The Ghost of Waterloo (18 page)

So he now looked closely at William Balcombe. He should know that face well, but he was shocked at how much the man had aged. His body seemed to have shrunk, too. What ailed him?

Lowe turned to the boy, only briefly. He was just that: a boy, though heavier and taller than the Governor recalled.

Sir Hudson saved his keenest scrutiny for the servant. He was a man of medium set, an ill-favoured fellow with grubby clothes and a face and hands to match. The Governor turned his attention to the only male left, a sturdy and tanned youth in, at a guess, his late teens.

‘Your name?’

‘Grenville, sir.’

‘Where will you go, boy?’

‘Wherever Mr Balcombe goes – at first.’

‘And then?’

‘Oh, I will make my mark somewhere, sir, rest assured. My father was at the Battle of the Nile, you know.’

The Governor grunted and forgot the lad, then turned to Balcombe. ‘Do you have a last message?’ he said, almost as if he were talking to a man on the scaffold. ‘Something, some bon mot, for me to remember you by, to ponder?’

Balcombe was silent for a long moment. Then a low voice came, softly but clearly: ‘Come, shepherd, let us make an honourable retreat; though not with scrip and scrippage, yet with bag and baggage.’ The words were lost in the exodus to the boat.

‘What the devil was that?’ Lowe turned to the soldier nearby, bending his rule. ‘What’s your name? Bagley, isn’t it?’

‘As you like it, sir,’ replied the man after a pause.

‘Well, I don’t damn well like it. Do you know what was said, or don’t you?’

The soldier retreated behind the ranker’s best defence: ignorance and stupidity. ‘Don’t know, sir,’ he said stolidly.

But the soldier did know. And Sir Hudson had been quite wrong earlier to brand him a dullard, ignorant of Defoe and suchlike. In truth, before drink and another deplorable flaw had driven him in disgrace to take the recruiting officer’s shilling, he had studied at Winchester and Cambridge. Then, in his drunken descent, he had become a tutor, and unfortunately too much more, to too many tempting rich small boys.

Their parents and a judge had not approved, and only a shortage of soldiers on the Peninsula had saved him from the hangman’s noose.

However, he still knew his Shakespeare as well as he now did the manual of arms, and so he had recognised the Balcombe passenger’s parting words. They were surely from
As You Like It
: Touchstone, the court jester, speaking to Corin, a shepherd.

But still, something vaguely concerned him. Enough for him that night to enter the odd exchange into the journal he kept secretly from his comrades and the officers, who would either scorn or fear his erudition.

The words would continue to puzzle him on and off. For a whole decade.

Within minutes the small boat was pulling away from the quay to its mothership, ready to leave its station. Sir Hudson Lowe did not bother to wait and watch its final pitch and roll towards the open sea. He had only one parting thought: Balcombe was gone. Good riddance.

Now that left only one of his enemies to harass – the prisoner held fast there on the heights of St Helena … Napoleon Bonaparte.

On St Helena, William Balcombe and his kin had become Napoleon Bonaparte’s firm, perhaps most faithful, friends.

On 17 October 1815, barely four months after Wellington and Blücher had bled Bonaparte dry at Waterloo and his escape to America had been foiled, the Royal Navy’s
Northumberland
delivered the fallen bogeyman of Europe into exile on the tiny outcrop.

The important supply point for the East India Company was transferred to the Crown and Sir Hudson Lowe put in charge as keeper. Upon his arrival, the erstwhile Emperor was to be permitted to keep his sword and 80000 francs. Sir Hudson honoured the promise on the sword, but seized the money. To cover expenses, he explained. ‘They have sent me more than a gaoler,’ the prisoner railed. ‘Sir Lowe is a hangman.’

Bonaparte made the undignified ascent of the winding road, and there, at the top, he met William Balcombe, the East India Company agent who had stayed on.

The man who at the height of his dizzying powers had reduced the armies of such as the King of Prussia, the Russian Prince Kutuzov and the Archduke of Austria was now humbled. He was no longer to be called
Votre Majesté
, only, grudgingly, General.

He lived with the Balcombe family in a pavilion attached to their house, The Briars, while his own residence, a farmstead called Longwood House, was made ready. This ruler, who had lived in palaces, now spent much of his time in two small rooms each measuring no more than fourteen feet by twelve. He had a camp bed, a table and bookshelves, and portraits of his distant wife and son. Later, even Longwood was never much better than a leaking, rat-infested shambles.

Bonaparte had a court of sorts. Just as he insisted on being addressed as a king, to little avail, his aide, Count Henri Bertrand, was still called Grand Marshal of the Palace. Still, the Emperor greatly enjoyed the companionship of the Balcombes, in particular that of the children in the house, Thomas, Grenville and, most of all, blooming Betsy. She spoke French, danced and flirted with the prisoner.

And now Bonaparte had been instrumental in bringing down his friends. Sir Hudson Lowe charged Balcombe with secretly transmitting the prisoner’s mail to and from overseas supporters and with arranging money transfers. Soon it was his turn for banishment.

Where will you go? asked Bonaparte. Balcombe said there was talk of sending him to Botany Bay. ‘To that convict cesspool,’ he laughed, ‘but not as a prisoner.’

The General looked at him keenly. ‘
L’Australie
? Why,
I
wanted to accompany La Pérouse there in ’88! Think of it – if I had, I would have disappeared with him and none of this would have happened. When I was first threatened with this pest-hole, I told them I would prefer to go to Botany Bay. Now the land of
le kangourou
raises its head once more.’

As William Balcombe and his little party sailed away on that day in 1818, the solitary figure standing outside Longwood House attracted little attention from the nearby guard. This, by chance, was Bagley, the redcoat who had seen off the Balcombes. Now he was tired – this was his last sentry post for the day – and bored. What was there to see? The bicorn hat with its tricolore rosette was familiar and, while a chestnutcoloured frockcoat and blue trousers had replaced the prisoner’s usual attire of green coat and white breeches, the cut of the clothing was not remarkable.

But Bagley did recall the tale of a civilian prisoner on the run who had left his folded clothes on a cliff-top and disappeared into the boiling sea below. The seething island gossip had soon tired of the story. Instead, talk now centred on how so many people close to the General were abandoning him.

Even Bonaparte’s mistress, Madame de Montholon, the wife of his chamberlain, Count de Montholon, was going; leaving behind her husband but taking the child that Bonaparte (and most others) believed was his. The child would be christened Joséphine-Napoléone. The story was that the General was put out that Madame Bertrand would not fill the role left vacant by Mme de Montholon’s departure.

Was all that, then, why the shoulders of the figure at the farmhouse now were shaking almost uncontrollably? Was it a paroxysm of sorrow? If asked (and he was not), the sole witness, that bored sentry, would have sworn that the General was laughing.

Chapter Twenty-five

Sydney, Australia – Spring, 1828

Nicodemus Dunne reported the summary he had made of his findings to Captain Rossi in the Police Office at the Market Square. Even though the women’s holding cells were far away, across a courtyard, the men’s conversation had to compete with the raucous singing by a chorus of women convicted earlier by a magistrate of being drunk and using lewd and abusive language to a constable. They were awaiting transfer next day to the Female Factory, the stocks or the pillory. A woman would not be put ‘on the step’ – the dreaded treadmill, the ‘stairway to nowhere’ – for the gaolers’ superstitious male belief was that climbing the mill would induce menstruation. No woman had been flogged since 1817, but they could, of course, still be hanged.

The singing was really quite harmonious and made much sense. It told how a woman prisoner had been seduced, or raped, by a guard in Ireland, impregnated and abandoned to carry the child, literally, to Botany Bay. Dunne had read similar popular, sad and cynical verses, called eclogues, on his newspaper rounds. This ditty lamented:

Such was the racket that the Patterer and his interlocutor were finally forced to pause until the serenaders had stopped. Such quieting was often achieved by the threat, or application, of a bucket of water.

‘So, there may be something to what Dr Owens says about Bonaparte, at that,’ summed up the Patterer. ‘He found irregularities in 1821 at the autopsy. And Bagley’s story tends to back him up. I believe something unusual did happen in March ten years ago.

‘The strange offering then of a quotation from Shakespeare may hold a key. I must talk again to our “Cauliflower”. What was it exactly? Who said it? And I don’t mean which character.’

‘Well,’ said Rossi, ‘from Bagley’s evidence it appears it was spoken on the dock by a male – Mr Balcombe, Thomas, Grenville, or the manservant.’

Dunne grimaced. ‘On the other hand, the Balcombes say they did not notice any such wordplay. Bagley, by the way, appears to have a good memory. He still recalls the name of the escaped criminal who committed suicide at that time. He was a Prosper Mendoza.