I meander downhill after Harold leaves me, ending up in the lower town, the centre of which holds the chapel that stood when I arrived to lay siege: Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. It sits humble and handmade by the people, not by a pope or by powers that have made church a thing I mistrust. In 1759 I nearly destroyed it. But now I stand in its vestibule and weep.

A Spanish saint, Genevieve, stands in the chapel holding a basket of loaves no bigger than my baby fingernail. These breads, offered for a dollar to pilgrims, have an unexpected effect on my emotions. It’s as if, stumbling into the sanctuary almost by accident on a tide of weariness, I have collided with a holiness I denied all my days as a soldier. It is not a holiness in which I can believe, but in which someone else might.

In the nave hangs a time-buckled painting of a fishing barque, crude and small on the sea: Mary, Joseph and child-Jesus float over it in a glowing cameo I’d normally dismiss as unsophisticated, but the tenderness here in Old Quebec’s central square unravels me—where is Harold with his knitting needles? The Holy Family trembles.

I run out, and into a shop that sells knobs of bread and salami ends labelled loup-marin, which I remember as the locals’ name for preserved seal meat. I buy a slice for old times’ sake and move into the square to eat it under the bust of Louis XIV. I am hoping to revive myself, but Louis’s onyx curls cascade over the cobbles. His youthful grace taunts me with the reminder that, contrary to Mrs. Waugh’s observation, I have never been a young man.

In this centre of the jewel of Quebec I’m stabbed by a longing to see my death-mate, the French counterpart to my generalship, the beautiful, sad Marquis de Montcalm, but I do not know where his body has been laid down. Last time I saw him he was leading the charge that would end in his own death. Surely he must lie in a vault within walking distance.

It has been my custom to ask a taxi driver for this sort of information in any strange city, and Quebec certainly feels strange to me now, layered with scenes of war and peace.

I glimpse—peripheral, fleeting—my Highland warriors, collapsed on the ground like fruit fallen among the living, who yet dance lithe up the narrow streets.

A taxi halts to let two old women out into the square and I slide into the back seat to inquire after Montcalm’s whereabouts.

The driver has not a clue of whom I speak.

“Montcalm, the Marquis…”

“Qui?”

“He is famous—died in battle here above us on the plains two hundred and fifty-eight years ago this week, surely you know?”

“He is dead?”

“Surely there are plans to commemorate that very battle here—the day after tomorrow? It’s…”