It was a fine, comfortable lodging, of course, appropriate for a man of his rank. It was central and convenient for his duties. But its presence there led, predictably, to continual fraternization. Any day of the week one might find Southerners sitting in the bar with English redcoats, having dinner with them, going off together for an evening’s performance at the Theatre Royal just a block away. Most of the Englishmen in the Hall were officers, born of the best families; they looked upon the well-bred Southerners as men of their own kind. Inclined already to be pro-Confederate, this ongoing personal contact only made them more so.
“Come on, Shaw. We got to cheer the lads up. I’ve heard it’s a bloody graveyard in there.” He nodded toward the bar at the far end of the foyer. “You’ve read the papers, I suppose?”
His companion did not give Erryn a chance to reply. “Hell, Bob, the whole world’s read the papers.” Then, to Erryn himself: “Have you talked to poor old Follett yet?”
“I spoke with Mr. Follett briefly, yes.”
“What did he say about it? Did he think it would’ve worked?”
“I fear you shall have to ask him yourself.”
The officer guffawed and slapped Erryn’s arm a second time. “Course it would’ve worked. Why else would the GG get himself all in a flap? It’s a damn shame he ever found out. We could have had ourselves a fine old dust-up with the Yankees.”
“We could have indeed.”
“Hell,” said another, “even if he did find out, why go running to them first thing? I mean, he could always say the source was unreliable and he had to look into it. A man’s got to cover his arse. That doesn’t mean he has to give the buggers anything.”
“Come on, Shaw. The drinks are on us.”
“I’m sorry, gentlemen. I’d love to join you.” That was lie number three hundred and eleven for the day, more or less. “I have a prior engagement. With a very charming lady.”
“Oh, well, in that case, you shan’t join us—we shall join you.”
“I think not.”
“Selfish bugger, ain’t he?” They laughed and parted like old friends.
How typical they were, he thought, watching them go. They were like a hundred others he had known, patrician officers—in England there was no other kind—young, generous, easy to get on with, a trifle shallow, living for the day and the hour. Decent enough men, in their own way, but painfully unaware of what the world was really like for most of the people who lived in it.
We could have had a fine old dust-up with the Yankees …
Oh, no doubt. And how many young men riding innocent into town to buy a sack of meal and swept away by the press gangs, never to be heard of again? How many old ones, later, like those he had seen in London, without legs or hands or faces, ragged and shivering in the streets, with a little flag beside their begging bowl? How many asylums full of children with nothing to eat? None of those three men would ever think to ask.
And if it were himself in that scarlet coat, his head full of drums and glory, sitting in a foreign outpost without half enough to do, desperate for adventure and promotion because, if you had made the military your life, what else was there? Then what?
I wouldn’t be like that, wanting war for its own sake, not ever … which is probably why I didn’t go.
Well, he reflected, it was a nice, comforting thing to tell himself, but deep down he was not sure. There were those paintings on his bedroom walls, after all. There was his boyhood hero, the admiral, as mangled as Nelson and almost as renowned, the man he had wanted so long and so passionately to emulate.
The man who swore at him: “Get out of here, God damn you, what the devil are you staring at?”
That was where it began. The first bewildered “oh,” the first uncertainty, the first hint of a war god’s clay feet. Not recognized as such, not then, not for years, but still the beginning.
Was that why the old man did it? Unconsciously, perhaps, not willing to say the thing plainly, or even to think it, yet driven nonetheless by some hidden and desperate intent: Don’t, lad, don’t! Whatever you do, don’t follow after me… !
It was this possibility, never considered before, that moved him to buy two beautiful roses to take down to the riverbank later, when he went with Sylvie for a final visit to the Irish Stone. One rose he placed on the stone, alongside Sylvie’s small bouquet. For the other he brought a model ship, small and very sturdy. He tied the rose to its single mast and set it adrift in the St. Lawrence. Then he took out his flute and played till the tiny craft was lost from sight.
“Will it reach the sea, do you think?” Sylvie wondered.
“No. Likely as not some youngster will find it washed up in the reeds half a mile away. But …” He shrugged. “It’s like the old Romans pouring wine in the ground for the spirits … or like you said about Nassau, about things going round and coming back again. Maybe it will count for something.”
It was a day of peculiar and uneasy perfection, the air hot and sensual with perfume, so warm a human might well be tempted to stretch out on the grass like a sunning cat. All around them the hills lay in a riot of colour, and wherever the autumn light struck the water, it danced.
Yet Erryn sensed the end of it hovering just out of sight. There was an oddness to the light, as when storms were in the air, and he was quite certain that if he climbed to the very top of Mount Royal and looked to the northwest, he would see black clouds prowling in the distance, with wind riding on their backs and the ice of winter in their eyes.
“Will you play another song or two?” Sylvie asked. “It be so beautiful, the way you do it, as if… as if you knew magic or something.”
He smiled. She was not a lady, as the world measured things. She said “bloody” and even “bugger” and never thought twice about picking up a messy pastry with her fingers. Yet she could pay a compliment as graceful as any lady might have dreamt of, and all the sweeter for being utterly sincere.
He found them a patch of grass that was free of stones and briers. It would have been pleasant to sit watching the river, but he preferred to keep an eye on the path and the docks, just in case.
No one came to trouble them. They sat close, their shoulders brushing warm in the sun. He needed both hands for his flute, and that, he decided, was likely just as well. After three or four pieces he stopped to kiss her, a few gentle, decidedly careful kisses. She returned them equally carefully, as if she knew how dangerous this all was—the flawless day, the utter, deceptive tranquility of the place, the loneliness in both of them. All tinder, he thought. If they were somewhere safe instead of here …
But they were here and that was the end of it.
“I wish Fran had met you,” she said. “She would have liked you awfully, I think.”
“She was a good judge of character, then, I take it?”
“You’re not very humble, Erryn Shaw.”
“Yes, I am. I’m so humble it doesn’t even bother me when people don’t notice it.”
She smiled faintly and then looked away. Not at the city sprawling across the hill before them, he suspected. Not at anything in particular.
“You have faith in things, don’t you?” she said. “I don’t mean religious things. I mean … life things. The future. Other people. Dreams. You believe when you set out to go somewhere you’ll get there, and when you have something of your own you’ll be able to keep it.” She paused, just for a breath. “It must make the world look very different.”
“Different from …?” Different from the way it looks to most everybody else, of course. That was the sort of thing Matt Calverley used to say to him, when they were just beginning to be friends. You don’t know what it’s like. You just don’t know! It was true, at least to a point, but it did not matter nearly as much as Matt expected.
“And you don’t have faith in such things?” he asked softly. “Not ever?”
“Oh, sometimes, I suppose. A little. But never … never way deep down, the way you do. The way you seem to.”
“Why?”
She answered slowly, thoughtfully, as if she were sorting her explanation even as she gave it.
“It’s not … it’s not because I think bad of people, or that I think the world’s a horrid place. I don’t. Honestly, I don’t. It’s just that things … things change. Like ice melting. Or like a fog coming in. You look at something and it ain’t what you were looking at a little while before.”
He thought about answering, but even as he chose the words his mind was taking a step back, hearing the truth in her own. Things did change. He himself had changed quite a lot in his still rather young life. He waited then, and listened.
“After it happens a few times,” she went on, “you get … wary, I suppose. When I were a kid, I could believe in anything. Like when I first went to school. I were so happy, as if a door opened, with a whole other world just lying on the other side. And then it were gone, like that, and I got put in the mill, working for Pa’s whiskey, living for the day I’d be grown up and could get out. That be freedom, see, being grown up. M’appen I’d go far away, or marry someone handsome and brave, a soldier who’d take me to India … Oh, I could dream of anything, I could. Then I got this.” She touched her face. “Fran took me to Rochdale, and there we dreamt of Canada. All those years slaving in that bloody mill, we held on to one thing, going to Canada, until I got sick from the cotton and the mill closed because of the war. And then nothing were going to get us out except a miracle.
“We still thought it would happen somehow. Or Fran did, anyway. I weren’t so sure anymore. But she were right, it did. One day we found a little notice in the newspaper, about a Yankee ship wanting cabin passengers. We had twenty-one quid between us, Fran and me, and the Osprey would take us to Nova Scotia for twenty.”
The Osprey? But the Osprey was … Oh, my God! … He went taut and unmoving, the way a hare might, sitting quiet in the sun, looking up suddenly into the eyes of a fox.
“You came on the Osprey?” he whispered. “Not on an immigrant ship?”
“No. Fran wouldn’t go near those ships. She said too many people died on them. She said we had to save for something better, but with one bloody thing and another we never had enough. And then we found the Osprey. Oh, she were beautiful, Erryn—you must have seen her in Halifax—she were something from a storybook. We thought we had our miracle, see. We thought we’d made it, and all the bad things were behind us.
“They told us about the Southern pirates before we left. That’s why the fare were so cheap. But we had no choice except to go, and anyway, it’s such a big ocean …”
Erryn felt shaken to his bones. He had wondered sometimes how Sylvie’s aunt came to be buried in Nassau. Merchant ships travelled far and wide with their cargoes, but emigrant ships usually sailed straight to a single destination, most often New York or Quebec. For such a vessel Nassau would be hundreds of miles off course. But he had never asked her about it. The subject was likely to be painful, and the explanation as predictable as it was tragic. High winds, no doubt, a damaged vessel blown off course, a quick docking for repairs, just as the epidemic was beginning, before the warning flags were up.
Just fate. Just the hard, cold fortunes of the North Atlantic. Not the war. They had never spoken of the war. He had consciously avoided ever bringing it up.
“So you were on the Osprey when she was captured?”
“Yes—”
“Did they hurt you?”
“No. Not … that way. But Fran wouldn’t be dead if it weren’t for them. She’d have the life she worked for all those years—friends, and a bit of money to live decent, and maybe Captain Foxe calling on her like he said he would. They took it all away. They burned our ship and dumped us off in Nassau. We were waiting for another ship out when she got sick.”
“Christ, love, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry …”
“She were always the strong one, never scared of nothing in the world, except what might become of me. And then she were the one who died.” Sylvie turned—almost unconsciously, he thought—to stare at the Irish Stone. “It were so fast. They had a row of white houses along the beach where they took her. A quarantine station. Like this one used to be, I suppose. They wouldn’t let me go inside—not even inside the fence.”
“Oh, Sylvie, my poor heart …”
She drew away from him, brushing off the two small tears that slithered down her cheeks. “Can we start back now? Please?”
“Yes, of course.”
He thought she meant to change the subject then, but she did not. Bit by bit, in no particular order, she told him more of it, perhaps nearly all of it, from a grey morning on the Mersey to a windswept grave in the Bahamas. And he saw that she simply found it easier to speak if she was walking, easier to fend off grief with her eyes on the path or the river, with her voice held carefully even, like her steps.
He walked close by her side, asked a small question now and then, and otherwise let the story unfold. Aunt Fran and Captain Foxe and the snobs who wondered where she got her money. The long chase and the failing wind, the Osprey’s burning sails tumbling into the sea, and poor Pepper the cat going down with his ship. Nassau glittering in the Caribbean sun, drunk with Rebel gold. The hospital and the terrible waiting, the hope when they told her Fran was better, the blind, reckless, stupid hope. The nurse explaining why she couldn’t have any of Fran’s things back, not one tiny thing to remember her by.
“You have her love,” he said. “You will always have that.”
“No,” she said bitterly. “I have the memory of it. And a memory ain’t the same.”
They were almost at the sailors’ church. She had talked about it all this long way and she had not cried at all.
“Everybody says we should forgive our enemies. Madame, too. She says if we don’t, we give them power over us. But I won’t ever forgive the Rebels for what they did to Fran. Not ever. I can’t.
“Anyway …” She turned, offering him a small, melancholy smile and brushing one hand softly up and down his sleeve. “I don’t believe in futures anymore, or anything being sure, or safe, or mine. And it ain’t because I don’t like you, Erryn. I like you awfully. But I think you know that already.”
“Well,” he said wryly, “I’ve rather suspected. But consider the possibility, Miss Bowen, that I may not be especially certain of the future either, or of anything being sure, or safe, or mine.”
This, he saw, surprised her. He wondered if she even saw the exile, the thin, unlovely scarecrow, the theatre manager without a theatre, the artist misfit who would not easily find a soulmate anywhere; or if she only saw a gentleman’s son, proud and privileged, for whom everything came at the snap of a finger.
“Will you be on the boat tomorrow night?” she asked.
“Yes. That much of the future you can depend on.”
“Will you play your flute for Madame? She loves music so.”
“And she has a soft spot in her heart for those who play it, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
“I would be delighted.”
He really could not kiss her on the street, not in the bright, sunny late afternoon, with carriages rattling by, and great trundling carts whose bored, curious drivers watched anything about that might be interesting; not with fine ladies hurrying past with their purchases, and worshippers beginning to drift down the street from the sailors’ church, some of them still murmuring their prayers. No, it simply would not do.
He did, however, lay a brief, chaste kiss against her forehead, and another, much less brief and chaste, against her hand, and watched her disappear into the old church with a deeply troubled heart.
God help us, he thought, she had endured so much. He ached for all she had endured, the cruelty and the endless work and the betrayals of fate, getting knocked down and getting up and getting knocked down again, as if being poor and cold and hungry were not misery enough all of itself. And then the Alabama. Raphael bloody Semmes and his God damn Rebel sons of bitches.
I won’t ever forgive them for what they did to Fran. I can’t.
Many things about her life were alien to him, things he had never experienced, even remotely; things he could only reach for with his imagination and try to understand. But he understood loss, the disbelief of it, the pitilessness, the darkness in his soul as he stared at Cuyler’s wrecked body lying on a slab, Cuyler his best-loved friend, who had laughed and sported with him just two days before, Cuyler who was only twenty-three, with the whole world before him, waiting to be conquered.
Forgive? No, never. Oh, maybe in the Christian sense, letting them be, leaving them to God—yes, he could forgive to that extent; he could walk away, with twelve years behind him and the worst of them dead. But personally forgive? Speak to them, allow them into the circles of his life? Never. Sylvie Bowen’s bitterness toward the Rebels was something he quite understood.
And what of you, Erryn Shaw, when she finds you among them? What of you?
CHAPTER 13
On the Saguenay
If there were dreams to sell, What would you buy?
—Thomas Lovell Beddoes
SYLVIE BOWEN STOOD quietly on the deck of the Saguenay as the big sidewheeler edged away from the jetty, where a few last faithful stay-behinds stood waving goodbye. Most had already gone, streaming back up the hill on foot, on horseback, or in fine, hurrying carriages that were soon out of sight. The sun was far behind the mountain, and already great parts of the city were wrapped in shadow. The steamer moved easily onto the great back of the river, past the bridge and the railway yards and the abandoned Irish Stone. So small the memorial appeared now, from the deck of the steamer, so very small and lonely; in no time at all it had vanished in the scrub. She wondered if she would see Montreal again … if she would ever see any of this again.
The Halifax Connection Page 18