Napoleon's Last Island Read Free Page B

when Arnott saw Henri Bertrand and the butler Marchand helping OGF walk round the room, he told the others he thought the patient was improving. Arnott did not understand that it was raw courage itself that caused his patient to walk, that he was taking his last steps up Golgotha. So, the surgeons told Sir Hudson Fiend that his prisoner’s pallor and decline were deceits of a disaffected mind. Whereas OGF well knew what was wrong with him. For here, my dear Balcombes, was a great mind, vaster in gifts and power of imagination than the squalid little shambles of their intellects. Not one of them ever asked what the patient thought! For twenty days he told them that it was fegato , his liver. But what would he know?’
    â€˜And was it the liver?’ asked my father, deeply invested in O’Meara’s narration and enduring it under his conflicting identities as a man befriended, a friend betrayed, a devotee – nonetheless – to the end. My mother was for now silenced by a similar order of grief and confusion. ‘I mean, entirely the liver?’
    â€˜Oh no, it was sadly the stomach too.’ O’Meara grew thoughtful. ‘Oh, how lucky we were to ride forth with him in those earlier days! I remember watching you two young women accompanying him one day over the edge of the ravine and into that abomination of boulders known as the Devil’s Glen. It was a sight, the three of you, the balance of all he knew and, well, your unworldlinessthen, in that arena of chaos – that affects me now. As you see, I am close to tears. And to think that OGF reached a stage where he could scarcely bear the fatigue of a ride in the carriage for half an hour, with the horses at a walk, and then could not walk from the carriage into his house without support. Remember his confiseur Pierron, who made those fantastical delicacies for him? Towards the end all that was nothing to OGF – he could digest only soups and jellies, served in those Sèvres bowls on which were painted records of his glories. Both the contents of the bowl and the ornamentation inadequate, alas, to nourish him any further! Our Great Friend choked and gagged and starved for lack of a capacity to swallow, and like many desperate patients he said unkind things. And when he vomited it was black matter, alike to coffee grounds.’
    â€˜How could that not have alerted Dr Arnott and the Corsican?’ my mother protested.
    â€˜They were associated in denial,’ O’Meara explained. ‘You must understand that each time they saw Name and Nature, he ranted with all the energy he possessed that the illness was a trick to garner the world’s concern. A pretence. That has an influence on men’s thoughts, on the thought of surgeons of limited skill. Sir Hudson Fiend wondered about moving him into that newly built house near Longwood, but the Emperor’s suite knew his condition was terminal, and so did – in their own way – far better surgeons than the claque of asses assigned to the poor fellow. And so did Sir Hudson Fiend, because though he could not stop pretending that the Emperor was a malingerer, he knew in his waters that some fatal stage had been entered on. So he moved himself and his odious chief of police, Sir Thomas Reade, into the new house and waited there. His systems of persecution were close to bringing him a complete result.’
    Jane still nursed her tears. We were all pale. Even my little brothers listened soundlessly to O’Meara, to whom they had never in all our time knowing him extended that compliment before.
    â€˜De Montholon told me in a letter – I give away no secret; it has been written in the French papers − that at four o’clock onone of those last mornings the Emperor called him and related with astonishing and desperate grief that he’d just seen his Josephine and that she would not embrace him. She had disappeared when he reached for her, he said, but