by Jan Needle
The general had a technique that she knew well, but she had few ways of fighting. Her lips began to quiver, her hands began to shake.
‘We have a child, Monsieur! You have not seen her yet! Have you no pity? I know you have no shame.’
The valet went to quietly close the door. Remaining on the inside.
‘No shame? Perhaps. No pity? That is a calumny. No child, however, is a certainty. Your little bundle, like your last one, your petite Hélène, had naught to do with me. I told your husband so, and there’s an end to it. Marquis de Montholon is a man of honour. Sometimes, my dear Albine, I fear it is a virtue that you lack.’
Albine de Montholon was finished. Ever since the birth, their liaison had been totally denied. Whether money had changed hands or not she might never know, but her husband now accepted she was pure. And he had pointed out, in “marital affection” as he put it, that to persuade him otherwise would be to exile herself far from the island, and probably from life itself.
She was in tears now, although she well knew it was the only female wile her lover was immune to. Her erstwhile lover. She was finished.
‘I have friends, sir, I beg you not forget that. I have friends who…’
She let the thought tail off, and Napoleon showed his contempt by sloshing so violently that hot soapy water spilled all down her gown.
‘I think she’s trying to threaten me, Jean-Baptiste. Please get her out of here, will you? I would hate to have to call the guard.’
By the time she left the room Albine was composed. It was time to go and see her friend O’Meara. She mopped and wrung the moisture from her dress, thinking of Napoleon in his bath and of their first child, ‘la petite Hélène’, who had been conceived in one. He so loved the sensation of warm water. She would go and see O’Meara.
Napoleon thought of her as well. Although he’d asked for the pretty serving girl to get him dressed, he would rather have taken Albine back into bed. She was a strong woman, a headstrong woman, who showed her husband as an eternal milksop. De Montholon had been appointed his companion-in-exile, and all he’d given him in terms of companionship had been the sweet body of his wife. The Emperor despised so many men. It was no wonder that their women threw themselves in legions at his feet.
But, steeped in water, he remembered bath times with Joséphine more than almost anything, although she had been dead since the year before he’d come to St Helena. He had adored bathing with her, and sometimes told her not to wash when they’d been apart, so that they could throw themselves into each other’s arms and into scented, aromatic water. And, clean or dirty, he had loved always to undress her.
How happy I would be, he thought, if I could assist her at her disrobing now, the little firm white breast, the adorable face, the hair tied up in a scarf à la créole. He had had to divorce her finally to get an heir, but neither of them had ever recovered the total joie de vivre they’d often shared.
Joséphine had not been French, as had not he, and also came from a family not blessed with wealth. She was from Martinique, in the Caribbean, with a drinking father and little chance of the life she dreamed of, but when the Revolution came she was one of Les Merveilleuses who laid siege to the most powerful men of Paris. When the President of the Directory had done with her, she had praised and lionised the rough young soldier he had introduced her to, and told him, in bed and out of it, he would one day be an even greater man than Barras.
Seduction was not a word they recognised, but their needs had been the same, and both had known it within moments of first meeting. Joséphine had high society in her hand, she could make both men and women dance to her tune, but she believed completely in Napoleon and he in her. As they rose, they glittered in the firmament.
Rose. A word that could have come between them. For Joséphine had been christened Rose — Marie Josèphe Rose de Beauharnais — and Napoleon had not liked the name — so changed it. He also did not care to acknowledge the age difference — she was thirty-two while he was only twenty-six — but he loved her two children like a father, and later ennobled them.
His bathwater seemed to cool of its own volition as he thought of his next wife, however. Marie Louise, Archduchess of Austria, scion of a truly royal family, blood relative of Marie Antoinette. They had a son together, truly, known as the King of Rome — but such a son! Napoleon reached across the side of the bath, spilling water everywhere, and reached for the bell. Oh come and save me, Cathérina. But you will never be my Joséphine.
*
In another house not far away from Longwood, Albine de Montholon had met up with her friend Barry O’Meara, and a rather unexpected thing had happened. They had ended up in each other’s arms and then — in a secluded corner of her husband’s thinking room (‘God spare the mark,’ O’Meara quipped), they had ended in flagrante.
Afterwards, Madame was rather tearful.
‘I fear we’re going to have to kill him now,’ she murmured.
‘Hell’s bells!’ expostulated O’Meara. ‘Kill your husband! Why?’
She gently bit his ear, then blew into it.
‘Goose,’ she said. ‘Not Charles Tristan, but Napoleon. He will not come and see his sweet new baby. And that is very hurtful, n’est-ce pas?’
Dr O’Meara was Napoleon’s doctor, paid by the English government to take care of his needs.
Well, he thought. It is a point of view…
Chapter Eleven
The first days of the “rescue convoy” were not untypical. Strong westerlies blew straight down the English Channel in their faces, and even Armstrong’s handy Tamarind found the going slow. It was an object lesson, he told his wife, of how the future bore down on the past. Johnson’s vessels punched fast and handy straight into the wind and sea, and made more miles in half a day then he would in a week.
‘Fie on you!’ said Eliza. ‘Keep your insults down, my husband, or you will cut poor Tammy to her soul!’ She skipped back and stroked the taffrail. Unfortunately, she had to push Lucy not too gently from her path. Lucy was hanging over the turbulent water of the wake, and throwing up her breakfast like a slattern.
The steamships were an amazing sight. Their hulls were most unusual, with no pretension to great beauty, and their smokestacks, guyed with doubled wire, were not much shorter than a wherry’s mast. As they hit each wave, it rolled up above the bow and hurried aft until it hit the iron covers of the boilers and machinery. Then ensued a burst of spray and steam and foam, carried back over the stern to pour into the sea again.
‘One thing I will agree with,’ Samson said, ‘the way they pitch and roll, I would be matching poor Miss Balcombe heave for heave. Those Irishmen, by all that’s wonderful, must have cast-iron guts.’
By the time they got to Ushant, the Eagle and the Etna had rendezvoused with the intrepid Bretons paid to bring out coal to them. Rebunkering had been a long and filthy job, and one at least of the passengers shipped with Johnson had given up. It was the French spy Ledru, who had been pulled across in the Eagle’s rowing boat, his sallow skin now almost corpse-like.
Tom Johnson, too, was prepared to make concessions to Eliza. He came across to say hello, trusting the two submarines to Arthur Preece and another seaman, and swore he had never found a berth so comfortable as the Tamarind’s saloon.
‘God love you, Missus Honey, you would not care to do a swap at all, now would you?’ he roared. ‘Another thousand miles of this will kill us all! It’s like Niagara in a barrel, so it is. You are the smart ones after all.’
That was not serious, but he did concede one thing. The amount of coal they’d consumed to reach the Western Approaches had been terrifying. When they were fully bunkered again, it would be a case of using only sail to reach the southern latitudes. Even with the coal that Armstrong carried, they could only use engines to finish off the job of ‘saving Boney’.
After the struggle to get down west, though, their positions were reversed. As they cleared the coast of France and headed south into the w
armer weather, the faster Tamarind must needs spill wind constantly to not outrun the Johnson craft. The French spy stayed on board — he would not rejoin a submarine at any price — and a regime of polite dinners was introduced. For Lucy, it was a time of some contentment. The only thing that troubled her, she confided to her friend, was the yellow face and staring eyes of the cadaverous Ledru.
‘He watches me, Eliza. I find him staring at me. It is as if he has a plan for me.’
Ledru had a plan indeed. There were events to happen on St Helena that he alone knew of.
While things on the convoy moved slowly, on the island they were moving very fast. Napoleon, working with an almanac and hope, was plotting daily with Cipriani and Robeaud on details of how the escape would be effected. That these men, both menials, should be so frequently closeted with the Emperor was no great surprise to most of those who knew him. Cipriani, indeed, closely resembled him, and was treated like the half-brother that rumour had it for the truth.
Robeaud’s resemblance to Napoleon was even more remarkable — so much so, in fact, that he kept his association with the English very slight. There was no doubt in the household that both were trusted body-men, with their servant status the merest blind.
Officially, Napoleon got letters and dispatches only through the office of the governor, but not infrequent packages were delivered clandestinely to one or other of these serving men. Well-guarded as the 28-mile coastline of the island was, disaffected seamen of John Company, on passage to and from the Cape, could find a way.
The bases at Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, set up by Admiral Cockburn for a completely different reason, had also proved their worth to people like Tom Johnson. Cipriani and Robeaud woke Napoleon in his bedroom one black night with a dispatch just landed from Ascension. The convoy, it appeared, was very close.
‘It is the plan drawn out in detail,’ Cipriani said excitedly. ‘Monsieur Johnson’s proposals as to how your Excellency is to reach the shore. He says there will be men there who can get you out of this. I pray, Your Excellency, that —’
Napoleon rarely showed his feelings, but after years of exile he still had an iron grip. Cipriani, he knew, was afraid the venture was impossible. But if it could be done, the general would do it.
‘Show. Give the paper over and shut up.’
The note was water-damaged, but Johnson’s hand interpreted as roughly this: ‘I should then obtain my introduction to his Imperial Majesty and explain my plan. I propose that coachman should go into the house at a certain hour and that His Majesty should be provided with a similar livery, as well as myself, in one in the character of a coachman and the other as a groom.
‘We should then watch our opportunity to avoid the eye of the guard, and upon arriving at the spot where our blocks, &c., were deposited, I should make fast one end of my ball of twine to the ring, and heave the ball down to my confidential man and then haul up the mechanical chair to the top.
‘I should then place His Majesty in the chair, while I took my station at the back, and lowered away with a corresponding weight on the other side.’
There was silence round the table for some while. Then Napoleon harrumphed.
‘He wants me dressed up as a groom, does he? And if I was taken, what then? To be captured as a common criminal would be demeaning. When I leave St Helena, gentlemen, I leave it with my hat upon my head and my good sword at my side. What does Johnson take me for? A stable lad?’
Men who argued with the general could often end up sorry, even trusted men like these.
‘Unconscionable,’ said Robeaud. ‘It shall not be done. Not like that, in any wise.’
Cipriani nodded.
‘Although the rest of it could be suitably dignified, Your Excellency.’
‘Yes,’ said Robeaud. ‘Capitaine Johnson envisages it all takes place at night, and when you reach the bottom in your chair, there will be stalwart men to place you in the smaller underwater craft in the merest twinkling.’
‘A twinkling,’ said Cipriani. ‘Almost nobody will see Your Excellency at all.’
‘Excellency?’ Napoleon responded with a growl, but he seemed more than half amused. ‘How excellent then do you think I’ll shape up as a common groom?’
Smiles were exchanged. They had almost won him over.
‘Then a most exceedingly short voyage off the shore, then you transfer from the Etna to the Eagle,’ Robeaud said. ‘As well as engines they have masts that are erected when they reach the open water, and if a hostile ship attempts to impede the progress, they haul down sails, strike yards and masts, and then submerge.’
Cipriani added: ‘Under water, they then await the approach of the attacker, and with the aid of the little Etna, attach the torpedo to her bottom, and affect her destruction. It takes, they say, no more than fifteen minutes.’
‘Or,’ His Excellency put in, ‘we await the arrival of the navy from Peru. Lord Cochrane confides that he will not let me down. By now he should be in Pernambuco at the least, or much more likely heading for us at this very moment. Ledru assured me the Sea Wolf will have a frigate to his command, and to be sure, the eleven lubberly coast-crawlers that can be mustered by this island will be no match for him.’
‘Ledru said the former governor will be part of the force as well,’ said Robeaud. ‘Cockburn may no longer be an admiral, but he certainly lost his post to Sir Hudson — which is all the more reason he will wish to lift you from this hellhole, your Excellency. I feel it in my water. They are almost on us!’
‘Everything,’ breathed Cipriani. ‘Everything, my lord, is with us now.’
Napoleon shifted the lank lock from his eyes.
‘Eh bien,’ he murmured. ‘C’est bon.’
Chapter Twelve
Since Napoleon’s humiliation of Sir Hudson Lowe at James Town, the governor had refused to meet him. All communication was conducted through the Marquis de Montholon, and officially Lowe behaved as though his prisoner had nothing whatever to do with him.
He had instituted a new regime by which he hoped to turn humiliation back on its perpetrator, though, and issued order after order laying out new and ever pettier regulations. This in turn infuriated de Montholon, who anybody could see had troubles of his own. His wife had borne her baby, which was the spitting image of the Emperor. Charles Tristan had only deigned to touch it once, and told his wife it was the ugliest little thing that he had ever seen. Relationships were hardly cordial.
Mainly, Sir Hudson required penny-pinching. He presented papers to de Montholon, screaming at him that Napoleon’s household was a scandal.
‘I ordered you to reduce expenses at Longwood to £1,000 per month, sir. £12,000 per year is the maximum allowed even to me for all expenditure, and I am the governor of this island! That is bad enough — but I see Napoleon in fact spends £20,000. It is outrageous. Is not sixty pounds of beef a day sufficient? And as for drinking —’
‘Sir, I have already made a daily saving of three bottles of claret, two of Madeira and inordinate quantities of beer, and that just for the servants. The house, from now on, must consume no more daily than nine bottles of claret, one of Madeira, one of Graves, one champagne, one Constantia, six bottles of Tenerife and twenty bottles of Cape. Napoleon’s man threatened me with physical violence. He said his Excellency would die of thirst!’
‘And your response?’
‘I said “set it on,” sir. Nothing would suit me better than to see the villain dead.’ A moment’s pause. ‘And Cipriani, into the bargain. And Robeaud, de Marchand, and all the other hangers-on. It is a nest of vipers, Sir Hudson. None of us, I fear, should be sleeping easy in our beds.’
‘You consider it a danger? You tell me that the threat is real?’
De Montholon sighed.
‘Napoleon is a villain. He owes me a deal of money, and he taunts me that I must wait for an inheritance — that will never come. He spends all his waking hours plotting, and his spies would commit suicide for him, gladly. Whe
rever there is a suspicious death on this whole island he will be behind it, he will be the man who kills.’
Lowe did not reply. These sentiments, to him, seemed rather strange.
‘Suspicious death,’ he said, contemplatively. ‘And why should that be, sir?’
It seemed at first that de Montholon would not reply. Then he blurted: ‘Napoleon trails hatred everywhere he goes. When I married my wife in Paris he told lies that spread throughout society like poison. I loved my wife and he told everyone the marriage was “unsuitable,” because Albine had been twice divorced. And later, when we came to this vile island, he…’
De Montholon tailed off, and Sir Hudson, his long face twisted in a smile, ended the sentence.
‘Seduced her. Yes yes, Viscount, no cause for blushing, everybody knows. I sometimes wonder that the man still lives, indeed. It would surely be a blessing unto God if something happened to him. If he himself were to be the subject of that “suspicious death”.’
Charles Tristan de Montholon was close to tears. Humiliation was always worse when it had no remedy. Governor Lowe was all-powerful. On the slightest whim he could have him deported to Cape Town, to England, or back to France. And Bonaparte would hardly step in to prevent it, would he? He had a vision of his wife in her death throes. Writhing. Not in ecstasy.
Madame de Montholon, by a cruel coincidence, was in ecstasy at that moment, or at least writhing in another’s arms. She had been the Emperor’s mistress until very recently, and now she was the mistress of his surgeon, Barry O’Meara. After they had finished, they too took to talking of suspicious death. O’Meara had been doing some research.
‘Of all the poisons available on St Helena,’ he said, ‘the best by far is arsenic. It has many advantages, but the best is this: administered in sufficiently small quantities, it is impossible to detect. The victim — or should I say in this case the poor patient — merely fades away.’
