The Sage of Waterloo Read online

  Oddly, Old Lavender settled back onto all fours at that point, as if she’d found whatever it was she’d been looking for. Perhaps she’d deciphered a message of some sort, and was reassured that all was well.

  The tapping ceased.

  I could make out two distinctly denser patches against the wall now—one slender and taller; the other low-slung, pale. Old Lavender leaned toward them. Both forms swelled from the shadows, then melted away.

  Late November: dusk. I was daydreaming near the chicken wire before supper when Grandmother bumped against me rather heavily. “Don’t you ever see them, William?” she asked, irritated.

  What was she talking about?

  “No” seemed the safest answer, so I said it.

  “Well, don’t you feel them, then? This is the perfect time of day for it.”

  “I . . . I don’t think so.” Then, weakly: “Who?”

  My mind turned uneasily to the night of the full moon, and those shapes against the wall.

  “Close your eyes,” she snapped.

  I did. But all I could think about was dinner. It was late, chilly, and I was too hungry for a lesson. The wind threw a clutch of dry leaves against the fence and befuddled me even further.

  “You’re not focusing,” she said. How did she know? “That’s better,” she said. Right again.

  She nosed my fur in the wrong direction, roughly. “Almost six thousand men died in this place on a single day.”

  I knew that already. Most of the time, any mention of the topic prompted much lurid banter in the colony. Jonas, in his element, would puff himself up and expound on the stacks of human corpses robbed of their clothes, and the communal fosse by the South Gate where they’d been dumped and burned. Why is it that the young always want to know about such things?

  “Observe properly!” Grandmother hectored. “You may not be able to sense what I do without many more years of practice. But any novice can detect something unusual in the air around here.”

  She’d taught us the theory about that sort of observation. Perception is rarely immediate, she said. It takes time. First you must tune your senses: You must slow all bodily and mental movement, and align your ears properly. And don’t look at things from too close up. (If any creature needs reading glasses, it’s rabbits.) It takes time to open up a space inside yourself wide enough to let ideas in and shed light on them.

  Who could forget our first tutorial, when Old Lavender had us all stare up at the chapel spire for a whole hour?

  “I told you several times what happened there,” she said. “Weren’t any of you listening? The wounded men were dragged inside the chapel; the fire licked through the door and singed only the feet of the crucifix. Then the flames suddenly retreated. Why? Open up your minds! Study the details. Be on the lookout for vibrations. The chapel was the site of great passion, after all. Was it the human god who saved it?” She paused to chew on some dry pellets. “Destiny?” With resignation she asked: “And what about our god? Would he have even arrived in time to put out the fire?”

  Jonas managed about seven minutes of observation. Caillou needed to use the toilet after three. Spode, probably to impress his inamorata, continued for two hours, long after Old Lavender herself had called it a day and gone off to lunch. For my part, I hung on for a good half an hour, after which my haunches began to quiver with that familiar restiveness and I moved off to study the meadow.

  There was something about Grandmother’s tone now, as the keen November wind came off the fields, that made me feel as if I were learning the observation lesson all over again.

  She ruffled my fur sternly. “Listen for the traffic of souls, William.” There was an uncharacteristic, pleading note in her voice. “There are enough of them around to leave a faint heaviness on the air, like dew. Surely you, of all my kin, must feel it. They’re quite spacious, those fields. But that’s still quite a lot of traffic.”

  “Can you see them, Grandmother?”

  “Sometimes. Through that breach in the eastern wall.” She indicated the tumbled-down bricks at the far end of the meadow. Was that what she looked at when the moon was full?

  I was quite familiar with that breach. In dreamy moments, I occasionally imagined the Duke of Wellington riding by it on his way through the orchard.

  “Guilt keeps them from settling,” she went on. “They care far less about being killed than they do about having killed.”

  How she knew this, I can’t tell you. But she would say things like that and then not speak for three days. All sorts of disturbances moved into her silence then—unidentified things, of the sort one didn’t want to contemplate when the shadows lengthened along the south wall.

  Emmanuel hadn’t the wits to look after us properly, he was too old for school, and he was certainly too fat to ride a bicycle. But he was obliged to do one or another of these things occasionally, and it was on the morning he had to do all three that the lapse occurred.

  We weren’t sure what to make of the open gate at first.

  We were suddenly, suspiciously, free. The gate lolled in the wind and let out a mournful sigh, as it always did when open. But it was strange: after the initial incredulity, we weren’t very happy about this state of affairs. It’s often like that, isn’t it? You want something so badly that you can think of nothing else; you lust after it selfishly, and daydream about it, and indulge the idea at odd hours until you’re only half engaged with the world around you. The want turns to obsession, and the obsession leaves you exhausted. Then the miracle happens: you get what you wanted. But after all that, you wonder why it isn’t quite what you’d had in mind.

  All I can say is that on that October morning, with the mist curling like winding sheets through the ancient Hougoumont trees, I caught my first glimpse of Moon and didn’t much like what I saw.

  We all milled uncertainly in the opening that had once been a gate—that now, oddly, looked incomplete, as if the gate really should have been there. We could still hear the clatter of Emmanuel’s bicycle fading away down the lane. Clearly he thought that he’d finished for the day and would not be coming back.

  “Freedom is not always what it’s made out to be,” Old Lavender liked to say, perhaps to make our lifelong incarceration less onerous. “It may be a good thing in the abstract, but on the ground, someone always ends up paying for it.”

  Little did we know that her words were about to be put to the test. Surely I wasn’t the only one recalling her standard admonitory triplet: “Look up! Use your nose! Make connections!” (Especially when things don’t seem right, she often added.) I do remember that in all the confusion at the open gate, quite a few of us were looking up, noses twitching at twice the normal speed, trying desperately to make connections. Something, after all, was far from right.

  Perhaps the oddest thing about that moment of dubious liberty was that Old Lavender herself was nowhere to be seen. She’d retired to the hutch—something that only nursing mothers or the sick did during the day. Another one of her cryptic signals, I thought later . . . one that I should have been able to read.

  We operated through brainless instinct from that point onward. In a rush of impulse—and probably to impress Jonas—I ventured out of the gate first. Jonas followed at my heels. It was as if William of Orange and Marshal Ney were going nose-to-tail on some historical nightmare of a mission.

  Unquestioning, everyone filed after us, Caillou in the rear. We crept along the interior wall of the compound to the barred gate through which cows passed back and forth between barns and meadow. Even then, the farm was subsiding into ruin. The bricks of the wall bulged with soft, mossy tumors. We had to flatten ourselves to traverse a grotesque tangle of fading, sky-high nettle and prickly vines. Ivy choked every available pasage.

  We made it through this jungle and slipped easily under the cow barrier.

  Suddenly there we were, in the scarred heart of Hougoumont.

  The magnitude of it must have struck us all simultaneously, for once we’d ski
rted the little chapel, we all stopped together in a tight huddle, spellbound. It was as if a host of bedtime stories had come disturbingly alive. History itself seemed to reach down with a cool hand. There, ahead of us, was the great barn with its open porch; to the right, the track leading to the infamous North Gate; on our left, the gardener’s house, shuttered and inscrutable. Under our feet, cobblestones whirled in ancient patterns. Grass and moss had pushed between them and turned most of the courtyard into a dreamy wash of green. Someone had left a wreath of poppies against the wall of the chapel. Aside from this crimson tingle of life, there was no movement, no sound. Even death, having once gorged here, seemed absent.

  Caillou broke the silence: “Is that the barn where they took the French drummer boy?”

  “They probably took him into the chateau for safety,” Spode sniffed, ever the professor.

  “I thought the chateau was in flames,” Jonas challenged.

  “That was later . . . ” Spode waffled.

  “Where did he come from?” Caillou asked. “What was his name?”

  “No one knows,” Spode said.

  “I don’t like it here,” moaned Berthe, trembling violently.

  We were all speaking in a hush, as the atmosphere pressed heavily and seemed to demand it. There was no wind in the courtyard, the autumn mist just a gauzy thickening in the air. Perhaps it was fitting that Old Lavender should come to mind at that moment, curiously absent though she was from this madcap adventure. A place of great conflict should bring on great reflection. If it doesn’t, all might as well have happened in vain. I’m not sure if Grandmother’s words had entered the others’ heads, but they were certainly echoing in mine, and it did seem a sacrilege, somehow, not to pause in the middle of that courtyard and honor the blood that had been spilled there.

  We all took a moment. But only one, mind you, as no rabbit can ever feel safe in an open space.

  The Eaton ladies always idled in the courtyard whenever they visited. They sometimes murmured the words of their mentor, Charlotte Eaton, who herself had visited Hougoumont just a month after the battle:

  “The château itself, the beautiful seat of a Belgic gentleman, had been set on fire by the explosion of shells during the action, which had completed the destruction occasioned by a most furious cannonade. Its broken walls and falling roof presented a most melancholy spectacle . . . its huge blackened beams had fallen in every direction upon the crumbling heaps of stone and plaster, which were intermixed with broken pieces of the marble flags, the carved cornices, and the gilded mirrors that once ornamented it.”

  (All this may seem like a lot of mental activity for a single moment, but it’s amazing what the brain can do under pressure.)

  The moment, however, was past. No historical importance could detain us any longer. We broke our huddle and filed past the gardener’s house to the South Gate. Arriving there occasioned another, astonished halt: that gate, too, was open! Had Emmanuel sunk to a new, delinquent low? Was the farmer ill? Uncertain, we skittered over the cobbles and massed beneath a stone archway.

  The stone archway! I thrilled. This must be where Private Matthew Clay had come across the drummer boy! The thought gave a satisfying crack, like a tough seed, though the tasty historical kernel soon vanished, and plain old terror took its place.

  Caillou stepped out first. Not because of any superior boldness, of course, but because, as the runt of the colony, he’d been caught up in the mass of swirling fur and jettisoned out the other side like the pebble after which he’d been named. How could Old Lavender have known to call him what she did? The creature was now bolting toward the fallow field behind the chestnuts. With inappropriate whimsy, I wondered whether Grandmother had predicted all along that this fateful day would come, and in anticipation named Caillou after the headquarters Napoleon had set up on the day before his downfall.

  We stared after the runt, too terrified to even utter his name. He’d scaled the ditch at the edge of the field now, and was advancing in pitiful, jerky leaps across the vast Untried. His pale gray coat would have been visible for miles.

  Was I the first to notice the hawk? I don’t remember. As instructed by Old Lavender, I was obediently looking up, even though everyone else was disobeying her and tracking the progress of poor Caillou. So yes, I probably was the first to spot the hunched form at the top of one of the chestnuts.

  Allow me to pause here for the sake of those trees.

  Those trees . . .

  Witnesses, judges, confessors. Call them what you will, but they cannot be ignored.

  The principal gates of Hougoumont are on the north and south sides of the farm. The first French assault came from the south, through woods that are now gone. Three tortured chestnuts are the only remaining trees from that forest and stand just across the courtyard from the South Gate. Two of the them, in death, seem to have hardened into wax effigies. Barkless, they are as pale as the naked corpses that were thrown into the pit at their feet. They resemble thick-bottomed obelisks, their trunks tapering at the top, and they are monumental to behold.

  The third chestnut is alive—though barely, as if through the fumbling intervention of somebody’s god. In autumn, its leaves become mottled like the hands of an old farmer, and chestnuts hang in valiant clusters, undersized and sickly. But like its fellows, this tree bears the scars of deep wounds and has its own, lifeless crest. It seems to be slowly, eloquently dying from the top down.

  The living chestnut is plainly visible from the South Gate, so we could see perfectly well that on its summit, stenciled against the sky, sat an agent of death.

  We could also still see Caillou—those of us not preoccupied with matters in the tree, that is. He was tripping over the deep ruts in the field now, panic having entirely supplanted any trace of rational thought—of instinct, even. That instinct should have warned him to flatten himself against the earth; or at least reminded him to be on the lookout for any nearby rabbit warren and dart down it. I found myself eyeing not only the hawk, but the milky sky behind him, wondering whether Moon might make an appearance at some point, this being an opportune moment.

  The hawk seemed in no hurry. He floated languorously down from his perch with a soft thurrup of wings, as if he weren’t an exquisitely tuned hunting machine at all, but just a pigeon on its beat, coming in to check for stray seeds.

  There was a single, terrifying screech . . . the sort of sound that haunts you for the rest of your days.

  The milling in the archway froze, as if a wand had passed overhead. Defying all instinct, I pushed my way out of the huddle in time to see the hawk rise up high over the south wall. He was slowed by his burden, and I could just make out a flaccid, pale gray object hanging from his talons before the mist swallowed them both, fur and feather alike.

  We remained in tight formation for some time. It struck me later that we must have resembled one of those squares Wellington’s troops adopted in the thick of battle. Such formations never seemed very fair to those on the outside of the square, in my opinion, which was where I happened to find myself at that moment, though Old Lavender had assured me, during one of my Waterloo lessons, that Wellington’s squares had been very effective for stopping cavalry charges. Which wasn’t much comfort when facing a hawk, mind you, but one had to forgive Old Lavender for not being versed in all aspects of battle formation.

  I peered out at the belly of mist that had swallowed Caillou and his destiny. Almost immediately, the mist began to come apart and drift away over the fields, as if it had accomplished its role as one of the dramatis personae and was heading for intermission. I tracked the wisps of ghostly air, hoping for a glimpse of that enigmatic fellow Old Lavender had mentioned so many times. But Moon, if he’d come at all, had left quickly. It was tempting to imagine that he had slipped in invisibly, taken Caillou by the paw and led him gently away, as Grandmother said he did when someone died. But now we knew for a fact that that wasn’t true. Two dozen of us had been looking up, after all; we’d seen exact
ly what had happened. Perhaps Moon had suddenly taken on the guise of a hawk, and Caillou’s terrible shriek had been one of transfiguration, not anguish. But that would have made for some complicated scripture, and such matters are complicated enough.

  A musket ball to the ribs; a hawk swooping in . . . death comes in an infinite array of disguises. But once arrived, its face is always the same—or so it seems to me. I’d seen enough inert lumps of fur pushed against the fence, and smelled that peculiar gaminess in the hutch to know when death had stopped by. I didn’t actually see Caillou after he’d died, it’s true. But I feel sure that even he, so quickly reduced to a meal, would have briefly taken on that aura everyone does at some point—a magnetic stillness more powerful than loss, or grief, or even love: the handprint of rapturous homecoming.

  There wasn’t a moment to lose. We headed back to the enclosure posthaste, scrabbling over the slippery cobbles, making evasive leaps in case there were other hawks in the vicinity who had heard about the fine dining at Hougoumont. We slunk back through the open gate and filed directly into the hutch—unusually, as it was only midday. Emmanuel wouldn’t be back again for another day or two, depending on whether or not he remembered having come that morning, and the farmer rarely checked in on us. That meant that the gate of the enclosure would remain open all night.

  Old Lavender greeted us curtly, then resumed a stony silence in her own reserved corner of the hutch. No one uttered Caillou’s name—it didn’t seem necessary, somehow. Old Lavender seemed to know already what had happened; I’m sure she’d known for some time that the runt was doomed. No one uttered my name, either, thank heavens, although Grandmother would find out soon enough who had led the excursion.

  When she emerged the next day, she went directly to the hollow and immersed herself in reflection. Her ears assumed their customary, skewed position. But her aspect was more forbidding, somehow. Warily, I settled against the earth a bit farther from her than usual. Had yesterday’s disaster prompted thoughts of her own legendary escape? I wondered. My imagination raced. I couldn’t help speculating that Grandmother’s escapade, festering off-limits in colony lore, had left something unfinished at the core of her being that continued to work on her day and night. Our disaster had clearly added to the burden. Her silence was weighted with all the lessons she had taught us, as obviously as if she had hung a reminder on the chicken wire. Indeed, we seemed to be amply punished just by her mute, smelly displeasure.