The Halifax Connection

by Marie Jakober

  It was the loveliest thing any man had ever said to her. She walked astonished into the chapel, carrying the words in her thoughts as she would have carried loose diamonds in her hands. All evening she carried them, riding in the carriage with Madame, eating supper with her, sitting in their lonely hotel room and reading aloud from The Imitation of Christ—a very fine book, admittedly, but not the sort of book she could keep her mind on tonight. She stumbled over words she had read without difficulty many times before, until Madame grew tired of it and said they should go to bed.

  She lay awake for a long time. She wondered if Madame slept or only brooded. She wondered about Erryn Shaw’s life, who he really was, and where he came from. He had offered nothing personal about himself, and she had been far too polite to ask. He was obviously well bred, a man with means and some standing in the world. Surely he had a choice of women for companions, pretty merchants’ daughters who would happily go for tea or to the concert in Viger Park. And yet he had asked her.

  She lingered over every detail of the afternoon, every word he spoke, the pleasure she felt when he touched her, such fierce pleasure, out of all proportion to the occasion. And even though she knew he was probably just being kind—liking her a little bit, perhaps, but mostly just being kind, doing a gentleman’s duty by a poor lass without friends—even while she knew this in her sensible mind, in another part of herself she revelled in his interest, believed in it, imagined there would be more. Something more, a walk through the streets, maybe tea while Madame was at church. A tiny gift, perhaps, some trifle she would keep forever, and show to old friends when she was old: A gentleman gave me this once, a long time ago … a very fine gentleman he were, too, so very sweet. He could say things to make a beggar girl think she were a queen.

  All the good sense in the world could not stop her from thinking thus, or from finding the next day intolerably slow, breakfast, forenoon, lunch, mid-afternoon, every part of it dragging worse than the last, and the sun stuck rigid in the sky like a dog on the end of a chain. Never had she been so happy to hear the summons of a church bell. It rang and rang as they rode through the cobblestone streets. She had five days, five long Masses, five meditations on death and Resurrection, five slowly counted rosaries, oh, a feast of time, if he came as he had promised.

  But he did not come. There was no sign of his tall bony figure anywhere near the church when they arrived. She helped Madame from the carriage, walked her to her pew, and sped back into the afternoon sun. Then she waited, watching the slow trickle of worshippers—not many, for it was a working day, just a few aged women, a few cripples, a few sailors on liberty. When a coach and four came tearing up, her heart bounded with hope. Of course he would come in a carriage; he was a gentleman, after all. But it was only the priest, sweating and weary, with his stole still draped around his shoulders—rushing back, she supposed, from some poor devil’s deathbed.

  The sun sped away now, heartless. Rue St-Paul was noisy as a beehive, with a great coming and going of hacks, and wagons, and people on foot. I’ll be back, he had said, I promise. The church bell rang for Communion; could it possibly be so late already? She walked back and forth, back and forth, watching the traffic. Still he did not come. People began drifting out of the church, just a few at first, hurrying, then the great body of them, then a few again, and finally no one. Madame was a humble shadow among the pews, entirely alone.

  As I will be in my turn … This fact of course she knew, and had known for years. So she did not cry, except a tiny bit, too little for Madame to notice. She spoke cheerfully at supper, and took her mistress for a quiet evening walk. But she could not read aloud, not from these holy books with all their talk of love—God’s love or any other kind—all of it just a great pack of bleeding lies. Madame asked her what the matter was and she lied. She said she had seen something very sad on the street, a crippled child being beaten, and Madame was kind as always and told her she did not have to read.

  But late, very late, when the moon was a hanging sickle in the west, she went to the window and pulled the curtain open and watched it drifting there, with its dirty scarred face. They said it was made of rocks—she had read it in a magazine—just a small, earth-like thing made out of rocks, with no water and nothing left alive.

  You didn’t really think he’d come, Sylvie Bowen? Surely you didn’t?

  But she had. That was the sorry truth of it; she had.

  CHAPTER 8

  Morrison’s Party

  No people ever had more at stake. In the maintenance, in all its integrity, of the relation of master and slave between the white and black races of the South, it is our universal sentiment that property, liberty, honour, and civilization itself are involved.

  —James P. Holcombe

  Richmond, Virginia, 1860

  IN THE WEST END of Montreal, between its commercial heart along St. James Street and the lonely ribbon of Côte-des-Neiges Road, lay a long swath of scattered, magnificent estates. These were the homes of the city’s richest and most powerful men, Molsons, McTavishes, Ogilvies, and Dows, among others, their spectacular mansions surrounded by acres of gardens, designed to be works of art as well as marks of pride. Except for Hugh Allan’s Ravenscrag, rising in solitary splendour from the wooded slopes of Mount Royal, none was more spectacular than Edmund Morrison’s Tilbury Hall. In truth, Erryn doubted there was much to surpass it anywhere in North America, even among the moguls of New York.

  For Morrison had built himself a Gothic castle with flamboyant gables and high, medieval turrets, an immense thing, yet fashioned with so light a touch that, when snow was falling or when a bit of fog drifted up from the river, it appeared to an approaching visitor like something out of fairyland, magical and shimmering with lights. How Morrison fastened upon so poetic a construction Erryn could not imagine, for the man was one of the toughest, most unsentimental empire builders he had ever met.

  Nonetheless, his party on Saturday afternoon was, as Jackson Follett had promised, fabulous. The tables were laden with a king’s feast, and Erryn took full advantage; he could rarely afford to eat so well. A fine chamber orchestra played in the garden, among the elms by the Montmorency wall. The women wore the finest Paris silks; their laughter sparkled like their wine; their wrists were drenched in filigree. The men were the elite of Montreal—merchant princes and sons of the great colonial families, diplomats from abroad, officers from the British garrison … Oh, yes, it was all very splendid and very familiar.

  Too familiar. Erryn felt disoriented, as if he had walked out onto a set of Hamlet and found himself in Elsinore Castle, the real Elsinore Castle, but looking exactly as he had staged it in the theatre, even to the spilled tankards and the smoke-blackened walls, even to the bodies lying in the hall, lying gracefully, the way dead heroes were supposed to lie on the stage, only this time it was absolutely real, this time they were really dead, they were never getting up again …

  Well. He shook the punch around in his glass. Maybe he was not quite so disoriented. But he found it eerie, being here. It was not like consorting with Southern exiles in bars, or partying with the easygoing, provincial, garrison-town elite of Halifax, who could not afford to be too excessively exclusive or there would hardly be any of them left. This was like home; these were the lords of British North America. He could name every stone in their signet rings and judge the precise amount of disapproval in one of their flickered eyebrows. He could move among them, if he chose, like a minnow in a pool, seeming perfectly at ease. He would not even have to call upon his acting skills to do it. Yet there was, he thought, scarcely any ordinary, livable world where he belonged less.

  “Erryn! There you are!” Jackson Follett was weaving his way through the gathering, accompanied by a thin stranger in obviously borrowed finery. Everything the man wore was appropriate; none of it fit particularly well. Follett introduced him: Mr. Maury Janes, from Wilmington, in North Carolina.

  “Mr. Shaw. Delighted, I’m sure.” He did not nod. He held out a
hard, sweaty hand for Erryn to shake.

  “I told Mr. Janes a bit about you,” Follett said. “He was mighty keen to meet you.”

  “That’s right!” Janes barely waited for his companion to finish. “Jack tells me you are one smooth operator.”

  “I trust that’s a compliment?”

  Janes was surprised. Then he laughed. “I suppose you Englishmen would say it different. What I mean is, you sound like a man who gets things done. Real quiet, without any loose ends hanging out. I could use a man like that, a ways down the road.”

  Oh, could you, indeed?

  “Perhaps we should go and have a drink together, then,” Erryn suggested.

  Edmund Morrison was an impeccable host, and he had made it quite clear to his servants that some of his guests, on this occasion as on many others, might wish to carry on certain conversations in absolute privacy. So it was that Erryn Shaw and Maury Janes were led to a small study, supplied with a decanter of superb wine, a plate of hors d’oeuvres sufficient for a large family, and a heavy, discreetly closed door.

  “I don’t believe this place,” Janes said. Everything in the room was of the finest quality: Indian tapestries, panelling and furniture of mahogany and teak, crystal glassware that glittered in their hands. “I never seen anything like it,” Janes went on. “Have you?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “I was out at Sheldon Wade’s plantation house a few times, and I thought that was awfully grand. It was nothing like this. Jack says your family’s pretty high, back in England.”

  “Well, we’re certainly respectable.”

  Janes laughed. “Oh, you Englishmen. You’d rather die than brag, wouldn’t you? Not like Americans. Well, I can tell you straight, sir, when I get my independent fortune, I’m not going to be shy of a little bragging. I’ll figure I earned it. My pa came down to Carolina with nothing but the clothes on his back and an old bowie knife with the point broke off. For three weeks he lived on clams, digging them out of the sand with that knife. Can’t stand a clam to this day, he says. But he built us a fine plantation, over the years—not as big as Sheldon Wade’s, but hell, Wade married his, he didn’t work for it. War’s over, I’ll have myself a place like this.”

  “Where did your father come from?”

  “Massachusetts. How about that, eh? He was a dad-blamed dyed-in-the-wool Yankee. Took to the South like a hound to a rabbit chase. Bought himself his first nigger on credit, before he had a house. Hell, he said, the damn nigger might as well build the house.”

  “Very practical,” Erryn murmured.

  It was the wrong thing to say, or perhaps the wrong tone in which to say it. Janes’s dark eyes hardened slightly, took on a quiet, calculating watchfulness.

  Your arrogance will be the death of you, Erryn Shaw …

  This man, he reminded himself, might well be a fine example of the rough-edged, grasping, nouveaux-not-quite-riches on the climb, but he was nobody’s fool. And he had probably had more than enough of well-born men looking down on him, his own fellow Southerners among them.

  Erryn reached to pass him the tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Please,” he offered. “They look quite irresistible.” He bit into one himself, and went on: “Personally, I’ve always thought that being practical is one of the great lost virtues of the Western world. Consider the Romans. They were infinitely practical men, and think what they accomplished. Now, it seems to me, everyone’s up on a soapbox, blathering about some new ism or another, and causing no end of trouble instead of getting on with the job.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Janes. “You took the words right out of my old man’s mouth. He thinks this war’s about nothing but some damn fool ideas.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think in a way it is and in a way it ain’t. I mean, there’s a lot of talk about fool ideas, both sides. But I figure if you look a little deeper, it’s about power. Who’s going to run things? Are we going to be our own masters, or are a handful of rich hypocrites with ramrods up their asses going to tell the whole damn country what to do? That’s what it’s really about.”

  This, Erryn thought, was by no means the worst summation of the matter he had ever heard.

  He raised his glass. “To being our own masters, then. And confusion to the enemy!”

  “Damn right, sir! I like that. Confusion to the enemy!”

  “Now,” Erryn went on, when the glasses had been manfully emptied and refilled, “Jack Follett said there might be some way I could be of service to you. In Halifax.”

  “I don’t know when I’ll get there. It depends on … well, let’s just say it depends. But if you could set me up when I arrive, put me in touch with the right people, folks I can trust, you know. And I’ll need someone to set up a job for me. I’ll choose the man myself, you understand. I won’t buy a pig in a poke, not from my best friend. But if you could point me to a few likely fellows, I’d be much obliged.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “A delivery. Across the border.”

  “Halifax is a fine seaport. Deliveries shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “I take problems for granted, Mr. Shaw, when I have to deal with Yankee revenue cutters and harbour police. I want the best man I can get.” He leaned forward. Bit by bit, his voice dropped almost to a whisper. “This ain’t no ordinary project, Mr. Shaw, like most I’ve heard about up here. I ain’t trying to criticize anybody. What the boys are doing in Canada, planning raids and such, it all helps. But this project is … well, this is the work of a genius, and I can say so myself, because it wasn’t my idea, not one bit of it. And if it goes off like it should, it’s going to end the war.”

  “Well.” Erryn saluted him with a lifted glass. “I wish you all possible success, Mr. Janes. But I fear I have to tell you that ending the war strikes me as somewhat”—he made a generous, apologetic gesture with his arms—“forgive me, somewhat … over-ambitious?”

  “That’s right,” Janes agreed. “It’s going to be the whole damned Red Sea coming down on Pharaoh’s army. That was a bit over-ambitious too, wouldn’t you say?”

  God bleeding almighty, now we’re in the Promised Land …

  “Well,” he said again. It was all he could think of for a considerable moment. Well. “Then I must say, Mr. Janes, I will be truly honoured to welcome you to Halifax.”

  Erryn wondered sometimes about the nature of lying. He wondered if there was some kind of limit, some critical mass of lies a man might tell, after which he became a liar by nature. And he wondered, if there were such a limit, if he might be approaching it. His count for the day was well into the hundreds, and going up fast.

  He was back in Morrison’s astonishing garden with the host himself, Jackson Follett, and perhaps half a dozen Southern exiles. Sir Fenwick Williams, commander of the British garrison in Montreal, as well as commander-in-chief of all the British forces in North America, had just left the group, and was now some distance away, paying his compliments to the ladies.

  Outwardly, the general’s behaviour could not have seemed more neutral. He had offered the Southerners nothing more than the usual polite greetings, the blandest political observations: Her Majesty’s government is following events in the current conflict with great interest—God willing there will soon be a satisfactory resolution—et cetera, et cetera. It was, however, widely understood that Williams’s personal inclinations were pro-Southern. This led to a long and lively debate as to how soon and under what circumstances England would enter the war.

  “All she wants is a good excuse.”

  The speaker was one of two military officers in the group, a lieutenant who had escaped from the Yankee prison camp at Johnson’s Island. He was still thin, weary, and malnourished. With a cool pride that Erryn deeply admired, he had come to the party in the plainest of garb, covered over with a frock coat of Confederate grey, sufficiently decent and clean to pose as a dress uniform.

  No one else could have got away with such lèse-majesté. B
ut the Southern fighting men were heroes here, disadvantaged merely by the fortunes of war. Their poverty was almost a mark of pride.

  The lieutenant had complete faith in England’s support. All she needed to enter the war, he said, was a good excuse. “So the English people will accept it, and so the rest of the world can’t accuse her of meddling.”

  Ah, Erryn thought, and when was the last time England ever cared if the world accused her of meddling?

  “The Trent was a plenty good excuse,” said another. “I still don’t understand why she didn’t pick up the gauntlet then.”

  “Because the Yankees backed down,” Follett said. “Lincoln let the envoys go, and bowed and scraped all over the place, and said sorry, sorry, sorry. I suppose in all fairness England felt she had to return the gesture.”

  “Yes, but only because she never saw it as a threat, merely as an insult. She’s lord of the sea and she knows it. Here it’s different. In North America the Yankees really are a threat. She might as well take them on now as later.”

  It went on. The Southerners discussed this question endlessly, but they did not, in Erryn Shaw’s opinion, understand it very well. They assumed a deep and passionate commitment on the part of England to her North American colonies; and a natural alliance, based on blood, class, and cotton, between the Confederacy and England. Both of these assumptions were false.

  The fact was, England did not care very much about North America at all. Her most lucrative commercial interests were in the Far East, and her great rivals for imperial wealth and power were in Europe. Of course, if her colonies here were openly attacked, she would defend them, simply because they were hers. Empires, by definition, could not afford to be attacked with impunity. But short of that, she was too busy elsewhere to want a war with the United States. When she lay awake at night brooding on the dark plots of her enemies, she did not worry about Yankees steaming across the Lakes to sack Toronto; she worried about the Portuguese in Africa, the Dutch in Southeast Asia, and the French just about everywhere.