The Sage of Waterloo (5 page)

Did you know there's a mythical rabbit in the moon? No? Well, there is one. You can trace its head, ears and tail in the various oceans on that heavenly body. Have a look, next time it's full. Some cultures think the animal is stirring something, or maybe pounding on a mortar. Others believe it is the Great Rabbit Himself—He who created the universe, that is. We were free to interpret the rabbit in the moon however we wished, though I've never reached a full understanding of the topic myself, being of modest intellect. But I like to think that since rabbits are generally seen at dawn and dusk, we act as gatekeepers of sorts for the night, and are somehow complicit in the rising and setting of our lunar relative. (This observation took quite a long time for me to formulate, by the way, and I'm rather proud of it.) There's little doubt that there
is
a rabbit in the moon. Now I just have to figure out what purpose he serves when he isn't rising or setting.

You may think the name of our god—Moon—rather unimaginative. Obvious, even. But you'd be wrong.

“There's
Moon
,” Grandmother used to say. “And there's
the
moon. Don't confuse them. Gods don't like to be tied down too much to their physical representations, and Moon is no exception. It smacks of idolatry, after all. The rabbit in the moon inspired the
idea
of our god (and the very tempting supposition that there is one at all). But Moon himself goes wherever he wants, whenever he wants. He's sometimes not even nearby when the moon is full. An ironic oversight, especially around here . . .”

We knew exactly what she was getting at. The Hougoumont night was not a normal phenomenon as nights go. How could it be, after what had happened there? The moon had only been a few days shy of full on the eighteenth of June, 1815, though the clouds were heavy and the moonlight unreliable. An insignificant detail, perhaps. Not many historians mention it. But if the full moon is anything, it's a handy lamp, and for the thousands who lay wounded on the Waterloo battlefield after sundown, their purgatory had only just begun. For the clouds would break from time to time, and when they did, the moon lit the plunderers' way.

Even the suggestion of plunderers made us head inside at night, which of course made Old Lavender's daily herding easier. It didn't matter that the threat was two hundred years old. She knew we had trouble distinguishing the centuries, and a plunderer was a plunderer, after all. What she wanted to impart was that twilight is a serious time for small animals. Foxes and owls lurk offstage, ever alert for a meal. Thus, strolling and stargazing were not encouraged in the colony (particularly with a lookout like Spode). Captivity tends to dull the senses, and we'd almost forgotten that predators existed at all. We'd grown complacent, I suppose. What better way to teach the dangers of the night, therefore, than with the dread of Napoleonic robbers—even if they hadn't been seen for some time?

I didn't mind going into the hutch during the full moon. The horde, the heat, the stench . . . such things seem normal, even agreeable, when you're young. It was just sad that no one was ever permitted to appreciate the spectacle of one of our own kind floating in the heavens. How we longed to defy the rule! Temptation sparred mightily with obedience, but eventually the conflict proved tiring, and we always straggled inside to bed.

“There a fine line between courage and recklessness,” Old Lavender liked to point out. “One day, you may find yourself locked outside at night. You'll have to find that line very quickly; you'll have to summon your courage, then slowly rein it in, because otherwise you'll cross over to recklessness and end up as somebody's dinner.”

She would cite the example of Marshal Ney for this lesson. Perhaps she admired him more than we thought. Though she labeled Ney “that spoiled hysteric,” Old Lavender knew that he'd been dealt a bad hand at Quatre Bras.

The confrontation had occurred two days before the main battle at Waterloo and ended in a bloody stalemate of sorts. Ney's various orders had come late . . . or not at all. He'd found himself with too few troops to fight Wellington, and even fewer options. “Nothing was going right for Ney on June sixteenth, and history judged him harshly,” Grandmother said. “When Napoleon sent him a message to hurry up, that was the last straw. Ney snapped. He crossed that line into recklessness, ordering an almost suicidal cavalry charge into Allied lines. He survived, though. So remember: If you find yourself shut out at night, think of the Marshal and his very bad day. If he could survive the British army, you have a pretty good chance of surviving one night out of doors.”

T
here was a rumor that Grandmother had escaped once.

Details were sketchy, but according to popular hearsay, one full moon several generations ago, she dug her way out of the enclosure and traversed the Untried, all the way to the eastern wall. No witnesses had ever come forward, and Old Lavender herself never spoke about it. So even though we lived next to the actual source of this legend, we might as well have been looking into a spring from which we were never permitted to drink.

I knew about it, though.

That is, I didn't see her escape, but I knew that she communed with something beyond the enclosure. I couldn't say how many times this had happened, or over how many years. I'd only defied her orders once, you see.

The moon was full that night—or nearly. Of that I'm certain, though on all other points my memory is a bit nebulous, because every second I spent outside I was frozen with alarm. Instinct seized my limbs.
Had Ney felt this way at Quatre Bras?
I wondered. And then:
How can I possibly be thinking about Marshal Ney at such a moment?
I couldn't have been bothered about the rabbit in the moon, although there he was, a whimsical gray squiggle on the surface of the glowing orb. Who cared if the squiggle was Moon himself? All I could think of was the darker gray of approaching wings.

I didn't see Old Lavender at first. She was in her usual hollow, which I hadn't expected, somehow. I'd assumed she would have chosen a safer spot: Jonas's earthworks under the hutch, for example. But there she was, upending all her own edicts, dallying under the full moon in a wide-open place. She was balancing on her hind legs in a stance I didn't even think she could manage anymore. Both ears were cocked forward. There was a wild, youthful aspect about her.

I shuffled up and stopped a few feet away. She would surely sense me at any moment, I remember thinking, as the wind was freshening behind me from the north. If so, I had to be ready to dart back into the hutch at once. Grandmother's punishment could be severe. These were just passing thoughts, however, insignificant before the greater pull I was experiencing: the wild impulse that played such havoc with the calm surface I was supposed to possess. Was this my gift kicking in? Surely not. The gift Grandmother had described was one of reflection, of intuition. Not this . . . not an urgent desire to leap over a fence.

Old Lavender was staring down the stretch of south wall. The moon had risen above the old beech: a harvest moon, overripe, expectant. Deep shadows cut across the silvery Untried. It seemed that light had shed its daytime duties and was doing whatever it fancied. It danced through the loopholes the British Guards had cut in the wall in 1815, and played unnervingly across the two bulbous tombstones of their fallen comrades, surfacing like mammals in a grassy sea. The memorial to the French rose like a buoy and threw a particularly frightening shadow. The monument had a cement eagle perched on top, and from it the moon had fashioned its black double on the grass.

The whole place was stage-lit, charged.

But inert.

Until something moved along the wall.

I peered where Old Lavender was peering: the movement skirted the tombs, vanished and then, to my horror, suddenly reappeared much closer, sidling slowly along the wall towards the pen. I knew that restless meadow well; I could only imagine that what I was witnessing was simply a manifestation of the usual rustling and sighing we heard each night.

But the thought rang false, somehow. Maybe I didn't know the meadow very well after all. The threat of Napoleonic plunderers didn't seem so far-fetched just then, and as the wind picked up, and the beech branch set up its tapping against the top of the wall, I found myself searching the rhythm for patterns, as if there might be some kind of signal in the sound.

Oddly, Old Lavender settled back onto all fours at that point, as if she'd found whatever it was she'd been looking for. Perhaps she'd deciphered a message of some sort, and was reassured that all was well.

The tapping ceased.

I could make out two distinctly denser patches against the wall now—one slender and taller; the other low-slung, pale. Old Lavender leaned toward them. Both forms swelled from the shadows, then melted away.

L
ate November: dusk. I was daydreaming near the chicken wire before supper when Grandmother bumped against me rather heavily. “Don't you ever see them, William?” she asked, irritated.

What was she talking about?

“No” seemed the safest answer, so I said it.

“Well, don't you feel them, then? This is the perfect time of day for it.”

“I . . . I don't think so.” Then, weakly: “Who?”

My mind turned uneasily to the night of the full moon, and those shapes against the wall.

“Close your eyes,” she snapped.

I did. But all I could think about was dinner. It was late, chilly, and I was too hungry for a lesson. The wind threw a clutch of dry leaves against the fence and befuddled me even further.

“You're not focusing,” she said.
How did she know?
“That's better,” she said.
Right again.

She nosed my fur in the wrong direction, roughly. “Almost six thousand men died in this place on a single day.”

I knew that already. Most of the time, any mention of the topic prompted much lurid banter in the colony. Jonas, in his element, would puff himself up and expound on the stacks of human corpses robbed of their clothes, and the communal fosse by the South Gate where they'd been dumped and burned. Why is it that the young always want to know about such things?

“Observe properly!” Grandmother hectored. “You may not be able to sense what I do without many more years of practice. But any novice can detect something unusual in the air around here.”

She'd taught us the theory about that sort of observation. Perception is rarely immediate, she said. It takes time. First you must tune your senses: You must slow all bodily and mental movement, and align your ears properly. And don't look at things from too close up. (If any creature needs reading glasses, it's rabbits.) It takes time to open up a space inside yourself wide enough to let ideas in and shed light on them.

Who could forget our first tutorial, when Old Lavender had us all stare up at the chapel spire for a whole hour?

“I told you several times what happened there,” she said. “Weren't any of you listening? The wounded men were dragged inside the chapel; the fire licked through the door and singed only the feet of the crucifix. Then the flames suddenly retreated.
Why?
Open up your minds! Study the details. Be on the lookout for vibrations. The chapel was the site of great passion, after all. Was it the human god who saved it?” She paused to chew on some dry pellets. “Destiny?” With resignation she asked: “And what about our god? Would he have even arrived in time to put out the fire?”

Jonas managed about seven minutes of observation. Caillou needed to use the toilet after three. Spode, probably to impress his inamorata, continued for two hours, long after Old Lavender herself had called it a day and gone off to lunch. For my part, I hung on for a good half an hour, after which my haunches began to quiver with that familiar restiveness and I moved off to study the meadow.

There was something about Grandmother's tone now, as the keen November wind came off the fields, that made me feel as if I were learning the observation lesson all over again.