The Sage of Waterloo

by Leona Francombe

  “You know about the Battle of Waterloo, then?” I asked, though the blackbird oozed sophistication and it was obvious he would know something about local history.

  “Nature never truly recovers from human cataclysms,” he said distantly.

  I was flabbergasted. To hear Old Lavender’s words recycled in this way, by someone I hardly knew, was astonishing, especially when he added: “Every creature who was anywhere near Waterloo sensed what was going to happen. The experience was passed down the generations through collective memory, right up to the present day.”

  I observed my interlocutor more closely. There was something about him I couldn’t quite place. He seemed not only well versed in history, but to be moving gracefully to its rhythm. He had about him the aura of another epoch. In a playful moment, I even considered that his bearing would not have been at all out of place at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball. The way the creature was turning his head and flicking a lustrous wing conjured all the courtliness of that event. In another incarnation, he might have been a prince. Or a duke . . .

  On a whim, I decided to call him Arthur (“the Duke of Wellington” seeming a tad too formal). Just to myself, of course, as he didn’t seem keen on introductions, and I wasn’t sure about his sense of humor. He was somewhat aloof, with that touch of superiority so discouraging to less adept conversationalists like me. I hunkered down against the wet grass and swiveled my right ear in a fair imitation of Old Lavender, hoping to appear more sophisticated.

  “Do you have collective memories in your own family?” I ventured.

  The bird tilted his head. (A bicorne hat would have looked quite dashing on it.) “My great-uncle lives with his family behind the parking lot of the Wellington Café, right on the edge of the battlefield. Humans have short memories, don’t they?”

  The question jerked me from my air-reading pretensions. I’d passed the Wellington Café in the farmer’s truck on the way to the marché. I suppose I’d been too engrossed in my reflections at the time to consider the callousness of building a café on a scene of carnage.

  “People lounge on the terrace, drinking their coffees,” Arthur went on, “clueless that they’re facing a field where the rye was completely flattened by corpses of their own kind, shot and hacked to death. Oh, they think they know what happened there. But their evolutionary progress seems to be in reverse. They gradually forget the magnitude of what they’ve done—or at least, they’ve managed to disguise their violence as glory—so eventually, in the course of time, they can no longer feel what still hangs in the air. Not the way we do. So they don’t have any qualms about building cafés on burial grounds. They’ve never really stamped out their zeal for warmongering—­quite the opposite, actually. They can’t seem to get enough of it.”

  I sat up straighter, impressed that some of the lessons from my rather insular upbringing might be shared by more worldly creatures.

  “Anyway,” Arthur continued, “this uncle of mine had a grandparent, who had a cousin, whose very distant grandfather witnessed Quatre Bras. That’s how we keep our memory going.”

  “I was brought up by someone like that,” I said dreamily. “I mean, she was an expert on Waterloo. She also has a special . . . well . . .” I paused. “Gift. She—my grandmother—can read those things you were talking about. In the air, in the soil . . . everywhere.”

  The mention of Old Lavender seemed to interest the bird. He approached me, his jet-colored feathers gleaming opulently through the hazy air. At that moment, Arthur didn’t seem to be a bird at all, but a being of stature, refinement. The namesake I’d given him out of sheer whimsy actually seemed to suit him.

  I allowed myself a moment of reverie at the thought of the Wellington Café. The place was just up the valley from Hougoumont. The Duke had ridden his chestnut horse, Copenhagen, across the very field Arthur had described. (A coffee might have been a welcome addition to that breakfast of hot tea and toast, come to think of it.) I knew from my grandmother that Wellington’s strategic ridge had been located just beyond where the tourist attractions now stand. In fact, the great conical mound with the lion on top was constructed with earth taken from that ridge.

  I chewed absently on a dry leaf and considered Arthur’s oversized personality. It seemed to me that maybe the human sect I mentioned earlier might have a point after all with its wheel of life: that maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss birds—or any other creature, for that matter—just in case, in an auspicious spin of the wheel, they may have led the life of a famous duke.

  “Is she still living, your grandmother?” Arthur asked.

  “Yes!” My heart surged. Then the old Hougoumont ache washed over me: “Well, I’m really not sure.”

  In truth, I hadn’t had any news of the physical Old Lavender since I’d left the farm, though her other manifestations were not infrequent. I’d already experienced unprecedented boldness that evening, venturing into the twilight. My audacity had been handsomely rewarded by this extraordinary encounter. So it seemed only natural to ride the wave and ask: “Would it be possible, as you are airborne, to find news of her? She’s called Old Lavender. And there are other family members, too . . .”

  Arthur stepped closer, as if approaching a partner for a dance. He then turned suddenly and made a rush across the lawn. “Old Lavender,” he muttered. “Hougoumont. I’ll do my best.”

  And with that he rose effortlessly to the top of the wall, fluttered his tail and was gone.

  There are only two things in life, William: earth and sky. We live in one, then we go to the other. There is no in-between. This ancient rabbit philosophy is still taught in some traditional colonies. I grew up with it, and never questioned it. But as I watched Arthur skim off into the twilight, part wing, part air, I found myself wondering about my received wisdom. For here was a creature who actually seemed to inhabit the in-between—and with such ease that I imagined him slipping casually from earth to sky at least a couple of times during the day, and again for his evening amusement, without showing the slightest sign of fatigue.

  I trudged back to the hutch, my sodden fur anchoring me securely to earth. As the sage said, there’s no in-between for rabbits.

  9

  It took some years of training after leaving Hougoumont to successfully practice what Old Lavender had preached about finding beauty. Fundamental to her teaching was the art of solitude, so it was indeed ironic that my persistent state of solitude usually occasioned only chronic heaviness, and not the lightness of being at the crux of her lesson.

  Ugliness. Sublimation. Appreciation. Contentment. I just couldn’t get past the first signpost, somehow.

  One afternoon in late summer, I was circling my gaze around a particularly unattractive patch of mold on the wall when Arthur sailed in.

  I whirled about, flustered. “I was involved in a delicate mental exercise before you scared me out of my wits!”

  He made a gallant step backwards and apologized.

  I stared hotly back at the wall. The mold hadn’t budged. In fact, it was uglier and more offensive than ever, and as far as I could tell, would always be so. The last object I had successfully used as a springboard to the spiritual had been the discarded toilet, and that was three weeks ago, when in a rare moment of transfiguration a ray of sunlight had fallen directly on it. Old Lavender would probably have considered that cheating.

  I set to grazing not far from where Arthur was spearing a patch of bare earth. We continued like that for some time, chewing and spearing in silence. Arthur seemed subdued, serious. I’d noticed that, together with the rest of his kin, he had almost entirely stopped singing, a sure sign that autumn was approaching and the frivolities of spring were about as far away in both calendar directions as they could be.

  Finally I braved the question. Funny, isn’t it, how the things we are most eager to know are so often the things we don’t want to know at all?

  “Do you have any news of Hougoumont?” I asked.

  Arthur quick-st
epped across the lawn, then made several elegant, dance-like moves towards the peony and back. With his formal attire and urbane poise, he was suddenly so much like his namesake that my opinion of the human animal momentarily brightened.

  “I went there myself,” he said.

  I stared at him. “But it’s several kilometers away!”

  “Clearly you don’t have wings,” he quipped, stretching one out langourously.

  My spirit soared. I couldn’t believe my good fortune, standing nose-to-beak with someone who had actually been to my birthplace! Breathlessly, I ran through a roll call of every member of the colony from my time there, using the most vivid descriptions possible in case Arthur had dismissed them all as just a bunch of faceless rodents. “You know, the one who bounces off the fence . . . ” and “Surely you noticed the elderly gentleman, and the homely one with drooping jowls . . . ”

  “Yes, yes,” Arthur said, discreetly impatient. “I met all of them.”

  I hesitated.

  “Well, all but one.”

  We paused as Old Lavender’s name silently registered. Somehow I knew she hadn’t come back.

  “She was never seen again,” Arthur said softly.

  “She disappeared on the night before I left,” I said.

  How long had it been? With difficulty I tried to assemble the years I’d been gone from Hougoumont. But I had no idea how long I’d been living in Brussels. City seasons don’t seem to have the same dimensions as country ones, somehow. Or perhaps it’s just that all the dramatics that mark country days—wind, rain, snow, ice, darkness—are shrugged off as nuisances in the city and life continues regardless, though it’s a pale half-life in comparison, in my opinion. And though I lifted my nose to the sky countless times a day in the city, studying the circumstances, each time the cycle of the year finished and the seasons began again, I grew more and more hazy as to how many cycles had gone before.

  “I heard news in the woods near the old sunken way,” said Arthur. “Something big happened at Hougoumont, apparently.”

  The tips of my ears went cold. “What do you mean?” I assumed he was not referring to the big thing that had happened at Hougoumont two hundred years ago. Most animals have a slightly more modest interpretation of that adjective than you people do. “Big” describes being hauled off to the abattoir, for instance. Not a major European battle.

  “Something . . . inexplicable,” Arthur answered.

  “Inexplicable?” My voice was barely audible.

  “I had the same reaction,” he said. “And I’m not one for fanciful stories.”

  It was true that Arthur was a consummate pragmatist—something about his relentless efficiency, I suppose, and singularity of purpose. But then again, there was that poignant singing. He couldn’t have been entirely without fantasy.

  “The weather was awful on the night your grandmother disappeared,” he said.

  “Yes, yes, I know! I was there.” I was impatient for new facts. “It was probably as bad as it was in 1815! The moon was almost full, too, though there wasn’t much light through the clouds . . . What else did you find out?”

  “There was a sound from the rabbit enclosure.”

  “What sort of sound?”

  “A groan. Or a sigh. Something like that.”

  I gasped. “Someone opened the gate!”

  “It makes a distinctive sound, apparently,” said Arthur.

  “Yes . . .” How could I have missed it? I must have had my head buried deep, indeed, in the pile of snoozing relatives. My ears turned busily at the memory of the gate’s doleful sigh. The lament of wood against wood had always meant only one of two things: that Emmanuel was finally coming to attend to us; or the farmer was about to take some of us away. I could think of no other reason.

  Until now.

  “So Old Lavender left by the gate?” I said. It seemed far-fetched, to say the least. The thought of the snoring Emmanuel, blundering from his bed in the middle of the night, struggling onto his bicycle and riding to the farm with the sole purpose of opening the gate to the rabbit enclosure was, of course, preposterous. Anyway, he never came to Hougoumont after dark.

  But who else could it have been?

  “Did you speak to anyone at the colony about this?” I asked.

  “The elderly gentleman with spots.”

  “Spode!”

  “That’s him.”

  “He saw what happened to Old Lavender?”

  “Yes,” Arthur said. The single word thrilled me, and yet my stomach sank with disappointment. Why hadn’t Spode told me himself, during that conversation before I left? He had only elaborated on Old Lavender’s escape from many years ago. I’d just assumed that he hadn’t witnessed her adventure the night before.

  “Monsieur Spode heard the sound of the gate,” Arthur went on. I marveled at his graciousness in mentioning that old curmudgeon. “He peered out the hutch door to see what was happening.”

  I could imagine Spode, squeezing his way through the slumbering ranks to reach the door—really just a piece of metal grille hammered to a frame and fastened with a hook. (The grille had the added advantage of permitting some of the odors of the hutch to dissipate.) But I knew for a fact that you couldn’t see very much through this opening—and certainly not the gate, which was on the other side of the pen.

  “He couldn’t have seen someone open the gate from the hutch door,” I said.

  “He didn’t.”

  “So perhaps it was nothing.” (Why do we say things we don’t believe ourselves?)

  “Stop interrupting and listen!”

  I straightened up like an errant foot soldier. Arthur definitely had a commander’s talent for tough love. Every nerve in my body obeyed him, and I didn’t blame him for his rudeness, either. I imagine that Wellington had used exactly that tone when he told his men, just before fighting began at Hougoumont: “Remain quiet where you are until further orders from me.”

  Arthur went on: “Monsieur Spode claims he saw a two-legged shape retreating across the meadow with two smaller, four-legged shapes.”

  It took me a moment to process all those numbers. “Just after he heard the sound of the gate?”

  “Yes. Spode was sure one of the smaller shapes was Old Lavender herself. It moved ponderously, at any rate. The other one . . . ” he hesitated. “The other one Monsieur thinks was a pale-colored animal of some sort. The exact color eluded him.”

  “There was heavy rain and mist,” I offered. “Colors can be tricky.”

  I couldn’t remember how visible the moon had been that night. Even in torrential rain, the countryside had a certain luminescence by the full moon that it lacked when the moon was new.

  I had no idea if this detail was as important to Arthur’s kind as it was to ours. I wasn’t aware of there being a blackbird in the moon, along with the rabbit that’s already there. At any rate, with all this singular activity in the Hougoumont meadow, it seemed possible that perhaps Moon himself might have played a role of some sort. Could he open gates? I wondered. If so, what had taken him so long? There’d been rabbits at Hougoumont for two hundred years, after all.

  Again I considered the possibility of the slothful Emmanuel coming by: overcoming his fears of the Hougoumont night and embarking on a life-changing mission—you know, the sort that erases forever the low regard people hold you in—even if that mission only entailed the freeing of an elderly, misanthropic rabbit. I would have dearly liked to believe this version. I do think that Emmanuel, like everyone, has hidden qualities. And anyway, there was no other rational explanation for the gate-opening, or the two-legged figure, unless Waterloo had suddenly become a hotbed of rabbit theft.

  A less rational explanation began to take shape. But loathe to venture into that territory, I said, resignedly: “Someone must have taken my grandmother away. Hougoumont is secluded. You saw that for yourself. Even before I left, the farm was in decline. Thieves were not unheard-of in the area . . . ”

  I felt too desp
ondent to go on. Modern gangs occasionally roamed the sleeping hamlets around Waterloo. They didn’t have the cachet of Napoleonic plunderers, but they still sowed fear. They were always on the lookout for any object they could carry off and sell. Someone had even made off with the priceless crucifix in the Hougoumont chapel.

  I began to tremble. Our enclosure could have fallen into the sights of some ne’er-do-well who had already done his principal looting for the evening; who might have spotted Old Lavender in the run, and amused himself with the thought of a nice pair of gloves—or maybe a meal. In her case, maybe two.

  Arthur broke into my burgeoning gloom. “I don’t think she was taken away,” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because apparently she and the other animal followed the person across the meadow.”

  This was unprecedented rabbit behavior—unthinkable for Old Lavender. My heart tripped: she must have left willingly!

  “But who was the person?” I asked.

  “Spode said that the two-legged shape was oddly dressed, and was carrying something . . . He couldn’t see what.”

  Unspoken business hung over this conversation. The figure Arthur had described didn’t sound like anyone I knew. Not the farmer. And not Emmanuel . . . at least, not the Emmanuel generally held in low regard. And he—or she—didn’t fit the description of a plunderer or thief.

  The less rational explanation had circled around and come back again, it seemed.

  “Does your kind have a god?” I asked Arthur, not as obliquely as I’d intended.

  “Just a beacon of sorts,” he said.

  “Can that beacon open gates?”

  “No.”

  This was what I would have expected from the cool-headed realist, until he added: “That is, I didn’t think so until I went out to Hougoumont.”

  I stared at him, not sure if Arthur was simply speaking of the collective memory he believed lingered around Waterloo, or of something else: the shadows against the south wall, for instance. Or the Hougoumont atmosphere itself, thickening into a particular, identifiable shape.