by Robin Adair
To the Public,
Soldiers & Others:
A gentleman wishes
contact with persons
who served in any
capacity on
St HELENA
during the Detention
of BONAPARTE.
Application to the
Running Patterer at
Hope & Anchor.
Dunne had particularly wished that somewhere in the settlement there would be at least one veteran of either of the British Army regiments that he knew had been posted to the prison island between 1815 and 1821. These were the 53rd (the ‘Brickdusts’, for their brickred uniform facings) and the 47th. The latter were known either as ‘Wolfe’s Own’, for their heroics at Quebec in 1759, or, for their odd, white-patched uniform, as the ‘Cauliflowers’.
Now Josiah Bagley had found him, and vice versa. Ah, the power of the press.
The Patterer remembered his training as a Bow Street Runner. George Ruthven, the ‘King of Catchpoles’, had insisted that evidence should be carefully noted and digested for oral reporting. He suspected that this fashion was originally tailored to suit the needs of the magistrate John Fielding – the famous ‘Blind Beak’, who claimed he could identify 3000 criminals by their voices alone.
After Bagley left, Dunne’s companions pressed him to discuss the man’s evidence, but he told them they would have to wait. A name raised by the former soldier had renewed a more urgent demand for attention.
The name was that of William Balcombe – the man Dr Owens in his outburst at Government House had mentioned obliquely as having been named a beneficiary in the 1821 will of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Mr Balcombe was the Colonial Treasurer; had been for four years. Dunne knew him to bow or nod to. And he knew well one of the man’s sons, the would-be artist Thomas, who enjoyed (perhaps) a second given name, Tyrwhitt; a family name, doubtless. In the recesses of his mind the Patterer had long stored the casual gossip that Balcombe and Thomas had crossed paths with the imprisoned warlord. But Dunne had never met anyone else of the family, although he knew there was a wife, at least one other son and, he believed, a daughter, whose history was clouded in some fashion.
Well, before he passed on to the Captain the meat of Bagley’s memories – and got rid of that damn book he was still carrying! – he would interrogate (discreetly, of course) the Balcombes and weigh the two versions, finally marrying them to give a balanced overview.
He resolved to – what was the latest popular expression meaning carpe diem? – yes, that was it: ‘strike the bell while he could’, and beard the Balcombes in their den. Straightaway.
Their den was in Bent Street (where the Patterer had once lived as a paying guest of the Coxes, parents of Sarah, the lover of the loud lawyer William Charles Wentworth), near the fashionable Pultney Hotel. He admired the handsome exterior of the house; so this was what a housing allowance of 150 pounds a year evidently gained you. But, on closer inspection the doorstep on which he waited was grubby and the garden unkempt.
He did not proffer his visiting card to the maid who opened the door. In truth, he owned no such nicety. Even if he had pursued such protocol, it was still, strictly speaking, too late in the day for making calls.
‘Tell your master, or mistress, that I am here on the official business of His Excellency, the Governor.’ He brazened out the servant’s suspicious stare at his simple clothing. She turned, but before she could shut the door, the visitor oozed past her into the vestibule. He did not relish being rude or frightening the woman, but it was a necessary tactic. Left outside, he could readily have been refused an audience; once inside, however, etiquette required that someone of the household would see him, even if only to turf him out.
After a short wait in the rather bare vestibule, he was shown into the withdrawing room, where five people were gathered. Dunne hid his surprise: the room, like the entry hall, was tastefully but poorly furnished, and the people in it did not have the prosperous air that the family of an important personage on 1200 pounds a year should. Dunne shelved these observations for later digestion, but it was obvious that the Balcombes were short of the readies.
No one seemed to question his bona fides. Mr Balcombe – it was clearly he – looked tired and puzzled but agreeable as he introduced his wife, Jane, a handsome woman. He then added, ‘I believe you know my son, Thomas.’ The Patterer nodded to the young man, of eighteen or so, who smiled nervously. ‘However,’ Mr Balcombe continued, ‘I don’t think that you have met Grenville?’
Dunne had not previously encountered the well-built man. He was of medium height and perhaps the same age as the Patterer himself, thirty or so. He, too, smiled, but the gesture was marred by the baring of blackened teeth. Too lazy to clean them, or too poor to seek out a surgeon who dabbled in dentistry? Were they simply dirty or were they decayed? Colonists’ teeth were notoriously bad and only the well-off could afford replacements for their rotten mouths.
Left in or ripped out, the bad teeth meant agony. Their substitutes would be carved from whalebone or taken from dead bodies. The golden age for this fashion had been when the dentists of Europe were knee-deep in sound teeth, real ones, torn from the mouths of young men killed on the battlefields of Bonaparte’s wars. After 1815, a set of such teeth was known with black humour as a ‘Waterloo smile’.
‘And this lady,’ Mr Balcombe went on, ‘Is my daughter, Lucia Elizabeth, Mrs Betsy Abell.’ Ah, decided Dunne, she does not use her husband’s forename – so she is divorced or separated. Only then did the whispers come back to him: Mr Abell had left her and a daughter not long after they were married.
The Patterer now lied, saying that Governor Darling had charged him with tapping the memories of any citizens who had dealings with the imprisoned erstwhile Emperor of France. It was all at the behest of the Foreign Office, he added.
Mr Balcombe paled, coughed and sat down suddenly. For the first time Dunne noted that the man seemed quite ill. He wondered too whether the old man was worried by the enquiry.
‘Our memories are bittersweet,’ said the Treasurer finally. ‘Of course, you must remember that our contact was to end in March 1818.’ He sighed. ‘There was pleasure, and much pain,’ he added of their troubled departure.
‘I remember the pleasure more clearly,’ said Mrs Abell, lacing her fingers together absently. ‘I also remember, however, how awful his house was. Why, one day he picked up his hat and a rat jumped out!’ Still perhaps in her late twenties, she was a lady of a decidedly distracted disposition – like Thomas, Dunne decided. And he now remembered from his reading that some had said Boney had been more than avuncular where Betsy was concerned. According to Monsieur Las Cases, she told someone that the General’s bedroom was ‘small and cheerless’.
Thomas nodded. ‘He was kind to me.’
‘To me also,’ added Grenville.
‘He was charming,’ confided Jane Balcombe. ‘He said I reminded him of his wife – his first wife, of course – Josephine de Beauharnais.’
But, noted the Patterer to himself, he called your daughter ‘the Rosebud of St Helena’ – and another of Josephine’s Christian names was Rose.
The Balcombes were hospitable (even though the tea was dusty and weak, perhaps undergoing a second or third infusion) and seemed cooperative in answering the Patterer’s series of questions.
When the interviews closed, Grenville walked him to the door. It was then that Dunne remembered something else Bagley had overheard. ‘I believe your father served bravely at the Battle of the Nile – an earlier, more distant link with Bonaparte. Does he carry a wound?’ That could explain his infirmity.
His escort paused, then showed his coalhole smile. ‘At the Nile? Why, yes, he was. What a generous observation.’
‘What ship did he serve on?’
‘Oh.’ Grenville was miles away – imagining the atrocities of Aboukir Bay, perhaps? ‘On the William Tell. He was unwounded.’
The Patterer thanked him for his
and the family’s patience, ignored a parting sniff from the maid and departed.
In an unfamiliar tavern, where he would be left alone, he transcribed his material. He matched the Balcombes’ stories with Bagley’s and Monsieur Las Cases’ (keeping Owens’ medical remarks on the castrato separate) and ended up with a composite narrative for Captain Rossi’s ears, a story that entwined intriguing twists – and one notable dead end…
Chapter Twenty-four
Latitude 15°55'S longitude 5°44'W – 18 March 1818
Eating the bitter bread of banishment.
– William Shakespeare, Richard III (1595)
‘Más a Tierra,’ muttered Sir Hudson Lowe.
‘Sir?’ the redcoat picket standing slightly behind him said, cocking his head respectfully.
Sir Hudson did not entertain any thought of answering. Importantly, he did not, ever, engage in idle conversation with private soldiers. And he could not imagine for a moment that this soldier – the sorry fellow was probably illiterate anyway – would ever have heard of the island in the Juan Fernández grouping. Never heard of Daniel Defoe, for that matter.
No, his whole point was that the South Pacific fly-speck on which Defoe’s inspiration for his Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk, had been marooned for five years was – as Sir Hudson now thought bitterly – closer to land (even if it was only South America) than this damned place on which he, Lowe, had the misfortune to find himself stranded.
Not that Sir Hudson, unlike Crusoe, could complain about lack of company. True, his island domain measured barely fifty square miles, at 4000 miles from Britain a black wart on the 90 million square miles of the South Atlantic between South America and West Africa.
But on and around his island he could find thousands of Man Fridays, most importantly fighting men: sailors and marines in seven warships, eight batteries of artillery and the gunners to serve them, and 2280 soldiers, in crack battalions of redcoats. All his to order, for he was Governor and Commander-in-Chief.
He could have been content. But he was not. Not quite.
Of all those on the island, only two souls concerned him deeply. For one he had mainly indifferent contempt; the other, though a powerless prisoner, he hated viscerally.
And now he had manoeuvred successfully to get his minor bête noire banished, in total disarray, if not quite complete disgrace.
All these thoughts ran through Sir Hudson’s mind as he stood waiting impatiently on the quay of the small town that was named, loyally and royally, Jamestown.
Bobbing at his feet was the crewed jolly-boat that would soon take its passengers out to the merchantman Winchelsea, wallowing at double anchor in the roads of James’s Bay. It was a secure island, Lowe thought; this was the only access. The travellers’ chests, boxes and other baggage had already gone aboard. Now there was only human cargo to come.
A sound made the Governor turn to see black servants leading five laden mules in a clatter down and around the last curve to the sea level of the rough serpentine road. It looped for five miles through the flaxlined Chapel Valley, down from the plateau that crowned the island’s volcanic cliffs and steep slopes.
There were five riders, all cloaked and hatted: two were clearly women, two others seemed larger males and Lowe knew to expect a child. The riders were as dusty and dispirited as their mounts. The Governor smiled thinly. Capital! He cared little if they were out of sorts.
He watched the five creak down from their saddles and approach the quay. A man on foot followed them.
He decided he would acknowledge the presence of William Balcombe and his wife – how old would the girl be? She had clearly shot up. He thought one boy’s name was Thomas. He nodded curtly to them, but ignored their discreetly hovering male companion, clearly the personal servant Balcombe had elected to take. Once again Sir Hudson was reinforcing his principle of disengagement from lesser mortals.
But then he abruptly halted their progress towards the waiting longboat. ‘Wait,’ he ordered curtly. Was there still a chance, however remote, just a chance, that the prisoner on the hill was again plotting mischief? After all, at his previous gaol the devil had outwitted the fool on guard, sailing to freedom. That careless keeper, Colonel Neil Campbell, might well be a fellow Scot, but Sir Hudson had little sympathy for him and certainly no desire to emulate his disgrace.
So he now looked closely at William Balcombe. He should know that face well, but he was shocked at how much the man had aged. His body seemed to have shrunk, too. What ailed him?
Lowe turned to the boy, only briefly. He was just that: a boy, though heavier and taller than the Governor recalled.
Sir Hudson saved his keenest scrutiny for the servant. He was a man of medium set, an ill-favoured fellow with grubby clothes and a face and hands to match. The Governor turned his attention to the only male left, a sturdy and tanned youth in, at a guess, his late teens.
‘Your name?’
‘Grenville, sir.’
‘Where will you go, boy?’
‘Wherever Mr Balcombe goes – at first.’
‘And then?’
‘Oh, I will make my mark somewhere, sir, rest assured. My father was at the Battle of the Nile, you know.’
The Governor grunted and forgot the lad, then turned to Balcombe. ‘Do you have a last message?’ he said, almost as if he were talking to a man on the scaffold. ‘Something, some bon mot, for me to remember you by, to ponder?’
Balcombe was silent for a long moment. Then a low voice came, softly but clearly: ‘Come, shepherd, let us make an honourable retreat; though not with scrip and scrippage, yet with bag and baggage.’ The words were lost in the exodus to the boat.
‘What the devil was that?’ Lowe turned to the soldier nearby, bending his rule. ‘What’s your name? Bagley, isn’t it?’
‘As you like it, sir,’ replied the man after a pause.
‘Well, I don’t damn well like it. Do you know what was said, or don’t you?’
The soldier retreated behind the ranker’s best defence: ignorance and stupidity. ‘Don’t know, sir,’ he said stolidly.
But the soldier did know. And Sir Hudson had been quite wrong earlier to brand him a dullard, ignorant of Defoe and suchlike. In truth, before drink and another deplorable flaw had driven him in disgrace to take the recruiting officer’s shilling, he had studied at Winchester and Cambridge. Then, in his drunken descent, he had become a tutor, and unfortunately too much more, to too many tempting rich small boys.
Their parents and a judge had not approved, and only a shortage of soldiers on the Peninsula had saved him from the hangman’s noose.
However, he still knew his Shakespeare as well as he now did the manual of arms, and so he had recognised the Balcombe passenger’s parting words. They were surely from As You Like It: Touchstone, the court jester, speaking to Corin, a shepherd.
But still, something vaguely concerned him. Enough for him that night to enter the odd exchange into the journal he kept secretly from his comrades and the officers, who would either scorn or fear his erudition.
The words would continue to puzzle him on and off. For a whole decade.
Within minutes the small boat was pulling away from the quay to its mothership, ready to leave its station. Sir Hudson Lowe did not bother to wait and watch its final pitch and roll towards the open sea. He had only one parting thought: Balcombe was gone. Good riddance.
Now that left only one of his enemies to harass – the prisoner held fast there on the heights of St Helena … Napoleon Bonaparte.
On St Helena, William Balcombe and his kin had become Napoleon Bonaparte’s firm, perhaps most faithful, friends.
On 17 October 1815, barely four months after Wellington and Blücher had bled Bonaparte dry at Waterloo and his escape to America had been foiled, the Royal Navy’s Northumberland delivered the fallen bogeyman of Europe into exile on the tiny outcrop.
The important supply point for the East India Company was transferred to the Crown and Sir Hudson Lowe
put in charge as keeper. Upon his arrival, the erstwhile Emperor was to be permitted to keep his sword and 80000 francs. Sir Hudson honoured the promise on the sword, but seized the money. To cover expenses, he explained. ‘They have sent me more than a gaoler,’ the prisoner railed. ‘Sir Lowe is a hangman.’
Bonaparte made the undignified ascent of the winding road, and there, at the top, he met William Balcombe, the East India Company agent who had stayed on.
The man who at the height of his dizzying powers had reduced the armies of such as the King of Prussia, the Russian Prince Kutuzov and the Archduke of Austria was now humbled. He was no longer to be called Votre Majesté, only, grudgingly, General.
He lived with the Balcombe family in a pavilion attached to their house, The Briars, while his own residence, a farmstead called Longwood House, was made ready. This ruler, who had lived in palaces, now spent much of his time in two small rooms each measuring no more than fourteen feet by twelve. He had a camp bed, a table and bookshelves, and portraits of his distant wife and son. Later, even Longwood was never much better than a leaking, rat-infested shambles.
Bonaparte had a court of sorts. Just as he insisted on being addressed as a king, to little avail, his aide, Count Henri Bertrand, was still called Grand Marshal of the Palace. Still, the Emperor greatly enjoyed the companionship of the Balcombes, in particular that of the children in the house, Thomas, Grenville and, most of all, blooming Betsy. She spoke French, danced and flirted with the prisoner.
And now Bonaparte had been instrumental in bringing down his friends. Sir Hudson Lowe charged Balcombe with secretly transmitting the prisoner’s mail to and from overseas supporters and with arranging money transfers. Soon it was his turn for banishment.
Where will you go? asked Bonaparte. Balcombe said there was talk of sending him to Botany Bay. ‘To that convict cesspool,’ he laughed, ‘but not as a prisoner.’
The General looked at him keenly. ‘L’Australie? Why, I wanted to accompany La Pérouse there in ’88! Think of it – if I had, I would have disappeared with him and none of this would have happened. When I was first threatened with this pest-hole, I told them I would prefer to go to Botany Bay. Now the land of le kangourou raises its head once more.’