Napoleon's Last Island (29 page)

They sat together in fraternal Whiggish agreement, two good citizens letting their ideas settle around them.

Suddenly my father asked Major Fehrzen, ‘Do you think that when they are alone in Longwood, the French speak of escape?'

‘I think there must be at least a daydream of escape,' said the major, and his eyes flicked a moment in my direction and he smiled in a manner I could not interpret. ‘But the means available have been limited.'

‘I can think of undignified means a lesser man than the Emperor would take,' my father declared. ‘If I were in his place I might try to hide myself in an empty barrel and be carried down to a transport. But I am an undistinguished man and that is the sort of comic escape ordinary men attempt. Our Friend could never countenance the indignity of being discovered in a barrel. It would become the symbol of his life, and all who hated him could depict him forever as a monkey-like creature bobbing amidst the staves. It is easy to think of escape. But harder to think of an escape worthy of him.'

Fehrzen remarked pensively, ‘America is full of escape plots, but then no one there has seen this island – a rock designed as if God had a hatred of beaches. If we had one broad strand, some sort of rescue might be possible even though our fast cruisers would be on patrol.'

‘We have our consuls in America though, and they must hear these things.'

‘But then there is Brazil, of course, Miss Balcombe,' he addressed me, or more accurately, my father through me. ‘They daydream of having the General as their leader.'

My mother commented that Fanny Bertrand was sure the Emperor would not go to Brazil without Madame de Montholon. Major Fehrzen nodded. ‘While your friend's brother lives in
America, then there is always a chance of mischief … We could not, however, have more troops on this island without, I think, sinking it.'

Such were the colloquia to which I was supposed participant but more witness, as Major Fehrzen tried to win the approval of my parents, and my father attempted to gain the respect of Major Fehrzen. They did not employ such efforts on Lieutenant Croad.

Before me on the wall of Longwood hung a vast map of Saxony, and in his white dressing-gown and a red turban on his head, Our Friend was instructing me where to place the coloured pins on the map. Gourgaud stood by him. Now that he had to share the house with all of them, with the de Montholons and the Bertrands so often to dinner, he seemed to have even less the style of an adult than he had had at The Briars.

None of these thoughts deflected me from my task, since the place names were printed in Gothic script and I had to be alert. As the Emperor directed me, I ran about placing black pins to represent Prussia, following instructions as to where the red French pins should go in relation to Erfurt and Eisenbach and Jena, and the blue Austrian ones with Bamberg at the centre. Each pin represented a corps, which I advanced as ordered. I had got the idea by now, and moved Lannes' corps up on the right to Auerstadt. Even had I not already known the Ogre had won dazzlingly, I would have guessed it from the dispositions. So I got into an almost meditative state of exaltation, and for some reason my father and Fehrzen's dialogue returned to me, so that I said suddenly, as if I were a year younger, ‘Before you escape from us, will you say goodbye to me?'

‘Before I
escape
? How can I escape from here, Betsy?'

‘I don't know, but the world has plans to come for you, and when we add in your own plans … surely …'

‘Surely we have confusion,' he told me. ‘It is all absurd, Betsy.'

‘But you would say that.'

He took me by the shoulders and stared into me with his large dark eyes, limpid and intense at the same time. ‘No, it is all
absurd, and you do not help me by pretending it is not.' He went and sat by the window and moved some of the papers there.

‘The admiral, as an example, gave me an English paper with a story by a man I have never met declaring that I had told him I would escape to Africa in a basket hung from a balloon. It is a good idea if I could find a balloon gondolier, or have one secreted in by ship, and if that balloon would kindly travel twelve thousand miles in the teeth of the trade winds. Then, this fellow says I claimed I would civilise the Negroes of Africa, recruit an army and form an empire there, and call in my supporters and my family to help me be Pharaoh – the Charlemagne of Africa's hip!'

He shook his head. Gourgaud remained po-faced and I felt he was indifferent to the conversation, to the hopes the Emperor at least pretended to mock.

‘This is the standard of escape plan suggested to me and attributed to me!' OGF said, pawing at a page of transcription. ‘If one has never left the English counties, a journey from St Helena to Africa seems a small thing. But when you are located in this island … then you know the world's dimensions.'

He put a hand on mine and continued, ‘Place two blue pins by the crossroads west of the River Saale. Not there. No, a little to your right. There. Jean Lannes' Fifth Corps. That's right. Yes, both sides of that road.'

‘But there is only one pin to a corps unless a cavalry division is involved,' I told him, quoting back his own rules.

‘But two together means a corps spreadeagling a road. All right, put it on the north side of the road to Apolda. Yes, you would be a splendid lieutenant, Betsy. Come. Don't worry with the pins anymore. We'll win Jena tomorrow.'

He was restless. He stood up and gazed out the window to the west. Gourgaud stalked him. The Emperor opened the shutters and pointed out over the low trees beyond the fringes of the plateau on which Longwood stood. Along its edge a line of Chinese could be seen, half-a-dozen men, carrying the vegetable peelings, the bottles, the discarded paper, cheese rinds and night waste of Longwood to a nearby gully.

‘It has been proposed to me, not by any of my suite but by well-meaning outsiders, that I could disguise myself as one of those refuse-carrying Chinese. If I will not go to Plantation House because the admiral will not honour me with my proper title, why would I pretend to take on the appearance of someone other than I am, and wear a conical hat and slink under a pail of rubbish down into the gully and to Jamestown? There are, you see, a thousand chances, broad and narrow. The question is, should they be entertained?'

‘This is exactly what my father says,' I confessed. ‘That your escape must honour your past.'

He made a gesture with his hand at the outer day and the far sea.

‘And how do I know that any agent of rescue is not an assassin in disguise? How do I know that three or four leagues from the shore they will not throw me into the sea?'

Still, I could not believe that behind the regular rehearsals of battles past, schemes of escape did not plague each hour.

‘You can use two pins if you like,' he groaned. ‘For Augereau's Seventh Corps.'

As I left that day I could see, as well as soldiers of the 53rd marching forward from across the natural causeway to the east to relieve the guard, some of the Chinese working on breaking up garden beds in the arid and disordered skirts of Longwood. The Emperor said he liked the Chinese and believed they would introduce an oriental flair into his garden. From the shade of a gumwood tree at the side of the house Emmanuel emerged. There was a strange hunger and discontent on his face.

‘Mademoiselle Balcombe,' he called as one of the French grooms appeared from the back of the house with my horse. ‘Where is your sister?'

‘She is not well today,' I told him briskly. He raised his jaw sideways to me, in a sort of challenge, an onset of hostility.

I wondered whether for a kind word he might change his demeanour. But I could not find that word to say.

I said to him, ‘Monsieur Las Cases,' as if to remind him to try to behave well, and went to pass him by.

He said, ‘You believe you can travel through life artlessly. Yet there is a price to be paid for all that mischief and impudence of yours.'

It was the sort of accusation that made me set my face and step forward in defiance, in spite of the accuracy of what he had said.

‘It is easier to be blunt with some people than with others,' I told him.

He lowered his voice. ‘You and your sister were discussed at dinner. They talked as if I were not there, or as if I were not one of them. They entered upon a discussion as to which of you was the more charming. Your sister was described as “sweet”, and you were called “alluring”. Do you wish to be called “alluring”? Your sister was declared “enchanting” by General Gourgaud, but you possessed, said one I shall not name, “
une allure vertigineuse
”.'

In desperation to make him stop, I found the kind word that had eluded me previously.

‘They should have had more care than to talk like that in front of you.'

‘But they talked like that just the same. To them you are meat. And one of the men at the table declared – and I leave you to guess which one – “If I wanted to marry a slave, I would choose the taller sister, but if I wished to become a slave myself, I would approach Betsy.” And the same person then said, “I suspect that His Majesty has the same feeling as mine.” And there was laughter at the table but the Emperor did not protest. So they think of you as just a woman, do you understand? They think of you as a woman.'

For a second it seemed as if he might begin to cry. I had my own confusion to conceal from him. I knew that St Denis, the one the Emperor called Ali, and Novarrez stood behind OGF's chair at dinner and would have heard all this, and I wondered if the women had been there, Madame de Montholon and Madame Bertrand? Surely not Madame Bertrand. For she would tell me such things. Unless her sense of delicacy intervened.

My mind had flickered about the idea of being desired, but now my sense of outrage submerged that sinister ambition. For I never wanted to be desired in a way that was reflected to me by the little Count Las Cases.

‘You are a poisonous child,' I hissed at him, but I was fearful that he seemed to know, from the flush and gleam and misery of his face, that he had altered me. I could not think of the Emperor in the same way as I had when placing the pins that morning. How could he ever be approached again, on his own or in the company of others?

I went and took my horse and rode home in confusion behind one of the twins, who was riding bareback ahead. Remaining tatters of pride prevented me from turning back and questioning him and trying to dissolve my discomfort – which seemed broader than my very body – in tears.

I was still overburdened by this encounter with the young Las Cases when Madame Bertrand next visited my mother at The Briars. I was sent for to join them at the table, and I grunted at Sarah and remained where I was, determinedly reading in the parlour, until Alice was back with a note, and said to me, ‘You better come now, miss, or your mama get over-cross with you.'

‘Over-cross' was Alice's excellent term for fury.

I waited in the hallway before I entered the drawing room, clenching all my muscles for the entry I must make. I went in, insubstantial as a ghost but also feeling, as I had since I had been confronted by Emmanuel, vaster than the island, bloated with his inferred weight of the desire of the French. I was relieved to hear that Madame Bertrand and my mother were talking about other things, about abrasive Mrs Younghusband, who had become unpopular with the garrison by her quarrel with the Nagles.