Betsy and the Emperor (9781439115879) Read online

“Well? Well? D’yer see some men what don’t look like limeys?”

  The clouds shifted again, and the moon shone brightly over the ocean.

  This time when I looked at the boat, I noticed a group of men—officers it seemed—I hadn’t seen before. They wore strange uniforms. And what was this? There were a few ladies on board too! They wore fancy long dresses of a style unfamiliar to me, and they had silk shawls wrapped around their shoulders. The men and women seemed to be engaged in serious discussion.

  “Yes,” I said to the Yamstock. “Foreigners. Some ladies, too.”

  He laughed—an unpleasant, raspy sound.

  “Aye!” he said.

  I studied the group of foreigners. One man puzzled me. He was small and stood as straight as a measuring stick, but apart from the others, and spoke to no one. No one tried to speak to him. He was the only man on board who was still facing away from the shore. Instead, motionless, hands clasped tightly behind his back, he stared out across the sea.

  “One of the men—I can’t see his face,” I said. “He’s wearing a big bicorne hat. And he’s shorter than the others.”

  “Ahhh!” the Yamstock exulted. “That’d be Boney!” He snatched the spyglass from me and looked through it.

  Boney. That name again! So he wasn’t just a character in a children’s fairy tale! He was real. But who was he?

  “Is he a pirate?” I asked the Yamstock.

  “A pirate?” he said with a snarl, never taking his eye from the glass. “Aye! And a murderer. Ravisher of women, too!”

  “Why are they bringing him here?”

  The Yamstock turned toward me and glowered with his one eye. “Aye, they should o’ hung that little French disease from London Tower and let the rats make short work o’ what was left!”

  The Yamstock jammed the spyglass into his apron pocket and stomped away, without a word of farewell.

  I was tired and eager to return to the Briars. But having come this far, I was anxious to get a better look at the little Frenchman. I’d never seen a real pirate before!

  The clock in Jamestown’s stone tower struck the hour. By the first stroke, the landing boat from the Northumberland had moored. By the fifth and last stroke, the passengers began to disembark. The order of their exit seemed to have been well planned. First, armed British sailors, sea legs wobbly from their long voyage, tumbled out onto the beach like crabs. As soon as they were able, they formed two neat columns facing each other. Next came navy officers and their orderlies, who helped the foreign ladies out of the boat. The ladies seemed very relieved to be on dry land.

  Then, on horseback, came the silver-haired Admiral in his striking black uniform and gold-fringed epaulets. His chest was littered with war medals. He reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of the great English Admiral Nelson, painted to pay tribute to him after he’d died defeating the French at Trafalgar. Of course, unlike Nelson, this fellow had whiskers—and both of his arms.

  Then came the foreign officers and orderlies in stiff blue uniforms with red cuffs and white sashes. They waited patiently in formation by the side of the boat. Staring straight ahead, their faces were expressionless.

  The crowd of onlookers, which had up to this point watched the scene unfold in near silence, became restless. They began to murmur and press toward the boat. Once more the soldiers held them at bay. The Jamestown men raised their torches high into the air so they could get a better view of the boat. There was a growing sense of anticipation in the air—excitement of an almost tangible sort. I hadn’t felt anything like it since the day I’d stood with a crowd outside the palace in London, hoping for a glimpse of the prince regent.

  I began to wonder whether there wasn’t some member of the royal family aboard. Surely a pirate wasn’t worthy of all this attention—not even if he were Jean Lafitte himself! But it was apparent that only one passenger remained aboard: the little Frenchman. Up close he looked even smaller and less impressive than I’d supposed. I was more than a little disappointed. The man was about to mount his horse—a magnificent black charger, trimmed in red and gold—but hesitated. He slid his small, black-booted heel from the stirrup and turned to face the murmuring crowd. As they saw him, they grew louder—more fearful and hostile. The Jamestown men pushed past the soldiers, gave out a yell—almost a war cry—and marched down the beach to within a few yards of the boat. There they waited and watched.

  The crowd’s behavior seemed to have a strange and powerful effect upon the Frenchman. He took a slow, deep breath that seemed to infuse him with electric energy. His gray eyes flashed fire; his jaw set in rigid determination. Life flooded into his face and limbs, adding such strength and presence to his appearance that it hardly seemed he could be the same man he was a moment before. He actually seemed to grow taller before my very eyes!

  The Frenchman mounted his charger, and the horse stepped onto shore. A few of the Jamestown men shouted things at him that I couldn’t understand. Unbeknownst to the British soldiers, one Jamestowner had raised and aimed his musket at the unarmed Frenchman. I tried to yell, but no sound came out. The Frenchman caught sight of the Jamestowner and stared at him with steely intensity. Incredibly, the man lowered his musket as if compelled to do so by an invisible power. Then the Frenchman’s gaze swept slowly over the crowd like the beam from a lighthouse. A hush fell upon the crowd. To a man, they fell back, clearing a wide path for the Frenchman. And suddenly, I understood who this man, capable of inspiring such terror, must be.

  Bonaparte! Was there any man more feared and hated in all of Europe—in all of history? General Bonaparte. Emperor Bonaparte. What on earth was he doing on St. Helena? Small wonder Jamestown was in such an uproar!

  The countries of Europe had been at war with one another for as far back into my childhood as I could remember. I had never known exactly what all the fighting was about. Perhaps, as in most wars, no one really did. But there was one name that was always mentioned in connection with it; one man mocked and condemned again and again in the British gazettes; one name that was never merely spoken, but spat—especially by the London matrons who had lost sons in the war. One man blamed for everything from British debt to British dysentery: Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France.

  He was rumored to have massacred prisoners of war and even the weak and wounded among his own troops. He was said to have kept a harem in Egypt and a dozen mistresses in every country he conquered. And more than once I’d heard that he’d stolen and sold his wife’s jewels to finance his military campaigns. What was fact and what was fiction? I did not know. I’d never paid much attention during Miss Bosworth’s history lessons at school. What did I care what happened last week, much less a year or twenty ago? As for the newspapers, only the results of the horse races interested me. I supposed I knew as much of Bonaparte as I cared to—as much as most Englishmen did. And like most my age, I could think back to my childhood and remember the little ditty my mother whispered in my ear as she tucked me in at night:

  Good night, small one—

  Be good and pray

  with all your precious heart,

  That day will dawn

  without a trace

  of vicious Boney-parte!

  Ah! So that’s where the name “Boney” came from!

  It had been only several months since word had come to us in London of Bonaparte’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo; I was sure I’d heard the last of him. I recall at the time some of the girls at Hawthorne were discussing possible methods of disposing of him. One of them actually proposed baking him into a tureen of French liver pâté and serving him to King George! And now, these several months later, it occurred to me that perhaps St. Helena was, in a sense, serving as that tureen. Perhaps this was the King’s chosen method of disposing of the vanquished Emperor Napoleon. Not a bad choice, at that. If I had an enemy I wished to see rot, I’d ship him posthaste to St. Helena!

  The long procession from the Northumberland wended its way up the beach. Bonaparte on his charger passe
d by close enough for me to smell the horse sweat. His face and body were brilliantly illuminated by the torches of the Jamestowners who lined his path. He looked not unlike the portraits I’d seen of him in London. Oh, he was a bit fatter, and I was surprised to see how yellowish and waxy the skin on his plump, round face appeared. But then, most portraits tend to flatter their subject. The short, green military jacket with red collar and piping, the fine white linen vest and breeches, the cumbersome black hat that seemed a bit too large for his small features, even the silver Star of Honor pinned to his breast—all were precisely as depicted in the gallery portraits and newspaper engravings. Bonaparte’s eagle eyes stared straight ahead seeming to see everyone—and yet no one—as he advanced through the silent crowd. For their part, their attention was fixed solely on the emperor. No one took any notice of the British admiral nor of any of the others. Where, I wondered, was the admiral taking him? By the look of things, it was difficult to determine just who was leading whom!

  Not long before the sun began to peek over the mountains on St. Helena, the procession passed from my view. I was suddenly too weary to follow.

  It was so far to the Briars that I decided to sleep out a few hours and return home as soon as I awoke. I was accustomed to doing this and to slipping back into the Briars unnoticed. Mercifully, my family were late risers. As long as I returned before ten o’clock, they’d be none the wiser.

  I had little trouble finding a proper bed. Next to a barn, not far from the beach, stood a rusty wheelbarrow—just my size! And now, for a mattress: I loaded the barrow with hay, which I’d pulled from the bales stacked nearby. Then I climbed aboard. I daresay it made a finer resting place than that “bed of nails” they gave me at Hawthorne!

  I watched the last star of night fade into the sunrise. Then I shut my eyes and thought about my encounter with Emperor Napoleon. Too bad, I mused, I can’t tell Jane about it. I couldn’t trust her to keep mum. And besides, I could imagine just how she’d react. I’d tell her the whole incredible story of my adventure, including the fact that I’d stood near enough to the most feared man on earth to have reached out and touched him. And what would Jane say? Good heavens, Betsy! You slept in a wheelbarrow?

  I laughed myself to sleep.

  Chapter 3

  I’m certain I would have slept half the day away if a game hen hadn’t seen fit to use my belly as her roost. She pounced on me, and I was jarred from a deep sleep—not a pleasant experience, to be sure. Despite a few aches and pains in my wheelbarrow-cramped limbs, I chased her all the way to the ocean, knowing the next wave would drench her from beak to bottom. A moment later the origin of the saying “mad as a wet hen” was no longer a mystery to me. Ah, sweet revenge!

  Self-satisfaction melted away quickly as I noted the position of the sun in the sky. My worst fears were confirmed when I heard the toll of the Jamestown clock: seven…eight…nine bells. Nine o’clock already!

  I fell down twice, scratched my cheek on a nettle, and tore the hem of my nightgown in the mad dash to reach home before my parents awoke. Still, I got there more quickly than ever before.

  All was quiet outside the Briars. I was in luck. Normally, my father would have been in the fields by this time, giving the day’s instructions to the slave overseer. If my father found out I’d been out all night, he might have sent me back to Hawthorne for another year!

  I ran around to the back of the house and climbed up the vine to my bedroom. Blast! The window was stuck. No, not stuck. Locked! Damn that miserable creature, she’d locked me out. I would have cursed Jane through the glass, but she wasn’t even in our room. I had no choice but to climb back down and go around to the front entrance.

  I said a quick prayer on the threshold: “Please, please let them be asleep!” Then, quietly, hardly daring to breathe, I opened the heavy oak door a crack and peered inside.

  I couldn’t see anyone, but I heard voices coming from another part of the house. With any luck, I could slip upstairs unnoticed. I galloped across the bright Persian rug in the parlor—and came within inches of colliding with a man who roared “Zut alors!” as I whizzed past. I stopped dead in my tracks and turned around to find myself face-to-face with Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Somehow, I had the presence of mind to behave as if there were nothing the slightest bit out of the ordinary in finding him here. I spoke to him in French, the only subject I’d excelled in at school.

  “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur,” I said.

  He looked me over from head to toe as if I were a heifer he was thinking of purchasing at market. He seemed to take particular note of my bare feet and ragged nightgown.

  “Hmmfftt!” he said—that was all. Then he waved the back of his small, white, plump hand at me, as if he were shooing flies.

  Apparently, I was being dismissed from his presence. More than happy to oblige him, I ran up the stairs three at a time and then into my bedroom. I shut the door behind me. Finally!—a chance to think. I paced up and down the creaky wooden floorboards.

  The first thing to do, I reasoned, was to change into my day clothes. After all, assuming Bonaparte hadn’t done away with my parents, I was still in danger of their punishing me should they discover I’d been out all night. Forgoing the scratchy petticoats my mother always pleaded with me to wear, I slipped directly into my only clean frock: a frilly pink cotton nonsense that Jane had outgrown and handed down to me. How I hated it!

  One glance in the looking glass told me that I ought to try to make some sense of my hair. My pale golden curls stood out at odd angles like celery roots. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do about it. Jane or one of the older girls at Hawthorne had always arranged my hair for me. “You’re so helpless, Betsy!”—or was it “hopeless”?—Jane often said to me. But I could find better things to do with my time than fussing with curling irons.

  I shook my head like a wet spaniel until a few pieces of hay fluttered to the floor. Then I pinned all my hair in a pile on top of my head. Good enough, I thought, and headed for the door. I was about to go downstairs but thought better of it. I realized it would be best if I learned more of what was going on at the Briars before I made my presence known. Taking care not to get soot on my frock, I removed the screen from the fireplace and climbed inside. By the time I was four years old, I’d made the happy discovery that the chimney led directly from the library to my bedroom and that conversations in one room could be heard distinctly in the other. I listened.

  The first thing I heard was a sound as familiar to me as the plaintive wail of St. Helena’s seagulls. My mother was weeping. This in itself was not cause for alarm—she cried over everything and nothing. But it spurred my curiosity. There was also an undercurrent of rapping noises, occurring in short bursts at frequent intervals, like percussive accompaniment to the melodic theme of tears. This I recognized as my father nervously rapping his pipe against the fireplace to empty it of old tobacco. He always did this when my mother wept, probably because he felt bewildered by it and inadequate to the task of comforting her.

  “Hear him out, my dear. Hear him out,” I heard my father say, clearly discomfited.

  Then a man—of fine old British stock, I judged by his manner of speech—joined the conversation. He cleared his throat, as if rather more out of uneasiness than any trace of influenza.

  “May I offer you my sincere apologies, Mrs. Balcombe, for—for causing you such discomfort. I’m sure I handled the situation rather badly.”

  “Not at all, Admiral,” I heard my father say. “Not at all.”

  So, the man was an admiral. The one from the Northumberland, no doubt.

  At this point my mother said something, but as she still had tears in her voice, I could not make it out. In any case, the admiral replied, “It would only be for a few months. Until we can find a proper place for him elsewhere on St. Helena.”

  At this, I began to suspect the nature of the proposal the admiral must have made to my parents.

  “Bonaparte h
as been known to vanquish entire nations in less time, Admiral,” my father said sternly.

  “I assure you, Balcombe, I have just spent seventy days at sea with the man. Without his army, he is not a dangerous fellow.”

  My father replied with a skeptical “Harumph.”

  “We have children, Admiral Cockburn,” my mother said calmly. “Two of them are young ladies,” she said meaningfully. I could picture her now, dry-eyed and alert, regally maternal, sitting up as straight as a washboard in her chair.

  “Madam, I understand your concern. He will be watched day and night—his every move. Over two thousand British soldiers are charged with supervising his captivity. Five hundred guns stand aready. I give you my word that—”

  “And you say this is not a dangerous man!” my mother interrupted.

  “To France, perhaps. To England, certainly. But to you?” The admiral probably shrugged, allowing his question to hang in the air like chimney dust. There was a silence. Then he tried a new tack. “Balcombe, you and I served together at sea,” he said earnestly. “Men who have shared berth and battle don’t steer each other wrong on dry land.”

  Another silence followed, this one longer than the last.

  My father sighed, just the way he does when I wheedle him for pin money and he’s ready for surrender. “He’s right, my dear,” my father said wearily. “The admiral would not allow us to place ourselves in any danger. We must do as he asks.”

  “Whatever you think best,” my mother said, her voice heavy with resignation. It was like her to give in without a fight. From whom did I inherit my pluck?

  Just then I heard the approach of smooth and graceful footsteps—as those of a lady. Someone had joined the group in the library.

  “I see I am no longer in any danger of being washed away by madame’s tears,” Bonaparte said. “Your aides saw to it that my sortie was as brief as it was well supervised.”

  Hmmm, I thought. There must be some officers about, whom I missed seeing on my way into the house.