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Warning: General Audience


The Sharpe Fan Fictions of A Lady.

Bernard Cornwell’s

Lawford’s Waterloo

Willian Lawford
In which Sir William Lawford, inconvenienced by the now familiar tedious drum-beat of ill-health which for has recently begun to regulate the pace of his life in an increasingly tyrannical way, suffers a presentiment of what is about to happen some eighty leagues east and twelve miles south of Brussels on 18th June 1815. He and Jessica, Lady Lawford, then attend a Ball, which turns out to be momentous.


This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Lawford’s Waterloo. Copyright © 2026 by A Lady


Lawford’s Waterloo is for
Sable Crow who supports our fanfiction with her website SharpeTales.net.
And
Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.


Chapter 1


June 1815
Durford, Hampshire
/PARAGRAPH ONE

Great God! Waterloo! I have never until now told anyone of this, although no doubt perspicacious Stephen will have formed some inkling.

On the morning of 18th June in the year ’15 I awoke at about half-past two o’clock with a feeling of the greatest dread, for all knew what had likely been about to ensue, had it not occurred already. I could not lie a-bed: I went at once to that window of my chamber which faces east (my chamber being situate upon the third storey and in the south-eastern corner of the house). It had still been almost entirely dark, but nonetheless it had been clear from the dull ruddy streak upon the north-eastern horizon that the night was far gone, and indeed that day was already at hand. I knew I had not have long to wait until the Sun rose, so rather than return to bed I continued to stand at the window clad only in my night-gown (for the air was ‘close’ and I was not cold), watching as the bar of scarlet and crimson increased in brilliancy to orange and pink, until at length Light began to flow upon the land like a charging squadron of brightly-caparisoned cavalry, their cuirasses gleaming in ruddy brilliance which grew ever in intensity as the Sun neared the horizon. Shortly thereafter the Sun raised his limb above the parapet of the world, his shining sabre in his hand, soon to appear in all his splendour, like a Field-Marshal as if come to direct his host on to glory.

Now, I do not know why – and this is most odd - but all at once, now that the Sun had arisen upon that Day of Days, I had understood that I must stay there and wait – simply to keep vigil - and so I did, all day, for the next seventeen, eighteen hours, looking always to the east: for if the threatened blow was to fall, it would fall there, in Flanders, that immemorial cockpit – if not in France itself, had the Allies been sufficiently collected to advance and meet Bonaparte there – but in either case the crucial action had been to take place but a scant two hundred and thirty miles distant, if that. Stephen came to me from time to time throughout the day and tried to persuade me at least to eat, if I would not permit myself to be dressed. On the third occasion I told him that I could not leave off my vigil – yet still he would not be deterred. He went away and then a little later returned bearing a tray on which there was a cup, a flask of water and another of wine, and some bread and cheese and cold meats. He was dismayed to find them still untouched by nightfall. I think my conduct must have perturbed him. I was sorry for that. Meanwhile, my absent arm troubled me far more than it had done in the last three years with restlessness and random sensations, and two or three times pangs of acutest pain, such as it had not done in all that time since Ciudad Rodrigo.

I recall that it had been almost as if I could see the threat, like an ominous cloud, gathering in that eastern quarter of the sky - more and more dreadful – until, just as I was certain that disaster must have befallen (disaster indeed for myself personally, as well as for the world, for I knew that Sharpe had returned from civilian life, having, with his lady the Vicomtesse Lucille of Seleglise and their child, prudently fled Normandy for the Netherlands upon the return of Bonaparte some months earlier, but had now gone to the war, together with his friend Harper - and that all my old comrades from the South Essex - as in my heart I still named my former Regiment - those of them who had survived the Peninsula at any rate - were there also, and I had greatly feared for them - Peter d’Alembord had written to me from Bruxelles at the beginning of the month, giving expression to his own severe forebodings - ) I felt in my heart, suddenly, that, against all hope and expectation, instead of disaster, it was deliverance! For, to my fancy, at about eight o’ clock that night (1) it was as if the ground shook suddenly, and the glass had rattled in the casement-frame (there had indeed come a clap of thunder unheralded by any lightning, Stephen had told me afterwards, although, somehow, I had not been aware of it), and it seemed as if the threatening cloud which all day had held itself raised in menace above Europe like a great mailed fist clenched to strike had all at once – inexplicably – incredibly – dissipated!

I was to discover some three days later, when Jessica and I were in attendance at a grand event in London at which, quite unexpectedly, the stunning news of Wellington’s final victory over Bonaparte at Waterloo had been first announced in public in England, that the hour of Doom had indeed struck at the very time which I had felt it. (I know many are sceptical of these phenomena, but I experienced a similar thing that very same year, just one month later, in July, when, just as before, very early in the morning, I had awoken suddenly as if startled from sleep and could not find repose again, so I had arisen from my bed and gone to the window of my chamber which overlooked the Park, this time at the front of the house, where at once I received the strangest impression that the sun had been about to rise in the south! for the sky in that quarter, above the quarter where, I knew, lay Portsmouth near twenty miles off, glowed a dull angry crimson, as if the town were ablaze (2) – but in a few moments the illusion vanished, and the sun soon rose in the north-east, as ever it does at that season of the year.

These impressions, these random moments of clairvoyancy, the fleeting conviction that I am feeling or seeing in a brief instant that which shall be, only began to visit me following that night at Ciudad Rodrigo when my heart had failed me thrice and each time I was, it seemed miraculously, recalled to life by a nun or orderly who was attendant upon me, who pounded upon my breast-bone until the vital pulse was restored. I do not speak of these flashes of insight to Stephen, for he is ever too susceptible to the lure of the uncanny - a common peril to the unusually sensitive mind, especially when that mind is of a native Celtic cast - and I do not wish to trouble him; but I wish my Uncle McCandless had still been alive when this first began to occur, for I should have welcomed his Highlander opinion upon the subject of the Second Sight. I do not think that even his sober and somewhat colourless Presbyterian version of the Christian faith could have suppressed his native convictions upon that subject.



Once Jessica had finally persuaded me, following a consultation with the eminent surgeon Sir William Chester, to have made an articulated prosthetic arm. Sir William had a particular interest in prosthetics - he heartily subscribed to the new science known as galvanism, having a belief that it was possible not only to harness the power of electrical force in to give life to dead tissue, but also to animate the mechanical devices which had been invented to replace limbs lost through sickness and violence, although such a notion strikes plain sensible men as impossible fantasy, of course. (Such ideas had become very much current, if you will pardon the pun, in the years following upon the terrible wars in Europe and the Peninsula, and indeed all around the world on account of France’s Revolution and the subsequent adventures of that parasite upon its commonwealth, the criminal Bonaparte.) I dubbed the ingenious albeit somewhat grotesque thing Cornelius, in tribute to my brother-in-law Slingsby, on account of its being, like him (in my opinion) generally useless, save (again like him) for its cosmetic function, which was in his case to disguise the secondary blemish upon our family escutcheon (3) (my existence of course being the long-standing primary blot - I might have been unconsciously influenced in this by a recollection of Captain Hughes’s anecdote about a man with a wooden leg called Wiggins, which he had repeated to me on the occasion of his visit to Durford when I had been convalescent there in the spring of ’97). At any rate, Jessica had wanted me to agree to have made a superior version which boasted an array of intricate pulleys and complicated straps which, after a great deal of practise, would have enabled me to perform tasks calling for a modest degree of dexterity, and I tried a trial model of it for a week, but the bloody thing irritated me beyond endurance. Donning the harness by which the wearer controlled it took almost half an hour in the morning and it simply made me feel like a trussed chicken! So in the end I opted for the plain model, with the aid of which I was at least able to appear more or less normal by candle-light and at a pinch it could serve one or two useful functions, such as carrying heavy objects and propping one up in bed during the occasional performance of one’s marital obligations. The best thing about it was that it restored my sense of balance so that I was no longer fearful of being knocked to the ground in a busy thoroughfare should a hastening stranger happen to push past me, as had happened to me on at least two occasions. I still preferred to go without it when I could. Wellington in later years loved to repeat the joke that he knew a man with a wooden leg called Paget (clearly a variation upon Captain Hughs’s anecdote about Wiggins – how these things do the rounds!) which he thought a surpassingly hilarious jest that moreover served the adulterous blackguard Uxbridge right; I would retort that I knew a man with a false arm called Cornelius, and he, being acquainted with some of that history, thought that equally worthy of one of his horse-like neighs of schoolboyish mirth, although when considered as a jest it only ever really went off at half-cock.

I remember there was an occasion when I wore it to attend a dinner in St James’s Square, to be followed by a ball, given by a Mrs Boehm, who was a friend of Nathan Rothschild’s wife, who no doubt had had cause of her own to celebrate that evening (4). It was the 21st of June of the year ’18. I set off in the carriage with Jessica in a high mood of self-congratulation – we might have walked, for it was a fine night, after a little light rain earlier, but the streets were very busy that evening with pedestrian traffic, for there had been much expectation of news from France or the Netherlands, and even with Cornelius attached I had still found it difficult to keep my footing amongst jostling crowds - having managed to fasten it to what remained of my left arm all by myself, without assistance – the first instance ever! It was only once we had arrived (very late - too late for the dinner, although for some time we held out hopes for the supper which was to come in the course of an interval in the dancing - our carriage had been greatly hindered, not only by the surprising presence of great and increasing crowds of people all shouting and cheering in the streets, the precise reason for which we had not been able to ascertain, although Jessica in the course of our journey had told me all about the three-day ferment of rumour and counter-rumour concerning the events presumed to have been unfolding recently in Flanders – I had only come up to Town from Guildford, where I had broken my journey overnight from Petersfield, earlier that afternoon, so had not heard - the news since mid-day had been tending towards something like the truth at last, it had seemed, although the official despatch had still not yet arrived – but also by the large number of carriages upon the road-ways (for Mrs Boehm’s entertainment had by no means been the only glittering event which had been arranged to take place that evening) and had been announced, and had entered the grand room, to see the Prince Regent himself bearing down upon us as we stood by the door - like a Seventy-Four, wind right abaft the beam so that we had almost to leap out of his path - and I had only realised then that I had put on Cornelius - the bugger! - back to front! But the Prince appeared not to notice, for he was gaping like a lunatic as if he had just heard something as prodigious as it was dreadful - indeed I was to discover that it was – so many men, both the greater and the lesser, dead! - or so grievously wounded that by now they were most probably dead also – Peter d’Alembord was amongst those officers who had been listed severely wounded, and not three weeks since he had written to me of his intuitive fears that he would not survive the campaign! He had not arrived with the draft from the Second Battalion until March of 1812, when I had been long gone, but we had become acquainted at first through correspondence after Toulouse, when he had first had a notion to write the short history of the South Essex – I had been glad to meet him later - I was only too relieved when I did not see Richard Sharpe’s name anywhere on the list, although I was uneasily aware that it was but a first draft and therefore inevitably incomplete - I had known very well that I ought not to think of him any longer as my Richard. Yes; I had long thought of him in that way, although I had never told him – never spoken to him any of the words I had very much wished to say to him but which I had known he would not have welcomed, nor even, probably, have tolerated hearing me speak them - words of devotion, of passion, of love – things which would no doubt have mortified him, and made him think me maudlin and unmanly.

But what then of Mark? I hear the Reader rebuke me - What of Mark, whom you say you loved – what of your oft-repeated claim that your heart has been dead and buried with him in his grave in Jamaica these many years? Are you really so faithless? I can but say that my Reader is perfectly correct to question me; but I know not the answer: perfectly just in his accusation, and I cannot vindicate myself. Yes, my Richard, even when he now had Lucille, who for better, for worse, &c, once Jane had died in ’21 and they had been able to marry at last, had finally become his wife, and I, for good or ill, had now been blessed by the presence of my dear devoted Stephen for nine years by this time. My Richard nonetheless, I still thought, and knew then that I always should, when at last, the next day I was finally able to set my eyes upon a copy of Wellington’s despatch with its appended list of dead and wounded – I was so far back in the queue in the House that eventually I sent Stephen to buy a Gazette Extraordinary in which the despatch was reproduced in full. (5) Not that it mattered, as the Prince, obviously sailing upon a veritable ocean of champagne and claret, had had no thought for my odd appearance, having just a few minutes before, it turned out, received at last the authentic news of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo (and, thank God, it was not at all the garbled nonsense which the fool Daniel Sutton had brought from Ostend the previous day and which had been foisted upon the public as the truth by the editor of the Morning Post on Tuesday morning - I used to try to impress upon Jessica that she should not read that paper as it was nothing but descriptions of balls and suppers and parties, and beyond that, sensational fabrications invented for the titillation of idle minds; she would simply smile, and ignore me - nor yet the incomplete account, which turned out to be correct at least as far as the battles at Les Quatre Bras and Ligny were concerned, which I had had from Maurice Fitzgerald when I had called in briefly at the club on my way to Lawford House towards the end of the afternoon. Fitzgerald had a kindly spot for me, as I had once shared with him my memories of his brother Robert, who was killed at Seringapatam, and how I had always admired him and felt myself to be something of an impostor as a Lieutenant when I compared myself with him, who, as Ensign, I felt had been distinctly my superior in terms of natural ability as a leader of men.

This news had been brought express from Bruxelles by Harry Percy, who, still clad in the torn, blood-spattered and mud-caked dancing-clothes which he had now been wearing for six days, having been called away from the Duchess of Richmond’s ball with the other officers on the eve of Les Quatre Bras upon the arrival of the desperate news that Bonaparte had stolen a march upon the Allies, had apparently, shortly before our arrival, burst into the ballroom bearing two captured French Eagles complete with their colours and laid them with a dramatic flourish at the feet of His Royal Highness. I recollected Percy – fifth son of an Earl and, like me, therefore necessarily neither the Heir nor the Spare and thus compelled to find his own way in life, even if his grandfather had been the Duke of Northumberland, so I felt a strong degree of empathy for him. I had met him in the Peninsula, where he had distinguished himself at Talavera. I recalled, too, that he had been one of the four officers who had carried the body of Sir John Moore to its hasty nocturnal burial in the ramparts of Corunna earlier that same year. Anyway, after that, everyone had been too excited either to dance or to eat the very inviting-looking supper which had been laid out in an adjacent chamber, and were moreover so exercised to find out more concerning the recent events in Belgium that as soon as Castlereagh and the Prince Regent and the Duke of York had departed, they had all rushed out of the ballroom in a flood as if ruled by one mind, as I have read that lemmings do, dispersing throughout the streets surrounding the Boehms’ house in St James’s.

Even the band ran away without filling their boots in the supper-room first, a thing unprecedented, so it would hardly have been good manners for Jessica and me to remain behind and go in uninvited and simply help ourselves, tempting as it was (by this time we had both been very hungry), for it truly was a spectacular spread which we glimpsed through the open door – I marked a particularly inviting-looking salmagundi; the sight of those halved hard-boiled eggs with their golden centres like bright half-guineas almost caused my resolve to break, and I daresay it would have, had it not been for the presence of Jessica, who said No, William! severe as any governess, when I had wheedled, What, not even the horses’ doovers? To which she had replied, Especially not those! (this phrase had become a silly private jest between us since first I had told her about Sharpe’s rather comical misunderstanding of the French term for appetising trifles long ago, when we had been in India) and then had firmly steered me towards the exit. So we reluctantly decided to return home hungry. The progress of our carriage was again impeded by the crowds of cheering people, who had seemed determined to remain all night roistering in the streets, which did cause me to reflect upon the essential differences obtaining between a joyous throng and a mob, for it struck me then, and has done again upon numerous subsequent occasions in the turbulent years of our nineteenth century, that they are both but the same beast exhibiting its capacity for wildly contrasting moods.

Had it not been for the fact that I could hear that the crowd was chanting Wellington’s name, and that by the light of the full moon and the lamps of the carriage I could clearly see that the faces of the people all wore a joyful aspect, I should have been afraid that we had perhaps found ourselves caught up in the midst of a riot against, say, the Corn Laws and in danger of being dragged out of our conveyance and torn to pieces! After above an hour of this, the carriage became immovably trapped in the midst of the almost static crowd which was blocking Piccadilly: there was no going either forward nor back, so Jessica suggested that we get out and walk back to Lawford House, which we did: she soon losing both her fragile shoes, which were the merest dancing-pumps, outside Apsley House whilst we were endeavouring to push our way through another immense throng of men and women all variously singing God Save The King and Rule, Britannia! and (oddly, but perhaps recalling the celebrations of Trafalgar ten years before) Heart of Oak, or cheering the Duke of Wellington (I cannot think why, as he must have been still more than two hundred miles away, probably in Paris by now in pursuit of Bonaparte, who was probably well on his way to the Atlantic coast in search of passage to the Americas, it occurred to me, at any rate - but people are people) and there was no rescuing of them, else we likely should have been trampled as we searched the ground.

So we staggered onwards, the one-armed man and the shoeless woman, and the increasingly wayward Cornelius, whose straps had been loosening by the minute so that he was now flapping about uncontrollably and probably scaring the passers-by who were in our way – Jessica letting fly with dreadful oaths like a fo’c’sle Jack, the incongruous shock of hearing such things from a lady’s mouth causing those people blocking our way to fall back before her onslaught (her parents had kept a general servant who had been a sailor until he had lost a leg, and she had evidently learned a lot from him, growing up) thinking of it afterwards I was shocked by the folly of it, for, vulnerable as we were - Jessica unable to run and me unable to fight - we could so easily have fallen victims to criminals and foot-pads, although I suppose I might have frightened them off by flourishing the absolute horror which by now was Cornelius in their faces, but everyone had seemed in a joyous and comradely mood that night, even the pick-pockets, I suppose, who according to later report had had a field-day thanks to Wellington, and must therefore have been cheering him louder than all the rest – I did actually lose my pocket-book but, knowing that something important was afoot but unsure of exactly what it was, in anticipation before we had left the house in Upper-Brook-Street that evening I had made sure that there was no more than a five-pound note in it; Jessica had already taken the precaution of stitching fish-hooks into the tail pockets of the dress-coat which I had kept in the Mayfair residence throughout the war – a manifestation of her admirable ruthless determined streak - and as my handkerchief, a rather fine one of best Indian silk which I had had since I bought it in Madras that same day upon which I had purchased the rug with which I had beautified my tent on our various halts upon the way to Seringapatam, and Bickerstaff and Sinnott had chosen a horse for me, had also vanished I comforted myself with the thought that the miscreant had brought it away at the price of his or her own blood in any event - and we ended eating bread and cheese in the kitchen of Lawford House at three o’clock in the morning of the 22nd June, I perched upon the edge of the deal table and Jessica seated in a chair with her poor feet in one of Cook’s favourite pans which I had found upon the range, and had laboriously filled with water from a tub in the scullery, which should have been cold but had nonetheless been warm (for it had been a hot and breathless day and had now become an insufferably hot and humid night) – this midnight raiding of the pantry a thing which I had not done since I had been a boy of fourteen or fifteen, perhaps, and which I do not think that Jessica can ever have done in her life! The circumstance caused us to laugh like children (and me to wonder suddenly at this brief glimpse of what our marriage might have been, had I been able to live my life like most straight-grained and, I dimly suspected, far happier men, fore-and-aft as Wellington wore his hat, and not athwart, as Bonaparte wore his, ninety degrees to what society considered the norm; nor yet neither one thing nor the other, a-cockbill (6) (as Richard Sharpe, who had once told me that he had been ‘happy either way’, was wont to wear his very battered shako) notwithstanding our anxiety concerning which of our friends and acquaintances might be in fear and apprehension for their loved ones and associates who had been present at the battle, that night – and it went without saying that I had been still greatly concerned for Richard and for the others amongst my own friends in the South Essex.

Thus Bonaparte had succeeded in ruining two balls within the space of a week, even if he had not succeeded in winning the great battle of the age.

Eventually I learned not to feel embarrassment concerning my missing limb and its artificial replacement, and FitzRoy Somerset, George Napier, Henry Hardinge and I (and occasionally Sir David Baird and a few others similarly marked by battle) often made a merry party at many a glittering occasion in the years following the downfall of the Corsican Tyrant – we called ourselves ‘The One-Handed Club’. Richard told me later that he had very nearly been eligible for membership too after Lucille had shot him in error in ’14, almost destroying the joint of his left shoulder; once again it had been Patrick Harper’s maggots which had saved the day, and his arm. (7) The parks and thoroughfares around Westminster and Whitehall were thronged all day and throughout the coming night by people of all classes desperate for news from Flanders and given the volatile mood of the public in those days things could easily have turned very unpleasant very rapidly. Eloisa’s reservations concerning the common sense, or lack of it, of her governess were not misplaced. Ed. Notes 1 Nine o’clock in Belgium – Ed.

2 Lawford seems to have experienced a premonition of the fate of Portsmouth in the Second World War here – the town, home to the Royal Navy, was bombed repeatedly between 1940 and 1944 – Ed.

3 Cornelius Slingsby was recruited by Jessica’s parents to marry her sister Portia, who had been got with child by a rogue who had subsequently ‘done a runner’. Lawford’s family had chipped in to the purchase price of his commission out of financial self-interest. See ‘Sharpe’s Escape’ in particular.

4 Rothschild was believed by some to have had through an unknown channel prior certain secret knowledge of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, which during those two or three days of uncertainty whilst England had waited with baited breath to learn of the determination of events in Flanders he had used to make an exceptionally large amount of money on the Stock Exchange - this view has been challenged by Brian Cathcart; Edward Boehm had made his fortune in trade with the West Indies, which was probably the connection which had led to Sir William and Lady Lawford’s invitation to attend this prestigious event – in 1819 the business venture failed and the Boehms were ruined - Ed.)

5 In his younger days Lawford had often been taken to task by his superiors for his nervous habit of ‘chattering’ and straying from the point; it seems he had a tendency to reproduce this failing in his prose style when it came to his literary efforts composed without the assistance of Stephen Murdogh. Ed.

6 Upon the slant. Before the yards of ships were made square upon the masts prior to the raising of sails they were referred to as being ‘a-cockbill’. Setting the yards of a vessel a-cockbill at other times was a token of mourning.

7 Daniel Sutton had been mistaken, not malicious in his story – in Ostend he had heard an incorrect account of what had passed at Les Quatre Bras, two days before the Waterloo engagement, although he had thought that that battle had taken place on Saturday 17th June, and had wrongly assumed that it had been on that occasion that the Allies had beaten Bonaparte. Rival newspapers had been quick to take up and amplify the story through several editions throughout Tuesday and Wednesday. Lawford had only travelled up from Hampshire upon the morning of Wednesday 21st June and so can have had little idea of what had happened at Waterloo apart from that arising from his own odd intuition on Sunday evening. It is not known how Jessica had spent the last two days, although she seems to have been better informed than her husband, so presumably she was in London, but apparently not at the family house in Mayfair. There is a rather plaintive entry made for Tuesday 20th June 1815 by Eloisa (aged eight years and nine months) in her journal which says “Miss Dudley and I walked in the Park. We spoke only French today because it is a Tuesday, which is our day for speaking that language exclusively, but I did not like to today, because many of the people whom we passed stared at us most unfriendly when they heard us, and some called out insults. I did not acquit myself well, I regret, and made shameful mistakes, because I was afraid of what might have ensued and could not help but think of it. I wished Papa had been with us, and moreover wearing his splendid scarlet coat with the gold lace on it, for then they would not have dared to abuse us so had we been in the company of the gallant handsome Colonel. Sometimes it seems to me that Miss Dudley is not very wise or sensible. She seems to know little of the world – “ (which was hardly surprising as Miss Dudley was eighteen years old and only lately come from boarding-school, which meant she would have been cheap; with Lord Ovalton’s sons, who, according to the law of the day, had been Lawford’s, bound for Eton in due course, this would have been a major consideration.) “I wished Mama had been here at home in Lawford House but she was at a pic-nic at Primrose Hill with Lord Robert and all the rest of that fast set of people who hang upon his coat-tails, whom I wish she and Lord Robert would give up. I like Lord Robert but I do not like those others, who, I feel, seek only advancement and advantage and are not our friends. In the afternoon I practised my new piece, which is a study in A-Major by Clementi. Dinner was boiled mutton and potatoes and cauliflower, and then blancmange for pudding. The meal appeared entirely a very dull dirty-white affair, like the sails of the Channel fleet at Spithead, when it has been at sea for too long, as I have seen when Papa has taken me to view the spectacle from Portsdown Hill above Portsmouth, through his Glass, and tasted as it looked. I believe I am beginning to understand the attraction of becoming an Ascetic, whether of Eastern or of Western tradition. Surely anything is better than death by cauliflower and blancmange.” Eloisa Lawford, or Lady Hungerford as she had become, was a precocious intellect. Her death in a street accident in 1829 at the age of barely 23 was a tragedy which hastened her father’s own demise. NB This piece draws heavily upon ‘The News from Waterloo: the Race to tell Britain of Wellington’s Victory’ by Brian Cathcart. 2015. Faber & Faber.

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