Free The Sage of Waterloo by Leona Francombe Page B

going. As if she were answering a summons .” These final words carried a little extra Spode gravity, of the sort he used when trying to make a point that needed a bigger dose than usual.
    â€œHow long was she gone?” I asked, for Grandmother had obviously come back that time.
    â€œShe returned just before dawn,” Spode said. “And she was . . . changed , somehow.”
    â€œHad she seen anyone?”
    â€œShe implied that she’d seen one of our kind.” He paused. “And one of theirs .”
    â€œA person? Who? ”
    Spode didn’t answer.
    I hardly knew how to react to all this. It seemed strange that Spode should be relating Grandmother’s escapade of twenty years ago, and not her flight of the night before, into the storm. The thought of her heading off into that driving rain distracted me from Spode’s story. And deeper questions lurked in the wings.
    Old Lavender had never mentioned escape to me, past or future. She didn’t live completely in the physical world, as you know, but seemed to come and go daily from some other, less earthbound place. Why would she go to all the trouble of escaping—of digging a hole, slipping past Emmanuel or devising any other cumbersome means of liberation—when all she had to do was slip away in her mind? Besides me (and I say this with humility, as I was still an apprentice), the only other member of the colony who might have understood this was Spode himself, and even then, despite his erudition, his thoughts could be decidedly lead-footed.
    Then he said something that has stayed with me always, though I’m pretty sure he was quoting Old Lavender: “At moments like that, William, when you muster the courage to attempt the unimaginable, the consequences are so often on your side. It’s as if good fortune is actually programmed to coincide with great risk.”
    â€œBut what happened last night, Spode? Did you see her leave? Did you see anyone else?”
    There would be no more answers. Emmanuel’s hand closed around me—rather meatier than Wellington’s providential digit, I imagine—and just like that, my old life ended.

    O n the way to the market, jostling next to my companions in the crate, I tried in vain to digest Spode’s story. Little about it seemed credible, least of all the emotion with which that fusty elder had told his tale. But emotions aside, I had to remember that this was Spode, archivist sans pareil . His attention to detail was legendary. If he said that Old Lavender had escaped many years before my birth, and that she had encountered another rabbit (along with a human of some sort), my instinct would be to believe him.
    The farmer’s truck trundled up through the woods and across the former Allied ridge. Heavy rain had turned the unpaved track into what it probably had looked like two hundred years ago. The truck dropped like a stone into brimming, artillery-sized craters.
    The jostling shifted a few gray cells. I recalled that the moon had been close to full the previous night. And it hadn’t escaped my notice that this was the month of June (although I couldn’t tell you what date, exactly). Maybe Old Lavender had been preparing herself for this particular alignment of circumstance: Moon approaching full. Torrential rain. June.
    We bumped past the Visitors’ Center and Lion’s Mound and turned left onto the Brussels road, and as the gray cells shifted again, I thought of the night I’d illicitly observed my grandmother: her heightened energies, and what surely could have been interpreted as intense longing.
    And those shapes.
    At the time, I could only explain them away as tricks of the air—visible exhales of the Hougoumont night.
    As if she were answering a summons .
    Had Old Lavender finally gone to join those shapes?
    She couldn’t have left by the same route she had taken twenty years ago, clearly. The fencing had been