“I put my nose in for a second.” I say this, although it is not true. I should have known Sophie would ridicule my mother’s letter. Perhaps I did know it—it’s why I’ve put off showing it to her though she has demanded to see it ever since I foolishly mentioned finding it—she assumed I had found an appeal written by Madame Blanchard and I was afraid to correct her. Sophie’s outright scorn saddens me now. In all our time together I’d hoped she understood me, the real James, deeply, as an intimate companion would. Instead she insists on dragging me with her toward a frightening emptiness….

“And?”

“Gerard has a bowl with a cobalt glaze like the one Betty Hooper gave me my posset in when I was little.”

“You mean Madame Blanchard, not Betty, who fed the Wolfe-child.”

“No, Betty—the nurse my mother hired. Betty had all the time in the world. I’ve told you, she worked my entire childhood on a waistcoat she was sewing for her husband, Roger, who I never saw. She sang Ned and me a song about sheep and marigolds and a white horse. I loved her more than I loved my mother.”

“You didn’t go to Gerard’s pawn shop today at all, did you? For God’s sake, Jimmy, I’m only trying to get you to face up to things as they are now, today. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do. Instead you go on about all the useless past history you claim to have seen. Gallows! Lightning rods! England’s first potatoes! I suppose you wasted yet another day today at the library, reading up on The Triumphant Life and Times of General Wolfe. God forbid you should forget any important details.”

Sophie alarms me not just with her insistence that I learn how to manage modern civilian life, but with how well she predicts my every move. I decide I’d better say nothing about this morning’s dust-up with the busker. I definitely must not tell her about following the man I’d recognized, the blind man in yellow from the changingrooms at the Y, after spying him through the window of my beloved Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy.

“Well, then, what else has Gerard got in there besides your old posset-bowl?”

“He has a horse-head cane. A nugget of pure ruby. A set of wine glasses from the 1988 Calgary Olympics, and several violins.”