She invited me to come with her to Montreal and share her tent while she helped me salvage whatever I’d forfeited in my lost days, though she was clear that I’d have to pay for her services and the space. “Have you got any money?”

I told her about my faint hope of a war pension, which I longed to recover, but so far had not.

“I can help you with that, if you do your homework. Have you no cash at all?”

“I have a little in the shortbread canister on top of Madame Blanchard’s spice tin…”

“For heaven’s sake, give me a bit up front and the rest when we get that war pension sorted out. You’re the most pathetic soldier I’ve ever met.”

“I’m not looking for pity,” I warned. “I need someone to listen and guide me in a no-nonsense way through the logistics of the modern world.”

“There’ll be no nonsense about me,” she said. “On that you can depend.”

“But can you build me up? Rescue me from my doubts?”

“Do I look like a cheerleader to you?”

“You look more like a…you’re not a succubus?” Succubi had been a problem when I encamped near my battlefields. Between the dryads of Scotland and camp-followers of the British army there had been more nights than I could count when I’d awoken to a woman’s exhalations on my neck, her limbs now cold, now hot, now wet, now dry and scaly as cedar bark, chafing or sliming or entwining, leechlike, around mine, smothering and unwanted.

“I can write succubus on my card if you want,” she said. “Look, if you want to stay in my tent, be my guest. I’ve told you what my fee is. But I don’t give crazy soldiers any guarantees. Sometimes they perk up and more often they mosey on back to their demented little worlds without having a grain more sense than they had when we met. That’s your call, Mr. Wolfe.”

—

LISTEN NOW TO HER SNORE! Sophie’s one of those people who’re jabbering away one minute and fast asleep the next. I tore an article out of the paper for her on the dangers of sleep apnea but she said silken-arsed wimps like me don’t understand how tired a hardworking woman can get. In mid-sentence every night she joins the dead like this, yet she fails to credit me when I explain how a man can linger amongst the living even if he has died—can linger for centuries, trying to make peace with what he has lost.

Mrs. Waugh, might you believe me? I reread the note I’ll post to her at Box 444 tomorrow.

Dear Mrs. Waugh,

Further to our little chat last year on the steps of the Fisher Library.