Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  She had the air of someone who had revelations for me. I had revelations for her, if I chose to repeat what I had overheard from Name and Nature. I held them back to pursue further about sisterly hiding of secrets.

  ‘How long did you hide it for my mother?’

  ‘Perhaps some months. Not six.’

  ‘And this is friendship? Or is it crime?’

  ‘How can I answer? It was apparent the Emperor needed her so sorely.’

  ‘We needed her sorely. We were the ones who were her duty. She had no duty to attend to the Ogre’s sore need.’ I felt the too familiar cruelty rise in me. ‘In any case, I can tell you that you were concealing nothing, since she betrayed all you said to Sir Hudson. Taking the gift of your words to him.’

  I wanted to see her shaken as I had been shaken. I wanted her to grow aghast. But she laughed without shock or enmity. ‘Oh, I knew that! I trusted her. She is no one’s fool. Just harmless gossip, my stock in trade. And items of no consequence.’

  ‘You knew about that? Jane doesn’t know.’

  ‘And no need to tell her. Yes, she told me about what the Fiend demanded of her. She gave me undertakings, and then she told me what she’d told him and we laughed. For Sir Hudson has a wonderful trait: he mistakes quantity of news for quality. That is the sort of man he is.’

  ‘O’Meara says that too,’ I remembered in a daze.

  ‘Yes, it is in that spirit that he guards the Emperor and weekly offends him by many new little quantities of straitening. And she gave nothing away of substance about Our Great Friend. The three of us would laugh at the things she told Sir Hudson. Since he thought his locating of her with the Emperor was a masterstroke. Even laundry lists, if she’d sent them from within Longwood, they would have resonated with him. She talked, and Sir Hudson was happy.’

  ‘The Emperor too? She told him?’

  ‘It was a game. It was all a game.’

  This made me near choke with fury. ‘But she did not tell her husband. My father wasn’t a party to all this worldly laughter and this poisonous game!’

  ‘Well, your father is part-citizen and part-saint, and it was for love of him that she …’

  ‘Or for love of the Ogre?’

  ‘I think your sainted pa has absorbed that and all else with great courage. Be kind to him.’

  A new, revelatory suspicion rose as late as this, on a stone platform above the Atlantic, the last whisper of earth.

  ‘Are you saying my father knew about … my mother and the Ogre?’

  ‘You think that we are powerful actors in the world. But we are all hostages, Betsy, and the best people, not the worst people, are victims of pity. If your mother pities the Emperor, did you think your father wouldn’t? Your mother is an honest woman and does not like to keep secrets. But she could not tell him about the monster she fed with supposed intelligence. She could confess it to OGF but your father … with him there was the matter of his pride. That was a terrible thing for him to know – that he was protected from the Fiend. And it was not by his wits but by his wife.’

  ‘How could my father know the other, Fanny? How could he be calm about it?’

  ‘That’s … I don’t know … that can only be revealed if you have been through it yourself.’

  ‘I took the poison,’ I said. ‘He could be calm and I took the poison.’

  ‘I know. I know, Betsy.’

  ‘I am disgusted by you all,’ I decided.

  ‘No. You have an excellent mother and an excellent father and that must be your yardstick. They will need you in these bitter days. You should be filled with pity. One day, when you think of it, you will be.’

  ‘Not if it leads me as it’s led them. I don’t want to feel any pity.’

  But I knew it was an impossible ambition. In the midst of my ferment a cutter had landed and a coxswain was bawling for passengers to our ship, Winchelsea.

  It meant our belongings were in the hold and our cabins awaited. We descended, me yielding, I confess and bitterly regret, merely a shake of Fanny Bertrand’s hand.

  As the ship left the shore, and all the way out to the vessel, I narrowed my gaze and kept my eyes down. I gave no last wave to anything. But across the water came a baritone chorus of shouts.

  ‘Good-by-y-y-e, Pri-i-ince!’

  AFTER-PAYMENT

  Explaining-himself sessions …

  When we first arrived at the new East India Docks aboard the Winchelsea, my mother seemed less grey in the face than she had been on our leaving the island. I knew – since I still listened as much as I could, and because the cabins on the ships were small and gave onto a shared saloon − that my father had been solicitous during what had been by everyone’s estimation an amazingly clement journey, with a pleasant four days ashore on Ascension Island, part of it spent riding from Georgetown into the verdure of the hills.

  On Ascension Island we had been made very welcome by the representative of Drummonds’ Bank who had children about my brothers’ ages. My father was mystified that when he presented a note to be cashed, the young man was embarrassed to tell him that London had placed some impediment in the way of his presenting notes, but that he should not be concerned – it would be sorted out in London and, in the meantime, all our expenses would be settled by a Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt and he, the banking agent, was authorised to remit my father a modest amount for incidentals. Did my father know this Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt? he asked. My father did. ‘I will see Lady Holland about this,’ said my father at table, when his anxiety spilled over. ‘She is a friend of the Emperor’s and does not think anyone should be penalised for it.’

  After we left Ascension he spent three days in his bunk, though the weather was good and he would usually have been more active on deck or reading in the saloon. I was grateful that by now we had by mutual signals decided that what had passed on the island was too grievous to consider and certainly impossible to discuss. There are some events so engorged that our only choice is to ignore them. That was the spirit in which we had resolved to face Britain. We hoped we would be permitted to be ourselves again.

  In the Channel we encountered a luminous but opaque greyness, which did not disperse even a little until we were on the Thames and off Gravesend, where we could see creaky-looking buildings in the dusky air over the banks. This was my homeland, and the children running on the banks my fellow countrymen.

  Entering the locks into the crowded basin of the East India Docks, we found ourselves in dizzying company, our three masts merely three trunks in a great forest. The air was hazed still, and it did not seem to be the atmosphere in which that banking issue would be settled. My father was dressed to settle it in a good navy suit and blue waistcoat. But our concern did not echo here.

  From a coach at the dockside emerged the compact form of little Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, soberly dressed and with intense, businesslike eyes but a smile I believed uncertain. He came aboard as soon as the gangplank was down. On deck he introduced himself pleasantly to us as Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt. ‘I remember my last conversation with Betsy, who has grown considerably,’ he murmured over-pleasantly (or so I think in retrospect), after praising Jane and the boys. With him was a nurse who took my brothers aside and entertained them with a card game across the deck and beyond the saloon lights on the ship’s non-business side. Jane and I strolled over there too – my father must have an earnest talk with this knight whose name so resonated in our family – and while the nurse showed some skill in entertaining the boys, we looked across the dock at the faces of warehouses, trying to find something informative in the hectic traffic of goods, wagons creaking in empty and going out loaded with everything from rum barrels to tea chests and curry powder. And through it all the male voices of many purposes rising from ship and dock and bouncing round the echoing clouds. It was so much more vastly busy than the island that it gave me the idea I did not know what haste was and so was fatally unsuited for this nation. I felt overwhelmed and doubted I could run its race.

  Sir Th
omas Tyrwhitt took my mother and father, who might have been able to read and interpret the scene for us, into the saloon. I wanted my father to be beside me, to read England for me – that enormous and impregnable book.

  When my parents did emerge with Sir Thomas, the little knight had a look of wisdom validated. I saw a gratified reflection of his glow in my mother, but more doubt in my father. In other words, she was buoying him up. If he had had to take account of my mother’s health as a motive for leaving the island, it seemed now that his was the one at most risk. There were solemn handshakes between my father and the knight.

  There were duties and conferences my father had to attend to in town, and Sir Thomas told us we might be in London a few months before we were to go to a house set aside for us in an area of Devon in which he had business interests. Until we reached that haven or retreat or place of detention, we would live in London residences provided by him.

  Our luggage was placed on the roof and back ledge of the coach. What did not fit was put in the hands of a carter and, Sir Thomas said, would be with us by that afternoon. There is so much to exercise the mind of a home-returning Briton on a grey day! More to try to discern than on a bright revealing one – and all that without other impending issues – like money, the censure of government, the feeling that Sir Thomas was both more and less than a friend, that he was put in place by high authority to be our keeper and monitor. To add to our unease, my small brothers were stupefied by the place and its scenes and had never known the earth held this many loud fellow beings, so many vehicles, and such masses of shops and chapels and stalls and warehouses as the East India Dock Road held, and so many cries from men and women and urchins selling things in amazing ways. We watched girls dragging carts of oranges and calling, ‘Fine Seville oranges, fine lemons, fine …’ There were watercress sellers, piemen carrying little portable ovens and assortments of gravies, vegetable sellers shouting their jingles in praise of cabbage or turnips, Jews crying out for old clothes. There were milkmaids, ink sellers, knife grinders, egg girls, and all of them clamorous to be heard above their vending brethren. In the coach, Alex buried his face in the hollow of my mother’s shoulder and Jane herself was milk-pallid. How would my father plead cases amidst those other voices and match them for urgency?

  The coach took us to a good house in a court off New Oxford Street and our spirits lifted. We did not fully understand that it was a mere holding pen for the Balcombes to – I have since decided – allow our father to be quizzed by high officers and even secretaries of state about his friendship with OGF. Sir Thomas had handed my father an amount from funds, but whether they were his funds or the government’s or ours, I was never sure, and was always embarrassed to ask. The knight then called on the housekeeper to show us the house, said that the nurse was on her way to attend to the boys, congratulated my mother and father warmly on their handsome girls, and left, with a promise of future meetings.

  Shown our rooms, Jane and I discussed whether Sir Thomas was a friend, a kind of parent. His care for us seemed exaggerated unless it had been ordered by a grander power still. His smile was that of a barterer – if William Balcombe and his wife behaved well, they would go on receiving it. Yet everything Sir Thomas did for us had an element that did not quite live up to the cheery benevolence he emitted. We would come to realise that there were reasons for this. There had arisen in the press a frenzy about a supposed escape plot in favour of the Emperor. This was purely to justify policy, but the claim was that Englishmen were involved. We had arrived in London at the peak of this rumour, and thus in a bad climate for my father, whose name was mentioned in some of the wilder versions. Thus we had, it seemed, landed ourselves unwittingly within the ambit of those who most wished to interrogate my father. Sir Thomas was mediator between the great men who had an interest in this tale and Billy Balcombe, already a suspect. That might have explained the equivocation in the knight’s smile that first day.

  We suddenly seemed to be living, like the Emperor on the island, on a budget, an experience we had not ourselves had before. For causes unexplained, Admiral Plampin’s rent did not arrive. Certainly we could afford bread and milk and meat, but the sense of plenty was gone, with the mangos and guavas, the nectarines and oranges. Who had made the limits of the budget for us? My father was all at once the most secretive man on that score.

  Tyrwhitt remained our shepherd. Why? One thing was that Father had written too often to the Prince about the Great Ogre, which unsettled the Prince and gave him doubts – he was believed to be prone to such claims and those around him thought it better to save him from having to encounter them. So now was my father considered disloyal, and the Ogre’s man?

  This was not a pleasant time under any aspect. I wondered – I wonder still – if they had used the power of the state to freeze his savings – a most un-British thing for them to do. His nominal partners, Messrs Cole and Fowler, in the ship-provisioning business my father had run with them on the island, had – further – not wanted to communicate with him, as if they’d been warned off. Altogether, dreadful things had been done to this over-trusting, genial man. It was all a mystery. Were we truly poor or the victims of assets seized in politics’ name? It seemed to me by the time we left New Oxford Street and moved out along Finchley Road, preparatory to our final domicile in Devon, that my parents had become government pensioners, and lived sparingly as pensioners do. For them, it was a new mode. My father was soured by it.

  Our friend from the island, Barry O’Meara, we then heard, had been ejected himself soon after us and for similar reasons. He was now working as a dentist in Edgware Road because they had taken away his membership of the College of Surgeons. So they were certainly able to deprive my father of savings and income. My father always returned from his explaining-himself sessions wan, and then drank a lot. Later he would tell us that some of the more extreme advisers to government ministers wanted him tried for treason. I heard him, with an elevated shrill, not utterly sober voice tell my mother, ‘They believed I was enriching myself by sending the Emperor’s letters on. I took only enough money from Bertrand to encourage ship captains to take this or that item to France or America. How can I give them the names of the captains without betraying men who were friends of mine and sat at our table? So they think I spent it on myself.’ And so they would conclude that he had transmitted the Emperor’s letters and money bills for pure profit, and this was a good thing since it put the likelihood of treason trials behind him, but a bad thing because it made them think of him as someone who sold his soul and relatively cheaply. His higher states of anxiety were slowly replaced by depression.

  I would find out later still that he was suspected of involvement in escape plots.

  A card delivered to the first house we occupied off New Oxford Street invited us to visit Lady Holland. It was an indication of her influence and insistence that the card was permitted to reach us.

  When the invitation came, my father began to hope again, for Lady Holland had been threatened too for her enthusiasm for the Great Ogre and, as the absolute Empress of Whiggish England, had laughed it off – or so we had been told.

  We had the use of a carriage, which had earlier brought us from the East India Dock, and on the afternoon mentioned in the invitation we set off for Holland House in Kensington – more used to London now and its clamour, less frightened – bowling along in sunlight through pleasanter reaches of London and through well-ordered parklands.

  In the coach, we were told by my mother, and my brothers were specially warned, that Lady Holland had been ‘a wonderful friend’ to the man we had known on the island and sent him books and delicacies and had tried to persuade those in power to set him free. So, my mother explained, we must not laugh if Lady Holland seemed … odd. ‘Any more,’ she said pointedly, ‘than we would have laughed at Alex for being frightened of the city.’ We are very fortunate, my mother told us, et cetera, et cetera. The point was made, and it would prove a necessary one: Lady Holland was mar
ried to a great man. The pathetic thing was that we did not know which direction deliverance might come from and must expose ourselves to every chance.

  Hers was a prodigious house set in a garden of oaks. As the carriage advanced towards it I tried to count the windows, ending at forty-nine before we had reached the portico, less than halfway through the count. There seemed to be towers beyond, as if the house stretched on and on. When we arrived footmen ran out to arrange our descent and our advance into the great hall, and then into a drawing room the size of Plantation House on the island. We were told to sit on plushly upholstered chairs and that Lady Holland would be with us very soon.

  When she came in, she did so forcibly. The door swung open and she strode forward on long legs, wearing a mantua over brown hair, a woman of about my mother’s age.

  ‘Oh, my heaven,’ she said to my mother, ‘You have five. Any died at birth?’

  My mother, astonished, but doing her best, said no.

  ‘But you’re closing the account now, aren’t you, good madam, while you still have something of yourself left? As am I. Wise woman! Wise woman!’

  She was accompanied by a spaniel. When she told us all to sit again and she sat, it placed itself before her long legs and stared worshipfully at her face. From all I ever knew of her, extraordinary woman that she was, she was not averse to worship. Her tallness and her exceptional bluntness brought back the island, and dear Madame Bertrand, who was still on it, and who didn’t mind speaking of womanly issues in front of children.

  ‘I heard that one of you is called Betsy,’ she said, ‘my name, as it happens. Which one of you is called Betsy? Hand up.’

  I had met my match. I said, ‘It is me, m’lady.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lady Holland heatedly, ‘I am very pleased to share that name with such a pretty girl. Hair colour more or less like mine, no? Ah yes, a young woman with a future. Not that you, dear,’ she said, addressing Jane, ‘need worry for your future either.’