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
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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
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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
