Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  ‘He would have come if the admiral had called him what you called him.’

  ‘Well,’ said Major Fehrzen, lowly and with a smile, ‘we have gone from a war of cannon to a war of words.’

  I said, rather proud of myself when I got it out, ‘There is always war where words come in.’

  And now this mature man looked at me appraisingly. It was somehow wonderful and unutterably awkward. Yet he was looking at the face from which my opinions emerged. I was like an equal in discourse.

  ‘You are very serene, Miss Balcombe – for a young woman who has the General at the bottom of her garden.’

  ‘He doesn’t act up to the level of his repute. If this island were the world, he would still be interested, and be its ultimate authority on population and vegetable gardening and goats.’

  He smiled and nodded his head emphatically. I found myself quite taken with the experience of being held by this large, weathered frame. In spite of the inequality of strength, there was an equality of conversation and, I suppose, of will.

  ‘May I ask you blunt questions?’ I asked as we danced. I was playing with the limits of my social gifts, but it was a very hot night and there was something in us all that did not mind uttering bold sentiments in pursuit of the real.

  ‘What manner of blunt things do you have in mind, Miss Balcombe?’ he asked.

  ‘I wonder, were you wounded? Were you wounded by the servants of the mischief-maker? Or near to being wounded? And where did that happen?’

  ‘I had a scratch, I admit,’ said Major Fehrzen. ‘An age ago.’

  ‘What does a scratch mean?’

  ‘I suppose it means a glancing wound from a fragment of ball. A fortunate wound.’

  ‘And where did this take place?’

  ‘Have you heard of Salamanca?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, though I was uncertain of its location. ‘And if it was a scratch, then you did not need to undergo treatment from a surgeon?’

  ‘Perhaps a few weeks. It was combined with a touch of fever.’

  ‘So you soldiers suffer from scratches and touches. It’s a wonder so many of you manage to get killed.’

  He laughed at this. ‘I was adjutant of my regiment at Salamanca,’ he told me, ‘so I was protected by the line. The colonel, seeing my wound in the upper thigh, poured brandy on it from a flask he carried. He believed that was essential treatment for all wounds.’

  The regimental band at the end of the ballroom, after demanding a crescendo of whirling from us, now paused. I was exhausted not only by the dance but by the experience of being even more a new person than I had been an hour before, and so Captain Fehrzen returned me to my seat.

  ‘If I come to The Briars again,’ said Fehrzen, returning to his long leather-faced solemnity, ‘I shall come and see you, Miss Balcombe, and your sister and delightful mother.’

  I feared my coming encounter with Lieutenant Croad. It was hard to imagine such a lustrous, smooth-faced young man living under canvas at Deadwood, amongst the fleas Mrs Younghusband had complained of, and, further, dancing with a rancorous little girl like me. The dance he had put his name down for was certainly a quadrille and I barely knew what that was. I was grateful to revert to girlhood and go to my mother.

  ‘Could you please tell Lieutenant Croad that I cannot fulfil my obligation to him?’

  My mother raised her eyebrows. Her face was flushed though she had had only the one dance, and that with General Bertrand, and I could tell she too felt that she was not quite up to the level. Just the same, she asked me why.

  ‘Tell him I have faintness, fatigue and a fever.’

  ‘That’s a lot to have,’ said my mother.

  The quietly spoken Madame de Montholon sitting nearby had overheard my pleadings. She reached out and took my hand.

  ‘Oh, it is nothing,’ she said. ‘It is a cotillion, but of shorter duration. If you can dance the cotillion, dear friend, you can dance a quadrille.’

  ‘Explain that I’m more comfortable with the country dances and the Scottish reel,’ I pleaded with my mother.

  Madame Bertrand now turned. She and Madame de Montholon both laughed as if it were endearingly typical of the young me and the ancient island, and its entire population. To these people, I knew, we were probably all yamstocks.

  Lady Bertrand told me, ‘You will be in the hands of the dance master himself, and he will be tolerant and a good guide. He might not qualify as a dance teacher in Paris, but he’s adequate for St Hélène.’

  And so Lieutenant Croad presented himself, smiling pleasantly, and I stood, feeling sick. He took my hand delicately but firmly as we strode out onto the floor and offered our compliments and bows to the opposing couple, the Younghusbands.

  There was not a chance for long conversations in a quadrille, but Lieutenant Croad did have time to say to me, in his voice as crisp as a wafer, ‘I had heard of your father before I landed on this island. The sailors told us about him.’

  Sailors did have stories about my father, and I wondered what their derivation was. I knew my father to be a considerable worthy of the island, but had never expected him to have a repute that stretched in all directions across the encircling ocean.

  Croad said, ‘I have already expressed my compliments to him this evening and hope to visit him at The Briars. Is the General himself a good dancer?’

  ‘I have never seen him dance,’ I confessed. ‘I’d say he doesn’t have the figure for it except that he is agile.’

  ‘Lady Bertrand is an excellent dancer,’ Croad told me when I next saw him, passed to him by Captain Younghusband. ‘And I’ve observed General Gourgaud.’

  Croad had an extraordinary gift for keeping his breath in the rigours of the dance. They weren’t rigours to him. ‘They have the ton which seems to come naturally to the French. It is a relief that we can say such things about the French now without being chastised by some patriotic yahoo. How they can dance! Without the jerking and rabbit-hopping and plunging of our country dances.’

  It was the jerking, rabbit-hopping and plunging for which I had any assured gift. Croad, I meanwhile noted, had a pretty, narrow face, and I found I had a weakness, not previously revealed to me, for that type of boy. I liked a great deal of brightness in wide eyes, a well-formed nose, less like a statement of will than that of Admiral Cockburn. And the Cupid’s-bow lips Croad had. I realised I had developed a vague interest, and thought it would be worth spending more time in his company, unless he withdrew it after this dance.

  The dance ended and I appreciated his offer to fetch me an ice, for the dance had evoked a level of competence in me that had dried me out. Croad went off to find refreshments for me and Madame de Montholon, who was feeling the warm night.

  When Croad came back I said to him, ‘These sailors, what did they say about my father?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, suddenly evasive, because he could see a certain bewilderment in me, ‘as the purveyor to the ships and the company he is well known.’

  ‘There is no nobler man,’ I agreed, ‘but I still can’t imagine why he’s so broadly known.’

  ‘You … you’ve heard no intimations from your family?’ He could see I hadn’t and seemed to blush. ‘Please, Miss Balcombe,’ he said. ‘I was talking off the top of my head rather than as an intelligent fellow. And as you know, on a ship everything you hear gets said, however minor and unreliable it is, to fill out all those sluggish hours. I heard his nickname, Prince, that’s all. Now, enough of that. If I came to The Briars, I would be delighted to accompany you and your sister on a tour naturaliste around Diana’s Peak.’

  And then to override our conversation to this point, he rushed to ask, ‘Do you think the General would consent to talk to me a little? I fancy I am a great student of his Egyptian campaign.’

  ‘He seems to be writing on exactly that matter right now. But if you want to please him, as I told Major Fehrzen, call him Emperor when you see him. He objects to the appellation General.’

  I
took an abstract pleasure as the night went on in having been asked permission to be visited by two officers, Fehrzen and Croad. I had not any great desire to see them specifically, but now as a young woman I was delighted by the idea of having visitors. I had become a fisher of men.

  More ices were brought. Some women went and slept a few hours in a parlour. My mother was one, but not Jane or I. When not dancing, I sat self-sufficient in my gown, and that was for me the central joy of the night.

  And, amazingly, all at once we heard the dawn gun fired from the top of Ladder Hill. The music ceased. One of the silken banners had fallen. The scale of our exhaustion became apparent to us. We found the Countess de Montholon already asleep on the settle in the women’s dressing room as servants helped us take off our dresses and pack them in our tin boxes.

  They were transmuted now, these robes, a different and somehow used-up fabric. So in a sense were we. Fabrics had been reduced by motion and gravity, and my roses drooped and would require a tender reopening by hand before I wore the dress again. Powder had clotted in the warm sockets of the body, perfumes had soured, inevitable and indelicate sweat had eroded the night. The wagon was rolled away from the gate by a party of soldiers – the young men who had put it there were slumped on camp cots amongst the trees or off in the Deadwood lines or on duty to contain the Ogre. My father was sleepy and a little irritable. It was not the time to ask him why sailors knew him and why his nickname was Prince.

  As we rode home, Jane seemed uncomplicatedly tranquil and sleepy. She could accommodate a world in which men said fantastical things and not have them leave her feverish. I had two males to think about, which seemed to me to be another token of new stature, certainly, but also a spur to uneasiness. The pretty face of Lieutenant Croad was clear in my head as we left the high road and took the track towards The Briars. But since I was still practising at womanhood, Croad remained a kind of roadside phantom, a teasing chimera rather than some sort of destination for the affections. By his suicide tree Huff was at that hour definitely dead.

  When I rose in the afternoon and found Jane and my mother drinking tea in the drawing room, they seemed to be sitting in a strange light, the altered light of a day in which one has slept long and unnaturally and without refreshment. I was sullen and dislocated. The question that abided from the night before was that talk of Croad’s about knowing my father, a remark that chimed in crucially with other mysterious pronouncements of sundry visitors and even that of the Emperor.

  ‘Boney sends his compliments,’ said Jane, brightly amused, ‘and wanted to know if you had brought home an affection for some officer? He asked had you met someone who would supplant what you feel for our friend the young Emmanuel Las Cases?’

  ‘A tired joke, that one,’ I said, slumping down.

  I knew that if I asked my mother a question she would not lie before Jane. Jane was a hard presence to lie in front of. The opportunity existed now, with the three of us in housecoats, and outside the trade wind making its daily combing of the upper air and nudging vigorously at the window sills.

  My hand dangling loose as if I were not asking a great question, I said, ‘Strangers are always saying they knew of Father before they met him. Even the Emperor. Lieutenant Croad said he heard him mentioned on ships at sea. Why do so many of those who come here seem to know him already? And why do I hear people call him Prince?’

  My mother looked away an instant, a sign it was a complex question, and then looked back at me with her hazel eyes which, I realise now, later became mine.

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t worry – there are rumours but that’s all,’ said my mother. ‘I’ve told you, your grandfather was in a cutter off the Isle of Dogs when the young Prince of Wales was aboard the royal yacht. The yacht collided with the cutter and your grandfather drowned. Your father might have told this story as a dark joke when in his cups, not realising how it would get around and be misunderstood. Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt visited the boys and their mother, and offered to fund their education and position on the Prince’s behalf. So the gossip about the Prince’s interest in your father got started. These are the sorts of stories people love to tell. And on the strength of it all they call your father “Prince”.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Father tell people it’s not true?’

  My mother stared a little and said in a whisper, ‘I think it’s the kind of rumour human beings like to set going about themselves. Otherwise, they are just who they are. And on an island like this, that’s barely enough.’

  She smiled and nodded. The idea that my father embraced his nickname had not occurred to me.

  ‘That was how he got that particular pet name, which you notice I never choose to call him by.’

  I studied Jane. I could not judge if she already knew all this. For now I was satisfied and thought I had received the truth entire.

  Marchand was at the door. As ever he was elegantly dressed, more so than Las Cases, his neck cloths and shirt immaculate. His English was better than his master’s too.

  ‘The Sèvres china has arrived,’ he told us. ‘The Emperor has invited you to see it.’

  This was welcome distraction and we pleaded for half an hour to dress properly.

  ‘Cipriani is relieved,’ Marchand told us of the Emperor’s maître d’hôtel. ‘He never liked that Nanking crockery we’ve been eating from.’

  As I prepared myself, the evening seemed to fill with new colour after that reduced fretful day of sleep, as if the pigments from the Sèvres had overflowed the plates and enriched the whole evening.

  In the marquee, we found the Emperor was dressed in his green coat and his vest and was wearing his Orders. It was clear he was delighted by this arrival of china, as if it restored something he had nearly forgotten yet nonetheless needed.

  He cried, ‘Young ladies! You will see that the painters have given me a history of my life to watch, even as I dine.’

  Two-handedly, he passed us plates on which his Italian and Egyptian adventures were depicted, and I saw a younger, thinner Emperor stepping amongst the pyramids. He could tell I was taken with this and declared, ‘Never think of going to Egypt, Betsy. It is the country of the blind.’

  The next plate showed him young and bare-headed and grim in an Alpine pass, with a shattered cannon beside him but his will intact. Then an older Emperor listening to reports, his staff around him, and again a shattered cannon, to indicate how regularly he courted catastrophe which destroyed things of iron and wood but not his flesh. At the head of each plate, atop delicately painted wreathes, gold on blue, stood an ‘N’.

  I remembered that at the ball beautiful Laura Wilks had asked me whether we, the family, had ever seen the Emperor pray. She was full of frank interest, though more interested in rumour than in theology. ‘Does he pray like a child of Mohammed, on a mat, facing the east?’ she asked. ‘I believe he has been a Child of the Prophet since he was in Egypt.’

  I had heard this too, and it had been said to my mother by people in town – that he had betrayed Christendom and, to no advantage, become a Turk. I held the plate of the Pyramids as this rumour recurred to me.

  ‘Did you become a Mohammedan in Egypt?’ I asked him.

  I heard Jane and my mother groan and could not quite understand why they did so. For if a man lays out the Pyramids before you, it is a fair thing to ask him had he taken the religion as he had sought to take the country.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, though not too obviously offended, ‘that English canard again! And from the lips of my Betsy.’

  ‘Who else would dare ask?’ said Jane, and the Emperor was fully appeased by her and became rueful.

  ‘It might shock good Protestant girls like you if I said that my religion is that of the country in which I am serving. Even here, Betsy, had you impaled me with my sword that night, I would have been happy to be buried by the Reverend Boys.’

  ‘That would be a very dull funeral,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed, I would have been chastised from the pulpit for my lif
e and for my death.’

  ‘So in Egypt, the religion of the Turks is as good as ours?’

  ‘If you were a young Turkish or Egyptian girl, you would say it was, and better.’

  The Emperor now walked up to my mother. He stood close to her and looked at what she was holding. ‘Oh, that! I sit astride a horse on a hill, don’t I? But that’s a plate I will choose not to eat from because I remember that day, and had a fever and did not leave my carriage … He who would eat from that plate would eat half-truths.’

  His lips were quite close to her ear. ‘Would you like it, Madame Balcombe?’ he asked. ‘For it’s of small comfort to me.’

  ‘You don’t mean it,’ said my mother, and though she was excited by the offer of this wonderful piece of clay and porcelain and art, she had the fibre to refuse it.

  The Emperor picked up one of the plates himself. ‘Perhaps you should take this one,’ said the Emperor. ‘That one you hold is a mild lie. This one is a calamity. Leipzig. Perhaps in a state of irony I may eat from the other, but never from this one.’

  He turned round and called for his maître d’hôtel.

  ‘Cipriani, take note. These two plates can be set before the innocents but not before me. One of them, this of myself mounted and a grand equestrian, when in fact I was a coach traveller. But perhaps Mrs Balcombe will not take the Leipzig plate. Would you take it as a favour to a friend? The people at the factory have not understood how fierce a blow this Leipzig business was in a catalogue of the events of my life.’

  I was rendered uneasy by the way his hand suddenly touched her shoulder and the closeness of his suggestions to her ear.

  ‘No, General,’ said my mother, shaking her head with some severity. ‘I could not consider taking either.’

  We said goodbye and walked back to the house. It was as if the failure to pass off the Leipzig plate on my mother had shortened the visit.