The Halifax Connection (13 page)

Or until you kill me …

This was not a good subject for meditation. Erryn leaned back in his chair and allowed himself to be drawn into a discussion of the Confederacy’s military prospects. At the moment, one of the Union’s western armies was surrounded in Chattanooga. A smaller one was stranded at Nashville, and rumoured to be running out of food. The army in the east, the one that clawed up General Lee at Gettysburg, had been inactive now for more than three months. It was clawed up just as bad, Follett said, or else its new general was yet another military mouse; the Union seemed to have no end of them. Either way, the prospects looked good for turning back the disasters of the summer.

“All the more need, then, for our work here to prosper.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Morrison’s having a gathering at his house on Saturday. A celebration, of course, now that we have such promising things to celebrate, but also a chance to build support. I trust you’ll come?”

“I would be honoured.”

“Good. There’s some people coming that I want you to meet, one in particular, a man named Janes. Maury Janes. A very bold fellow, from what I’ve seen. He’ll be heading to Halifax later if his plans come together. He’d like nothing better than to share a glass of wine with you.”

“Not a mint julep?”

“No. I understand he hates them.”

“Ah. A man after my own heart.”

“There’s one other thing, Erryn. I hesitate to ask—you’ve done so much for us already. But is it possible I might impose on you one more time, for a small favour?”

Erryn nodded. “Yes, of course,” he said, “but there is one condition.” He paused just long enough to make Follett look uneasy. “I’m not searching for any more kidnap victims.”

Follett’s laugh was relieved and slightly embarrassed, as well it should have been. Early in the war, almost a year ago, he had persuaded Erryn to find a Georgian who had disembarked at the railroad depot in Montreal and promptly disappeared. According to the lad’s companion, the Reverend Andrew Boyle, the young man was part of a vital secret mission, and had undoubtedly fallen into the hands of Yankee agents. Erryn had his doubts about the Yankee agents—desertion seemed a likelier explanation—but he wanted very much to discover what this vital secret mission might prove to be. Boyle, the leader, was a man of mature years, with excellent credentials from Richmond. He would say nothing whatever about his plans, only that he must absolutely have his comrade back. So Erryn went on the hunt.

Seventeen days and many good English pounds later, with a case of grippe mean enough to die of and an almost broken wrist, he found the missing agent on a country farm, cheerfully picking apples, shovelling manure, and courting the farmer’s pretty daughter. As for the mission, according to the Georgian, the Reverend Boyle meant to go secretly about the wilds of Canada—most secretly, lest the Yankees got wind of it—and persuade all the runaway Negroes to come home. Africans as they were, used to the heat, and innocents as they were, barely able to survive as free men in the North—how they must be suffering here, poor creatures, in a world of snow and rocks, with no white men looking after them, and nothing to live on but pine scrub and beaver meat. All it would take would be a word or two of encouragement, and someone to pay their passage, and they would follow him home like boys behind a piper.

Erryn Shaw sat in the farmer’s snug little house, wrapped in a blanket, drinking all the hot apple juice spiked with lemon he could force down his throat, and let the young man tell his tale. He was, as far as Erryn could judge, not a day past seventeen.

“Y’all got to understand, see, when I was at home, I thought it was a good enough idea. We never had but one slave ourselves, and
we never whopped him or anything, and I figured he’d rather be with us than off in the wilderness somewheres. So I went along with the Reverend, to help him out, and to see a bit of the world. He wanted me to stay with him, once we got to Canada. But I’d been talking to Miss Lucy on the train, and she told me there was some runaways living right nearby, and I was awful fond of her, so’s I figured I could just start here instead. But them niggers got themselves little farms—” Here Miss Lucy’s eyes turned on him, troubled. “Negroes, I mean—the both of them got farms. They ain’t well off, but they’s eating okay, and when I asked one of ’em how they got through the winters up here, he just looked at me bold as brass and says, ‘Same as you get through the summers down in Georgia, I reckon.’ And I started wondering if maybe the Reverend got it a bit wrong. Someone wanting to be rescued cain’t afford to be so mouthy. So I asked him right out, would he ever think of coming home, was we to pay his way and such? And he went and got me a drink of whiskey, and says, ‘Here, you rest easy for a bit, young feller. Someone’s whopped you good on the haid.’”

In a way, Erryn thought, it was fortunate he was so sick and miserable. Had he been healthy, his hard-earned victory would have had him doubled over in his chair.

He smiled faintly now, remembering. He had come west twice before, following through on matters that began at the coast, and each time he had gone home muttering to himself:
Bunch of bleeding nitwits … Confederate intelligence is a contradiction in terms … we don’t need spies here, all we need to do is stay conscious …
And each time he had pulled himself up short. There were some bleeding nitwits in the expatriate community, certainly. There were others who were simply young and inexperienced, with way too much time on their hands. Both groups were given to sitting up nights, fashioning hare-brained master plans for winning the war. And some concerned Canadians, alas, found themselves sitting up as well, worrying themselves silly, and ultimately discovering they had used a broadside of cannon to exterminate a beetle.

All of this was true. But it was also true that the Confederates had good men here—Jackson Follett was one of them—and that even a foolish plot, left unwatched, could turn deadly, could succeed even as it failed, simply by creating chaos.

No, he reminded himself, it would not do at all to get cocky, to underestimate his enemies. There was, after all, a young man in a family vault in London, a young man of considerable ability and excellent bloodlines, who had once made the understandable but decidedly foolish mistake of underestimating
him.

“No kidnap victims this time,” Follett said amiably. “I guarantee it. And by the way, just so you know, Richmond has severed its connections with the Reverend Boyle. He has no more claim on our funds or on our people.”

What a pity.
They clinked glasses, smiled.

“Well then,” Erryn said, “how can I be of service?”

It rained that night, ferociously. Erryn did not mind the rain; a chap could hardly go on living in Halifax if he minded rain. Besides, a good downpour shielded a man’s movements, and helped to keep the idle and the curious indoors. He dressed himself with an actor’s care: black wig, lumberjack’s boots, a great heavy jacket and baggy working man’s trousers that disguised his height a trifle by making him bulky; over all of it, an old shapeless slicker. Eyebrows darkened with makeup, lean cheeks puffed out with cotton, a peculiar twist to his mouth … Yes, he observed to his mirror—perhaps for the thousandth time—a life in the theatre was very useful to a spy, quite apart from anything he might have learned about acting.

His rendezvous point was a quiet house near the Champ-de-Mars. Whoever owned it, or lived in it by day, it was always empty when he came there, except for one or two men. Both were there tonight, dressed in dark, nondescript clothing and wearing a familiar
air of boredom and exhaustion. One was Jonathan Bryce, a detective from the Montreal constabulary; the other a civilian who used but a single name, Latour. Erryn himself was known to them as James Todd.

They began with little ceremony, a brief handshake and a greeting, and then on to the matters at hand.

“What have you got for us, Todd?” Bryce asked.

“Follett wants me to buy ten good Colt pistols, sixty rounds of ammunition for each, and ten good knives—the sort that might have the authority of a cutlass, as he put it.”

“How interesting,” Latour murmured. “Did he say what he wanted them for?”

“No. But I come from a long line of naval officers. When anyone mentions a cutlass, I think of sailors boarding an enemy ship.”

“Ah, yes,” Bryce said. “And twenty-two sailors in particular, I suppose?”

Bryce’s tone was ever so slightly patronizing. It annoyed Erryn a little, but he gave no sign. “It did cross my mind, Jon.”

Bryce wiped his forehead, where rainwater still trickled from his hair. He was forty or thereabouts, a quiet, experienced policeman, the man in charge of intelligence operations in Montreal insofar as anyone seemed to be in charge at all. Spying on the Confederates was a slapdash affair everywhere, even in Halifax, and this man did not have Matt Calverley’s talent for organizing the work or reading the evidence. Still less did he have Matt’s killer instinct.

It was Matt who had smelled trouble when the blockade-runner
Robert E. Lee
steamed into Halifax harbour with twenty-two Confederate naval officers and men, among them the already well-known and well-respected Captain John Wilkinson. They were all supposedly bound for England, perhaps to take charge of a newly purchased vessel. Matt was having none of it; the scuttlebutt, he said, was way too loud. Moreover, the
Lee
’s valuable cargo had been sold by Alexander MacNab, who was the Confederacy’s
chief supply agent in Halifax, and who was, in Matt’s opinion, a conspirator of the first order. Matt put every informer he had onto watching the waterfront, the hotels, the boarding houses, and the stagecoach depot. He had good descriptions of several of the men, and Erryn had personally encountered one. Also, as with most Southerners, their accents were difficult to hide.

As far as anyone could discover, none of the twenty-two Rebels boarded an outgoing ship. Indeed, none of them were spotted on the waterfront again. Two were discovered waiting for the stagecoach to Windsor—almost certainly the first leg of an overland journey west. As for the others, in a matter of days it became impossible for any of Matt’s men to find a trace of them. Even among the Grey Tories it was quietly and casually assumed that the men had sailed.

All of this Erryn had explained in detail to Bryce and Latour when he first arrived in Montreal, along with Matt’s conviction that the sailors had come west to do some mischief on the Lakes. The Montrealers had listened politely, and Latour had promised to watch for any sign of Wilkinson’s men. But now, sitting in the house in the Champ-de-Mars, Erryn wondered if their efforts would all prove too little and too late, if the Rebels would slip away and do whatever harm they intended, long before the Canadians learned enough to stop them.

He shifted restlessly in his chair. His great sodden boots were by the door, but every time he moved, more water slithered down his trouser legs.

“Do either of you have anything for me?” he asked.

“Yes, actually,” Latour replied. “It seems you’re not the only chap who’s been sent out shopping. Do you know Daniel Carroll?”

“Only by reputation.” Second-generation Irish. Importer/exporter. Rich. Pro-Confederate. Very low-key, however; not the sort to sit in the bar of St Lawrence Hall drinking toasts to Dixie.

“About eight days back,” Latour went on, “Carroll paid a long visit to George Kane’s house, accompanied by Jackson Follett. On
Monday he placed an order at Frères Desmarais for fifty dumbbells. Of course”—this with a quick, almost apologetic glance at Jonathan Bryce—“Carroll’s a wholesale merchant, with a half-dozen country stores up the Ottawa Valley buying stock from him, so …” He shrugged. “So it probably doesn’t mean very much.”

Erryn thought it might mean quite a lot. Kane was the former police marshal of Baltimore. He had spent several months in a Federal jail for suspected disloyalty. Immediately on his release, he bolted for Richmond, and soon afterwards turned up in Canada. He was now the second most important Confederate agent in Montreal. According to Latour, there were four men staying at his house, four quiet young men who almost never went outside. It was no great stretch to wonder if Daniel Carroll’s visit—and his purchase—was in some way linked to them.

“What the devil would a country store in the Ottawa Valley want with fifty dumbbells?” Erryn asked.

“I don’t know,” Bryce said. “What would the Confederates want with them?”

“Cannon shot.”

“Well, that’s what Latour said too. Maybe cannon shot. But where are the cannon? You can’t go out and buy them the way you buy pistols.”

“Any kind of weapon can be bought,” Erryn said wearily. “If you can pay for it, you can buy a cruiser, armed and manned and ready for action. The Confederates have already done it twice.”

Neither man could argue with him. After all, the
Alabama
and the
Florida
were already abroad, every beam and ratline and brass cannon built in England, paid for in Rebel gold.

“The
Robert E. Lee,”
he reminded them, “sold a raft of blockade-run cotton in Halifax—about seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth. That would buy a nine-pounder or two. To say nothing of some pistols and knives.”