“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.