Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  ‘No, no,’ said the Emperor/General. It sounded like, ‘Nor, nor.’ He smiled quite attractively then, a smile drawn into being, it seemed, by a sudden innocent whimsy in the corners of his mouth. I did not quite believe in it. Cockburn and the colonel both laughed as if they did.

  ‘The General does not wish to incommode you to that degree, Balcombe,’ the admiral assured us.

  The Emperor lifted a feminine finger, which had somehow directed the movements of hundreds of thousands of men and compelled the fealty of millions.

  ‘Là, le Pavillon seulement, monsieur.’

  He pointed to the little knoll atop which stood the summerhouse, and then he brought his eyes back to my father’s face and tried his smile, and to clinch matters tried to encompass us all with a glance, as if I could so readily be rendered loyal.

  ‘Well, we were told as much,’ said my father. ‘But now he is here, I see that the Pavilion is hardly large enough for the … the General.’

  Indeed we knew it to be a mere eighteen by twelve feet. Upstairs were two small bedrooms, hot when it was hot, damp when it was damp. Having got to an island five miles across, did the Ogre wish to further reduce his scope to eighteen feet by twelve?

  Now the man was about to speak and I will not fill this account for readers of one language with discourse in another, just to show that I had a certain competence in French. It would turn out that the General claimed to speak French, Italian, German and English. But his French and Italian were the better of the four. And his English would prove the worst.

  So he turned to Jane and me and said with his Satanic smile – for the Universal Demon always has a good smile, fleeting light on darkness, a bird skimming the night – ‘Speak do you the French, young ladies? The admiral tell me you did.’

  Jane was dumbstruck.

  ‘My sister speaks it better than me,’ I assured him.

  I must make another aside here. I know that any compiler of memoirs likes to enlarge her part in encounters with the renowned. But I assure you I’m not doing this now, for it is a despicable conceit and in any case invites contradiction. He happened to begin with Jane and me because he saw that we had followed a conversation he had been having with Colonel Bingham, sotto voce, about servants and accommodation. But it soon became apparent too that he was likely to try to win over the person in any company who exuded most suspicion or contrary feeling towards him. And last of all, he liked directness, and since I had looked at him so directly and ferociously – or at least I liked to think so – I presented him with an obvious mark.

  He looked around and remarked to us that it was very quiet and pleasant, as if the metropolis of Jamestown was raucous by comparison. We were proud to hear him say it nonetheless. We stood in a basin on a desert island, on a plot that my parents and the gardeners Toby and Ernest had transformed into something creditable.

  ‘Does the General have a large establishment?’ asked my father nervously.

  ‘Considerable,’ said the admiral. ‘He even has a lampiste to illuminate his quarters. But surely only a few can be accommodated here.’

  Already some of Napoleon’s servants or attendants were riding or walking across the upland towards us, summoned from Jamestown. A group of five male servants now passed through our carriageway gate, carrying various items of furniture. Their leader was a darker man, and another had a wizened face and a crankily tied neckcloth. The rest were young and well dressed, their hair was groomed with care, and beneath their hats they seemed to be laying their own claim to the place. A wagon followed the servants and there were some crates of goods aboard it which a party of Admiral Cockburn sailors were set to unload. As the admiral’s attention was now absorbed by the servants and the first items of toiletry and pieces of furniture to enter the Pavilion, we Balcombes became hapless witnesses to it all. We did not know whether to go in the house or remain in the garden. Furniture – mattresses and a camp cot, commodes and a washstand – was now being hauled across the lawn and into the Pavilion. The admiral began to discuss with my father the necessity for erecting a large marquee as extra accommodation for the French, while inside the little house the young lampiste, Rousseau, began to illuminate the Pavilion with lamps and candles brought up from Jamestown. A sour-faced cook whom we would get to know as Le Page was led to the kitchen at the back of the house by Sarah to inspect the site of his labours. We could see two other household servants unpacking the chests on the knoll, taking out books and china.

  My father occupied himself in discussing with the admiral where the proposed marquee should be located. We watched through the drawing room window, beside which we had settled as an uneasy compromise, and my mother asked Jane to go and invite the Emperor to dinner and, since she had made her own assessment of the items of furniture, to ask if he might need a dressing table we had to spare. She had used the term ‘Emperor’, and the idea of uttering such a sentence amused her. ‘Oh,’ she asked us, ‘doesn’t it sound like a line from a drama on Roman potentates? But tell him the dressing table is very plain and not up to usual imperial standards.’

  Jane returned with the message that the Emperor had said he would be delighted to dine with our kindly parents – ‘as long as you and your imp of a sister are also at the table, mademoiselle’. Jane had met Marchand, the butler, a young man of noble features who wore a trim navy-blue suit, and another, a Corsican, an intense man, very formal, much older than Marchand. We learned their names at once, as a person seeing previously unknown and questionable beasts moving in a forest learns and never forgets their exotic names. The Corsican was the maître d’hôtel, Mister Cipriani.

  I wanted to pass up and down the corridor to hear what else was happening in this overcrowded universe of The Briars. I heard the Emperor’s cook in conference with Sarah, who had trouble understanding Le Page’s fractured English. He was concerned with two things – chickens for the Emperor’s breakfast and adequate hot water for his washing basin: he liked his bath water extremely hot, said Le Page, tossing his head. He was a man who had once worked for the Emperor’s brother Joseph, the one now in America, and could have been in America himself, and seemed, as he tossed his head in our kitchen, to wish he was.

  Jane, having overheard Le Page, told me with her solemn air, ‘If he eats chickens for breakfast, nothing but sides of beef will suit him for dinner.’

  My father came back inside with the admiral, who was also staying for dinner.

  ‘It is a plain and ample British dinner,’ my father warned him.

  ‘Precisely what I need, in any case.’

  ‘Does the Emperor like port?’ asked my father. For port was my father’s passion and brought out the gout in his left foot, the one Pipes had licked.

  ‘Perhaps some Bordeaux?’ murmured the tactful admiral.

  ‘Oh, sir, I have some stored, but the conditions of this island …’

  The admiral said he would send one of the sailors to fetch some from Northumberland.

  Dusk fell, and men of all complexions kept coming back and forth between the town and there, delivering the Emperor’s impedimenta. At the back of the house, my mother was speaking in a loud fluting voice with Le Page, his communications with Sarah having broken down. He was not happy with the lamb that had been prepared but could not say exactly why. Perhaps the French did not eat lamb. Even the admiral could overhear Le Page, and sent a message to him that all would be well, for Le Page should remember General Bonaparte was a tolerant eater and, the admiral whispered to us, if he put up with Le Page’s cooking it was an exemplar of his tolerance.

  The Emperor had told Cockburn that he wanted to see the orchard, and in the last of the day’s light the old admiral and Pipes, and the Universal Demon – surely not the Emperor, I thought, at least judged from behind, by his narrow shoulders and his pear-like shape – walked amongst the trees with my father, and with Jane and myself trailing behind with the young grandee General Gourgaud, who still stalked the little man’s spine. An English officer named Po
ppleton, who had been appointed as England’s answer to Gourgaud, a sort of Emperor’s bodyguard or supervisor, followed.

  The Ogre told the admiral it refreshed him to be in such a place, and began to discuss the species of oranges grown.

  My father said, ‘Oh, sir, it is Toby who is the orchardist.’ He pointed to Toby’s hut beyond the rear boundary of the orchard, up the hill a short distance.

  The admiral turned to Poppleton and told him to run to the hut. The Emperor stood and discoursed in French with the admiral, and absently patted Pipes’ ears as old Toby emerged and walked towards us at Poppleton’s side. He held a straw hat in his hand by way of reverence.

  The Emperor reached out towards him and made putting-in-place gestures, installing him emphatically as the informant and then pointing to a particular bush.

  ‘Shamouti?’ he asked, fondling the leaves of a tree, rubbing a thumb along the skin of one of the fruit.

  Old Toby said, ‘Jaffa orange, Your Majesty.’

  The Emperor nodded, and the word ‘majesty’ was forgiven in Toby. He had only a selection of broken teeth left in his mouth but was known as a great eater of his produce – given my father’s agreement that he should eat his fill.

  ‘Palestine,’ said the Emperor, though he pronounced it differently from us.

  ‘They are oranges from Spain, Your Honour,’ said Toby, pointing to another bush. The slave looked at Jane and me, whom he considered scholars, to see if he’d done well in his answer, and Jane nodded at him.

  Poppleton declared, ‘Espagne, Général.’

  The Emperor seemed more curt in acknowledging this than he was with Toby and kept his attention determinedly on the orchardist. ‘Valencia,’ he murmured. And then he moved his hand to another bush. ‘Bionda Commune?’

  ‘The plant come by ship, Your Honour,’ said Toby, looking at us now, my sister and I, as if requiring further support.

  ‘India?’ asked the Emperor, assisting Toby with a kind of respect. ‘Or Bretagne?’

  But Toby did not seem to know and he painfully let his silence hang in the air. Jane suddenly declared in French that she believed they came from India, but that the orchard had existed long before our family came to the island.

  The Emperor was delighted to see a mango tree and stood admiring the subtly coloured hanging fruit, but did not take anything, even at my father’s urging. Gourgaud had turned from his place at the Emperor’s right shoulder and placed his placid dark eyes on Jane. His collar held his chin high and his hair was dark and there was something not to be depended on about the overall features. A hunger resided too obviously there, like a child’s smear of jam on a man’s face.

  I said in praise of the slave, and to diminish Gourgaud’s place in the landscape, ‘It is Toby who made them perfect. Parfait.’

  The admiral, Colonel Bingham and Captain Poppleton all looked at me as if to say, ‘We have encountered the Universal Demon’s devouring curiosity before.’ It would certainly prove to range wildly far beyond questions of fruit and extend, as his now quenched ambition had, to the world.

  The Emperor said to Jane and me, in his oddly accented French, ‘I should know the botanical differences, but campaigning absorbed a great deal of time which should have been given to the study of nature.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have plenty of time now,’ I told him. ‘But there’s not so much nature here as in other places.’

  Jane nudged me as if I had said something too sharp-edged and I felt that bewilderment of being unable to judge that myself. This was the directness, apparently, of which I was always accused. I never quite understood when people laughed, as the Emperor and the admiral both did now, as if remarking the flatly obvious was funny. The laughter of the Ogre sounded less affected than that of Admiral Cockburn.

  I had noticed that so far his discourse had been with a slave and two young girls, and it did not escape me even then that he might have been making a point, declaring he knew the men of influence had orders that made friendship with them dubious. But then he was exclaiming again, moving onto the guavas and further onto the shaddock trees, with weighty citrus hanging from them big as balloons, and Toby was not further questioned and was allowed to return to his hut.

  The orchard having been adequately surveyed, the Emperor turned and began to tread his way down the slope. My father moved uncertainly. Was he courtier or guard, was he the friend of the admiral or had he encompassed the Emperor into his circle of connections and loyalties?

  ‘Well, I have some good Bordeaux,’ he boasted too loudly.

  It seemed that every lamp and candle we possessed was burning from within The Briars, and in the Pavilion Rousseau had been so skilfully at work that the summerhouse looked itself like an ornamental lantern. The pulse and flicker of light through our windows was so intense it seemed that The Briars was about to consume itself – in delighted anxiety, I thought, for I had noticed that my mother, in instructing Sarah and other servants, had been more fearful than I was, and her pale, pretty face was shiny with hope and endeavour.

  She greeted us when we all re-entered the hallway from the orchard and announced, ‘Dinner is in advanced preparation’, then asked the Ogre in French if he would like to sit in the drawing room a while. And so he and Gourgaud approached the room with the admiral, the colonel and my father following, and there was suddenly no sense, after his toddle in the orchard, that the Emperor’s radiant renown would consume the place. His thin shoulders and large head, which seemed to advance ahead of his body, bespoke a being more alert than inflammatory.

  My father had lined up Sarah, Alice and the twins with their white gloves, a small corps of servants for the visitor to inspect. In the drawing room, where we had by now been marshalled, my mother presented us in order of age and we rose. The Emperor took Jane’s presented hand, and kissed it. Then mine, as I flinched, not wanting his hungry lips on my skin. Then William, Thomas and little Alexander, who had had some solemnity threatened into them by our parents and Sarah. I felt a second’s pride of kinship in these uncommonly solemn, pretty children, destined to be handsome men.

  My father offered the Emperor refreshment and he raised his plump hand in refusal. He asked my father what quality of goods he stocked, and he listened earnestly as my father explained that provision supply from any direction had advantages and disadvantages – he knew reputable merchants as far away as Recife on South America’s hip and had dealt with them. They were sometimes better suppliers of port than the British. But distance made it all difficult. On the other hand, he said, he depended a great deal on the store ship captains he knew, because they, and the suppliers too, would not load inferior goods for him.

  The arrival of such a large garrison and a naval squadron would drive up the prices of local produce, my father further explained in English, attempting to translate this into his poor French. ‘I am very honoured to serve the Emperor,’ he laboured to say in conclusion.

  ‘It is good of you to call me “the Emperor”,’ the Ogre remarked with a kind of earnest humility and he turned to the Balcombe women, his face immediately lightening. I would see him direct that look at many; it was a device of his to engage. He asked me in French, with that whimsical light still in his face, whether I was familiar with the outer world. I said we were familiar with England and the island, and of course the Atlantic. Jane made the same declaration.

  Then he began to quiz us on the capitals of nations.

  ‘Bavaria?’ he asked.

  ‘Landshut,’ said Jane, who had acquired these names of the world’s cities as part of the furniture of an ordered mind.

  ‘Württemberg?’

  ‘Stuttgart, sir.’ Jane again.

  ‘Pologne?’

  Jane let me answer this, because she knew I knew it.

  ‘Bravo! Russie?’

  Jane told him that the capital was now St Petersburg, but it had been Moscow.

  Why was he doing this? Had his fall from power sent him mad? Quickly his humorous eyes fixe
d me because he knew I was the more intractable one and he asked me a question which I must give in French, despite the pretension of that, but perhaps to convey its impact on me.

  ‘Moscou? Qui l’a brûlée?’

  Who burned it?

  I said, ‘It wasn’t the English.’

  ‘No,’ he declared with false solemnity. ‘Whatever the faults of the English, they cannot be blamed for that. And so who burned it?’

  I said, ‘The Russians burned it, I have heard, or the French say so.’

  He said, ‘Exactly, exactly.’ His laugh was intense and unmeasured and therefore startling. And he fixed me again and said I was prevaricating. ‘As an Englishwoman, you are required by law to be certain that I was the one who burned it.’

  This man was playing ducks and drakes about fires, famed as they might be, and for pure mad jollity in a room on an island of nullity!

  ‘What I’ve been told,’ I said to him in a literal way, ‘was that it was the Russians who burned it down to get rid of you, sir.’

  My father and the admiral choked on some sort of laughter. The man wagged his finger but with a wide, alien smile.

  Jane looked terrified. Huge combustions had been evoked and it was as if The Briars were not safe from them. I had found my voice with this creature, meanwhile, and I resolved not to be treated with the kind of sport he clearly saw me as good for.

  My father pointed the Emperor to a chair, while the admiral occupied a slender window seat that had survived the Atlantic in a ship’s hold and been carried up the terraces to The Briars without breakage. The same miracle of survival had been achieved by the slim-legged cabinet beside which the Emperor’s seat was placed. The Emperor had noticed this item of furniture and, before sitting, began to exclaim how charming it was and told my mother in English, ‘Very good, very good!’ He admired in particular the inlays. ‘They is the yew – commun? Or sycamore? Very much of English style. Very much of the English.’