Napoleon's Last Island (48 page)

It was clear in hindsight that my father did not bring to the management of the colony's finances the calm enthusiasm he might once have done, before the turmoils brought on by OGF
and Name and Nature. Sir Thomas Brisbane gave him latitude, however, and was often himself accused of being more interested in stargazing than administration – this was a jibe of the Exclusive party, in any case, who had friends in the House of Commons. The starry Scotsman was complained of and ultimately replaced. A new, strenuous soldier named General Darling, a scientific Tory, not without resemblances to Name and Nature, arrived, and immediately enquired into all government departments, and chastised my father in terms that became the subject of rumours.

The Treasury of New South Wales was a most eccentric institution. From merchants and leaseholders in remoter regions arrived the requisite payments. Some of the currency my father received on the government's behalf, land rents and customs duties included, was sterling, but some was refashioned Spanish dollars, stamped by the colonial mint to make legal tender. For more than a year the safe that contained the incomings of the revenue of the colony was located in my parents' bedroom, an oddity that made the entire Balcombe ménage look stranger than it should have. In fact, I believe, the long years of demi-disgrace and the injustice of the government blocking my father's access to his own assets meant that though he had great competence, he could not take the matter of colonial revenue seriously. So he had been using the Colonial Treasury, for example, to discount merchants' bills, charging a modest share of the commission for doing so for himself, according to practice, and remitting the residue of the bill, when it was at last paid, into colonial revenue.

It was the board of the Bank of New South Wales who complained about him, because they thought that discounting bills should be their business, and that he should not compete in these matters. These were ironically the people who were most akin to him, the emancipists, convicts, children thereof, supporters, founders of a bank that came to dominate colonial business.

Darling himself was the last gasp of fierce Tory-dom, before the long Tory reign of England ended, a reign that had helped mark our destinies on the island and had, before ceasing, sent Darling to New South Wales.

Curiously it was Croke who was most faithful to my father, and on whom he relied most – a man transported and apparently redeemed by the experience, after being sentenced for issuing false invoices from an architecture office in Dublin, with the design of having clients pay more than his employer knew they were, he inevitably pocketing the modest difference. I liked Croke. He never made a palaver of his loyalty, he just applied himself. He took the sacraments of his church, which in his case seemed a further certificate of his honesty, and he intended to marry a Sydney school-teacher when his conditional pardon was issued. I'm sure they live now in Antipodean serenity with their Australian children.

As judges and newspaper editors fought with Darling about his imperious manners – he seemed to be a colonial Charles I – my father grew more dropsical, his limbs puffing up with fluid, his ankles bloating. Yes, drinking was a problem, yet more because it no longer pumped the machine of his nature but abraded and clogged it.

Between the town and the Brickfields, where the cemetery and the brick ovens were located, was the town of the natives, where the people who had lived in their own state of nature before the penal settlement began occupied small huts and shanties or slept in the open by fires. All the town worthies were agreed that liquor was a chief peril for these people, but someone must have collaborated with them for profit, for they seemed to acquire it with ease. They were stately men and women, these former possessors of New South Wales, and their stateliness was not entirely taken away by the habit of some of their men who wore a top hat and a jacket and nothing below it. Some of the women wore convict skirts and were bare-breasted, and yet were often healthy-looking, except for those who were the portion claimed by raw brandy, and the poor souls we generally did not see much of, who were poxed, and in whom, as innocent creatures, the pox flared more heinously than it did in any Briton. They and, of course, the convicts were the lesser class of humans in our polity, the people of whom we in our arrogance expected less, though the convicts seemed to think that their station was at least superior to that of the indigenes.

My father took eccentrically to showing a powerful interest in the two despised groups, convicts and Aboriginals. He would stop convict men, the more prognathous the better, or women, the more toothless and dudeen-sucking, and want to know where they were from, and was earnestly interested in what had earned them this place at the Earth's end.

It became clear that my father considered himself just one more transportee, one of Britain's rejected, and was trying to find some certainty of definition for that rejection by quizzing his fellows. At home he was distracted, if not plaintively pretending to fulfil the role of
paterfamilias.
One night, when he had drunk considerably, he declared that he was entitled to accommodate his friends at the Bank of New South Wales and to negotiate bills, for had not
they
(the British government) taken everything from him – a job, the flow of assets, a daughter.

‘I am merely taking what the Tories owe me,' he proclaimed.

My mother argued, ‘Dear, this might prove to be a dangerous attitude to take.'

On a summer's morning more than five years after we had arrived in Sydney, when I was away giving young colonials their music lessons, as I had been doing for the past three years, my father saw an Aboriginal with an engraved metal plate on his scarred chest proclaiming his kingship of the Broken Bay natives. This was a well-known man, very sage, very earnest, named Bungaree. While it sometimes seemed that my father sought out the more incoherent men and women to interview, Bungaree was said to possess great intelligence and coherence.

Billy Balcombe discoursed to polite Bungaree for an hour until the native was looking around, wanting to get on, an uncommon impulse in many of his kind, whose sense of time did not coincide with ours, though they could spot incipient madness as well as anyone. Very pleased after his conversation with Bungaree, my father went in to the clerks and to Croke, but when they asked him what Bungaree had said, he could not quite manage to tell
them. And then, as if struck by intense recall and about to quote Bungaree's exact account, he stood with a look of growing enlightenment on his face and fell to the floor. Over the coming days he suffered bewilderment, was tormented by gout and gastric fever both, and died, exhausted by life and bloody flux.

He was the Emperor's final, fallen soldier and left in my map of the earth a similar vacancy to that left by OGF. But a vacancy whose edges lacerated me with remembered fragments of his jollity, hope and ultimate souring.

We bought a plot for him on the chief Anglican Church on the western ridge above the town, and all our resources, material and spiritual, seemed drained away. My father's papers were in disorder and those of the Treasury would have been except for the clerks. Yet now we were under polite but definite notice to leave our habitation.

Tormented by her lost love and her anxiety that she had never been kindly enough to him, my mother needed to auction land-holdings my father had acquired. We had hoped at a minimum that once we settled all debts, Governor Darling would give us a further grant, a widow's mite in the Antipodes. But he was determined we should not have it. My mother said that we must argue our case in London.

And we did. My mother, Bessie and I sailed back, but the boys chose to stay for the time being, addicted to the place, as I had been earlier to the island. I understood it. William had his eye on pastoral land to the south-west. The younger boys couldn't wait to join him.

My little daughter remained robust on the voyage back to England. We spoke to Lord and Lady Holland, and applied to the office of the new secretary of state for the colonies. And thus our validity was recognised. Darling, or whosoever succeeded him, was ordered to consider our case compassionately, and we returned to the remote province with better hopes of a colonial living.

Could it ever match our hopes as enlarged by OGF? Could we ever be more than pensioned ghosts in the netherworld?

But Bessie, who had not been marred by earlier things, sang childhood's songs earnestly under the Australian constellations, which shone for her without ambiguity. For she could savour any location without knowledge of what could, by comparison, belittle it or leach value from it. God be praised, she was the Balcombe who knew no better.

Certainly on St Helena there were manifestations that could be most likely explained by obsessions, in the manner they have been. Mrs Balcombe and, less importantly, the strange General Gaspard Gourgaud and Dr O'Meara may have been defamed, in which case I can merely apologise to a fine woman and to the others. As for Albine, she took little trouble in concealing she was up for most adventures.

In the meantime, it is true that my present home, one the Balcombes occupied in the nineteenth century, New South Wales, a territory of exquisite weirdness and beauty, nearly went broke under William's administration. It is hard to say
because
of it, since it would be difficult to excuse the collapse in London wool prices and thus Australian land prices in the late 1820s. On William's death, his land grant of 2500 acres at a place named Bungonia, and his earlier purchase of 4000 further south in the Monaro, down towards Canberra, stocked with sheep and cattle bought in boom times by loans from the Treasury itself (William Balcombe's right hand endowing his left, without any other intervening authority), were handled by young William, his eldest son, barely twenty years old. William needed to manage assigned convict drovers and shepherds in
rough country far from the nearest magistrate. By the time of his father's death, the countryside was brown and deprived of grass, and of the two available Australian seasons, drought and flooding rains, drought held sway. As well, when the price of Australian wool fell in London, so did many of the plutocrats, free and convict-born.

William called the farm The Briars. Alex, the youngest Balcombe, spent time with him there, and they became accomplished horsemen. It is not within the purview of this novel, but William would sell this farm and then go gold-seeking in 1851 on the Turon River with his younger brother Thomas. There, William caught fever and died of it in 1852, and was buried in an unmarked grave with two others. Thomas, the middle brother, achieved some fame as an artist of animals, married and had three children, but suffered from mental disease and suicided in his Sydney house, Napoleon Cottage, in 1861.

It was Alex, the child who had fed laxatives to the Emperor, who now enjoyed a more pleasant existence, and after experience of the pastoral life with his brothers on the Molonglo, moved to the Port Phillip area, the future colony of Victoria or, as Baudin would have it,
Terre Napoléon
. He married, but left for a time his wife and young children to go and prospect for gold, before returning himself to the duller but surer regimen of a family man and a grazier. His pastoral station was on the eastern side of Port Phillip, and here he became a successful man, a magistrate and a patriarch, and built a homestead that he, too, called The Briars, now a museum.

Over time the Balcombe Napoleonic relics were augmented by items bought by a granddaughter of Alexander's, the doyenne of Melbourne society Dame Mabel Brooks. Some of those same relics were stolen from The Briars in what seemed to be a steal-to-order raid by robbers in 2014.

When Betsy, her mother, Jane, and Betsy's daughter, Bessie, sailed to England, their fares were paid by the Colonial Office, as was their return to Sydney two years later. They were in England more than a year, including the entire span of 1832. Betsy at that
time met the Emperor's brother, Joseph Bonaparte – he had just returned from a long American sojourn and he dandled young Bessie on his knee.

Betsy would ultimately have less trouble receiving land in Algeria from Napoleon III, whom she would meet when, as Prince Louis Napoleon, he was sheltering in London after a failed attempt to dislodge the Bourbons, and wanted to hear from her lips that he looked like his uncle. She briskly told him, ‘No, you don't!' Yet he would nonetheless gratefully ascribe her the Algeria land grant that she would never see.

She and her mother needed to visit the boys once more. What they achieved at the Colonial Office was the offer of government posts for the boys, and though William and Alex were not interested, Thomas, already sacked from the colonial surveyor's office, was now reinstated.

On the ship back to Australia, Betsy enchanted a young man of seventeen named Edward John Eyre who, as an explorer, would later cross the vast Nullarbor Plain and the country of the Great Australian Bight – a heinous ordeal to put himself and his Aboriginal companion through – and much later still would become a notorious governor of Jamaica. Edward John Eyre was a mere seven years older than Bessie, but wrote of Betsy as appreciatively as any male adult admirer, describing her as in her prime, pretty of feature and ‘commanding in form a good figure, stylish in her dress and having a strange mixture of polish and dash in her manner, which was very captivating'. Her hair was ‘copious and exquisite' to the young Eyre, a rich nut-brown ‘shot with gold in any unusual fashion'.

I think he might have been the last man to describe Betsy in writing. But an artist of some note, Alfred Tidey, also left a record of her in his painting
The Music Class
, which I believe can be viewed at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery in West Sussex in the south of England. Of four figures, Besty is teacher, Bessie, her daughter, the page turner, and two students, pianist and harpist, play at Betsy's direction. Hers is the best-realised figure in the painting.

Betsy, the glittering woman, still young as perceived by Eyre and Tidey both, is nonetheless a tragic figure. The blight and glory that entered her household on St Helena in October 1815 both enlivened and plagued her. All else thereafter seemed almost an outfall of the good and ill-fortune of her Napoleonic encounter.