Napoleon's Last Island (23 page)

Polly said to the Emperor, ‘My father was a gentleman and he
would not like the fact that I have let myself go. But it is the way that I am, and it cannot be denied and I am quite happy to ride to Deadwood on a cow. I might use a mount if it were necessary to get down to Jamestown, but that place is a den of thieves, and best to be avoided.'

This encounter, Polly and the Ogre, resembled a parley between an august man at the height of his energies, a man who could roll the earth downhill like a boulder, and Polly who was as confident as the Tsar of all the Russias, her legs poking out heroically and without apology.

I still believed as a woman of thirteen that my elders, elders such as Polly, for example, were set like stars or mountains, and had been immutable before my birth and would remain immutable for an untold period. I did not think they were creatures of flux as I was. Only later, when I no longer saw her so regularly, did I speculate whether as little as twenty-five years earlier Polly had ridden as a fresh girl on good horses with other women to balls at the Castle Terrace or at Plantation House, and danced with the neat officers of the navy, and with the garrison of the East India Company, and charmed them, and rendered them lovesick. And that she was in their company all the night, since it was too perilous and long a track back to her father's house.

And thus I saw her as a sort of warning, not as a raw yamstock but an Englishwoman born in soft airs. The island had, however, by now made her one of its own. Unlike me, the Ogre knew better than anyone that people were not born as they became. The Corsican child, speaking Italian, looking to Genoa as the great city, had become the Emperor of France, and now the great bull contained raging within a palisade of cliffs. Nothing was fixed, and the woman riding her cow was a manifestation of a more startling history of shifts and accidents than the woman on an unexceptional horse.

The Emperor therefore wanted Jane to ask Miss Mason her origins.

‘My father was an Ulsterman,' she said. ‘He was a younger son, and joined the navy, and while visiting the island on a ship had ridden its length and width and so had chosen the reach
beyond Prosperous Plain. My mother died when I was too young to acquire memory of her. My father had his weakness, Sir Emperor. Took to our slave housekeeper, and I assure you that I have half-brothers and sisters in the freed slave quarters. And you will see the resemblance. There is no filament between me and them. I am an exhibit for the fraternity of all men and the sorority of all women.'

‘You are speaking of one of the ills of slavery,' the Emperor opined.

‘Perhaps. But men will mock any certainties to have a bit of company and a caress. I must get to Deadwood now.'

As she kicked her cow's flanks and urged it on towards her vegetable gardens at Deadwood, I had the impression that she was riding away from a treaty-making, pondering the terms of existence offered her by the Great Ogre.

There was an island consensus that something within Polly, some fortress of proprieties, had once tumbled. A now deceased male slave was in some way obscurely connected to this fall of Polly's.

One clear and balmy spring evening (the island being in the southern half of the world and thus reversing the accustomed seasons), my parents had gone out by cart to dine, over near the great column of rock named Lot's Wife at Horse Pasture Farm. The house belonged to the gentleman farmer Knipe, uncle of yet another beautiful young woman, Miss Knipe, whom the French had named
Le Bouton de Rose.

Because I had made a tolerant accommodation of all the Emperor's vagaries of soul, including those involving
Le Bouton de Rose
,
La Nymphe
and Madame de Montholon, I thought somehow that he might have made the same equivalent arrangements in his attitude as well. I had thought that since he gave me a ball gown paid for from his own resources, I was now conclusively beyond the restless frolicking he brought to his play with children. So I was calm at the idea that the Ogre and his attendants were to entertain us in my parents' absence. The Ogre came up to the house attended by Marchand, and with his card softener, Las Cases senior, his son as a phantom at his elbow, and the eternal Gourgaud, to play whist. I was confident that our earlier disasters at cards would not be repeated. Whist was my favourite game of all, beautifully simple, understandable by children but challenging to adult intelligence. I loved to draw
the lowest card and come to triumph playing in partnership with the other lower drawer.

We got the two-card packs from the hands of the chamberlain and I became Gourgaud's partner, since he and I drew the two higher cards.

There is something in me that cherishes the rules of games. They are an authority higher than human, or so I like to believe. It turned out that the Ogre, however, saw this evening as a continuation of an earlier farcical game we had played. He talked to Jane, his partner, about his supposedly poor hand, he played false trumps, refusing to follow suit. He seemed to fail a compact of respect owed to me.

I will not deal with all the silliness of which he was guilty, except to say that Emmanuel frowned, as if he could foresee the danger, but callow Gourgaud laughed at any trick of his master and increased the pressure I felt within me. At last I asked, ‘Do you think this is the way for a Man of Reason to play at games?'

Las Cases the elder raised his eyes in mute shock, but the son lowered his.

‘Who created the Code Napoleon?' I asked. ‘Was it a Man of Reason or a clown?'

The Ogre said, ‘Ah, my Betsy, is whist a game that's suitable for a Man of Reason? That is the true question.'

‘God help a Man of Reason who cannot follow the game of whist!' I was on my feet now, leaning over him. I could hear Las Cases making small squeaks with his lips, which were meant to counsel me to be more measured.

By a fathomable but unlucky chance, the ball gown crafted by
La Nymphe
lay on the settle at the far corner of the room, a display piece at the heart of The Briars for the admiration of visitors. He had bought me this woman's dress, but his behaviour proclaimed me unfit for it. He rose to his feet now, and an instant later so did Gourgaud, hand on sword hilt, once more grotesquely ready to defend his Emperor as he had against the aggression of the Holstein cow. Las Cases' parchment skin exuded a gloss of sweat and was sourly bunched at the lips.

‘Come, Betsy,' said the Ogre in a voice pitched between adult reproof and amusement, ‘making laws for an empire is a happy experience compared to playing whist with some young women.'

With his customary nimbleness he advanced to the settle and hauled up my ball gown.

‘In exoneration, I demand my gown back,' he said, with annoyance but also playfulness, the worst of combinations, the one most offensive to me. He walked out of the drawing room with it over his elbow and down the hallway towards our door, and I leaped up and called after him as he passed out into the darkness of the garden. ‘Bring it back!' I roared.

For I seemed to be losing everything, my new agreed-upon being, my serious advance towards the grown-up world, my claim on my own years and stature, derived from the vivid blood that now flowed more or less monthly from me. I was ready to follow him and launch myself at him and fell the little top-heavy man. At the same time a despair set in, a knowledge that I could not be the first one on the island to deliver punches to the Emperor, and that if I were, it would embed me further in childhood and ignominy. So it seemed, unimpeded, the Emperor was gone from the house with the patent of my womanhood over his elbow.

Gourgaud had followed him, and now Las Cases and his son stood, nodded curtly and left. Emmanuel stared bleakly at me over his shoulder, and I did not know what the bleakness meant, disapproval or sympathy.

Jane came up to my side. ‘He's joking,' she assured me. ‘My heaven, you did get far too upset with him, Betsy! But he'll give it back in the morning. And I think you should wait until then, until his temper, or whatever it is, recedes.'

She understood nothing. I felt exhausted from my continual struggle at self-certainty. It was the Ogre who kept shifting the terms on me.

The next morning, I got up leadenly from a profound sleep and appeared at the breakfast table wan, and through shameful tears I begged my father to go and intercede for me.

‘I will not,' he told me with that gratuitous firmness of his,
a rigidity generally missing from him. Because his severity was so intermittent and irrational, it sounded pompous when he adopted it, like a man wearing another's grander clothes.

‘Your sister says you were very abusive to the Emperor. I cannot have that, either in terms of his dignity or of my being his provedore.'

‘My sister is not right in what she says,' I claimed. ‘She cannot understand why a person would feel outrage.'

Jane bore, of course, a burning face and furiously wished to help me now. ‘I did not interpret it as abuse, Father,' she said. ‘I told you only that she said that a man who made the Code Napoleon could certainly understand the laws of whist, and that is very close to being a just statement.'

What did she truly think, amidst the sweetness of her temperament, about Gourgaud? Had she lost all breath and reason for him?

‘No, not just,' said my father. ‘Far too hot indeed, considering his sins were so venial and you were playing for sugarplums and not for fortunes.' He turned to me. ‘You must do your own pleading, miss.'

That put paid to any lacrimosity of mine. I turned at once and set out to go to the Pavilion. The purpose with which I moved was to impress my father. Secretly I decided that the first aim was to win back my gown by any means, and thus I was ready to be contrite. I was fearful in case the Ogre had crushed the gown, or vengefully stripped the roses from it.

As I came to the Pavilion, I was met from behind by Gourgaud, and Las Cases appeared on the doorstep and told me that the Emperor was not to be disturbed. I did not have gravity or judgement enough to tell him I would wait for an audience, and so I withdrew to the verandah of The Briars.

I waited for an hour and a half, eating nothing, taking some tepid tea Sarah brought, and then I saw the Emperor, Gourgaud and both Las Cases descend to the garden and enter the grape arbour. Coming down into the garden myself, I glanced into the entrance of that grotto of vines and could dimly see the Emperor
pacing in his peculiar cock-sparrow manner, hands behind his back, vapouring on about some battlefield performance of his which must surely have risen above the level of childishness he imposed on me.

I opened the gate and entered the arbour. I called softly in the vegetable dimness. ‘I've come for my gown.'

There was silence and the Comte Las Cases emerged and told me drily the Emperor could not see me.

‘Tell him,' I said, ‘that he is killing me as he killed the Duke d'Enghien.'

The little chamberlain reached back his hand and struck me across the cheek. It stung a considerable swathe of skin, bigger than his hand, but the sting was irrelevant. I looked him full in the face. He hissed, ‘The Duke d'Enghien was a traitor. Do you not execute traitors in England? In my time there you executed people who were not even traitors. You should please go now.'

And he turned his back and walked back into the deep shade of the arbour.

I called in a level voice for the Emperor's edification, ‘He has struck me, your chamberlain. He strikes me in
my
house.'

I heard the Emperor muttering, ‘Did you strike her?'

‘She accused you of murder,' said the chamberlain, as if the entire career of the Emperor had been bloodless and an imputation of any spillage was an outright insult.

‘Next time I shall bring a pistol,' I called. And then there were a few seconds of private tears as I stood there, after which I called out with a cruelty I decided was in measure with the damage Las Cases had done me. ‘I feel happy that you are persecuting me instead of your son, the King of Rome, as you would if you were with him.'

Could it be suppressed laughter I heard then? Not from Las Cases anyhow. I was sure he didn't have any talent for sustained laughter. And so I withdrew before I was sure about the laughter, because if it were confirmed, that would be intolerable. I had an assassin's pistol to fetch as well, though I was unsure whether I would use it on Las Cases or the Universal Demon.

I returned to the house in a stupefied state. I knew I could not enlist my father to punch Las Cases in return, or to call him out for a duel; there was little gain in a parental revenge inflicted at a distance from me. I needed to devise revenge for my own hand.

I did not seek a pistol. Not even I could sustain a killing mania.

My father, seeing how I was, let me off my French translation for the day. By mid-afternoon my natural obduracy had reached a high state. I went to my mother and called in Sarah and Alice and asked them to tuck in the waist of one of my mother's gowns for me. I would not shine at Plantation House, but I
would
be present.

Sick and sullen, I was with Jane and my mother as we packed our dresses and combs and powder and rouge and all other requirements for the ball in tin boxes. They were carried out by Robert and Roger to the carriage the Ogre had lent us for the journey to Plantation House. The barouche stood there, and the two brothers, the Archambaults, stood by the team of horses.

The Archambaults were ready to mount the horses in front and the tin boxes had been loaded into the barouche when we saw the Emperor running across the lawn, up the slope to our house with my gown over his arm. My father, already in the barouche with us, kept his face neutral.

‘You are leaving without your dress, Mademoiselle Betsy,' the Ogre cried. He had it draped across his arms. ‘I hope you are a penitent girl now,' he said, offering the gown to me, and I took it and felt its unsullied satin and intact roses. ‘I hope that you are not going to tell those who are having a jolly time with you that they are somehow cheats.' He lowered his voice. ‘I have spoken severely to Las Cases for his ill-placed zeal.' He resumed in a normal voice, ‘You will like the ball, and you will shine in this dress, but you have to dance with Gourgaud here.'

General Gourgaud climbed aboard the barouche with us, since he was permitted to attend the levee, ‘General' being the correct designation for him. I only partly listened to his halting conversation with my father. The now forgiven seducer of my sister! I was still inspecting the dress, enchanted by it, revived by its roses. The Emperor saw this.

‘I had them removed by Ali in case they were crushed, and he reattached them today. You always knew I would give it back. Farewell, eminent Mr Balcombe. Splendid Balcombe women,
madame
, and
mesdemoiselles
, rejoice! General, sir. Off, Archambaults!'

We rattled forth in the half-dark, but with the Emperor still striding at the stirrup of the older Archambault, who prevented the horses from speeding away even though he had a repute for recklessness. The Ogre kept pace with us all the way down the carriageway, where two soldiers of the regiment presented arms to him, their eyes flittering over him as they always did, trying to puzzle him out, memorising all they could of that half-lit visage to relay to those who had never seen it close. Now the Emperor had seen the lights of a house about a mile away. He delayed my father to ask him, ‘
La maison? Là-bas?
'

My father understood as much French as that. He told him it was Major Hodson's.

‘Not invite to ball?' asked the Emperor.

I tried to imagine the tall Major Hodson dancing. In any case, he was of the East India Company garrison and not quite of the same status or novelty as the officers of the 53rd.

My father said, ‘I don't think he is of a temper, Your Majesty, to go to balls.'

‘You must go now, all of you,' the Emperor told us. ‘And remember that a ball is a rapid form of destiny. Consider that you might meet your husband tonight,
mesdemoiselles
!'

Thus, while we were at the ball the Ogre of Europe, accompanied by the Comte Las Cases, rode across to that lit house, hungry as ever for company, and bringing with him that avidity to know about the childless Hodsons, husband and wife.

The squat Emperor and the towering Hodson, as it happened, got on quite well, because after the ball it became apparent he had awarded him a nickname, Hercules, as he did for all people he admired.

We, in the meantime, were driven on up the ridge behind The Briars and by pleasant country lanes, though some traversed steep ridges. Tonight even the crossroads seemed exempt from the
influence of demented Huff. Along a track to the east we reached the plain that led to Plantation House and so debouched into the grounds, where I glanced at Jane and we exchanged tight smiles, anxious at the challenge, eager for it to happen as well. In the last of light we could see in the broad green garden the land tortoises, moving just fast enough not to be mistaken for rocks, and an occasional peacock, beak down, tails furled, and lights in all the windows of the white rectangular frame of the house. Colonel Wilks and his gentle wife and beauteous daughter Laura reigned here, he as governor for the East India Company, cooperating gently in Admiral Cockburn's management of the Colossus.