None of them stayed, until one man made the island his home.

Dom Fernando Lopez, a Portuguese officer and gentleman, was with the invading army that took Goa in 1512, overwhelming the defending Indian forces. But Lopez stood accused of leading a group of deserters. His garrison commander spared the men’s lives but, according to the Portuguese historian Afonso D’Albuquerque, decreed ‘that their right hands, and the thumbs of their left hands, and their ears and noses should be cut off’.23 Most of them died from loss of blood, but Lopez survived. He scratched out a mendicant’s existence, despised by his countrymen, shunned by the Indians.

Three years later, he stowed away on a ship bound for Portugal, dreaming of a reunion with his wife and child, of embracing them with his claw-like left hand and the stump of his right, trusting they would see past the hideous wound of his noseless face, the holes where his ears had been. The sailors may have cautioned him, for by the time the vessel put in for water at St Helena he had lost confidence in his dream. He bolted into the forest and hid. His shipboard companions searched for him in vain, and when they sailed they left behind a barrel of biscuits, hung beef, dried fish, salt, a fire, and some old clothes.24

One day, as another ship departed, a rooster fell overboard and was drowning when Lopez rescued it. The rooster followed him everywhere and slept in the cave with him at night. Lopez never dreamed of eating the bird. He had found love, of a sort. When Lopez finally died, in 1545, he had survived at his island refuge for thirty years.

Betsy described the colonisation of St Helena, how the Dutch followed the Portuguese, and then the British East India Company claimed and occupied the island in 1661. But it was the story of the disfigured hermit Dom Fernando Lopez and his lonely island exile that fascinated Napoleon; that was the story he always asked her to repeat.25

CHAPTER 8

THE ADMIRAL’S BALL

From the side balcony of The Briars’ Pavilion one looks down towards Jamestown, the ocean in the distance, and across to the waterfall which spills over the lip of the horseshoe-shaped gorge into the rocky gloom far below. The sides of the gulch are barren except for aloes and prickly pear, an impenetrable clump of them in the foreground, descendants of those that once inflicted pain on some well-upholstered buttocks. But the cascade still sparkles just as Betsy described it, and those clear waters were the reason seafarers called at the island, that the poor hermit Lopez survived for so long, and that a settlement developed and supported the growth of a trading empire.1

Across the gorge and looming some 500 metres above the Pavilion is High Knoll Fort, St Helena’s most spectacular military installation. Seen from below, with its martello tower, turreted stone walls and slit embrasures, it could be a medieval castle. It was actually built during the Victorian era as a redoubt against any possible invaders, its guns commanding James Bay while the whole island population could be herded into its keep. It has been described by a building archaeologist as one of the finest nineteenth-century forts in the world.2 This citadel greatly extended an earlier fort on the same site, built in the 1790s. After Napoleon’s arrival, soldiers kept a close watch on The Briars from up there; in the event of any suspicious activity involving the prisoner, they could signal to other watch-houses on high points right across the island.

Charles Darwin, visiting St Helena on HMS Beagle in July 1836, was astonished: ‘It is quite extraordinary, the scrupulous degree to which the coast must formerly have been guarded. There are alarm houses, alarm guns and alarm stations on every peak.’3

At the end of October, Gourgaud made another visit to The Briars, on the way passing a slave auction at the crossroads in town. He had a familiar discussion with Napoleon: ‘He cannot understand his defeat at Waterloo. “It isn’t for me,” he adds, “it is for poor France.” His Majesty tells me again, that with twenty thousand men less, he ought to have won the battle. It is Fate which made him lose it.’

Gourgaud was annoyed to find the Balcombe girls joining them for dinner in the marquee. In fact, Betsy had been reluctant, as they had already dined. ‘Then come and see me eat,’ Napoleon had insisted.

Cipriani delivered his punctilious announcement: ‘Le dîner de votre Majesté est servi.’ The girls sat beside their host at the table, opposite a sullen Gourgaud. A plate of elaborate sweets was placed in front of them, ‘spun sugar confections, architectural delicacies’, produced by Pierron, said to have been the most famous and accomplished confectioner in Paris. Betsy protested that she was not hungry but made herself eat half a cream. ‘But although I was satisfied, Napoleon was not; and when I left off eating, he commenced feeding me like a baby, calling me his little bambina, and laughing violently at my woeful countenance.’4

The mornings always began with the dictation of the memoirs. ‘The Emperor knew that the best way to counter boredom was work,’ wrote Marchand, noting that Napoleon had tried to do the writing himself, but ‘his hand could not follow his thoughts that were so highly-strung, concise and full of fire; his fingers could not keep up with the speed of his imagination’.5 Gourgaud was bored and unemployed in town so was persuaded to help young Emmanuel de Las Cases transcribe fair copies, all the while protesting that he was not a clerk.

In Betsy’s account, word of Gourgaud’s complaints reached her brothers’ elderly tutor, Mr Huff. The old man burst in on Napoleon and Las Cases during a dictation session and offered his services. When these were declined, he became distraught and was bustled out by Marchand.