Napoleon's Last Island (44 page)

We got near the long, low manor house. Slaves and sailors were erecting a wrought-iron fence on one of the margins.

‘It is to go right around,' said my father.

‘Of course,' said Jane.

Our horses were taken and we were admitted by Novarrez, who bowed profoundly to us as if we were a corps of the victorious, the dauntless.

OGF was in the salon. The billiard table had been moved out. The map of Prussia was pinned only in three corners now Las Cases was gone. History was collapsing without that strict mentor. But OGF had been opening books with Marchand in a room where Gourgaud was no longer his attendant spirit.

‘Oh,' he declared. He stood up straight. He looked at all of us. I could detect the basilisk eyes of my dream behind the ones he now directed at us. ‘This I have dreaded!'

It might have been that people wondered about the authenticity of the Ogre's intense emotions after they had left him and had leisure to think back. But they seemed utterly real; they convinced the Balcombes and had one other unifying effect on us: that we suddenly saw ourselves as part of those who had been taken from him. We had heard that Albine de Montholon was also going to Europe for her health's sake. The nakedness of men and women I had perceived here at Longwood should have overridden this meeting, but in fact OGF's bereavement did. We all wept as we embraced him. No one hesitated, not even Jane. The caresses were pure, and all of them had travelled beyond sin.

‘Oh,
Cinq Bouteilles
,' he said, ‘if I were still France, you would never want for wealth or honour, my dearest friend. You would be Comte Balcombe.'

He asked forgiveness one by one of us. Jane was weeping. Her pardon came without a struggle.

Nothing memorable was said.

‘Where will it end?' my mother asked. ‘I see Lowe is building the encircling fence …'

‘Ah yes, my Jeanne, but you will get well in un-walled sunshine, as you deserve. There you will hear I have died in this palisade of cliffs, and you will know at last the escape has occurred.'

I felt a panic at how little could be said from our side. A world must be encompassed and yet we only had our threads of banal words. I had also given way to tears. It was the day for them. Yet I had left my handkerchief in the pocket of my side-saddle. OGF took his, shook it out and told me to use and keep it – to remember the sad day, he said, worthy of Talma.

‘And now at last, tears, Betsy,' he said, and pursed his lips and nodded, as if he had always known they were there and it was this visit and his penitence that had brought them forth.

We went to dinner. Counts Bertrand and the de Montholons attended, Albine heroically unabashed, and O'Meara and a new liaison officer from the garrison, a pleasant enough man who seemed somewhat bewildered.

Beneath the floor the rats played their rowdy game of possession. ‘And Guglielmo,' asked OGF, ‘where will you live in England?'

‘I believe …' he said, ‘I believe that in the first instance the Cabinet want to see me.'

‘Tell them all, my dear
Cinq Bouteilles
. For your own sake. There is nothing I want concealed.'

My father nodded, but I knew there was much to be concealed.

‘I think we might then take to Devon, the scene of operation of our patron, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt.'

‘Oh God forbid, they will rusticate you by force.'

My father laughed for the first time in days, and the minutes fled. The bonbons and ices arrived, OGF urged Jane and myself to eat them up as if these were normal times. Soon we were back in the salon.

‘Do not worry, my friends. No Racine tonight.' And he sent for Marchand. Marchand arrived solemn, was instructed in a whisper, and went again. He came back with a bowl, a towel and scissors. The towel went around the Emperor's shoulders. Marchand cut strands of his master's hair and put them in the bowl. Each cutting he then picked up and placed in an envelope. Four envelopes. Pouches of the essence of OGF.

‘When I die,' he told me, ‘I want my friends to be able to say they have the real hair.'

Before I left, I managed to ask after the new baby, Josephine, and Albine had it brought by a maid. I looked into its wide, dark, questioning eyes for a sign of its rumoured imperial blood. But then, in confusion, being unable to fit it and Albine and OGF into any acceptable model of the world, I kissed it and ran to join my parents.

Lady Bertrand had sent a note to say she would collect us at The Briars and take us to the dock in the Emperor's barouche at noon on our last day as islanders. This journey was always a risky one because of the narrowness of the track and the steepness of the country, but the idea of Fanny Bertrand shone for my mother like a guarantee of safety and sisterly warmth. My father needed to ride – he had a gelding to deliver to one of the town's merchants.

The older Archambault brother rode postilion with another servant. When we pulled out I did not take a last doleful scan of The Briars, for I had done that already. I had interred the house and its gardens in my mind, and no longer had any meaningful sight left to take of it. I noticed that beside Fanny Bertrand my mother looked cooler under her big hat and a net of mantua lace, as if she were suddenly the one most willing to escape the rock in the great sea. After we transited the shade of the carriageway, with Father riding ahead, and came to Huff's Gate on the main road down to Jamestown, I had enough distance on all this geography as to be dourly amused that in burying Huff at that place, as if to bury his shame, they had given his name a prominence that might last more years than had he been buried amongst the just of St Matthew's.

Fanny Bertrand was attentive to my mother, consolatory to my sister and nervously tender towards me. Her gestures remained those not of formality but of unforced friendship. She made a comment to my mother and pointed away towards her right, where at Deadwood Camp many huts had by now replaced the tents of that barren zone, and new soldiers had replaced the ones we had met in the high days. My mother turned her head to look in that direction but saw nothing to engage her.

We reached the gap in the coastal heights, where the tiers down to the port began. I sat in the barouche beside my sister, and I saw the plateau and its peaks disappear by small degrees and suffered from a sense that proved accurate – I was losing the geography for good. How convenient if the barouche, with all the questions it contained, had its wheels slip on one of the track-side precipices and we went tumbling down, our now too-knowing skulls and bodies crushed with every revolution of the vehicle's fall beyond control.

It didn't happen. I saw the redoubts either end of the gap and their watchful cannon, and they seemed more eternal to the island that I had been.

There was some comfort in the town. A number of shopkeepers, and Mr Porteous, were on the pavements to raise their hats as my father and the barouche rode by. At a front floor window of the Portions I beheld the smirk of Miss Porteous. A number of army and naval officers in the street, men who had at one time dined at our table, saluted us as we passed. There was a regard for my father that was not to be despised in these gestures. He could learn from them, if not too depressed, that Lowe's view was not the island's view of him.

At the dock itself waited the Solomon family, and the Counts Bertrand and de Montholon. I think I saw distinctly in their faces the strain of
not
going, the temptation of escape that we unwillingly represented. I would have changed places with them happily – those who must go but want to stay: those who must stay but want to go. Bertrand moved amongst us with his normal air of courtly wariness. He kissed my mother's hand, ours; he even
bent to Fanny's hand devoutly. He assured us in his fluid voice that the Emperor was inconsolable to lose us. More friends gone, OGF was said to have lamented. More true friends. It wasn't the day to ask with an edge in what regard the Ogre was inconsolable about my mother. Bertrand laid the softest of touches on my wrist. ‘He tells you, Betsy, to forgive him and then forget you knew him at all, as if you had never met.'

The pious absurdity of this tempted me to crazy laughter, yet again it was not the day for such things.

‘Tell him that's ridiculous,' I said.

‘I know,' said Bertrand, ‘and he knows. But you might be happier if you could.'

As he went to speak again to my father, Fanny Bertrand drew me aside and, enveloping my shoulders with her arms, walked me a little way along the dock. ‘Have you forgiven me? You know that women conceal these things for each other, and for the good of families. Forgive me before you go, Betsy.'

She had the air of someone who had revelations for me. I had revelations for her, if I chose to repeat what I had overheard from Name and Nature. I held them back to pursue further about sisterly hiding of secrets.

‘How long did you hide it for my mother?'

‘Perhaps some months. Not six.'

‘And this is friendship? Or is it crime?'

‘How can I answer? It was apparent the Emperor needed her so sorely.'

‘
We
needed her sorely. We were the ones who were her duty. She had no duty to attend to the Ogre's sore need.' I felt the too familiar cruelty rise in me. ‘In any case, I can tell you that you were concealing nothing, since she betrayed all you said to Sir Hudson. Taking the gift of your words to
him.'

I wanted to see her shaken as I had been shaken. I wanted her to grow aghast. But she laughed without shock or enmity. ‘Oh, I knew that! I trusted her. She is no one's fool. Just harmless gossip, my stock in trade. And items of no consequence.'

‘You knew about that? Jane doesn't know.'

‘And no need to tell her. Yes, she told me about what the Fiend demanded of her. She gave me undertakings, and then she told me what she'd told him and we laughed. For Sir Hudson has a wonderful trait: he mistakes quantity of news for quality. That is the sort of man he is.'

‘O'Meara says that too,' I remembered in a daze.

‘Yes, it is in that spirit that he guards the Emperor and weekly offends him by many new little quantities of straitening. And she gave nothing away of substance about Our Great Friend. The three of us would laugh at the things she told Sir Hudson. Since he thought his locating of her with the Emperor was a masterstroke. Even laundry lists, if she'd sent them from within Longwood, they would have resonated with him. She talked, and Sir Hudson was happy.'

‘The Emperor too?
She
told him?'

‘It was a game. It was all a game.'

This made me near choke with fury. ‘But she did not tell her husband. My father wasn't a party to all this worldly laughter and this poisonous game!'

‘Well, your father is part-citizen and part-saint, and it was for love of him that she …'

‘Or for love of the Ogre?'

‘I think your sainted pa has absorbed that and all else with great courage. Be kind to him.'

A new, revelatory suspicion rose as late as this, on a stone platform above the Atlantic, the last whisper of earth.

‘Are you saying my father knew about … my mother and the Ogre?'

‘You think that we are powerful actors in the world. But we are all hostages, Betsy, and the best people, not the worst people, are victims of pity. If your mother pities the Emperor, did you think your father wouldn't? Your mother is an honest woman and does not like to keep secrets. But she could not tell him about the monster she fed with supposed intelligence. She could confess it to OGF but your father … with him there was the matter of his pride. That was a terrible thing for him to know – that he was
protected from the Fiend. And it was not by his wits but by his wife.'

‘How could my father know the other, Fanny? How could he be calm about it?'

‘That's … I don't know … that can only be revealed if you have been through it yourself.'

‘I took the poison,' I said. ‘He could be calm and I took the poison.'

‘I know. I know, Betsy.'

‘I am disgusted by you all,' I decided.

‘No. You have an excellent mother and an excellent father and that must be your yardstick. They will need you in these bitter days. You should be filled with pity. One day, when you think of it, you will be.'

‘Not if it leads me as it's led them. I don't want to feel any pity.'

But I knew it was an impossible ambition. In the midst of my ferment a cutter had landed and a coxswain was bawling for passengers to our ship,
Winchelsea
.

It meant our belongings were in the hold and our cabins awaited. We descended, me yielding, I confess and bitterly regret, merely a shake of Fanny Bertrand's hand.

As the ship left the shore, and all the way out to the vessel, I narrowed my gaze and kept my eyes down. I gave no last wave to anything. But across the water came a baritone chorus of shouts.

‘Good-by-y-y-e, Pri-i-ince!'

When we first arrived at the new East India Docks aboard the
Winchelsea
, my mother seemed less grey in the face than she had been on our leaving the island. I knew – since I still listened as much as I could, and because the cabins on the ships were small and gave onto a shared saloon − that my father had been solicitous during what had been by everyone's estimation an amazingly clement journey, with a pleasant four days ashore on Ascension Island, part of it spent riding from Georgetown into the verdure of the hills.

On Ascension Island we had been made very welcome by the representative of Drummonds' Bank who had children about my brothers' ages. My father was mystified that when he presented a note to be cashed, the young man was embarrassed to tell him that London had placed some impediment in the way of his presenting notes, but that he should not be concerned – it would be sorted out in London and, in the meantime, all our expenses would be settled by a Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt and he, the banking agent, was authorised to remit my father a modest amount for incidentals. Did my father know this Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt? he asked. My father did. ‘I will see Lady Holland about this,' said my father at table, when his anxiety spilled over. ‘She is a friend of the Emperor's and does not think anyone should be penalised for it.'

After we left Ascension he spent three days in his bunk, though the weather was good and he would usually have been more active on deck or reading in the saloon. I was grateful that by now we had by mutual signals decided that what had passed on the island was too grievous to consider and certainly impossible to discuss. There are some events so engorged that our only choice is to ignore them. That was the spirit in which we had resolved to face Britain. We hoped we would be permitted to be ourselves again.

In the Channel we encountered a luminous but opaque greyness, which did not disperse even a little until we were on the Thames and off Gravesend, where we could see creaky-looking buildings in the dusky air over the banks. This was my homeland, and the children running on the banks my fellow countrymen.

Entering the locks into the crowded basin of the East India Docks, we found ourselves in dizzying company, our three masts merely three trunks in a great forest. The air was hazed still, and it did not seem to be the atmosphere in which that banking issue would be settled. My father was dressed to settle it in a good navy suit and blue waistcoat. But our concern did not echo here.

From a coach at the dockside emerged the compact form of little Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, soberly dressed and with intense, businesslike eyes but a smile I believed uncertain. He came aboard as soon as the gangplank was down. On deck he introduced himself pleasantly to us as Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt. ‘I remember my last conversation with Betsy, who has grown considerably,' he murmured over-pleasantly (or so I think in retrospect), after praising Jane and the boys. With him was a nurse who took my brothers aside and entertained them with a card game across the deck and beyond the saloon lights on the ship's non-business side. Jane and I strolled over there too – my father must have an earnest talk with this knight whose name so resonated in our family – and while the nurse showed some skill in entertaining the boys, we looked across the dock at the faces of warehouses, trying to find something informative in the hectic traffic of goods, wagons creaking in empty and going out loaded with everything from rum barrels to tea chests and curry powder.
And through it all the male voices of many purposes rising from ship and dock and bouncing round the echoing clouds. It was so much more vastly busy than the island that it gave me the idea I did not know what haste was and so was fatally unsuited for this nation. I felt overwhelmed and doubted I could run its race.

Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt took my mother and father, who might have been able to read and interpret the scene for us, into the saloon. I wanted my father to be beside me, to read England for me – that enormous and impregnable book.

When my parents did emerge with Sir Thomas, the little knight had a look of wisdom validated. I saw a gratified reflection of his glow in my mother, but more doubt in my father. In other words, she was buoying him up. If he had had to take account of my mother's health as a motive for leaving the island, it seemed now that his was the one at most risk. There were solemn handshakes between my father and the knight.

There were duties and conferences my father had to attend to in town, and Sir Thomas told us we might be in London a few months before we were to go to a house set aside for us in an area of Devon in which he had business interests. Until we reached that haven or retreat or place of detention, we would live in London residences provided by him.

Our luggage was placed on the roof and back ledge of the coach. What did not fit was put in the hands of a carter and, Sir Thomas said, would be with us by that afternoon. There is so much to exercise the mind of a home-returning Briton on a grey day! More to try to discern than on a bright revealing one – and all that without other impending issues – like money, the censure of government, the feeling that Sir Thomas was both more and less than a friend, that he was put in place by high authority to be our keeper and monitor. To add to our unease, my small brothers were stupefied by the place and its scenes and had never known the earth held this many loud fellow beings, so many vehicles, and such masses of shops and chapels and stalls and warehouses as the East India Dock Road held, and so many cries from men and women and urchins selling things in amazing ways. We
watched girls dragging carts of oranges and calling, ‘Fine Seville oranges, fine lemons, fine …' There were watercress sellers, piemen carrying little portable ovens and assortments of gravies, vegetable sellers shouting their jingles in praise of cabbage or turnips, Jews crying out for old clothes. There were milkmaids, ink sellers, knife grinders, egg girls, and all of them clamorous to be heard above their vending brethren. In the coach, Alex buried his face in the hollow of my mother's shoulder and Jane herself was milk-pallid. How would my father plead cases amidst those other voices and match them for urgency?

The coach took us to a good house in a court off New Oxford Street and our spirits lifted. We did not fully understand that it was a mere holding pen for the Balcombes to – I have since decided – allow our father to be quizzed by high officers and even secretaries of state about his friendship with OGF. Sir Thomas had handed my father an amount from funds, but whether they were his funds or the government's or ours, I was never sure, and was always embarrassed to ask. The knight then called on the housekeeper to show us the house, said that the nurse was on her way to attend to the boys, congratulated my mother and father warmly on their handsome girls, and left, with a promise of future meetings.

Shown our rooms, Jane and I discussed whether Sir Thomas was a friend, a kind of parent. His care for us seemed exaggerated unless it had been ordered by a grander power still. His smile was that of a barterer – if William Balcombe and his wife behaved well, they would go on receiving it. Yet everything Sir Thomas did for us had an element that did not quite live up to the cheery benevolence he emitted. We would come to realise that there were reasons for this. There had arisen in the press a frenzy about a supposed escape plot in favour of the Emperor. This was purely to justify policy, but the claim was that Englishmen were involved. We had arrived in London at the peak of this rumour, and thus in a bad climate for my father, whose name was mentioned in some of the wilder versions. Thus we had, it seemed, landed ourselves unwittingly within the ambit of those who most wished to interrogate my father. Sir Thomas was
mediator between the great men who had an interest in this tale and Billy Balcombe, already a suspect. That might have explained the equivocation in the knight's smile that first day.

We suddenly seemed to be living, like the Emperor on the island, on a budget, an experience we had not ourselves had before. For causes unexplained, Admiral Plampin's rent did not arrive. Certainly we could afford bread and milk and meat, but the sense of plenty was gone, with the mangos and guavas, the nectarines and oranges. Who had made the limits of the budget for us? My father was all at once the most secretive man on that score.

Tyrwhitt remained our shepherd. Why? One thing was that Father had written too often to the Prince about the Great Ogre, which unsettled the Prince and gave him doubts – he was believed to be prone to such claims and those around him thought it better to save him from having to encounter them. So now was my father considered disloyal, and the Ogre's man?

This was not a pleasant time under any aspect. I wondered – I wonder still – if they had used the power of the state to freeze his savings – a most un-British thing for them to do. His nominal partners, Messrs Cole and Fowler, in the ship-provisioning business my father had run with them on the island, had – further – not wanted to communicate with him, as if they'd been warned off. Altogether, dreadful things had been done to this over-trusting, genial man. It was all a mystery. Were we truly poor or the victims of assets seized in politics' name? It seemed to me by the time we left New Oxford Street and moved out along Finchley Road, preparatory to our final domicile in Devon, that my parents had become government pensioners, and lived sparingly as pensioners do. For them, it was a new mode. My father was soured by it.

Our friend from the island, Barry O'Meara, we then heard, had been ejected himself soon after us and for similar reasons. He
was now working as a dentist in Edgware Road because they had taken away his membership of the College of Surgeons. So they were certainly able to deprive my father of savings and income. My father always returned from his explaining-himself sessions wan, and then drank a lot. Later he would tell us that some of the more extreme advisers to government ministers wanted him tried for treason. I heard him, with an elevated shrill, not utterly sober voice tell my mother, ‘They believed I was enriching myself by sending the Emperor's letters on. I took only enough money from Bertrand to encourage ship captains to take this or that item to France or America. How can I give them the names of the captains without betraying men who were friends of mine and sat at our table? So they think I spent it on myself.' And so they would conclude that he had transmitted the Emperor's letters and money bills for pure profit, and this was a good thing since it put the likelihood of treason trials behind him, but a bad thing because it made them think of him as someone who sold his soul and relatively cheaply. His higher states of anxiety were slowly replaced by depression.

I would find out later still that he was suspected of involvement in escape plots.

A card delivered to the first house we occupied off New Oxford Street invited us to visit Lady Holland. It was an indication of her influence and insistence that the card was permitted to reach us.

When the invitation came, my father began to hope again, for Lady Holland had been threatened too for her enthusiasm for the Great Ogre and, as the absolute Empress of Whiggish England, had laughed it off – or so we had been told.