Napoleon's Last Island (18 page)

It would be suitably dramatic to say that that night I received the first alarming signs of my womanhood, but it happened in reality a few nights after, and leaning over my bed at dawn, consoling me, my mother said, ‘Now you must start to behave like a woman, and less like a child.'

She seemed close to being amused. My attempt to push the imperial party down the steps had by then become more a story along the lines of, ‘What a wild thing our Betsy is!' rather than the scandal it had been on the night. My father also visited me and could be heard discussing my condition in mutters, and reached down to feel my brow with an ineffectual dry hand. My sister Jane brought me a plate of arrowroot, which I did not eat.

On the second morning, when I lay mute and desolate, by now despairing at my inability to expire, General Gourgaud apparently visited our door with a letter for me from the Emperor.

‘I don't want to hear it,' I protested.

I stopped my ears as Jane read but of course I heard as well, because I wanted to hear. It was not beyond him to have included the formula to make survival tolerable. ‘My dearest Betzi,' Jane said. ‘He spells it B-E-T-Z-I!'

My mother laughed hopefully in the background as if this eccentric spelling might coax me out of my state.

Jane read, ‘My dearest Betzi, I have gone too far and treated you as if you are a child and not a young woman. When I play with children I become flippant, because I did not have much chance of childhood myself – it was all serious, my father so solemn about Corsican independence and the great Pasquale Paoli, and I not being permitted to do anything but agree with my noble father. But enough of that! I am desolated that I have offended you, and thus hurt your kind parents too, who – with you – have given the exile a more generous home than many would have desired him to have. I ask you to forgive your friend, who has treated you too recklessly and will not make that mistake again. Young Las Cases apologises fluently for pushing you. This letter comes to you with my thanks, esteem and gratitude.'

Jane studied me in an educative way, as if I were to learn something from her responsive face rather than she from mine. I turned my head, refusing her the illusion.

‘It is signed,' I heard her say, ‘with a large N.'

My mother said, ‘He apologises to no king, Betsy, but he apologises to you.'

I was aware that nothing of ease or certainty had come from my playfulness with the Emperor, so I did not seek reconciliation and tolerance. Thus I accused Jane, of course, of caring more about the Ogre than about me. But this was just more of the business of childish retaliation. There were, it seemed suddenly obvious, hopes of adult equality in that sentence, ‘I ask you to forgive your friend …'

‘If you want to make a reply,' suggested Jane, ‘I can transcribe it.'

And though I had left my infancy, I had not left behind my bluntness, and I dictated to Jane a reply that read, ‘Though indisposed at the moment, Miss Elizabeth Balcombe acknowledges the correspondence she has received and accepts it as a full requital of any pain inflicted on her, and extends her concern for any offence she might have given, but does not choose any further to involve herself at the infantile level which seems to be the one her friend considers suitable for her, but which she does not!'

‘Do you really want to say that?' asked Jane.

‘Yes,' I howled at her.

‘But he writes a number of gentle sentences and you give him back a few blunt ones.'

‘He can write ornately,' I said. ‘It doesn't mean I have to.'

Jane shook her head but then won me over by smiling, with a kind of gratitude, because I had in a way just proved that I had returned to my normal being. In that second I loved her and more than half-hoped that she would add some further softening sentiment in her own hand, which was very much like mine.

I had achieved the status of one of the women towards whom he was regretful, and I knew it was time I gave up baiting him and let him get on with writing his account. And once more I put forward his letter as a sign that, being amenable to me, he was following his nature and could not possibly seek any advantage. He could not have, because I had no advantage to extend to him. If he would be simply a man to my woman, that would be enough and all would be well.

Count Bertrand in uniform and with a sculpted face and the Count de Montholon, often in darker, statesmanly clothes, were frequently at the Pavilion. I was pleased to see them walking on the lawn mournfully discussing matters of the renovations of Longwood with the Ogre. So concerned did they seem that there appeared a chance the Ogre might never have to leave The Briars, an outcome which, despite the contest in which we were joined, and because of it, I would have welcomed. I dreamed that we would nobly vacate our home and be given quarters in town, and that he would stay and be fixed in place by gratitude, avoiding forever the rebuilt and repainted farmhouse at goat-and rat-ridden Longwood.

In that time, we also had more visits from Fanny and Albine. On arrival they would first pay their respects to the Emperor in the grape arbour or, if it were raining, in the Pavilion. The Countess Bertrand always finished chatting to the Emperor first,
and the Countess de Montholon, now a little more visibly with child, stayed at the Pavilion or the arbour longer.

Madame Bertrand did not seem to mind that she was let go first. Of the French party she seemed the least enchanted, the most at a remove, of all of them. But my mother became more reluctant to have Jane and me at the tea table with the two French women, claiming she could not take us away from our French translation.

My mother asked Fanny Bertrand on one such occasion, ‘Shall we be fortunate enough to see the Countess de Montholon today?'

Or Madame Bertrand would give a little blowing of the lips and say in an accent still flavoured by her Irish childhood, ‘God only knows when we'll enjoy the ultimate honour of Albine's company.'

Our soundless desire for elucidation filled the vacant air.

‘She lingers with the Emperor, doesn't she?' said Fanny Bertrand in that way of saying more than the exact words. ‘Since she is with child, there is little risk, one would think, of an impropriety. But I would still like to see all parties spared the low gossip of the town. The servants visit women down below in the port and spread all manner of guff. Marchand is in love with one of these English girls down there, and visits her. I don't condemn Marchand. He's one of the more reliable. But there are plenty of others as well.'

My mother seemed to be getting a taste for what was said in these taut, crisp, breathy sentences, and I had at such times the painful experience, new to me, of finding her not a goddess but a mere woman at sport amongst women. Yet in a way I loved the example laid before me by Countess Bertrand, because she said what she wanted to say with such openness, her jaw raised and not stifled in a handkerchief.

‘Men were crazy about Albine,' reflected Fanny. The reasons could not be obviously discerned. We knew old Admiral Cockburn liked to spend time in her company in the parlour at Mr Porteous's boarding house establishment, where they were all crowded in together.

‘Of course,' she said with candid archness, ‘it's the way you present yourself, isn't it?'

I glimpsed through her how crowded life must be down in the cramped rooms of the Portions – Fanny Bertrand and Albine de Montholon on the one sofa, their children confined in the rooms, the husbands at their allotted duties of supervision of Longwood, of dealing with my father, of correspondence with France and within the island, while contemplating the chance that in these narrow walls their alliance might fracture because of the different kinds of men they were, and the different kind of woman each was married to.

I had taken a deliberate resolve in my new adult life to let the Emperor have, without any mockery from me, his friendship with Madame de Montholon. It was impossible for me to say why their friendship bloomed, but, overlaid with the flavour of the improper, it seemed far easier to tolerate than the frolics he directed my way. I had decided to be solitary now, and broadly tolerant even of the Las Cases, who would notice my new gravity as a woman wise beyond years in her judgement of others, though ever capable of lamenting their limits in a neat sentence.

One afternoon the Emperor suggested we visit the farming family to which little Miss Robinson belonged. Jane and I were ready for the ride across to Prosperous Plain, looking forward to a diagonal over rough ground, as we both liked. I was to ride plain old Tom, whereas Jane was permitted to ride our mother's bay mare, which had been brought in by ship. The Emperor's Arab horse, Mameluke, brown with white markings, had been led down to the carriage gate by Ernest. It was a gelding, for stallions were considered far too flighty for the island's more precipitous tracks, and generally they were used for breeding. Last of all was the English escort Captain Poppleton's grey.

But before the two slave boys could help us into the saddle, the Emperor stopped at the tea table under the trees to see what Lady Bertrand was showing my mother. It happened to be a locket with a miniature painting of her cousin, the dead Empress, the paragon to whom he had with an undue weight compared my
mother. Old Huff emerged from one of his intermittent lessons with my brothers and, in his tattered suit, fell to his knees before the Emperor.

The Emperor took his hat off to Old Huff and called with more concern than amusement, ‘Oh, not again, dear Huff. Not again.' But he was not easily distracted from the miniature, from the transactions of memory and longing, mourning and justification. The vanished Josephine, the divorced one. She had got a cold one evening while showing the lilacs and the roses at her house at Malmaison to the Russian Emperor, while the Ogre was in Elba. But she was not dead as ordinary women died. She was immortal. How could she be compared, and how comprehended?

So he ignored Huff for a while and murmured to Madame Bertrand, ‘Fanny, do you see a chance that you would let me keep this?'

I could see she was reluctant to surrender the object yet also felt she should, and before she left that day she would hand the miniature into the Emperor's possession, and he would hang it by its black ribbon by a nail above the mantelpiece in the Pavilion, at a point to which he would often direct visitors' attention.

‘Please rise up, Mr Huff. The Emperor does not like such displays,' I meantime called, as the transaction proceeded between Fanny and the Emperor. It was still some seconds before the Ogre actually kissed Madame Bertrand's hand as a sign that he had accepted the little treasure from her, and gazed on it and closed it and raised his eyes and saw that, indeed, Huff was kneeling still, leaning into a breeze, trembling.

The Emperor rose from his chair and walked towards the old tutor. ‘Sir,' he said with a gentle breathiness, and in French, which Huff understood. ‘I believe you have been a student in one of the great universities.'

‘At Cambridge, my Emperor,' Huff answered in a brisk but reverent French.

‘Ah. And you enjoyed reading the English radicals? John Wilkes and others?'

‘And Tom Payne,' said Huff. ‘A great Englishman, an immortal American, and a friend of France.'

‘And you must know from Tom Payne that an enlightened man does not kneel to any other of his kind.'

Huff protested, in perhaps too loud a voice, ‘But to an incarnation, sir! One kneels to an incarnation.'

‘You are clearly mistaken in that, my dear friend, for I am an incarnation of nothing but myself. Besides that, your government does not want you to kneel to me, and might consider it a crime on your part and a further reason for punishment of me!'

‘Let them consider it such!' Huff affirmed in a cracked throaty voice. ‘I have had revealed to me a divine intention that I should be your liberator. You must be spirited from this garden of exile. That is the judgement of the gods. For this is an island of murderous airs.'

‘For God's sake, no, Mr Huff,' the Emperor murmured. ‘You make things hard for me by such utterances. The revelation you tell me of is not reliable. Austria and France and England have not concluded terms yet and may well be my liberators themselves, and thus you need not fuss. Then you and I might well live together in your homeland, as gentlemen, under English heavens.'

‘English heavens are not kind,' Huff asserted. ‘They are pitiless.' He shook his head emphatically. ‘I am not permitted to return. I was considered to be intemperate in the past. Nor do I see that you will be permitted either. Hence, you must be rescued, and the Lord, the Master of the Universe, the God of all Reason, has appointed the matter to me. This is the meaning of my life, of my being caged here all these years. It is the reason I was permitted in my youth to disgrace myself. This was a divine mechanism to bring me to your presence. To ensure, indeed, that I was in position to rescue you.'

The Emperor had grasped Huff's hands and was trying to raise him before Poppleton and the guards who stalked the edge of the property saw this excessive veneration.