The book opens with Burke and Brown infiltrating a Bonapartist plot to assassinate the Duke of Wellington, and from there sets them on the trail of a dangerous agent of the Corsican. As in previous books, Burke must make full use of his wits, his courage, and his uncanny knack for inhabiting a new identity so completely it nearly overtakes him.
Also as in previous books, Burke gets plenty of time to use his seductive charms, though this time around he finds a woman that he cannot control and, moreover, with whom he begins to fall in love, in a subplot that underscores the difficulty of finding a happy love life for a man in the service of His Majesty.
And then there’s the battle itself, which Williams describes vividly and dramatically. Honestly, it felt more immediate and exciting than watching the movie Waterloo. Williams somehow manages to make it suspenseful. I could almost forget the known historical facts, temporarily, and feel as uncertain of the outcome as any soldier on the field that day. “A damned nice thing,” indeed…
I’ve read books about, watched documentaries on, and seen dramatizations and reenactments of Waterloo. And I’ve always found it a little tough to follow. For a long time, I chalked this up to my own blockheadedness. But, reading this book, and especially the author’s afterword, I learned there is still much about the battle that is not well understood. Certain aspects are confusing and weird. Like Marshal Ney’s unsupported cavalry charge. What was that?
Oh, well. I imagine it was a confused nightmare of artillery fire, charging horses, and multiple loosely-coordinated armies. Under such circumstances, even first-hand observers could hardly be expected to remember clearly what they saw, or what they did. The one thing everyone seems to agree on was that the field in the aftermath of the battle was a horrific hellscape of carnage, noxious with the smell of the dead and the screams of the dying, and this book portrays that, as well as a hint of the soul-searching that the survivors must have gone through.
This is everything you could want out of historical fiction: a gripping story interwoven with enough details of life in the period to give you a little taste of what it would have been like to be there on that fateful day.
[Audio version of this post available below.]
