Napoleon's Last Island by Tom Keneally Page B

daily use. I could not have made a sextant reading, but was happy to leave navigation to officers of the Royal Navy. My self-education in music advanced, and when I applied myself to the spinet in the drawing room I found myself naturally impelled towards making music. One of the first songs I could fluently play – and sing in full – was ‘Ye Braes and Banks of Bonnie Doon’. It spoke to me so powerfully and melodically of losses I could not understand yet instinctively knew I might suffer at some time.
    Jane returned to the island the following summer. The family was complete and little Thomas Tyrwhitt so charming we used to play with him as he sat on a rug in the garden, he making speeches in the language of infancy, we answering him in French and English and always indulgent. Soon, it seemed, he was joined by Alex, of questioning eye and roguish smile. A decent fortress seemed our family on the island of St Helena. The education of the Balcombe girls was marked by fits of well-meaning parental supervision, and my father was exercised by the new question of who would educate his sons.
    When I was twelve years, Boney fell from his height of power. That was a distant drumbeat. And he returned from an exile and imposed himself on Europe once more. But this was an irrelevance to the rock we inhabited amidst the primeval waters.

The last day of my accustomed life …
    One day when I had reached the uncertain age of thirteen, I went off on Tom the horse, with Jane on her horse, riding at my mother’s insistence with a lady’s saddle, which while it sat aboard the creature also cleverly prevented women from riding astride. When I reached home on the last day of my accustomed life, the life I wanted, I spotted in the V in the mountains a ship newly anchored in the roads, with a few lumpy store ships I had seen the day before around it. This new ship was a sloop, fast and sleek.
    By the time I reached the house and had taken Tom to the stable and put him in the care of Ernest, I found that there were two naval gentlemen on the verandah speaking urgently to my father. My mother was there with little Alex in her arms and she intercepted me. Her face was aglow and when I asked her what was happening she said she did not know, but something was wholly out of the ordinary. In fact, from that point on, we would never know the ordinary again.
    And yet she asked me, in her innocence, ‘We need something a little unusual, don’t we, Betsy?’
    Her full smile transcended her fraught condition, the inroads made on her tranquillity by baby colic, and Jane’s occasional asthma. I thought then with some amazement that the island might not be to her what it was to me: sufficient. Now, in anycase, she confided in me, ‘Those gentlemen are officers from the frigate Icarus . They have come ahead of their squadron.’
    At last my father asked the two officers to sit down. My mother and I passed indoors, but she called to Sarah to go and see if the gentlemen wanted anything. We could see from the drawing room that they asked for brandy and water, but they also went on talking at length.
    In the remnants of the dusk, they sat at the table in the garden as the two boys in white gloves served them their refreshment, and then after some time both officers went off on the horses they had been rented or loaned in town. My father, etiquette’s child, waved them out of sight from the carriage gate before bounding across the lawn and up the steps and into the house.
    â€˜Jane,’ he called out. ‘Jane!’ We were all instantly in the corridor.
    â€˜I have a very large provisions order before me,’ said my father. ‘I should tell you that. I have a very large provisions order .’
    And then his florid face broke into giggles like a schoolboy. He had not a malicious crease in his whole face, and later I would wish he had some armour against the world. ‘Very large’, he