Erryn did not like the sound of this at all, but Janes went on, “Sometimes you seem like an ordinary fellow—a lot like me, actually, down to earth and all, with your head on straight. And then, for no damn reason I can see, you turn all …” He made a wide gesture in the air. “I don’t know, all full of … notions. All proper, like the sort what think truffle ain’t truffle if you don’t eat it with the right spoon.”
“Surely not that bad,” Erryn said. He managed a watery smile.
“No. Not quite that bad. Orton tells me you come from a real fine family in England, and went to college and all. That true?”
“It’s true.”
“And then you ran the theatre in Halifax, till it burned down?”
“That’s right.”
“Why’d you want to do a thing like that?”
A talent for the theatre, and all it might imply, was the last thing in the world Erryn wanted to discuss with a Rebel agent.
“Well,” he said, “do you know a better way to meet pretty actresses?”
“Can’t say as I do.” Janes laughed a bit and leaned back in his chair—satisfied, apparently, at least for the moment. An appetite for women was something he understood.
After more than a fortnight travelling with the man, Erryn could still not decide if Janes was the most skilful professional operative he had ever met, or simply an adventurer who had spent his whole life playing for the main chance and was now extremely good at it. What Erryn did believe by this point was that Janes had about him nothing of the actor. Everything he seemed to be, he was—coarse, ambitious, highly intelligent, cold. A man who would talk cheerfully to anyone who crossed his path and afterwards, never mention them again. A man who scarcely seemed to live in his body, who never cared what he ate or where he slept or how long the road was. A man who resented bitterly his lack of social place, not because of the pleasures and opportunities he had lost, but because others were able to look down on him. And therefore, more than anything else, a man who meant to rise in the world, so he might look down on others in his turn. This he showed without pretence, as he showed his frank approval of slavery. Cream just naturally rose to the top, he said. The folks who were running things were mostly the ones who knew how, who were best at it. And sure, once in a while some worthless scalawag made it in. Hell, just look at Abe Lincoln. But Lincoln would never have made it on his own; he found himself a pack of riff-raff to hold him up, folks who thought they could climb by tearing other people down.
Mile by mile, Janes had explained America to Erryn, two days back when they had the coach to themselves for a time. He explained the North and the South, freedom, slavery, all of it. Abolition was not about freedom, he said; abolition was about tearing other people down.
“Getting freedom’s like … like getting young ones: when the critter’s growed up enough, it simply does it. Like those countries in Europe, kicking out the Turks and the Russians one by one. They had to be ready first. Now some folks figure the niggers will be ready for freedom someday, couple of hundred years maybe, but I don’t think so. I think they’ll always be slaves.”
“Always?” Erryn said. “That’s pretty grim.”
“Not really. You like books and such things, don’t you? And the opera? Well, the way I see it, you can’t have those things less’n you have a class of men with nothing else to do. Your friend Shakespeare didn’t write his plays grubbing in a cottonfield, now, did he?”
“Indeed not.”
“So look at history, Shaw. Where did all the great cultures come from, all those famous writers and philosophers? They came from slave states—Greece, Rome, the aristocracies of Europe. The Europeans called them serfs, and couldn’t sell them, but they were slaves just the same. The world is like … it’s like those old cathedrals, you might say. You can’t build yourself a cathedral without putting a lot of stone face down in the mud. There’ll be high and low in the world, or there’ll be nothing but low. Nothing but savagery and stupidity.”
Erryn had heard this argument before, of course: slavery made possible a cultured elite, from whose ranks would come the finest thinkers and artists, just as in the past. But those who argued it never told him which idle slave owner painted the Sistine Chapel, or wrote the Unfinished Symphony, or observed how the earth moved around the sun. They never explained why Mozart was dead at thirty-one, thrown in a common grave and covered over with lime.
Nor did anyone ever explain why so little art was coming from the slaveholding South. The region certainly did not lack for brilliance. For decades it had provided the nation with talented statesmen, lawyers, and military leaders. Its people designed magnificent homes and public buildings, and made food to tempt most any Englishman into never going home again. But where was the literature, the painting, the music? Why did their brilliance and creativity stop so sharply, so abruptly, at the boundary of the imaginative arts?
Was it perhaps because those arts were imaginative, because the imagination never abided walls? It wanted to experience everything, to answer the whys and hows and what-ifs of all eternity. Why did this happen? What does it mean? What would it feel like?
What would it feel like to be a slave?
The Great Wall of Dixie, right there in a single question, solid stone and a hundred feet high. Picture it, he thought: the blossoming artist and the question. Maybe a friend throws it at him, or the rain at midnight, or the sound of someone crying, but the question is there and his imagination must answer it. What is it like to be a slave? To own nothing, not even the rough shack you sleep in or the shapeless clothes on your back? To be sure of nothing, not your food or your safety or your dearest affections? What is it like to be flogged for a trifle and never call it cruelty, to be used as a whore and never call it rape? What is it like to hoe and scrub and mend and carry, hour upon hour, day upon day, nothing else, no books, no symphonies, no theatre, just work, till your eyes are ruined from the sun or your joints from the cold, till your back cannot straighten and your hands fumble when they pick up a piece of bread? To know there is no end to it, and no escape, not for you, not for your children, ever?
To imagine these things, and then to give them form—to paint them or write them or set them to music—would tear the institution of slavery apart. To imagine these things and not to give them form would tear the artist apart.
For the young Southerners were not Greeks or Romans, or even children of the Renaissance. They did not have the world view of the medieval Church, which made it Christlike to be downtrodden and oppressed. They did not have the paradigms of pagan Fortuna, reminding them how a lord might become a slave, or a slave a free man, in the turning of a single battle. Aeschylus could weep for Hecuba in chains; she might easily have been himself.
Now the world was different, no longer a world of virtuous suffering or arbitrary fortune, but one where men governed themselves under the authority of a just God in heaven, where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were inscribed as inalienable rights. In such a world slavery was unthinkable, unless the slaves were slaves by nature—no tragic queens, no conquered children of Israel, no possible other self, no there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I, but rather someone, or indeed almost something, utterly different from oneself.
At which point, of course, one could stop wondering what it might be like to be a slave, since for oneself the question had become meaningless. Unfortunately, for a youthful searching mind, a whole other set of questions came into play. If the slaves are base and alien, what makes them so? If it is merely the fact of slavery itself, then how can we possibly condone it? If it is race, then what is the difference between a free black and a slave, except an arbitrary piece of paper? How is it that free blacks can prosper, and even acquire slaves of their own? If it is race, what happens when you mix them? What does it mean when we cannot even tell? And if they are so different from ourselves, why do we trust them with our children and our sick? Why do we lay down with them?
No, Erryn thought, the contrad
ictions of democratic slavery simply ran too deep, were too unmanageable. He ached to his bones to point this out to Maury Janes, sitting in the stagecoach mile by mile, listening to the man blather on. Instead, he merely smiled and pretended to be impressed.
Now he had to do the same wearisome thing at Miller’s Inn. Mercifully, the other passengers were gathering for a card game and noticed Janes eyeing them hopefully.
“Care to join us, gentlemen?”
“That’s real obliging of you,” Janes said, getting to his feet. “How about you, Shaw?”
“Thanks, but no. Not tonight.”
The one luxury in the depot was a large hearth. Erryn pulled a chair up close to it and fetched a book from his portmanteau. After ten minutes or so he put it back, just as he had the night before and the night before that. He wished he had brought his flute, even though he knew why he had left it behind: he was too desolate to play it without weeping. For a time, indifferently, he watched his fellows at the table. The logic of poker interested him well enough; the spirit of gambling did not. He understood playing to win—playing anything to win—but wagering money seemed completely beside the point. All of his peers did it, of course. It was a badge of aristocratic manliness, like downing absurd amounts of spirits and fighting over trifles. Risk lay at the heart of it, he supposed; risk practised as a way of life, as a pretended readiness for war.
And he himself, now, so wise and so worldly—was he any less a gambler, or any less a fool?
You’ve lost her, Erryn Shaw. You wagered something far more precious than money. You wagered the only woman who ever loved you, and you lost.
In every moment of quiet he found himself thinking about all that he had lost. He turned his memories of her over in his mind as he might have turned the pages of a book, lingering now on this one, now on another. The way she laughed sometimes, so precious, at small, unexpected things. The way she kissed him in the rain. The way she sat by the Irish Stone and talked about the mills, and the dream of a New World that died on the Osprey. But two memories, more than all the others, haunted him: a steamer cabin in the dead of an October night, the ice of death already in his blood, and Sylvie wrapped soft against him, sheltering him in her warmth and in her voice. I’m here, Erryn, I won’t leave you. That night she gave him back his life. And in Gideon Winslow’s house she gave him meaning for his life, a centre it never had before. Every moment of their mating was alive in his mind—her long hair lying spilled on the quilt, shimmering in the firelight; her thin body in its plain woollen dress, smooth as a gazelle’s, discovered one whisper at a time, one tiny button. She had been so uncertain, lying with him, and yet so eager. He had been utterly undone by her eagerness, and by her eyes after, when she gazed at him and stroked him softly, all over, as if he were the finest and most precious thing she had ever touched.
Now she was gone.
At first he had refused to believe it. They had quarrelled, yes. She was angry at him, and said she would not see him anymore, but people said such things in anger all the time. He sent a letter to her at the Den, as tender and apologetic a letter as he knew how to write. The following Friday he waited for her outside, thinking to walk with her to Madame Mallette’s house. Maybe she would still be angry. Maybe she would refuse to go to dinner with him, or anywhere else. But they would talk; they would take the first cautious steps back to friendship.
She wanted nothing to do with him. She walked like a pillar, rigid and silent. When he fell in step beside her and tried to speak, she wheeled and faced him. “You are cruel, Erryn. There is nothing to talk about. For God’s sake let me be!” And so, reluctantly, he did. He told himself the very ferocity of her rejection was proof she loved him deeply, but there was no comfort in the thought, rather the reverse; rather a reminder of how much he had wagered and lost.
I should have told her the truth.
Always he came back to the same conclusion: he should have told her he was working for the Crown. But every argument of common sense and policy stood against it. Secret operations were by definition secret; therein lay their whole reason for existing. Matt had been adamant when on one occasion Erryn had suggested confiding in a mutual friend, a strong Union backer who was bitterly disappointed in him. No, Matt had told him. Don’t tell anyone. Absolutely not. Never.
People let things slip, Matt said. Of course, they didn’t mean to, it just happened; often it was some little thing they didn’t even notice. But whatever they let slip, it was sure to be passed on. Secrets were like water: once they were out of the jar, there was no telling where they would run, so the only thing to do was keep the damn jar shut. Besides, he added, if the staunch Unionists in town were disappointed in Erryn Shaw, all the better for his image as a good Grey Tory.
Erryn might have told her anyway, despite Matt’s warning. But his brush with death had shaken him—and reminded him, insofar as he needed reminding, that neutral soil was no protection for a spy. Whatever niceties were observed by day, in the shadows enemies were merely enemies; murder cared not a fig for citizenship. He did not want to end in a waterfront alley with a bullet in his back.
He also did not want to fail in the work he had taken on. That was part of it too, that old hard kernel of duty drilled into him from boyhood. He wore no uniform and carried no sword, but the piece of paper hidden in his shoe was still a commission. It bound him to serve as faithfully as any of the warriors he once hung on his bedroom wall.
So he kept his secrets, and lied to Sylvie Bowen, and watched her stalk away, ignoring the small voice inside him that wailed, No! Come back! It isn’t like that! Then Al MacNab sought him out, all unexpectedly: “Listen, lad, we’ve got a wee problem come up in Woodstock. Janes said he can handle it, but we need a man to go with him, and right now there’s no one else. Any chance you could help us out?” Erryn nodded, the same voice protesting bitterly, Now? It’s not possible. I can’t go anywhere NOW! I need to win her back!
But he went. And sat tonight in a makeshift inn on a dreary road in the midst of godforsaken nowhere, terrified that she would be lost forever when he got back.
One by one the passengers lifted pallets from the pile and laid them out near the hearth, curling up in their coats or in the scruffy blankets offered by the station keeper. Erryn lay awake for a long time, listening to the quiet sounds of the house, to Maury Janes’s peaceful snoring. Deliberately, to keep his mind off his own misery, he went over recent events, and all that he knew and did not know about his companion. When they first met in Montreal, the Carolinian had said he needed someone to do a job for him, a delivery across the border. He never hinted as to what would be delivered or where it was coming from, except that it would come by ship. Later, at the Waverley, he assured Erryn that Al MacNab had taken care of everything. He 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.
That was weeks ago, and nothing had happened since. Once, Janes had grumbled bitterly but vaguely about delays, about God damned foreigners who could not be depended on (present company excepted, of course). Clearly, the mission had encountered some sort of snag. Janes was entirely willing to go to Woodstock, though the trip would take a fortnight even in good weather. And he should not go alone, MacNab insisted to Erryn. No one should—not with some twenty thousand dollars in captured army payroll waiting to be carried back.
“Some irregulars took it off the Yankees in Kentucky,” MacNab told him. “Canada was a whole lot closer than the Southern coast, so they sent three men to take it through to Halifax. They came all this way, it seems, and then one of them turned on his mates.”
“For the money?” Erryn asked.
“Probably. It’s not entirely clear. What is clear is that there’s only one left, and he’ll not be travelling any time soon.”
That was an understatement, Erryn thought, remembering the young Rebel they found in Woodstock, thin as a stick and pale as the sheets he lay on. He had walked some fifteen or twenty miles in th
e dead of winter, wounded. They’d had a sled, he explained, but the horse got spooked in the fight and ran away. So he walked all that long way. The doctor had to cut his foot off, and three of his right fingers. But he had the money. He looked eaten up with pain and fever, but very proud: he had kept every dollar safe. He was, Erryn thought, not a day past seventeen.
“You’ll get it out, won’t you?” he had pleaded. “They need it so bad.”
The money was in a carpet bag now, sitting innocently on the floor by the shoulder of Maury Janes. No doubt Janes would get it out; Erryn saw no way to prevent it, short of betraying himself or murdering the miserable sod.
Then again, if the gods were kind, Janes might decide to steal it. The Rebel agent coveted an independent fortune. Maybe he would take this one, buy himself a fancy house, and set himself up as the gentleman he longed to be. And Erryn Shaw would not have to worry about him anymore.
Right, he told himself. And maybe pigs will fly.
CHAPTER 27
The Return
Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead, Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
HALIFAX LAY draped in fog. The stage from Windsor, due in the mid-afternoon, did not arrive until after supper—late enough that chores at the Den might be over, and early enough that a visitor might still call. Erryn knew it was foolish simply to go there unannounced, but knowing made no difference; he had to try. He had been away for weeks. Maybe she was not angry anymore. Maybe she had missed him enough to want to see him in spite of everything. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Mrs. Breault greeted him at the door. When he had called at the Den back in February, to bring a fruit basket for Sylvie when he thought she was ill, the housemaid had been polite but not particularly friendly. She was even less friendly now. She opened the door only a small bit and gave no sign that she might invite him in.
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