Napoleon's Rosebud

by Humphry Knipe

  Daniel nearly lost his struggle to keep a straight face.

  Chapter 20: Napoleon’s Last Conquest

  Never interfere with an enemy who is making a mistake or with a beautiful woman who is falling in love with you.

  The girl was dressed in a page boy costume, the riding attire she’d worn when she went to Venice to deliver herself to Byron. Short blonde hair curled, sitting at his desk behind a forest of quill pens, waiting for him to start his dictation. Delicious.

  The conqueror stood motionless, his hands clasped behind his back, silent as a room he had just entered, his full-faced look penetrating, searching, commanding. A look that made princes and kings shake in their shoes.

  Not her. Not this island girl he had sent adventuring in Europe, this Charlotte with the unpronounceable last name who was becoming such a large piece on the chessboard of his life, although not the white queen, at least not yet. There was no defiance in the way she returned his gaze. The emerald eyes remained wide, serene, as if they were looking out over a vast tranquil sea. A chess match, an appropriate analogy. He was playing black.

  He took some snuff, spilling twice as much as he shoveled into his nose down the front of his threadbare green jacket, nibbled at the licorice he snacked on all day for his digestion, began pacing up and down with his hands clasped behind his back as he talked.

  “Everyone wants to know about Josephine,” he said. “She was an island girl like you, did you know that? A Creole from Martinique. Talked with a lilting island accent, like you do, rolled like a sailor when she walked—we had to teach her deportment. Pretty, beautiful, even, although she had bad teeth. Had to learn how to smile with her mouth closed. Sweet nature, people adored her. Wonderful memory for names and faces. A valuable ally. Promiscuous. I like my women on the promiscuous side, makes them more spirited, except of course when I am trying to breed with them. That’s why I sent you to Byron in Venice, so he could make you even livelier.” His crude, mocking laugh. “I hear that ended well!”

  “Your Majesty, am I to take all this down?” said Charlotte evenly.

  Napoleon didn’t break his stride, as he seemed to be considering this request at length and from all angles.

  He wasn’t. His restless thoughts were flying. “What? Josephine couldn’t give me a child, you see, so I had to divorce her, which was a pity, because she had finally come to accept that I needed mistresses when the rutting season came upon me. I was quite candid about them, you see. Told her about their virtues and imperfections. We were together for thirteen years. She was the most intimate witness of my rise to the ultimate power. I lost part of my past when I had to set her aside. But my dynasty must come first, and it turned out she couldn’t breed me a dynasty. I am the revolution, you see, and the revolution lives only in my seed.”

  That’s how it began, his Story of My Love, as he called it. It was continued Monday through Friday, two hours a day, a roll call of his amorous conquests spiced with explicit details that excited the girl, he could see that. But exciting her wasn’t enough. He needed more. He needed her begging to be vanquished. Power was the ultimate aphrodisiac.

  “He doesn’t ever ask me read back his dictation,” Charlotte told Daniel. “He’s just very lonely. He doesn’t seem to care if I write down what he says or not. He wanders off topic. For example, today he talked about the submarine.”

  Daniel looked up from the banana tree he was planting. They were at Virgin Hall, taming the jungle that would become a garden. Their garden, when Charlotte finally agreed to tie the knot.

  “What did he say about the submarine?” asked Daniel.

  “That there was a problem, a temporary delay. It couldn’t run submerged for long enough. The steam engine’s furnace uses up all the fresh air.”

  “So he’s giving up the idea?”

  “Oh, no, far from it. He says someone called Volta has developed a device that stores electricity. It’s called a voltaic pile. Napoleon says that he’s seen it work with his own eyes, back in Paris. That was twenty years ago. He says it’s bound to have been improved since then.”

  “But even a pile of electricity won’t drive a ship.”

  “It will, Napoleon says, if it’s connected to an electric motor.”

  Daniel gave her a lovely, level gaze, which set her heart racing. “There isn’t such a thing. The only electric motor we have is a frog’s leg that twitches when you run a current through it.”

  Charlotte said, “Napoleon says an Englishman called Faraday has invented one. He says that Captain Johnson has installed it in his submarine. He could be here any day now!”

  The submarine didn’t arrive. What did come to the island, in February 1819, was the news that Dr. O’Meara had arrived in England and was shouting to anybody who would listen that Napoleon’s jailer had ordered him to murder his famous patient. The War Office ignored him, but a publisher, correctly sniffing sales, didn’t.

  By coincidence, curious to many, the same ship carried the news that Gaspard had been arrested shortly after O’Meara’s arrival. The charge was that he had been writing seditious letters to just about everyone, including Napoleon’s wife Empress Marie-Louise and the emperors of Russia and Austria.

  “I told Gaspard to write those letters,” said Napoleon when Charlotte read him the article in The Times, “since he was bound to be found out.”

  Charlotte failed to grasp his point. “Poor Gaspard! Why would you want him thrown into prison?”

  “Only for a night or two, then off he went on a grand tour of the courts of Europe, spreading the gospel!”

  A dangerous thought crossed Charlotte’s mind. She put it into words anyway. “Did you order Dr. O’Meara to betray Gaspard?”

  Napoleon seemed surprised by the question. “Of course! It was a brilliant way for the good doctor to draw attention to his book and our cause. Dear Gaspard will be writing one soon, I am sure. It will be among the first of the thousands destined to be written about me as the centuries unfold.”

  Henry Porteous, who had been ailing for some time, died in June and was buried in his kilt. Daniel, with Governor Lowe’s patronage, took his place as superintendent of the company’s gardens. A month later Albine de Montholon left with baby Napoleone. But the rescue balloon someone had promised did not arrive. Nor the double, which would impersonate Napoleon long enough for the emperor to slip away on a racing yacht. Nor the electric submarine.

  Charlotte said, “Sooner or later it will come for you, Your Majesty. Nobody who has actually seen it would doubt that.”

  Napoleon pinched her cheek so hard it hurt. “Yes, I am relying on your underwater boat as a last resort. However, I’d much prefer to leave this island like a gentleman, wearing my hat and sword, not sliding down a wire in my servants’ livery! Something is welling up in England, a wave of unrest. It will sweep Lord Holland and his Liberals into power, and they will sweep me back to France in a grand flotilla. It will happen! I can feel it in my bones. Write that down.”

  Something was brewing. In November 1819 the news arrived in The Times.

  “Read it to me,” Napoleon barked at Charlotte, “the July report first.” He had his hat on, for some reason, and was pacing to and fro in front of his miniature desk, hands clasped tightly behind his back, in an obvious state of excitement.

  She saw two copies of The Times lying open on his desk. The story was dated July 22, 1819. The headline was: “Napoleon’s Release Demanded.” A raucous crowd of forty thousand had gathered the previous day at Smithfield in London to hear Henry “Orator” Hunt praise Napoleon and demand his release.

  “Go on, girl! What did he say? Read it aloud!”

  Charlotte’s clear voice rose above the howl of the wind. “‘All of us at this grand assembly denounce the imprisonment of brave Napoleon upon a desert island,’ it says.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Yes, sire, there is. This Orator Hunt goes on, ‘A desert island where the democratic head of Europe is tormented by the bruta
l insolence of a hired keeper who will go down in the annals of infamy for being as low as his name suggests! Napoleon is a prisoner, like all of us are prisoners of the aristocracy. I have not the least hesitation in pronouncing Napoleon, both in talent and courage, to be unrivaled in the pages of history. Here is a man who is destined to take the lead in setting us free.’”

  “That’s enough! Now read the other one. Just the headlines.”

  This edition was dated three weeks later, August 17, 1819. ‘“Huge march in Manchester!”’ Charlotte read. ‘“Eighty thousand protestors! Banners say, Equal Representation or Revolution, Liberty or Death. Government cracks down. Over five hundred killed or wounded.”’

  “What do you think?” Napoleon barked at her.

  Charlotte couldn’t conceal her excitement. “It begins, Your Majesty.”

  To her surprise he cursed. “Merde! It doesn’t begin, it ends! Revolutionary mobs will do nothing but panic the English people and strengthen the hold of the government!” He walked to the window and stared over Deadwood Plain, with its neat rows of army tents, the hives of his guards.

  “My spies tell me that the agitators are planning something even worse than street riots,” he said. “Their leader, that fool Thistlewood, plans to assassinate the entire British cabinet! Can you believe the lunacy? Not even I could think of a better way to strengthen the iron fist of the tyrant. They have damned Lord Holland and his reformers to insignificance. They have damned me!”

  Napoleon’s mood changed abruptly. He stared at Charlotte until she felt herself drowning in his deep-set eyes, which were sometimes blue and sometimes gray. “My memoirs. I have saved the best for last. The Story of My Love is not complete until I have told you about my beautiful sister Pauline. You’ve heard of her, surely?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. Lady Holland showed me a statue of her, reclining.”

  “A copy of the one by Canova, no doubt. What did you think?”

  “She’s very beautiful.”

  “As beautiful as you are?”

  “More beautiful.”

  “You lie, you witch. Unless there’s some imperfection you’re hiding from me. Ugly feet, perhaps?”

  Charlotte couldn’t help being drawn into his teasing banter. “No, sire. I have been complimented on my feet.”

  A coarse Corsican laugh. “Show them to me!”

  Charlotte did, even wriggled her toes, just once, as she had done for Gaspard on the Winchelsea, showing off her high arches. As she did so, the thought struck her that here she was, unchaperoned, flirting with a promiscuous womanizer, all-powerful once, used to having his way with any woman he wanted. She scented danger, found it intoxicating. She left her feet bare.

  The ship carrying the birdlike man fought its way into the South Atlantic, pitching and rolling as it was tossed like a toy in the ill wind’s white-capped teeth. There were two hundred passengers on board, settlers heading for a new life in southern Africa, plus a creature who admitted to himself that he had no soul to lose. After ten weeks at sea, everybody had told their life stories ten times over. But the creature wrapped in black didn’t tell his once.

  On the evening of June 6, 1820, the ship dropped anchor in James Bay. The next morning the birdlike man went ashore. Napoleon’s valet Marchand was waiting for him at the wharf with a bag of gold and written instructions. A single request at the Almond Tree got him directions to where Daniel could be found.

  For the first time in months, the creature flashed his yellow fangs in an approximation of a smile. “Daniel, my boy!” he sang out. “A sorry sight, this little patch of weeds, after the wonders of Kew!”

  Daniel looked up from the cutting he was planting into the black eyes of George Edwards. “Edwards,” he said, “what the devil are you doing here?”

  “Emigrating to Cape Town. Opening a little shop. Going back to painting and sculpting. Done with politics and all that. You have heard the good news, haven’t you, about Thistlewood?”

  “What news?”

  “I netted him, finally. Set a trap he walked right into. You don’t by any chance have some brandy hidden in the shrubbery, do you?”

  “You netted him?”

  “Yes, finally. Thistlewood admired the way the French revolutionaries did things, you see. So what I did was persuaded him to stage a coup that would begin with the assassination of the whole of the British cabinet, every last one of them in one fell swoop.” He looked over his shoulder quick as a crow, dropped his voice. “You see, what I did was show him an official advertisement, which announced that all His Majesty’s ministers would be dining at the Earl of Harrowby’s on a particular night—February 23, to be exact. Persuaded him that this was the perfect opportunity to do the glorious deed. Oh, how eagerly the fool flew at the bait!”

  “So all this time you were working for the police?”

  The little man nodded like a parrot. “Always played both sides, I did. More butter on your bread that way. Come now, lad, you’re a man of the world. Did a bit of double-dealing yourself to keep your little Rosebud safe, didn’t you? Delivered all those smuggled Rosebud letters to me and Thistlewood. I wager you never told her you knew the government was reading them as well.”

  Daniel didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

  Edwards cackled with malicious delight. “I was telling you about Thistlewood, I was. See, he arranged for the assassins to meet him in a loft right around the corner on Cato Street. It was eight thirty in the evening. The murderous swine were about to strike when I sent in the police, thirteen brave men. Thistlewood killed one of them, bullet straight through the heart, then escaped out a window. We took him the next day. Had to deny myself the pleasure of seeing him hang, because I was warned that there was suddenly a very liberal price on my head, if you get my meaning, and that I’d better shake the dust of old England off my shoes. Sad, but no matter. In lieu of services rendered, His Majesty’s government was kind enough to give me money and a free passage to Cape Town. I was delighted to hear that the ship was stopping at Saint Helena. You and the beautiful Rosebud, together at last.” Edwards gave Daniel a nauseating wink. “I couldn’t miss out on that, now could I?”

  “What do you want?” said Daniel, struggling to rein in his rising temper.

  “Oh, just a small contribution to help me set up shop. A farewell present. Say, one hundred guineas. A trifle for the superintendent of the Honorable East India Company’s gardens and lord of stately Virgin Hall. A mere pittance in exchange for a guarantee I will not tell your darling Charlotte you are Governor Lowe’s spy. That you whisper everything she tells you about Napoleon into the governor’s ear.”

  Daniel glared at him. “You disgusting blackguard! Get out of my sight!”

  Edwards strode off whistling in facetious merriment. The written instructions that accompanied the bag of gold he’d been given at the wharf had told him to go directly to Charlotte with the news of Daniel’s betrayal. The detour via Daniel was merely an entertaining attempt to double his money.

  Edwards found Charlotte busy with the fruit and vegetable display on her mother’s porch. Because she was about to ride up to Longwood, she was dressed in one of the white off-the-shoulder dresses with a plunging neckline that Napoleon liked her to wear.

  “Good day, Miss Charlotte, or should I call you Rosebud?”

  She eyed the little man coolly, looking him full in the face, a habit she picked up from Napoleon.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  The creature bowed like a bird pecking at a seed. “George Edwards, at your service.”

  “How did you know my name, Mr. Edwards?”

  “We are fortunate enough to have friends in common. Daniel Hamilton, for example. I have just had a chat with him in his Gardens. Lovely lad, that.”

  “You’re off the boat?”

  “Yes. Just passing through on my way to Cape Town.” He glanced at her horse tethered to the fence. “Going for a ride?”

  “As it happens, yes. I a
m riding up to Longwood.”

  “To see the emperor, of course.”

  “Yes. I take down his dictation.”

  “That isn’t a sidesaddle, surely?”

  “No, it’s not. I ride astride.”

  “In a dress? How daring! The lads don’t whistle at you when you pass by?”

  “This is Saint Helena. We have our own customs. One of the wealthiest local ladies rides an ox and smokes a pipe!”

  Edwards laughed his birdlike cackle. “You certainly do seem to be having the time of your life, which is why I so much regret being the bearer of bad tidings.”

  “From London?”

  “No. About someone much closer to home. Daniel.”

  “What about him?”

  “He pretends to love you so he can use you,” said Edwards and told her how.

  Daniel heard the thundering hooves. He looked up just in time to see Charlotte bearing down on him at a full gallop, her spurred horse white eyed with panic, her skirt hitched up so she could ride astride, showing off her long, sculptured legs.

  “You don’t love me. You are using me!” she shouted.

  “What? Charlotte!” he yelled as she tried to run him down.

  “You know! That man Edwards! He told me everything. You are a traitor! You’re the one who told the governor about the submarine. Now I see it all. From the very beginning you have been in the government’s pay. We’re finished, you and I. You have betrayed Napoleon. You have betrayed me!”

  “Charlotte, calm down. It’s not what it seems.”

  She spun the horse in a tight turn. She was bearing down on him again. This time her riding crop was raised. “Swear it’s a lie, damn you! But it’s not a lie. It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “Get off that damn animal!” Daniel shouted, his blood up. Purposely he didn’t try to defend himself from her whip. He couldn’t live with the indignity. The crop cut his cheek. Charlotte didn’t wait to see the blood flow.