by Tom Keneally
The party reined in perhaps twenty paces away from this soiled whiteness, and a black decayed face lying cheek by jowl with the rock at first justified the idea that we had found Ernest. But it was apparent that this version of Ernest wore military pants with a stripe, and one military boot dangled from a leg. The fact was that a soldier had vanished a little time before, something unremarkable amongst soldiers, one or other of whom occasionally went unaccounted for, blown off the cliff-side artillery placements, it was said, like rag dolls.
The Emperor solemnly ordered Gourgaud to ride to Deadwood camp and report the discovery to the colonel. Jane was retching behind one of the tumbled great stones. I wished to join her but for the fact I would not permit myself to do so in the Ogre’s presence.
Gourgaud, as it turned out, did not go far before he met one of the patrols who were still out looking for Ernest. The guards ascended the height above the stone on which the soldier had been more or less impaled and found no boot marks that would have indicated an involuntary fall. Again, the suicide season was invoked, and apparently the poor fellow had been rejected by a yamstock farmer’s daughter so had perhaps yielded to his resultant melancholy.
‘Did you notice,’ Jane asked me after our return, ‘Our Friend was not afraid? He has seen so many soldiers fallen, so he is not afraid of the dead.’
We were both quaking, again, in anticipation of the night. I feared Ernest’s returning by dark and appearing like an impersonation of the dead soldier’s black putrefied face at my window or, worse, as a spectre in his own right.
As the news of the self-destroyed soldier made its way around the island, I was reminded of the Ogre’s earlier story of his sachet of poison carried round the neck against capture by Cossacks. Had he, so practised in thoughts of self-harm, summoned up this supposed suicide season? His grief at Old Huff’s death seemed to do him credit, however, and I had no appetite of accusing him of creating the general ailment.
The next day I asked Alice whether she was afraid of Old Huff. With a deep breath she drew her fine-featured face to sharp definition. ‘We’re afeared of Old Huff surely,’ she told me. ‘But not of that man Ernest.’
‘Why not Ernest?’
‘Ernest is gone,’ she told me, ‘flung into the sea by his own will, just to escape the spirit of Old Huff. The spirit cannot go through water.’ Thus Ernest was not yet a ghost, but a being of the tides and profound currents.
It would have been fashionable for me to be patronising towards this belief about water, but I had sufficient English superstition of my own to cause me to feel dread.
‘Why did Ernest run away though? Everyone’s scared of Old Huff, but we don’t run away.’
‘Old Huff one day tells him,’ said Alice, ‘to get out of here. Ernest find Old Huff stealing the fruit one day and chase him off, and Old Huff turn and say, “You I curse! You, Ernest, I curse.” And then he point at him and speaks in all these tongues, with the voices of dead people, Ernest says. So when Old Huff hang himself, Ernest has nothing else left but run from that thing.’
Mr Lette the farmer and Mr Robinson visited my father at his office and said they would go to Major Hodson to report stolen chickens – not taken by foxes and found as a rummage of feathers and bones, but utterly gone. People were talking about encountering sprinkles of blood, votive or prohibitory, by roadsides. It was believed the African and other slaves had stolen the chickens to perform ceremonies of slaughter that might allay the island’s less tranquil spirits. Or else, I wondered, could it be a living Ernest, dining out?
Now I had begun to talk to Alice about the ghost, she became freer in discussing the subject with me. She told me that she and Sarah and the twin boys, returning one night from the camp on the slope above Jamestown where they’d attended some gathering or ceremony, saw Old Huff’s white ghost flitting at some speed, more lithe than Old Huff had been in life, beyond the crossroads. The farmer Miss Mason who, lacking horses, rode cows, reported vegetables had been dug up from a garden worked by slaves of hers near Deadwood camp.
Town Major Hodson had spoken to a freed African who had a grievance against Ernest, a man who had lost a beloved woman to him, and the hunt was renewed one morning by a squadron of East India Company hussars who had now joined the 53rd, and by my father, simply for recreation, and for similar reasons by Generals Bertrand and Gourgaud. The Emperor, however, found he could not avoid continuing the dictation of his history that morning. Or perhaps, having captured kingdoms, he had no taste for the cruel capture of a single slave.
The aggrieved freed slave led the party up over a stony ridge and into the great bowl in the rock into which the water fell in a thread from the heights. On the side of the slope, unseeable from Jamestown or Deadwood or The Briars, they found a cave, a low lintel of rock shielded by other boulders. The soldiers crowded in towards its entrance.
An officer of the hussars ordered Ernest to emerge or suffer a fusillade of musketry. There was no answer. The infantry fired into the black hole and my father later declared he was sorry he’d come when he heard Ernest scream. But then chicken theft and vegetable theft were despicable things, and slavery was still the order of the world. We had the freedom to choose paths of folly or wisdom, piety or impiousness, departure or remaining. It was a misfortune that the slave did not, one that the East India Company believed must be endured.
Of course I saw nothing of this and heard only my father’s report, but once again there was white on the mountain, the blood-blotted linen in which wounded Ernest was wrapped and, praying in his Malay tongue, taken down to the Castle Terrace at Jamestown to be nursed and punished. If one believed in curses, Huff’s curse at being prevented the plunder of mangoes had operated very powerfully upon Ernest.
The afternoon of Ernest’s capture and removal, the Emperor all at once wanted to ride out and inspect the cave. The idea of a cave in which a man could escape detection at least for a time attracted him. These days I believe the truth of him was that he was a fluid personage, given to depression at one hour, exuberance at another, interested in one soul for an afternoon, indifferent to the destiny of thousands for a day. It was later declared, as I have read, that he kept his populace exhilarated and distracted by this fluidity, and it had not ceased at The Briars. For he was on the lawn calling, ‘Betsy and Mademoiselle Jeanne!’
We had our horses saddled, and off I went, as ever, on Tommy, an animal conveyance pitched somewhere between the Emperor’s Arab, Mameluke, and Miss Mason’s cow. Gourgaud knew the cave we were bound for, and when we neared the ridge that fell away into the crater of the waterfall, we dismounted and he led us down on a stony track to the well-hidden cave. We ducked under the narrow stone lintel. There was a whiff of coolness but also of faint rot.
Enough light entered to let us see how Ernest had heaped clothing together for a bed. There was a can of water still standing in the cave and along the edges of the wall the bones of every animal Ernest had caught or stolen or devoured were laid out like a message, like a precaution, in lines. This script of bones, arranged in order like incisors in the mouth of a phantom brute, would protect Ernest and drive off the ghost of Old Huff. I imagined poor Ernest placing them with care and fear. Having been myself driven by my night fear down the corridor to Jane’s room after Huff’s death, I found an answering trepidation from her. Now, seeing this frantic artefact of fear, I felt a rage sweep up my body with such force that I was tilted forward and in the Emperor’s direction.
‘I blame you for the whole of this,’ I told him. ‘All your playing around with sheets. What may be play to you, sir, is a serious business with the slaves. But as soon as you found you hadn’t killed Huff you couldn’t wait to play hoaxes. And now you want to look at these bones as if they were a curiosity and not of your making. And the blood on the cave floor, the same. You’ve made blood flow on this island like you did in the big world! And you think it’s all funny.’
Gourgaud stepped up towards me. I could smell his souring perfume
and his liquorice breath. ‘Mademoiselle Balcombe, you cannot speak to the Emperor in that way. We have overlooked sins of protocol on your part before, allowing for your having lived since childhood on a barbarous island. But this is too far.’ And he extended a small, bridled-harshened hand as if he were going to remove me from the cave.
The Ogre murmured, ‘You are very cruel, Betsy, very cruel. Would you like to hear your father say this manner of thing to a visitor?’ This time there was no humour in him at all. He asked, ‘Would you like my enemies or gaolers to hear this of me? That I have some magic to make slaves escape? That is what you are as good as saying.’
He and Gourgaud took to their horses and we rode back, with Jane turning towards me with an annoyingly benign inquiry of the kind that suggested I shouldn’t have spoken, or else that their solemnity mystified her.
It seemed that to canvas my accusations against the Emperor, Gourgaud spoke to Count Bertrand about them, and about their potential danger, and Bertrand thought it necessary to walk down to the seafront at Jamestown from the Portions to the Company warehouse where my father’s port office stood.
Having heard Bertrand’s complaint about what I had said to the Emperor, my father rode home in one of his rare ill tempers. He listened willingly to the French; their complaints were infrequent but held a special authority for him. When, red-faced, he rode into the yard, I could see signs that he would direct at me one of his rare spasms of severity. From the table under the trees, I saw his horse taken away. He asked me to leave my book and to come into the house.
In the drawing room he shook me by the shoulders as my mother and Jane entered the room and watched in melancholy. During the shaking, I did not discriminate one of his words from another, any more than one does individual hailstones when a torrent of them hits bare flesh.
‘This girl will not be content until she has driven Our Friend away from here into the hands of his bloody enemies,’ he yelled to the ceiling.
Jane began weeping, and this almost instantly sucked half the fury out of him. Once his rage was pricked, it began to deflate very quickly, and he let go of me and paleness and sweat replaced the ruby hue of his face. My eyes ached with tears but I still retained the power not to yield them up. I would thus always be deprived, by temperament or habit, of the power and sway that weeping represented as an essential item in women’s threadbare arsenal.
‘I don’t believe you understand that he could have been impossibly contemptuous towards us,’ he said as he calmed. ‘That he could have dismissed us! After all the gloire he has known, who are we? An insignificant English family. But he’s indulged you, and when he takes a little sport, you insolently accuse him of the greatest malice.’
I raised a small flag of protest and argued that ‘malice’ was too big a word for what I had accused him of. But that only needled my father again. He saw that I could not surrender even when I was wrong – and especially when I was wrong.
Jane meantime was re-releasing the flow of tears that should have been mine, and they, and the obvious bronchitic harshness of her breathing, washed away the flimsy knoll of certitude on which he stood. Now he fell into self-reproach which was normal with him as his anger declined.
‘But,’ he said with a cooler reason, ‘what was simple impudence when we were just island-dwellers can become a matter of State now that we have this guest – this Phenomenon! This Friend! Imagine if your accusations did reach a British newspaper. God forfend they should, but suppose they did? What would the friends of the Emperor, those good Whigs of England – such as the mythic Lady Holland, Elizabeth Fox, who visited him in the peace of the year when you were born, Betsy, and became a champion of his – say then in his defence? What would the Prince Regent make of the accusation? And from a Balcombe!’
He reflected on these distant possible reverberations, and his thoughts caused a small shudder to move through him and rattle his shoulders.
‘I must impress that on you,’ he mused. ‘Beyond all argument, therefore, I am sending you to the cellar.’
I gave a gasp, a non-theatrical one. I hated the place. I had been put in there once before, with a chamber-pot and water bottle, but only for a day, when the rats were not so active and nor was Old Huff abroad.
‘You will have sewing, a book, a palliasse and pillow. And other comforts. Alice will bring your meals.’
‘For how many days must this happen?’ howled Jane. Better it was she who asked.
‘You know the answer to that. Until the lesson appears to penetrate.’
I abominated the idea of sitting down sewing and waiting for my enemies to appear from hidden places.
‘The cellar belongs to rats,’ I told him, trying to adopt a reasonable tone.
‘Alice will give you a cudgel,’ my father told me.
I emitted in his direction the purest hate. For the modest chiding of a guest, no, a household tenant, for a venial crime of insult, I was to be punished like a person condemned for a crime of state.
‘I am to be the Duke d’Enghien then?’ I challenged him. ‘Abducted and thrown in to a cellar for indefinite spite.’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ he told me.
Jane assured me, ‘There will be no firing squad.’
My mother looked pale and stricken and yet seemed to believe that forces beyond her impelled her to consent.
‘So I will go now,’ I said, determined to choose the hour myself.
My father became uncertain, but then re-gathered his resources of resolution.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, you are to go now.’
I fetched the needlework I was working on from the drawing room, and the book I was reading – thank heavens, Henry Summersett’s fantastical The Wizard and the Sword, and went to the door of the cellar with lacerating dignity. I waited there for Alice to bring a mallet for me to whack rats with. Alice gave him one stare – was she an ally? – before lowering her gaze. She left. And so he unlocked the cellar door onto the musk of rat droppings, ageing port and mould. We descended the stairs and he pointed to a small table and a stool beyond it.
‘There is a chair for you. Now I must do this.’ Then he turned on his heel and, as fast as he could, rushed up the stairs, unimpeded by gout. I heard the door lock. I was in a space hemmed on one side by racks of port and sherry and claret, beyond the first of which I would not venture to go, and the three walls of the cellar in which sat the draped shapes of unloved or unrepaired furniture. The half-window high in the wall behind me would be my chief daytime illumination. I noticed that a ventilator pipe rose from the corner, up through the house and no doubt ultimately through the roof, to dispel the cellar’s miasmas.
Alone now, without antagonists and left purely with the fear of rodents, I began to weep and felt a panicked constriction of the throat. At last I swallowed. It took a time for me to assess from the pallid light through the half-window that there were not many rats visible at the moment and they probably preferred night. I began to work desultorily with my needle, and to ration out the famous Summersett book. Perhaps, if I finished it, there was another one down here, warping with mould in some corner, but I had a fear of treading on living rat fur and I did not dare go looking. I stayed in that clear space where I had elbow room for the mallet in case of attack.
I noticed that when in the afternoon my father came to his small office and library, I could hear all his movements, his laying down of papers, his sitting in a chair, his cough, and the clunk and slide of his boots, all clearly transmitted through the ventilating tube. I held to a hope that my mother might join him and I would again learn something of how parents talked in the absence of their children. It would be delightful if they fought about me. But it did not happen. Soon enough my father left and did not enter the room again that day and evening.
By now I had come to believe penitently that my father’s punishment did have its reason, that his intentions were not fatuous, and that I must be careful. For towards the plump man with the dimpled knuckles
living in the Pavilion and its associated marquee, the simplest gestures of sportiveness or irritation could race across oceans and echo in spectacular rooms with gold-leaf mouldings glinting above the heads of mighty creatures. My actions were no longer dependably obscure from attention. And yet still I was not ready to tell my father I had come to this realisation.
To face the coming evening I had a lamp and two candles, and a pillow and palliasse and blanket to place on top of the table, where I would rest – or not – for the night. I was determined not to be frightened of Old Huff. If I had shown fears, it would have been a sort of surrender to my punishment. But rats were of the temporal world and dread of them dominated me.
Alice brought dinner.
‘I suppose you think my father is kind because he doesn’t starve me,’ I challenged her.
‘Miss, he is kind,’ she said, engaging the use of her startling broad eyes. I had seen her pray in the manner of the Mussulmen, on a mat outside the kitchen, facing north-east across the Atlantic, penetrating Africa diagonally with her supplications, which struck home at last in Arabia.
‘You feel you must say that,’ I called after her.
I burned one candle to extinction while reading and saved the other in case the lamp ran out of oil and I possessed just the one taper by which to see. In my nest on top of the table I fell asleep earlier than I expected and, mallet handle in hand, must have slept for some hours. The night was full of rat-tread when I woke by dwindling lamplight and saw that my table was an island in a trade road of furred vermin. I could see them busy below me, twitching with that ratty inquisition of objects, that perpetual nosing for small verminous advantage. I gripped the mallet and threw it into their midst. There was certainly a squeal, but reinforced by one from me, since the mallet head fell off the handle in flight and disappeared under the wine racks. I was now in a fury. They had given me not only an absurd weapon against the little beasts but one that failed at first use!
