Napoleon's Last Island (19 page)

‘I think that is not the case, Mr Huff,' said the Ogre. ‘And we are all a disgrace in our youths. It is our fault. It is not a divine plan.'

‘No, no!' said Huff. ‘It is all of divinity! For not all of us consume Italy in our youths. Only you!' He lowered his voice and brought some frayed pages of paper from his breast pocket. ‘I have already studied the arrival and departure of commercial ships.'

Next he pulled from the other side pocket a page on which a map had been clearly drawn. ‘I have made a note of lookouts and batteries, including the one above the waterfall. They expect us to leave by Sandy Bay, but I am pondering unexpected points of escape. I must say it is all a great weariness to my mind, but it is demanded of me even though far beyond my strength.'

‘Please, no, sir,' said the Emperor, pushing the map and the pages back into Old Huff's coat. ‘You see that Miss Betsy has overheard this, and Miss Jane, as has Madame Bertrand. The Balcombes are honest English girls and would be forced by duty to inform the admiral and the government of Britain of what they have heard. And young Captain Poppleton may overhear you too. So, you must understand, your plans are uncalled for and cannot succeed.'

As if by summons, a red-faced young Poppleton appeared on the verandah then. ‘Yes, yes, Captain Poppleton,' the Emperor called to him. ‘I know you must report these manifestations. Don't feel awkward about that. But report my refusal to accept Mr Huff's veneration as well. And leave him untouched, as any man of decent sense would, for he is well-meaning and he is …'

The Emperor made a waving gesture with his hand. Then he tugged Huff upright, and Huff rose in a sort of obedience, waved his head about, put it close to the Emperor's ear and whispered something, something that he clearly believed would act as a revelation. After that, he grabbed the Emperor's hand and left a kiss on its dimpled plumpness. At last he left, reached the gate, turned back and raised just one finger to wave it solemnly back and forward like a conjurer, something meant to be of significance to the Emperor alone. Then he opened the carriageway gate and sloped off down the shadowy carriageway.

The Emperor turned back to Poppleton. ‘You must do what you can to ensure they treat him lightly or not at all.'

Poppleton saluted the Emperor. ‘Do you intend we should ride, General?' he asked.

And so we rode south, Gourgaud with us too, past the foothills of Diana's Peak, flags fluttering atop it to signal the Emperor's expedition to the chief posts of the island. We passed through green country and a ravine into a land of stone fences and cacti. Finally we came to the stony farm of Mr Robinson, its fields occupied at this hour of the day only by a scarecrow. A mastiff sat before the daub and wattle farmhouse under its shingle roof. Poppleton knocked on the door and Mr Robinson emerged, tall and barefoot and dressed in canvas.

‘There be the rail, Your Gentles, for tetherin' your horses,' he genially called. ‘You are right welcome to come into the house if the honour of your enterin' be mine!'

He knew who was visiting him. He was trying his best to be urbane. Somewhere in the farmhouse or outbuildings was Mrs Robinson, the handsome mulatto, and her daughters. Mr Robinson nodded us inside to a spacious dark area in which stood a table, with a sand-soaped smell as if Mrs Robinson were a very particular woman. The man of the house suggested that the Emperor and his party each should take a seat and offered them wine.

‘You have wine?' the Emperor asked him.

‘Not the finest, Your Worship. But from the Cape.'

The Emperor said to me, ‘If we are not depriving him of it, Betsy, tell him we would like a glass of the Cape wine.'

I told Mr Robinson, and that Jane and I would abstain. He fetched a bottle from a dresser and pulled the cork and poured a claret into three tin cups, which he handed one each to the Emperor, Captain Poppleton and General Gourgaud. The Emperor gave his cup the honour of a serious sniff and looked around the room with his usual curiosity. This was why men had loved him, I understood: his curiosity was undiscriminating; he brought it to every human, and every habitation.

The Emperor asked me to request of Mr Robinson whether he had a wife. I did so though I knew the answer.

‘Yes, and may it please you, Sir Emperor.'

‘And I met your little girl,' said the Emperor. ‘She was alarmed at first and I was reduced to reassuring her.'

‘My daughter said you were jolly, sir.'

The word
jolly
confused him because of its clash with
joli
. ‘I don't think
joli,'
said the Emperor with a mock frown and then that harsh laugh of his, and Mr Robinson did not try to pursue the subject.

‘How much land do you have?' asked the Emperor then, leaning forward. Again he was interested in such facts.

‘A hundred acres.'

‘All of good farming?'

‘Sir Emperor, not one half of it, but things are on an improvement.'

Now Anna, the girl the Emperor had terrified in our garden, emerged through a door and she led by the hand her mother, who was somewhat hollowed and much wrinkled by the labours she shared with her husband. The little girl brought the farm wife straight up to the Emperor, who stood and bowed.

‘Madame,' he said, ‘I am question this husband yours. And now I go beyond English. Miss Balcombe, give me help.'

I saw that the girl, a worldling now by comparison with her parents, beamed up at him, and he said, ‘Young mademoiselle, in case of terror, this gift I brought.'

He reached inside his green chasseur's coat and withdrew a napkin tied into a bundle, which he now undid on the table to reveal four sugar plums. ‘I fear I did not bring six,' he told her.

Like my brothers, who had frequently been treated to sugar plums, Miss Robinson was captivated for life. The Emperor had a chair drawn up by Gourgaud, and the Robinson girl sat on it by his side. Jane and I again took the translation of the questions he had for Mr Robinson, as if his dynasty was to be recorded in a gazetteer. The Emperor wanted to know, did the land bring Mr Robinson much profit then, if it was not half arable?

‘Why, Sir Emperor, you know we cannot grow corn on this
island, what with the soil and the goats, and it is hard enough to grow vegetables. But that we do, and before you came, our vegetables would have a ready market only now and then.'

‘Now,' murmured Mrs Robinson, nodding, ‘and then.'

Her little girl kept smiling up at the Emperor and looked like someone else's child, for Mrs Robinson kept her children dressed well, if roughly, by her own needlework. I had heard she poured much of the profit of the farm into her ambitions for them. Even her calico skirt had a grace to it.

Mr Robinson continued, ‘Generally we had to wait and pray for the coming of a ship or blessedly a convoy before the vegetables rotted. They would often all spoil before the ships arrived. But now! Now, Sir General, we sell our goods every time we want to. This is what you have brought us!'

There was nothing like improved vegetable prices to make an Englishman into a true admirer of the French republican-imperial system. (Boney, as my father with tender whimsy said, having become Emperor merely to save the republic.)

The Ogre turned to Jane and me. ‘Tell him I am delighted to have been a boon to the economy, and to that extent I am gratified. But ask him where his other children are.'

When we did, Mr Robinson declared, ‘Dang it and please you, Sir Emperor.' He was getting used to discoursing and his quick intake of wine had made him less stiff. ‘Two of the boys have gone for sailors, but for the rest, I believe they have all run out and hid on us. Except the little un, who knows you.'

‘Send for them,' said the Emperor through Jane, ‘and let me be introduced. Pray, have you some good water to go with the wine? And shouldn't you fill your own cup again?'

But first Mr Robinson had to continue to praise the Emperor for making things so good.

‘So good, so good,' repeated Mrs Robinson, nodding. She forced the words through her remaining teeth.

Jane earnestly said, ‘Your Majesty, I wanted to point out to Mr Robinson that our father was an honest fellow, but he could only buy from farmers when ships arrived and said what they needed.
And so no one ever looked out more anxiously for a ship of any kind – slave, store, navy – as did he.'

‘Indeed,' said both the Robinsons, nodding in chorus. ‘Honest fellow. Yes, honest fellow.'

I wondered when Mrs Robinson had resembled her daughter, but the one who had not yet been sighted and who was a great beauty of the island.

At last little Anna was sent to find this fabled daughter in one of the farm's outhouses, and eventually led her back, a glorious young auburn-haired woman, as I knew her to be and took a pride in, wearing a plain dress of calico. She was green-eyed but there was a wondrous lustre to her eyes and hair.

The Emperor, Gourgaud and Poppleton stood up as she entered. The longing and infantile desire of Gourgaud was in the air of the kitchen, almost like an unpleasant aroma, the smell of spoiled fruit. The Emperor too was stunned with a somehow more honest brand of longing, having – or at least I believed this – something more of substance and persistence and respect than Gourgaud's avid canine hunger. But like all girls of my age, I still had my education in the fickleness of male attention ahead of me. I knew that Captain Edwards, the young master of a cargo vessel named
Chloe
, had sat at our table six months before, praising Florence Robinson at length. By the time he left the island – aboard his ship trading with the Cape – there was thought to be some form of understanding between himself and the Robinsons. But how could the captain of a merchant vessel stand up against the radiance of a world-changing man?

I would later interpret what charmed the Emperor that afternoon. The French, for all their stress on
ton
and fashion, were demented also about the unspoiled pastoral girl, untouched by the blemish of the city or by the paint of the salon, the one with the rustic glow of honest suns in her face, whose teeth gleamed with enough vigour to make up for the toothlessness of her parents. If the Emperor had a picture framed in his head with the title, ‘Bucolic Beauty', the goddess of Thermidor, Florence Robinson stepped in to fill it with her glory.

That glow of suns is what Miss Robinson possessed, and the Emperor said in French, as if for our party's attention, ‘
Cette femme – c'est vraiment La Nymphe.'
This is truly the Nymph!
The
Nymph like
The
Briars.

She made a little bob of the knee, but it struck me it was a more knowing one than a sprite of landscape should be up to. She had an instinct at how she had affected these celibate men. ‘Does Mademoiselle Robinson work with her father and mother in the fields?' the Emperor asked through the plain Balcombe girls. The idea of her as a barefooted goddess with a basket of harvested fruits on her hip no doubt appealed to him, though the effect was a little spoiled by the fact that she had a sort of shoe, made of canvas uppers and a leather sole.

‘She is a seamstress, Sir General,' said her father, beaming. ‘She makes the dresses for weddings and parties. Things have turned better for her now too.'

‘Admiral Cockburn is having a ball for you, sir,' said Miss Robinson with a soft directness. ‘At Plantation House.'

‘I am afraid I shall not be attending,' said the Emperor in French, ‘since Admiral Cockburn will not address me in the proper manner. But I hope that does not influence your trade in dresses, so let us keep my intentions a secret.'

He smiled while Jane translated for him. The Emperor raised one of his plump fingers. With that soft instrument he had directed corps and armies, and was also willing to contract a seamstress.

‘Ask Miss Robinson, would you, Mademoiselle Jane, whether she would make a ball dress for young Betsy here? Bets will need something more elegant than pantaloons, for she has achieved a height which brings her to the level of my ear.'

Jane was about to ask the question but I told the Emperor in French, ‘I have not been invited to the gala. And my father has told me in any case I cannot take up such invitations until I am a year older.'

‘I shall speak to your father,' the Emperor told me, but he was very quick to turn back to his goddess of the day and lay his
ardent eyes on her. ‘Ask Miss Robinson that if I or the Countess Bertrand brings her the material, could you make our Betsy something that will arrest the eyes? For she is a beautiful girl.'

Being fifteen, Jane already possessed a ball gown, and was in any case not an envious girl. She had no hesitation translating. Then she murmured to the Emperor, ‘I don't know if my father will relent.'

But she was amused and far from appalled by the course the Emperor was taking. To her it was all great entertainment and she saw no traps in it.

The Emperor said, ‘If he listens to anyone on the question of our Betsy, he will listen to me.'

‘Am I back to being spoken of as a child?' I asked them in French. ‘In my own presence?'

All four Robinsons in the room were greatly impressed by our conversation but were beginning to seem lost.

‘Oh, dear Betsy,' exclaimed the Emperor. ‘I am spoken of in the third person all the time. Do not take it as an offence.'

‘You wish going to ball,' he then asked in English. ‘It is not?'

I spent time on the proposition and suddenly he laughed and said to Jane in French, ‘Yes, our Betsy wants to go to the ball.'

And thus I was the pretext for the Ogre to confer with
La Nymphe
, Florence Robinson, who was contracted to make me a dress. I knew I was a convenient dupe and yet for once it generally pleased me.

The next day the Ogre lunched with my father and other gentlemen, and my father called me in and told me in front of the Emperor that due to the intercession of my great patron I could attend the Plantation House ball.