mournfully discussing matters of the renovations of Longwood with the Ogre. So concerned did they seem that there appeared a chance the Ogre might never have to leave The Briars, an outcome which, despite the contest in which we were joined, and because of it, I would have welcomed. I dreamed that we would nobly vacate our home and be given quarters in town, and that he would stay and be fixed in place by gratitude, avoiding forever the rebuilt and repainted farmhouse at goat-and rat-ridden Longwood.

  In that time, we also had more visits from Fanny and Albine. On arrival they would first pay their respects to the Emperor in the grape arbour or, if it were raining, in the Pavilion. The Countess Bertrand always finished chatting to the Emperor first, and the Countess de Montholon, now a little more visibly with child, stayed at the Pavilion or the arbour longer.

  Madame Bertrand did not seem to mind that she was let go first. Of the French party she seemed the least enchanted, the most at a remove, of all of them. But my mother became more reluctant to have Jane and me at the tea table with the two French women, claiming she could not take us away from our French translation.

  My mother asked Fanny Bertrand on one such occasion, ‘Shall we be fortunate enough to see the Countess de Montholon today?’

  Or Madame Bertrand would give a little blowing of the lips and say in an accent still flavoured by her Irish childhood, ‘God only knows when we’ll enjoy the ultimate honour of Albine’s company.’

  Our soundless desire for elucidation filled the vacant air.

  ‘She lingers with the Emperor, doesn’t she?’ said Fanny Bertrand in that way of saying more than the exact words. ‘Since she is with child, there is little risk, one would think, of an impropriety. But I would still like to see all parties spared the low gossip of the town. The servants visit women down below in the port and spread all manner of guff. Marchand is in love with one of these English girls down there, and visits her. I don’t condemn Marchand. He’s one of the more reliable. But there are plenty of others as well.’

  My mother seemed to be getting a taste for what was said in these taut, crisp, breathy sentences, and I had at such times the painful experience, new to me, of finding her not a goddess but a mere woman at sport amongst women. Yet in a way I loved the example laid before me by Countess Bertrand, because she said what she wanted to say with such openness, her jaw raised and not stifled in a handkerchief.

  ‘Men were crazy about Albine,’ reflected Fanny. The reasons could not be obviously discerned. We knew old Admiral Cockburn liked to spend time in her company in the parlour at Mr Porteous’s boarding house establishment, where they were all crowded in together.

  ‘Of course,’ she said with candid archness, ‘it’s the way you present yourself, isn’t it?’

  I glimpsed through her how crowded life must be down in the cramped rooms of the Portions – Fanny Bertrand and Albine de Montholon on the one sofa, their children confined in the rooms, the husbands at their allotted duties of supervision of Longwood, of dealing with my father, of corresponde
nce with France and within the island, while contemplating the chance that in these narrow walls their alliance might fracture because of the different kinds of men they were, and the different kind of woman each was married to.

  I had taken a deliberate resolve in my new adult life to let the Emperor have, without any mockery from me, his friendship with Madame de Montholon. It was impossible for me to say why their friendship bloomed, but, overlaid with the flavour of the improper, it seemed far easier to tolerate than the frolics he directed my way. I had decided to be solitary now, and broadly tolerant even of the Las Cases, who would notice my new gravity as a woman wise beyond years in her judgement of others, though ever capable of lamenting their limits in a neat sentence.

  One afternoon the Emperor suggested we visit the farming family to which little Miss Robinson belonged. Jane and I were ready for the ride across to Prosperous Plain, looking forward to a diagonal over rough ground, as we both liked. I was to ride plain old Tom, whereas Jane was permitted to ride our mother’s bay mare, which had been brought in by ship. The Emperor’s Arab horse, Mameluke, brown with white markings, had been led down to the carriage gate by Ernest. It was a gelding, for stallions were considered far too flighty for the island’s more precipitous tracks, and generally they were used for breeding. Last of all was the English escort Captain Poppleton’s grey.

  But before the two slave boys could help us into the saddle, the Emperor stopped at the tea table under the trees to see what Lady Bertrand was showing my mother. It happened to be a locket with a miniature painting of her cousin, the dead Empress, the paragon to whom he had with an undue weight compared my mother. Old Huff emerged from one of his intermittent lessons with my brothers and, in his tattered suit, fell to his knees before the Emperor.