Napoleon's Last Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

rented small but comfortable rooms. It was a common axiom that the longer you spent in Jamestown, the less you felt cramped in by the great vices of rock either side of the town. I myself came to love the place. It was the only town to go to town to.
    The Pavilion would become the engine of Balcombe destiny, but one couldn’t have guessed to see it glimmer on its mound to the South American side of our garden. For now, the garden favoured my nature and gave me room for unruliness. Store ship captains who stayed in the Pavilion with their wives did not do soa second time, and that was probably because of me, my spying, my intrusion, my hectic and impudent nature. I was a child with the gifts to be decorative, but I did not sit still enough to adorn any scene, exterior or interior. The supposed wildness and taste for frank talk I was later accused of had shown its early signs.
    I accepted, as one unthinkingly accepts air for breathing, my parents’ making of their way on the island. My sister Jane was a wonderful playmate, since she lacked all unnecessary competitive spirit, all spitefulness, everything that I had in abundance. She was capable of firmness though, displayed only when essential. We were the Balcombes’ two girl children, and did not question why there was no son.
    Our brother William was delivered at the hands of the island’s English midwife a full four or so years after we came to the island. This birth seemed at least to me to occur with no fuss, no pain, no expectation of loss of mother or child. I had not then discovered for myself that giving birth is the equator, the dangerous passage between the poles of new life and death, which participates of, and can deliver, both.
    I knew nothing. I must have some form of education before I was too old. My parents had resolved that they would take a consistent line on this. No young tutor had answered our newspaper advertisement before we left England. Jane and I had an intermittent series of teachers but tutors were not native to the island and impossible to attract from England or the Cape. At some stage, it was set in stone: we would have to go back to England to pick up some of that commodity.
    In the meantime, to direct my energy and prevent me from mounting on dangerous horses, I was given a docile island-bred gelding unimaginatively, and like half the known world, named Tom. Jane got Augustus, a horse of similar bloodlines, whose ancestors had come from Arabia to Africa, that had first grown shaggy on the African plains and then uncouth on the island. My parents had brought two English horses, a black and a bay, with them, for island horses were considered crasser flesh. But horses like Tom were fair enough for teaching children.
    Until such time as we would be sent to England for our education, the Reverend Jones, the chaplain appointed to the island by the East India Company, who had a large family to support, would be our tutor.
    This Reverend Jones was considered slightly odd because he felt his Church of St Matthews, over in the direction of Plantation House, the governor’s residence, was a rock of certitude attacked from two directions – not just from the direction of insufficiently reverent white inhabitants of the island, but from the paganism of the slaves as well. Major Hodson complained that he never preached on the text ‘Wives, be obedient to your husbands’ or ‘Render under Caesar the things that are Caesar’s …’
    In any case, the Reverend Jones, at my parents’ invitation, rode over to The Briars to visit Jane and me and quizzed us on our catechism, a few answers to which my mother had primed us with, but not sufficient to do more than annoy a clergyman who knew the entirety of it.
    Reverend Jones had a strange way of showing his disappointment at the raw condition of our religious and civil education. He would sigh most frightfully and easily withdraw into sadness. Contradictorily, this