“He stole up the mighty Saint Lawrence,” these histories say, “toward the little beach at L’Anse au Foulon…He instructed his men to such stealth that it would have been a vigilant Savage indeed who perceived the curlew disturbed from its roost, the lone vole peeping, curious, from its tiny hole in the hill below Quebec’s fortress…”

They crow about Montcalm’s redoubts, our numbers of cannon and the weight of their shot. Then, Gray’s poem…

“Wolfe extracted from his breast the precious volume given to him in parting by his fiancée, Miss Katherine Lowther. He raised its pages to the scant moonlight…”

I’ll say the moon was scant! Would any decent general have ventured to take Quebec on a night when a fat moon poured limelight on his men? No, I chose waning gibbous, cloudy sky, perfect tide.

From my fronds I peep out to get a better look at the busker’s flute. I discern from the fellow’s age and from his hesitant fingers that he must have played as a child and retained his ability with a bodily memory that can perhaps be trusted more than he believes. I crawl out and get a bit nearer. My fingers ache to dance on the holes of his instrument. How I miss my own dancing fingers, my breath shared between openings in silver. What a sweet voice a flute lends a man whose throat has grown hoarse and useless shouting commands of war.

He’s finished the Mozart, and, hesitant, I ask, “Might I—hold your flute?”

I can’t help reaching.

My fingers remind me of the starlings that beg for crumbs under café tables. Around every Montreal terrasse these creatures congregate, a golden lining peeping from their feathers of dun. I always like to dust crumbs off myself as I rise. The crumbs, tiny as stardust, sustain starling flight over the city for days. Crumbs feed birdsong—that wild parent of anything written by Handel or Hotteterre or Mozart or any of the new composers whose work I have not learned.

The busker gapes. He hasn’t shaved and a stink of urine shrouds him. The velvet of his open flute case is smashed, stained with old rosin, the shine long out of it. But the flute is immaculate. It has been cleaned with fastidious regularity.

But the flautist bares teeth stuck on yellow posts in his gums. He says something in an incoherent joual, and with savage might swipes his flute across my outstretched fingers, then raises it and beats my face so hard I nearly lose consciousness. My cut cheek bleeds and my hands shake—my finger bones turn cold then hot, and for many seconds I fear he’s broken my fingers: I can’t feel them.