Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  ‘And I believe the Irish leader O’Connell has sought you out.’

  ‘It is true. A great man. You cannot blame me, can you, Bill, for wanting advancement for my wretched countrymen?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said my father. ‘But from what I hear and read, your butchers’ bills are well looked after these days.’

  I could see then that O’Meara’s success was insupportable to my father and robbed him of a brother in wretchedness. O’Meara turned to my father, nodded his head and blinked as if accommodating himself to a new light. ‘Are you angry I’ve not written any letters, Bill? The truth is I kept expecting to see you in London.’ O’Meara’s face was solemn.

  ‘There are still some restrictions on my travelling to London,’ rumbled my father, refusing to meet the Irishman’s eye.

  ‘Surely Name and Nature doesn’t have the power to keep you down here in the west. Surely there is freedom of movement?’

  ‘It is not, for once, Sir Hudson,’ my father admitted, though not yielding much. ‘Though he was the initiator of our condition, as he was for all of us – for you too!’

  So the Irishman continued ill at ease and, though my mother was polite, my father continued to do nothing to make him feel complacent. He had been in the shadows like us but had had the wit to write himself out of them. Did my father resent that? Surely not, not like your average rancorous man? I had an instinct that he was somehow testing the Irishman, and at a deeper level than he had ever tested him before.

  ‘I should tell you that Lady Holland remembers and asks after you both,’ O’Meara hurried to say.

  ‘I imagine all her dinner guests are required to recite your book at table,’ sneered my father, going now further than dignity should have let him. He knew it himself, and moved his lips around querulously, uncertain what tack he should now take.

  ‘I wasn’t aware,’ O’Meara pleaded, ‘that you were actually still stuck here against your will and was horrified to hear it said by Lady Holland. I thought when I brought you the news … the news from the island I was so anxious to share … after the death I mean, that you would be free to …’

  My mother and father exchanged glances. This was a man they had liked considerably but it was as if they had spotted something slipshod in his goodwill. Jane looked at me. Despite her earlier sentiments, she had got to the stage as natural peacemaker where she believed enough bile had been expressed and wished they could all just be nice and perhaps that Father could bring out the port or brandy.

  ‘Did you come down here just to commiserate with us?’ asked my father nonetheless. ‘Given that we are still hostages?’

  ‘No, no,’ said O’Meara. ‘Commiserate is not the word. It is too much a word of patronage, and I can’t extend patronage, nor would you, from what I know of you, accept it.’

  ‘And therefore,’ said my mother, a good partner for my father now in keeping the Irishman on edge, ‘if you have not come to commiserate with us, why have you come?’

  Barry O’Meara, friend of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, had been rendered markedly edgy by now. From neither side was this a normal meeting between the Balcombes and he.

  He half rose. ‘I believed I was coming to see friends … If my coming has in any way caused discomfort, then …’

  ‘You have travelled a considerable way, and by road,’ said my mother, a bit more lenient.

  ‘I won’t deceive you on that. A personage loaned me their coach and I accepted after some insistence. It was a pleasant and illuminating journey. If one travels by coasting ship, one sees less of the character of England.’

  ‘Who is this personage?’

  ‘A lady and dear friend who does not much travel herself.’

  ‘Is it an elderly lady whose brother was poisoned?’

  ‘Dame Theodosia,’ said O’Meara instantly. ‘Yes. It has been a matter of malice in some newspapers … Ah, now I see what you meant earlier about butchers’ bills. A little less than your normal nature and wit, William, it must be said. And indeed, the lady is thirty years beyond me in age. But you know I am not a base fellow, Bill … This is genuine affection and true friendship of the soul. The mockers do not know me and, above all, do not know her.’

  So my father called the game off for a while and said, ‘All right, all right. Sit down, Barry. It is not at all an unwelcome thing to see you and we are not as soured as you think at your literary success.’

  ‘To which you have contributed,’ said Barry. ‘The Balcombes are memorialised with affection in the book, in volumes one and two. Betsy and the Deadwood races, for example …’

  My performance at Deadwood had been remembered by the Fiend, too. It must indeed have annoyed a lot of people while amusing one, the watcher through the notches in the shutters of Longwood.

  ‘You should have a share in my success, yes,’ said O’Meara.

  ‘Please don’t dare continue with that rubbish,’ said my father, but almost half-amused. ‘But what I resent is that in all these months of your redemption you have not written to us.’

  O’Meara raised his hands above his head like a man pacifying a crowd.

  ‘I have been in proportion forgetful, vain, flattered by attentions from those I never expected to meet, and deprived of time. And my statement that I expected to see you was no lie. I believed you, like I, would be liberated now. You have not written, Bill, when it comes to that!’

  ‘We were still in the confines, Barry, where they’ve put us. A letter from us to you means little. A remembrance from you to us would be everything. To be remembered by you when all your lustre and more had been returned to you. We had no light to be shed on you, but you had light you might have shed on us.’

  O’Meara spread his hands, nodded and nodded again, conceding the force of what my father had said.

  ‘But this elderly dame, Barry? Is this the wisest …? Well, only you will know.’

  O’Meara looked at my father with an intense melancholy insistence. ‘It is wise,’ he said. ‘It is wise but not according to the wisdom of the world.’

  ‘Do you like women, Barry?’ asked my mother.

  ‘You know me, Jane – I adore them, but not necessarily in the more accustomed sense as dear Bill.’

  Jane and I and the listening boys made what we could of this complex declaration. My mother and father looked at each other. ‘Ah,’ said my father, ‘we are not wise according to the world’s wisdom too. But I love my wife above all women.’

  He reached for my mother’s wrist, and when he took it she gleamed with joy but also a sort of shame, her face growing glossy in a cloying way.

  Both my father and O’Meara took some of the plum cake. It soothed them, but O’Meara, in the middle of savouring it, put it aside and said, ‘I must now be honest with you all, for there are purposes I have. You guessed I was not here from motives of the purest brotherhood, Bill, as much as I should be, and you are right.’

  ‘Ah!’ said my father, though without the hubris of having had an accurate nose.

  The Irishman said, ‘It has now emerged that Sir Hudson intends to sue me over my book for criminal libel. If he wins, I could well be financially damaged, but, more seriously, I could be transported. And the Fiend is able to compel a number of his lackeys from the island to say what a soft heart he had for his prisoner, and how well he treated the Emperor. But knowing their testimony could be compromised by my lawyers, he has travelled the country looking for former saints, that is, islanders, who were considered more neutral, and pleading with them, or threatening them with his secret knowledge of their island behaviour, to give sworn statements about his clement behaviour toward Our Great Friend. I have meanwhile a handful of robust souls who have supplied me with affidavits, but no one knows the tyrannies of Hudson Lowe like you do, William. So, straight out, would you ever provide me with an affidavit? I am here of course to see you, but with shame I tell you, I am also here to plead for that sworn statement. I was for two years expelled from my station and reduced to being
a tooth-puller, and the idea that my fortune should take another steep downturn – well, I could not bear it. I can offer you no inducement for this service, because it would make your testimony invalid. Though later …’

  ‘No, I would want nothing,’ my father thundered. And then he looked around amongst us all, frowning, as if telling us not to debate the matter. Why should not my father swear against Sir Hudson and make it certain that, as surely as when Christ’s name is uttered, the name Judas lies accursed by its side, so when the name of the Emperor was ever mentioned in future, Lowe by Name and Nature would reek at its side too. ‘I must think about it, O’Meara.’

  ‘Of course,’ the surgeon assured my father. ‘You must decide on your own terms whether to give me the affidavit or not. For this is the law and there can be no coercion in the law. I would be grateful if in the spirit of our old friendship you could consider my request, but …’

  He knew not to push too hard.

  When he left, it was without the immutable self-regard of Sir Hudson. He simply kissed all of us.

  It was the visit of O’Meara that triggered my father somehow, in ways I do not understand to this day. Admittedly, the departure of my husband Abell seemed to have made everything uncertain in a way Sir Hudson Lowe could not. My baby and I were back home, and while I confess to being less than desolated to lose Abell, I was dependent again on the Balcombe resources, to which I contributed only through teaching music occasionally. As for my little daughter, she at least seemed to quickly transfer her infant affection for her father to my father and my brothers.

  My father, though, who had been an amiable constant on the island, seemed no longer constant. It struck me he sometimes shifted principles purely from exhaustion. He did not know how to take O’Meara anymore.

  There was another illogic in his great impending decision, however – between issuing a false affidavit for Sir Hudson and a valid one for O’Meara. He foresaw that if he collaborated with Sir Hudson, destiny would remove us eastwards or westwards a pleasant few hundred miles, even to a post in Scotland or Ireland. He did not calculate that Sir Hudson might have thousands in mind. So many thousands that it would put an end to Sir Thomas’s need for supervising us on behalf of the higher powers, distance becoming our chief constable.

  To put it briefly, my father wrote now to Sir Hudson to get the man’s terms down on paper, and an affidavit made out in favour of Sir Hudson for my father to sign, with the offer of a post underpinning it. He had been counted a man of shadows long enough. He wished to regain substance. I could understand it. His turbulent daughter and sweet granddaughter were of course on his mind. But above all, he was trying for once to align himself with the wisdom of the world, and with no two-volume history to write, could think only of this. He had a visit from Sir Thomas, who heartily said the affidavit would be the Balcombes’ salvation and our return to full stature.

  Even so, the criminal libel case Name and Nature hoped to assail O’Meara with never came to court. Indeed, when Las Cases’ seven-volume Mémorial de St Hélène appeared that year, and was lambasted by Name and Nature, young Emmanuel came to London and, accosting Lowe as he left his house near Hyde Park, thrashed him with a horsewhip as he entered a coach. We could not exact such vengeance and read the press reports wanly.

  A French sailor called it that …

  The Hibernia was a cheery ship. Though small, it was broad-decked, with a big salon and ample in the beam, a modern sort of ship, and a decent omen of redemption for our family. Waiting at a hotel near Holborn to board it, we nursed Jane back from a bad croup. It was the dead of winter. My infant daughter, Bessie, thrived here, would thrive even at sea and was a sign of better things.

  The captain of the Hibernia intended to send for us as soon as the ship was loaded and the tide propitious. My brothers were impatient to board and went chasing carriages in the streets but were happy at their colonial prospects. For everyone agreed that New South Wales was the most debased society but at the same time the one that offered the most improbable rewards.

  A gentleman named Saxe Bannister, who was going out there as attorney-general to my father’s colonial treasurer, had told my brothers that in New South Wales boys played cricket all day, though they sometimes had to play with the children of convicts. After our hard time in the West Country, they were ready to play cricket with the devil as long as it was all day.

  Meantime, in chilly Holborn consumptive girls haunted the corners of streets, and the damaged soldiery of Wellington’s campaigns kept watch with them in the cold. The world would love Wellington – or at least the British world, which considered itself the world, did. But he did not seem to love his wounded remnants.

  When we went aboard the Hibernia at the captain’s summons, life suddenly seemed crisper, more definable, and snow fell on the lights of the brightly painted salon and melted before one’s eyes, as if the tropics already exerted an influence from within our ship.

  It seemed that the Hibernia would be Jane’s sanatorium. Her cabin was good-sized, especially so for that time – I believe my parents gave up their berth to her. I sat by her and read, and kept up her dosage of tonics laced with opium. I was aware she had somehow ceased to be a girl and had in a way ceased to be a woman, but instead was purely the target of solicitude. My mother was prodigal with the contents of opiate bottles when it came to Jane. If Jane, now a mild ghost with rasping breath, could be prevented from expectorating so painfully and with such richness of blood against white linen, then she would be prevented from the worst thing of all, the consuming of her system by disease.

  It may have been the first ten days at sea that settled the issue, for they were wild, and we could hardly stand even in our pleasant accommodations, and lost control of ourselves, of our heads and hearts and stomachs even in a ship of those modern and luxurious dimensions. I lay a considerable time in my bunk with my baby girl, who was barely influenced by nausea.

  It became apparent to us then that there was a danger of losing Jane, who had always sat so easily and lightly and benignly at the heart of the Balcombe family but whose capacity to hold us down against storms had now become noticeable. Yet Saxe Bannister, who had a soft manner with her, was suddenly and palpably a potential husband. There was no question that he was well in love with her, despite her hours of torpor, and that Jane could still prove herself a candidate for marriage and dutiful friendship with him. Saxe was a Tory and hence a voter for the government that had oppressed the Emperor and O’Meara and the Balcombes. Tory opinions were, in the midst of mighty waves, a small blemish. When Saxe knew my father had been provedore to the Emperor’s household, he was as interested as anyone in my father’s assessments of OGF, and did not challenge them. The world was still agog for that man. The Balcombes themselves were agog, even as we told our stories of the island, the tales we had bought at the cost of our own happiness.

  We had calm weather after sighting the Azores and got to know the other dozen or so saloon guests, four of whom were settlers returning from a visit home, who had a very jaded view of colonial society but were full of practical advice on colonial life. Jane now tolerated the slack, furnace weather off Africa’s huge groin, the Hibernia being the apex of a triangle with, away to the west, St Helena, somehow forever our true home, and to the east, Cape Town.

  On the worst night, Jane was moved up to the deck on a mattress and we all sat with her, discussing constellations and predicting more benign times. Saxe Bannister tried to sit near us and comforted my father with tales about land grants in New South Wales. ‘These days,’ he expatiated, ‘the governor requires someone granted a ticket of occupation to employ assigned convicts according to the scope of the country – one for every one hundred square miles.’

  ‘Do you hear these fantastic things?’ my mother would ask Jane, providing her with a motive to endure. One hundred square miles at a time awaited the serial occupier in Australia. But for the moment we were in a zone beyond geography, beyond God, and the Satanic
heat lay in the exact partings of our hair, and between our shoulders.

  ‘Terre Napoléon,’ I murmured.

  My father and Saxe Bannister cocked their ear interrogatively.

  ‘A French sailor called it that – Baudin. Terre Napoléon.’

  My father gave a minute shake of his head as this French presumption yea even unto the limits of the earth. And Saxe Bannister said, ‘Well, that threat was avoided, as in the end all others.’

  When the Hibernia reached the waters where the Southern Ocean collided with the Indian, in a zone beyond all claims and all explanation, Jane died quite suddenly. At the height of a piteous choking paroxysm, her amiable but perhaps too pliable heart gave way. The captain told us sympathetically that those raging winds, ice cold, had killed other passengers he had carried in the past, souls already exhausted by the passage of the Bay of Biscay and Atlantic, then braised by African heat and, finally, unleashed into the earth’s southernmost mad waters, down here, beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, the goat latitudes.

  It was appalling to see such a small creature, my riding companion from the island, now strictly encased in canvas, entrusted, as one would entrust an infant to a relative, to an ocean that could not have been vaster, less predictable, less human or more indifferent. Could it be argued that God in His magnitude, of an order even greater than this, could reach down his finger to the spot where she lay? For He who knew of the death of a single sparrow knew nothing of the Roaring Forties. The idea of His concern could not be supported there. There was not room even on the mighty, modern Hibernia to support it.

  We were bereft, though Bessie helped us with her prattling, smiles and crumbs of diction. She was charmingly and sometimes relentlessly demanding and her demands were the footholds on which we passed the remainder of our sea days, nearly all of them rough. The children fell into high fevers, my daughter now included, recovering and relapsing, overlapping the course of each other’s maladies.