“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “But sometimes, in a war, innocent people get caught in the middle. No one meant for your aunt to be hurt.”
“So people tell me. But were it someone you loved, dying like that, m’appen you’d be a time forgetting too.”
She went on with her work, quietly, methodically. If one thing useful ever came from her father’s drunken rages, she thought, it was this: she could move around a man as though he were not even there. Dust, sweep, carry; empty the basin, straighten the bed. Notice nothing, least of all his attention.
“But if you had your druthers,” Janes persisted, “you’d want the Yankees to beat us down, ain’t that true?”
She gave the bedcover a wicked two-hand tug. “If I had my druthers, Mr. Janes, I’d have a nice easy job and a room with a fire and a mess of books. That’d be my druthers.”
“Maybe so,” he said, “but it ain’t what I asked you.”
“I can’t answer what you asked me. Back in England, when I worked in the mill, a lot of my friends kept saying the North were right, and I thought m’appen it were true. Now I come here and a lot of people be saying the opposite. What’s a poor soul to make of it, then, between scrubbing stairs and fixing beds and staying out of Miss Susan’s hair? I ain’t like Dobbsy, sir. I don’t know everything yet.”
He laughed then, just a little. “You’re a plucky little snippet, ain’t you? I reckon that’s what Shaw likes about you.”
She straightened sharply, turning to him with what she hoped would seem to be the right sort of silly, girlish surprise. “You’re acquainted with Mr. Shaw?”
“Yeah.”
His gaze went over her, top to bottom, returning to her face, evaluating everything, not even troubling to hide the fact. Plucky, my ass. You’re a she-cat in bed, I expect, and not bad to look at from the neck down. That’s what he likes, same as any man would … She dropped her eyes and turned away.
“Mr. Shaw and I are good friends,” he went on. There was a warning in his words, but it was not, she thought, particularly political. It was a man’s warning to a whore to remember her place.
She knew he was not altogether reassured, neither as to her real opinions nor as to her possible influence on Erryn Shaw. He was undoubtedly a smart man, and the relentless bareness of his room suggested that he was a cautious one—extraordinarily cautious, in fact, leaving nothing to chance, assuming nothing was safe. Even a tiny misstep would make him suspect her, and perhaps Erryn as well.
Yet now, she thought, she dared not let him be. He was one of Erryn’s targets; he had to be. Erryn would never be friends with such a man. He would not touch the sorry bugger with a pole unless there was a reason for it. Each time she cleaned his room, she searched it. He was human like everybody else. Maybe once he would leave something. Maybe just once.
But he never did.
June was almost gone. In the States, three huge battles had been fought, battles everyone talked about, their names as common as the days of the week. The Wilderness. Spotsylvania. Cold Harbor. Bloody slaughters, all of them, and nothing had been decided. Now the armies were dug in at Petersburg, and the Confederates and their friends began to speak again of victory. The Union campaign was a total failure, they said; General Grant had achieved nothing except a stalemate, and this at an appalling cost. The Northern population would never tolerate such losses. Elections were coming in November and Lincoln would be turfed out. An independent Confederacy was only months away.
So it surprised Sylvie, passing Aggie Breault in the hallway one quiet, rainy morning and seeing a smile on her face. Aggie paused, glanced around, and said, very softly: “Have you heard? We sunk the Alabama. It’s all they’re talking about in the parlour. I guess it was in the morning papers.”
“What?” Sylvie whispered.
“Yes. Just outside of Cherbourg harbour. Seems she went in for repairs and couldn’t get out again before a Union warship caught her there. Semmes was stuck. He could come out in the open and fight, or he could hunker down and hide till the war was over. He came out, and he got beat.”
“They sunk her?”
“Lock, stock, and barrel. And we didn’t lose a man. We had some wounded, but no one killed.”
It seemed impossible to Sylvie, recalling that lean grey shark of a ship, set low in the water and bristling with guns.
“And do you want to know something else?” Aggie went on. “Our ship had some chains draped around her hull, covered up with planks. And now Semmes is whining to all and sundry that the fight wasn’t fair. He says Captain Winslow should have told him about the armour.”
“Told him?”
“Yeah. Told him. You know: Hello there, Captain Semmes. We know you’ve sunk a couple of hundred of our merchantmen and whalers and poor little fishing boats, none of them armed with anything bigger than the captain’s pistol and a skinning knife for the cook. But one mustn’t be unfair, so before you come out to fight us, we have to tell you … Do you believe it, Sylvie? Do you bloody believe it?”
She believed it. Back in Rochdale, every time the workers wanted something, however little, the mill owners howled that they were being ruined, that the very bread was being snatched from their babies’ mouths. For men who went through life with every advantage, “fair” was merely more of the same.
“Did they get the bugger?”
“Captain Semmes? No, he got rescued. He’s safe in France. But I reckon he’s out of the war. Nobody’ll be crazy enough to give him another raider.”
“Well, that’s something. Thanks for telling me, Aggie. It’s the best news I’ve had in a while.”
“Dobbs is out running errands. I told him to buy me a couple of papers. I’ll leave them on your bed when I’m done.”
“Thanks.”
For the first time in months they both truly, full-heartedly smiled.
The papers were there as Aggie promised when Sylvie went up after evening chores were done. She considered taking them down to the kitchen, where the light would be better, and then decided no, she wanted to read them undisturbed by other people’s conversations, or by Harry Dobbs’s silly Rebel nattering. She settled on the bed as close to the little lamp as she could, leaving the door open in case she might be wanted.
It was, she thought, a small bit of justice at last. In New Brunswick, the Chesapeake pirates had walked laughing from the courtroom. Here, George Wade had made it clean away. Jamie Orton went up against the Supreme Court for helping him to do it, and did not get so much as a rap on his well-bred knuckles. But the Alabama, at least, was at the bottom of the sea.
She was pleased when she heard Aggie’s heavy steps on the stair. Perhaps they would talk; perhaps they would begin to be friends again. But Aggie did not come to the attic. She turned down the hallway on the boarders’ floor and rapped smartly on one of the nearer doors.
Sylvie recognized at once the voice that answered. “Yes, what is it?”
“There is a messenger here for you, Mr. Janes. I offered to bring the letter up, but he said he was to place it personally in your hands.”
“I’ll be right down. Thank you.”
“Very good, sir.”
Sylvie blew out her lamp and slipped onto the landing, watching as Aggie wearily returned downstairs, as Maury Janes emerged from his room, carefully locked it, and rushed after her. Whatever his message was, she thought, he wanted it very badly.
Never had it seemed so difficult to creep down a stairwell, so clumsily time-consuming to turn a key. Thankfully, the light was on inside. Janes too had a Chronicle, but he had not been reading the news of the day. It lay flung open on the shipping news. She searched the columns desperately, but nothing had been marked. She lifted it aside. Beneath it was a piece of notepaper. It had been folded many times, as though he normally kept it tucked away, perhaps in his pocket. She copied it frantically and laid it back as she found it, knowing she dared not look for more. She replaced the newspaper and slipped to the door. There was no
sound in the hallway. She opened the door a crack, saw no one, stepped out, and sped to her room like a ghost. She had not yet stopped trembling when she heard Maury Janes return.
After a while she lit her lamp again and reread what she had found: merely three names and three addresses, each of them in a different Northern city. Nothing more. No hint as to who these men were or why they mattered to Maury Janes.
But matter they did, she was sure of it, and even surer after she passed it on to Erryn. She did not tell him how she had come by it, only that Janes had left his room and forgotten it.
He took it carefully. He was a good actor, but she was coming to know him rather well. He was, she thought, both pleased and appalled.
“Sylvie, you didn’t … he wasn’t still in the building, was he?”
“Yes. But he were busy.”
“Oh, God … Sylvie … Sylvie, please, please don’t do anything like that again! Not with any of them, and most especially not with him!”
CHAPTER 31
Setting the Snare
One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
—Henry Adams
EVERY TIME Matt saw Jabin Romney, he looked older and more tired. Today was no exception. His last shave had obviously been days ago; his last haircut, sometime before Christmas. His voice, as always, was quiet and bland, as if everything he said was of equal and minor importance.
“You’re in search of a—what the deuce do you call them here? Oh, yeah, footpads—it’s a better word than ‘ruffians,’ isn’t it? You’re looking for a footpad, are you?”
Matt smiled faintly. He was both amused and impressed by Romney’s recollection of a conversation they shared more than a year ago.
“Yes,” he said. “And I thought, given your line of work here, it must be a simple matter for you to send messages back and forth to the States? In some sort of code, I mean? And that your superiors there could … ah … find something out for you if you asked them?”
Romney’s sagging, world-weary manner did not change so much as a whisper. “I’ve done that from time to time,” he said.
Matt passed him a paper on which he had written the names and addresses found in Maury Janes’s room. “I’d like to know who these men are and what they do. Criminal records if they have them—or the opposite. Rank, money, positions of power, whatever. Anything you can find out. But quietly, of course. Very, very quietly.”
Romney read the paper. “These folks appear to be Americans, constable.”
“Yes, that’s the problem. Do you think you could help?”
A great black crow flew into a nearby tree and screamed at them. Romney watched it for a time.
“Why do you want to know anything about a man in Philadelphia?” he asked. “Or Baltimore? Places like that? They’re a long ways from Halifax.”
“We think they might be planning a crime here, but we don’t know what it is. They have a … an accomplice in the city. Of course, we could send a man down ourselves, but it would take time, and as you can see, they’re in three different cities. And we might be running out of time.”
“So just arrest him. Your accomplice.”
“And charge him with what?”
Romney scuffed grass.
“It ain’t much I’m asking, Mr. Romney.”
“That depends on who those men are, don’t it, and why you really want to know. And don’t take offence at that, constable. I consider you an honest man, down to the bones. It’s your government I have doubts about.”
“Our governments have doubts about each other,” Matt said amiably. “Why should I take offence? However, since I’m an honest man, I’m willing to pay for what I get.”
“And how would you do that?”
“There appears to be a certain commissioned officer in Her Majesty’s Navy who was given indefinite leave, took himself a made-up name, and is now serving as the captain of a blockade-runner. And this blockade-runner just happens to be owned by the company whose major partner is the admiral who gave him his leave in the first place.”
“I see,” Romney murmured. This interested him, and he allowed it to show. “My government will find this most useful information.”
They would indeed, Matt thought. They would take it straight to the British ambassador in Washington, and Lord Lyons, properly outraged, would send it to London, and London would make all manner of apologetic noises and insist they hadn’t known a thing about it but they would put a stop to it immediately … It was a real pleasure, once in a while, to get two birds with a single stone.
“I could certainly take this as proof of your good intentions,” Jabin Romney went on. “On the other hand, you might want to do this bugger in on your own account. Old enmities, perhaps? Or a simple respect for your country’s laws? You do see my point, constable?”
There was a reason this hangdog, unshaven, said-to-be former bank clerk was still the Americans’ resident agent in the toughest post in British North America. He was just plain good.
“I do see your point. I trust you see mine.”
For a tiny moment Matt considered telling Romney the entire truth—that it was not a criminal conspiracy he feared, but a political one; that the matter deeply concerned the Americans themselves. From where he was standing, it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But Erryn was the man on the spot, and Erryn said no. Absolutely no. One wrong move, he said, and Janes would spook and run. Matt quietly laid the temptation aside and went on, “I need help. I’m offering fair payment, but I can’t offer more than I have.”
“Frankly, you’re offering way too much, and that makes me damnably curious. Tell you what, constable. Give me the names of your naval men and I’ll ask all the questions you want, and I’ll give you what answers I can. But I warn you, I’ll keep back anything I figure is none of an Englishman’s business. And if you don’t mind too much, I’d like the names now.”
“Will you give me your word?”
“I’ll do my best, and I’ll play you fair. On that you have my word.”
Matt sighed. It was less than he wanted. It was as much as he would have offered in Romney’s place. He held out his hand.
“Then we have a deal, Mr. Romney.”
Romney was not merely competent; he obviously had good connections as well. In less than three days Erryn was summoned back to the waterfront warehouse where he and Matt had met before. There, after the briefest of greetings, Matt handed him a small piece of paper, neatly printed by hand.
“From Romney,” he said.
Erryn read, with growing disappointment: Hans Ludwig Schultz. Age fifty-two years. Married to Maria Schneider of Evansburg in 1825. Seven adult children. Owner of second-hand store at 732 Field Avenue, Philadelphia. Lutheran. Attends church regularly. Member of the Oddfellows Club for twenty-three years. No police record or known criminal contacts. No known political affiliation. Has never held elected or appointed office of any kind. Net worth about three thousand dollars.
The others were of a similar sort. Raymond Hill, thirty-one, unmarried, auctioneer, no religion, no police record, no connections of importance, net worth about two hundred dollars. Zebediah Turner, forty-three, married, haberdasher and dry goods merchant, Episcopalian, no police record, one term as city alderman, net worth about five thousand dollars …
Erryn looked at Matt, who said nothing. “These are Janes’s contacts?” Erryn demanded.
“Apparently.”
“God bleeding almighty. Two small merchants and a bloody auctioneer? All completely respectable, with no political affiliations—”
“What did you expect? Fire-eating Copperheads? Sworn members of the Sons of Liberty?”
Erryn waved an arm at nothing in particular and then sagged in his chair, defeated. “I don’t know. I suppose I did.”
He had not, actually. But he had expected … something. Something that would leap off the page, that would have immediate, recogniz
able implications. Something that mattered.
“This is useless,” he went on, laying the paper aside. “Those men don’t have a thing in common, except for being males and living in the States.”
“They have one thing,” Matt said quietly. “They sell stuff.”
“Why, thanks, mate. I hadn’t noticed.”
“Don’t be an ass, Erryn. Think about it.”
“Sorry,” Erryn said. “I didn’t mean to jump on you. But what’s to think about? Millions of people sell stuff.”
“No, think about it. Two stores and an auction mart. What better place could you want to hide something, or to stash it away until it’s needed? Merchandise comes and goes, people come and go, nobody pays attention.”
“So they’re just another set of middlemen?”
“That would be my guess.”
“Well then, like I said, it’s useless. We’ve added a link, that’s all. The chain still doesn’t lead anywhere. We don’t know what Janes is planning. We don’t know what he’s delivering, or when, or what it’s going to be used for. We don’t know anything that matters.” He linked his hands and stared at them. “Worst of it is, Matt, I think we’re running out of time.”
“Has he said anything?”
“No. But he’s been … different … the last while. Edgy. Ever since the night that message came. If I had to wager, Matt, I’d say his shipment is coming soon.”
“Well then, I think it’s time for you and I to have a talk with the old man.” He made as if to go, and turned back with a small, tired smile. “We’ll get one thing out of this, mate. We’ll get Captain William Ross on a ship back to England.”
Colonel Hawkins stepped into the warehouse out of midnight fog, quiet as a ghost despite his solid two hundred pounds. He nodded to Matt Calverley, taking off the shabby slouch hat that hid most of his face, and turned to Erryn.
The Halifax Connection Page 42