The Halifax Connection

by Marie Jakober

  “I say, Matt, you wouldn’t consider coming with us, just for a bit? It ain’t but a block, and I’d sure feel better walking in there if there was three of us. Especially if one of ’em was you.”

  “Sorry, lads,” Matt said. “I’m off-duty.” He gave them half a minute to feel sorry for themselves and then added, “I might come down to Mahoney’s for a drink, though.”

  They walked in quietly, poor battered Downs hanging close to their sides. He never needed to identify his attackers. Halfway across the room a hulking brute in a sheepskin roared to his feet. “Look! The flamin’ little bugger’s gone and fetched the guard!”

  And the fight was on. The big man overturned his table and came straight for them, howling obscene promises of death and dismemberment. Matt gave him a billy stick across the midsection followed by a knee to the chin as he buckled, and then paid him no more attention. There were three others right behind him. Constable Coffin tackled one to the floor, got a manacle on him, and cuffed him to a table leg. Matt was grappling with another when he heard a panicked yell behind him. “Christ, man, look out!” Then something hit him—something hot, sticky, and reeking of onions, splattering onto his neck and over the back of his head. Furious, he brought a deadly right into his opponent’s jaw, and by then Constable Perreault was there to pin the man’s arms.

  It was one of those moments when Matt hated bars, hated drink, and purely hated men in packs. The whole place rattled with laughter and hoots: Bloody good toss, mate!—Ten shillings says he can’t do it again!—Och, look at the constable, ain’t he a pretty sight!

  Hot gravy was running down the inside of Matt’s collar. A chunk of greasy carrot slithered out of his hair and sat for one hideous moment squarely on his nose. He flung it aside with his cuff, turning to the crowd from whose ranks, somewhere, the mess had come. He knew it was pointless, but he spat the outraged question nonetheless.

  “Who the God damn bloody hell threw that?”

  To his complete astonishment, someone answered.

  “I did, sir.”

  It was the bony Englishman from the theatre, Shaw his name was, if Matt remembered it right. A man who never brawled, never made trouble, indeed a man who was rarely seen in ratholes such as Mahoney’s. Before Matt could begin to imagine what this meant, the Englishman added, with a small, easy gesture: “He had a knife.”

  Matt spun round and saw the brute in the sheepskin trying to get to his knees. He had stew all over him, and blood running down from his cheek and his ear. Beside him lay a copper tureen. Nearby, still in reach of his fumbling hand, was an eight-inch blade.

  God almighty, I thought I put him out! Matt slammed his boot across the knife and then bent to seize it, remembering the harsh warning shout, realizing that this maniac had been a mere foot or two from his back. He felt chilled all over, as if he had fallen through a frozen lake … and been pulled back again, a breath before he drowned.

  He walked over to the Englishman and held out his hand. “Thank you, mate. You’ve done me a damn fine turn. It’s Mr. Shaw, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and you’re most welcome. I’m sorry I splattered you, but it was all I could think of at the time.”

  They shook hands like old friends.

  “It was your supper, I suppose?” Matt asked.

  “It’s replaceable.”

  “We have to take these dumb buggers to jail, but if you’ll join me after, I’ll buy you a better one, and a bottle of the best wine in town.”

  “That’s most kind of you.” Shaw surveyed the room: the crowd, volatile as crowds always were; two night guards, neither of them as young as he used to be; four captives, all crazy drunk and mad as hell, quite possibly with friends in the room or in the streets. “If you wish,” he added, “I could just as well tag along and save you the trouble of coming back here.”

  Well, Mr. Shaw, I see you can toss a courtesy as smoothly as a soup tureen…

  They sat up for hours that night, talking, and from their last weary handshake at four in the morning they never looked back. Still, Matt was cautious. He was intrigued by his new friend, and liked him intensely, but he was nonetheless cautious, always holding back a measure of trust. Then Erryn came to see his spiders, grinned at them, let one of them scuttle across his hand, and the last wall came down.

  “Is it your spirit creature, do you suppose?” Erryn asked.

  “Spirit creature?”

  “Like the Indians have—leastways in the stories I used to read. The creature who comes to a young man in his vision, when he goes off to fast and become a grown-up. An animal comes to teach him and he takes its name. Black Hawk, Running Wolf, that sort of thing.”

  “I was named after an Apostle, Erryn.”

  “Oh, that’s what our parents name us for, when we’re too small to fight back. Saints and ancestors and pretentious virtues. Like Prudence, for God’s sake. Who’d ever want to be burdened with a name like Prudence? Or that poor sod in Massachusetts, Increase Mather. Imagine what the other lads must have called him when he was little. Here, Inky. Run, Inky. Stinky Inky. No, the Indians had the right idea—we should take our own names. Would you be Spider-Something, do you think?”

  Matt laughed a little, softly, at a loss for what to say, remembering all at once a room over on Barrack Street—a room where half the time he could not sleep because the noise went on all night, a room with a spiderweb in the corner, just below the ceiling, a web he watched sometimes for hours because there was absolutely nothing else to do. The winters came and went, the strange men, the ships, the cholera, the Temperance Society, the Church, the state, the law. The spider survived them all, and so did he.

  Spirit creature.

  “Do you know much about Indians, Erryn?”

  “Bugger all, to tell you the truth. Just books I read as a boy, probably half of them nonsense. I hoped to learn a bit about the Mi’kmaq here, but they seem to keep pretty much to themselves.”

  “I suppose they think it’s safer that way. I been told they were friendly enough when the first of us came. Traded, visited, let us have land all over. Of course, it dawned on them that we kept on coming and more of their land kept going, so they started to fight back. And they got damn near wiped out.”

  “There was an Indian war here? I never knew that.”

  “Oh, it was nothing so gallant as a war. There were some skirmishes, of course, an attack here and there. Then General Amherst invited them to a parley and made peace. Said we’d leave them alone, and brought along a whole raft of blankets as a gift. They all smoked the peace pipe and went home happy. Only what Amherst didn’t tell them was that his blankets came from folks who had the smallpox.”

  “Good God.”

  “They had no resistance, I guess. They died in droves. After that they backed off.”

  Erryn Shaw looked at him, and then at a spider hanging by the window, and then at Matt again. “Rule, Britannia, eh?” he murmured.

  Matt said nothing. Nothing seemed to be necessary.

  “Will we ever get past it, do you think?” Erryn went on. “Not just England. Us. Humankind.”

  “I don’t know. But the day we decide we can’t, that’s the day we’re finished.”

  “You’re a frightfully practical man, you know.”

  People said that sort of thing a lot, but Matt did not think it was true. He was not practical at all; he was a dreamer. The practical sort, growing up as he did, would have taken to crime, or found a likely whore to live off, or at the very least run away to sea. The practical sort would have drunk everything in sight to forget how much he hurt.

  The practical sort … hell, he thought, the practical sort would be dead by now.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Den

  Life means dirty work, small wages, hard words, no holidays, no social station, no future …

  —Wilkie Collins

  THE DEN ON BARRINGTON was bigger than many of the warehouses on Water Street, and plainer than most of them. Every line o
f the building was straight and severe, every window a blunt rectangle exactly like every other. The smooth-cut granite face had no hint of decoration. Sylvie could not help but wonder at the man who built it; why, with so much money to spend, he would not have got himself something prettier.

  But then, as Fran used to say, the rich were peculiar. Perhaps he was one of those hard-bitten sods who never even noticed prettiness unless it wore a skirt. Whatever the case, when he died, the house was sold, and sold twice more before Jack Danner bought it in ’52. The rumour among the help—never confirmed, of course—was that Danner had mortgaged everything except his immortal soul to get it, and even so, the Scott family had to stand good for the loan. If it was true, Sylvie thought, it certainly explained the Danners’ driving ambition.

  She arrived back on a chilly late October afternoon. As usual, the boarding house was full. She walked through the back entrance into the familiar scrubbed hallway, the smell of chicken roasting, a piano tinkling idly in the boarders’ sitting room. But the first person she met was a stranger, a woman slightly older than herself, in servant’s dress, with the solid, muscled body of someone raised on a farm and used to plenty of work. She had plain, blunt features and big ears. She looked briefly at Sylvie’s face, at the travelling bag in her hand. She seemed bewildered, as if a guest had wandered through the service entrance by mistake.

  “Good afternoon, miss. Were you looking for Mrs. Danner?”

  “I’m Sylvie Bowen. The chambermaid. I work here.”

  “Oh, it’s you! We were wondering when you’d be getting back.” She held out her hand, the same as men did when they met. “Howdy. I’m Aggie Breault. I’m real glad to see you. I’ve been doing most of the rooms of late. That woman Miss Louise gave us to replace you, she’s a sweet little thing, but she’s a hundred years too old.”

  “Where’s Reeve?”

  “Gone. Miss Susan’s in the stillroom, last I saw her. Watch out for her today, she’s eating nails.”

  “Thanks,” Sylvie said. She hoped this Aggie Breault would prove a friendly sort, as she seemed. The Den had need of one.

  She hurried to the maids’ quarters, up three flights of steep and narrow stairs, and changed quickly into her work clothes: plain dark brown dress, white apron, white cap—not a proper bonnet at all, just a silly round cotton muffin pinned to her hair. The room was gloomy as a cave, hunched up under the rafters with only a small dormer window. There was no grate, much less a stove; the only warmth came from the stovepipe passing through from the kitchen four floors below. Sanders had a room to herself, across the hall; the other three women slept here. The smaller, nicer bed was Reeve’s—or, no doubt, Aggie Breault’s now. The old, lumpy one Sylvie shared with Annie MacKay. Their furniture consisted of one chair, one washstand and basin, one wardrobe, and one chamber pot.

  She could not help but remember the fine hotel rooms she had stayed in with Madame, the even finer quarters the Danners had for themselves on the first floor. Soft beds with canopies they could close all around. Fireplaces in every room. Big windows, from which they could see the carriages on Barrington, and the running children, and the pretty stray cats; from which they could see the world, like anyone who lived in it.

  This was the dark side of service. Oh, the work was hard, bitter hard, and always the same; but what could break a servant’s spirit was that she had no private life, no space that was her own, not even a factory worker’s tenement, just a cubbyhole like this one, of which her share was more or less the size of a coffin. If she had free time and wanted to read, or have a friend in for tea, the only place she could go was the kitchen, down in the basement, where there was barely a scrap of sunlight, and where she got in the cook’s way at the peril of her life. A servant was discouraged from courting, and sometimes forbidden it; many had no friends at all. In Lancashire the rich went begging for domestics; the women said bugger it and went by droves into the mills.

  Sylvie picked up the small mirror on the washstand, saw that her hair was pinned back neatly and the cap positioned right … and saw also, even in this poor light, how well she looked compared with a year ago. It was a trade, she thought, the only trade she could have made; the mill would have killed her. That was all she could afford to think about: here she might survive. And maybe, just maybe, she would be able to move on. Every free afternoon now she would go to Madame’s house to read. You’re a bright lass, Bowen. You could improve yourself a great deal with a bit of effort. Come every week, and I shall lend you a book to take home with you.

  She would learn all manner of things, and then she would find some other kind of work. Maybe there was something else, even for a woman, even for someone with a ruined face. She was bright; that much she honestly believed of herself. And this was Canada, as hard and desperate a world as the one she had left, perhaps, but with one critical difference: the boundaries to a human life were not written in stone. There was a possibility of moving on.

  But for the time being, there were only rooms to clean. Her mistress barely took a moment to say good afternoon. The boarders’ rooms were in dreadful shape, she said. Miss Louise’s housemaid had never been able to keep up, and Breault had too many other things to do.

  “I want them done from top to bottom, Bowen, floors, windows, everything. You can manage two a day, can’t you, until they’re all shipshape?”

  Two in a day? One big job was the usual, in addition to her other tasks. Each day, she cleaned out the grates in the ten guest rooms and brought up fresh coals. She heated water on the kitchen stove and carried it to every guest. She emptied and scrubbed their chamber pots while they were gone to breakfast; scrubbed their wash basins; cleaned up whatever they spilled or left about, anything from crumpled papers to men’s whiskers and women’s bloodstains. She aired out the beds and made them again, with every corner tucked tight and every blanket absolutely straight. She dusted the rooms from corner to corner, even the frames around the windows and the knobs on the bottom of the bedsteads. She scrubbed four flights of stairs and cleaned the servants’ privy and washing area below the basement. If the housemaid fell behind, she was expected to help clean the family bedrooms as well.

  All of that, and the missus wanted her to shipshape two rooms a day besides? Watch out for her today, she’s eating nails.

  “You can manage that, Bowen, can’t you?” It was neither question nor request. Susan Danner rarely bothered with either.

  She stood now with one hand on the banister and one foot on the step, as if pausing in flight. She was probably in her early forties—Fran’s age, more or less; they had been girlhood friends. She was beautiful, which must have helped a great deal in winning Jack Danner’s hand. She was also weary-looking, extremely so, and Sylvie wondered, not for the first time, what sort of bargain the Danners had made with each other when they married. He was a small commission merchant—prosperous certainly, but small; it was the Den that was making them rich. The Den, and the Lancashire mill girl who ran it like a man-o’-war.

  “Yes, m’um. I can manage it.”

  Sylvie was not at all sure how her fellows would receive her back at the supper table, but they were friendly enough, asking all sorts of questions: had Madame tried to make her Catholic, what were the riverboats like, did she see a lot of Indians? The meal was almost over when she got to ask a question of her own.

  “So where did Reeve go, then? I thought she were staying till the New Year. Till she got married.”

  No one looked at her.

  “She was let go,” Sanders said bluntly.

  “Dear heavens, why?”

  “That is not your concern, Bowen.”

  “Oh, tell her,” Harry Dobbs said. “She’ll find out anyway. Dinah’s laddie put himself on a steamer to points unknown and Miss Susan had to let her go.”

  Had to let her go? Nobody dismissed an experienced servant because her young man left her; more likely they would be grateful. Unless she was … Oh, bloody hell, Sylvie thought. Bloody damned hell.<
br />
  “He left her with a baby coming, is that it?”

  “That’s enough!” Sanders snapped. “This sort of wickedness ain’t to be discussed at our table. I’ll have no more of it. Breault, bring us our dessert.”

  There was no more of it until the women were alone in their room. Sylvie was the last to get in. She found little MacKay already curled up in the bed and Breault wearily tugging off her shoes in the light of the kerosene lamp. The new woman looked directly at her and spoke, very soft.

  “I’m sorry about your friend, Sylvie Bowen.”

  “My friend?”

  “The housemaid. Reeve.”

  “Oh. She weren’t my friend, really. We just worked together for a few weeks. But it’s so unfair, what happened to her. She were gone when you came, I guess?”

  “Yes. More’n two weeks ago now. Dobbs says he’s heard she’s in the poorhouse.” She was silent for a breath and then added, “Men talk about these things.” As if Sylvie did not know.

  “Where you from? The States?”

  “New Hampshire. My dad’s got a big farm over there.”

  “So how’d you end up here?”

  “I lost my ma when I was twelve, and I had to raise all my brothers. I didn’t mind. I reckoned it was my duty, being the oldest. But when the last of them hit seventeen, I’d had enough, and I married Charlie Breault. He was Acadian, come down to work the harvest. He was big and shaggy and shy as a mouse, hardly said ten sentences to me before he was ready to head home. Then he up and asked me to come with him. I figured I’d never get a better offer, so I went. He was a good man.”

  “Was?”