“That little snot Vaudreuil must’ve driven Montcalm crazy—as soon as we reached the island their defectors ran to us, sick of Vaudreuil stuffing himself with goose legs and capers and hoarded sweetmeats while his militia subsisted on the black-hearted turnips they were obliged to count as wages. They told us that Vaudreuil, with his coxcomb’s sense of theatre, had prescribed fire-ships be sent toward us on our first night, to finish off what the storm could not. Fire-ships! No modern army took them seriously any more. That man must have been sleepwalking in history, imagining himself fighting Spanish and Turks in ages when fire-ships were a force in which one might still believe. Now they were no more than stage lighting or fanfare for a royal wedding.

“ ‘He’s counting on no moon,’ said one toothless defector as he wrapped his joyful gums around a crackled pig’s ear, releasing a runnel of slaver down his chin. It was difficult for me to make him out, between his atrocious accent and the gnawing and smacking. ‘He’s made a dozen fire-ships with Delouche in command.’

“ ‘Is Delouche the one with the ludicrous moustache?’ I asked Pig-Ears. I thought I’d seen Delouche in Paris, dancing a gavotte with an overconfident frothiness.

“ ‘Oui.’

“Flies swarmed straight from hell and we had to slather ourselves with lard to fend off the numbers bulging with our blood, which they sucked through stingers fine as pins in my mother’s sewing box. The process would have been fascinating had it not covered us in itchy welts. My men ripped their coats, slashing the red skirts and tearing off epaulets and fastenings and anything that might snag on the stumps and pricks of the twigs and bush all stunted and broken aslant. I did not modify a thing on my own coat, but would eagerly have done so had I not been bound to set a good example.

“As dusk fell we smelt sap and dog-roses in the marsh and heard plaintive notes of white-throated sparrows and eerie snipe. Quebec towered before us and all I could do was glare at Montcalm’s encampment that straggled all the way up from our deafening water-cascade at Montmorency through Beauport to the Charles River at the city’s back gate. Beyond Montcalm’s redoubts and entrenchments loomed the natural cliffs, and on these I kept my gaze.

“The storm-rinsed sky glowered then cleared, as Pig-Ears had promised, without a moon. Vaudreuil was an idiot for thinking this meant we’d have no light to discern his fire-ships’ approach: we had a sky crammed with stars dusting the river surface with their influence. Their quiet light gathered in the water and magnified, and the rain-bulged waves sifted luminosity back into the air where it hovered over the whole river before us.