“Erryn?”
“So c-cold,” he whispered. “Is there … m-m-more blankets?”
She looked around desperately. There was a small sea-chest in the corner, but it was locked, or perhaps only worn and difficult; in any case she could not get it open. There was an old jacket hanging on the wall, and an oilskin lying across the foot of the bunk. That was all. She spread the garments over him, right to his chin, tucking each carefully against his sides. He said a feeble thanks, trying vainly to keep his teeth from chattering.
The captain had said his wound was not dangerous, and maybe it was true. But no one knew how much blood he had lost, how close he had come to drowning. His skin felt dry and cold where she touched it, not just his hands but his chest as well, as though all the life in him were huddled deep inside, trying not to be driven out.
“I’ll be right back,” she whispered fiercely. “I promise!”
She did not know whom she might find to ask for help, and she did not care. Anyone would do. Her second try found the steward’s door. He opened it half asleep, but he said yes, he would fetch the captain right off, and she fled back to Erryn Shaw’s side. He was as she had left him, ashen and shivering. The thought that he might die—that he was perhaps already dying—closed like a cold wind around her, turning everything to ice.
Please, God … oh, please, please …
She had known that she might lose him. Indeed, she considered it all but inevitable. He might court her, even care for her a little, but in the end he would go his own way, perhaps with a laugh and a kiss, or perhaps without a second thought, the way you walked away from a kitten you had cuddled on the street. She would lose him, of course … but it had never crossed her mind that she might lose him to death. She had thought him invincible.
She slid her hand like a feather down the side of his bruised face, puzzled by her blindness. How was it possible that she had forgotten death? Forgotten her mother, and the poisoned air of the mill, and the graves scattered right here on the bank of this river? Forgotten Fran, smiling and asking for some oranges, no longer there when Sylvie came back, never there again? Was it because they were powerless and poor? Because wanton, stupid, pointless death was the headsman of the poor? Because however much she liked Erryn Shaw, or even loved him, she had always seen the image of pride and power more than she had seen the man?
Now only the man was left, desperately hurt, broken, shivering with fever. Just a bit of bone and blood. Maybe with a soul, the way the church folks said, or maybe not; but no lord, no elfkind, only another animal as fragile as herself. The yellow jack could take him, or a knife, or the black darkness of the river, and he would be gone just like the others. Forever.
No.
It was empty defiance, of course. God was not likely to listen, nor was anyone else, but she would say it anyway. No. She lifted the covers and slid gently into the bunk, wrapping as much of her body as she could against his own, the way Lucy Brady had wrapped her son when they carried him home from the mill in Rochdale. It was cold in the tenement that night, far colder than the Saguenay; they could see their breaths like puffs of smoke. Lucy laid her boy on a blanket and covered him with her coat, an old dress, some rags, everything she had, finally herself. Her own warmth, holding back the night.
“It’s all right, Erryn. I won’t leave you. I promise. You’ll be all right.”
The captain did not return. He had just left after all, pronouncing the patient fine. What would he think now, except that she was a silly, panic-stricken girl? She fitted the coverings tightly around him again and then lay very still except for a whisper now and then: It’s all right, love, you’ll be all right. She did not care what the ship’s men might think if they came in, all proper and appalled: What the devil do you think you’re doing, miss? Whatever they thought, it did not matter. She wrapped Erryn close, and after a long time she no longer heard his teeth knocking, and after a much longer time she realized he had stopped trembling; his chest was rising and falling quietly against her—unevenly, but quietly—and he had begun to sweat.
She took the oilskin away and stood upright again, barely daring to hope. The captain did come by at last. He was sorry, he said, there was trouble in the engine room. Now, what seemed to be the matter?
When she told him, he did not seem concerned. It was common, he said, just a bit of fever, nothing to worry about. He laid his hand across Erryn’s forehead, looked briefly at the bandaged wound, and nodded, satisfied. Sylvie listened until the last of his steps faded down the hall, and turned again to the thin figure on the bunk.
He was asleep. The cold, deathlike thing that closed on him had backed away—maybe not very far, but it had backed away. She watched him, one hand lying soft against his shoulder, until dawn light crept across the windows … dawn light, and foggy bits of farms, and finally a harbour, grey and rugged, sodden with October rain.
BOOK FOUR
Halifax, October–December 1863
CHAPTER 15
Spirit Creatures
For a dreamer he’ll live forever, and a spoiler will die in a day.
—John Boyce O’Reilly
THERE WERE only a handful of people by the graveside: a widowed mother, a few friends, three discharged soldiers from the United States Army, who had never met Sandie Douglas but who came just the same to honour a fallen comrade. Matt Calverley stood alone, somewhat apart from the others. He barely heard the simple, familiar prayers. He thought of the years he had known Sandie, the times they had been hungry together or cornered in some rathole, the things they had stolen. They were gifted thieves, back when they were boys. Sandie had joked about it on his last furlough home. Barrack Street was far enough away by then; they could find it amusing being respectable, tramping around in uniforms and earning honest money. “If there was a jail for the squeaky clean,” Sandie said, “they’d lock us both up in two minutes flat.”
And then he had gone all serious, right in a breath. “You know what I think about sometimes, Matt, old boy? When the camp’s gone quiet and most everyone’s asleep? I think nothing’s changed much at all. It was always a war, surviving. We’ve just gotten better at it.”
He had joined up for a three-hundred-dollar bounty, re-enlisted because he said some wars were more worth fighting than others, survived malaria and Gettysburg, and then took a mortal wound in a skirmish so small no one even gave it a name. Crippled and in pain, he came back to Halifax to die. He was not alone. Every week or so there was a notice in one newspaper or another, someone’s son or brother wounded, or killed, or finally safe home. There were thousands of Canadians in Mr. Lincoln’s army—or more likely tens of thousands—a fact too often forgotten under the blustering of the Grey Tories. Joseph Howe’s own son had gone to fight, and a regiment raised in Boston in ’61 had so many Nova Scotians in it they nicknamed it the Highlanders. There were New Brunswickers too, and Islanders, and young men from the West, most of them working in the States when the war began. Others marched across the border for money or adventure or faith in the cause; a much smaller number (again, no one knew quite how many) were taken against their will by dishonest crimps, drugged or bashed on the head, and woke up in a Yankee uniform. All of them were part of it now.
Erryn Shaw, too.
Wind tugged at Matt’s sleeves and whipped about his uncovered head, tore spatters of dirt off the grave mound and spun them willy-nilly over the mourners’ feet and into the grass. He looked away, out to sea. It was impossible to keep them apart in his mind, the dead and the wounded. It was impossible not to wonder if Erryn might also be coming home to die, this time or the next time, or if one day he might never come home at all.
And it will be your doing.
It would not be, of course, not really. Recruiting men for this work was no different from a sea captain signing up a crew: he wanted good people, the best ones possible, and if one or two were his friends, all the better—they would be the men he could especially depend on. It was not his fault if one da
y a hurricane swept over them and the ship went down.
Funny, Matt thought, how the logic of the mind and the logic of the heart sat at opposite sides of a man’s being, and never quite met in the middle.
Earth fell hard on the wood of Sandie’s coffin, a terrible, melancholy sound, one Matt had heard far too often of late. He turned to go, and was surprised to find another man standing alone, even farther back from the others than himself.
“Mr. Romney.”
“Constable. Figured I’d find you here.”
Jabin Romney was heavy-set and well into his forties, generally unshaven, with the look of a man who rarely slept enough. He was the most important Federal agent in Halifax—that is, he was the most important Federal agent who was recognized as such. That others equally important came in secret, and were replaced when the nature of their business became known or even suspected—this Matt took for granted. Romney’s particular role required openness; he was the man to whom anyone could go to trade information for money.
Matt did not envy him this role. To begin with, the use of paid informers was almost universally despised. Worse, in a place like Halifax, Romney’s job could drive a man crazy. Like any port, the city was full of transients, people whom no one really knew, people whom no one could vouch for. Like any garrison town, it numbered among its permanent inhabitants many who lived on the edge of the law, in a dirty world where violence, drunkenness, prostitution, and general desperation were the order of the day. Any of these people might stumble on a piece of useful intelligence and rush to sell it for a meal or a bottle or a day’s peace. Many were equally capable of inventing information they did not have, and offering the Yankee anything they thought he might be dumb enough to buy, right up to and including General Lee’s beard in a brown paper bag.
Matt had encountered similar nonsense himself, but he had the great advantage of knowing the city and its denizens from boyhood; he had a decade of experience as a policeman, and a street rat’s instincts for the game. Poor Romney had been a bank clerk before the war. No wonder he looked permanently spent.
Romney nodded faintly toward the gravesite. “You knew him?”
“He was an old friend.”
“I’m sorry.”
Matt said nothing, and Romney went on: “Did you go to Major Harrington’s funeral last week?”
“Now why would I do that?”
“I thought you were an extraordinarily curious man.”
Matt laughed a little, dryly. “They wouldn’t have liked it much, me and my curiosity turning up. I heard all about it, though. Coach and six, all matched and decked out in black. Parade five blocks long. Half the Halifax Club come to pay their respects, and the Archbishop of Charleston himself saying the Mass.” He looked back at Sandie Douglas’s lonely grave, at the handful of mourners now drifting away, an even dozen if you counted the minister and the American spy. And Sandie was a Halifax man. Major Harrington was a Southern Rebel, an ordnance specialist sent abroad to obtain weapons. “It could make a man bloody cynical, watching this war unfold.”
“You got that right,” Romney said. “Most of the time, anyway.” He turned his hat around in his hands, brushing off invisible bits of dust. “You wouldn’t happen to know a flossie girl named Jessie Bedard, would you?”
“You mean personally?” Matt murmured, and was amused to see Romney blush.
“Oh, no, not at all, constable! I meant did you know anything about her—”
“I do. And I was only joshing you, mate.”
“Would you believe her if she told you something quite outrageous?”
“Maybe. But only if it wasn’t going to come back on her. She wouldn’t rat on anyone who might break her head a couple of weeks down the road. Someone passing through, well, that might be different.”
Romney nodded faintly, his only acknowledgment. He never said thanks, and Matt was glad of it. They were, after all, only making conversation.
“Captain Wilkinson’s back in town, with some of his boys. I suppose you heard.”
“I heard,” Matt said. “Word on the docks is he’s likely to get command of a blockade-runner.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. He’s a damn fine seaman. Well, good day to you, constable.” Romney put his hat back on and moved away, a worn and sorry-looking figure, bending slightly against the wind.
He had arrived in Halifax in the fall of ’61. Partly from scuttlebutt and partly from a few casual conversations with the man, Matt had learned that he was—or at least claimed to be—a bank clerk from somewhere in Maine. He had no pre-war experience in dealing with such matters as conspiracy or deceit. He had no legal or investigative training. He had no particular charm or persuasive skills; indeed, he was almost timid toward others. He seemed, on the surface, a most unlikely candidate for his job. Yet, more than two years later, he was still here, and appeared to have the full confidence of the American consul, Mortimer Jackson, who was himself competent, energetic, and alert.
Matt’s relationship with Romney was delicate. There was, to begin with, the question of English neutrality, a profoundly slippery question, clear in principle but fuzzy at the edges, shifting its meaning as the balances of power in Europe shifted, and as the war itself became more ferocious and harder to predict. Scarcely anyone who was paying attention was really neutral; certainly Matt was not. Yet he considered it his duty to seem so, at least publicly, to do nothing that might embarrass his superiors, whether in Spencer Hall or in London. Secondly, and fundamentally, he was a Canadian, and Romney was the agent of a foreign state. Questions of neutrality Matt would bend from time to time; questions of nationality, never.
So he was careful. He liked Romney, and he had come to respect the man’s quiet resolve. But he never hinted that he himself might be anything more than a friendly city constable who thought the Union had the right of it in the war. No doubt Romney knew better. Indeed, it was probably because he knew better that he so readily accepted the boundaries Matt set. There were a remarkable number of things Constable Calverley claimed to know nothing about, and after he had made such a claim once or twice, Romney never asked him again.
Still, Matt shared with the American everything he felt he could, not least his knowledge of the city. He took no money, of course. He merely grinned once and said, “Oh, well, one day I might need your help to catch a footpad.” To which Romney solemnly nodded, as if such a request, from an experienced policeman to an expatriate bank clerk, were the most reasonable notion in the world.
The police station was lodged in the grubby heart of the Halifax waterfront, in the triangle where Upper Water Street veered northwesterly to cut off Bedford Row. It was a busy, noisy, rambunctious part of town. Within two blocks in various directions were the city docks, the market, Her Majesty’s ordnance yard, six banks, the customs house, and the provincial legislature, along with scores of ironstone warehouses and all manner of tradesmen and shops: cobblers, tackle makers, a chocolate factory, imported fashions, grog shops, eateries, and numerous taverns and houses of ill repute.
Tucked among them on Hollis Street was a decaying three-storey rooming house with sombre Scottish dormers and creaky stairs. Matt Calverley had taken lodgings there many years before, a scrappy, half-grown youth with his first real job. He held it more than once on credit, for Mrs. Kramer could not bring herself to pitch him out, young as he was and trying hard to make himself a life. Now he could afford something better, but he had no wish to move. He liked the old woman, for all that she was not much of a cook. He liked his room, tucked in the back away from the worst of the noise and the sea wind. And he liked his spiders. He doubted he could move them without half of them getting lost or killed, and he was not at all sure anyone else would let him keep them.
A lot of people thought he was crazy, having those small crawly things around on purpose. They would laugh uneasily if he mentioned it, or make a dumb joke that proved they did not believe him. After all, he was a grown man and otherwise appeared normal. He was a
police constable, for God’s sake. He kept spiders?
Erryn Shaw’s eyes had lit up like a boy’s. “What a smashing idea!” he had said. “Can I see them?”
It was precisely at that moment that Matt was satisfied they could be friends. Real friends, deep-down-to-the-bone friends, for whom an English manor house and a Barrack Street brothel were merely places they used to live, places that shaped them, of course, but that they had long ago left behind. It was not because of the spiders, of course; they would have been friends even if Erryn Shaw hated spiders, or if he were scared to death of them. But that was when Matt knew.
He wondered sometimes if they were fated to be friends or if it was only chance—if it might never have happened at all except for the dust-up in Mahoney’s Bar back in ’55. He thought about it often, as a man would think about those occasions that completely changed his life. It began on an ugly November night, just after seven. The night guard was coming on duty and Matt was supposed to be going home. But the guards were two men short, with a terrible grippe making the rounds, and word had just come of a robbery over on Bedford Row. The victim, one Colin Downs, had stumbled into the police station severely battered and covered in blood. The men who attacked him, he said, were in Mahoney’s Bar, drinking their ill-gotten money as quickly as they could.
Matt did not necessarily believe him. Downs was something of a low-life himself, and not very bright, the sort who might be driven to the law from honest desperation or from thoughtless, stupid malice, or from anything imaginable in between. Still, it required a look, and Stan Coffin and Tom Perreault were the only men at hand. They were both past fifty, decent, ordinary chaps, and Mahoney’s was famous for its rough crowd. It was not the worst place in town—that honour was claimed by three or four different ratholes on Barrack Street—but it was, without question, the worst place on the waterfront. Stan turned to Matt with one of the saddest, most hangdog looks he had ever seen.
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