Napoleon's Last Island

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by Tom Keneally


  Over time the Balcombe Napoleonic relics were augmented by items bought by a granddaughter of Alexander’s, the doyenne of Melbourne society Dame Mabel Brooks. Some of those same relics were stolen from The Briars in what seemed to be a steal-to-order raid by robbers in 2014.

  When Betsy, her mother, Jane, and Betsy’s daughter, Bessie, sailed to England, their fares were paid by the Colonial Office, as was their return to Sydney two years later. They were in England more than a year, including the entire span of 1832. Betsy at that time met the Emperor’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte – he had just returned from a long American sojourn and he dandled young Bessie on his knee.

  Betsy would ultimately have less trouble receiving land in Algeria from Napoleon III, whom she would meet when, as Prince Louis Napoleon, he was sheltering in London after a failed attempt to dislodge the Bourbons, and wanted to hear from her lips that he looked like his uncle. She briskly told him, ‘No, you don’t!’ Yet he would nonetheless gratefully ascribe her the Algeria land grant that she would never see.

  She and her mother needed to visit the boys once more. What they achieved at the Colonial Office was the offer of government posts for the boys, and though William and Alex were not interested, Thomas, already sacked from the colonial surveyor’s office, was now reinstated.

  On the ship back to Australia, Betsy enchanted a young man of seventeen named Edward John Eyre who, as an explorer, would later cross the vast Nullarbor Plain and the country of the Great Australian Bight – a heinous ordeal to put himself and his Aboriginal companion through – and much later still would become a notorious governor of Jamaica. Edward John Eyre was a mere seven years older than Bessie, but wrote of Betsy as appreciatively as any male adult admirer, describing her as in her prime, pretty of feature and ‘commanding in form a good figure, stylish in her dress and having a strange mixture of polish and dash in her manner, which was very captivating’. Her hair was ‘copious and exquisite’ to the young Eyre, a rich nut-brown ‘shot with gold in any unusual fashion’.

  I think he might have been the last man to describe Betsy in writing. But an artist of some note, Alfred Tidey, also left a record of her in his painting The Music Class, which I believe can be viewed at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery in West Sussex in the south of England. Of four figures, Besty is teacher, Bessie, her daughter, the page turner, and two students, pianist and harpist, play at Betsy’s direction. Hers is the best-realised figure in the painting.

  Betsy, the glittering woman, still young as perceived by Eyre and Tidey both, is nonetheless a tragic figure. The blight and glory that entered her household on St Helena in October 1815 both enlivened and plagued her. All else thereafter seemed almost an outfall of the good and ill-fortune of her Napoleonic encounter.

  Also by Tom Keneally

  Fiction

  The Place at Whitton

  The Fear

  Bring Larks and Heroes

  Three Cheers for the Paraclete

  The Survivor

  A Dutiful Daughter

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

  Blood Red, Sister Rose

  Gossip from the Forest

  Season in Purgatory

  A Victim of the Aurora

  Passenger

  Confederates

  The Cut-rate Kingdom

  Schindler’s Ark

  A Family Madness

  The Playmaker

  Towards Asmara

  By the Line

  Flying Hero Class

  Woman of the Inner Sea

  Jacko

  A River Town

  Bettany’s Book

  An Angel in Australia

  The Tyrant’s Novel

  The Widow and Her Hero

  The People’s Train

  The Daughters of Mars

  Shame and the Captives

  Non-fiction

  Outback

  The Place Where Souls Are Born

  Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish

  Memoirs from a Young Republic

  Homebush Boy: A Memoir

  The Great Shame

  American Scoundrel

  Lincoln

  The Commonwealth of Thieves

  Searching for Schindler

  Three Famines

  Australians (vols I, II and III)

  A Country Too Far (ed. with Rosie Scott)

  For Children

  Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

  Roos in Shoes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Napoleon’s Last Island

  9780857984630

  First published by Vintage in 2015

  Copyright © The Serpentine Publishing Company Pty Ltd, 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A Vintage book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  Random House Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com/offices.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Keneally, Thomas, 1935– author

  Napoleon’s last island/Tom Keneally

  ISBN 978 0 85798 463 0 (ebook: epub)

  Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769–1821 – Fiction

  Families – Australia – Fiction

  Frontier and pioneer life – Australia – Fiction

  Cover image © Jill Ferry, Trevillion Images

  Cover design by Christabella Designs

 

 

 


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