Wilks learned from the captain of the Icarus that a retinue was coming with the prisoner, not only his officers and servants but also some aristocratic Frenchwomen. He thought that Longwood House, the lieutenant-governor’s isolated summer residence, could be a possibility, but it was badly in need of repairs.

And what of Bonaparte’s Austrian wife, the former empress Marie Louise—would she be expecting to join him, although she had declined to do so on Elba? Rumour had it that the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Metternich, had thoughtfully organised a handsome aide-de-camp for her, Count von Neipperg, who had lost no time in becoming her lover; he was reputed to be ‘a perfect serpent in matters of seduction’.11 But if the lady chose to make the voyage, she was authentic royalty, the daughter of the Austrian Emperor, and conditions must meet her satisfaction.

With the fleet imminently arriving under the command of the rear-admiral, there would also be another 2000 sailors and soldiers and the massive logistical exercise of feeding them all. Most of the island’s food came from the Cape of Good Hope and shortages were chronic. It would be a challenge for the commissary-general and storekeeper, who allocated provisions brought by the twice-yearly storeship, and for Solomons Merchants and William Balcombe, the Company sales agent with a providore business on the side.

In fact, the merchants recognised splendid commercial opportunities in the new situation. Balcombe was pleased; as well as his providore business, he owned the Union brewery supplying beer to the garrison, and had an orchard and large vegetable garden at his home, The Briars. He would soon, like the Solomons, take advantage of the increase in the island’s population by doubling his prices. But there were negative implications for the merchants as well: with the island removed from the jurisdiction of the East India Company and patrolled by the Royal Navy, ships of other flags would be unable to call for water, victualling and trading, thereby limiting business. However, Balcombe was a man who looked in every setback for an opportunity and usually succeeded in finding one.

Few people were more agitated by the news than Balcombe’s younger daughter Betsy. Just five months earlier, she and her sister Jane had arrived back at the island with their mother from school in England.12 Believing Bonaparte was still incarcerated on Elba it had at last seemed safe to make the voyage. At their Nottinghamshire boarding school the girls had heard of Bonaparte’s outrages, the lands laid waste, the innocent souls massacred and, almost certainly, the whispered stories of unspeakable deeds perpetrated on young girls. The yellow cover of a contemporary English children’s primer bore a picture of Bonaparte brandishing a cat-o’-nine-tails, and nannies warned disobedient children that he would come down the chimney to snatch them.13 Betsy, a pretty adolescent with blonde curls, always a prankster and mischief-maker, was certain to have been chided by some grim teacher with a warning much in currency at the time, ‘Be good or Boney will get you!’, or by the more savage ‘Limb from limb he’ll tear you, just as pussy tears a mouse!’14

In 1812, her teachers had spoken gravely of his Russian campaign, how the buildings in Moscow were set on fire to repel him, and the devastating retreat of his great army in the snow. Hundreds of thousands of his soldiers died of starvation and frostbite, a horror that Betsy could not comprehend. What upset her most were the stories of the poor horses, not properly shod, slipping on ice and left to die or hacked at for food while still alive. And Bonaparte rode safely back to Paris in a carriage! She hated him! She knelt in church with the other girls and prayed for the successful progress of the war and a righteous victory for the great British Empire. But at night she tossed and turned in her narrow bed and the ogre with protruding teeth and one flaming red eye returned, his vast cape shadowed Europe and her own fevered thoughts; he circled like a vulture, swooping to leave battered, bleeding bodies and screaming horses in the snow. When she cried out, Jane would creep across the dormitory to hug her and smooth her hair.

And now here he was at her island home, walking right past her, the monster of her nightmares.

CHAPTER 2

THE PRISONER

From the deck in the dawn light, the island of St Helena appeared as a smudge on the grey horizon of the South Atlantic, a brooding apparition, something from Grimm. Another plunge and it was gone in a haze of sea mist and spume, a chimera. As we chugged closer, all that I’d read of its infamous, forbidding appearance could not prepare me for the starkness of those sheer basalt cliffs, their ridges shrouded in mist, plunging over 300 metres to murderous foaming rocks. All of us on deck were subdued.

‘It consists of one vast rock,’ wrote an 1815 visitor, ‘perpendicular on every side, like a castle, in the middle of the Ocean, whose natural walls are too high to be attempted by scaling ladders; nor is there the smallest beach except at the Bay . . . which is fortified with a strong battery of large cannon, and further defended by the perpetual dashing of prodigious waves against the shore, which, without further resistance, makes the landing difficult.’1

I was on the island’s own vessel, subsidised by the British government, RMS St Helena, the last operational Royal Mail ship in the world. There were 88 on board for this voyage, two-thirds of them St Helenians, or ‘Saints’ as they call themselves, descended from people stolen from the East Indies, Madagascar and Africa during two centuries of slave trading. It had taken five days to come from Cape Town, 3100 kilometres to the south-east, following the Benguela current, as did the great wandering albatrosses which occasionally and magically swooped in our wake.

We made a semi-circumnavigation north to the island’s only town and shipping roadstead, and a pod of some two hundred dolphins leaped and plunged beside us, the essence of life and joy. But as I gazed at those barren brown escarpments it seemed hard to credit that humans lived somewhere beyond them, that trees and grass grew, that birds sang. The island seemed saurian, like an ancient, hulking giant tortoise.

‘I almost feel sorry for Napoleon,’ I said.

‘He was a prisoner,’ growled an Afrikaner passenger, ‘he wasn’t coming here for any damned holiday. They should have shot him.’

‘The morning was pleasant, and the breeze steady,’ wrote William Warden, HMS Northumberland’s surgeon. ‘At dawn we were sufficiently near to behold the black peak of St Helena. Between eight and nine we were close under the Sugar-Loaf Hill. The whole of the French party had quitted their cabins, with the exception of Napoleon, and taken their respective stations.