The Halifax Connection

by Marie Jakober

  He caught her hand and nuzzled it. “What do you say, then, Sylvie Bowen? Could you love this poor lonely scarecrow well enough to marry him?”

  “I love you more than anything,” she told him, very soft. “I would marry you gladly, I would, only …” She touched her cheek. “Only there’s this, see? Aunt Addie told me once there’d be no sense my getting married, because there weren’t a man on earth could wake up every morning of his life looking at this face.”

  It was hard to read his eyes in the firelight, but it seemed that something darkened in them.

  “I think,” he said, “it is a very bold soul who speaks for every man on earth.” Lightly as a feather, his fingers played across the spot she had touched. “The first time I saw you, on the rue St-Antoine, stepping out of a carriage, I thought you were enchanting. Nothing has made me change my mind. You have scars on your face, yes, and that is a cruel place to have them, but they’re not what I see when I look at you. I see your hair, and all I want is to touch it. I see how your body moves like running water, and how, when you laugh, it lights up the whole lonely world. I see you, my heart, and you are all that matters. Only you.”

  If he had been someone else, someone who was less a magician with words, it would have been easier to believe him. Even so, she almost did.

  “Do you know what I grieved for,” he went on, “when I was lost in the river? Besides the thought of dying? It was that I would never have your love, never know you as I wanted to. Never lay down beside you. I know we’re … different … in some ways. You’ve lived in a world I can scarcely imagine, and you aren’t at all sure what to make of me. But in spite of it, we seem to love the same things in life, and I think we love each other. Leastways, I love you.”

  “And I love you, Erryn; I do! You’ve been everything to me a lass could wish for! At first I thought you were just being kind, but I know now it be more. Only I … I don’t want for you to ever feel beholden, see? I don’t want you spending time with me, or laying down beside me, except because you want to. I know what it’s like now, to have that. I don’t ever want less. I don’t want … duty. Not from you, Erryn—it would purely break my heart.”

  His eyes fell for a long, brooding time. She wished she could take her words back, trade them for something harmless and vague. But it had always been her way to be honest, most especially with people she cared for.

  “Duty?” he murmured at last. “You fear it would come to that?”

  “I don’t know. It weren’t that I … I’m sorry, Erryn, I just … don’t know.”

  To her astonishment, he smiled a little then, and drew her to nestle close against him. “And how could you, after all? Everything you ever put your faith in was taken from you, one way or another. So why should you put any faith in this? I do see it, love, I do. And I can wait. God knows I expected a lot, asking you so soon. But you haven’t said, ‘No, go away, you big bony troll,’ so I’ll wait. I’ll walk out with you Friday afternoons, and babble at you, and take you to bed every chance I get. And I’ll ask you again, as often as I have to, and one day you’ll be sure.”

  She wept then, fast in his arms, more tempted than ever to tell him yes. But he had spoken the truth: she had no faith in it, not deep down. She adored him; she believed him honest; she believed, even, that he loved her in some measure. But she had no faith that it would last.

  As long as they were free, she could take whatever love and happiness he offered in the certainty that it was real, and whatever became of it, became. Maybe she would grow sure of him, like he said; maybe they would marry. If they did not, if in the end he did not want a mill girl with a ruined face, he would wish her well and walk quietly away. And then all this sweetness would never turn to poison—to sorrow, yes, but not to poison, not to mere icy duty or bitterness or cruel names.

  It was hard beyond bearing, but there was no other way.

  CHAPTER 23

  At the Waverley

  He seemed to me a man with just enough of intellect to be a villain … and just enough of daring to make him indifferent to the dangers of guilt …

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  EVER SINCE MORRISON’S party, back in Montreal, the image of Maury Janes’s face had remained clear in Erryn’s memory—plain and rather square, with a thin line of mouth and straight, dull brown hair. An altogether forgettable face, except for who he was and what he had promised: If this goes off like it should, it’s going to end the war… Half a million men were trying to end the war and could not. Such a promise made Janes impossible to forget.

  Erryn spotted him immediately on arriving at the Waverley. He was standing somewhat aside from the crowd, talking quietly with Al MacNab and a burly brute Erryn recalled well from Montreal: George Kane, the one-time police marshal of Baltimore. Jackson Follett’s right-hand man.

  God almighty. Two of them already, and I just got in the door. I think it’s going to be a long night.

  “Mr. Shaw! Good to see you again! How are you?” Janes strode over to him at once, smiling like an old friend, shaking his hand as though he meant to wring it off and keep it.

  “I’m well, thank you. And yourself?”

  “Just fine, sir, just fine. Glad to see you’re still in one piece. I heard you got knifed on the boat coming over. Damn rotten business. Did they ever get the son of a bitch?”

  “They didn’t. I did.”

  Janes laughed roughly and clapped him on the arm. “I guess you Brits are tougher than you look.”

  “Positively indestructible,” Erryn murmured. He leaned closer. “Did you just get in?”

  “No, we came Saturday. I know you said to call on you, but it was just my luck Mr. Kane was heading off to Halifax the same day I was. Made everything right simple. Soon as we landed, he took me over to meet Al MacNab. Hell of a man, MacNab, but I reckon you know that. Never saw anybody get more things done in less time. He got us a nice place to stay, told me to come by Monday morning and he’d get me all set up, and damned if he wasn’t as good as his word. I do appreciate your offer, though. I’ll say one thing for you folks up here, you all are damnably obliging.”

  “Well, the offer still stands, Mr. Janes. If I can help in any way at all, be sure to let me know.”

  “That man,” Jack Murray muttered over his punch, “is a mouth on wheels.”

  Erryn smiled faintly. “Men have said the same about me once or twice.”

  Jack laughed. “Yes, but you’re interesting, Erryn. Janes is … to tell you the truth, when I first met him, a couple of days back, I thought he was dumb as a brick.”

  “And do you still think so?”

  “No. I’d say he’s rather shrewd, actually, in his own horrid Yankee trader sort of way. Sam Slick in person, and all that. His father was from Massachusetts, did you know?”

  “Yes, he told me.”

  Erryn would have liked to say more, to remind Jack that it really did not make a lot of sense to judge men by their origins. But the entire Grey Tory community judged him by his own, and therein lay much of his security.

  An aristocrat, his best friend Cuyler had said to him once, an aristocrat is like God. He doesn’t need to explain his existence; he simply is.

  The comment was cynical and irreverent (Cuyler was often both), but it contained a good deal of truth. Sons of the English ruling class turned up routinely in the colonies, doing nothing in particular, merely travelling and socializing with their peers. When Erryn Shaw arrived in Halifax, no one doubted that he was one of them. He had a princely education and impeccable good manners; he had an intimate knowledge of aristocratic life. When he spoke, casually and in passing, of a party at Windsor Castle, of dukes and duchesses come to tea; of seeing, through the window of his boyhood study, the great Lord Wellington old and sad, walking in his father’s garden in the rain, it was obvious that he spoke from lived experience.

  Oh, people wondered about him, he supposed—wondered just how blue his blood really was, and why he would spend his time on someth
ing so dubious as a playhouse, and why he never went home. But as long as he did not aim to marry one of their daughters, or involve himself in their business affairs, the Canadians would neither pry nor judge. Financial difficulties could strike the best of families; and everyone knew there were not enough military commissions and political appointments to go around. Some members of the aristocracy, younger sons in particular, did spend part of their lives like God, simply being there. Halifax was content to take him as he was.

  Season after season, the business lords and their families patronized his theatre. The garrison officers worked with him on amateur plays and concerts, and bought him drinks and took him out to dinner. Because he liked to be companionable, he rarely discussed politics in social situations. Still, he never made a secret of his distaste for American slavery, or of his admiration for English Radicals such as Cobden and Bright. The whole town knew of his long friendship with Constable Calverley, an unrelenting leveller of the meanest possible origins.

  So, when he shrugged it all aside and involved himself more and more on behalf of the Confederate elite, it seemed to him that someone should have asked him some hard questions. Had the circumstances been reversed, Matt Calverley would certainly have done so.

  But the Grey Tories took him at his word—or rather, he supposed, at his blood. They did not believe he was returning to the world of his peers; they believed he had never really left it. All the rest had been temporary and trifling, merely the sort of thing young gentlemen did—consorting with low-life a way of learning about the world, running a playhouse a mere diversion, like seducing ballerinas or chasing the great auk in Timbuktu. Now there was something important at stake, and he, as the best of his kind always did, was showing his mettle when it mattered.

  Jack Murray had done the same, done it easily and naturally, without the slightest consciousness of anything amiss. If Erryn were to ask him how the values he once embraced could have led him here, he would look at his friend in pure bewilderment. He would find the question absurd.

  And that, Erryn Shaw, is your great good fortune. Don’t bloody grumble about it.

  “So,” Jack murmured to him, very low, “I hear it said you’re courting.”

  “Have you, indeed.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “I took a young lady to tea. Does that constitute courting?”

  Jack laughed. “Oh, all right, Erryn. I’ll mind my own business. But you were seen with her before, you know. Collier didn’t think twice about it, the first time. He didn’t know who she was—”

  “And now he does think twice about it? Rather presumptuous of him, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Easy, mate. I didn’t mean anything.”

  “No, of course you didn’t. Sorry. I have an old, well-entrenched dislike for gossip when I’m the object of it. Petty of me, I know, but there you are. Can I get you some more punch?”

  Well, he thought, to show himself so touchy on the matter, he might as well have admitted to being hopelessly in love. He filled Jack’s glass very generously, handed it to him with a flourish and a smile, and changed the subject. He was irritated by his own naked reaction; but mostly he was irritated by them, by all of them, collectively. He knew how they would speak of Sylvie Bowen, and how they would evaluate her, noting her scars and her age and her place in the world—most especially her place in the world—wondering what could possibly make her worth it, even for sport. It would have to be for sport, of course; no other possibility would cross their minds. An aristocrat might well seduce a servant. He might, if he was truly besotted, set her up as a kept woman. He did not marry her. In England it would lose him both his friends and his position. Here, at least in some circles, it would make him a laughingstock.

  Dinner was eventually served, at a long table draped in pure white linen and glistening with silver and candles. The guests from Montreal were seated in the places of honour next to their host. Erryn, seeing Maury Janes well out of reach, was both sorry and relieved. He knew he had to seek Janes out at some point and spend some time with him, but he did not look forward to it in the least. He felt a powerful distaste for the man. He had felt it almost the instant they met, back in Montreal: the hackles going up all over him, along with a powerful, gut-knotting wish to be somewhere else. He knew, when he thought about it sensibly, that such antipathies simply happened between people, as did their opposite; he had come to love Cuyler in a day. He knew also that he could sometimes be a snob, not as to rank, but as to qualities of mind and spirit; and Maury Janes had a certain shabby crassness about him that represented, perhaps, the complete opposite of what Erryn admired in other men. Yet, when he accounted for all of this, something still remained, something cold and repugnant, like old rubbish, something that made him look repeatedly down the length of the table and think: Watch that one, Erryn Shaw. Watch him like a hawk.

  “Tell me, does it ever get warm in this place?”

  The words came out like taffy, sticky and slow, with most of the r’s left behind altogether. Evah. Wahm. Erryn smiled, turning back to his tablemate, a worn and shaggy Southerner who was, in Jamie Orton’s words, “the best blockade-running pilot in the game.” His name was Taber Hague and he was, he had said, from South Carolina. He had obviously never encountered a northern winter before, not even the tolerable Nova Scotian variety. He was wearing his outdoor jacket to the table, with a heavy scarf around his neck, and he still seemed cold.

  “Warm?” Across the table, James Orton responded to his question with a chuckle. He was his old aggressive self, having spent less than twenty-four hours in jail for his part in the escape of George Wade. The local justice simply refused to hear the case against him, holding it over to the spring session of the Supreme Court. That was months away, and Erryn knew that the longer they dallied, the more it all became past history, the less likely would be any sort of conviction at all.

  The Grey Tory leader spoke proudly now to Taber Hague. “There’s no a bonnier spot in the world than this one, come summertime.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, sir,” the pilot said.

  “No need to take my word for it, lad. There’s thousands to tell you the same, and it’s the good Lord’s truth.” He was sitting several places away. He planted his elbows on the table and leaned well forward, the better to affirm the good Lord’s truth. “As ye know, lad, the sun never sets on the British Empire, and that makes for many a garrison town, and many a soldier lad to man them. And do you ken what they all pray for, when the hot sun’s killing them in Nassau and the cholera in India? They pray to be posted to bonnie Halifax the next time round. So they do, lad, every last one of them.”

  The pilot smiled and reached for his whiskey glass. There was, after all, no accounting for the strange tastes of Englishmen. There was also no arguing with James Dougal Orton. Every time he spoke, he was like a train coming at you. You didn’t argue; you got out of the way. Erryn Shaw had known several such men in his life, the first and most memorable being his father.

  He took a small sip of port and studied his companions. There were some twenty of them, in a strange mix of the very elite and the decidedly raffish—men who, under ordinary circumstances, would never be found eating and drinking together. There was a Virginian named Evers who had been in Halifax since the start of the war, writing newspaper articles, organizing lectures and meetings, and generally promoting the Confederate cause. He was highly effective; Erryn often wondered why the Union never troubled itself to send a man of its own to do the same. Along with Evers were eight other Americans, including Confederate naval captain John Fallon. The remaining guests were Englishmen and local Grey Tories. At the far end of the table, one of them was just rising to his feet.

  “Gentlemen, a toast.”

  Everyone fell expectantly silent. They had already paid tribute to the Queen, to the Confederate States of America, and to their host, Alexander MacNab, who was paying for this exceptional dinner. At some point there would be a toast to Jefferson Dav
is, may his government soon be recognized by the world, and another to Robert E. Lee, the finest general since Wellington. Someone would remember His Excellency the Archbishop, who was doing as much as any man could to keep God on their side. They would drink to dark nights and safe voyaging, and Erryn himself would raise his glass “To the ladies, God bless them!” if no one else did. By midnight, he thought, most everyone should be well and thoroughly drunk.

  “Gentlemen. To Captain John Fallon, and all the brave seamen who run the blockade!”

  “Captain Fallon!”

  As usual, Erryn found ways to drink much less than he appeared to, a process that became easier and easier as the evening wore on. Thus the toast to Captain Fallon was duly consumed, or not consumed, and the company sat down again. The conversation shifted to the exploits of the blockade-runners, those canny rogues, as Alexander MacNab described them, who ran in and out of the beleaguered Southern ports. They ran out with cotton, coveted in the starving mills of England, and with naval stores—pitch, turpentine, and oakum—coveted in every port city in the world, including Halifax. They ran back to the South with food, shoes, and clothing; with weapons, ammunition, and other materials of war … and with luxury goods. Mostly with luxury goods, as Erryn gradually discovered. They were entrepreneurs, after all, not patriots, something canny Al MacNab quite understood.

  “It was priceless to see, sir. The look on his face!”

  Erryn leaned forward a little to identify the speaker, even though he was sure he recognized the voice. It was Tremain, mate of the ship Marigold, whose captain, William Ross, had for some reason not attended this dinner. Tremain was smiling broadly, looking about to catch everyone’s attention, with the air of a man who had a tale to tell.

  “The captain walks into his store—he’d walked past four or five different ones already. None of them was big enough, he said. Then he walks into MacNab’s and looks around, and this little clerk with spectacles hurries over. ‘Yes, sir, and what might I offer you today, sir?’ and Ross says, ‘All of it.’ The clerk just blinks. ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ ‘I want all of it,’ says Ross. You should have seen the poor man’s face.”