by Tom Keneally
‘Your sister says you were very abusive to the Emperor. I cannot have that, either in terms of his dignity or of my being his provedore.’
‘My sister is not right in what she says,’ I claimed. ‘She cannot understand why a person would feel outrage.’
Jane bore, of course, a burning face and furiously wished to help me now. ‘I did not interpret it as abuse, Father,’ she said. ‘I told you only that she said that a man who made the Code Napoleon could certainly understand the laws of whist, and that is very close to being a just statement.’
What did she truly think, amidst the sweetness of her temperament, about Gourgaud? Had she lost all breath and reason for him?
‘No, not just,’ said my father. ‘Far too hot indeed, considering his sins were so venial and you were playing for sugarplums and not for fortunes.’ He turned to me. ‘You must do your own pleading, miss.’
That put paid to any lacrimosity of mine. I turned at once and set out to go to the Pavilion. The purpose with which I moved was to impress my father. Secretly I decided that the first aim was to win back my gown by any means, and thus I was ready to be contrite. I was fearful in case the Ogre had crushed the gown, or vengefully stripped the roses from it.
As I came to the Pavilion, I was met from behind by Gourgaud, and Las Cases appeared on the doorstep and told me that the Emperor was not to be disturbed. I did not have gravity or judgement enough to tell him I would wait for an audience, and so I withdrew to the verandah of The Briars.
I waited for an hour and a half, eating nothing, taking some tepid tea Sarah brought, and then I saw the Emperor, Gourgaud and both Las Cases descend to the garden and enter the grape arbour. Coming down into the garden myself, I glanced into the entrance of that grotto of vines and could dimly see the Emperor pacing in his peculiar cock-sparrow manner, hands behind his back, vapouring on about some battlefield performance of his which must surely have risen above the level of childishness he imposed on me.
I opened the gate and entered the arbour. I called softly in the vegetable dimness. ‘I’ve come for my gown.’
There was silence and the Comte Las Cases emerged and told me drily the Emperor could not see me.
‘Tell him,’ I said, ‘that he is killing me as he killed the Duke d’Enghien.’
The little chamberlain reached back his hand and struck me across the cheek. It stung a considerable swathe of skin, bigger than his hand, but the sting was irrelevant. I looked him full in the face. He hissed, ‘The Duke d’Enghien was a traitor. Do you not execute traitors in England? In my time there you executed people who were not even traitors. You should please go now.’
And he turned his back and walked back into the deep shade of the arbour.
I called in a level voice for the Emperor’s edification, ‘He has struck me, your chamberlain. He strikes me in my house.’
I heard the Emperor muttering, ‘Did you strike her?’
‘She accused you of murder,’ said the chamberlain, as if the entire career of the Emperor had been bloodless and an imputation of any spillage was an outright insult.
‘Next time I shall bring a pistol,’ I called. And then there were a few seconds of private tears as I stood there, after which I called out with a cruelty I decided was in measure with the damage Las Cases had done me. ‘I feel happy that you are persecuting me instead of your son, the King of Rome, as you would if you were with him.’
Could it be suppressed laughter I heard then? Not from Las Cases anyhow. I was sure he didn’t have any talent for sustained laughter. And so I withdrew before I was sure about the laughter, because if it were confirmed, that would be intolerable. I had an assassin’s pistol to fetch as well, though I was unsure whether I would use it on Las Cases or the Universal Demon.
I returned to the house in a stupefied state. I knew I could not enlist my father to punch Las Cases in return, or to call him out for a duel; there was little gain in a parental revenge inflicted at a distance from me. I needed to devise revenge for my own hand.
I did not seek a pistol. Not even I could sustain a killing mania.
My father, seeing how I was, let me off my French translation for the day. By mid-afternoon my natural obduracy had reached a high state. I went to my mother and called in Sarah and Alice and asked them to tuck in the waist of one of my mother’s gowns for me. I would not shine at Plantation House, but I would be present.
Sick and sullen, I was with Jane and my mother as we packed our dresses and combs and powder and rouge and all other requirements for the ball in tin boxes. They were carried out by Robert and Roger to the carriage the Ogre had lent us for the journey to Plantation House. The barouche stood there, and the two brothers, the Archambaults, stood by the team of horses.
The Archambaults were ready to mount the horses in front and the tin boxes had been loaded into the barouche when we saw the Emperor running across the lawn, up the slope to our house with my gown over his arm. My father, already in the barouche with us, kept his face neutral.
‘You are leaving without your dress, Mademoiselle Betsy,’ the Ogre cried. He had it draped across his arms. ‘I hope you are a penitent girl now,’ he said, offering the gown to me, and I took it and felt its unsullied satin and intact roses. ‘I hope that you are not going to tell those who are having a jolly time with you that they are somehow cheats.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I have spoken severely to Las Cases for his ill-placed zeal.’ He resumed in a normal voice, ‘You will like the ball, and you will shine in this dress, but you have to dance with Gourgaud here.’
General Gourgaud climbed aboard the barouche with us, since he was permitted to attend the levee, ‘General’ being the correct designation for him. I only partly listened to his halting conversation with my father. The now forgiven seducer of my sister! I was still inspecting the dress, enchanted by it, revived by its roses. The Emperor saw this.
‘I had them removed by Ali in case they were crushed, and he reattached them today. You always knew I would give it back. Farewell, eminent Mr Balcombe. Splendid Balcombe women, madame, and mesdemoiselles, rejoice! General, sir. Off, Archambaults!’
We rattled forth in the half-dark, but with the Emperor still striding at the stirrup of the older Archambault, who prevented the horses from speeding away even though he had a repute for recklessness. The Ogre kept pace with us all the way down the carriageway, where two soldiers of the regiment presented arms to him, their eyes flittering over him as they always did, trying to puzzle him out, memorising all they could of that half-lit visage to relay to those who had never seen it close. Now the Emperor had seen the lights of a house about a mile away. He delayed my father to ask him, ‘La maison? Là-bas?’
My father understood as much French as that. He told him it was Major Hodson’s.
‘Not invite to ball?’ asked the Emperor.
I tried to imagine the tall Major Hodson dancing. In any case, he was of the East India Company garrison and not quite of the same status or novelty as the officers of the 53rd.
My father said, ‘I don’t think he is of a temper, Your Majesty, to go to balls.’
‘You must go now, all of you,’ the Emperor told us. ‘And remember that a ball is a rapid form of destiny. Consider that you might meet your husband tonight, mesdemoiselles!’
Thus, while we were at the ball the Ogre of Europe, accompanied by the Comte Las Cases, rode across to that lit house, hungry as ever for company, and bringing with him that avidity to know about the childless Hodsons, husband and wife.
The squat Emperor and the towering Hodson, as it happened, got on quite well, because after the ball it became apparent he had awarded him a nickname, Hercules, as he did for all people he admired.
We, in the meantime, were driven on up the ridge behind The Briars and by pleasant country lanes, though some traversed steep ridges. Tonight even the crossroads seemed exempt from the influence of demented Huff. Along a track to the east we reached the plain that led to Plantation House and so debouched i
nto the grounds, where I glanced at Jane and we exchanged tight smiles, anxious at the challenge, eager for it to happen as well. In the last of light we could see in the broad green garden the land tortoises, moving just fast enough not to be mistaken for rocks, and an occasional peacock, beak down, tails furled, and lights in all the windows of the white rectangular frame of the house. Colonel Wilks and his gentle wife and beauteous daughter Laura reigned here, he as governor for the East India Company, cooperating gently in Admiral Cockburn’s management of the Colossus.
Long before we came to the house, we could hear a hubbub of voices, and found the ensigns and lieutenants were hauling a farm dray up towards the main entrance. It was a substantial vehicle, and as we rolled closer they swept their hats off and told us that they intended to drag the wagon in front of the portico once all the ladies had arrived and so keep them captive till dawn. The idea was heady, and carried an innocent whiff of abduction.
So we rode past them laughing breathily, and the barouche was taken and we were handed down by slave servants dressed in livery and led by a black serving woman inside the door of the house and to a parlour set aside as a dressing room for the ladies of the ball.
I felt that for the first time in my life I had arrived at last at a destination. In the dressing room I took off my travelling clothes and was helped by the Wilks’s servant to put on my dress of satin and calico roses, and I was a woman amongst women, in a musk of perfume and fabric and excited wives and daughters and slaves, many of them beautiful enough to look with longing at what I wore.
Knowing that I was an initiate, that this was a rite of womanhood for me, various ladies, including Mrs Solomon and Mrs Captain Younghusband, came up to compliment me. Mrs Younghusband was a woman of the same age as Madame de Montholon and Fanny Bertrand, her husband a very fresh-faced captain, seven years younger than her. She possessed beneath her brown curls, large, shifting, limpid eyes, and as she spoke I wondered if her gestures had been influenced by Fanny Bertrand’s. Her broad arms were spread wide at the end of her imparting any modest piece of information. At tea at our place she had complained about the fleas that infested the whole Deadwood site where the camp was being built, and where she lived in a tent with her eight-year-old daughter Emily, a sweet English child rather overborne by her mother. After taking a walk on the grass, Catherine Younghusband was quick to tell us all, she would come home totally infested with fleas and have to enter the tent and throw her clothes out of the flap to be boiled up and deloused. So she was trying to persuade her husband to build her a more permanent habitation. Her husband was besotted and had the vigorous intention to save her from parasites.
At The Briars once, Napoleon had seen her from the grape arbour or the marquee and came out calling, ‘Who is this lady?’
Speaking first in French and then in Italian, in both of which Mrs Younghusband was fluent, he had ushered her into our house to give her a chance to present a recital of Italian airs on our piano in the style grandissimo, and played an Italian duet with little Emily. Emily was clearly a gifted child, but Mrs Younghusband herself brought from the Emperor an extraordinary compliment. ‘Ah! There is a woman of spirit.’
She had told him, as she often did with others as a conversational gambit, that she had descended from Oliver Cromwell, that enemy of the dance. But here she was, determined to be celebrated at the Plantation House ball.
Mrs Nagle, wife of a lieutenant, was also very kind, and Miss Rosebud Knipe. I had been admitted by them, and I exulted. I was meanly pleased that La Nymphe, Miss Robinson, was not invited; nor many of the yamstocks.
At a supreme moment, the Countess de Montholon, her compact belly leading, crossed the floor to compliment me. It was her approval that excited me most since it seemed to come from a woman more deeply emplaced in the mystery of womanhood than anyone else, including Fanny Bertrand. Madame de Montholon’s voice had a small and silken quality, yet at the same time was forceful. She said simply, ‘Oh, dear Betsy, how I envy your dress! Is it true the Emperor had it made?’
In the ballroom on the ground floor, frowning on my joy, hung the portraits of members of the Council of the East India Company, distant grey men of a seniority that yielded precedence only to the long dead. By contrast the room glittered with light, and loops of fabric canopies had been erected along its length to give it an appropriate feeling of licensed pleasure.
Fanny Bertrand had already entered from the dressing room and we found her in the garlanded ballroom, high-waisted and glowing-shouldered in fabrics of powdery blue, and around her neck and shoulders a grand, structural necklace once worn in salons superior to this one. So we chose our seats about her, having, as women are doomed to do, located our father and assessed his happiness as he chattered beside Mr Ibbetson, his fellow professional, commissary for the military, a man my father dealt with almost daily. Cups of punch were delivered to us by a number of young officers. The pretension of their uniforms seemed far removed from mud and blood, and I always wondered, and do to this day, why men wore such splendour to go to die or be maimed. My mother forbade Jane and me to drink what was brought, and more innocent concoctions were fetched from the bowl the few children present drank from. My dress did not qualify me for intoxicants.
There were two officers, two very different men indeed, one mature, one young, on that night, which I remember as the highest night of the island, before our steep decline. One of them was a lean, leather-faced officer, a major, ageless, possibly younger than my father, in a uniform that had been turned according to need and that had been used in other stations than this. It had become pink from campaigning. He was a little narrow in the face, but his features were those of a reliable human. He presented himself as Major Oliver Fehrzen and assuredly had the seasoned look of one who had campaigned in the war in Spain against my Grand Playmate from The Briars.
He asked me in a direct, decisive voice whether I would permit him to mark my card as a dance partner.
‘I’m not good at quadrilles, Major,’ I warned him, ‘and I hear they’ll be dancing quadrilles.’
He laughed benignly. He had amiable eyes whose gravity elevated my words pleasantly.
‘I have not been much exposed to them myself,’ he confessed. And he wrote his name in a space in my card and moved on to bow to other ladies and to seek dancing partners, but without anxiety, a man merely fulfilling his pleasant duty.
Then I saw Lieutenant Croad, as did everyone. For he was the young man, a little beak-nosed but with eyes abrim with enthusiasm, who was said to be set on introducing quadrilles into the programme, no matter how much they tested the skills of an island girl. Mrs Nagle told us Croad had been training the officers and their spouses in the movements required for the dance, but he had not spread this benevolence beyond the camp. I recognised Croad as one of the courtly officers who had bowed to us in a Gallic manner on the day the Ogre arrived at the dock. His uniform was a great variation from the workman’s uniform of Major Fehrzen. The epaulettes trailed gold thread down his shoulders. Everything on his clothing that could be frogged with gold was. His breeches were a dazzling white, and below the knee ended in gaiters.
His bows were as earlier most profound, and involved not just his body from the waist upwards but a genuflection of the knee, with an appropriate near kneeling of the other leg, while his gold-handled sword and golden jewel-chaised scabbard stuck up in the air so that other members of the party had to make a circuit around its point to accommodate his gallantry.
He had already greeted the Frenchwomen, Bertrand and de Montholon, with an even more extreme stretch of his limbs and more reverent smoothing of his lips against their white knuckles, and Madame de Montholon’s eyes glowed when she saw him. In that she was honest. She liked, more than Fanny Bertrand, to be flattered by men. Then Croad moved on to my mother, about whom he enthused, as a number of men did too much. He charmed Jane and finally me.
‘I must say, Miss Balcombe, I have not seen in my campaigns as apt a dress as yo
urs,’ he palavered on, yet with a saving enthusiasm behind what he said. ‘Sufficiently rustic for the island, sufficiently elegant to remind us of nature but also of ceremony. I offer no promises that I will live to be an eighty-year-old general but if I do I shall celebrate each rare future encounter with such a dress.’ And then, a further twist to the oratory. ‘I do not plan to have, Miss Balcombe, the memory of your splendid equipage eroded by any future encounters, however exalted.’
I could merely gape at him, uncertain as to whether to beam or not, and lower my head.
‘Thank you,’ I said at last in an ungainly voice.
It had been a wonderful encomium to my dress – at least I think that’s what it was as I could not absorb the words discretely – and I could neither answer him, nor escape the suspicion either, that he might be putting me in my place as a girl stuck in the mid-Atlantic.
I danced first with the rather distracted surgeon of one of the ships of the squadron, a friend of O’Meara’s. The Irish surgeon was also there, laughing in a corner near my father, and being eloquent and red-cheeked. The man who held me was pleasant but too clearly saw himself as being engaged, perhaps at O’Meara’s instruction, in patronising me.
The dance I looked forward to, and the one for which Major Fehrzen had signed his name, was a country reel. I knew the steps and it seemed to suit Major Fehrzen’s unpretentious nature. I felt very small in his hands, hardened by unimaginable tasks in the war against the Ogre, and could feel his calluses, and yet decided to be calm, since women around me were being similarly tranquil in the hands of other men.
‘I have been up to your place, Miss Balcombe,’ he told me. ‘But you probably did not see me. I was visiting the Emperor. Like everybody else, such crowds of people try to go there and have a sight of him.’
‘Are you supposed to call him the Emperor?’ I asked. ‘I thought that soldiers were required to call him General.’
‘Sometimes our tongue betrays us,’ he said. ‘He was a great mischief-maker, indeed the mischief-maker of my lifetime. But one looks at all that – the canvas marquee and the summerhouse – an absolutely charming one, of course, but … I think you would admit it’s not Fontainebleau. How remarkable it would have been if he’d come tonight.’