Barbarities I never confessed to my mother hang to this day in the air over my battlefields: if she got wind of them she used sleight-of-hand to whisk them into that pouch I sent her from Madame Pompadour’s dressing-table….Oh Mother, you loved to hear of the time our ambassador took me to kneel before the French king’s mistress, didn’t you. You devoured my tales of bows and curtseys and of ruffles that ran down your son’s fine shirts in France.

You weren’t quite so eager to hear how much the ruffles cost, or how, exactly, your son gained the wages to pay for them, or for his fencing lessons, his dance-master, and all that lustre. You treasured La Pompadour’s pouch and the lace hoods I sent you from the shop beneath the studio of my dance teacher…

The French in their home country are so enamoured of dainty ornament. My fine presents imbued with this sensibility pacified my mother, and god knows she was hard to appease. The lacemaker had stitched little white words across that pouch: Honour, Empire, Victory.

When I came to Canada my mother held on to that sachet, but she never sniffed what she’d hidden in it; she just waved the pretty bag around for show. But in it she had mixed quite the potpourri, poison she knew I must swallow but whose existence she refused to acknowledge: essence of human meat and bone, seasoned with a generous helping of herbes salées du Bas-du-Fleuve—salted weeds from the lower Saint Lawrence River.

Once you’ve sunk your cleats in the savage’s back, you knife the crescent that stretches from temple to temple and you slice his bleeding meat off its bone. It’s fascinating how layers of meat separate off a skull—I fancy, had I been brute enough to tell my mother the details aloud, she’d have forgotten her feigned ignorance of my affairs and exclaimed, “Bravo—that is exactly how François prepares a hare for our soup!”

“Understand, Madam,” I once wrote to her—I occasionally slipped up and lost sight of epistolary decorum after too long away from civilizing influences—“I’d perform this act only on an Indian or on a Canadian dressed like one….”

But I remembered, no matter how long I’d been away from England, never to confess that my Redcoats scalped any Canadian they pleased: Indian, habitant, woman or babe.

Honour. Empire. Victory.

The word “victory” has gone out of use. Even my mother preferred to look at it only after the fact, in triumphal Gazette headlines, on monuments for the town square, or in a telegram from the king. Now victory has become unfashionable, shameful—never bandied about by the au courant.

Here is a letter I did not send:

Dear Mother,