Montcalm had slippers and he had fine sheets and despite his sadness and his love-letters to his wife he had a woman who fetched him wild strawberries folded into whipped cream from the cow she kept in the back yard. He had a window-seat on the landing and used to sit on its fine brocade with a blanket on his knee and his book of poetry, different from mine—he told me during one of our brandies that his was an anthology. He liked dipping into a variety of the finest minds between games of Goose with Marie-Louise, the little slave Vaudreuil loaned him.

Montcalm had a daily life—all the French did. We were in their homeland as invaders, encamped and temporary, while they had all home’s comforts. No wonder he did not want to come out and fight—it would prove a great inconvenience.

The way it feels to be near a fire but unable to warm yourself is this: you feel inside your body a bruise like the rot inside a bad potato. All you want is the housemaid to come with her sharp little knife and cut out the black rot—the potato would have a chance then. But the dark spot, like the rest of the fruit, is alive, and has its own growth and emanations. It causes an ache, a dank pain heat can’t reach. The spot is made of dense dark matter far from the sun, and has its own bitter energy. We think cold is an absence of warmth but we’re wrong. It is a present and energetic fire, and I knew this as I kept watch outside Montcalm’s lovely house, so much more a home than my commandeered farmhouse at L’Ange Gardien with its poisonous foxgloves and the tiny radishes that burned hot while I crunched them cold.

—

TODAY THE RIVER TELLS ME NOTHING. It gives me no hint as to what has become of my blind yet not-blind companion, Harold in yellow, who I suspect understands me better than any slave, or prostitute, or strawberry-bearing lover, or even any mother. Perhaps it is because Harold, like myself, has been unable to see properly for so many years.

It is September 9, and I must face the fact that I have not yet done what I came to do: see for myself the Plains of Abraham on the days leading to my own death-day. I have to face the truth that Sophie is no help to me anymore. She goads and threatens to abandon me if I spend my eleventh September in Montreal without making that journey to Quebec City. What will you do, she says. Go and moulder again in the place where I found you, where fog and juniper claw across the bogs?

No, the one I need now, the one who understands, is Harold.

Did Harold say he’d go with me to the Plains of Abraham? I think he said that.