Napoleon's Last Island (43 page)

I certainly did not know what to say to her, but for the first time I could perceive a key to what I had seen at Longwood. Charades. Dress-ups. Dress-downs. That could be understood. My mother's nakedness, Albine's, O'Meara, the dress on OGF. Fanny's speech helped to diminish the mystery of it all and the scene began to make itself proportionate to my inhabited earth.

‘And,' Madame Bertrand gurgled, ‘it is well known that soldiers like other men, through being with them in peril and in hardship. So we simply overlook that. O'Meara – a sailor, of course. And a good doctor and a nice talker. I do not find him a disgrace to the land of my forebears. We have to accept these things, Betsy, and to forgive and to discover when we are girls that there may be no more wisdom in our elders than in ourselves. That is when you
become a woman, Betsy. What you saw is not a cause to take some nasty rat powders. It is the onset of wisdom.'

Then she lowered her head and played with my fingers one by one, teasing them forth, inspecting the knuckles.

‘They all want to own him, you know. Each one to himself. The Emperor is sometimes cool with me because I do not want to own him. He wants people to be in competition for him. My husband won't join the contest and neither will I. But the de Montholons? Gourgaud? … Dear God above!'

I could never escape the idea that my mother's fever was a chosen one. It was endemic on the island. It not only lay on the surface of the island ready to be picked up, but seemed to chase down its victims like a predator. It had killed slaves. It made its victims yellow and wan, far more than it killed, and to acquire it offered my mother a chance to escape and exonerate what Madame Bertrand called foolishness.

One of its chief symptoms, exhaustion, kept my mother at home. And as it had in Croad, it also enhanced her melancholy. My father, at dinner, said, ‘Do be attentive to your dear mother, girls, I know you are.'

I saw him walking with O'Meara in the garden and wondered, does he know? Did he know the range of possible O'Mearas, including the naked one who stood by the Emperor? If he did not know, it was pitiable and I was bewildered as to whether it was my duty to tell him.

I remembered my mother mentioning Alice. Had she? Was that a phantasm? And now Alice was gone and another woman had come in to help Sarah.

‘Where is Alice?' I asked Jane.

‘Gone to the Hodsons' for her lying-in.'

Countess Bertrand remained a sturdy and determined visitor to me under the influence of my poison, and to my mother under
the influence of hers. She would drink tea with us all, but she took no trouble to instruct Jane as she had me. Was Jane's mind of such scope that it could encompass both poles of the island, the visible by nature on the one hand and that of the salon, visible by accident? I could be the Emperor's mistress, Fanny had claimed, and I imagined how she could submerge him with her long bones and ample flesh, how she could vanquish the vanquisher. She had for me the air of an aunt who understands all the children.

Before my father set off one morning for one of his frequent meetings at Plantation House in which the orders for household goods, coming from de Montholon, were matched against my father's capacity to supply and Sir Hudson's willingness to cramp, he took me aside, grasping my hand, clapping it under his arm and leading me, weak as I still was, on a walk down the lawn.

He said, ‘The Emperor is concerned for you, Betsy.'

‘Did he visit me?' I asked. ‘I dreamed he visited me.'

‘You know he will not leave Longwood,' reasoned my father. ‘You know he is not permitted.'

‘But he came to see me. He came to see me because of the wrong he did.'

My father frowned. ‘I don't think …'

‘Do you know?' I asked. ‘Do you know? Has he made you forgive him too? And has Alice forgiven us?'

‘Let's not talk about Alice,' he warned me.

‘Do you know …?' I asked. I intended to be a revelator, not a betrayer.

‘Do I know what?' asked my father.

So I would be required to be the revealer. I wanted to run, but he had my arm clamped under his.

He said, ‘Your mother is a good woman. Some people enchant us though, people like us. Some people are too large for us … They override our minds, our normal lives, make us do things … That's all. Be kind to your mother.'

He seemed to think about this more than I did and then looked sideways at me.

‘My God, when you think of the punishment they have put him to … when you think of the scope of mental endeavours they have tried to shrink him to … it is a wonder that …'

‘So we must all be sacrificed,' I said. Indeed, though I did not know it, he was going to sacrifice himself.

We both looked at the Pavilion and back at the day the Emperor came and asked us could he stay here at The Briars. And my father's instinct was to say, ‘Of course, you are welcome, when should we make way for you?' It would have been better if we had done that, moved from The Briars to some other place. My father had said we were enchanted and his word made it truer than if anyone else, Countess Bertrand, for instance, or I, had said it.

He reached across me and took my bonnet and said, ‘Your hair is growing out again. You must never, never … It would be insupportable.'

Then he was overcome by the plainest grief, the simplest tears, tears from the world before the Emperor. Tears lacking in all craft and artfulness.

‘Betsy,' he said, his jowl shuddering with grief, ‘our complaints involving you are far too regular in my book … We tell you too often you displease us. But not anymore. You are my arresting child, my vivid child, the one that was up to the strength of OGF … the one we need above all if we're to go on inhabiting the world …'

So I simply turned and in equally plain currency kissed his teary cheek and thought it unimportant whether he was ignorant and uncomplaining or knowledgeable and forgiving. He had brought us, father and daughter, back onto the simple field in which the usual connections of families
should
operate.

I waited by him while his horse was brought and even used a hand to help him up into the saddle, where he looked at me and sighed and smiled and rode out the gate for the wearisome interview.

When he returned that evening he seemed in a particularly flushed state and was inebriated by nightfall. My mother could not reach the table and so it was to Jane and my brothers and me, in a dining room sadly lacking in jovial presences, that my father announced without warning, ‘We are returning to England.'

It did not sound like a liberation. It sounded like a sentence. Surprisingly Jane was affronted by it and asked, ‘How did we arrive at this?'

My father answered, ‘Causes. Causes.'

It was so ominous an answer that Alex began to weep.

‘Is Our Great Friend Our Great Enemy?' asked Jane.

I had framed that same dark question of recent days but I found in the end that as my mother and father had been acquiescent to OGF, I had in my own way been equally so.

‘Alex,' said my father. ‘England is where you come from. You are going home.'

‘Is Mother well enough?' asked Jane. It was one of those questions that held a multitude of other questions within it.

When Sarah came to take the younger boys away to bed, my father said, ‘Of course, you realise that we have become too close to the Emperor and Sir Hudson has been frank in accounting that a crime. And he has made sure that he depicts it as a crime to the British Cabinet.'

And that was as full an explanation as anyone wanted and we sat in silence.

‘It is true I have negotiated money bills that did not go through the exalted conduit of Sir Hudson. Your mother and I … we have conveyed letters. We are not ashamed. The man is our friend.'

I stopped myself from roaring, ‘But is he? Is he?'

‘Fowler, Cole and Balcombe are no longer, or will soon be no longer, the contractors for the East India Company.'

And my mother had bared a breast for him as if he were a child and had contracted fever. So much she had done.

It would take us time to understand that the terms on which my father had agreed to quit the island were tight, like all arrangements Name and Nature made, and involved restriction on his access to assets.

It was a dismal period, assembling things that had once been treasures but had been rendered mere stuff by our going, and putting them in boxes – more than a dozen years of books and toys, clothing items and island mementos. Much furniture was being left behind for the use of the new tenant of The Briars, Admiral Plampin, and so from seeing those pieces static in their places, we knew that we merely
thought
we had possessed our place in the island, and that these remaining sticks of furniture would look on with the same mute patience at the newcomer as they had brought to serving us.

Our slaves Robert and Roger were to become liverymen to another family, though one of them showed an interest in the orchard and might be appointed apprentice to Toby. My mother was nursed by Sarah, and could be called convalescent. Slaves also collected baskets and boxes of our goods on the verandah to take them to the port. Jane and I packed everyone's belongings, including our parents' clothing and items of toilette, and
I marshalled our bags and sea trunks on the verandah. It was grief to look out at the garden and grief not to.

As I stood a second between burdens one morning, I thought I saw a movement in the grape arbour. For some reason I was terrified, my extremities went cold as if the past intended to foist itself delusionally on me. I could hear from within that grotto a rustling, and approached it with some fear, worried that I might see an apparition of the Emperor and Gourgaud and Las Cases
père et fils,
all engaged in making the history of OGF, and that the confusion of the sight, as a dislocation of time itself, would prove the new unmanageable nature of the world.

I suffered no such spasm of the senses, as it turned out. It proved, when I looked, that there was a goat in there. I went in and took it by the horns and dragged it forth furiously, and kicked it until it skittered away through a fence by the carriageway. I could not quite understand my own rage against it. It had filled my head with viciousness, though, and I wanted to extirpate it and all its kind.

On the way back to the house, panting, I saw, placed like a statue at the carriageway gate, Sir Hudson in his uniform. By him stood Major Gorrequer, similarly silent. A servant of theirs, behind them, held both their horses – they would not be entrusted to our grooms. They had arrived unobserved, and watched with a terrible dispassion my struggle with the goat. The governor doffed his hat and said, ‘I hear that your father is in, Miss Balcombe.'

I stared at him.

‘Is it so?' he persisted.

‘I believe it is,' I admitted.

‘In that case, would you let him know I wish to see him?'

I said, ‘He is very busy.'

Name and Nature sighed.

‘I'll see,' I offered.

I went into the house and found Father alone at his desk in the study, distractedly looking at accounts. I told him Name and Nature was at the carriageway gate, and wanted an audience. He was struck solemn by the idea but moved to instant decision. He said, ‘Before you let him in, send your brothers to the stables – they love it there.
Jane is meantime with your mother in her sickroom. Ask her to stay there. Then lead him in here please and go to join your mother too.'

I did as he asked. I went then and found that Sir Hudson stood, hat under his armpit, at the bottom of the garden stair. I told him my father would see him in his small library down the hall. So Name and Nature ascended the steps delicately, and his feet fell without militant weight in our hallway, and then he was with my father. I closed the door on them, without others in the house aware.

I knew from my earlier detention in the cellar that a ventilating shaft ran up from the cellar, through my father's library and out the roof, and I found the keys to the cellar now and locked myself in and went down there. From the table where I had slept during my detention, I heard the entire conversation between Name and Nature and his prey, Billy Balcombe.

‘So, it must be strange for you to go,' I heard Sir Hudson say, in what sounded like a neighbourly voice but was in fact the voice of a victor.

‘It has the feeling of final days, yes.'

‘And your treasure of a wife?'

‘She has the jaundice. You must have heard.'

‘The jaundice, yes,' said Sir Hudson, still with inhuman calm.

‘It is unfortunate,' my father told him. ‘But I shall care for her.'

Though it was the truth that he was no nurse and that he would care for his wife to his last daughter and maid, there was no doubting his sturdy aim. It was his answer to the suspicion of shame I had helped bring into the house by my taking of poison. And there were other suspicions he had to counter too.

‘You notice I say a “treasure of a wife”, Balcombe. I have always managed to be amiable to you, but you could never quite manage to be amiable to me. I mean genuinely amiable, beyond a mere show.'

My father said nothing.

Sir Hudson said, ‘I am an Englishman of decent but not huge reputation. No man who was utterly established in his public repute or influential in Whitehall or Horse Guards would have sought this job. It is the sort of post found for a man who has
been of some service. “What shall we do with Lowe? He was of some service at Waterloo.” Let me say frankly that my wife would have expected a more spacious government post. Nova Scotia, for example. Though I understand my limitations, I have been useful to my government, usefulness your friend at Longwood mocked.'

My father muttered, ‘I think the Tories must be very happy with you.'

‘You see, you cannot even say “our government”. You have to say “the Tories” as if they were an alien regime. The point is that your friend seems to wish they had sent an Emperor to guard him, and a Pope for a chaplain, our Divine Lord being sadly not available for the task. How absurd! And as an avowedly and self-confessed lesser man, I attract his relentless contempt.'

‘I am a small man and he treats me congenially,' said Billy Balcombe.

‘Yes, I suppose in a sense he does. But then your circumstances, Balcombe, are rather enmeshed with his.'

Was Name and Nature in some way going to be explicit about the sense in which the Emperor had not been congenial? I was about to block my ears when the conversation continued on a subject I was furiously interested in as much as astounded by.

‘Is there any truth at all in the story one hears that you are the blow-by bastard of the Prince Regent?'

My father laughed a little, a laugh appropriate to his good days at table.

‘His Majesty would have been fifteen when I was born. It's unlikely.'

‘But not impossible. For there is a resemblance …'

‘We both have gout, but that is not royal blood. That is uric acid. The truth is that my father was a Rotherhithe boatman, killed by the Prince's yacht off the Isle of Dogs.'

‘But you and your brother spent time in Carlton House.'

‘No, that is mere rumour. Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt was secretary to the Prince and was ordered to see to our education and find us positions. He did so, in trading houses, and backed me in my efforts to be appointed to my present post. And here I am. Not a prince, not a prince's son, but a provedore, for a time, to
an emperor – though sometimes embarrassed by the quality of goods I was forced to supply him.'

‘You rather liked the rumour of this royal connection though, didn't you, Balcombe?'

‘It appealed to me when I was in my cups. It made a plain Englishman more interesting.'

‘That was something of a conceit, wasn't it?'

‘I fear so. Ordinary men allow themselves conceits. Without them they entirely lack colour.'

‘Ultimately harmless, of course,' said Sir Hudson with a false air of forgiveness. ‘You have other tricks. I would hate you to think that all these tricks you've played, harmless or not, have placed you in a position of honour, or even of scoring points. You have been indulged by me but, believe me, at a price to yourself. You negotiate bills for the General! You bribe ships' captains to take letters! And you thought that old Lowe at Plantation House was so contemptible he would not know.'

‘I never said you were contemptible, sir, nor do I now.'

‘No, you have never so much as
said
. Your actions, however, had the arrogance of a person who believes he is not observed and not reported upon. But, my dear fellow, you were reported upon.'

‘Everyone on this island is reported upon.'

Name and Nature ignored this. ‘I would let you go on with your little gestures of vanity on behalf of the soi-disant Emperor, and maintain your status on the island. And why would I do that, do you think, when you were so scornful, Balcombe? Unworldly men resort to scorn too easily – they don't understand the cost – and I think you are one of
them
. Your wife recognised that I could not be scorned. And by your malice, Balcombe, you exposed your wife. Did you think of that? That I might use her devotion to you to learn things?'

My father said, ‘You are trying to say something by implication. I don't like implication from fellows like you.' One could tell Billy Balcombe was awed and frightened though.

‘Then I can be explicit, William. While you were being clever smuggling financial instruments and letters, I was clever in enlisting Mrs Balcombe. She knew better than you did that
you were behaving impolitically. She knew that your respectable partners, Cole and Fowler, would not be flattered to have their premises used as a staging post for the General's correspondence or to give credibility to French negotiated bills. She knew that she must protect you. And so she did, by the week. Sometimes we met at Count Balmain's and Baron de Stürmer's, sometimes on the road near Plantation House. Always privately, so that no shame would attach.

‘My wife thought that I was engaged in an affair of the heart and became jealous and, I believe, expressed some of that towards your daughter, the equestrian. I was engaged, in fact, simply in arranging a dossier. Of course, your wife tried to protect me by telling me not even the half of it, to give me harmless details that betrayed no one, even when relaying the gossip of Fanny Bertrand. But remember that the General was particular to call me, as if in contempt, “a Prussian spymaster”. Well, it happens I was, in my role as their British advisor. I lost Capri but had a revenge on that other day, that day of all days. In my role as their British liaison, I got Blücher's Prussian army into place beside Wellington's at a crucial hour. If I wanted to impress a village alehouse, I could depict myself to an amazed set of townsmen the critical if barely known factor on that day. But such vanity is shallow and such consolation worthless.'

‘I thought you rather liked impressing the alehouse in Jamestown,' my father suggested, but the blow did not even land.

‘Whatever you did to spite me, whatever you considered as your exercises in worldliness and of loyalty to what you probably called the Great Man, I heard all of it in substance from an anxious and devoted wife. Think of that, Balcombe, as you return to a narrowed world.'

‘This can't be the case,' muttered my father, but there was a silence then and it grew. I wanted, impossibly, to be able to get to my father and offer him comfort. I remembered the day we went to Plantation House to avert bloodshed, and my mother, to my surprise, had been treated coarsely by Lady Lowe.

I heard a faint scrape. It could all have been Sir Hudson taking up his hat.

I raced for the stairs and bounded up them and let myself from the cellar into the corridor. There, as he was leaving, I encountered Sir Hudson face to face.

He stood before me, composed, with a mild half-smile. The splotch of dead red colour in his cheek did not pulse. He had the calmness of a winner, and though he had no idea I had heard him, he would not have cared if I had. Without even forming the intent to do it, I drew my hand back and struck him across the face with a closed fist, the way men did. It made a considerable noise.

He felt it but did not touch the place. He absorbed it and moved his head back from the side, where I had smacked it, and said, ‘Remember me, Miss Balcombe, in your unhappiness.'

We were now absolutely free in movements, since in the eye of Name and Nature our movements had lost all meaning. We knew we must say goodbye to OGF. It could not be avoided, and though Jane at first refused and intended, or said she intended, to leave the island without seeing him, this was in reality nearly as impossible as disdaining the air of the island. Whatever each of us, knowing what we knew, would make of the encounter, it was precisely like engaging the elements: it could not be avoided.

And so we all rode over, en famille, though without the boys, indifferent to the snideness of the sentries who bore the number 66. We traced the familiar route through Devil's Glen and up the escarpment where Croad had mooned over an earwig and longed for zoological renown. Fehrzen and Croad and the victors of the Peninsula and Toulon. Thank God they'd gone!