My companion and I had an apartment in a classic Georgian building in Market Street above Thorpe & Sons’ grocery store. There were comfortable couches, a Regency dining table, and a mahogany glass-fronted bookcase with volumes of Scott, Dickens and Charles Kingsley. Through tall windows we looked across at the brown cliffs and the fairy terns wheeling and shrieking.

For a long time St Helena has appeared an oddity, lost in a British imperial time warp. Overwhelmingly Anglican, its population varies now between 4500 and 5800, as transient workers for the building of the airport come and go, but they have His Lordship the Bishop presiding at St Paul’s cathedral and His Lordship the Chief Justice at the Supreme Court; His Excellency the Governor is chauffeured from Plantation House to his office at the castle in a black Jaguar with a Union Jack pennant, and until a few years ago donned a white-plumed hat for ceremonial occasions. Painted in big white letters on the cliffs above is the greeting ‘We Welcome You Prince Andrew’, still there from the prince’s 1984 visit as a member of the armed forces. Most shops display a fading portrait of the Queen.

Apart from the mostly local government employees coming in and out of the castle, tapping smartly over the cobblestones clutching files, it was evident that the people of working age had generally fled; most Saints in town appeared to be adolescent or younger, or older than fifty. But everyone I passed gave a friendly greeting in the soft singsong St Helenian accent, said to be a throwback to eighteenth-century English—part Dickensian Cockney, part West Country burr—blended with African cadences.

Admiral Cockburn elected to stay at the castle, where he had access to the warships in the bay, rather than be a guest at Plantation House, the governor’s mansion out of town. It was determined that Bonaparte’s permanent home would be Longwood House, up on the high plateau, remote enough to serve as a prison. It had recently been occupied by the lieutenant-governor and his family as a summer retreat from the humidity of Jamestown, but its earlier use was as a cattle house and barn, to which some rough additions had been made. It was dilapidated and at least two months’ work would be needed before it could be acceptable accommodation.

Because of this decision, the Balcombe family did not have to vacate The Briars, although William probably regretted the compensation he would have been offered. He had first rented The Briars property in early 1806, not long after he and his family had settled on the island, and he bought it one year later when he was made superintendent of public sales for the East India Company. It was one of the most favoured locations on the island, a vale on the sheltered middle level, protected from the prevailing winds, with a waterfall tumbling over a horseshoe-shaped cliff into a deep gorge behind the homestead.

The house was in the style of a long Indian villa, with an upper section of three rooms; it had shuttered windows and a colonnaded verandah along the front onto which the ground floor rooms opened.1 The kitchen was in a separate building, while the twenty slaves lived in huts at the rear. Balcombe had statutory ownership of seven men, four women, four boys and five girls.2 Slavery was still legal on the island—the last outpost of empire where it was—despite the British government’s legislation four years earlier against the transportation of human beings. Toby, the old Malay gardener, although a slave, was allowed his own hut in the orchard. He had made the garden of The Briars envied throughout the island for its beauty and productivity, while Balcombe enjoyed a profit of £600 a year selling the fruit and vegetables.

A leafy avenue of banyan trees and myrtles led from the front gates to the little paradise Toby had created. A creamy froth of pink and white roses, the sweetbriars that gave the place its name, mingled with geraniums and nasturtiums. Beyond was the orchard of oranges, guavas, mangoes and figs, with vegetable beds near the kitchen door. Pomegranate trees shaded a sloping path up to a little summer-house pavilion that Balcombe had constructed as a ballroom and occasional accommodation for guests and visiting officials of the East India Company.3

The eldest Balcombe boy, William, aged seven in 1815, had been left to continue his education in England under the guardianship of Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt. William’s sisters had been ‘finished’ at Mrs Clarke’s genteel Ladies’ Boarding School in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, where they had learned ‘French, Music, Dancing, Drawing, Geography and the Use of Globes’ with ‘the greatest Care taken of the Morals and Conduct of the Pupils’.4 The school was some 60 miles from South Cave in Yorkshire where the girls had spent holidays with their aunt, Mrs Balcombe’s sister, and her stockbroker husband.

Once the Napoleonic Wars had seemed at an end and the perpetrator safely held on Elba, it had been possible for ordinary people to risk sea travel once more. Mrs Jane Balcombe had sailed to England at the beginning of 1815 to bring her daughters back home. Even without the threat of French warships, the voyage would have been a trial for this charming and attractive woman who suffered indifferent health. Although she was well liked in the island community, the isolation disagreed with her: she wrote to a relative that life on St Helena was ‘worse than being transported to Botany Bay’.5

The girls were thrilled to return to the island. They found their father stouter than ever, more prone to gout, as volatile in temperament, but still for the most part cheerful and gregarious. Betsy was glad to abandon the strictures of school, to be petted and fussed over by their old black nurse Sarah Timms, to run barefoot in the garden, to lie on the grass by the fishpond and let the sun beat down on her face. She had grown up clambering up and down the island’s rocky slopes and gorges. Up on the misty heights she had revelled in flocks of canaries twittering through the trees and huge spiderwebs shimmering between ancient tree ferns. Sometimes the sisters had followed the tortuous descent to a pool beneath the waterfall that cascaded behind their house, just deep enough to swim in after heavy rain.

But now they were young ladies of thirteen and fifteen and so had to forsake such escapades. Their duty henceforth was to acquire domestic skills and drawing-room graces to equip them for marriage to a gentleman of good prospects—or, if they were very fortunate or very pretty, as Betsy indeed was—perhaps to a gentleman of wealth and distinction. But this future held little attraction for Betsy Balcombe.

On Bonaparte’s first full day on St Helena, the admiral planned a tour of the island, concluding with an inspection of Longwood. We know from General Gourgaud’s journal that the outing started badly: the admiral and Governor Wilks arrived early on horseback at the Porteous house, accompanied by soldiers bringing two splendid horses for the former emperor and his marshal.