The Sage of Waterloo

by Leona Francombe

  “You felt it, then,” I said. “That presence in the air.”

  “Yes. But I don’t feel the need to identify it the way you do. A presence can take many forms, after all.”

  Where did that leave us? I wondered. The gate had been opened. Old Lavender and an unknown animal had followed an unknown human form across the meadow. The human form was carrying something unidentifiable. And no one came back.

  I reflected briefly on Spode; I remembered the torch he had always carried for Old Lavender, and my criticism of him softened. For only then did I realize the anguish he must have felt. He had observed the object of his ardor depart willingly, never to return. And he hadn’t even been outside on lookout duty, where he might have dissuaded her. In neglecting to tell me about these things, he had betrayed his remorse, and his bitter, aching jealousy, more clearly than any words ever could have.

  Arthur broke my train of thought. “Monsieur Spode did say something else.”

  I hesitated. “What?”

  “He heard a tapping that night. I asked him if it was a branch. Or a piece of fence in the wind.”

  “Yes, yes,” I assured him. “There’s an old beech at the south wall that makes that sound. Especially when the weather’s bad.”

  “Maybe. But he said that the tapping was different than usual. Too regular. And it didn’t correspond with the wind.”

  10

  This is a particularly painful episode, involving hotheadedness, stupidity and a complete misrepresentation of one’s dreams.

  After years of being left behind when my proprietor’s family went on holiday, a summer finally arrived when they decided to take me along. And it wasn’t just a jaunt outside the city—a trip up the Chaussée de Waterloo to see my old home, for example, which I would have loved. No: This trip was an odyssey in both body and spirit. And though the family’s destination may have been Normandy, mine was very nearly much, much farther: as far as the stretch of green ambrosia at the end of the Hollow Way.

  I traveled in the same little white cage in which I’d been brought home from the market. Poetic, isn’t it, taking the unsuspecting innocent on a fateful journey in the same vehicle in which he was rescued from the abattoir? Vaguely circular, philosophically speaking. A metaphor for the Way, perhaps. In retrospect, maybe I should have prepared myself better, as I felt ominously like Napoleon on his gentle white mare, Desirée, taking a benign mode of transport to imminent disaster.

  How splendid the destination seemed at first! The house was, in fact, a chateau, in which the owner—a gentleman farmer who spent much of the day riding around on his tractor, mildly inebriated—­rented out a few rooms. Even Jonas, one of those tiring, bigger-is-better individuals, would have been impressed.

  The experience began with a significant vibration: a feeling of déjà vu without the “vu” part. That is to say, I’d spent my early years in the shadow of a phantom chateau—Hougoumont—that in our epoch existed only in the historical record. Thanks to French artillery in 1815, I’d never actually seen it. All our young lives, therefore, we’d only imagined its life story . . . its genteel flourishing and epic demise. We could only inhale the air near its vanished walls and from it build our own, weightless Hougoumonts.

  So up until that day, when the family car rounded the last bend of the drive in Normandy, I’d known only a ghost chateau.

  But here was the real thing: turrets, balustrades, windowpanes glinting like a thousand eyes . . . Inside, there were acres of parquet, frescoed ceilings so remote you would have needed Wellington’s telescope to make them out, and other luxuries that don’t necessarily make life more comfortable. They just make you tired.

  Getting from water dish to sleeping quarters in that place required a map and a compass. There were thirteen paces between the fridge and the sink. Thirteen! That’s a long way to go to wash lettuce. It was a servants’ kitchen, no doubt, where maids trod holes in their shoes on behalf of the gentry, idling upstairs in drafty salons.

  At night I slept on the kitchen floor in the little white cage. But in the daytime, I went outside. And not just any outside, either: this was a vast parkland with soaring woods, a lake, uncultivated fields and untamed winds. The sensations were far more insistent than any I’d known at Hougoumont. Here was the Untried of all Untrieds. Even Jonas might have balked at the idea of venturing out into it.

  The owner erected a fenced run for me, and for a hutch he refurbished a large wooden box which, he said with an ironic turn to his lip, had once been used as a meat container. It was kind of him, really. I mean, not many rabbits enjoy indoor and outdoor accommodation at a French chateau—especially when they’re not expected on the dinner table.

  Within seconds in that improvised run I felt it: that stirring in the gut I’d tried to stifle in my youth . . . that mysterious, wild gene I’d experienced in action during Old Lavender’s moonlit escapade.

  We’d of course lived and breathed outdoor smells at Hougoumont. But even when a tantalizing scent reached us on the wind, or a cryptic signal beckoned from beyond the trees, the general effect was diluted by the stench and chaos of the pen.

  But here . . . here . . .

  My gift for reading the circumstances, and that hot drive in my blood, were on a collision course.

  I felt powerless to choose between them.

  It was as if I’d spent my whole life waiting for this moment. My haunches were weary from constantly rising up and trying to catch things on the air. How Old Lavender had managed it at her age, I can hardly guess! Odors that I knew well—dandelions, for example—flooded the senses. Even with my dim vision I could see why: just beyond the fencing lay an entire, hallucinatory lawn of them.

  Ah, yes . . . How well I remember my dandelion lesson.

  “Life cannot be lived secondhand, William.” (Old Lavender again.) “No one can truly describe a dandelion. You must experience one yourself—even if it means taking a risk. And you can’t say you’ve really lived until you’ve taken at least one risk. Can you?”

  I remember thinking it odd that she had added that little question at the end. She knew that I’d taken a risk with that open gate at Hougoumont. Did she actually think I needed to take any more?

  Do you really want to be like Jonas, William? was another question Old Lavender used to ask, and one that now emerged in full interrogatory splendor as I gazed through the fence at wild Normandy. I was full-grown by the time I’d realized that I really didn’t want to be like Jonas. But here I was, middle-aged, still asking myself the same question.

  And how Jonas would have lusted after this view! Beyond the chateau, the vista increased in excitement incrementally. Since the rabbit eye is designed to spot approaching hawks and not the ants underfoot, this rolling-out of the view was a particular bonus. Beyond the dandelions—nirvana enough for anyone—more lawns beckoned. Farther still, meadows of long grass glistened, of the sort that had been recounted by our long-eared bards since the dawn of our history. This glorious Untried was broken only by a ring of forest towering at the very edge of my vision, like the gateway to another solar system.

  My blood rushed; my heart thrummed. I was briefly reminded of leading the colony, the doomed Caillou in tow, out of the open gate, and my head cooled slightly. Jonas probably wouldn’t have even blinked at the memory, however, and suddenly I wanted to be like him most keenly.

  I can’t for the life of me remember how I found myself in the dandelions. One moment I was in captivity; the next, I’d gone wild. Literally. There were no holes under the barrier. Looking back, I think I must have leapt onto the roof of the hutch and scaled the fence from there. I then crept across the drive and entered the green kingdom. This is it! I thought. The Untried stretched in every direction. My body hummed and flexed with an energy that all wild rabbits must feel, but that had been bred out of me countless flabby, bowl-fed generations ago.

  Hubris surged. I even briefly, giddily imagined that I was at the center of the universe, and that everything was
spinning around me.

  Rather as Napoleon might have felt, come to think of it.

  Indeed, Bonaparte had built his agenda around the presumption that he was, in fact, at the center of the universe—his universe, fashioned to the dimensions of a colossal will and ego. He wrote conquests into his weekly plan as one would a routine lunch or dinner. Spain, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, Egypt (and I probably left something out) . . . Which shall I acquire tomorrow? It all would have made an impressive universe indeed if Bonaparte had actually been able to hold on to it. He certainly tried. “Power is my mistress,” he declared. “I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me, or even to covet her.”

  Well, I never worked that hard at anything. But standing where I was, on the threshold of a territory that would have fueled Napoleon’s ambitions even further had he been closer to my size, I can say that a certain lust for adventure seized my loins.

  Until I remembered that Napoleon had also said:

  “One never climbs so high as when he knows not where he is going.”

  By now I was lost.

  Look up! Read the circumstances! The old edicts batted like random flies. I barely noticed them. Oh, I could feel the danger in every pore, all right. I knew that there were hawks, owls, foxes, and more, all very near. Worse, I sensed that they all knew exactly where I was, and were just biding their time until supper. You would have to be a very myopic bird of prey indeed not to notice a white rabbit in the middle of all that green. The thought slowed me down somewhat. Had I gone mad as well as wild? A nearby burrow of foreign rabbits would have offset this foolery in terms of an emergency exit, but I didn’t smell anything, and even a tame rabbit can detect the telltale fustiness of a burrow.

  I made myself flat and immobile and waited for I knew not what.

  How far had Old Lavender gone, I wondered vaguely, on the night she’d disappeared for good? Had she found herself alone like this, in the middle of the Hougoumont meadow? Had she made it through the breach in the east wall? Perhaps she’d reached safety in a warren somewhere in the barley field beyond, having bravely crossed, at her advanced age, one of the great sites of the Waterloo battle.

  I’m not sure at what time I was officially declared missing. By now I could hear my proprietor’s children: the frenzy in their voices as they shouted my name, and the boozy owner himself, calling to them rather charmingly not to worry, he would ride his tractor all around the meadow to search for me if they wanted, but very slowly, so as not to run me over.

  I found myself cowering somewhere near the forest, stranded alone in a place that felt completely wrong in the cataclysmic sense. That is, in the sense of a sandbar in a quick-rising tide. Or a serene valley before the tanks roll in.

  Rays of late afternoon sun pierced the trees and lay in golden seams across the grass. A crescent moon glided into view, almost eagerly, as the summer sun would linger long yet. The thought of an eager moon was endearing, as if the universe may not have been the unfeeling place I was making it out to be, and I braved a wan smile. But then something began to weigh heavily—­something significant, as if Moon himself, and not his namesake in the sky, had slipped past and placed a paw on my shoulder.

  If something bad happens, William, chew through the problem methodically, as if it’s a long, hard carrot. I’d like to think that this flash of Old Lavender wisdom was a portent, like the light of wisdom going on, but panic had replaced excitement as the cause of my shivering haunches and I was certain that if I was going to chew a carrot of any kind, it would be my last.

  Old Lavender was not yet finished with me, thank heavens: Square your shoulders! Take a step, even with all that despair pressing down. “Rise up!” Wellington told his men as they were hiding among the corn stalks. This you must do, William; you must rise up and face whatever life puts before you.

  I was just squaring my shoulders, preparing to rise up à la Wellington, when I saw it: a dark, irregular patch, floating down from the forest as if unmotorized. Just a branch, I thought hopefully, riding the wind. But there was no wind. And as it turned out, the dark patch had feathers instead of leaves, and soon I could see that its motor was of the most efficient kind, propelling it in my direction.

  The “vu” was definitely back in the “déjà vu,” because I’d seen this aerial maneuver before, near the South Gate at Hougoumont. The only difference was that back then, I’d been a spectator at the tragedy and Caillou had played the leading role.

  Now I was the one at center stage.

  Spode, Old Lavender, Jonas and of course Caillou himself all paraded before me, bemoaning my recklessness. I wondered what sort of arrogance could have drugged me like that—altered me until I’d had the temerity to consider myself a risk-taker on par with Jonas, and even, briefly, the center of the universe.

  Anyway, it was good of them to turn out for my demise.

  The falcon began his dive.

  I’d always thought there wasn’t much time in these sorts of situations. I’d seen the speed of Caillou’s exit, after all. But when it’s your own exit, there is, paradoxically, all the time in the world. Certainly enough time for the light of wisdom to switch on.

  Old Lavender said that if you believe in something strongly enough, it very often materializes. I’m not sure if by “something” she meant the finger of providence, or just a particularly tasty dandelion, though you can probably imagine which one I was hoping for just then. I had my doubts about that particular piece of Old Lavender philosophy, however. The notion that Moon would limit his appearances only to those who truly believe he’ll turn up would seem to relieve him of quite a bit of responsibility, in my view. If this were the case, then gods would have more time on their hands for general do-gooding, which they obviously didn’t take full advantage of. As I trembled in that foreign meadow, nose-to-nose with destiny, I considered—I hoped—I actually prayed—that Moon was better than that; that it really had been his paw on my shoulder just now.

  Perhaps Napoleon had reflected along these lines just before his Waterloo.

  A timely supposition, considering I was facing my own.

  Suddenly, ridiculously, I was not afraid at all. In fact, I felt very, very well—content, even. Content enough to feel a twinge of regret when I heard:

  “There he is!” It was the proprietor’s young daughter, screaming and sobbing all at once.

  “Where?”

  “Over there!”

  The falcon wheeled back towards the forest in a leisurely arc, as if his mission had been one of simple reconnaissance all along and he hadn’t been in the least put out.

  Did the near-cataclysm in Normandy change me? Old Lavender was a great believer in cataclysms as long as they were near and not complete ones. I was reminded of something she had said to Jonas after he was lifted, half dead, off the fence, his innards swaying in the breeze: Disasters are often good things, Jonas—unless you actually die during them, though that’s often not the cataclysm it’s made out to be. In retrospect, maybe this piece of advice had not been quite as encouraging as Jonas would have liked. He did go through that odd transformation, though, so perhaps he had learned to look at life and death in a new way.

  Disasters can even be entertaining. Oh, not really funny, per se, especially when the disaster is a complete one. Unless you’re British, of course, in which case just about any sort of cataclysm can be rendered droll on the spot.

  The battlefield of Waterloo offered some choice examples. Take the Earl of Uxbridge, for instance, Wellington’s second-in-command and commander of the cavalry. Family scandal had prompted Wellington to treat Uxbridge with icy politeness, the latter having eloped with the former’s sister-in-law. This painful personal history might have explained Wellington’s laconic reaction to Uxbridge’s predicament. When rusted grapeshot from French artillery struck the Earl’s right leg, completely shattering it, he remarked to Wellington: “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!” Wellington replied: “By Go
d, sir, so you have!”

  The Earl was then taken to the village of Waterloo, where he underwent a gruesome amputation without anesthetic, but with a huge measure of bravery and good cheer. He complained only that “the knives seem rather blunt.”

  Uxbridge’s leg was buried in the garden of the house in which it had been cut off. A mock memorial was erected with the inscription: “Here lies the Leg of the illustrious and valiant Earl Uxbridge, Lieutenant-General of His Britannic Majesty, Commander in Chief of the English, Belgian and Dutch cavalry, wounded on the 18 June 1815 at the memorable battle of Waterloo, who, by his heroism, assisted in the triumph of the cause of mankind, gloriously decided by the resounding victory of the said day.”

  Some years later, Uxbridge revisited Waterloo with two of his sons, found the table on which the operation had taken place and ate dinner off of it.

  At least the Earl’s chances of survival had been good—however dull the knives might have been. The stakes were far higher for me: four-legged creatures don’t often lose a limb and survive, let alone go back and have a leisurely dinner at the same spot. I’m not sure I could have summoned Uxbridge’s extraordinary good cheer if the falcon had actually grabbed me and lifted me high. All would have been over then—all good cheer in vain. The only remaining piece of agenda would have been the formal handing over of my essence to Moon, if that part is to be believed. But let’s face it: if one has to cry out to something from the grip of imminent death, it may as well be to something rapturous, rather than (in my case) to an inebriated farmer unlikely to find you on his tractor.

  After Normandy, I realized that perhaps I’d been too hasty in my judgment of Moon. Lately, I’ve even come to the conclusion that he is, on balance, a good-hearted individual, in spite of his flaws. Oh, I’d blamed him for what had happened to Caillou, all right (maybe to deflect blame from myself); I’d denounced him for letting me be taken away from Hougoumont and my family, and for giving me no sign that Old Lavender was all right. This is only natural for us: we don’t hesitate to give our god a thorough scolding when life turns bleak. I only knew that I couldn’t go on living in anger and remorse. That was no way to spend a single day—let alone the rest of your life. Nor was it any way to build a partnership with someone like Moon, whom you really don’t want to scold too thoroughly.