Napoleon's Last Island (28 page)

‘Why then is there no lightning or thunder here?' asked Captain Younghusband as if he had found a positive attribute of the island to appease his wife with.

‘It is my belief,' said Croad, ‘that the galvanic fluid of electricity from the sky is attracted by Diana's Peak and the more sharply conical hills about here, and so conducted through the ground
and thus into the sea bed without ever concerning God's humble servants at the lower levels of the island.'

‘Then why does this same immunity to lightning not operate in the mountains of Italy?' asked O'Meara reasonably.

‘For geologic and conductive reasons,' Croad told us authoritatively.

A number of people agreed that it must be so, that it made sense, since the great rocks of the island were of such regular shape and could carry away the electricity of lightning very smoothly. Having been successful in the matter of lightning, Croad rashly addressed himself to that other fiery element, Mrs Younghusband.

‘Perhaps,' he declared to her, ‘many a suffering woman, the life partner of a soldier, tells similar tales, madam. The man has chosen soldiering whereas the woman chooses the man. The military is by nature a test of endurance not only for the soldier but for his loyal followers.'

Mrs Younghusband's eyes coruscated. ‘Do you think you have sufficient knowledge of encampments and marriage to sermonise on the matter, Mr Croad?'

Croad, too used perhaps to applause, held his hands up and bowed to the lady as if willing to absorb her chastisement. But Mrs Younghusband's anger was not diffused.

‘Only another woman who has lived in encampments could, or indeed
should
, make any significant comment on the suffering of military wives. Soldiers are the least qualified of all to do so, since they are already half-enamoured of the squalor of it all.'

I turned to O'Meara and whispered my plan to make Mrs Younghusband's quarrelsomeness a nothing. ‘I will ride to Longwood and demand he come.'

I had been looking for a pretext to summon Our Friend.

‘Today of all days you must avoid doing that very thing,' murmured O'Meara. ‘The man
wants
to be left with his ghosts and his absences. Besides, should the Emperor come, the admiral will not address him with his proper title. So it's as impossible as the ball.'

Our conversation was gradually becoming public and overtaking the acrimony between Croad and Mrs Younghusband.

‘But he will do it for me,' I asserted.

The Irishman smiled his soft ironic smile. ‘No, he won't do it, even for you, Betsy. It is your festival but not his.'

Mrs Younghusband forced a smile at me across the table, but there was a warning in it, something I did not appreciate in my own home, a suggestion that she disliked whispering – given that she was never guilty of it.

The arrival of the Bertrands in the mid-afternoon improved the uneasy balance of the day. Fanny Bertrand, despite her passion for gossip, also had power to draw people in the direction of their more spacious feelings. That is, she overwhelmed the squalling Mrs Younghusband.

After the Plantation House ball, Lieutenant Croad and Major Fehrzen had come regularly to The Briars. One of the reasons I liked Croad better than my sister did was this perhaps excessive but unfeigned enthusiasm he had for the natural habitat of the island. If we went out walking or riding with him, trying to sight animals, I would watch his lips moving in Latinate definitions, fresh and replete with the blood of a boy on the edge of what it is to become a young man. There was both prettiness and cleverness in Croad, but it was clear he was not flippant or shallow.

Oliver Fehrzen had more solidity and less colour. He would sit and converse with my father with an air of workaday sagacity and of having been tried in the furnace. We could tell he was a man made – by merit but not by fortune – for greater rank.

‘I would suggest,' Lieutenant Croad told us as on horseback we patrolled the rocky, eroded edge of Devil's Glen, the young officer leaning over in his saddle to inspect the leaves of black cabbage trees and ferns, ‘that your little island here is exciting in two respects. One finds many invertebrates which, had I visited the place fifty years past, I might have had the honour of first discovery.'

He decided to dismount to inspect a complex of rocks, and after doing so, with easy, undistracted grace, helped Jane and me down from our ladies' saddles. On days of slack vigilance I had sometimes ridden astride Tom with a saddle of burlap, and enjoyed the liberty of it. Now we dismounted from our polite saddles with a gentle, audible slide of fabric.

‘For example, look here!' Croad cried.

On a ledge of moist rock, a high-kneed spider, reddish and vigilant, could be seen. The golden sail spider, Croad told us,
Argyrodes mellissii
, found nowhere else on the globe! It
did
look plausibly golden, enough to justify the poetic name. It could have been
Argyrodes croadii
, had Lieutenant Croad reached the island just five decades past. (He was oblivious of the fact he had not even been born fifty years ago.) A wire bird alighted in the glen and stalked around a fern on its fragile little legs. ‘The cousin of the plover,' sang Croad. And then there was the St Helena petrel and hoopoe, he declared, looking into the air as if in the hope of conjuring them up.

All this authentic learning was at the same time uttered with such circularities of hand gesture and solemnity that Jane and I were driven to hilarities. And yet if you had asked me, I would have said in my ignorance that I felt a marked affection for him. It was like reverence, and it increased as he spoke of the
labidural herculeana
, the St Helena giant earwig, which lived in the gumwood trees and was believed to obliterate everything in their shadow except other earwigs and the sticky flies that savoured the gumwood fruit.

‘The earwig was identified by a Dane named Fabricius only seventeen years ago,' Croad lamented. ‘The giant of earwigs, you know – three inches long.'

‘I don't like them,' said Jane, shivering. They had malicious-looking pincers behind them. I had thought to say that it was strange that the island's claim to the gigantic extended only to an insect. I was sure that was a symbol of something. But Jane again jumped in and commiserated with him that the Dane had forestalled him. And behind his epaulettes and gestures I saw a
serious man of ferocious, diverse ambition. The Emperor, I was sure, would like him. For the longer I spent with him, the more I doubted if at any deep level I could match his spaciousness and his passion and his intellect. I also doubted his fitness for soldiering. I could not imagine him commanding hard-headed British soldiers of the kind we passed on the way to Longwood. And I was uncertain yet whether he was with us to court me or to court Jane or the earwig. Like every loud girl, I doubted my capacity to interest men; it was only later in life that I discovered that loud girls had an advantage, however momentary, with some types.

‘Is there anywhere left on earth where you can go to find a creature that you can attach your name to?' I asked, since his desire to do so was clearly so fervent.

‘There is Australia,' he said. ‘It is in botany and zoology a
terra incognita
. There are the cores of Africa and Amazonia. There is the coast of the Russian colonies, in Siberia and Alaska, fertile with unclassified insects and with minute flowers to which the Indians of the region could lead one. But, alas, a soldier is limited in his discoveries to the places where he is sent.'

‘If the Indians have already found them, are you entitled to put your name to them?'

Croad considered this question.

‘Well, there is no denying the aborigines have known these plants from eons past. But in terms of Latin classifications, they do not yet belong to the European system, and it is in the European system we plant-sniffers seek our fame. In the meantime, the indigenes are free to carry on with their traditional names, and are unlikely to be distressed if far away, in some institute, some rarely encountered bird or Arctic midge is labelled
croadii
.'

My mother rode out with us on one of our excursions and, giving Croad tea later, asked, ‘If the natives lead you to a species, will you leave their dances unchanged?'

She was teasing him about his missionary fervour for the quadrille.

‘The quadrille exists because we are admirers of all things French, Mrs Balcombe. I don't think this is true of the native
Esquimaux or of the savages at Africa's centre or of the aborigines of America and Australia.'

Jane reacted by asking him a sudden question.

‘Do you think the man who lives at the centre of Africa will become an Englishman in time? Or a Frenchman?'

Some serious weighing up went on beneath Croad's extravagant epaulettes.

‘I think he would be better off,' he said at last, ‘as an English constitutional Protestant than as a French Jacobin or as a member of the Roman church. For he has already in his existence been seriously enough damaged by demonism and superstition.'

‘That is a good answer, lieutenant,' said my sister, who was certainly finding her voice in his presence.

Croad looked at her with dewy, slightly moist eyes. He did not feel patronised at all, which was in his favour.

When we went into the house for tea, my mother drew me to one side. A hazy blueness invaded from the day outside.

‘You should know, Betsy,' she told me, ‘Croad comes here to court you, not Jane. The reverse is true with that fool Gourgaud. I thought it would be useful to you if I made that clear.'

‘And what of Major Fehrzen?' I asked her. I felt a strange pleasure and shock at her clarifying of Croad's purposes.

‘You are the girl that interests Major Fehrzen too. He is a decent fellow and will play a waiting game, and will not require any gesture from you until you are some years older.'

Yet my meetings with Major Fehrzen were purposefully educational by contrast to those with Croad. The major included me in complex conversations of European politics. On those occasions when his references to statesmen rose above my level of learning, my mother always took up the necessary duties of intellection, of response and comment and question. Fehrzen was a man so earnest that he seemed to carry his own share of the burden of England, and the question of its perfecting through reform. He excited us by asking us whether the Allied powers and their Congress might not give the General the chance to live somewhere that did not smack as strongly of exile as did our island.

‘You see, he speaks so much of his desire to be an English gentleman,' said Fehrzen.

My mother was now irreverent enough towards the Ogre to say, ‘It is a pity it's a course he did not choose twenty-five years past.'

‘Ah,' said Fehrzen, smiling, ‘but he had ambitions then. Now he will never rise again – it would be fanciful to believe he could. He was an exile a hundred days on Elba, but there he had had not a thousand troops to guard him but a thousand troops of his own, and it was a business well within his powers of planning to take them to the south of France and commence his restoration. That is the act of ingratitude which may so drive our ministers to sternness. So, here he has merely maps and pins, and Bertrand and de Montholon, Las Cases and Gourgaud. Yet I think it would be a better concept altogether to permit him to live in our kingdom than to have him settle in America, where his brother Jerome lives, and the Americans themselves, tempting him to some new aggression against Britannia.'

Though it was mere common sense, I was quite dispirited to hear it confirmed by an admirable soldier that I would never see a risen Emperor.

Fehrzen's hungry mind extended itself also, when he came to dinner, to the matter of slaves. My father, in his practical and unpoetic way, was quite driven by this subject and though he had been provedore to companies whose slave ships reprovisioned at the island, insisted that he had no taste for slaving. ‘We are told,' my father discoursed, ‘that Jehovah described Job as “perfect, upright, fearing God and eschewing evil”. Yet Job was a slaveholder, say the slave traders, often a rare recourse on their part to the Bible. “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves,” says the Book of Leviticus. And there are other passages of Leviticus I do not want to cite before the ladies.'

Fehrzen declared in agreement, ‘Slavery was one of the unquestioned terms of trade of the biblical times. But it is not the reason for calling people godly.'

Would I ever be able to sit at a table and converse so earnestly, so neatly, with a man who wanted to be considered godly?

My father said, ‘Some say that for the conscientious master, slavery offers more challenges for the exercise of virtue – that we must mind them as we mind our children. And that this is not as true of the owner of the mine with his miners, or the man who owns a mechanical loom shop and his weavers.'