Napoleon's Last Island (34 page)

Could OGF melt through the fingers of Sir Hudson in this same way?

More confrontations, more strictures, reported to us by O'Meara, and I became increasingly uneasy about some of them, the extreme of feeling invested in them. To the point of oddity, if not madness. Once again anxious from not sighting his captive, Sir Hudson arrived at Longwood one day while OGF was walking around the garden with Bertrand, de Montholon and the Las Cases. And here is the meat of my captive, Sir Hudson must have thought, seeing the Ogre's pale wrists beneath the sleeves of his white suit – the one he had taken to wearing in the garden. He sent Major Gorrequer a few steps ahead to ask whether the General would tolerate an interview, but Sir Thomas opined loudly at His Excellency's side that it should not be a matter of the Ogre's permission. So Sir Hudson and Admiral Malcolm stood a little distance from the French group, conferring, then moved in and saluted OGF. Sir Hudson told OGF that he had come from Plantation House to Longwood three times already to discuss the reduction of the budget with him and was told each time that the General was in his bath.

‘I was not,' the Emperor declared, ‘but I had one poured especially each time so as not to be able to see you.'

Sir Hudson declared in French, ‘You are a dishonest man, sir.' He turned on his heels and walked up to Poppleton and O'Meara and said, po-faced, ‘The General has been very abusive to me. I ask you gentlemen to observe as much.'

The exchange between the Great Ogre and the Fiend, which O'Meara rightly or wrongly admired, was rightly or wrongly admired in turn by us. We had not reached the stage of asking if it was wise of the Emperor to speak this way to Sir Hudson, or if it was unavoidable that the Emperor would react to being governed by him exactly as he did? And standing by at Sir Hudson's shoulder, Sir Thomas, whistling a bitter tune between plump lips, suggested in a low undertone that £8000 per annum
was an obscene indulgence, a cell being too good for the fallen General.

‘Slit my throat, sir,' called the Emperor. ‘Then you don't need to feed me.'

‘You do not know my true nature,' Sir Hudson asserted.

‘Know your nature, sir,' replied OGF. ‘Could I know you? People in my world make themselves known by commanding in the field. You never had such command and if you did it was to lead Corsican brigands and deserters. I know the name of every English general who has distinguished himself in battle and I have never heard of you but as a clerk to the Prussian General Blucher, and a briber of German princes to jump the fence in England's direction.'

‘I have only done my duty,' Sir Hudson was heard protesting by O'Meara, to which the Emperor answered, ‘So does the hangman.'

Bravo, we cried in our souls. The Emperor had won resonantly. But do resonations count against power?

And with that, his career dismissed, Sir Hudson's red patches glowed and his lips tightened and he mounted his horse and so did a head-shaking Sir Thomas Reade, who probably thought the Emperor should have been shot, and, after waiting for the admiral hanging behind to make a melancholy bow towards the Ogre before joining Sir Hudson's cavalcade, they rode away.

Now Sir Hudson decided to trim the household too. Three of the French servants were to be sent back to France. One was Archambault's brother, stylish groom and postilion-rider. The other was Santini, a man we children found forbidding. He had served in a Corsican regiment in the service of OGF and was a dark man with emphatic features and ancestral grievances, many of them directed at the families of those Corsicans who, for similar grudges, had decided to serve England. He was a rifleman, and had a hunting rifle provided him. Now he began to mutter to other servants that vengeance against the debasing of his master
was a divine prerogative which sometimes entrusted itself to the hands of a Corsican with good aim – himself as an instance.

It was a classic Corsican ambush Santini planned for Sir Hudson: atop the eastern end of the saddle to Jamestown, taking the governor as he descended to the port. Or he could fire from the rocky defiles near Hutt's Gate or the geologic debris south of Devil's Glen. Santini, concealed amidst rocks or trees, would blow Sir Hudson out of his saddle. As we heard from Fanny Bertrand in her narration of the aftermath of the dismissal of Santini, the news that he would be leaving in a ship within a day and a half convinced him that he must carry out his assassination. Seeing him oil the bore of his musket, Cipriani, fellow Italian speaker, warned the Emperor, who was appalled to hear of his fellow Corsican's intentions. It was obvious to the Emperor, of course, that if one of his servants killed the British governor there could be no hope for his ambition to be admitted to the British Isles and live there a free, easy and cultivated life.

Santini was therefore called and OGF told him that he was not to consider such a gesture of vengeance and honour. Much later still I would hear that he had won Santini's obedience by giving him an alternate and somewhat less lethal task. Montholon – again, the devotion in this cannot be gainsaid – had stayed up all night writing on silk an account of the harshness of Sir Hudson's policy. Santini was to wear it in his nether garments, and should he be searched by Sir Thomas Reade, who did not stop at the outer layers of a man, and should it be discovered, was to say that he had been bullied into it.

From The Briars we saw a little procession come across the Deadwood Plain and descend down the mountain the next day, and Santini and young Archambault in a trap driven by Marchand. They reached the saddle above the cliffs that led to Jamestown and vanished altogether, out of the vision and knowledge of The Briars. My mother went to her room to, as she phrased it, ‘have a little swoon' before riding over to commiserate with her friend Fanny.

Novarrez told my father, when he was next at Longwood, ‘They will strip us one by one like leaves from this dead tree. The Great Soul will be left alone.'

It was not the first time my father had evidence of how profound was the affection between OGF and his servants. Of course, if a master or mistress is ill or has died servants tend to tears under the weight of the solemnity. But with Novarrez and Marchand it was a far less occasional and a more unrehearsed thing. Novarrez loved OGF, even though he knew what the Emperor was in his nakedness, in his nightmares and insomnia, indigestion and costiveness, and in all other demonstrations of his imperfection.

My father, more confident at French after his regular exposure to it, was led to the salon with the billiard table in it where the Emperor was striding about in his turban and dressing gown, and Las Cases and Emmanuel, with their pens poised, sat at the
écritoire
waiting wanly for the Emperor's next sentence. OGF always seemed delighted to be distracted by outsiders. In some ways it was as if he had repented of his history and kept working at it for the good of the souls of the Las Cases and to keep Gourgaud out of trouble or appeased.

‘
Guglielmo
,' he cried as usual when seeing my father.

The earnest Las Cases, father and son, looked up with infinite patience at their unruly master. OGF raised his hand to my father's shoulder and drew him into an embrace and told him that both de Montholon and Bertrand had assured him the household could not get by on the allocated sum. Proposing for the sake of simplicity that servants and the suite ate precisely the same food, it brought the weekly budget for each person to five pounds a week. ‘This means a soldier as excellent as Bertrand,' said the Emperor, ‘and a woman as delicate as the Countess de Montholon – these people who have known the most sumptuous quarters and the most elevated European luxuries – will now eat as well as the drummer boys of the 53rd or 66th regiments!'

It was about then, I think, though I cannot be sure, that the Emperor for the first time gave my father a money bill drawn on certain resources in France, written out by Las Cases and signed by the Emperor himself, a bill to be transported, without any intrusion from the governor, to a broker in England, a friend
of O'Meara, and so on to relatives of the Emperor in Paris – a bill for negotiation between the English broker and the French bank, the sum settled on after commissions to be returned to the household at Longwood.

In later years, in his distracted final time in a penal city on another continent, my father would tell me that when he was first given a bill drawn up on the Emperor's behalf, Las Cases had told him to extract a fee for himself from the overall sum when the discounted amount was returned by way of the coffers of Foster, Coles and Balcombe. My father always claimed, almost as a self-condemnation for naivety, that he refused to do it for any such commission, but he knew he might have to pay an agent, a store ship captain perhaps, to carry the bill away from the island. (A fellow, for example like Captain Cook, might have been amenable after the treatment he got at the hands of Sir Tom Reade and Name and Nature's troops.)

The Emperor's household trusted my father with these affairs, when he might have made himself safe in his stature on the island by betraying the dealings to Sir Hudson Lowe.

That's what I sing in the silence of the bush: that he kept the faith, that congenial poor old plump winebibber. He had honour and played a simple game when he could and should have played the new serpentine ones. Of course, Name and Nature had demanded to be the clearing house for all bills and all correspondence, and my father, out of the plainest sympathy and friendship, subverted that, but to eternal cost.

My father secreted the note to be smuggled. OGF dolefully rubbed his hands. ‘The other thing,' he announced, ‘is that I need to sell my plate, and I want you to handle the sale.'

Selling the silver plate of a family is considered an evil omen in most families, and, I believe, even in French ones, and my father stared at the Emperor.

‘Yes, I want you to handle the sale, my dear
Cinq Bouteilles
. God knows, there must be merchants who'd see a good thing in it, or officers in the squadron or the garrison who might like to have a piece as a memento of their delightful times in this little
acre. I trust it will go at an outrageous price, like the fruit and vegetables on this island.'

My father began to argue with him. He should not sell anything as precious and see it dispersed from this geologic phenomenon of a mid-oceanic rock to every obscure latitude.

The Emperor told him, ‘Come,
Cinq Bouteilles
, there is no reason to possess a plate when there's nothing to eat off it.'

This, of course, was a dramatic statement of the truth and perhaps the Emperor was seized by a desire to exhibit to the world the extent to which the British and Sir Hudson had reduced him.

And so the plan was made that the silverware of the Emperor's household would be carried down to Jamestown on the shoulders of slaves and Chinese and advertised for sale in Mr Solomon's newspaper and on a handbill produced in his printery.

My father rode away utterly depressed. He knew that having refused to take a margin on the money bill he was carrying in his breast pocket, he would also need as a consistent admirer and friend of OGF to undercharge his commission on the sale of the silver plate.

After another jolly Christmas at The Briars, from an officer from the English vessel,
Baring
, it became known that a Mr Radwick, a gentleman sailor, had brought a bust of the King of Rome to St Helena. When he had landed and inquired innocently of members of the garrison how to get it to the Emperor, Sir Thomas Reade found out in no time and at once visited Radwick's ship. By evening Sir Hudson Lowe was the possessor of the bust of the son of OGF, and was said to have mused aloud that perhaps he should break it up, for the British Cabinet had not approved its arrival.

Lady Holland had sent books and other items by the
Baring
: these had also been seized and retained at Plantation House. And O'Meara had learned all this by doing what he liked best, conversing at length and sometimes drinking in that same dimension. When he told the Emperor, OGF became agitated, indeed beyond comfort.

The bust of Napoleon's son was in Name and Nature's possession for two weeks. We weren't the only ones who knew it; the freed slaves
and
the slaves knew it too. He was hanging onto it at Plantation House until he had communicated with Lord Bathurst in London about whether to give a man an image of his son, something that might have been allowed to the most common of common criminals.

It was now that at The Briars our feelings against Name and Nature really began to mount. We understood nothing of his fear and his monomania. We understood that he was prepared to be inhuman and saw denial as a duty. Only at this distance of time and place time do I feel almost sorry for the anguish these possessions evoked in Name and Nature, the way they rankled and bespoke the bigger world's unwillingness to foreswear severity against the Ogre. But Sir Thomas Reade – so I believe even now – had no inhibitions about prohibiting comforts to OGF. His was a vileness unsullied by mania and thus more to be deplored.

At last Reade, though not known for his moderation, pointed out that the bust was made of marble through and through, there could be no secret traps to it, and that it could be safely forwarded to Longwood. The governor called on Count Bertrand and said that although the bust had come in a very suspect manner, it seemed to be no reason to separate the breathing father from the marbled child, except for one thing – that the sculptor expected £125 for it, which Sir Hudson suggested it was not worth. The statue arrived at Longwood, and the entire household gathered to see it. It was placed on the mantelpiece of Napoleon's small and strange study, and the Emperor sat down and stared at the features for at least half an hour before he said anything.

I would later see this bust of the young Napoleon, the King of Rome, Francis, the simulacrum of the infant Emperor himself, in OGF's rooms, and his demeanour towards it was intense even by the standards of those times. You have to remember that in those days men dwelt upon carvings and cameos as one now dwells upon photographs, so he gazed on the statue of his son, and the lovely boy smiled back, miraculously in his own features. OGF did not have complicated features, merely complicated lines to his face, and yet the Italian sculptor had somehow managed to delineate his son in a way that flattered and delighted the father.

The weeks Name and Nature had detained the bust, depriving OGF of the sight of his child's countenance, made us discuss whether Lord Bathurst, had he been here on St Helena, would have been more accommodating than Sir Hudson and
permitted all manner of things Sir Hudson would not. We wondered between us if this island was unable to accommodate great men, wider souls.

Yet it was the only place I would choose to be, and from which I have ever afterwards been an exile.

It was almost in a desire to relieve the expenses of the table at Longwood that my father would invite either the Count or Countess de Montholon or Madame and Marshal Bertrand to The Briars for dinner. He wanted to ask the Las Cases men, but I am ashamed to tell you that I had pleaded with him not to. ‘The boy hit me fair in the face here, in our own garden,' I told my father, and I demanded that if he ever asked the Las Cases he must allow me not to attend the table. I was frightened not of the boy as an assailant though. I was frightened by his ardour, and its messiness, and by his delicate feelings that had been violated at the table in Longwood.

I saw that Madame de Montholon was pregnant again, a tribute to de Montholon's virility, yet she was at that same time losing weight, the column of her neck becoming stringy, and there was a gloss of fatigue on her broad forehead. I was still fascinated by her having been married three times. It was a grave and eternal matter to marry once, and since I had become aware of the bewildering news of Major Fehrzen's supposed interest in me, I was engaged by the idea that Albine had first married an old man when she was just two years older than me – my source in these matters was as ever Madame Bertrand.

Admiral Malcolm and his wife liked to attend when we had the French at the table. We would find that the admiral, too, had smuggled goods to Longwood from his own store at the Castle, but in the end did not permit himself to show disloyalty to Sir Hudson, the commander by land. This tiny clump of dense rock outweighed in authority, it seemed, the vastness of Admiral Malcolm's Atlantic when it came to managing the prisoner.

Lady Malcolm had become quieter of late, as if at the advice of her husband, uneasily caught in such a delicate position. She
still came in her swathes of colour, or in exorbitant turbans of many hues which echoed her general air of jolliness and enthusiasm. But she was more subdued, and the corners of her mouth would tuck themselves away in reflectiveness. It seemed clear she did not like the over-punctilious reign of Name and Nature over the island. It oppressed her too, though she could not say so.

The Count de Montholon, a guest at The Briars with Albine, closed his mouth firmly and made his eyes blank as Major Gorrequer arrived one evening. My father had given up attempting friendship with Name and Nature and Sir Tom, but not Gorrequer, whom he felt could be a moderate influence on his master. However, de Montholon and Bertrand considered Gorrequer more vicious than he pretended to be, a less than reluctant bearer of impositions,
un finaud
, as de Montholon said – a sly one. So de Montholon was not won over when Gorrequer greeted everyone with apologies and with a proper round of acknowledgements and titles, extending them even to Jane and me. Indeed Gorrequer's tentative and regretful demeanour made us anticipate some edict he carried from Sir Hudson, and so instead of convincing us of his sympathy, by his very presence he sucked the joy out of the room and made the French anxious.

Gorrequer observed and inquired, ‘So I believe, since I've seen a caravan hoisting it down to Jamestown, that the General wishes to sell his plate.'

My father said that the Emperor considered it necessary.

‘And you are to be the agent for the sale of this plate?'

My father agreed that he was honoured to be so entrusted. Gorrequer conceded, ‘The governor believes it's within the General's right to do so.'

‘Well, I should think it would be in his right,' said my father. ‘It's his plate.'

Later, as Gorrequer was leaving, he buttonholed my father in the hallway.

‘His Excellency has ordered that these items of silver not become relics to a supposed man of destiny. I told you he has permitted the sale …'

‘Of course,' said my father. ‘He must.'

‘The silver as silver has a value, and Sir Hudson believes it is at that value the General is entitled to sell it. But he is not entitled to sell it as mementos of his lost power, and have it reach distant places with the symbols of his past ambitions. The plate's ornamentations lie under the same prohibition as would advertisements in newspapers for the General's return as Emperor of France.'

‘Oh my heavens,' said my father, totally undone. ‘What does he mean we should do?'

‘The plate is to be melted down,' Gorrequer said. ‘That's what His Excellency the Governor requires. Imperial insignia, whether the humble bee or the eagle or any other motifs – shields, swords – are to be removed from the plate and melted down with the rest in the Jamestown forge. The government has fixed a fair price of five shillings an ounce for the silver.'

‘But that's a barbarity,' complained my father. ‘These are fine pieces, well-wrought, work crafted from the lofty imagination of humankind.'

Gorrequer said, ‘I know, my dear fellow. I know. But the fair price of five shillings an ounce compares well with the price of silver on the London market as quoted in the last edition of
The Times
to reach us.'

My father made guttural noises. He said, ‘In that case I shall advise the Emperor to keep his plate and spite your master. And the porters can bring it all back from Jamestown again.'

‘Well, there you see,' said Gorrequer, ‘it's already settled … The governor has foreseen such an attitude on your part, which he knows does you some honour, and tells me that since the decision has been made to sell the plate, the proposed sale will stand and the purpose will not be altered.'

There was a silence, and then my father said, ‘What sort of man bent on torment would come up with such an order as that? I mean to say, you've seen some of the decent fellows on this island – open-hearted fellows. Hodson, Ibbetson, Doveton … We do things honestly and face each other frankly. What in God's name is wrong with your man?'

‘It is not within my power to speculate,' Gorrequer said piously.

‘My God, Gorrequer, what sort of man is not disgraced to deliver such an order?'

‘I cannot say, dear Balcombe, I cannot say.'

‘But you were a brave fellow in Spain, used to shot and the detonations of artillery. Cannot you be brave in this matter?'

‘It is entirely different,' said Gorrequer.

My mother seemed to spend much time with Lady Name and Nature. The summonses to Plantation House were regular and my mother would say, ‘Lady Lowe needs to speak to me, and I may do some good.' Lady Lowe had taken a liking to my mother's company, perhaps, in contradistinction to the animosity between the husbands. This did not seem a totally strange business. They were both Englishwomen of about the same age, and of some similar experience.

One of the matters my mother said she must take up with Name and Nature was that Madame Bertrand had written a letter to Mr Solomon, a normal letter of trade, which was intercepted on the tiers above the port and sent to Sir Hudson by his watchers. He returned it to her with a note that it had been written without his permission. He added an observation that if the restrictions imposed on the Emperor's party seemed too hard, they could relieve themselves from them by simply leaving the island.

Nonetheless, it was a time OGF briefly gave those who knew him a sense that his world was ample. He had the bust of his son. He had books from Lord and Lady Holland and from French friends, and even Sir Hudson's delaying of the crates that contained them did not spoil the pleasure the prisoner of Longwood took in receiving them. Jane and I rode over to attend the happy opening of the boxes. The Emperor had dressed formally in uniform and set to opening them himself with hammer and chisel. He was ecstatic to find bound volumes of
le Moniteur Universel
– the paper he had founded and which still prevailed under freedom of the press – and gave up any attempt at dictation to stay up at night reading them.

‘What a pleasure I've enjoyed,' he told us. ‘So far, only the dear French titles. For I can read forty pages of French in the time it takes me to read two of English.'

Even the mist that blew past Longwood like squadrons of stoop-shouldered sullen horsemen, or sat down on the roof and on the lungs, did not ruin his spirit for some days.

‘Surgeon O'Meara is limited in his cures,' O'Meara reported OGF as saying. ‘
Le Moniteur Universel
is far more accomplished in his effects.'

Letters from France, however, soured things. They turned up by way of Sir Hudson's office, where they had been opened and scoured, and Name and Nature had written on them his reason for delaying them – which was that before being posted from Europe they had not been passed through the office of the secretary of state in Whitehall.