Napoleon's Last Island (31 page)

The man sent by the restored King of France was much older, nearly sixty and corpulent and named the Marquis de Montchenu. Apparently, on his arrival on the warship
Oronte,
he had begun telling Major Hodson in the main street that he must see the Emperor urgently. ‘I have known this person, Bonaparte,' he shouted. To show he believed in the wonderful and sanctified old days before the Revolution, he wore a long queue, about the length of the tail of an average-sized dog, and seemed thus to come from an earlier time. ‘I commanded his regiment when he was a child! He knows me and my king requires me to interview and assess him. Please ensure this is possible this very day! Where are you all? Where is the governor?'

Even as de Montchenu raged, a rider was on his way to Longwood, and came back reporting that the Emperor would not receive de Montchenu or any commissioner appointed by kings or emperors – those he had once addressed as equals and by name, had liked and exchanged pleasantries with, or, in the case of the restored Bourbon King of France, despised as a charmless inheritor of a poisonous bloodline.

The third of the triumvirate Sir Hudson had to greet was the Austrian Baron von Stürmer. He was an ancestral nobleman
with a beautiful young French wife, of no more rank than the Balcombes, who liked to tell people that Las Cases had tutored her brother while they had all been in London hiding from the Terror in France.

I managed to grasp the idea that these three new officials were largely immune from Sir Hudson's edicts, though their servants were not. Sir Hudson had the power to insist that when the commissioners were with the Emperor, he would be present too. Immediately the three men met somewhere in Jamestown, considered Sir Hudson's decree an intrusion, and swore they would not try to visit the Emperor until Sir Hudson relented on that matter. So they settled into the life of the island. Once they would have seemed gods, the most exotic novelties. But now that we had the ultimate standard of mankind resident amongst us, and he refused to see them, they became, at least for now, no more than other householders.

O'Meara had to make a medical report on the Emperor to Plantation House at least every two days, and he told us of an extraordinary incident he had heard about from Sir Hudson's clerk, a man named Janisch. Sir Hudson, a few nights past, had woken from a nightmare that the Emperor had vanished from the island. ‘He is always having nightmares, this commander of bandits and thieves,' O'Meara asserted. ‘So he rouses his policeman, Sir Tom, and they gallop across the plain and come to Longwood and hammer on the door. They are met by Novarrez, who sleeps in the corridor. The governor's eyes were darting and wanted to be assured OGF was in place, so I woke Captain Poppleton, who rushed from our fresh-finished quarters at the rear of the house and assured the governor that he had seen the Emperor.'

In the meantime Reade had ranted round the house, opening doors and calling, ‘Come out, Bonaparte. We want Napoleon Bonaparte!'

The next day OGF murmured to O'Meara, as O'Meara palpated the Emperor's side to find the cause of pain there,
that if he had known that his voice would give Sir Hudson any comfort, he would have kept quieter, but he had cried out to let the governor know he was in residence.

On the strength of this story, Jane and I rode across with my father to commiserate with OGF and de Montholon, now firmly in charge of the household, to Gourgaud's occasional chagrin, over the governor's night visit and Sir Thomas Reade's crass banging about the house.

‘And he was mad enough to have done that, this Sir Thomas,' said OGF with his eyes beginning to start forth. ‘Just as his master is mad enough to have nightmares. May they worsen! It is not the case that I detest Lowe on principle, because I have received visits from his stepdaughter, Miss Charlotte Johnson, a woman of whom the Countess Bertrand approves without any qualification – a rare distinction when it comes to our dear Fanny.'

Then he rushed off towards his bedroom calling over his shoulder, ‘Do you know why I'm so happy?' He turned again for a second but was impatient to be going. ‘So sanguine? So willing to bear the manias of Sir Hudson the bandit chief, the jackal? It is because I have received the hair of my son in a letter from Marchand's mother, who nurses my boy.'

And he went to get it.

But we found out that even this, when he brought it, opened it, displayed it, a wisp of child-silk, had come to him by difficulty and via a Sir Hudson imbroglio.

Following the arrival of Sir Hudson and around the middle of the year, there were stories that our friends of the 53rd would leave for India soon enough, for we saw that a new contingent of men wearing 66 on their facings had already landed to swell Deadwood and all the other camps to a great size, yet had arrived without the influence of good humour such as Cockburn had brought ashore. Other omens of beginnings and endings included the birth of Madame de Montholon's baby, begotten at sea and born at Longwood at the island's heart. It was reported
to be a girl and very healthy, and her parents gave her the name Napoléone. Of all exiles, she was one of the more piteous, an involuntarily detained child who, in the end, as I had once done, would need to face the shock of the larger world when the Emperor was pardoned, liberated, forgiven and transmuted into an English squire.

Lieutenant Croad, meanwhile, was certainly spending a lot of time with us, as if uncertain he would find decent company in Bengal. I must confess I find it hard to remember what my expectations were of Lieutenant Croad. I do remember that at some level of fantasy he was a potential husband, and I dreaded he would give a sign that he had a similar flavour of an idea, yet was anxious that he would leave without confirming his regard in some way.

One day Jane, Croad and I decided we would walk to Plantation House, where I assumed we would be welcome to Lady Susan Lowe, who everyone said was pleasanter than her husband. It was not a long walk, but my plan was to go westwards by the heart-shaped waterfall and over a peaked hill not far from The Briars, a tor scattered with volcanic scree and thus unsuitable for horses. I had many times suggested it as the most direct route to Plantation House, and now I was of an age to assert my opinion, and when I urged Lieutenant Croad to it, he was all in favour.

The only aspect of the tramp to give us pause as we set out was Croad's welcoming the suggestion of the route I had in mind because it was the one most likely to yield a sight of the island's sole venomous animal, the scorpion
isometrus maculatus
.

‘If the shale moves, you should merely be conscious of where you put your hand,' he cheerily advised us.

Thus we set out to traverse the higher ground, which would then bring us down into that fertile eastern basin on which Plantation House stood. Despite the lack of anything but lichen, the hillside was populated by goats – they seemed to cherish the heights, and I hoped their hooves had been an adequate terror to the
isometrus
. Our scrabbling hands feared the scorpion, but instead they often found sharp stone and goat droppings. The sun, which
was more merciful everywhere else on the island, found us there, and burned my shoulders through the light fabric of my dress, and blinded and bullied us along. One of our two young servants followed carrying a canteen, a silver cup attached by a chain. I called on the mercy of that cool water twice before we reached the high crest and began the descent, arriving amongst the trees and finding the Plantation House road. Croad had barely picked up a stain on his uniform during the scramble and his epaulettes bore no dust on their gold thread. He went on talking to Jane and me about the difficulty of finding that St Helena earwig he had looked for on an earlier excursion. He bemoaned the fact its carapace was no protection at all against the rats. The rats and the goats were destroying the primeval species, he lamented even as the loose stones shifted beneath his feet.

It surprised us that Laura and Mrs Wilks were in the drawing room when we got to Plantation House – their ship had not yet sailed – and we found them sharing one of their last afternoons on the island with Lady Susan Lowe and her two daughters. Laura Wilks stood up to greet us.

‘Major Fehrzen will be jealous,' she warned me privately, and as ever I did not know how reliable such observations were or even if I wanted to hear them. Nor did Miss Wilks herself, so assured in her polished good looks, in her lustrous self-possession, seem to think it was in any way to be deplored that these two men with whom I could not conceive sharing a drawing room, let alone anything more, seemed to want my company.

Lady Lowe had not come as readily to her feet. A woman of sweet features but a certain undisguisable acerbity around the mouth, she was the possessor of brown, piled hair, only a little frowzy. She let Croad approach her and treat her to one of his exaggerated bows, which made her daughters titter.

My first meeting with the Lowe women suffered from an intervening yellow membrane of nausea from our walk, and since I felt the sun had bludgeoned me, I excused myself and went down the corridor looking for a door into the garden so that I could be sick. I bent by hydrangeas and let loose the
sour contents and stood unresisting and stunned by weakness as a slave gardener moved in with a shovel and erased my shame with a layer of dark soil. Recovered, I stood upright and walked inside, trying to make a figure to whom frailty was unimaginable.

When I came back, Lady Lowe smiled remotely at me. There seemed to be a person submerged in her who was sending messages to the surface of her skin, signalling when to be approving or congenial. Since my father, Sank Bootay, was a drinker who concentrated that vice into the span of a few hours a day, I did not recognise the signs in Lady Susan Lowe. Hers was exactly the remoteness of the chronic tippler always absent through calming dosages of – as would come to be said – all-day sherry.

I did not suspect that at the time because of her undeniable prettiness, the amplitude of her olive cheeks. What teased my mind was the puzzle of how her beauty consorted with the russet patchiness of Sir Hudson's features, and the unimaginable idea of her sharing a bed with him.

She liked Croad, I could see. She took the trouble to study his face.

Her daughters had no disdain but seemed very much engrossed in each other's company and not ready yet to take warmly to Jane and me. The elder, Miss Charlotte Johnson (she carried the name of her father, Lady Susan's first husband, an officer in the Canadian garrison), who might have been sixteen, lent an ear to Croad's account of our expedition, from which he graciously left out all references to my heatstroke.

‘It was Betsy's expedition,' he said with a sort of whimsical gallantry. ‘She marshalled us and directed us onward.'

Charlotte suddenly composed her mouth in a certain way, in what could have been a moue of friendship or a pout of contempt. I had often rebuffed and chastised genuine friendship, but could not quite understand what to do with dislike, and with an idea that my reputation – of which these women may have heard, as a friend and persecutor of OGF – might have coloured their opinion of me.

It felt essential that when we went to a late luncheon I tried to eat. With Charlotte's pretty eyes on me – or I thought they were, and could not look often enough to check – I ate the turtle soup, which I knew should be delightful but instantly brought out my arms and throat in a cold sweat.

Lady Lowe watched the slave-waiter pour white wine for her and said with more assertiveness than she had brought to any matter until now, ‘I must meet your mother, Miss Balcombe, and take an assessment of her beauty, since my husband much admires her.'

My husband much admires her?
I felt an acidic scepticism. On what basis would this admiration by Sir Hudson stand?

Then some flounder was served and I strove to treat it with respect, but found myself dreading the second half of our expedition – the proposed journey from Plantation House across the island to Mr William Doveton's house at Mount Pleasant. Mr Doveton's family had lived on the island as farmers for generations, yet he had been educated in England and no one dared to call him a yamstock.