When I love anything, be it man, woman, or river, I want to make it mine. I want to separate it from the world of all that belongs to others, and hold it to myself. I look on it as crystalline, a vision of the heart that only I can see. I have to do this or my love won’t ignite.

Is this a failing? I think some call it insanity. But from childhood I did this: I moved away from the crowd so I could hold my love before me and examine it in precision and solitude, like a cut gem with my vision of the loved one suspended inside.

I did this with my secret beach. After I went with Sam Holland, I returned alone. When everyone thought me too ill to act, I acted. While they lamented ordinary discomforts, shrews in the bread and saltwater rotting their shoes, I took a catamaran and one dripping oar and went back to my Foulon.

—

“ELWYN?”

Usually Elwyn doesn’t come to me unless I’ve been asleep.

Normally I judder in and out of slumber and sometimes I think I’ve woken up to find Elwyn armless on the ground, outside the tent, trying to open the flap with his teeth. The last bit of the knot eludes him every time, slippery and tight, impossible for teeth to unfasten, and of course there’s nothing I, a sleeping man, can do to help him. I’m paralyzed in the bed.

Sophie calls this recurring nightmare “the Hag.”

She has rolled over and missed my story about the river. I wish Mrs. Waugh could hear me, wherever she is, out there in the night. I carefully bring out her letter once again, and, for comfort, try to decipher it by the light of the park lamp shining through the tent. But Sophie stirs—paper is so loud! I shove it back into hiding and await dawn.

12 Dragonfly Girls

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6.

MORNING.

Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

AS SOON AS THE SUN RISES I examine the letter of Mrs. Waugh—it is slow-going to decipher her spidery handwriting, and I dread waking Sophie.

Dear James,

Thank you for your letter, which arrived this afternoon. Can you believe I spent nearly all day today at the McCord Museum in the company of a piece of Wolfe’s—of your—red hair? Here in Montreal, on Sherbrooke Street! They have it encased in a glass circlet bound by green ribbon. I wish they’d let me touch it. Red hair’s often coarse isn’t it. My mother had it, and I fancy if I’d had a son or daughter—but what I wanted to ask is this: it’s about the letter you sent me…would you mind, terribly, if I had your handwriting analyzed? You see, I’ve been in contact with a graphologist, a Monsieur Choinière…