Napoleon's Last Island (15 page)

That evening, the Emperor declared, ‘I see you wear, Miss Jane and Miss Betsy, your short skirts over your pantaloons again. This is a terrible fashion your nation subjects its young naiads to. You are not at fault for it, but only the English could devise such a means of punishing young women for their beauty.'

This opening, I see now, grew from his unexamined belief that one's first remarks to women of our age were teasing – that teasing was the essential path to their affections.

‘What do young French women wear then?' I challenged him.

Gourgaud stepped in and in a very courtly way, bowing, said not to me but to Jane, ‘They wear long dresses, mademoiselle, with low-cut necks and shifts and other proper garments beneath.'

Our younger brothers were milling amidst this parley and wanted to show their toys. But Pierron, the pastrycook, brought out for the three boys some swans constructed of spun sugar and embodied with cream, and at a side table my brothers began devouring them, William still with his Frenchman and frog in one hand, and Alexander with his unrevealed seditious toy in his jacket pocket.

I had felt a flush of rebellion, meanwhile, against the idea that the French were superior in all their manners.

‘Is there anything we do the right way?' I asked the Emperor. ‘You don't like our roast beef, or you say you don't, and you don't like our puddings, and you hate our music, and now you don't like pantaloons. Is there anything else to hate?'

Jane put a hand on my shoulder to restrain me.

‘Oh,' he said, ‘I am sad if I brought forth in you, Betsy, the need to be a patriot. I admire so much that is English, above all the hearts in your breasts.'

I leaned across the table at which we sat and said, ‘Jane, the boys are finished. They wanted to show the Emperor something before they go to bed.'

Of course the Ogre immediately wished to see it, and pushed his chair back to welcome the delegation of boys. This was the
true aspect of the Emperor, his face full of a kind of unpretending, childlike expectation. William displayed the Frenchman devouring the frog. The Ogre hooted. Next, Alexander came up confidently and showed him a ladder with a crude wooden doll of the Emperor at the top rung. At one flick of Alex's finger, the Ogre overbalanced and went tumbling down the rungs in a clickety-clack manner which made the boys laugh and Jane cry, ‘Oh, no!' When Alex reversed the ladder, the Ogre doll swung upright again, and then descended. This process was repeated by gleeful Alex over and over again.

As if he thought the Balcombe girls might be affronted by Alex's toy, the Ogre took a second to assess us, as the arrogant doll began a further clattering fall. Gourgaud stared at the apparatus with a particular kind of frown, bringing his fingers together as if he might want to pray. Young Emmanuel considered the device wanly, but it was his father who uttered a gasp and looked away into the corner of the marquee as if invoking the Muse Clio to intervene and end this vulgar atrocity.

Then the Emperor began to laugh, his hacking but musical laugh. This pacified Gourgaud but not Las Cases. The more the Emperor laughed the faster Alex inverted the ladder and doll to let the Ogre fall yet again and again. ‘I hope you understand,' he said, gasping. ‘I hope you understand … Alex, oh, for dear old Boney's sake, let the thing down for a moment …'

Jane had gone to Alex and prised the apparatus out of his hands and gave a look of reproof in my direction.

‘I hope you understand,' the Emperor continued, ‘that to make me fall, young Alex has first to raise me up. I doubt, young Alex, that your Lord Bathurst would be as amused by that. But that
is
indeed a toy! Give it here and let me manufacture my own downfall.'

Jane raised her eyebrows and passed the thing over and the Ogre played with the tiny doll in the bicorn blue hat with a rosette on it, and laughed every time the small doll fell down the ladder.

‘Oop, he's up!' he cried in English and as the doll rattled down the steps of the ladder, ‘Bah, he's on the down!'

He and my brothers were by now crazed with laughter.

There had not been sufficient mischief, so I asked in French, ‘Do you think the ladder is Russia?'

‘It is an imbecile toy,' said young Emmanuel Las Cases in English. ‘It is not Russia.'

This did make me pause. I was not expecting commentary from him.

‘It is for baby imbeciles,' he asserted.

He was so certain about it that I was almost attracted to agree with him, to make an alliance now. He had been the one to attack the malignity of my question. I was hoping it would be his father.

Gourgaud was saying, ‘No, no, my little scholar. It is amusing.'

He thought that in defending me he was pleasing Jane.

Las Cases in the corner of the marquee, and his son at table, both glared.

The Emperor held the thing aloft and said to everyone at the table, ‘This is what they gave English children in their nurseries to ensure they would grow up and defeat me.'

At last he handed the toy back to Alex.

‘The ladder, Betsy,' said the Emperor, ‘is rather small for Russia. But what does it matter? For
choc, choc, choc
, I am here!'

Jane and I ushered the boys out, and they went with the unrepentant laughter of the Ogre in their ears. The dinner was brought in – two tureens of soup and a number of dishes of meat and fish and vegetable – and served onto silver plates decorated with the Emperor's eagles under the direction of Marchand. We could smell the work of Le Page and Pierron before we saw it, for they had prepared three chickens which had been cooked and basted on a spit Le Page had devised so that he did not need to incommode, or at least struggle with, Sarah and Alice in our kitchen.

We sat. The Emperor spooned up the soup less elegantly than the Balcombes did. When the rest of the food arrived, he ate very quickly and uttered a little murmur as he chewed. The two Las Cases men and Gourgaud rushed their food to keep pace dutifully with the Emperor.

Gourgaud asked, ‘How long have the charming Balcombe girls actually lived in their native land as distinct from on this island?'

The Emperor interjected. ‘My friend General Gourgaud would prefer to say that you had never been to your native land. That you were the unsullied product of this rock.'

‘We have been for some time in England,' said Jane. ‘We were there as young children. And Betsy and I as students.'

The Emperor asked, ‘But if asked to define yourself, are you women of Britain or women of St Helena?'

‘Britain,' said Jane without hesitation.

‘St Helena,' I said with the same level of conviction.

The Emperor held out a plump, cossetted finger and, not for the first time, looked pleased. ‘And there we have it.'

Jane, the Englishwoman; I, the desert island savage.

‘Then what can you tell me about this woman who rides to town on an ox?' he asked.

This was Miss Mason, a farmer of the island. We had heard, both Jane and I, that she was once a great beauty. Now she was a strange crone in a canvas skirt. We said what we could – she had extensive vegetable plots and dairy herds and was a rich islander but never displayed her prosperity. We were interrupted by the brisk clearing of plates, whether we'd finished or not, and Pierron brought in some chocolate and ices and spun sugar swans of the kind the boys had earlier eaten.

‘Tell us,' asked the Ogre, ‘is the Prince Regent really your grandfather?'

This was a question that routed us. Jane was stunned. By nature, I knew how to play for a little time.

‘
Our grandfather
?'

‘I don't think it can be true,' said the Ogre. ‘Though it's said in the town.'

‘What is said in the town?' I demanded. The Emperor could see that we were both bewildered and he rushed to say, ‘Are you not all the children and grandchildren of the Prince Regent, or as you call him Prinny? Is that not a proud enough description for you?'

I frowned. Jane signalled with her hands and movements of her lips that we should let the Ogre's statements slide by us.

‘Betsy is distressed without cause,' declared the Emperor. He turned to young Emmanuel. ‘She laments the lack of a standard education, you understand. But the value of such things is overestimated. Have you known a standard education, my young friend? Tell the Balcombe girls.'

‘I was in Your Majesty's court. I caught lessons from excellent tutors as I could. I receive an excellent education but not in the usual manner.'

The Ogre said, ‘I know. You must forgive us. You could not have been born at a worse time. A child at home in Languedoc and then, all at once, as I called on your father, at court. And the rest of your schooling?'

Emmanuel declared, ‘I have learned all I know by obeying and assisting my father.'

‘A wonderful education in itself,' said the Ogre. ‘So, Betsy, you have little to complain of. For there is no perfect education, whether in an imperial court or on an island in the midst of seas.'

I was thinking not of education but this thing he had said about being Prinny's grand brats.

Suddenly the conversation seemed to have been taken over by Gourgaud and Las Cases and military matters. The geography they called up evaded me, yet I was overwhelmed, to an extent I vowed not to show, by what these men had achieved and endured together. That I refused even at that age to be awed was my strength, and marred my life.

A shrug in Gourgaud's direction …

An afternoon shower had brought my mother and me in from the garden, and as clouds milled at the top of Diana's Peak, we sat together companionably reading, an experience I valued as much as if I had her entire attention. I had presumed that my sister was in her room – I was sure I had seen her flit inside earlier. And then I heard Thomas, whose feet pounded on the
steps as he entered the house, shouting, ‘I saw old Gourgaud. With Jane. In the grape arbour. He was feeling her bubbies!'

My mother ran into the hall. ‘What is that?' she asked as if terminology was the problem. ‘Where did you hear that word?'

‘They were kissing,' he roared with riotous distaste.

‘Go to your room!'

She pushed him down the hallway and he stumbled but as he righted himself acrobatically he gleefully called again, ‘Her bubbies!'

As abominable a term as it was to my mother, it was an adventure in language to him.

I followed her onto the verandah and saw Gourgoud and Jane standing together on the lawn looking confused, Adam and Eve cast out of the grape arbour. Thomas, imbued as all boy children are with such curiosity, compounded with much animosity to the female gender, was still carolling the news indoors with gusto.

‘Jane!' my mother called to my sister. And Jane came across the garden and up the steps towards her, pallid for one second and blazing-faced for the next two, and without a glance towards Gourgaud. The sword of my mother's voice had easily cleaved them apart. Gourgaud now bowed profoundly towards my mother though his face did not change colour. My mother did not accept his obeisance and turned on her heel and followed my sister inside.

I do not know why I then made a shrug in Gourgaud's direction. It was certainly in part to let him know that he had gone beyond the terms of our sharing our habitation with him. But I realised at once that it could have been interpreted to mean that I thought he'd had bad luck. When one is thirteen it is hard to say anything clearly, for all is ferment, and this gesture was of that order. As I felt there had been a sort of invasion, now I was comforted by how severe my mother's face had been to Gourgaud, as severe as I could possibly have wished it to be. I was also amazed by Jane. If she and Gourgaud had been close together … well, it couldn't be imagined. And if something had happened to Jane, then it must happen in a worse way
to all lesser girls, including myself. I rushed down the hall to hear, through the closed door to my sister's bedroom, the loud and urgent counsels of my mother. Jane's shamed sobs were audible too.

‘God knows,' said my mother, ‘you are innocent enough and men of the great world take advantage of it. Men are not ruined but a girl is ruined every minute. Men can move from sunshine to the dark at will. But women live on a knife edge, miss. You must be more careful. To go with a man like that into a hidden place …'

I was thrilled and appalled by this definition of my sister's folly. My mother would have been delighted to know how thirstily I drank up every minatory word. I wanted her to be harsh, to make me a safe child. I was delighted with every admonition I heard thrown in Jane's direction in the next half-hour, not in this case out of some mean delight in seeing Jane threatened, but because I felt the threats enhanced and fixed me in time and virtue as well.

At last Jane was left to herself, and my mother emerged into the hallway. I had fled down the hall by then and into the drawing room, but my mother stamped in behind me and put her ferocious and seemingly bruised eyes on me. ‘Don't pretend you didn't listen, Betsy. You take note too. A knife edge! You are the sort of girl the world would love to condemn!'