We finished our Perrier and shared a pot of green tea. Monsieur Choinière had spent the whole morning in the McCord archives animating the frozen movement of Wolfe’s hand. Now he told me, “It’s like I was meeting him in person, doing an interview with him. I see him moving….His writing is slanted and angular—I see him like this….”

And Jimmy, at this the handwriting expert rose from his seat, raised a hand holding an invisible sword, and lunged across the sushi café, his body slanted and gangling. He suddenly became the figure of Wolfe himself—awkward yet determined and elongated, although Hippolyte Choinière is in fact quite small and round and not forceful-looking at all. It was as if his hours of studying and contemplating the handwriting of Wolfe had allowed Wolfe to briefly inhabit him.

As soon as I gasped in recognition of the man I have studied so long, Monsieur Choinière laid down his sword and re-inhabited his own frame, and sat down again on the other side of our teapot.

Finally, dear Jimmy, I asked Monsieur Choinière the question you have probably been wondering about: how did the handwriting of James Wolfe compare with yours, in the letter you were kind enough to let me share with him—the one about Wolfe’s lost days?

I thought you might like to know Monsieur Choinière’s exact words, so I wrote them down in my old friend, Forkner shorthand, so as to be certain not to miss a thing.

“Forensically speaking,” said Hippolyte Choinière, “the handwriting styles of James Wolfe and your friend, Jimmy Blanchard, are worlds apart. But from a psychological handwriting analysis point of view, the documents might have been written by the same man.”

Dear Jimmy, I will close, and attend to my own papers. As you saw, at the Fisher Library, I am not very neat, and between my photocopied research materials and my own notes, you can hardly see from one end to the other of this little apartment, papers everywhere! I have been writing draft after draft of the story of a man called James, yet I hardly know if I will ever be able to do him justice. So I intend to press on, through the winter, hoping to have some sort of coherent manuscript in time for the new year.

I am not sure where to send this letter. I hardly think it will last through the snow at the gazebo in the park, and you aren’t at the mission at this time of year, I know. I guess I’ll just leave it with the mission wrapped in a copy of my manuscript when I finally finish it, so that, should you choose to return, you might see what I have done with your story.

My sincere regards,

Jenny Waugh

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS