Napoleon's Last Island (8 page)

We thanked the Solomons for their hospitality. They were people who were careful of their repute and in a way kept separate from us, to give no offence. They would never have paraded on a balcony like Miss Porteous, or like, had I been Porteous's daughter, I must admit I would have.

Returned up the terraces to The Briars in late light, and eating a modest dinner, we slept once more fitfully. That squat giant lying in his room at Mr Porteous's house was on our mind. The tension of seeing him and not expiring at the first sight had tired us. I slept late. At breakfast my father said it was as if the entire town were exhausted, for he had already been down there and seen but a gathering in the street watching the window behind which, it had been decided by someone, the Ogre lay and now began to engage himself in preparing for his first island day. Yet no blind was raised; indeed Porteous's entire upper floor refused to open its blinds to look down upon the avid, restive towns-people. And as during yesterday there was more than a vulgar curiosity in the crowd, though there was that as well. Above all, there was an attempt to work out the great cipher, the small man in the boarding house who was somehow taller than pyramids. They had been set by God or the heavens or the British Cabinet a puzzle beyond their means to resolve, and yet they felt they must not evade the duty.

My father rode over to Deadwood, an area grazed clean by the island's goats and subject to high trade winds, where the regiment had its tented cantonment. Wagons were dangerously creeping up the terraces to reach inland and turn
for Deadwood, and behind them came a string of Chinamen and slaves carrying the high-priced goods of the East India Company provided from the warehouse of Fowler, Cole and Balcombe. As we watched the wagons crest the escarpment in unfamiliar profusion, we felt the same puzzling burden as my father had observed in people in town. My mother said we should not go to town at all that day. She meant to keep us at home for obvious fear that in some way our brains might be disturbed and an eternal restlessness set in. Old Huff came along and taught my brothers some Latin vocabulary and my sister and I some French and a little Greek. He had been warned not to talk of the Phenomenon, the Great Ogre, but to keep us on the plain fare of pedagogy. My mother knew Huff needed too, for his own sake, to avoid the burden of the imagination that had made him drop to his knees on the pier, an action I had somehow understood. I was rather pleased someone had done it, as shockingly venerating a posture as it was.

Afterwards, as Old Huff was fed refreshments by Sarah, my mother sat us down to sew on the verandah, but the endless passage of wagons, slaves and Chinamen in the middle distance distracted us. In late morning we saw a group of horsemen come over the saddle and keep on towards us under a great inland cliff and in bright sunshine. We could see scarlet in there amongst the file of horsemen and were sure, even at that distance, that a darker one was Admiral Cockburn, for we could see his dog, Pipes, running behind his horse. It must be remembered that we were girls unaccustomed to seeing such traffic, for until now we could remain at The Briars for days without our vision being teased by any distant human movement.

We went inside and combed our hair and washed ourselves from a basin of cold water brought in by Sarah and a new younger maid, Alice. She had been granted to us by Plantation House in view of the pressures about to be put upon our family. Her slightness and delicacy of movement contrasted with the heavier household tread of Sarah. As the admiral's caval cade neared the crossroads below The Briars, navy blue manifested
itself more clearly, and my mother decided for certain it must be the admiral. They passed on eastwards.

At my mother's insistence, we went to our rooms to rest and we swooned away and woke at an hour when hints of a blue dusk were being spread eastwards from Plantation House to Deadwood. When I went out to the verandah, my mother and Jane were already there and they were standing as the cavalcade, seemingly the one we'd seen that morning, picked up the main track that ran down to Jamestown and, instead of taking it, turned to The Briars. Then we saw a preposterous streak of green hedged in amongst the rest of the horsemen, in a position of imprisonment or at a centre of honour.

Nearing our carriageway, the individuals became discrete from each other. Green there – beyond dispute! As the party turned into the carriageway amongst the trees, I felt an impulse to flee. At the gate, most of the gentlemen of the party dismounted and Toby and Ernest ran from our stables to take the bridles. One presence remained on its horse.

I, supposedly the bolder and crasser of the Balcombe girls, reputed to be willing to say anything and to ride astride horses, stood on the balls of my feet and took a half-step sideways like a restive animal, and my mother could read the urge in me to be gone, to flit under the pressure of the fear that this man would take my air away from me.

My father had emerged from the house now, and indicated with some urgency that we should line up with him on the lawn. A young officer was opening the gate and it was apparent that old Admiral Cockburn and the regiment's Colonel Bingham were amongst those who had dismounted. But the Emperor was not required to, and when the gate was open, Cockburn and Bingham accompanied him through, one at either stirrup. The mountings on his horse were crimson and gold, as was the saddle cloth, on which stood an embroidered golden bee, which I would discover was the Emperor's most admired creature – small and effective, I suppose you could say of him and the bee both.

The Ogre was rendered grander by the men who accompanied him at his stirrup, and by those who followed. The jet, imperial horse, big-hoofed, was tearing the family's cultivated lawn and my father was advancing warily, an Englishman ready to defend his home, beginning with his turf and his wife and daughters.

Sarah and my three brothers also broke from the house now. The boys, too young to be impressed by omens or to know the man's record, were unafraid, as if, on a dull day, they had discovered that there was a sort of fête in the garden. The bulky admiral with his huge face shook hands with my father first and his great shaggy dog grew familiar with my father's scent and gave his left boot a lick. Next the admiral removed his hat ceremoniously in our direction, as did the colonel.

There was an awful gravity in the two of them still and in the party, as if they wondered whether the green man would deign to debouch from his saddle and need to be seduced by courtliness. He did not. I could see his eyes were dark and feminine and with them he took in the scene and weighed it and only then – with a surprising equestrian agility and in one fluid movement – did he descend from his saddle.

He did not seem happy nor, once his feet hit the ground, as grand anymore, but I still suspected that a predator might have been let loose, a man who could disorder the world from a height of five feet five inches.

‘May I introduce you, Mr Balcombe,' the admiral ground out, ‘to the General Bonaparte.'

My father would of course find out, as we all would, that Cockburn's orders from the home government were such that the detained Ogre on the island should be called ‘General' and never addressed at a higher rank, and certainly not as ‘Emperor' or ‘Majesty'. For that reason, in my account I will use the contrarian ‘Emperor', unless I remember slights, in which case I will fall back on the term ‘the Ogre'.

I watched my father reach out and shake the small hand and engulf its tapered fingers. The Emperor's complexion, I now saw, was sallow, perhaps from the sea journey.

‘I have heard of you, sir,' said the visitor with great conviction, directness and glittering eyes. The interesting thing was that I could tell he meant it. The bestrider of worlds had been on the island less than a day, there were many inhabitants to hear about, yet he had heard of my father. Other than that my father might supply groceries and candles to him, the question was: why?

With an embarrassment he covered by adopting a basso voice, the admiral stated, ‘In company with the General, we have been to see Longwood and it is – as you no doubt know, Balcombe – neither fit nor ready. It will need to be rendered suitable but that will take months. I have already instructed the ships' carpenters to get to work on it. In the meantime, the Emperor … the General … would like to be accommodated at The Briars.'

As my parents exchanged looks, I raised my chin towards the man and felt immediate resentment. His dark, gravid eyes rested on mine, and despite their fame – I had seen them depicted in journals as the eyes of a tyrant or of a hero martyring himself for
gloire
– I would not look away. This was characteristic, of course. I would not let my sight slew off to uncontested ground. He who had sought to seize Russia now wanted us to surrender the whole Briars to him, not simply the Pavilion. Of course he would expect that. Let him bring up his cannon, I thought. But I feared him too, just as much as I had earlier. To have him on the island was peril enough for me. To have him at The Briars was beyond tolerance.

My father must have felt the same because he was left muttering in a numbed voice, ‘Of course the Emperor is welcome to The Briars. When would he care to take occupation?'

‘No, no,' said the Emperor/General. It sounded like, ‘Nor, nor.' He smiled quite attractively then, a smile drawn into being, it seemed, by a sudden innocent whimsy in the corners of his mouth. I did not quite believe in it. Cockburn and the colonel both laughed as if they did.

‘The General does not wish to incommode you to that degree, Balcombe,' the admiral assured us.

The Emperor lifted a feminine finger, which had somehow directed the movements of hundreds of thousands of men and compelled the fealty of millions.

‘
Là, le Pavillon seulement, monsieur
.'

He pointed to the little knoll atop which stood the summerhouse, and then he brought his eyes back to my father's face and tried his smile, and to clinch matters tried to encompass us all with a glance, as if I could so readily be rendered loyal.

‘Well, we were told as much,' said my father. ‘But now he is here, I see that the Pavilion is hardly large enough for the … the General.'

Indeed we knew it to be a mere eighteen by twelve feet. Upstairs were two small bedrooms, hot when it was hot, damp when it was damp. Having got to an island five miles across, did the Ogre wish to further reduce his scope to eighteen feet by twelve?

Now the man was about to speak and I will not fill this account for readers of one language with discourse in another, just to show that I had a certain competence in French. It would turn out that the General claimed to speak French, Italian, German and English. But his French and Italian were the better of the four. And his English would prove the worst.

So he turned to Jane and me and said with his Satanic smile – for the Universal Demon always has a good smile, fleeting light on darkness, a bird skimming the night – ‘Speak do you the French, young ladies? The admiral tell me you did.'

Jane was dumbstruck.

‘My sister speaks it better than me,' I assured him.

I must make another aside here. I know that any compiler of memoirs likes to enlarge her part in encounters with the renowned. But I assure you I'm not doing this now, for it is a despicable conceit and in any case invites contradiction. He happened to begin with Jane and me because he saw that we had followed a conversation he had been having with Colonel Bingham,
sotto voce
, about servants and accommodation. But it soon became apparent too that he was likely to try to win
over the person in any company who exuded most suspicion or contrary feeling towards him. And last of all, he liked directness, and since I had looked at him so directly and ferociously – or at least I liked to think so – I presented him with an obvious mark.

He looked around and remarked to us that it was very quiet and pleasant, as if the metropolis of Jamestown was raucous by comparison. We were proud to hear him say it nonetheless. We stood in a basin on a desert island, on a plot that my parents and the gardeners Toby and Ernest had transformed into something creditable.

‘Does the General have a large establishment?' asked my father nervously.

‘Considerable,' said the admiral. ‘He even has a
lampiste
to illuminate his quarters. But surely only a few can be accommodated here.'

Already some of Napoleon's servants or attendants were riding or walking across the upland towards us, summoned from Jamestown. A group of five male servants now passed through our carriageway gate, carrying various items of furniture. Their leader was a darker man, and another had a wizened face and a crankily tied neckcloth. The rest were young and well dressed, their hair was groomed with care, and beneath their hats they seemed to be laying their own claim to the place. A wagon followed the servants and there were some crates of goods aboard it which a party of Admiral Cockburn sailors were set to unload. As the admiral's attention was now absorbed by the servants and the first items of toiletry and pieces of furniture to enter the Pavilion, we Balcombes became hapless witnesses to it all. We did not know whether to go in the house or remain in the garden. Furniture – mattresses and a camp cot, commodes and a washstand – was now being hauled across the lawn and into the Pavilion. The admiral began to discuss with my father the necessity for erecting a large marquee as extra accommodation for the French, while inside the little house the young
lampiste,
Rousseau, began to illuminate the Pavilion with lamps and candles brought up from Jamestown. A sour-faced cook whom we
would get to know as Le Page was led to the kitchen at the back of the house by Sarah to inspect the site of his labours. We could see two other household servants unpacking the chests on the knoll, taking out books and china.

My father occupied himself in discussing with the admiral where the proposed marquee should be located. We watched through the drawing room window, beside which we had settled as an uneasy compromise, and my mother asked Jane to go and invite the Emperor to dinner and, since she had made her own assessment of the items of furniture, to ask if he might need a dressing table we had to spare. She had used the term ‘Emperor', and the idea of uttering such a sentence amused her. ‘Oh,' she asked us, ‘doesn't it sound like a line from a drama on Roman potentates? But tell him the dressing table is very plain and not up to usual imperial standards.'