Napoleon's Last Island (7 page)

A chamberlain of middle years named Las Cases, and his son, Emmanuel, were also in the party of French, and then, said the surgeons, ‘There's Gaspar Gourgaud.' They didn't get round to describing Gourgaud, except for both of them to toss their heads in an eloquent way. They gave us no clue to his nature or the register of his voice, and the same applied to the chamberlain Las Cases and his son.

For they were now interrupted. I saw the two surgeons stand stiffly and formally, and then in the doorway their tall admiral and behind him a large woolly-haired dog.

‘This is ridiculous, Balcombe,' said the admiral as if my father and he were intimates. ‘It is Balcombe, isn't it? You provisioned me four years back. Remember? Yes, you remember.'

My father of course said how pleasant it was to remake the admiral's acquaintance. Indeed, had he been here alone, had every islander's expectation not been fixed on, to use O'Meara's term, the Universal Demon, Cockburn's advent would have been considered momentous, though in a normal way, a way that did not threaten to sink the island under the weight of its own significance.

‘The map we were given,' said the admiral, as the Balcombe and Solomon women stared at him stupefied, ‘would indicate that Bonaparte should reside at Plantation House or else at the Castle over the way. Now I'm told that this has all been ruled against by a higher power. Poor Wilks himself is embarrassed by it all.'

‘So, sir,' my father asked, ‘what is left to the man?'

‘Well, there's Porteous's establishment. Looked it over earlier. Not of an appropriate standard! But what can be done?'

We were all quite impressed at the Castle, a structure of some pretended grandeur which stood on a terrace on the cliff above Jamestown. At the top of the opposing steep cliff stood the most
handsome house other than The Briars on the island, Plantation House, a ‘country seat' style of house, squirely, large-gardened and in kindlier territory towards the South American side. Both of them had been denied to the island's improbable visitor. The Great Ogre and all those counts and their children and two countesses and a further grand figure and his son seemed to have no other option than to become boarding house inmates.

As we waited, the sentinels on the dock and all the way up the street remained silent, but there was an eloquent hubbub from the crowd and it mounted now because, after a day of waiting, the party of all parties was declared to have left the
Northumberland.
Eyeglasses were screwed to eye sockets but my father felt the necessity of offering his to the admiral.

‘No thank you, Balcombe,' said the admiral softly. ‘I know our visitor's features very well.'

So it was my father who swung the glass over the roads and the late afternoon meeting between air and light and water, and was the first of us to report he was sure he could see the man, in green coat, amongst others in the midst of the cutter. The glass was then passed for verification to everyone in turn – my mother, Mr Solomon, who had closed his store by now and joined us, Mrs Solomon, Jane, me, Miss Esther Solomon, and on to my sweaty little brothers.

I could not see anything during my turn – the high colour of the moment made my hold on the thing skittish, but if I found the cutter for an instant, the light swell in the roads lifted it out of my sight. I wanted anyhow to see the corporeal Emperor with the naked eye, not distorted, flattened and hazed by distance and the imperfection of lenses. As I waited and others exclaimed, ‘I see, I see!' I closed my eyes for half a minute at a time, in a sort of dread but in the most intense and aching curiosity I have ever felt.

The admiral excused himself to go down and greet the Emperor on the landing.

The dread that seized the port in that instant was not only for the man's devilish reputation, not only for the fact that he was the Great Ogre, but once more that his tread would rock the
earth, and that the escarpments above Jamestown would shatter, and boulders the size of God's hand would descend on the town's humble roofs. Many indeed must have felt like that, since when the cutter was not so far off, the crowd, which had been vocal all day, grew near to silence, and what had been shouts became whispers, and as the air grew reverent and fearful I noticed near the archway to Main Road, behind the dock and the little bridge, an island character named Old Huff. Old Huff was an English gentleman and something of a scholar, enduring exile – it was said – at his family's demand, to expiate some offence committed when he was young. My father had recently employed him to tutor my sister and me occasionally, but especially my younger brothers, William, Thomas, who was five, and Alex, who was nearly four. Now, eccentrically dressed, slightly mad-haired, Huff dropped to his knees and raised a pained, reverent face to heaven as if it was from the clouds that the Ogre would reveal himself.

‘Old fool,' I heard my mother whisper. ‘Someone should send him home for his own good.'

For his posture was that of a papist in front of a saintly statue, not of a sensible man.

My father murmured, ‘Always odd,' and then, after a while, ‘but erudite.'

No one came up to trouble Old Huff for his excessive reverence and try to drag him upright. The silence, if anything, intensified and one heard the bump of the cutter against the buffers of the stone dock, and after a few seconds, feet could be heard ascending the step of the dock. A banal British naval officer and coxswain were seen first. We had beheld figures like these two all day and so were disappointed.

But then the Ogre appeared, revealing himself step by step, a fellow of unremarkable or even diminutive height, but with a marked ceremonial walk. He wore the same hat that was depicted in all the cartoons of Boney, his green coat with white facings, and over his vest a sash with one single vast star-like decoration, its symbols and validity as mysterious as, say, a headdress of the Incas. And he had a paunch. His breeches and knee boots were
unremarkable. He stood on the stone dock and looked about at Jamestown's architecture and the cliffs that so aggressively contained the modest town. Thus he read the geography we already knew by heart. How we all wished in that second that we had something vaster, something of metropolitan or imperial scale, to present him with.

He waited in that spot with the naval officer standing by, and the old admiral, his dog at his heels, greeted him and bowed to him, even though they knew each other so well from the voyage, and they exchanged salutes, and the admiral moved his hand towards the inland, offering the Emperor the hospitality of the place.

Others arrived on the dock. There was a serious-looking man wearing a brown morning suit. His combed black hair did not quite cover his brow. At his shoulder was a boy about my age, a miniature version of the unimpressive father, dressed identically in brown, outfitted by the very same tailor with the very same cloth. The father led his son and they stood with purpose by the admiral, as though the father – Las Cases? – perceived himself to be an intermediary between the big naval Englishman and the Great Ogre. Then a tall, well-fleshed woman with her little boys, and a diminutive, plump woman also with a young son appeared and stood gracefully on the dock after the months they had been at sea since their capture. No sooner did they reveal themselves than we saw they were dazzling, long-necked women, the diminutive one in a gown of russet roses on white and with a vivid green shawl on her shoulders, the taller, apparently the half-Irish woman Fanny of whom O'Meara had spoken, in blue and saffron. ‘They are court dresses,' my mother whispered with assurance and uncertainty at once. Both wore about their shoulders long necklaces of cameo and gold. Veils framed their faces, but I could tell that Madame de Montholon's was oval and dark. Their husbands, one neatly made (Bertrand, the Marshal, as it turned out) and his colleague de Montholon, wore uniforms of a bluer hue, their jackets severely cut away from higher than the navel and long-tailed behind, all of it saying most emphatically, ‘French, French! Alien!' A fussy young officer in frogged green
jacket and the hat they called a ‘shako' was the last and manoeuvred himself amongst the others till he was close to the Emperor.

‘He wore that coat to Moscow and back,' whispered O'Meara, pointing to the Emperor's uniform.

Women in the crowd were voluble, but in whispers, discussing the exiled women's clothes, full-bosomed, high-waisted, sweeping down, a cut which, they told each other, as we did at the warehouse, as if to exempt ourselves from competing, only the French could achieve. This mixture of the natural and the elegant even in their hairstyles seemed beyond the skills of the island. They were exquisite. The smaller one seemed the more classically so and had that gift women talk about of ‘carrying things off'. The strangeness of the newcomers was such that they might have come not from another country but from another star.

It was time to begin some progress from the dock, and Admiral Sir George Cockburn, accompanied by his dog, and the senior officers of the regiment, raised their hats to the Emperor with a broad gesture. The Emperor, frowning, unsettled his own black hat on his brows. The regiment was stridently ordered to present arms, and did it.

They, the powers of the earth, still allowed the Ogre to wear his sword, my father observed, and we were astounded, since that sword had dominated the Continent and could easily dominate eight miles by five. ‘That is the sword he wore at Waterloo,' the Irishman told us.

I wondered was it so or if the surgeon was exaggerating his intimate knowledge of the man's garments and accoutrements.

‘We look upon the habiliments and the implements of great histories,' O'Meara reminded us, though he did not need to.

We all gazed. ‘You see that little man in the green uniform, the young one with the exceptional hat atop?' O'Meara hissed. ‘That fellow would volunteer to be the Demon's literal shadow if the laws of physics permitted such a thing. And like most French generals he's scarcely a year my senior. A general named Gourgaud! Could you imagine a fellow like that, that size, that age, a restricted intelligence for that matter, commanding thousands?'

My mother said, ‘He is not much smaller than the Emperor.'

O'Meara conceded, ‘Yes, that is acutely observed, madam.' He beamed as if proud of her. ‘But the Emperor is the Emperor. Sure, this crowd around the Emperor are baby generals – you see Bertrand, a man now of decent age but a general when a child, and de Montholon – generals before they were out of their swaddling clothes. It's the way the Emperor's always done things.'

I could make out Gourgaud manoeuvring to be close to his master, with the tall figures of the Bertrands bulking behind him.

For those of us who had waited the entire day, it was an exotic procession that now took place. The Emperor was escorted by Admiral Cockburn and that gentleman's huge dog, and the colonel of those who wore the number 53. The slight general, Gourgaud, followed as close to Napoleon's spine as if he actually wished to assassinate him or prevent someone with the imminent intent to do so. Behind them trod the trim figure of Bertrand with their little girl, Hortense, and his wife with her hands out to their two little boys, using no nursemaid for the purpose this afternoon, for surely no nursemaid would be adequate to the experience of these children. The chamberlain and his son followed, the son with his head thrust forward as if to study the earth now he had been reunited with it. General de Montholon supported his wife by the elbow as if she were lame. A French maid followed, holding by the hand the son of Madame de Montholon − Tristan, a handsome boy of five or six.

Our curiosity was endless and the procession had not satisfied it when the admiral and the colonel stood by the door of the Portions to allow the Ogre the first entry into that honest but very ordinary establishment.

From our position we could see, just inside the door, the gleam of Mr Porteous's bald head, and it rose and fell, rose and fell again, doing the Great Ogre serious honour, more than he would later be instructed by the representatives of the British government to offer. The Emperor vanished from sight. So did the rest of his stately and fashionable suite, and Miss Porteous was now reduced to waving to the crowd. A sergeant's guard moved in to the doorway of the boarding house, but it did seem that their task was not to keep the Ogre in but the crowd out.

We fell back again on the gossip of the surgeons, O'Meara and Warden, and they were willing to rehearse various scenes aboard
Northumberland
. Previously the Emperor had been on another vessel of war, named the
Billy Ruff'n
or more correctly the
Bellerophon.
It was there that he wrote his appeal to the Prince Regent asking that he be let live as a private person in the English countryside. He received no response. Aboard the
Northumberland
, the news about his being consigned to our island had become definite. The Emperor had straightaway sickened and it had taken him a week of seclusion in his cabin, with his valet Marchand as his chief company, to recover.

There was some talk between my mother and Mrs Solomon about Countess de Montholon's magnificence and the statuesque appearance of Countess Bertrand and the dignity with which she had progressed with her two children, looking over the heads of the populace, refusing to be weighed by the eyes of the Saint Helenes and the yamstocks. But the only new thing that was added was an aside by O'Meara, addressed to Jane and myself. He welcomed us into an exchange of views by extending his arms. ‘Be careful of General Gourgaud,' he warned us. ‘He kept on asking me whether the island has any
femmes jolies
, and I am delighted to say that you Balcombe girls are as
jolie
as would be required by any island or, I do not flatter you, any continent.'

O'Meara did flatter us, of course, and we were both flustered and excited by this compliment. He withdrew his arms and stood straight and returned to conversing with our parents. We noticed Huff was still on his knees, though somehow he had moved around to face the Porteous place, into which the object of his veneration had passed. No one disturbed him, the soldiers thinking he was the town's problem, and the town the soldiers'.