Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

‘And he was mad enough to have done that, this Sir Thomas,’ said OGF with his eyes beginning to start forth. ‘Just as his master is mad enough to have nightmares. May they worsen! It is not the case that I detest Lowe on principle, because I have received visits from his stepdaughter, Miss Charlotte Johnson, a woman of whom the Countess Bertrand approves without any qualification – a rare distinction when it comes to our dear Fanny.’

  Then he rushed off towards his bedroom calling over his shoulder, ‘Do you know why I’m so happy?’ He turned again for a second but was impatient to be going. ‘So sanguine? So willing to bear the manias of Sir Hudson the bandit chief, the jackal? It is because I have received the hair of my son in a letter from Marchand’s mother, who nurses my boy.’

  And he went to get it.

  But we found out that even this, when he brought it, opened it, displayed it, a wisp of child-silk, had come to him by difficulty and via a Sir Hudson imbroglio.

  Following the arrival of Sir Hudson and around the middle of the year, there were stories that our friends of the 53rd would leave for India soon enough, for we saw that a new contingent of men wearing 66 on their facings had already landed to swell Deadwood and all the other camps to a great size, yet had arrived without the influence of good humour such as Cockburn had brought ashore. Other omens of beginnings and endings included the birth of Madame de Montholon’s baby, begotten at sea and born at Longwood at the island’s heart. It was reported to be a girl and very healthy, and her parents gave her the name Napoléone. Of all exiles, she was one of the more piteous, an involuntarily detained child who, in the end, as I had once done, would need to face the shock of the larger world when the Emperor was pardoned, liberated, forgiven and transmuted into an English squire.

  Lieutenant Croad, meanwhile, was certainly spending a lot of time with us, as if uncertain he would find decent company in Bengal. I must confess I find it hard to remember what my expectations were of Lieutenant Croad. I do remember that at some level of fantasy he was a potential husband, and I dreaded he would give a sign that he had a similar flavour of an idea, yet was anxious that he would leave without confirming his regard in some way.

  One day Jane, Croad and I decided we would walk to Plantation House, where I assumed we would be welcome to Lady Susan Lowe, who everyone said was pleasanter than her husband. It was not a long walk, but my plan was to go westwards by the heart-shaped waterfall and over a peaked hill not far from The Briars, a tor scattered with volcanic scree and thus unsuitable for horses. I had many times suggested it as the most direct route to Plantation House, and now I was of an age to assert my opinion, and when I urged Lieutenant Croad to it, he was all in favour.

  The only aspect of the tramp to give us pause as we set out was Croad’s welcoming the suggestion of the route I had in mind because it was the one most likely to yield a sight of the island’s sole venomous animal, the scorpion isometrus maculatus.

  ‘If the shale moves, you should merely be conscious of where you put your hand,’ he cheerily advised us.

  Thus we set out to traverse the higher ground, which would then bring us down into that fertile eastern basin on which Plantation House stood. Despite the lack of anything but lichen, the hillside was populated by goats – they seemed to cherish the heights, and I hoped their hooves had been an adequate terror to the isometrus. Our scrabbling hands feared the scorpion, but instead they often found sharp stone and goat droppings. The sun, which was more merciful everywhere else on the island, found us there, and burned my shoulders through the light fabric of my dress, and blinded and bullied us along. One of our two young servants followed carrying a canteen, a silver cup attached by a chain. I called on the mercy of that cool water twice before we reached the high crest and began the descent, arriving amongst the trees and finding the Plantation House road. Croad had barely picked up a stain on his uniform during the scramble and his epaulettes bore no dust on their gold thread. He went on talking to Jane and me about the difficulty of finding that St Helena earwig he had looked for on an earlier excursion. He bemoaned the fact its carapace was no protection at all against the rats. The rats and the goats were destroying the primeval species, he lamented even as the loose stones shifted beneath his feet.

  It surprised us that Laura and Mrs Wilks were in the drawing room when we got to Plantation House – their ship had not yet sailed – and we found them sharing one of their last afternoons on the island with Lady Susan Lowe and her two daughters. Laura Wilks stood up to greet us.

  ‘Major Fehrzen will be jealous,’ she warned me privately, and as ever I did not know how reliable such observations were or even if I wanted to hear them. Nor did Miss Wilks herself, so assured in her polished good looks, in her lustrous self-possession, seem to think it was in any way to be deplored that these two men with whom I could not conceive sharing a drawing room, let alone anything more, seemed to want my company.

  Lady Lowe had not come as readily to her feet. A woman of sweet features but a certain undisguisable acerbity around the mouth, she was the possessor of brown, piled hair, only a little frowzy. She let Croad approach her and treat her to one of his exaggerated bows, which made her daughters titter.

  My first meeting with the Lowe women suffered from an intervening yellow membrane of nausea from our walk, and since I felt the sun had bludgeoned me, I excused myself and went down the corridor looking for a door into the garden so that I could be sick. I bent by hydrangeas and let loose the sour contents and stood unresisting and stunned by weakness as a slave gardener moved in with a shovel and erased my shame with a layer of dark soil. Recovered, I stood upright and walked inside, trying to make a figure to whom frailty was unimaginable.

  When I came back, Lady Lowe smiled remotely at me. There seemed to be a person submerged in her who was sending messages to the surface of her skin, signalling when to be approving or congenial. Since my father, Sank Bootay, was a drinker who concentrated that vice into the span of a few hours a day, I did not recognise the signs in Lady Susan Lowe. Hers was exactly the remoteness of the chronic tippler always absent through calming dosages of – as would come to be said – all-day sherry.

  I did not suspect that at the time because of her undeniable prettiness, the amplitude of her olive cheeks. What teased my mind was the puzzle of how her beauty consorted with the russet patchiness of Sir Hudson’s features, and the unimaginable idea of her sharing a bed with him.

  She liked Croad, I could see. She took the trouble to study his face.

  Her daughters had no disdain but seemed very much engrossed in each other’s company and not ready yet to take warmly to Jane and me. The elder, Miss Charlotte Johnson (she carried the name of her father, Lady Susan’s first husband, an officer in the Canadian garrison), who might have been sixteen, lent an ear to Croad’s account of our expedition, from which he graciously left out all references to my heatstroke.

  ‘It was Betsy’s expedition,’ he said with a sort of whimsical gallantry. ‘She marshalled us and directed us onward.’

  Charlotte suddenly composed her mouth in a certain way, in what could have been a moue of friendship or a pout of contempt. I had often rebuffed and chastised genuine friendship, but could not quite understand what to do with dislike, and with an idea that my reputation – of which these women may have heard, as a friend and persecutor of OGF – might have coloured their opinion of me.

  It felt essential that when we went to a late luncheon I tried to eat. With Charlotte’s pretty eyes on me – or I thought they were, and could not look often enough to check – I ate the turtle soup, which I knew should be delightful but instantly brought out my arms and throat in a cold sweat.

  Lady Lowe watched the slave-waiter pour white wine for her and said with more assertiveness than she had brought to any matter until now, ‘I must meet your mother, Miss Balcombe, and take an assessment of her beauty, since my husband much admires her.’

  My husband much admires her? I felt an acidic scepticism. On what basis would this ad
miration by Sir Hudson stand?

  Then some flounder was served and I strove to treat it with respect, but found myself dreading the second half of our expedition – the proposed journey from Plantation House across the island to Mr William Doveton’s house at Mount Pleasant. Mr Doveton’s family had lived on the island as farmers for generations, yet he had been educated in England and no one dared to call him a yamstock.

  Afterwards we were offered a carriage ride home, and I hoped Croad and my sister would decide that they should take me back to The Briars. They both turned to me, but I stupidly assured them they need not take account of me, that I would continue the journey with them. The path was easier and the Doveton house had the distinction of not harbouring a woman desired by the Emperor or Gourgaud or even Sir Hudson Lowe.

  Oh, how the Balcombe girls were so hardy! I had little doubt that I was more hardy because I was less feminine than Jane. But I sickened all the way there, and Jane did not, and after arriving at his hillside house Mr Doveton had me lie down in a cool dark room to recover, instead of taking in the view and exclaiming, as did the lieutenant. I emerged after a humiliating hour to declare there was no need for a carriage. ‘I’m fully improved, sir,’ I assured Mr Doveton. We could definitely walk again. I was so insistent, and I realised that I wanted in part to defy my mother with pain and, through becoming reproachfully sicker still, to punish her for insisting on being desirable to outsiders.

  On the way back Croad and Jane talked merrily as if they did not notice that I had dropped out of their conversation. They became solicitous when, a mile from home, with shadows growing long and my head like a ball of heat, I embarrassed myself again by being ill.

  Mr Croad did not sight his earwig or the scorpion and this illness meant I did not visit the Emperor for some time. I sulked and writhed in my room. The whole amalgam of humankind – Sir Hudson, OGF, my mother, Lady Lowe, young Emmanuel, the mysterious intentions of Croad and Fehrzen – had me in a disgruntled fever. I realise now I was suffering a chronic condition of bewilderment, and slight shifts in normal conversation could plunge me into it. In fact, this story is in large part a tale of its comings and goings. I hoped that this time a revelation or simply a chance event would shake me out of it.

  Ultimately it was a highly coloured event that did so. Admiral Cockburn had finally left the island. The barouche of Pulteney Malcolm, the new admiral, arose out of the Jamestown saddle, crossed the upland without turning to Deadwood and came past Huff’s haunted crossroads. Jane told me it was coming and had already guessed from the spectrum of colours within that it carried Lady Clementina Malcolm, the new admiral’s wife.

  Jane then broke to me the news that dressed in vibrant swathes of cloth, her hair like a flame above the fabric, Lady Clementina was in the drawing room and was asking for me. I went to the drawing room and there she was, her face blazing not so much with freckles (though it did) but with raucous and eccentric goodwill.

  ‘I wrote to Countess Bertrand from Jamestown,’ she said, ‘and she told me to bring both the Miss Balcombes and their pretty mother.’

  From her lips ‘pretty’ was fine, in a way it was not from Lady Lowe’s.

  ‘So I’ve called in, and your mama has been kind, and we’re all going − first to the Bertrands and then on to the Emperor!’

  She had said, ‘the Emperor’. That itself was an omen to feel better. I thought this woman was wonderful, a Fanny Bertrand without a taint of acid.

  We got into her cart, driven by a sailor, and as we settled she cried, ‘Off we go, my brave tar, eastwards into the day!’

  The sailor drove carefully, which suited my fear of carriages. We made a safe transit of the jolting dip into and out of Devil’s Glen and reached the Bertrands’ house at Hutt’s Gate, where Archambault the postilion rider and his younger brother were with the Emperor’s carriage, to which we were now to transfer, both of them leaning against the horses taking mouthfuls from a silver flask.

  ‘Oh, that is no doubt spirits,’ claimed Lady Malcolm. It concerned me because Archambault was said to be a reckless driver. He had been fine on the way to the ball, but the path to Longwood lay through some breakneck ravines. Yet we gave up our cart and climbed into the barouche, where we were joined by Fanny Bertrand, seating herself in the forward-facing seats, her features benignly composed.

  As we thundered over a ridge, I thought with some fear of the ravine between us and Longwood, and of how that would be negotiated by the Archambaults, each on his horse bent like a jockey and urging it on as if there were a prize for arriving immediately at the house. Indeed, no one who has not been to the island can realise how vertical it all is, how precipitous.

  All the way, at every jolt, Madame Bertrand was on her favourite subject, willing to include the newcomer in what she might imagine was an island-wide coterie of Madame de Montholon’s critics. She remarked, ‘You will see that the new child resembles Montholon – she has his eyes. His Majesty was very worried while his wife was in labour. But that is his nature. He has expressed the same delicacies to me.’ She had never a shadow of blame for the Emperor himself for his flirtations with Madame de Montholon. Albine and her husband were the culprits in Fanny Bertrand’s map of the world.

  The more Fanny talked, the more we could see the impact of the island and the unchosen restrictions upon her. Lady Malcolm made a mouth at me as if she had perhaps had more information on Madame de Montholon than she actually needed. According to Fanny, Albine played deliberately rousing tunes like ‘Marlborough’ and ‘Vive Henri Quatre’ on the pianoforte, or practised scales and reversed the pedals if the Emperor did not pay sufficient attention, all the time smiling like a nun. In the meantime, Fanny was suffering from the fact that she could not travel to town and expect to be greeted on the street. Only the most defiant military officers now visited her, she said, and were being asked by Reade to report back anything of importance that they might hear. I had already heard myself that Major Fehrzen had decided he would not submit himself to this restriction.

  Fanny Bertrand told us in jolly vein as we rolled along that she had listened to Gourgaud complain to the Emperor one evening, after the de Montholons had gone, ‘She is always scratching her neck and spitting her food into her plate. I never thought Your Majesty would like her for that, but she goes around telling everyone that you do like her.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fanny Bertrand in the barouche – and she was careful not to exonerate Madame de Montholon even while condemning Gourgaud – ‘This is the whole thing of internal jealousy in that house. Gourgaud is quite mad, or if he is not, he is saved from being so by the arrival of the Russian, Count Balmain, who seems a pleasant enough man and has made a fuss of him. Oh, Lady Malcolm, I am grateful nonetheless I live elsewhere, what with Las Cases drying up into a walnut before our eyes and mummifying his son with a glance, that lost boy, and the de Montholons and, on top of it all, Gourgaud.’

  I looked at my mother and like friends we both raised our eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, my heavens,’ said Lady Malcolm, but it was because Archambault’s horses dragged us askew on two wheels, down into the defile and up again with all the brio of artillery being hurried into place. Artillery it was, when you counted the high calibre of Lady Bertrand.

  Lady Malcolm said, recovering, ‘It is not our intention to cause misery at Longwood.’

  ‘No,’ said Madame Bertrand kindly. ‘But exile is exile and a desert island is a desert island. As Madame de Montholon says, “One ages rapidly in St Helena.” That is true of men and women. You see, Madame Malcolm, the Emperor is very wearied by this place. He feels he is beyond life.’

  Madame Malcolm was abashed and plucked at the fabric about her shoulders. ‘Oh dear, I regret that.’

  ‘But I do not say it that you should feel uneasy. You have been a friend to him. And remember that what he has lost, he has lost. No one can make up that to him. Though there are those who could behave towards him better, of course!’

  I was no
t certain how Lady Clementina Malcolm was ‘a friend to him’, but I was sure I would find out. Admitted at Longwood by Novarrez, we all sat down in the salon, which had windows opening to the west that the Emperor had not drawn the shutters on today.

  When OGF entered he was in uniform and he embraced Lady Malcolm by the shoulders. She bobbed her face for him to kiss and began to speak in French. An immediate, enchanting energy rose in the room and the Emperor himself seemed revivified.

  He would tell my mother that Clementina Malcolm was the first plain woman he had ever admired, and that he could see why the admiral remained in her thrall. Fanny told me that the books I had one day seen OGF unload from crates had been a gift from her.

  Now the Emperor talked with her about her brother, Colonel Elphinstone, who had commanded a regiment of foot at Waterloo, and whom the Emperor had, during that day, seen lying on the ground. Brandy and surgical care had been summoned immediately, and her brother could hear through a haze of pain and damage that the Ogre was taking a personal interest in his welfare. Possibly, as Miss Robinson had filled the role of bucolic beauty, Lady Malcolm’s brother had thus presented himself as an archetype of the fallen soldier. Still, it was clear Lady Malcolm credited OGF with saving his life.

  She said chirpily, ‘When he was recovered he was made a Companion of the Bath and received Dutch and Russian honours as well. But every great man who honoured him asked him about you, Sire, and your famed rescue of him.’

  This information sparkled in the room and the Emperor said with a full smile, ‘Some men rise and some men fall, and all in an afternoon. We live for years. But at every turn, from our conception to the end, our life swings on twenty minutes, if not twenty seconds.’

  This grim reflection seemed to cheer him a great deal. Lady Malcolm, however, appeared to feel that she had unduly boasted of her brother as a survivor of battle. She declared, ‘After all, it was the Duke of Wellington’s own regiment he commanded, so his valour was inevitably visible.’ She turned to the rest of us. ‘Pulteney and I were in Brussels on the eve of the battle, when the city was a ballroom, and then the following night when it was a vast hospital.’