Napoleon's Last Island (42 page)

‘I don't have the authority, Miss Balcombe,' he said, though he took the suggestion without condescension and with scarcely a trace of annoyance.

‘I know you have the influence though. If he stays here, he wishes to marry me so he has the comfort of a widow to miss him.'

Fehrzen's eyes widened.

‘If you take him to India, he'll die,' I asserted. ‘We all know that. You must excuse me.'

Jane and I descended into the cutter. Other wide-eyed women sat around us.

‘I give it to you,' murmured Jane as the sailors began to row. ‘You do not cry.'

It had been noted by my parents that dry lids were my religion, and indeed I would not cry now, and bit my inner lip to keep the hot blood out of my face, and to give the other women in the boat nothing to stare at, which caused them to turn their eyes away. As we reached the dock, mutely we climbed the steps, and Jane and I walked to the stables at Solomon's and mounted. It was not until we were ascending the tiers towards The Briars that Jane brought her barrel-chested mare level with Tom and me on the narrow, perilous path.

‘Why do you make it so hard for us all?' she asked, and I could see an unexpected and accumulated fury in her. ‘You rake us all back to your level, and we're paid out in your coin. Do you think that's fair? Do you know what they call me? “The one with the difficult sister.”'

I did not know what to say to this. The weight of it was equal to all the occasional approbrations the Balcombes received, added together.

‘How often do people say that to me?' Jane hissed, and hissing wasn't part of her daily performance. ‘How often do I have to smile as it's said?'

This was too much. I had brought my sister's grievance to a head; I had alienated Plantation House to the limits; and destroyed two potential marriages in a mere hour. But in that second I saw myself as the despised person I
knew
myself to be. I was in that frightful condition of naked worthlessness we are usually able to avoid seeing. If we see it for too long, it kills us.

‘Do you think Major Fehrzen finds your behaviour sane?' called Jane.

Thus convinced (and I cannot deny there was a little self-indulgence left in me), I knew the only company for me were those officially despised, the French, who had never taken my pranks as a reason for denying me their fraternity. I began to spur away in the direction of Longwood, not making for the road junction, and – in shame and self-pity – welcoming the idea that even amiable Tom might pitch me into a ravine and rescue me from the packed-in contempt of the island.

Tom did his best to hold his footing on broken and boulder-scattered ground, and I dimly heard Jane calling after me, her voice fluting in urgency. If she followed me, I knew she had only the horsewomanship to go by the road, and that would do no good in catching up with me.

Soon I encountered a curious sight – all the Emperor's servants were sitting picnicking on the slope of a hill to the south, their fête coinciding with ours aboard the
Conqueror
. It was as if, separated from their masters, they seemed more real, and Marchand had his arm around the waist of the English servant, Elizabeth, who was to be his wife. There was something unconstrained about it all, bodices loose or unbuttoned to admit cooling air, jesters unabashed, that I both despised and envied them, and yearned for some of their freedoms.

I saw Novarrez break from the party and come hobbling down the hill as if to meet me. Soon thereafter Pierron, the pastrycook, followed, and was quicker. I did not want to speak to them and be
delayed, and despite the difficulty I hitched my skirts and swung my right leg over the saddle and rode astride, my left thigh being hammered up against the second pommel, and taking a bruise on my upper thigh, which was of no importance to a rider driven by such gales as I. Glancing back, I saw even the fleet Pierron give up the chase and stand hands on hips, mystified. So there would be no servants to open the Longwood door, Marchand and Novarrez, the two normally given that duty, now left behind.

I saw the sentries ahead, by the ditch, the great daily boredom of their task, dramatic as stated, grinding as fulfilled, upon them. I was level with some of them before they noticed.

I heard a sergeant call, ‘Miss, not today!'

But I had crossed the ditch by a little earth causeway, and, reining in Tom, dismounted like a circus rider, whacking my left thigh a last time as I vacated the inappropriate saddle, and landing unevenly but without falling over. I righted myself and, strode, skirts held up, past the rose garden and right into the house, opening the front door beyond which sentries could not intrude, and continuing through the vestibule and library and into the salon.

Before I opened that door I felt human presences and the question that possessed me was whether to weep before the Emperor. And what to weep about? His exile was deeper than mine. My rant must be sympathetic to the depth of his entrapment. Yet he had had a life already, and I had had none. He had been praised, and I had been sometimes excused but regularly condemned. And now, for the first time, by my sister, my upholder, who had managed to champion me in front of Sir Hudson's wife, but could not manage the trick for the length of our ride home.

I broke into the salon and I encountered a scene so undue, so crowded with people who had burst the limits of my knowledge of them that I did believe this was death and instant hell.

The Emperor, wearing a splendid green dress with décolletage that I remembered from observing Madame de Montholon's repertoire of dresses, had his arm companionably around a naked
Surgeon O'Meara. That part of a man's body of which I had but heard rumours of its existence in normal life and its properties in the abnormal business of what I had thought of as marriage, was red and straight.

On his farther side sat my mother, whom he was kissing. My mother's breasts were bare and her lower body veiled only by some half-cast-off muslin garment. Her breast interested OGF, who gently kneaded with his tapered fingers. Looking on from a straight-backed chair, legs apart, a very pelt of dark hair marking her groin, was the utterly naked Madame de Montholon, who had just three months past given birth to another girl whom she had named Josephine. Albine exuded a sort of contentment, proud within her round and white little body and her full breasts stark amidst the furniture.

It is impossible to tease out what I took from this scene of massed nakedness and strange
déshabille
. The only dressed body in the group was that of the Emperor, but he was dressed so awry that it was perhaps even more startling than the rest, though nothing could be so startling as to see one's mother in such a context, with the languorous promise of further nakedness conveyed by her posture, her ease, her air of consent.

I screamed and ran out of the room. I think it came to me in part that now there was no one on the island open to my presence, and that awareness fuelled part of my impulse. It was the strangeness, the improper madness of the scene, that had devoured me and I could hear O'Meara and my mother calling, but they were delayed by the state they had placed themselves in.

Outside, I grabbed Tom, who was grazing by the rose garden, and rode through the line of sentries, who did not try to stop me. I heard two soldiers laughing as I urged Tom on and made them stand aside. It was the laughter of utter knowledge.
They
knew what drove me.

I understood that I was riding in the wrong direction. I should have been riding to the cliffs, Tom and I going over as one creature into a trajectory to take hold of the liberty and solace of the Atlantic. Instead, I was heading to the core. I was heading to The Briars and the den of my mother. I would take poison, not to obliterate myself but to obliterate the untenable island. I would need a lot.

I bounced off Tom and let Roger take him. My sister was reading on the verandah and looked at me with tear-stained eyes. She stood up as I raced past.

She said, ‘Betsy, I'm proud to be …'

But I vanished inside.

I went to the pantry to find an appropriate toxin. There were suicide trees from India on this island but you needed to be a native to know how to use their pod correctly for the purpose. However, thanks to the island of rats we lived on, I knew there was a jug of rat poison always there in the corner. I believed genuinely and with false vengeance of theatricality that presenting my mother with my death was the only gambit. People would think I was looking for revenge, or to induce shame. The truth was I did not know what other word to give her except the very word of myself, and to do it urgently. There was no room left
within me for what I had seen in the Longwood salon. On this island of rats and goats, the Emperor and my mother had joined the beasts.

I could hear Sarah outside speaking to Alice. I took down the jug from its shelf, spread some greasy paper and made a package of the poison I poured out on it. I imagined myself drinking it in my tea and expiring at the table in the drawing room.

Having secreted it in a pocket, I called to Sarah to bring me tea and went and sat in the seat by which I would escape the island, such a simple proposition – no involvement of flotillas, secret beaches or the like. My sister followed me in and looked at me as I adopted the posture of a statue. I wanted her to go – I did not want her to be punished by the sight of poison taking its strangling effect.

‘I am not angry at you,' I told her. ‘You are a wonderful girl and deserve to be somewhere else. But leave me alone, please.'

She made a few abortive attempts at apologetic sentiments, and when I said she had nothing to repent of, it seemed only to encourage her in uttering more regrets. She was of that character; she could not blame herself enough nor do adequate penance. To her, one testy sentence, after which I had ridden away, had cancelled all the years of bewildered love she had given me.

‘You have done nothing wrong,' I shouted. ‘You have nothing to come creeping around here for, yelling sorry, sorry. Now please go away.'

And so she did. I was giving her a grand opportunity to live within her comfortable soul by making her tame her indulgence in guilt.

The tea arrived. I laced it with South African honey and poured the powder in and stirred it. I did not know the names of the toxins I was anxious to absorb. I did not need to make their acquaintance in that sense.

I began to drink. The concoction needed the honey. I had hoped the venoms would penetrate my throat and take my breath, but it was not like that, though there was a burning. My breath remained. It was pernicious. It wanted to argue the
case with the dominant elements. I drank more to convince it it had no case to offer.

I felt heat and cold successively possess my body. I felt dryness, and pain in my shoulders and wrists. A succession of nauseas would grip me, lift me and depart, but these were no more dramatic, I was disappointed to notice, than spasms of biliousness or mild fever. I had designed a long fall from a great height, and ended with little more than sore ankles.

So I went back to the pantry for more and ordered more tea, and it was brought by gravid Alice and I drank it with more of the toxin mixed in and this time at last I felt the giddiness of a fast descent, or more, a fast dislocation from place to place, in reality or in delusion being on the floor, or at the ceiling, or looking in the window or ascending into the sky. I vomited helplessly down the fabrics at my breast, but the fumes of my delirium would not quite carry me away or extinguish me. How was it to kill rats then? I wondered. No wonder the East India Company's hundred years' war against the rodents of St Helena had not been won.

When I lowered my forehead and closed my eyes to go to sleep, it seemed to be just that, sleeping. And true to sleep, I awoke after. The light had changed, lamps were lit, my mother and sister and Alice and Sarah were fussing about me, and Sarah had my shoulders back and was wiping my vomit off my chest.

‘Dr O'Meara is on his way, darling,' my mother assured me.

The same Dr O'Meara I had last seen naked, kissing her and beside a frock-clad Emperor? My mother could see the question in my mind, the one that I would ask if I had the full range of my normal strengths, and she held up a hand just for me and murmured, ‘He is a good man; you don't understand.'

She told Sarah and Jane to leave us. Immediately her eyes were full of tears.

‘Don't judge me, Betsy,' she pleaded. ‘Tell nobody else, but there has been a plan to get the Emperor away in a woman's dress. This has led to a certain … silliness – even older people are capable of silliness. It's a sort of game, in which we rehearse the … the expedient.'

I could see she was telling the truth about the proposed stratagem. But I did not believe that the
games
I'd witnessed were justified by the experiment.

‘Why did you have no top?' I asked with difficulty. ‘Why did Albine de Montholon have no drawers?'

She shook her head, not evasive, definitely postponing. ‘What did you drink?' she asked. ‘Oh Betsy, I'm so sorry, but what did you drink? Sarah thinks it's the rat poison.'

‘Wouldn't poison a flea, that stuff,' I assured her. ‘Don't ask me things.'

This last command was ferocious.

‘My darling,' whispered my mother, ‘I am a sinner. But there are things to be considered. Remember how sad we felt for him the day he showed us his room … and the soldiers came intruding. That little room. Such pity to it. I … I felt …'

I remembered the day, but I said nothing.

She said, ‘Your father, he's an honest man but a weak one. He … you have seen the condition of Alice? It is no excuse for me. But I began in kindness …'

I was not interested. Her words were like pushing around vegetables on a plate I had no intention of eating from.

Darkness fell suddenly, irradiated by a lamp in the room, and time gone and O'Meara coming in and making to inspect me with that physician's arrogance.

‘Don't let him touch me!' I ordered my mother, who was in the shadows.

My father held me by the shoulders, in a grip far in excess of affection, while O'Meara forced some liquid between my teeth. I felt the bitter shaft of this antidote act like a lever on my intentions, shift the large rock of my obliteration away from the mouth of the cave in which I sought to be sealed. All my ejected ambitions came burning up through my throat and nostrils. Muck and puke and bile and acidic poison drenched my being and my bed. They were so determined to make me live on with the tableau of the salon stuck in my head forever.

Predictably enough my one recurring dream was of myself and the Emperor and General Gourgaud in a boat far out beyond the
Jamestown Roads. The Emperor was rouged and had basilisk eyes, not much different from those of his real existence, except that they were marked out in a definite black, as if to enlarge them and give them a look both female yet somehow doubly martial. With him sat my drowned grandfather, though I could not explain how I knew it was him. He seemed a cheery man like his son, but I realised I had failed to grieve for him because I had foolishly thought his death happy, since he had been killed by a prince. Having been myself killed by an emperor, I knew my boatman grandfather was not consoled in drowning by the elevated cause of his agony.

Gourgaud himself had not been in the salon so his presence in the boat was baffling. If the others belonged there, in that salon of iniquities, why not Gourgaud? And I knew with my new knowledge that Gourgaud would make too much of it and see in it a pledge of utter, indivisible friendship and love, no fragment of it to go to others in the party.

As I fought with shame and poison through my long unconsciousness, the intentions of the grand military machine came to a head, or, more accurately, troop transports gathered in the Jamestown Roads in numbers adequate to take the men of the 53rd away to India. If destiny had laid down before me the generous but confusing cards represented by Fehrzen and Croad, it had in view of my unworthiness, of the combined unworthiness of our family, withdrawn them. So Fehrzen, from the quarterdeck of a transport, saw the island at whose heart I lay in stupor subside, fall down, a smaller and smaller thing, below the horizon. One of the transports was fitted as a hospital ship to take the cases of jaundice to Cape Town, where their superiors would expect them to recover in that balmy port. The rest were going on Empire's business to Bengal, whose strangeness would not diminish the memory of OGF but would surely erase all else. I was quite happy to be forgotten by Fehrzen.

I woke up in a flat, slatey light, dawn or dusk. My mind was confused, and I was uncertain about the distinction between those two phases of the day – I was uncertain, indeed, as to
whether the earth's entire light had taken on this dour tone. My mother's whirling oval face was close to mine and had replaced the usual celestial bodies.

‘My darling,' she said, ‘no one is more precious to me than you.'

I was amazed at the clumsiness of this – it was a shot that missed the target by margins hard to calculate.

‘I am a foolish woman,' she said. ‘I am ashamed. To face you even is to be burned by a flame – not yours, darling Betsy, but my own.'

I asked in the voice I had left, ‘Will the Emperor escape in your dress?'

She began to weep. ‘It will take more than that,' she said. ‘It will take more than a dress.'

‘It was not your dress,' I reasoned. ‘It was Madame de Montholon's.'

She nodded and put her fingers to my mouth.

‘Her child is
his
. Everyone knows it. Not her husband's.
His
. And yet still I wanted to comfort and serve him. Still I chose to. I am a foolish woman and your father is a foolish man. Marriage itself is an arena for foolishness.'

My hair fell out in tufts, in those days whose light and spirit was so supine. I had set out for an utter departure and managed to look like a girl with ringworm on her scalp. They stood beside each other in that light, studying me, the foolish parents. In what sense had Father been foolish? I wondered. In what strange scene had he disported himself, with his thirst for sherry and his goodwill and his general talent for merriment? In what form had he offered the Emperor escape?

So they were together again in good imitation of a marriage, a union of intents. Good enough.

‘Was the Emperor here?' I asked them.

They looked at each other as if he could have been. I remembered that the Emperor in a black suit had come into my room and said, ‘Hush, Betsy. We are all fools.'

That seemed to be what they all universally and individually agreed upon. But I was his friend, said OGF, and he wanted
nothing ill to happen to me and was sad that by some means I had been hurt, and so had hurt myself in answer, as if I were a culprit. He kept on insisting I was his friend, and there was nothing heightened about his eyes – they were not the excessive eyes of a dream in which he had also called me a friend in a less straightforward way.

Once I could stand I did not make an honest convalescent at all. I wanted to ride and when they said no I took the chance to go hiking, with just a flask of water, up towards that cave in the great punchbowl beneath the waterfall where slave Ernest had hidden. From the rim I could see my father and Jane on horseback, and a number of the slaves, including Toby, whose liberation once proposed by OGF had been denied for now by Plantation House. They were scouring the lower ground for me. Why I came back down from there instead of taking to that cave and being a female anchorite, I don't know. Except that a hermitage is something you try in the fullness of soul and in a God-filled universe, not in bewilderment and an island God has abandoned for its fatuity.

In the days that followed I heard them discussing whether I should be sent to England, and to what person there. Would Lady Holland take me? They seemed to think it a likelihood that she would look after a creature broken by the Emperor's presence. Did they feel shame and wish to remove my eyes, my judgement?

Meanwhile I was blank and sullen, though not for the sake of sullenness, but because all my pretensions at upright gestures had been blown flat in the gust that emitted from that salon when I opened the door on the indefinable storm inside.

I was remotely pleased to find Madame Bertrand ride up one day and come striding in through the carriage gate like a woman with sharply defined business to attend to. In meeting with me, she had obviously given the order she was not to be interrupted by my sister or mother – she emanated that message in the way she grabbed both my hands as if they were instruments of work she meant to employ. My mother was in any case prostrated that
day with a fever. Bewildered Jane kept faithfully to her timetable of French translation, needlework, sketching and reading, and seemed nearly as sallow as my mother. She would not intrude.

‘Now, you mustn't take any notice of that infantile play-acting at Longwood,' Fanny Bertrand told me. She waved a hand in the eastward direction of Longwood in case I did not understand. ‘It means nothing. The Emperor likes to play games – that is all. Would it be better if the games weren't played? It would be. I'll talk to you as a woman. I do not play along with him. But I understand those who do, from generosity of spirit. What you saw is nothing – nothing! Your mama's good nature … they play on it. The English are sinners, oh yes, sinners backwards and sideways. But the French, they bring their imaginations to life and … it is a confection. I think the Emperor is shocked for your sake. He is embarrassed
by
me, by my anger, and he is shocked, and in a way repentant, for you. Do you understand? The Countess de Montholon is full of pride for being the Emperor's mistress, but any of us could be the Emperor's mistress – I could be. It is helpful that the countess's clothing fits him. He was always interested in clothing – the Empress Josephine used to complain that he would take hers and she could not be sure of the condition of her wardrobe. Again, it is nothing! It is the French. It is not that they do not easily confront their sins. They find them hard to identify.'