The Sage of Waterloo (12 page)

Just the thought of Longwood House made me feel more at home in my own exile. No rabbit could have endured the damp vapors of Napoleon's last residence, after all. And I do think that of the two deportees, I was luckier with the accommodation, though there were times when a myopic outsider might have confused us: like Napoleon, I paced the edge of the patio, trying to pick up scents from home. I scanned the tops of the walls, hoping for a bearer of news. When the northern mists descended over the ash trees, my bones ached, as I'm sure Napoleon's had.

Even as he fretted and pined, however, the emperor wasn't beyond dropping compliments. The following one was related to me by my grandmother, and as I repeat it now, separated as I am from my beloved Hougoumont, the words have a special ring. One exile comforting another, you might say: “But for the heroic determination of William, the Prince of Orange, who, with a handful of men dared to stand firm at Quatre Bras, I would have taken the English army in
flagrante delicto
and would have conquered.”

7

W
as I afraid of my new, alien patch of turf? Oh, terrified! The walls soared high . . . so high that they seemed to lean ominously inward. Light was a scant commodity. The lawn itself was just a scrappy rectangle, bald as a newborn rabbit in places. Though not the windy plain of Waterloo, the garden did contain a harmonic of sorts that I couldn't interpret. At first I rued this lapse in my gift. But soon I realized that the air could not move freely here, and any reading of the circumstances, as Old Lavender liked to call it, was necessarily hampered.

This hidden harmonic turned out to be just as frightening as the predators of Hougoumont . . . or even the threat of Napoleonic plunderers. This was my new Untried, you might say. But even if my cage door was left open during the day and I was free to wander wherever I liked, the risk of stepping off the patio into that inchoate space always seemed too great. For you see, whenever I stood there alone, contemplating my very own Untried, all I could think of was what had happened to poor Caillou.

His shriek resides in me still.

But at last I did it: in a triumph of will I banished Caillou from my mind and stepped off the patio!

At once my haunches turned to water.

Caillou reappeared immediately. I looked up, as indeed he seemed to be urging, and imagined a hawk with the wingspan of a vulture. In vain I searched for a sign from Old Lavender. How could she have summoned the courage to enter the Hougoumont meadow, alone, and at night
—twice
? I even cast about for a signal from Moon himself, assuring me that I had nothing to fear; that I would certainly return to my hutch from this excursion in one piece. (“One piece” meaning, of course, without bloodied, shredded flesh. Why is reality always reduced to insipid niceties?)

The Untried lay before me, ripe as a cabbage. For the first time in my life I was poised to take a bite.

The light had begun to fail.
When the sun touches the tops of the trees it's time to go home, William
. The voice jangled a distant nerve, then vanished.

Heedless, I crept to the center of the grassy patch, where something familiar suddenly gripped my body. That old impulsiveness surged. Exhilerated, I felt pulled towards the tree at the back corner as if by a knowing hand. (The hand also, thank heavens, bestowed a last-minute dollop of self-confidence.) Behind the tree yawned the sort of long, dark, narrow space of earth to which every rabbit feels an atavistic pull, but which I'd never seen myself until that moment.

No, William.

The warning seemed closer now.

I rose up on my hind legs and peered behind me. Old Lavender must have been present in some incarnation or another, for she then raised her voice with typical surliness and snapped:
Go back! It's late. Remember Caillou . . .

It's interesting to recall the first time one breaks step with a mentor. We all have to grow up, after all. It was in that garden, at dusk, when I felt it for the first time: the voice of the old sage being drowned out by another, more resonant one. Instinct? Destiny? No matter. Far more compelling was the sensation of finally acting on that wild streak in my blood. The impulse was so strong that I found myself wondering if my white Hougoumont ancestors had ever spent any time outside the hutch.

Whatever it was that spurred me ahead, I'd completely forgotten the mindless choreography of the herd. For once I was acting entirely, gloriously, alone.

It was late October. The light was already slinking away over the walls, leaving just a few stray shafts in the greenery. A cozy, yellowish glow arced out from the house, but I'd ventured far beyond it, and anyway, the house lights only served to darken the rest of the garden.

I was craning my neck to sniff behind the ivy when I heard it: that soft, terrifying
thurrup
of wings.

Instinct took the upper hand. I flattened myself against the earth, rigid as wood. My heart beat at a speed unknown to humans. The tips of my ears turned cold. Was this what Caillou had felt, I wondered, at the moment the hawk floated in? But why bother to ask? I'd soon find out for myself.

The wings descended somewhere near the peony. I glanced sideways in the general direction of the disturbance. One thing struck me: the relative ease with which my mind was functioning at that moment—relative, that is, to the utter rigor in my limbs. In a flash of déjà vu, I recognized the fear I'd known when venturing out by the full moon to observe my grandmother. But thoughts of the Hougoumont night also fueled a curious resolve. Now that I was removed from my birthplace, I had a moment (enhanced, I realized later, by the presence of doom) to reflect on one of those vintage Old Lavender tenets: something to the effect that someone else's predicament is almost always worse than one's own. For example, our kind generally has only the usual night predators to worry about. Waterloo combatants, on the other hand, had had snipers and skirmishers to contend with, not to mention mud, clogged weapons and fatigue, and regardless of whether it was death or survival that had greeted them at battle's end, those lads had gone forth gallantly and accepted whichever hand was extended. Surely, then, I could face whatever awaited me under the peony.

I also remember wondering about my new proprietor, and whether she'd been wise in her choice of rabbit. I was glaringly white, after all. Caillou had only been pale gray, and he'd been visible from across the Waterloo battlefield.

There was a vigorous scattering of earth, as if by an impatient beak. Then with horror I saw a small shadow detach itself from the peony's larger one and skip with purpose towards me (though stylishly, I couldn't help noticing). Death has many guises, I reminded myself . . . especially winged ones . . . and so I made myself even flatter, awaiting my fate. Should I speak to it? I wondered. Negotiate in some way? It was difficult to imagine Caillou surviving even this long in the proceedings, so I ceased to wonder what
he
might have said or done.

Before I could determine anything more, however, there was another
thurrup
, a rustle of ivy and the thing was gone.

I went faint with relief.

But I had to admit that there'd been a strange measure of grace about those wings, as if they'd belonged to something not intent on dinner. Was this my gift speaking? Had I read the air correctly? I knew that I couldn't afford to get poetic, though, stranded as I was at the back of the Untried . . . and at twilight, no less.

Someone came out of the house calling my name. Rabbits don't usually respond to that sort of thing, sensing as we do a trap just about everywhere, so I was reluctant to emerge from the shadows. I was found easily, though (I would have made a lousy foot soldier in the end), and gently locked in for the night.

How I longed for warm bodies that night! For musky smells, and the nocturnal whispers of Hougoumont. The sound of the beech branch would have been most welcome, even with its suggestion of phantom drummers.

I wasn't entirely alone, however. Old Lavender still felt close by, lingering somewhere in the ectoplasm.
What had happened to her?
The question stalked my sleep each night, and greeted me every day upon waking. Would I ever know the answer?

I tried to imagine the confusion in the colony after I'd left—after the farmer had headed out the North Gate with the load of us, and the dust had settled on the lane. Everyone in the pen would have been milling, taking stock. Maybe Spode, with his newly minted seniority, would have chosen a solemn moment to deliver the news.

Old Lavender, gone!
Would there have been chaos? Insurrection? I considered the way that Grandmother had hectored everybody at one time or another and decided that some in the colony might have even breathed a sigh of relief at her departure. I could imagine the rumors swirling: Had the rabbit in the moon bewitched her? Or a wild lover?

Alone, in an unfamiliar hutch, I simply couldn't ward off the vision of that moonlit night: Old Lavender standing on her hind legs like a young doe, and the specter of something moving against the south wall. Curiously, there'd been no scent on the air. No sound. Just the odd feeling that Grandmother had seemed to recognize those shadows—perhaps had even encountered them before.

I hunkered down in my new home, confused and lonely. Existential questions crowded around me like annoying relatives. Old Lavender drifted near:

There are sometimes no explanations, William. So don't try to find them, or pretend that they're there. They aren't. But there's always, always a way forward.

A
s it turned out, finding my way forward in exile would take more than an occasional visit from the disembodied Old Lavender. Solitude is the absence of others, one would say. Therefore, using that classic definition, my solitude in Brussels was almost as pure as it comes. I had my proprietors, of course—not to mention the presence of those elusive,
thurrup
ing wings, which might have belonged to something resembling company—so the definition was blurred slightly. Nevertheless, like Napoleon on his cursed rock, I had never felt lonelier.

I'm not usually prone to quoting Berthe, but as I'll probably never see her again, her remarks have taken on some poignancy, especially now that I was no longer a candidate for relieving her own solitude.

“Solitude is a state of being, William,” she said once at Hougoumont. “There's a big difference between being alone, and feeling lonely.” I even remember when she said this: We were jostling near the supper dish one evening, sandwiched up against Jonas's tail. Berthe was being unusually forthcoming, I remember thinking, and had I been able to escape her I would have, especially as her topic implied a need for attention. “How lonely one can feel in a crowd!” she sighed, shoving Jonas ineffectually before continuing. “Everyone pushes past me. No one looks me in the eye. They couldn't be bothered about my ideas.”

All this I understood. With some remorse I remembered that I'd treated Berthe like that myself. I had looked her in the eye only once and never again, because she'd confused my politeness with ardor and it had taken me weeks to shake her off.

Just as we reached the supper dish, she said something disturbing: “I'd rather be a ghost, somewhere out there”—she indicated the meadow—­“than feel invisible in here.”

I remember that I'd glanced at Berthe's drooping jowls—not her finest quality—and then out through the chicken wire into the gloaming. “Have you actually seen them, then?” I asked.

“Only Old Lavender has,” Berthe said. “You have to have her gift to see anything out there.”

A chill passed through me and I said nothing. I'd never breathed a word to anyone about the gift I'd supposedly inherited from Grandmother. Nor had I ever connected it with anything actually visible—­apparitions, for example. I pressed against the fence and shot a look at the place near the south wall where I'd seen those moonlit shapes.

Twilight was a particularly atmospheric time in the meadow, and it wasn't difficult to imagine all those battlefield ghosts going about their evening business. The traffic of souls was brisk at that hour, according to Old Lavender. She once mused that to fill the idle eons, the ghosts had formed various clubs to keep themselves occupied: cricket for the British, boules for the French . . . that sort of thing. So if Berthe's wish came true and she actually joined them, she might very well encounter the same large crowds outside the hutch as inside—and the same loneliness. Death solves a lot of problems, but not all of them.

But I've strayed from my subject.

“No one encourages reflection anymore,” bemoaned Grandmother during my Hougoumont years. “These days, contemplation is reserved for misfits . . . or for those who chew their cud for a living. Our species can produce first-class thinkers, especially in captivity. It's just that you cannot be too comfortable. Comfort makes you sluggish and unimaginative.”