Janitorial and Maintenance Services

Wet Nurse

Hypnosis, Talk Therapy, Shamanic Tent

“I thought a wet nurse had to be— Aren’t you—”

“Aren’t I what?”

“Pardon me.”

“What.”

“Nothing.”

“Too old?”

“I wasn’t—” But I was. She had to be nearly fifty.

“That’s how much you know, buddy. Have you never heard of Judy Waterford? I thought you said you were British. I’ve kept my milk going twenty-seven years. I hear from my other soldiers who miss their mommas that it does the trick. Check out my reviews on wetnurse.com.”

It was a while before I entrusted Sophie with my September nights.

I hung out by the snack van for a couple of days and discovered she loved a midnight bacon sandwich as much as I did. We ate these on the stones while I talked and she repaired her tent, which she was planning to set up in Montreal once Germain Medosset, her cousin, came back from hospital. “He had nobody else down here,” she told me. She’d come from the Magdalen Islands to give him a hand. “Don’t get the idea I’m a pushover though,” she warned me. “I have my own reasons for getting off the islands and working through the winters in Montreal. What about you? How come you’re stuck here in the land of cod and fog, a young man like you in that big old wreck of a house up the hill?”

That’s when I started telling Sophie Cotterill about my past. I told her about Cartagena then Dettingen, about losing my brother, Ned, at Ghent, and nearly losing my mind on Flemish battlefields.

“A child soldier,” Sophie said, nodding.

I divulged the horrors of Culloden, then the broken promise of my longed-for leave in Paris, where I’d thought I might become free—and I told her about my eleven stolen days. How, on September 2, 1752, England fell for Europe’s shiny new Gregorian calendar, and how every man, woman and child among us found September second followed by the fourteenth, missing out the days between. Portentous interval! The new calendar not only stole my dancing lessons in Paris and all manner of joy, it darkened the very date—September 13—of my death, seven years later, on Abraham’s plains. I swear I felt a shadow.

“As it happens, today’s the anniversary,” I told her. “September second, the day I lost everything.”

By the time I finished telling her my story I broke down on the pebbles near that barachois where I’d mouldered, since Madame Blanchard’s forlorn departure earlier that summer, without a soul to listen or offer consolation.

“Jesus,” said Sophie, “If anyone needs my services it’s you. You need to come back to the present, my friend, or you’re gonna fade to nothing here, like that starfish in the dried-out rockpool behind you.”