-x-

                It is now a dripping October, most of autumn’s leaves a soggy rug trodden into the rutted mud of streets and lanes. He accepts the invitation to a Saturday night dinner, with ‘a ball and sundry other diverting entertainments’. He dresses in a splendid new uniform, with his full regalia of rank and honours. He even wears a spotless white wig – an accoutrement he’s always loathed and feels to be ridiculous.

                   “My goodness!” exclaims Julie, admiring the dazzle of gold, red, blue and white. “You look like an emperor!” 

                “That’s the whole point,” he says. “I want these people to know who’s now the real power in this midden-heap.” He’s told her why she is not accompanying him to these preliminary functions – he’s not hiding her. 

                  ‘I’m happy to be spared,’ she says. She prefers to spend her time with baby Jean, who she dotes over, barely allowing a servant or even a nursery maid near the bawling little bundle. What had been suppressed with little Eduard now floods to the surface in a rip tide.

                  Captain Weatherall will accompany him to the dinner, in the role of stickler for royal protocol – making it up if he needs to. “These people don’t know how to behave,” he’d explained to Weatherall. “You are going to stuff them so full of decorum and delicacy that they’ll choke on it.”

                  They arrive at Government Hall deliberately late, riding in a magnificent landau with an escort of horse guards, who blow his personal fanfare on polished brass horns. People inside begin crowding at windows, pushing one another aside to obtain a better view. Lieutenant-Governor Wentworth, towed by Lady Frances, comes out to the carriage, fairly swelling with pride and waving to onlookers, the chartered witnesses to his latest honour. Weatherall is first to climb down, once a postilion has unfolded the steps. Prince Edward follows him, seeing Wentworth start forward with outstretched hand. Weatherall deftly dodges between them.

                “His Royal Highness does not shake hands, sir,” he says firmly. “Indeed, his person is not to be touched at all…not under any circumstances.”

                  After the prince’s original masonic grip, this must confuse the man.

                “How should we greet him then, eh?” Wentworth whispers anxiously.

              “You simply bow, sir, and make sure to speak only if spoken to.”

                Weatherall enjoys this game. He has no respect for the governor. Wentworth now bows low enough to kiss his own shoes. Lady Frances, urgently trying to catch the prince’s eye, embarks on an ungainly curtsey. He then accompanies Wentworth into the house. The place attempts grandeur in its decor yet achieves something between shabby ostentation and monumental tastelessness. Like the building itself, everything is out of proportion, doors and windows either too big or too small for the rooms they serve. “Have you been quite well, Sir John?” he asks the governor.

                “Oh, excellent well, Highness,” he blurts out, spittle spilling in a froth from his lips onto the lace of a cravat, where it blends in perfectly. “And so exceedingly much looking forward to your first official visit.”

                ‘Yes. As am I…’

                A throng of men in various versions of dinner dress, and women in handsome yet antiquated satin gowns, has by now pushed its way into the hall. The women are so laden down with an excess of jewelry that they resemble thieves running from Aladdin’s cave with booty. A collective gasp goes up as he enters, bowing to them indifferently. Weatherall goes ahead, a Moses of protocol, parting the sea of eager faces, uttering his rigid instructions. Edward takes in his surroundings. Well, he thinks, you can see where the appropriated funds from London go. There are gilded marble-topped tables; there are monstrous gold urns, holding paper flowers the size of latern pans in a dozen garish hues; there are vast mirrors with golden cupids crawling around their frames in search of love. The Prince of Wales could do no worse.

               “Oh, Edward!” a husky voice breathes in his ear. “How wonderful to see you again!” Lady Frances is goggle-eyed with excitement and craving.

              “Madame,” he says coldly. “I do not countenance such familiarity, particularly not in public.”

                  She takes a step back, as if he’d slapped her; and then, smiling wickedly, she says, “Then I shall hope we will not always find ourselves ‘in public’…”

                He ignores this remark, proceeding into the wake created by Weatherall, which takes him into a large salon. The walls are covered in a terrifyingly pink silk, and hung profusely with portraits of dogs, cats and parrots. 

                 ‘My God!’ Weatherall whispers. ‘What a nightmare…’

                   ‘Badly painted too,’ he whispers back.

                    Sixty or seventy men and women now gawk at him; both sexes are equally and obviously drunk. A negro servant, clad in cheap many-coloured livery that gives him a clownish appearance, offers the prince a glass of champagne. He declines politely, requesting water instead. 

                “Now they don’t know what to do,” Weatherall mutters. “I have protocolled them into mutes.”

                “Good,” says the prince. “Silence is golden – not gilded. Let them get a taste of what good society is like. Or is supposed to be like. Only dinner with my mother is this deadly. Have Sir John and Lady Frances introduce me to all the guests formally — married couples first, then singles. That ought to kill the time before we are summoned to table.” 

                      Since the West Indies, he’s become far more confident in dealing with strangers. He’s been told that one advantage of blue eyes is their ability to convey nothing of what goes on behind them. They are curtains of the soul — and he uses this. His purpose here is to improve the place, and improve it he will, no matter who he must offend in the process. Like that, he tells himself, looking down.  Covering rough-hewn planks on the floor is a carpet of stupendous dimensions, incorporating a Greek key motif border with an inner section containing a hothouse full of unlikely blooms, each a yard wide. There are vines too, and odd green cat-like creatures. ‘It does its duty, Fred,’ he whispers, ‘this rug…’

                    ‘I’m not sure I…’

                    ‘Its function is to cover this floor, and that it does, not caring in the least who it offends by doing it…’

                  ‘No. It certainly doesn’t care about that…’

                   ‘Oh,’ says the prince brightly, looking across the room, ‘look at those!’

                  Upon a broad stone mantelpiece, framing a lacklustre fire of steaming birch logs, there stand several interesting timepieces. More are scattered around the room on side tables. For some years now the prince has recognized in himself his father’s enthusiasm for clocks, indeed for mechanical marvels in general. He cannot resist the more novel examples. Is he making up for that timepiece he smashed as a child? No, these days he even attributes that incident to an early, if crude manifestation of his current interest. In this curious manner, he strives to erase a disagreeable past. Little wonder his success is minimal. Peering at one clock, in which a small porcelain couple suddenly pops out from a gold door as the hour strikes, moving in a circle to disappear through another door, he’s aware of an encroaching odour, one of spiced rum mingled with stale tobacco. This is the habitual aroma of Sir John Wentworth. “Is this your collection?” he asks him.

                  “It is, Highness,” Wentworth replies in an oily voice. “Allow me to show you my favourite piece…if it pleases you, sire?”

                  The prince follows him over to a table whose marquetry design is merely circles within circles, the veneers in three shades of brown. Upon this dizzying surface sits a complex device under a glass dome. It has a clock-face with two wicked-looking eyes made from onyx and lapis lazuli, the hands carved from ivory to resemble long beaks. Seated among the cogs, springs and levers are three stuffed birds, finches perhaps, of differing colours, red, white and blue. Wentworth carefully removes the dome, and then turns the beaks – which are twenty minutes slow – until the larger one stands close to its zenith at twelve. “Now watch, sire,” urges Sir John, aglow with pride.

                  As the hour rings out, each of the little birds, wings flapping, beaks twittering sweetly, moves in ascending and descending spirals all around the clock for a full minute, before coming to rest once more upon their perches. 

              “Where did you find such a wonder?” he asks Wentworth, completely enthralled by what he’s seen – and quite forgetting his purpose here tonight.

                “There’s an old Swiss clock-maker out in Shelburne,” says the governor, “and he makes ‘em for me. He likes to surprise with new marvels every time. But I should be real honoured if Your Highness would accept this piece as a gift…”

                “I could not do that, Sir John, no,” he replies, though without much conviction. He wants this clock. It is the helpless and inexplicable need of an inveterate collector.

                “Please accept it, Highness. It’d make us so darn happy to give you a memento of your first weeks in command here…”

                “I see. Yes… Well, but only on that condition,” he says, eager to show Julie and their baby the marvel, “Then in that case I do accept most gratefully. Yet you must introduce me to this Shelburne wizard…”

                  “It’ll be my pleasure, sire… and no doubt the old boy’s delight too. He’ll be tickled pink when he finds out a son of King George has one of his clocks.”

              Not as pink as this room, I hope, he thinks. ‘Just one?’ he says. ‘I suspect one of many, Sir John…’

                As they start towards another timepiece, this one resembling a castle standing in its own silvery moat, Lady Frances intercepts them, irritably announcing that the reception line is ready.

                “Duty calls,” he says. ‘Another time for all this time, perhaps?’

              “Sire.”

              “By the way, Sir John,’ he says, ‘where did you find this astonishing carpet?”

                “A Turkoman weaver in Philadelphia made it for me before the Revolution,” he replies wistfully. “His own design, too. But the problem was I’d asked for a rug one hundred inches by eighty, and the guy makes it a hundred feet by eighty feet. But the thing was so darn beautiful, and had taken him so long to weave, I couldn’t refuse to take it, could I now? Until we moved here, though, I never had a room big enough for it. It’d been folded up for years — years! But when I had it spread out here it looked even prettier than it had back then, so bright, so cheerful…”

                ‘Yes, indeed it is…cheerful.’ He likes this story. Despite the rumours and gossip, he’s beginning to like Wentworth too. They are brother masons, after all. And now brothers in clockwork, he tells himself, only too well aware of contrary emotions, but dismissing them. 

                   Lady Frances is annoyed by the attention paid to Prince Edward by her young lady guests, especially the pretty ones. Attractive and provocative she certainly still is, in her late forties, she also knows her game will soon be lost to some of these budding beauties the prince will dance with after dinner. The knowledge has a bitter taste, a spiteful virtue

                “The one thing Halifax appears not to be sorely lacking in is comely maidens,” says Weatherall, whistling quietly through his teeth.

                  “Perhaps we should find you a wife, Fred?” the prince suggests. “Better to marry than to burn, as St. Paul advises us.” He indicates Weatherall’s ruddy face.

                  “Didn’t he burn anyway?”

              “No… Wasn’t it a stoning?”

              ‘Well, I’m sure marriage is better than a rock in the face…’

                  ‘Not always,’ he says, laughing.

                “What is so funny?” asks Lady Frances, shooting over to them, probably wondering if she is the source of their evident mirth.

                  “His Royal Highness and I were just recalling a naval battle,” Weatherall tells her.

                “And where is the humour in that?” she demands. 

                “Oh, you had to be there, ma’am” Weatherall replies, as annoyingly as possible.

                The prince is seated at the head of the main table, with Sir John to his right and Lady Frances on the left, with Weatherall next to her. The other guests appear to be the dullest couples from the receiving line. All the prettiest ladies are at a far table, looked down upon by glassy-eyed stag and moose heads affixed to the dark pine panelling. 

                “May I say the Grace?” he asks Wentworth, who nods sheepishly.

                “Benedict nobis domine deus,” he intones, adding to this prayer some others that dry old Bishop John Fisher had taught him at Kew. “Perhaps our host will care to utter a blessing of his own,” he then says, looking at Sir John expectantly.

              “Oh, well,” mumbles the governor, proposing a toast more than a grace, “of course, yeah: we thank the good Lord for all his bounty; but we ought also to thank him for sending us so darn heroic and so…um…royal a Commander-in-Chief as the prince. Ladies and gents: His Royal Highness, Prince Edward. May God keep and protect him!” Wentworth raises his glass.

                Several more toasts are drunk, to King, Country, Army, Province, Canada, and even to Lord Dorchester. Glasses are refilled instantly from magnums ferried about by negro footmen, now dressed more like blacksmiths. Edward keeps a hand over his glass.  

                “His Royal Highness never drinks more than a sip,” you can hear Weatherall telling Lady Frances, “and he disapproves intensely of drunkenness… as indeed he does of gambling and all the other… the other vices…”

                “So…gee, what does he do for amusement then?” she asks, genuinely perplexed.

            “Amusement? I would not call it that, ma’am. He studies his Bible, and other edifying books,” Weatherall confides in hushed tones. “And, of course, he works…indeed he works very hard. Up at four in the morning, and rarely home before nine of an evening. His work gives him the greatest pleasure, or so I believe, ma’am.”

                  “Then he’s most unlike his older brother,” remarks Lady Frances. She laughs behind her napkin. “I always knew what gave him the greatest pleasure — yes, I sure did…”

                Weatherall coughs artificially, raising a dangerous eyebrow. “Indeed, ma’am, he is most unlike all of his brothers… which is why he’s the apple of his father’s eye. Many even think that Parliament will insist the crown next pass to him, and not to the elder princes…”

                ‘Is that so?’

                  To avoid bursting with laughter at this, Prince Edward asks Sir John if he’s read Mr. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The governor regrets he has not, thereby allowing the prince an opportunity to relate for him the entire plot, with its ogres, demons, cautionary tales about vanity, and all the other deadly sins. Unable to get a word in and listening in mortification to what sounds like a personal indictment, Lady Frances begins to worry about the diversions she’s planned for this evening. 

                  “Is all this here yarn taken from the Bible?” Wentworth inquires anxiously, when Christian has finally been saved from the waters of death by his Redeemer.

              “Naturally,” the prince assures him. “Which is why Mr. Bunyan’s book was once more popular than the Bible – a feat no other work has ever achieved…”

                    Soon Sir John is yawning over his venison – a dish the heads nailed to wall panelling strongly disapprove of.

                “Your husband seems weary,” he remarks to Lady Frances, who seizes upon this opportunity to speak.

                  “No reason why the old goat should be,” she says disinterestedly. “After all, he hardly does anything. And what, if I may be so bold, is it that keeps Your Highness so very, very busy here?”

                He launches into an interminable account of the minutiae involved in rethinking and rebuilding the city’s fortifications, including types of stone best suited to the different structures, optimum positioning of redoubts, variety and poundage of guns to be deployed, and so forth, on and on and on. Only when he’s paused, wondering whether to discuss the best diet for men on guard duty in winter, does she get a word in.

                “And this is seriously what you actually regard as fun, is it?” she asks, no longer so sure of herself at all.

                  “Indeed, it is, Madame. The Good Lord proscribes idleness and frivolity, does He not?”

                “What about all them flirtatious young girls you invited to dance?”

                  “I have the best and prettiest one at home already,” he says. “Here I am merely trying to be civil and dutiful… as is my, ah, my duty.”

                “When shall I meet this fine lady of yours?” she eventually asks, looking much deflated now.

                “When she chooses to invite you, I should imagine. She never visits strangers in their own home. Besides, she’s extremely busy at this moment.”

                  “What very busy lives you both must lead. It’s a wonder you found the time to meet, ain’t it?”

                “There is a time for every purpose under heaven,” he tells her gravely. “And now it must be time for those ‘entertainments’ promised by your invitation, no?”

                     ‘Excuse me for a Halifax minute, Highness.’ She now whispers to Weatherall: ‘Would he be offended by our negro slaves singing some rather bawdy songs?’

                    ‘Ma’am, he’d be deeply offended by the slaves, as well as by their songs. He regards slavery as a sin…’

                   ‘What about a local girl performin’ as Salome in that Dance of the Several Veils?’

                    ‘Absolutely appalled, ma’am.’

                    ‘Some card games?’

                    ‘No. But listen,’ says Weatherall considerately, ‘His Royal Highness will be leaving after his duty dances, so you could postpone your entertainments until then.’

                      She turns back to him, to the prince, and tentatively asks if he’d care to hear the city’s most eminent poet reciting some of his verse.

                  ‘No, not really, Madame.’ He places a hand on Sir John’s arm and says, ‘Are you fond of poetry here, Governor?’

                  Wentworth jumps out of his slumber. “I can’t tell a poem from a pisspot, Highness,” he says in an exhausted tone. “I’m not your man. To me it’s all flowery thoughts that rhyme. I don’t need my more mundane thoughts to rhyme, do you?”

                  “No. But I should require it of my flowery ones, though, Sir John – if ever they bloom, that is…”

                ‘How darn witty,’ says Lady Frances despairingly. ‘His Highness is quite the conversationalist…’

                  ‘He is quite the conservationist too, my lady,’ says Weatherall, ‘conserving his strength for the work of improving this country in every way. So, if you please…’

                The prince now performs all his duty dances, leaving many a breathless, flushed little face dizzy with delight. Then, announcing a busy day on the morrow, he takes his leave. 

                  Card tables are being put in place before he’s through the main doors, where he deftly manages to avoid further private moments with Lady Frances. He’s made sure, however, that the marvellous timepiece of beaks and twittering birds has been carried to his landau wrapped in a blanket. The slight concern lingering in him about this gift evaporates the moment he sees the giggling delight it brings to baby Jean’s eyes, as they gaze wonderingly at those fluttering, swooping, tweeting birds.

-xi-

                  The winter of 1794-95 is a busy time indeed. The desultory skirmishes and local sea-battles with France have now escalated into an all-out conflict, with much of the world seemingly as its major battlefields. The French navy, as we’ve noted, manages to retake Guadeloupe, Martinique and other islands. Because of a renewed French presence near the eastern shores of the American continent, London suddenly becomes gravely concerned that a concerted attack on Halifax might be imminent. It would comprise a first stage in their effort to regain the old French colony. You can’t wage war across the Atlantic Ocean – the English army has grasped this idea by now – so everyone is banking on Prince Edward, as the first line of defense, to keep French soldiers from landing at the only viable Canadian swaport; and also to keep French sailors from entering the St. Lawrence, headed west for Quebec. 

                     By now he’s hired many Maroons to work on rebuilding fortifications around the harbour. He’s sympathetic to the plight of these men – and at least this work will pay them – but he’s also impressed by their great strength and tireless stamina. Being so heavily forested, Jamaica received the strongest slaves, and these Maroons, originally from the Coromandel Coast of Africa, are among the strongest of all, something they prove daily clearing the roots and stumps on Citadel Hill. They still speak the Twi language of their homeland, are high-spirited, reliable and never object to the work, content now to be free men with paying employment. He has far more trouble with the local working men – especially the Scotch — than he does with the Africans. The white journeymen have a haughty attitude, regarding work as an irksome necessity, and their wages as a God-given right. They are explosively quarrelsome and annoyingly unreliable, recognizing no form of authority but their own. The provincial militia, also employed in building, he has a fondness for, however; and he’s sympathetic to the unavoidable exigencies of their personal lives. They’re obliged to return to their rural homes from April to August in order to tend farms and fields, lest their families starve during the harshly deprived winters. ‘Nova Scarcer’ is one nickname some of these hard-working, affable, mainly Irish farmers have given the province. 

                      Ever on the alert for French vessels, he keeps the pace of building at a fever pitch, soon constructing a truly formidable defense system. Yet it never seems to be formidable or extensive enough for him. He knows London is watching, his father is watching and, as always, his need to please the King overrides all other concerns. He must make Halifax impregnable — and he will.

                  Governor Wentworth’s greed, and his need to placate Lady Frances with gifts, begin to interfere with this vital project, since the funds to pay for it go first through Wentworth’s hands. This is,  as we’ve already noted, where a goodly portion of them remain too, spent on such preposterous fripperies as an ornately gilded galley, rowed by Maroons, in which Lady Frances reclines upon pillows like Cleopatra, with her various gallants peeling grapes to feed her as she slides langorously about the harbour on a sunny afternoon.

                   ‘It does not so much burn upon the waters, does it,’ he says to Weatherall, while they watch the royal barge, ‘as it smoulders in the murk out there?’

                    ‘Indeed,’ says Weatherall. ‘When people of doubtful moral quality are placed in positions of near-absolute power over remote areas the size of some European states, it swells the head…’

                ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘And can that head just keep on swelling?’

                ‘In the lady’s case, I’d say it could…’

                ‘Then we shall have to hope a strong wind comes up to blow her away one day…’ 

                     Wentworth has also taken some fifty Maroons off to his country estate out at Preston, where they work as slaves, living in wretched hovels outside the perimeter wall. To further aggravate already grievous conditions in the city, the place is now becoming overrun with French prisoners-of-war, sent up from battles in the West Indies and elsewhere. The governor was supposed to incarcerate and care for these men; yet instead, and to keep in his own offers the money provided for this purpose, he’s allowed the ragged, dispirited Frenchmen to roam city streets, plying their former trades in order to eke out a living,  though at greatly reduced rates. There are goldsmiths, shoemakers, dancing masters, perfumiers, leather workers, and men who carve dice or little boxes from animal bones. Every one of these bereft souls is being exploited in his pitiful situation by citizens eager for a bargain. The sight of her countrymen in such a poor state and so ill-used makes Julie very indignant indeed. She soon hires some of their skills, for a fair remuneration of course, in decorating the house Edward has just bought. It sits upon the northern slope of Citadel Hill, leading down to Cogswell Street and, although only made from wood, boasts Corinthian columns and an entrance lodge lit by copper oil lanterns. It is his first attempt at designing and building a house, but it will not be the last by a long chalk.With Julie’s French craftsmen, she soon makes the interior comfortable without it being  in the least part  ostentatious, like the exterior. 

                 ‘They’ve done excellent work, wouldn’t you say?’ she asks Edward, as they inspect the rooms.

                     ‘I’d also say you ought to be careful showing preferment to the French. We are at war with them, remember…’

                   ‘Them? I’m one of them… remember?’

                    ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But don’t remind everyone…’

-xii-

                      In the late spring of 1795, Julie receives another letter from her friend, Rose in Paris. She fears more bad news, yet it is not. “She’s met an artillery commander,” she tells the prince excitedly. Not another one of those, he thinks. “And they are to be married. He adores her and her children;d his real interest is mathematics, which he hopes to pursue at the Institute when this war is over. Isn’t that wonderful?”

                    ‘Yes,’ he says obligingly. ‘But it probably won’t be very wonderful for the French when it is over…’

                    ‘It’ll be wonderful for all of us.’ She hugs the letter to her breast, sighing with relief. She’s a good, faithful friend.

                      But, he thinks, interesting to find an artillery commander who’s also a mathematician. Perhaps they won’t be firing their guns quite so randomly anymore? 

                   By now he’s informed Julie and Robert Wood that, should he be transferred to the war in Europe, Wood and Chloe, his wife, have been selected as baby Jean’s potential adoptive parents. Struck dumb by the honour, they have agreed to play this role. So far there have been no signs of their own brood appearing. ‘It may be we cannot,’ Wood had said.

                    ‘You’ll never want for anything,’ the prince had assured him. ‘Money will be provided for little Jean’s schooling and personal needs as required and upon demand. Always…’ 

                   Julie had initially objected to a mere servant adopting her son, but she was easily persuaded of Wood’s exemplary character, since she has so often seen it for herself. Her main concern is that Jean’s name never be changed from ‘de Mestre’. Inwardly, however, the prospect of another appalling loss torments her, driving glacial knives into the heart.

               “In any case,” Edward had said in a placatory manner, “I regard Robert as a friend, not a servant; and this is just a contingency plan. I may well remain here. But if I am ordered to Europe, it will happen swiftly, and we need to be prepared, do we not?” With York as C-in-C, he thinks, we only need to be prepared to stay here forever.

                “We do. It’s hard, though. It’s not easy. But I know I could not care for him properly when I have no idea where I’ll be…where you’ll be…’ 

                  In the new house, they soon begin to entertain in the formal manner they’d done back in Quebec. There are levees, dinner parties, and balls enlivened by his Fusiliers’ band. For guests, they invite officers, colonial officials, landowners, manufacturers, tradesmen, and a wide variety of other local worthies – including of course the Wentworths. These are rigidly sober events, though, with Captain Weatherall informing everyone of the conduct expected from them. Prince Edward does permit games of whist, however, but only for absurdly small stakes, and mainly because Julie enjoys playing. He never touches a card himself, and he remains abstemious, rarely drinking more than a half-glass of wine. The point is not to harass and bore people, but to set an example of proper behaviour in good society; or rather to reinstate the example that was so effectively undermined by his brother, the Duke of Clarence. It’s a good thing, he thinks, that no one here can see the habitually grotesque behaviour of his brothers back home. That too is trickling down to influence every stratum of society in one way or another. The wealthier classes emulate it; the increasingly radicalized poor bitterly resent it. Edward’s entertaining also allows him to meet and befriend the kind of men who are never seen in the company of his family. The financiers, manufacturers, and particularly the aspiring industrialists make him realize with startling clarity that, while good government will always be vital, the life-blood of any country flows through the veins of an economy not an administration. The implacable force of this flow will push all the old ways aside. Land and power will soon be handing over the reins to commerce. He can see it very clearly; just as he can see the immense changes or adaptations it will require from every echelon of every society.

                    ‘Well,’ says Weatherall, after the first dinner, ‘Madame Julie certainly put that Messalina Lady Frances in her place…’

                 ‘Indeed,’ he says. ‘Poor lady, trying to trade with rapidly staling goods… I feel sorry for her…’

                    ‘That would be premature, Edward, I suspect…’

                      ‘Why?’

                      ‘She’s not someone to underestimate.’

‘Then it’s good we aren’t at war with her, is it not?’

‘Aren’t we?’