Dear Madam, fifty-seven’s young! Fifty-seven grabs my buttocks, reaches for my cock and grasps it with the expertise that I’d have thought belonged only to a man who has out of necessity pulled his own cock alone at night on a succession of warships. She has a way of snaking her arm around me so it feels I’m doing the thing myself, or that it is being performed by Elwyn, or George. Her arm is muscled as an eel. If ever she chooses to rescind her rule that I’m never to penetrate her body, I might almost feel like a husbandly consort.

I cannot imagine Sophie in a dove-grey gown like Eliza’s, nor does Sophie carry rouge or a handkerchief. She shoves her bison-hide wallet in her jeans and reams her nails with the pocket-knife hung on the key ring in her belt loop. With this knife she also lifts Portuguese sardines to her gob out of tins, slices hard skin off her heels, and digs out splinters. I’ve whiffed the sardines on her at three in the morning.

“Well, General Wolfe?” Sophie prods me with her sharp elbow.

“Well what?”

“On with your fire-ships!”

6 Fire-Ships

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.

NIGHT.

Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

“BRAVERY, SOPHIE, IS A CAST of the dice. And I gamble, but only if I’m wearing the red coat. Without that coat you’ll find me cautious as the next man, soft and passive as a slug—don’t judge! When I put on the coat it is a costume and I’m a player, a man who’ll jump to court the dice. If a soldier chances nothing he might as well go to war in his bedshirt, clinging to a biscuit dipped in milk. You think me a mama’s boy? I won’t argue with that or even resent it. Brigadier Townshend, that fine artist and soldier, cartooned me as a spineless coward, but he did it because he couldn’t tell the difference between soldier and man.

“Superstition engulfed the French in June of 1759, as did grey ghost-ribbons of rain hung in shreds and shrouds in the nearing squall. The French fell on their knees and kissed crucifixes and their priest gave out stale cake and pickled wine to thank their god for the wind rattling our ships hard enough to block the Saint Lawrence with splinters. But the luck of the dice has its own power and I find that it cooperates with a general who won’t take his own life too seriously. I mean, I was gaunt, seasick and plagued with the gravels, with dysentery and bad vapours. I’d no reason to fear for my health—it was ruined already. The storm that welcomed us to Île d’Orléans worried my men but I told them to consider it background music to what we would, ourselves, unleash.