“Indeed.”

Right then and there, on those steps, I tried to explain to Mrs. Waugh about my lost eleven days. “Not just any days,” I told her, “they were days I had been granted leave to go to Paris, after many years of asking. They were to have been my dancing days, my hour of learning, my time of freedom from a decade of combat. A golden segment of my youth, stolen as I was about to dance the sarabande in Paris…”

Mrs. Waugh regarded me carefully but declined my offer to accompany her home and fully explain. She lived, she told me, not in Toronto, but in a tiny apartment across from Saint Louis Chapel on Montreal’s Rue Drolet.

“My apartment is very small,” she began, “unsuitable, really—”

“But I visit Montreal every September,” I told her. “We could convene at your kitchen table while I tell you about myself and my mother—”

“I don’t actually have a kitchen table,” she said, “and I—well, I’m embarrassed to say I have a small problem with mice, little black mice who come in from the garden next door once September comes—right after the first one or two cool nights…”

“I do not mind mice!”

“Well, I mind them.” Mrs. Waugh grasped for a firm reply. I saw she was one of those people who startle at intimacy of any kind. I had an impression she might rather be alone with her mice than have large humans intrude upon her. She wished to examine my letters in the safe cloister of a library, not necessarily to befriend their author. I understood this, and decided to give her a piece of encouragement.

“Here,” I took a precious envelope from my pocket, “is a letter you won’t find in the Fisher Library.”

That fixed her. She read it, then handed it back to me quite shaken. “How did you get this? It’s—” She glanced back at the library doors.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t steal it from there.”

“But it’s a—it looks like an original document…”

“Yes, my mother wrote to the prime minister—”

“…written by Wolfe’s mother, Henrietta—look, you can’t just walk around with—”

“My mother! Yes—She wrote this one begging, beseeching, demanding the pension due to her upon my death—look, you can see how angry she was, the injustice of what a government will try to do to cheat a fallen soldier’s family—” I held the letter aloft and read my mother’s indignation aloud:

Am I to sue on bended knees for what should be given…and would have been had He survived the Campaign which covered England with Glory….

Distressed, Mrs. Waugh actually touched my arm. “Look, you have to give the letter back—Heather Forest will be…”