She knew scarcely anything of the lives of the upper classes—how they behaved among themselves, their social rules, their games, the meaning they might attach to a kindness or a snub—it was all uncharted territory. But she felt she knew a few things about power, things that cut across social lines, and probably across centuries and nationalities too; things that held for the ruffians in the streets of Rochdale and for the silk-clad lords of the mills. The powerful never gave you something for nothing. Favours were passed out in return for favours received or in expectation of favours to come.
What did Erryn Shaw have to offer the princelings of Nova Scotia?
He was gentry, yes; he had the blood. But nothing she had ever seen of his life, nothing he had ever said or done, nothing anyone had ever said about him, suggested in the smallest way that he had usable connections. On the contrary, he had gone to considerable trouble to make it clear to her that he did not. I am as you see me, nothing more. It surprised her, having just met him, but the Halifax elite had known him for ten years; surely by now they guessed as much themselves. He was well bred, gifted, charming; socially he was one of them; he would be welcome at the young men’s drinking parties, at their sleigh rides and concerts and birthday celebrations. But did he have any real power, anything he could offer to those men in the upper room, most of them twice his age, rich enough to buy him and sell him for pocket money? Did he still have influence with some of those relatives in wigs? Everything she knew argued against it. And yes, he could pretend to have influence; he could pretend most anything for a while. But he had been cuddled up with the Grey Tories since the fall of ’61, Aggie said, more than two years. All that time, living well without his theatre, without a cent of his father’s money, dining at the Waverley and invited to the Halifax Club, dressing like a prince, buying her oranges in the dead of winter … Long before now, those men in linen and gold watch fobs would have been wanting something back.
There it lay. No matter what he said, no matter how much she wanted to believe him, there it lay. They would be wanting something back. If he was not of real, substantial use to them, then he was just a hanger-on; they would have edged him to the margins long before.
“You helped John Braine to escape, didn’t you? Fran is dead because of pirates like him, and you helped the bloody sod go free!”
She had learned young to watch her father’s eyes. They were easy to read, muddied sometimes by drink but otherwise naked and open. Erryn’s were difficult, the eyes of an actor. But she saw a small flash of dismay, like a flinch from a blow, instantaneous, desperate. How in God’s name does she know?
“Sylvie! What on earth—”
He stared at her, all bewildered innocence now, but it was too late. She had seen. She felt cold all through.
“You carry messages for them. I suppose you spy, too. Is it just for money, Erryn? Is that all you care about?”
“I don’t know what you mean, love. I’m not a spy. I wouldn’t know how to be. I just hang about with the lads and pick up a bit of work—”
“Stop lying! God almighty, do you take me for an idiot? The whole town knows! You’re doing work for the Rebels, real work, the sort they’ll pay you for, and I want to know why! How can you do it? You know what they are! How can you?”
In the silence that followed, she realized the coach had stopped. It shifted slightly as the driver swung down and opened the door.
“Your destination, sir.”
“Wait a moment, please,” Erryn said, pulling it shut again. “Sylvie, I’m not …” He met her eyes and looked away. After a breath he began again. “I’m not doing anything that really matters. Wars get settled on battlefields. Most of these men … they’re dreamers, Sylvie, they—”
“Stop the fancy talk, all right? Just bloody stop. I ain’t asking about them. I’m asking about you. Why are you helping them? Is it just the damn money?”
He made a small, defeated gesture. “Does it matter so very much?” he asked softly. “We all get on as best we can. I could work for ten years on the docks and not equal what I’ve made in two. We can get married, use my father’s money to set up a theatre—”
“Do you think I’d marry you now?” she said bitterly.
“I thought you loved me.”
“No. I loved a man who never existed. I don’t know who you are, Erryn Shaw. I don’t know what you are. Tell me, what else would you do to get on as best you can? Keep slaves? Run a cotton mill?”
“No, of course not—”
“Why not? The mill in Rochdale ran on Southern cotton. Somebody’s slaves worked themselves into the ground to grow it and we rotted our lungs to spin it and the planters and the mill owners got on as best they could! You helping them now, so’s they can keep everything after just the same as before, how’s that any different?”
Erryn Shaw could talk the stars right out of their moorings most days, but he had no answer for her now. He looked at her, and at the carriage door, and at his knees; on his face and in his manner was a tangle of emotions she had never seen in him before. For a moment she feared he would rail at her or put his fist through the wall, but instead, when he looked up, there was in his eyes an intense, astonishing tenderness.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“Do?”
“Now. Will you come in? The house is empty, but if you wished, we need do nothing more than have a cup of tea. I would be honoured.”
She almost said yes. In spite of everything, she almost said yes, for the sake of the warmth in his eyes, for the wish to run her hands across his dear bony face just one last time.
“No.”
“Have you had supper? We could go to Corey’s if you like.”
“I want to go back to the Den.”
It felt like the slowest journey she had ever taken, and the quickest. Twice Erryn made a feeble attempt at conversation and fell silent again when she did not answer him. She had feared so many endings to their friendship, but never this one—this melting away of the man’s identity into something she could not recognize and did not understand. She thought he would fail her in the predictable ways: he would grow bored, or choose another, more desirable woman. She never imagined that she would be the one to walk away.
After a time she watched only the street. It was late. All along Barrington the stores and warehouses and factories were dark, their stone and timber storefronts a long wall of silence. A few carriages passed them, a few men on foot. Now and again a fine, fancy house showed lighted windows. Finally, on her left, there was nothing at all, just the empty Grand Parade, where the soldiers drilled and their bands came to play on Sunday afternoon. The Den was just beyond, its bright-lit windows the only cheer it held.
She felt tears rising, and fought them. She would cry herself half to death, but not now, dear God, not now. She puttered with her gloves as the carriage pulled to a slow, gentle stop.
“Sylvie,” Erryn said quietly, “I know nothing I can say just now will make any difference, but I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you. I’m sorrier than I can possibly say.”
“I’m sure you are.” She was, she discovered, past anger, past everything except despair. “Thank you for the fruit. It was kind of you to send it.”
He smiled faintly. “It was my pleasure.” He paused, as if searching for words. “Sylvie, I …”
“Don’t,” she said. “There is nothing to say. I want to go in. Please.”
He nodded. “Friday, then? It’s still your half day?”
“I’m not walking out with you anymore, Erryn.”
“You’re not …? Sylvie, you can’t mean that!”
She said nothing. She rapped on the roof for the driver to open the door.
“Sylvie, please! Don’t just … don’t just walk away! I love you! I’ll find a way to make things right—”
“You can’t make it right. Everything you showed me of yourself was a lie—everything that matters—what you’re doing with your life, what you believe in, what
you care about. How can you possibly make it right?”
“I never lied about loving you. And the rest—the rest I only lied about so you wouldn’t hate me.”
She rose as the door opened, took the driver’s offered hand, and stepped down. Erryn followed, silent. He opened the big iron gate of the Den and walked with her to the servants’ entrance at the back. She paused with her hand on the door and turned.
“You were good company, Erryn Shaw, and I thank you for it—for all the good times you showed me, and your kindness. You made me happy, and I’ll never say different to no one.” One last deep breath, a tiny bit more courage … “Goodbye, then.”
“Good night, my heart. I’m not going to say goodbye.”
The door opened, closed. The hallway was dim. Voices came from the parlour above, from the kitchen below, the soft voices of late evening. She scurried into the cellar and stripped to her under-things. She fetched her dress from the laundry bin, flung Harry Dobbs’s trousers back in, clothed herself again, and shook down her hair. The masquerade was over.
All the masquerades were over …
I could have let it be. I could have told Aggie I didn’t believe her and just let it be.
She sat on a wooden bin and wrapped her arms around her knees. All around her, the cellar stank of coal, a harsh smell that stuck in the throat like dust. Coal dust killed men in the mines; cotton dust killed them in the mills. Or machinery did. Or something else. Nobody cared. We’re all cattle, her father said to her once, reeling on his wooden chair with his bottle in his hand. Just bloody God damn cattle. Something had broken that day in the mill, he said. There was a boy underneath when it broke, screaming for help, but the foreman refused to shut the machine down. It would waste too much time, starting it up again.
There were so many ways to grind people up, and they were all different—and they were all, in one way, alike. Someone who had the power to do things differently chose not to care.
How, then, could she forgive Erryn Shaw for not caring? For having so many gifts, so many advantages, for knowing everything he knew about the world, and then not caring? A good and decent Southerner might fight for his home and friends, regardless of the cause; a sheltered English lordling might be dumb enough to believe the cause was just. Either one she might have gone on loving. But Erryn was neither, and he knew what was at stake. He could not have lived the life he lived, and said the things he said, without knowing. And he did not care. The Rebels paid him well for his service, so he chose not to care.
There was the barrier she would never cross. To be mistaken was forgivable. But to simply smile and shrug it all aside, to expect it all to come out in the divine wash, ten years down the road it wouldn’t matter a fig … no, that was beyond forgiveness. That was a man without a soul.
That night, for the first time in months, she heard Sanders snoring in the room across the hall; she heard every late carriage that clattered down Barrington. Earlier, arguing with Aggie Breault, she had thought about practical things, facts and arguments and her own experiences. Now it was hard to think of anything except Erryn himself, the man who laughed and played music and lay with her, the man whose love she wanted almost as much as life itself. Whose love, perhaps, she might have had …
She cried softly for hours, so softly that little Annie MacKay never woke, huddled close though she was for warmth. Long after midnight, the sea wind came at last and whispered her to sleep.
The next day was all but intolerable. Never had the buckets she carried seemed so heavy, the chamber pots so rank, the disorder in the rooms so tiresome and so eternal. To be a chambermaid, she thought, was to be the worst sort of drudge. Even a scullion could see food at the end of her labours, good things to eat born of the endless scrubbing and peeling. All Sylvie could see was the guests coming back and soiling everything again. At one point, kneeling at the top of the stair, she wrung out her scrub rag and turned to look down. She wondered what it would feel like to toss it all, to watch the water splashing over the furniture and hear the pail going thumpety-thump down the staircase. She had had similar thoughts in the mill sometimes, pictured the great rattling monster crashing to a stop with wrenches and two-by-fours rammed into its guts.
People with nothing lived on hope. They lived for the small things that waited beyond the present—a child’s laughter, a gathering with friends, a ship to America. They survived the intolerable because there was something to survive it for. She imagined, just for a moment, year upon year spent scrubbing the Den, shut in almost as a prisoner, as even the mill girls were not—better off, oh yes, much better off, well fed and no cotton dust to breathe, likely to live to a hundred, scrubbing stairways, cleaning grates, remembering that once, for a small while, she had tasted love and would never taste it again. Each of her hopes, so few as they were, either met or annihilated, and nothing to replace them. She understood now, in a way she never had before, why Annie MacKay went through the days like a frightened mouse, why her own father surrendered to drink. To go on, you needed hope. What happened when you no longer had any?
The days bled one into the other. Aggie tried to talk to her, to cheer her; she listened politely and said nothing back. Outside, in the streets, everything was mud; inside, everything was damp and cold and the work was endless. When the first bit of grippe came on, she paid little attention. On a bleak Saturday morning a few days later, Aggie dragged her from the ice house, burning with fever and coughing as though she would die.
She was aware of very little that came after: mouthfuls of soup and bread; a man’s voice, harsh and tired, talking about her as though she were not there; someone crying out in the hallway, MacKay perhaps, nobody else had that soft, scared little whimper; Aggie Breault’s strong hands wiping her face, straightening the covers, lifting her when she needed to use the pot. All the time, when she was conscious enough to want anything at all, she wanted Erryn. But he never came.
CHAPTER 26
Separation
O what to her shall be the end? And what to me remains of good? To her, perpetual maidenhood, And unto me no second friend.
—Alfred Tennyson
MARCH WAS HALF GONE, but the nights still came early. Outside, for endless miles in all directions, there was only forest—snow to a man’s knees, and bare trees, and silence. Perhaps a few wolves. Inside the stagecoach depot, dim kerosene lamps barely held back the darkness, and the fire burned sputtery and pale. Erryn glanced once around the room and sighed. Weeks before, at a candlelit table in the Waverley Hotel, he had wished for a chance to spend some time with Maury Janes. He had proof now, if he ever needed it, that a man should be bloody damned careful what he wished for.
The depot called itself Miller’s Inn, but it had no chambers to let, or even beds. Most of it was a long wood-frame house belonging to a family presumably named Miller. At the front, for the use of the stage passengers, was a large, drafty room, rather like an ill-kept mess hall in a frontier fortress, its windows rattling in every gust of wind. The room had a fireplace, a table where the passengers could eat, and some pallets they could spread out on the floor. Millers of both sexes and various ages appeared from time to time through a back door, to sell drinks and eventually supper. They were always friendly and polite. It was, Erryn thought, the only good thing to be said about the place.
He picked at his supper. The food was stale, and in any case he had no interest in it; his mind and his heart were elsewhere.
Across from him, Maury Janes lifted a last forkful of stew halfway to his mouth and glared at it. “What d’you figure they made this out of, anyway? Skunk?”
“No,” Erryn said. “Skunk is meat. If there ever was any meat in that pot, it jumped out and ran home at least a week ago.”
“Ha.” Janes put the offending mess in his mouth, wiped off his plate with a piece of bread, and gobbled it down too. The man could eat anything. He could sleep anywhere. He was one of the few Southerners Erryn had ever met who seemed indifferent to northern cold. If h
e had any weaknesses at all, Erryn had yet to discover them. Even his tendency to talk too much proved harmless, for he never talked about his work. He talked about his boyhood. He talked about the things he disliked in the world, and how to fix them. But more than anything, Janes talked about women, including the young Miller who came to fetch away the plates when their meal was ended.
“Made just like a willow, ain’t she?” he remarked. He watched her brazenly until she disappeared through the door. “Damned if she don’t remind me of that chambermaid we got back at the boarding house in Halifax. She’d be a real tasty morsel too, except she’s got the most godawful scars down one side of her face. Top to bottom, like this.” He ran his fingers over his cheek as he spoke. “I seen sailors cut up like that, but never a girl. She must’ve got herself in one hell of a cat fight.”
Erryn took a long sip of brandy and put the glass carefully down. The man would dare, by God? She tended his fire and packed away his filth, and he would make sport of her? He of all the maggots in the world?
Erryn would not say it; he must not. But neither could he let the matter be.
“I always thought the Danners ran a respectable place,” he said with all the amiability he could manage.
“Oh, I’m sure they do. I’ve never had a thing to say against the Danners.”
“But you can’t possibly keep a respectable place without respectable servants. I’d rather think the poor lass must have been in some kind of accident, wouldn’t you?”
Janes stared at him for a moment as if puzzled, and then he shrugged. “Might be,” he said. “I don’t see as how it makes any difference.” He glanced briefly down the table, where one of the other passengers had taken out a deck of cards. “You’re an odd fellow, Shaw. I keep trying to figure you, and I can’t.”
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