Napoleon's Last Island (5 page)

He said to me, ‘So you could not take to school, Miss Balcombe?'

I wanted to say that school could not take to me, but for once, perhaps with a small surge from the dormant veins of wisdom within me, I did not. With a smile I never trusted, he told me that I was required to answer him directly.

‘Sir,' I said, ‘I want to go back to the island.'

Sir Thomas and the elderly male relative exchanged looks. ‘The father's daughter then,' he said, smirking. ‘Fit for islands and secluded posts.'

Then he undertook a long study of me, one more extensive in its searchfulness, I thought, than there was material to justify it.

‘Does it worry you,' he asked me, ‘that you will grow up a savage?'

It didn't worry me at all. I said, ‘If it pleases you, sir … no!'

‘And your sister Jane has been so happy at the academy.'

‘She has a bad chest because the academy is cold. But she is not impudent, sir.'

He laughed drily and scanned the ceiling and returned large almond eyes to me. ‘Impudence is not a disease you catch,' he told me with his gnome-like infallibility. ‘Not like your sister's bad chest. It is a chosen condition. And you have chosen it. And now or later you should un-choose it, miss, if you do not want to be a savage on an island.'

I could see that the dour but tender relative had put his head to the side like a questioning, honest hound, and was beginning to feel sorry for me. He said, ‘Perhaps the experiment could be tried again, Sir Thomas, in a year or two? Perhaps she will grow to be more like her sister. That sort of thing has been known to occur.'

‘I don't want to anger great men,' I declared in what would have been total bemusement, except for the fact that beyond this sea of humiliation and disapproval glimmered the island. It was a fit landscape for my fallen state. Surprisingly this contrite or at least sincere utterance seemed to disarm Sir Thomas. His laughter at it sounded authentic and no longer a form of judgement.

‘I found you,' he said, ‘the wife of an East India Company garrison surgeon on her way to India by way of the island. She will look after you on the voyage back.'

And so I had achieved my aim through defiance, and on the island I would be saved by distance from the disappointment of great men. I was allowed to write to Jane and ask her to forgive me for being so bad and leaving her behind. She wrote back declaring herself quite happy for the time being to stay with Miss Clarke. She existed there, after all, in a comfortable net of admiration woven of teachers and other pupils alike.

Sir Thomas's tubercular young man took me to Portsmouth in a carriage and I returned home on a naval vessel of seventy-two guns, a most sleek ship that would achieve the passage in seven weeks. Aboard, I met the surgeon's wife, who had two girls younger than me and to whom I knew at once I must be kind and companionable. For the woman meant me nothing but good and was very handsome in a darker, watchful, ample way. Her name was Mrs Amie Stuart, she was Canadian-French and had met her husband, Surgeon Stuart, on what she called ‘the Nova Scotia station', where Stuart had supervised the hospital of the naval squadron and the garrison. I learned her unmarried name was Troublant and heard her speaking in French to her two young daughters – the older of whom, the six-year-old, shared a cabin with me. Through the partition we could hear her talking
in French to the four-year-old. At a specially blocked-off table in a mid-ship saloon, a rare enough thing in a ship of war, we all spoke French, and it was from her tuition that I learned much more of the language, reading from her daughters' primers and from French histories of the Angevin Age or of Charlemagne she had in her possession.

On the morning we at last stood in the Jamestown Roads and waited to be taken ashore in the cutter, I did not feel that there were so many grounds now for men of great power to be disappointed in me, and in any case their disappointment was remote. Admittedly, my French was only partially accomplished, but what I had, I somehow had to the full, in a way that promised future and perfect facility if I simply pursued my native interest.

I had composed an address to my parents who, I knew, would be at the pier. They were not the kind of people who exercised punishment by absenting themselves from the ritual of welcoming one of their children. There might be chastisement later in the day, but I was confident enough in their affection to know that whatever had been communicated about me, however my character had been traduced, it would be swallowed up in their relief in seeing me again.

So it happened. I came ashore with Mrs Stuart and her two girls, and when I climbed up to the dock from the cutter I found my mother and father. They looked to me like all I desired: abundance and forgiveness and repatriation – as if I had survived a battle and were to be celebrated for it. Sarah was there carrying my plump new brother, Thomas Tyrwhitt, and it would turn out that Mother was pregnant with baby Alexander. My enlarged family seemed to promise an enlargement of the terms of life. It was 1811, I would soon be ten, and I was home for an indefinite future. My mother thanked Mrs Stuart and invited her to The Briars and then knelt and said, ‘Oh, my Betsy,' and took Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe from Sarah and in one long-armed hug enclosed my new brother and me.

In the shadow of the warehouse of Fowler, Cole and Balcombe, I uttered my first long French salutation, and I could see that
it eased something in my father's fraught eyes. He said to my mother, pointing to me, ‘You see, Jane. We are what we are, and in that we may well be superior to those who seek to tut about us.'

Mrs Stuart and the girls were to overnight with us, in the house, not in the Pavilion. They were astounded by the journey from Jamestown up the precipitous terraces to The Briars, where the girls and I ran madly on the lawn and called out in French to each other. We stumbled for lack of land legs, and the two Stuart children still had far to travel, through rough waters which would be succeeded by torpid ones, and then India. Late the following afternoon, they were warned by a seaman sent from the ship that they should be prepared to get aboard, for the captain intended departure as soon as favourable.

We went down with them, and returned to the interior of the island in the near-dark, and I informed my mother of the Medes and Persians, for her pleasure at what I
had
learned outweighed the displeasure of the so-called greater folk who hadn't liked my English performance at all. My parents were delighted to find that I was willing to stay in the parlour of The Briars for three hours a day absorbing books. I sucked up
The Pilgrim's Progress
and thought it a very sensible religious fable indeed. I delighted in
The Vicar of Wakefield
, and the humanity and sense of the vicar, Dr Primrose. My mother was busy with Thomas, and had trouble finding a wet nurse for him amongst the slaves of the island, which was extremely bad luck given their rate of pregnancy and the fact that it was known their milk was plenteous. Sarah was on daily watch to report the birth of a slave baby or the sad death of one, and thus the emergence of a potential nurse.

Meanwhile, I had heard my father complain to my mother, ‘What will happen when these girls no longer live on the island, Jane? I would like to see them lead a fuller life, and exercise fuller skills.' But he was a man easily comforted and I continued with my own education, reading occasional French novels my mother borrowed, with strong assurances of their propriety, from Mrs Wilks, the wife of the governor of the East India Company, or from the bookish wife of the commander of the East India Company artillery.

My mathematics remained serviceable for daily use. I could not have made a sextant reading, but was happy to leave navigation to officers of the Royal Navy. My self-education in music advanced, and when I applied myself to the spinet in the drawing room I found myself naturally impelled towards making music. One of the first songs I could fluently play – and sing in full – was ‘Ye Braes and Banks of Bonnie Doon'. It spoke to me so powerfully and melodically of losses I could not understand yet instinctively knew I might suffer at some time.

Jane returned to the island the following summer. The family was complete and little Thomas Tyrwhitt so charming we used to play with him as he sat on a rug in the garden, he making speeches in the language of infancy, we answering him in French and English and always indulgent. Soon, it seemed, he was joined by Alex, of questioning eye and roguish smile. A decent fortress seemed our family on the island of St Helena. The education of the Balcombe girls was marked by fits of well-meaning parental supervision, and my father was exercised by the new question of who would educate his sons.

When I was twelve years, Boney fell from his height of power. That was a distant drumbeat. And he returned from an exile and imposed himself on Europe once more. But this was an irrelevance to the rock we inhabited amidst the primeval waters.

One day when I had reached the uncertain age of thirteen, I went off on Tom the horse, with Jane on her horse, riding at my mother's insistence with a lady's saddle, which while it sat aboard the creature also cleverly prevented women from riding astride. When I reached home on the last day of my accustomed life, the life I wanted, I spotted in the V in the mountains a ship newly anchored in the roads, with a few lumpy store ships I had seen the day before around it. This new ship was a sloop, fast and sleek.

By the time I reached the house and had taken Tom to the stable and put him in the care of Ernest, I found that there were two naval gentlemen on the verandah speaking urgently to my father. My mother was there with little Alex in her arms and she intercepted me. Her face was aglow and when I asked her what was happening she said she did not know, but something was wholly out of the ordinary. In fact, from that point on, we would never know the ordinary again.

And yet she asked me, in her innocence, ‘We need something a little unusual, don't we, Betsy?'

Her full smile transcended her fraught condition, the inroads made on her tranquillity by baby colic, and Jane's occasional asthma. I thought then with some amazement that the island might not be to her what it was to me: sufficient. Now, in any
case, she confided in me, ‘Those gentlemen are officers from the frigate
Icarus
. They have come ahead of their squadron.'

At last my father asked the two officers to sit down. My mother and I passed indoors, but she called to Sarah to go and see if the gentlemen wanted anything. We could see from the drawing room that they asked for brandy and water, but they also went on talking at length.

In the remnants of the dusk, they sat at the table in the garden as the two boys in white gloves served them their refreshment, and then after some time both officers went off on the horses they had been rented or loaned in town. My father, etiquette's child, waved them out of sight from the carriage gate before bounding across the lawn and up the steps and into the house.

‘Jane,' he called out. ‘Jane!' We were all instantly in the corridor.

‘I have a very large provisions order before me,' said my father. ‘I should tell you that. I have a
very large provisions order
.'

And then his florid face broke into giggles like a schoolboy. He had not a malicious crease in his whole face, and later I would wish he had some armour against the world. ‘Very large', he declared, choking on laughter. ‘You wouldn't believe …'

‘Tell us, for dear heaven's sake,' asked my mother.

‘I am to provision the party, the entourage, the suite of the Emperor Bonaparte.'

My mother laughed at this – it was hilarious to all of us – and said, ‘On what invasion is he now embarked?'

And my father said, ‘Why, it's the invasion of our own island. Of St Helena!'

These propositions were beyond our powers to accommodate. We stood stupefied. I could hear my sister Jane breathing earnestly.

And he said, ‘That was exactly how I felt, that such outcomes were too great for our geography. But those two gentlemen who rode off … they have warned me that the Great Ogre of Europe is two days off, aboard the
Northumberland
, Admiral Cockburn's
flag aboard, Captain Maitland commanding. They are coming
here
. And I am to be the provedore to the entire party of Napoleon and not only that … but that is enough for now!'

‘But what is such a being doing here?' asked my mother.

‘The captain … the man who just left … he told me that this is to be a new Elba. The Ogre is to be placed halfway between Europe, Africa and South America. This is the deepest pocket they could find to put the Universal Demon in.'

‘Then he is very lucky,' I, St Helena's greatest patriot, asserted.

My father said, with a laugh I can hear down the years, ‘And it is more than that, more than that.'

‘It can't be him,' said my mother. ‘Does he even exist?'

It was as if her world were becoming glutted with more meaning than she wanted it to contain.

‘The gentlemen tell me that his intended residence here on the island is not ready.'

‘But surely that would be Plantation House?' This was the congenial English-style house, where Governor Wilks administered the island on behalf of the East India Company.

‘Oh no, that is reserved for the governor, by specific order of the British Cabinet. They are building the Ogre a house at Longwood. Or they intend to.'

And we all said, ‘Longwood?'

Longwood was a mix of farm buildings off to the eastern end of the island – not so far from us, in fact, and yet in the zone of blightedness. The eastern, western and southern ends of the island were delicious with plantations and places where the arid and the verdant played with each other harmoniously. Longwood was where the fun stopped: a series of poor farmhouses and cow byres belonging to, originally occupied and then neglected by Major Skelton, lieutenant-governor. Now they were going to combine these into a residence for the Great Ogre, said my father. But until then, the naval gentlemen had asked, could the Emperor use the Pavilion in our garden?

This was like asking could Zeus use our grape arbour. But my mother asked, reasonably enough, ‘Did you say yes?' She did
so, I remember, in a way that acknowledged there must be some danger in saying yes to such an explosive commodity.

‘Of course,' said my father. ‘Of course I said yes. This extraordinary man of destiny!'

Men talked like that about the Great Ogre, even though we had gone to such national anguish and expenditures of blood to stop him. He was still ‘this extraordinary man of destiny'.

‘And an enemy of England,' said my mother. And we all became quiet.

‘There is a line regiment which will come ashore to guard us,' said my father.

This was too vast an item of news to be digested. Boney from Dieppe? Who wanted to stay in the Pavilion? It was apparent, if you could believe it, that Jamestown would be like Lilliput, with the giant landing amongst us, and we holding him in place by our combined flimsiness. Except that Gulliver had been a decent fellow, and this was Boney from Dieppe. And he was to stay in
our
Pavilion. To stay like men who aren't extraordinary? To sit. To sleep. To eat food with a fork?

The improbability made me dizzy. My mother set Sarah and the twins to clean the Pavilion.

My father told us when he came home the next day that the town had been crowded, though there was nothing in sight, no naval squadron, no
Northumberland
. People had come to town simply to test out what it was like when such a vast possibility lay close to our horizons. They knew that bearing south on them was the force of Europe, the bull Europa fell in love with, up against our plainness and the geologic fastness of our cliffs. Thank the dear Lord at least for the latter.