All the flickering green light your father never noticed or cared about, all the shadows in the leaves—we cared about them, didn’t we. I wonder if you care about them now?

“You and your nonsense,” Sophie said. “Always going on about trees, and little old men, and things you spy on the street.” She crammed into her mouth popcorn she’d scooped for free out of a machine at Jumbo Video—she’s always storing free food to eat at night in the tent. “And tell me, where am I supposed to believe you found that letter, since you had died by the time she wrote it?”

“I can’t remember—why?”

“I suspected you might be a bit vague about it.”

“What does it matter? She wrote it to me and I remember it.”

“If, as you say, Henrietta wrote it to you after your death in 1759, obviously you’d not have received it posthumously.”

“It must have lain among the papers I retrieved out of our house at Westerham when I went back to England, two years ago, to endure the mock musketry among the watermelons, the so-called reenactment of my glorious battles….”

“So you stole it.”

“I don’t see how it can be called stealing—anyone could see the letter was plainly addressed to me.”

“What about that pension letter to the prime minister, hmm? Why won’t you hand it over?”

“Is my pension really all you care about?”

“You should care about it too, Jimmy Bee. Money is power and we had an agreement.”

4 Lonely Calèche

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.

AFTERNOON.

Place d’Armes. Montreal, Quebec

I STILL HAVEN’T COMPLETED MY mission and found a baguette—even though Sophie did remind me bread is to be found in the city’s second circle of roads, not the first.

The first circle is what she calls this old Iroquois road along the Saint Lawrence River up as far as the cobblestones around Place d’Armes. They aren’t, strictly speaking, cobblestones at all, since they haven’t come from a beach. But I’d best keep this knowledge to myself, as Soph becomes offended when I correct her.

Looking at our shopping list lifts my vapours slightly. I used to love going to Blackheath Market with a shopping list of my mother’s: currant jelly, eggs, bacon. Shopping was always a cheerful prospect after military camp and it still gives me solace here amid the rain and stones of Place d’Armes, where statues preside arrogantly over the square and a lonely calèche horse awaits a customer, nostrils aquiver at the sugar-scent from the pile of wet carrots on his red seat.

I’ve no umbrella, dammit. I tried to add one to our list but Sophie mocked the notion—an opinion my mother shared. So now my collar wilts in this dreary square and I can’t free my heart from the oppression of these statues with their pompous inscriptions.