by Tom Keneally
‘They call them Cape Holsteins,’ Jane told him. ‘They are Dutch but mixed in with African cattle. The African element makes them hardy.’
‘I should very much wish to greet them,’ he said. ‘I mean, we should visit them. Gourgaud, you will help the ladies, will you not?’
And so we began to scramble over the stone wall. It took the Emperor little time. He seemed very agile on his thin legs and carrying his paunch, and was over at once, while Jane and I still sat on the top stones as if mounted upon horses.
‘Good evening, ladies,’ said the Emperor, bowing amidst the cattle.
Gourgaud took Jane’s hand, standing by the outside of the wall, and vaulted it himself without losing hold of her, and helped her descend onto the pasture side. I had to manage things according to my own skills.
By now the Emperor was already advancing across the pasture for the inspection of the Holsteins. As he drew near the small herd he joined his hands behind his back in the manner in which he was always depicted, as if he were about to inspect a regiment. I may have been the first to notice that a robust if slightly scrawny and saggy cow raised her tail like a flag and began to run towards him.
There instantly rose in me a reluctance to call out a warning, a willingness to wait and see how events developed, to see if a man who was so prompt in recognising his Empress in other men’s wives might be able to deal with this hazard of nature. So I was fascinated and in terror at once and an inevitable rush of Greek fables ran through my head. As the cow lumbered forward at a solid pace, I thought of Zeus appearing to Europa in the guise of a white bull, fragrant and roaring but in a form of divine music. Then, according to the book of myths, Zeus ‘had his way with her’, and what his way was went unspecified. This was the reverse, a cow running at Europa’s bull, emitting as it came an unmusical dairy-yard moo.
But I waited to see if it was she who had been appointed to take revenge on the new Zeus, the deity who had ravaged Europa, who stood five yards from me in his green uniform jacket. Was she an instrument of the divine? It seemed there was no other explanation but the Emperor’s presence that had got this languid old cow running in this way.
The Emperor saw his peril now but began laughing. Again, given his age and his portliness, he proved to be a creature of great nimbleness. And as he stepped aside and made a pirouette the cow could not reproduce, he cried out, ‘Retreat, ladies.’
Gourgaud came running up beside him to hurl himself between the beast and the Ogre and was told, ‘No, Gaspard. Flight!’
As we ran back to the wall I felt the Emperor’s arms around my waist, tight, identifiably male, lifting me over the stone fence – given that the proprieties of moving in pantaloons would have delayed us – the Emperor then himself vaulting the fence. It developed that this man of such ordinary dimensions had managed to sweep both Jane and me off the wall, and I heard Jane wheezing, as she had when she was a child with a repute for a weak chest. But Gourgaud remained in the field with the cow looking at him in confusion. He stepped forward and had drawn his sword, and I did not know if he was joking, but thought he wasn’t, for he cried in French, ‘This is the second time that I have saved Your Majesty’s life!’
The cow, however, did not seem to wish to immolate itself on Gourgaud’s sword. Boney was panting, but absolutely tickled by the behaviour of Gourgaud and, indeed, of the cow. Whether the young general’s boast was serious or comic, the Emperor took it as the latter. ‘Remain in a position to repel cavalry, General.’ The closer the cow got to Gourgaud, the more impetus it lost, and at last it veered off towards a tuft of pasture to its left, finding grass more appealing than the task of impaling. I think it was to Gourgaud’s disappointment that it showed such a lack of Russian and Cossack malice.
‘Come, Gaspard,’ called the Emperor. ‘She’s lost interest in transfixing me with her horns.’ He turned to Jane and me and said, ‘A valiant cow, young ladies, who wished to save your government the cost and fuss of keeping me!’
General Gourgaud waited a time before he solemnly sheathed his sword and still after that stood there, asserting the right to that invaded stretch of pasture. Then he turned and vaulted the fence. From the look on his face he might have just defended the crossing of the Berezina.
Jane watched him as if he had achieved valour.
Sportiveness
I am at this age embarrassed by some of the sportiveness between the Emperor and me at that time, since much of it seems so childish. My behaviour varied between the blatant and the pert, with an occasional bold-faced phase if I happened to remember his unabashed compliment to my mother.
People do not believe me that given his awful stature, his repute as the great tyrant and the devourer of bodies, he was ready as if by instinct to play children’s games, by which I mean blind man’s buff and hide-and-seek, with myself and my brothers raging round looking for him, or wearing one of his own vast scented handkerchiefs as a blinder that smelled so potently of something strange, of him. Some of our exchanges could correctly be seen as infantile, as if he had never had a chance to get childhood out of his system.
My father had meantime decided that Jane and I would become even more accomplished at French, and each morning he set us a passage from a book in our library to translate, having already spoken to the Emperor and extracted from him, with ease, an offer to study the results of our exercises.
My father did not quite seem to understand what an astounding offer this was. You might manoeuvre an offer like that from a lodger, but it was not the sort generally made by men faced with the task of writing not only a history of the domination of the world but of his domination of it.
I hated this translation task. It would be a cause of conflict between me and my father. Let him translate! His French wasn’t as good as mine.
Jane, as well as being assiduous at her translation, was the sort of unpretentious girl who was quite admired by the yamstocks. Occasionally a farm child would come and visit her, though only rarely would a farmer be found at The Briars. My father dealt with them directly, either down at the dock or by riding up into the hinterland to buy their stocks of vegetables. In the midst of our French lesson, there appeared at our gate a girl of about ten, Miss Robinson, wearing new leather shoes. In her world, they were a phenomenon – many of the farmers’ families went barefoot year round, but the new prosperity had enabled her to receive a gift beyond her expectations, a gift from another tier of society. In her place I would have had the same impulse to show off the shoes, and Jane was a perfect, open-hearted target, I knew, for such demonstrations.
The child was still wearing a canvas dress as she rode up on her rough island pony, the shoes glittering in the stirrups. She dismounted and showed them excitedly to us at the table where we often sat on the shaded lawn in front of the house working on Montaigne. Jane did everything the child would have wanted – exclaimed about the stitching and the leather and the buckles! We called on Alice to get the girl a glass of milk to celebrate the attainment of this footwear.
There was, sadly, always something about Jane’s untainted goodwill that annoyed me, that rankled for being too seamless, for not presenting edges up against which one could rub. Down in the grape arbour there was no such smoothness. If one passed, one could look into that cave of vines and the seats within as the Emperor, Las Cases and little Las Cases worked, the son occasionally escaping to transcribe, being trusted, I noticed, even to put a gloss on what had been dictated.
Sometimes the Emperor would send the Las Cases away and Gourgaud, if at home, would be sitting there with him, watching the Ogre doze with his legs up on Las Cases’ chair. Today though, I knew, Gourgaud had gone down to Jamestown on business.
When Jane went to attend to something, I was left with Miss Robinson. To call my impulses in her absence impish was to diminish some of the severity in them, that there was a kind of strict reason to them. For they were a protest – the child should understand this, I believed, that not all young women possesse
d the same transparent and seamless kindliness Jane had inherited from my father.
‘Miss Robinson,’ I said, ‘would you care to meet Boney, our Ogre, who is in his cave at the bottom of the garden?’
‘No, thank you,’ she said briskly. ‘I came to visit you, but had I seen him on the way I was purposed to ride home again helter-skelter.’
‘Come,’ I said, ‘you mustn’t be like that. You are of valiant stock and not to be so easily frightened.’
I took her hand and held it in an inescapable manner, and she was brave enough to yield, and together we walked down the lawn past the marquee, towards the gate that gave into the arbour. I walked her quickly, before tears or stubbornness could develop.
When I got to the gateway, I yelled, ‘Boney, Boney, are you awake? I have brought a child who is terrified of you. Do you intend to devour her?’
I could now feel Miss Robinson pulling at my hand. I could also make out that the Emperor was standing, and brushing his hair. He began then to make peaks of his thin hair either side of his head, as if to represent horns. And thus in breeches and shirt he came running down the tunnel roaring – a Cossack yell, he later told me – and little Miss Robinson screamed as I let her hand go, and she ran for the house, and I felt something despicable. A malign glee.
Knowing that my parents would never applaud what I was doing, and could not understand the fine balance of ill will and impishness that the Emperor and I shared so thoroughly, I caught up with Miss Robinson and held her, and she sobbed into my shoulder as the Ogre also drew level with us. I could smell his scented sweat.
‘Please, mademoiselle,’ he cried and dropped to his knee and set to smoothing her hair. He brought from the pocket of his breeches some liquorice and said in English, ‘You like some supplies me? Liquorice are very tonique, I do believe.’
Choking with sobs, Miss Robinson was nonetheless not going to let liquorice pass her by.
‘You are unkind to compel her,’ said the Emperor to me, but I noticed that his eyes were alight and ironic, as if he understood me precisely.
‘You are unkind to chase her like a fiend,’ I told him.
He remained kneeling beside the child and asked in English, ‘Your name, mademoiselle?’
I told him in French, ‘She is Mr Robinson’s daughter, Anna. She came to show us her new shoes bought because of all her father’s vegetables the garrison is eating.’
Miss Robinson, dry-sobbing, shook her head and said, ‘No, it is because my papa loves me.’ She hid her eyes again in my shoulder but her sentiment chastened us.
‘Tell her I thought it was a game,’ the Emperor pleaded with me to tell Miss Robinson. ‘I have a little boy, you know,’ he continued. ‘More younger than you. I do not like it that a child be fearful.’
And in a very short time he had won her over – of course, winning children over was his style. She chewed her liquorice, raised her eyes and looked at him directly.
‘Where your father been living?’ asked the liquorice-dispensing Ogre.
She told him – Prosperous Plain.
‘May I be a visit him?’ he inquired.
‘As long as you don’t yell at me,’ said Miss Robinson.
‘I am visit the farm seulement by the daytime,’ he told her seriously, ‘since not permitted leaving my bed at night.’
‘Miss Robinson has a very pretty elder sister,’ I told the Emperor, making mischief, selling him the senior Miss Robinson so he would no longer declare anything untoward to my mother.
From our verandah we could now see each day a parade of wagons and slaves and Chinamen making their way up to Longwood, carrying planks and plaster and implements. That this farm had been announced as the ultimate imperial residence baffled my father, and even I was bemused about why that open plateau, beneath a dour block of stone named the Barn, which barely blocked the easterlies always blowing and frequently carrying fog on their breath, had been chosen for the Universal Demon’s ultimate residence. Had the British men of power simply inspected a map, seen the house identified on its plateau and chosen it without reference to its notable disadvantages?
It had been a gentleman’s farmhouse some time back, had been lived in by the Skelton family for a while, but had since deteriorated, its inner core abandoned, its outer rooms serving as cow byres. On these decaying premises, the domiciled rats suffered little attrition to their abounding numbers. Cats’ appetite for rat meat was on St Helena in particular out-sped by rats’ appetite to proliferate. If St Helena had a coat of arms, its heraldry would have consisted of a rat and a goat.
For now, at the Pavilion and in its marquee, the Ogre remained relatively free of the gross intrusion of rats and we were interested in the civilities and ceremonies of the household. The breakfast that preceded the history-writing was quite modest by English standards and appeared to consist chiefly of coffee and rolls. The longer the Emperor stayed at The Briars, the more his morning nourishment seemed to consist chiefly of coffee. But even that was prepared and served with imperial formality.
Then, in the evenings, if the Emperor was not dining with us, we would hear Cipriani intone his loud invitation to his master to descend from his Pavilion and enter the marquee, and when the Emperor emerged to dine he wore uniform and decorations, and so did Gourgaud, whereas Las Cases and his son wore court suits.
There seem in memory to have been many nights when the Ogre and his suite dined, similarly adorned, with us, and accepted whatever dinner hour the Balcombes decreed. He was a lenient guest, easy with any menu that was presented.
Within a few weeks of his moving in, he sent General Gourgaud to our door to deliver an invitation to Jane and me to attend dinner, and, he declared, our three small brothers were welcome to visit too. I discovered that my brothers had decided amongst themselves to bring with them a particular toy they thought their fellow child, the Emperor, would enjoy. It was a toy Frenchman with a big curlicue moustache, and a lever with a frog on it. When the lever was pressed the frog entered the Frenchman’s mouth, and the English children giggled and squirmed to think that this was what the French were like. William was a thoughtful seven-year-old, anxious to be wise, rather in the manner of Jane, and had asked if he could bring the toy with him, and Jane had said no, that the Emperor might be offended by it. But I argued with her and said that if our guest, who, after all, lived on our property, could not tolerate such a small dent in French amour-propre, then he was not who we thought he was.
I was aware that Alexander, who was most like me in assertiveness, had yet another toy, which Jane and my mother had forgotten to prohibit him from bringing. I whispered to him that he should bring that one too, that the Emperor would not be offended. Even Alex frowned and did not immediately fetch it, until once more I urged him to.
‘Keep it in the pocket of your dressing-gown and surprise him,’ I advised Alex.
So we set out with our three brothers, and the French servants reported we were on the way and Gourgaud was waiting for us near the door of the marquee. Gourgaud’s eyes flicked in admiration across the face of my sister Jane, and she turned her head aside. But I could see she was not averse to him. He bent and, to impress Jane, playfully shook the boys’ hands and nodded to the toy Frenchman and toy frog William carried. His English was a little better than the Emperor’s, so that he could manage to say only slowly, and without full accuracy, ‘What is it here?’
‘Something he had a fancy to show the Emperor,’ I told Gourgaud in French.
‘But yes,’ said Gourgaud. Before anything could happen, however, Las Cases in a grey suit turned up with Emmanuel similarly arrayed, who looked mournfully at us from under his brown locks. I could tell that he wanted to be led into being some sort of playmate but that he did not know the moves to go through to achieve it. A cruel negation in me prevented me from guiding him in the simple steps involved, and I sat thinking punitively, ‘You could be your father’s brother rather than his son.’
Then I nudged Alexander forward
, in part precisely because I knew Emmanuel would be shocked by his toy. And now the Emperor appeared, plump and uniformed, wearing his hat and striding towards the table, his teeth stained with his liquorice. Cipriani stood straight, and the servant, Ali St Denis (who did not look Arabic at all yet had been given Ali as a nickname by the Emperor), prepared to take the Ogre’s hat.
I would later think of his time at The Briars as OGF’s optimistic period on the island. I wonder, even while he was in our garden, did he hope for deliverance? There were plans for it everywhere, closer to us than we believed, but I think he must have hoped at this stage that his friends in the Parliament – and one in particular, the eloquent Lord Holland, Henry Fox, whose uncle had once been Prime Minister of Great Britain – would win him a decent home in an English county. I did not know then that there were plans even in America for his rescue, though I guessed they proliferated in France and Europe.
Much later I would read that five soldiers in the French army closely resembled him and had been schooled in his mannerisms. He must have harboured this knowledge even as he presented himself to us and invited us to dinner. So was there a hope then, even at The Briars, and despite the British flotilla keeping guard, that one could somehow be landed on a St Helena beach – Sandy Bay, perhaps, the only realistic one – and exchanged for him? To this day there are stories that such an exchange took place. As if physical resemb lance could be enough to compensate for the exact balance of resentment, playfulness, hubris, humility, curiosity and literary appetite, and all the rest of which I would, in the end, learn something more than I would have wished.
That evening, the Emperor declared, ‘I see you wear, Miss Jane and Miss Betsy, your short skirts over your pantaloons again. This is a terrible fashion your nation subjects its young naiads to. You are not at fault for it, but only the English could devise such a means of punishing young women for their beauty.’