by Tom Keneally
That evening O’Meara came to dinner, but the Emperor preferred to stay in his marquee and eat off his beloved Sèvres. There was something in O’Meara’s pleasant, jocular face and bright eyes and humorous delivery I had begun to be concerned about. Before dinner I asked my mother, ‘Is Dr O’Meara sent to spy on the Emperor?’
‘Perhaps,’ said my mother. ‘It may be his duty. For God’s sake, don’t ask him.’ And she laughed in my direction, as if she could foresee what a sensation it would be if I did.
I decided I would ask him one day, privately. I did not want him passing on to the admiral details such as the Emperor’s breath against my mother’s ear.
She said, ‘He is a decent fellow, O’Meara. You can be assured of that.’
At dinner, O’Meara was still amused by the Emperor’s being a medical sceptic. He was worried about the sudden prevalence of jaundice in the fleet.
‘And I think in the Countess de Montholon,’ my mother remarked. Apparently, without my noticing it, Albine had the yellow coloration.
‘Indeed,’ said O’Meara. ‘To be deplored in a woman in her condition! And there is nothing to be done except hot ferments and bleeding, and the rest must be waited out.’
Jane told my father and O’Meara about the dinner plates the Emperor disowned. ‘Betsy asked him if he was a Mohammedan,’ she said with a kind of admiration.
‘Oh, he’s all things,’ said the Irishman. ‘Believe me. One day he is a Deist, another a Catholic, another an atheist, another a Mohammedan and the next a predestinarian Calvinist. He talks himself into a different religious situation each day; the Almighty cannot keep up with the fellow at all.’
Jane now took up the matter of the wounded on the Sèvres plate. It had struck her that the Emperor carried them in his memory with some composure. ‘Has he spoken about the wounded to you, Dr O’Meara? Wouldn’t it be natural for him to speak of the wounded to his surgeon? His wounded at Gaza, about whom stories are told, just for an example.’
‘I can’t stop him talking,’ admitted O’Meara. ‘He raises the wounded of Jaffa quicker than any enemy could. He raises all that there is against him quicker than malice can manage.’ O’Meara, as so often, turned to me to answer.
‘Yes, Betsy. His wounded in Jaffa, have you heard of them? Well, according to Our Great Friend, his army was forced to withdraw from Jaffa, and we know that as a fact, and there were wounded to be left. What should be done with the poor fellows, further from home than any Frenchman who died in all those years, far away in Palestine? So he suggested to the surgeons that the sickest be given a merciful dose of morphine. He knew they would be terribly treated, says he, if they fell into the Turks’ hands. He declares that had he been in their situation, he would have welcomed the option of morphine. Our man invited me then, Betsy, to put myself in the situation of one of those fellows. If it had been his own son, he said, he would ask the surgeon to apply that remedy.’
O’Meara paused to be sure of the weight of this tale upon me.
‘Now, his chief surgeon presented the concept to his corps of surgeons, who to their credit took the Hippocratic view that it was their duty to cure and not to kill. And so the rumour that he poisoned them is utterly a fiction, an evil rumour. Truth be told, he left a rearguard to protect them. He would like to think that the rearguard did not withdraw until his wounded were all dead, but certainly they did not until most of them were.’
‘War is complex,’ murmured peaceable Billy Balcombe. ‘It takes away choosing between good and bad and leaves men with choosing between bad and less bad.’
O’Meara said, ‘Our Friend’s enemies say Jaffa became a poisoning en masse. But had he been a man to poison soldiers secretly, or to commit such savageries as driving his carriage over the bleeding and smashed bodies of the wounded, do you think his troops would have fought under him with that zest and love they uniformly displayed? For so long and to our great Britannic discomfiture? If he had been such a man as some of his nay-sayers would have it, he would have been long ago shot by his own people. What you think, Betsy Balcombe? I think that is an argument of some sinew.’
‘But I will never eat off that dish with the Pyramids,’ I told him.
For some reason, not entirely flattering, he laughed.
Consider the burden …
Mrs Stuart, the surgeon’s wife who had taught me French on my voyage back to the island some years before, or had somehow ratified my capacity to speak it, was now on her way home from India with her daughters, and her ship put into Jamestown Roads as so many did. My mother insisted that she and her two young daughters should stay at The Briars. The two little girls I had played with were changed and had become waspish – my mother said it was exactly what happened in India to such people, being surrounded by opulence over which they had no composure through ownership. Mrs Stuart was unchanged; however, there was no doubt that in staying at The Briars one of her chief motives was to sight the Great Ogre, and being of French-speaking stock herself, the desire to do so must have been intense.
By sitting in the garden with my mother, she would see him pass into the marquee or the grape arbour, emerging from the latter with all the exuberance of a released schoolboy. But his greetings in our direction were curt though genial. Mrs Stuart saw him, but did not really see him.
My mother rode out one afternoon to show the beautiful Mrs Stuart our island. Having given birth to three sons here, she had become something of a St Helena patriot, and commonly made the point to visitors that however forbidding the outer crags – the awesome coast studded with artillery – within those walls, one found the inner valleys and hills of delight.
The two women – I have this tale from my mother – were returning to The Briars and came to the intersection with the road that led to Longwood. There they had the fortune to meet the Emperor, riding his Arab, Mameluke, and escorted by ‘poor Poppleton’ (as we now called him), and Gourgaud. The Emperor reined in, itself an act of urbane horsemanship involving more grace than the normal stern tugs, which were the equestrian style of most island folk, subtleties of pressure that enabled his horse to obey in its own balletic manner and show off the contours of its head and neck. The Emperor thus did great homage to the man he always boasted of as his movement tutor, François-Joseph Talma, the famed French actor.
Also passing down this road towards the building at Longwood was a line of Chinese and Malay labourers, bearing every imaginable necessity for a large house – from mortar and bricks to window frames and wallpaper – and in the distance behind them were two wagons groaning under the weight of a piano and what would prove to be a dismantled billiard table shrouded in dust covers.
The Emperor had demanded a billiard table for his future home and this was still a season in which his requests were listened to. But he took little notice of its perilous journey from Jamestown. It was, my mother noticed, Mrs Stuart who had arrested him, and she was amused to see him halting so elegantly by the visitor. She had by now long recovered from being compared to Josephine, and knew, as all we Balcombes did, how intense but fleeting his affections for women were.
We believed at that stage too that the Emperor had been warned, perhaps by Las Cases, that he should make fewer visits to Miss Robinson, that each one became common knowledge on the island and in the garrison and squadron, and thus a news item likely to reach England and Europe through the hand of some scribbler. Indeed, her parents were said to be thinking of sending her to Cape Town under the care of an older woman to await the arrival of Captain Edwards of the East Indiaman Chloe. Miss Robinson, of whom I had been so jealous, was not a woman who could have an open association with OGF. Her own parents knew she was no Josephine and no Countess Walewska – it was all too improbable and mismatched, except in the Ogre’s fervent mind.
As I had observed with Miss Robinson, the Emperor was enchanted by a revolutionary archetype of rustic vigour rather than by the breathing young woman herself. In the same spirit he was now willing to be enchanted b
y this young, ruddy woman, Mrs Stuart, whose hair ran in streams of vivid chestnut down her shoulders and who, as my mother told him, was returning on a ship only one month ahead of the troop transport on which her surgeon husband would return. There, near Huff’s lethal crossroads, the Ogre began to interview Mrs Stuart, just as he interviewed all comers, a man intrigued by the history of obscure Britons (French-speaking as they might be) as of so many other matters. For him interrogation seemed to be a form of enticement.
He was deep in discourse about Canada, and Canadian-French, and Mrs Stuart’s husband’s home in Forfar, and what acreage her father-in-law owned there, as the line of burden-bearers neared the crossroads to turn east to Longwood. My mother eased her horse away from the conversation and made a gesture to the slaves to swing wide of the track and leave the Emperor undisturbed. They began to obey, but the Emperor’s wide-set eyes noticed the untoward movement about him. He abandoned for now his interest in Mrs Stuart’s family’s Highland sheep and protested to my mother. ‘Madame Jane,’ he told her, ‘consider the burden on their shoulders!’
By further artful manoeuvres he edged his horse to the verge of the road with such elegance the others followed. My mother told me later she was angry, wanting to chide him with being no champion of slaves, having crushed the slave revolt in Dominica. ‘You did not worry about the burden of the slave leader Toussaint l’Overture,’ she itched for a moment to say – as indeed I had once said.
He was posturing before Mrs Stuart, she decided in irritation, but she was by no way certain. The French-Canadian woman’s brown eyes glinted to see his fraternal concern for this train of mute bearers, whom he now directed back onto the road.
Then my mother counselled herself that she must simply accept him as an unarguable whole, his vanities, his impulses for showing humanity as well as those for making mischief, as the one manifestation, in the way that weather is one and diverse and, above all, changeable by its own inimitable will. If she did not do this, she saw, she would be teased beyond tolerance by his multiplicity of faces.
It was a resolve that would influence our lives. Forever.
December began and the Emperor, breathing better after suffering a cold, thought it was time to visit Longwood and to have Jane and me accompany him. He had already decided not to like Longwood, and perhaps the attitudes of islanders towards it, a tendency to sneer at its unsuitability, had contributed. He did not enjoy riding there, and the garrison on Deadwood, whose rows of tents could be seen as we rose up out of Devil’s Glen to the Longwood plateau, might have made him too aware of the severe brake they represented on any idea of getting away.
By the time we approached the house and saw the many workers and slaves hurrying to finish it, Our Friend’s pessimism had intensified.
‘They think they are being kind to me,’ he suggested bitterly, taking in the long villa and inhaling the smell of butchered and planed wood, the sight of the tar-paper roofing being placed over the rear apartments, the quarters of his dependents and servants. It gave off an insinuating smell and bespoke cheapness. He looked at the great stone block of the Barn, the mountain just to the east, which had the effect of reducing the view of the ocean and helped confuse the advancing trade winds, so that they often dropped their moisture and their vapour around Longwood in particular. ‘That evil block,’ he said that day and always. ‘It will be a gag across our mouths and our eyes.’ He made grumbling noises with his throat. Then he turned his horse and rode away, back towards The Briars.
Some few days later, handsome General Bertrand arrived in our garden, having done an inspection of the new house. We knew that the move could not be far away, and the anticipation of loss began to afflict the Balcombes. We found out later that Bertrand had come to report on the smell of paint in Longwood. The Emperor apparently claimed to have a phobia of that smell, and the unchallenged idea was that he would not move until the oppressive odour had dispelled itself. He asked Las Cases to go to Longwood the next day to reassess the offensiveness of the smell. We heard by way of Marchand that Gourgaud, whom the butler did not like, had tossed his head when Las Cases was sent, wondering why he could not be the monitor of paint odour.
There was a deliberate purpose to delay in all this and the Emperor was pleased when Las Cases was able to report to the admiral that the smell had not sufficiently evaporated, that it still cloyed and would be a threat to the Emperor’s health. Soon Admiral Cockburn and Colonel Bingham of the regiment were seen crossing our lawn to the marquee and the Pavilion, where a new mood seemed to attend their conferences with OGF and his staff.
On the Monday morning at the start of the third week of Advent, the Emperor declared he had decided to look forward to the new existence on Longwood plateau. It was as if it represented the real life of the island, and he had been under a spell, a lotus-eater, amongst the Balcombes. Fanny Bertrand came up to see us and murmured that Admiral Cockburn had helped along Our Friend’s sanguine attitude by asking whether he would need to be escorted to Longwood by troops. The Briars had been now exalted massively in our eyes by his preference for it; that we, the Balcombes, even at the risk of senna bonbons, were inhabitants of the Emperor’s only tolerable place. Longwood was barely two miles to the east but until now one thought it a far more extreme exile.
It was probably best he went when he did or else our family would never have recovered from the way the Emperor flattered us by trying to stay with us. There were more conferences with the admiral, and the Emperor told us at dinner, ‘I am going tomorrow. It is settled. The paint is no longer such as to strangulate a person.’
We woke to find the Chinese labourers all over the yard, carrying his possessions. His camp bed and the green curtains, boxes of books and Sèvres porcelain, his miniatures and his ornamental alarm clock were disappearing out of our carriageway. Soon the Pavilion would be empty of all its interest – the locket of Josephine, the manuscripts, his silver commode and washstand.
I saw Marchand and Cipriani set out by horse for Longwood to intercept the goods as they arrived there. The Emperor’s whole party came up from the Portions to The Briars that morning, and I saw the ever-more pregnant Countess de Montholon get down with her husband from the barouche to go and greet the Emperor as he emerged for the last time from the Pavilion. It was clear that the Bertrands, already conversing with my mother, had no reason to think of Longwood plateau as a place of worse exile than Porteous’s boarding room had already been for them. To them a change from the narrow town to the broad plateau was a form of liberation. On an island not ten miles across, a journey such as was underway here, from humid sea level to a place high on the broken plateau – somewhere at least notionally freer in atmosphere than the precipice-enclosed port – was, I supposed, like travelling from Brussels to Paris.
My brothers ran around the garden with the Bertrand boys and with little Hortense, a girl after my own heart, out-boying the boys, and the wistful de Montholon child, Tristan. They had not often seen each other during the time the French had lived in Jamestown. They looked healthier after time ashore, and they spoke the same language as my brothers, the language of childhood, amongst the myrtles and the trunks of the gumwoods. Through mutual incomprehension they came to the same intents as regards climbing, falling and using sticks as mimic swords.
I vividly recall the French still, as they lined up in honour of their Emperor. Bertrand, dark-eyed and with half-smiling long lips and an engaging dark stubble on his face, stiff-collared in his blue marshal’s jacket, curly-haired and, despite all, bearing the worried, hungry eyes of a child. In that I now see he was a bit like my father. And then the august Fanny Bertrand, larger in frame than her husband, a luxuriant woman in a white dress of the Empire. To call a dress ‘Empire’ was not forbidden. But to call an Emperor ‘Emperor’ was.
Bertrand, who knew Longwood, must have understood how limited a relief it would be for his Emperor. We knew that at Fanny’s insistence the Bertrands meant to live at a remove from Longwood fa
rm itself, at a house named Hutt’s Gate. Longwood would still, however, be the place the Count went each day to serve his master, and Fanny would need to have recourse there on a frequent basis, perhaps especially now, after many weeks of intimate existence in the company of Madame de Montholon. Fanny surely, too, wanted to keep her heart free from the voracious competition for the Emperor’s favour which would mark Longwood.
Before OGF emerged from the Pavilion, Gourgaud came to stand with the others, and then Las Cases and Emmanuel appeared. I saw Gourgaud glimpse at Jane.
Admiral Cockburn and the colonel of the regiment arrived with their escorts. Now the Emperor emerged and it was not like his casual emergence but a manifestation, as on the first day. Once again he wore the green coat with facings, the sash of the Order and the face not whimsical but militant. The drums sounded from the sergeant’s guard on the lawn, salutes were exchanged, weapons solemnly presented – ceremonies appropriate to a journey of hundreds of miles. We Balcombes stood on the verandah steps absorbing the moment, boys silent, women in tears, patriarch very solemn.
He greeted everyone, kissed Albines’s and Fanny’s hands, thanked the admiral as if it were not that big shaggy man’s duty to see him to Longwood.
He kissed my mother’s hands and, against all resolve, she began to weep. He kissed Jane’s two cheeks and she blazed with the compliment of it. And then he came to me and grasped my hand.
‘Betsy, we are going just a little way. It seems more, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘But it is at most two English miles. Your father will bring you, since he is my provedore and has an unchallengeable right to come there.’
He had pressed gifts into our hands – for my mother a golden snuffbox, for Jane and me each an enamelled bonbonnière. His supply of these decorative boxes, all dazzling in themselves, faïence and enamel, seemed limitless, and we were slowly acquiring a trove of them.
