We felt a wind nudge us and we both knew it was the first touch of September’s equinoctial gales. Our personal secret floated on the eddies with the fragrance of coffee and juniper. Our premonition of the gales to come swirled beneath our conversation. We knew our pact would fruit only when French or English lust claimed this land, as it would claim our bodies.

Afterwards, I wrote to England warning the Earl of Holderness of the coming gales. Already my anchor scraped across the Saint Lawrence’s bedrock. Only the accident of its grappling a ridge of outcrop prevented my vessel from dragging anchor and floundering toward the river-mouth with each ebb-tide that sucked wild at night.

There was a bond between the ebbing river and my failing body. Patch me up, I told my surgeon. I know very well there’s no fixing this ruin—just knock me back together in time to gain what England craves, before the gales wreck the hell out of our ships and spew the bits in the gulf.

The difference between the river’s ebb and mine was that the river flexed violent and alive and would recover.

I was so run-down I let myself do what I had promised my mother I wouldn’t: complain about a circumstance while it is yet ongoing. She always urged me to make a game of restraint: wait until a trying situation is over. Afterward, it is permissible to recount things I might do to prevent the undesirable circumstance’s recurrence.

But for Montcalm and myself, the war game occupied all our powers of stratagem so that—I confess—we each complained to the other. I mind very much if people know this.

He complained about the regime in which he found himself compelled to work: the lewd and gluttonous Vaudreuil, who stole more than he ever gave to his people. Bigot, whose name summed him up precisely: a small-minded thief of no nobility or discretion, constantly on the lookout for ways he could personally profit from the misery of his own citizens. These were parochial ne’er-do-wells whose minds admitted not the thinnest crack of enlightenment, or service to one’s king, or the simplest human kindness; they were the coarsest rogues imaginable. In his off-guard hours with me at our spot in the woods, Montcalm regretted his place among their machinations.

“When I am gone,” he told me, “after you and I succumb together to this war’s blessed death, Bigot and Vaudreuil will take over here along with the clergy, and willfully cast centuries of ignorance and darkness over this place like a foul rain carrying all the blight and avarice of Old France over this abandoned peasantry.”