Free Napoleon's Last Island by Tom Keneally Page B

both of them to toss their heads in an eloquent way. They gave us no clue to his nature or the register of his voice, and the same applied to the chamberlain Las Cases and his son.
    For they were now interrupted. I saw the two surgeons stand stiffly and formally, and then in the doorway their tall admiral and behind him a large woolly-haired dog.
    â€˜This is ridiculous, Balcombe,’ said the admiral as if my father and he were intimates. ‘It is Balcombe, isn’t it? You provisioned me four years back. Remember? Yes, you remember.’
    My father of course said how pleasant it was to remake the admiral’s acquaintance. Indeed, had he been here alone, had every islander’s expectation not been fixed on, to use O’Meara’s term, the Universal Demon, Cockburn’s advent would have been considered momentous, though in a normal way, a way that did not threaten to sink the island under the weight of its own significance.
    â€˜The map we were given,’ said the admiral, as the Balcombe and Solomon women stared at him stupefied, ‘would indicate that Bonaparte should reside at Plantation House or else at the Castle over the way. Now I’m told that this has all been ruled against by a higher power. Poor Wilks himself is embarrassed by it all.’
    â€˜So, sir,’ my father asked, ‘what is left to the man?’
    â€˜Well, there’s Porteous’s establishment. Looked it over earlier. Not of an appropriate standard! But what can be done?’
    We were all quite impressed at the Castle, a structure of some pretended grandeur which stood on a terrace on the cliff above Jamestown. At the top of the opposing steep cliff stood the mosthandsome house other than The Briars on the island, Plantation House, a ‘country seat’ style of house, squirely, large-gardened and in kindlier territory towards the South American side. Both of them had been denied to the island’s improbable visitor. The Great Ogre and all those counts and their children and two countesses and a further grand figure and his son seemed to have no other option than to become boarding house inmates.
    As we waited, the sentinels on the dock and all the way up the street remained silent, but there was an eloquent hubbub from the crowd and it mounted now because, after a day of waiting, the party of all parties was declared to have left the Northumberland. Eyeglasses were screwed to eye sockets but my father felt the necessity of offering his to the admiral.
    â€˜No thank you, Balcombe,’ said the admiral softly. ‘I know our visitor’s features very well.’
    So it was my father who swung the glass over the roads and the late afternoon meeting between air and light and water, and was the first of us to report he was sure he could see the man, in green coat, amongst others in the midst of the cutter. The glass was then passed for verification to everyone in turn – my mother, Mr Solomon, who had closed his store by now and joined us, Mrs Solomon, Jane, me, Miss Esther Solomon, and on to my sweaty little brothers.
    I could not see anything during my turn – the high colour of the moment made my hold on the thing skittish, but if I found the cutter for an instant, the light swell in the roads lifted it out of my sight. I wanted anyhow to see the corporeal Emperor with the naked eye, not distorted, flattened and hazed by distance and the imperfection of lenses. As I waited and others exclaimed, ‘I see, I see!’ I closed my eyes for half a minute at a time, in a sort of dread but in the most intense and aching curiosity I have ever felt.
    The admiral excused himself to go down and greet the Emperor on the landing.
    The dread that seized the port in that instant was not only for the man’s devilish reputation, not only for the fact that he was the Great Ogre, but once more that his tread would rock theearth, and that the escarpments above Jamestown would shatter, and