by Tom Keneally
‘Lady Lowe,’ she declared, ‘you can’t strike my sister.’
‘Your sister is the sole girl here who would persecute my daughters’ friends. The sole one!’ Her conviction was terrible and accurate. ‘Your sister is a nuisance to the public life of this island. A playful impishness one could forgive. But Betsy is in all respects disordered. She brings the General’s horseflesh to our notice and pushes it under our noses. We know she habitually sneaks past the garrison to visit the General and the French as a group. When not engaged in subversion she is sullen. As now …’
Lady Lowe pointed at me to prove her argument.
‘A slap in the face will make a girl sullen,’ I told her.
‘Go back ashore by the first cutter and ride home,’ said Lady Lowe.
‘But she is not to be hit,’ Jane insisted.
‘If you wish to make complaints, refer them through your parents,’ said Lady Lowe. ‘You, Jane Balcombe, you … deserve a better sister.’
Lady Lowe nodded, turned and Jane called after her, ‘I’m content with what I have, Lady Lowe.’
But to me it sounded a hollow boast, the best Jane could think of in such a confrontation.
Unexpectedly, Major Fehrzen appeared at her shoulder. I imagined a large cabin in which he and other officers spoke earnestly on matters of the world while the heedless picnic progressed outside.
‘Please, dear Lady Susan,’ he said, urbane but authoritative as well, ‘don’t agitate yourself.’
Her head jolted around like that of a much older woman as she searched for a number of expressions of dissatisfaction, only to be defeated.
Major Fehrzen said further, ‘It sounds as though this was a standard girls’ quarrel, and not worth your anguish.’
A standard girls’ quarrel? How did he know that? And what was a standard girls’ quarrel? But I suppose he was right. I did not want to be thought of under that light.
Lady Lowe had discovered what to say. ‘The Balcombes, Major Fehrzen. You have had your adequate aggravations from them too. Good day.’ And she turned away.
‘So what do you say to me, Betsy?’ asked Major Fehrzen, turning to me in her wake and not hostile but of course not in the mode of man to woman. In the mode of uncle to child.
‘I say to you that you can send Lieutenant Croad back to England as soon as you can. Because he can live there or die here and he is far too gifted to be buried here.’
‘I don’t have the authority, Miss Balcombe,’ he said, though he took the suggestion without condescension and with scarcely a trace of annoyance.
‘I know you have the influence though. If he stays here, he wishes to marry me so he has the comfort of a widow to miss him.’
Fehrzen’s eyes widened.
‘If you take him to India, he’ll die,’ I asserted. ‘We all know that. You must excuse me.’
Jane and I descended into the cutter. Other wide-eyed women sat around us.
‘I give it to you,’ murmured Jane as the sailors began to row. ‘You do not cry.’
It had been noted by my parents that dry lids were my religion, and indeed I would not cry now, and bit my inner lip to keep the hot blood out of my face, and to give the other women in the boat nothing to stare at, which caused them to turn their eyes away. As we reached the dock, mutely we climbed the steps, and Jane and I walked to the stables at Solomon’s and mounted. It was not until we were ascending the tiers towards The Briars that Jane brought her barrel-chested mare level with Tom and me on the narrow, perilous path.
‘Why do you make it so hard for us all?’ she asked, and I could see an unexpected and accumulated fury in her. ‘You rake us all back to your level, and we’re paid out in your coin. Do you think that’s fair? Do you know what they call me? “The one with the difficult sister.”’
I did not know what to say to this. The weight of it was equal to all the occasional approbrations the Balcombes received, added together.
‘How often do people say that to me?’ Jane hissed, and hissing wasn’t part of her daily performance. ‘How often do I have to smile as it’s said?’
This was too much. I had brought my sister’s grievance to a head; I had alienated Plantation House to the limits; and destroyed two potential marriages in a mere hour. But in that second I saw myself as the despised person I knew myself to be. I was in that frightful condition of naked worthlessness we are usually able to avoid seeing. If we see it for too long, it kills us.
‘Do you think Major Fehrzen finds your behaviour sane?’ called Jane.
Thus convinced (and I cannot deny there was a little self-indulgence left in me), I knew the only company for me were those officially despised, the French, who had never taken my pranks as a reason for denying me their fraternity. I began to spur away in the direction of Longwood, not making for the road junction, and – in shame and self-pity – welcoming the idea that even amiable Tom might pitch me into a ravine and rescue me from the packed-in contempt of the island.
Tom did his best to hold his footing on broken and boulder-scattered ground, and I dimly heard Jane calling after me, her voice fluting in urgency. If she followed me, I knew she had only the horsewomanship to go by the road, and that would do no good in catching up with me.
Soon I encountered a curious sight – all the Emperor’s servants were sitting picnicking on the slope of a hill to the south, their fête coinciding with ours aboard the Conqueror. It was as if, separated from their masters, they seemed more real, and Marchand had his arm around the waist of the English servant, Elizabeth, who was to be his wife. There was something unconstrained about it all, bodices loose or unbuttoned to admit cooling air, jesters unabashed, that I both despised and envied them, and yearned for some of their freedoms.
I saw Novarrez break from the party and come hobbling down the hill as if to meet me. Soon thereafter Pierron, the pastrycook, followed, and was quicker. I did not want to speak to them and be delayed, and despite the difficulty I hitched my skirts and swung my right leg over the saddle and rode astride, my left thigh being hammered up against the second pommel, and taking a bruise on my upper thigh, which was of no importance to a rider driven by such gales as I. Glancing back, I saw even the fleet Pierron give up the chase and stand hands on hips, mystified. So there would be no servants to open the Longwood door, Marchand and Novarrez, the two normally given that duty, now left behind.
I saw the sentries ahead, by the ditch, the great daily boredom of their task, dramatic as stated, grinding as fulfilled, upon them. I was level with some of them before they noticed.
I heard a sergeant call, ‘Miss, not today!’
But I had crossed the ditch by a little earth causeway, and, reining in Tom, dismounted like a circus rider, whacking my left thigh a last time as I vacated the inappropriate saddle, and landing unevenly but without falling over. I righted myself and, strode, skirts held up, past the rose garden and right into the house, opening the front door beyond which sentries could not intrude, and continuing through the vestibule and library and into the salon.
Before I opened that door I felt human presences and the question that possessed me was whether to weep before the Emperor. And what to weep about? His exile was deeper than mine. My rant must be sympathetic to the depth of his entrapment. Yet he had had a life already, and I had had none. He had been praised, and I had been sometimes excused but regularly condemned. And now, for the first time, by my sister, my upholder, who had managed to champion me in front of Sir Hudson’s wife, but could not manage the trick for the length of our ride home.
I broke into the salon and I encountered a scene so undue, so crowded with people who had burst the limits of my knowledge of them that I did believe this was death and instant hell.
The Emperor, wearing a splendid green dress with décolletage that I remembered from observing Madame de Montholon’s repertoire of dresses, had his arm companionably around a naked Surgeon O’Meara. That part of a man’s body of which I had but heard rumours of its existence
in normal life and its properties in the abnormal business of what I had thought of as marriage, was red and straight.
On his farther side sat my mother, whom he was kissing. My mother’s breasts were bare and her lower body veiled only by some half-cast-off muslin garment. Her breast interested OGF, who gently kneaded with his tapered fingers. Looking on from a straight-backed chair, legs apart, a very pelt of dark hair marking her groin, was the utterly naked Madame de Montholon, who had just three months past given birth to another girl whom she had named Josephine. Albine exuded a sort of contentment, proud within her round and white little body and her full breasts stark amidst the furniture.
It is impossible to tease out what I took from this scene of massed nakedness and strange déshabille. The only dressed body in the group was that of the Emperor, but he was dressed so awry that it was perhaps even more startling than the rest, though nothing could be so startling as to see one’s mother in such a context, with the languorous promise of further nakedness conveyed by her posture, her ease, her air of consent.
I screamed and ran out of the room. I think it came to me in part that now there was no one on the island open to my presence, and that awareness fuelled part of my impulse. It was the strangeness, the improper madness of the scene, that had devoured me and I could hear O’Meara and my mother calling, but they were delayed by the state they had placed themselves in.
Outside, I grabbed Tom, who was grazing by the rose garden, and rode through the line of sentries, who did not try to stop me. I heard two soldiers laughing as I urged Tom on and made them stand aside. It was the laughter of utter knowledge. They knew what drove me.
An appropriate toxin …
I understood that I was riding in the wrong direction. I should have been riding to the cliffs, Tom and I going over as one creature into a trajectory to take hold of the liberty and solace of the Atlantic. Instead, I was heading to the core. I was heading to The Briars and the den of my mother. I would take poison, not to obliterate myself but to obliterate the untenable island. I would need a lot.
I bounced off Tom and let Roger take him. My sister was reading on the verandah and looked at me with tear-stained eyes. She stood up as I raced past.
She said, ‘Betsy, I’m proud to be …’
But I vanished inside.
I went to the pantry to find an appropriate toxin. There were suicide trees from India on this island but you needed to be a native to know how to use their pod correctly for the purpose. However, thanks to the island of rats we lived on, I knew there was a jug of rat poison always there in the corner. I believed genuinely and with false vengeance of theatricality that presenting my mother with my death was the only gambit. People would think I was looking for revenge, or to induce shame. The truth was I did not know what other word to give her except the very word of myself, and to do it urgently. There was no room left within me for what I had seen in the Longwood salon. On this island of rats and goats, the Emperor and my mother had joined the beasts.
I could hear Sarah outside speaking to Alice. I took down the jug from its shelf, spread some greasy paper and made a package of the poison I poured out on it. I imagined myself drinking it in my tea and expiring at the table in the drawing room.
Having secreted it in a pocket, I called to Sarah to bring me tea and went and sat in the seat by which I would escape the island, such a simple proposition – no involvement of flotillas, secret beaches or the like. My sister followed me in and looked at me as I adopted the posture of a statue. I wanted her to go – I did not want her to be punished by the sight of poison taking its strangling effect.
‘I am not angry at you,’ I told her. ‘You are a wonderful girl and deserve to be somewhere else. But leave me alone, please.’
She made a few abortive attempts at apologetic sentiments, and when I said she had nothing to repent of, it seemed only to encourage her in uttering more regrets. She was of that character; she could not blame herself enough nor do adequate penance. To her, one testy sentence, after which I had ridden away, had cancelled all the years of bewildered love she had given me.
‘You have done nothing wrong,’ I shouted. ‘You have nothing to come creeping around here for, yelling sorry, sorry. Now please go away.’
And so she did. I was giving her a grand opportunity to live within her comfortable soul by making her tame her indulgence in guilt.
The tea arrived. I laced it with South African honey and poured the powder in and stirred it. I did not know the names of the toxins I was anxious to absorb. I did not need to make their acquaintance in that sense.
I began to drink. The concoction needed the honey. I had hoped the venoms would penetrate my throat and take my breath, but it was not like that, though there was a burning. My breath remained. It was pernicious. It wanted to argue the case with the dominant elements. I drank more to convince it it had no case to offer.
I felt heat and cold successively possess my body. I felt dryness, and pain in my shoulders and wrists. A succession of nauseas would grip me, lift me and depart, but these were no more dramatic, I was disappointed to notice, than spasms of biliousness or mild fever. I had designed a long fall from a great height, and ended with little more than sore ankles.
So I went back to the pantry for more and ordered more tea, and it was brought by gravid Alice and I drank it with more of the toxin mixed in and this time at last I felt the giddiness of a fast descent, or more, a fast dislocation from place to place, in reality or in delusion being on the floor, or at the ceiling, or looking in the window or ascending into the sky. I vomited helplessly down the fabrics at my breast, but the fumes of my delirium would not quite carry me away or extinguish me. How was it to kill rats then? I wondered. No wonder the East India Company’s hundred years’ war against the rodents of St Helena had not been won.
When I lowered my forehead and closed my eyes to go to sleep, it seemed to be just that, sleeping. And true to sleep, I awoke after. The light had changed, lamps were lit, my mother and sister and Alice and Sarah were fussing about me, and Sarah had my shoulders back and was wiping my vomit off my chest.
‘Dr O’Meara is on his way, darling,’ my mother assured me.
The same Dr O’Meara I had last seen naked, kissing her and beside a frock-clad Emperor? My mother could see the question in my mind, the one that I would ask if I had the full range of my normal strengths, and she held up a hand just for me and murmured, ‘He is a good man; you don’t understand.’
She told Sarah and Jane to leave us. Immediately her eyes were full of tears.
‘Don’t judge me, Betsy,’ she pleaded. ‘Tell nobody else, but there has been a plan to get the Emperor away in a woman’s dress. This has led to a certain … silliness – even older people are capable of silliness. It’s a sort of game, in which we rehearse the … the expedient.’
I could see she was telling the truth about the proposed stratagem. But I did not believe that the games I’d witnessed were justified by the experiment.
‘Why did you have no top?’ I asked with difficulty. ‘Why did Albine de Montholon have no drawers?’
She shook her head, not evasive, definitely postponing. ‘What did you drink?’ she asked. ‘Oh Betsy, I’m so sorry, but what did you drink? Sarah thinks it’s the rat poison.’
‘Wouldn’t poison a flea, that stuff,’ I assured her. ‘Don’t ask me things.’
This last command was ferocious.
‘My darling,’ whispered my mother, ‘I am a sinner. But there are things to be considered. Remember how sad we felt for him the day he showed us his room … and the soldiers came intruding. That little room. Such pity to it. I … I felt …’
I remembered the day, but I said nothing.
She said, ‘Your father, he’s an honest man but a weak one. He … you have seen the condition of Alice? It is no excuse for me. But I began in kindness …’
I was not interested. Her words were like pushing around vegetables on a plate I had no intention of eati
ng from.
Darkness fell suddenly, irradiated by a lamp in the room, and time gone and O’Meara coming in and making to inspect me with that physician’s arrogance.
‘Don’t let him touch me!’ I ordered my mother, who was in the shadows.
My father held me by the shoulders, in a grip far in excess of affection, while O’Meara forced some liquid between my teeth. I felt the bitter shaft of this antidote act like a lever on my intentions, shift the large rock of my obliteration away from the mouth of the cave in which I sought to be sealed. All my ejected ambitions came burning up through my throat and nostrils. Muck and puke and bile and acidic poison drenched my being and my bed. They were so determined to make me live on with the tableau of the salon stuck in my head forever.
Predictably enough my one recurring dream was of myself and the Emperor and General Gourgaud in a boat far out beyond the Jamestown Roads. The Emperor was rouged and had basilisk eyes, not much different from those of his real existence, except that they were marked out in a definite black, as if to enlarge them and give them a look both female yet somehow doubly martial. With him sat my drowned grandfather, though I could not explain how I knew it was him. He seemed a cheery man like his son, but I realised I had failed to grieve for him because I had foolishly thought his death happy, since he had been killed by a prince. Having been myself killed by an emperor, I knew my boatman grandfather was not consoled in drowning by the elevated cause of his agony.
Gourgaud himself had not been in the salon so his presence in the boat was baffling. If the others belonged there, in that salon of iniquities, why not Gourgaud? And I knew with my new knowledge that Gourgaud would make too much of it and see in it a pledge of utter, indivisible friendship and love, no fragment of it to go to others in the party.