Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  The Emperor weighed Lady Malcolm’s neat contrast with the tristesse it deserved. He began to discuss his famous friends who were also friends of Lady Malcolm’s, Lady Holland and her husband – names that hung over us like biblical names, remote and benign and unquestioned, mythic rather than plain friends of OGF. ‘Had Henry Fox’s politics prevailed,’ said the Emperor piously, ‘the history of Europe and my history might have been altered for the better.’

  ‘Would he have stopped you invading Russia?’ I asked.

  I heard Jane’s breath, taken in quickly. The Emperor stared at me ruefully and without reproach. My mother gave a brief shake of her head in my direction, as if mine had not been an utterly reasonable question.

  ‘Have you heard from your son?’ Lady Malcolm suddenly asked the Emperor.

  The memory swallowed all thought, all regret, and his face lightened.

  ‘If I said something hurtful,’ I doubtfully proposed, in a little access of wisdom.

  ‘No,’ he declared, holding up his hand. ‘I cannot have you doubting your words. For that would not be Betsy, would it? But I can show our friends what I have of my son.’ He made a wide gesture. ‘Please, ladies, follow.’

  He led us through the room and past the dining room, to one side, and on the other side – the door into his bedrooms. Through one further door in this compartment we saw Marchand’s truckle bed in a dressing room. Marchand remained on call all night, it would turn out, always a victim of his master’s insomnia.

  The main bedroom was an unimpressive room in which the green-curtained bed looked almost like that of a monk. A mat, we would later be told, had been bought from a lieutenant at Deadwood to dimly adorn the floor. The walls were covered with dark burgundy wallpaper and there were long gauze curtains on two windows, which looked out in the direction of Deadwood. I noticed the silver washstand which had been the glory of his furniture at the Pavilion. It seemed dulled by the room’s gloom. White walls might have at least suggested greater spaces, walls covered with brown-ish nankeen bespoke heaviness and containment. Here was the shrine of the house and he took us to the mantelpiece and enumerated the relics: pictures of Marie Louise, to us an unimaginable spouse living in an unimaginable home in Vienna, and a miniature of the King of Rome, his son, bearer of a lost title, and of course the Josephine cameo that he had extorted from Madame Bertrand. At one end of that mantelpiece was the ornate alarm clock which, he told us, had been Frederick the Great’s. As at the Pavilion, it seemed too complex and grand an apparatus for the plain wooden shelf, and shone earnestly in a way that led me to believe it felt some insensate superiority to its surroundings. From a nail hammered into the wall at the other end was his own Consular watch, hung from a plait of hair of Marie Louise. Its lid was marked with the huge letter ‘B’ picked out in diamonds. We Balcombe women had seen this piece before – it had been similarly displayed in the Pavilion at The Briars, and we knew how he always fondled the plait as he showed the watch to anyone, and how this gesture had such power that somehow when you saw him do it he was forgiven all. And at that moment it seemed the most barbarous thing in history that Marie Louise was not permitted by her imperial house of Austria to join him on our island. She was instead a hostage of her own family at her own household, stuck, said O’Meara, in a parallel island to his − the island of an imperial court.

  OGF took up an envelope off the shelf and exhibited more hair still, soft and thin of filament and fair. ‘This lustrous strand,’ he told us, ‘is the hair of my son. You have seen it already, I believe, Betsy and Jane.’

  ‘And I,’ said my mother.

  We had by now heard how the package of hair had reached him, but it would seem that he was too delicate to mention the noxious details to Lady Malcolm. O’Meara had been fast to town to see the Allied commissioners patrolling Jamestown’s streets, trying to interpret the cliffs of volcanic rocks hopefully. He had introduced himself – being the physician to the Ogre gave him something like an equality of status to them. Husky Baron von Stürmer told him confidentially there was a newly come Austrian botanist staying at a house in the town who had a package it might be in Longwood’s interest to collect. The Emperor, hearing this from O’Meara, sent Marchand to retrieve it, and the valet did everything as required by ordinance. Not having been to town since he stopped living in the Portions, Marchand asked Poppleton to give him a soldier as escort, and Poppleton gave him a subaltern.

  Marchand rode to town, called at the botanist’s lodgings, received from him a letter written by Marchand’s own mother, who was nursemaid to the King of Rome in the castle at Schoenbrunn. Inside it was a further letter from Napoleon’s mother, and in it the skein of hair. Marchand, leaving town with this treasure, saw Sir Hudson and a party of horsemen (including Tom Reade, no doubt, and Major Gorrequer) going to town to find this Austrian botanist, who had been in the Austrian commissioner’s party, to expel him. Who had told Sir Hudson? He had many spies, of course, and then there was simple gossip. The botanist had wanted to visit OGF to tell him about the good health of Marie Louise, and the tendency of the King of Rome to lead the whole court along the rooms of Schoenbrunn naming objects – doors, clocks, pictures. But instead he was detained in the Castle until a ship was ready to remove him from his botanical investigations on the island.

  While the other women exclaimed over the locks, I slowly paced out the bedroom, but in a way that made my meanderings look normal. Seven paces long and four wide. Even to me, who had never lived on the same terms Our Great Friend had, in the Elysée or the Tuileries, it seemed a hutch. Fanny Bertrand saw what I was doing and smiled at me, approving and mournful.

  At that second two soldiers, one from the 53rd and one from the newcomers of the 66th, approached the window outside. We could hear one saying to the other, ‘He nair closes shutters in this yer room. He nair does.’ An island veteran taking the newcomer on a tour of the Ogre in its cage. The Emperor raced to the window.

  ‘I am been here, infants,’ he yelled at them in exasperated English. ‘Now get away all far please!’

  Novarrez rushed in and pulled the curtains closed. OGF turned back to us and addressed not us but, it seemed, some other presence. ‘Why can’t the governor place his pickets around the outer rim of the island, close to the sea cliffs? He already has parties and horsemen on the hills to see where I walk. Why does he have to cram them in against the house? If an adequate soldier, he could place his dispositions without letting me know about it. Can he not do this without obliging me to tell Poppleton, if I travel forth, that I want to go for a walk and want a way clear before me?’

  He obviously did not intend this outcry to be reported to the governor by Lady Malcolm, who was pale and whose freckles had emerged like reluctant stars. It was a cri de cœur, not a cri politique. The Emperor muttered then, ‘Not that I have an objection to Poppleton. I always loved a good soldier and Poppleton is one, though I fear he is about to be replaced – for being too amiable!’

  It was a torrent of complaint and qualification and yet in the corner of my soul, a strange remaining Britishness still held me back for the moment from joining him in the fullest condemnation of Sir Hudson, whom my father had already turned against but who had not fully turned against me. (It would not take long, of course.)

  He said to Lady Malcolm, ‘I have to ride seven or eight leagues a day, my good friend. For my health.’

  Fanny Bertrand echoed him. ‘Seven or eight leagues – perhaps twenty miles. That would keep a man in honest trim. You should seize them daily, Your Majesty, whatever hindrance they put in your way.’

  But we could still hear the soldiers clumping about the garden, trying to gawp in other windows. He sent for Marchand now and told him to order the soldiers off the flowerbeds, and asked him to take the ladies into the new garden to see the roses growing there.

  ‘I have become a digger of the soil,’ the Emperor told us. ‘But Marchand is the grower of roses. Betsy, will you stay a moment with me? You and I will foll
ow soon.’

  My mother frowned at me and then at Fanny Bertrand, though not perhaps at the Emperor himself. She did not like this arrangement.

  ‘Dear Jane,’ said the Emperor to my mother, sensing her unease, ‘I am your friend, and Betsy’s friend.’ His earnestness convinced her and the women went out with Marchand.

  The Emperor’s benign smile turned into a thunderous frown as they left.

  ‘What is this I hear of you becoming ill from the heat? That ridiculous long expedition of yours – what were you thinking? The roads on this island are bad enough. But to take a route via the mountains …’

  I did not know what his intense concern meant and felt he was somehow not entitled to it.

  ‘You have never made an unwise choice?’ I challenged him.

  ‘Yes, and you take the chance to point them out to me. But I wish you were more aware how important you are to your mother.’

  This sounded paternal of him, or at least uncle-some. It was not the normal mode. And did he tell Miss Robinson, La Nymphe, that she must avoid sunstroke for her family’s sake?

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘there is a dangerous state of nullity in you. To choose death out of spite. You must resist it. You are like a conscript who, to show me how wrong I am in throwing him into battle, places his chest against the mouth of an enemy cannon.’

  This overwrought imagery amused me. I laughed, but forgivingly. I had no idea where leniency came from. I was fairly pleased to be aware that it was arising in me.

  He placed a hand very delicately on my upper arm. It was all it was. A hand.

  ‘You are my friend and you are not to get sick,’ he told me. ‘I want no more recklessness from you.’

  I did not quite know what any of this meant but found myself consenting to be cautioned. We heard my mother calling from the garden. Her voice seemed to me to have a number of strands – that of an anxious mother, but that of a jealous friend as well.

  ‘Your Majesty, are you going to delay Betsy much longer?’

  ‘We will go,’ he said, ‘But you must not harm yourself, Betsy. There is a restless beast in you, looking around for some way to harm you. You must not yield.’

  Novarrez seemed to hear and came in to put the Emperor’s normal bicorn hat on his head, but OGF had already seized up a straw gardener’s hat, so he ushered us out to where the rosebushes had been planted in a long line between his house and the edge of the Longwood plateau, almost as far as where it fell away towards Deadwood.

  As an aunt watching a heedless nephew …

  My father decided he would make one more attempt to win over Sir Thomas Reade and thus, at a remove, Sir Hudson Lowe. He had a self-conceit, my father, that he could make any reasonable fellow a friend between soup and pudding. I was myself as dubious as an aunt watching a heedless nephew, and I wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him that even I knew now the world was no longer as innocent as that.

  Sir Thomas did come to dinner and seemed harmless, a man younger than Fehrzen, florid, jowly like a sleek parson, but with features that looked deceptively given to casualness and dreams, a certain sleepiness about the eyes. It was easy to believe there was no real flint within.

  My father warned me to be nice to him and play the piano. Like Madame de Montholon to Our Great Friend, I thought.

  Also at table that night with Sir Thomas was one of my father’s old regulars – the captain of the store ship Tortoise, Philip Cook, at least fifteen if not twenty years older than Sir Thomas. But they got on well enough, even if Cook had said in genial complaint early in the evening, ‘Your searchers put my ship through a thorough combing, Sir Thomas.’

  For Sir Hudson and Sir Thomas were determined that nothing would come in and nothing leave but what they had assessed and judged harmless.

  The conversation during the meal changed from policy to more urbane things, such as the poetry of Ossian, the ancient Celtic poet. ‘Ossian’s work has been by my bunk these twenty years,’ asserted Cook.

  ‘I believe the General at Longwood is much enamoured of Ossian too,’ Sir Thomas Reade told him.

  Captain Cook, gliding naturally from Ossian to the Ogre, said, ‘So, this general can’t be too bad if he likes your Scottish poetry. I heard they were hard up for variety at Longwood, so I sent up three English hams and a keg of American biscuits – American biscuit is superior to ours. I thought that a fraternal thing to do, a gesture to wayfarers. But now I know he likes the Scots, I am doubly glad.’

  ‘Sir Hudson and I thought that rather a large reward for appreciation of things Pictish,’ Sir Thomas Reade declared with an apparently dreamy smile.

  ‘Well,’ said the old captain of the Tortoise, ‘it was a plain sort of tribute from my side. When you consider the lives those people at Longwood must have led when they had all of Europe by the coat-tails … ham and biscuit seems like a mere introduction to plain taste.’

  ‘Um,’ said Sir Thomas, and I saw behind his soft features another being of flint.

  ‘I was going to say too, Colonel,’ the captain continued, ‘I have had a letter from one Comte de Bertrand inviting me to visit His Majesty.’

  ‘Bertrand’s Majesty perhaps. Surely not Your Majesty, Mr Cook.’

  ‘Maybe not mine,’ agreed the store ship captain, ‘but this fellow, think of him what you may, is a feature of the world, a breathing sphinx. It is surely normal, Sir Thomas, for all parties to wish to see him and balance him on whatever poor scales we happen to possess. But I believe one cannot approach the place when challenged without the countersign. I wonder, could you, as a kindness, Sir Thomas, supply me with tomorrow’s countersign, so that I might get close?’

  ‘I shall write it on a piece of paper, sir,’ said Hudson Lowe’s Sejanus, ‘if Mr Balcombe will supply one.’

  My father had Sarah bring pen and paper and Sir Thomas wrote out the countersign, blew on it until it was dry, folded it and gave it to Captain Cook. And then my father, beaming at all, said that his charming daughter Betsy had agreed to entertain the party on the piano.

  I went to the instrument and sat on the stool. I decided that the Scots tunes were safest for me and for the entire dinner party – ‘Ye Banks and Braes’, my safe wager.

  I contemplated the keys, and the mistrust that had been building in me even as it was diminishing in my father asserted itself. I embarked on ‘Vive Henri Quatre’, and did not care if Sir Thomas knew it was the Emperor’s favourite tune. I was ignorant of the fact that as much as OGF liked it, the French royalists liked it even more, and what I hoped Sir Thomas could tell was that it was martial, but that it was not martial in an English sort of way. I thumped it out for it was a tune for thumping out. Its forceful rhythm implied threats just beyond the border, just beyond the sea, and I punished the keys to emphasise these threats.

  I was disappointed when Sir Thomas clapped as enthusiastically as Captain Cook and my mother.

  My father found his way home the next afternoon, in the midst of a fog that totally obscured the heights of the island, and he was flushed with rage. He had discovered that Cook had ridden up from Jamestown in the murk and approached the sentries at Longwood, and when he was challenged, he uttered the countersign as written down by Sir Thomas. This caused him to be surrounded by a harsh set of challenges in the mist, and the men of the 53rd and 66th regiments both moved up and solidified around him, cursing him, having been warned that conspirators might be abroad under cover of the weather. My father had encountered Captain Cook in the fog on the saddle, with a surly military escort of four soldiers, banished to the port, not to be trusted on the heights and headed for a night in the guardhouse of the Castle Terrace.

  So poor Cook, having blundered up the dangerous track on horseback and uttered the wrong password, deliberately fed him in apparent vengeance for his gift of superior American biscuit, had been betrayed and humiliated by evil counsel given at his, Sank Bootay’s, Prince’s, Billy’s table!

  To my father, sharing a dinner was like mak
ing a compact with the other diners. My father recounted to us the argument he had had with the lieutenant in charge of the escort. My father had been so angered that he had then followed the misty road to Plantation House and confronted Sir Thomas in his office.

  Sir Thomas sympathised and said that there must have been a mistake with the countersign and it was to be regretted. But when my father proved not at all easily soothed, more sensitive to an insult against a friend than against himself, Sir Thomas spoke more frankly. He told my father, ‘The enemies of Britain should not be comforted with hams. All such gifts are meant to go to Longwood with the governor’s permission. This wasn’t mentioned by your damned captain. He will be more aware of the formalities for next time.’

  ‘It you contrived that foul arrangement at an equable board you’d been invited to.’

  It seemed Sir Thomas was not sentimental about shared meals.

  My father knew that he had wasted his port and lamb upon Reade. If hams were to be proscribed by the policeman and his master, then he knew finally and beyond argument that he would be required indefinitely to provide the very cheapest purchases to Longwood – the prison basics.

  Some would say my father’s anger was self-interested, his income diminished by the diminished rations he supplied to Longwood, but it is not so, since he did handsomely enough, or the East India Company did, out of the garrison, about whose expenditures there were fewer quibbles, and out of the naval squadron, who did not constitute the main cause of the governor’s fretful anger or Sir Thomas Reade’s scrutiny.

  Thus it was, given the shrinkage of supplies to OGF and perhaps more significantly to the smaller Bertrands and de Montholons, that the governor came to be referred to in our house as the Fiend. My mother speculated that Sir Thomas Reade might try to cramp our own table, but was delighted to find that he did not have the power. O’Meara visited us in that season of fogs and helped calm my father down by telling him of the Emperor’s witticisms about said Fiend.