Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  O’Meara said, ‘Of course, the Fiend wishes to use me as a spy on OGF. I told them at Longwood that some remarks would be required of me – a daily health bulletin in general terms, no medical secrets given away, some harmless intelligence on the household. And there’s one great thing about that Fiend fellow. He tends to be satisfied as long as you give him plenty of details. He’s more interested in the knowing not so much whether the Emperor ate boiled eggs for breakfast than whether they are soft or hard-boiled, as if their condition is somehow an omen for him. And by the way, we can’t call the man the Fiend indefinitely. We need a code, as for OGF.’

  I declared, ‘Name and Nature.’

  ‘What is that?’ asked the men.

  ‘Lowe by Name and Lowe by Nature.’

  O’Meara cast up his hands to the ceiling. Then he knelt before me.

  ‘You, lovely Betsy, have achieved it. Lowe by name and nature! This is the code of codes.’

  My father beamed and kissed my cheek.

  I meanwhile wondered, was O’Meara right or somehow salving his conscience for having to collaborate with a governor he did not like? Or was it even possible he liked him more than he said? It was as if the Fiend had put multiple meanings into previously simple acts.

  It would come to be argued in some quarters that the Emperor was as narrow-minded as Sir Hudson Lowe. But he did not have power to impose his conditions upon Sir Hudson, and the small man was making the great man dance to his tune, and a very poor and rough and niggardly tune it increasingly became.

  And so our house was full of plaints from my father and other visitors – that the servants from Longwood who toted the Bertrands’ share of the provisions across to the little house at Hutt’s Gate were stopped by the very sentinels who taught the young Bertrands their profanities. At last a sergeant allowed the provisions to be passed over the fence of Hutt’s Gate to the servants, but in silence. Such was the panic of severity in which Sir Hudson Fiend had the soldiers.

  O’Meara went there to attend to one of the Bertrands’ servants, a Frenchman who had caught hepatitis, the disease that had come on the ships and which appeared to flourish particularly here, like the blue flies that gathered on the gumwoods. It seemed that one in every three islanders carried on their face that unhealthy bronzed look. O’Meara was told he could not go inside the house to see the patient, however, and wrote instructions in French so that the dosage could be taken indoors to be administered. Though the sergeant of the guard could not read it and thus destroyed it, O’Meara’s entry was barred still.

  This was the sort of daily absurdity that was recounted and complained of in our home, and my father laughed bitterly now over every instance of the abominable and inane restriction. And so no doubt did the soldiers, for one had been relieved of his duty and sent to be tried by court martial for having allowed a passing slave to go into the Bertrands’ courtyard to drink water. The man could have been carrying a missive! Someone else begging water might later carry a message not authorised by the august Name and Nature, and that thought now had the capacity to put unnecessary starch into those who guarded the Bertrands, as into those who guarded Longwood itself.

  The governor, Admiral Malcolm at his side – this was told to us by O’Meara, who was present – went to Longwood to argue with Montholon about the amount of refined basket salt used, proclaiming, ‘We don’t use half as much at Plantation House. I want you to use grey salt for the servants in their cooking.’

  ‘But, Your Excellency,’ said de Montholon, ‘grey salt clots in the humidity.’

  It has to be said that a better disposed witness than our friend O’Meara might have seen this as a reasonable enough economy. Sel gris, grey salt, not whitened by drainage through baskets, even when clotted would not kill the servants. But such an instance of the rational was consumed by the irrational. Good sense was lost amidst absurdity.

  Sir Hudson could not prevent the admiral from entering Longwood and being welcomed, and indeed need not do so, for the admiral could reassure Hudson that the Emperor was there, in his salon sitting at a table experimenting with a Leslie pneumatic machine for making ice, which an admirer in England had sent him and which had been allowed to be delivered to Longwood the day before.

  This was the machine that we Balcombe women visited. We rode across there as by right and were exempt from Sir Hudson’s normal requirements that visitors to Longwood should receive a ticket at Plantation House, to be returned to that source of authority on completion of the visit. We did not inquire into the privilege that operated with us, which seemed to me to derive from our having been hosts to OGF in the early part of his island career. We came to Longwood and found the new wonder of the machine had clearly enlarged the Emperor’s day, as he sat there telling us how ethyl bromide worked in a vacuum inside the machine to turn water at room temperature to ice. ‘We are far, far from the fields of ice to the south,’ he said. ‘This chemical wonder denies geography.’

  Was it, in defying geography, a comforting mechanism of escape?

  He had got permission through Captain Poppleton to let some of the yamstock farmers, the Letts and the Robinsons, including La Nymphe, Florence Robinson, and Polly Mason and others, to visit Longwood to see the machine grind, fizz and groan as it produced a chip of ice in the tray below. Mr Lett, a lump of ice deposited in his hand by the Emperor, was astonished at this devil’s work; he had never seen ice before, having lived all his life within the narrow limits of St Helena’s temperatures. He held it and exclaimed, amazed, as it began to melt in his hands.

  Could OGF melt through the fingers of Sir Hudson in this same way?

  More confrontations, more strictures, reported to us by O’Meara, and I became increasingly uneasy about some of them, the extreme of feeling invested in them. To the point of oddity, if not madness. Once again anxious from not sighting his captive, Sir Hudson arrived at Longwood one day while OGF was walking around the garden with Bertrand, de Montholon and the Las Cases. And here is the meat of my captive, Sir Hudson must have thought, seeing the Ogre’s pale wrists beneath the sleeves of his white suit – the one he had taken to wearing in the garden. He sent Major Gorrequer a few steps ahead to ask whether the General would tolerate an interview, but Sir Thomas opined loudly at His Excellency’s side that it should not be a matter of the Ogre’s permission. So Sir Hudson and Admiral Malcolm stood a little distance from the French group, conferring, then moved in and saluted OGF. Sir Hudson told OGF that he had come from Plantation House to Longwood three times already to discuss the reduction of the budget with him and was told each time that the General was in his bath.

  ‘I was not,’ the Emperor declared, ‘but I had one poured especially each time so as not to be able to see you.’

  Sir Hudson declared in French, ‘You are a dishonest man, sir.’ He turned on his heels and walked up to Poppleton and O’Meara and said, po-faced, ‘The General has been very abusive to me. I ask you gentlemen to observe as much.’

  The exchange between the Great Ogre and the Fiend, which O’Meara rightly or wrongly admired, was rightly or wrongly admired in turn by us. We had not reached the stage of asking if it was wise of the Emperor to speak this way to Sir Hudson, or if it was unavoidable that the Emperor would react to being governed by him exactly as he did? And standing by at Sir Hudson’s shoulder, Sir Thomas, whistling a bitter tune between plump lips, suggested in a low undertone that £8000 per annum was an obscene indulgence, a cell being too good for the fallen General.

  ‘Slit my throat, sir,’ called the Emperor. ‘Then you don’t need to feed me.’

  ‘You do not know my true nature,’ Sir Hudson asserted.

  ‘Know your nature, sir,’ replied OGF. ‘Could I know you? People in my world make themselves known by commanding in the field. You never had such command and if you did it was to lead Corsican brigands and deserters. I know the name of every English general who has distinguished himself in battle and I have never heard of you but as a clerk to the Prussian
General Blucher, and a briber of German princes to jump the fence in England’s direction.’

  ‘I have only done my duty,’ Sir Hudson was heard protesting by O’Meara, to which the Emperor answered, ‘So does the hangman.’

  Bravo, we cried in our souls. The Emperor had won resonantly. But do resonations count against power?

  And with that, his career dismissed, Sir Hudson’s red patches glowed and his lips tightened and he mounted his horse and so did a head-shaking Sir Thomas Reade, who probably thought the Emperor should have been shot, and, after waiting for the admiral hanging behind to make a melancholy bow towards the Ogre before joining Sir Hudson’s cavalcade, they rode away.

  Now Sir Hudson decided to trim the household too. Three of the French servants were to be sent back to France. One was Archambault’s brother, stylish groom and postilion-rider. The other was Santini, a man we children found forbidding. He had served in a Corsican regiment in the service of OGF and was a dark man with emphatic features and ancestral grievances, many of them directed at the families of those Corsicans who, for similar grudges, had decided to serve England. He was a rifleman, and had a hunting rifle provided him. Now he began to mutter to other servants that vengeance against the debasing of his master was a divine prerogative which sometimes entrusted itself to the hands of a Corsican with good aim – himself as an instance.

  It was a classic Corsican ambush Santini planned for Sir Hudson: atop the eastern end of the saddle to Jamestown, taking the governor as he descended to the port. Or he could fire from the rocky defiles near Hutt’s Gate or the geologic debris south of Devil’s Glen. Santini, concealed amidst rocks or trees, would blow Sir Hudson out of his saddle. As we heard from Fanny Bertrand in her narration of the aftermath of the dismissal of Santini, the news that he would be leaving in a ship within a day and a half convinced him that he must carry out his assassination. Seeing him oil the bore of his musket, Cipriani, fellow Italian speaker, warned the Emperor, who was appalled to hear of his fellow Corsican’s intentions. It was obvious to the Emperor, of course, that if one of his servants killed the British governor there could be no hope for his ambition to be admitted to the British Isles and live there a free, easy and cultivated life.

  Santini was therefore called and OGF told him that he was not to consider such a gesture of vengeance and honour. Much later still I would hear that he had won Santini’s obedience by giving him an alternate and somewhat less lethal task. Montholon – again, the devotion in this cannot be gainsaid – had stayed up all night writing on silk an account of the harshness of Sir Hudson’s policy. Santini was to wear it in his nether garments, and should he be searched by Sir Thomas Reade, who did not stop at the outer layers of a man, and should it be discovered, was to say that he had been bullied into it.

  From The Briars we saw a little procession come across the Deadwood Plain and descend down the mountain the next day, and Santini and young Archambault in a trap driven by Marchand. They reached the saddle above the cliffs that led to Jamestown and vanished altogether, out of the vision and knowledge of The Briars. My mother went to her room to, as she phrased it, ‘have a little swoon’ before riding over to commiserate with her friend Fanny.

  Novarrez told my father, when he was next at Longwood, ‘They will strip us one by one like leaves from this dead tree. The Great Soul will be left alone.’

  It was not the first time my father had evidence of how profound was the affection between OGF and his servants. Of course, if a master or mistress is ill or has died servants tend to tears under the weight of the solemnity. But with Novarrez and Marchand it was a far less occasional and a more unrehearsed thing. Novarrez loved OGF, even though he knew what the Emperor was in his nakedness, in his nightmares and insomnia, indigestion and costiveness, and in all other demonstrations of his imperfection.

  My father, more confident at French after his regular exposure to it, was led to the salon with the billiard table in it where the Emperor was striding about in his turban and dressing gown, and Las Cases and Emmanuel, with their pens poised, sat at the écritoire waiting wanly for the Emperor’s next sentence. OGF always seemed delighted to be distracted by outsiders. In some ways it was as if he had repented of his history and kept working at it for the good of the souls of the Las Cases and to keep Gourgaud out of trouble or appeased.

  ‘Guglielmo,’ he cried as usual when seeing my father.

  The earnest Las Cases, father and son, looked up with infinite patience at their unruly master. OGF raised his hand to my father’s shoulder and drew him into an embrace and told him that both de Montholon and Bertrand had assured him the household could not get by on the allocated sum. Proposing for the sake of simplicity that servants and the suite ate precisely the same food, it brought the weekly budget for each person to five pounds a week. ‘This means a soldier as excellent as Bertrand,’ said the Emperor, ‘and a woman as delicate as the Countess de Montholon – these people who have known the most sumptuous quarters and the most elevated European luxuries – will now eat as well as the drummer boys of the 53rd or 66th regiments!’

  It was about then, I think, though I cannot be sure, that the Emperor for the first time gave my father a money bill drawn on certain resources in France, written out by Las Cases and signed by the Emperor himself, a bill to be transported, without any intrusion from the governor, to a broker in England, a friend of O’Meara, and so on to relatives of the Emperor in Paris – a bill for negotiation between the English broker and the French bank, the sum settled on after commissions to be returned to the household at Longwood.

  In later years, in his distracted final time in a penal city on another continent, my father would tell me that when he was first given a bill drawn up on the Emperor’s behalf, Las Cases had told him to extract a fee for himself from the overall sum when the discounted amount was returned by way of the coffers of Foster, Coles and Balcombe. My father always claimed, almost as a self-condemnation for naivety, that he refused to do it for any such commission, but he knew he might have to pay an agent, a store ship captain perhaps, to carry the bill away from the island. (A fellow, for example like Captain Cook, might have been amenable after the treatment he got at the hands of Sir Tom Reade and Name and Nature’s troops.)

  The Emperor’s household trusted my father with these affairs, when he might have made himself safe in his stature on the island by betraying the dealings to Sir Hudson Lowe.

  That’s what I sing in the silence of the bush: that he kept the faith, that congenial poor old plump winebibber. He had honour and played a simple game when he could and should have played the new serpentine ones. Of course, Name and Nature had demanded to be the clearing house for all bills and all correspondence, and my father, out of the plainest sympathy and friendship, subverted that, but to eternal cost.

  My father secreted the note to be smuggled. OGF dolefully rubbed his hands. ‘The other thing,’ he announced, ‘is that I need to sell my plate, and I want you to handle the sale.’

  Selling the silver plate of a family is considered an evil omen in most families, and, I believe, even in French ones, and my father stared at the Emperor.

  ‘Yes, I want you to handle the sale, my dear Cinq Bouteilles. God knows, there must be merchants who’d see a good thing in it, or officers in the squadron or the garrison who might like to have a piece as a memento of their delightful times in this little acre. I trust it will go at an outrageous price, like the fruit and vegetables on this island.’

  My father began to argue with him. He should not sell anything as precious and see it dispersed from this geologic phenomenon of a mid-oceanic rock to every obscure latitude.

  The Emperor told him, ‘Come, Cinq Bouteilles, there is no reason to possess a plate when there’s nothing to eat off it.’

  This, of course, was a dramatic statement of the truth and perhaps the Emperor was seized by a desire to exhibit to the world the extent to which the British and Sir Hudson had reduced him.

  And so the pl
an was made that the silverware of the Emperor’s household would be carried down to Jamestown on the shoulders of slaves and Chinese and advertised for sale in Mr Solomon’s newspaper and on a handbill produced in his printery.

  My father rode away utterly depressed. He knew that having refused to take a margin on the money bill he was carrying in his breast pocket, he would also need as a consistent admirer and friend of OGF to undercharge his commission on the sale of the silver plate.

  The possessor of the bust of …

  After another jolly Christmas at The Briars, from an officer from the English vessel, Baring, it became known that a Mr Radwick, a gentleman sailor, had brought a bust of the King of Rome to St Helena. When he had landed and inquired innocently of members of the garrison how to get it to the Emperor, Sir Thomas Reade found out in no time and at once visited Radwick’s ship. By evening Sir Hudson Lowe was the possessor of the bust of the son of OGF, and was said to have mused aloud that perhaps he should break it up, for the British Cabinet had not approved its arrival.

  Lady Holland had sent books and other items by the Baring: these had also been seized and retained at Plantation House. And O’Meara had learned all this by doing what he liked best, conversing at length and sometimes drinking in that same dimension. When he told the Emperor, OGF became agitated, indeed beyond comfort.

  The bust of Napoleon’s son was in Name and Nature’s possession for two weeks. We weren’t the only ones who knew it; the freed slaves and the slaves knew it too. He was hanging onto it at Plantation House until he had communicated with Lord Bathurst in London about whether to give a man an image of his son, something that might have been allowed to the most common of common criminals.