The Halifax Connection

by Marie Jakober

  Steps approached Sylvie’s door, passed by quietly, faded into silence. Of course they would pass by: it was the middle of the night. Nonetheless they reminded her that she knew no one on this vessel, and no one in Halifax; she was altogether alone in the world. She bit her lip, bending to rest her chin on her knees. She could have gone with Captain Foxe to Baltimore. He had offered to take her, to introduce her to friends who might help her find a place. She could even have stayed in Nassau—God knew there was work enough. Only they had shared a dream, she and Fran. They had believed in it so desperately, and worked for it so long. Nothing seemed right except to go on. Tomorrow she would step out onto the pier at Halifax, find Miss Susan’s inn, and begin her life again.

  That was all she could do. Just go on.

  BOOK THREE

  Montreal, October 1863

  CHAPTER 5

  Little Richmond

  Some extremely nice Southern families had taken refuge in Montreal, and added much to its social amusements.

  —Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, British Army

  THEY CALLED THE PLACE Little Richmond, and Erryn Shaw could certainly understand why. St. Lawrence Hall took up most of a city block on St. James Street, and day after day its parlours and smoking rooms were filled with the mellow, drawling voices of American Southerners. Its dinner menu offered such marvels as lobster crepes, gumbo filé, and Georgia-style country ham. Its beautiful mahogany-panelled barroom was the only watering hole in the entire length and breadth of British North America where a man could buy himself a mint julep.

  Why a man would ever want to buy a mint julep, well, that was an altogether different question. To drink bourbon mixed with stomach herbs and sugar, when the world was full of delicate wines, divine Madeira, and even better port? Sweet God in heaven, Erryn reflected silently, only in America.

  He smiled across the table at his companion, Jackson Follett. Follett was a slender, very personable man in his thirties, a wealthy planter and former member of the South Carolina State Assembly. He was also, since early in the year, the Confederacy’s senior operative in Montreal.

  “Your health, Jack,” Erryn said.

  “And yours.” Follett raised his glass, returning the salute, then paused with the glass held close to his face, savouring the bouquet of fresh crushed mint. “They do do it well here,” he sighed.

  “Almost as well as the best Charleston butler, I suppose,” Erryn replied with a smile.

  “Almost.”

  It was three in the afternoon, but the bar of St. Lawrence Hall was full, as most always. There were, by Erryn’s estimate, at least two thousand Southerners in the city of Montreal—political exiles, refugees, escaped prisoners, and agents of the Confederate government. They found lodgings where they could—among sympathetic citizens, in boarding houses, in hotels. The poor and the frugal stayed at the scruffy Donegana, down on Notre-Dame; those who could afford it stayed here. Jackson Follett had a fine, balconied room on the first floor.

  “Do you remember the last time you came?” Follett murmured. “It was like a wake.”

  “Christ, yes,” Erryn said. “Worse than a wake.” August, it had been; early August, and the expatriate community was reeling with bewildered shock. For several months the war had gone impressively in favour of the Confederates. In December they defeated the Union’s eastern army at Fredericksburg; in the spring they all but destroyed it at Chancellorsville. Even in the States, Erryn suspected, a majority of Southerners believed the war was almost won. In Canada, they were sure of it. Buffered by distance, fed a steady diet of optimistic exaggerations by pro-Southern newspapers, distrustful of anything pro-Yankee, even a fact, they allowed themselves to be confident to the point of making plans for going home.

  Then the news came, stark headlines they could scarcely bring themselves to believe. Vicksburg, their strategic fortress on the Mississippi, had surrendered. The great continental river was gone up, and the whole Confederacy was cut in two. Then, before all of this could be properly absorbed, came the slow-breaking story out of Pennsylvania: General Lee’s bold invasion running into trouble, a costly battle outside a small country town, a withdrawal. Not a defeat, dear God, no; even as they sat and stared at their comrades, or at their knotted hands, they would not call it a defeat. Nonetheless, the invasion had failed. They were not going home anytime soon.

  These were the military losses, the ones the whole world knew about, and talked about. But Confederate policy had non-military objectives as well: to garner foreign support, especially from England and her North American colonies, and to foster disaffection within the Northern states. To many of the exiles, this part of the war was almost as important as the battlefield. Every time Erryn came west, he was told about the growing numbers of Copperheads in the Northern states: angry men who met by night with false names and deadly oaths of secrecy, preparing for a great uprising against Lincoln and the Black Republicans. He was told of meetings held all across the region, of arms purchased, of numbers reaching thousands, tens of thousands, finally hundreds of thousands. Southerners poured into Canada, especially in the West, hoping to make contact with these future rebels. They spoke boldly of opening a second front against the Yankees, right in their own backyard.

  At first, Erryn took it all very seriously, passing on to his superiors every scrap of information he could find about this extraordinary conspiracy, and spending many a troubled hour wondering what impact it would have on the British colonies. But as the months came and passed, and nothing seemed to happen—or even to change very much, except for those fascinating numbers—he began to wonder how much of it was actually conspiracy and how much of it was chimera. He was an outsider, granted, but just the same it was damned hard to see anything in Wisconsin that looked like the second American Revolution.

  Then, on July 9, 1863, Confederate general John Hunt Morgan led a brigade of tough, battle-hardened cavalry into Indiana, on a raid that was to sweep through the entire Northwest, gathering the disaffected to its banners as it went. In Canada, the spirits of the Southerners soared again. Now, finally, all the work and struggle would bear fruit. Young men would thunder through the night like Paul Revere, calling their countrymen to arms. Long-hidden weapons would be snatched from cellars and haylofts, and the thousands who had bided their time would storm the Yankee garrisons, the supply depots, the jails. They would climb on their lean country horses and race to Morgan’s side. And then the fall of Vicksburg would not matter. Gettysburg would not matter either, even if it had been a defeat. With enemies all around it, Lincoln’s government could not hope to stand.

  So ran the talk in the crowded rooms of exiles, in the bars where they gathered, in the parlours of their wealthy Canadian friends. Back in Halifax, big James Orton had thrown a comradely arm around Erryn’s shoulders—even he had to reach up to do it—and said, “Och, and won’t it be a great shock for the buggers to see Rebels coming at ’em from the North?”

  It would have been a great shock, no doubt, had it ever come to be. But there was no rising in the North. No legions flocked to Morgan’s banners, only the barest handfuls. Such men as thundered through the night with messages were mostly racing to the army posts for help, or calling out the militias. As for the Northern Copperheads, they seemed to think there was a difference between opposing their government and overthrowing it by force. And most everyone, Copperhead or not, seemed to think John Morgan’s men were horse thieves; raiders who strayed from their comrades in search of food or fresh mounts rarely came back. Within a week, the raid was plainly in trouble; within three, it was over. The entire brigade was scattered, captured, or dead, and Morgan himself was in an Ohio penitentiary.

  Such was the state of affairs in August, the last time Erryn sat in the bar of St. Lawrence Hall. Morgan’s defeat and capture had been confirmed for more than a week, long enough for even the most optimistic Southerners to have no choice except to believe it. Terrible as the losses at Vicksburg and Gettysburg had been, for many in
the colonies the failure of the Northwest rising was even harder to bear. That had been their fight. They had believed in it; they had worked and schemed and gone hungry for it, utterly convinced it would change the course of the war.

  And then it had simply faded into smoke.

  Now it was October, and everything was promising again. St. Lawrence Hall sparkled with triumph and excitement. At a table near their own, a young soldier was rising to his feet. He was thin and ragged, no doubt one of the many escaped Confederate prisoners in the city.

  “Gentlemen!” he shouted. “A toast!” He raised his own glass, somewhat unsteadily. “To General Braxton Bragg!”

  Scores around him rose as one, and drank to the victor of Chickamauga.

  “A damned necessary victory, that one,” Follett said, sitting down again. “Some of our friends were getting a tad skittish, after what happened in July. Even Morrison, you know. Sat me down one night and asked me if the Confederacy might possibly be coming apart at the seams. Not saying it, you understand, just asking.”

  “I trust you reminded him that July was the first time the Yankees won anything decisive since the war began?”

  “I did,” Follett said. “And he agreed with me, of course. Said we couldn’t expect it to be all fair sailing. But still, he said, it gave a man a bad scare. And I asked him, if it scared him, being a Canadian, how the devil did he think we felt?”

  You felt somewhat the way I feel now, I suppose. In July, I was the damn fool who thought it was almost over. Now it looks as if it could go on for years. I might be chasing your bloody Rebels around the colonies until my teeth start falling out.

  Or until you kill me …

  This was not a good subject for meditation. Erryn leaned back in his chair and allowed himself to be drawn into a discussion of the Confederacy’s military prospects. At the moment, one of the Union’s western armies was surrounded in Chattanooga. A smaller one was stranded at Nashville, and rumoured to be running out of food. The army in the east, the one that clawed up General Lee at Gettysburg, had been inactive now for more than three months. It was clawed up just as bad, Follett said, or else its new general was yet another military mouse; the Union seemed to have no end of them. Either way, the prospects looked good for turning back the disasters of the summer.

  “All the more need, then, for our work here to prosper.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Morrison’s having a gathering at his house on Saturday. A celebration, of course, now that we have such promising things to celebrate, but also a chance to build support. I trust you’ll come?”

  “I would be honoured.”

  “Good. There’s some people coming that I want you to meet, one in particular, a man named Janes. Maury Janes. A very bold fellow, from what I’ve seen. He’ll be heading to Halifax later if his plans come together. He’d like nothing better than to share a glass of wine with you.”

  “Not a mint julep?”

  “No. I understand he hates them.”

  “Ah. A man after my own heart.”

  “There’s one other thing, Erryn. I hesitate to ask—you’ve done so much for us already. But is it possible I might impose on you one more time, for a small favour?”

  Erryn nodded. “Yes, of course,” he said, “but there is one condition.” He paused just long enough to make Follett look uneasy. “I’m not searching for any more kidnap victims.”

  Follett’s laugh was relieved and slightly embarrassed, as well it should have been. Early in the war, almost a year ago, he had persuaded Erryn to find a Georgian who had disembarked at the railroad depot in Montreal and promptly disappeared. According to the lad’s companion, the Reverend Andrew Boyle, the young man was part of a vital secret mission, and had undoubtedly fallen into the hands of Yankee agents. Erryn had his doubts about the Yankee agents—desertion seemed a likelier explanation—but he wanted very much to discover what this vital secret mission might prove to be. Boyle, the leader, was a man of mature years, with excellent credentials from Richmond. He would say nothing whatever about his plans, only that he must absolutely have his comrade back. So Erryn went on the hunt.

  Seventeen days and many good English pounds later, with a case of grippe mean enough to die of and an almost broken wrist, he found the missing agent on a country farm, cheerfully picking apples, shovelling manure, and courting the farmer’s pretty daughter. As for the mission, according to the Georgian, the Reverend Boyle meant to go secretly about the wilds of Canada—most secretly, lest the Yankees got wind of it—and persuade all the runaway Negroes to come home. Africans as they were, used to the heat, and innocents as they were, barely able to survive as free men in the North—how they must be suffering here, poor creatures, in a world of snow and rocks, with no white men looking after them, and nothing to live on but pine scrub and beaver meat. All it would take would be a word or two of encouragement, and someone to pay their passage, and they would follow him home like boys behind a piper.

  Erryn Shaw sat in the farmer’s snug little house, wrapped in a blanket, drinking all the hot apple juice spiked with lemon he could force down his throat, and let the young man tell his tale. He was, as far as Erryn could judge, not a day past seventeen.

  “Y’all got to understand, see, when I was at home, I thought it was a good enough idea. We never had but one slave ourselves, and we never whopped him or anything, and I figured he’d rather be with us than off in the wilderness somewheres. So I went along with the Reverend, to help him out, and to see a bit of the world. He wanted me to stay with him, once we got to Canada. But I’d been talking to Miss Lucy on the train, and she told me there was some runaways living right nearby, and I was awful fond of her, so’s I figured I could just start here instead. But them niggers got themselves little farms—” Here Miss Lucy’s eyes turned on him, troubled. “Negroes, I mean—the both of them got farms. They ain’t well off, but they’s eating okay, and when I asked one of ’em how they got through the winters up here, he just looked at me bold as brass and says, ‘Same as you get through the summers down in Georgia, I reckon.’ And I started wondering if maybe the Reverend got it a bit wrong. Someone wanting to be rescued cain’t afford to be so mouthy. So I asked him right out, would he ever think of coming home, was we to pay his way and such? And he went and got me a drink of whiskey, and says, ‘Here, you rest easy for a bit, young feller. Someone’s whopped you good on the haid.’”

  In a way, Erryn thought, it was fortunate he was so sick and miserable. Had he been healthy, his hard-earned victory would have had him doubled over in his chair.

  He smiled faintly now, remembering. He had come west twice before, following through on matters that began at the coast, and each time he had gone home muttering to himself: Bunch of bleeding nitwits … Confederate intelligence is a contradiction in terms … we don’t need spies here, all we need to do is stay conscious … And each time he had pulled himself up short. There were some bleeding nitwits in the expatriate community, certainly. There were others who were simply young and inexperienced, with way too much time on their hands. Both groups were given to sitting up nights, fashioning hare-brained master plans for winning the war. And some concerned Canadians, alas, found themselves sitting up as well, worrying themselves silly, and ultimately discovering they had used a broadside of cannon to exterminate a beetle.

  All of this was true. But it was also true that the Confederates had good men here—Jackson Follett was one of them—and that even a foolish plot, left unwatched, could turn deadly, could succeed even as it failed, simply by creating chaos.

  No, he reminded himself, it would not do at all to get cocky, to underestimate his enemies. There was, after all, a young man in a family vault in London, a young man of considerable ability and excellent bloodlines, who had once made the understandable but decidedly foolish mistake of underestimating him.

  “No kidnap victims this time,” Follett said amiably. “I guarantee it. And by the way, just so you know, Richmond has severed its connections with the Reveren
d Boyle. He has no more claim on our funds or on our people.”

  What a pity. They clinked glasses, smiled.

  “Well then,” Erryn said, “how can I be of service?”

  It rained that night, ferociously. Erryn did not mind the rain; a chap could hardly go on living in Halifax if he minded rain. Besides, a good downpour shielded a man’s movements, and helped to keep the idle and the curious indoors. He dressed himself with an actor’s care: black wig, lumberjack’s boots, a great heavy jacket and baggy working man’s trousers that disguised his height a trifle by making him bulky; over all of it, an old shapeless slicker. Eyebrows darkened with makeup, lean cheeks puffed out with cotton, a peculiar twist to his mouth … Yes, he observed to his mirror—perhaps for the thousandth time—a life in the theatre was very useful to a spy, quite apart from anything he might have learned about acting.

  His rendezvous point was a quiet house near the Champ-de-Mars. Whoever owned it, or lived in it by day, it was always empty when he came there, except for one or two men. Both were there tonight, dressed in dark, nondescript clothing and wearing a familiar air of boredom and exhaustion. One was Jonathan Bryce, a detective from the Montreal constabulary; the other a civilian who used but a single name, Latour. Erryn himself was known to them as James Todd.

  They began with little ceremony, a brief handshake and a greeting, and then on to the matters at hand.

  “What have you got for us, Todd?” Bryce asked.

  “Follett wants me to buy ten good Colt pistols, sixty rounds of ammunition for each, and ten good knives—the sort that might have the authority of a cutlass, as he put it.”

  “How interesting,” Latour murmured. “Did he say what he wanted them for?”

  “No. But I come from a long line of naval officers. When anyone mentions a cutlass, I think of sailors boarding an enemy ship.”