The Sage of Waterloo by Leona Francombe Page B

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.
    â€œOh, 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:
    On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; . . .
    . . . But hark!—that heavy sound breaks in once more,
    As if the clouds its echo would repeat;
    And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before;
    Arm! arm! it is—it is—the cannon’s opening roar!
    Some of you may have noticed that these are not, in fact, the words of Old Lavender, but those of Lord Byron, though one can hardly blame her for overlooking such a thing in the heat of storytelling. For our part, we couldn’t have cared less. By the time Old Lavender was quoting Byron, we had long since left the hutch for the ball.
    The evening’s most eminent guests would miss their supper,