Napoleon's Last Island by Tom Keneally

once, perhaps with a small surge from the dormant veins of wisdom within me, I did not. With a smile I never trusted, he told me that I was required to answer him directly.
    â€˜Sir,’ I said, ‘I want to go back to the island.’
    Sir Thomas and the elderly male relative exchanged looks. ‘The father’s daughter then,’ he said, smirking. ‘Fit for islands and secluded posts.’
    Then he undertook a long study of me, one more extensive in its searchfulness, I thought, than there was material to justify it.
    â€˜Does it worry you,’ he asked me, ‘that you will grow up a savage?’
    It didn’t worry me at all. I said, ‘If it pleases you, sir … no!’
    â€˜And your sister Jane has been so happy at the academy.’
    â€˜She has a bad chest because the academy is cold. But she is not impudent, sir.’
    He laughed drily and scanned the ceiling and returned large almond eyes to me. ‘Impudence is not a disease you catch,’ he told me with his gnome-like infallibility. ‘Not like your sister’s bad chest. It is a chosen condition. And you have chosen it. And now or later you should un-choose it, miss, if you do not want to be a savage on an island.’
    I could see that the dour but tender relative had put his head to the side like a questioning, honest hound, and was beginning to feel sorry for me. He said, ‘Perhaps the experiment could be tried again, Sir Thomas, in a year or two? Perhaps she will grow to be more like her sister. That sort of thing has been known to occur.’
    â€˜I don’t want to anger great men,’ I declared in what would have been total bemusement, except for the fact that beyond this sea of humiliation and disapproval glimmered the island. It was a fit landscape for my fallen state. Surprisingly this contrite or at least sincere utterance seemed to disarm Sir Thomas. His laughter at it sounded authentic and no longer a form of judgement.
    â€˜I found you,’ he said, ‘the wife of an East India Company garrison surgeon on her way to India by way of the island. She will look after you on the voyage back.’
    And so I had achieved my aim through defiance, and on the island I would be saved by distance from the disappointment of great men. I was allowed to write to Jane and ask her to forgive me for being so bad and leaving her behind. She wrote back declaring herself quite happy for the time being to stay with Miss Clarke. She existed there, after all, in a comfortable net of admiration woven of teachers and other pupils alike.
    Sir Thomas’s tubercular young man took me to Portsmouth in a carriage and I returned home on a naval vessel of seventy-two guns, a most sleek ship that would achieve the passage in seven weeks. Aboard, I met the surgeon’s wife, who had two girls younger than me and to whom I knew at once I must be kind and companionable. For the woman meant me nothing but good and was very handsome in a darker, watchful, ample way. Her name was Mrs Amie Stuart, she was Canadian-French and had met her husband, Surgeon Stuart, on what she called ‘the Nova Scotia station’, where Stuart had supervised the hospital of the naval squadron and the garrison. I learned her unmarried name was Troublant and heard her speaking in French to her two young daughters – the older of whom, the six-year-old, shared a cabin with me. Through the partition we could hear her talkingin French to the four-year-old. At a specially blocked-off table in a mid-ship saloon, a rare enough thing in a ship of war, we all spoke French, and it was from her tuition that I learned much more of the language, reading from her daughters’ primers and from French histories of the Angevin Age or of Charlemagne she had in her possession.
    On the morning we at last stood in the Jamestown Roads and waited to be taken ashore in the cutter, I did not feel that there were so many grounds now for men of