Read Chapter 3: Seven Hours

The mud was already cold against his cheek when the world snapped back into place. Harrow's lungs heaved, tasting wet earth and the acrid ghost of gunpowder before the first cannonade had even sounded. The watches were there—both of them, heavy and warm in his breast pocket—and that was proof enough that this third morning was not a dream.

He sat up slowly, drawing stares from the redcoats around him. They saw a man in their uniform, shivering and pale, and they looked away. Every soldier at Waterloo had something haunted in his eyes that day. Harrow was simply one more ghost who hadn't finished dying.

The French line was a dark smudge on the opposite ridge, still and patient. The cannons had not yet spoken. He counted the seconds from his first awakening—the thunder had come at roughly two minutes after he'd opened his eyes, both times. It did not come now.

Harrow rose, brushed mud from his coat, and began walking toward the crossroads.

He tested the loop with small things. He dropped a button from his cuff into a puddle and marked the stone beside it. He memorized the face of a drummer boy, pale and freckled, and deliberately turned him away from the path of a supply wagon he remembered overturning. The boy looked confused, then grateful, then vanished into the press of men. Harrow did not know if any of it would hold after the reset. But the watches had, and that was enough to build a theory on.

By the time he reached the Mont-Saint-Jean farm, the French artillery had still not fired. A full ten minutes had passed. He found a low stone wall at the edge of the farmyard and sat, pulling out the two watches. They were identical down to the hairline crack in the enamel of the second hand. "J.H." on both. "For what is broken" on both. Two men had carried the same watch. One of them was dead in a ditch. The other was sitting here, wearing his corpse's coat, unable to remember his own name.

"You are not with a regiment."

Harrow looked up. A man stood a few paces away, lean and weathered, dressed in the dark blue of the Dutch-Belgian forces. He carried no musket, only a leather satchel and a folded map, and his face had the sharp, assessing look of a man who made his living watching armies move.

"I'm attached to Wellington's staff," Harrow said, and hated how weak the lie sounded.

The man smiled without warmth. "I have been watching the staff since dawn. You are not among them."

Harrow stood, but the man raised a hand.

"Peace. I am Pieter Van der Meer. I am a guide for the Duke's officers—I know these fields, every farm and hollow. I was told a strange Englishman was wandering the lines asking questions that did not have to do with the battle."

"Who told you that?"

"Does it matter?" Pieter unfolded his map and held it out. "You want to know why the French have not moved. Yes?"

Harrow hesitated. Then he took the map. It was detailed, hand-inked, showing the shallow valley between the ridges, the farms and woods in between. Hougoumont to the west, Papelotte to the east, La Haye Sainte in the center. He knew this terrain better than any place on earth, and he knew it was wrong. Not the geography—the timing.

"The French should have opened fire before sunrise," Harrow said. "Buonaparte wants to pin Wellington's right before the Prussians arrive. A dawn bombardment, an attack on Hougoumont by eight. It is nearly eight now, and there is not a shot fired."

Pieter studied him with sharp patience. "You speak of Buonaparte as if you have read the battle before it is fought."

Harrow's jaw tightened. "I read a great deal."

"Then read this." Pieter tapped the map at Hougoumont. "The French were moving men toward that farm before first light. Not the skirmishers—those came later. A column of chasseurs, perhaps two hundred strong, marched along the sunken lane and did not stop. They went into the wood and did not come out."

Harrow stared at the map. "That doesn't make sense. The attack on Hougoumont doesn't begin until later. And it's a full assault, not two hundred men."

"They were not there to fight," Pieter said. "I followed them. I am good at following. They went into the copse south of the farm, and they dug. When they came out an hour later, they were carrying something long and wrapped in oilcloth. They took it north, past the farm, toward the main road."

"North? Toward Brussels?" Harrow shook his head. "That's absurd. There's no strategic value in—"

"There is no strategic value," Pieter agreed. "That is why I thought you might know something about it. You are not the only stranger on this field today."

The words landed like a cold stone in Harrow's chest. "What do you mean?"

Pieter folded his arms. "There is a woman at the farmhouse by the Papelotte road. Red-haired, French accent, but she speaks English well enough. She has been asking every officer she meets about a soldier. Not a French soldier—a British one. Missing since last night. She says he was carrying a message, a communiqué meant for Wellington's hands, and he never arrived."

The second watch pressed against Harrow's ribs. "What was the soldier's name?"

"She would not say. But she described him." Pieter's eyes flickered to Harrow's coat. "Young. Dark hair. Carried a silver watch on a chain that did not match his uniform."

Harrow's blood went cold. He stepped forward, but Pieter held up his hand again.

"I am only a guide. I do not take sides." Pieter folded his map and tucked it into his satchel. "The woman is at the farm on the Papelotte road—the one with the blue shutters, half a mile southeast of here. If you want to find her, go now. The French may not wait for dawn to end."

He turned and walked away without another word, swallowed quickly by the crowd of soldiers shifting like a restless tide.

Harrow did not run. Running drew attention, and attention was a kind of death in an army that was about to fight for its life. He walked with purpose, threading through artillery crews and supply wagons, keeping the low ridge to his left. The morning was turning gold and gray, and still the French guns were silent. It felt like the world was holding its breath.

He reached the farm with the blue shutters in under ten minutes. It was a smallholding, half-burned and abandoned by its owners, but the yard was alive with the bustle of wounded men and the few women who followed the army. He asked for the red-haired woman, and was pointed to a lean-to at the rear of the barn, where a handful of wounded were laid out on straw.

She was there, kneeling beside a soldier with a bandaged leg, and her hair was the color of rust in firelight. She looked up when he stopped in the doorway, and her face was pale and sharp with grief kept carefully at bay.

"You are the man asking about the soldier," he said. "Brother. Husband."

"Cousin." Her voice was low and musical, with a French edge she did not try to hide. "His name is Jean. He was a courier for the Belgian liaison. He was carrying a communiqué that was supposed to reach Wellington's staff before dawn."

"He never arrived."

"No." She rose, wiping her hands on a cloth. "He was last seen near the farm at Papelotte, just before midnight. He was stopped by a French patrol. Three men, a sergeant and two privates. Jean was not a fighter. He surrendered. But they took him away, and the communiqué with him. I have been searching since first light. No one has seen him."

"What was in the communiqué?"

She shook her head. "I am his cousin, not his commanding officer. He did not tell me. But it was important enough that Wellington wanted it before the battle. And it was important enough that a French patrol crossed the lines to intercept it."

Harrow's mind raced through his knowledge of the campaign. A communiqué moved between the Belgian liaison and Wellington's staff on the night before Waterloo. He could not recall any such message in the histories he had memorized. But he was beginning to understand that the histories he knew did not include everything.

"I can help you find him," he said.

She looked at him with the careful eyes of someone who had learned not to trust uniforms. "Why?"

Before he could answer, the first cannon of the day fired. It was not from the French lines to the south, but from the wood at Hougoumont, low and muffled—and then came the crack of rifle fire, close, too close. Harrow turned toward the sound just as a ball tore through the lean-to's wooden frame, sending splinters into the air.

The woman cried out and dropped to her knees. Harrow threw himself toward her, shielding her with his body as a second shot whined past, this one higher and badly aimed. He looked up across the yard and saw a puff of smoke rising from the treeline east of the farm, a hundred yards away. A French sharpshooter, sighting them.

Harrow dragged the woman behind the barn's corner, pressing her against the timber. His heart was slamming against his ribs.

"Stay down," he said.

She grabbed his wrist. Her grip was fierce. "The communiqué. Jean's communiqué. It is not about troop movements. It is about a man. A man who should not be at this battle at all." Her eyes searched his face. "A man wearing a British coat who carries a dead officer's watch."

Harrow went still. The second shot had been a warning. The third would not be.

"What do you know about the watch?" he asked.

She opened her mouth to answer, and then the world turned white. A cannonball, this one from the main French line, struck the corner of the barn not five feet from where they crouched. The heavy stone crumbled, and Harrow felt a pain like fire in his chest, and then the loop reached out and pulled him under.

He woke in the mud, coughing water and blood that was not there. The sun was low and the cannons were silent, and the two watches were heavy in his breast pocket.

He sat up, gasping, and looked toward the ridge where the farm with the blue shutters should have stood. It was too far to see. But he knew now that the woman had known his face before he had seen hers.

And she had known about the watch.