The Halifax Connection

by Marie Jakober

  As for the colonies themselves, they were not beloved in London, not anymore. They cost £200,000 a year merely to garrison, and thousands more for the salaries of imperial administrators. The glorious days of the fur trade were over, and nothing comparable had replaced it, just timber, fish, and the products of modest farms and factories—respectable exports, certainly, enough to make a good living for many, and small fortunes for some, but rarely the stuff of great fortunes. And the empire needed great fortunes—great coffers of money for her ships and her mushrooming industries, money for her pampered upper class, money for her wars. From Africa came diamonds and gold; from the Far East, spices, silks, and tea; from the west, mostly lumber and salt cod, alas. More and more, British North America was resembling an orphaned niece who ate too much and spun too little. London could scarcely wait for her to grow up and leave home.

  But the Southerners—at least the ones who came north—never seemed to notice. Erryn Shaw might have found this fact amusing had he not found it so dangerous. The Anglo-American war they desired could still happen, not for any of the reasons they imagined but simply because, believing in those reasons, they might yet find a way to provoke it. Here was another of those troubling contradictions between reality and non-reality that, as a man of the theatre, he thought about rather often. Plays were only make-believe, yet what passed in them took on its own, quite substantial reality. Lies were purely lies, but when enough people believed in them, their belief was a fact—a fact that could change the whole world.

  So he listened to the debate with attention, but avoided contributing anything of substance. When asked, as the only Englishman present in the group (Morrison himself was a native Canadian), he said of course the better people supported the Confederacy with all their hearts, and left it so.

  “Well.” This response came from a civilian of thirty or so, a man named Darius Gavin, whom Erryn had met for the first time that day. Gavin spoke softly, with an exceptionally heavy Deep South accent. “I wish you all could have a talk with young Zeb Taylor, then. He just about wore me out the other day, telling me we had no friends among the Brits, and even fewer among these damned colonials, as he called you—begging your pardon, gentlemen. He’s grieving for his brother, and there wasn’t much I could say to him made any difference.”

  “His brother?” Morrison asked sharply. “Good God, was his brother Brad Taylor? The poor lad who was killed in Halifax?”

  “Yes. You knew him, I suppose?”

  “I knew him well. He ate many a dinner here in my house, and a fine lad he was, too. A fine lad. It was a damn shame the way he died.”

  “What happened to him?” asked the Confederate lieutenant.

  With a quick, discreet glance, Morrison left it to Jackson Follett to explain as much of it, or as little, as he saw fit.

  “You never heard? No, I suppose not—you were still in that prison camp. Brad was a courier, one of the best we ever had. He came through from Richmond maybe three, four times, overland, when we were using that route a lot, carrying dispatches to the coast to go to Europe. Last May he was found knifed to death in a little back street off the Halifax waterfront. The police took it for a common robbery, apparently.”

  “And was it? Or did some Yankee agent get him?”

  “Either is possible,” Erryn said. “There’s Yankees crawling all over Halifax. They’re generally careful about not breaking the law—the last thing they want to do is step on the lion’s tail. But in the dead of night on a dark street, who knows? On the other hand, Halifax is a sorry rough place betimes. He might well have run into a footpad.”

  “As anyone might, God knows,” Follett added. “But Taylor’s kid brother didn’t know anything about it. He was with Morgan on the Northwest raid. He got separated from his unit, like a lot of them did, and escaped into Canada. The first he heard of it was in Toronto, talking to the boys there. I haven’t met with him yet, but I understand he’s pretty tore up.”

  “He’s half crazy,” Gavin said, “and that’s meaning him no disrespect, since I don’t figure it’s his fault. He’s wounded, same as if he’d been hit by a minié ball. But he’s hunkered down in that little rooming house he’s in, and he won’t be comforted by anyone. I asked him to come with me today, said it would do him good to be with some of his countrymen. He told me Southerners who got into bed with the Brits were no countrymen of his. Said England was using everybody, playing both sides against the middle.”

  “Can’t anything be done for him?” Erryn asked. “A visit from a clergyman, perhaps?”

  “All he wants is to go home. I gave him enough money to get him to Halifax, and to feed him for a while, till a blockade-runner can pick him up. The only thing likely to help him now is time.”

  Time. The venerable cure for all mortal grief … or so men said. And in part it was true, Erryn thought. Time had healed his own terrible wound, or at least covered it over, slid it out of his immediate, daily line of sight, into some quiet place in the back of his soul. But a chance word, an unexpected familiar face—all sorts of things could draw it back, not least of them the thought of a nineteen-year-old boy gone half crazy for the killing of his brother.

  He made his way thoughtfully toward the outdoor facilities, tucked behind an immense hedge well beyond the house. The estate and its gardens were huge; if a man took his time, the journey there and back could eat up a quarter of an hour. He felt the need of that quarter of an hour just now: time to think, to steel himself again. The Irishman Daniel Carroll had arrived at the party—the man who was buying dumbbells for Jackson Follett. The man who might or might not be involved in a plot with the missing naval officers who might or might not be staying at George Kane’s house. The man who was next on Erryn Shaw’s list of people to have a quiet drink with.

  He barely heard the mingled voices of other guests, someone’s sudden loud laugh, the fallen leaves crunching under his feet. He barely noticed how the sun had slipped away, how the reddened maples on the slopes of Mount Royal had gone dark and brooding as the sun abandoned them. But the church bell he heard, a great heavy bell, ringing slowly and muted with distance—the sailors’ church, perhaps, down by the riverfront. He turned to look back over the curve of the city, at the tall spires still traced in gold, one of them just beyond the docks, by the dome of the Bonsecours Market.

  I could be there with her instead of here. In a sane world I would be, laughing and telling stories, buying her ices.

  God almighty, where would we all be if the world were sane? Brad Taylor would be back in Kentucky, I suppose, plowing his father’s farm. I wonder who killed him? Maybe a Yankee, maybe a footpad. Maybe me. How far do you trace it back? Matt knew everything about him, and he knew because of me, and maybe the Yankees knew because of Matt. Maybe a lot of people knew. Even a thief might have gone for him then, thinking to get his hands on something secret and dangerous, something he could sell.

  A very real possibility, for whoever had killed the Rebel courier, they had taken not merely his purse, if he had one, but his hat, coat, and boots; they had sliced open the cuffs of his shirt and his trouser legs—all of which had caused Matt Calverley to raise no more than one cool eyebrow. “Hell,” he said, “on Barrack Street a man’s lucky if they don’t take his liver too.”

  But Erryn, being Erryn, wondered. It was not guilt he felt; it was something more diffuse and probably more permanent: a sense of loss, of dislocation, of irremediable, tragic absurdity. He had liked Brad Taylor, ate with him, drank with him, asked himself in quiet moments what the devil the man was doing on the other side … and finally, quite possibly, caused his death. And yes, one could blame it all on the treacherous life of the spy, but that was mere hypocrisy. A spy was much like an actor: he put on a mask and in doing it laid bare a truth. War was the killing of those who should have been one’s friends, most of the time. Banners and uniforms were the real deception, the great We and They denying everyone’s common humanity.

  He stepped into the pr
ivy. As it was part of Tilbury Hall, it was not a privy of the ordinary sort, but a genuine outdoor dressing room, with three water closets, a table holding a marble basin and several pitchers of water, and a fine stuffed chair. On the wall hung a full-length mirror. He paused walking past it, studying the image there not with vanity but with quiet, professional approval. He knew the value of costume. He had spared no expense in the shops, buying the proper accoutrements for this party. He had dressed himself with the care of an actor giving a command performance. The effect was impressive. Not beautiful, but very impressive: a tall, slender gentleman in impeccable clothing, his every thread implying wealth, position, blood; his face thin, hawk-nosed, with an air of natural hauteur and eyes as icy grey as the North Atlantic. Yes, definitely, this was someone to reckon with. The playmaker and the spy in him were satisfied.

  The man knew it was all illusion. Beneath the cambric and silk was title to nothing, no lands, no ships, no warehouses filled with cinnamon and cloves; only a paper that came every first week of January, drawn on Lloyds of London, worth seventy English pounds. Edmund Morrison could buy him with pocket money and serve him on a small plate of hors d’oeuvres.

  Edmund Morrison rose when he walked into the room: Mr. Shaw, how very good to see you back, sir!

  Not just illusion, he thought. Something more. Something Morrison saw, and Matt Calverley too—not blood or race or any of those genuine illusions, but irrevocable lived experience: tapestried ballrooms and liveried servants and coaches and six at the gates; dead heroes eternally staring down from their painted frames, live ones smiling briefly, passing on, Wellington himself once, proud and silent. So much silence in that house. His great-uncle the admiral erect as a pillar, one arm gone, one eye, scars all over him, Trafalgar, Sicily, Martinique, his body a map of Napoleon’s wars. Never Uncle to anyone, or even John, always the “admiral,” the undaunted hero: How are you, sir? Capital, capital, couldn’t be better! And so the boy thought it little to be wounded, even horribly, if a man could be a hero. Then he found the old man in a hallway once, buckled to his knees and blubbering with pain, so wrecked that he was pissing himself, and mewling like a small, chewed-up animal.

  Still he might have saved the moment—plucked victory, as they said, from the jaws of defeat—if he had laughed, however bitterly; if he had wrapped his one stiff arm around his great-nephew and told him everybody cried once or twice in his life, even Wellington. Instead, he cursed: Get out of here, God damn you, what the devil are you staring at?

  That night there was a ball, and music and fireworks, the whole sky lit with glory and the admiral as capital as ever. The boy watched him from a quiet corner, still worshipful, but also hurt, bewildered, troubled less by his harshness than by the silence that lay beneath it, some unspoken thing hinting at more unspoken things, at a whole ciphered world they were not telling him about, a world he was simply to accept, as the old man accepted such appalling pain.

  The following year he went to Eton. He went joyously, expecting to find a banquet of learning and friendship, and found instead that a pack of privileged young men at a boarding school were not much different from a pack of convicts, take away the chapel and the fine silver plate. Everyone had to make his own way among them, scrap for his own place, take what was dished him, and keep his mouth shut. Rank was not worth much; too many others had it. Nor did it help a boy to have gangly limbs too long for his body and a big, bony head with a hooked nose and a rag of pale hair, walking around among his peers with a name like Herron.

  All of which he had explained to Matt Calverley, some five or six years back, during a long night of affectionate, melancholy drinking. His first years at Eton had been hell on earth, he said; he grew to hate the place right down into his bones, the way slaves hated their galley ships and prisoners their dungeons.

  “I don’t suppose they were any harder on me than they were on other new boys, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Cruelty was a way of life there, a philosophy. Toughen the little sods up. Turn them into stern, hard-nosed agents of the empire. And anything was fair game. I’d barely arrived before some sixth-former told me I’d obviously been named Herron because I looked like one. Of course I objected. I’d been named for my mother’s family, I told him—my mother was a Herron.”

  “Oh, dear,” Matt said softly.

  “I know. I was too innocent to be let out without a keeper. And the buggers never quit. Once, they gathered a pile of jagged stones, about the size of heron eggs, and made me sit on them all night. It was December, cold as bleeding hell. They took turns standing guard. Every time I tried to get up, they knocked me down and kicked me, told me to hatch my chicks. That sort of thing went on all the time. And worse things, some that hardly bear speaking of, even between friends. Once the doors were locked, there was no supervision; the sixth form chaps were supposed to keep order.”

  “Setting the wolves to watch the chickens?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Didn’t anybody fight back?”

  “We never stopped fighting. The whole damn school looked like a sick bay sometimes—black eyes, broken hands, missing teeth. God knows I was never pretty, but my face has quite a few bumps and ruffles I wasn’t born with.”

  He drained his wine, noting the long thin scar running from his thumb down the side of his wrist—one of dozens he had not thought about for years. He knew that many of his peers looked back on Eton with affection. They forgot the painful times, remembered the good ones, and valued what they had learned. Some of the teaching had been excellent; those with good minds flowered in it, as he had himself. And yet he knew that if he ever had a son, he would never send him near the place. Its gifts were like many others he had received in his life: fine gifts indeed, but at a price he judged intolerably high.

  “You never went to a boarding school, did you, Matt?”

  “No. I never had the misfortune to be born rich.”

  “Touché, my friend. Being rich isn’t a misfortune, I admit. Rich means you have enough to eat. You have coal in the wintertime—”

  “My point exactly.”

  “But being born an aristocrat—that, Constable Calverley, is a misfortune. From one point of view you might as well be born a puppet, with strings on your fingers and strings on your toes, and a whole tribe of puppet masters pulling on them, fathers and grandfathers and uncles and cousins, the lords of the realm and the lords of the Church, every last one of them telling you what to be, and what to do, and what to think. And from another point of view you might as well be born a bandit, because you can get away with anything as long as you pick your targets with a bit of care. When I got older, and stronger, and stopped being a target myself, that was when I really saw it—saw it as a pattern, not just something that was happening to me.”

  He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the window ledge. “It’s all hollow, the aristocracy. Like an old iron temple in the woods, glittering and hard, with wind blowing through its cracks and a ton of rubbish inside …”

  Silence. With Matt, it was always a comfortable silence. “Is that why you changed your name?” he asked after a bit.

  “No. Changing my name was a condition of my departure from England. I killed one of my peers. Not at the school. Later, in London. There was no trial, of course. The scandal would have hurt my family, but it would have been a disaster for his—I would have made sure of it. I knew enough about him and the pack he ran with, I could have wrecked them all, socially and politically—hell, odds are even I could have brought down the government. So it was handled as such things often are among my peers: quietly, behind closed doors. I was told to go away somewhere and never come back. My family agreed to send me money for my support, but only if I changed my name and allowed nothing of the matter to be known, even among my relatives and friends.”

  “And what did they tell your relatives and friends? As to what became of you, I mean?”

  “The usual sort of thing, I suppose. Touring the colonie
s, chasing the great auk in Timbuktu. I’m sure there were rumours—very quiet and discreet, of course … Odd about milord’s son, very odd. Daresay there was trouble there … Anyway, I picked Shaw because it’s a nice, ordinary name. And I picked Erryn because it sounds enough like Herron I can recognize it even when I’m drunk. Besides, it suits me. If you asked my father, he’d tell you I’ve been errin’ since the day I was born.”

  It was the first time he had spoken so frankly of his past. Matt did not seem particularly surprised. Perhaps he had seen violence often enough, and close enough, that nothing surprised him very much.

  “The fellow you knocked on the head,” he asked quietly, “did you mean it?”

  “I don’t know. He and his pack were responsible for the death of my dearest friend, a young actor who’d never hurt anyone in his life. It was an ugly business. They…. Oh, Christ, never mind. It was unforgivable, that’s all. And I knew the villain would never be prosecuted, because his mates would all say he was somewhere else. He wouldn’t fight me—couldn’t, really. His sight was terrible; he wouldn’t have known his mother at twenty paces. But the worst of it was, he didn’t care, Matt. He said it wasn’t his fault, who could have guessed the little libertine would die? He told me to sit down. He had some capital Madeira, fresh off the ship—or would I prefer a tincture of laudanum, I was looking a bit shaky? I put him through the fourth-storey window.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Two. Both of them his mates. It doesn’t matter. They’ve as much reason as anyone to let the matter die—and they have, as far as I know.”

  “But they didn’t try to stop you?”

  “They didn’t have time.”

  “God almighty. You’re dangerous, for a scarecrow.”