I studied you, and you taught me. Why will you not teach me again? I studied you and your banks. I found things out. I did not take your silence for an answer!

I read your current every night as my soldiers slept.

I sat among rhubarb and cabbage stalks of that old habitant whose house I’d seized, and requested that you inform me.

Has time diluted your power?

Your body in those days taught me to be quieter than a vole, more mercurial than eel or smelt. I smelled your weeds and hid my red coat under a rock and stole by dusk in underclothes dim as submerged stones.

That river told me of Montcalm. It reported Montcalm in deep mourning for a dead daughter…but which daughter? Beloved Mirète? The letter did not say if he’d lost the one he loved most. And Montcalm was himself unwell, having succumbed to a sense of doom even greater, perhaps, than my own habitual melancholy. Bad vapours are one thing: seasickness and dysentery and all that. But to lose Mirète…?

I listened, and in listening became the river’s own. I became a droplet in the river. That river carried me swift and fluid and noiseless past sad, dreaming Montcalm, to the secret beach at Foulon.

Anyone could see the beauty of Montcalm’s house from the shore—he had rooms galore, and in them, every comfort: cruets made of crystal, full of vinaigrette with chives chopped into it, even snippets of the mauve flower. He had a basket of slippers, whereas I walked the floorboards of my one-room farmhouse in the socks I had worn on the ship—not that I complained or am complaining now. I just want to point out that he had the comforts of home, or at least of hospitality: he was a guest in the home of a wealthy local man, with all the blessings and perks.

The biggest thing of all, and it affects me yet, is that I was cold.

I was cold to the bone and I couldn’t get warm no matter how many fires I lit in the kitchen, or how close I sat to the embers. I was and remain solitary, and that makes a coldness in the heart that can turn into disease if one is not careful, and in myself I believe it has.

Some people might think I’m deluded in imagining I can pay Sophie to hold me close and feel the relief I’d feel were an unpaid lover to radiate heat. I pay Sophie and people think—my mother would certainly think—that nothing can alleviate the icy touch of cash changing hands. But Sophie does a good job.