Napoleon's Last Island (3 page)

The committee of doctors, so O'Meara told us, reached a consensus that the Emperor should rise and be shaved. He told them he was too weak and that he preferred to shave himself but lacked the strength. When Antommarchi and Arnott prodded his liver, the Emperor screamed – it was like a stab from a bayonet – and began to vomit. ‘What did they all do? Why, nobody worried – they thought it a good sign. And when OGF told them, “The devil has eaten my legs,” they thought it was poetry, not an omen. Arnott reached the dazzling conclusion that the disease lay entirely in the Emperor's mind. And when Arnott saw Henri Bertrand and the butler Marchand helping OGF walk round the room, he told the others he thought the patient was improving. Arnott did not understand that it was raw courage itself that caused his patient to walk, that he was taking his last steps up Golgotha. So, the surgeons told Sir Hudson Fiend that his prisoner's pallor and decline were deceits of a disaffected mind. Whereas OGF well knew what was wrong with him. For here, my dear Balcombes, was a great mind, vaster in gifts and power of imagination than the squalid little shambles of their intellects. Not one of them ever asked what the patient thought! For twenty days he told them that it was
fegato
, his liver. But what would he know?'

‘And was it the liver?' asked my father, deeply invested in O'Meara's narration and enduring it under his conflicting identities as a man befriended, a friend betrayed, a devotee – nonetheless – to the end. My mother was for now silenced by a similar order of grief and confusion. ‘I mean, entirely the liver?'

‘Oh no, it was sadly the stomach too.' O'Meara grew thoughtful. ‘Oh, how lucky we were to ride forth with him in those earlier days! I remember watching you two young women accompanying him one day over the edge of the ravine and into that abomination of boulders known as the Devil's Glen. It was a sight, the three of you, the balance of all he knew and, well, your unworldliness
then, in that arena of chaos – that affects me now. As you see, I am close to tears. And to think that OGF reached a stage where he could scarcely bear the fatigue of a ride in the carriage for half an hour, with the horses at a walk, and then could not walk from the carriage into his house without support. Remember his
confiseur
Pierron, who made those fantastical delicacies for him? Towards the end all that was nothing to OGF – he could digest only soups and jellies, served in those Sèvres bowls on which were painted records of his glories. Both the contents of the bowl and the ornamentation inadequate, alas, to nourish him any further! Our Great Friend choked and gagged and starved for lack of a capacity to swallow, and like many desperate patients he said unkind things. And when he vomited it was black matter, alike to coffee grounds.'

‘How could that not have alerted Dr Arnott and the Corsican?' my mother protested.

‘They were associated in denial,' O'Meara explained. ‘You must understand that each time they saw Name and Nature, he ranted with all the energy he possessed that the illness was a trick to garner the world's concern. A pretence. That has an influence on men's thoughts, on the thought of surgeons of limited skill. Sir Hudson Fiend wondered about moving him into that newly built house near Longwood, but the Emperor's suite knew his condition was terminal, and so did – in their own way – far better surgeons than the claque of asses assigned to the poor fellow. And so did Sir Hudson Fiend, because though he could not stop pretending that the Emperor was a malingerer, he knew in his waters that some fatal stage had been entered on. So he moved himself and his odious chief of police, Sir Thomas Reade, into the new house and waited there. His systems of persecution were close to bringing him a complete result.'

Jane still nursed her tears. We were all pale. Even my little brothers listened soundlessly to O'Meara, to whom they had never in all our time knowing him extended that compliment before.

‘De Montholon told me in a letter – I give away no secret; it has been written in the French papers − that at four o'clock on
one of those last mornings the Emperor called him and related with astonishing and desperate grief that he'd just seen his Josephine and that she would not embrace him. She had disappeared when he reached for her, he said, but not before telling him that they would see each other again,
de nouveau
. De Montholon reminded him that
de nouveau
did not mean
bientôt
. Then he and others set to change the Emperor's soaked bedclothes and replace the sweat-drenched mattress. This is what it had come to. Better, wrote dear Bertrand to me, that he had been killed by a cannonball, obliterated at dusk on the day of that final battle six years past than die hunched in the bottom half of his bed.'

We could see that O'Meara was nearing an end to his narration. Jane's unpretentious and authoritative tears increased. My mother's face held a blue pallor, and my father glowed with a revived unhealthy ruddiness made up of bewildered and conflicting thought and brandy.

‘So, OGF was persuaded to move to a new bed in the drawing room since that was more airy. He would let only de Montholon and Marchand the butler help him – a good man altogether, that Marchand. He permitted them to swathe his legs with hot towels.

‘Our dear friends had had an altar set up in the next apartment,' O'Meara said. ‘An Italian priest had landed on the island after we went. Apparently he is a clodhopper, yet the Emperor liked him. If he were not irrational in his friendships, OGF, some of us would not be his friends, would we? And the priest was ordered to say Mass every day. Well, the Emperor had never renounced the Church of Rome, even if he
had
imprisoned the Pope himself.'

‘Mercy, Barry,' my mother pleaded. ‘You must take us now to the point.'

Yet O'Meara, with a sure instinct, was out to make us share in every detail, as relayed by friends on the island and by the French suite. So we heard how the surgeons decided next to give OGF calomel, mercury chloride, in a desire to make the poor man vomit more black grounds, as if these too were part of a mental attitude that must be corrected. But they had overdosed him with ten grains of the stuff, which he could barely swallow
and which, when he did, caused him to vomit up both the black matter and blood. After that, he refused to see the corps of attendant doctors. He began to think O'Meara was still on the island, and kept calling for him.

‘He began thinking you Balcombes were still on the island too. “And Guglielmo Balcombe, where is he?” he asked. Honestly, he had such affection for you, William, and hoped he had never wronged you. “Has he really left? When did it happen? And Madame Balcombe too? How very strange. She really has gone.”'

My parents lowered their eyes. They did not take equal joy in the Emperor's confused remembrance. O'Meara recognised it – he had said something that meant more to the Balcombe parents, and indeed their children, than he could tell.

‘They moved him to the drawing room because there was less damp. On the day before his death, he had sunk into a coma and the shutters were opened to let the light and the island's air in, which could not harm him now, it having done its damage. And off beyond the railings stood the new version of Longwood House, where the Fiend camped, biting his nails. He was so restless for
it
to happen that he rode across to the real Longwood and stood at the door listening for the advance of death inside, yet knowing he would not be admitted. He would ride off again, but be back within an hour or so. Meanwhile, my dear friends, OGF was on his camp bed, which sat so low to the ground, but which bore four mattresses to elevate him.'

The green silk curtains which we remembered from his time in the Pavilion were now draped. A few seconds before the time of the evening gun from Ladder Hill, said O'Meara, OGF expired. Fanny Bertrand was in the room, half-Irish, half-imperial Fanny, a woman fit for ceremoniousness, and she remembered, as he breathed out and the breath was not succeeded, to stop the clock in his room, the one he'd always shown off to us, the alarm clock. It read eleven minutes before six.

By the time O'Meara reached this stage, we women were choking and my father's head was still down and the boys, William, Tom, Alex, were pale, old enough now to be awed out of
boyishness. I thought how noble a man my father, Billy Balcombe –
Cinq Bouteilles
, as OGF called him – was. He blamed the Emperor for nothing, for no portion of the blight on our own lives.

The tale was briskly finished. O'Meara seemed to know, he must get to an end if he did not wish to provoke some unpredictable contrary felling amidst my parents – for all he knew, a frantic quarrel was possible. Marchand and the other butlers had carried the body from the death bed to a new camp bed. The priest laid a crucifix on the breast of the corpse and left the room. Outside he recited the rosary. Name and Nature turned up at the door of Longwood but was denied entry by Bertrand, who told him the autopsy must proceed. This dissection took place in a room we acutely remembered – where the billiard table had once been, and the maps on which I'd stuck pins to represent the movement of hordes of men around the countryside near Jena and Auerstadt.

Afterwards, Surgeon Short, one of the group, writing that the Emperor's liver was grossly swollen, came under great pressure from Sir Hudson, Name and Nature, to alter his report. The Fiend thought he might somehow be blamed for that distended organ. Short refused and left the report in Sir Hudson's hands, and according to Short, Name and Nature himself changed the words, crossing out Short's verdict. Fortunately, Short had the final chance to write on the document that the words obliterated had been suppressed by the Fiend's orders.

Meanwhile, the autopsy over, the dead man was moved back to his bedroom, which had been set out in the manner of a mortuary chapel and draped in black. The next morning Name and Nature came in with a posse of fifteen officials, including Sir Tom Reade, and declared the corpse was ‘the General', as he still called him even in death, and asked both his party individually and Marshal Bertrand to confirm it. Reade was not fully happy, for there was no achievable happiness in such a man. He appeared in part to believe that his enemy, OGF, had taken the game to the extreme now. In a bid for world sympathy, he had died. The soldiers, the sailors and the farmers, the Letts, the Robinsons, old Polly Mason, Reverend Jones, keeper of the sheep
and goats, the Porteouses, the Solomons, the Ibbetsons, the Knipes, the Dovetons and all the rest were let in to see the chin-strapped corpse dressed in military style, lying on the old blue cloak from the great victory of his youth, Marengo, and dressed by Marchand and the others in the green coat of a colonel of the chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, with white facings, the sash, the
Légion d'honneur
, the cavalry boots, and with the bicorn hat across his lower stomach. Marshal Bertrand and Comte de Montholon stood by him, in their uniforms, and in a gown of mourning, inimitable Fanny, the best-dressed woman even in bereavement that the island had ever seen, and the most faithful.

I imagined the yamstocks – you remember, the island-born? − processing through those rooms that were known to us, gawping at the maps on the wall, the books, the peepholes in the shutters he used for watching the garrison and to see me win the ladies' race at Deadwood from which all the glory had long since been sucked. They must have known, those islanders, that their world was about to shrink. The garrison would go, the squadron would sail away, and all items would plummet in cost.

A death mask had had to be made, and quickly. The first was not successful, so Novarrez, doorkeeper of Longwood, shaved him for a second mask undertaken with pulverised gypsum. But the processes of death were underway and by that afternoon the body had to be placed promptly in a coffin.

Hearing this, we groaned and cast our eyes about. This was more of mortality than we could bear.

‘Enough, enough,' said O'Meara, as if to himself. ‘You have made us,' said my mother, ‘devour the entire bitter loaf.'

‘As we must,' growled my father.

One quick, abominable detail: they had removed the heart to send to his wife and now placed it in the room near the corpse, with a cloth over it. During the night, a rat emerged in the room and grabbed the heart half off its silver dish. ‘That rat, the very image of the Fiend, then went on to devour half the dead man's ear … You see? You see?'

And we did see. That representative of darkness, in eating heart and ear, passion and the senses, provided gruesome echoes of the cramping of ambitions of self-redemption on the Emperor's part by a paltry and choleric Englishman.

Finally it was easier to listen. So we heard that the soldiers of two regiments had carried him on their shoulders to the hearse, which had made its way into Geranium Valley, ever after to be called the Valley of the Tomb, with friends and servants weeping behind it. Name and Nature rampaged through Longwood, being free to do so at last, and looked at all that the Emperor had set aside before he died, including a gold snuffbox for his London friend Lady Holland. Then he rifled through papers to see if he could discover plans of escape which could be used to justify the strangulation process he had put in place. ‘And the fact that he could find nothing suggestive of it goes to explain the attacks which now appear upon him, Name and Nature, in all honest newspapers.'

O'Meara spoke as if he were not himself one of the chief attackers.

‘
Consummatum est
,' he sang conclusively. ‘It is consummated.'

He helped himself to more punch.

I came to our island, St Helena, which the Portuguese had prophetically named to honour the mother of the Emperor Constantine, as barely more than an infant; three years of age. I assume I can remember our arrival sharply, but I cannot say whether some of the details later relayed by my mother have been taken by me and labelled as memory. With that qualification, I can say that when I was brought up on deck to see the island, which had risen from the sea during the night and presented itself in a brilliant dawn, I stood holding the hand of one of the young sailors my parents liked and trusted, and the closer the island got the more it looked like a deliberate exercise in dizzying cliffs, and the more their sheer faces seemed to deny any chance of a safe landing. I stared up at the huge nose of terrifying rock rising behind inner mountains, and high saddles between them. The island began to seem less like a brief interruption of the Atlantic Ocean and to occupy a major part of the sky above. I imagined we would have to pass over those peaks and precipices to get to any habitation. And if that were not alarm enough, the young man told me that one mountain beyond the astounding cliffs consisted of the face of a Negro giant at rest.

This man carried me down into the cutter which threw itself about madly on the writhing Jamestown Roads, as for some reason naval men called not quite secure harbours, and my mother assured me I would not be devoured. The island was not a resting giant after all. But for the Balcombes the time would come when the clumsy fable of the sailor would be made flesh, and the island would become the devourer.

The chief port was a very narrow affair. Beyond the dock one crossed a stone bridge with a trickle of water below and, through an arched gate, entered the chief street. Jamestown sat in a slot that had tried its best to be a valley. But its wide Main Street and shallow cross lanes provided a narrow vista of sky and interior, a V of sea in a gun-sight of rock. Set on an island in the mid-Atlantic where all possibilities of wind existed, this town went for most of the year without more than an occasional breeze. Its main street was of white stucco but there was a serious fortification on a terrace above the port called the Castle. My father's warehouse was here at the beginning of the town, but we did not have to live in this pocket, amongst immutable rocks, looking up at terraces where the fortresses and artillery stood. We would live in open space beyond. Meanwhile, the British cannon above us considered that strangulated town and the sleeping Negro giant worth keeping!

The slaves of the island were mostly the children of people brought from Madagascar, East Africa or India by the ships of the East India Company. Even as we landed at St Helena, in London slavery as a trade was about to be enacted out of existence, but it would long continue on the island. We, who had never had slaves before, would have the use of them. The town major, a tall, dutiful sort of man from the East India Company infantry, named Hodson, had gathered the five that were our lot. Our house servants were Sarah, a sweet-faced African woman of perhaps my mother's age, and two half-Malay, half-African twin boys of about ten, Roger and Robert. They were bare-footed and wore canvas trousers and a jacket but white gloves. If there was an assumption by folk other than myself that Sarah was the boys' mother, she claimed to be their aunt, and they the children of
her dead sister. A Cape Malay male, an older and scrawny man named Toby, was our gardener, and Ernest, perhaps thirty, limpid-eyed and with an air of caution about him, a second gardener and our groom.

We were escorted by these slaves, and the clerks of the East India Company agency named Fowler, Cole and Balcombe, through the town. A horse waited for my father, and there was a narrow-axled carriage for my mother, Jane and me. I did not want to mount the carriage – I had already developed an unexplained fear of the things. The conveyance looked incapable of negotiating the long terraces of the track that led up the cliffs of rock to the broader place my mother had promised, where we hoped to breathe and spread our elbows more freely than the citizens of the port could. One of the clerks drove the trap and behind it walked our servants, free of baggage. But there was a string of perhaps thirty other Cape Malays following with burdens on their head and shoulders, supplies and items for our house.

Jouncing along, I was carried by a talkative slave, a tall energetic one, in a basket on his shoulder. As I jolted my way up the heights he declared, ‘Oh, lady, I carry washing, I carry flour, I carry salt beef, I carry linseed. But you, my miss, are the finest load I carry. No one bake you, no one wear you, no one pour you out on the ground.'

I think of slavery now and I wonder what gave this man the goodwill to say such soothing things to the child of his enslavers. The basket was hard-edged and the sky bounced above me and home did not present itself for more than an hour. I was heaved up into a notch in an escarpment and I saw behind me the caravan of people hauling bags and panniers. We walked in pleasant open country now but there were inland hills, a diaphanous forest to the right and a large white house visible beyond it. A waterfall fell into a heart-shaped bowl of rock to our right, and to our left was a wooded hill, and notable peaks lay ahead. But there was open space for gardens and orchards, pastures and slave huts, and for our house, on the level ground ahead. A nearby small stream was named Briars Gut.

The carriageway running from the road into The Briars was made by canopies of huge banyan trees which imposed a sudden dusk on us, and then from the gate of the garden, a walk of pomegranate trees took us towards a long, low house with wide verandahs. I saw over the basket's rim to the side of the house a plentiful orchard running down the slight slope, and now Toby and Ernest peeled off to penetrate the fence and stand amidst the trees, the older man and his apprentice, making ready to go home to the slave shacks through a grove of myrtles at the back of the house.

I did not understand then that this orchard was part of the family riches. It alone would earn my father some £200 a year, with its grapes, oranges, figs, shaddock – the biggest of the citrus – and two fruits many of the passengers on passing ships found exotic beyond their dreams, the guava and the mango, whose flesh was so overladen with syrup.

Away to the left and before the house ran a well-ordered garden.

While I assumed my fear was the only one at loose in that landscape, I now wonder how my mother had endured such a journey of ill-defined prospects before riding into this reassuring place. She was then less than thirty by some years. She was practical and sturdy but had a thin elegant neck, very marked lustrous dark eyes, what I always thought of as a wise and witty mouth, and brown hair done in the modern, seemingly informal way. She was not finished with childbearing and knew she must give birth here. But the sight of the orchard must have excited her and my father, and not just for its monetary power. They could not have imagined beforehand any of the tropic luxuriance of the vines and fruit trees as they stood beneath that vivid afternoon sky.

Toby and Ernest had already placed tubs filled with fruit ready for collection by the porters on their return journey from The Briars to the port, specifically to the warehouse of Fowler, Cole and Balcombe, agents to the Company and superintendents of its sales. That fruit would be bought by the officers and passengers
of our own ship and eaten during the passage to Cape Town. Sea breakfasts and evening desserts would be thus enlivened.

The pannier containing me was let down and, strange fruit, I was lifted out in vast calloused hands and found my parents smiling at me by the trellis gate that led to the long, low bungalow. Its garden was full of beds of white, yellow and red roses, hence The Briars, spelled always with a capital ‘T', like
The Times
of London!

Told by so many that St Helena was a ‘desert island', which we interpreted as meaning ‘barren', as its huge bare cliffs had also suggested it was, this vale of orchards and roses on a high plain delighted us. On the African side of the island – to the east, that is – a plateau and a great block of rock, again imitating a human face, stopped the more unruly vigour of the trade winds from reaching us. Down an escarpment towards the South American, west side of the island fell a great thread of waterfall into a heart-shaped bowl of rock.

Below the house stretched the lawn, which seemed to offer limitless play. I began to run on it. I could smell Jane near me – her child smell, enthusiasm and powder and fresh-laundered linen. We turned to each other and smiled. It was the simplest of communications on an island that would come to harbour complex ones.