Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  I knew from my earlier detention in the cellar that a ventilating shaft ran up from the cellar, through my father’s library and out the roof, and I found the keys to the cellar now and locked myself in and went down there. From the table where I had slept during my detention, I heard the entire conversation between Name and Nature and his prey, Billy Balcombe.

  ‘So, it must be strange for you to go,’ I heard Sir Hudson say, in what sounded like a neighbourly voice but was in fact the voice of a victor.

  ‘It has the feeling of final days, yes.’

  ‘And your treasure of a wife?’

  ‘She has the jaundice. You must have heard.’

  ‘The jaundice, yes,’ said Sir Hudson, still with inhuman calm.

  ‘It is unfortunate,’ my father told him. ‘But I shall care for her.’

  Though it was the truth that he was no nurse and that he would care for his wife to his last daughter and maid, there was no doubting his sturdy aim. It was his answer to the suspicion of shame I had helped bring into the house by my taking of poison. And there were other suspicions he had to counter too.

  ‘You notice I say a “treasure of a wife”, Balcombe. I have always managed to be amiable to you, but you could never quite manage to be amiable to me. I mean genuinely amiable, beyond a mere show.’

  My father said nothing.

  Sir Hudson said, ‘I am an Englishman of decent but not huge reputation. No man who was utterly established in his public repute or influential in Whitehall or Horse Guards would have sought this job. It is the sort of post found for a man who has been of some service. “What shall we do with Lowe? He was of some service at Waterloo.” Let me say frankly that my wife would have expected a more spacious government post. Nova Scotia, for example. Though I understand my limitations, I have been useful to my government, usefulness your friend at Longwood mocked.’

  My father muttered, ‘I think the Tories must be very happy with you.’

  ‘You see, you cannot even say “our government”. You have to say “the Tories” as if they were an alien regime. The point is that your friend seems to wish they had sent an Emperor to guard him, and a Pope for a chaplain, our Divine Lord being sadly not available for the task. How absurd! And as an avowedly and self-confessed lesser man, I attract his relentless contempt.’

  ‘I am a small man and he treats me congenially,’ said Billy Balcombe.

  ‘Yes, I suppose in a sense he does. But then your circumstances, Balcombe, are rather enmeshed with his.’

  Was Name and Nature in some way going to be explicit about the sense in which the Emperor had not been congenial? I was about to block my ears when the conversation continued on a subject I was furiously interested in as much as astounded by.

  ‘Is there any truth at all in the story one hears that you are the blow-by bastard of the Prince Regent?’

  My father laughed a little, a laugh appropriate to his good days at table.

  ‘His Majesty would have been fifteen when I was born. It’s unlikely.’

  ‘But not impossible. For there is a resemblance …’

  ‘We both have gout, but that is not royal blood. That is uric acid. The truth is that my father was a Rotherhithe boatman, killed by the Prince’s yacht off the Isle of Dogs.’

  ‘But you and your brother spent time in Carlton House.’

  ‘No, that is mere rumour. Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt was secretary to the Prince and was ordered to see to our education and find us positions. He did so, in trading houses, and backed me in my efforts to be appointed to my present post. And here I am. Not a prince, not a prince’s son, but a provedore, for a time, to an emperor – though sometimes embarrassed by the quality of goods I was forced to supply him.’

  ‘You rather liked the rumour of this royal connection though, didn’t you, Balcombe?’

  ‘It appealed to me when I was in my cups. It made a plain Englishman more interesting.’

  ‘That was something of a conceit, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I fear so. Ordinary men allow themselves conceits. Without them they entirely lack colour.’

  ‘Ultimately harmless, of course,’ said Sir Hudson with a false air of forgiveness. ‘You have other tricks. I would hate you to think that all these tricks you’ve played, harmless or not, have placed you in a position of honour, or even of scoring points. You have been indulged by me but, believe me, at a price to yourself. You negotiate bills for the General! You bribe ships’ captains to take letters! And you thought that old Lowe at Plantation House was so contemptible he would not know.’

  ‘I never said you were contemptible, sir, nor do I now.’

  ‘No, you have never so much as said. Your actions, however, had the arrogance of a person who believes he is not observed and not reported upon. But, my dear fellow, you were reported upon.’

  ‘Everyone on this island is reported upon.’

  Name and Nature ignored this. ‘I would let you go on with your little gestures of vanity on behalf of the soi-disant Emperor, and maintain your status on the island. And why would I do that, do you think, when you were so scornful, Balcombe? Unworldly men resort to scorn too easily – they don’t understand the cost – and I think you are one of them. Your wife recognised that I could not be scorned. And by your malice, Balcombe, you exposed your wife. Did you think of that? That I might use her devotion to you to learn things?’

  My father said, ‘You are trying to say something by implication. I don’t like implication from fellows like you.’ One could tell Billy Balcombe was awed and frightened though.

  ‘Then I can be explicit, William. While you were being clever smuggling financial instruments and letters, I was clever in enlisting Mrs Balcombe. She knew better than you did that you were behaving impolitically. She knew that your respectable partners, Cole and Fowler, would not be flattered to have their premises used as a staging post for the General’s correspondence or to give credibility to French negotiated bills. She knew that she must protect you. And so she did, by the week. Sometimes we met at Count Balmain’s and Baron de Stürmer’s, sometimes on the road near Plantation House. Always privately, so that no shame would attach.

  ‘My wife thought that I was engaged in an affair of the heart and became jealous and, I believe, expressed some of that towards your daughter, the equestrian. I was engaged, in fact, simply in arranging a dossier. Of course, your wife tried to protect me by telling me not even the half of it, to give me harmless details that betrayed no one, even when relaying the gossip of Fanny Bertrand. But remember that the General was particular to call me, as if in contempt, “a Prussian spymaster”. Well, it happens I was, in my role as their British advisor. I lost Capri but had a revenge on that other day, that day of all days. In my role as their British liaison, I got Blücher’s Prussian army into place beside Wellington’s at a crucial hour. If I wanted to impress a village alehouse, I could depict myself to an amazed set of townsmen the critical if barely known factor on that day. But such vanity is shallow and such consolation worthless.’

  ‘I thought you rather liked impressing the alehouse in Jamestown,’ my father suggested, but the blow did not even land.

  ‘Whatever you did to spite me, whatever you considered as your exercises in worldliness and of loyalty to what you probably called the Great Man, I heard all of it in substance from an anxious and devoted wife. Think of that, Balcombe, as you return to a narrowed world.’

  ‘This can’t be the case,’ muttered my father, but there was a silence then and it grew. I wanted, impossibly, to be able to get to my father and offer him comfort. I remembered the day we went to Plantation House to avert bloodshed, and my mother, to my surprise, had been treated coarsely by Lady Lowe.

  I heard a faint scrape. It could all have been Sir Hudson taking up his hat.

  I raced for the stairs and bounded up them and let myself from the cellar into the corridor. There, as he was leaving, I encountered Sir Hudson face to face.

  He stood before me, composed, with a mild
half-smile. The splotch of dead red colour in his cheek did not pulse. He had the calmness of a winner, and though he had no idea I had heard him, he would not have cared if I had. Without even forming the intent to do it, I drew my hand back and struck him across the face with a closed fist, the way men did. It made a considerable noise.

  He felt it but did not touch the place. He absorbed it and moved his head back from the side, where I had smacked it, and said, ‘Remember me, Miss Balcombe, in your unhappiness.’

  We were now absolutely free in movements, since in the eye of Name and Nature our movements had lost all meaning. We knew we must say goodbye to OGF. It could not be avoided, and though Jane at first refused and intended, or said she intended, to leave the island without seeing him, this was in reality nearly as impossible as disdaining the air of the island. Whatever each of us, knowing what we knew, would make of the encounter, it was precisely like engaging the elements: it could not be avoided.

  And so we all rode over, en famille, though without the boys, indifferent to the snideness of the sentries who bore the number 66. We traced the familiar route through Devil’s Glen and up the escarpment where Croad had mooned over an earwig and longed for zoological renown. Fehrzen and Croad and the victors of the Peninsula and Toulon. Thank God they’d gone!

  We got near the long, low manor house. Slaves and sailors were erecting a wrought-iron fence on one of the margins.

  ‘It is to go right around,’ said my father.

  ‘Of course,’ said Jane.

  Our horses were taken and we were admitted by Novarrez, who bowed profoundly to us as if we were a corps of the victorious, the dauntless.

  OGF was in the salon. The billiard table had been moved out. The map of Prussia was pinned only in three corners now Las Cases was gone. History was collapsing without that strict mentor. But OGF had been opening books with Marchand in a room where Gourgaud was no longer his attendant spirit.

  ‘Oh,’ he declared. He stood up straight. He looked at all of us. I could detect the basilisk eyes of my dream behind the ones he now directed at us. ‘This I have dreaded!’

  It might have been that people wondered about the authenticity of the Ogre’s intense emotions after they had left him and had leisure to think back. But they seemed utterly real; they convinced the Balcombes and had one other unifying effect on us: that we suddenly saw ourselves as part of those who had been taken from him. We had heard that Albine de Montholon was also going to Europe for her health’s sake. The nakedness of men and women I had perceived here at Longwood should have overridden this meeting, but in fact OGF’s bereavement did. We all wept as we embraced him. No one hesitated, not even Jane. The caresses were pure, and all of them had travelled beyond sin.

  ‘Oh, Cinq Bouteilles,’ he said, ‘if I were still France, you would never want for wealth or honour, my dearest friend. You would be Comte Balcombe.’

  He asked forgiveness one by one of us. Jane was weeping. Her pardon came without a struggle.

  Nothing memorable was said.

  ‘Where will it end?’ my mother asked. ‘I see Lowe is building the encircling fence …’

  ‘Ah yes, my Jeanne, but you will get well in un-walled sunshine, as you deserve. There you will hear I have died in this palisade of cliffs, and you will know at last the escape has occurred.’

  I felt a panic at how little could be said from our side. A world must be encompassed and yet we only had our threads of banal words. I had also given way to tears. It was the day for them. Yet I had left my handkerchief in the pocket of my side-saddle. OGF took his, shook it out and told me to use and keep it – to remember the sad day, he said, worthy of Talma.

  ‘And now at last, tears, Betsy,’ he said, and pursed his lips and nodded, as if he had always known they were there and it was this visit and his penitence that had brought them forth.

  We went to dinner. Counts Bertrand and the de Montholons attended, Albine heroically unabashed, and O’Meara and a new liaison officer from the garrison, a pleasant enough man who seemed somewhat bewildered.

  Beneath the floor the rats played their rowdy game of possession. ‘And Guglielmo,’ asked OGF, ‘where will you live in England?’

  ‘I believe …’ he said, ‘I believe that in the first instance the Cabinet want to see me.’

  ‘Tell them all, my dear Cinq Bouteilles. For your own sake. There is nothing I want concealed.’

  My father nodded, but I knew there was much to be concealed.

  ‘I think we might then take to Devon, the scene of operation of our patron, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt.’

  ‘Oh God forbid, they will rusticate you by force.’

  My father laughed for the first time in days, and the minutes fled. The bonbons and ices arrived, OGF urged Jane and myself to eat them up as if these were normal times. Soon we were back in the salon.

  ‘Do not worry, my friends. No Racine tonight.’ And he sent for Marchand. Marchand arrived solemn, was instructed in a whisper, and went again. He came back with a bowl, a towel and scissors. The towel went around the Emperor’s shoulders. Marchand cut strands of his master’s hair and put them in the bowl. Each cutting he then picked up and placed in an envelope. Four envelopes. Pouches of the essence of OGF.

  ‘When I die,’ he told me, ‘I want my friends to be able to say they have the real hair.’

  Before I left, I managed to ask after the new baby, Josephine, and Albine had it brought by a maid. I looked into its wide, dark, questioning eyes for a sign of its rumoured imperial blood. But then, in confusion, being unable to fit it and Albine and OGF into any acceptable model of the world, I kissed it and ran to join my parents.

  Collect us at The Briars …

  Lady Bertrand had sent a note to say she would collect us at The Briars and take us to the dock in the Emperor’s barouche at noon on our last day as islanders. This journey was always a risky one because of the narrowness of the track and the steepness of the country, but the idea of Fanny Bertrand shone for my mother like a guarantee of safety and sisterly warmth. My father needed to ride – he had a gelding to deliver to one of the town’s merchants.

  The older Archambault brother rode postilion with another servant. When we pulled out I did not take a last doleful scan of The Briars, for I had done that already. I had interred the house and its gardens in my mind, and no longer had any meaningful sight left to take of it. I noticed that beside Fanny Bertrand my mother looked cooler under her big hat and a net of mantua lace, as if she were suddenly the one most willing to escape the rock in the great sea. After we transited the shade of the carriageway, with Father riding ahead, and came to Huff’s Gate on the main road down to Jamestown, I had enough distance on all this geography as to be dourly amused that in burying Huff at that place, as if to bury his shame, they had given his name a prominence that might last more years than had he been buried amongst the just of St Matthew’s.

  Fanny Bertrand was attentive to my mother, consolatory to my sister and nervously tender towards me. Her gestures remained those not of formality but of unforced friendship. She made a comment to my mother and pointed away towards her right, where at Deadwood Camp many huts had by now replaced the tents of that barren zone, and new soldiers had replaced the ones we had met in the high days. My mother turned her head to look in that direction but saw nothing to engage her.

  We reached the gap in the coastal heights, where the tiers down to the port began. I sat in the barouche beside my sister, and I saw the plateau and its peaks disappear by small degrees and suffered from a sense that proved accurate – I was losing the geography for good. How convenient if the barouche, with all the questions it contained, had its wheels slip on one of the track-side precipices and we went tumbling down, our now too-knowing skulls and bodies crushed with every revolution of the vehicle’s fall beyond control.

  It didn’t happen. I saw the redoubts either end of the gap and their watchful cannon, and they seemed more eternal to the island that I had been.

  There
was some comfort in the town. A number of shopkeepers, and Mr Porteous, were on the pavements to raise their hats as my father and the barouche rode by. At a front floor window of the Portions I beheld the smirk of Miss Porteous. A number of army and naval officers in the street, men who had at one time dined at our table, saluted us as we passed. There was a regard for my father that was not to be despised in these gestures. He could learn from them, if not too depressed, that Lowe’s view was not the island’s view of him.

  At the dock itself waited the Solomon family, and the Counts Bertrand and de Montholon. I think I saw distinctly in their faces the strain of not going, the temptation of escape that we unwillingly represented. I would have changed places with them happily – those who must go but want to stay: those who must stay but want to go. Bertrand moved amongst us with his normal air of courtly wariness. He kissed my mother’s hand, ours; he even bent to Fanny’s hand devoutly. He assured us in his fluid voice that the Emperor was inconsolable to lose us. More friends gone, OGF was said to have lamented. More true friends. It wasn’t the day to ask with an edge in what regard the Ogre was inconsolable about my mother. Bertrand laid the softest of touches on my wrist. ‘He tells you, Betsy, to forgive him and then forget you knew him at all, as if you had never met.’

  The pious absurdity of this tempted me to crazy laughter, yet again it was not the day for such things.

  ‘Tell him that’s ridiculous,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Bertrand, ‘and he knows. But you might be happier if you could.’

  As he went to speak again to my father, Fanny Bertrand drew me aside and, enveloping my shoulders with her arms, walked me a little way along the dock. ‘Have you forgiven me? You know that women conceal these things for each other, and for the good of families. Forgive me before you go, Betsy.’