The Sage of Waterloo (2 page)

Hougoumont is . . . dear me, where are the words? It's a mute place, you see, but with such startling eloquence. Perhaps the fact that few visitors to the battlefield even know it exists fosters the air of an unopened message. Physically speaking, it's a ruin: a decaying farmstead of brick and sandstone in perfect complicity with the land. The other, less tangible things are far more difficult to describe. Go there yourself and you'll feel it: the knowing wind; the trees scarred as leviathans; and a strange sort of peace that isn't peaceful at all but alert with memory and other, less palatable phenomena. Sometimes, when the wind comes off the eastern fields, it's as if a worn curtain is shifting, and through a tear in the fabric you can see something unimaginable for such a sleepy backwater.

I was happy at Hougoumont. The last farmer to live there was not like the aristocrats who had once owned the chateau (there was no more chateau—­the French had shelled it). He raised cattle, and seemed far less interested in rabbit and pigeon dishes than his predecessors. He was, thank heavens, a frozen-food sort of man, and thus our existence was blissfully irrelevant.

We were cared for by a local boy, Emmanuel, an oafish giant who neglected us mainly because he could never remember whether he had fed us or not. He also flatly refused to come to the farm after dark. If other chores kept him busy elsewhere and the twilight began to deepen, he would just toss a few grains over the fence to us and pedal off on his bicycle—and at an impressive speed, too, for such a pudgy fellow. Perhaps, like many simpletons, his raw senses made up for lack of brainpower; perhaps he could intuit the unrest at Hougoumont even better than we could, and felt it begin to stir at dusk.

Emmanuel was too benign to cause any intentional harm. We even suspected that the only reason the farmer kept us on was to give him something to do. Maybe because the boy seemed so unloved, we developed a love for him ourselves, though I don't think he ever noticed, to be honest. But as I learned only years later, such a thing should never play a role in the offering of love.

My crèche was the humblest of rabbit pens. The run stood next to a dovecote—a hexagonal Victorian frippery abandoned years ago—and was enclosed by rusting chicken wire nailed to a fence and strung overhead in a roof of sorts, although any predator worthy of the name could probably have found a way in. Grass once grew in the enclosure, but so long ago that my grandmother was the only one who remembered it. For the rest of us, hard, unyielding earth was our world.

The run was furnished with a makeshift hutch the farmer had cobbled together with fallen beams from the old granary. Whenever he remembered, Emmanuel herded us into this fetid abode before sundown; if he forgot, or the approaching darkness scared him off, most of us knew to go in by ourselves. The jaws and beaks of predators, real or imagined, loomed large in the country night.

Beyond the dovecote we could glimpse the old, wounded Hougoumont: the original gardener's house, stables, cobbled courtyard and battle-worn doors, all creeping with mold and cracking in the tight, dank grasp of time. Only the tiny chapel had been restored, its new roof sloping like a nun's cap, a remnant of the vanished chateau still attached to one end. From our grandmother we'd learned where in the courtyard the famous haunted well had been. According to legend, three hundred corpses were thrown down it just after the fighting in an effort to ward off disease, and later, long after any poor, still-breathing soul could have uttered them, unearthly cries still issued from the depths.

H
ougoumont's restless past was our only company. I'm not speaking of haunted wells here; or of trifling amusements to relieve boredom. You see, our pen overlooked what used to be the formal chateau gardens, witness to the slaughter of 1815. What lingered there was powerful enough even for human nerve endings to register. You would hardly believe it now, though, from the lush expanse of meadow where the gardens had been, and the cows serenely grazing there. We barely believed it ourselves.

Until we were taught otherwise . . . until we could read the air.

But what temptations drifted in from that paradise before we'd learned to read! Our young hearts overflowed with bounty. Poplar leaves flashed like coins in the breeze. Wood pigeons cooed from across the valley. On spring twilights, blackbirds staged their pearly evensong in trees tilted like wizards. We would press against the chicken wire and listen, staring out across the meadow all the way to the eastern wall where, through a breach, there stretched an ocean of space that used to be the old orchard but was now open farmland. Cloistered as we were, this green sea was our own Elysium—our Untried—and like anybody's fantasy, made even more enchanting by the knowledge that we could never go there.

Each fantasy carries a stain, however.

Something other than enchantment dwelled beneath those lush grasses; something that made the tips of our ears go cold. Our senses, exquisitely tuned, could catch unearthly signals as easily as spiderwebs catch floating down, so it took very little effort for us to hear the Hougoumont meadow whispering in its sleep. Try as we might, we younger members of the colony couldn't read those signals properly—not as Old Lavender could—though the whispering often kept us awake . . . that, and the insistent, rhythmic tapping of a beech branch against the south wall.

“Don't forget,” Grandmother cautioned. “Two hundred years ago, the meadow was hardly untried.” (She was generally considered to be an expert on Waterloo.) “It was a soaked, bloody sponge, and nobody's fantasy. It wasn't even a meadow back then, you know. It was a French garden: orange trees, roses, geraniums—everything was in full flower during the battle. Corpses were piled six high, over there, against the wall.” Out of politeness, we tried not to stare where she was indicating, though of course we threw avid glances that way.

As you can imagine, Old Lavender's comments cast a shadow over our Elysium. But it's a curious thing about shadows: They're not what you remember about a beloved place . . . about home. You remember the sweet smell of woodland decay; the tilled earth on the wind; the blackbirds' cantata in the valley. You don't remember stains. At least, you push them into a dark corner and rarely visit them there.

It was clear that Hougoumont was coming to a sad, lingering end. It had reached a crossroads of sorts even before I'd left, its future as uncertain as our own. I'm not even sure how much longer the others in the colony stayed on after I was gone. One more crisp, silent winter, perhaps? A final, aromatic spring? The farmer might even have passed away by now, and the place gone to ruin. I can barely contemplate what the fate of my family would have been then, with the main gates locked and Emmanuel, even if he'd remembered, not being able to get in. (The French had had enough trouble, if you recall.) I can only hope that the blackbirds organized some kind of requiem.

I
am no longer young. I'll be eleven in a few months, which not only requires math well beyond my skills to calculate in human years, but also obliges me to press on with my storytelling. Those of you who are already experiencing the adventure of aging may have discovered that this part of the journey does not only entail unexpected dips and fissures in the road, aches in the limbs, problems reaching those hard-to-clean areas (Old Lavender gave them up early on) and so forth. No, there's much more to it, as it turns out. One great plus is the subtle tuning that takes place, as if Moon—or whatever you prefer to call the tuner—were drawing gently tighter a hitherto merrily quivering string, with the perceptible and rather heady effect of purer tone and sweeter echo. (Other interesting effects, presumably, are to follow.) At the same time, one feels a certain lifting of the spirit and breadth of vision, as if—in my case, anyway—one were looking down at farm and family from the summit of the Lion's Mound. It's not surprising, therefore, that I can still picture fairly well the dramatis personae of my youth.

Jonas, a distant cousin, was a rash, handsome buck infamous for his preening, scheming and disreputable tail-chasing. When she was angry with him, Old Lavender called him Marshal Ney after Napoleon's hotheaded commander. It was meant as an insult. But what Grandmother didn't realize was that Jonas had actually been listening on the day she'd given the lecture on Ney, and the heroic bits had sunk in. She respected accuracy even more than she disliked Ney, so she had to give the Marshal his due. For example, she couldn't omit the fact that he'd been nicknamed “the bravest of the brave” for his cavalry charges, foolhardy though they'd been; or that five horses had been shot from under him and even that hadn't stopped him. Jonas was rather pleased, therefore, with Grandmother's insult.

Boomerang, a slightly crazed uncle, had the obscure habit of throwing himself sideways against the barrier, bouncing off at ever-more-interesting angles. The gentle addling of the brain that resulted was part of his charm.

Caillou was the runt (his name, fittingly, meant “pebble”). He was always underfoot, and a typical runt mainly because there was absolutely nothing of note to say about him.

And then there was Berthe . . . poor, homely Berthe, a placid doe, and rather saintly in the respect that she vowed to reject all suitors until she found her true soul mate. To my great chagrin, her glance occasionally fell my way. I don't mean any disrespect here. Berthe was sweet, and so earnestly eager to please. But she had no interest whatsoever in history. She could never be bothered to check her facts: she insisted, for example, that the Battle of Waterloo had occurred on June 15, 1818, and not on June 18, 1815. (Maybe she was dyslexic.) She didn't even know what had happened at Hougoumont. So what would we talk about during those long winter nights?

Spode was the elder statesman of the colony. He was an archivist par excellence, collecting tidbits of information from passing wildlife or tourists and codifying his findings one by one with little, officious sniffs. There were few topics about which he couldn't—or didn't—discourse, which was one of the reasons that he sought out my grandmother for conversation.

Spode had escaped once, a feat that offset his general stuffiness somewhat. He was gone for three days, coming back to us in a porcelain soup tureen (alive, thank heavens), this being the only receptacle the farmer's wife had handy to capture him among her cabbages. Perhaps because of this impressive episode, Old Lavender designated Spode the colony's lookout. Whenever he wasn't engaged in research, therefore, he would patrol the perimeter of the enclosure like some aging fusilier,
thumping his hind foot at any sign of danger. When he
was
engaged in research—which was most of the time—we were on our own.

Spode was fat and deliberate, with little brown spots on his jowls and a rather superior aspect that was tough to chew on, like dry corn husks. He occasionally embarked on philosophical discussions with Old Lavender, but she couldn't abide his airs, promptly turning her rump to him whenever she'd had enough. He always deferred to her, however. She was older than he, and her knowledge of Waterloo more comprehensive, so he usually ambled away with a sniff rather than enter into a full-blown argument with a creature who could have felled him with a single kick. Grandmother often referred to Spode as Bonaparte behind his back, which was sad, really, considering the flame he carried for her. He wasn't a bad sort. But we weren't about to cry “
Vive l'empereur!
” whenever he walked by, either.

Most of us followed the general rules that defined the Hollow Way. Yield. Bump ahead. No left turn. That sort of thing. It was a predictable sort of life, vigorously stamped with the colony's imprimatur: milling, eating, nudging, nipping, dozing . . . milling, eating, nudging, nip . . . You get the idea. That said, we were a democratic lot, never according privileges based on birth; always allowing freedom of religion, including complete denial of Moon, should that be one's bent; favoring merit-based opportunities (Jonas, for instance, with his natural zeal and superior shoulder muscles, was in charge of digging the hole under the hutch). I would venture to say that we were probably some of the first unsung proponents of the Napoleonic Code.