Napoleon's Last Island (6 page)

The night before the arrival was warm and moonlit and unkind to those who sought sleep, given that the crowds of constellations seemed to pause above us, as if to herald the most exceptional day that was coming, its dread and wonder and melancholy. We were awakened the next morning by the usual ragged fusillade from the guns atop Ladder Hill. Sound sleepers could remain unconscious through this dawn thunder, but none of us had been sound sleepers that night. We rode down to the town the next morning, hastening on the way, me ahead at what my mother considered an unwise canter. The island and the town and the familiar hills seemed new, as if a certain pulse of the earth had created them afresh. We had left the babies, Thomas and Alex, with Sarah, and William, now seven, rode in front of my father's saddle.

When we got there, the town appeared struck by a kind of dread. A squadron of newly arrived ships crowded the water. The question was, how could that massive advent be contained in Jamestown's narrow span?

Little more than thirty steps from the East India Company dock were my father's warehouse and his office. A crowd was gathering along and around the dock, and the East India Company gunners ignored their cannon on the height and were looking down the terraces for the apparition.

Early in the day, as we watched from the windows of my father's office, everything – any signal from an island official, any sign of activity on the largest warship that was said to contain the Ogre – fascinated us and churned our stomachs. A shore party of sailors landed from a cutter, and from them everyone wanted to know the entire subtle history of the Ogre's transportation to the island. Boatload by boatload a regiment landed in red coats with black facings and pipe-clayed belts and fresh-laundered breeches and elegant black and white leggings, and every soldier who clambered up the steps drew heightened cheers.

The numeral 53 was on the soldiers' collars and this number evinced more interpretations in the crowd than even the cabalists of Poland could bring to bear on a five and a three in combination. The soldiers of ‘53' formed up in the main street of the town, while their band stayed at the dock and played a medley of patriotic airs. Company by company they continued to land, doubling the population of the island in three or four hours. Some of the young officers, waiting for their horses to come ashore on barges, bowed to us in our window at the warehouse, a few of them so extravagantly that it was like a dance step. One foot before the other, a movement whose rhythm looked very French as if in conquering that nation they had seized its habits as well. Their swords lifted high behind them as some of them tried to get their head down to the level of their knees. It struck me for the first time that the English had won the military battle but the French had conquered English bluntness by imposing on it certain affectations. Older officers, more weary of foreign parts and customs, were satisfied merely to salute.

My father stayed at the window with us, for the young men were flamboyant with Jane and me, and full of compliments, and it was clear that he did not want us to be toyed with on such an overheated day for the imagination. So he introduced himself, and occupied them in talking about their recent service.

They were a Shropshire regiment, and people called them for some reason the Brickdusts, and these younger men could have
been with them only for the last year or so of the war, advancing through the Pyrenees to the last battle at Toulouse – the young men, boys plus a year or two, were willing to mention Toulouse, as if it were there that they had learned the scope of the world and the intersection between military plumage and carnage. They told us it would be a time before we sighted the Great Ogre. First they would be marched to Deadwood barracks, they told us, where they would set up the rudiments of their camp, and return to town that afternoon to line the way for old Boney.

‘Have any of you spoken to him?' asked my father.

‘We were not encouraged to, sir,' said a forthright young man. He was an angel of war, as they all were. Their faces and bodies seemed made for their uniforms in some cases, and others were recent to the ranks and the reverse could have been said of them.

‘But we've seen him once or twice, sir,' said another. ‘However, we were not on his ship.'

‘
Northumberland
?' asked my father.

‘Yes. But we rowed over there for a visit mid-ocean. The colonel knew we all wanted to get a sighting of him.'

A young man who could not have been more than eighteen and whose uniform seemed massive and drooping, his epaulettes hanging down his arms, declared, ‘He seemed very pensive, sir.' This stylish and gestural young man we would get to know later as Lieutenant Croad. Another, older subaltern declared, ‘Yet in his mood he can be very jolly indeed. Very jolly nearly to a fault. I mean, a man who has set Europe by the ears … does he have the right to be jolly? I don't know, sir.'

Then commands were shouted and the fifes began again and they were off, and people cheered them out of town and up the terraces. Wagons and slaves carrying impedimenta made a banal tail to the advance of the 53 men into the interior. The air of the spring afternoon grew dense now. The mood of the crowd was occasionally revived when this or that braided naval officer came ashore, tight-featured from the day's tension, from the business of conveying history's demon to this little socket in the midst of the ocean.

A man my father identified as Admiral George Cockburn landed with his aides, and Mr Porteous came out of his boarding house, the Portions, and shook his hand and took him to that establishment which was deemed the finest hotel of the island, with its big bulk and its narrow balconies – the place that most gentlemen stayed. Porteous had a daughter of fourteen named Adela, whom I despised, and she pranced on the edge of the group. The admiral and his party went into the house. Soon after, Governor Wilks turned up at the same door on horseback and dismounted, and he too went in with an earnest tread.

My father claimed, ‘He's gone to say, “You can't put poor Boney up at Porteous's place. Bring him over to Plantation House.”'

We saw Miss Esther Solomon and her mother, both wearing mantua lace, and witnessing things from the dock near the warehouse and they called up to us and invited us home for tea. I was reassured by Esther's laughter − it was a comfort, a girl who was not argued out of her sameness by the scale of events. My father said to go with the Solomons, for all activity had slackened now, as if the deity was not coming. There were no further boats from the ships. History had frozen on its path.

The Solomons were the chief shopkeepers of the island, and some people complained about their prices and – in the same breath – their Jewishness. But my father admired Mr Solomon as a man of decent repute, and my father of all people knew the high price goods achieved on their way to our island. Mr Solomon was something of a scholar, too, and had a fine library, and on top of that produced the island's news-sheet, whose next instalment would of course be devoted to the general enthusiasm for, and the arrival of, the monster.

We went and drank tea with Mrs Solomon and her daughter Esther in their house above the Solomon establishment, in which Mr Solomon level-headedly had throughout the day attended to the needs of come-to-town householders and farmers combining their purchases with standing in the foreshadow of the colossus. The furnishings where we sat were very sombre and the curtains of deep damask or velvet, and silverware and the candlestick
of seven separate candles – a Jewish mystery – stood on the sideboard.

Suddenly it was darker, for it got dark early in this slot in the cliffs. The sun was still high enough for most places and, no doubt, still shone on The Briars.

‘Surely soon,' said Miss Solomon.

Into that afternoon torpor came, with fast steps on the Solomon stairwell and appearing in the door, Adela Porteous. On her reddish complexion there sat a layer of sweat. She was a girl of neat bones and a confidence I did not know how to imitate but passionately wished I could. I know she thought me crass or stupid or vile, and I had been told to be wary of her by Esther herself. Adela also seemed, ridiculously, to think that because we lived in the hinterland we were somehow debased, and it was true that a lot of Jamestown's gossip was about improprieties, references that sometimes surpassed my understanding, in the inner reaches of the island.

Something else had stimulated her today, though, and she was willing to include the Balcombes in what she had to say to the Solomons. She gasped twice to show that this was not normal island news.

‘My father found out this morning that Boney and his Frenchies are to be accommodated at our place. The admiral has arranged it. We are all in a confusion, with the maids, stupid creatures, and the slaves who think Boney is an incarnate devil, and men moving some of our best furniture into the chambers where Boney will stay. We'll have detachments of guards on the door to save us from being murdered in our beds.'

‘I thought that the Ogre was staying with us,' said my mother.

‘Oh, I don't know about the future,' said Miss Porteous airily. ‘But the Portions will be first!' She shivered theatrically. ‘Thank God for the soldiers.'

‘Wouldn't their first task be to guard against General Bonaparte's escape?' asked my mother, who had a clear disdain for this boastful news. I believe we were suddenly quite jealous; not the Solomons, though, who seemed to possess a wisdom and dispassion peculiar to themselves. And not Jane. But my mother
and I – we were capable of jealousy. Of wondering why a vapid girl as Adela should have such prime proximity to the Ogre.

Any further conversation with the breathless girl was cut short by the sound of the returning band leading a regiment who had seen Spain and Toulouse and left their dead brothers on that alien ground, and had gone up to pitch tents on Deadwood Plain. There was a determined, far-from-routine booming from the cannon up the many-stepped ladder above the town's roofs, and answering fusillades from the Castle Terrace. Soldiers lined up either side of Main Street and you could hear the thunderous smartness of their boots in the heavy air.

We stood up from the teacups and walked downstairs, proceeding behind the backs of the lined-up infantry, Miss Porteous, mouth agape with her grin of anticipation on her way to her father's balcony; and we set off towards the warehouse where, to return the Solomons' kindness, we had offered mother and daughter a view from the window of our father's office.

We found his clerks had crowded into that office too, and the business of the world had ceased. All attention was directed on the great experiment that would begin when the Ogre trod on the first step of the dock. Would the island sink under the weight of his deeds and crimes, the weight of the decisions he had brought down on Europe?

There were two naval surgeons there, in our warehouse, Surgeon Warden and Surgeon O'Meara, and my father seemed to know them already, given his talent for bonhomie. It was the first time I saw Surgeon O'Meara, with his piquant Irish face, eternally amused with an irony lacking in ill will, and acute in his judgements … though I am rushing things – I would find all that out only after a time.

The more clerkly Surgeon Warden declared of the Ogre, ‘He likes band music. I don't think he has an ear for more delicate airs. He used to ask for the regimental band to play him patriotic tunes, and ours – not theirs.'

‘And the thing that astonishes me,' the Irishman joined in, ‘is that the French do everything backwards from our point of view.
The Emperor, he prowls the deck by night, and sleeps late. And then what does the man do but demand a large breakfast full of all manner of things we would consider appropriate for supper – even chickens we collected in Tenerife. And he imbibes claret with it! In the evening he champs down a brisk little meal, no lingering over the plate and taking a sip or two of wine. The man's virtue exists at the wrong end of the day.'

‘That wouldn't suit me,' my father asserted.

‘It doesn't suit the wardroom, let me tell you,' said Dr Warden. ‘Your average naval officer likes a long dinner more than your average citizen.'

They seemed delighted to have licence to offload their items of witness on solid ground, for this passage to our island had transcended all the passages they had ever made, even in the time of war. The afternoon stretched until its warmth had utterly congealed in Main Street and the sun was being lost from the eastern precipice above the town and the Castle Terrace. Still the Ogre's cutter didn't leave
Northumberland.

The gossip of the two men moved onto the man's entourage, the sub-demons. There was Marshal Bertrand, loyal and sensible, O'Meara said, and his wife – a tall lump of a woman, the daughter of an Irish general who had fled to France in disaffection. He should have fled again but was caught by the Terror of the Revolution and Robespierre beheaded him. The Revolution was incarnated in the General, perhaps, said O'Meara, but he had hated the Terror and thus Fanny Bertrand was herself also a disciple of the Great Ogre and Universal Demon.

When her husband Bertrand had decided that it was necessary for him to be with the Ogre, so it became necessary for her. ‘She is a good wife,' declared O'Meara, ‘if one with her own opinions. A big, raw Irish girl.' This was an unknown woman we might or might not sight within the span of the remaining hours of light.

It was from these gentlemen too that I first heard the names of Comte de Montholon and his wife – ‘Looks meek but would fight a tiger with a twig', as O'Meara summarised her – and of her small son, Tristan. De Montholon himself, as a child cadet, had been
taught the principles of artillery by an older cadet – yes, Emperor-to-be. So he was solidly loyal too and his wife, though pregnant and not in the best of health, was less noisy about her destiny than the Countess Bertrand. Albine de Montholon, the surgeons told us, sang Italian tunes, the kind the Emperor liked, in a high voice which seemed strange at first but became appealing.