Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  ‘I don’t think he would have repented of his bravery,’ said my mother. ‘He is not that sort of man.’

  It was not now easy to find out by approaching an officer at one of the guard posts, since they had been primed to see conspiracy in the mildest question, so we resolved to set O’Meara the task of looking into Lieutenant Croad’s present activities and an explanation of his absence. It didn’t take him long to find that Croad had hepatitis and its associated fever badly – he was in the army’s hospital at Deadwood.

  Jane and I thus rode with our mother to see him. The wind blew strong across Deadwood, but Croad was sitting on a protected verandah, in a bath chair, half in, half out of the light, wearing a white linen dressing-gown over canvas pants and slippers, and by him on a table sat Bancroft’s book Natural History of Guiana.

  ‘Oh, oh,’ he declared with full lips, an ‘oh’ worthy of a thespian, as he tried to rise from his reclined position to greet us. We protested and told him to stay where he was and he surprised us by bursting into tears. My mother placed a hand gently on his shoulder. ‘So you see me,’ he declared as if we had caught him at a crime, ‘in this fallen state.’

  We made our sympathetic noises and he sent an orderly to search for extra seats. Soon we were seated around him and he was composed again.

  ‘You must forgive me,’ he pleaded. ‘You know quite well what a person of show I am. I am thus humiliated by my lethargy and fever. I reach for a gesture and lassitude intervenes, and all my pride of conversation is rendered hollow.’

  I had heard people say this: that the fever brought melancholy.

  ‘You’ll be back teaching the quadrille at Plantation House very soon,’ Jane assured him.

  ‘Oh,’ murmured Croad, ‘Plantation House is no longer. But nature awaits me. Your daughters, Mrs Balcombe, have done me the honour of asking me where. I said Africa. I said perhaps Brazil and Australia. In that I should now make myself an honest man and go. But, oh dear, how lacking I am in the necessary force.’

  ‘Well, of course you don’t feel up to it at the moment,’ I told him. ‘But there’s some huge ugly insect at the heart of Africa ready to receive your name.’

  My mother’s eyes widened, until she realised that this was a botanical promise and not an adolescent insult.

  ‘But the world has become too great for my few ounces of energy,’ Croad complained.

  ‘Well, as Betsy says,’ my mother persisted, ‘you’ll get your energy back.’

  ‘I’ve barely seen battle, you know. I encountered the French when they were already in disorder. And having barely seen battle, I am already ingloriously felled.’

  The statement would have been laughable had he not been so convinced of his own spiritual and physical distress.

  ‘His Excellency,’ he said, ‘has a team of officers who convene at Plantation House to read and report on the letters of the French, those that come into them, those that go out. It is not a very gallant activity. None of us enjoys it. That’s what Plantation House has become − a sieve, a clearing house. I read a letter from Las Cases to his wife. Oh, says Sir Tom Reade, don’t be deceived by any poignant sentiments they include. For every one missive they submit to us they may be smuggling out a half-dozen subversive items! Watch for slyness, says Sir Tom, and yet a letter of Comte Las Cases, dry old insect as he may be, was potent, and without any pretention, in his concern for two beings, the Universal Demon and his own son, Emmanuel. I thought that of all the military things I could have done reading that brave letter was the most futile, the one most vacant of valour.’

  And he shed real further tears, authentic and very soft.

  My mother placed her hand on his shoulder again. ‘Come, you will have much better spheres of activity in your future.’

  When we rode home from the hospital, my mother said, ‘It seems that the Fiend at Plantation House poisons everything. Even honest fevers.’

  We returned to see Croad a few more times and noticed that his exhaustion became more profound. I did not enjoy these visits. One day I received a letter from him. The handwriting lacked the scientific sharpness it must once have possessed. He had written, ‘Come, please, dear Betsy, and bring your dear mother. But, if you would be so kind, not this time your sister.’

  We rode over to Deadwood and found him on the same verandah, being fed broth by an orderly. He seemed weaker still to me, and I remembered that there was a military graveyard, ill-visited, that accommodated the victims of this fever. I could not commence on the cheerful talk that instinct told me the sick detest, so I left it to my mother.

  He said suddenly, ‘Do you know there are Englishmen of my era buried all across the earth? No desolation of Canada or India is innocent of their presence. Fever and shell bursts seek them out to baptise barbarous places with their young men’s blood. You must all know that, you have seen the stones. “Sacred to the memory of Lieutenant … of Captain … Erected by his Fellow Officers … Did his supreme duty in the engagement at …” I don’t think I can have claimed to have earned the enthusiasm of my fellow officers to that extent.’

  My mother declared, ‘I am certain it will be a long time before anyone composes your stone, Mr Croad.’

  I added, ‘O’Meara believes you will live to be a great age.’

  Croad shook his head. ‘There are murmurs of the heart associated with this disease.’

  ‘O’Meara says you don’t have them,’ I rushed in to lie to him.

  ‘I don’t want to be one of those,’ Croad pleaded. ‘I don’t want to display those predicable dates in stone – 1797–1817. But it seems that I must be marked after all with such banal mathematics, and it strikes me that if you would marry me, Betsy, young as you are, I could bear a stone that would declare me “Grievously missed by his young widow.” Hence the question, Will you marry me on my sick bed, Betsy?’

  I was of course rendered stupid by the weight of such an offer. This was the great commerce between men and women, the great arrangement! And the arrangement proposed here was such a strange one – that he would give me his hand and then his death, and I would bring my grief to the party and all that would be merrily recorded in stone.

  My mother said, knowing I would not be able to speak, ‘I think you may be overimaginative, Lieutenant Croad. Of course Betsy is fifteen, but that is not the point. The point is that you should wait until recovery has given you a more even mind.’

  I had already decided that I must flee, but that I must also say something decisive. ‘You will get better, Lieutenant Croad,’ I declared. ‘You won’t need me to grieve for you. And what if we were to marry and we hated each other for half a hundred years. Consider that. Be sensible. Be moderate. I must go.’

  The next time we saw O’Meara my mother wanted to know if Lieutenant Croad would benefit from being shipped back to England if he were judged fit for it. ‘Getting away from this island would improve anyone’s health,’ said O’Meara.

  Not mine, I thought.

  Sunk in herculean matter …

  Another Christmas was celebrated at The Briars with O’Meara, but once again without OGF or Fanny. With Sir Hudson weighing and measuring all our tables, it was not the ample time it had once been.

  The previous year the Conqueror had brought out a new admiral to replace Pulteney Malcolm, whom the navy had recalled, as if careful not to allow any sailor too long an acquaintance with the Emperor. We saw the vivid, wire-haired Lady Malcolm off with some sorrow: her going diminished the island’s pool of amity.

  The new admiral, Plampin, had lush grey locks and a long, tanned face. It had created something of a scandal on the island that this man had hove to off the Isle of Wight to welcome a cutter carrying a woman who was not his wife yet would share the cabin with him, and about whom the prurient on the island now gossiped hard. We remotely knew the woman, since Plampin had asked us before the Christmas just gone if he could stay in the Pavilion for a while, and the lady, Miss Daphne Bilham, was sometimes there too, the admir
al’s naval status overriding the moral question even for my parents. As well as that, Plampin might prove an enemy of Name and Nature’s and an ally of ours.

  A New Year’s picnic – a fête for the island’s young – was to be held aboard the Conqueror out on the Jamestown Roads. For the occasion of the maritime celebration, the shrouds of the ships were bedecked with uniformed and welcoming tars in ribboned hats. The young men and women of the island arrived at the docks in late afternoon to be greeted by a naval lieutenant and two midshipmen, who handed down the ladies into the cutters. The gallantry with which this was done was extreme.

  I could not get over the sense that cliques were predominant, and the further uneasiness that my part in the race had given impetus to these groupings. First to board a cutter were the stepdaughters of Sir Hudson, with little Miss Porteous and her brick-coloured hair and complexion, still determined to act as admiring companion and thus to touch a more elevated world. She could have had greater advantages by cultivating the French at Longwood, except that she was not like us a flouter of mean authority. She was one of those who rather liked it when conditions were such that the puny had authority and the paltry thus dominated over the august.

  Jane was by now seventeen – certain, I was sure, to have secrets; watchful and occasionally stricken by congestive chest complaints, which she bore with characteristic forbearance. She and I rode forth in the second cutter and felt the implicit force of the sea moving beneath us and the briny smell which had thoroughly claimed the timbers of the cutter, and the rowers who themselves had a deeply kippered odour. There was a sense I’d always had about the oceans, even about the business of mooring a cutter by the steps and flanks of a ship of any sort. Things seemed always barely managed at sea, barely safely brought to a conclusion. Calamity on the earth was at a polar remove from safety, but at sea the two were just a hair’s breadth from each other. Even during my return from the academy in England I would wake in my bunk, or that of one of the Stuart girls I had sought for company, with a suspicion that I was being scarcely allowed my survival in fragile timbers sunk in herculean matter.

  We came to the Conqueror’s side. The cutter kept bumping itself against the landing stage but we vaulted onto the latter. When we ascended the ship, we found at the top of the stairs a cordon of saluting officers. The air was full of jovial music, as the regimental band, borrowed from ashore, played on benches by the quarterdeck. The tars in the rigging waved to us and to the distant town, and ships’ servants circulated with cooling drinks and ices.

  All the signal flags were flying near the quarterdeck, and Plampin was there, with an air not so much of greeting us but almost of shyly assessing us as recruits. The Johnson girls were already seated with their coterie of female friends amidships. We sat at a diagonal from them with Miss Knipe, whose conversation was unpretentious and without malignity – not, however, without gossip. She murmured, ‘Did you hear the new admiral secretly had a woman not his wife come aboard at Ascension, who had travelled there by her own means?’

  I said as politely as I could manage, ‘I believe she actually came aboard earlier, at the Isle of Wight.’

  My mother, reasonably safe from the town’s judgement – rules became a little looser as one came to the interior of the island – had invited Miss Bilham to tea one afternoon some days before, and had chatted with her amiably, taking perhaps too much trouble to show a certain tenderness towards the sinner, as after all the Gospels argued we should. Miss Bilham was very pretty and small-boned – in that regard like the admiral himself. She had been a milliner, an elegant one, and our family of course did not have any prejudices against making one’s way by trade or the handling of fabrics or supplies.

  There was already talk of her expulsion from St Helena, and the Reverend Boys had denounced from the pulpit one he called ‘a man of considerable rank’ who had come to live on the island with his concubine against the dictates of Christ.

  My mother had taken to explaining to us that women would suffer exile for a man, often a very plain man, if they perceived wit in him. They would endure all the disgrace, her own and the man’s. But it was a hard price, and not to be recommended morally or socially, for people relished shunning you – it repaid them for their own miseries. Such women, my mother instructed us, suffered in this world. People presumed, even when they most condemned such an alliance, that there was some extra lustre to an illicit union. But it was not so. It was just another marriage but with a different kind of price to be met.

  That’s what she had said. Just another marriage. Surely this modifier didn’t attach to her marriage to William Balcombe, and I took some trouble, internally, to persuade myself that she was speaking of the usual run of alliances, not hers to my father.

  The band ceased and we were served the promised plates, a harsh picnic but considered amusing because it mimicked the food – lobscouse and hard tack – that sailors ate. Miss Knipe ate with a healthy and uncritical appetite. I thought that it was as well she was engaged and safe from the Emperor, because she was not serpentine enough to deal with him.

  After the heavy plates had been sampled but in most cases not finished, a sailor with a pipe and another with a fiddle began to play, and sailors invited us to do hornpipes. As we danced around the deck, one hand above our head, then another, trying to be light of foot, Miss Porteous swung close to me.

  ‘Where is your mama today?’ she asked, with a smile intended to be knowing. For whatever reason, the question entered me like a pointed object.

  ‘Lady Lowe is here,’ she said, ‘my mama, Mrs Solomon, but not your mama.’

  There was a snide air of knowingness about her, as if she had more intelligence on my mother’s movements than I ever would. She swirled away. She had made a point.

  I wanted to say, ‘My mother is perfectly happy at home.’ But that sounded to me like too childish a defence. My mother had told us she was not sure that she had been invited, and that perhaps for an hour she would ride across to Madame Bertrand’s and try her luck with the guards and visit that worthy woman. What was there in this to cause Miss Porteous, proud of her Plantation House connections, to belittle us?

  All she had to do on her next circuit near me was to smile in a terse, canny way, scarifying my soul because I could not imagine what, possibly very plain, thing it was that my mother was doing. ‘I’ll show you motherhood!’ I wanted to yell after her. I meant that I desired to do some vengeance which would make nothing of her mother’s being on the boat without mine.

  I saw Major Fehrzen come aboard – he would have been welcome earlier, his augustness serving as a protection for Balcombe dignity against Miss Porteous’s girlish presumption. But now I barely glanced at him. I had been brought down so easily to Adela Porteous’s schoolgirl level, I did not want sane company.

  Lady Lowe had been instructed where the privies were for the sake of young women on board. They were aft, down a large oaken corridor beneath the quarterdeck. To mark them for our sole use, a triangle of white paper had been pinned to each door.

  My conversations had renewed with Miss Solomon, and even with the Johnson girls, whom I approached and who were gracious enough not to mention any quarrel we had had at the Deadwood races. They were again in the company of Count Balmain, whose eye was still on Charlotte. She had the flushed cheeks of a young woman who knows she is yearned for.

  In the period when everyone was telling me that Major Fehrzen and Lieutenant Croad might, one or the other, propose marriage to me, a prospect that reality had overtaken, I felt at fullest force the nullity of this picnic on deck.

  Late in the afternoon, I went by nature’s desire down the aisle towards the captain’s cabin and saw Miss Porteous enter one of the chambers marked with a white triangle. There was no other presence there. I was at once at a cusp. I could be a mean girl or an urbane woman. I chose in an instant to be a mean girl. These chambers were of course capable of being locked on the outside to secure them between use in storms. I shut Mis
s Porteous away with the commode.

  Having locked the privy, I went full of a strange excitement and confusion to rejoin Jane, who was conversing with a midshipman about our age, but a sage one who had been tempered, according to Jane, by action in the West Indies at a young age. Instead of being rendered uneasy by the contrast between my childishness and this young man’s careful politeness, I felt confirmed in my perverse delight to have confined Miss Porteous, that utterer of insinuations too hard for me to interpret. Coffined in oak, in her malodorous closet, she could mutter her insinuations to the stinking air.

  I decided to hold my ground and confess nothing when the dipping of the sun above the crags to the west set people to gathering themselves for the ride back ashore. It was then that Mrs Lowe and her daughters and various others went looking for Miss Porteous. ‘She could not surely have slipped over the side,’ was a breathy statement I began to hear from various mouths. The Count Balmain, speaking his glottal English, was calling for her all the more energetically to impress the elder Miss Johnson.

  There are only so many places a person can hide or be involuntarily hidden on a ship, so I would like to tell you that members of the party ran around, tears on the brims of their eyes, frantic, and still speculating that Miss Porteous had gone overboard into the deep roads. A young lieutenant found her by tentatively shaking the door of the closet marked with the triangle of white paper, and hearing her cry from within, going to Lady Lowe to allow, according to propriety, Miss Porteous to be liberated.

  Lady Lowe walked determinedly out across the deck to Jane and her midshipman – for hers was normally the conquest – and to me also tarrying there, sitting one leg tucked beneath me, one dangling, a posture much criticised by my mother. I was disappointed at once to see she was not furious. It seemed my little ruse had not deserved fury.

  ‘Stand up, Miss Balcombe,’ she said.

  I did, but it took me a time as I manoeuvred my tucked leg from beneath me. As a human I could have done it very quickly. As a young woman with a reputation to uphold, I played it to its limit of time. Then she slapped me across the face, and it was the calm authority of the gesture which most produced pain and encouraged the tears which arose but which I did not let flow. My sister was upright straightaway.