Napoleon's Rosebud

by Humphry Knipe

  Never interfere with a beautiful woman who is falling in love with you.

  Napoleon listened gravely to Charlotte’s angry, heartbroken account of Daniel’s betrayal, his face expressionless except for eyes that shifted mysteriously between blue and gray.

  “All these years, he pretended to love me, but he was just using me to spy on you . He is nothing to me anymore. Nothing. I hate him. You are everything! If you want me, take me!”

  He did. They made love in the deep shade of a pomegranate tree. His body was perfumed with eau de cologne. The Pyramids…Marengo…Austerlitz. Borodino. The roar of cannon. The cries of soldiers—or were those her cries?—the blare of trumpets, the thundering of a thousand hooves swept her away. Much too soon, Waterloo.

  Afterward he flashed her his cupid’s smile. “Rosebud, I have a confession to make, and I want you to know it’s very rare for a man like me to apologize for anything.”

  “Your Majesty?”

  “To conquer you I have used deception, as I did in all my battles,” he said.

  Charlotte was sure he was teasing her. “Deception?”

  In a swift, practiced maneuver, Napoleon reached out and pinched her flushed cheek so hard it brought tears to her eyes. “Yes. I used you and Daniel to feed my jailer a poisonous diet of fictional escape plans. For a while, thanks to the scroll in your last packet, we had him believing that the whole of Chile’s navy was about to tear me out of his clutches!”

  A chill of realization closed its frosty fingers around Charlotte’s heart. “Lowe opened my packets?”

  “I made sure he did.”

  Her head was spinning. “Daniel knew?”

  “We made him aware. He cooperated to protect you.”

  “What about the submarine?”

  “A decoy. A provocation. It couldn’t cross the Thames, let alone the Atlantic. But you had to convince Daniel that it could. So he would convince my jailer. People lie more convincingly when they think they are telling the truth. I fed you lies. You passed them on to Daniel. On my instructions Daniel passed them on to Lowe.”

  Charlotte’s heart leaped. “So that vulture of a man was lying. Daniel isn’t a traitor?”

  “Edweeds. He was telling his half of the truth. He is our spy as well as England’s. He informed us he was passing through, on his way to the Cape. I had the brilliant idea of using him as my flank attack, to drive you into my arms. A man like me, who has carried the world on his shoulders, has the right to indulge himself with light distractions such as the seduction of a beautiful woman.”

  “So I am a light distraction while Daniel is—”

  Napoleon let loose his bark of a laugh. “Is a hero, not a villain! Now that I have exercised my droit du seigneur by deflowering you, I order you to marry him immediately!”

  Daniel, biting down hard on his anger, was still doggedly at work in the Botanical Gardens when Charlotte arrived in a whirlwind of dust. The nasty cut on his face, oozing blood, did nothing to offset his smile, because he could see that at last she knew.

  “Daniel!” she called out from the saddle. “My sweetest darling!” she called out again as she abandoned her foam-flecked horse and threw herself into his arms. “I am so, so very sorry I doubted you. Boney told me everything!”

  She kissed him again, breathing fire. Her lips found the wound. “Your sweet blood,” she said with a mad laugh she’d learned from Byron. “It’s delicious!”

  He pushed her away, laughing too, making the sign of the cross. “You’re cursed!”

  She was crying now. “Yes, I am, cursed by love! Use me now, in the garden shed, use me anywhere. I’m a fallen woman.”

  He looked at her as if he were trying to find the point of a joke. “What do you mean?”

  “He tricked me. He’s given up all hope of leaving Saint Helena. He said he needed one last conquest.”

  Daniel was suddenly eerily calm. This was a side of him Charlotte hadn’t seen before, not the lonely, dreamy Gypsy child, not the bookish botanist. A side that was made of steel. He was going to have to be made of steel if he was going to weather what she had to tell him next.

  “I was blinded by the Furies. I knew Napoleon wanted me. I could tell by the way he’s been looking at me, by little things he said. I wanted to hurt you for deceiving me, to take revenge. It was my fault. I threw myself at him. Daniel, I am no longer a virgin! Do you hate me now?” She was crying. “Because I love you!”

  Time stopped as they gazed into each other’s eyes, his brown as the honest earth, hers green as the deepest water. “We’d better get married immediately,” he said with his lovely lopsided grin. “You may be pregnant with a prince!”

  They exchanged vows two days later in Saint James Church, across the street from the Castle. All the Knipes were there in their Sunday best. Henry Knipe wore his kilt. Charlotte’s mother was in tears. The tiny clutch of Hamiltons filled half of a pew on the other side of the aisle, Daniel’s half sisters and his mother, who had read the auspices and found them favorable. Even with the contingent sent by Napoleon—General Bertrand with his wife, Count Montholon without his, the valet Marchand—it was an empty church until the officers in full dress uniform, uninvited, began to file in. Soon the church was packed.

  The minister smiled benignly as if this show of military force were all his own doing. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together—” he began. He was cut short by a hundred well-drilled soldiers jumping to their feet. The Knipes and the Hamiltons gaped. Even the bride and groom abandoned decorum long enough to glance over their shoulders. Sir Hudson Lowe was striding in at a stately pace, a splendid plumed helmet under one arm and Lady Lowe, cheerfully tipsy, clinging to the other. He was smiling benevolently because, for a change, he suspected nothing.

  Two weeks later, when she didn’t bleed, Charlotte knew she was indeed pregnant, although she wasn’t certain who the father was. She had a strong feeling it was Daniel’s, because he was a tiger in bed, as Polly had promised. But when she wandered alone along the paths skirting the precipice that fell down to Sandy Bay, the ill wind gusting in off the sea whispered to her, “The Pyramids. Marengo. Austerlitz. Borodino. Other great battles. The Code Napoleon. An emperor who once had Europe in his thrall. Father of your child.”

  As soon as the baby began to show, she was banned from Longwood. That came as no surprise.

  “I can’t stand seeing perfection disfigured,” Napoleon told her. “Come back when you’ve had the child. I want to see him, to make sure he’s mine.”

  Although he wrote to her almost every day, quick notes in his own execrable handwriting, a comical mixture of English, French, and Italian, she only saw him once more during her pregnancy, on October 4, 1820, when he called briefly at Virgin Hall on his way back from a carriage visit to Sandy Bay. The visit was stiff and formal. Napoleon looked pale and ill. The cancer eating at his stomach had begun to torment him, the same cancer, he said, that had killed his father at the age of thirty-nine.

  The child was born on March 9, 1821. It did have a large head like Napoleon, but in many ways it looked like Daniel, Charlotte thought. Also, it was a girl. They baptized her Mary Ann, which was what the French called Lady Liberty. She was two months old when Napoleon, who wrote that he heard death calling to him in the howling of the ill wind, asked to see the child. He told her to bring Daniel with her.

  Death was everywhere in the converted cow barn that had become the parody of an emperor’s palace. Faces were downcast. People spoke in whispers. Napoleon, propped up on pillows, was white as his sheets.

  “Out, everyone!” he whispered when Charlotte and Daniel were shown in. When they were alone, he kissed the baby on the forehead and then seemed to lose interest in her. He started to speak in a soft, sad voice, very different to the mocking bark Charlotte was used to. She passed the baby, who was gurgling happily, to Daniel and leaned forward to make sure she heard every word.

  “It was the evening of my first great victory, over the Austrians at Lodi,
” Napoleon murmured. “I was only twenty-six at the time, but as became my custom I was surveying the field of the battle I had just won. The scene of carnage, thousands of Austrians lying dead, was lit by a bright crescent moon, sharp as a scimitar. Suddenly the deep, beautiful silence was broken by a dog’s anxious barking, as it leaped up from his dead master’s body, rushed at us teeth flashing, then slunk back to the body, tail between its legs, whimpering. As we watched, it tried to wake the dead man by licking his face and when that failed flew at us again, repeating the same sequence of actions, over and over. Nothing on any field of battle before or since made such a deep impression on me. This man, I thought, has friends, family to mourn him. But here he lies, all alone, abandoned by everyone except his dog.”

  Napoleon coughed weakly. There was a long silence. Eventually he continued, “The closer I approach the end, the more I think of that dog. You see, that poor creature is me, doing everything I can to defend my empire, unable to accept that it is dead.” He rolled his head weakly so that he was looking straight at Charlotte. “What do you think of my story?”

  “It will haunt me, Your Majesty.”

  “Not as much as what I am going to tell you next. I’m not like other men. The rules of morality do not apply to me. I used the myth of democracy to reach the pinnacle of power. Then I cast it aside to impose a new line of kings on Europe, my family. Crowned my son king of Rome, dauphin of the new dynasty. My brother Joseph king of Spain, my brother Louis king of Holland, Jerome king of Westphalia, sister Elisa duchess of Tuscany, made Lucien a prince, lovely Pauline a princess, Caroline queen of Naples. Out with the Bourbons, in with the Bonapartes! And then came Waterloo, and my empire shrank to this miserable little shack on this unspeakable little island and my last conquest…” He rolled his eyes to Charlotte, smiled faintly when he saw she was weeping. “You, my Rosebud.”

  They were back home at Virgin Hall when the thunder of the signal cannons eight minutes after sunset told Charlotte and Daniel what they were expecting to hear. They were alone. Daniel said:

  Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

  Charlotte was staring at a twilight image under a guava tree, a shadowy figure that wore his black hat sideways, a cupid’s smile on his lips. For as long as she could she forced herself not to blink because she knew he would disappear when she did.

  The southeaster sighed “farewell.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Acknowledgements

  The Knipe Family of Saint Helena Island (which at 468 pages must rank as one of South Africa’s most exhaustive family histories) introduced me to the Rosebud legend. I would like to thank its author, Glennis Snell, for her most helpful responses to my endless e-mails while absolving her from any responsibility for my flights of novelistic fantasy.

  I would also like to thank Albert Benhamou, author of L’autre Sainte-Hélène and Inside Longwood: Barry O’Meara’s Clandestine Letters, for his valuable contributions concerning the micro politics of the island during Napoleon’s exile. It was he who discovered Albine de Montholon’s description of Rosebud, which establishes that she was the daughter of an invalided lieutenant (my great-great-great-grandfather Richard Knipe) and not his brother Samuel, the comparatively rich planter.

  Two other books I found particularly helpful were Brian Unwin’s Terrible Exile and R. C. Seaton’s Napoleon’s Captivity in Relation to Sir Hudson Lowe, where Napoleon’s campaign of deliberately provoking harsh reprisals from Lowe to arouse sympathy in England, Europe, and America is clearly laid out.

  For Saint Helena as the inspiration for The Tempest see David Jeremiah’s new book Shakespeare’s Island.

  The hero of Napoleon’s Rosebud is an emperor without his clothes. No book I know of shows us this personal, intimate side, with all its idiosyncrasies, vanity, and cunning, better than Christopher Hibbert’s Napoleon: His Wives and Women.

  Charlotte died in 1835, three days after giving birth to her ninth child. If she had lived a few months longer, because of her botanical connections she would almost certainly have met Charles Darwin, who visited the island on the Beagle in 1836.

  IF YOU ENJOYED THIS BOOK, PLEASE REVIEW IT FOR AMAZON. EVEN A FEW COMMENTS WOULD BE VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!