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 OâMeara, and my father seemed to know them already, given his talent for bonhomie. It was the first time I saw Surgeon OâMeara, with his piquant Irish face, eternally amused with an irony lacking in ill will, and acute in his judgements ⦠though I am rushing things â I would find all that out only after a time.
The more clerkly Surgeon Warden declared of the Ogre, âHe likes band music. I donât think he has an ear for more delicate airs. He used to ask for the regimental band to play him patriotic tunes, and ours â not theirs.â
âAnd the thing that astonishes me,â the Irishman joined in, âis 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 â 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 manâs virtue exists at the wrong end of the day.â
âThat wouldnât suit me,â my father asserted.
âIt doesnât suit the wardroom, let me tell you,â said Dr Warden. âYour average naval officer likes a long dinner more than your average citizen.â
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 Ogreâs cutter didnât leave Northumberland.
The gossip of the two men moved onto the manâs entourage, the sub-demons. There was Marshal Bertrand, loyal and sensible, OâMeara said, and his wife â 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 OâMeara, 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. âShe is a good wife,â declared OâMeara, âif one with her own opinions. A big, raw Irish girl.â 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 â âLooks meek but would fight a tiger with a twigâ, as OâMeara summarised her â and of her small son, Tristan. De Montholon himself, as a child cadet, had beentaught the principles of artillery by an older cadet â 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, âThereâs Gaspar Gourgaud.â They didnât get round to describing Gourgaud, except for