“Please! A little memento!”
“Such as? You know I have next to nothing.”
“A story is all I want. I want you to tell me a story to remember you by. The Friar’s story. I want to remember you telling it to me.”
He took her hand, brushed it with his lips. “You do have such beautiful hands,” he said. “Mr. Burchell captured them perfectly in his drawings.”
“Please!”
“You will look after my father for me while I’m gone?”
“Of course I will,” she said.
“He’s got hardly anyone else who’ll…see him.”
“I know. Please…the story.”
So he told her the story in his freshly broken voice, almost the voice of a man, not quite. It was the sad little tale of a saintly Franciscan friar, hope of the hopeless, who fell madly in love with a mountain nymph and begged her to marry him. The fairy agreed on the condition the friar give up his religion and worship wild nature as she did.
“The day of their wedding finally arrived,” Daniel said, squeezing Charlotte’s hand. “They were to be married in a chapel that once stood on this very spot. Then at the exact moment they were to be joined together forever, the rock opened with a mighty roar and swallowed the chapel and everyone in it. All that was left was the friar, turned to stone as you see him now, forever searching the horizon for his lost love.”
“Daniel,” she said, “that was beautiful.”
“It’s a warning for boys like me to beware of lovely witches like you!”
She’d laughed at that. “You’ve heeded the warning,” she said. “Because you’re fleeing to England tomorrow.”
“I’m going because I want to be better than just another Saint Helena Yamstock who’s born, bred, and dead on the island. Besides, while I’m gone you’ll just keep on growing more beautiful.” He squeezed her hand. “Promise me you’ll wait. At least give me a chance.”
Charlotte had gazed into his quick brown eyes with their turbulent black depths. She made her promise. “Yes, I shall.”
Dear Daniel! Two years more before he served out his apprenticeship at Kew Gardens and came back a gentleman who would publish scholarly books on the plants of Saint Helena found nowhere else in the world. She took his latest letter out of her pocket—she always kept at least one with her. As usual the lines crossed and re-crossed one another to squeeze as many words as possible onto the single sheet of paper, all that was allowed to qualify for the cheap letter rate.
This one was special because it brought the grand news that Lord Byron had just visited Kew and that Daniel had actually spoken with him!
I am suddenly in a rage about his poems. And of course his pursuit of freedom. I’ve read his ‘Childe Harold’ three times and ‘Corsair’ four. Here’s how his latest poem begins. The lady reminds me so much of you!
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes…
You are the best of dark and bright! he wrote very small so he could squeeze it onto the crowded page and so save a penny. How I long to hold you! Two more years, but what’s two years in a lifetime? Wait for me!
“I’ll wait for you, I promise!” she told Daniel at the feet of the Friar but she was thinking of the living apparition that was about to appear. The mischievous wind snatched away her words and carried them gleefully out to sea.
“Napoleon! Oh, what will I wear?”
Chapter 2: The Eagle Lands
Would he find her pretty?
That was the question she asked her full-length looking glass. Molly, her slave, had done her long wavy blonde hair in ringlets. She’d borrowed a green dress from her cousin Elizabeth, rich Uncle Samuel’s daughter, because she’d heard that it was the emperor’s favorite color and because it emphasized the emerald green of her eyes. It was just a tiny bit short on her, but that had the advantage of showing off her ankles.
On Saturday evening five shots from the alarm cannons on Signal Hill announced that five ships had been sighted. At noon on Sunday another cannon roared, this time from the three-masted man-of-war Northumberland to signal it had dropped anchor. Swelled by the congregation that had just spilled out of Saint James’s Church, a crowd of island faces, black, white, and yellow, watched from the wharf.
A longboat pulled away from the ship, a hundred spyglasses glued to every oar stroke.
“There’s someone in uniform up front!”
“Napoleon!”
“Does he look like his pictures?”
“Is he a monster as they say?”
“It’s not him! It’s someone tall and thin!”
The thin man in a splendid blue uniform with gold epaulets who was standing stiff as a pikestaff at the prow of the longboat was indeed not Napoleon. He was Admiral Sir George Cockburn, a hard man, fresh from burning down the White House in Washington and now charged with keeping the most dangerous man on earth safe until his permanent jailer arrived.
The outgoing governor, Mark Wilks, replaced because he was thought to be too soft, waited for the boat at the slippery, sea-slapped tier of stone steps, the only dry way onto the island. Next to him stood his daughter, Laura, shielding herself from the vulgar sun with an embroidered umbrella that must have cost as much as Charlotte’s slave, Molly. Charlotte, perspiring in her borrowed green dress, narrowed her eyes. She hated Laura, the spoiled little prig who was always oh so languid about her good breeding! Laura who had never bottled a peach in her life. But highest on Laura’s list of crimes was that she allowed herself to be complimented as the most beautiful woman on the island. Did she have no shame?
Governor Wilks beamed at Charlotte. “Ah, Miss Knipe! Quite the event, what? Not every day we have an emperor stopping with us!”
Charlotte liked the governor. He was intelligent and educated, prepped by his parents for the ministry although he had chosen government service instead. His wit was sly and his nose never up in the air. He invited her to functions at Plantation House quite frequently, in spite of his daughter’s disapproval. More than once Charlotte had caught him looking at her with a lingering gaze that made her blush.
Laura Wilks, impeccably tailored, favored Charlotte with a condescending smile. “Oh, I see you dressed for the occasion,” she drawled. “How thoughtful. Perhaps I should have.”
Happily all eyes turned from Laura to the longboat, which was now within hailing distance. “Make way!” bellowed a sailor with a barrel chest. “Make way for Admiral Sir George Cockburn on His Majesty’s business!”
The longboat hove to, and the admiral stepped out. Distracted, perhaps by the mean prospect of the little one-street town, he stepped into six inches of the South Atlantic. He ignored the mishap. Although his right foot sloshed loudly in his shoe, he strode forward boldly and introduced himself to the governor, fixing him with his eye as he took his hand, and walked with him and Laura the short distance to the rambling collection of offices and reception rooms laughably called the Castle.
With no introduction and no umbrella (she didn’t have anything as grand as Laura Wilks’s and wouldn’t be seen with less) Charlotte fled to the shade of the Castle gardens. That was where the dreadful Balcombe brats found her.
“Papa’s just gone into the Castle!” crowed Betsy, nearly thirteen.
“He’s in with the governor and the admiral!” crowed Jane, almost fifteen. “He’s going to be Boney’s provisioner!” she whispered, as if that were a cabinet-level position. “It’s all settled.”
“Means Papa could starve him if he wanted to!” Betsy added spitefully.
Probably will, Charlotte wanted to say but couldn’t. She’d heard all about William Balcombe’s light fingers from Mr. Burchell, who’d been unlucky enough to go into the trading business with him back in 1805, the year Charlotte’s father died and left his large family with nothing much more than a shack in town, a run-down yam far
m, a few lazy slaves, and a meager widow’s pension from the company, in whose regiment he had risen to the modest rank of first lieutenant.
Mary Porteous, Charlotte’s best friend, plump and plain, pushed her way through the wild-eyed throng. Her face was pink with excitement. “My father’s just come out!” she squealed. “Napoleon’s to stay with us! Can you believe it! Oh, my mercy, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in Porteous House! Of course we’re busy kicking out all our lodgers. You can’t imagine the bedlam!”
Charlotte felt a chill that defied the dusty Jamestown heat. “That means you’ll meet him?”
Mary laughed, the high sound of tinkling wineglasses. “But of course! You’ll meet him, too. We’re family, aren’t we? They say there’s a handsome young general with him. He’s Napoleon’s right hand man, apparently.” She winked as she whispered the next word. “Unmarried! Apparently he’s quite the firebrand, if you get my meaning.”
“What’s his name?” asked Betsy Balcombe sullenly, her bubble popped by this extraordinary news, as if an eligible young general’s name should be any business of hers.
But Mary was generous and affable even though she’d drawn a short straw in the competition for good looks. “Gaspard something. French names are so hard to pronounce! But I suppose we’ll soon get used to that.”
“Is Napoleon coming ashore today?” asked Charlotte, feeling a chill when she said the name.
“Oh, dear no. We aren’t half-ready for them,” said Mary Porteous. “Tomorrow maybe. Almost certainly tomorrow. What a day it’s going to be for Porteous House!”
“Merde!” cursed Napoleon.
He was on the afterdeck of the Northumberland, examining Jamestown through a telescope. He didn’t like what he saw. The village was a fungus of white hovels that had infested the crack between two rearing granite thighs. He’d heard it called the brothel of the South Atlantic. It certainly looked it. He was back in this cabin when he was told that the governor—soon to be ex-governor—of this cow pad, someone called Wilks was calling on him with the imperial party’s provisioner, a merchant of some sort called Balcombe who fancied himself one of the local gentry. Napoleon examined them through the well used peephole in his cabin door. Governor Wilks looked like a calm, bookish man with intelligent eyes. But the provisioner was sweating with apprehension, licking nervously at his lips as if he were parched for a drink. Excellent! He would make this shopkeeper his creature.
Napoleon began by refusing to admit the provisioner. Instead, he interrogated the ex-governor about his accommodation, his menu, his laundry, and even handed him two gold watches that had stopped during the voyage (one of them because he had hurled it to the deck in a fit of temper) with instructions to repair them.
An hour later, governor and provisioner dismissed, Napoleon was back on deck gazing at the sheer, thousand foot walls of his prison when Admiral Cockburn approached. The emperor pretended not to see him. Pretended not to hear him when he cleared his throat and asked if the general was ready to go ashore. The general! The emperor took a last loathing look at the canaille waiting for him at the landing like hungry dogs so they could tell their grandchildren that they’d seen Napoleon Bonaparte with their own eyes.
He would not give them the pleasure. When he eventually responded to the admiral’s question, he told the preening rooster that he was not ready and that he would not be ready to set foot on this miserable rock except at night. He would not be gawked at.
The swift tropical sun had fled the scene, and the moon, almost perfectly full, was slicing its way skyward through the tall date palms when Napoleon stepped ashore. The landing, the walk of shame to the lodging house where he was to stay until his residence was ready, all were lit as bright as day by the thousand flaming torches waved aloft by the leering islanders, most of them drunk, every one of them hungry for their bite of history. All they needed, Napoleon thought, were pitchforks to complete the horror. He had been steeling himself to endure jeers and catcalls, but though the rabble pushed and shoved at the shabby redcoats who lined the road from the landing to the village, the night was eerily silent. The rabble was listening for him to say something, anything to pass down to their descendants.
The only sound Napoleon could hear above the soft hiss of the surf was faint music, if you could call it that, coming from somewhere in the town. It was so badly played that it took him a moment to recognize the piece. It was the butchered first movement of a symphony being tortured by a rump of an orchestra. His symphony, the third, the Eroica, the one Beethoven composed for him. Oh, the monstrous irony! Only the presence of the leering mob prevented him from weeping.
The Balcombe girls had run off to hold hands with their freshly famous father. Charlotte, with Mary Porteous at her side, had established a spot on the pavement that gave her a gull’s-eye view of the procession.
It was the hat that gave him away. The two men walking on either side of him were Cockburn, the ramrod straight English admiral, and an equally vertical French general of some sort. Both wore tall hats with plumes that danced like flames with every step. But the shorter, broader figure between them, who was dressed in a green jacket decorated with a huge star-shaped medal, wore his plain black hat crosswise. The model for a myriad paintings and drawings.
Napoleon!
The miserable band fell silent, for which Napoleon thanked the nonexistent gods. At the top of the seven steps that led up to the front door of the warren where they were going to make him spend the night stood the governor, the bookish Wilks man. Next to him was an absurd figure in a kilt with a dirk stuffed into the top of his left sock and a timid grin perched nervously on his lips, as if it was ready to fly away at the first sign of danger. Perhaps, Napoleon thought, the faux Scotsman would draw his weapon and put him out of his misery. Too much to hope for.
Governor Wilks waved a hand in the kilted man’s general direction. “General Bonaparte, may I present your host Henry Porteous, landlord of this establishment.”
General Bonaparte. Again the insult to the man the world styled emperor, this time right in front of the rabble!
The landlord didn’t make the same mistake. “Your Majesty,” Porteous said with an awkward attempt at a courtly bow. “Welcome to my humble abode.”
Napoleon ignored the man. The door was open, so he brushed past him and walked inside. Anything, even the shoddy interior, was preferable to the leering eyes of the mob. The reception room lived up to his worst expectations. It was barely big enough for twenty people if they didn’t mind rubbing shoulders. And twenty people it soon contained, men and women, dressed in what he supposed was their Sunday best. He closed his nose to the sour smell of unwashed bodies, ignored the pathetically eager eyes, especially those of Balcombe the provisioner and the two brats who clung to him like clams, closed his ears as the landlord stuttered his way through introductions. Only when he said, “And this is the governor’s daughter Miss Laura Wilks,” in a tone of voice that indicated someone special, did he focus on anyone at all. Laura Wilks was pretty, but it was in a vapid way, which aroused no interest in him, although he had been at sea without intimate female companionship for over three months. Merde!
On droned Porteous the landlord, spewing out names that would be remembered only by their gravestones. Napoleon should have noticed the engraving earlier, no doubt hastily borrowed for the occasion, because it had been given pride of place on the wall facing the front door. It was a cheap reproduction of him in his imperial robes, a golden laurel wreath perched on his head, a parody of the original. To deepen the cut, outside the apology for an orchestra went back to gnawing at the Eroica. He was looking for an escape, even more fervently than he had been at Waterloo, when she came in. A tall blonde vision wrapped in green, eyes to match, faultless complexion, no doubt with long legs underneath that peasant’s dress, just the way he liked them.
Porteous the landlord was smarter than his kilt and knobby knees made him look. He noticed Napoleon’s sudden interest. “Your Highness, may I
introduce Miss Charlotte Knipe,” he said.
The conqueror of Europe looked her full in the face with that penetrating gaze that turned brave men to stone and beautiful women to water. A delicious tingle ran up the back of Charlotte’s neck, a sensation she had never felt before, but her green eyes kept coming back to his as she ran through her repertoire of delightful expressions.
He had found what he was looking for, he was sure of that. For the first time on Saint Helena, Napoleon spoke. “A rosebud among the thorns,” he said so softly that it might have been no more than a wistful sigh, heard only because the room was quiet as a wink. The girl was moving something that had not moved since Waterloo. Napoleon made a quick dismissive motion with his fingers that was noticed only by Marchand, his valet, who was an expert at reading his master’s gestures.
“Enough!” Marchand boomed at Porteous the landlord. “The emperor wishes to retire.”
Porteous showed off the backs of his hairy thighs as he hopped like a goblin up the narrow stairs leading to the second floor. “Of course!” he said. “This way, Your Highness, this way!”
Countess Albine de Montholon, spirited wife of the emperor’s chief adviser, was as usual the first in Napoleon’s entourage to find her voice. “Bouton de rose. Rosebud!” she gushed. “From now on no one must call you anything else! What do you think, Gaspard?” she said in French.
“Very appropriate,” said a gorgeously attired young French officer, magnetic even though he was only of medium height, who was examining Charlotte with his large gray eyes. “Rosebud it is if that is acceptable to mademoiselle.”
Charlotte’s French was barely up to the task. “Yes, yes, of course,” she said, hoping her Yamstock accent didn’t carry over into the language of love.
Countess Albine clapped her hands. “So that’s settled then!” She added a sting in the tail. “We shall call you Rosebud, or Miss Kneips, whichever comes easiest to the tongue.”
Napoleon's Rosebud Page 2
