“A hell of a soldier; wounded at Aldea de Ponte and sent home, unfit for active service. Not good for a man of his calibre. Anyone else would probably have drunk himself into a stupor. Luckily, a friend came to his rescue.” Lawrence paused to let Hawkwood take the bait.

“And this friend just happened to be …?”

“General Prevost, Governor-General of Canada.”

“That’s impressive.”

“Ain’t it just. They served together in Martinique. Rather than see him put out to grass, Prevost offered him a staff position as Inspecting Field Officer of Militia in Canada. He was already en route when hostilities broke out. Didn’t take him long to see that improvements were needed. Came up with quite a few, one of which was establishing a web of paid informants. To liaise with them, he recruited special, ah … correspondents, I suppose you’d call ’em – like the ones employed by your Alien Office – to gather intelligence from behind the American lines. That got him to thinking about the way Grant had recruited the guerrilleros in Spain and Portugal. He thought it might be possible to try the same tactic with the indigenous tribes. It worked during the Revolution – why not now?”

“So they sent for you,” Hawkwood said.

“Grant wasn’t available, on account of he’d been captured, so the generals decided I was the man for the job. I received my marching orders in October. Hardly drew breath before they had me on a packet out of Lisbon.”

Lawrence smiled thinly. “Put the Indian Department’s nose out of joint, of course: Pearson bringing in his own man. There’s a rift deep between the department and the military. The army reckons most of the department’s officials are corrupt and only out to feather their own nests. There’s a fair number who’ve married into the tribes, so they’ve a vested interest in the Nations remaining neutral. It protects their positions.

“Now that we’re at war, as far as the army’s concerned, those who ain’t with us are agin us. It wants the Nations to take a positive stance. If we’re to defend the Canadas, as we must, we need the tribes on our side.

“For that to happen, we have to convince the leaders that their best interests lie with us and not the Americans.” Lawrence sighed. “And there’s the rub. The Indian Department would prefer the peace chiefs to be in charge. The army, for obvious reasons, wants the war chiefs to hold the reins. Up until a month or so ago, it was what the Frogs call impasse.”

“What changed?”