The Sage of Waterloo

by Leona Francombe

  Don’t wait for the mud to dry before you go ahead and do things was, therefore, one of Grandmother’s classic aphorisms, along with: You can always jump higher than you think you can, referring to our ancestors in the chateau hutches, who may or may not have escaped the Hougoumont siege. Like most historical details, it depends on whom you ask.

  It’s a curious fact that no one knows at what time, exactly, the Battle of Waterloo began. Most historians think it was around eleven-thirty in the morning; Old Lavender thought it started at eleven. Her conviction was such that she could have told us it started at midnight and we would have believed her.

  She would have been a natural film director, our grandmother, so sweeping was her vision. The panorama she created spread to the farthest reaches of our fancy, and even with our eyes closed, we couldn’t fathom its limits. Her images were only words, of course. But how they hummed through our waking hours and commandeered our dreams! She cast such a spell that we weren’t sure what was real, and what imagined. We were kept awake by the smell of the wet, trampled barley the soldiers slept on the night before the battle. We felt the floor of the hutch shudder at Napoleon’s magnificent cuirassiers, advancing at full gallop. We heard every strike of the village clock on that June morning—even counted them aloud until eleven, when we imagined the French guns thundering to life.

  Now and then, Grandmother indulged Caillou with his favorite bedtime story. It’s an elusive tale, and one with few hard facts: a French drummer boy survived the bloody siege of Hougoumont’s North Gate. That’s about it. Hardly enough, you would say, to fashion a decent bedtime story. But it was the kind of deceptive triviality that Grandmother so loved, because historians generally tossed it away like those careless pearl fishermen—even misrepresented it—not realizing what bounty they had missed. Old Lavender thus felt free to appropriate the treasure and do with it as she liked.

  The drummer boy himself was never identified. He’d been led into the Hougoumont barn at the height of the battle by Private Matthew Clay, a British soldier who was hardly more than a boy himself at the time, and whose eyewitness account was widely quoted by the Eaton ladies. According to Clay, the drummer boy survived a skirmish at the South Gate, not the North. (Grandmother never understood how historians could be so remiss with their reading.)

  No one knows what happened to the French boy after that. Was he an orphan? An impoverished urchin seeking adventure? Other youngsters had run off to war under such circumstances, after all. Did he ever make his way back to France, or even grow to manhood?

  In the manner of the greatest teachers, Old Lavender placed the pearls before us but made us string and polish them ourselves. She was not without her opinions, though.

  “He may have become a teacher, or a leader . . . even a philosopher,” she offered. “He’d seen the slaughter at Hougoumont with an innocent’s gaze, don’t forget. Like your own.” The comment made us look around the hutch at each other in a new, dawning way. “He could have helped chart another course for humanity, away from its morbid obsession with war.”

  Then her tone cooled, and her eyes revealed deeper significance: “Or he may have perished finding his way off the battlefield. Died of fever . . .” Her pause was exquisitely timed. “And become something else.”

  Our nerves sparked to life. Consider it: from such uncertainty does history take its oxygen. When the what, where, who, how and why of a historical event are known, then all the details are neatly recorded, entombed between the covers of a weighty book and stowed away on a shelf, only to be taken down some twenty years later when someone needs a doorstop. (A reasonable description of Spode, come to think of it.)

  Whatever the details surrounding the mysterious drummer boy, we all sensed that there was something odd about him, as if he’d not quite signed off on his own drama . . . even centuries later. For my part, I secretly believed that providence had brushed against this incident (when not otherwise engaged with the Duke of Wellington, that is), making from it the sort of tantalizing, under­water gleam one can never bring to the surface.

  Old Lavender embellished the story for Caillou, of course. She even became quite poetic, describing the boy’s slight build, his tousled hair, and the large brown eyes that had missed nothing on that humid summer afternoon. The runt invariably dozed off before she’d finished. But the rest of us just weren’t able to sleep, somehow. We would tune our ears warily to the wind outside the hutch, listening for the tap of stick against drum. There were all sorts of stray sounds in the Hougoumont night one couldn’t always explain. Rhythmic tapping was just one of them.

  Mornings were reserved for pop quizzes:

  “What did Wellington have for breakfast?” (Hot, sweet tea and toast. Napoleon, by the way, took his breakfast on silver plate.) “Why was Napoleon such a poor rider?” (He slid around on the saddle too much, wearing holes in his breeches.) “How long was Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher pinned under his dead horse?” (Even longer than it takes to pronounce his name properly.) “What did they use to revive him? (Blücher, not the horse: gin and garlic.)

  I had no difficulty building history around these nuggets. In fact, I often escaped into my creations completely, which was probably not what Grandmother had in mind, crusty realist that she was.

  You see, all of her details moved me, arrested me, spoke to me . . . to the very depths of my soul. I hardly knew which one to choose from. For guaranteed escape, Wellington was always a good bet, so I would track him eagerly as he rode about all day in his plain blue frock coat and bicorne hat, amazed at how such a mythmaker could subsist on just hot tea and toast. Then I would leave the Duke to his reconnoitering for a while and practice pronouncing Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. I never really mastered it, despite all the hours spent trying, thereby gaining a much greater appreciation of the old Prussian general’s predicament. (He was seventy-three at the time.) When those activities paled, I imagined myself boldly escaping from the Hougoumont barn during the fiercest of the fighting, leaping across the chateau garden through a blizzard of bullets, the finger of providence firmly upon me.

  Sometimes, in the sanctum of the hollow, I stole a glance at the long-eared sphinx that was my grandmother and wondered how she could possibly know as much as she did. Anyone can stare for hours through a wire fence, after all, thinking about nothing much. But she had elevated patient observation to the highest art form; she listened, and deliberated, and had detected the unrest in that walled meadow long before any of us were born. It was obvious from her vast knowledge that she enjoyed privileged communion with something or other: Moon, perhaps. But he’s a casual god as these things go, and I’m not sure he was all that keen on historical detail, to be honest, having been so spectacularly absent from one of history’s most famous battles.

  My theory is that Old Lavender used her cunning, and her extreme sensitivity, to glean and intuit. She could read shifts in the air; tremors underfoot; the gestures and regard of passing wildlife. This she did serenely, through countless hours of reflection. I imagine the process was rather like harvesting an orchard by hand, one fruit at a time. Though the orchard at the far end of the Hougoumont meadow has long since disappeared and I cannot prove this hypothesis.

  Any details she couldn’t glean or intuit she learned outright from visitors—the Eaton ladies, chiefly, who made a habit of lingering near the dovecote and sharing their reading. I must admit that I quaked a bit before those singular women, as I often did before Old Lavender herself, even if she happened to be my grandmother. Maybe it was their silver hair and unlined faces, a combination that is rare, I understand, and worthy of attention.

  “Nature never truly recovers from human cataclysms,” Grandmother said one day, to me alone. “Never.” She was using that tone: two parts old sage, one part female warrior, scant affection and no salt. I suspected that she’d picked up some pointers listening to the Eaton ladies.

  “Every creature who was anywhere near Water
loo sensed what was going to happen,” she explained. “If they could, they got out. Those who stayed and survived passed the experience on through collective memory, right down through the generations until the present day. Collective memory . . . and resonance.”

  “Resonance?” I tried to give the word the same weight she had.

  “Of course! Landscapes where great passion has been spilled resonate. Not loudly. But loud enough for most wild creatures to detect. Once set in motion, the vibrations continue forever.”

  Her look was grave. “Yes, William. Forever.” With a pinch of affection she added: “I’m telling you this because I believe you have my gift. We can all pick up vibrations. But you have the ability to interpret them, and pass them on. You should be aware of this now, even though you won’t master your gift for many years. It’s a responsibility, you know. Take great care with it.”

  3

  A curious thing happened on nights of the full moon: Old Lavender would herd us summarily into the hutch even before Emmanuel stopped by and dismiss Spode from his lookout. Then she would linger outside in the run, as if she’d forgotten to reflect on something or other during the day and needed extra time in her hollow. If Emmanuel did turn up, he’d give his usual, cursory look for stragglers, but was often playing a game on his cell phone at the same time and frequently overlooked someone. Old Lavender he steered clear of. Even an oaf could summon the gray cells to fathom that this rabbit, always difficult, was unmanageable by the full moon.

  Did you know there’s a mythical rabbit in the moon? No? Well, there is one. You can trace its head, ears and tail in the various oceans on that heavenly body. Have a look, next time it’s full. Some cultures think the animal is stirring something, or maybe pounding on a mortar. Others believe it is the Great Rabbit Himself—He who created the universe, that is. We were free to interpret the rabbit in the moon however we wished, though I’ve never reached a full understanding of the topic myself, being of modest intellect. But I like to think that since rabbits are generally seen at dawn and dusk, we act as gatekeepers of sorts for the night, and are somehow complicit in the rising and setting of our lunar relative. (This observation took quite a long time for me to formulate, by the way, and I’m rather proud of it.) There’s little doubt that there is a rabbit in the moon. Now I just have to figure out what purpose he serves when he isn’t rising or setting.

  You may think the name of our god—Moon—rather unimaginative. Obvious, even. But you’d be wrong.

  “There’s Moon,” Grandmother used to say. “And there’s the moon. Don’t confuse them. Gods don’t like to be tied down too much to their physical representations, and Moon is no exception. It smacks of idolatry, after all. The rabbit in the moon inspired the idea of our god (and the very tempting supposition that there is one at all). But Moon himself goes wherever he wants, whenever he wants. He’s sometimes not even nearby when the moon is full. An ironic oversight, especially around here . . .”

  We knew exactly what she was getting at. The Hougoumont night was not a normal phenomenon as nights go. How could it be, after what had happened there? The moon had only been a few days shy of full on the eighteenth of June, 1815, though the clouds were heavy and the moonlight unreliable. An insignificant detail, perhaps. Not many historians mention it. But if the full moon is anything, it’s a handy lamp, and for the thousands who lay wounded on the Waterloo battlefield after sundown, their purgatory had only just begun. For the clouds would break from time to time, and when they did, the moon lit the plunderers’ way.

  Even the suggestion of plunderers made us head inside at night, which of course made Old Lavender’s daily herding easier. It didn’t matter that the threat was two hundred years old. She knew we had trouble distinguishing the centuries, and a plunderer was a plunderer, after all. What she wanted to impart was that twilight is a serious time for small animals. Foxes and owls lurk offstage, ever alert for a meal. Thus, strolling and stargazing were not encouraged in the colony (particularly with a lookout like Spode). Captivity tends to dull the senses, and we’d almost forgotten that predators existed at all. We’d grown complacent, I suppose. What better way to teach the dangers of the night, therefore, than with the dread of Napoleonic robbers—even if they hadn’t been seen for some time?

  I didn’t mind going into the hutch during the full moon. The horde, the heat, the stench . . . such things seem normal, even agreeable, when you’re young. It was just sad that no one was ever permitted to appreciate the spectacle of one of our own kind floating in the heavens. How we longed to defy the rule! Temptation sparred mightily with obedience, but eventually the conflict proved tiring, and we always straggled inside to bed.

  “There a fine line between courage and recklessness,” Old Lavender liked to point out. “One day, you may find yourself locked outside at night. You’ll have to find that line very quickly; you’ll have to summon your courage, then slowly rein it in, because otherwise you’ll cross over to recklessness and end up as somebody’s dinner.”

  She would cite the example of Marshal Ney for this lesson. Perhaps she admired him more than we thought. Though she labeled Ney “that spoiled hysteric,” Old Lavender knew that he’d been dealt a bad hand at Quatre Bras.

  The confrontation had occurred two days before the main battle at Waterloo and ended in a bloody stalemate of sorts. Ney’s various orders had come late . . . or not at all. He’d found himself with too few troops to fight Wellington, and even fewer options. “Nothing was going right for Ney on June sixteenth, and history judged him harshly,” Grandmother said. “When Napoleon sent him a message to hurry up, that was the last straw. Ney snapped. He crossed that line into recklessness, ordering an almost suicidal cavalry charge into Allied lines. He survived, though. So remember: If you find yourself shut out at night, think of the Marshal and his very bad day. If he could survive the British army, you have a pretty good chance of surviving one night out of doors.”

  There was a rumor that Grandmother had escaped once.

  Details were sketchy, but according to popular hearsay, one full moon several generations ago, she dug her way out of the enclosure and traversed the Untried, all the way to the eastern wall. No witnesses had ever come forward, and Old Lavender herself never spoke about it. So even though we lived next to the actual source of this legend, we might as well have been looking into a spring from which we were never permitted to drink.

  I knew about it, though.

  That is, I didn’t see her escape, but I knew that she communed with something beyond the enclosure. I couldn’t say how many times this had happened, or over how many years. I’d only defied her orders once, you see.

  The moon was full that night—or nearly. Of that I’m certain, though on all other points my memory is a bit nebulous, because every second I spent outside I was frozen with alarm. Instinct seized my limbs. Had Ney felt this way at Quatre Bras? I wondered. And then: How can I possibly be thinking about Marshal Ney at such a moment? I couldn’t have been bothered about the rabbit in the moon, although there he was, a whimsical gray squiggle on the surface of the glowing orb. Who cared if the squiggle was Moon himself? All I could think of was the darker gray of approaching wings.

  I didn’t see Old Lavender at first. She was in her usual hollow, which I hadn’t expected, somehow. I’d assumed she would have chosen a safer spot: Jonas’s earthworks under the hutch, for example. But there she was, upending all her own edicts, dallying under the full moon in a wide-open place. She was balancing on her hind legs in a stance I didn’t even think she could manage anymore. Both ears were cocked forward. There was a wild, youthful aspect about her.

  I shuffled up and stopped a few feet away. She would surely sense me at any moment, I remember thinking, as the wind was freshening behind me from the north. If so, I had to be ready to dart back into the hutch at once. Grandmother’s punishment could be severe. These were just passing thoughts, however, insignificant before the greater pull I was experiencing: the wild impulse that pl
ayed such havoc with the calm surface I was supposed to possess. Was this my gift kicking in? Surely not. The gift Grandmother had described was one of reflection, of intuition. Not this . . . not an urgent desire to leap over a fence.

  Old Lavender was staring down the stretch of south wall. The moon had risen above the old beech: a harvest moon, overripe, expectant. Deep shadows cut across the silvery Untried. It seemed that light had shed its daytime duties and was doing whatever it fancied. It danced through the loopholes the British Guards had cut in the wall in 1815, and played unnervingly across the two bulbous tombstones of their fallen comrades, surfacing like mammals in a grassy sea. The memorial to the French rose like a buoy and threw a particularly frightening shadow. The monument had a cement eagle perched on top, and from it the moon had fashioned its black double on the grass.

  The whole place was stage-lit, charged.

  But inert.

  Until something moved along the wall.

  I peered where Old Lavender was peering: the movement skirted the tombs, vanished and then, to my horror, suddenly reappeared much closer, sidling slowly along the wall towards the pen. I knew that restless meadow well; I could only imagine that what I was witnessing was simply a manifestation of the usual rustling and sighing we heard each night.

  But the thought rang false, somehow. Maybe I didn’t know the meadow very well after all. The threat of Napoleonic plunderers didn’t seem so far-fetched just then, and as the wind picked up, and the beech branch set up its tapping against the top of the wall, I found myself searching the rhythm for patterns, as if there might be some kind of signal in the sound.