Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  The admiral had bought him a new horse, a sable Arab, whose name was the Vizier, though the General was welcome to change it, he said. It seemed a well-meaning bribe to get the Ogre to move.

  The Emperor mounted, and so did the British officials and the French generals. Nursemaids hunted the Bertrand and de Montholon children to make them join their mothers in the barouche. The drums sounded again with an enforced emphasis, military boots thudded and muskets were once more presented, and the greatest cavalcade ever to leave The Briars began to move, preceded all the way to Huff’s Gate by pipes and drums both, with young Emmanuel Las Cases on a grey pony at the end of this pathetic equipage.

  During the day the admiral’s sailors arrived and dismantled the marquees, the signs of our shared familiarity, as if the powers of Great Britain and the world wanted his habitation at the Pavilion forgotten. Their voices seemed to echo in a great absence. But as the marquees came down, we became aware that it had all been a test of our nerves, an effort of deportment, a struggle to maintain grace that all the Balcombes had probably passed except me.

  I knew there would never be blind man’s buff again.

  More solidly caged there …

  It was only a few days before we rode out to see Madame Bertrand in her house at Hutt’s Gate. She was entertaining some of the officers of the garrison, and they graciously left as we arrived, as if to make room for us. Hutt’s Gate was like a two-storey English country house in disrepair, though it too had been painted and furnished, largely with chests and chairs and tables provided by the admiral. The Bertrands did not have as many items of their own as the Emperor, and the combination of furniture was clumsy, English and Cape and island, at odds with their Gallic natures and their experience of courts.

  When my father himself came back from his first interview at Longwood, he said at dinner, ‘Our Friend told me he feels not freer but more solidly caged there.’ The Emperor had taken my father out for a short walk and showed him the bare ground around, studded with gumwoods and goat droppings, and spoken of a garden which he meant to grow and to use as a refuge. But he pointed out above all that there were sentries on Flagstaff Hill and even on the goat tracks either side of the Barn, from which heights they could see all his movements in case he went on the African side of his house for a few minutes, and became not as visible to the garrison as on the Diana’s Peak side.

  The garden was a plan of his in part to defeat this continuous visibility, and to ensure shade beyond the gaze of men.

  ‘They are honest enough fellows,’ he told my father about his sentries, ‘but have been placed there to harass me.’

  I think of us, innocent about the table, unaware that more stringent things were coming, and so the Emperor’s situation struck us as uniquely poignant, and he had done us the compliment of telling my father on that open plateau that he felt hedged in by the gaze of others in a way that had not been the case amongst the Balcombes at The Briars.

  Longwood, much bigger than the Pavilion, seemed to me always cramped; an unfortunate sense of density hung over the house. It had an air the Emperor by instinct feared, an atmosphere congealing there, and yet – outside – the trade winds blew relentlessly, clarifying nothing, heaping humidity on Deadwood and Longwood both.

  ‘Now that I have my court together, I must live accordingly, Betsy,’ he told me one day. And it was as well that I was approaching womanhood and a mature cast of mind, since Longwood was never a venue for childishness. There was from the beginning a serious-minded attempt to treat Longwood as a genuine court, to try to deny its mere manor-house dimensions. Las Cases played at it, Gourgaud welcomed it, Bertrand and de Montholon pursued it as appropriate. It was clearly going to be fantastically harder here to be ceremonious and attentive than it had been in France, but they were determined to try it.

  When my parents, Jane and I first went to Longwood, we entered by way of five steps and across a little porch into a salon, quite a good size by island standards, but not imperial ones, its walls painted pale green, two windows looking out to the Barn, three to Diana’s Peak and the outline of the fortress on High Knoll. Novarrez, the young Swiss, now official porter, conducted us through this room. He was a sturdy youth and had been specially chosen for his willingness to tell pretentious people they must not enter.

  Late in the Emperor’s day at the Pavilion, Marchand had begun to tell me stories about Novarrez, and their time with the Emperor in earlier exile on Elba, and how when their master had them all leave with him and follow him back to France, and they landed, on faith, on a shore that had turned against him, in a town in the south named Orgon, a violent mob rushed to open the door of the carriage in which the Emperor was travelling. Novarrez had pulled his pistol and sabre and jumped onto the step of the coach and defied the whole crowd. Like so many of the servants, he had his tale of militant devotion; he was a man fit to guard a door.

  We progressed from this entryway with Novarrez into the drawing room or salon, where maps had been hung, and bookcases and card tables erected by the windows, and so into a living room and then, in the crossbeam of the cruciform house, the dining room. It had lost its windows, if it had ever had any. The Emperor was not permitted to eat and see the outer world at the same time. The chamber was dim even before sunset, when the lampiste lit the candles early. It would always grow hot too easily, even as Marchand and others, under Cipriani’s supervision, laid out the table.

  That first time we were bidden to dinner, the entire suite and the Balcombes sat in this dim, compressed, dispiriting place. By the time the soup had been eaten it was already stifling and I felt a rivulet of sweat descend the line of my neck and lose itself somewhere in the fabrics at my chest. Everyone wore his uniforms and orders though, in defiance of the clotted island air.

  The Bertrands had come in from their house at Hutt’s Gate and Fanny’s conversation was fluting away in the space and out-shining the melodic undertones of Albine de Montholon. The chatter was merry enough at table, but when there was a lull one could hear rats at work behind the walls and beneath the floor.

  ‘Our friends the rodents,’ said the Comte Las Cases drily. Already there was a plate of tin nailed over the corner of the floor by the side table – a sign that a gang of the beasts had eaten their way through the floor.

  As we enjoyed the beef prepared in an excellent sauce, the matter of Christmas and year’s end arose. In our heads was a surmise that the Emperor might be pleased to say farewell to this year by celebrating some sort of Gallic Hogmanay. Discussion of the supposedly safe subject was instigated by my mother, but Albine de Montholon seemed to have little enthusiasm for it. Tristan would place his shoes out on 6 December, she said, as she had done where she grew up, so that candies and small wooden toys made by Pierron could be placed in them. She was clearly a good revolutionary and knew there was no Christmas for the God of Reason.

  It turned out too that people from different areas of France had different Christmases. The Emperor had unified the French but not their Noël. Hortense and the Bertrand boys, or their robust mama, knew when Christmas was, however, and Fanny’s boys were expecting gifts to be placed in their shoes on the normal date, some eighteen days after Tristan de Montholon expected his.

  And so at The Briars on a sweating and hazy Christmas Day, we held the normal revels on our own, aware that there was no echoing festivity at Longwood. Admiral Cockburn, who had visited Longwood on Christmas morning, reported that the Emperor, who was working on his history as on a normal day, seemed well, but complained that he lacked the full set of the Bulletins de la Grande Armée.

  But then, O’Meara suggested, himself indulging at our place a more traditional taste for the festival, every day was a determined sort of Christmas at Longwood, with that solemn windowless room illuminated and – within the resources of the cook – a banquet made. The ceremoniousness of the meals was not, however, reflected by the accommodations the members of the suite endured. ‘I have the honour at the moment to share a
large tent with Poppleton and Gourgaud,’ O’Meara told us as if relating a mock tragedy. ‘And I can assure you of the reality that Poppleton’s more scrupulous with his small linen than Gaspard is! Gaspard is on a perpetual campaign and has no time for the humbler comforts. The fellow’s costive to boot!’

  Young Emmanuel and his father, I heard with some interest and even concern, occupied a small room near the kitchen, and the lingering heat from the kitchen next door made the place sweltering. In the end Our Friend would have them moved into a room off his library.

  On Christmas Eve Captain Younghusband and the lively Mrs Catherine Younghusband had ridden with their young daughter across from Plantation House and stayed in the Pavilion. The experience of occupying a previously imperial space seemed to excite Mrs Younghusband. She was exuberant since her husband had been posted to Plantation House and the family was living in its grounds, far from Deadwood Camp and its fleas.

  On Christmas Day at The Briars, though my parents had invited a range of people, the Ogre remained the great absentee, and his significant absence grew amongst us almost as did the presence of the man. But Mrs Younghusband was still engaged on the fleas of Deadwood.

  ‘The camp,’ Captain Younghusband suggested with a mild loyalty to the army, ‘was surely not as bad as that, my dear.’

  ‘Deadwood itself is such an unprepossessing name,’ she told him. ‘You, my dear, are used to bivouacs in Spain, and your expectations are simple. But a woman notices if a camp is so infested with biting creatures and ground rodents that it could with truth be named Fleawood or Ratwood.’

  ‘No,’ he persisted bravely, as if trying to reconcile her to the island for her own good, ‘Deadwood was chosen by our engineers after consulting the surgeons. It was adjudged a very healthy place.’

  She seemed to be amused by him, yet could not let his innocence stand.

  ‘Perhaps the engineers,’ said Mrs Younghusband, ‘should now return and inspect the soldiers’ teeth, listen to their chests and report on the colour of their skin, which is turning yellow.’

  With Captain Younghusband bested, O’Meara was moved himself to defend Deadwood’s ills.

  ‘There is an endemic malaise that began with the fleet and has moved to the garrison,’ said O’Meara. ‘And it has now infected the soldiers broadly. But I think you will find, madam, that it is not the fault of the location. The illness arose from the unventilated depths of some negligently run ship. Longwood itself is, I can tell you, a more unhealthy place, for there are morning fogs and bullying winds. If the British Cabinet had sent an agent to discover the least savoury location on this island, he would have come back and said, “Longwood! Put the man you want to oppress there!” And when I ride out from that place to visit the Balcombes, there is an instant improvement in the weather and the clarity of the air as I pass the mountains above Hutt’s Gate and skirt Deadwood.’

  The surprising Lieutenant Croad had by now arrived and joined the table, his expressive eyes swimming towards me. Why had my father invited him, I wondered – for the sake of Jane and me or because he considered him a good fellow? Like a peacemaker Croad asked, ‘But have you noticed that there is no thunder and lightning on this island? The Emperor need never mistake thunder with his memory of cannonades.’

  And there was a rare flash of irritation in Jane, who thought Croad was overdoing things. ‘Nor need you,’ she said. Her outburst might have been caused by the fact we had heard much from that young officer on the subject of the island’s unique flora and beasts. They were, appropriately, all small beasts. There was another possible reason for her answer – she had foresworn a true artillerer or at least a provider of artillery, Gourgaud. She had been chastened out of him and now had to bear with the limited Croad.

  But Croad took it so well. ‘Oh, miss,’ he said, ‘you do me too much military honour. I came to the Iberian campaign late in the day and have not had enough experience of cannonades to mistake them with the voice of the heavens.’

  ‘Why then is there no lightning or thunder here?’ asked Captain Younghusband as if he had found a positive attribute of the island to appease his wife with.

  ‘It is my belief,’ said Croad, ‘that the galvanic fluid of electricity from the sky is attracted by Diana’s Peak and the more sharply conical hills about here, and so conducted through the ground and thus into the sea bed without ever concerning God’s humble servants at the lower levels of the island.’

  ‘Then why does this same immunity to lightning not operate in the mountains of Italy?’ asked O’Meara reasonably.

  ‘For geologic and conductive reasons,’ Croad told us authoritatively.

  A number of people agreed that it must be so, that it made sense, since the great rocks of the island were of such regular shape and could carry away the electricity of lightning very smoothly. Having been successful in the matter of lightning, Croad rashly addressed himself to that other fiery element, Mrs Younghusband.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he declared to her, ‘many a suffering woman, the life partner of a soldier, tells similar tales, madam. The man has chosen soldiering whereas the woman chooses the man. The military is by nature a test of endurance not only for the soldier but for his loyal followers.’

  Mrs Younghusband’s eyes coruscated. ‘Do you think you have sufficient knowledge of encampments and marriage to sermonise on the matter, Mr Croad?’

  Croad, too used perhaps to applause, held his hands up and bowed to the lady as if willing to absorb her chastisement. But Mrs Younghusband’s anger was not diffused.

  ‘Only another woman who has lived in encampments could, or indeed should, make any significant comment on the suffering of military wives. Soldiers are the least qualified of all to do so, since they are already half-enamoured of the squalor of it all.’

  I turned to O’Meara and whispered my plan to make Mrs Younghusband’s quarrelsomeness a nothing. ‘I will ride to Longwood and demand he come.’

  I had been looking for a pretext to summon Our Friend.

  ‘Today of all days you must avoid doing that very thing,’ murmured O’Meara. ‘The man wants to be left with his ghosts and his absences. Besides, should the Emperor come, the admiral will not address him with his proper title. So it’s as impossible as the ball.’

  Our conversation was gradually becoming public and overtaking the acrimony between Croad and Mrs Younghusband.

  ‘But he will do it for me,’ I asserted.

  The Irishman smiled his soft ironic smile. ‘No, he won’t do it, even for you, Betsy. It is your festival but not his.’

  Mrs Younghusband forced a smile at me across the table, but there was a warning in it, something I did not appreciate in my own home, a suggestion that she disliked whispering – given that she was never guilty of it.

  The arrival of the Bertrands in the mid-afternoon improved the uneasy balance of the day. Fanny Bertrand, despite her passion for gossip, also had power to draw people in the direction of their more spacious feelings. That is, she overwhelmed the squalling Mrs Younghusband.

  After the Plantation House ball, Lieutenant Croad and Major Fehrzen had come regularly to The Briars. One of the reasons I liked Croad better than my sister did was this perhaps excessive but unfeigned enthusiasm he had for the natural habitat of the island. If we went out walking or riding with him, trying to sight animals, I would watch his lips moving in Latinate definitions, fresh and replete with the blood of a boy on the edge of what it is to become a young man. There was both prettiness and cleverness in Croad, but it was clear he was not flippant or shallow.

  Oliver Fehrzen had more solidity and less colour. He would sit and converse with my father with an air of workaday sagacity and of having been tried in the furnace. We could tell he was a man made – by merit but not by fortune – for greater rank.

  ‘I would suggest,’ Lieutenant Croad told us as on horseback we patrolled the rocky, eroded edge of Devil’s Glen, the young officer leaning over in his saddle to inspect the leaves of black cabba
ge trees and ferns, ‘that your little island here is exciting in two respects. One finds many invertebrates which, had I visited the place fifty years past, I might have had the honour of first discovery.’

  He decided to dismount to inspect a complex of rocks, and after doing so, with easy, undistracted grace, helped Jane and me down from our ladies’ saddles. On days of slack vigilance I had sometimes ridden astride Tom with a saddle of burlap, and enjoyed the liberty of it. Now we dismounted from our polite saddles with a gentle, audible slide of fabric.

  ‘For example, look here!’ Croad cried.

  On a ledge of moist rock, a high-kneed spider, reddish and vigilant, could be seen. The golden sail spider, Croad told us, Argyrodes mellissii, found nowhere else on the globe! It did look plausibly golden, enough to justify the poetic name. It could have been Argyrodes croadii, had Lieutenant Croad reached the island just five decades past. (He was oblivious of the fact he had not even been born fifty years ago.) A wire bird alighted in the glen and stalked around a fern on its fragile little legs. ‘The cousin of the plover,’ sang Croad. And then there was the St Helena petrel and hoopoe, he declared, looking into the air as if in the hope of conjuring them up.

  All this authentic learning was at the same time uttered with such circularities of hand gesture and solemnity that Jane and I were driven to hilarities. And yet if you had asked me, I would have said in my ignorance that I felt a marked affection for him. It was like reverence, and it increased as he spoke of the labidural herculeana, the St Helena giant earwig, which lived in the gumwood trees and was believed to obliterate everything in their shadow except other earwigs and the sticky flies that savoured the gumwood fruit.

  ‘The earwig was identified by a Dane named Fabricius only seventeen years ago,’ Croad lamented. ‘The giant of earwigs, you know – three inches long.’