Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Bill, Bill,’ cooed Sir Hudson, ‘it was the Admiralty, and O’Meara was always telling me that he was the servant of the Admiralty. I am flattered you suspect me of having so much authority that the College of Surgeons would listen to me.’

  He spoke in a way he had never done on the island, where his tone was always more tyrannical.

  ‘As for the General …’

  ‘The Emperor, as some of us called him,’ said my father.

  Sir Hudson coughed. ‘If you wish, Bill. The point is the man is gone, and we are in private.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you ever say it,’ our father remarked. ‘You never said, “Emperor”. And yet there were times during the wars when our government referred to him by that title.’

  ‘Dear Balcombe, that was necessity. The necessity vanished once we caught him. But imagine the pressure I was under. You don’t know the reports Lord Bathurst and I received about intended American and French rescues of the General. If you had known that, you would understand, as the Irish surgeon fails to do for two volumes, that the General needed very close watching indeed. What was protection against enemy rescue to me might well have seemed mistreatment to you. But it was always mere prudence that motivated me, I assure you.’

  There was a silence. Then my father said, ‘And what you said to me before we left the island, that was mere prudence, sir?’

  ‘I regret we are not always wise in choosing how things are to be said.’

  ‘I believe we can discern the difference of a wise man momentarily giving way to intemperate emotion,’ said my father, ‘and a fool revelling in malice.’

  My mother was pale, pale behind the door, but I was more taken by the pure enjoyment of hearing our father give it to him square and simple. The idea of getting favours out of Sir Hudson had been harboured by me for a while but had vanished now in delight at hearing his discomfiture at the hands of Billy Balcombe, said once to be the most jovial man on his lost island.

  ‘Easy, sir,’ said Sir Hudson in his old commanding way. But then something made him grow appeasing again. ‘As you know, Bill, I fought the Ogre – the man I was then ordered to confine. I have seen firsthand the disruptions he brought to the civilised life of Europe. And my rewards for that are the Irishman’s accusations. I had no hand at all in O’Meara’s being struck from the College of Surgeons; others, mightier than myself, might have.’

  Silence.

  Then my father spoke. ‘I will not impugn your word by suggesting you might have mentioned it in your dispatches to Lord Bathurst or others as a suitable punishment for O’Meara. You’ve said you had no hand, and I accept that.’

  But it was obvious that he didn’t accept it. ‘Look here,’ Sir Hudson said, ‘I’ve been treated worse by Surgeon O’Meara than I ever treated him. As for your fleeing the island, you and your family did so voluntarily …’

  ‘To forestall arrest, or expulsion, and slanders against my wife and shaming by you,’ said my father in a trembling voice.

  Laudate patrem! It was curative to hear him at the height of his fury. His soul had wavered over the past years and become blurred, but now that he had his enemy in place he was arrow-straight and transfixing. And since Sir Hudson did not rant or threaten or leave, it must mean he needed the Balcombes in some way. He needed my father.

  ‘Bill, I knew you were sending unauthorised letters for the General. And negotiating bills for him.’

  ‘I have never seen the evidence against me,’ said my father. ‘Though you were eloquent about it on our last day, as on other matters.’

  ‘Mind it, Bill!’ said Sir Hudson, but even then in a moderate way without any of that fierce, manic authority he had exercised on the island.

  ‘Get to what you want,’ my father urged. ‘It’s sickening to see you pretend to be a decent man. Admit to who you are, for God’s sake!’

  Again, silence. And then …

  ‘The thing is that Surgeon O’Meara has smeared my reputation. But I do not matter so much. I was the minister’s appointment, however, and so he – Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State – is almost equally embarrassed by the Irishman’s book, and that is significant and should be addressed.’

  My father was silent. No doubt he was contemplating the embarrassment of Lord Bathurst without too profound a sympathy. My father, of course, was Whiggish, with a touch of the radical about him, whereas Lord Bathurst was Tory. Henry Bathurst was frequently publicly exercised by slavery matters, and in my father’s eyes that made his appointment of Sir Hudson to control our island, and his connivance in freezing my father’s assets, all the more hypocritical. Such opinions were not easily roused in my father. To earn his enmity, men had to work hard at showing their ill will. Sir Hudson had worked hard enough.

  We were still united, the listeners in the kitchen as well as my father, in the expectation that there was something more to be said by Sir Hudson, that he was only halfway through some sort of proposition. And since propositions were rare in our lives, especially ones that demanded apology or abasement of Name and Nature Lowe, we were appropriately breathless. Not like girls in some hollow novel – we had none of that filament-like delicacy. We had known shock and debasement too, and we drank down the scalding cup of familial humiliation.

  In any case, as certain as sunrise, here came the rear end of Sir Hudson’s expedient argument dressed up as a generous one.

  ‘You were a witness to what took place on the island, Bill, and despite our differences, you were always a fair man. It would be of some service to all parties if you signed an affidavit declaring that I treated General Bonaparte as any prudent man would, placing appropriate but generous limits to his freedoms in that place. If you could indicate in your statement – which Sir Thomas’s attorney will help you prepare – the time I spent, while I held the office of governor, in receiving representations from his group of exiled followers and from himself, and of my active interest in his health through frequent questionings of Surgeon O’Meara, then such a document would be appreciated not only by myself but in official quarters. And for asserting nothing but the truth, you would be rewarded with a government posting, at home or in the colonies, of a minimum of £400 per annum.’

  There was again a notable, weighty silence. A post like that would restore us to what we ached to become: something akin to our old selves. Then my father said, ‘I should order you to leave, sir. For you are inducing me to perjure myself by swearing untruths.’

  Sir Hudson rushed in to say, ‘I am simply asking you to balance out the libels of Dr O’Meara. And remember, he is comfortably restored to the College of Surgeons now, and is flush with the proceeds from his slanders. Does he even come down here? Since his book was published, has he offered the hand of help to his friend William Balcombe?’

  ‘He’s a more decent man than many,’ my father asserted. ‘You have the recourse of the courts if he is so libellous to you.’

  Sir Hudson rushed on. ‘And we hope to take that course. And in that instance or any other, an affidavit from a neutral and respected onlooker would be of more immediate value.’

  In the kitchen, we women waited through the pause.

  ‘I will not provide the document,’ said my father with the sort of throaty sturdiness that indicated he had stood up to end this hateful discourse. ‘Be clear, Sir Hudson, that I do not envy Dr O’Meara, and I’m delighted that at least one of the two or more men who were punished for opposing you on the island has done well from it and made a fortune on the back of your despotism.’

  There was a large breath here to fuel a flight of aggrieved and magical oratory most people only dream of delivering. ‘You speak of my financial needs, but they are nothing to my spiritual ones, and I refuse to compromise the latter to put a shine on the reputation of a man like you. For you do not deserve any lustre and are a fellow who proved himself in this interview as much a brigand as the Emperor always said you were. I feel I cannot thank you for taking an interest in my family or for visiting me. Do plea
se feel free to go now.’

  We could hear sounds that could have corresponded to Name and Nature standing up, in dudgeon perhaps but not as deeply affronted as we would have wanted.

  ‘Do you know,’ asked Name and Nature, ‘that O’Meara considers himself so much in the wrong concerning me that he is courting a sixty-six-year-old widow to pay his legal bills?’

  We did not know this, yet also did not necessarily believe it, given its source.

  ‘Yes,’ continued the Fiend, ‘and if that were not sufficiently absurd, Dame Theodosia Beauchamp of Montagu Square, for whom he is showing such passion, has her own absurd history. She had her fortune from her brother Sir Theodosius, a ridiculous family but, like many such, very rich! Her first husband, a Captain Donellan, was charged with poisoning Sir Theodosius and was hanged for it! I do not make up this story, sir, I assure you. After her husband swung she married and then buried another husband, and now O’Meara is lining up to be the third consort and may well be already married to the lady. Love has strange ways, but the unkind could say that O’Meara, never vastly interested in women, has secured a buttress against loss of his royalties, and an exchequer out of which to pay for his criminal libel defence. You choose to be loyal to such a fellow, Bill?’

  ‘Good luck to Barry O’Meara in all his endeavours,’ my father cried. But he was taken aback, and we listeners too, despite ourselves, by Sir Hudson’s gossip. It was so exotic and we doubted his gifts to make up such eccentric details.

  ‘What do you care for how the Frenchman was handled on the island, Balcombe? All those bills of his you negotiated for them behind my back. Where’s your commission for that? What motive do you have for insulting a government minister like this?’

  ‘From what I’ve heard,’ my father replied, ‘you may not be as close to government anymore and may carry most of the opprobrium for what befell the Ogre. This frequently occurs with overly slavish servants of the great. The gods are skilled in arranging such things.’

  ‘In the meantime,’ said Sir Hudson in a voice that evoked in my mind the uneven patches of reddish colour that marked his countenance, ‘be assured, Bill, I still retain enough influence to guarantee you a government position on a scale of income which will assure you against want. Be certain about that.’

  ‘No,’ said my father. ‘No, sir. I will not be certain.’

  Sir Hudson sighed in that ‘some people can’t see the obvious’ way and audibly began reaching about him for hat and cape and gloves and all the rest. Then he was heard making for the door. Just a single set of boots. My father was not going ahead of him to open it. He was showing him the door. We heard it scrape wide and then Sir Hudson called, ‘I realise why you are heated, Bill. But I think that in the watches of the night you might consider what I have offered.’

  After the door closed we emerged with congratulations brimming at our mouths. William Balcombe had returned to the best of his vigour. So it had sounded through the kitchen door. But what we saw gave us pause. Our father was flopped in his seat, as if all his muscular energy had gone into putting Sir Hudson down, as well as the last energy of his soul. And when we saw this grey-faced wreck, applause and praise died in our throats.

  The mood of our household, in the wake of my father’s routing of the Fiend, was strangely wistful, even despairing. No one had ever closed destiny’s door on us as firmly as my father had, with a power and eloquence worthy of Cicero scarifying Catiline.

  But not ten days after his visit, the Irish surgeon arrived in town again by the London stage – a mode which proved he had the most earnest desire to see us. He put up at Exminster’s Stowey Arms and sent a boy ahead of him to ask what hour would be convenient for Mr and Mrs Balcombe to receive him.

  The boys, river rats with muddy boots and sloppy noses, were, despite O’Meara’s earlier solemn narration of the death of OGF, excited by the news of the Irish surgeon’s visit. For he had always been playful with children, and though the boys were older now – William fifteen – they too were nostalgic for the island, where O’Meara had seemed an uncle and an agent of their truest and most hectic playmate, OGF.

  It was Jane who for once took up the duty of the voice of contradiction. ‘It’s taken him long enough to come back. I thought he’d forgotten us now that he has become a literary and social notable.’

  So the Fiend’s poison had entered her, and so had some further signs of the possible onset of consumption. And if O’Meara had a fault, of course, it was his little vanity that his conversations with the Emperor were unique, that he had inherited the true words. But at the same time, the Great Ogre and OGF had his own power over people to make them believe such things, to believe that each one of us was the only confidant he had. Even when I was younger, I had seen this belief at operation in so many – in O’Meara and General Bertrand, in Las Casas, destructively in young General Gourgaud, and in the de Montholons. The conviction of receiving unique trust from the Emperor had had its part in my mother’s history too, and in my father’s. But in my own as well. It was an appropriate delusion for the French on the island. It was a dangerous one for the English. Yet even officers on visiting ships who managed to get a two-hour audience with the Emperor would write a comprehensive history in the London newspapers, as if they too believed in the singular intensity of a confrontation where seconds were plumped out with timeless meaning, and that they had been there when the Emperor had uttered the essential revealing word.

  ‘We will not apologise to Mr O’Meara for our quarters,’ my mother told everyone before he arrived. For he had not seen the cottage when last in the town, having stayed at one of the inns. My mother’s better china from the island had taken a year and a half to reach us, her pride as a householder having travelled fragilely in boxes from the island to Cape Town, and then up the dangerous coast of Africa, on past Spain and Portugal and into the ship-shattering, let alone teacup-pulverising Bay of Biscay and Channel.

  To the agreed hour, when the knock came, Jane opened the door with an expectancy caught from the rest of us. O’Meara was impressively dressed in black serge and a cape, a beaver hat and glimmering shoes whose buckles were new enough not to have acquired any metallic streaking from the vapours and ordure of the streets of London and Exminster and all intermediate towns he had travelled through.

  When my father stood up to greet him, we were sure suddenly that the tale of the older rich woman and her poisoned brother was a malignant fiction of Sir Hudson’s, or that it could be explained in a way that shone with honour, not absurdity. My father took in the sight of the surgeon, his eyes no longer the same companionable ones of our last meeting eighteen months before, when a raggedy O’Meara, fresh from pulling teeth to allay poverty, had come to tell us from purest fraternity how the Emperor had died.

  ‘Dear William,’ he said, galloping across the room to take my father’s hand, and then turning to kiss my mother’s.

  ‘We are very happy, Mr Barry O’Meara,’ she said warily, ‘for your success.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and beamed. ‘Have you really read it yet, Jane?’

  ‘We thought you had forgotten us,’ said my father. ‘In your new renown.’

  He sounded resentful in a way I did not like.

  ‘I had inscribed copies of the two volumes to you but thought that as a courtesy I should ask if you would consent to accept them. They’re at the Stowey Arms. I can send them round to you.’

  ‘It would be very welcome,’ said my mother, glancing at her husband, ‘to receive them from your own hand.’

  He pretended to be distracted by the splendour of Jane and me and uttered the normal palaver, though he must have known that the consumptive redness of Jane’s face was not healthy. He slapped his hands as he took us in. ‘Aren’t you girls the very selfsame picture of delight as you were on the island? But enriched – as it were – in scale, according to your age? How is it down here in this far-off town?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jane, with a particular pointedness her an
swers generally lacked, but as if the Fiend had persuaded her of O’Meara’s flaws, ‘you must understand that if we live here, it isn’t far off for us.’

  ‘I have been married to Mr Abell,’ I said. ‘My baby’s sleeping in the small parlour. You can see her later.’

  I was tempted to ask, ‘Do you happen to have seen her father?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said O’Meara in a self-chastising tone. ‘I had heard you were wed.’

  Jane went to the kitchen to make tea and cut plum cake to accompany the brew. My father, meanwhile, told O’Meara to take a seat and, uncomfortably, knowing there was something astray in Billy Balcombe, the surgeon did it with a rare brand of obedience. He was pleased to leave the question of my father aside a moment and question me on my husband. I pretended that all was blither (I still hoped that booby would come back). I offered a few plain details about Abell’s work for Sir Thomas and Tyrwhitt’s plans for Prince’s Town, up on the moors.

  ‘What can we do for you, Surgeon O’Meara?’ my father broke in. ‘You surely can’t be here just to visit the exiles.’

  ‘I hear,’ said my mother, as if to temper her husband, ‘that your book is in all the great London shops.’

  ‘I was fortunate, ma’am … Jane. The total accident of being appointed surgeon to an Emperor gave me something to recount, beyond the normal adventures of the traveller.’

  ‘And are you invited to all the salons?’ she asked, her chin raised, her neck extended as if to chide him with the lines of want and sadness that marked it.

  ‘In some places, Jane, I have been fêted beyond my merits.’

  ‘And in those salons of praise,’ my mother earnestly wanted to know, ‘at Lady Holland’s, say … who have you met?’

  O’Meara blushed. He was proud of who he had met.

  ‘My fellow countryman Sheridan,’ admitted O’Meara, ‘ageing now and drinking to keep pace. Consider it like this … if one writes something halfway notorious, it gets puffed up to be a masterpiece. But monetary credit is still everything, and if you run out of money and leave a butcher unpaid, that is the end of all literary repute.’