Free Napoleon's Last Island by Tom Keneally Page A

the business of the world had ceased. All attention was directed on the great experiment that would begin when the Ogre trod on the first step of the dock. Would the island sink under the weight of his deeds and crimes, the weight of the decisions he had brought down on Europe?
    There were two naval surgeons there, in our warehouse, Surgeon Warden and Surgeon O’Meara, and my father seemed to know them already, given his talent for bonhomie. It was the first time I saw Surgeon O’Meara, with his piquant Irish face, eternally amused with an irony lacking in ill will, and acute in his judgements … though I am rushing things – I would find all that out only after a time.
    The more clerkly Surgeon Warden declared of the Ogre, ‘He likes band music. I don’t think he has an ear for more delicate airs. He used to ask for the regimental band to play him patriotic tunes, and ours – not theirs.’
    â€˜And the thing that astonishes me,’ the Irishman joined in, ‘is that the French do everything backwards from our point of view.The Emperor, he prowls the deck by night, and sleeps late. And then what does the man do but demand a large breakfast full of all manner of things we would consider appropriate for supper – even chickens we collected in Tenerife. And he imbibes claret with it! In the evening he champs down a brisk little meal, no lingering over the plate and taking a sip or two of wine. The man’s virtue exists at the wrong end of the day.’
    â€˜That wouldn’t suit me,’ my father asserted.
    â€˜It doesn’t suit the wardroom, let me tell you,’ said Dr Warden. ‘Your average naval officer likes a long dinner more than your average citizen.’
    They seemed delighted to have licence to offload their items of witness on solid ground, for this passage to our island had transcended all the passages they had ever made, even in the time of war. The afternoon stretched until its warmth had utterly congealed in Main Street and the sun was being lost from the eastern precipice above the town and the Castle Terrace. Still the Ogre’s cutter didn’t leave Northumberland.
    The gossip of the two men moved onto the man’s entourage, the sub-demons. There was Marshal Bertrand, loyal and sensible, O’Meara said, and his wife – a tall lump of a woman, the daughter of an Irish general who had fled to France in disaffection. He should have fled again but was caught by the Terror of the Revolution and Robespierre beheaded him. The Revolution was incarnated in the General, perhaps, said O’Meara, but he had hated the Terror and thus Fanny Bertrand was herself also a disciple of the Great Ogre and Universal Demon.
    When her husband Bertrand had decided that it was necessary for him to be with the Ogre, so it became necessary for her. ‘She is a good wife,’ declared O’Meara, ‘if one with her own opinions. A big, raw Irish girl.’ This was an unknown woman we might or might not sight within the span of the remaining hours of light.
    It was from these gentlemen too that I first heard the names of Comte de Montholon and his wife – ‘Looks meek but would fight a tiger with a twig’, as O’Meara summarised her – and of her small son, Tristan. De Montholon himself, as a child cadet, had beentaught the principles of artillery by an older cadet – yes, Emperor-to-be. So he was solidly loyal too and his wife, though pregnant and not in the best of health, was less noisy about her destiny than the Countess Bertrand. Albine de Montholon, the surgeons told us, sang Italian tunes, the kind the Emperor liked, in a high voice which seemed strange at first but became appealing.
    A chamberlain of middle years named Las Cases, and his son, Emmanuel, were also in the party of French, and then, said the surgeons, ‘There’s Gaspar Gourgaud.’ They didn’t get round to describing Gourgaud, except for