Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  This rage was of assistance. It impelled me to jump to the floor, with my feet surrounded by pestilential squealers, my bare flesh meeting the unspeakable pelts as I broke the siege and reached the wine rack, where I set myself lustily to demonstrate to my father that I would not be left in dim places infested by living demons with negligent weapons. So I hauled his wine bottles, one after another, from the racks and hurled them at the floor where they shattered and drenched the rats in vintages and sherry. The noise would have filled my father’s small library upstairs but, sadly, would not penetrate to other rooms. I must have thrown a dozen or more before the furore of glass-splintered and claret- or port-sodden creatures died, and heavy, part-sweet, part-tannin air pleasantly filled the room. I trod tenderly, suffering only small cuts to my feet, back to the table and my bedclothes. I wiped my bloodied, sticky feet with a towel and, elated but spent from my warfare, and my awe at the damage I’d done, I lay down. I dreamed of achieving grandeur through spurned fatherly tenderness and discipline.

  I woke in pinkish dawn from the cellar half-window. The rats were quiescent. Sarah entered and began at once to repair the condition of the floor in silence. She brought everything she needed for cleaning up, and a new dress for me. I had wanted her to rush out a report to my father of the destruction of bottles. But she did not want him to know, and cleared up as I harangued her. I saw her push three dead rats into a corner. ‘Go and tell him, Sarah, go and tell him!’

  She fetched me new stockings and shoes, bathed the cuts in my feet, emptied and returned my chamber-pot and brought me a new mallet which she tested against the surface of the table. She took away the lamp to fill with oil.

  I sat at the table with a sense that I had cowed the rats, returned to my book and revelled in it, enforced in confidence by my survival of the night. It was mid-morning when I looked up with a shock to see the Ogre’s visage, bent sideways, looking in from the cellar window. He must have been on his hands and knees, or even flat to the ground beyond the window, and there were briars around his face, though he did not seem to have been scratched.

  ‘Bet-see!’ he called, so that I could hear him through the glass. I left my book on the chair, arranged my needlework – he need not think me anxious to rush to him – and strolled towards the half-window, looking up to it.

  ‘Why do you hide in the cellar?’ he called.

  ‘I don’t hide. I was placed here. Because I endangered you.’

  ‘Endangered me? You?’

  He seemed oblivious to the possibilities my father had made so much of.

  ‘I thought you wanted this. Your General Gourgaud certainly did.’

  ‘Do we want a pretty girl locked in a cellar? I think not.’

  For some reason the stubborn tears arrived now and the flood began, and I despised myself.

  ‘I am a prisoner,’ he called. ‘And now you are a prisoner. That’s why we are a pair, Betsy! Now, don’t cry!’

  ‘But you have cried. I’ve seen you.’

  ‘I have cried – that is true. But you are sure to escape and I am not.’

  As I remember him lying sideways amongst the briars, beside The Briars, let me from my distance of time yet again pour scorn on those who thought all he did was to extend witnessed charm as a plan to procure freedom. There were no witnesses to where he then lay gaping in at me, a fat little man with large, volatile eyes.

  ‘Betsy, I see your needlework. Very nice. But I do not think you are a needlework girl.’

  ‘I don’t pretend to be,’ I confessed.

  ‘I must see your good father. A more decent and temperate fellow there cannot be! But with you he does too much on my behalf. I will go and speak to him.’

  ‘Brush yourself down first,’ I ordered him.

  And now he struggled upwards and I could see by the window how he had soiled his silk hose, and the knees of his breeches, while lying on the ground to talk to me. That’s his concern, I thought.

  With such an eminent advocate, I sat enjoying the grimmest sense of self-justification and sewed away, plunging the needle with a fury. Within an hour he was back, kneeling again at the half-window.

  ‘I tried to persuade him, Betsy,’ he roared in through the glass panes. ‘And I think he will yield. But he argued that his welfare is at risk too. He may pursue this affair for another little while, but he is a tender-hearted man …’

  ‘Everyone says it. But I’m the proof he’s not!’

  I saw that doleful face and those remarkable Italian eyes which had gazed into men’s souls and infused them with some unutterable concept more important than their blood and their lives and thought of their own offspring.

  ‘I don’t care if I have to stay here forever,’ I told him, totally dry-eyed now.

  ‘My brave creature,’ he said. ‘But it will not be required. Your father is of a soul to let all people go.’

  My father remained contrary to his soul, however, all that day. At dusk the lamp and the dinner arrived, and as I ate, thinking of myself in appropriately pathetic terms, I assured myself that this would be my habitation, amongst the abounding rats, forever, and the rats and my family would both pay. My kin would beg me to come up to their level of the house and I would spurn them. I would break and devastate my father’s bottles before he could empty them. I would become an island legend, the pale girl in the cellar. People would deal vengefully with my heartless father.

  He opened the cellar door and came down the stairs as I finished dinner. He stood before me. The smell of his slaughtered wine had not disappeared from the space around but he did not choose to notice. He adopted sage and severe airs.

  ‘Do you know to be careful now, miss?’ he asked.

  ‘I am willing to spend more time down here to discover it more fully,’ I told him. ‘And to smash bottles of your wine on the heads of the rats whenever the beasts attack me.’

  ‘You see,’ he complained, ‘you always exact a price. You never bend your stiff neck. Do you think God is amused by your style of obduracy? Where does it come from? It is not a thing of our family!’

  ‘It is a thing of me,’ I boasted. ‘But I know how to be careful. The Emperor is a man, you are a man. I do not want to harm either of you unless forced beyond toleration.’

  ‘Forced beyond …? My Holy Christ. You’re rich, Betsy!’ He took thought. ‘I suppose such a statement from you is, after all, a small miracle!’ said my father, his eyes widening. ‘And it is not only the Emperor and I who must be treated well. You must live too. You must live for many, many years. You must live in the shadow of this great thing that has befallen us. You must live on when Our Great Friend is vanished, when I am vanished, when the island is behind you. But these events will never leave you!’

  I stood with a level determination, which he read as consent – and a form of consent it certainly was. On balance now I decided that there were conveniences associated with being reconciled rather than locked away. There was as well pus in one of my cuts and I wanted my mother to see and be reproached by it. And it was apparent that my father both knew of the ruin of wine and had not chosen to pursue it.

  ‘Come upstairs and see your mother and Jane and the boys.’

  And so I emerged free and changed, chastised and intractable.

  And back now to the full status of riding with the Emperor to visit the lovely yamstock Miss Robinson, La Nymphe. On our next journey there we encountered on the road Miss Polly Mason, less well mounted than us but in her way a grandee of the island. She lived beyond Prosperous Plain in a good and elegant house her loving father had begun to build, and which, when she was orphaned, while still a young woman capable of intimidating island carpenters, she had finished.

  There grew in her quarter of the island lovely groves of ferns, and avenues of pines, and clumps of gumwoods and it had lately been rumoured that she had offered her house to the admiral as a place for the Emperor, and it might indeed have been a better place than the proposed Longwood. Though she had few visitors, t
hose who had seen inside her house, including Mr Solomon the merchant from Jamestown, said it was full of sturdy furniture, Dutch-styled from the Cape. But her stable of horses had died off and she had not replenished it, so in a faded and unpretentious calico dress and canvas shoes she rode one of her dairy cattle across the island without a saddle. Astride her cow, her short legs, as modestly skirted as the posture permitted, stuck out comically from the cow’s saggy flanks.

  Encountered on the road by the Emperor, she too was interrogated about her farming. Jane and I watched the plump yet august contours of the mounted Emperor as he gazed down at Polly on her cow, and the slim, grave Gourgaud waiting, reined in, by his side.

  ‘How much acreage does Miss Mason have?’ the Emperor wanted me to ask her.

  I was rather astounded to know that she owned 350 acres – I had not presumed she was such an affluent woman.

  ‘I am, Yer Highness, growing vegetables for the garrison at Deadwood, on my very Deadwood acreage,’ she said.

  The Emperor was interested in all this and watching him, I thought, it is all supply – the making of a war is all the passage of food and fodder and cannon shells.

  Polly said to the Emperor, ‘My father was a gentleman and he would not like the fact that I have let myself go. But it is the way that I am, and it cannot be denied and I am quite happy to ride to Deadwood on a cow. I might use a mount if it were necessary to get down to Jamestown, but that place is a den of thieves, and best to be avoided.’

  This encounter, Polly and the Ogre, resembled a parley between an august man at the height of his energies, a man who could roll the earth downhill like a boulder, and Polly who was as confident as the Tsar of all the Russias, her legs poking out heroically and without apology.

  I still believed as a woman of thirteen that my elders, elders such as Polly, for example, were set like stars or mountains, and had been immutable before my birth and would remain immutable for an untold period. I did not think they were creatures of flux as I was. Only later, when I no longer saw her so regularly, did I speculate whether as little as twenty-five years earlier Polly had ridden as a fresh girl on good horses with other women to balls at the Castle Terrace or at Plantation House, and danced with the neat officers of the navy, and with the garrison of the East India Company, and charmed them, and rendered them lovesick. And that she was in their company all the night, since it was too perilous and long a track back to her father’s house.

  And thus I saw her as a sort of warning, not as a raw yamstock but an Englishwoman born in soft airs. The island had, however, by now made her one of its own. Unlike me, the Ogre knew better than anyone that people were not born as they became. The Corsican child, speaking Italian, looking to Genoa as the great city, had become the Emperor of France, and now the great bull contained raging within a palisade of cliffs. Nothing was fixed, and the woman riding her cow was a manifestation of a more startling history of shifts and accidents than the woman on an unexceptional horse.

  The Emperor therefore wanted Jane to ask Miss Mason her origins.

  ‘My father was an Ulsterman,’ she said. ‘He was a younger son, and joined the navy, and while visiting the island on a ship had ridden its length and width and so had chosen the reach beyond Prosperous Plain. My mother died when I was too young to acquire memory of her. My father had his weakness, Sir Emperor. Took to our slave housekeeper, and I assure you that I have half-brothers and sisters in the freed slave quarters. And you will see the resemblance. There is no filament between me and them. I am an exhibit for the fraternity of all men and the sorority of all women.’

  ‘You are speaking of one of the ills of slavery,’ the Emperor opined.

  ‘Perhaps. But men will mock any certainties to have a bit of company and a caress. I must get to Deadwood now.’

  As she kicked her cow’s flanks and urged it on towards her vegetable gardens at Deadwood, I had the impression that she was riding away from a treaty-making, pondering the terms of existence offered her by the Great Ogre.

  There was an island consensus that something within Polly, some fortress of proprieties, had once tumbled. A now deceased male slave was in some way obscurely connected to this fall of Polly’s.

  Was it a Man of Reason or a clown …?

  One clear and balmy spring evening (the island being in the southern half of the world and thus reversing the accustomed seasons), my parents had gone out by cart to dine, over near the great column of rock named Lot’s Wife at Horse Pasture Farm. The house belonged to the gentleman farmer Knipe, uncle of yet another beautiful young woman, Miss Knipe, whom the French had named Le Bouton de Rose.

  Because I had made a tolerant accommodation of all the Emperor’s vagaries of soul, including those involving Le Bouton de Rose, La Nymphe and Madame de Montholon, I thought somehow that he might have made the same equivalent arrangements in his attitude as well. I had thought that since he gave me a ball gown paid for from his own resources, I was now conclusively beyond the restless frolicking he brought to his play with children. So I was calm at the idea that the Ogre and his attendants were to entertain us in my parents’ absence. The Ogre came up to the house attended by Marchand, and with his card softener, Las Cases senior, his son as a phantom at his elbow, and the eternal Gourgaud, to play whist. I was confident that our earlier disasters at cards would not be repeated. Whist was my favourite game of all, beautifully simple, understandable by children but challenging to adult intelligence. I loved to draw the lowest card and come to triumph playing in partnership with the other lower drawer.

  We got the two-card packs from the hands of the chamberlain and I became Gourgaud’s partner, since he and I drew the two higher cards.

  There is something in me that cherishes the rules of games. They are an authority higher than human, or so I like to believe. It turned out that the Ogre, however, saw this evening as a continuation of an earlier farcical game we had played. He talked to Jane, his partner, about his supposedly poor hand, he played false trumps, refusing to follow suit. He seemed to fail a compact of respect owed to me.

  I will not deal with all the silliness of which he was guilty, except to say that Emmanuel frowned, as if he could foresee the danger, but callow Gourgaud laughed at any trick of his master and increased the pressure I felt within me. At last I asked, ‘Do you think this is the way for a Man of Reason to play at games?’

  Las Cases the elder raised his eyes in mute shock, but the son lowered his.

  ‘Who created the Code Napoleon?’ I asked. ‘Was it a Man of Reason or a clown?’

  The Ogre said, ‘Ah, my Betsy, is whist a game that’s suitable for a Man of Reason? That is the true question.’

  ‘God help a Man of Reason who cannot follow the game of whist!’ I was on my feet now, leaning over him. I could hear Las Cases making small squeaks with his lips, which were meant to counsel me to be more measured.

  By a fathomable but unlucky chance, the ball gown crafted by La Nymphe lay on the settle at the far corner of the room, a display piece at the heart of The Briars for the admiration of visitors. He had bought me this woman’s dress, but his behaviour proclaimed me unfit for it. He rose to his feet now, and an instant later so did Gourgaud, hand on sword hilt, once more grotesquely ready to defend his Emperor as he had against the aggression of the Holstein cow. Las Cases’ parchment skin exuded a gloss of sweat and was sourly bunched at the lips.

  ‘Come, Betsy,’ said the Ogre in a voice pitched between adult reproof and amusement, ‘making laws for an empire is a happy experience compared to playing whist with some young women.’

  With his customary nimbleness he advanced to the settle and hauled up my ball gown.

  ‘In exoneration, I demand my gown back,’ he said, with annoyance but also playfulness, the worst of combinations, the one most offensive to me. He walked out of the drawing room with it over his elbow and down the hallway towards our door, and I leaped up and called after him as he passed out into the darkness of the garden. ‘Bring it b
ack!’ I roared.

  For I seemed to be losing everything, my new agreed-upon being, my serious advance towards the grown-up world, my claim on my own years and stature, derived from the vivid blood that now flowed more or less monthly from me. I was ready to follow him and launch myself at him and fell the little top-heavy man. At the same time a despair set in, a knowledge that I could not be the first one on the island to deliver punches to the Emperor, and that if I were, it would embed me further in childhood and ignominy. So it seemed, unimpeded, the Emperor was gone from the house with the patent of my womanhood over his elbow.

  Gourgaud had followed him, and now Las Cases and his son stood, nodded curtly and left. Emmanuel stared bleakly at me over his shoulder, and I did not know what the bleakness meant, disapproval or sympathy.

  Jane came up to my side. ‘He’s joking,’ she assured me. ‘My heaven, you did get far too upset with him, Betsy! But he’ll give it back in the morning. And I think you should wait until then, until his temper, or whatever it is, recedes.’

  She understood nothing. I felt exhausted from my continual struggle at self-certainty. It was the Ogre who kept shifting the terms on me.

  The next morning, I got up leadenly from a profound sleep and appeared at the breakfast table wan, and through shameful tears I begged my father to go and intercede for me.

  ‘I will not,’ he told me with that gratuitous firmness of his, a rigidity generally missing from him. Because his severity was so intermittent and irrational, it sounded pompous when he adopted it, like a man wearing another’s grander clothes.