The Sage of Waterloo by Leona Francombe

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.