'No, my lord.'
'Then if he'd attacked earlier he'd have won!' the Earl insisted.
Sandman looked at the model. It was impressive, comprehensive and all wrong. It was too clean for a start. Even in the morning, before the French attacked, everyone was filthy because, on the previous day, most of the army had slogged back from Quatre Bras through quagmires of mud and then they had spent the night in the open under successive cloudbursts. Sandman remembered the thunder and the lightning whiplashing the far ridge and the terror when some cavalry horses broke free in the night and galloped among the sodden troops.
'So why did Bonaparte lose?' the Earl demanded querulously.
'Because he allowed his cavalry to fight unsupported by foot or artillery,' Sandman said shortly. 'And might I ask your lordship what happened to the servants from the house in Mount Street?'
'So why did he commit his cavalry when he did, eh? Tell me that?'
'It was a mistake, my lord, even the best generals make them. Did the servants come back here?'
The Earl petulantly slapped the wicker arms of his chair. 'Bonaparte didn't make futile mistakes! The man might be scum, but he's clever scum. So why?'
Sandman sighed. 'Our line had been thinned, we were on the reverse slope of the hill and it must have seemed, from their side of the valley, that we were beaten.'
'Beaten?' The Earl leapt on that word.
'I doubt we were even visible,' Sandman said. 'The Duke had ordered the men to lie down so, from the French viewpoint, it must have looked as if we just vanished. The French saw an empty ridge, they doubtless saw our wounded retreating into the forest behind, and they must have thought we were all retreating, so they charged. My lord, tell me what happened to your wife's servants.'
'Wife? I don't have a wife. Maddox!'
'My lord?' The servant who had let Sandman into the house stepped forward.
'The cold chicken, I think, and some champagne,' the Earl demanded, then scowled at Sandman. 'Were you wounded?'
'No, my lord.'
'So you were there when the Imperial Guard attacked?'
'I was there, my lord, from the guns that signalled the first French assault to the very last shot of the day.'
The Earl seemed to shudder. 'I hate the French,' he said suddenly. 'I detest them. A race of dancing-masters, and we brought glory on ourselves at Waterloo, Captain, glory!'
Sandman wondered what glory came from defeating dancing-masters, but said nothing. He had met other men like the Earl, men who were obsessed by Waterloo and who wanted to know every remembered minute of the battle, men who could not hear enough tales from that awful day, and all of those men, Sandman knew, had one thing in common: none had been there. Yet they revered that day, thinking it the supreme moment of their lives and of Britain's history. Indeed, for some it seemed as though history itself had come to its end on June 18th, 1815, and that the world would never again see a rivalry to match that of Britain and France. That rivalry had given meaning to a whole generation, it had burnt the globe, matching fleets and armies in Asia, America and Europe, and now it was all gone and there was only dullness in its place and, for the Earl of Avebury, as for so many others, that dullness could only be driven away by reliving the rivalry. 'So tell me,' the Earl said, 'how many times the French cavalry charged.'
'Did you bring the servants from Mount Street to this house?' Sandman asked.
'Servants? Mount Street? You're drivelling. Were you at the battle?'
'All day, my lord. And all I wish to know from you, my lord, is whether a maid called Meg came here from London.'
'How the devil would I know what happened to that bitch's servants, eh? And why would you ask?'
'A man is in prison, my lord, awaiting execution for the murder of your wife, and there is good reason to believe him innocent. That is why I am here.'
The Earl gazed up at Sandman, then began to laugh. The laugh came from deep in his narrow chest and it racked him, dredged up phlegm that half choked him, brought tears to his eyes and left him gasping. He fumbled a handkerchief from his lace-frilled sleeve and wiped his eyes, then spat into it. 'She wronged a man at the very end, did she?' he asked in a hoarse voice. 'Oh, she was good, my Celia, she was so very good at being bad.' He hawked another gobbet of spittle into the handkerchief, then glowered at Sandman. 'So, how many battalions of Napoleon's Guard climbed the hill?'
'Not enough, my lord. What happened to your wife's servants?'
The Earl ignored Sandman because the cold chicken and champagne had been placed on the edge of the model table. He summoned Betty to cut up the chicken and, as she did so, he put an arm round her waist. She seemed to shudder slightly as he first touched her, but then tolerated the caresses.
The Earl, a length of spittle hanging from his wattled jaw, turned his red, rheumy eyes on Sandman. 'I have always liked women young,' he said, 'young and tender. You!' This was to the other girl. 'Pour the champagne, child.' The girl stood on his other side and the Earl put a hand under her skirt while she poured the champagne. He still stared defiantly at Sandman. 'Young flesh,' he growled, 'young and soft.' His servants gazed at the panelled walls and Sandman turned away to look out of the window at two men scything the lawn while a third raked up the clippings. Two herons flew above the distant stream.
The Earl released his grip on the two girls, then gobbled his chicken and slurped his champagne. 'I was told,' he dismissed the two girls back to their painting by slapping their rumps, 'that the French cavalry charged at least twenty times. Was that so?'
'I didn't count,' Sandman said, still looking out of the window.
'Perhaps you were not there after all?' the Earl suggested.
Sandman did not rise to the bait. He was still looking through the window, but instead of seeing the long scythes hiss through the grass, he was staring down a smoky slope in Belgium. He was seeing his recurring dream, watching the French cavalry surge up the slope, their horses labouring in the damp earth. The air on the British-held ridge had seemed heated, as though the door of hell's great oven had been left ajar, and in that heat and smoke the French horsemen had never stopped coming. Sandman had not counted their charges for there were too many, a succession of cavalrymen thumping about the British squares, their horses bleeding and limping, the smoke of the muskets and cannon drifting over the British standards, the ground underfoot a matted tangle of trampled rye stalks, thick as a woven rush mat, but damp and rotten from the rain. The Frenchmen had been grimacing, their eyes red from the smoke and their mouths open as they shouted for their doomed emperor. 'All I remember clearly, my lord,' Sandman said, turning from the window, 'was feeling grateful to the French.'
'Grateful, why?'
'Because so long as their horsemen milled so thick about our squares then their artillery could not fire on us.'
'But how many charges did they make? Someone must know!' The Earl was petulant.
'Ten?' Sandman suggested. 'Twenty? They just kept coming. And they were hard to count because of the smoke. And I remember being very thirsty. And we didn't just stand and watch them coming, we were looking backwards, too.'
'Backwards? Why?'
'Because once a charge had gone through the squares, my lord, they had to come back again.'
'So they were attacking from both sides?'
'From every side,' Sandman said, remembering the swirl of horsemen, the mud and straw kicking up from the hooves and the screams of the dying horses.
'How many cavalry?' the Earl wanted to know.
'I didn't count, my lord. How many servants did your wife have in Mount Street?'
The Earl grinned, then turned from Sandman. 'Bring me a horseman, Betty,' he ordered and the girl dutifully brought him a model French dragoon in his greencoat. 'Very pretty, my dear,' the Earl said, then put the dragoon on the table and hauled Betty onto his lap. 'I am an old man, Captain,' he said, 'and if you want something of me then you must oblige me. Betty knows that, don't you, child?'
The girl nodded. She flinched as the Earl dug a skeletal hand into her dress to cradle one of her breasts. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, a country girl, curly haired, freckled and with a round healthy face.
