The Sage of Waterloo (14 page)

The rain had left a few cool breaths of mist lacing the shadows, and a sopping lawn underfoot. The frondy leaves of the ash trees, made tremulous by the slightest breeze, hung eerily motionless. Only the occasional, rasping drip from one leaf to another measured the evening's adagio.

I made my way to the garden's wide-open center and hesitated. The grass had already soaked the fur of my undercarriage, making it unpleasantly heavy. The sun had set early . . . twilight was faltering. I was breaking every rule of the rabbit canon.

I looked up: beyond the wall, a star blinked faintly through the grayish wash of city light. Perhaps it was the same star that had hung over us as we filed into the hutch at night. How I'd always longed to stay outside under the great vault of sky! Now here I was, doing just that, but the vault yawned coldly, and though I was apparently a reasonable student of circumstance, I felt illiterate in the face of such grandeur. For the first time, I thought of Moon in more subtle colors than the usual black and white. We'd always been trained to think of him as the chief arbiter of life and death—clear-cut conditions not requiring a lot of subtle shading. I mean, you're either alive or dead. That sort of reasoning.

On this blurred evening, however, I imagined a superior being of softer, more companionable hues. Dun-colored, perhaps. With little brown spots on his jowls, like Spode. And with some sort of weakness, such as digging up spring bulbs just as they're sprouting and then suffering from bloat. I considered that with such a stressful job and so few holidays, Moon might enjoy a rest on such an evening, when there appeared to be a lull in the life/death business.

Old Lavender hove unexpectedly into view. Normally I would have smelled her coming, but in this incarnation, she was curiously fragrance-free.

William! Stop being an idiot. Get back to the hutch at once!
She'd never been one to mince words. Anyway, how could I forget the lesson she had drummed into us—the lesson learned from Napoleon's careless ebullience on the morning of Waterloo? The emperor's leisurely breakfast in the face of battle was just the sort of rash behavior Grandmother was always warning us about. “We shall dine in Brussels tonight!” Bonaparte had proclaimed, even ordering a well-done shoulder of lamb for his supper. But of course, he never dined in Brussels. He didn't dine anywhere that evening.

According to one of his personal aides, Jardin Aîné, Napoleon left the battlefield not long before midnight and was on the move all night. Around four o'clock the next morning, after passing through Charleroi, he stopped to warm himself by the fire of a bivouac. He said to General Corbineau: “
Eh bien, Monsieur
, we have done a fine thing,” to which Corbineau replied, “Sire, it is the utter ruin of France.” Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and turned away. Haggard and drained of all color, he accepted a small glass of wine, and a morsel of bread that one of his equerries happened to have in his pocket. He then remounted and galloped off.

All right, so Napoleon suffered from hubris along with all his digestive miseries. He paid amply for it, though, didn't he, with that lousy dinner?

I
'd fully intended to get back to the hutch after Old Lavender's admonition. Something detained me, however.

I don't know what, exactly.

I studied the recesses of the garden through dim eyes. The shreds of mist seemed to be coalescing now, as if they may not have been purely atmospheric in origin. Was I using my gift and reading the air? I shivered. The suspect mist was only one step removed from the concept of ghosts, which had never sat very well with me. I knew that Old Lavender had seen them from time to time, at the far end of the meadow. She was never quite sure whether they were wearing French or English uniforms, but the point was, she said, that whoever they were, at least they weren't shooting at anyone.

The
thurrup
came out of nowhere.

“Well, well.” The voice was cool, aloof. “Venturing out in the dark, are we?”

My response was a quaking thigh.

“I've been watching you lately,” the voice continued. “You're finally letting your guard down, I see.”

“Who . . . who are you?” I stammered, more rudely than I might have had the apparition introduced itself properly. This couldn't be a hawk, I consoled myself. Hawks have no time for chitchat.

The creature stepped closer, flipped a wing, then cocked its head in an elegant tilt. “I never bother with names,” he said, for I could tell by now that it was indeed a “he,” a blackbird, and more urbane and forthright than any blackbird I'd ever seen.

I'd noticed blackbirds come and go from the garden. They were usually in such an earnest hurry, which made them seem more like emissaries than residents. But just after dawn, and just before twilight, the air stood still, and at those moments they lingered. The entire courtyard of walled gardens became their open-air basilica then. They chose chimneys, topmost branches or the spines of roofs for platforms, and from there they staged the most mellifluous plainsong. Sometimes they warbled quieter fare, as if thinking aloud, or answered each other from opposite sides of the sanctuary. I never knew what, exactly, they were singing about. But the greater emotions were unmistakable: passion, lament, reverie, exultation. These bards of the half-light could soften anything—even extreme loneliness like mine.

“It's taken you a while to drum up the courage to explore at sundown,” the blackbird said. He shifted his weight delicately, sidling to the right, then to the left, as if thoroughly reviewing me.

“My kind never explores at dusk,” I said. I was about to tell him that my name was William, but as he had said himself, he wasn't terribly interested in names, and anyway, I was rather put off by the fact that he seemed to have been observing me for some time without my knowledge. “Aren't you afraid of the cats?” I added. It was a childish challenge.

“No,” he said. “They're quite stupid, and useless parasites. But one must be careful all the same.”

I glanced away. This creature seemed cultured—­­at least to someone of my humble breeding. And he spoke with a wry twist unexpected in a master of serious melody.

“I've heard singing like yours where I come from,” I offered, making conversation. “It's exquisite.”

He ignored the compliment. “Where are you from?”

“Waterloo. Hougoumont, specifically.”

“Waterloo . . . ”

“Yes!” I hadn't heard the word pronounced since I'd left home. “Do you know it?”

He said: “The road to Waterloo is just over there, behind those houses. The Chaussée de Waterloo, as it's still called. Wellington himself passed that way. The Pelouse des Anglais is very close by, you know. ‘The Englishmen's lawn.' It was named after the cricket match Wellington's soldiers played there on the eve of the battle.”

I glanced beyond the wall at the silhouettes of chimneys and gables cut against the night sky. “I didn't know that,” I said, stunned to discover that all along, I'd been living so close to the road that led back to Waterloo . . . to home. I could hear the rush of passing vehicles from the garden, to be sure, and an occasional horn or ear-damaging siren, but I'd never imagined that such banal noise could suggest exalted destinations.

Forgetting my visitor entirely, I lifted my nose to the sky and tried to imagine the sound of horses' hooves and carriage wheels.

“You know about the Battle of Waterloo, then?” I asked, though the blackbird oozed sophistication and it was obvious he would know something about local history.

“Nature never truly recovers from human cataclysms,” he said distantly.

I was flabbergasted. To hear Old Lavender's words recycled in this way, by someone I hardly knew, was astonishing, especially when he added: “Every creature who was anywhere near Waterloo sensed what was going to happen. The experience was passed down the generations through collective memory, right up to the present day.”

I observed my interlocutor more closely. There was something about him I couldn't quite place. He seemed not only well versed in history, but to be moving gracefully to its rhythm. He had about him the aura of another epoch. In a playful moment, I even considered that his bearing would not have been at all out of place at the Duchess of Richmond's ball. The way the creature was turning his head and flicking a lustrous wing conjured all the courtliness of that event. In another incarnation, he might have been a prince. Or a duke . . .

On a whim, I decided to call him Arthur (“the Duke of Wellington” seeming a tad too formal). Just to myself, of course, as he didn't seem keen on introductions, and I wasn't sure about his sense of humor. He was somewhat aloof, with that touch of superiority so discouraging to less adept conversationalists like me. I hunkered down against the wet grass and swiveled my right ear in a fair imitation of Old Lavender, hoping to appear more sophisticated.

“Do you have collective memories in your own family?” I ventured.

The bird tilted his head. (A bicorne hat would have looked quite dashing on it.) “My great-uncle lives with his family behind the parking lot of the Wellington Café, right on the edge of the battlefield. Humans have short memories, don't they?”

The question jerked me from my air-reading pretensions. I'd passed the Wellington Café in the farmer's truck on the way to the
marché.
I suppose I'd been too engrossed in my reflections at the time to consider the callousness of building a café on a scene of carnage.

“People lounge on the terrace, drinking their coffees,” Arthur went on, “clueless that they're facing a field where the rye was completely flattened by corpses of their own kind, shot and hacked to death. Oh, they think they know what happened there. But their evolutionary progress seems to be in reverse. They gradually forget the magnitude of what they've done—or at least, they've managed to disguise their violence as glory—so eventually, in the course of time, they can no longer feel what still hangs in the air. Not the way we do. So they don't have any qualms about building cafés on burial grounds. They've never really stamped out their zeal for warmongering—­quite the opposite, actually. They can't seem to get enough of it.”

I sat up straighter, impressed that some of the lessons from my rather insular upbringing might be shared by more worldly creatures.

“Anyway,” Arthur continued, “this uncle of mine had a grandparent, who had a cousin, whose very distant grandfather witnessed Quatre Bras. That's how we keep our memory going.”

“I was brought up by someone like that,” I said dreamily. “I mean, she was an expert on Waterloo. She also has a special . . . well . . .” I paused. “
Gift
. She—my grandmother—can read those things you were talking about. In the air, in the soil . . . everywhere.”

The mention of Old Lavender seemed to interest the bird. He approached me, his jet-colored feathers gleaming opulently through the hazy air. At that moment, Arthur didn't seem to be a bird at all, but a being of stature, refinement. The namesake I'd given him out of sheer whimsy actually seemed to suit him.

I allowed myself a moment of reverie at the thought of the Wellington Café. The place was just up the valley from Hougoumont. The Duke had ridden his chestnut horse, Copenhagen, across the very field Arthur had described. (A coffee might have been a welcome addition to that breakfast of hot tea and toast, come to think of it.) I knew from my grandmother that Wellington's strategic ridge had been located just beyond where the tourist attractions now stand. In fact, the great conical mound with the lion on top was constructed with earth taken from that ridge.

I chewed absently on a dry leaf and considered Arthur's oversized personality. It seemed to me that maybe the human sect I mentioned earlier might have a point after all with its wheel of life: that maybe we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss birds—or any other creature, for that matter—just in case, in an auspicious spin of the wheel, they may have led the life of a famous duke.

“Is she still living, your grandmother?” Arthur asked.

“Yes!” My heart surged. Then the old Hougoumont ache washed over me: “Well, I'm really not sure.”

In truth, I hadn't had any news of the physical Old Lavender since I'd left the farm, though her other manifestations were not infrequent. I'd already experienced unprecedented boldness that evening, venturing into the twilight. My audacity had been handsomely rewarded by this extraordinary encounter. So it seemed only natural to ride the wave and ask: “Would it be possible, as you are airborne, to find news of her? She's called Old Lavender. And there are other family members, too . . .”

Arthur stepped closer, as if approaching a partner for a dance. He then turned suddenly and made a rush across the lawn. “Old Lavender,” he muttered. “Hougoumont. I'll do my best.”