“Ghislain—they call him the family intellectual—told me Voltaire wrote about why the French really lost the battle,” said Mrs. Waugh. “It wasn’t because of Wolfe. It was because the government of France had abandoned the people of New France. They thought it more worthwhile defending colonies where there was warmth, sugar, rum. Why should France trouble itself over, as Voltaire put it, quelques arpents de neige…a few acres of snow? France was indifferent and Montcalm didn’t have what he needed to win the battle.”

“Yes, it’s famous, that quote about the snow,” said Mrs. Forest.

“It makes my heart sink a little bit,” said Mrs. Waugh. “It makes me feel desolate…er, do you mind my asking, who is that man over in the corner?”

“The one with the long red hair? The tall young man?”

“Yes, him, the thin one. He seems to be studying my subject, and, to tell you the truth, I find his face remarkably…I mean if you just look at him over there and then look at these pictures, I mean this one in particular…”

There was no mistaking it. They were talking about me.

Mrs. Forest put her arm around Mrs. Waugh and led her just out of earshot. They turned their backs and murmured, and seemed to have forgotten that the letters, the precious letters that by rights are mine but which I cannot have, lay on the table. I stole a peep at the topmost one, dated November 13, 1756, in which I beg my mother’s forgiveness yet again…would my mother and I ever untwine? I the shoot, my mother the vine festooned with deathly trumpets?

But my sad reverie was cut short; Mrs. Waugh was coming back.

If only I was allowed to touch my letters as she could touch them! I longed to finger them once more: my High Street paper fragile, woven and folded, stained pink by my seal and blotched with my notorious ink-spills. Transparent with time, rain, and oil from my own fingers and my mother’s—how often Mama folded and unfolded, read and reread each letter of mine, searching for the wound I in fact revealed to her over and over again, the truth she couldn’t grasp.

Mothers!

Now my letters sat on their bindings in crazed time-worn layers, 232 of them, enfolding my brother’s death, my lost innocence, my picking of those wild, sweet Canadian strawberries so tiny and juicy, my love of dogs, the deep unease with my mother, the arms of my lifelong dearest George, my forlorn ethereal Eliza, yet more anguish with my mother, and my everlasting question of how not to lose my humanity in the ecstasy of war.

Sophie Cotterill knows nothing of these words. But Mrs. Waugh, in the year since I met her at the Fisher, has been devouring them.