Napoleon's Last Island (36 page)

‘This is what the Fiend has done to our circle of friends,' my mother admitted, close to tears herself. She kissed him tenderly. It was the kind of kiss you give an unknowing child.

And all continued to close in. Longwood was surrounded at six hundred paces by a string of subaltern guards, while at nine o'clock in the evening, when Sir Hudson had decreed no one but the garrison should be abroad in the open air, the sentinels were stationed within voice of each other, strangling the outskirts so that no person could come in or go out without being examined by them. At the entrance of the house double sentinels were placed and the patrols continually passed backwards and forwards in the garden, hampering its growth. After that fated hour of nine, the Emperor could leave the house only in company of a British field officer.

Our father told us that every landing place in the island, and indeed every rocky cove that offered half a chance of one, was furnished with a picket of patrolling victors of Toulon, and sentinels were even placed at night upon every goat path leading to the sea, though it was hard to imagine the Emperor trying to struggle his way down them.

Name and Nature's mania lacked a cause. All of us knew ships could be seen at twenty-four leagues' distance when approaching the island, and I know now through inquiry what I then did not – that two ships of war continually cruised, one to the
windward and the other to the leeward, to whom signals were made as soon as any vessel was discovered by the patrols on shore. No ship except a British naval vessel was permitted to sail down to the Jamestown Roads unless accompanied by one of the cruisers, which remained with her until she was either permitted to anchor or sail away. All these precautions, all the time, around our island. All the fishing boats belonging to the island were numbered and anchored every evening under the control of a lieutenant in the navy, and no boats, excepting guard boats from the ships of war, which rowed around the island each night on patrol, were allowed to be put into the shore after sunset. Every human precaution to prevent escape, short of actually sealing OGF in a cell or enchaining him, was adopted. Yet apparently, and I realise this now more than I did then, in Name and Nature's fevered mind, the Ogre had already slipped forth.

There were admittedly rumours enough to disturb Sir Hudson's and thus Lady Hudson's sleep. Texans were said to be plotting the Emperor's deliverance from the island, and in Louisiana they had already built a palace for him to occupy. And yet during the day British passengers travelling through from India and China requested an audience with Napoleon (even at the cost of making a report), who rarely disappointed them unless he was sick. He was like an actor whose repute was attached to the one theatre: Longwood. As O'Meara told us, many ladies and gentlemen who had ridden up to the house at inconvenient times waited in Mr O'Meara's room long after the fore-topsail of the ship that was to take them to England was loosed, just on the chance of seeing through O'Meara's window the Emperor's appearance at the windows of his apartments.

At dinner at our house, the Marquis de Montchenu seemed to me the duffer O'Meara had depicted him and peered at us like a pink-eyed mouse. Anxious about where to sit and what to say and what might be served, he clung to his aide, a young French officer named de Gors. When soup was served, de Montchenu required
Captain de Gors to produce from his jacket an emetic and place it by his master's soup bowl in case the liquid was poisoned. Captain de Gors explained in an embarrassed tone that the henchmen of the French Revolution had once, twenty-five years past, tried to poison his master. De Montchenu's long queue tied with ribbon bobbed up and down, and he was absorbed in the drama of his eating, for each un-envenomed mouthful was an exciting gift from the gods.

He was short-sighted, clearly, and it turned out that he loved cauliflower, of which there were two dishes on our table with boats of white sauce. He, for all his peering, had not seen them, but noticed them at once as the twins arrived to take them away. As the vegetables passed him, he turned on poor Captain de Gors and yelled, in French, ‘Imbecile! Why didn't you know that in this awful place there was cauliflower?'

All around the table there was choked laughter. Half of us ate cauliflower out of a dietary duty to avoid boils, but here was a pallid man who liked this pallid vegetable, his
chou-fleur.
I nicknamed him Munch Enough. Someone else more wittily, Montez-Chez-Nous. Altogether we were pleased he had escaped the guillotine so that he could come here to wear his queue and pretend that he was so important that he was in peril of death by poisoning.

Everyone thought he was harmless enough, though, and we were willing to tolerate him. That is, until copies of
The Chronicle
arrived on a ship and reached our table, and other tables on the island. In it, translated into English from a French newspaper, was an article by de Montchenu, detailing in a garbled way some of the games the Emperor and the Balcombe children had played together during the residency in the Pavilion. I had, in fact, told him these stories, though there was no recognition of me as the source in the article. He described the blind man's buff, my drawing the sword and seeming to threaten the Emperor, the hide-and-seek with my brothers, and spoke of me as a ‘wild girl' and ‘a particular familiar' of the Emperor. He did not mention in the article that he had never clapped eyes on the Emperor himself.

According to O'Meara – our map of Longwood was mediated to us by O'Meara and Fanny Bertrand as ever – de Montchenu had approached Name and Nature with the crazed proposition that the commissioners could easily force their way into Longwood with a company of British troops. Name and Nature was wise enough to know that this could be a debacle, that the Ogre would resist, that someone would be killed, perhaps even the Emperor himself, who would thus achieve an apotheosis in the view of his followers in Europe, a martyr who cried out for the mean souls of Earls Liverpool, Bathurst and Castlereagh. And now, after that absurd suggestion, another one – the imputation that I was a ‘familiar', a term I did not understand, or at least did not understand why it so exercised my father, and that I was ‘a wild girl', which some would have thought a fair description!

The article had first been shown to my father by one of the store ship captains who had arrived with a cargo. My father had immediately gone half-striding, half-hobbling (under gout's influence) from his warehouse up the road to the Portions. None of the servants knew where the Marquis de Montchenu was, but they suggested Plantation House. His day's work ruined, my father rode home and called my mother to the drawing room and showed her the piece. He planned, he said, to call de Montchenu out, demand honour, and fight a duel.

‘If a man can't see damn cauliflower from ten yards,' my father ranted, rendered unsporting by fury, ‘he has no chance of hitting me.'

He declared an intention to go to Plantation House and hunt the little weasel from under the shadow of Sir Hudson. But rage is tiring and I felt my father collapse, and my mother urge him to rest upon it for an hour or two, and perhaps write a letter of protest to the old French count. He wrote to the count certainly, but asked him to receive a visit from Mr Balcombe at six that evening, or at an alternative hour Munch Enough nominated.

Passing to his room, he saw me through the open door of the library, where I was extracting a book with every display of literate intentions. He came to me and embraced me and
I smelled snuff and brandy and a perfume. He had shaved for the murder of de Montchenu, or the outside chance of his own death. He had used clouds of a delicate powder that brought up his childlike and soft complexion.

‘My dear child,' he said, pulling my head close to his chest and kissing the part in my hair. ‘You must worry about nothing. You are a wonderful and honourable girl.'

I was delighted, and clung to him, and then he stumbled off.

My mother had been behind him and came up to where I still stood, astonished.

‘Eavesdropping again,' she remarked with a smile and as if that were not the main issue. Her face was one of weary delusion. ‘I will get the horses saddled. We must go and find Count Balmain. He'll be spending time with the Lowe women at Plantation House. He's always there for tea these days.'

I realised my mother would know this from her frequent visits to Lady Lowe.

We had our horses saddled. We followed the road, with the waterfall to the side running well from the rains of the mid-year of 1817, and behind and above us, in a separate patch of paler, hazier light, Longwood. We made good progress on the surface mud of the firm road to Plantation House and passed its old tortoise, unhurried by any care on its lawns, and we reined in and were met by a groom from the East India Company of hussars.

We were led into the drawing room, which still seemed naked now that all the Wilks's refined paintings were gone and had been replaced by dull oils of dead pheasants and unnameable and meaningless battles. Lady Susan Lowe and her daughters sat beneath them with Count Balmain, who rose to greet us as the women kept their seats. He declared in French that the balance of women had now swung too strongly against him and as delighted to see the Balcombes as he was, he felt he should leave and allow appropriate conversation to occur without the inhibition of his presence. It was a typical flow of courtly palaver on his part.

As he kissed hands, including ours, he muttered French phrases over them. He lingered over the hand of Miss Charlotte Johnson, the elder daughter of Lady Lowe.

‘Before you go,' my mother said when he reached her hand and was opulently gesturing over it. ‘Lady Lowe, I wish I could have a word with Count Balmain.'

Lady Lowe looked up with a strange contemptuous benignity.

‘Conduct the count and Mrs Balcombe to the smaller parlour,' she ordered a servant immediately.

I stood up to follow my mother but my mother made a ‘stay there' gesture and said, ‘Lady Lowe, you don't mind if Betsy remains here?'

I was disappointed I would not behold the urgency of my mother's appeal to Count Balmain, her plea to intercede and prevent a slaughter.

Lady Lowe nodded in her normal distrait manner, negligent, one would have thought, as if my mother had not been her occasional confidante. So I sat.

Charlotte Johnson looked at me with that edge, a look of a woman who was secure in her control of men. ‘Has Major Fehrzen visited your family recently?'

She exchanged a significant look with her younger sister.

‘I see very little of him,' I said, more stiffly that I would have liked. It emerged almost as a plea.

A secret amusement crackled between them, a shiver, deniable and not nakedly vicious. Their appetite to see me shift in discomfort seemed strange, as if they did not understand that I had convinced myself, on one level of my soul, it was all the same to me if Fehrzen and Croad stayed or went. It was, wasn't it? I liked to think I did not play the sort of game they did, but then I had almost forgotten my treatment of poor young Emmanuel. And remembering him now, I thought, they are causing me pain from some instinct of the kind that provokes me to cause young Las Cases pain.

I could hear my mother's voice raised somewhat in another room and the honeyed voice of Count Balmain playing a minor part. At
last my mother returned. I could tell from the way her face had reddened that she had persuaded Count Balmain to intervene.

She said, ‘Betsy, we must not inconvenience dear Lady Lowe and her daughters any further.'

Lady Lowe rose now and I did too, and my mother thanked her again for allowing this intrusion. They sounded like strangers to each other. Because of the enmity between their husbands, had they become enemies too?

‘Count Balmain left,' said my mother, ‘but wanted me to say that the reason he would not return was that he did not want to incommode the company.'

‘What a flight by our friends,' commented Charlotte. ‘What a confabulation you must have had with the count to make you wish to escape us simultaneously with him.'

‘As you wish, dear Mrs Balcombe,' murmured pretty Lady Susan with a tiny belch.

We stood in front of the door as our horses arrived.

‘I believe we should ride to town,' said my mother.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘in case father has gone after Munch Enough with a pistol.'

The contest of honour, which we knew could become a contest of mayhem and tragedy, was about to either take place or be prevented.

But our journey down into Jamestown was abortive: as my father had left for that port himself, he was intercepted by two fortunate arrivals. One was Captain de Gors riding up from the Portions with a propitiating letter in French. My father agreed to go back to The Briars to formally receive the letter there. Back home, he took it to his library office, asking Jane to come with him and help with translation, while the young French aide waited fretfully yet humbly for him in the drawing room. My father deliberately kept de Gors waiting, as if he were still looking to impose such a large retributory slight that old Munch Enough would fight him anyhow.