Napoleon's Last Island (24 page)

Long before we came to the house, we could hear a hubbub of voices, and found the ensigns and lieutenants were hauling a farm dray up towards the main entrance. It was a substantial vehicle, and as we rolled closer they swept their hats off and told us that they intended to drag the wagon in front of the portico once all the ladies had arrived and so keep them captive till dawn. The idea was heady, and carried an innocent whiff of abduction.

So we rode past them laughing breathily, and the barouche was taken and we were handed down by slave servants dressed in livery and led by a black serving woman inside the door of the house and to a parlour set aside as a dressing room for the ladies of the ball.

I felt that for the first time in my life I had arrived at last at a destination. In the dressing room I took off my travelling clothes and was helped by the Wilks's servant to put on my dress of satin and calico roses, and I was a woman amongst women, in a musk of perfume and fabric and excited wives and daughters and slaves, many of them beautiful enough to look with longing at what I wore.

Knowing that I was an initiate, that this was a rite of womanhood for me, various ladies, including Mrs Solomon and Mrs Captain Younghusband, came up to compliment me. Mrs Younghusband was a woman of the same age as Madame de Montholon and Fanny Bertrand, her husband a very fresh-faced captain, seven years younger than her. She possessed beneath her brown curls, large, shifting, limpid eyes, and as she spoke
I wondered if her gestures had been influenced by Fanny Bertrand's. Her broad arms were spread wide at the end of her imparting any modest piece of information. At tea at our place she had complained about the fleas that infested the whole Deadwood site where the camp was being built, and where she lived in a tent with her eight-year-old daughter Emily, a sweet English child rather overborne by her mother. After taking a walk on the grass, Catherine Younghusband was quick to tell us all, she would come home totally infested with fleas and have to enter the tent and throw her clothes out of the flap to be boiled up and deloused. So she was trying to persuade her husband to build her a more permanent habitation. Her husband was besotted and had the vigorous intention to save her from parasites.

At The Briars once, Napoleon had seen her from the grape arbour or the marquee and came out calling, ‘Who is this lady?'

Speaking first in French and then in Italian, in both of which Mrs Younghusband was fluent, he had ushered her into our house to give her a chance to present a recital of Italian airs on our piano in the style
grandissimo
, and played an Italian duet with little Emily. Emily was clearly a gifted child, but Mrs Younghusband herself brought from the Emperor an extraordinary compliment. ‘Ah! There is a woman of spirit.'

She had told him, as she often did with others as a conversational gambit, that she had descended from Oliver Cromwell, that enemy of the dance. But here she was, determined to be celebrated at the Plantation House ball.

Mrs Nagle, wife of a lieutenant, was also very kind, and Miss Rosebud Knipe. I had been admitted by them, and I exulted. I was meanly pleased that
La Nymphe
, Miss Robinson, was not invited; nor many of the yamstocks.

At a supreme moment, the Countess de Montholon, her compact belly leading, crossed the floor to compliment me. It was her approval that excited me most since it seemed to come from a woman more deeply emplaced in the mystery of womanhood than anyone else, including Fanny Bertrand. Madame de Montholon's voice had a small and silken quality, yet at the same
time was forceful. She said simply, ‘Oh, dear Betsy, how I envy your dress! Is it true the Emperor had it made?'

In the ballroom on the ground floor, frowning on my joy, hung the portraits of members of the Council of the East India Company, distant grey men of a seniority that yielded precedence only to the long dead. By contrast the room glittered with light, and loops of fabric canopies had been erected along its length to give it an appropriate feeling of licensed pleasure.

Fanny Bertrand had already entered from the dressing room and we found her in the garlanded ballroom, high-waisted and glowing-shouldered in fabrics of powdery blue, and around her neck and shoulders a grand, structural necklace once worn in salons superior to this one. So we chose our seats about her, having, as women are doomed to do, located our father and assessed his happiness as he chattered beside Mr Ibbetson, his fellow professional, commissary for the military, a man my father dealt with almost daily. Cups of punch were delivered to us by a number of young officers. The pretension of their uniforms seemed far removed from mud and blood, and I always wondered, and do to this day, why men wore such splendour to go to die or be maimed. My mother forbade Jane and me to drink what was brought, and more innocent concoctions were fetched from the bowl the few children present drank from. My dress did not qualify me for intoxicants.

There were two officers, two very different men indeed, one mature, one young, on that night, which I remember as the highest night of the island, before our steep decline. One of them was a lean, leather-faced officer, a major, ageless, possibly younger than my father, in a uniform that had been turned according to need and that had been used in other stations than this. It had become pink from campaigning. He was a little narrow in the face, but his features were those of a reliable human. He presented himself as Major Oliver Fehrzen and assuredly had the seasoned look of one who had campaigned in the war in Spain against my Grand Playmate from The Briars.

He asked me in a direct, decisive voice whether I would permit him to mark my card as a dance partner.

‘I'm not good at quadrilles, Major,' I warned him, ‘and I hear they'll be dancing quadrilles.'

He laughed benignly. He had amiable eyes whose gravity elevated my words pleasantly.

‘I have not been much exposed to them myself,' he confessed. And he wrote his name in a space in my card and moved on to bow to other ladies and to seek dancing partners, but without anxiety, a man merely fulfilling his pleasant duty.

Then I saw Lieutenant Croad, as did everyone. For he was the young man, a little beak-nosed but with eyes abrim with enthusiasm, who was said to be set on introducing quadrilles into the programme, no matter how much they tested the skills of an island girl. Mrs Nagle told us Croad had been training the officers and their spouses in the movements required for the dance, but he had not spread this benevolence beyond the camp. I recognised Croad as one of the courtly officers who had bowed to us in a Gallic manner on the day the Ogre arrived at the dock. His uniform was a great variation from the workman's uniform of Major Fehrzen. The epaulettes trailed gold thread down his shoulders. Everything on his clothing that could be frogged with gold was. His breeches were a dazzling white, and below the knee ended in gaiters.

His bows were as earlier most profound, and involved not just his body from the waist upwards but a genuflection of the knee, with an appropriate near kneeling of the other leg, while his gold-handled sword and golden jewel-chaised scabbard stuck up in the air so that other members of the party had to make a circuit around its point to accommodate his gallantry.

He had already greeted the Frenchwomen, Bertrand and de Montholon, with an even more extreme stretch of his limbs and more reverent smoothing of his lips against their white knuckles, and Madame de Montholon's eyes glowed when she saw him. In that she was honest. She liked, more than Fanny Bertrand, to be flattered by men. Then Croad moved on to my mother, about whom he enthused, as a number of men did too much. He charmed Jane and finally me.

‘I must say, Miss Balcombe, I have not seen in my campaigns as apt a dress as yours,' he palavered on, yet with a saving enthusiasm behind what he said. ‘Sufficiently rustic for the island, sufficiently elegant to remind us of nature but also of ceremony. I offer no promises that I will live to be an eighty-year-old general but if I do I shall celebrate each rare future encounter with such a dress.' And then, a further twist to the oratory. ‘I do not plan to have, Miss Balcombe, the memory of your splendid equipage eroded by any future encounters, however exalted.'

I could merely gape at him, uncertain as to whether to beam or not, and lower my head.

‘Thank you,' I said at last in an ungainly voice.

It had been a wonderful encomium to my dress – at least I think that's what it was as I could not absorb the words discretely – and I could neither answer him, nor escape the suspicion either, that he might be putting me in my place as a girl stuck in the mid-Atlantic.

I danced first with the rather distracted surgeon of one of the ships of the squadron, a friend of O'Meara's. The Irish surgeon was also there, laughing in a corner near my father, and being eloquent and red-cheeked. The man who held me was pleasant but too clearly saw himself as being engaged, perhaps at O'Meara's instruction, in patronising me.

The dance I looked forward to, and the one for which Major Fehrzen had signed his name, was a country reel. I knew the steps and it seemed to suit Major Fehrzen's unpretentious nature. I felt very small in his hands, hardened by unimaginable tasks in the war against the Ogre, and could feel his calluses, and yet decided to be calm, since women around me were being similarly tranquil in the hands of other men.

‘I have been up to your place, Miss Balcombe,' he told me. ‘But you probably did not see me. I was visiting the Emperor. Like everybody else, such crowds of people try to go there and have a sight of him.'

‘Are you supposed to call him the
Emperor
?' I asked. ‘I thought that soldiers were required to call him
General.'

‘Sometimes our tongue betrays us,' he said. ‘He was a great mischief-maker, indeed the mischief-maker of my lifetime. But one looks at all that – the canvas marquee and the summerhouse – an absolutely charming one, of course, but … I think you would admit it's not Fontainebleau. How remarkable it would have been if he'd come tonight.'

‘He would have come if the admiral had called him what you called him.'

‘Well,' said Major Fehrzen, lowly and with a smile, ‘we have gone from a war of cannon to a war of words.'

I said, rather proud of myself when I got it out, ‘There is always war where words come in.'

And now this mature man looked at me appraisingly. It was somehow wonderful and unutterably awkward. Yet he was looking at the face from which my opinions emerged. I was like an equal in discourse.

‘You are very serene, Miss Balcombe – for a young woman who has
the General
at the bottom of her garden.'

‘He doesn't act up to the level of his repute. If this island were the world, he would still be interested, and be its ultimate authority on population and vegetable gardening and goats.'

He smiled and nodded his head emphatically. I found myself quite taken with the experience of being held by this large, weathered frame. In spite of the inequality of strength, there was an equality of conversation and, I suppose, of will.

‘May I ask you blunt questions?' I asked as we danced. I was playing with the limits of my social gifts, but it was a very hot night and there was something in us all that did not mind uttering bold sentiments in pursuit of the real.

‘What manner of blunt things do you have in mind, Miss Balcombe?' he asked.

‘I wonder, were you wounded? Were you wounded by the servants of the mischief-maker? Or near to being wounded? And where did that happen?'

‘I had a scratch, I admit,' said Major Fehrzen. ‘An age ago.'

‘What does a scratch mean?'

‘I suppose it means a glancing wound from a fragment of ball. A fortunate wound.'

‘And where did this take place?'

‘Have you heard of Salamanca?'

‘Of course,' I said, though I was uncertain of its location. ‘And if it was a scratch, then you did not need to undergo treatment from a surgeon?'

‘Perhaps a few weeks. It was combined with a touch of fever.'

‘So you soldiers suffer from scratches and touches. It's a wonder so many of you manage to get killed.'

He laughed at this. ‘I was adjutant of my regiment at Salamanca,' he told me, ‘so I was protected by the line. The colonel, seeing my wound in the upper thigh, poured brandy on it from a flask he carried. He believed that was essential treatment for all wounds.'

The regimental band at the end of the ballroom, after demanding a crescendo of whirling from us, now paused. I was exhausted not only by the dance but by the experience of being even more a new person than I had been an hour before, and so Captain Fehrzen returned me to my seat.

‘If I come to The Briars again,' said Fehrzen, returning to his long leather-faced solemnity, ‘I shall come and see you, Miss Balcombe, and your sister and delightful mother.'

I feared my coming encounter with Lieutenant Croad. It was hard to imagine such a lustrous, smooth-faced young man living under canvas at Deadwood, amongst the fleas Mrs Younghusband had complained of, and, further, dancing with a rancorous little girl like me. The dance he had put his name down for was certainly a quadrille and I barely knew what that was. I was grateful to revert to girlhood and go to my mother.

‘Could you please tell Lieutenant Croad that I cannot fulfil my obligation to him?'

My mother raised her eyebrows. Her face was flushed though she had had only the one dance, and that with General Bertrand, and I could tell she too felt that she was not quite up to the level. Just the same, she asked me why.

‘Tell him I have faintness, fatigue and a fever.'

‘That's a lot to have,' said my mother.

The quietly spoken Madame de Montholon sitting nearby had overheard my pleadings. She reached out and took my hand.

‘Oh, it is nothing,' she said. ‘It is a cotillion, but of shorter duration. If you can dance the cotillion, dear friend, you can dance a quadrille.'