I found the head librarian, a Mrs. Heather Forest, and without hesitation begged her to give me my papers back, but one look at the incredulity on her face and it dawned on me that I might be prevented from visiting them unless I hovered unobtrusively over Mrs. Waugh’s shoulder with my dollar-store reading glasses perched just so.

“I’m sorry I haven’t combed my hair,” I told Mrs. Forest. “Perhaps I should’ve—”

“It’s not that. Your hair’s quite…striking.” She looked at me with a glimmer of what I took, with faint hope, to be understanding. Dared I lean forward and whisper the truth into her ear?

“It’s hard to remember niceties such as one’s coiffure when one is on leave from the battlefield,” I began.

Then, in a rush, I confessed to her my name.

I find that even stern librarians are among the more soft-hearted denizens of the New World. Perhaps they feel kinship with my type: antique, forgotten, relegated to history.

“I understand,” said Mrs. Forest, her face so grave yet kind that I believed her. Some people recognize truth even when it has been orphaned for a while among this world’s bright falsities. I believe that a tiny part of Mrs. Forest took—not pity on me; never pity…had she taken pity I’d have fled. No, a part of her, the part that welcomes people who ask to stay in her sanctum and study, to steep themselves in history so that time loses its artificial calibrations and begins to swirl as a single entity, that part of Mrs. Forest took me at my word.

“At least,” she said, “I can let you sit here and study some of the non-restricted materials.” She gave me bound photocopies that included letters to my father and entries about myself in old editions of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

I noticed that Mrs. Waugh, the researcher ensconced with my material, had hair messier than mine—how had she the right to my original papers? She nosed through my letters in a cardigan whose elbows she’d patched with bits of other, even more decrepit, attire. I felt both envious and sympathetic.

I overheard her ask Mrs. Forest, “However did Wolfe manage to find that pineapple he gave to the wife of his enemy, Drucour, in Louisbourg?”

Ah! That was a fantastic pineapple, my pineapple of 1758, the summer I ravaged Louisbourg in preparation for my victory in Quebec. It was a delicious, perfectly ripe specimen in a sere and fruitless land.

“I can answer that,” Heather Forest said, “since my other interest, outside these archives, happens to be eighteenth-century horticulture.”

“Really?” said Mrs. Waugh, with childish delight.

“The British were mad about pineapples!”

“Were they?”