Napoleon's Last Island (32 page)

Afterwards we were offered a carriage ride home, and I hoped Croad and my sister would decide that they should take me back to The Briars. They both turned to me, but I stupidly assured them they need not take account of me, that I would continue the journey with them. The path was easier and the Doveton house had the distinction of not harbouring a woman desired by the Emperor or Gourgaud or even Sir Hudson Lowe.

Oh, how the Balcombe girls were so hardy! I had little doubt that I was more hardy because I was less feminine than Jane. But I sickened all the way there, and Jane did not, and after arriving at his hillside house Mr Doveton had me lie down in a cool dark room to recover, instead of taking in the view and exclaiming, as did the lieutenant. I emerged after a humiliating hour to declare there was no need for a carriage. ‘I'm fully improved, sir,' I assured Mr Doveton. We could
definitely
walk again. I was so insistent, and I realised that I wanted in part to defy my mother with pain and, through becoming reproachfully sicker still, to punish her for insisting on being desirable to outsiders.

On the way back Croad and Jane talked merrily as if they did not notice that I had dropped out of their conversation. They became solicitous when, a mile from home, with shadows growing long and my head like a ball of heat, I embarrassed myself again by being ill.

Mr Croad did not sight his earwig or the scorpion and this illness meant I did not visit the Emperor for some time. I sulked and writhed in my room. The whole amalgam of humankind – Sir Hudson, OGF, my mother, Lady Lowe, young Emmanuel, the mysterious intentions of Croad and Fehrzen – had me in a disgruntled fever. I realise now I was suffering a chronic condition of bewilderment, and slight shifts in normal conversation could plunge me into it. In fact, this story is in large part a tale of its comings and goings. I hoped that this time a revelation or simply a chance event would shake me out of it.

Ultimately it was a highly coloured event that did so. Admiral Cockburn had finally left the island. The barouche of Pulteney Malcolm, the new admiral, arose out of the Jamestown saddle, crossed the upland without turning to Deadwood and came past Huff's haunted crossroads. Jane told me it was coming and had already guessed from the spectrum of colours within that it carried Lady Clementina Malcolm, the new admiral's wife.

Jane then broke to me the news that dressed in vibrant swathes of cloth, her hair like a flame above the fabric, Lady Clementina was in the drawing room and was asking for me. I went to the drawing room and there she was, her face blazing not so much with freckles (though it did) but with raucous and eccentric goodwill.

‘I wrote to Countess Bertrand from Jamestown,' she said, ‘and she told me to bring both the Miss Balcombes and their pretty mother.'

From her lips ‘pretty' was fine, in a way it was not from Lady Lowe's.

‘So I've called in, and your mama has been kind, and we're all going − first to the Bertrands and then on to the Emperor!'

She had said, ‘the Emperor'. That itself was an omen to feel better. I thought this woman was wonderful, a Fanny Bertrand without a taint of acid.

We got into her cart, driven by a sailor, and as we settled she cried, ‘Off we go, my brave tar, eastwards into the day!'

The sailor drove carefully, which suited my fear of carriages. We made a safe transit of the jolting dip into and out of Devil's Glen and reached the Bertrands' house at Hutt's Gate, where Archambault the postilion rider and his younger brother were with the Emperor's carriage, to which we were now to transfer, both of them leaning against the horses taking mouthfuls from a silver flask.

‘Oh, that is no doubt spirits,' claimed Lady Malcolm. It concerned me because Archambault was said to be a reckless driver. He had been fine on the way to the ball, but the path to Longwood lay through some breakneck ravines. Yet we gave up our cart and climbed into the barouche, where we were joined by Fanny Bertrand, seating herself in the forward-facing seats, her features benignly composed.

As we thundered over a ridge, I thought with some fear of the ravine between us and Longwood, and of how that would be negotiated by the Archambaults, each on his horse bent like a jockey and urging it on as if there were a prize for arriving immediately at the house. Indeed, no one who has not been to the island can realise how vertical it all is, how precipitous.

All the way, at every jolt, Madame Bertrand was on her favourite subject, willing to include the newcomer in what she might imagine was an island-wide coterie of Madame de Montholon's critics. She remarked, ‘You will see that the new child resembles Montholon – she has his eyes. His Majesty was very worried while his wife was in labour. But that
is
his nature. He has expressed the same delicacies to me.' She had never a shadow of blame for the Emperor himself for his flirtations with Madame de Montholon. Albine and her husband were the culprits in Fanny Bertrand's map of the world.

The more Fanny talked, the more we could see the impact of the island and the unchosen restrictions upon her. Lady Malcolm made a mouth at me as if she had perhaps had more information
on Madame de Montholon than she actually needed. According to Fanny, Albine played deliberately rousing tunes like ‘Marlborough' and ‘
Vive Henri Quatre
' on the pianoforte, or practised scales and reversed the pedals if the Emperor did not pay sufficient attention, all the time smiling like a nun. In the meantime, Fanny was suffering from the fact that she could not travel to town and expect to be greeted on the street. Only the most defiant military officers now visited her, she said, and were being asked by Reade to report back anything of importance that they might hear. I had already heard myself that Major Fehrzen had decided he would not submit himself to this restriction.

Fanny Bertrand told us in jolly vein as we rolled along that she had listened to Gourgaud complain to the Emperor one evening, after the de Montholons had gone, ‘She is always scratching her neck and spitting her food into her plate. I never thought Your Majesty would like her for that, but she goes around telling everyone that you do like her.'

‘Of course,' said Fanny Bertrand in the barouche – and she was careful not to exonerate Madame de Montholon even while condemning Gourgaud – ‘This is the whole thing of internal jealousy in that house. Gourgaud is quite mad, or if he is not, he is saved from being so by the arrival of the Russian, Count Balmain, who seems a pleasant enough man and has made a fuss of him. Oh, Lady Malcolm, I am grateful nonetheless I live elsewhere, what with Las Cases drying up into a walnut before our eyes and mummifying his son with a glance, that lost boy, and the de Montholons and, on top of it all, Gourgaud.'

I looked at my mother and like friends we both raised our eyebrows.

‘Oh, my heavens,' said Lady Malcolm, but it was because Archambault's horses dragged us askew on two wheels, down into the defile and up again with all the brio of artillery being hurried into place. Artillery it was, when you counted the high calibre of Lady Bertrand.

Lady Malcolm said, recovering, ‘It is not our intention to cause misery at Longwood.'

‘No,' said Madame Bertrand kindly. ‘But exile is exile and a desert island is a desert island. As Madame de Montholon says, “One ages rapidly in St Helena.” That is true of men and women. You see, Madame Malcolm, the Emperor is very wearied by this place. He feels he is beyond life.'

Madame Malcolm was abashed and plucked at the fabric about her shoulders. ‘Oh dear, I regret that.'

‘But I do not say it that you should feel uneasy. You have been a friend to him. And remember that what he has lost,
he
has lost. No one can make up that to him. Though there are those who could behave towards him better, of course!'

I was not certain how Lady Clementina Malcolm was ‘a friend to him', but I was sure I would find out. Admitted at Longwood by Novarrez, we all sat down in the salon, which had windows opening to the west that the Emperor had not drawn the shutters on today.

When OGF entered he was in uniform and he embraced Lady Malcolm by the shoulders. She bobbed her face for him to kiss and began to speak in French. An immediate, enchanting energy rose in the room and the Emperor himself seemed revivified.

He would tell my mother that Clementina Malcolm was the first plain woman he had ever admired, and that he could see why the admiral remained in her thrall. Fanny told me that the books I had one day seen OGF unload from crates had been a gift from her.

Now the Emperor talked with her about her brother, Colonel Elphinstone, who had commanded a regiment of foot at Waterloo, and whom the Emperor had, during that day, seen lying on the ground. Brandy and surgical care had been summoned immediately, and her brother could hear through a haze of pain and damage that the Ogre was taking a personal interest in his welfare. Possibly, as Miss Robinson had filled the role of bucolic beauty, Lady Malcolm's brother had thus presented himself as an archetype of the fallen soldier. Still, it was clear Lady Malcolm credited OGF with saving his life.

She said chirpily, ‘When he was recovered he was made a Companion of the Bath and received Dutch and Russian honours as
well. But every great man who honoured him asked him about you, Sire, and your famed rescue of him.'

This information sparkled in the room and the Emperor said with a full smile, ‘Some men rise and some men fall, and all in an afternoon. We live for years. But at every turn, from our conception to the end, our life swings on twenty minutes, if not twenty seconds.'

This grim reflection seemed to cheer him a great deal. Lady Malcolm, however, appeared to feel that she had unduly boasted of her brother as a survivor of battle. She declared, ‘After all, it was the Duke of Wellington's own regiment he commanded, so his valour was inevitably visible.' She turned to the rest of us. ‘Pulteney and I were in Brussels on the eve of the battle, when the city was a ballroom, and then the following night when it was a vast hospital.'

The Emperor weighed Lady Malcolm's neat contrast with the
tristesse
it deserved. He began to discuss his famous friends who were also friends of Lady Malcolm's, Lady Holland and her husband – names that hung over us like biblical names, remote and benign and unquestioned, mythic rather than plain friends of OGF. ‘Had Henry Fox's politics prevailed,' said the Emperor piously, ‘the history of Europe and my history might have been altered for the better.'

‘Would he have stopped you invading Russia?' I asked.

I heard Jane's breath, taken in quickly. The Emperor stared at me ruefully and without reproach. My mother gave a brief shake of her head in my direction, as if mine had not been an utterly reasonable question.

‘Have you heard from your son?' Lady Malcolm suddenly asked the Emperor.

The memory swallowed all thought, all regret, and his face lightened.

‘If I said something hurtful,' I doubtfully proposed, in a little access of wisdom.

‘No,' he declared, holding up his hand. ‘I cannot have you doubting your words. For that would not be Betsy, would it?
But I can show our friends what I have of my son.' He made a wide gesture. ‘Please, ladies, follow.'

He led us through the room and past the dining room, to one side, and on the other side – the door into his bedrooms. Through one further door in this compartment we saw Marchand's truckle bed in a dressing room. Marchand remained on call all night, it would turn out, always a victim of his master's insomnia.

The main bedroom was an unimpressive room in which the green-curtained bed looked almost like that of a monk. A mat, we would later be told, had been bought from a lieutenant at Deadwood to dimly adorn the floor. The walls were covered with dark burgundy wallpaper and there were long gauze curtains on two windows, which looked out in the direction of Deadwood. I noticed the silver washstand which had been the glory of his furniture at the Pavilion. It seemed dulled by the room's gloom. White walls might have at least suggested greater spaces, walls covered with brown-ish nankeen bespoke heaviness and containment. Here was the shrine of the house and he took us to the mantelpiece and enumerated the relics: pictures of Marie Louise, to us an unimaginable spouse living in an unimaginable home in Vienna, and a miniature of the King of Rome, his son, bearer of a lost title, and of course the Josephine cameo that he had extorted from Madame Bertrand. At one end of that mantelpiece was the ornate alarm clock which, he told us, had been Frederick the Great's. As at the Pavilion, it seemed too complex and grand an apparatus for the plain wooden shelf, and shone earnestly in a way that led me to believe it felt some insensate superiority to its surroundings. From a nail hammered into the wall at the other end was his own Consular watch, hung from a plait of hair of Marie Louise. Its lid was marked with the huge letter ‘B' picked out in diamonds. We Balcombe women had seen this piece before – it had been similarly displayed in the Pavilion at The Briars, and we knew how he always fondled the plait as he showed the watch to anyone, and how this gesture had such power that somehow when you saw him do it he was forgiven all. And at
that moment it seemed the most barbarous thing in history that Marie Louise was not permitted by her imperial house of Austria to join him on our island. She was instead a hostage of her own family at her own household, stuck, said O'Meara, in a parallel island to his − the island of an imperial court.