Napoleon's Last Island by Tom Keneally Page A

great power to be disappointed in me, and in any case their disappointment was remote. Admittedly, my French was only partially accomplished, but what I had, I somehow had to the full, in a way that promised future and perfect facility if I simply pursued my native interest.
    I had composed an address to my parents who, I knew, would be at the pier. They were not the kind of people who exercised punishment by absenting themselves from the ritual of welcoming one of their children. There might be chastisement later in the day, but I was confident enough in their affection to know that whatever had been communicated about me, however my character had been traduced, it would be swallowed up in their relief in seeing me again.
    So it happened. I came ashore with Mrs Stuart and her two girls, and when I climbed up to the dock from the cutter I found my mother and father. They looked to me like all I desired: abundance and forgiveness and repatriation – as if I had survived a battle and were to be celebrated for it. Sarah was there carrying my plump new brother, Thomas Tyrwhitt, and it would turn out that Mother was pregnant with baby Alexander. My enlarged family seemed to promise an enlargement of the terms of life. It was 1811, I would soon be ten, and I was home for an indefinite future. My mother thanked Mrs Stuart and invited her to The Briars and then knelt and said, ‘Oh, my Betsy,’ and took Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe from Sarah and in one long-armed hug enclosed my new brother and me.
    In the shadow of the warehouse of Fowler, Cole and Balcombe, I uttered my first long French salutation, and I could see thatit eased something in my father’s fraught eyes. He said to my mother, pointing to me, ‘You see, Jane. We are what we are, and in that we may well be superior to those who seek to tut about us.’
    Mrs Stuart and the girls were to overnight with us, in the house, not in the Pavilion. They were astounded by the journey from Jamestown up the precipitous terraces to The Briars, where the girls and I ran madly on the lawn and called out in French to each other. We stumbled for lack of land legs, and the two Stuart children still had far to travel, through rough waters which would be succeeded by torpid ones, and then India. Late the following afternoon, they were warned by a seaman sent from the ship that they should be prepared to get aboard, for the captain intended departure as soon as favourable.
    We went down with them, and returned to the interior of the island in the near-dark, and I informed my mother of the Medes and Persians, for her pleasure at what I had learned outweighed the displeasure of the so-called greater folk who hadn’t liked my English performance at all. My parents were delighted to find that I was willing to stay in the parlour of The Briars for three hours a day absorbing books. I sucked up The Pilgrim’s Progress and thought it a very sensible religious fable indeed. I delighted in The Vicar of Wakefield , and the humanity and sense of the vicar, Dr Primrose. My mother was busy with Thomas, and had trouble finding a wet nurse for him amongst the slaves of the island, which was extremely bad luck given their rate of pregnancy and the fact that it was known their milk was plenteous. Sarah was on daily watch to report the birth of a slave baby or the sad death of one, and thus the emergence of a potential nurse.
    Meanwhile, I had heard my father complain to my mother, ‘What will happen when these girls no longer live on the island, Jane? I would like to see them lead a fuller life, and exercise fuller skills.’ But he was a man easily comforted and I continued with my own education, reading occasional French novels my mother borrowed, with strong assurances of their propriety, from Mrs Wilks, the wife of the governor of the East India Company, or from the bookish wife of the commander of the East India Company artillery.
    My mathematics remained serviceable for