The Halifax Connection (15 page)

He was smiling a trifle as he hurried away, imagining Brownie’s quandary: should he continue the chase, or fetch the note, or wait to see who claimed it? (Oh, and a sweet wait that would be!) The American leapt to his feet, standing irresolute for a moment, staring one way and then the other. But Erryn had a mighty stride, and considerable experience in losing his watchers when he seriously wanted to. Before Brownie could decide what to do about him, he had jumped into a carriage and was gone.

I
T WAS SURELY
the most melancholy spot in the world: a small cluster of burial mounds, a fence of weathered palings, a great granite boulder on a slab—only these, and scrub grass long gone to seed, and white gulls, and the river. Wilted flowers lay scattered here and there, and the grass was trampled down, proof that others came to mourn from time to time. But now there was no one. Sylvie walked softly to the fence and placed her offering. It was a foolish thing, of course, coming down here alone; any sensible person would say so. Madame herself had refused to come. Far too dangerous, she said, not a decent soul about, and the docks with all their ruffians just a small distance off. Madame would be horrified to think she had come anyway … but then, Madame need never know.

The wind tugged at her hair, pressed her thin cotton dress
against her thighs. It was different here, not like Nassau at all, no sand, no tropic sun; the river was grey and cold. And yet it was the same. These dead were strangers too, strangers who had come by sea. Few remembered them, and fewer cared. No one in Nassau would remember Frances Harris … except perhaps another stranger, a passerby, seeing a lonely grave all untended:
Ah, poor thing, she has no one, so I will give her a flower, and say her a prayer …

Perhaps it would be so. Things went around sometimes, and came back; she believed this sincerely, not in any traditional religious sense, not as bread cast upon the waters, but in an older sense, older and purer and harder. Perhaps there was justice in the afterworld. Perhaps God was up there in some great counting house of deeds, keeping records and paying men back; this she did not know. But there were cycles of good and evil in the common world. They were strange and unpredictable; she knew she could not count on them for justice, or indeed for anything at all, but sometimes things came back.

So she bowed her head and said a prayer for the Irish exiles, the ones Madame Louise had spoken of, the ones who lay all along the riverbank in unmarked graves, half forgotten until the Grand Trunk Railway began laying piers for the Victoria Bridge. Right here the work began, beyond the tag end of the waterfront, and the soft earth yielded bodies at every turn: men and women in their immigrants’ rags; small broken children, their skinny limbs shattering like eggshells, so many of them that tough, brawling workmen who could smash a tavern in two minutes flat wept like boys in the mud, and never cared who saw them do it.

For here was where the city had placed the quarantine station back in ’47, when the Irish exiles started coming in—the second quarantine station, after the hospital on Grosse-Île could no longer handle the numbers. Devastated by famine before they ever left home, packed into steerage like so many cattle, with many a captain never caring if he took sickness on board as long as he was paid, they came by the shipload; and here, by the shipload,
they died. The nuns came to care for them, Madame said, and so did some other brave souls, but they were too many, arriving too fast. Even the wooden sheds that shielded them from sun and rain were thrown together in reckless haste. No one could spare time or strength for the dead; they were buried with a blessing and a spadeful of earth. Their only monument was this one, raised twelve years later, raised neither by the city nor by the Church, but by the ordinary men who had disturbed their graves. Carefully they reburied all they found, and fenced the ground, and inscribed one of the massive granite stones they had taken from the riverbank:

Six thousand … It was hard to imagine so much death, so many betrayed hopes, for even the weakest and most desperate must have dared to hope a little. They were going to a New World, and life would be better there. It had to be better, for nothing could be as bad as starving Ireland—nothing, not even the Lancashire mills, where those who found a place, working from dawn to dusk in mind-numbing noise, and sickening of the cotton dust, nonetheless told Sylvie they were blessed compared with their families at home.

And after all of it, ship fever. No New World waiting, just a cramped hold ankle deep in bilge, and the sickness running through it like fire through September grass, and neither man nor God caring in the least what they dreamt of, or how bravely they had once believed in the future.

We didn’t go through all this so I could bury you at sea …

She wept then, thinking of them, and of Frances. And so, lost in her grief, she forgot to watch the path that led back to the docks, and did not hear the approaching steps until they were much too close.

She looked up sharply, a spasm of pure, hard fear knotting her belly and her throat. All she could tell about the man at first, framed as he was against the lowering sun, was that he was big, or at least very tall, and he was carrying a parcel under his arm. He had left the path and was picking his way through the scrub, not to where she was standing by the stone but well to the side—the way the decent sort might do, not wanting to frighten her, or to bother her in her grief.

Her fear had been instinctive, an old fear, born of too many years spent far too close to violence. It eased a little now as the stranger moved yet farther from her, and stood like any quiet mourner by the paling. She turned away, wiping her face discreetly on her sleeve, and glanced along the riverbank. It was utterly empty, just the railway yards and the long, splendid span of bridge veering out from them, low and straight as an arrow across the water. The stranger was alone, and so was she.

It was time to go.

Oh, Fran, Fran, if there is another world, I hope you’re happy there, I hope they make it up to you, because I can’t. I wanted to so much, and now I can’t.

She bit back tears as she turned to go, and froze at the sound of his voice.

“Forgive me,” he said. It was a very gentle voice. Almost anywhere else, she would have trusted it. “I happened to be passing, and I noticed you were alone. In all decency I could not go on and leave you so. It’s not very safe here for a lady.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But there were no need.” She kept her voice—and her brief, polite glance in his direction—as cool and indifferent as possible. Modest, the way the church ladies taught her. “And I be going back now anyways. Madame is waiting.”

“Let me accompany you, then,” he offered.

Oh, Christ, I suppose I’m for it now. She were right; I never should have come.

He made a small, apologetic gesture with his hand. “Just to where there’s people, if you like. I meant nothing more.”

Sylvie Bowen was a brave woman—some might well have called her reckless—but she was not naive. She knew she was unsafe here. She knew also that pleasant manners in a man were proof of absolutely nothing, least of all for a servant girl prowling a deserted riverbank where everyone from Madame to the Lord Chief Justice would tell her she had asked for anything she got. Yet she had grown up in a rough mill town, and rubbed shoulders with many kinds of men, the decent and the dangerous alike. Her instincts read nothing predatory in the stranger. They read something quite different.

He was not at all good-looking. If she had needed to describe him to a friend, she might have said: “A great scrawny beanpole sort of chap, but graceful, and dressed real nice, with a voice like a pot of honey …” She liked what she saw, and she knew perfectly well that he liked what he had seen. Men often liked her, until they saw her face.

So she turned full toward him, directly into the lowering sun, and then, casually, as if she were brushing away a fly, she flicked her hair back.

There, kind sir, it ain’t what you thought at all, is it? Not some pretty damsel in distress, just me, just a nobody with a face like a wicker basket. Feel free to go now; they all do …

He stood utterly still, as though she had clubbed him with a hatchet. Ah well, she thought, no reaction at all was better than most, better than disgust or pity, better than Oh-my-God-in-heaven-where-did-you-get-that-
face
?

“Good day to you, sir.”

“Wait!” He swept past her with a couple of long strides and turned. “Please. My name is Erryn Shaw. I don’t know if I look it at
the moment, but I’m quite respectable. I’ll see you safe into town regardless. But it would please me very much to walk with you.”

He seemed quite unchanged by what he had seen. It was courtesy, she supposed, the kind of perfect manners some people had. They would never let anything improper show, not if it killed them. On the other hand, she had been approached once by a man who ran a brothel for the weird sort, and polite as hell he was, too. He thought she would make a smashing addition to his stable. In this world, anything was possible.

It was even possible that Erryn Shaw still liked her, that he was striding backward in the scrub with one hand clutching his parcel and the other held out appealingly, like a boy with an angry parent, because he really did fancy her company.

“Besides,” he was saying, “if you won’t walk with me, then I’ll have to walk with myself, and that gets to be a frightful boring business after a while.”

She smiled in spite of herself, just a little. He was charming, she thought, whatever sort of chap he might turn out to be. She felt an uncommonly strong temptation to think well of him, to be pleased that he had wandered so unexpectedly into her day. Later she would reflect on this temptation, and wonder how much of it was born of good judgment and how much of loneliness. A dangerous emotion, loneliness, especially for a woman—for what was there, really, to judge him by? A certain delicacy of manner, a touch of humour, decent clothing, and a parcel obviously wrapped in one of the better shops … Dear God in heaven, half the villains in the world could boast as much, and more.

But loneliness won out—loneliness and her own reluctance to snub a friendly stranger who so far had done nothing to deserve it.

“All right,” she said. “But I have to go straight back to the church.”

“Anywhere at all,” he agreed, falling in step beside her. “Would you think me too forward if I asked to know your name?”

“It’s Sylvie. Sylvie Bowen.”

“A
pleasure to meet you, Miss Bowen. I’m Erryn Shaw.”

“Yes. I remember.” This, she realized, might show altogether too much interest. She changed the subject quickly. “You got people there, do you? By the stone?”

“No. I was just passing. I like to walk by the river sometimes, when I’m out of sorts and need to think.” He hesitated a moment, and then went on, cautiously: “And yourself? Someone in your family, I suppose?”

“No. My aunt died in Nassau, of the yellow jack. She were the only real family I had since I were twelve. I’ll never get to put a flower on her grave. So’s I thought, you know, I’d put one here, and m’appen someone there would do the same for her. I suppose that sounds awful silly.”

“Not in the least. I think it’s a fine thing to do, and I am sorry for your loss.”

“She would have loved it here, every bit of it. I just came back from St. Catharines last week, with Madame. It’s where her sister lives. We come on the riverboat, and all that long way I kept thinking of nothing but how Fran would have loved it. Especially the Thousand Islands. Have you ever seen them?”

“Yes.”

So they talked for a while about sailing through the Thousand Islands, and running the rapids at Galouse and the Cedars and Lachine, the boat plunging from smooth water into frothing cataracts, as if over a cliff, speeds of twenty-five knots and better, rocks and islands looming dead ahead, evaded at the last possible moment, or so it seemed to the passengers. Some of them were falling to their knees in the saloon, heads bent and prayer books clutched to their hearts, waiting for the end, while others were on the deck, laughing with the pure, wild pleasure of it.

“And you were one of them?” she asked.