Free The Sage of Waterloo by Leona Francombe

to find shelter.
    At length the clamor settled, and the downpour muffled the night.
    Sometime before dawn, a sharp tapping punctured the stillness: someone was nailing down the coffin of the Duke of Brunswick.

    T he next morning, the square outside the hotel sprouted with umbrellas as people gathered for news.
    It was Sunday, June 18, 1815.

5
    O ne muggy afternoon in June, I was leaning against the chicken wire without a thought in my head when Old Lavender opened a narrow slit of eye.
    â€œYou’ll be leaving here soon,” she said.
    The comment smacked me unawares, like a falling chestnut.
    The sound of her voice was hollow and slightly menacing. I inched away, momentarily stunned by this message from the oracle.
    â€œBut I’ll come back someday, won’t I?” I ventured.
    â€œNo,” she said.
    â€œNever?”
    Old Lavender went back to her thinking. Distant thunder stalked the fields and the air grew heavier.
    â€œNever,” she said at last. Her truths always shut cleanly, like the door of a well-made hutch.
    Of course I knew I would never come back. No one ever did. Why should I be any different?
    I watched a magpie skitter down over the top of the wall and begin a jaunty walk along the perimeter of the enclosure. He pecked casually, eyeing us as he went. There was something opportunistic about his gait and I shivered, remembering what Old Lavender had said about the crowds that visited the field of Waterloo on the day after the battle. Some were looking for loved ones, of course. But others were simply out to rob the corpses.
    â€œWhy do you fight the truth so?” she asked, grinding her teeth on a troublesome corn kernel. “It could be your ally, if only you would let it.”
    â€œHow do I let it?”
    But she’d dozed off. A few minutes later she resurfaced and said: “Accept it, for one thing.”
    â€œBut I don’t want to leave Hougoumont!” I cried. I pushed against the fence again and stared out at the meadow with entirely new eyes. The idea of imminent departure made me feel ill. How could I leave here?
    â€œYou will not be leaving alone.”
    Hope surged. “Who’s coming with me?” I asked. The thought of having company, even if it meant being crammed into a crate with relatives, and that some of us would end up at the abattoir, opened a window onto this catastrophe.
    â€œThat’s not what I was getting at,” Old Lavender bristled. She seemed quite unmoved by the prospect of my leaving. “What I meant was: you will be taking your gift with you— my gift, which will assure you a lifetime of illumination, no matter where you end up. That, and . . . ”
    â€œAnd?” I was hoping she would come up with something more promising than the gift of picking up errant signals.
    â€œAnd Hougoumont, of course.”
    â€œHougoumont?” As if in answer, the humid air stirred and the beech branch gave a faint tap on the wall. In a moment of anguish I thought of Caillou, and how much he had loved the story about the French drummer boy.
    Stillness fell again, trailed by a long roll of thunder. A few fat raindrops slapped against the dry earth in the pen.
    â€œHougoumont is at your core, William. Like a power source. All homes, physical or ephemeral, work that way.”

    O ld Lavender had certainly read the air correctly, for it was just as she had predicted—only much sooner than I could ever have imagined. The next morning, Emmanuel came at dawn and loaded me into a banana crate along with a large selection of cousins.
    I just wish that Spode hadn’t sought me out before the boy scooped me up.
    Emmanuel dropped the crate with a significance that sent me leaping pell-mell into every corner to find Old Lavender. How could I leave without saying good-bye? Rain was pulsing in billows from the north now, cloaking the wizard trees and deepening their torpor. You would never have known that the moon had