Napoleon's Last Island (45 page)

We had the use of a carriage, which had earlier brought us from the East India Dock, and on the afternoon mentioned in the invitation we set off for Holland House in Kensington – more used to London now and its clamour, less frightened – bowling along in sunlight through pleasanter reaches of London and through well-ordered parklands.

In the coach, we were told by my mother, and my brothers were specially warned, that Lady Holland had been ‘a wonderful
friend' to the man we had known on the island and sent him books and delicacies and had tried to persuade those in power to set him free. So, my mother explained, we must not laugh if Lady Holland seemed … odd. ‘Any more,' she said pointedly, ‘than we would have laughed at Alex for being frightened of the city.' We are very fortunate, my mother told us, et cetera, et cetera. The point was made, and it would prove a necessary one: Lady Holland was married to a great man. The pathetic thing was that we did not know which direction deliverance might come from and must expose ourselves to every chance.

Hers was a prodigious house set in a garden of oaks. As the carriage advanced towards it I tried to count the windows, ending at forty-nine before we had reached the portico, less than halfway through the count. There seemed to be towers beyond, as if the house stretched on and on. When we arrived footmen ran out to arrange our descent and our advance into the great hall, and then into a drawing room the size of Plantation House on the island. We were told to sit on plushly upholstered chairs and that Lady Holland would be with us very soon.

When she came in, she did so forcibly. The door swung open and she strode forward on long legs, wearing a mantua over brown hair, a woman of about my mother's age.

‘Oh, my heaven,' she said to my mother, ‘You have five. Any died at birth?'

My mother, astonished, but doing her best, said no.

‘But you're closing the account now, aren't you, good madam, while you still have something of yourself left? As am I. Wise woman!
Wise
woman!'

She was accompanied by a spaniel. When she told us all to sit again and she sat, it placed itself before her long legs and stared worshipfully at her face. From all I ever knew of her, extraordinary woman that she was, she was not averse to worship. Her tallness and her exceptional bluntness brought back the island, and dear Madame Bertrand, who was still on it, and who didn't mind speaking of womanly issues in front of children.

‘I heard that one of you is called Betsy,' she said, ‘my name, as it happens. Which one of you is called Betsy? Hand up.'

I had met my match. I said, ‘It is me, m'lady.'

‘Well,' said Lady Holland heatedly, ‘I am very pleased to share that name with such a pretty girl. Hair colour more or less like mine, no? Ah yes, a young woman with a future. Not that you, dear,' she said, addressing Jane, ‘need worry for your future either.'

She was more content with consigning us to unassisted destinies than we would have liked her to be. Tom began to smirk and my mother glared him down and terrified him back into the upholstery.

More formal introductions now succeeded the raid of frankness with which Lady Holland instituted proceedings.

‘I'm sorry Fox isn't here,' she told us. ‘He's engaged in some Whig business to do with Catholic emancipation. Not to be despised, that issue. If we are to free the slaves, we must also free the Irish. In any case, I must thank you for having been kind to my dear friend, or more accurately my admired acquaintance, the Emperor Napoleon. Fox and I were travelling in Spain and came up to Paris just after the peace of 1802, and we met him and I knew he was a new kind of man, a man Europe had not seen before. I felt I was meeting a man of the future, a man who foresaw a new Europe and a new humanity, and …' she dropped her voice an octave or two, ‘whatever his flaws, as we all have them – that he envisaged something that stood above our narrow grasp. Did you feel that way too? Meeting him? On that island, however clipped his wings?'

My mother and father both said they had certainly felt that. My mother also said, ‘He appreciated what you sent him, especially the books.'

‘Well,' she said, slamming her hands down on either arm of her chair, ‘to neglect providing books to such an intellect … I hazard Sir Hudson – and Lords Bathurst and Liverpool, for that matter – can get by splendidly without books simply by following their narrow natures. But the great souls can't! Books are their breath.'

‘Indeed,' my father agreed.

‘Oh,' said Lady Holland, ‘you have been good friends yourselves. Tell me, tell me, have you suffered?'

As we all sat there, we were aware of my father's suffering, of our own bewilderment, and perhaps it was a time when our fortune spun on the rim of a word and would fall one way or the other. And then my father, as if he came from a place like this, Holland House, as if he exercised a similar influence, moved by pure pride and the scope of the architecture, said, ‘No. There is nothing directed my way that I cannot manage.'

Again, Lady Holland slammed the arms of her chair, ‘I am so relieved. Please, do you have any needs?'

I saw my mother's middle fingers caress the inside of her nose bridge by the eye as if to say, ‘For dear Christ's sake, tell her.
Tell her!'

My father said, ‘You should not worry yourself about this. I am a lesser figure, yet I have patrons, including of course yourself, and I have no doubt that my family and I shall flourish now we have returned home.'

‘But no immediate wants?' asked Lady Holland, looking sideways and searchingly.

We all awaited the answer, the chance of escape from Sir Thomas's supervision and, even if by Lady Holland's appeal to the liberal spirits of Britain, from the bullying of the Cabinet.

I understand that he could not plead with her to get the intimidators off his neck. I understand it all now. But we were doomed to the monitorship of Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt from that proud point, when he pretended he was above help. The opportunity that some brilliant writer from her salon should plant a piece about our misuse in the
Quarterly Review
and win us back the stature Sir Hudson had taken from us was one my father refused to entertain. He would have rather died. And before many years, when we were sent into the far imperial province of Judea (a Messiah-less New South Wales), that's what he would do.

Curiosity alone, as well as chance sightings of us at church, caused a number of young men to be sociable with Jane and me. Several were clerks in the businesses of Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt. Edward Abell was not like them. He was a former soldier of the East India Company and had seen battle against those plunderers of India, the Pindaris. His stories were only in part about the great encirclement of these desperate tribes-men. Most of his conversation was about his fellow officers and their gambling contests, which tickled him so much that I in turn was tickled. For some reason he had a letter of introduction to Sir Thomas, and I first met him in the London house we occupied a while near New Oxford Street. I should, then, have mistrusted his good manners and ease with compliments. I did know by instinct that he issued so many protestations that, like a mint producing too much currency, he was in danger of devaluing that coinage of which he was so verbally profligate – our coming eternal union. But I had been trained, by encountering great artists of the lavish, and one great artist in particular, to be both enchanted and rendered mistrustful of it; as so often happens in courtships, flamboyant compliments can outshout the calmer warnings about coming events. And as a suitor Abell, ten years older than me, was boyish enough
to laugh when I played the reliable old tricks on him, the trippings-up, the skilful hiding-away of oneself in the landscape, the taunts in blind man's buff. He was a tall man of an apparently yielding temperament, was natty and had a salary around about the same as the allowance from my father's remaining wealth permitted to our family. For a young man that was not so bad an income.

Abell moved to our region in Devon, as if to consider working for Sir Thomas's enterprises there, and became a regular visitor to our damp country cottage in Exminster. He inspected Prince's Town, Tyrwhitt's prisoner-of-war camp on Dartmoor, which included the township that had grown around it while the war against the Ogre lasted. Sir Thomas had seen it as a place to hold French and American prisoners in a high-up gaol far from ships. Nine thousand prisoners had once been held there, and a village and farms had grown up around the prison, to sell things to guards and the captives alike. To ensure Prince's Town would continue in existence, Tyrwhitt had gathered gentlemen into another scheme − to build a Plymouth-to-Dartmoor horse-drawn railway; the act to empower it was already passed, and cuttings were being dug.

Abell had talked intermittently to my parents and me about returning to India, and my parents had said that, should we marry, in these depressed times they could find no grounds to oppose it, bitter as the separation might be. Abell's eyes were alive at the chance of reviving his earlier adventures, but on the civil level. I believed I could manage him. As well as a cure for longing and possible shame, my marriage would leave my father with one less mouth to feed out of whatever seepage of funds came his way. I was in love and suddenly aware of how easy it is to succumb. When I was already
enceinte
with our child, who proved to be a daughter, I married Abell by licence at the altar of St Martin's, Exminster, that year after the death of OGF.

Though early in our marriage he still praised my spirited, un-conforming nature, he all too quickly came to see me as merely blunt and stubborn. After an argument about his staying
late somewhere and losing money at cards, he declared that I was the crassest woman he had ever met. When husband and wife insult each other it's always with superlatives.

‘That's the exact case why we should take a subsidised immigration to some colony,' he said. ‘Your rawness will not stand out as much in the New World.'

I can remember asking myself on one occasion why I had married such a sawny child. And soon after it was known I was pregnant, I cried out impolitically, in his presence, ‘What, two children to raise?'

‘I was man enough to produce a child,' he asserted and pleaded. And indeed he was. He was not a man lacking in vital forces. There had been delight in our connection and I should not pretend anything else.

Almost as soon as we married he became restless about the incipient child, and anxious in a new way. Even as he mimed delight, I could tell that he saw in the immanence of this baby the beginning of a number of them, little apostles of domestic sordidness who would drag him down and weigh on his chances and his ability to wager. I saw his eyes scudding around the walls, calculating how much infantile squalor they could contain without bursting their limits and poisoning the well springs of all his hope.

‘If you are not delighted,' I told him, ‘I expect you to have the courage to tell me. You know there are methods – including abstinence – by which people do not have children, but you have not shown any appetite to avail yourself of them …'

I did not fully understand, however, how seriously frightened he was, how certain he was of his grand error, how determined he was to amend it. And I had not realised that the island and OGF abided in me or that I troubled him with their memory. Except when he might say, ‘Will I always be a stranger to you because I was not on that damned island?'

Given that the shivered rock of my parents' marriage had stood up to gales and shocks and deceptions, remaining as the one creature beginning to end, I did not expect so much fast
change and volatility in my connection with Mr Abell. But after the birth of Bessie, he was more resistant to my past than ever.

‘The island is nothing!' he ranted once.

‘Your so-called OGF is a criminal, the greatest who drew breath, and now he is dust, and deserves to be. You will not let go of the dust, you fool of a woman.'

I asked him not to awake our daughter. ‘The future is with the Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway, with Thomas Tyrwhitt. The Monster is with the Pharaohs! Let them all go!'

But he would be the one who disappeared a few weeks later. He abandoned not only me but Sir Thomas's Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway, the great penitentiary buildings of Prince's Town, and any delusion he had harboured about how Sir Thomas Tywhitt favoured us.

He also took all my jewellery.

Two years after OGF's death, and some time after the birth of Bessie and Edward's disappearance, when I, defeated by matrimony, had moved back into my parents' house with my baby, one day knocking of a polite rhythm was succeeded by a more insistent kind from the same fist. The volume and frequency grew, like a prelude to ramming our door open, and we knew it wouldn't take much with the rattly old portal of our country cottage.

My father deliberately settled himself by the fire and picked up a copy of the London
Chronicle
– he knew it was a paper that transmitted a signal, a paper that had been hostile to Name and Nature and kindly disposed to OGF. My father no doubt wished he had a
Quarterly Review
at hand, the journal Sir Hudson really abominated.

Under the barrage of knocking, my mother pointed us to chairs where there were books for us to take up. ‘I shall open it,' she determined.

When she did that service to the front door, she performed it suddenly and surprised the servant mid-pummel. ‘Is there a fire nearby?' she asked him. ‘Are you here to warn us?'

He stepped back without a word to allow Sir Hudson to occupy our door frame. She was as silent and un-amazed as she could manage, indeed as if she did not recognise Name and Nature as one of the chief determinants of our earthly welfare, though
it was our first sight of him for five years. ‘Madam,' he said, with that well-oiled air of reproof of his, as if he were ecstatic to find her placed behind the door his servant had just been pounding.

‘General Lowe,' she said. She had decided some years back that if OGF could be called ‘General Bonaparte', the less notable Sir Hudson could be ‘General Lowe', without frills such as ‘Your Excellency'.

‘It is the charming Mrs Balcombe, no? My acquaintance Mrs Balcombe, formerly of St Helena?'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘you know very well it is. Was I not your informer?'

He coughed. ‘Ah,' he said, ‘you did fulfil that function.'

‘Then I am ashamed. But I am abashed, too, to say the general's visit has given me no time to attend to the toilette.'

She wasn't abashed at all, of course. It was mockery, we could tell, and we were thrilled by it. Cold invaded the house through the spaces not occupied by Sir Hudson's great coat and small head.

‘William is in?' he asked. The only good thing about him, it had to be admitted, was that his voice was melodious.

‘Mr Balcombe,' she said. ‘Mr Balcombe is in.'

‘The boys?'

‘Not here. They go to a grammar school in the town.'

She swung the door open with an energy itself ironic, which nearly satirised her frail self with the force she applied. ‘Please come in.' We stood up slowly to see him in. After all, he had for a time governed the only solid earth I'd known for more than half my life and with any adequacy, from infancy until I was sixteen. But he had blighted us too. We partially asked him in to enclose him with our angry circle.

Father had stood up, but more like a man defending his hearth rather than exacting vengeance. He held out the
Chronicle
for his shield, and advanced a few steps. Lowe covered the distance as if grateful to meet him.

‘Bill,' Sir Hudson said with concern, as if our circumstances had been on his mind, our place, the rent we paid for it, our sparse income. ‘May I say you deserve better than this.'

‘Oh, Sir Hudson, “deserve” is not found in the dictionary of landlords and even of patrons such as Sir Thomas.'

‘It's a long way from the charming Briars, I regret to say,' rumbled Sir Hudson.

He took off his splashed greatcoat and looked around, but we had no one to take it.

‘You may hang it on the hook,' said my mother. And after a second he did it without any air of reproach. He was wearing underneath a subtle saffron suit – in fact, not far off in colour from ones I later saw worn by the privately employed convicts called ‘canaries' in Sydney. He had a silk hat and brown boots the overcoat had saved from stains, and whose soles he had had the grace to scrape on the boot-scraper in the garden. He took off his gloves but no one accepted them from him, so he put them on a side table.

‘You were able to attend the Emperor's funeral?' my mother asked with sudden false interest and falser respect.

He didn't have the power to stop her using that term anymore. He had lost that, just as we had lost our hold on The Briars.

‘Yes,' said Sir Hudson, still standing. ‘He lies in one of the sweetest places on the island. Geranium Valley.'

‘A pity,' said my father suddenly, ‘that his house wasn't so amiably located from the start.'

Sir Hudson looked ahead with his unsteady, red-lashed eyes – they could give the impression sometimes of circling their orbits. He knew by now he would not have an easy time under this roof. That would not have surprised him.

‘We all, in our different ways, served the purposes of policy,' Sir Hudson said, if not pleaded. ‘I followed policy as crafted in Westminster. Others may have followed less solid dictates.'

‘Yes,' said my mother, ‘you frequently made that point.'

Sir Hudson got the idea. At least he got
an
idea. He had to set out to appease us. He turned his eyes to me where I sat across the room and said, ‘Yes, Geranium Valley, Betsy. You know the island better than me, I'm sure. Remember how frightened of carriages you always were, Miss Betsy?'

‘It was carriages traversing heights I feared,' I told him. ‘For I rode horses up any crag you'd name.'

‘Yes, I seem to remember that,' he said as if he were interested. ‘You won that Deadwood ladies' race.'

‘I did, indeed. You chastised me for using the wrong horse – the Emperor's.'

My father said, ‘The island days are too dim for us, Sir Hudson. But it would not be right for me to deny you a welcome. Or my hand.'

Sir Hudson rushed gratefully towards him. ‘Dear Bill,' he cried, taking my father's offered hand.

Bill?
Yet again. Had he ever called him Bill on the island? I could remember only ‘Mr Balcombe' or plain ‘Balcombe'. You could tell by the way he said it that he had come to do business.

Once Sir Hudson's hand was in my father's, my father held him firm and murmured, ‘My funds, Sir Hudson. Can you tell me anything about the freezing of my funds? A release from administration.'

‘I know nothing to do with that – if indeed anyone did. You were charmingly prodigal, Bill, on the island. And as for the other … well,
the
man is dead, Bill. Isn't it so? That's where we should start.'

‘Please sit here,' said my father neutrally and pointed to an empty easy chair on the other side of the fire. ‘Betsy, would you fill a pipe for Sir Hudson?'

‘No, no,' said Sir Hudson, sitting. ‘I'll take my snuff.'

And, seated, he produced his snuffbox. The Emperor had given his own snuffboxes away as presents so regularly on the island – we Balcombes had three of OGF's – but this was not one of the Emperor's.

My father lit his pipe and Sir Hudson – the sort of inhaler who spreads the snuff on the back of his hand, sniffed the powdered stimulant in either nostril and put the box away – indulged his preference. I read my father's air of calm tolerance as arising from his suspicion that for our welfare he might have to do business with this fellow, despite all. I hoped though in a primal
way that he might soon give us a signal to speak our encompassing contempt, as we dearly wanted to. But we were ready and hungry too for the phenomenon of promise, definite or not.

‘I wondered, Balcombe, if I could prevail on your charming ladies to allow us to speak privately?' asked Sir Hudson.

We all got up. My mother and Jane bobbed in the two men's direction, having picked up the signal from my father to be mannerly for now, and I did too – a mere five-degree crimp of the knee. We made for the kitchen and, from there, flattened against a door, heard the substance of an engrossing discourse between the island's former martinet and my father.

‘You must know, Bill, that our companion on the island, that Irishman … well, you know the Irish were all besotted with General Bonaparte and wanted him to deliver them from the Crown … in any case, O'Meara has written a two-volume work which accuses me of cruelty to his patient.'

‘The Emperor?' my father asked, my mother and sister and I joining our hands in silent applause. ‘I know that when it comes to Barry O'Meara you had him suspended from the College of Surgeons.'

‘Bill, Bill,' cooed Sir Hudson, ‘it was the Admiralty, and O'Meara was always telling me that he was the servant of the Admiralty. I am flattered you suspect me of having so much authority that the College of Surgeons would listen to me.'

He spoke in a way he had never done on the island, where his tone was always more tyrannical.

‘As for the General …'

‘The Emperor, as some of us called him,' said my father.

Sir Hudson coughed. ‘If you wish, Bill. The point is the man is gone, and we are in private.'

‘I didn't hear you ever say it,' our father remarked. ‘You never said, “Emperor”. And yet there were times during the wars when our government referred to him by that title.'

‘Dear Balcombe, that was necessity. The necessity vanished once we caught him. But imagine the pressure I was under. You don't know the reports Lord Bathurst and I received about
intended American and French rescues of the General. If you had known that, you would understand, as the Irish surgeon fails to do for two volumes, that the General needed very close watching indeed. What was protection against enemy rescue to me might well have seemed mistreatment to you. But it was always mere prudence that motivated me, I assure you.'

There was a silence. Then my father said, ‘And what you said to me before we left the island, that was mere prudence, sir?'

‘I regret we are not always wise in choosing how things are to be said.'

‘I believe we can discern the difference of a wise man momentarily giving way to intemperate emotion,' said my father, ‘and a fool revelling in malice.'

My mother was pale, pale behind the door, but I was more taken by the pure enjoyment of hearing our father give it to him square and simple. The idea of getting favours out of Sir Hudson had been harboured by me for a while but had vanished now in delight at hearing his discomfiture at the hands of Billy Balcombe, said once to be the most jovial man on his lost island.

‘Easy, sir,' said Sir Hudson in his old commanding way. But then something made him grow appeasing again. ‘As you know, Bill, I fought the Ogre – the man I was then ordered to confine. I have seen firsthand the disruptions he brought to the civilised life of Europe. And my rewards for that are the Irishman's accusations. I had no hand at all in O'Meara's being struck from the College of Surgeons; others, mightier than myself, might have.'

Silence.

Then my father spoke. ‘I will not impugn your word by suggesting you might have mentioned it in your dispatches to Lord Bathurst or others as a suitable punishment for O'Meara. You've said you had no hand, and I accept that.'

But it was obvious that he didn't accept it. ‘Look here,' Sir Hudson said, ‘I've been treated worse by Surgeon O'Meara than I ever treated him. As for your fleeing the island, you and your family did so voluntarily …'

‘To forestall arrest, or expulsion, and slanders against my wife and shaming by you,' said my father in a trembling voice.

Laudate patrem!
It was curative to hear him at the height of his fury. His soul had wavered over the past years and become blurred, but now that he had his enemy in place he was arrow-straight and transfixing. And since Sir Hudson did not rant or threaten or leave, it must mean he needed the Balcombes in some way. He needed my father.

‘Bill, I knew you were sending unauthorised letters for the General. And negotiating bills for him.'

‘I have never seen the evidence against me,' said my father. ‘Though you were eloquent about it on our last day, as on other matters.'

‘Mind it, Bill!' said Sir Hudson, but even then in a moderate way without any of that fierce, manic authority he had exercised on the island.

‘Get to what you want,' my father urged. ‘It's sickening to see you pretend to be a decent man. Admit to who you are, for God's sake!'

Again, silence. And then …

‘The thing is that Surgeon O'Meara has smeared my reputation. But I do not matter so much. I was the minister's appointment, however, and so he – Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State – is almost equally embarrassed by the Irishman's book, and that
is
significant and should be addressed.'

My father was silent. No doubt he was contemplating the embarrassment of Lord Bathurst without too profound a sympathy. My father, of course, was Whiggish, with a touch of the radical about him, whereas Lord Bathurst was Tory. Henry Bathurst was frequently publicly exercised by slavery matters, and in my father's eyes that made his appointment of Sir Hudson to control our island, and his connivance in freezing my father's assets, all the more hypocritical. Such opinions were not easily roused in my father. To earn his enmity, men had to work hard at showing their ill will. Sir Hudson had worked hard enough.

We were still united, the listeners in the kitchen as well as my father, in the expectation that there was something more to be said by Sir Hudson, that he was only halfway through some sort of proposition. And since propositions were rare in our lives,
especially ones that demanded apology or abasement of Name and Nature Lowe, we were appropriately breathless. Not like girls in some hollow novel – we had none of that filament-like delicacy. We had known shock and debasement too, and we drank down the scalding cup of familial humiliation.