Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  ‘If a man can’t see damn cauliflower from ten yards,’ my father ranted, rendered unsporting by fury, ‘he has no chance of hitting me.’

  He declared an intention to go to Plantation House and hunt the little weasel from under the shadow of Sir Hudson. But rage is tiring and I felt my father collapse, and my mother urge him to rest upon it for an hour or two, and perhaps write a letter of protest to the old French count. He wrote to the count certainly, but asked him to receive a visit from Mr Balcombe at six that evening, or at an alternative hour Munch Enough nominated.

  Passing to his room, he saw me through the open door of the library, where I was extracting a book with every display of literate intentions. He came to me and embraced me and I smelled snuff and brandy and a perfume. He had shaved for the murder of de Montchenu, or the outside chance of his own death. He had used clouds of a delicate powder that brought up his childlike and soft complexion.

  ‘My dear child,’ he said, pulling my head close to his chest and kissing the part in my hair. ‘You must worry about nothing. You are a wonderful and honourable girl.’

  I was delighted, and clung to him, and then he stumbled off.

  My mother had been behind him and came up to where I still stood, astonished.

  ‘Eavesdropping again,’ she remarked with a smile and as if that were not the main issue. Her face was one of weary delusion. ‘I will get the horses saddled. We must go and find Count Balmain. He’ll be spending time with the Lowe women at Plantation House. He’s always there for tea these days.’

  I realised my mother would know this from her frequent visits to Lady Lowe.

  We had our horses saddled. We followed the road, with the waterfall to the side running well from the rains of the mid-year of 1817, and behind and above us, in a separate patch of paler, hazier light, Longwood. We made good progress on the surface mud of the firm road to Plantation House and passed its old tortoise, unhurried by any care on its lawns, and we reined in and were met by a groom from the East India Company of hussars.

  We were led into the drawing room, which still seemed naked now that all the Wilks’s refined paintings were gone and had been replaced by dull oils of dead pheasants and unnameable and meaningless battles. Lady Susan Lowe and her daughters sat beneath them with Count Balmain, who rose to greet us as the women kept their seats. He declared in French that the balance of women had now swung too strongly against him and as delighted to see the Balcombes as he was, he felt he should leave and allow appropriate conversation to occur without the inhibition of his presence. It was a typical flow of courtly palaver on his part.

  As he kissed hands, including ours, he muttered French phrases over them. He lingered over the hand of Miss Charlotte Johnson, the elder daughter of Lady Lowe.

  ‘Before you go,’ my mother said when he reached her hand and was opulently gesturing over it. ‘Lady Lowe, I wish I could have a word with Count Balmain.’

  Lady Lowe looked up with a strange contemptuous benignity.

  ‘Conduct the count and Mrs Balcombe to the smaller parlour,’ she ordered a servant immediately.

  I stood up to follow my mother but my mother made a ‘stay there’ gesture and said, ‘Lady Lowe, you don’t mind if Betsy remains here?’

  I was disappointed I would not behold the urgency of my mother’s appeal to Count Balmain, her plea to intercede and prevent a slaughter.

  Lady Lowe nodded in her normal distrait manner, negligent, one would have thought, as if my mother had not been her occasional confidante. So I sat.

  Charlotte Johnson looked at me with that edge, a look of a woman who was secure in her control of men. ‘Has Major Fehrzen visited your family recently?’

  She exchanged a significant look with her younger sister.

  ‘I see very little of him,’ I said, more stiffly that I would have liked. It emerged almost as a plea.

  A secret amusement crackled between them, a shiver, deniable and not nakedly vicious. Their appetite to see me shift in discomfort seemed strange, as if they did not understand that I had convinced myself, on one level of my soul, it was all the same to me if Fehrzen and Croad stayed or went. It was, wasn’t it? I liked to think I did not play the sort of game they did, but then I had almost forgotten my treatment of poor young Emmanuel. And remembering him now, I thought, they are causing me pain from some instinct of the kind that provokes me to cause young Las Cases pain.

  I could hear my mother’s voice raised somewhat in another room and the honeyed voice of Count Balmain playing a minor part. At last my mother returned. I could tell from the way her face had reddened that she had persuaded Count Balmain to intervene.

  She said, ‘Betsy, we must not inconvenience dear Lady Lowe and her daughters any further.’

  Lady Lowe rose now and I did too, and my mother thanked her again for allowing this intrusion. They sounded like strangers to each other. Because of the enmity between their husbands, had they become enemies too?

  ‘Count Balmain left,’ said my mother, ‘but wanted me to say that the reason he would not return was that he did not want to incommode the company.’

  ‘What a flight by our friends,’ commented Charlotte. ‘What a confabulation you must have had with the count to make you wish to escape us simultaneously with him.’

  ‘As you wish, dear Mrs Balcombe,’ murmured pretty Lady Susan with a tiny belch.

  We stood in front of the door as our horses arrived.

  ‘I believe we should ride to town,’ said my mother.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in case father has gone after Munch Enough with a pistol.’

  The contest of honour, which we knew could become a contest of mayhem and tragedy, was about to either take place or be prevented.

  But our journey down into Jamestown was abortive: as my father had left for that port himself, he was intercepted by two fortunate arrivals. One was Captain de Gors riding up from the Portions with a propitiating letter in French. My father agreed to go back to The Briars to formally receive the letter there. Back home, he took it to his library office, asking Jane to come with him and help with translation, while the young French aide waited fretfully yet humbly for him in the drawing room. My father deliberately kept de Gors waiting, as if he were still looking to impose such a large retributory slight that old Munch Enough would fight him anyhow.

  De Montchenu’s letter turned out to be an exhaustive apology, claiming both that the term ‘wild girl’ would have been more properly translated as ‘spirited girl’, and that the term ‘familiar’ had been mistranslated from the French, ‘jeune amie’. He offered to show my father his manuscript copy and also accused de Gors, the deliverer of his own letter, for having made the final polish to the piece, and said it was de Gors, not him, who had entered the names of the Balcombes.

  My father returned to the drawing room.

  ‘You should leave that old man’s service,’ he told de Gors. ‘He is a liar and a coward.’

  De Gors maintained his blank discretion and politeness, and handed my father an enclosure for me expressing Marquis de Montchenu’s profoundest apologies. I never quite accepted them.

  Amongst all the pent suspicions, there were still times for shows of amity. The commissary to the military, Denzil Ibbetson, my father’s friend, organised one for us. He had arrived with the regiment and the naval squadron at the same time as the Emperor, and had got to know my father well since he managed the government stores which fed the garrison and the servants of the small protectorate, and bought goods when necessary from Fowler, Cole and Balcombe. When the Bertrands moved into a new-built cottage closer to Longwood, Mr Ibbetson in turn moved into Hutt’s Gate.

  Denzil Ibbetson was a great painter of views and watercolours rather than a student of stores and inventories. Many of his works were hung proudly at Hutt’s Gate, and he had even been allowed by Sir Hudson to go to Longwood and sketch the Emperor, in a general, rustic context, however – a garden or drawing room – not in a martial one.

 
He declared that on an afternoon in September he was to hold a picnic at his home, which he had renamed Little Pasture. He had no wife, and my mother attributed his absorption in commissary work supplying the army in the Iberian Peninsula for that apparent oddity. I had heard Sarah and Alice talk of his interest in a Tamil slave woman.

  On the afternoon of the picnic, Mr Ibbetson had tables set out in his garden, and a young male slave in white gloves and exotic striped green and white livery poured punch for the adults and lemonade for the children, and brought around sugarplums and ices, puddings and pastries – not quite of the delicacy Pierron the confiseur used to create at the Pavilion, but adequate for solid tastes. And no child was told to restrain himself. I saw my three small brothers attacking buns, and wished that the children of Madame Bertrand and young Tristan de Montholon had been there. But they were now prohibited by Name and Nature from joining our general company at these events for fear that people would give them advice on how the Emperor might escape down the groin of hill that led to Sandy Bay, and how to hide behind the Doveton wall to await rescue.

  Madame Bertrand was still then in a situation on that island for which I have not forgiven Name and Nature to this day. Her allies in the town were people biblically accustomed to exile, the Jewish family the Solomons. Even so, if Madame Bertrand wished to purchase anything in Jamestown, the Solomons had been warned by Sir Tom Reade, she had to first submit a form to Sir Hudson, even for clothing she was buying on her own account. Rouge and powder, dental whitener and fabrics all fell under Sir Hudson’s proscription and could not be bought except with vice-regal assent.

  Once the permission to shop was received, she would have to ride down from Longwood with an officer of the guard, who was required to make a record of everything she said to any other party. Often these were urbane men – Major Fehrzen once told us he had accompanied her, for he was characteristically fascinated by the connection between the Irish Wild Geese, men like her father, who had chosen to serve France rather than stay in a British Ireland.

  After she reached town, the Solomons let Fanny use the trying-on room of their store to change out of her riding habit into something more elegant, since she refused to be dowdy in front of the cowed locals. Some greeted her on the street – my father, and, by his orders, the Company clerks. She would also accept greetings from any of the commissioners who may have been progressing through Jamestown, and from the warder of the prison at the Castle. But many still evaded her gaze and hustled past. Madame von Stürmer seemed to enjoy her company and put herself in the way to meet her, but she was a shy woman and did not have the confidence for a full friendship.

  So, no Bertrands at Mr Ibbetson’s party. Some officers called in, including Major Fehrzen, who came over and presented himself to Jane and me. He leaned earnestly, and when Jane turned away, he said, ‘What do you think of India, Betsy? Does it have any prominence in your imagination?’

  It was a fair question, or appeared to be so. I considered it.

  ‘It exists as one great brown clot of earth,’ I told him.

  He smiled. ‘Do you imagine it habitable?’

  I considered this. I thought of Mrs Stuart and her daughters.

  ‘I believe it can spoil people’s fibre. The rest, it seems to inflict fevers on.’

  He smiled again, in a way that said he found the conversation disarming rather than informative.

  ‘And no one comes back whole?’ he asked.

  ‘Some don’t come back at all,’ I said.

  I had no idea, in the face of his towering allure, why I wanted to depict India so darkly. My sister now turned her full attention back to us.

  ‘We must talk about this further, Betsy,’ he said. ‘You clearly cannot see yourself ever living there, then?’

  ‘I could if my father was sent there,’ I said, wilfully playing the child instead of the woman. He saw through that.

  ‘I meant, when you are a woman under your own direction?’

  ‘I shall consider it when the time comes,’ I told him.

  He laughed in a kind of surrender. ‘You should,’ he assured me. ‘There are fables and religions and images there that have never crossed the minds of people in Europe.’

  And he went. I have to say in admiration of him that he seemed to understand exactly my stance as a stubborn and wary girl-woman.

  The vice-regal party arrived, as it was required to, and included Charlotte and Susannah. Lady Lowe and her husband stayed long enough for her to drink a quotient of sherry, for which performance she had by now become notable on the island. We had heard the rumour that Sir Hudson went to the Lantern Tavern each night to get away from the rather pointed lamentations of his wife, who had predicted that this appointment would create stress to little personal benefit and who could now say as often as she liked that it had. When Name and Nature had ridden up with the Prussians, late in the day of Waterloo but crucially for the chances of Wellington, he might have expected a better post than to be guard to a vast ex-potency on a small island.

  Mr Ibbetson had provided donkeys too for children to ride on, and there were races and conversation, and Sir Hudson and his women vanished early in their fug of vague discontent. Major Fehrzen bowed to us and said he would return to Deadwood to undertake some obscure military duty. For all my supposed independence and wildness, I kept close to my sister Jane as he was departing. I did not want to be questioned further about India. Jane was my anchor in the indeterminate waters of supposed courtship or – I could not tell the difference – conversation.

  No one, in visiting the picnic, neither Major Fehrzen nor more significantly Sir Hudson, had mentioned the curfew, towards a violation of which the party in its very spirit seemed to be aimed. I cannot remember all the conversations that occurred that day, since they were effervescent and fumed up into the sky. It was one of those seductive subtropical afternoons when the light seems eternal, itself a lingering guest at the party. Florence Robinson strode proudly but without arrogance through the people, accompanied by her new husband. La Nymphe had recently married Captain Edwards of the Chloe and had acquired leather shoes. She was about to sail in them to England with her husband, and might well accompany him back and forth between England, Cape Town, Calcutta and the island. She had survived the Emperor’s desire and come to a safe harbour, even though, contradictorily, it was a harbour at sea.

  Darkness came suddenly. There had been a sort of communal forgetfulness over the greensward in front of Mr Ibbettson’s place. The air was then remotely jolted by the curfew gun sounding from Ladder Hill above Jamestown, a sufficiently far-off shudder in the air to convince us that we lived in another sphere altogether from it and had latitude to go on playing. But it was only at this profound though distant sound that the more serious of the party suggested we should break up, and farmers and their wives, who would not have to pass too many patrols, looked for their horses and drays. Those who lived in Jamestown were offered accommodation by Mr Ibbetson, and the Solomons wisely accepted it. For the crasser members of the garrison would have enjoyed too fulsomely encountering a Jewish family by evening light.

  One of the men of our company called out, almost as a joke, ‘Do we know the countersign if we run into pickets?’

  But all the soldiers who had attended the party were long gone home and would not have told us in any case what the password was.

  My father assured my mother, nonetheless, and Jane and myself, that he knew the garrison well. He declared this in that expansive and not necessarily reliable way, his trust in humanity perhaps superseding the stringent orders humanity had from above. But in any case we all got on our horses and set out and expected to be lucky for two miles on an already bright night even before moonrise, in which we would be able to travel without fear of the gaps that had a way of appearing either side of roads on the island.

  The Reverend Boys was with us, and an old fellow called Colonel Smith, who lived in the north-west of the island and would need simply to sneak by Plantat
ion House. So did the Knipe family, who lived in the nearby Half Moon House and whose niece the French so loved and had dubbed le Bouton de Rose. Sometimes I would develop an ambition to have a name implying beauty applied to me by the French, but most of the time I was relieved, knowing that I carried a sufficient burden for the repute I had as the Emperor’s fellow buffoon and jeune amie.

  As we travelled on horseback, the stars came out. There was nowhere in the world, said the Reverend Boys, where stars could be seen with such lucidity should the conditions be right. I remember that there was some discussion about the Cassiopeia constellation, but everyone was on sure ground in identifying Venus. The Reverend Boys then set himself to discourse on Cassiopeia, the god of rainbows. A distance existed between Boys and the other men. They let his words fall like brief showers of sparks, confident that the dark could be relied on to extinguish them. They liked him and thought he was an honest enough fellow, but he was getting to be one of those overbearing parsons. There had been complaints about some of his sermons, which were said to speak of the sinners of the island, particularly the males, in terms that were too easily transparent. I knew that he had named the white fathers of slave children who were christened in the church. Over the baptismal bowl, he did not let either parent, the slave woman nor the owner, escape chastisement, and it was clear, so it seemed from what I had overheard, that he considered the owner more reprehensible.

  There were things I had not known a year past but were now somehow apparent, though I could not understand how this new knowledge had arrived in me, and certainly could not remember my mother explicitly imparting it to me.

  The men of this island therefore obviously thought that Mr Boys was taking religion too far, to the point of fanaticism, and that he would be better to preach reformation rather than denounce and advertise the sinners. The good man had been appalled at the time of the funeral of a slave to find his high altar decorated with myrtle leaves, some of them soaked in a form of blood, a chicken’s or a man’s. This violation of the sanctuary, like the violation of slave women, caused him to fulminate in a way that people thought was beyond his correct realm, but which I thought surely someone must do.