can say for sure is that’s her place, and if you’re going in there then you need to watch out for her. Now take me back to my room, please. I don’t want a chill to get into my bones.’
I wheeled him back to the center, and we said our goodbyes. His roommate was back in his bed, still reading the same newspaper.
‘You brought him back,’ he said. ‘I was hoping you’da drowned him.’
He sniffed the air. ‘Someone’s been smoking,’ he said. He shook his newspaper at Phineas. ‘You smell like Cuba.’
‘You’re an ignorant old man,’ said Phineas. ‘I smell like the Dominican Republic.’
He reached into a pocket of his coat, and waved a fresh Cohiba at his rival. ‘But if you’re good, and you let me nap in peace for an hour or two, maybe I’ll let you wheel me out to the lake before supper, and I’ll tell you a story . . .’
44
Shielded by looming pines, Wolfe’s Folly hid itself from the setting sun; less a fortress than the memory of one constructed by the forest, its lineaments blurred by shrubs and ivy, most of its buildings long collapsed in on themselves and only its log walls still standing intact.
Its proper name was Fort Mordant, after Sir Giles Mordant, an advisor to General Wolfe who had first suggested its construction. It had been intended as a supply depot and a place of refuge, a link in a proposed chain of such small forts stretching from the colonies on the east coast of the British claims to the St Lawrence River by the northwest of the French territories, part of a new front from which to harry Quebec. Unfortunately, the changing fortunes of war had left Fort Mordant unsuited to its purpose, and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 made the fort redundant. By then Wolfe himself was dead, killed at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham with his enemy Montcalm, and Sir Giles had been shipped home with a chest wound from which he never fully recovered, dying at the age of thirty-three.
In 1764, it was decided that the fort was to be abandoned, and its small garrison sent east. By then, the name Wolfe’s Folly had stuck: while the blame for the fort more properly lay with Mordant himself, it was Wolfe’s folly to have listened to him in the first place. It was said by some that Wolfe owed a substantial debt of money to Mordant, and was obliged to support his scheme; others took the view that Mordant was a fool, and Wolfe preferred to have him concentrating on his fort than interfering in more important matters of war. Whatever the reason for its construction, it brought no luck to either man, and had no impact on the outcome of the conflict.
The man entrusted with bringing word of the decision to close the fort and supervising its evacuation was a Lieutenant Buckingham, who traveled northwest in April 1764 accompanied by a platoon of infantrymen. They were still three days’ march from the fort when the first rumors began to reach them. They encountered a Quaker missionary named Benjamin Woolman, a distant relative of James Woolman of New Jersey, a leading figure in the burgeoning abolition movement. Benjamin Woolman had taken it upon himself to preach Christianity to the natives, and he was known to act as a conduit between the tribes and the British forces.
Woolman informed Buckingham that the garrison at Fort Mordant had carried out a punitive expedition against a small Abenaki village a week or so earlier, killing more than twenty natives, including, it was said, women and children. When Buckingham requested information about the reason for the slaughter, Woolman replied that he had no knowledge of why it was carried out. Such a small native group, scarcely more than a single extended family, could have posed little threat to the fort or its inhabitants, and, as far as Woolman was aware, there had been no particular tension between the soldiers and the natives. The Abenaki considered the fort’s construction to be an exercise in foolishness. More importantly, they tended to avoid the area of the forest in which it was located, terming it majigek, which Woolman translated as ‘wicked’. In fact, that was one of the reasons why Mordant had chosen that location for the fort’s construction. One of his sole redeeming qualities was his interest in the traditions of the native population, and he left behind