Waterloo village, June 1815
It seems lunacy, that when I first met Vilder, and followed him across the icy Thames, I longed for his attention. Now, though in just as unearthly a place, I shadow him with contempt, at a distance, not caring if he looks round, or what he thinks of me.
Reaching the peak of the ridge I halt a moment. A burnt sun is setting, casting a tobacco-stained light against the myriad estuaries of flat dark red. In all directions acres of corpses are tide-marked against the valley, tangled up with smashed artillery, cannon wheels, upturned carts and acres of felled horses, some still twitching. Everywhere chimneys of smoke, like hot springs, lift from the cratered ground. Woods are charred leafless skeletons and every farm building in sight is broken in pieces and blackened by fire. The wind is sharp, slanting waves of drizzle against my fur.
Vilder pauses to make sure I’m still behind him and when I press on, he does too. After everything, there’s still something magnetic about him: the haughtiness that is both self-regarding and self-loathing, his density, the vanity that is so inwrought it will decay after his bones. Even the soiled splendour of his clothes pronounces him as something other, a being beyond or above our world.
We go down into the basin of the valley. Some of the soldiers who I thought dead are sleeping, propped up by kit or by corpses, or lying motionless, white eyes in smoke-black faces, gabbling to themselves. Crafty looters are already picking through the bodies, pocketing watches, spectacles, purses, tugging rings from fingers. And there are real vultures too, congregations of them massing on branches, waiting their turn.
I pass an infantryman jabbing his dagger into the knee of a dead horse, pulling hard until the cartilage rips, throwing the joint on to fire; his companions are already eating, tearing flesh from long bones and washing it down with water sucked from helmets. The meat tastes bitter, I can see from their faces, and they slit their eyes at me, wondering if I would make a tastier meal. But something in my gaze makes them turn away.
I pass the farm we visited last night. The wall of the main building has collapsed, and in the sooty cavities of the rooms inside bodies are piled three high and burnt together like molasses, reeking of ammonia, petrified mouths frozen in a yell. A man is twisted in the rubble of the blown-out courtyard: white breeches, dark red tunic with golden epaulettes. He has a hole in his chest that has snapped through his ribs, but his hair, though powdered with pieces of bone, is slick dark ginger. I’ve seen him before, in Brussels. He is the young officer, the duke’s companion, who stared from the window as I took shelter in the alley. For a moment I’d been entranced by him and the confidence he possessed his life would be successful. Now his indigo eyes are as plain as puddle water.
And Sporco. With every step I take, his single grey eye pursues me.
There’s a final wink of gold and the sun slips from view. In its place a luminous, stenching fog cloaks the land from the outer reaches in. Vilder checks on me, and carries on. I have nothing else to do but shadow him.
Once, during a campaign in Saxony, my master took me down into a coal mine. We threaded through a hole in the mountain and descended into a labyrinth of passages and caves where teams of mute workers pickaxed the shining coalface and carried away the treasure. The village we come to, in the darkness before dawn, Waterloo, reminds me of that place. Black-faced servicemen swarm in silent packs, to the endless flitting of lanterns, as cannon, and carts—of the captured and the dead—roll in and out, bottlenecking the high street. The walking wounded hobble through in a dream state, and dogs, with the pattern of their day turned upside down, watch from doorways with slow sways of their tails. ‘Is it over now, is it?’ they murmur. ‘Or shall it start again?’ Here and there, in pools of lamplight, baggy-eyed orderlies scratch reports and tally numbers.
‘They found his carriage in Genappe,’ an old man, a town resident, asides to another. ‘Napoleon’s. He’d escaped somehow, but inside was his hat, telescope and a pouch of diamonds worth a million francs. Now there’s a piece of magic.’
Vilder is waiting on the front porch of the town church. It seems, in my hallucinatory state, an absurd parody of the dream I’ve held for more than a century, of finding my master waiting for me at the doors of the cathedral in Venice. This church, with its domed roof and pale flight of steps up to its large front door, could be miniature version of it. Vilder motions for me to enter, and I am too drained to do anything but comply. I bristle when I brush by him, not looking at his face, and he does not follow me in.
Inside, is a hellish scene, a makeshift hospital, or mortuary, the injured and the dead thrown in rows in the stony gloom, moaning for help, but receiving none, whilst a mugworty sweet smoke, another muddling parallel to my dream, melds with the whiff of infected flesh and surgical preparations.
Yet I feel a clarity inside, a tingle at the root of my tail. I’m drawn towards the altar and the first tentative rays of dawn sift through the stained-glass window and jewels of colour—sapphire, lemon, violet and rose—illuminate a golden sculpture. An ancient man clutches a staff, his gaze fixed on some wonder above, a dog at his side. Every forward step, every pad of my paw is thrilling. The legs of a soldier stick out from behind the altar, muddied boots, torn breeches. Tremors, deep and unnatural, earthquake through me. I edge closer and find him asleep, his chest slowly rising and falling and a sack next to him, daubed with a yellow symbol of a snake and staff. My heartbeat quickens, doubles, then triples in speed.
For a moment I hold my breath. I wait, teasing myself with delicious pain. At last, I lower my head and inhale a minute draught of him.
I am made of light.
It is he.
I dig my nose all over his cloak, extraordinary mewls, whines and squeaks tumbling out of me, sounds I haven’t made since I was tiny, if ever. Rearing from his collar, the back of his head, the truth of his hair: tight hazel curls dusted with grey. The sight makes my jaw shiver. Then I glimpse his face, shadowed in the folds of the cloak and I am home. My limbs give way, I drop, but bounce straight up again. His face. A gaunter, sallower version, but his face—his crinkled eyes closed in sleep. I lean down and whisper. How I have longed to make this sound—
‘Valentyne. It is me.’
Silence. His eyes stay shut.
‘Valentyne.’
Suddenly there’s a stab of panic: he’s dead. No, I’m not thinking, his chest is moving. I lick his cheek and I’m shocked by the coldness of it. I put my muzzle to his mouth, his lips are bloodless, but breath passes between them. I nudge back the collar of his cloak, shocked at how emaciated he is: where his chest used to bulge from his neck, his collar bones now jut out in shiny ridges. And an unpleasant, rusty smell, foreign to him, lifts from his skin.
‘Valentyne.’
This time his eyes open.
He looks at me and my heart stops. He looks, but doesn’t see me. I lick his face, wetting the spine of his nose. He just stares as if I were any dog in the world. He sits up then, wheezing with pain, carefully leaning his back against the wall, the sheer exertion making him grimace until his chest settles. ‘Valentyne?’ There is worry in my tone. I put my paw on his lap, gaping up at him, waiting for the great tide of his reaction. He pads me absent-mindedly, barely touching, like a human who doesn’t care for animals.
‘Valentyne!’ Now my bark is snappish and it makes him wince. ‘Valentyne! Valentyne! Valentyne!’
Someone calls for quiet and a soldier laughs like a madman. My master does not know me. His pupils swivel up to white, his head lolls forward, mouth dripping slobber and his body slides back to the floor. I paw him, lick him, nudge him with my nose, half-choked yowls whistling out of me. I look round, meaning to catch the attention of a doctor, but find Vilder instead.
‘Now that you have been reacquainted, let us leave this hellhole.’ He makes a move for my master, but I block his way. Vilder returns my gaze squarely. ‘He will have no help here, I assure you. He will die.’ He reaches out again, but I let out a growl. ‘I did not bring you here to fight. You have already ripped my arm to the bone. I have helped you. Now help me. We must take him from here.’ His manner is forthright and blunt and his eyes seem to ask me to trust him. They are deep wells, but still I don’t know what lies at the bottom of them, if there are entrances to other worlds, better places. Gently he moves me aside, digs his arms under my master’s body and lifts him as if he was no heavier than a bundle of brushwood. ‘Follow,’ he says, returning down the aisle.
What other choice do I have?