It is as if England has had a nightmare in which the Empire’s crowning achievement has been to inflate the size of material goods: every chicken leg, every shirt, all the grapes and loaves and boxes of tea, even the people, their bodies sluggish and distended. Madam, if you thought me thin in England, then I am emaciated here.

“Remember the Kirkland made him throw up all over Amber’s beanbag chair?”

Dear Madam, if I am not careful, someone—a guard, for this place employs beefy guards—might have to send for a doctor and have me removed to hospital….I am beset by an overwhelming panic.

Sophie warns me I need to stop hunting for the fruits of General Wolfe’s labours. She says they cannot be arrayed like corpses on a battlefield: four hundred French vanquished here, ninety Savages laid waste there, and over here twenty Canadian prisoners…whose wives, I promise you, Mother, we have not harmed—in fact we have offered the wives, as well as all the old men and babies, decent boats and shelter….

No such calculation of wartime accomplishments occurs in peacetime, Sophie likes to remind me.

I’ve told her I’m well-used to the shock of peacetime, its boredom and lack of passion—I’ve experienced it many times and know it takes months to acclimatize to the loss of adrenaline. My fear is not the fear of stasis: waiting and inertia are a soldier’s everlasting companions. My fear is that I see no evidence that our lives in peacetime have any direction at all.

New French Britain is extremely frightening. I don’t see how any soldier returning here could want to do anything except slit his own throat.

Sophie claims this is not the fault of the place. The fault is mine.

I need to be rehumanized.

And she says I have to do it myself. She hasn’t time to help, the way I have time. She’s got too much other work to do, too many other soldiers to shelter. All she can do is direct my vision.

“Get your ass out of Montreal to Quebec City,” she says. “Search its bloody Plains of Abraham. Look under every bush and examine every blade of grass—until you see that what you lost in the past isn’t there.”

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.

EVENING.

Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

EVEN SOPHIE HAS TO ADMIT I’m pretty good at building our clandestine campfire on the mountain. While I prepare the draught for my ailment—it involves boiling snails, from an old recipe of my mother’s—I try to describe my day, including Dogfood Woman and Arnold.

“This new letter to your mother is maudlin and useless,” Sophie declares.