The Sage of Waterloo (13 page)

I knew what was coming.

As if to prove her point, she would turn her rump to the fence and gaze at the interior of the pen. This meant that I, too, had to shift my position against her, which was most uncomfortable.

Jonas would look up from his digging with his usual insouciance, taking care not to look directly at Old Lavender. He may have been a rake and a cad, but in her presence he was reduced to the same obeisance as everyone else.

It would take several attempts for the question to audibly pass my incisors: “Why are you turned this way, Grandmother?”

She usually went into a deep trance during these pen-gazing episodes, and it would take a good half hour for her to resurface.

Finally, on one occasion, she explained:

“I'm finding beauty in ugliness,” she said.

The others stopped their nudging and mingling. The oracle had not only stirred, but reoriented her rump, a rare combination worthy of note. The rest of us might reorient our rumps for a stiff wind, an overly ardent suitor, or to avoid Emmanuel's lethal boots at feeding time. But when Old Lavender shifted her rump, she actually had something to say.

I examined the interior of the pen: there was plenty of ugliness to go around. Along the side of the fence facing the derelict dovecote, the earth had a darker hue from constant urination. Rotting seeds floated on the water dish; the hutch hadn't been cleaned in over a week and Spode, a stickler for cleanliness, had pushed some of the soiled hay out of the door. Berthe, usually more discreet, had left a scattering of droppings in the mid-foreground and everybody passing by felt they had to follow suit (an ancient lagomorph ritual), resulting in quite a rise in elevation. Even beyond the pen, there were no breezy fields to see in this direction, just the crumbling bricks of the courtyard wall and Emmanuel's rusting bicycle, dumped on its side with the back wheel immersed in a puddle.

Finding ugliness wasn't the problem. Beauty, however . . .

In a rare moment of affection, Old Lavender turned to me and said: “You're puzzled.”

I nodded.

“William, the art of solitude is to appreciate your surroundings.”

I nodded again. This much made sense.

“Any surroundings.”

My eyes fell on the droppings. This made less sense.

Old Lavender sank back into her trance. It was another hour before she surfaced again.

“Make ugliness fascinating,” she said, following my gaze. “Yes, even a pile of droppings. Then you're hooked. You know . . .”

How well I knew her “you knows.” They usually preceded a lecture of fair length, punctuated by the usual periods of silence, which meant that lunch would be delayed by at least an hour. Here's a short version:

“ ‘Boredom' is a word invented by humans and used exclusively by them. If you can turn your back on beauty and still find the world interesting, then you have it made. Every important lesson can be learned from the simple tools at hand. Remember this, William. Because you may find yourself in far more challenging surroundings someday. Don't let dreariness spoil your spirit.”

“How do you do that, Grandmother?”

“Well, let's begin.” She rearranged her haunches, letting off a potent broadside of smell. “You can use any object as a springboard. Even common waste.”

I regarded the growing hill of droppings. (Berthe had just made another contribution.) The word “springboard” didn't come naturally to mind.

“Now look at the droppings square on. Come, William!” Old Lavender nipped me lightly on the shoulder. “Focus yourself. Good. Now, slowly, carefully, move your gaze around the object in question.”

I studied the dark, glistening mass. Like most rabbits, my near vision was dim; and anyway, I wasn't exactly sure what there was to look at.

“Take in the general size and shape, the bulk, that sort of thing,” Old Lavender continued impatiently. “As if you had to draw it.”

I did this, wondering idly what artist would draw such a subject. At once I felt my thoughts slow to a more comfortable tempo. The exercise felt a bit like our childhood studies of the chapel—a meditation that was supposed to open up a space in our minds into which light could shine—but this procedure felt much more refreshing and meaningful in comparison (the pile of droppings notwithstanding).

“Run your eyes over it several more times,” Grandmother said. “Are you doing this? All right. Now, let your eyes follow an invisible circle around the pile. Then increase the distance between object and circle. Slowly!” she chided. “And don't get distracted! Do you feel lighter now?”

In fact, I was beginning to feel rather dizzy.

I tried the slow-circling again. Strangely, as if stirring from a long sleep, something moved within—a rising feeling somewhere in the region of my gut. I'd eaten well that morning, so I knew it wasn't indigestion.

Grandmother could tell at once that I'd felt it. Not only that, I'm certain that she knew I
would
feel it. She wasn't called an oracle for nothing.

“
Ugliness. Sublimation. Appreciation. Contentment.
Follow these four signposts as best you can.”

Eagerly, and with considerable fascination now, I pinpointed each piece of ugliness in the pen and tried the circle technique. Before long the soiled hay, the putrid water dish and even Spode were easily encircled, brightened, and transformed into a sort of lightness of being generally reserved for higher mammals.

“There you are,” Old Lavender said, sensing my elation. “You've now experienced true beauty: the letting go of the physical. You usually feel a bit lighter looking out at the fields, don't you?”

“Yes,” I said. I hadn't thought about it before, but she was right. One did get a lift from the landscape—­even from Waterloo's
morne plaine
.

“Well, you may not always have fields to look at. So you must find the lift in whatever happens to lie before you.”

“In droppings?”

“In anything.”

T
hanks to Old Lavender's rigorous schooling, after just a few weeks in my new home, I began to experience results with the circling technique. Not miracles, mind you: the garden was still too unfamiliar. Still, I managed to transform the peony into a thing of elegance at least once. And after a few months, the missing bricks in the garden wall began to look like loopholes. Not a sublimation, exactly. But a very comforting transformation all the same.

8

O
n nights of driving rain I always dreamed of Hougoumont.

I'd already been living in Brussels for some months and had hoped the dreams would have stopped. For gradually, day by day, I was pulling away from the clutches of homesickness.

And yet something still worked on me. Memory, of course. But also an unpredictable,
Hougoumont-inspired quickening of the air that often happened in the early evening. There was no doubt that my birthplace had begun to settle into my bones. The images, sounds, smells . . . all had filtered deep—as deep as the roots of the chestnuts at the South Gate. Perhaps the Hougoumont I had taken away with me was already turning itself into that power source Old Lavender had spoken about: the energy of a beloved place or idea being put to good use.

The creations of sleep can never be controlled, however.

Heavy rain, then, always brought on the same dream:

It was the night of June 17, 1815. I was sheltering in the great barn. Despite the darkness and mud, supply wagons were splashing up the lane and passing through the North Gate. Troops bustled to and fro in nervous haste, their lips pale with cold and fear. It seemed that I could even smell their wet uniforms, rank as an uncleaned hutch. I perceived it all from the high seat of my dream, though logic prevailed even in sleep, and I found myself somewhere in the vicinity of the rabbit hutches.

I drifted outside into the courtyard, free as mist now, protected by the strange largesse of dreams through which a white rabbit drew no attention to himself whatsoever in the midst of preparations for the Battle of Waterloo.

The atmosphere was charged with the certainty of tragedy about to unfold, and the foreboding chilled me utterly. My breathing felt shallow. Men shouted above the din of the rain, and I detected a quaver in the top notes, as if their hearts had already acknowledged that they would soon kill . . . or be killed. It was as if I were stranded with them on the very knife-edge of circumstance, with only the flaccid grasp of Moon to keep me from falling. (I hoped that the men's god had had a tighter grip.)

I knew from my grandmother that Hougoumont sat in a strategic position coveted by both the French and Allied armies. Wellington had occupied the property first and was determined to hold on to it. The soldiers initially posted to the chateau-farm—two to three hundred men making up the light companies of the Coldstream and 3rd Foot Guards—had recently acted as part of the rearguard on the retreat from Quatre Bras and were completely spent. Stifling heat and humidity had been as merciless as the French.

I watched from the safety of sleep as the farm's defenses were shored up against imminent attack. The Guards faced a Herculean task: smashing loopholes in brick walls; barricading gates and doors; building fire steps inside the garden walls on which soldiers could stand to take aim. Any piece of wood would do: even chateau furniture was hacked apart for the cause. There was little food on offer. Few could sleep. Rain continued to fall in torrents and the temperature plummeted. The deluge soaked soldiers from both sides equally, though at least the Hougoumont defenders could take occasional shelter in the chateau and outbuildings.

Wellington personally supervised every detail of the preparations. But even he could do nothing about clogged muskets, or hands bloodied from gouging loopholes with bayonets, or the purgatory of sodden wool, rubbing the skin raw.

It seemed I could feel the rain against my own skin at this point, even in sleep . . .

An ensign of the Coldstream, Charles Short, was there: “We were under arms the whole night expecting the attack and it rained to that degree that the field where we were was half-way up our legs in mud; nobody, of course, could lie down. The ague got hold of some of the men. I with another officer had a blanket and with a little more gin we kept up very well. We had only one fire, and you cannot conceive the state we were in. We found an old cask full of wet rye loaves which we breakfasted upon.”

No one, not even Old Lavender, could have put themselves into Charles Short's boots—or into any of the other tens of thousands of boots that had filled with mud that night. But it's possible to stand where they once stood . . . to imagine what they had seen. You don't even need rain and mud to feel what I'm talking about. You just have to let yourself go very still, at your core, and the moment will do the rest.

Now go there: venture into the silent heart of Hougoumont.

That seething night is closer than you think.

Don't move . . . cobblestones gleam underfoot in the pelting rain. Close your eyes . . . mallets crack against stone; shouts pierce the orchard and echo through the barns. In the bleeding light of coach lamps, figures scurry to get ammunition out of the rain and into the chateau. They skirt the chapel, as if it were just another farm building, and you wonder why they don't slip in for a moment.

Because for so many of them, these would be their final hours.

O
ne morning, worn out from one of those dramatic preparation dreams, I slept most of the day and awoke to a calm, dripping evening. A little ramble wouldn't go amiss, I thought.

The rain had finally stopped and a pleasant somnolence enveloped the garden. I'd lived long enough with my new proprietor to know that this sort of evening was more conducive to romance than danger in the human lexicon. Much to my dismay, I'd begun to understand this lexicon quite well, even embracing some of its excesses myself, though the excess in question—promenading at night—was a mortal sin in our world, and probably the most egregious of all.