The Halifax Connection (12 page)

It be a very long time now since I believed in luck …

Fran’s words, she thought, would stay with her forever. They would sit quietly in all the corners of her life, as they sat now in the shadows of her cabin, the cabin Captain Foxe had booked for her when she left Nassau, and paid for with his own money. Some people would call it luck, no doubt, this fine lodging on a fine, fast vessel. Luck also, the envelope he pressed into her hand before he said goodbye, in which, when she opened it, she found twenty-five pounds. She was grateful. Life was too hard for her ever to be ungrateful. But it was not luck. It was simply something that happened, like she and Fran finding the
Osprey
, and the
Alabama
finding them.

Everything the captain told them had proved to be correct; they were treated as civilians according to the normal usages of war. Sylvie had feared all sorts of violence, not least a battle on the high seas, the
Alabama
going down and all her captives with her. She had never feared Nassau; she all but wept with thankfulness when they docked. She had not thought to fear the yellow fever, or the
long line of quarantine cabins she could only stare at through a fence, or the windswept hillside where they took the dead …

It was impossible to sleep. More than anything, just now, she wished she had something of Fran’s—anything, a scarf, a comb, or best of all the little book of Mrs. Browning’s sonnets Sylvie bought for her years before. It was the one fine gift she had ever been able to buy, and she could afford it only because the spine of the book was wrecked and the pages stained with wine. The damage mattered to neither of them. Only the words mattered, and the words were astonishing, divine. Many a night in Rochdale they would sit and read together, awed by the beauty of the poetry, awed also by the poet’s story. Elizabeth Barrett had been almost as old as Fran when she encountered Robert Browning. She had not been poor, admittedly, but she had been frail, living a constrained and lonely life with very little future. Love, for her, changed everything.

For Fran it changed half a dozen days.

Steps approached Sylvie’s door, passed by quietly, faded into silence. Of course they would pass by: it was the middle of the night. Nonetheless they reminded her that she knew no one on this vessel, and no one in Halifax; she was altogether alone in the world. She bit her lip, bending to rest her chin on her knees. She could have gone with Captain Foxe to Baltimore. He had offered to take her, to introduce her to friends who might help her find a place. She could even have stayed in Nassau—God knew there was work enough. Only they had shared a dream, she and Fran. They had believed in it so desperately, and worked for it so long. Nothing seemed right except to go on. Tomorrow she would step out onto the pier at Halifax, find Miss Susan’s inn, and begin her life again.

That was all she could do. Just go on.

T
HEY CALLED THE PLACE
Little Richmond, and Erryn Shaw could certainly understand why. St. Lawrence Hall took up most of a city block on St. James Street, and day after day its parlours and smoking rooms were filled with the mellow, drawling voices of American Southerners. Its dinner menu offered such marvels as lobster crepes, gumbo filé, and Georgia-style country ham. Its beautiful mahogany-panelled barroom was the only watering hole in the entire length and breadth of British North America where a man could buy himself a mint julep.

Why a man would ever
want
to buy a mint julep, well, that was an altogether different question. To drink bourbon mixed with stomach herbs and sugar, when the world was full of delicate wines, divine Madeira, and even better port?
Sweet God in heaven
, Erryn reflected silently,
only in America.

He smiled across the table at his companion, Jackson Follett. Follett was a slender, very personable man in his thirties, a wealthy planter and former member of the South Carolina State Assembly. He was also, since early in the year, the Confederacy’s senior operative in Montreal.

“Your health, Jack,” Erryn said.

“And yours.” Follett raised his glass, returning the salute, then paused with the glass held close to his face, savouring the bouquet of fresh crushed mint. “They
do
do it well here,” he sighed.

“Almost as well as the best Charleston butler, I suppose,” Erryn replied with a smile.

“Almost.”

It was three in the afternoon, but the bar of St. Lawrence Hall was full, as most always. There were, by Erryn’s estimate, at least two thousand Southerners in the city of Montreal—political exiles, refugees, escaped prisoners, and agents of the Confederate government. They found lodgings where they could—among sympathetic citizens, in boarding houses, in hotels. The poor and the frugal stayed at the scruffy Donegana, down on Notre-Dame; those who could afford it stayed here. Jackson Follett had a fine, balconied room on the first floor.

“Do you remember the last time you came?” Follett murmured. “It was like a wake.”

“Christ, yes,” Erryn said. “Worse than a wake.” August, it had been; early August, and the expatriate community was reeling with bewildered shock. For several months the war had gone impressively in favour of the Confederates. In December they defeated the Union’s eastern army at Fredericksburg; in the spring they all but destroyed it at Chancellorsville. Even in the States, Erryn suspected, a majority of Southerners believed the war was almost won. In Canada, they were sure of it. Buffered by distance, fed a steady diet of optimistic exaggerations by pro-Southern newspapers, distrustful of anything pro-Yankee, even a fact, they allowed themselves to be confident to the point of making plans for going home.

Then the news came, stark headlines they could scarcely bring themselves to believe. Vicksburg, their strategic fortress on the Mississippi, had surrendered. The great continental river was gone up, and the whole Confederacy was cut in two. Then, before all of this could be properly absorbed, came the slow-breaking story out of Pennsylvania: General Lee’s bold invasion running into trouble, a costly battle outside a small country town, a withdrawal. Not a defeat, dear God, no; even as they sat and stared at their comrades, or at their knotted hands, they would not call it a defeat. Nonetheless, the invasion had failed. They were not going home anytime soon.

These were the military losses, the ones the whole world knew about, and talked about. But Confederate policy had non-military objectives as well: to garner foreign support, especially from England and her North American colonies, and to foster disaffection within the Northern states. To many of the exiles, this part of the war was almost as important as the battlefield. Every time Erryn came west, he was told about the growing numbers of Copperheads in the Northern states: angry men who met by night with false names and deadly oaths of secrecy, preparing for a great uprising against Lincoln and the Black Republicans. He was told of meetings held all across the region, of arms purchased, of numbers reaching thousands, tens of thousands, finally hundreds of thousands. Southerners poured into Canada, especially in the West, hoping to make contact with these future rebels. They spoke boldly of opening a second front against the Yankees, right in their own backyard.

At first, Erryn took it all very seriously, passing on to his superiors every scrap of information he could find about this extraordinary conspiracy, and spending many a troubled hour wondering what impact it would have on the British colonies. But as the months came and passed, and nothing seemed to happen—or even to change very much, except for those fascinating numbers—he began to wonder how much of it was actually conspiracy and
how much of it was chimera. He was an outsider, granted, but just the same it was damned hard to see anything in Wisconsin that looked like the second American Revolution.

Then, on July 9, 1863, Confederate general John Hunt Morgan led a brigade of tough, battle-hardened cavalry into Indiana, on a raid that was to sweep through the entire Northwest, gathering the disaffected to its banners as it went. In Canada, the spirits of the Southerners soared again. Now, finally, all the work and struggle would bear fruit. Young men would thunder through the night like Paul Revere, calling their countrymen to arms. Long-hidden weapons would be snatched from cellars and haylofts, and the thousands who had bided their time would storm the Yankee garrisons, the supply depots, the jails. They would climb on their lean country horses and race to Morgan’s side. And then the fall of Vicksburg would not matter. Gettysburg would not matter either, even if it had been a defeat. With enemies all around it, Lincoln’s government could not hope to stand.

So ran the talk in the crowded rooms of exiles, in the bars where they gathered, in the parlours of their wealthy Canadian friends. Back in Halifax, big James Orton had thrown a comradely arm around Erryn’s shoulders—even he had to reach up to do it—and said, “Och, and won’t it be a great shock for the buggers to see Rebels coming at ’em from the North?”

It would have been a great shock, no doubt, had it ever come to be. But there was no rising in the North. No legions flocked to Morgan’s banners, only the barest handfuls. Such men as thundered through the night with messages were mostly racing to the army posts for help, or calling out the militias. As for the Northern Copperheads, they seemed to think there was a difference between opposing their government and overthrowing it by force. And most everyone, Copperhead or not, seemed to think John Morgan’s men were horse thieves; raiders who strayed from their comrades in search of food or fresh mounts rarely came back. Within a week, the raid was plainly in trouble; within three, it was
over. The entire brigade was scattered, captured, or dead, and Morgan himself was in an Ohio penitentiary.

Such was the state of affairs in August, the last time Erryn sat in the bar of St. Lawrence Hall. Morgan’s defeat and capture had been confirmed for more than a week, long enough for even the most optimistic Southerners to have no choice except to believe it. Terrible as the losses at Vicksburg and Gettysburg had been, for many in the colonies the failure of the Northwest rising was even harder to bear. That had been
their
fight. They had believed in it; they had worked and schemed and gone hungry for it, utterly convinced it would change the course of the war.

And then it had simply faded into smoke.

Now it was October, and everything was promising again. St. Lawrence Hall sparkled with triumph and excitement. At a table near their own, a young soldier was rising to his feet. He was thin and ragged, no doubt one of the many escaped Confederate prisoners in the city.

“Gentlemen!” he shouted.
“A
toast!” He raised his own glass, somewhat unsteadily. “To General Braxton Bragg!”

Scores around him rose as one, and drank to the victor of Chickamauga.

“A
damned necessary victory, that one,” Follett said, sitting down again. “Some of our friends were getting a tad skittish, after what happened in July. Even Morrison, you know. Sat me down one night and asked me if the Confederacy might possibly be coming apart at the seams. Not saying it, you understand, just asking.”

“I trust you reminded him that July was the first time the Yankees won anything decisive since the war began?”

“I did,” Follett said. “And he agreed with me, of course. Said we couldn’t expect it to be all fair sailing. But still, he said, it gave a man a bad scare. And I asked him, if it scared him, being a Canadian, how the devil did he think we felt?”

You felt somewhat the way I feel now, I suppose. In July, I was the damn fool who thought it was almost over. Now it looks as if it could go
on for years. I might be chasing your bloody Rebels around the colonies until my teeth start falling out.