Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  The first roses were trying to grow in that hard soil of Longwood, struggling against the killing draughts of salt that came off the sea on the south-east trade. The table was placed in the scattered shade of a few pines and of a sail Admiral Malcolm had had the sailors erect, and amidst the contorted gumwoods coffee was taken in the clear air, and everyone was invigorated by this amalgam of conditions, including the condition of the Emperor’s will in bringing them together. When the conversation began with the predictable complaints against Plantation House, OGF held up his hand and told them, ‘None of that. For when you are restored to the world one day, you have to think of yourselves as brothers, on my account.’

  But the Emperor was not talking about his death. The good news had come in the British newspapers that Lord Holland and the Duke of Sussex had moved a remonstrance in the House of Lords against what they called the illegal imprisonment of Napoleon. The Lords would not in the end vote to accept it, but OGF did not know that. It had for now been eloquently argued with plentiful accusations of ill will against Castlereagh and Bathurst, men who had sent troops to shoot down protesters in England and had also set them to cramp the soul of OGF.

  De Montholon looked at Las Cases, whose prissiness he hated, whose air of being the Emperor’s confidant, said Fanny, irked him. Las Cases simply gazed back at him with transparent eyes and bowed his head in the simplest goodwill that de Montholon was won over. Bertrand, seeing it, smiled and held out his hand to de Montholon, and Gourgaud sat in his place, rocking his head back and forth, as if saying, ‘Very well. But have you assessed all the elements? And what about the money I loaned you?’

  ‘Help each other?’ Fanny asked us later. ‘They are nearer to murdering each other. And the Emperor himself thinks he is the sun and shines equally on all, and wonders why I’m careful about exposing myself to his rays.

  ‘He has got feeble again, turning back from walks, and of all things eating his dinner in the bath from that device that straddles it, with a small table placed by the side for Las Cases to eat from. Which means that Gourgaud is moping all the more at the table in the dining room and has – if you can believe it – challenged de Montholon to a duel. To a duel! How Sir Hudson would enjoy that. Two Frenchmen killing each other and saving him the trouble.’

  The Emperor had observed to Madame de Montholon and Fanny Bertrand at dinner – as Fanny Bertrand said wryly, ‘just to win us over’ – that their garments would soon resemble those of the old misers who buy their wardrobes in second-hand clothes. ‘For once,’ said Fanny, ‘Albine de Montholon looked at me with a wan face, as if we were sisters in our misery. And we were. I must say she dotes on her little girl, Napoléone, and wonders if she will live. Though the child’s so healthy − a true little barbarian – and I think there’s another in progress. Lately Albine’s been worried about looking old – she believes the island ages us at twice the rate – so now her misery is deeper. I told him, “We take all the care we can, sire.” And he said, “But your clothes no longer show the freshness of Leroi or Despeaux or Herbault.” Imagine how dowdy we all felt.’

  Moved by an impulse to succour the big, square-shouldered woman, I said, ‘I think he was teasing you, Fanny.’ I wanted to push that gracious lie. ‘You are still,’ I insisted, ‘the most sumptuous and comely of women within thousands of square miles.’

  ‘No, Betsy, my darling. He criticised his own hunting coat and now they have thrown Santini off the island he has lost his most skilled repairer.’ Santini, the assassin, had been the expert at maintaining uniforms, reversing cloth, and producing a new suit from an old grey frockcoat. He made the Emperor a pair of shoes from the leather of old boots, and could always make something plausible out of the irreparable.

  To help accommodate Gourgaud’s valid desire for money for his mother, and perhaps to avoid a duel with him, Count de Montholon had made an earnest submission to Plantation House. It said that the Emperor was ready to pay all the expenses of the establishment if any mercantile or banking house in St Helena, London or Paris, chosen by the British Government, could serve as intermediaries through which the Emperor could send sealed letters, and receive sealed answers. The Emperor would pledge his honour that the letters should relate solely to pecuniary matters. De Montholon explained his reasonable proposition to my father. The secret, smuggled money bills were not working so well. Bankers in France did not know whether they were forgeries, for example.

  Two mornings later, Sir Thomas was delighted to announce to de Montholon that no sealed letters were permitted to leave Longwood.

  Balmain had told O’Meara that his own instructions were not to trouble OGF but to simply report to his master the Tsar on how he was held. So Balmain was content with island life and the gathering of sightings of the Emperor from Poppleton and other officers at Longwood to include in his elegant reports. But de Montchenu in particular, and even the Austrian von Stürmer, believed regular sightings of the Emperor were part of their instructions. And being prevented from seeing him by restrictions placed by Sir Hudson and by OGF himself, they lived in a sort of frustrated nullity.

  It was later discovered that Las Cases secretly and regularly wrote to the Frenchwoman Madame von Stürmer, him having when young been a tutor to her brothers, but it was said her husband, who was a fairly straight and narrow Austrian diplomat, forbade her to answer. This young lady came one afternoon, sombrely dressed, to The Briars and introduced herself to us. Jane and I loved visitors to whom we could show off our passable French, and we strolled with her as she made her solemn circuit of the garden and the Pavilion.

  She asked gravely, looking pale, ‘Was he inconsolable while living here?’

  ‘No,’ Jane said. ‘It suited him. He seemed lively.’

  And we told her the family stories – the carriage with the mouse, the occasional impudence, the bonbon poisoning and all the rest, the tales that would recur throughout our family’s existence, and that even now I tell virtually to myself.

  After inspecting the empty Pavilion, Madam Sturmer stalked our garden, where the trace of the crown the Emperor’s servants had drawn in the lawn was still vaguely visible, not by way of the scoring of the ground but in the grass. I wondered if she was snooping for her husband, but it was with an authentic teary-cheeked reverence that she walked the crown outline with us. Was she mourning for her own surrender to the Austrians, or OGF’s? For her to fail to meet the Emperor was a great loss, and yet she was also terrified of such a confrontation.

  Count Balmain and the von Stürmers were sharing Rosemary Hall, a rambling two-storey house inland. With the help of ship carpenters and many porters they had made it habitable. My father dealt there with the commissioners over their household supplies and the unsatisfactory warrants with which they paid for their requirements, warrants issued in the name of far-off treasuries in Vienna, Paris and Moscow. All three of the commissioners were exercised by the cost of living on the island, all three of them were writing to their masters saying ‘You must not let your delegate be embarrassed by the ample resources of the other commissioners.’

  One day at The Briars I saw a paper addressed to Count Balmain and written in my father’s hand. It said, ‘Beef 22 pence per pound, pork 30 pence per pound, stock of the smallest kind 40–60 shillings, duck or chicken 10–15 shillings each, turkey 40–60 shillings.’ These prices impressed even me. The silver at Longwood had by now been melted down and sold as Sir Tom had ordered, en bloc without imperial insignia, and what it had earned for the Emperor was being consumed by turkeys worth their weight in gold.

  It was O’Meara’s mode to be quite whimsical and open in recounting what he said to OGF. ‘Don’t think I’m a spy for Sir Hudson. I’m not permitted to be. I’m a spy for my friend Finlaison at the Admiralty,’ O’Meara told OGF one day. And the Emperor laughed and said with a strange kind of complacency, ‘Well, of course. You’re a sailor under orders. And I don’t mind the Admiralty. Honest men, by and large. But what do you report to that appallin
g Reade and to the Fiend himself?’

  O’Meara replied with Hippocratic purity, ‘I am here as your surgeon, and to attend upon you and your suite. I have received no other orders than to make reports on your health but I do so in general terms except in the case of your being taken seriously ill, when I need to receive promptly the advice and assistance of other physicians.’

  ‘First obtaining my consent to call in those accursed others, is that not so?’

  O’Meara agreed, perhaps more glibly than he should have. OGF said with sudden lack of humour, ‘If you are appointed as a surgeon to a prison and to report my conversations to the governor, I want never to see you again.’

  Then perhaps even for OGF this axe of a sentence seemed too extreme for the conversation in progress. ‘Do not suppose that I take you for a spy,’ he rushed to tell the Irishman. ‘On the contrary I have never had the least occasion to find fault with you, and I have a friendship for you on this isola maledetta, without which I would be poorer, and an esteem for your character, a greater proof of which I could not give you than asking you candidly your own opinion on your situation.’

  But this was another sign that suspicion pervaded all. It became known, as things did on the island, that Name and Nature had sent an order to the shopkeepers of the town that they were not to give any credit to the French, or to sell them any article, unless for ready money, under pain of not only losing the amount of the sum credited, but of suffering such punishment as being turned off the island.

  Many of the 53 officers who were in the habit of calling to see Madame Bertrand at Hutt’s Gate received hints from Sir Tom and Major Gorrequer that their visits were not pleasing to the authorities. The officer of the Hutt’s Gate guard was ordered to report the names of all persons entering the Bertrands’ house. Several of the officers of the 53rd went to Hutt’s Gate to say goodbye to Countess Bertrand. They explained to Fanny that since they would be ordered to make a report of any conversations they had with her to the governor or to Sir Thomas Reade, they could not as men of honour allow themselves to comply with that regulation.

  ‘Sir Name and Nature,’ O’Meara narrated, ‘intends to have a ditch dug around the house, to prevent cattle from trespassing into the Emperor’s garden. So he walks it out with me, this notional ditch of his, and we come to a rare low-branched tree with foliage near to the ground. “This has to go!” he cries, and he asks me to send one of the servants down to the port for Mr Porteous, who it turns out amongst other glorious honours is the superintendent of the Company’s gardens. And I have to wait with him making conversation until Porteous is back, none too happy at being dragged up there from his establishment. And Name and Nature orders him to send some men instantly and have the tree grubbed out. It blotted the terrain and introduced the chance of intolerable subterfuge, you see!’

  When O’Meara left, my mother asked my father, ‘Do you think O’Meara protests too much?’

  ‘In what sense?’ asked my bibulous father with a soft hiccough.

  ‘In the sense that he may be closer to Name and Nature than he says,’ said my mother with a new kind of speculation in her voice.

  ‘Why would he be so mischievous?’ my father asked, and tears appeared at his soft lids.

  ‘This is what the Fiend has done to our circle of friends,’ my mother admitted, close to tears herself. She kissed him tenderly. It was the kind of kiss you give an unknowing child.

  And all continued to close in. Longwood was surrounded at six hundred paces by a string of subaltern guards, while at nine o’clock in the evening, when Sir Hudson had decreed no one but the garrison should be abroad in the open air, the sentinels were stationed within voice of each other, strangling the outskirts so that no person could come in or go out without being examined by them. At the entrance of the house double sentinels were placed and the patrols continually passed backwards and forwards in the garden, hampering its growth. After that fated hour of nine, the Emperor could leave the house only in company of a British field officer.

  Our father told us that every landing place in the island, and indeed every rocky cove that offered half a chance of one, was furnished with a picket of patrolling victors of Toulon, and sentinels were even placed at night upon every goat path leading to the sea, though it was hard to imagine the Emperor trying to struggle his way down them.

  Name and Nature’s mania lacked a cause. All of us knew ships could be seen at twenty-four leagues’ distance when approaching the island, and I know now through inquiry what I then did not – that two ships of war continually cruised, one to the windward and the other to the leeward, to whom signals were made as soon as any vessel was discovered by the patrols on shore. No ship except a British naval vessel was permitted to sail down to the Jamestown Roads unless accompanied by one of the cruisers, which remained with her until she was either permitted to anchor or sail away. All these precautions, all the time, around our island. All the fishing boats belonging to the island were numbered and anchored every evening under the control of a lieutenant in the navy, and no boats, excepting guard boats from the ships of war, which rowed around the island each night on patrol, were allowed to be put into the shore after sunset. Every human precaution to prevent escape, short of actually sealing OGF in a cell or enchaining him, was adopted. Yet apparently, and I realise this now more than I did then, in Name and Nature’s fevered mind, the Ogre had already slipped forth.

  There were admittedly rumours enough to disturb Sir Hudson’s and thus Lady Hudson’s sleep. Texans were said to be plotting the Emperor’s deliverance from the island, and in Louisiana they had already built a palace for him to occupy. And yet during the day British passengers travelling through from India and China requested an audience with Napoleon (even at the cost of making a report), who rarely disappointed them unless he was sick. He was like an actor whose repute was attached to the one theatre: Longwood. As O’Meara told us, many ladies and gentlemen who had ridden up to the house at inconvenient times waited in Mr O’Meara’s room long after the fore-topsail of the ship that was to take them to England was loosed, just on the chance of seeing through O’Meara’s window the Emperor’s appearance at the windows of his apartments.

  At dinner at our house, the Marquis de Montchenu seemed to me the duffer O’Meara had depicted him and peered at us like a pink-eyed mouse. Anxious about where to sit and what to say and what might be served, he clung to his aide, a young French officer named de Gors. When soup was served, de Montchenu required Captain de Gors to produce from his jacket an emetic and place it by his master’s soup bowl in case the liquid was poisoned. Captain de Gors explained in an embarrassed tone that the henchmen of the French Revolution had once, twenty-five years past, tried to poison his master. De Montchenu’s long queue tied with ribbon bobbed up and down, and he was absorbed in the drama of his eating, for each un-envenomed mouthful was an exciting gift from the gods.

  He was short-sighted, clearly, and it turned out that he loved cauliflower, of which there were two dishes on our table with boats of white sauce. He, for all his peering, had not seen them, but noticed them at once as the twins arrived to take them away. As the vegetables passed him, he turned on poor Captain de Gors and yelled, in French, ‘Imbecile! Why didn’t you know that in this awful place there was cauliflower?’

  All around the table there was choked laughter. Half of us ate cauliflower out of a dietary duty to avoid boils, but here was a pallid man who liked this pallid vegetable, his chou-fleur. I nicknamed him Munch Enough. Someone else more wittily, Montez-Chez-Nous. Altogether we were pleased he had escaped the guillotine so that he could come here to wear his queue and pretend that he was so important that he was in peril of death by poisoning.

  Everyone thought he was harmless enough, though, and we were willing to tolerate him. That is, until copies of The Chronicle arrived on a ship and reached our table, and other tables on the island. In it, translated into English from a French newspaper, was an article by de Montchenu, detailing in
a garbled way some of the games the Emperor and the Balcombe children had played together during the residency in the Pavilion. I had, in fact, told him these stories, though there was no recognition of me as the source in the article. He described the blind man’s buff, my drawing the sword and seeming to threaten the Emperor, the hide-and-seek with my brothers, and spoke of me as a ‘wild girl’ and ‘a particular familiar’ of the Emperor. He did not mention in the article that he had never clapped eyes on the Emperor himself.

  According to O’Meara – our map of Longwood was mediated to us by O’Meara and Fanny Bertrand as ever – de Montchenu had approached Name and Nature with the crazed proposition that the commissioners could easily force their way into Longwood with a company of British troops. Name and Nature was wise enough to know that this could be a debacle, that the Ogre would resist, that someone would be killed, perhaps even the Emperor himself, who would thus achieve an apotheosis in the view of his followers in Europe, a martyr who cried out for the mean souls of Earls Liverpool, Bathurst and Castlereagh. And now, after that absurd suggestion, another one – the imputation that I was a ‘familiar’, a term I did not understand, or at least did not understand why it so exercised my father, and that I was ‘a wild girl’, which some would have thought a fair description!

  The article had first been shown to my father by one of the store ship captains who had arrived with a cargo. My father had immediately gone half-striding, half-hobbling (under gout’s influence) from his warehouse up the road to the Portions. None of the servants knew where the Marquis de Montchenu was, but they suggested Plantation House. His day’s work ruined, my father rode home and called my mother to the drawing room and showed her the piece. He planned, he said, to call de Montchenu out, demand honour, and fight a duel.