Napoleon's Rosebud

by Humphry Knipe

  “Knipe, pronounced like knife,” Charlotte corrected, a defiant glint in her eyes.

  Albine de Montholon had played word games in the most fashionable salons of Europe, only to find herself in this armpit sparring with one of the local peasant girls. “Exactly. Kneips,” she purred.

  Napoleon followed the kilted landlord down a narrow passage. Henri Bertrand, grand marshal of the palace, walked one step behind, and Marchand the valet made up the rear guard. Porteous threw open the door to a dusty closet that would no doubt forever after be known as the emperor’s suite.

  Napoleon didn’t hear the man’s apologies for the smallness of the room and the narrowness of the bed. “Rosebud,” he said. “Is she married?”

  Porteous’s face was alive with smiles, because here was an irresistible tidbit of gossip. The emperor had his eye on Charlotte, his daughter’s best friend! “No, sire,” he said, “although she pretends to be the fiancée of a boy in England—Kew Gardens, to be exact. He’s doing his apprenticeship there.” He resisted the impulse to wink. “He won’t be back for more than a year.”

  “They correspond?”

  “Regularly, Your Majesty,” said the landlord, puzzled by the question.

  Napoleon waved at Marchand, who nudged Porteous the few steps to the door. The man at least had the manners to walk backward, bowing all the way.

  Napoleon stood at the window looking down at the street, where the drunken crowd had put down roots and the band had gone back to murdering Beethoven’s greatest symphony.

  “Tell them to stop that caterwauling,” Napoleon barked at Marchand.

  “At once, sire,” said the valet.

  “But first tell me about our provisioner, that Balcombe person.”

  The valet frowned. “He drinks too much.”

  “All the English do,” Napoleon snapped. “Anything else?”

  “Admiral Cockburn is going to stay in his guest cottage. Wellington stayed there for five days when he visited ten years ago on his way back from India.”

  “Ah!” said Napoleon. “Cockburn’s going to stay there, is he?”

  “That’s the plan, sire,” said Marchand who immediately caught his master’s drift. “It’s apparently a little pavilion, nice little place set in the garden, away from the main house, quite private. We’ll be passing nearby it tomorrow, on the way to view your residence.”

  “Can’t be too bad if Wellington stayed there,” Grand Marshal Bertrand said.

  Napoleon’s bitter bark of a laugh. “How unlucky he ever left! What else do we know about our man Balcombe?”

  “Describes himself as an auctioneer’s appraiser. But he’s a jack-of-all-trades, like most of the locals,” said Marchand. “Has crooked fingers in several pies.”

  “Excellent!” said Napoleon. “Best news we’ve had since Austerlitz!”

  General Gaspard Gourgaud, personal aide-de-camp to the emperor, was indeed a handsome young man of considerable swagger who had the intriguing habit of examining others down his rather long nose. While showing him to his room Mary Porteous had invited him to cool off in the night air with her and a friend, the girl the emperor had just christened Rosebud. She mentioned Charlotte not because she wanted her there but because Mary knew, by the firebrand’s air of indifference to her, that she needed to bait her hook with a more dazzling fly. It worked. His gray eyes widened with sudden interest when she mentioned Charlotte’s name. He said with a quick smile that he would be honored.

  Charlotte was downstairs talking with the kilted landlord. “Papa,” interrupted Mary, “General Gourgaud is dying to take some fresh air. I thought Charlotte and I could walk with him to the Almond Tree, since it’s just across the street. You want to come along, don’t you Charlotte?” she asked, hoping Charlotte would say no.

  “Of course I do!”

  Mary’s father frowned. “I don’t know if it’s such a good idea,” he said, “going out tonight. The town is crawling with drunken soldiers.”

  The general slapped his sword and shot the landlord an intimidating glare. “Are you suggesting that I am unable to defend the ladies?”

  “Oh no, of course not,” the landlord Henry Porteous said hastily.

  In the bright moonlight the street, lined with its neat white houses, looked like a scene in the theater, Gaspard Gourgaud thought. The tavern, which spilled out onto the pavement, was a sorry imitation of a Parisian street café. He ignored the vulgar stares coming at him from every direction and in turn did his best not to stare at Rosebud, of course a tactical move.

  He hardly had time to become acquainted with his vile glass of Cape wine when Rosebud asked the inevitable question: “What is Napoleon like in person?”

  “Oh, I expect you will find out very soon for yourself,” he said dryly. “I’m much more interested in hearing all about Saint Helena.”

  “All right then, we have two kinds of mosquitoes,” said Charlotte. “One bites you in the night and the other in the day.”

  “She’s being silly,” Mary cut in, “they’re not that bad. To answer your question, the Portuguese discovered the island in 1502. Nobody here, never has been. Not until Dom Fernando.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Our own Robinson Crusoe,” Mary gushed. “He was a Portuguese gentleman, a soldier, who turned traitor in Goa and converted to Islam. The Portuguese were furious. They captured him and – you’re going to hate this. The first day they pulled out his hair and beard and eyebrows and dragged him through a pigsty – you know how Muslims hate pigs. On the second day they cut off his nose and ears. On the third day they cut off his right hand and left thumb.”

  “Mary!” said Charlotte. “You’ll give the general nightmares!”

  “Then what?” he said, curiously excited, Charlotte noticed.

  Mary rushed on. “Then they put him on a boat heading for Portugal. But he jumped ship here in Saint Helena because he didn’t want his family to see he looked like a fish.”

  “Crippled Dom Fernando inspired Shakespeare’s Caliban,” Charlotte said. “So hooray, you’re on Prospero’s magic island!”

  “I’ve heard the rumor,” said the general. “Your admiral had the crew perform the play when we were crossing the equator. They even had Caliban wear his hat crossways as the emperor does. His Majesty laughed the whole thing off as a silly joke. Said the only line he liked was ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’. All the devils, he said, except for one. The real Caliban.”

  “Who on earth did he mean?” asked Charlotte.

  “Sir Hudson Lowe. The ogre they’re sending out to be our jailer.” The young general stifled a yawn. “Now I really must go to bed. It’s been a trying day. Do you both live in the boardinghouse?”

  “No,” said Mary. “Charlotte is with her mother, up the street. There’s only one of them. Street, I mean.”

  Gaspard examined the young woman thoughtfully. She was plain and gauche, but she had an ample bosom that she was pathetically eager to share, he was sure. But the other one was a true beauty. No wonder she had caught Napoleon’s eye. He turned to her. “Then I insist on walking you home, Miss Kneips.”

  Charlotte knew he was teasing her by intentionally mispronouncing her name, so she didn’t correct him. “Thank you general.”

  “Gaspard.”

  “Thank you Gaspard,” she said with her prettiest smile.

  “I’ll walk with you,” said Mary hopefully.

  “Best not,” said Gaspard. “I might go for a stroll afterwards. I need to be on my own for a change, after being cooped up on a crowded ship for months. I’m sure you understand.”

  Mary did her best to keep the disappointment out of her voice when she said she did.

  At the gate to the modest bungalow, Gaspard looked up at the midnight moon burning down as bright as the sun. “Rosebud, may I kiss you good-night?”

  “Certainly not!” she said with a laugh. “We hardly know each other, and anyway I am promised to another.”

  “Who?
”

  His name’s Daniel. Daniel Hamilton. He’s apprenticed in Kew Gardens, London. He’s studying to be a botanist.”

  “Excellent! London is a long way away. Shall we save the kiss until tomorrow?”

  Charlotte laughed. “Not even tomorrow!”

  When the young general laughed, too, Charlotte found she liked him.

  At dawn the next morning, the little cavalcade set out for a preview of Napoleon’s residence, still under construction. The emperor, dressed now in the bright green satin uniform of a colonel in the imperial guard, his chest glittering with medals, was seated on a half-decent little black stallion auspiciously called Hope. It was almost like old times. Gaspard rode with him, and so did Admiral Cockburn, who pretended to be in charge. Marchand the valet was there as well, ready to fling himself between his master and the assassins he was convinced infested this foul island like the fleas that had kept him awake all night.

  Up the steep, narrow, switchback road, their horses sweated. An hour and a half later, they emerged. Below them was Jamestown. The island lay before them. Westward were trees and houses with the governor’s residence, a decent-sized country house painted dove gray, nestling in the distance. But eastward, the windward side of the island, was a scene of desolation. Black volcanic mountains patchily covered by a thin layer of soil. It was arid and virtually treeless.

  “Which way do we go?” asked Gaspard.

  “East,” said Admiral Cockburn.

  “Of course,” said Napoleon without a trace of sarcasm. He had his spyglass trained on a beautifully manicured little estate below a high heart-shaped waterfall that had just come into view. “Who lives down there?”

  “William Balcombe, your provisioner. I am going to stay in his little pavilion, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh, you are, are you?” said Napoleon, a faintly ominous ring to his words.

  They rode on through a narrow gorge called Hutt’s Gate. It should have been called Hell’s Gate, thought Napoleon, because it led to Deadwood Plain, a plateau that was dotted with gnarled and crooked gumwoods, native to the island, all leaning their umbrella tops in the same direction, permanently deformed by the relentless southeaster. The party was welcomed by the lieutenant governor who had recently made a halfhearted attempt to convert a clutch of cowsheds into a summer house he called Longwood, an effort that was being redoubled by a swarm of navy carpenters already hard at work.

  “Well, General Bonaparte,” said Admiral Cockburn afterward, “it obviously needs work, but what do you think?”

  Napoleon was thinking of something else altogether, namely how to get his hands on a replacement for the vial of poison that had failed to kill him after Waterloo. He thrust the negative thought behind him and charged back through Hutt’s Gate on his way down to the residence below the heart-shaped waterfall. Balcombe’s. He had a conquest to make.

  Late that afternoon Charlotte, bonnet on and parasol up, was promenading on Sister’s Walk, the seaside path cut into the cliffside that towered over the wharf. Because of the tropical heat she was naked under her sleeveless dress, her tall, willowy silhouette with its nipped waist needing no corset to set it off.

  She tried unsuccessfully to calm herself by gazing down at the ships, small as matchsticks, swaying their masts in the bay below. She greeted people she knew and ignored the cheeky compliments of redcoats and sailors. Her mind was elsewhere, reliving the previous evening, examining it from every point of view like facets of a diamond.

  Who does that woman think she is to tease me about my name? she was thinking. She’s nothing more than a prisoner of war. One word to Governor Wilks…oh, no!

  The unspeakable Balcombe girls appeared around a bend of the cliffside path, shrieking with delight at having run Charlotte to ground.

  “Rosebud! Rosebud!” they chanted. “Boney wants to sniff Rosebud!”

  Charlotte’s frown was as disapproving as she could make it. “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s true!” said Jane.

  Betsy beat her sister to the really extraordinary nugget of news. “He galloped down to the Briars on his way back from Longwood. Ruined our lawn by charging across it on his horse. Insisted on seeing Papa immediately.”

  Jane would be interrupted no longer. “They talked together all alone for at least an hour while Admiral Cockburn walked up and down, absolutely fuming. And—”

  “And then Papa made this big announcement. He said that Emperor Napoleon had accepted his invitation to stay in our pavilion until Longwood is ready for him!” said Betsy.

  “You should have seen the admiral’s face. He was absolutely livid!” said Jane.

  “Because he was planning on staying there himself, as Wellington did,” said Betsy.

  “Anyway,” said Jane, “Boney moved in right away without even going back to town.”

  “Said he didn’t want to be gawked at,” said Betsy.

  “Turns out he’s ever so nice and friendly. Not at all the man-eating monster you’d expect,” said Jane. “He and Papa talked politics. I think Papa has quite fallen under his spell.” She dropped her voice to an urgent whisper. “I’m sure they’re plotting something.”

  “He likes me specially,” said Betsy brightly. “Lets me call him Boney and calls me Miss Beetsy. We played blind man’s buff and suchlike. He even asked after you, if we knew you and whatnot. So of course I told him you’re one of our best friends and visit all the time.”

  “She’s telling the truth for once,” said Jane. “He did ask after you.”

  “Of course I am! I’ll ask Papa when you can come up.”

  Napoleon, used to being on campaign, settled into his new accommodations quickly. The next morning he asked Balcombe to walk with him in the garden.

  He got straight to the point because he owned this creature already. “Tell me about Rosebud’s correspondence.”

  “I believe Henry Porteous told Your Majesty that she writes regularly to her fiancé, who is serving an apprenticeship at Kew Gardens in London. She’s been sending him packets of plant specimens for five years.”

  “Can she be recruited?”

  “She will have to be persuaded.”

  “By you?”

  “Not by me, sire. We aren’t that close.”

  “Who, then?”

  “She worships you, of course. All Your Majesty has to do is ask her.”

  Napoleon was impatient to get back to dictating his memoirs, because he was in the middle of his victory at Austerlitz, the most exhilarating day of his life, when his spirit soared into the empyrean and even the tongues of the trees were singing his praises to the highest heaven.

  “Settled!” he said. “Now listen carefully. I say things only once, as I remind my secretaries even when they ride into battle with me, writing down my dictation as they go. I will instruct Rosebud from now on to enclose a sealed scroll in her packet of weeds. When the packet arrives in England, Rosebud’s inamorato will extract the scroll and hand it over to one of our agents. Do you understand?”

  Balcombe said he did.

  “You will launch this venture by going to the admiral and betraying the scheme to him.”

  Napoleon looked Balcombe full in the face, enjoying the man’s befuddlement.

  “Your Majesty, may I know why?”

  “It’s a well-worn military maneuver called a misinformation campaign. You will offer the admiral a letter from me, which he believes to be secret. You will make sure he thinks you are a blackguard who has betrayed me for money. That won’t be so difficult, will it?”

  A smile, slow as a slug, crept over Balcombe’s lips. “No, Your Majesty.”

  After a largely liquid lunch William Balcombe rode into Jamestown, thinking through Napoleon’s scheme all the way. The diabolical cunning of the man! The freshly minted double agent was certain he was being followed, but the winding road the locals called the High Road—although it was only six feet wide in places—made it easy to see that he was not. He took a glass of wine
at the Almond Tree tavern, where officers and gentlemen met to swap the latest news. A second glass steadied his nerves enough for him to tether his horse purposefully and stride into the Castle’s reception room with the assured gait of one who had an appointment. He managed to persuade the orderly that he needed to speak with Admiral Cockburn on an urgent matter.

  Admiral Cockburn, already officiating as acting governor, ignored Balcombe when he was shown in. He hadn’t recovered his good humor since this man had handed over his very pleasant accommodations to Bonaparte. The cowardice of the man, treating the prisoner as if he were still in command! That puffed up criminal Bonaparte was sorely in need of deflating, and he, George Cockburn, the man who had eaten President Madison’s lunch, was just the man to do it.

  As if to make this point, Cockburn was sitting in front of a large painting that had kept him company in his cabin all the way from England. It was a portrait of himself wearing a self-satisfied smile as Washington burned behind him. “Mr. Balcombe!” he said eventually. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  After Balcombe told him, the admiral snorted as if he were trying to evacuate a particularly obnoxious smell from his nostrils. “Let me see if I have understood you correctly. Just by chance, you say, you have overheard that Bonaparte has a scheme in which he will use that Rosebud girl to smuggle secret correspondence to England. She will do this by delivering a packet hiding a secret scroll to the postmaster. The postmaster hands the packet to you, who brings it to me. When I have read its contents, we reseal the scroll with a copy of the imperial seal, which you will supply to us. You return the reconstituted packet to the postmaster, who sends it on its merry way so the girl will remain unaware that we have penetrated her secret. The young man at Kew extracts the scroll from its hiding place in the packet of dried weeds and hands it over to Napoleon’s London courier, whoever that may be. The point of this rather circuitous exercise is that we get to read Napoleon’s private correspondence without his being aware of it. Is that a fair summary?”

  “Yes, Sir George.”