Napoleon's Last Island (40 page)

As we milled beyond the finish line, girls and women came to congratulate me with flushed and open faces. Some, who belonged to the other party on the island and had laid their bets on Plantation House, might be brisk in their greetings but were fair enough to make them. Susannah Johnson went as far as to half-smile and say sportingly, ‘I tried to drive you off the course, Miss Balcombe, but you wouldn't be driven. Fair play to you!'

Charlotte declared, ‘I admire your horsemanship, Miss Balcombe.' She leaned over and said in a half-whisper, ‘I would love to see what would happen if you rode astride. You'd beat half these officers.' But then she leaned back. ‘I find it hard to applaud your discretion though. However, that's your business.'

I was cheered back to the saddling yard. Was Captain Fehrzen here? I had not seen him. Somehow I hoped he was on duty somewhere. In front of the refreshment pavilion men were clapping my father's shoulders. Sir Hudson was very upright on his dais, gazing without apparent interest in what had happened, and without discernible pique, even if on that ambiguous red face pique was hard to differentiate from his normal expression. It would of course have been unworthy and un-English of him to believe that his stepdaughters must triumph by reason of mere vice-regal relationship. But one could not be certain.

My mother and Jane were there to greet me, and their faces were flushed with plainest family pride. ‘You fought it out like two roughnecks, you and Susannah Johnson,' said Jane, approvingly.

I leaned over and whispered to them, as Charlotte had whispered to me, ‘I have OGF's horse. See the bee on the saddlecloth? The saddle is Lady Bertrand's. The Emperor was watching it all – I rode for him. That's the reason Susannah Johnson could not be permitted to succeed.'

My mother and sister were awed as they took in the imperial saddlecloth and the bulk of this thoroughbred. I said, ‘Lady Lowe noticed it before the race and thought it was improper.'

My mother swallowed, aware now of the potential machinery for ill will which I had set going. She said, ‘Lady Susan doesn't hold spleen long. She is not like her husband.' And again a lowered voice: ‘But her tipsiness …' Its weight in any animosity could not be predicted.

Jane argued that I should not concern myself but let the groom take the horse home. ‘We can watch the rest of the races, and as long as O'Meara doesn't get bosky with liquor himself, he will be able to lead Father home. You will have Gargoyle back, for Lieutenant Howard, who did dismally in the officers' plate on the poor old thing, is very disillusioned in him.'

I saw that at the mouth of a marquee O'Meara stood and raised a bumper of port and solemnly, though with his feline Celtic smile, toasted my win. Officers innocent of the meaning of this victory approached, bowed, offered their congratulations
and went off to ride in the last races of Captain Rous's great festival of the horse.

As the afternoon went on, the news that I had ridden the Emperor's horse got round. Some gentlemen laughed at the idea, the sauce of it, the style. Others shrugged and cast their arms wide, as if asking why Balcombe had allowed his daughter to do it. I could feel blood in my face as I ate a last ice for the day and savoured my pride, my gift to OGF, while wondering whether I was an outcast.

Finally, in ambiguous air, all we Balcombes went home, accompanied by O'Meara and the groom. In my hand I clasped the small silver cup that Captain Rous had presented, with my little brother looking on in astonishment. Then O'Meara and Mameluke and the groom went off into the night, O'Meara singing the disreputable words of ‘Lilliburlero'.

‘
My thing is my own and I keep it so still,

All the young lasses may do as they will
…'

I wanted to cry out to him to ride back with news of the Emperor's joy and approval, even though O'Meara might only have the capacity left in him to find his own bed.

The next morning my father, a little tremulous from the riot of the previous day, arrived at Plantation House to go through the orders for Longwood from the Count de Montholon. Sir Thomas Reade was in Name and Nature's library and in his presence Lowe declared, ‘I saw your daughter's remarkable ride yesterday. She contested it strenuously, wouldn't you say? The racetrack isn't for ninnies, so it is not that she was victorious that I complain of.' And here, without a doubt, his lips took on that pursed solemnity and his red-splotched forehead a slight frown. ‘But I must ask you how your family thought it correct to use a horse from the General's stable without my permission? The Crown stands mocked, Balcombe. Isn't it subversion that, either consciously or unconsciously, you permitted this mockery of authority and violation of discipline to occur?'

My father pleaded the fact that he had not known prior to the event what horse I was using and that I reacted as any child of spirit might when offered the loan of an unspecified horse. It was a succession of accidents and not a stratagem.

Sir Hudson held up his hand. It was symptomatic, he asserted, of the undue closeness between the Balcombes and Longwood. ‘I am forced to look again at your serving the French as provedore at Longwood.'

My father would have paled at this. He did not mention O'Meara's part in providing Mameluke because O'Meara claimed to have his own problems with Name and Nature, yet my father was secretly angry with the surgeon for putting me in that situation.

He was clearly shaken when he arrived home and inveighed against O'Meara and even OGF for using me as a dupe. My mother soothed him, declaring O'Meara thoughtless but not vile.

After he had recounted the interview with Name and Nature, my mother declared that Sir Hudson
did
resent my win and the small silver cup that now sat in the drawing room of The Briars. My father composed himself with port and settled into his chair and was soon restored to his sense of security, with my mother and Jane and I defending O'Meara, though I felt more dubious about him than my mother and sister seemed to. ‘I think,' my father sighed, ‘that you are right, my dear woman. Everyone on the island
is
playing their own game and even two games at once.'

I went to bed uneasy. Sir Hudson, who was said to be a frantic letter writer, might, at this hour of the night, be complaining by dispatch to the home secretary of state of my father's connivance in the Ogre's trick, a trick that I had been more than willing to perform. I did an impeccable translation the next morning as an offering of propitiation to the merciless cogs of the world and left it in my father's study as a tribute. Then I went to the stable, saddled Tom without calling on any groom and rode out to Plantation House.

When they took my horse at the side door, I told a sentry that I must have an appointment with Sir Hudson. He saluted me, winked and said, ‘Well ridden, miss.'

Major Gorrequer arrived, that small, precise man, and led me down the hallway through the vacant ballroom. I could hear Name and Nature's voice from a room at the far end, directing his dire grammar to his clerk, Mr Janisch.

Gorrequer indicated where I was to stay and went into the room, and I heard the magisterial dictation cease. The major reappeared and ushered me in. The room smelled of ink and of official paper, and the slight sweet, vegetable smell of cooling sealing wax. Sir Hudson was dressed soberly today, in a grey morning suit – no military excursions planned. Janisch retired to the corner and adopted a hear-nothing, see-nothing posture and expression.

Sir Hudson did not invite me to sit but ordered me to, on a plain chair in the corner.

‘Is Sir Thomas in his office?' he asked Gorrequer, and Gorrequer said yes.

‘Have him come,' said Sir Hudson, not taking his watery, pinpoint eyes off me. I realise now they were the eyes of a frightened and in some ways overwhelmed man. That morning, however, I considered him engaged in the pure sport of power, and for my father's sake I had to be submissive. He gazed at me, that strange unevenness of colour on his face. I crossed my hands like a supplicant.

‘Your Excellency,' I ventured, having never used the term previously. ‘I have come to make an explanation of my behaviour yesterday.'

I knew that I was being greeted with unwarranted seriousness. Major Gorrequer was back in the room, obviously to stay, and Name and Nature attempted to impale me to the chair with his red-lidded eyes and, still waiting for Sir Thomas, went through his papers on the desk until he had found a passage to read which by its pure gravity caused him to lean forward to reassess it. He raised the document and pointed it in Gorrequer's direction, indicating a particular with his index finger.

The imputation – or so I thought – was that the passage was both far above my understanding yet at the same time reflected damnation on me or my father. After a time, accumulated like
a weight inside my chest, we heard Sir Thomas's boots in the ballroom, and he entered.

‘Miss Balcombe wanted to regale us with her understanding of what happened yesterday,' said Sir Hudson immediately.

Sir Thomas nodded twice and then bowed to me and sat in an easy chair. Major Gorrequer remained stranded with the highly significant paper still in hand. All three men leaned forward a little as if the room was so capacious they might not hear unless they paid proximate attention.

So I began, fearing that I appeared at the one time pompous, deceitful and childish. My father had not known, I argued; the Emperor's groom had offered me the horse after my family had already left for Deadwood.

‘Ah,' said Sir Hudson, raising a finger. ‘But who … I ask you who … gave the groom the authority to do so? Do grooms normally have control of the General's stable?'

‘I am uncertain who told him, sir,' I said. For how could I betray O'Meara without betraying my father?

‘Did you not consider it a sufficient matter that I should be approached?' His voice rose. ‘Shouldn't I or Sir Thomas, in whom my trust is absolute, have been acquainted with this transaction?'

I said that I did not know it was a matter of such significance. But, I said, I had ridden rather clumsily and in an island manner during the ladies' race, and if I had in any way hurt Miss Susannah Johnson, I was very sorry for my enthusiasm.

‘No, it is not the race,' he told me, waving that consideration away. ‘I've told you – it was not the race itself or its result that affronts us here at Plantation House. No! It was the slyness – the slyness of that man at Longwood, whose tool you allowed yourself to become. And even at your age, could you not have seen that you were being used as an implement of insult? My family do not care who won a silly race. My daughters were more amused than perhaps they should have been by the entire incident. If you do not understand that it was a matter of much more significance than that, then it confirms what I have heard of you – that you are a vacuous, frivolous girl.'

I said, ‘I believe it was Madame Bertrand's saddle the groom kindly loaned me. But she would not have known.'

‘What that woman knows … what she knows … is volumes.
Volumes
!'

Sir Thomas asked me, ‘Did you not think that that great criminal at Longwood would take some joy to see his horse engaged in a race in the middle of a British military camp?'

I said, ‘No, sir.'

‘Well, I hope you see it now, young woman,' he said. ‘Because you have done your family great harm, and everyone must think twice now before they rashly receive gifts. I am interested in what you can do to make amends.'

Sir Hudson intervened. ‘No, no, major. Her intelligence is not advanced enough for her to be a reliable agent.' He waved his hand even more broadly. ‘Do you really think we could trust her to tell the truth in any case?'

I saw with some relief that I had narrowly escaped being appointed a spy and that my father's career on the island might have depended upon my being willing to be one. But Sir Hudson was right. I would have lied. Just to tease his taut imagination, I would have reported American sloops off Sandy Cove, or repeated some similar rumour that would burrow into his brain like a worm.

‘You would be a beautiful liar, would you not, Miss Balcombe?' Sir Hudson asked me. ‘A beautiful liar. A sweet face and a venomous soul. Yes, I principally see the General and his servants behind this, and you as a mere used thing. Do you like to be a used thing?'

I said indeed I didn't.

‘Then be
warned
, just as I have already warned your father.'

To be warned by Sir Hudson was a frightening experience. Colour shifted across his face as if there were, behind his features, some bloody flicker of the power of the state. And after more predictable chiding, he ordered Sir Thomas to take me out. The pink-cheeked Sir Thomas led me back through the ballroom and downstairs to the side door. I saw through the window an ancient tortoise grazing the lawn.

‘The governor is very lenient on you Balcombes,' he told me cheerily. ‘If he listened to my counsels, the General would not dare try any of these pretty little ruses. Nor would those who were party to them escape imprisonment. You should therefore be grateful.'