Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  On their return, Fanny told my mother and the rest of us, ‘The girl is more knowing, I think, than the Emperor would prefer her to be. Believe me, she has the means to be more than a rustic.’

  My mother could tell that I did not necessarily like to have the Emperor’s gesture to serve as his reason to visit the shrine of La Nymphe in Prosperous Plain. But she pointed out that I had my chief wishes on all counts. Through a grand intermediary, who had already insisted he would pay for my first ball gown, a woman’s gown and not that of a juvenile.

  I still did not quite trust him not to make some prank of it all.

  In the meantime, my brothers were still drawn to their Boney by unalloyed play. It turned out the young lampiste Rousseau could make toys too – carving pieces out of wood. So he made my brothers a little articulated carriage, with axles and four wheels, and to it he tethered four mice he had managed to trap.

  The Ogre invited the boys to see it one evening, and they crowded into the Pavilion, past the mattresses of Marchand and St Denis who slept in front of the Pavilion door every night, guarding entry. I followed, but as observer. The Balcombes’ hot boy breath and wondering eyes fell on the vermin, the minuscule steeds and their minuscule carriage.

  ‘Avanti!’ the Emperor cried, but the mice were stunned by the presence of such a fervent audience.

  The Emperor reached down and began to ravel and squeeze the tails of the front mice with the fingers of his left hand, and they took off across the teak table as if they meant to hurl themselves off the other end. But, amazingly, they turned, like a real coach – too sharply though, since over the cart went on its side, and the harnesses tangled. Laughing, Rousseau and the Emperor recaptured the mice in a cage and untangled the harnesses. And yet again, this was private amusement. It sought no one to chronicle it, or to expound upon it, or to build it into a claim or an apologia.

  Some days before the ball Florence Robinson rode to our place on a coarse-haired mount carrying a dress folded before her in a tin box. Invited in, she clumped up the hall in her agricultural boots and opened the box in our drawing room, and took out the dress as if it were a newborn child of uncertain health.

  I gasped at what I saw. It was a perfect thing in island terms. Immediately I forgave Miss Robinson her splendour and declared, ‘Oh, Miss Robinson, this is a wonder you’ve made.’

  I tried it on and sought my reflection in each of the two mirrors, and my mother and Jane exclaimed. I was utterly captured by its elegance. The gown delivered me from all contradictory feeling. I wanted more moments like this.

  ‘How do you know to make such a fine dress?’ asked my mother, with a renewed admiration for this girl who had until now seemed to be merely a rose amongst the cacti. ‘You have not been an apprentice to a dressmaker surely?’

  ‘I get the fashion plates from the ladies who come here by ship,’ said the Nymph. ‘If they cannot spare them, I make drawings. That is how it is done.’

  I felt so sisterly towards her for her industry and earnestness that all at once her passive flirting with the Emperor seemed a harmless thing. I was shallowly won over by this elegant gift. On impulse I kissed her flawless, downy cheek. It smelled of milk.

  I had achieved the mountain. I felt Olympian.

  Before the ball, and without my being present, my brothers’ play with the Emperor turned noxious.

  The admiral had given them a box of bonbons and they wanted to offer some to the Ogre. Alex was permitted to taste one bonbon that evening, and the next morning waited to offer the Emperor one from the near-pristine box near the grape arbour, under orders from all of us not to enter, as the Emperor dictated to Las Cases and the others. When the dictation was over, Alex regretted that the box was nearly half-empty and tottered to my parents’ room, where he found a packet of senna pods my father had been using and filled out the missing bonbons with these. The box of bonbons adequately reinforced, it was presented to the Emperor at the door of the marquee by young Alex. Looking at the available sweetmeats, the Ogre chose one of my father’s canary-coloured pellets. Overcome by that strange powerlessness to warn him, and hoping as children always do that he would not notice, Alex watched the Universal Demon as he theatrically placed it in his mouth.

  ‘Take two, Boney!’ Alex urged. ‘Take two!’

  The Emperor did take two, and the smile with which he began the process of consuming them was replaced in ten seconds with an expression of broad horror. His face reddened and he held his throat.

  ‘Have they sent a child to do it?’ he cried to the surrounding air. He stumbled away towards the marquee, my mother following and calling for Gourgaud, who for once was not close behind him, and for Cipriani and Marchand.

  Alex began to wail too, and to plead, ‘It’s only pills. It’s only pills.’

  My mother called to Sarah to fetch tea for the Emperor. The Emperor was vomiting into a basin held by Marchand by the time Sarah, Alice and my mother took the tea in to him.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ my mother said, a term unfamiliar to her lips and brought on by desperate concern. ‘My son has given you harmless senna. I am appalled that he knows where to look for medicines that imitate the confiseur’s art. But it is a harmless mixture!’

  We managed to get this message through the deafness of his panic, and he began to gasp like a man retrieving his living breath. From dire expectation of being strangled by toxins, the Emperor passed in five minutes to utter hilarity.

  ‘Madame,’ he said, barely panting, ‘your son has nearly succeeded in doing what the Chouan agents of Britain could not manage. And he did not receive even a twenty-franc Napoleon for frightening me nearly to my grave.’

  But within a day the Ogre began coughing and suffered congestion, and my mother, guilty for what she thought might be the long-running effect of the senna pods, nursed him, was frequently in the marquee and came and went with vapour inhalations, insisting on carrying basins of camphor in boiling water herself.

  The Emperor proved a difficult patient and had Marchand take away the first basin she brought, but after a few days asked for more to be brought – without fuss, he specified. He could not stand the ado people made about the temporarily afflicted.

  O’Meara rode up from Jamestown and found that the Emperor would permit himself to take a little mercury chloride, but would not be blistered – as O’Meara had suggested – to draw out the afflicting humours. My mother told us at dinner, ‘Our Emperor believes that blistering is quackery.’

  ‘Well,’ murmured my father, ‘he did grow up on Corsica.’

  ‘Corsica’ was code for a primitive society.

  ‘Escape’, or any other word of that meaning …

  My view of time was all to do with the coming ball in late November. My attention was distracted, though, when Old Huff failed to arrive to give his lessons, and Poppleton confessed to my father at breakfast that, against Poppleton’s own recommendations, Huff had been summoned to Plantation House for a terse conversation with Admiral Cockburn. He had been escorted there from town by soldiers, though according to rumour they spoke to him calmly and did not threaten him with either the lash or with prison cells. The admiral explained to him that he was not to kneel to the General anymore or mention the word ‘escape’, or any other word of that same meaning.

  This interview came at a stage when we were seeing more soldiers at the crossroads and at the signal station atop High Knoll. It was as if they were closing upon the exile; and there was a new encampment near Hutt’s Gate on the way to Longwood whose presence made the Emperor unwilling to ride in that direction.

  The Emperor, rather pleased that he was blameless in the Huff matter, remarked to my father that, alas, only mad Englishmen seemed interested in freeing him. It was primary proof that the British Cabinet, he said, though far from admirable men, were not mad.

  A letter arrived from the admiral’s residence at the Castle advising my father that Cockburn expected him to employ Huff no more. The admiral was aware that this wo
uld affect Huff’s income, but he intended to make funds available for Huff’s modest upkeep.

  My father informed the Ogre of this letter and the Ogre asked him whether Huff would starve. My father had heard that Huff received a remittance from his family in England and tried to reassure our guest on that point.

  On Monday morning my father set out for Jamestown in his trap, but while we were working on French translation he returned – he had obviously not reached Jamestown or anywhere near it – and dismounted, advancing on the shade of our tree, frowning and flushed in the face. He called for my mother and Sarah, and he muttered whatever news he had to them both. Sarah’s eyes grew wide; it seemed her irises shrunk amidst the white of her eyeballs. My father collected Toby and Ernest from the orchard and ventured out of the gate on foot to the carriageway again. He called to us, ‘Jane, Betsy, keep the children in the house. Please stay here yourselves.’

  The men advanced a little way and my father and Toby went on further still while Ernest returned to harness up the dray, as if freight would be involved. As soon as the dray had gone up the carriageway, I went to the gate and began to squint down that tunnel of pomegranate trees myself.

  Far off, a considerable way down the track, beyond the avenues of trees, I saw what looked like a large black comma suspended in the thin shade of an isolated gumwood, the tree of the island, crooked with ugly pale leaves. There were two or three soldiers standing by and my father and Toby approaching it. It was as if an emanation from that shape immediately passed through my body. I returned, frightened, to my sister.

  ‘What is it, Betsy?’ she asked.

  I told her I didn’t know, but the truth was I dared not know yet, and soon I returned to the gate again.

  My father and Toby had arrived by then at the spot where the soldiers stood. The sentries at the crossroads beyond were facing the solitary gumwood, but could not leave their post.

  Toby and Ernest took a step ladder from the back of the dray and erected it by the black punctuation mark. Ernest was sent up the stepladder and sawed at the air above the thing. I knew the party had not had time to hang a man, and lacked the authority to, and thus a man must have hanged himself there.

  My mother appeared behind me, exasperated.

  ‘Didn’t your father tell you to sit down?’

  When I went to join Jane I whispered to her, ‘There is a man, hanged.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  I could not say. My mother stayed at the gate and placed a hand to her mouth. My father was returning to us by foot. When he reached the gates, he cried to my mother loudly, ‘Have we destroyed the poor man by rejecting him?’

  So it was the man he was worried about, the man with the escape plans. Huff.

  Robert and Roger, our house servants, now grown men, came out howling onto the verandah, as if they had had a vision of what had happened, and began to chant and shudder. Alice stood with large eyes full of a blazing alarm. I knew that in the song the twins had set up there was a desire to diffuse and allay the evil spirit let loose in our carriageway.

  My mother cried, ‘Then it is Huff. That’s who it is. It is Huff.’

  I felt trapped. The track to the crossroads, which we needed to use in all our arrivals at and departures from the house, was now a tunnel stopped up by Huff’s terrible plan, and by limbs stretched out to us not just from the vegetable but from the spectral world.

  The Emperor had emerged from the marquee in shirtsleeves, and approached us across the lawn, looking bewildered.

  My mother told him, ‘Sire, it is Huff. It is Mad Huff.’

  ‘But what?’ asked the Emperor. They spoke like old neighbours.

  ‘Hanged himself, it seems,’ said my mother.

  The Emperor peered down the arched trees of the carriageway. ‘My God,’ the Emperor murmured and turned to Jane and me. ‘Did poor Huff hang himself because I refused his ravings of escape?’

  ‘No,’ I said as if talking sense to a family member, ‘you would have been hanged had you listened to him.’

  I wondered what would become of Huff’s body now – would the thing be brought to our door? But in fact Toby and Ernest had been told to take it down to the coroner in Jamestown, and a sentry was allocated by Captain Poppleton to travel with them.

  The fact that the body was gone from the road did not seem to allay the terrors of Sarah or the stupefaction of Alice, Roger and Robert. We moved into the house, since the normal world of order could be encountered only indoors. My brothers ran about asking us, ‘Did Old Huff hang himself? Jane? Betsy? With rope? How’d he tie the knot?’

  ‘Dead, is he?’ asked William.

  ‘Not dead,’ said Alex. ‘He was just arsing around.’ And everyone worked at being normally offended at the imp’s crudity.

  ‘Aleph, beth, gamel, daleth,’ said Thomas as a sort of eulogy.

  I was in terror of the night. Darkness fell hazy, like smoke. We were told that evening by my father when he arrived back that he had gone with the town officials to Huff’s shack. There he and Major Hodson found a locked box within a chest under Old Huff’s bed. My father broke the box open and found 250 sovereigns in a bag. The belief Huff had hanged himself because he had lost all sources of income was thus allayed.

  My father and Hodson took the box and a journal to Plantation House, for he still trusted Colonel Wilks to behave with discretion over the matter. On the last page of the erratic diary was written, ‘It is too great a weight for a fallen child – I mean the contrivance that is demanded of me by the God of Reason.’

  It was as if Huff had chosen sentiments to exonerate us. Even I felt less subject to his baleful ghost. For we all knew by evening that it was the weight of his delusion, not of his true situation, that had sent Huff up the tree, and weight of delusion pulled on him fiercer than his own weight when he descended from the branch, and the weight of delusion squeezed the spirit from him. It had not been any rejection by my father, the admiral, or the Ogre.

  My mother said to us, ‘Why should the Emperor feel such a burden from Huff’s foolishness? I mean to say, in terms of robustness of soul, he left a whole army behind in Egypt.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s easier to leave a whole army,’ I suggested earnestly, ‘than one mad man.’

  This caused my father to laugh. It was still the case that when I proposed what I thought of as a transparent truth, my elders laughed.

  A few uneasy days and fitful nights followed Huff’s suicide. It was taken by all levels of society with great seriousness, and after a quick inquest it was deemed that Huff should be buried at the crossroads nearest the site of his self-destruction, where the road from The Briars to Jamestown crossed the road to Longwood.

  No one attended the funeral except the Chinese gravediggers and two slaves. It was in our secret thoughts and amongst the servants that the stricken imaginings ran. The carriageway was now a haunted place leading to the last residence of an unhappy spirit. If our servants wished to go to meet up at the freed slaves’ camp above Jamestown, they would be for years inhibited by the crossroads through which they must pass. And so was I.

  But the Emperor came to feel perhaps too exonerated, and that fact was shown by his actions on a summer night soon after Huff had been buried. That night he had the lights put out early in the Pavilion and the marquee and sent the Las Cases to bed, and we presumed that the Emperor too had retired early. I could feel Huff’s ghost settling as a frigid insomniac shadow over me.

  The Emperor had secretly recruited Sarah’s two nephews, in a way that was designed to relieve them from the augustness and steely terror of Huff by making them collaborate in a joke about him with the Great Ogre. He had persuaded them to sneak down the carriageway, each wearing a white sheet, and to intrude, clad in that way, into our garden. It sounds like a primitive trick that should not have impressed us. But we were simple people, and it did. The light, what was left of it, was an amalgam of the darkness that precedes a new-risen full moon, but it was precisely right to make
an ordinary bedsheet gleam with a faint blue emanation of a persistent presence.

  The Emperor’s relief at being innocent of causing the suicide’s death still allowed him in nights thereafter when crossing the lawn at evening from our house to the Pavilion to utter in a faux-ominous voice, ‘Old Huff! Old Huff!’ But he would ruin the affright he was trying to induce by bursting into the sort of laughter that embraced itself in undue self-congratulation, the sort of laughter a puckish child might emit having performed a trick.

  My mother was of course always forgiving of him. She would go to the door and call, ‘Good evening, Your Majesty.’

  She laughed and shook her head, and I wondered if she would have been as forgiving of Robert and Roger had they done such a thing, on their own initiative. But it was clear that the Emperor was supremely forgivable. It was endearing of him to concentrate, even in jest, on one lost wretch.

  According to ghost-struck Alice, a fear of the evil spirit of the man he had handled caused Ernest to vanish from The Briars that night of the Emperor’s first Huff trick. She and Toby both solemnly reported at dawn that he was missing. My father in turn reported the matter to Major Hodson, and the constables were sent to the camp of the freed blacks above Jamestown, fairly sure that he must have sought to place himself on the safe and uncursed side of the crossroads there and could be easily retrieved.

  But he was not at the camp. Military patrols were ordered to keep a watch out for him but, as days passed, none of them sighted him. It began to be muttered that he had hidden on a ship, or had drowned trying to reach one, or else had fallen from a cliff or thrown himself from it.

  I heard for the first time my parents and other adults who visited them for dinner mention the suicide season. Was this a proposition Old Huff had introduced? Because I did not know until then that the island had such a season. But there was a theory now that humidity and heat and the fuggy air of summer through which illimitable sea could be glimpsed could confirm people in the idea of their paltriness and suggest they were candidates for self-destruction. On one of our late afternoon rides towards Diana’s Peak and the heights around it, we saw a patch of white on a cone of rock. When we drew closer, we saw beneath the peak to the apex of a large boulder what looked like a white linen bag, a bundle of laundry, pungent, stinking of disease – at least as I thought of it.