They part (Andrew will not see either again; he cannot interest Byron in Barlow’s raven, for which the poet declares the only useful rhyme in English is craven; the kindness of the Jew John Blaski appeals to him more; he is considering a series of “Hebrew melodies” to be set by his friend Isaac Nathan. But off to the Admiralty, and well met!): on the first of August, his conscience stung by Byron’s reference to twins, Andrew takes ship from Ireland to Nova Scotia. There is a lull in the war: Madison’s peace commissioners are in St. Petersburg with John Quincy Adams, but the prince regent, perhaps in view of Dearborn’s failure of nerve, declines after all to send representatives of his own. Napoleon’s momentum in Europe, like Dearborn’s in Canada, shows signs of flagging; President Madison has recalled the old general, but there is no one to recall the emperor. Andrew will not learn of this until he reaches Canada, or of Admiral Cockburn’s sack of Hampton, Virginia, or of Commodore Perry’s improbable launching of his Lake Erie fleet, or of the capture on August 13 of the drunken Argus by His Majesty’s brig Pelican. Meanwhile, as if his baiting of Germaine de Staël has provoked the gods of Romance…
Twenty-four hours out from Cobh, as he stands on the quarterdeck with other passengers anxiously scanning the Channel for the dreaded Argus, he fetches out and winds the old Breguet. A veiled lady beside him catches her breath. Not long after, a sealed, scented envelope is delivered to his bunk in the gentlemen’s cabin…
“Rossini, von Weber, Chateaubriand: your pardon!” Andrew here pleads. “Above all yours, Andrée!” But there she is, like the third-act reflex of a tired librettist. A still-striking, if plumpish, thirty-three, she has been the mistress of the Spanish minister to London; but her implacable ex-lover Don Escarpio, now a royalist agent in Rome, continues to harass her for her disobedience in Algiers. It is to flee his operatives and begin a new and different life that she has taken ship for Canada. But what honorable profession, in 1813, is open to a woman of no independent wealth who would be dependent on no man? Only one, that Consuelo knows of: following the examples of Mrs. Burney and Mrs. Edgeworth, above all of her idol Mme de Staël, she is determined to become… una novelista! Indeed, she is well into her maiden effort: an epistolary account, in the manner of Delphine, of her imbroglios with Serior Barlow and the wicked Escarpio. There is a new spirit abroad in Europe — perhaps Senor Cook has not heard of it — called romanticismo: as she has had alas no luck with the booksellers of Madrid and London, who advise her that the novel is a worn-out fad, Consuelo intends to introduce el romanticismo to North America and become the first famous Canadian novelist. For old time’s sake, will her carisimo Andrew read through the manuscript and help her English it?
Three weeks later they part, affectionately, at Halifax. Andrew says no more of their shipboard intimacy (he is, after all, writing to his wife, and tardily) or of his friend’s novel, except that, searching promptly for the truth about the poisoned snuffbox, he finds it metamorphosed into a poisoned letter-opener (“¿Mas romántico, no?”) and suggests she rework that passage, among others. But that their reconnection was not merely editorial we may infer from Andrew’s immediate guilty assumption — when upon reaching Castines Hundred in September he finds Tecumseh there with Andrée — that in his long and newsless absence his wife has returned for consolation to her Indian friend.
He does not “blame her”—or question her, or even make his presence known. For three days he haunts the area (the same three, ye muses of romantical coincidence, of Tecumseh’s single and innocent visit to his Star-of-the-Lake), surreptitiously satisfying himself that the twins are well, his wife and Tecumseh likewise. He hears the news that Perry has met the enemy at Put-In-Bay and that they are his; he understands that this victory spells the end, at least for the present, of British control of the Great Lakes, and that Perry’s fleet will now freely transport General Harrison’s army to meet Proctor and Tecumseh somewhere above Detroit. It wants no strategist to guess that another, two-pronged American invasion of Canada is imminent: one thrust from New England against Montreal, the other up from Detroit. Does Tecumseh understand that the battle to come is the most crucial of his life?
