Napoleon's Last Island (2 page)

I had just met my husband-to-be when we had word from the Exmouth newspapers and from the harsh cries of coachmen that Our Great Friend had died on the island. This was of course impossible to believe, but we believed in it sufficiently to wail communally and privately. We saw all too sharply in our minds the rooms of Longwood, and that squat, exiled figure peering out of his windows towards the Barn, or Deadwood, or Diana's Peak, in a manner that foretold a bewildered death. Old family wounds gaped anew, and ghosts of varying colorations were released.

Eventually, something like the true circumstances of that death came to us from the mouth of an old friend, the Irish surgeon Barry O'Meara. Even though the great loss had occurred, it was temporarily an invigorating thing for our Balcombe family to see O'Meara, up from London, flaws and all, and to look to him to interpret the event and help us drink the chalice of bereavement. When we sat by a fire on a rainy day in June at the Swan's Nest, my father and the Irishman smoking pipes, and a bowl of punch before them, a couple of cups of which my mother was persuaded to take, we glowed with a familial anticipation that despite the circumstances felt like glee. To us, O'Meara had always been a sprite, so we felt strangely eased by the truth that he shared our onus of mourning.

He had arrived in our town the day before and sent us a note inviting us to the Swan's Nest. When my father received it, he went sallow with rage. On the island he used to get rubicund with irritation, but in England he turned less healthy colours. In the letter O'Meara raised the question of his naval agent, Mr William Holmes, a man my father suspected of dishonour. Given the risks my father had taken in order to secretly ship off money drafts drawn by Our Great Friend, the idea that some had stuck to Holmes's hands on the way to Laffitte's bank in Paris was something odious. None, however, seemed to have stuck to O'Meara's, and O'Meara defended his friend in any case, saying that Holmes was about to go to Paris to introduce himself to Laffitte and allay suspicions the bank harboured about the origin of the money bills. My father was not utterly convinced, yet in the flatness and desolation of our lives, we were still pleased to see the face of a fellow conspirator from the island, a face rendered greyer, and his grey suit, familiar from the island, older.

By then it was three weeks since the news of OGF's death had come to us by way of the papers, and we were hungry for salient detail, to serve as palpable shelves on which we would stack our grief. Like soldiers of the
Grande Armée
, who had reportedly, on hearing the news, limped forth into town squares in France, looking about in shock, unable to accommodate themselves to the obliteration from the Earth of that Force, we too were shocked. The newspaper accounts, even the well-meaning, progressive scribes, did not always avoid false premises concerning the Emperor and his exile, and were unable to recount credibly what had happened at Longwood House weeks before, since none of them had ever seen the island. We were consoled by the honest accounts of the
Morning Chronicle
when it arrived in Exminster from London. The
Chronicle
had the advantage of sources amongst those not rancorous to the Emperor, his admirers and in some cases old friends. But we were appalled by other at best grudging reports, such as that in
The Times
, which purported to recount the death of a man we could not recognise from the text. All this had deepened our
familial depression, of course. We had been suffering for allegiances and services of various kinds to a living Emperor, and now he was gone our suffering lacked meaning. Most of the time we crept about each other, being terribly kind, even me, the sort of kindness that confessed vacancy at our hearts, and a sense of the meaninglessness before us.

And then there came the letter from O'Meara promising to settle with my father the question of Holmes – and that he could give us the truth of OGF's expiring. With these offers O'Meara raised hope that he might return to us our meaning. He told us he had heard from surgeons still on the island the circumstances of the Emperor's death.

O'Meara drank up his cup of punch with relish, and that oval beaming face with the curly black hair now touched with grey and the smile seemed to revive before us, and thus a little of the island and the times of promise were restored. There was no layer of despair over his features. He was writing a book, and believed that would redeem him. My father served him a second cup with a ladle, and he raised it and said solemnly, ‘I propose a health to the memory of Our Great Friend, whose constitution was destroyed by the Fiend, Sir Hudson Lowe!'

Jane, my sister, and I were restricted to tea, and my brothers to cherry sodas. I suspected all at once, unlike our parents, who had been cosseted by the punch, that O'Meara might alter things for us; that the Fiend and the island might now become the one dream, and that all the questions arising from that time might be swallowed in the ocean of OGF's demise. But it could not happen until the matter and process of death was detailed for us.

‘I once took out a septic tooth from the Great Ogre,' declared O'Meara. ‘A canine tooth. And now I scrape a crust of bread, and let me tell you it is a thin enough crust, out of the septic teeth of Edgeware Road – an Indian, Jewish and Arabian clientele by and large. I am limited to places beyond the eye of the College of Surgeons, and must proceed carefully and modestly if I am ever to be reinstated. And that is the work of Lowe by Name and Nature.'

‘Ah,' my father said, warmed by the punch and by an animosity not native to him. ‘I know, though, that you write pieces in the
Chronicle
and
The Times,
Barry, still hammering that man, and justly so. And declaring other things as well.'

‘The men who read that don't know I am a dental surgeon. The people from whom I draw teeth and the men who publish and read don't know each other. It is incumbent upon me …'

Here the Irish surgeon realised he was speaking rather loudly, and dropped his voice, but there was still colour in his face, as if he were being criticised. ‘It is incumbent upon me to strike that fiend, Sir Hudson, who has violated all human expectation. None of it makes me a rich fellow, but it sustains me as a poor one.'

My father raised his hand appeasingly, palm out. ‘You realise that for my part I am with you in the proposition that there does not exist sufficient ink in this world to supply an appropriate condemnation of Lowe by Name and Nature.'

‘The Fiend and Our Great Friend,' murmured O'Meara, making the implicit contrast between the small, mean man with all his petty civil and military titles and the small, spacious man with all his flaws. ‘Do you know that when I left the island they gave him a Corsican horse doctor? You heard that?'

‘I had not in any detail,' my father admitted. ‘We are far from reliable intelligence in this little town. I have had a few letters from islanders, and some intercepted by the powers of the earth, and some smuggled out by store ship captains of my old acquaintance. But even now these missives are a peril to them. Even here, I believe I am subject to a degree of scrutiny.'

Barry O'Meara nodded ponderously and, with vividness typical of him, said, ‘I understand well the methods of those who clipped our wings but yet still want to be fully acquainted with what we do in the chicken yard!'

‘You mentioned the Corsican doctor,' my mother reminded him.

‘I did. Now that Corsican, the supposed doctor Antommarchi, is a prosector, a cutter of corpses! Our friend Fanny Bertrand
told me that he laughs wildly when the idea of death is mentioned because he has private theories about what death is and he won't share them with others. Likewise pain. They are both some sort of human delusion, it seems. If the man would share the secret, it would bring a large saving in opiates.'

Both men chuckled acridly while my mother frowned and let a shiver move through her.

‘In any case, this Corsican administered a blistering to Our Great Friend without first shaving the flesh. And to both arms simultaneously! When the man was limp with disease! That barbarous torture brought on a burning rash and OGF cried, “Am I not yet free of assassins?” But our Corsican quack – what does he do but get the giggles and call in Surgeon Arnott, of the infantry, a fellow I happen to know. Now Arnott was in Spain with the 53rd Regiment when they were more than decimated by OGF's Polish cavalry, with only some fifty-two men left standing at the end. And thus, you see,
that
is his measure of an emergency, and though an amiable fellow, he is so sanguine a man that he is likely to stand right at the lip of a soldier's grave and declare the poor fellow's condition temporary. And so it was Arnott who was brought to see OGF and afterwards reported to Governor Lowe at Plantation House that the Emperor was surprisingly well, given all rumours to the contrary. He said that OGF was suffering from hypochondria. He assured Name and Nature that if a seventy-four-gun warship were to arrive from England suddenly to take the Emperor away from the island, it would instantly put him on his legs again.'

My mother made a sound of incredulity and O'Meara went on.

‘In fact, even had such a mercy been considered by the grand Tories of the Cabinet, he would have died at sea before he reached this shore. Our friends at Longwood had long since written to the Cabinet via the Fiend to ask that the Emperor should be removed to another climate, and be permitted to take the waters at some health spa. But Sir Name and Nature refused to allow the letter to be transmitted, all under the old pretext that the suite had used the term “Emperor” in their appeal.'

I remembered that the Dr Arnott O'Meara spoke of had once paid a visit to Longwood while my father was there, and OGF had greeted him with a jocose question: ‘How many patients have you killed so far, Mr Arnott?' The surgeon replied, ‘Most of my patients happen to have been killed by you, General.'

Already now I saw my sister beside me beginning to tremble. Her father's daughter, she was overborne by the idea of the ruthless pain to whose ambush humanity was subject, and the onset of her own congestive ailments, signs of which had become visible in the past year, sharpened that. She was more at ease with death than she could ever manage to be with pain. She had become more given to tears, though she had never considered them an enemy or a self-betrayal, even in the years we were on the island. I heard the pace of her wheeze increase now, and I saw her habitual pressing of a handkerchief to her lips. I put my arm around her and enclosed her shoulders. They were almost as thin as they had been six years earlier, when OGF first descended on our garden on the island. Her undeserved affliction was settling in, and the Fiend and great men in England were guilty in part for that too, through the imperfectly sealed cottage we occupied by their implied desire.

‘And so,' Barry O'Meara proceeded, ‘those great minds, Antommarchi the Corsican goat-doser, and Arnott the smiling fool, decided between them that Our Great Friend should be given a
lavement
. But OGF had never in sickness or health admired the suggestion that he be turned onto his stomach, which was so tender now, and be interfered with at all by surgeons with such indignity, even by those he tolerated, those he did
not
consider utter charlatans.'

‘Like you,' said my father. ‘He trusted you.'

‘A
lavement
?' asked my mother softly. It seemed a kindly word.

‘An enema,' Barry rushed to say. ‘Certainly, something needed to be done. OGF had been sweating appallingly, and all his mattresses were drenched. My genial informants, Fanny and her husband Henri, also tell me that in the last months the Emperor was like a woman with child, and that everything he ate he vomited. So a
lavement
was chosen. It would never have
been had I been there. It is like trying to erase a bruise from a fist by inflicting one with a mallet! It did nothing to ease his tender stomach. And having failed with one crass remedy, they proceeded to give him castor oil to temper stomach pain, as if he were a child who had eaten too much fruit. The treatment, of course, caused OGF to contort himself into a ball at the base of the bed. The pity of it, Balcombe! The pity! Knotted up like a child, at the base of his bed.'

Jane let her most honest tears loose then – not that she had any other kind.

‘Do you want some more tea?' I asked her, but she shook her head and was mute. I dared not look at her for fear now that she would start me on the same course as her, yet I did not want to give Dr O'Meara a cause to suspend his report for sensibility's sake. Indeed, he asked my mother now, in a way that made me remember that he knew much about her from the island.

‘Should I perhaps pursue a different subject, Jane?'

‘No,' said my mother (another Jane) in a breaking voice. ‘We seek to know all, Barry. We must go through our obsequies too. If there are moans here, it is no different from what we would have uttered had we been there to witness it all. We would like to have that death defined, for other wise our imaginations are tempted to think of infinite pain.'

‘But I fear it becomes more distressing yet,' O'Meara warned my mother.

‘Even so …' said Jane, my sister.

‘Yes,' my mother agreed, ‘even so.'

O'Meara drained his punch and my father poured him another ladleful to fortify him against our distress. Then he recommenced.

‘So the Corsican quack, who at least knew that things were more serious than Arnott did, sent a message to Name and Nature at Plantation House asking Short – the island's civil doctor you'd remember – and a naval surgeon from the
Vigo
, Mitchell, to be called in. But sometimes, as I know so well, a congeries of surgeons may simply confirm the party in their worst and least
advised opinions. And in any case, battalions of surgeons could not argue with a system so depleted by aggravation and hepatitis as OGF's.'