The Sage of Waterloo (20 page)

I thought about the magic of Hougoumont, especially at twilight: the vapors that crept over the walls and into the garden, and the restless pockets of air trapped in the milkiness. How could I forget the shadows fingering their way over the grass, and the occasional tremor in the darkness, as if it had been startled? Would my memories be ruined by Arthur's revelation?

I squared my shoulders. Wellington would have. “Yes,” I said. “I want to know.”

He began:

“The fighting at Hougoumont finally stopped at about seven-thirty in the evening. Your grandmother told you the details, I think. I don't need to elaborate.”

Arthur's delivery lacked its usual elegance. He seemed anxious, as if he had to impart his news as quickly as possible.

“Sometime that afternoon, a young soldier led a boy from the South Gate to safety in one of the barns.”

“Ah, yes, the South Gate,” I mumbled to myself. “Private Matthew Clay.” Then, to Arthur: “Grandmother would be glad that you made that distinction, because most people think that the boy came through the North Gate.”

“Theories differ,” Arthur said, rather coolly, I thought. He went on: “The air in the yard was suffocating. Everything was black with soot from the burning chateau. Flying embers scorched everyone. Horses went mad. Some of them ran the wrong way, straight into the fire. Livestock burned to death in their byres. There were many injured men in the barn where the boy had been taken—this was obvious to any creature by the prevailing odor of blood. And, of course, by the screams . . . ”

Arthur paused with the drama of a natural storyteller.

“A surgeon was amputating limbs.”

Another pause. Then: “No one knows exactly what happened to the boy once he reached the barn. The young soldier may have given him a corner of rye cake, or some tainted water. Maybe the fact of being only a boy saved him from certain punishment for being French. At any rate, he was left to his own devices. According to what I heard, when darkness fell, he emerged into the courtyard.”

The next pause seemed a bit exaggerated, so I urged him on. “Yes?
And?
”

“And he was carrying a rabbit.”

“A
rabbit
?” This development seemed anticlimactic, even for me.

Arthur ignored the comment. “A white one. There were rabbit hutches in the barn, of course. It was an estate, after all. There were gardens. Livestock. The gentry would have raised delicacies like pigeon and rabbit.” He gave me a sympathetic glance before continuing.

“I've spent some time going over the information I picked up at Hougoumont, you know.” Arthur spoke more earnestly now. “That's why I haven't been by to see you for a while. Here is my theory: It seems that the boy noticed the rabbit hutches when they took him into the barn. When no one was looking, he opened one of them, intending to liberate the occupants. But the creatures—­those that had survived the trauma, that is—were so terrorized, they couldn't budge. None of them emerged. So the boy grabbed the one that had caught his attention and slipped away, tucking the rabbit into his uniform jacket as he crossed the courtyard.”

The one that had caught his attention
. . . I regretted tuning Arthur out at that point, as his story was moving apace, but I'd felt a frisson at the mention of choosing a white rabbit from among its terrorized relatives, thereby saving it from neglect . . . or the dinner plate. The anecdote has an oddly familiar ring, doesn't it? There are people, it seems (thank heavens), who are naturally attracted to white rabbits.

“There was too much chaos and smoke for anyone to bother about a boy,” Arthur went on. “Too many medical emergencies. So he carried the rabbit into the formal garden, and stopped about halfway across it, near the trellises.”

At this point, Arthur meandered a bit from his plotline. He described the beauty of the Hougoumont gardens, and how they had miraculously survived the slaughter. Myrtle and fig trees were in bloom, he said. Jasmine and honeysuckle draped the trellises. Nature had been almost callous in her response to the violence, lacing the stench of corruption with such sweet perfume.

In full swing now, Arthur embarked on a tale about how the British soldiers had butchered a pig the morning before the fighting started, and ate chunks of it warmed through over a fire and blackened with smoke. Finding his own portion too unsavory, Private Clay stuffed the meat in his pocket and went off to fight the French, after which, at the end of that long day, he found a fire burning on some ruin or other and gladly extracted his pork for cooking. He discovered, however, “that the glow of fire arose from the half-consumed body of some party who had fallen in the contest.”

I hesitated for a moment to give dramatic timing its due. Then, impatient, I asked: “Where did the boy take the rabbit?”

“He just let him go,” Arthur said.

“He . . . ”

“Yes. He just set him down in the garden. But the animal didn't move from his side. Then someone yelled to him from the gate—maybe the young soldier, looking for him. The boy panicked and bolted, leaving the rabbit behind, and crawled through a tumbled-down section of the east wall, escaping into the orchard.”

“Did the Allies on the ridge take him in?” I asked, my heartbeat accelerating. “Was he shot by a stray bullet?”
He may have perished finding his way off the battlefield
, Old Lavender had said.
Or died of fever.

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?

“W
here 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.

Y
our 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.