Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  As I fought with shame and poison through my long unconsciousness, the intentions of the grand military machine came to a head, or, more accurately, troop transports gathered in the Jamestown Roads in numbers adequate to take the men of the 53rd away to India. If destiny had laid down before me the generous but confusing cards represented by Fehrzen and Croad, it had in view of my unworthiness, of the combined unworthiness of our family, withdrawn them. So Fehrzen, from the quarterdeck of a transport, saw the island at whose heart I lay in stupor subside, fall down, a smaller and smaller thing, below the horizon. One of the transports was fitted as a hospital ship to take the cases of jaundice to Cape Town, where their superiors would expect them to recover in that balmy port. The rest were going on Empire’s business to Bengal, whose strangeness would not diminish the memory of OGF but would surely erase all else. I was quite happy to be forgotten by Fehrzen.

  I woke up in a flat, slatey light, dawn or dusk. My mind was confused, and I was uncertain about the distinction between those two phases of the day – I was uncertain, indeed, as to whether the earth’s entire light had taken on this dour tone. My mother’s whirling oval face was close to mine and had replaced the usual celestial bodies.

  ‘My darling,’ she said, ‘no one is more precious to me than you.’

  I was amazed at the clumsiness of this – it was a shot that missed the target by margins hard to calculate.

  ‘I am a foolish woman,’ she said. ‘I am ashamed. To face you even is to be burned by a flame – not yours, darling Betsy, but my own.’

  I asked in the voice I had left, ‘Will the Emperor escape in your dress?’

  She began to weep. ‘It will take more than that,’ she said. ‘It will take more than a dress.’

  ‘It was not your dress,’ I reasoned. ‘It was Madame de Montholon’s.’

  She nodded and put her fingers to my mouth.

  ‘Her child is his. Everyone knows it. Not her husband’s. His. And yet still I wanted to comfort and serve him. Still I chose to. I am a foolish woman and your father is a foolish man. Marriage itself is an arena for foolishness.’

  My hair fell out in tufts, in those days whose light and spirit was so supine. I had set out for an utter departure and managed to look like a girl with ringworm on her scalp. They stood beside each other in that light, studying me, the foolish parents. In what sense had Father been foolish? I wondered. In what strange scene had he disported himself, with his thirst for sherry and his goodwill and his general talent for merriment? In what form had he offered the Emperor escape?

  So they were together again in good imitation of a marriage, a union of intents. Good enough.

  ‘Was the Emperor here?’ I asked them.

  They looked at each other as if he could have been. I remembered that the Emperor in a black suit had come into my room and said, ‘Hush, Betsy. We are all fools.’

  That seemed to be what they all universally and individually agreed upon. But I was his friend, said OGF, and he wanted nothing ill to happen to me and was sad that by some means I had been hurt, and so had hurt myself in answer, as if I were a culprit. He kept on insisting I was his friend, and there was nothing heightened about his eyes – they were not the excessive eyes of a dream in which he had also called me a friend in a less straightforward way.

  Once I could stand I did not make an honest convalescent at all. I wanted to ride and when they said no I took the chance to go hiking, with just a flask of water, up towards that cave in the great punchbowl beneath the waterfall where slave Ernest had hidden. From the rim I could see my father and Jane on horseback, and a number of the slaves, including Toby, whose liberation once proposed by OGF had been denied for now by Plantation House. They were scouring the lower ground for me. Why I came back down from there instead of taking to that cave and being a female anchorite, I don’t know. Except that a hermitage is something you try in the fullness of soul and in a God-filled universe, not in bewilderment and an island God has abandoned for its fatuity.

  In the days that followed I heard them discussing whether I should be sent to England, and to what person there. Would Lady Holland take me? They seemed to think it a likelihood that she would look after a creature broken by the Emperor’s presence. Did they feel shame and wish to remove my eyes, my judgement?

  Meanwhile I was blank and sullen, though not for the sake of sullenness, but because all my pretensions at upright gestures had been blown flat in the gust that emitted from that salon when I opened the door on the indefinable storm inside.

  I was remotely pleased to find Madame Bertrand ride up one day and come striding in through the carriage gate like a woman with sharply defined business to attend to. In meeting with me, she had obviously given the order she was not to be interrupted by my sister or mother – she emanated that message in the way she grabbed both my hands as if they were instruments of work she meant to employ. My mother was in any case prostrated that day with a fever. Bewildered Jane kept faithfully to her timetable of French translation, needlework, sketching and reading, and seemed nearly as sallow as my mother. She would not intrude.

  ‘Now, you mustn’t take any notice of that infantile play-acting at Longwood,’ Fanny Bertrand told me. She waved a hand in the eastward direction of Longwood in case I did not understand. ‘It means nothing. The Emperor likes to play games – that is all. Would it be better if the games weren’t played? It would be. I’ll talk to you as a woman. I do not play along with him. But I understand those who do, from generosity of spirit. What you saw is nothing – nothing! Your mama’s good nature … they play on it. The English are sinners, oh yes, sinners backwards and sideways. But the French, they bring their imaginations to life and … it is a confection. I think the Emperor is shocked for your sake. He is embarrassed by me, by my anger, and he is shocked, and in a way repentant, for you. Do you understand? The Countess de Montholon is full of pride for being the Emperor’s mistress, but any of us could be the Emperor’s mistress – I could be. It is helpful that the countess’s clothing fits him. He was always interested in clothing – the Empress Josephine used to complain that he would take hers and she could not be sure of the condition of her wardrobe. Again, it is nothing! It is the French. It is not that they do not easily confront their sins. They find them hard to identify.’

  I certainly did not know what to say to her, but for the first time I could perceive a key to what I had seen at Longwood. Charades. Dress-ups. Dress-downs. That could be understood. My mother’s nakedness, Albine’s, O’Meara, the dress on OGF. Fanny’s speech helped to diminish the mystery of it all and the scene began to make itself proportionate to my inhabited earth.

  ‘And,’ Madame Bertrand gurgled, ‘it is well known that soldiers like other men, through being with them in peril and in hardship. So we simply overlook that. O’Meara – a sailor, of course. And a good doctor and a nice talker. I do not find him a disgrace to the land of my forebears. We have to accept these things, Betsy, and to forgive and to discover when we are girls that there may be no more wisdom in our elders than in ourselves. That is when you become a woman, Betsy. What you saw is not a cause to take some nasty rat powders. It is the onset of wisdom.’

  Then she lowered her head and played with my fingers one by one, teasing them forth, inspecting the knuckles.

  ‘They all want to own him, you know. Each one to himself. The Emperor is sometimes cool with me because I do not want to own him. He wants people to be in competition for him. My husband won’t join the contest and neither will I. But the de Montholons? Gourgaud? … Dear God above!’

  I could never escape the idea that my mother’s fever was a chosen one. It was endemic on the island. It not only lay on the surface of the island ready to be picked up, but seemed to chase down its victims like a predator. It had killed slaves. It made its victims yellow and wan, far more than it killed, and to acquire it offered my mother a chance to escape and exonerate what Madame Bertrand called foolishness.

  One of its chief sympt
oms, exhaustion, kept my mother at home. And as it had in Croad, it also enhanced her melancholy. My father, at dinner, said, ‘Do be attentive to your dear mother, girls, I know you are.’

  I saw him walking with O’Meara in the garden and wondered, does he know? Did he know the range of possible O’Mearas, including the naked one who stood by the Emperor? If he did not know, it was pitiable and I was bewildered as to whether it was my duty to tell him.

  I remembered my mother mentioning Alice. Had she? Was that a phantasm? And now Alice was gone and another woman had come in to help Sarah.

  ‘Where is Alice?’ I asked Jane.

  ‘Gone to the Hodsons’ for her lying-in.’

  Countess Bertrand remained a sturdy and determined visitor to me under the influence of my poison, and to my mother under the influence of hers. She would drink tea with us all, but she took no trouble to instruct Jane as she had me. Was Jane’s mind of such scope that it could encompass both poles of the island, the visible by nature on the one hand and that of the salon, visible by accident? I could be the Emperor’s mistress, Fanny had claimed, and I imagined how she could submerge him with her long bones and ample flesh, how she could vanquish the vanquisher. She had for me the air of an aunt who understands all the children.

  Before my father set off one morning for one of his frequent meetings at Plantation House in which the orders for household goods, coming from de Montholon, were matched against my father’s capacity to supply and Sir Hudson’s willingness to cramp, he took me aside, grasping my hand, clapping it under his arm and leading me, weak as I still was, on a walk down the lawn.

  He said, ‘The Emperor is concerned for you, Betsy.’

  ‘Did he visit me?’ I asked. ‘I dreamed he visited me.’

  ‘You know he will not leave Longwood,’ reasoned my father. ‘You know he is not permitted.’

  ‘But he came to see me. He came to see me because of the wrong he did.’

  My father frowned. ‘I don’t think …’

  ‘Do you know?’ I asked. ‘Do you know? Has he made you forgive him too? And has Alice forgiven us?’

  ‘Let’s not talk about Alice,’ he warned me.

  ‘Do you know …?’ I asked. I intended to be a revelator, not a betrayer.

  ‘Do I know what?’ asked my father.

  So I would be required to be the revealer. I wanted to run, but he had my arm clamped under his.

  He said, ‘Your mother is a good woman. Some people enchant us though, people like us. Some people are too large for us … They override our minds, our normal lives, make us do things … That’s all. Be kind to your mother.’

  He seemed to think about this more than I did and then looked sideways at me.

  ‘My God, when you think of the punishment they have put him to … when you think of the scope of mental endeavours they have tried to shrink him to … it is a wonder that …’

  ‘So we must all be sacrificed,’ I said. Indeed, though I did not know it, he was going to sacrifice himself.

  We both looked at the Pavilion and back at the day the Emperor came and asked us could he stay here at The Briars. And my father’s instinct was to say, ‘Of course, you are welcome, when should we make way for you?’ It would have been better if we had done that, moved from The Briars to some other place. My father had said we were enchanted and his word made it truer than if anyone else, Countess Bertrand, for instance, or I, had said it.

  He reached across me and took my bonnet and said, ‘Your hair is growing out again. You must never, never … It would be insupportable.’

  Then he was overcome by the plainest grief, the simplest tears, tears from the world before the Emperor. Tears lacking in all craft and artfulness.

  ‘Betsy,’ he said, his jowl shuddering with grief, ‘our complaints involving you are far too regular in my book … We tell you too often you displease us. But not anymore. You are my arresting child, my vivid child, the one that was up to the strength of OGF … the one we need above all if we’re to go on inhabiting the world …’

  So I simply turned and in equally plain currency kissed his teary cheek and thought it unimportant whether he was ignorant and uncomplaining or knowledgeable and forgiving. He had brought us, father and daughter, back onto the simple field in which the usual connections of families should operate.

  I waited by him while his horse was brought and even used a hand to help him up into the saddle, where he looked at me and sighed and smiled and rode out the gate for the wearisome interview.

  When he returned that evening he seemed in a particularly flushed state and was inebriated by nightfall. My mother could not reach the table and so it was to Jane and my brothers and me, in a dining room sadly lacking in jovial presences, that my father announced without warning, ‘We are returning to England.’

  It did not sound like a liberation. It sounded like a sentence. Surprisingly Jane was affronted by it and asked, ‘How did we arrive at this?’

  My father answered, ‘Causes. Causes.’

  It was so ominous an answer that Alex began to weep.

  ‘Is Our Great Friend Our Great Enemy?’ asked Jane.

  I had framed that same dark question of recent days but I found in the end that as my mother and father had been acquiescent to OGF, I had in my own way been equally so.

  ‘Alex,’ said my father. ‘England is where you come from. You are going home.’

  ‘Is Mother well enough?’ asked Jane. It was one of those questions that held a multitude of other questions within it.

  When Sarah came to take the younger boys away to bed, my father said, ‘Of course, you realise that we have become too close to the Emperor and Sir Hudson has been frank in accounting that a crime. And he has made sure that he depicts it as a crime to the British Cabinet.’

  And that was as full an explanation as anyone wanted and we sat in silence.

  ‘It is true I have negotiated money bills that did not go through the exalted conduit of Sir Hudson. Your mother and I … we have conveyed letters. We are not ashamed. The man is our friend.’

  I stopped myself from roaring, ‘But is he? Is he?’

  ‘Fowler, Cole and Balcombe are no longer, or will soon be no longer, the contractors for the East India Company.’

  And my mother had bared a breast for him as if he were a child and had contracted fever. So much she had done.

  Agreed to quit the island …

  It would take us time to understand that the terms on which my father had agreed to quit the island were tight, like all arrangements Name and Nature made, and involved restriction on his access to assets.

  It was a dismal period, assembling things that had once been treasures but had been rendered mere stuff by our going, and putting them in boxes – more than a dozen years of books and toys, clothing items and island mementos. Much furniture was being left behind for the use of the new tenant of The Briars, Admiral Plampin, and so from seeing those pieces static in their places, we knew that we merely thought we had possessed our place in the island, and that these remaining sticks of furniture would look on with the same mute patience at the newcomer as they had brought to serving us.

  Our slaves Robert and Roger were to become liverymen to another family, though one of them showed an interest in the orchard and might be appointed apprentice to Toby. My mother was nursed by Sarah, and could be called convalescent. Slaves also collected baskets and boxes of our goods on the verandah to take them to the port. Jane and I packed everyone’s belongings, including our parents’ clothing and items of toilette, and I marshalled our bags and sea trunks on the verandah. It was grief to look out at the garden and grief not to.

  As I stood a second between burdens one morning, I thought I saw a movement in the grape arbour. For some reason I was terrified, my extremities went cold as if the past intended to foist itself delusionally on me. I could hear from within that grotto a rustling, and approached it with some fear, worried that I might see an apparition of the Emperor and Gourgau
d and Las Cases père et fils, all engaged in making the history of OGF, and that the confusion of the sight, as a dislocation of time itself, would prove the new unmanageable nature of the world.

  I suffered no such spasm of the senses, as it turned out. It proved, when I looked, that there was a goat in there. I went in and took it by the horns and dragged it forth furiously, and kicked it until it skittered away through a fence by the carriageway. I could not quite understand my own rage against it. It had filled my head with viciousness, though, and I wanted to extirpate it and all its kind.

  On the way back to the house, panting, I saw, placed like a statue at the carriageway gate, Sir Hudson in his uniform. By him stood Major Gorrequer, similarly silent. A servant of theirs, behind them, held both their horses – they would not be entrusted to our grooms. They had arrived unobserved, and watched with a terrible dispassion my struggle with the goat. The governor doffed his hat and said, ‘I hear that your father is in, Miss Balcombe.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘Is it so?’ he persisted.

  ‘I believe it is,’ I admitted.

  ‘In that case, would you let him know I wish to see him?’

  I said, ‘He is very busy.’

  Name and Nature sighed.

  ‘I’ll see,’ I offered.

  I went into the house and found Father alone at his desk in the study, distractedly looking at accounts. I told him Name and Nature was at the carriageway gate, and wanted an audience. He was struck solemn by the idea but moved to instant decision. He said, ‘Before you let him in, send your brothers to the stables – they love it there. Jane is meantime with your mother in her sickroom. Ask her to stay there. Then lead him in here please and go to join your mother too.’

  I did as he asked. I went then and found that Sir Hudson stood, hat under his armpit, at the bottom of the garden stair. I told him my father would see him in his small library down the hall. So Name and Nature ascended the steps delicately, and his feet fell without militant weight in our hallway, and then he was with my father. I closed the door on them, without others in the house aware.