Napoleon's Last Island (22 page)

I noticed that when in the afternoon my father came to his small office and library, I could hear all his movements, his
laying down of papers, his sitting in a chair, his cough, and the clunk and slide of his boots, all clearly transmitted through the ventilating tube. I held to a hope that my mother might join him and I would again learn something of how parents talked in the absence of their children. It would be delightful if they fought about me. But it did not happen. Soon enough my father left and did not enter the room again that day and evening.

By now I had come to believe penitently that my father's punishment did have its reason, that his intentions were not fatuous, and that I must be careful. For towards the plump man with the dimpled knuckles living in the Pavilion and its associated marquee, the simplest gestures of sportiveness or irritation could race across oceans and echo in spectacular rooms with gold-leaf mouldings glinting above the heads of mighty creatures. My actions were no longer dependably obscure from attention. And yet still I was not ready to tell my father I had come to this realisation.

To face the coming evening I had a lamp and two candles, and a pillow and palliasse and blanket to place on top of the table, where I would rest – or not – for the night. I was determined not to be frightened of Old Huff. If I had shown fears, it would have been a sort of surrender to my punishment. But rats were of the temporal world and dread of them dominated me.

Alice brought dinner.

‘I suppose you think my father is kind because he doesn't starve me,' I challenged her.

‘Miss, he is kind,' she said, engaging the use of her startling broad eyes. I had seen her pray in the manner of the Mussulmen, on a mat outside the kitchen, facing north-east across the Atlantic, penetrating Africa diagonally with her supplications, which struck home at last in Arabia.

‘You feel you must say that,' I called after her.

I burned one candle to extinction while reading and saved the other in case the lamp ran out of oil and I possessed just the one taper by which to see. In my nest on top of the table I fell asleep earlier than I expected and, mallet handle in hand,
must have slept for some hours. The night was full of rat-tread when I woke by dwindling lamplight and saw that my table was an island in a trade road of furred vermin. I could see them busy below me, twitching with that ratty inquisition of objects, that perpetual nosing for small verminous advantage. I gripped the mallet and threw it into their midst. There was certainly a squeal, but reinforced by one from me, since the mallet head fell off the handle in flight and disappeared under the wine racks. I was now in a fury. They had given me not only an absurd weapon against the little beasts but one that failed at first use!

This rage was of assistance. It impelled me to jump to the floor, with my feet surrounded by pestilential squealers, my bare flesh meeting the unspeakable pelts as I broke the siege and reached the wine rack, where I set myself lustily to demonstrate to my father that I would not be left in dim places infested by living demons with negligent weapons. So I hauled his wine bottles, one after another, from the racks and hurled them at the floor where they shattered and drenched the rats in vintages and sherry. The noise would have filled my father's small library upstairs but, sadly, would not penetrate to other rooms. I must have thrown a dozen or more before the furore of glass-splintered and claret- or port-sodden creatures died, and heavy, part-sweet, part-tannin air pleasantly filled the room. I trod tenderly, suffering only small cuts to my feet, back to the table and my bedclothes. I wiped my bloodied, sticky feet with a towel and, elated but spent from my warfare, and my awe at the damage I'd done, I lay down. I dreamed of achieving grandeur through spurned fatherly tenderness and discipline.

I woke in pinkish dawn from the cellar half-window. The rats were quiescent. Sarah entered and began at once to repair the condition of the floor in silence. She brought everything she needed for cleaning up, and a new dress for me. I had wanted her to rush out a report to my father of the destruction of bottles. But she did not want him to know, and cleared up as I harangued her.
I saw her push three dead rats into a corner. ‘Go and tell him, Sarah, go and tell him!'

She fetched me new stockings and shoes, bathed the cuts in my feet, emptied and returned my chamber-pot and brought me a new mallet which she tested against the surface of the table. She took away the lamp to fill with oil.

I sat at the table with a sense that I had cowed the rats, returned to my book and revelled in it, enforced in confidence by my survival of the night. It was mid-morning when I looked up with a shock to see the Ogre's visage, bent sideways, looking in from the cellar window. He must have been on his hands and knees, or even flat to the ground beyond the window, and there were briars around his face, though he did not seem to have been scratched.

‘Bet-see!' he called, so that I could hear him through the glass. I left my book on the chair, arranged my needlework – he need not think me anxious to rush to him – and strolled towards the half-window, looking up to it.

‘Why do you hide in the cellar?' he called.

‘I don't hide. I was placed here. Because I endangered you.'

‘Endangered me? You?'

He seemed oblivious to the possibilities my father had made so much of.

‘I thought you wanted this. Your General Gourgaud certainly did.'

‘
Do
we want a pretty girl locked in a cellar? I think not.'

For some reason the stubborn tears arrived now and the flood began, and I despised myself.

‘I am a prisoner,' he called. ‘And now you are a prisoner. That's why we are a pair, Betsy! Now, don't cry!'

‘But you have cried. I've seen you.'

‘I have cried – that is true. But you are sure to escape and I am not.'

As I remember him lying sideways amongst the briars, beside The Briars, let me from my distance of time yet again pour scorn on those who thought all he did was to extend witnessed charm as
a plan to procure freedom. There were no witnesses to where he then lay gaping in at me, a fat little man with large, volatile eyes.

‘Betsy, I see your needlework. Very nice. But I do not think you are a needlework girl.'

‘I don't pretend to be,' I confessed.

‘I must see your good father. A more decent and temperate fellow there cannot be! But with you he does too much on my behalf. I will go and speak to him.'

‘Brush yourself down first,' I ordered him.

And now he struggled upwards and I could see by the window how he had soiled his silk hose, and the knees of his breeches, while lying on the ground to talk to me. That's his concern, I thought.

With such an eminent advocate, I sat enjoying the grimmest sense of self-justification and sewed away, plunging the needle with a fury. Within an hour he was back, kneeling again at the half-window.

‘I tried to persuade him, Betsy,' he roared in through the glass panes. ‘And I think he will yield. But he argued that
his
welfare is at risk too. He may pursue this affair for another little while, but he is a tender-hearted man …'

‘Everyone says it. But I'm the proof he's not!'

I saw that doleful face and those remarkable Italian eyes which had gazed into men's souls and infused them with some unutterable concept more important than their blood and their lives and thought of their own offspring.

‘I don't care if I have to stay here forever,' I told him, totally dry-eyed now.

‘My brave creature,' he said. ‘But it will not be required. Your father is of a soul to let all people go.'

My father remained contrary to his soul, however, all that day. At dusk the lamp and the dinner arrived, and as I ate, thinking of myself in appropriately pathetic terms, I assured myself that this would be my habitation, amongst the abounding rats, forever, and the rats and my family would both pay. My kin would beg me to come up to their level of the house and I would spurn them.
I would break and devastate my father's bottles before he could empty them. I would become an island legend, the pale girl in the cellar. People would deal vengefully with my heartless father.

He opened the cellar door and came down the stairs as I finished dinner. He stood before me. The smell of his slaughtered wine had not disappeared from the space around but he did not choose to notice. He adopted sage and severe airs.

‘Do you know to be careful now, miss?' he asked.

‘I am willing to spend more time down here to discover it more fully,' I told him. ‘And to smash bottles of your wine on the heads of the rats whenever the beasts attack me.'

‘You see,' he complained, ‘you always exact a price. You never bend your stiff neck. Do you think God is amused by your style of obduracy? Where does it come from? It is not a thing of our family!'

‘It is a thing of me,' I boasted. ‘But I know how to be careful. The Emperor is a man, you are a man. I do not want to harm either of you unless forced beyond toleration.'

‘Forced beyond …? My Holy Christ. You're rich, Betsy!' He took thought. ‘I suppose such a statement from you is, after all, a small miracle!' said my father, his eyes widening. ‘And it is not only the Emperor and I who must be treated well. You must live too. You must live for many, many years. You must live in the shadow of this great thing that has befallen us. You must live on when Our Great Friend is vanished, when I am vanished, when the island is behind you. But these events will never leave you!'

I stood with a level determination, which he read as consent – and a form of consent it certainly was. On balance now I decided that there were conveniences associated with being reconciled rather than locked away. There was as well pus in one of my cuts and I wanted my mother to see and be reproached by it. And it was apparent that my father both knew of the ruin of wine and had not chosen to pursue it.

‘Come upstairs and see your mother and Jane and the boys.'

And so I emerged free and changed, chastised and intractable.

And back now to the full status of riding with the Emperor to visit the lovely yamstock Miss Robinson,
La Nymphe
. On our next journey there we encountered on the road Miss Polly Mason, less well mounted than us but in her way a grandee of the island. She lived beyond Prosperous Plain in a good and elegant house her loving father had begun to build, and which, when she was orphaned, while still a young woman capable of intimidating island carpenters, she had finished.

There grew in her quarter of the island lovely groves of ferns, and avenues of pines, and clumps of gumwoods and it had lately been rumoured that she had offered her house to the admiral as a place for the Emperor, and it might indeed have been a better place than the proposed Longwood. Though she had few visitors, those who had seen inside her house, including Mr Solomon the merchant from Jamestown, said it was full of sturdy furniture, Dutch-styled from the Cape. But her stable of horses had died off and she had not replenished it, so in a faded and unpretentious calico dress and canvas shoes she rode one of her dairy cattle across the island without a saddle. Astride her cow, her short legs, as modestly skirted as the posture permitted, stuck out comically from the cow's saggy flanks.

Encountered on the road by the Emperor, she too was interrogated about her farming. Jane and I watched the plump yet august contours of the mounted Emperor as he gazed down at Polly on her cow, and the slim, grave Gourgaud waiting, reined in, by his side.

‘How much acreage does Miss Mason have?' the Emperor wanted me to ask her.

I was rather astounded to know that she owned 350 acres – I had not presumed she was such an affluent woman.

‘I am, Yer Highness, growing vegetables for the garrison at Deadwood, on my very Deadwood acreage,' she said.

The Emperor was interested in all this and watching him, I thought, it is all supply – the making of a war is all the passage of food and fodder and cannon shells.