Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (50 page)

An hour or so later, in the town of Ath twenty miles from Brussels (or, rather, twenty miles from where Brussels usually stood) a
pâtissier
took a batch of little cakes from the oven. After the cakes had cooled he drew a letter upon each one in pink icing — a thing he had never in his life done before. His wife (who knew not a word of English) laid the cakes in a wooden tray and gave the tray to the
sous-pâtissier
. The
sous-pâtissier
carried it to the Headquarters of the Allied Army in the town, where Sir Henry Clinton was issuing orders to his officers. The
sous-pâtissier
presented the cakes to Sir Henry. Sir Henry took one and was about to carry it to his mouth when Major Norcott of the 95th Rifles gave a cry of surprize. There in front of them, written in pink icing on little cakes, was a dispatch from Wellington instructing Sir Henry to move the 2nd Division of Infantry towards Quatre Bras with as little delay as possible. Sir Henry looked up in amazement. The
sous-pâtissier
beamed at him.

At about the same time the general in charge of the 3rd Division — a Hanoverian gentleman called Sir Charles Alten — was hard at work in a Château twenty-five miles south-west of Brussels. He happened to look out of the window and observed a very small and oddly behaved rainstorm in the courtyard. It shed its rain in the centre of the courtyard and touched the walls not at all. Sir Charles was curious enough to go outside and look more closely. There, written in the dust with raindrops, was the following missive:

Bruxelles, 15th June, 1815

The 3rd Division to move upon Quatre Bras immediately.

Wellington

Meanwhile some Dutch and Belgian generals in Wellington’s Army had discovered for themselves that the French were at Quatre Bras and were on their way there with the 2nd Netherlands Division. Consequently these generals (whose names were Rebecq and Perponcher) were more annoyed than enlightened when a great mass of songbirds alighted in the trees all around and began to sing:

The Duke’s ideas let us expound

At Quatre Bras the French are found

All his troops must gather round

To the crossroads all are bound

“Yes, yes! We know!” cried General Perponcher, gesturing at the birds to shoo them away. “Be off, d— you!” But the birds only flew closer and some actually settled upon his shoulders and horse. They continued singing in the most officious manner possible:

There reputations will be made

The Duke commands: be not afraid!

All the army’s plans are laid

Go quickly now with your brigade!

The birds accompanied the soldiers for all the remainder of the day, never ceasing for a moment to twitter and cheep the same aggravating song. General Rebecq — whose English was excellent — managed to catch hold of one of them and tried to teach it a new song, in the hopes that it might return to Jonathan Strange and sing it to him:

The Duke’s magician must be kicked

From Bruxelles to Maastricht

For playing tricks on honest men

To Maastricht and back again
²

At six o’clock Strange returned Brussels to European soil. Immediately those regiments which had been quartered inside the city marched out of the Namur Gate and down the road that led to Quatre Bras. That done, Strange was able to make his own preparations for war. He collected together his silver dish; half a dozen books of magic; a pair of pistols; a light summer coat with a number of unusually deep pockets; a dozen hard-boiled eggs; three flasks of brandy; some pieces of pork pie wrapped in paper; and a very large silk umbrella.

The next morning, with these necessaries stowed in various places about his person and his horse, he rode with the Duke and his staff up to the crossroads at Quatre Bras. Several thousand Allied troops were assembled there now, but the French had yet to shew themselves. From time to time there was the sound of a musket, but it was scarcely more than you would hear in any English wood where gentlemen are shooting.

Strange was looking about him when a songthrush alighted upon his shoulder and began to chirrup:

The Duke’s ideas let us expound

At Quatre Bras the French are found …

“What?” muttered Strange. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to have disappeared hours ago!” He made Ormskirk’s sign to disperse a magic spell and the bird flew off. In fact, rather to his consternation, a whole flock of birds took flight at the same moment. He glanced round nervously to see if any one had noticed that he had bungled the magic; but everyone seemed busy with military concerns and he concluded they had not.

He found a position to his liking — in a ditch directly in front of Quatre Bras farmhouse. The crossroads was on his immediate right and the 92nd Foot, the Highland Regiment were on his left. He took the hard-boiled eggs out of his pockets and gave them to such of the Highlanders as thought they might like to eat them. (In peacetime some sort of introduction is generally required to make a person’s acquaintance; in war a small eatable will perform the same office.) The Highlanders gave him some sweet, milky tea in return and soon they were chatting very companionably together.

The day was intensely hot. The road went down between the fields of rye, which seemed, under that bright sun, to glow with an almost supernatural brilliance. Three miles away the Prussian Army had already engaged with the French and there were faint sounds of guns booming and men shouting, like the ghosts of things to come. Just before noon drums and fierce singing were heard in the distance. The ground began to shake with the stamping of tens of thousands of feet, and through the rye towards them came the thick, dark columns of French infantry.

The Duke had given Strange no particular orders and so, when the fighting began, he set about performing all the magic he used to do on Spanish battlefields. He sent fiery angels to menace the French and dragons to breathe flames over them. These illusions were larger and brighter than any thing he had managed in Spain. Several times he climbed out of the ditch to admire the effect — in spite of the warnings of the Highlanders that he was liable to be shot at any moment.

He had been diligently casting such spells for three or four hours when something happened. Out on the battlefield, a sudden assault by the French Chasseurs threatened to envelop the Duke and his staff. These gentlemen were obliged to wheel round and ride pell-mell back to the Allied lines. The nearest troops happened to be the 92nd Foot.

“92nd!” cried the Duke. “Lie down!”

The Highlanders immediately lay down. Strange looked up from the ditch to see the Duke upon Copenhagen
³
skimming over their heads. His Grace was quite unharmed and indeed appeared more invigorated than alarmed by his adventure. He looked around to see what everyone was doing. His eye alighted upon Strange.

“Mr Strange! What are you doing? When I want a display of Vauxhall-Gardens magic I shall ask for it!
⁴
The French saw plenty of this sort of thing in Spain — they are not in the least disturbed by it. But it is entirely new to the Belgians, Dutch and Germans in
my
Army. I have just seen one of your dragons menace a company of Brunswickers in that wood. Four of them fell over. It will not do, Mr Strange! It simply will not do!” He galloped off.

Strange stared after him. He had half a mind to make some pointed remarks about the Duke’s ingratitude to his friends, the Highlanders; but they seemed a little busy at the moment, being shot at by cannons and hacked at by sabres. So he picked up his map, climbed out of the ditch and made his way to the crossroads where the Duke’s military secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, was looking about him with an anxious air.

“My lord?” said Strange. “I need to ask you something. How is the battle going?”

Somerset sighed. “All will be well in the end. Of course it will. But half the Army is not here yet. We have scarcely any cavalry to speak of. I know you sent the divisions their orders very promptly but some of them were simply too far away. If the French get reinforcements before we get ours, then …” He shrugged.

“And if French reinforcements do come, which direction will they come from? The south, I suppose?”

“The south and south-east.”

Strange did not return to the battle. Instead, he walked to Quatre Bras farm, just behind the British lines. The farm was quite deserted. Doors stood open; curtains billowed out of windows; a scythe and hoe had been thrown down in the dust in the haste to get away. In the milk-smelling gloom of the dairy he found a cat with some newborn kittens. Whenever the guns sounded (which was often) the cat trembled. He fetched her some water and spoke to her gently. Then he sat down upon the cool flagstones and placed his map before him.

He began to move the roads, lanes and villages to the south and east of the battlefield. First he changed the positions of two villages. Then he made all the roads that went east to west, run north to south. He waited ten minutes and then he put it all back the way it was. He made all the woods in the vicinity turn round and face the other way. Next he made the brooks flow in the wrong direction. Hour after hour he continued to change the landscape. It was intricate, tedious work — quite as dull as any thing he had done with Norrell. At half-past six he heard the Allied bugles sound the advance. At eight o’clock he stood up and stretched his cramped limbs. “Well,” he remarked to the cat, “I have not the least idea whether that achieved any thing or not.”
⁵

Black smoke hung over the fields. Those dismal attendants of any battle, the crows and ravens, had arrived in their hundreds. Strange found his friends, the Highlanders, in a most forlorn condition. They had captured a house next to the road, but in doing so they had lost half their men and twenty-five of their thirty-six officers, including their colonel — a man whom many of them had regarded as a father. More than one grizzled-looking veteran was sitting with his head in his hands, weeping.

The French had apparently returned to Frasnes — the town they had come from that morning. Strange asked several people if this meant the Allies had won, but no one seemed to have any precise information upon this point.

He slept that night in Genappe, a village three miles up the road to Brussels. He was at breakfast when Captain Hadley-Bright appeared, bearing news: the Duke’s Allies, the Prussian Army had received a terrible beating in the fighting of previous day.

“Are they defeated?” asked Strange.

“No, but they have retreated and so the Duke says we must do the same. His Grace has chosen somewhere to fight and the Prussians will meet us there. A place called Waterloo.”

“Waterloo? What a ridiculously odd name!” said Strange.

“It is odd, is it not? I could not find it on the map.”

“Oh!” said Strange. “This was continually happening in Spain! No doubt the fellow who told you got the name wrong. Depend upon it, there is no such place as Waterloo!”

A little after noon they mounted their horses and were about to follow the Army out of the village, when a message arrived from Wellington: a squadron of French lancers was approaching and could Mr Strange do something to annoy them? Strange, anxious to avoid another accusation of Vauxhall-Gardens magic, asked Hadley-Bright’s advice. “What do cavalry hate the most?”

Hadley-Bright thought for a moment. “Mud,” he said.

“Mud? Really? Yes, I suppose you are right. Well, there are few things more plain and workman-like than weather magic!”

The skies darkened. An inky thundercloud appeared; it was as large as all Belgium and so full and heavy that its ragged skirts seemed to brush the tops of the trees. There was a flash and the world turned bone-white for an instant. There was a deafening crack and the next moment the rain came down in such torrents that the earth boiled and hissed.

Within minutes the surrounding fields had turned to a quagmire. The French lancers were quite unable to indulge in their favourite sport of fast and dextrous riding; Wellington’s rearguard got safely away.

An hour later Strange and Hadley-Bright were surprized to discover that there was indeed a place called Waterloo and that they had arrived at it. The Duke was sitting on his horse in the rain, gazing in high good humour at the filthy men, horses and carts. “Excellent mud, Merlin!” he called out cheerfully. “Very sticky and slippery. The French will not like it at all. More rain, if you please! Now, you see that tree where the road dips down?”

“The elm, your Grace?”

“The very one. If you will stand there during the battle tomorrow, I will be much obliged to you. I will be there some of the time, but probably not very often. My boys will bring you your instructions.”

That evening the various divisions of the Allied Army took up positions along a shallow ridge south of Waterloo. Above them the thunder roared and the rain came down in torrents. From time to time deputations of bedraggled men approached the elm-tree and begged Strange to make it stop, but he only shook his head and said, “When the Duke tells me to stop, I shall.”

But the veterans of the Peninsular War remarked approvingly that rain was always an Englishman’s friend in times of war. They told their comrades: “There is nothing so comforting or familiar to us, you see — whereas other nations it baffles. It rained on the nights before Fuentes, Salamanca and Vitoria.” (These were the names of some of Wellington’s great victories in the Peninsula.)

In the shelter of his umbrella Strange mused on the battle to come. Ever since the end of the Peninsular War he had been studying the magic that the
Aureates
used in times of war. Very little was known about it; there were rumours — nothing more — of a spell which John Uskglass had used before his own battles. It foretold the outcome of present events. Just before nightfall Strange had a sudden inspiration. “There is no way of finding out what Uskglass did, but there is always Pale’s Conjectures Concerning the Foreshadowing of Things To Come. That is very likely a watered-down version of the same thing. I could use that.”