Their linen blazed. Slender boys paddled two canoes. I nicked my hand clenching the filigree on the locket bearing my fiancée’s portrait—not Eliza but Katherine, the one my mother had reluctantly approved. Katherine: sensible—not the French sensible—Katherine Lowther was not sensitive or thin-skinned at all, but sensible in the English way. Katherine and I both wanted a home life. We did not need the kind of estate my mother envisioned. Here, through Sam’s spyglass, I saw the life that pleases me: sons, my home-smoked fish, dogs, guns, shelter. I needed a roof no grander than the huts over this raw edge of a new and different Europe. Although too rough, in truth, even for sensible Katherine.

On the Quebec side, opposite that sweet river camp, sat the lonely beach at L’Anse au Foulon, the dark north shore rising above it to Abraham’s Heights.

—

THE TWO SIDES OF THE Saint Lawrence are different countries. The north side on which Quebec stands is not benevolent like settlements I marauded along the south. It has none of Kamouraska’s golden and pleasant incline, no grasses or dreaming horses. The north is the salt side, the tide-harsh cliffs whose rockface and spruce loom so tight there’s no place a husbandman can lie down and read his poem or drink a draught.

When Sam Holland and I turned our backs on the pastoral Etchemin River encampment, I grew cold and felt knowledge drain out of me. If Sam had been of a melancholic nature as I am, I might never have thought a Foulon landing possible. But he was one of those souls whose natural warmth emanates toward the man near him.

I knew Sam had a girl at home who was unlike Katherine—one who craved to fling her thighs round him. Katherine and I had a different sort of ease. If I made it home she could count on me for kind attention and my soldier’s wages. Ha! In those days I actually believed that there would be a wage coming to me to reward me for my service. Well, those were the days of innocence, and Katherine was part of that innocence—or should I call it gentle peace? She knew I’d sit reading half the night rather than come to bed. It was she who slipped me my favourite poem as I left England—and for a long time I hid the volume in my bunk so as not to arouse scorn.

Sam and I faced the north side’s rock. Hostility suffused the embankment beyond Quebec all down Montcalm’s guarded shore. Canadian loathing migrated toward my men camped at Montmorency Falls. It spilled over Île d’Orléans and Isle-aux-Coudres. Terror welled up in the ground, engulfed the soles of my feet and infected me.

Yet the Foulon was perfect.