Napoleon's Last Island (16 page)

I felt with a wave of primitive awareness that she was right.

My father, once home, was sent down to the Pavilion to ask Las Cases whether he could have an interview with the Emperor, and when he was let in to see OGF, who was reading in shirtsleeves, he outlined Gourgaud's behaviour towards Jane. From what I heard, listening agape during my father's later conversation with my mother, the Ogre called Gourgaud up from the marquee, where he had been sent to wait throughout the meeting. At the end of my father's complaint, Marchand was then sent to fetch Gourgaud. Gourgaud's face did not betray the contrition my father had expected he should be suffering, but at least he showed no arrogance. He accepted the Ogre's reproof almost
humbly but also, said my father, with a military dispassion. The Emperor told him that he had violated a dear friend's welcome, and then slapped him on the cheek, one deft, plump-fingered slap. My father was pleased to hear Gourgaud's breath catch, but then the man stepped forward instantly and apologised as fully as my father wished. I believed, however, that it was a soldier's apology and owed more to Gourgaud's alacritous obeying of the Emperor's orders without question than to true penitence.

Later that night I went to take some junket to my sister's room. She began to spoon it in mournfully, for she had eaten nothing.

‘What was it like?' I suddenly wanted to know. I was hungry to know. What was to be avoided and what welcomed? ‘What did it mean to you?'

‘It was terrible,' Jane insisted. ‘It was hateful.'

She thought that, under my mother's strictures, she was telling me the right thing, but I could see that she was lying. I could well believe it was horrible in some sense, that it was the awful collision of the angelic and the worldly, and terrifying. But there was something before that. Something I could not envisage – something to do with allure and a choking of the heart.

While Jane and I worked on our French translation, Jane invariably finishing first, I took every chance to move into the house, visit the kitchen for a piece of cheese from indulgent Sarah, and pause by the small parlour to hear how Huff was getting on with my brothers. William as the oldest was more solemn and tried to manage the other two by example, but Tom and Alex were indulged by my parents, or else benefited from the idea that girls on the edge of womanhood needed more rigorous terms imposed than did small boys, in whose case it was accepted that they should be feral for the time being. As well as that Alex was clever and glowing-cheeked like my father, and capable of sitting docilely on his daddy's lap and charmingly instructing him in the history of the Medes and Persians, which he had precociously learned from Old Huff. My father told anyone who would take
an interest that Alex would be the family's scholar. Huff's exposition of any knowledge before the young meant that, as from the passage of migratory birds, a seed might drop into a pocket of rich soil and produce from it an educated being.

It was not only the Medes and Persians and the Hebrew alphabet that Huff imparted to the boys, just as earlier the Reverend Jones had imparted them to Jane and me. He had seized their imaginations with the tale of Fernando Lopez, the first man of the island. It was confidently said by the yamstocks that Lopez was out there still, that he could be heard howling from the thickets in the mountains by Prosperous Plain. Lopez, a Portuguese nobleman, had travelled with General Albuquerque to seize the port of Goa in India. He had been the man placed in command of the garrison at Goa while Albuquerque returned to Portugal for reinforcements. During that time, Lopez and his men, led astray by the beautiful darkling Moslem girls of Goa and accepting their beauty as if it were a theological argument, adopted the religion of the region.

In time General Albuquerque returned to Goa with a fleet of transports and considerable Portuguese soldiery. Now back in the hands of his appalled countrymen, amongst whom the Inquisition and its punishments were established, Lopez was tortured for his apostasy – as were his men. Indeed, many of his fellow apostates died during the torture. Amongst the spiritual cures and defacements Lopez himself suffered was the excision of his nose, cartilage and bone, his ears being cut off, his right hand and his left thumb lopped. And though he was now unspeakable to behold, his soul was returned to Christ.

All this Alex and his older brothers were thrilled and awed by.

Thomas asked my father one evening, ‘Is it better to have no nose and have God, or to have no God and keep your nose?'

Alex waited moon-eyed for an answer.

‘We English people,' my father said, ‘are not as extreme. We believe in keeping our God and our nose and not swapping one for another.'

To the boys it was an utterly unsatisfactory answer.

Lopez, on his way home to the country of his God and his family, seeing the island and what a fortress it was with its cliffs, and how wooded in those days, and being uncertain whether his family in Portugal could still love him after taking first sight of his savaged face and body, chose to land and hide in the woods that then covered Deadwood Plain and amongst the rocks of Devil's Glen. Parties searched for him for many days, but he could not be found. So he was abandoned, though his shipmates left goats ashore to provide him with ongoing sustenance. Where Fernando Lopez's bitter tears fell, the island's fancy says, lemon trees grew.

Yet he was not an evil man, Huff argued. Not in his deep heart. He had imprisoned himself here as a penance, and with his mutilated lips and sucking breath he prayed by our streams and our mountains and rendered the island holy. Fernando Lopez bathed himself in the streams and cleansed himself in a repeated form of christening. Lopez foreshadowed the Emperor, said Huff, as St John the Baptist foreshadowed the Lord. The Emperor, as tormented within as was Lopez, was also confined to this island and had the power to give it, said Huff, a new weight. This latter, prophetic detail barely touched the boys. They had been satisfied by nose-mutilation and were now ready to move on to other arresting tales of that kind. So plain meanings, let alone unspeakable ones, were beyond Tom and Alex, and noise from Huff's classroom was riotous, and William was distracted by trying to act as a conscientious prefect, as Jane would have done.

Yet there was for me some mental stimulation in hearing Lopez depicted as St John the Baptist, making straight the way, and holy the streams and mountains. For the One to Come.

So again it was a day for translations. My father had gone to his little library and extracted a copy of Thomas West's
Guide to the Lake District
and marked a passage for Jane to translate into French and then allocated another one to me. The passages were never longer than a page, and with ordinary application I could have made a fair rendering in twenty minutes. But it was the application of the perverse soul that failed me. My father had his fixed and simple idea about what was needed of young ladies. He had randomly decided to express all his sense of parental duty into this damned daily exercise.

As we worked at the table under the tree in the garden – the very ambience should have made me more amenable – my father's horse was brought to him where he waited by the gate to the carriageway. At this second the Ogre emerged down the rock steps from his breakfast in the Pavilion, in a hurry, bearing down on the table, where he snatched my paper and with a rogue's smile said he would show my father how much or how little progress I had made. He took the page up to my father and seemed almost to expect shared amusement. He looked at its scatter of ill-framed phrases and dismounted. He advanced on me with the translation in his hand and told me there would be trouble if the exercise was not adequately done
by the time he returned from the town. He bowed august thanks and respects to the Emperor, then was helped by Ernest into the saddle, raised his large hat and was gone.

‘Oh, my dear,' the Ogre, returning, said to me, ‘I did not expect your father to be so very serious about this. But perhaps he understands we cannot have a young woman of your station in life unable to make a lively translation. You can express lively sentiments to me. Why can't you simply write down what is there?'

He then leaned over and murmured, ‘Do not forget your French is better than your Papa's, so you have that advantage if you simply make it neat.'

‘Was it your place to interfere?' I asked him.

He made a squeak with his lips and a little shrug, very Gallic, and said, ‘Marchand must shave me now that I have created sufficient disorder.' And he was gone, fast on his thin legs, his plump feet.

This intervention by the Emperor summoned up a spritely riposte in me. Suddenly I could work with a will, because I was doing so to defy the Ogre. That afternoon, with the translation done and approved by the Emperor, all the Balcombe children were invited into the marquee to be served some of Pierron's refreshing ices.

Without our knowing, Alexander brought his own pack of cards, hoping the Emperor would play snap with him but also unabashed that on the back of each card the Emperor himself was depicted, his head rising upwards and wearing a tricorn, but connected at the neck to another Emperor head, upside down and wearing a Turkish turban. I could not work out the purpose of this device but it was clearly not meant to flatter.

‘See, Boney,' said Alexander, breathless. ‘This is you on the cards.' To Alex, this made the Emperor a figure of true fame.

‘
Bony
?' asked the Emperor in mock reproof, and did what had become in a week or two the standard joke of showing his hand to prove that he lacked boniness. I found it a fascinating hand and wanted to be able to hold and study it at length – something that was socially impossible – for it seemed to possess a martial
strength and yet was dimpled at the knuckles like the hand of a healthy child of two years.

I said, ‘I know your hand has held a sword. Yet it's hard to imagine you wielding such a heavy cavalry weapon as the one you were wearing on the day you first came to the Pavilion.'

It was a harmless remark by the standards of my normal discourse with the Emperor. But with that Gourgaud drew his sword, the one with which he had attempted to repel the Cape Holstein. Did he think I had insulted the Emperor and now intended to impale me? If so, I would die laughing, for Gourgaud's steel brought out more whimsy than fear in me. I was once more amazed by this man who had managed to find more than one hundred cannon and put them in place at the frozen Berezina River, and yet had no more idea of how to behave in company than I did.

‘It is not about the size of a hand or its form,' he declared. ‘The sword glides. The sword emerges like a viper.' And then, inspecting it, he became more absurd still. ‘You see those tarnishes? They are acidity from the blood of men I have impaled.'

Again, was this meant to be a warning?

The Emperor laughed, ‘Sheath the thing, Gaspard, for dear God's sake. By heaven, you really never have lived anywhere except in a barracks or a field camp, have you?'

This chiding, added to the one given in the field when Gourgaud ridiculously faced the Cape cow, brought the darkness of rejection to his face. We were getting used to this expression. Jane, who was comfortable with him now that he had been reduced to an integer in her life and affections, declared, ‘I doubt it would glide and emerge like a viper for me.'

‘Run in behind the screen, and get mine then,' the Emperor instructed Gourgaud. Gourgaud sheathed his sword and proceeded with a military degree of ceremony behind the screen and came back, with a face hard to read, carrying a long embossed case with a golden ‘B' on it. He laid the case ceremoniously on the table, and backed away from it as from a bier on which lay the corpse of ambition. The Emperor approached the case, opened
it and lifted with two hands a glittering sword in a gold and blue scabbard. I looked again at the tortoiseshell scabbard in his left hand, all studded with golden bees, his plain and subtle symbol. The handle in his right hand was shaped as a gold fleur-de-lis.

After holding it aloft, he suddenly withdrew the blade from the scabbard, and began flicking it about in his hand and lunging with it as if to satisfy theorems of swordsmanship, and as if the friction of the thing in his hand was like a form of memory.

‘It is very heavy, nonetheless, Betsy,' he said, ceasing to feint, fluidly reversing the sword and passing it handle first towards me.

I felt that in receiving it I was oafish amongst masters. I was dragged forward by its very weight. In the sweaty fold of my plain hand it was a rich implement, perhaps the most valuable, for symbolism as well as for cash, that had ever entered the island. The gravity of the blade threatened to tear the gold handle out of my hand.

‘I do not want to tarnish the handle,' I said with some awe and in the hope they'd take it from me.

‘No, Betsy,' the Emperor said. ‘You are designed for such implements. Or it is their duty to be designed for you.'

And so my awe gave way, as he had intended it should. He wanted some gesture from me. I knew what it was: that I would threaten him with this tool of war. He wanted the craziness of such a scene. I took full possession of the handle then. ‘It is a matter of honour, sir,' I shouted then, ‘that my French translation shall not be mocked!'

He barked with excited laughter and began to back away as I gestured. I lunged towards him, careful not to strike him but to find empty space with the point of the thing, with which I felt an increasing contact through the haft and steel and tip. Even so, given my lack of skill, this was possibly the most dangerous thing I could do. The idea of accidentally impaling the Universal Demon excited me, and him too.

I saw Gourgaud go for his own sword and have it in his hand, half-drawn, willing to tarnish it with further gore of the Emperor's enemies.

‘No, General Gourgaud,' yelled the Emperor, and returned to braying with hilarity.

The measure of excited fear in the Emperor's voice made me understand it was not merely play with him. It was all to test the terms imposed on him by the island, to see if one of its daughters could be ill-spirited or accidently exact enough to kill him in play and thus render his escape. In the way he laughed was a sort of proposition, an invitation to give him from a risible and friendly hand what hostile hands had never been able to. And, after all, they would not hang me for transfixing the Great Ogre and Universal Demon.

So in frantic excitement I began to make slashes in the air either side of his body, and then, reaching the limits of my strength, swishes above his head, even while holding on in desperation so that the sword would not fall and harm him. A mere cut, as against a serious penetration, would reduce the scene to inanity. It wasn't what he was looking for. He was looking for something ultimate, and that was marvellous.

Not being a knowing participant in the whole gamble, Jane was raging at me in terror at the possibilities of my swordplay. The boys were cheering me on, of course, since they were creatures of mayhem. But with Jane there was the risk she would run and get Father. I was to put the sword away immediately, she screamed. I laughed in a particular manic way that made the Ogre laugh too, and I pointed the point to Gourgaud and yelled in English, ‘Come and take me!'

And the Emperor still, within easy reach of my sword point – for it
was
my sword point now – and in the midst of breathless laughter, kept telling Gourgaud to hold his place.

I was aware of other presences in the room now, a gathering of forces. The Grand Chamberlain, old desiccated Las Cases, had entered with his solemn son. I took an instant to see if they were both as wide-eyed as I wanted them to be, the scholarly chamberlain and his mannequin.

Jane was still screaming her energetic threats as Las Cases roared with surprising force, ‘Desist, mademoiselle! In the name of all reason, desist!'

I had become exhausted by now from holding the thing. The madness that had kept the blade horizontal was passing from me. I stepped back and with a great gasp let the blade come down towards the earth, being careful not to dent it against the ground. I managed that by holding the hilt two-handedly. This permitted them to think I could still choose to prosecute further havoc. But then, not looking at the Ogre, and certainly more clumsily than he would have done, I presented the hilt to him.

‘Fair exchange, Boney,' I told him without repentance, and confident that he was the only one who understood what I was talking about.

The Emperor slowly took the sword and inspected it with love.

He said, ‘It has not had such a flourishing in a long time, Betsy.' He passed it unsheathed to Las Cases. ‘Please, Comte, have the blade and handle cleaned. It is so humid on this island, and Betsy so enthusiastic.'

And then he turned to me with his eyes playful and waved his finger in front of my face as if to get my attention, and reached forward and chose an ear that had happened to have been pierced the day before. He knew it had been pierced too – it had been at his recommendation that my parents let Sarah attend to it. And now he squeezed it.

Of course, I determined I would not show any pain. I gazed at him. The ear stung but it was less intense than being impaled by Gourgaud, who would have cherished more blood-acid on his blade.

‘I can't believe what I have just seen,' said Jane in what sounded more like shock than chastisement. ‘General, you must forgive my sister. She is sometimes out of all control.' She lowered her voice. ‘She's supposed to be nearly a woman.'

I heard the soupy, regular piety of her voice and hated her for it.

‘Oh,' I said, ‘I suppose that if I were a woman, I would be so much under my own control that I'd let Gourgaud paw my body!'

She turned away, uttering a few more vapid, terse sentiments. She could not participate at the level of understanding the Ogre
and I had reached. The Emperor himself was making reassuring waves of his hand. She did not understand the compact that existed between him and me; that I had particular knowledge of him, and of his impulse to play, fully as children play, inflicting pain as children do, and with the same fierce intent of children.