by Tom Keneally
The Emperor took his hat off to Old Huff and called with more concern than amusement, ‘Oh, not again, dear Huff. Not again.’ But he was not easily distracted from the miniature, from the transactions of memory and longing, mourning and justification. The vanished Josephine, the divorced one. She had got a cold one evening while showing the lilacs and the roses at her house at Malmaison to the Russian Emperor, while the Ogre was in Elba. But she was not dead as ordinary women died. She was immortal. How could she be compared, and how comprehended?
So he ignored Huff for a while and murmured to Madame Bertrand, ‘Fanny, do you see a chance that you would let me keep this?’
I could see she was reluctant to surrender the object yet also felt she should, and before she left that day she would hand the miniature into the Emperor’s possession, and he would hang it by its black ribbon by a nail above the mantelpiece in the Pavilion, at a point to which he would often direct visitors’ attention.
‘Please rise up, Mr Huff. The Emperor does not like such displays,’ I meantime called, as the transaction proceeded between Fanny and the Emperor. It was still some seconds before the Ogre actually kissed Madame Bertrand’s hand as a sign that he had accepted the little treasure from her, and gazed on it and closed it and raised his eyes and saw that, indeed, Huff was kneeling still, leaning into a breeze, trembling.
The Emperor rose from his chair and walked towards the old tutor. ‘Sir,’ he said with a gentle breathiness, and in French, which Huff understood. ‘I believe you have been a student in one of the great universities.’
‘At Cambridge, my Emperor,’ Huff answered in a brisk but reverent French.
‘Ah. And you enjoyed reading the English radicals? John Wilkes and others?’
‘And Tom Payne,’ said Huff. ‘A great Englishman, an immortal American, and a friend of France.’
‘And you must know from Tom Payne that an enlightened man does not kneel to any other of his kind.’
Huff protested, in perhaps too loud a voice, ‘But to an incarnation, sir! One kneels to an incarnation.’
‘You are clearly mistaken in that, my dear friend, for I am an incarnation of nothing but myself. Besides that, your government does not want you to kneel to me, and might consider it a crime on your part and a further reason for punishment of me!’
‘Let them consider it such!’ Huff affirmed in a cracked throaty voice. ‘I have had revealed to me a divine intention that I should be your liberator. You must be spirited from this garden of exile. That is the judgement of the gods. For this is an island of murderous airs.’
‘For God’s sake, no, Mr Huff,’ the Emperor murmured. ‘You make things hard for me by such utterances. The revelation you tell me of is not reliable. Austria and France and England have not concluded terms yet and may well be my liberators themselves, and thus you need not fuss. Then you and I might well live together in your homeland, as gentlemen, under English heavens.’
‘English heavens are not kind,’ Huff asserted. ‘They are pitiless.’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘I am not permitted to return. I was considered to be intemperate in the past. Nor do I see that you will be permitted either. Hence, you must be rescued, and the Lord, the Master of the Universe, the God of all Reason, has appointed the matter to me. This is the meaning of my life, of my being caged here all these years. It is the reason I was permitted in my youth to disgrace myself. This was a divine mechanism to bring me to your presence. To ensure, indeed, that I was in position to rescue you.’
The Emperor had grasped Huff’s hands and was trying to raise him before Poppleton and the guards who stalked the edge of the property saw this excessive veneration.
‘I think that is not the case, Mr Huff,’ said the Ogre. ‘And we are all a disgrace in our youths. It is our fault. It is not a divine plan.’
‘No, no!’ said Huff. ‘It is all of divinity! For not all of us consume Italy in our youths. Only you!’ He lowered his voice and brought some frayed pages of paper from his breast pocket. ‘I have already studied the arrival and departure of commercial ships.’
Next he pulled from the other side pocket a page on which a map had been clearly drawn. ‘I have made a note of lookouts and batteries, including the one above the waterfall. They expect us to leave by Sandy Bay, but I am pondering unexpected points of escape. I must say it is all a great weariness to my mind, but it is demanded of me even though far beyond my strength.’
‘Please, no, sir,’ said the Emperor, pushing the map and the pages back into Old Huff’s coat. ‘You see that Miss Betsy has overheard this, and Miss Jane, as has Madame Bertrand. The Balcombes are honest English girls and would be forced by duty to inform the admiral and the government of Britain of what they have heard. And young Captain Poppleton may overhear you too. So, you must understand, your plans are uncalled for and cannot succeed.’
As if by summons, a red-faced young Poppleton appeared on the verandah then. ‘Yes, yes, Captain Poppleton,’ the Emperor called to him. ‘I know you must report these manifestations. Don’t feel awkward about that. But report my refusal to accept Mr Huff’s veneration as well. And leave him untouched, as any man of decent sense would, for he is well-meaning and he is …’
The Emperor made a waving gesture with his hand. Then he tugged Huff upright, and Huff rose in a sort of obedience, waved his head about, put it close to the Emperor’s ear and whispered something, something that he clearly believed would act as a revelation. After that, he grabbed the Emperor’s hand and left a kiss on its dimpled plumpness. At last he left, reached the gate, turned back and raised just one finger to wave it solemnly back and forward like a conjurer, something meant to be of significance to the Emperor alone. Then he opened the carriageway gate and sloped off down the shadowy carriageway.
The Emperor turned back to Poppleton. ‘You must do what you can to ensure they treat him lightly or not at all.’
Poppleton saluted the Emperor. ‘Do you intend we should ride, General?’ he asked.
And so we rode south, Gourgaud with us too, past the foothills of Diana’s Peak, flags fluttering atop it to signal the Emperor’s expedition to the chief posts of the island. We passed through green country and a ravine into a land of stone fences and cacti. Finally we came to the stony farm of Mr Robinson, its fields occupied at this hour of the day only by a scarecrow. A mastiff sat before the daub and wattle farmhouse under its shingle roof. Poppleton knocked on the door and Mr Robinson emerged, tall and barefoot and dressed in canvas.
‘There be the rail, Your Gentles, for tetherin’ your horses,’ he genially called. ‘You are right welcome to come into the house if the honour of your enterin’ be mine!’
He knew who was visiting him. He was trying his best to be urbane. Somewhere in the farmhouse or outbuildings was Mrs Robinson, the handsome mulatto, and her daughters. Mr Robinson nodded us inside to a spacious dark area in which stood a table, with a sand-soaped smell as if Mrs Robinson were a very particular woman. The man of the house suggested that the Emperor and his party each should take a seat and offered them wine.
‘You have wine?’ the Emperor asked him.
‘Not the finest, Your Worship. But from the Cape.’
The Emperor said to me, ‘If we are not depriving him of it, Betsy, tell him we would like a glass of the Cape wine.’
I told Mr Robinson, and that Jane and I would abstain. He fetched a bottle from a dresser and pulled the cork and poured a claret into three tin cups, which he handed one each to the Emperor, Captain Poppleton and General Gourgaud. The Emperor gave his cup the honour of a serious sniff and looked around the room with his usual curiosity. This was why men had loved him, I understood: his curiosity was undiscriminating; he brought it to every human, and every habitation.
The Emperor asked me to request of Mr Robinson whether he had a wife. I did so though I knew the answer.
‘Yes, and may it please you, Sir Emperor.’
‘And I met your little girl,’ said the Emperor. ‘She was alarmed
at first and I was reduced to reassuring her.’
‘My daughter said you were jolly, sir.’
The word jolly confused him because of its clash with joli. ‘I don’t think joli,’ said the Emperor with a mock frown and then that harsh laugh of his, and Mr Robinson did not try to pursue the subject.
‘How much land do you have?’ asked the Emperor then, leaning forward. Again he was interested in such facts.
‘A hundred acres.’
‘All of good farming?’
‘Sir Emperor, not one half of it, but things are on an improvement.’
Now Anna, the girl the Emperor had terrified in our garden, emerged through a door and she led by the hand her mother, who was somewhat hollowed and much wrinkled by the labours she shared with her husband. The little girl brought the farm wife straight up to the Emperor, who stood and bowed.
‘Madame,’ he said, ‘I am question this husband yours. And now I go beyond English. Miss Balcombe, give me help.’
I saw that the girl, a worldling now by comparison with her parents, beamed up at him, and he said, ‘Young mademoiselle, in case of terror, this gift I brought.’
He reached inside his green chasseur’s coat and withdrew a napkin tied into a bundle, which he now undid on the table to reveal four sugar plums. ‘I fear I did not bring six,’ he told her.
Like my brothers, who had frequently been treated to sugar plums, Miss Robinson was captivated for life. The Emperor had a chair drawn up by Gourgaud, and the Robinson girl sat on it by his side. Jane and I again took the translation of the questions he had for Mr Robinson, as if his dynasty was to be recorded in a gazetteer. The Emperor wanted to know, did the land bring Mr Robinson much profit then, if it was not half arable?
‘Why, Sir Emperor, you know we cannot grow corn on this island, what with the soil and the goats, and it is hard enough to grow vegetables. But that we do, and before you came, our vegetables would have a ready market only now and then.’
‘Now,’ murmured Mrs Robinson, nodding, ‘and then.’
Her little girl kept smiling up at the Emperor and looked like someone else’s child, for Mrs Robinson kept her children dressed well, if roughly, by her own needlework. I had heard she poured much of the profit of the farm into her ambitions for them. Even her calico skirt had a grace to it.
Mr Robinson continued, ‘Generally we had to wait and pray for the coming of a ship or blessedly a convoy before the vegetables rotted. They would often all spoil before the ships arrived. But now! Now, Sir General, we sell our goods every time we want to. This is what you have brought us!’
There was nothing like improved vegetable prices to make an Englishman into a true admirer of the French republican-imperial system. (Boney, as my father with tender whimsy said, having become Emperor merely to save the republic.)
The Ogre turned to Jane and me. ‘Tell him I am delighted to have been a boon to the economy, and to that extent I am gratified. But ask him where his other children are.’
When we did, Mr Robinson declared, ‘Dang it and please you, Sir Emperor.’ He was getting used to discoursing and his quick intake of wine had made him less stiff. ‘Two of the boys have gone for sailors, but for the rest, I believe they have all run out and hid on us. Except the little un, who knows you.’
‘Send for them,’ said the Emperor through Jane, ‘and let me be introduced. Pray, have you some good water to go with the wine? And shouldn’t you fill your own cup again?’
But first Mr Robinson had to continue to praise the Emperor for making things so good.
‘So good, so good,’ repeated Mrs Robinson, nodding. She forced the words through her remaining teeth.
Jane earnestly said, ‘Your Majesty, I wanted to point out to Mr Robinson that our father was an honest fellow, but he could only buy from farmers when ships arrived and said what they needed. And so no one ever looked out more anxiously for a ship of any kind – slave, store, navy – as did he.’
‘Indeed,’ said both the Robinsons, nodding in chorus. ‘Honest fellow. Yes, honest fellow.’
I wondered when Mrs Robinson had resembled her daughter, but the one who had not yet been sighted and who was a great beauty of the island.
At last little Anna was sent to find this fabled daughter in one of the farm’s outhouses, and eventually led her back, a glorious young auburn-haired woman, as I knew her to be and took a pride in, wearing a plain dress of calico. She was green-eyed but there was a wondrous lustre to her eyes and hair.
The Emperor, Gourgaud and Poppleton stood up as she entered. The longing and infantile desire of Gourgaud was in the air of the kitchen, almost like an unpleasant aroma, the smell of spoiled fruit. The Emperor too was stunned with a somehow more honest brand of longing, having – or at least I believed this – something more of substance and persistence and respect than Gourgaud’s avid canine hunger. But like all girls of my age, I still had my education in the fickleness of male attention ahead of me. I knew that Captain Edwards, the young master of a cargo vessel named Chloe, had sat at our table six months before, praising Florence Robinson at length. By the time he left the island – aboard his ship trading with the Cape – there was thought to be some form of understanding between himself and the Robinsons. But how could the captain of a merchant vessel stand up against the radiance of a world-changing man?
I would later interpret what charmed the Emperor that afternoon. The French, for all their stress on ton and fashion, were demented also about the unspoiled pastoral girl, untouched by the blemish of the city or by the paint of the salon, the one with the rustic glow of honest suns in her face, whose teeth gleamed with enough vigour to make up for the toothlessness of her parents. If the Emperor had a picture framed in his head with the title, ‘Bucolic Beauty’, the goddess of Thermidor, Florence Robinson stepped in to fill it with her glory.
That glow of suns is what Miss Robinson possessed, and the Emperor said in French, as if for our party’s attention, ‘Cette femme – c’est vraiment La Nymphe.’ This is truly the Nymph! The Nymph like The Briars.
She made a little bob of the knee, but it struck me it was a more knowing one than a sprite of landscape should be up to. She had an instinct at how she had affected these celibate men. ‘Does Mademoiselle Robinson work with her father and mother in the fields?’ the Emperor asked through the plain Balcombe girls. The idea of her as a barefooted goddess with a basket of harvested fruits on her hip no doubt appealed to him, though the effect was a little spoiled by the fact that she had a sort of shoe, made of canvas uppers and a leather sole.
‘She is a seamstress, Sir General,’ said her father, beaming. ‘She makes the dresses for weddings and parties. Things have turned better for her now too.’
‘Admiral Cockburn is having a ball for you, sir,’ said Miss Robinson with a soft directness. ‘At Plantation House.’
‘I am afraid I shall not be attending,’ said the Emperor in French, ‘since Admiral Cockburn will not address me in the proper manner. But I hope that does not influence your trade in dresses, so let us keep my intentions a secret.’
He smiled while Jane translated for him. The Emperor raised one of his plump fingers. With that soft instrument he had directed corps and armies, and was also willing to contract a seamstress.
‘Ask Miss Robinson, would you, Mademoiselle Jane, whether she would make a ball dress for young Betsy here? Bets will need something more elegant than pantaloons, for she has achieved a height which brings her to the level of my ear.’
Jane was about to ask the question but I told the Emperor in French, ‘I have not been invited to the gala. And my father has told me in any case I cannot take up such invitations until I am a year older.’
‘I shall speak to your father,’ the Emperor told me, but he was very quick to turn back to his goddess of the day and lay his ardent eyes on her. ‘Ask Miss Robinson that if I or the Countess Bertrand brings her the material, could you make our Betsy something that will arrest the eyes? For she is a beautifu
l girl.’
Being fifteen, Jane already possessed a ball gown, and was in any case not an envious girl. She had no hesitation translating. Then she murmured to the Emperor, ‘I don’t know if my father will relent.’
But she was amused and far from appalled by the course the Emperor was taking. To her it was all great entertainment and she saw no traps in it.
The Emperor said, ‘If he listens to anyone on the question of our Betsy, he will listen to me.’
‘Am I back to being spoken of as a child?’ I asked them in French. ‘In my own presence?’
All four Robinsons in the room were greatly impressed by our conversation but were beginning to seem lost.
‘Oh, dear Betsy,’ exclaimed the Emperor. ‘I am spoken of in the third person all the time. Do not take it as an offence.’
‘You wish going to ball,’ he then asked in English. ‘It is not?’
I spent time on the proposition and suddenly he laughed and said to Jane in French, ‘Yes, our Betsy wants to go to the ball.’
And thus I was the pretext for the Ogre to confer with La Nymphe, Florence Robinson, who was contracted to make me a dress. I knew I was a convenient dupe and yet for once it generally pleased me.
The next day the Ogre lunched with my father and other gentlemen, and my father called me in and told me in front of the Emperor that due to the intercession of my great patron I could attend the Plantation House ball.
Blurred by port, he told me, ‘The dress will be long.’
‘Am I to have a true gown?’ I asked the Emperor. ‘I would like something high-waisted and white. A woman’s ball dress, with red roses at the bodice and on the skirt.’
‘Ah,’ said the Emperor and his laugh seemed level, with no malice in it, no barb. ‘I shall have Madame Bertrand assemble the elements and we shall deliver them to the Nymphe.’
So the Ogre and Madame Bertrand would ride out there with Gourgaud and Poppleton, and leave the gentlemen waiting outside as he and Fanny Bertrand discussed my dress with Miss Robinson, Fanny Bertrand being the translator.
