Once I complete my inspection of the fortifications, I intend to walk on the old Iroquois road, to an area just up from the port where you’ll be amused and perhaps happy to know they have named a modest but dignified street after

Your devoted, loving and obedient Son…

I despise Wolfe Avenue.

If my mother ever saw it she’d lose her mind.

The street is no more than a block and a half long and contains no landmark, no building of commerce or industry, no church and not even a scrap of shrubbery for beauty. It is a street with shuttered doors and heavy red brick over narrow, frowning windows, and it holds a terrible and undefined sadness, especially when in shadow, as it remains for all but a half hour each day. I would rather not have a street named after me at all than see this tiny avenue with my name on the sign at the end, obviously erected with supreme reluctance by the city fathers: an afterthought. There is no joy in it for anyone. My only solace is that next door to it lies a street exactly the same named after Montcalm—not that I wish such melancholic remembrance for him either.

How strange that Montcalm and I lie side by side, in cement and treeless brick, in shadow: each of us dreaming of loves we lost while fighting one another on the desolate plains. Montcalm, I know, dreams of his beloved daughter Mirète. And I am myself tormented over losing Ned, and George, and Eliza, though Sophie claims I did not love Eliza Lawson at all. She claims that with Eliza I had something else going on: yet another reason I must come back each autumn to the land of the living to try and redress what was left unfinished.

I did not save all my mother’s letters. I know sons do—they collect them in a drawer to revisit once she has passed on, hoping her letters might, over time, release some yet-unfathomed importance. I never felt that way about my own mother’s letters. The only one I keep, the one I showed to Mrs. Waugh and guard in my pocket, is the one beseeching the prime minister to release my pension.

I’ve recited others to Sophie in our tent at night, despite how impatient she grows.

“Where are the originals?” she demands. I have to explain to her again and again that my mother’s letters to me have become caught between the years and I’m unsure whether some library keeps them, or I left them in my desk at Westerham in Kent, or if, in fact, they might be in the upstairs room where Madame Blanchard safeguarded some of my belongings in her little saltbox on the Gaspé.

“The one I need to examine,” Sophie says, “is the one about your bloody pension.”

“I thought I showed you that one already.”