Certainly the Foulon beach was all hazard. But a general whom ladies chide as bookish does not discount faint possibilities. He does not think anything is simple or certain. I did not think it would be easy to reach Abraham’s Heights, even though we had Abraham’s own grandson tied up on our fleet, having tricked him into believing we were French merely by raising that country’s flag. How little deception is needed when men believe so fervently in bits of bright cloth. This is what I mean about men’s ideas of certainty and how they fail us.

But what I do find certain is that beauty hides in risk.

I have no time for safe military games, tame as a round of piquet with my mother. I pant for a chance to amass elusive scraps of military strategy into a satisfying whole. The longer solutions escape me the harder I thrill. If answers outrun me, if I flounder on a dark shore in an uncertain night, I am home.

I might not be certain in word or in command, but I do not lack confidence when it comes to navigating the loneliest, most dismal stretches of shore known to any servant of the king. Certainty is sustenance for coxcombs who have no affinity for a north wind.

“What are you looking at?” Sam Holland asked me. I knew I could trust him by the genuine engagement on his face. He was interested in the reality at hand, not in his future status or promotion. I find it amazing how thoroughly self-interest prevents a man from seeing. It makes him blind. I never minded having my parents’ hopes melted when it came to my military career. Nor did I ever fear finding myself lost in woods or in fog around Point-Levis or the Etchemin River or the Foulon. The soldier in me is used to sensations of loss, of being the stranger. It is only when I’m out of uniform that I mind being unrecognized in a Canada that disdains to know me.

I handed Sam back his spyglass so he too could see the embankment opposite the Foulon, where the pretty river Etchemin glittered. I’d caught scent of smoke from a camp of French and Indians and begged Sam to lend me his glass. I’d trained it on the wisp, coiled and slender, where a few of Montcalm’s old men and boys and a couple of Indians smoked a heap of silver éperlans, and I have to admit I went into reverie.

I would have flown to that camp for solace had we not been at war, had I not been a general, had I no responsibility on earth save healing my personal weariness.

“Do you see the women laundering their garments in the river?” I asked Sam.