Napoleon's Last Island (38 page)

‘Attention!' called the old Colonel Smith, sighting the fire, in a staged imitation of an officer, ironically, not like a former military man at all.

‘Here we are then,' said Mr Knipe, the uncle of Rosebud. ‘They're good lads though. Good lads at base.'

We British believed this of our soldiers. Indeed, my father reflected aloud that some of them had fought the French throughout Spain, and were under the most severe orders to cage a person who might present them with further battles, as unlikely as that was.

A sentry stepped forward from the circle of firelight and asked who went there. He had his weapon levelled, and his bayonet on the end.

‘Who else but a friend?' said my father reasonably. ‘Is there any other species on this island?'

The young man might once have laughed but was now under severer threats and could not afford whimsy. He declared without humour, ‘Advance, friend, and give the countersign.'

He sounded as urgent as I imagined a bivouac in Spain three years before to have been.

‘You know we have no countersign, young man,' said Mr Knipe. He sounded terse and wanted to get this rubbish over.

My father told the pickets, ‘There are no French folk amongst us except the dear Baroness von Stürmer, whose husband is vowed to contain the French.' He pointed back down the line to
where her white features shone with a faintly blue luminescence in the night. ‘The rest of us have not a single barrel with us to install Boney in and send him wallowing off to America.'

Another officer had appeared and these verbal forays of my father produced no smiles. For Sir Hudson had killed laughter and they had the most definite orders not to smile.

The officer said, ‘You are all under arrest, ladies and gentlemen. I must require you to dismount.'

There were satiric groans from the men of the company and cries of incredulity from the women. But then we were surrounded by soldiers who ordered us off our horses. After many complaints we dismounted and, our horses confiscated for now, were ordered by guards to march towards the lights of Deadwood.

‘I could show you every face in this company,' my father told the officer accompanying us, ‘and you would know it, sir, you would know it.'

‘I regret, sir,' said the officer, ‘it is not the known faces but the question of whether they know the countersign.'

As Colonel Smith, Mr Knipe, the Reverend Boys and my father further pronounced that all this was ridiculous and the governor would receive blasts from them, we were led across to the edge of Deadwood and crowded into a long hut. We were numerous enough that by the time everyone was inside we could stand only, and the officers sincerely conferred with older women such as Mrs Boys about the proprieties regarding calls of nature that might occur, but warned against frivolous claims.

When the door was closed, my father and Mr Knipe arranged things so that the women were able to sit either on the camp cots on each side of the hut or, if they were young enough, on the floor. My mother stood raging, saying she would seek a chance to cut Sir Hudson for his berserk policies. I insisted on standing too. If it went to prove Name and Nature wrong, my patience was limitless.

It was a mild night. Older women went to the door in the care of younger ones, and returned from the outer night unmolested. But the fleas that had plagued Mrs Younghusband in the past
were at work amongst us, ecstatic for such a feast, while through the slats of the window mosquitoes from the few swamps on the Jamestown coast found us.

‘A commissioner's wife is here, for God's sake!' said my father.

A young officer was called. We propelled the beautiful Baroness von Stürmer in front of us.

‘It is very unfortunate what you do,' she told a captain. A more senior officer who knew all the commissioners was summoned and validated that it was her.

‘Aren't you embarrassed?' called my father gleefully to the officer outside. And then, ‘How wise were the Solomons? To stay as guests of Ibbetson. If you let Madame von Stürmer loose, why not liberate the other women? They were guilty of nothing except the act of accompanying their husbands.'

But such a voice of reason had no place on Sir Hudson's island. The Reverend Boys told us we must endure our penance when it overcame us, and here it had overcome us suddenly at the end of a golden day.

In the early hours of the evening there was a contest about what music should occupy us. Mr Boys had opened up by suggesting that we sing together, ‘All People That on Earth Do Dwell'. It was obvious the men did not go along with this, though a number of women did, and it was sung, with everyone striving to make up for the Reverend's tunelessness. He had become less popular in this hut than he had been on the road.

‘Does penance have to come with fleas?' asked my mother.

Le Bouton de Rose
had her face tucked in to her aunt's shoulder and was dozing and reconciled, or, perhaps like Jane and me, almost enjoying this, seeing in it the future anecdote. Jane had been conversing with Florence Robinson, asking how she had taken to the open ocean after a childhood on her father's farm. The army of Britain had locked up yet another of the Emperor's admired women. Florence said she had found the life of a captain's wife a congenial experience, since being an islander she had always had to look at the horizon, which in the case of a seafarer was the advised method of progressing across oceans
without harm or malaise. She had learned to walk with the roll of the ship, she assured us. She was on the island visiting her parents while her husband took his ship
Chloe
to Cape Town, and then on his return she would say goodbye to her mother, and go to an England she had never seen, and so be transformed into a new person and escape the condition of yamstock-hood. Meanwhile, locked in here with her mother and father, she endured well. They were plain people and few of the railings emitted concerning Name and Nature came from their mouths.

In any case there was enough interest and sufficient questions contained in that hut to keep me awake for quite a time and then, exhausting me with their own stimulation, to cause me to sleep in the small hours, leaning against my mother, waking often clammy and sore, and hearing other women complain of fleas. Miss Knipe now sang a little from
Love in the Village
and Jane sang ‘The Padlock', and I was encouraged to sing ‘The Waterman' and Florence Robinson had the culminating success with ‘The Comic Mirror'.

Suddenly we were having a memorable night, with the bonus that we would take away from this hovel, all of us, an immutable contempt for Sir Hudson, the contempt we had always been trying to achieve, but which we had now been fully provoked into.

We were released at first light. Many of the men harangued the officers of the guard about our imprisonment, but it was clearly not their substantial fault. In morning clarity we saw army grooms leading our detained horses in our direction.

The startling news O'Meara brought with an almost jubilant suddenness was that Name and Nature had ordered the Comte Las Cases and his son arrested and detained in that same flea-bitten hut at Deadwood we had all become acquainted with on the night we failed the test of the countersign. The surgeon was worried about heart palpitations he had detected in the boy, and thought detention in the hut on Deadwood Plain not a curative environment for them. My mother rode to the camp with a hamper for the father and son.

At the time of the arrest Las Cases had been conferring with OGF when a servant arrived to say that a party of horsemen, including Name and Nature, were searching the rooms occupied by Las Cases and Emmanuel. ‘I'll go and see to it,' Las Cases promised and OGF had said plaintively, ‘Hurry back.' But Name and Nature and his servants had found a report of the treatment of OGF further to the one earlier given to Santini, and again inked on silk, in the hands of a servant of Las Cases about to board ship for England.

Within a day they were imprisoned down on the Castle Terrace. They were to be evicted from the island.

My mother asked, ‘Do you think the Count Las Cases put himself in this position to save his son and take him to doctors in Europe?'

My father said, ‘But he is so devoted to OGF.'

Yet the question remained; life which had been direct and readable before Name and Nature was no longer so.

When we rode down to see them in the naked stone grandeur of the Castle Terrace, Major Gorrequer was sent from Plantation House to accompany the visiting Balcombes. My parents were close-lipped with Gorrequer. He took us in to a chamber not too ominous or oppressive by the Castle's standards. The comte, hair combed forward, properly dressed – ‘shirtsleeves' not being part of his mental vocabulary, and that fact now seeming pitiful – stood. His son was in one of the two beds. I went straight up to the boy. He had a pallor screening his jaundice and a clamminess of fever.

‘I am very sorry that I find you like this,' I said in a small voice, then adding, ‘Emmanuel.'

He said, croakily, ‘I am very sorry in return that I beat you that night in the garden.' I had never noted until now how good his English was. I had been busy trying to prevent myself giving him credit.

‘Well, I should not have tripped the Emperor. I wouldn't do it now. Not these days.'

‘And I wouldn't beat you these days. Or say other ridiculous things.'

I could smell that his voice was sour from his sickness.

‘I beat you because you were very beautiful,' he told me quietly. ‘I didn't know how to state the idea then.'

He closed his eyes.

I told him, ‘They are sending you to the Cape, I hear.' That at least would avert the peril of further praise, and it would end his uncertainty too. ‘But in the end they will send you to England or France and you can go to an academy and meet other boys your own age.'

I realised this implied a deficit in him. There was a deficit in him, as there was in me, and he was as confused by his behaviour as I was by mine. I sounded anyhow like an insincere aunt and as if he were a companionable, harum-scarum boy.

‘Please, when you're better, could you write to me at The Briars and tell me how you are?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘It is a pity we could not have spoken more normally here. But the circumstances didn't permit it, did they? And I am to blame, of course.'

I now found myself protesting it wasn't so with the same energy I had earlier put into blaming him for existing. Captain Fehrzen entered my mind. How would I be able to talk to him when I couldn't talk to a male more than half as young as he?

‘Would you like me to cut you up a mango?' I asked with a sudden inspiration, for we had brought mangoes from the orchard. I thanked God that he said yes, and asked my father for his knife and began to peel and slice the succulent mango on a plate, its smooth flesh yielding to the blade easily. Then I fed it to him with a spoon. His eyes concentrated on the fruit but not on me, and he savoured it.

Gorrequer said it was time to go and I asked Emmanuel if he wanted a book. I felt a sense of loss. I had deprived myself of an ally, a companion, a friend and some sort of indefinable accomplice.

OGF wanted the Comte Las Cases to be brought to Longwood to say goodbye before he went, and all without requiring a third person to be present. That was, of course, refused. OGF sent Bertrand down with an officer to see Las Cases, which the Emperor himself refused to do unless, again, there was no escort present. OGF complained, ‘Lowe must think that Europe is a mine of gunpowder and Las Cases the spark that would blow it up on a word from me.'

Gourgaud, who had once wanted to fight de Montholon
and
Las Cases in duels, had somehow found a new contentment and ease of soul. Las Cases was a sort of martyr, who had to be revered like most martyrs when they ascended to heaven or to Cape Town. O'Meara told me Gourgaud asked Las Cases to look into the reimbursing of his 100,000 francs, and into the health of his mother.

Young Emmanuel – it had been decided – was fit for the sea voyage. Yet when they arrived in Cape Town after eighteen days,
they found that on the basis of a letter written by Sir Hudson Lowe, they were imprisoned as before, albeit in a house, and it would be seven months before they were sent to England, where Las Cases had been an
emigré
himself and written his famous atlas. But still, as it turned out, the malice of Sir Hudson preceded them there. They would be arrested by order of the British ministry, prohibited from landing, sent on board another ship, and after a few days at Dover spent under guard in an inn, they were placed on another ship which took them to Ostend, where their persecution did not end.

For in Ostend they were both arrested again, placed in a carriage between two police officers, and passed from town to town, from police station to police station, across the entire kingdom of Holland. When they arrived at the frontiers of Prussia, the comte was placed in the hands of the Prussian police, and on arriving in Cologne, Emmanuel and his father were so ill that they could not be forced any further, and were allowed twenty-four hours' rest.

Here the Comtesse Las Cases caught up with her husband and son after having been for many days in energetic pursuit, and consumed by fierce concern for them, following them and always one rumour behind until now.

Las Cases took the chance to write to all the relatives of the Emperor, and then to the British Cabinet and to the Prince Regent, and to the King of Prussia and the emperors of Austria and Russia, explaining the circumstances of the Emperor on the island. Receiving Las Cases' letters, OGF's brother Lucien, a man of independent mind who had not liked the Ogre becoming Emperor, and their mother, Madame
Mère
, asked Lord Bathurst if they could be permitted to go to St Helena to bear the exile with the Emperor. Lucien proved particularly insistent, being willing to stay there for two years, with or without his wife and children, and promising not to occasion any increase in expense, while guaranteeing beforehand and with a full heart, to obey all restrictions placed upon him.

I never saw Emmanuel again and he would return not to the Emperor's history but to that of Sir Hudson and be a better
vengeance than any of us – apart perhaps from Surgeon O'Meara himself.

In the days of strange grieving after the Las Cases left, my mind turned despite itself, flippantly and like a compass needle to the true north of the coming Deadwood races. They were a new event for the island, the creation of the horse-mad Captain Henry Rous of the navy flotilla. All the fuzzed outline of my life, the question of whether I was a woman, the likelihood I was still a child, the question of why Major Fehrzen spent such an effort to impress me, if that was what he was doing, all this was drawn to a point, and the point seemed to be the Deadwood races.

I was aware of my rough and ruthless horsewomanship. I knew I was flexible in the waist and inflexible in the will to victory. I could ride in a manner even in a side-saddle that other women might consider uncouth. I could outstrip the field, one leg hitched, the other, under the hem of my skirt, thumping the flanks of Gargoyle, the family gelding I had decided my father would allocate me for the races.

I would make myself apparent in a new way through that race. I would be one thing, the victorious girl, not all the many confusing things I presently was. The girl bent at the waist with eagerness, not leaning back on the saddle with hauteur or a desire for comfort, but aimed as forward as a woman could be.

Whenever I could get away with it, I rode astride, in the male manner, for the sake of greater speed. I had no small regard for myself as a horsewoman – even on Tom, long in honesty, energy and pliability as his name was short. When out with others I tested the limits of my daring sitting on a side-saddle, and believed I was up to the ladies' race at Deadwood and that I would do well enough in the mens', if it were permitted.

I was unlucky that the races coincided with one of those intermittent periods when my father felt a passion for education and would quiz me on Latin and give me passages from Montaigne to translate. I protested as I had in the days of the cellar punishment: I was a speaker, not a translator. Drop me down in France,
and I was sure I could order bread, meat, water and fire. But the exercises of translation seemed wilfully removed from those obvious requirements. Since I had enough French to converse with OGF, translating Montaigne seemed a meaningless exercise and provoked a fury in me. I both could and would not try.

I could not help also but adopt a desultory air when my father sometimes, forgetting he was indulgent, came striding into the parlour to see my progress. Then he became enraged as in past spasms, in part at guilt for his own educational neglect to this point, wishing to make up with today's severity the indifference and lack of application to the matter he considered himself culpable for. It was as if he believed that if ever I were to be admitted to any polite company, I would be first asked to do a passable translation from Montaigne or La Fontaine's fables.

‘All right,' said my father on the evening before the races, ‘Lieutenant Howard of the
Vigo
asked me if I had a horse, and I told him no. But I now find I do have a horse to spare, since you will not be needing it.'

And in this same rare bout of grimness, he wrote out a note for one of the slaves to take down to Jamestown for transmission to Howard. The lieutenant would now have Gargoyle, even if he were inevitably inferior to some of the shipped-in thoroughbreds of the Plantation House stable. I saw Howard arrive on foot that afternoon and ride Gargoyle down the carriageway without apparent happiness – a dismal moment amongst many. So I sullenly told my father and mother later that morning that I was not going to Deadwood if I couldn't ride, and my father's quick, erratic anger mounted again and he told me that, very well, I was not obligated to attend the races, and could suit myself.

Dr O'Meara came down the track from the Longwood plateau just before my parents, Jane and William were leaving, William riding on my father's horse, encased within the arms that held the reins.

I could see O'Meara discussing the day with my parents near the corner. At one stage my father nodded to where I sulked on the verandah. Then the Balcombe party set forth largely
unrepentant about me, except for Jane, who looked back dolefully. I was manufacturing the purest bile but was interrupted when O'Meara cantered up to the carriageway. He leaned down and opened the gate without dismounting and rode in with whimsy aflame in his face. I stood up from my chair and was about level with his head as he advanced on his bay.

‘I am an ambassador from your father, Betsy,' he told me. ‘He is reconsidering the terms of your punishment.'

‘It's like him that he does,' I said. ‘Angry one moment, and then the next, well … pliable.'

‘By far the best sort of father to have, wouldn't you say? A man has to get irritable now and again and has to look as if he's legislating for his bairns. And there are some who are like it all the time. And then there's my good friend Billy Balcombe, who's kind to everyone and so must have almost by force of nature a mere occasional outburst. You should be better to him, Betsy. You should go to pains not to grieve the poor fellow.'

It sounded a reasonable proposition, but I knew it was like a well-meaning bird telling a rabbit how to fly. The principles were solid. It was the gulf of nature that did not work.

‘If he must be occasionally irked,' I told him, ‘then I must be occasionally awkward. Actually, I am awkward most of the time, as you know.'

‘No, no,' he said. ‘You are lively, something much admired where I come from. Who would want a girl to be supine? Not I, Miss Balcombe, not I!'

We looked at each other and a new form of alliance-making passed between us.

‘Betsy, like your mother, you are uncommonly handsome and agile. Jane too, but that florid breadth your father has – amiable features, Jane and your father. You and your mother are beautiful. You would not consider giving an old Irishman a kiss?'