The Sage of Waterloo (4 page)

A
fter a period of reflection—several days or so—Old Lavender would lecture to the enclosure at large. The place was crowded: we were unable to eat, groom, fornicate or daydream more than about a foot away from someone else, so she had a decent captive audience. Not that we objected. She mined her Waterloo passion for treasures that were exclusively ours for the taking.

It was a subject none of us could avoid, of course, living as we did against the very earth that had shook with the conflict, and breathing air still dense with souls. Like the rest of us, Old Lavender couldn't escape her destiny as a small creature, so her brand of history had mainly to do with small things.

“Our point of view is a gift,” she said. “We understand essential minutiae, in our species and in humans: unease in a voice or gesture; electricity sparked by panic or excitement; signals betraying doubt, joy, grief. And don't forget the rich realm of smell. What an encyclopedia that is! Any one of you could have picked up Napoleon's stress on the eve of battle.” Grandmother went on to say that Napoleon's very pores had exuded the sort of anxiety that even the dullest animal wit can pick up. His human entourage, however, could only go by less subtle pointers: loud, agitated talking, and orders issued with great vehemence; constant snuff-taking, and the supreme confidence that he would be sleeping at the royal palace in Brussels after his victory.

History is in the details
. . . How many times we were reminded of that! Pick the details that move you, we were instructed—the ones that speak to you, and arrest you. Then build your idea of history around them, for only then will it come alive.

My first lessons taught me the smallest pearls . . . so small that any serious pearl fisherman would have tossed them away. But through Old Lavender's eyes, these tiny treasures were like pebbles viewed through a drop of rain: color, size and clarity were all enhanced, transforming an insignificant scrap of stone into a jewel.

Observe closely
, Grandmother said, adding:
but with passion
. And what a passionate stage she set! She was living proof that emotion can reside in the surliest, smelliest of vessels.

Clouds, mists, driving rain . . . annoying details, perhaps, but on the eve of Waterloo, our countryside had become the twilight of some despairing god. Higher forces were clearly circling . . . circling . . .

“It was peculiarly awful, that storm,” Old Lavender said. “An omen, surely. Soldiers fell up to their necks in mud. It was only logical that Napoleon had to wait for things to dry a bit before he could move his artillery. Cannonballs need to deflect, after all, and not get bogged down. It was a fateful waste of time, though. Napoleon was four hours late to his own battle.”

Don't wait for the mud to dry before you go ahead and do things
was, therefore, one of Grandmother's classic aphorisms, along with:
You can always jump higher than you think you can
, referring to our ancestors in the chateau hutches, who may or may not have escaped the Hougoumont siege. Like most historical details, it depends on whom you ask.

It's a curious fact that no one knows at what time, exactly, the Battle of Waterloo began. Most historians think it was around eleven-thirty in the morning; Old Lavender thought it started at eleven. Her conviction was such that she could have told us it started at midnight and we would have believed her.

She would have been a natural film director, our grandmother, so sweeping was her vision. The panorama she created spread to the farthest reaches of our fancy, and even with our eyes closed, we couldn't fathom its limits. Her images were only words, of course. But how they hummed through our waking hours and commandeered our dreams! She cast such a spell that we weren't sure what was real, and what imagined. We were kept awake by the smell of the wet, trampled barley the soldiers slept on the night before the battle. We felt the floor of the hutch shudder at Napoleon's magnificent cuirassiers, advancing at full gallop. We heard every strike of the village clock on that June morning—even counted them aloud until eleven, when we imagined the French guns thundering to life.

Now and then, Grandmother indulged Caillou with his favorite bedtime story. It's an elusive tale, and one with few hard facts: a French drummer boy survived the bloody siege of Hougoumont's North Gate. That's about it. Hardly enough, you would say, to fashion a decent bedtime story. But it was the kind of deceptive triviality that Grandmother so loved, because historians generally tossed it away like those careless pearl fishermen—even misrepresented it—not realizing what bounty they had missed. Old Lavender thus felt free to appropriate the treasure and do with it as she liked.

The drummer boy himself was never identified. He'd been led into the Hougoumont barn at the height of the battle by Private Matthew Clay, a British soldier who was hardly more than a boy himself at the time, and whose eyewitness account was widely quoted by the Eaton ladies. According to Clay, the drummer boy survived a skirmish at the South Gate, not the North. (Grandmother never understood how historians could be so remiss with their reading.)

No one knows what happened to the French boy after that. Was he an orphan? An impoverished urchin seeking adventure? Other youngsters had run off to war under such circumstances, after all. Did he ever make his way back to France, or even grow to manhood?

In the manner of the greatest teachers, Old Lavender placed the pearls before us but made us string and polish them ourselves. She was not without her opinions, though.

“He may have become a teacher, or a leader . . . even a philosopher,” she offered. “He'd seen the slaughter at Hougoumont with an innocent's gaze, don't forget. Like your own.” The comment made us look around the hutch at each other in a new, dawning way. “He could have helped chart another course for humanity, away from its morbid obsession with war.”

Then her tone cooled, and her eyes revealed deeper significance: “Or he may have perished finding his way off the battlefield. Died of fever . . .” Her pause was exquisitely timed. “And become something else.”

Our nerves sparked to life. Consider it: from such uncertainty does history take its oxygen. When the what, where, who, how and why of a historical event are known, then all the details are neatly recorded, entombed between the covers of a weighty book and stowed away on a shelf, only to be taken down some twenty years later when someone needs a doorstop. (A reasonable description of Spode, come to think of it.)

Whatever the details surrounding the mysterious drummer boy, we all sensed that there was something odd about him, as if he'd not quite signed off on his own drama . . . even centuries later. For my part, I secretly believed that providence had brushed against this incident (when not otherwise engaged with the Duke of Wellington, that is), making from it the sort of tantalizing, under­water gleam one can never bring to the surface.

Old Lavender embellished the story for Caillou, of course. She even became quite poetic, describing the boy's slight build, his tousled hair, and the large brown eyes that had missed nothing on that humid summer afternoon. The runt invariably dozed off before she'd finished. But the rest of us just weren't able to sleep, somehow. We would tune our ears warily to the wind outside the hutch, listening for the tap of stick against drum. There were all sorts of stray sounds in the Hougoumont night one couldn't always explain. Rhythmic tapping was just one of them.

M
ornings were reserved for pop quizzes:

“What did Wellington have for breakfast?” (Hot, sweet tea and toast. Napoleon, by the way, took his breakfast on silver plate.) “Why was Napoleon such a poor rider?” (He slid around on the saddle too much, wearing holes in his breeches.) “How long was Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher pinned under his dead horse?” (Even longer than it takes to pronounce his name properly.) “What did they use to revive him? (Blücher, not the horse: gin and garlic.)

I had no difficulty building history around these nuggets. In fact, I often escaped into my creations completely, which was probably not what Grandmother had in mind, crusty realist that she was.

You see, all of her details moved me, arrested me, spoke to me . . . to the very depths of my soul. I hardly knew which one to choose from. For guaranteed escape, Wellington was always a good bet, so I would track him eagerly as he rode about all day in his plain blue frock coat and bicorne hat, amazed at how such a mythmaker could subsist on just hot tea and toast. Then I would leave the Duke to his reconnoitering for a while and practice pronouncing
Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.
I never really mastered it, despite all the hours spent trying, thereby gaining a much greater appreciation of the old Prussian general's predicament. (He was seventy-three at the time.) When those activities paled, I imagined myself boldly escaping from the Hougoumont barn during the fiercest of the fighting, leaping across the chateau garden through a blizzard of bullets, the finger of providence firmly upon me.

Sometimes, in the sanctum of the hollow, I stole a glance at the long-eared sphinx that was my grandmother and wondered how she could possibly know as much as she did. Anyone can stare for hours through a wire fence, after all, thinking about nothing much. But she had elevated patient observation to the highest art form; she listened, and deliberated, and had detected the unrest in that walled meadow long before any of us were born. It was obvious from her vast knowledge that she enjoyed privileged communion with something or other: Moon, perhaps. But he's a casual god as these things go, and I'm not sure he was all that keen on historical detail, to be honest, having been so spectacularly absent from one of history's most famous battles.

My theory is that Old Lavender used her cunning, and her extreme sensitivity, to glean and intuit. She could read shifts in the air; tremors underfoot; the gestures and regard of passing wildlife. This she did serenely, through countless hours of reflection. I imagine the process was rather like harvesting an orchard by hand, one fruit at a time. Though the orchard at the far end of the Hougoumont meadow has long since disappeared and I cannot prove this hypothesis.

Any details she couldn't glean or intuit she learned outright from visitors—the Eaton ladies, chiefly, who made a habit of lingering near the dovecote and sharing their reading. I must admit that I quaked a bit before those singular women, as I often did before Old Lavender herself, even if she happened to be my grandmother. Maybe it was their silver hair and unlined faces, a combination that is rare, I understand, and worthy of attention.

“Nature never truly recovers from human cataclysms,” Grandmother said one day, to me alone. “Never.” She was using
that
tone: two parts old sage, one part female warrior, scant affection and no salt. I suspected that she'd picked up some pointers listening to the Eaton ladies.

“Every creature who was anywhere near Waterloo sensed what was going to happen,” she explained. “If they could, they got out. Those who stayed and survived passed the experience on through collective memory, right down through the generations until the present day. Collective memory . . . and resonance.”

“Resonance?” I tried to give the word the same weight she had.

“Of course! Landscapes where great passion has been spilled resonate. Not loudly. But loud enough for most wild creatures to detect. Once set in motion, the vibrations continue forever.”

Her look was grave. “Yes, William.
Forever.
” With a pinch of affection she added: “I'm telling you this because I believe you have my gift. We can all pick up vibrations. But you have the ability to interpret them, and pass them on. You should be aware of this now, even though you won't master your gift for many years. It's a responsibility, you know. Take great care with it.”

3

A
curious thing happened on nights of the full moon: Old Lavender would herd us summarily into the hutch even before Emmanuel stopped by and dismiss Spode from his lookout. Then she would linger outside in the run, as if she'd forgotten to reflect on something or other during the day and needed extra time in her hollow. If Emmanuel did turn up, he'd give his usual, cursory look for stragglers, but was often playing a game on his cell phone at the same time and frequently overlooked someone. Old Lavender he steered clear of. Even an oaf could summon the gray cells to fathom that this rabbit, always difficult, was unmanageable by the full moon.