Napoleon's Last Island Read Free Page A

in part for that too, through the imperfectly sealed cottage we occupied by their implied desire.
    â€˜And so,’ Barry O’Meara proceeded, ‘those great minds, Antommarchi the Corsican goat-doser, and Arnott the smiling fool, decided between them that Our Great Friend should be given a lavement . But OGF had never in sickness or health admired the suggestion that he be turned onto his stomach, which was so tender now, and be interfered with at all by surgeons with such indignity, even by those he tolerated, those he did not consider utter charlatans.’
    â€˜Like you,’ said my father. ‘He trusted you.’
    â€˜A lavement ?’ asked my mother softly. It seemed a kindly word.
    â€˜An enema,’ Barry rushed to say. ‘Certainly, something needed to be done. OGF had been sweating appallingly, and all his mattresses were drenched. My genial informants, Fanny and her husband Henri, also tell me that in the last months the Emperor was like a woman with child, and that everything he ate he vomited. So a lavement was chosen. It would never havebeen had I been there. It is like trying to erase a bruise from a fist by inflicting one with a mallet! It did nothing to ease his tender stomach. And having failed with one crass remedy, they proceeded to give him castor oil to temper stomach pain, as if he were a child who had eaten too much fruit. The treatment, of course, caused OGF to contort himself into a ball at the base of the bed. The pity of it, Balcombe! The pity! Knotted up like a child, at the base of his bed.’
    Jane let her most honest tears loose then – not that she had any other kind.
    â€˜Do you want some more tea?’ I asked her, but she shook her head and was mute. I dared not look at her for fear now that she would start me on the same course as her, yet I did not want to give Dr O’Meara a cause to suspend his report for sensibility’s sake. Indeed, he asked my mother now, in a way that made me remember that he knew much about her from the island.
    â€˜Should I perhaps pursue a different subject, Jane?’
    â€˜No,’ said my mother (another Jane) in a breaking voice. ‘We seek to know all, Barry. We must go through our obsequies too. If there are moans here, it is no different from what we would have uttered had we been there to witness it all. We would like to have that death defined, for other wise our imaginations are tempted to think of infinite pain.’
    â€˜But I fear it becomes more distressing yet,’ O’Meara warned my mother.
    â€˜Even so …’ said Jane, my sister.
    â€˜Yes,’ my mother agreed, ‘even so.’
    O’Meara drained his punch and my father poured him another ladleful to fortify him against our distress. Then he recommenced.
    â€˜So the Corsican quack, who at least knew that things were more serious than Arnott did, sent a message to Name and Nature at Plantation House asking Short – the island’s civil doctor you’d remember – and a naval surgeon from the Vigo , Mitchell, to be called in. But sometimes, as I know so well, a congeries of surgeons may simply confirm the party in their worst and leastadvised opinions. And in any case, battalions of surgeons could not argue with a system so depleted by aggravation and hepatitis as OGF’s.’
    The committee of doctors, so O’Meara told us, reached a consensus that the Emperor should rise and be shaved. He told them he was too weak and that he preferred to shave himself but lacked the strength. When Antommarchi and Arnott prodded his liver, the Emperor screamed – it was like a stab from a bayonet – and began to vomit. ‘What did they all do? Why, nobody worried – they thought it a good sign. And when OGF told them, “The devil has eaten my legs,” they thought it was poetry, not an omen. Arnott reached the dazzling conclusion that the disease lay entirely in the Emperor’s mind. And