Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  I leaned over and whispered to them, as Charlotte had whispered to me, ‘I have OGF’s horse. See the bee on the saddlecloth? The saddle is Lady Bertrand’s. The Emperor was watching it all – I rode for him. That’s the reason Susannah Johnson could not be permitted to succeed.’

  My mother and sister were awed as they took in the imperial saddlecloth and the bulk of this thoroughbred. I said, ‘Lady Lowe noticed it before the race and thought it was improper.’

  My mother swallowed, aware now of the potential machinery for ill will which I had set going. She said, ‘Lady Susan doesn’t hold spleen long. She is not like her husband.’ And again a lowered voice: ‘But her tipsiness …’ Its weight in any animosity could not be predicted.

  Jane argued that I should not concern myself but let the groom take the horse home. ‘We can watch the rest of the races, and as long as O’Meara doesn’t get bosky with liquor himself, he will be able to lead Father home. You will have Gargoyle back, for Lieutenant Howard, who did dismally in the officers’ plate on the poor old thing, is very disillusioned in him.’

  I saw that at the mouth of a marquee O’Meara stood and raised a bumper of port and solemnly, though with his feline Celtic smile, toasted my win. Officers innocent of the meaning of this victory approached, bowed, offered their congratulations and went off to ride in the last races of Captain Rous’s great festival of the horse.

  As the afternoon went on, the news that I had ridden the Emperor’s horse got round. Some gentlemen laughed at the idea, the sauce of it, the style. Others shrugged and cast their arms wide, as if asking why Balcombe had allowed his daughter to do it. I could feel blood in my face as I ate a last ice for the day and savoured my pride, my gift to OGF, while wondering whether I was an outcast.

  Finally, in ambiguous air, all we Balcombes went home, accompanied by O’Meara and the groom. In my hand I clasped the small silver cup that Captain Rous had presented, with my little brother looking on in astonishment. Then O’Meara and Mameluke and the groom went off into the night, O’Meara singing the disreputable words of ‘Lilliburlero’.

  ‘My thing is my own and I keep it so still,

  All the young lasses may do as they will …’

  I wanted to cry out to him to ride back with news of the Emperor’s joy and approval, even though O’Meara might only have the capacity left in him to find his own bed.

  The next morning my father, a little tremulous from the riot of the previous day, arrived at Plantation House to go through the orders for Longwood from the Count de Montholon. Sir Thomas Reade was in Name and Nature’s library and in his presence Lowe declared, ‘I saw your daughter’s remarkable ride yesterday. She contested it strenuously, wouldn’t you say? The racetrack isn’t for ninnies, so it is not that she was victorious that I complain of.’ And here, without a doubt, his lips took on that pursed solemnity and his red-splotched forehead a slight frown. ‘But I must ask you how your family thought it correct to use a horse from the General’s stable without my permission? The Crown stands mocked, Balcombe. Isn’t it subversion that, either consciously or unconsciously, you permitted this mockery of authority and violation of discipline to occur?’

  My father pleaded the fact that he had not known prior to the event what horse I was using and that I reacted as any child of spirit might when offered the loan of an unspecified horse. It was a succession of accidents and not a stratagem.

  Sir Hudson held up his hand. It was symptomatic, he asserted, of the undue closeness between the Balcombes and Longwood. ‘I am forced to look again at your serving the French as provedore at Longwood.’

  My father would have paled at this. He did not mention O’Meara’s part in providing Mameluke because O’Meara claimed to have his own problems with Name and Nature, yet my father was secretly angry with the surgeon for putting me in that situation.

  He was clearly shaken when he arrived home and inveighed against O’Meara and even OGF for using me as a dupe. My mother soothed him, declaring O’Meara thoughtless but not vile.

  After he had recounted the interview with Name and Nature, my mother declared that Sir Hudson did resent my win and the small silver cup that now sat in the drawing room of The Briars. My father composed himself with port and settled into his chair and was soon restored to his sense of security, with my mother and Jane and I defending O’Meara, though I felt more dubious about him than my mother and sister seemed to. ‘I think,’ my father sighed, ‘that you are right, my dear woman. Everyone on the island is playing their own game and even two games at once.’

  I went to bed uneasy. Sir Hudson, who was said to be a frantic letter writer, might, at this hour of the night, be complaining by dispatch to the home secretary of state of my father’s connivance in the Ogre’s trick, a trick that I had been more than willing to perform. I did an impeccable translation the next morning as an offering of propitiation to the merciless cogs of the world and left it in my father’s study as a tribute. Then I went to the stable, saddled Tom without calling on any groom and rode out to Plantation House.

  When they took my horse at the side door, I told a sentry that I must have an appointment with Sir Hudson. He saluted me, winked and said, ‘Well ridden, miss.’

  Major Gorrequer arrived, that small, precise man, and led me down the hallway through the vacant ballroom. I could hear Name and Nature’s voice from a room at the far end, directing his dire grammar to his clerk, Mr Janisch.

  Gorrequer indicated where I was to stay and went into the room, and I heard the magisterial dictation cease. The major reappeared and ushered me in. The room smelled of ink and of official paper, and the slight sweet, vegetable smell of cooling sealing wax. Sir Hudson was dressed soberly today, in a grey morning suit – no military excursions planned. Janisch retired to the corner and adopted a hear-nothing, see-nothing posture and expression.

  Sir Hudson did not invite me to sit but ordered me to, on a plain chair in the corner.

  ‘Is Sir Thomas in his office?’ he asked Gorrequer, and Gorrequer said yes.

  ‘Have him come,’ said Sir Hudson, not taking his watery, pinpoint eyes off me. I realise now they were the eyes of a frightened and in some ways overwhelmed man. That morning, however, I considered him engaged in the pure sport of power, and for my father’s sake I had to be submissive. He gazed at me, that strange unevenness of colour on his face. I crossed my hands like a supplicant.

  ‘Your Excellency,’ I ventured, having never used the term previously. ‘I have come to make an explanation of my behaviour yesterday.’

  I knew that I was being greeted with unwarranted seriousness. Major Gorrequer was back in the room, obviously to stay, and Name and Nature attempted to impale me to the chair with his red-lidded eyes and, still waiting for Sir Thomas, went through his papers on the desk until he had found a passage to read which by its pure gravity caused him to lean forward to reassess it. He raised the document and pointed it in Gorrequer’s direction, indicating a particular with his index finger.

  The imputation – or so I thought – was that the passage was both far above my understanding yet at the same time reflected damnation on me or my father. After a time, accumulated like a weight inside my chest, we heard Sir Thomas’s boots in the ballroom, and he entered.

  ‘Miss Balcombe wanted to regale us with her understanding of what happened yesterday,’ said Sir Hudson immediately.

  Sir Thomas nodded twice and then bowed to me and sat in an easy chair. Major Gorrequer remained stranded with the highly significant paper still in hand. All three men leaned forward a little as if the room was so capacious they might not hear unless they paid proximate attention.

  So I began, fearing that I appeared at the one time pompous, deceitful and childish. My father had not known, I argued; the Emperor’s groom had offered me the horse after my family had already left for Deadwood.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sir Hudson, raising a finger. ‘But who … I ask you who … gave the groom the authority to do so? Do grooms normally have contro
l of the General’s stable?’

  ‘I am uncertain who told him, sir,’ I said. For how could I betray O’Meara without betraying my father?

  ‘Did you not consider it a sufficient matter that I should be approached?’ His voice rose. ‘Shouldn’t I or Sir Thomas, in whom my trust is absolute, have been acquainted with this transaction?’

  I said that I did not know it was a matter of such significance. But, I said, I had ridden rather clumsily and in an island manner during the ladies’ race, and if I had in any way hurt Miss Susannah Johnson, I was very sorry for my enthusiasm.

  ‘No, it is not the race,’ he told me, waving that consideration away. ‘I’ve told you – it was not the race itself or its result that affronts us here at Plantation House. No! It was the slyness – the slyness of that man at Longwood, whose tool you allowed yourself to become. And even at your age, could you not have seen that you were being used as an implement of insult? My family do not care who won a silly race. My daughters were more amused than perhaps they should have been by the entire incident. If you do not understand that it was a matter of much more significance than that, then it confirms what I have heard of you – that you are a vacuous, frivolous girl.’

  I said, ‘I believe it was Madame Bertrand’s saddle the groom kindly loaned me. But she would not have known.’

  ‘What that woman knows … what she knows … is volumes. Volumes!’

  Sir Thomas asked me, ‘Did you not think that that great criminal at Longwood would take some joy to see his horse engaged in a race in the middle of a British military camp?’

  I said, ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well, I hope you see it now, young woman,’ he said. ‘Because you have done your family great harm, and everyone must think twice now before they rashly receive gifts. I am interested in what you can do to make amends.’

  Sir Hudson intervened. ‘No, no, major. Her intelligence is not advanced enough for her to be a reliable agent.’ He waved his hand even more broadly. ‘Do you really think we could trust her to tell the truth in any case?’

  I saw with some relief that I had narrowly escaped being appointed a spy and that my father’s career on the island might have depended upon my being willing to be one. But Sir Hudson was right. I would have lied. Just to tease his taut imagination, I would have reported American sloops off Sandy Cove, or repeated some similar rumour that would burrow into his brain like a worm.

  ‘You would be a beautiful liar, would you not, Miss Balcombe?’ Sir Hudson asked me. ‘A beautiful liar. A sweet face and a venomous soul. Yes, I principally see the General and his servants behind this, and you as a mere used thing. Do you like to be a used thing?’

  I said indeed I didn’t.

  ‘Then be warned, just as I have already warned your father.’

  To be warned by Sir Hudson was a frightening experience. Colour shifted across his face as if there were, behind his features, some bloody flicker of the power of the state. And after more predictable chiding, he ordered Sir Thomas to take me out. The pink-cheeked Sir Thomas led me back through the ballroom and downstairs to the side door. I saw through the window an ancient tortoise grazing the lawn.

  ‘The governor is very lenient on you Balcombes,’ he told me cheerily. ‘If he listened to my counsels, the General would not dare try any of these pretty little ruses. Nor would those who were party to them escape imprisonment. You should therefore be grateful.’

  The sentry assisted me up onto the inferior and agricultural-looking Tom as Sir Thomas observed the entire process.

  ‘May I go, sir?’ I asked like a cowed, obedient girl – once again for my father’s sake, and for O’Meara’s. I could taste furious words now − a shame at my own supineness, but if I exercised them I would humble Sir Thomas before this soldier, and the news of that verbal storm would travel round the regiment, and he, whenever he was absent, would be mocked by soldiers. It was an indulgence I must not take.

  ‘You may go,’ he said, as if it were in his power to delay me.

  By the time I got to Huff’s crossroads, I grew happier. I did not dare think I had saved my father, but it was possible that I had.

  The next day I asserted my contempt for Name and Nature and his creatures by riding across to Longwood. The garrison still let our family through the sentry lines around Longwood, while others required a pass. Today, it seemed, I was let through on the grounds of my notoriety as such a spirited rider. The garrison had not yet been instructed, at least at the level of privates and corporals, to disapprove of me.

  The sergeant of the guard, by the ditch Sir Hudson had ordered dug, declared, ‘You showed them the tiger, miss. They saw the tiger as soon as you prodded the stallion.’ I did not mind this mixture of animal images at all. It indicated what pleasant fellows the men of the 53rd and 66th could be if severity of mind and manner were not demanded of them. This sergeant, ageless and leathered, would have roared a challenge had strangers presented themselves here, for fear of Sir Hudson and of a distant government whose will the sergeant believed to be incarnate in Name and Nature.

  Marchand met me at the door – in a frenzied household, he was still the centre of calm ceremony. It was known that he was the lover of Esther Vesey, the daughter of a sergeant in the East India Company and an African woman, and that Esther was now pregnant. It was in this season, of picnics and drinking, that I began to hear these things, couched in argot or insinuation, and to understand them. I began to hear rumours that Alice was pregnant too.

  Marchand led me past the salon with the billiard table, which was now a book table holding volumes newly arrived by per mission of Plantation House, and into the drawing room. There, OGF, wearing a turban and a white dressing-gown over white pants and shoes, sat on a contraption called a seesaw, made for him by the Chinese workers who had become loyal to him. On this, O’Meara hoped, the Emperor would have exercise while being able to converse with his partner on the other end, and his partner at the moment was the Comte de Montholon.

  ‘Our Caenis, daughter of Atrix, has come,’ cried OGF to Gourgaud, who sat palely by the window and showed enough interest to rise and bow. I knew the Emperor was referring to some horsewoman of antiquity. He signalled to de Montholon to abandon his end of the apparatus, which he slowly did to ease the Emperor’s end down and allow him to dismount.

  ‘It was a delight to see you, Betsy,’ cried OGF, ‘conquering the Fiend’s daughters, and the daughters and wives of all! The servants bet for and against you, and enough were doubtful about your capacity to handle Mameluke that those who put their investment in you were well rewarded. Gourgaud, poor fellow, went so far as to put his small resources upon Sir Hudson’s daughter, Charlotte – not out of any sentimentality for her, you understand …’ and here he winked because Gourgaud had been going to Plantation House for some time, was not inhibited to go there ‘… but because he was uncertain about your horsewomanship. Yet I told him, didn’t I, Gourgaud?’

  Gourgaud stood there, still pale from the liquors of two days hence and not enjoying himself. But if he had an interest in Plantation House, I believe now that it was because OGF suggested to him that he might become a familiar and thus a spy there. My spy, the Emperor would have said, which would have inflamed Gourgaud with a desire to be the spy superlative there.

  ‘I told him,’ OGF continued, ‘that you were afraid of carriages – not a bad fear to have given the incidence of harm they cause – but that you were a splendid, rough rider, and the surface of Deadwood was rough, and that you were both rough and elegant enough – and I hope you do not object to my using the term “rustic” – to win out. And I knew you would do it for me.’

  ‘So I was a tool for your pleasure?’ I said, in my own old abrupt way. It was not pure insolence that drove me on. It was the pain my father had had over the matter. And yet I decided I did not want to tell OGF about that; I did not want to destroy his good cheer, his plain, boyish jollity.

  Indeed, he cried, ‘Oh, please don’t be so sev
ere on your friend’s small enjoyment.’ He pointed to himself as he said ‘friend’. ‘There is surely little enough permitted me.’

  It was true. I pulled out of a pocket in my skirts the silver trophy they had given me for my triumph.

  ‘Since you gave me your horse,’ I declared, ‘I must give you this. If you do not choose to accept it, then I’m sure Madame Bertrand would take it as payment for the use of her excellent saddle.’

  The Emperor clapped his hands and reached out and took the cup. He let his fingers explore its roundnesses and flanges and handles. How could he who consumed Prussia, and exalted and devoured Poland at the same time, let his eyes glimmer, his smile come so easily at such a trifle? I was close to embarrassment at his gratitude and said, ‘You have given the Balcombes many gifts.’

  Including, of course, though I did not say it, grief.

  ‘General Gourgaud,’ said the Emperor, ‘would you be so kind to put this on the mantelpiece in my bedroom?’

  Was this pretence? The mantelpiece was where Josephine and the King of Rome sat, and Marie Louise, the wife he did not seem to bitterly miss.

  Gourgaud brightened at being given this small errand. He stepped forward and received it, and bowed to the Emperor and to me before leaving. The Emperor invited me to get on the other end of the seesaw, and so we bounced up and down as he happily, and almost without a falter, read to me for forty-five minutes from Corneille, one of his favourites.

  Gourgaud came back and, as he sat, nodded and smiled in a particular way at me while I rose and fell. My dear God, I thought. He has noticed me. I did not know whether to be pleased or to flee.

  Some huge ugly insect in the heart of Africa …

  ‘Where is Croad these days?’ asked my sister Jane one day. ‘I see him nowhere I go.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fanny Bertrand agreed. ‘He made a brave point of continuing to visit me but I haven’t seen him for weeks.’