What fine use Charlotte could have made of a lagomorph’s intuition that day! Without it—without being able to discern the exact nature and location of hostilities, or evaluate the depth of anxiety and deception revealed through voice and body language, there was only one sensible thing to do: flee.
Every creature who was anywhere near Waterloo sensed what was going to happen. If they could, they got out . . .
Charlotte Eaton was no Old Lavender. But she knew, even without an accurate reading of the air, that it would have been madness to stay in Brussels any longer.
By the time she and her party had come to this conclusion, however, a stampede was heading for the exits. Not a single horse was available anywhere. Carriages were seized by force. On every corner, a frantic babble of languages lamented, squabbled, exclaimed, implored. No one doubted that evil lurked just outside the city limits, wearing a French uniform. The very idea threatened to shred public order entirely, though as the wagonloads of dead and wounded began to trickle into Brussels, many stoic hearts stayed behind to help.
At the Eatons’ Hôtel de Flandre on the Place Royale, rooms were abandoned in haste, their doors gaping open, candles still burning inside. Below, noted Charlotte, the mistress of the hotel, “with a countenance dressed in woe, was carrying off her most valuable plate in order to secure it, ejaculating, as she went, the name of Jesus incessantly, and, I believe, unconsciously; while the master, with a red nightcap on his head, and the eternal pipe sticking mechanically out of one corner of his mouth, was standing with his hands in his pockets, a silent statue of despair.”
The first wounded stragglers appeared: Prussians and Belgians, each man bearing his own unique horror written in dirt and blood. For a soldier, the sight was as ordinary as a slaughtered ox to a farmer.
But not for an English lady.
“The moment in which I first saw some of these unfortunate people was, I think, one of the most painful I ever experienced,” Charlotte wrote, “and soon, very soon, they arrived in numbers. At every jolt of the slow wagons upon the rough pavement we seemed to feel the excruciating pain which they must suffer.”
The Eatons eventually secured a carriage, and on June 17 they became refugees along with thousands of others. Slowly, haltingly, they made their way to Antwerp, where they had a better chance of finding a boat back to England if things should come to that.
The day was sultry, the journey oppressive and fraught. Grim-faced, each traveler silently bore the weight of the reality unfolding just a few kilometers away, where the wounded lay helpless on the battlefield in the same, blazing heat, without shelter or water. Ladies whose lives had centered on drawing room comforts confronted horrors that would change them forever. For weeks, war to them had just been lively, colorful words. Now they knew the truth: that no civilized language could describe what was happening within earshot.
The amiable Duke of Brunswick was one of the first casualties of Quatre Bras.
The hearty, laughing Highlanders were felled almost to a man.
A stream of misery flooded Antwerp, clogging all available hospitals, hotels, private lodgings, hovels and tents. Wounded soldiers were billeted with ordinary citizens. Those without such luxury languished on doorsteps, under bridges, on open squares. Countless others, abandoned by providence, expired in the backs of the wagons that had dragged them from the field.
French soldiers were among the casualties, and were cared for like the rest. Indeed, war’s perverse logic began to filter through the horror, and little by little, inhumanity revealed itself, until the sight of it, naked, overpowered the hate and suspicion that had caused it in the first place.
Society loosened its guard on all fronts.
“At this momentous crisis, one feeling actuated every heart—one thought engaged every tongue—one common interest bound together every human being. All ranks were confounded; all distinctions leveled; British and foreigners were all upon an equality . . .”
The Eatons found lodging in the same hotel in which the corpse of the Duke of Brunswick occupied a room. The body had already been embalmed, and all evening and well into the night, members of the British and foreign military filed in to pay their respects.
It was past midnight when Charlotte found herself sitting alone, listening to the rain resume with all its former intensity. Through the deluge, other sounds could be distinguished, of alarm filling the streets, and carriages rattling past, and refugees beating on doors in vain attempts to find shelter.
At length the clamor settled, and the downpour muffled the night.
Sometime before dawn, a sharp tapping punctured the stillness: someone was nailing down the coffin of the Duke of Brunswick.
The next morning, the square outside the hotel sprouted with umbrellas as people gathered for news.
It was Sunday, June 18, 1815.
5
One muggy afternoon in June, I was leaning against the chicken wire without a thought in my head when Old Lavender opened a narrow slit of eye.
“You’ll be leaving here soon,” she said.
The comment smacked me unawares, like a falling chestnut.
The sound of her voice was hollow and slightly menacing. I inched away, momentarily stunned by this message from the oracle.
“But I’ll come back someday, won’t I?” I ventured.
“No,” she said.
“Never?”
Old Lavender went back to her thinking. Distant thunder stalked the fields and the air grew heavier.
“Never,” she said at last. Her truths always shut cleanly, like the door of a well-made hutch.
Of course I knew I would never come back. No one ever did. Why should I be any different?
I watched a magpie skitter down over the top of the wall and begin a jaunty walk along the perimeter of the enclosure. He pecked casually, eyeing us as he went. There was something opportunistic about his gait and I shivered, remembering what Old Lavender had said about the crowds that visited the field of Waterloo on the day after the battle. Some were looking for loved ones, of course. But others were simply out to rob the corpses.
“Why do you fight the truth so?” she asked, grinding her teeth on a troublesome corn kernel. “It could be your ally, if only you would let it.”
“How do I let it?”
But she’d dozed off. A few minutes later she resurfaced and said: “Accept it, for one thing.”
“But I don’t want to leave Hougoumont!” I cried. I pushed against the fence again and stared out at the meadow with entirely new eyes. The idea of imminent departure made me feel ill. How could I leave here?
“You will not be leaving alone.”
Hope surged. “Who’s coming with me?” I asked. The thought of having company, even if it meant being crammed into a crate with relatives, and that some of us would end up at the abattoir, opened a window onto this catastrophe.
“That’s not what I was getting at,” Old Lavender bristled. She seemed quite unmoved by the prospect of my leaving. “What I meant was: you will be taking your gift with you—my gift, which will assure you a lifetime of illumination, no matter where you end up. That, and . . . ”
“And?” I was hoping she would come up with something more promising than the gift of picking up errant signals.
“And Hougoumont, of course.”
“Hougoumont?” As if in answer, the humid air stirred and the beech branch gave a faint tap on the wall. In a moment of anguish I thought of Caillou, and how much he had loved the story about the French drummer boy.
Stillness fell again, trailed by a long roll of thunder. A few fat raindrops slapped against the dry earth in the pen.
“Hougoumont is at your core, William. Like a power source. All homes, physical or ephemeral, work that way.”
Old Lavender had certainly read the air correctly, for it was just as she had predicted—only much sooner than I could ever have imagined. The next morning, Emmanuel came at dawn and loaded me into a banana crate along with a larg
e selection of cousins.
I just wish that Spode hadn’t sought me out before the boy scooped me up.
Emmanuel dropped the crate with a significance that sent me leaping pell-mell into every corner to find Old Lavender. How could I leave without saying good-bye? Rain was pulsing in billows from the north now, cloaking the wizard trees and deepening their torpor. You would never have known that the moon had been close to full the night before. “Peculiarly awful” was how Grandmother had described the storm on the eve of Waterloo, and as I understand it, the weather hadn’t improved much by the next morning. So here I was, I thought, at the dawn of my own Waterloo, if not as petrified as the men who had waited all night for battle, at least as wet.
I paid a final visit to the hollow: Grandmother wasn’t there. Anyway, our spot—the cherished site of my awakenings—had been transformed into a small lake. I poked my head into the hutch: perhaps I shouldn’t have, because doing so only confirmed without a doubt that Old Lavender was gone, and destroyed my last remaining hope of nourishing myself for the rest of my life on thoughts of her, resplendent at the center of the colony, the planet around which we all revolved.
Spode materialized from the mist. “Old Lavender disappeared last night, William,” he said, deeply shaken.
I could barely breathe. His comment cemented all my fears. A frenzied spinning gripped my mind: images of foxes and owls tumbled together with Napoleonic plunderers and even with Emmanuel, poor fellow, who in my panic had morphed into a villain and opportunist (unfair, I suppose, but I knew so few people).
“But how?” I gasped.
Spode said nothing. He nudged me into the hutch out of the rain.
Something in my devastation must have brought a whole new facet to light in Spode, for his normally chilly demeanor warmed up. In the next few minutes, he would say more to me than he had in the three years I’d lived in the colony.
“I promised your grandmother I wouldn’t breathe a word of what happened last night, William. So you must respect that.”
“So you know!”
He ignored me and said: “As you will be leaving soon, perhaps you should know about the other time that she . . . well . . . slipped out.”
“The other time?” I echoed.
Spode nodded. “The last time was many years ago, long before you were born. The moon was just a few days shy of full—like last night. But the evening long ago was clear, fresh. Your grandmother was lingering outside alone, as she liked to do on such evenings.” He noted my surprise. “Oh, I used to watch her from the hutch, William—even before I’d been engaged as a lookout. I was so afraid what might happen to her. The mesh over the pen could never hold off a determined predator.”
I experienced a ridiculous twinge of guilt at the thought that he might have seen me creep outside and observe Old Lavender myself on one such occasion. But the twinge passed at once. I was an adult now, and Spode was clearly treating me as an equal.
“The hollow where you spent so much time with her used to be quite a bit deeper, you know,” he continued. “The wire was bent up in that corner, and even for a . . . ” Spode faltered. “For a goodly-proportioned rabbit like your grandmother, escape was possible, though only if you squeezed very hard.”
I recalled Spode’s own successful escape to the cabbages. “Is that how you got out?” I asked.
“Yes. At around the same time she did—before they put the bricks under that part of the fence.” He thought for a moment. “It was nearly twenty years ago now.”
“She must have been really determined to squeeze that hard.”
“Oh, she was! Suddenly, she was out. It was terrifying to witness. I watched the trees every second, of course. They were crisp against the moonlit sky. I would have been able to see the silhouette of wings, swooping down upon her and . . . ”—he faltered again—“taking her away. She took just a few moments to get her bearings. Then she leapt briskly across the meadow, heading past the French memorial and onwards to the east wall. She didn’t once look back. It’s as if she knew exactly where she was going. As if she were answering a summons.” These final words carried a little extra Spode gravity, of the sort he used when trying to make a point that needed a bigger dose than usual.
“How long was she gone?” I asked, for Grandmother had obviously come back that time.
“She returned just before dawn,” Spode said. “And she was . . . changed, somehow.”
“Had she seen anyone?”
“She implied that she’d seen one of our kind.” He paused. “And one of theirs.”
“A person? Who?”
Spode didn’t answer.
I hardly knew how to react to all this. It seemed strange that Spode should be relating Grandmother’s escapade of twenty years ago, and not her flight of the night before, into the storm. The thought of her heading off into that driving rain distracted me from Spode’s story. And deeper questions lurked in the wings.
Old Lavender had never mentioned escape to me, past or future. She didn’t live completely in the physical world, as you know, but seemed to come and go daily from some other, less earthbound place. Why would she go to all the trouble of escaping—of digging a hole, slipping past Emmanuel or devising any other cumbersome means of liberation—when all she had to do was slip away in her mind? Besides me (and I say this with humility, as I was still an apprentice), the only other member of the colony who might have understood this was Spode himself, and even then, despite his erudition, his thoughts could be decidedly lead-footed.
Then he said something that has stayed with me always, though I’m pretty sure he was quoting Old Lavender: “At moments like that, William, when you muster the courage to attempt the unimaginable, the consequences are so often on your side. It’s as if good fortune is actually programmed to coincide with great risk.”
“But what happened last night, Spode? Did you see her leave? Did you see anyone else?”
There would be no more answers. Emmanuel’s hand closed around me—rather meatier than Wellington’s providential digit, I imagine—and just like that, my old life ended.
On the way to the market, jostling next to my companions in the crate, I tried in vain to digest Spode’s story. Little about it seemed credible, least of all the emotion with which that fusty elder had told his tale. But emotions aside, I had to remember that this was Spode, archivist sans pareil. His attention to detail was legendary. If he said that Old Lavender had escaped many years before my birth, and that she had encountered another rabbit (along with a human of some sort), my instinct would be to believe him.
The farmer’s truck trundled up through the woods and across the former Allied ridge. Heavy rain had turned the unpaved track into what it probably had looked like two hundred years ago. The truck dropped like a stone into brimming, artillery-sized craters.
The jostling shifted a few gray cells. I recalled that the moon had been close to full the previous night. And it hadn’t escaped my notice that this was the month of June (although I couldn’t tell you what date, exactly). Maybe Old Lavender had been preparing herself for this particular alignment of circumstance: Moon approaching full. Torrential rain. June.
We bumped past the Visitors’ Center and Lion’s Mound and turned left onto the Brussels road, and as the gray cells shifted again, I thought of the night I’d illicitly observed my grandmother: her heightened energies, and what surely could have been interpreted as intense longing.
And those shapes.
At the time, I could only explain them away as tricks of the air—visible exhales of the Hougoumont night.
As if she were answering a summons.
Had Old Lavender finally gone to join those shapes?
She couldn’t have left by the same route she had taken twenty years ago, clearly. The fencing had been reinforced, and bricks added.
How did she get out last night, then?
I began to tremble as another thought surfaced: Had someone taken her away?
The truck
entered the city limits and approached the market, and these questions gave way quite naturally to other, less specific ones, as if, my fate drawing near, the Hollow Way were meandering into a higher arena. The view was definitely better from here, that’s for sure. And existential questions relaxed a bit: destiny’s whereabouts didn’t seem nearly as pressing as Old Lavender’s at that moment, for instance. I couldn’t help wondering, though: Is providence a relative thing? Is my providence—or yours, for that matter—less significant than the providence that had touched the Duke of Wellington?
Reassurance often comes from the most unlikely sources. As Emmanuel was grabbing for me in the pen, I distinctly remembered him saying: “Allez, mon petit. Everything will be all right.” He seemed unusually well informed, and it did make me wonder whether Moon hides wisdom in simpletons for a reason.
I suppose that what happened to me at the marché des abattoirs could be called providential, even though the fate of Europe didn’t hang in the balance. For how else can you explain being crammed into a banana crate with a heaving mass of your own kind one moment, and trucked to a Brussels market with a decidedly ominous name, and the next moment finding yourself in a quiet garden with two trees and a perfectly acceptable patch of grass? From hell to nirvana, you might say. And in just under two hours, including the transportation. I don’t know. I’m over eighty in your mathematics, they say, and I still don’t have an answer. The abattoir market does, as its name suggests, sell meat. But there are also vegetables, clothing, trinkets and pets on offer, and it was never clear if the items in this last category, when not sold in their living state, were then sent to the abattoir across the place to be sold as something else. How is it that I didn’t have to make that momentous journey?
The Sage of Waterloo Page 6