The Sage of Waterloo (7 page)

A musket ball to the ribs; a hawk swooping in . . . death comes in an infinite array of disguises. But once arrived, its face is always the same—or so it seems to me. I'd seen enough inert lumps of fur pushed against the fence, and smelled that peculiar gaminess in the hutch to know when death had stopped by. I didn't actually see Caillou after he'd died, it's true. But I feel sure that even he, so quickly reduced to a meal, would have briefly taken on that aura everyone does at some point—a magnetic stillness more powerful than loss, or grief, or even love: the handprint of rapturous homecoming.

There wasn't a moment to lose. We headed back to the enclosure posthaste, scrabbling over the slippery cobbles, making evasive leaps in case there were other hawks in the vicinity who had heard about the fine dining at Hougoumont. We slunk back through the open gate and filed directly into the hutch—unusually, as it was only midday. Emmanuel wouldn't be back again for another day or two, depending on whether or not he remembered having come that morning, and the farmer rarely checked in on us. That meant that the gate of the enclosure would remain open all night.

Old Lavender greeted us curtly, then resumed a stony silence in her own reserved corner of the hutch. No one uttered Caillou's name—it didn't seem necessary, somehow. Old Lavender seemed to know already what had happened; I'm sure she'd known for some time that the runt was doomed. No one uttered my name, either, thank heavens, although Grandmother would find out soon enough who had led the excursion.

When she emerged the next day, she went directly to the hollow and immersed herself in reflection. Her ears assumed their customary, skewed position. But her aspect was more forbidding, somehow. Warily, I settled against the earth a bit farther from her than usual. Had yesterday's disaster prompted thoughts of her own legendary escape? I wondered. My imagination raced. I couldn't help speculating that Grandmother's escapade, festering off-limits in colony lore, had left something unfinished at the core of her being that continued to work on her day and night. Our disaster had clearly added to the burden. Her silence was weighted with all the lessons she had taught us, as obviously as if she had hung a reminder on the chicken wire. Indeed, we seemed to be amply punished just by her mute, smelly displeasure.

It actually wasn't so bad, nestling against my own piece of earth for a change. It gave me a chance to come to my own conclusions about yesterday, as unformed as they may have been at my young age. I'm not sure if I was recalling something Grandmother had once told us, or if I had actually come up with this myself, but I realized, after our abortive escape, that there's an optimal time for everything. Casting a furtive glance at Old Lavender, I considered that if she had indeed slipped out herself once, she may have chosen the wrong time, and that's why she'd come back. Patience is the key. To do something important at the wrong moment is worse than not doing it at all.

I should have avoided that open gate. The moment had been about as wrong as could be.

I shifted in the dirt. I'd acted mindlessly, stepping out even before Jonas on an adventure that had ended in death. Now I saw how fitting it had been to name me after the naïve Prince of Orange. Not everyone called his actions “heroic determination,” as Napoleon had. Some accounts show that the Prince had brought destruction to a company of men at Quatre Bras through a deadly mix of impulse and inexperience.

I didn't have as many deaths on my conscience as William of Orange, perhaps. But I had Caillou's. And at that moment, I was sure that no regret, princely or otherwise, could have matched my own.

My heart ached for the poor runt. I longed for Grandmother to shed some light on what had happened that morning at the South Gate. I mean, think about it: Is a single death—especially the death of a creature that the human species considers insignificant enough to eat—of any universal importance at all in a place where thousands of men have died? (Or in any other place, for that matter?) For the human animal, probably not. But for us . . . for us . . . . Oh, can you not step outside the human mind-set for just a moment and imagine the remorse I felt?

I studied Old Lavender as she sat alone in our hollow, and began to understand that she wanted me to sort these things out for myself.

That was the day I grew up.

4

J
onas may have been the finest physical specimen of our colony, but I do think (not to be immodest about it) that I was one of the better students. I had the privilege of a higher education, after all, sharing that hollow with our grandmother; and like her, I was also a secret admirer of the Eaton ladies. I tarried at the fence during their visits, tracking each step of their progress around the meadow. Whenever they rested near the dovecote and Old Lavender drew near them, I was never far behind her. I'm sure that the snow-and-moon ladies never dreamed that their reading aloud so close to the Hougoumont rabbit enclosure would be sifted and analyzed by the long-eared matriarch behind the fence, and eagerly stored away by her young apostle.

Charlotte Eaton herself traveled to Brussels from Ghent on June 15, 1815, accompanied by her brother and sister, and taking the same road along which Napoleon Bonaparte had made his triumphant progress some twenty years before. The French surrendered this territory in 1814—known officially at the time as “the Austrian (Southern) Netherlands”—but Napoleon, of course, would make one more attempt to conquer it at Waterloo.

As her carriage advanced down the tree-lined
chaussée
and stopped at inns and hamlets along the way
,
Charlotte encountered a universal hatred and fear of the former rulers, an emotion that burst forth from villagers spontaneously, “as if they could not suppress it; their whole countenances change; their eyes sparkle with indignation; they seem at a loss for words strong enough to express the bitterness of their detestation.” This lingering spite notwithstanding, the countryside wore the appearance of plenty—of hope, even. Verdant farms, neat cottages and luxuriant corn all signaled prosperity. Barefoot children ran, laughing, behind the carriage and offered flowers. As Charlotte began her journey southward, she naïvely thought that peace was at hand.

She soon perceived her error.

In the hot, sultry air of that June two hundred years ago, events were moving behind the scenes with dark swiftness. Charlotte Eaton was perhaps not the most gifted air-reader, it must be said. But if she had studied the details of those days as Old Lavender would have (a Thursday through Sunday, I believe they were)—had perceived the swollen foreboding in them—she would have clearly noticed that Nature was gathering fear and dread to her bosom. The air, forest, soil and all their occupants sensed that human cataclysm was nigh. Even if the natural world wasn't quite sure when or where, exactly, war was about to break out again, or even that it was Bonaparte himself who happened to be breathing at the door (all human tyrants are alike, after all), a warning had been sounded. Horses and cattle shifted and twitched; small creatures burrowed deep, waiting. The weather brooded, gathered itself and at times broke in brief, violent premonition.

By the time the Eaton party had arrived in Brussels, the entire city was wearing a military aspect. But how well the magnificence of a soldier masks his job! Charlotte marveled at the tassels and epaulets, the clasps and crosses and braids . . . not things that, when seen on a fine young man, one could ever imagine being darkened with his blood, or left behind in the dirt after he's been thrown into a communal grave. One didn't have to imagine it . . . at least, not yet.

The Eatons entered a city brimming with fine young men. Despite all the rumors charging the air, there was a vigor to the outpost that proved irresistible. The thronged streets pulsed with confidence and expectation, as if something important were about to happen, but to someone else, and not anytime soon. Allied soldiers in every variety of uniform mingled with the locals in convivial groups, or took a turn with the ladies down one of the shaded avenues of the Parc de Bruxelles. There were English soldiers in their red coats and white belts, and hearty, laughing Highlanders, as renowned in battle for their fierceness as for those unimpeachable kilts. Only the so-called Black Brunswickers, a corps under the command of the amiable Duke of Brunswick and kept in reserve by Wellington, offered a bleak counterpoint. They dressed in black, and rode black horses. On their heads they wore shakos decorated with sinister death's heads and plumes of black horsehair. Their long, regular procession looked “like an immense moving hearse,” Charlotte noted, “that one might take for a bad omen.”

Twilight drifted in on the humid haze. Dispatches flew from servant to officer, hotelier to guest, washerwoman to valet.
The fighting has begun!
But how far off do you suppose it is? Are the French in great number? Where are the Prussians?
There was no reliable intelligence anywhere. The mood in Brussels traced a great, emotive arc: from the depths of French-fueled panic, to the heights of incredulous relief, and back down to the French again.

Daylight lingered, as it does during a northern June.

Night fell.

After they had dined, officers donned their stockings and dancing shoes. For the Duchess of Richmond's ball was going ahead as planned.

N
ow, I would like to reduce the stage of events a bit, if I may—well, quite a lot, actually. Specifically, to the size of our hutch. For it was there, in the pleasant fug of dozing family members, that Old Lavender occasionally took us to the Duchess of Richmond's ball.

Grandmother wasn't much of a sentimentalist, as you've probably gathered by now, her preference leaning more towards military strategy—battle formations, cavalry charges and the like. So it wasn't often that she told us this story. I suspect that she had to force the dreamy tone she used for the ball scene—not an easy feat for such a hard-boiled old rabbit. Her efforts succeeded, however, for I had only to close my eyes to step easily into that long, low-ceilinged room.

The Duke of Richmond had rented the space in Rue de la Blanchisserie from his neighbor in Brussels, a coach builder. Richmond himself was in charge of a reserve force to protect Brussels in case of a surprise invasion by Napoleon. Bonaparte was a wily adversary, after all. One never knew with him. But despite conflicting reports of his movements, it was thought that the emperor was still quite a way off, and under the circumstances, perhaps a bit of merrymaking might keep fate from the door for a few more hours.

In retrospect, the ball was a gathering of butterflies at the foot of a smoking volcano.

The “volcano” was Quatre Bras: the crossroads south of Waterloo that would turn out to be the prelude to full-scale eruption. I'd heard about those crossroads. Old Lavender always mentioned them whenever she talked about the ball, so we wouldn't forget that war had been biding its time.
Just out there
, she would say, indicating the door of the hutch.
Just outside the Richmonds' window.

Quatre Bras used to be an obscure country intersection (literal meaning: “four arms”). Towering corn, dense woodland and only four gabled cottages, shut and alert, marked the spot. Everything shimmered in a mirage of heat. And the stillness . . . not of bucolic peace, but that other kind . . . the kind that presages an earthquake, or a tempest. No creature could have ignored it.

“Oh, the animals knew what was about to happen,” Grandmother said. “Those who could, fled. The others . . .” She paused dramatically. “The others could only pull into their shells for protection, or crawl down to their deepest chambers. Remember your Thomas Hardy!”

And we did—well, most of us only remembered the part about the fleeing coneys. But I had memorized the rest of Hardy's Waterloo poem, and even whispered it aloud now and then, just to honor our doomed neighbors, though invariably I had to stop after the worm, sick-hearted:

. . . The worm asks what can be overhead,

And wriggles deep from a scene so grim,

And guesses him safe; for he does not know

What a foul red flood will be soaking him! . . .

The Richmonds' dancing and dining went on until the early hours. How well Old Lavender described it, her military preferences notwithstanding! So well that I can hear the music even now: the jaunty dances and gliding tunes; the genteel stomping on parquet floors. I can smell the warm, humid air, too, thick with perfume and the mushroomy promise of dinner (not necessarily rabbit, we were assured). The low room was decorated with rose-trellised wallpaper, and rich draperies of crimson, gold and black. Pillars were wreathed in ribbons and flowers. They danced reels and cotillions. The list of beauty and chivalry glittered. Handsome lads in uniform took care with their grips, accustomed as they were to gun barrels and not the feminine upper arm. The Prince of Orange and Duke of Wellington were themselves guests, but only in passing, as they were just hours away from the first salvos of battle. No one could describe it better than Grandmother: