My ears grew chill.
“No one knows,” Arthur answered.
“What happened to the rabbit?”
“It ran after the boy, apparently.”
“How extraordinary!” I remembered Spode’s story about the two-legged shape crossing the meadow by moonlight, followed by two four-legged shapes—one of them Old Lavender. But Spode’s incident had occurred on the night before I left Hougoumont.
Arthur’s story had happened two hundred years ago.
The French drummer boy had helped a white rabbit to freedom, then.
That still didn’t explain who had liberated Old Lavender.
“Since the battle, white rabbits have apparently been spotted in the woods from time to time throughout the post-Waterloo generations,” said Arthur, “all of them presumably descended from that creature the French boy liberated. Imagine that!”
He gave me a penetrating look. “I also learned that many years ago, someone escaped from your colony one night and spent several hours . . . well, let’s just say cavorting . . . with one of those white descendants.”
My heart raced. My haunches quivered. It would take a day to restore these functions to their normal rhythm. “Old Lavender!” I exclaimed.
Have you ever experienced a moment when everything rings at such a perfect pitch, it makes you dizzy? Well, here was my moment.
She returned just before dawn, Spode had said. She was . . . changed, somehow.
I’ll say she was changed! And not just “somehow”: she must have returned home pregnant! Thus it was that, through a single night of indiscretion, a white rabbit surfaced occasionally in the colony, and our family perpetuated a noble Hougoumont legend.
“History is like a wheel sometimes,” Arthur said, deducing my thoughts. “It turns, and turns, and every once in a while a forgotten incident in the past makes a complete circle and reappears in some incarnation or other.”
Arthur tilted his head at me with that signature panache of his. “You are one of those incarnations.”
I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling of compassion towards our god. Funny, isn’t it? I felt as if I could forgive Moon for his chronic tardiness, and the seemingly random way he went about his business, simply because the connecting threads of my own story seemed far too miraculous to have happened by chance. Something—someone—must have been involved.
I decided that the genius of a god is probably at its best with small miracles—the flames in the chapel of Hougoumont, for instance; or saving white rabbits—and not so impressive with bigger jobs, such as stopping wholesale slaughter.
In this rush of illumination, I even forgave myself for what had happened to Caillou. My guilt vis-à-vis the open gate evaporated. I thought of Old Lavender’s famous maxim: Should have, could have, would have . . . an inharmonious rhyme in any language, William. A thorny conditional everyone can do without. They should excise it from the grammar books.
Old Lavender’s teachings notwithstanding, Caillou himself had embraced the conditional occasionally, as the young tend to do. At their closest points, the French and Allied armies were only fifteen hundred yards apart, watching, waiting. They could smell each other’s cooking fires; they could hear each other’s songs. I know, I know, those aren’t conditionals, they’re the past tense, but here’s what I’m getting at: “If everyone at Waterloo knew they were probably going to die,” said Caillou, “they should have refused to fight. They could have talked about it, couldn’t they? All those men and horses would have lived.”
Not so thorny, in fact, that conditional: approximately fifty thousand men would have lived. And ten thousand horses.
And who knows how many rabbits?
“Where did you learn all this?” I asked Arthur, after I’d finished my mulling.
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe the things that remain in the woods around Hougoumont,” he said. “The resonance is quite astounding. Small creatures for miles around are still aware of the story.”
Those who survived passed the experience on through collective memory . . . and resonance.
“Yes, but surely you must have talked to someone in the colony,” I said. “To Spode, maybe?”
“Oh, Spode is gone.”
I froze.
“It’s true,” Arthur said. “Everyone’s gone.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t bear to ask if the farmer had finally carted my entire family off to the marché. Therefore, I asked the more palatable question: “Did they escape?” To which came the astonishing reply:
“Emmanuel let them all out. Last year.”
Well, well, I thought, still staring at Arthur. Heroism certainly takes on many forms! I had heard that pregnant women dragged their husbands off the battlefield; I knew that mere boys played their drums in the thick of the fighting. Even oafish giants, therefore, can have their moment of glory.
Emmanuel had obviously known that Hougoumont’s life as a farm was coming to an end, and that the rabbit colony would soon be hauled away to an uncertain fate. Well, maybe “known” is too strong a word. “Sensed,” perhaps? Hang on: Does that mean that the boy had been harboring deeper waters all along, and even we, with our highly tuned sensibilities, hadn’t noticed them?
It makes one wonder what had happened, exactly, on that day of liberation. Maybe providence itself had momentarily brightened the boy’s wits and charmed his hand; maybe, as he passed by Hougoumont on his bicycle and experienced a dull firing of brain cells, that divine finger had brushed against his pudgy shoulder.
Bravo, dear Emmanuel! You spared us our own, inevitable Waterloo.
The dim-witted, liberating the meek . . . redemption had finally arrived at Hougoumont.
Your head is probably spinning by now with the various untoward rabbit activities at Hougoumont. I know mine is. I don’t usually make lists, as they remind me of Spode, but perhaps it would be clearer for everyone at this juncture if I did:
1) June 18, 1815: A French drummer boy released a white rabbit into the Hougoumont gardens.
2) About 165 years later: Old Lavender burrowed under the fence of the enclosure to tryst with a descendant of that white rabbit, and returned pregnant.
3) Some generations later—about twenty years or so—I was born.
4) Three years after that, Old Lavender left permanently, via the gate.
5) The next morning, I was taken away.
6) About seven years after all that, Emmanuel liberated the colony.
That’s quite a lot of activity, now that I see it on paper. There are always loose ends, though, aren’t there? Theories are never watertight; hutches never close cleanly (or vice versa). I’m thinking specifically of Activity No. 4. Spode had mentioned only vaguely “a two-legged shape.” No clear description. A very long, loose end, one would say.
Who had liberated Old Lavender on the night before I was taken away?
Arthur was already primping himself in preparation for departure when I called him back down from the wall. “Who let Old Lavender out on the night before I left?” I demanded.
“Well,” he said, obviously stalling. He glided onto the grass in an impeccable landing. “The gate had been opened, apparently.”
“Yes, yes, I know that. But by whom?”
“A boy,” Arthur said.
Emmanuel! Of course! So he had been held in too low regard. My innards relaxed and I sighed audibly. Everything will be all right, the boy had said as he loaded me into the banana crate. Maybe he’d noticed me frantically searching for Old Lavender, and was reassuring me that all would be well . . . with her . . . because he’d let her out himself the night before—possibly even watched her until she’d found a suitable hiding place in the meadow. If Arthur’s story was to be believed, and the emboldened oaf Emmanuel had also let everyone else out seven years later, then liberation was clearly an important part of his destiny and we had all underestimated him cruelly.
“Fat and clumsy, was he?” I pressed Arthur, just to verify that Emmanuel had
, indeed, been the unlikely hero, though my insides had seized up again. But then I remembered an indisputable fact about Emmanuel that my strained mental capacities momentarily overlooked, and that, when examined closely, tended to reduce the boy to his former, doltish dimensions:
Emmanuel never came to Hougoumont after dark . . . never.
I sighed again, but not with relief. I could see Emmanuel clearly in my mind, casting an anxious eye at the shadows lengthening over the Hougoumont meadow, throwing a handful of grain into the rabbit enclosure and lumbering off on his bicycle like a bear from a swarm of bees.
He just couldn’t have come at night to liberate Old Lavender.
Arthur sensed my confusion. He sidled towards the begonias and dashed back again, as he often did when preparing an important thought. With altered tone he said, “Your grandmother . . . she . . . saw things, didn’t she?”
The remark immobilized me. But perhaps not as completely as a question Old Lavender herself had asked, more than once: Don’t you ever see them, William?
“Yes, she did see things,” I muttered. “Well, she sensed them. Shapes. Movement. She called it ‘the traffic of souls.’ ”
“Hmm,” said Arthur. He fell silent, then continued: “In that case, it wouldn’t surprise you to learn that the boy who opened the gate for your grandmother seven years ago, and led her across the meadow with her wild, white lover was slender, nimble.”
Not Emmanuel, then.
“He was wearing a uniform.”
But it had to be. There was no other explanation.
“And he carried a drum.”
Author’s Note
At this writing, Hougoumont Farm is at last being restored. The farmer passed away a few years after the liberation of William’s family and the property was taken over by a consortium of local authorities. The hutch where William was born, and where his family continued to live after his departure to Brussels, has been razed, along with the antique dovecote. Neither structure figured in drawings of the farm from the Waterloo period.
These are cosmetic changes, however, and man-made: Nature did not join the consortium.
Go there and you’ll see.
The three chestnuts still stand, though their vigil must surely be nearing its end. Their branches trace the battle’s entire story against the sky, as if seeking redemption for the men buried at their feet.
The wind is laden with whispers and other, more precise sounds: the stamp of a horse’s hoof, maybe. Or a tapping branch.
And if you’re lucky, on days when the mists rise, you might see a flash of white near the eastern wall and wonder whether Hougoumont has just revealed one of its secrets.
William would be so pleased to know that it had.
A veritable sea of books and essays has been
written about Waterloo, though comparatively few of them go into any detail about Hougoumont. Publications that were particularly helpful for this story include: A Narrative of the Battles of Quatre-Bras And Waterloo with the Defence of Hougoumont by Matthew Clay; “Keep Hougoumont—at What Price?” by Mick Crumplin from www.waterloo200.org; “Waterloo Days” by Charlotte Eaton, from Ladies of Waterloo: The Experiences of Three Women During the Campaign of 1815; Waterloo: A Guide to the Battlefield by David Howarth; Hougoumont by Julian Paget and Derek Saunders; “Waterloo” by D. H. Parry, from Battles of the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1; and Le Goumont 1815: Citadelle de la mémoire by Claude Van Hoorebeeck.
Acknowledgments
Unusual creative projects generally have few supporters at first . . . if any. People smile that smile, shuffle their feet and wish you well. Then the project dies. This paragraph, therefore, is short. But it’s also the most important one in the book: Sarah McFadden, first-class editor and writer, you were brave enough to read the initial manuscript of The Sage of Waterloo, embrace it and offer some suggestions, without which I wouldn’t have had the courage to send it to Norton and to you, Matt Weiland, editor extraordinaire. With insight and intuition you leapt into the Untried, and for that I am deeply grateful. Cindy Gesuale, beloved childhood companion: nurturing small animals together imparted lessons of love, loss and friendship that inspire to this day. And for the occupants of my extended hutch, Francombe and Maxson alike: thank you! When I announced that I was going to write about rabbits and Waterloo, you guffawed (who didn’t?). But seeing that I was serious, you indulged me, and encouraged me, and made me believe that providence would surely lend a hand.
Copyright © 2015 by Leona Francombe
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Francombe, Leona.
The Sage of Waterloo : a tale / Leona Francombe.—First edition.
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ISBN 978-0-393-24691-9 (hardcover)
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