The Halifax Connection (17 page)

Too familiar. Erryn felt disoriented, as if he had walked out onto a set of Hamlet and found himself in Elsinore Castle, the real Elsinore Castle, but looking exactly as he had staged it in the theatre, even to the spilled tankards and the smoke-blackened walls, even to the bodies lying in the hall, lying gracefully, the way dead heroes were supposed to lie on the stage, only this time it was absolutely real, this time they were really dead, they were never getting up again …

Well. He shook the punch around in his glass. Maybe he was not
quite
so disoriented. But he found it eerie, being here. It was not like consorting with Southern exiles in bars, or partying with the easygoing, provincial, garrison-town elite of Halifax, who could not afford to be too excessively exclusive or there would hardly be any of them left. This was like home; these were the lords of British North America. He could name every stone in their signet rings and judge the precise amount of disapproval in one of their flickered eyebrows. He could move among them, if he chose, like a minnow in a pool, seeming perfectly at ease. He would not even
have to call upon his acting skills to do it. Yet there was, he thought, scarcely any ordinary, livable world where he belonged less.

“Erryn! There you are!” Jackson Follett was weaving his way through the gathering, accompanied by a thin stranger in obviously borrowed finery. Everything the man wore was appropriate; none of it fit particularly well. Follett introduced him: Mr. Maury Janes, from Wilmington, in North Carolina.

“Mr. Shaw. Delighted, I’m sure.” He did not nod. He held out a hard, sweaty hand for Erryn to shake.

“I told Mr. Janes a bit about you,” Follett said. “He was mighty keen to meet you.”

“That’s right!” Janes barely waited for his companion to finish. “Jack tells me you are one smooth operator.”

“I trust that’s a compliment?”

Janes was surprised. Then he laughed. “I suppose you Englishmen would say it different. What I mean is, you sound like a man who gets things done. Real quiet, without any loose ends hanging out. I could use a man like that, a ways down the road.”

Oh, could you, indeed?

“Perhaps we should go and have a drink together, then,” Erryn suggested.

Edmund Morrison was an impeccable host, and he had made it quite clear to his servants that some of his guests, on this occasion as on many others, might wish to carry on certain conversations in absolute privacy. So it was that Erryn Shaw and Maury Janes were led to a small study, supplied with a decanter of superb wine, a plate of hors d’oeuvres sufficient for a large family, and a heavy, discreetly closed door.

“I don’t believe this place,” Janes said. Everything in the room was of the finest quality: Indian tapestries, panelling and furniture of mahogany and teak, crystal glassware that glittered in
their hands. “I never seen anything like it,” Janes went on. “Have you?”

“Once or twice.”

“I was out at Sheldon Wade’s plantation house a few times, and I thought that was awfully grand. It was nothing like this. Jack says your family’s pretty high, back in England.”

“Well, we’re certainly respectable.”

Janes laughed. “Oh, you Englishmen. You’d rather die than brag, wouldn’t you? Not like Americans. Well, I can tell you straight, sir, when I get my independent fortune, I’m not going to be shy of a little bragging. I’ll figure I earned it. My pa came down to Carolina with nothing but the clothes on his back and an old bowie knife with the point broke off. For three weeks he lived on clams, digging them out of the sand with that knife. Can’t stand a clam to this day, he says. But he built us a fine plantation, over the years—not as big as Sheldon Wade’s, but hell, Wade
married
his, he didn’t work for it. War’s over, I’ll have myself a place like this.”

“Where did your father come from?”

“Massachusetts. How about that, eh? He was a dad-blamed dyed-in-the-wool Yankee. Took to the South like a hound to a rabbit chase. Bought himself his first nigger on credit, before he had a house. Hell, he said, the damn nigger might as well build the house.”

“Very practical,” Erryn murmured.

It was the wrong thing to say, or perhaps the wrong tone in which to say it. Janes’s dark eyes hardened slightly, took on a quiet, calculating watchfulness.

Your arrogance will be the death of you, Erryn Shaw …

This man, he reminded himself, might well be a fine example of the rough-edged, grasping, nouveaux-not-quite-riches on the climb, but he was nobody’s fool. And he had probably had more than enough of well-born men looking down on him, his own fellow Southerners among them.

Erryn reached to pass him the tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Please,” he offered. “They look quite irresistible.” He bit into one himself,
and went on: “Personally, I’ve always thought that being practical is one of the great lost virtues of the Western world. Consider the Romans. They were infinitely practical men, and think what they accomplished. Now, it seems to me, everyone’s up on a soapbox, blathering about some new ism or another, and causing no end of trouble instead of getting on with the job.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Janes. “You took the words right out of my old man’s mouth. He thinks this war’s about nothing but some damn fool ideas.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think in a way it is and in a way it ain’t. I mean, there’s a lot of talk about fool ideas, both sides. But I figure if you look a little deeper, it’s about power. Who’s going to run things? Are we going to be our own masters, or are a handful of rich hypocrites with ramrods up their asses going to tell the whole damn country what to do? That’s what it’s
really
about.”

This, Erryn thought, was by no means the worst summation of the matter he had ever heard.

He raised his glass. “To being our own masters, then. And confusion to the enemy!”

“Damn right, sir! I like that. Confusion to the enemy!”

“Now,” Erryn went on, when the glasses had been manfully emptied and refilled, “Jack Follett said there might be some way I could be of service to you. In Halifax.”

“I don’t know when I’ll get there. It depends on … well, let’s just say it depends. But if you could set me up when I arrive, put me in touch with the right people, folks I can trust, you know. And I’ll need someone to set up a job for me. I’ll choose the man myself, you understand. I won’t buy a pig in a poke, not from my best friend. But if you could point me to a few likely fellows, I’d be much obliged.”

“What kind of job?”

“A
delivery. Across the border.”

“Halifax is a fine seaport. Deliveries shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I take problems for granted, Mr. Shaw, when I have to deal with Yankee revenue cutters and harbour police. I want the best man I can get.” He leaned forward. Bit by bit, his voice dropped almost to a whisper. “This ain’t no ordinary project, Mr. Shaw, like most I’ve heard about up here. I ain’t trying to criticize anybody. What the boys are doing in Canada, planning raids and such, it all helps. But this project is … well, this is the work of a genius, and I can say so myself, because it wasn’t my idea, not one bit of it. And if it goes off like it should, it’s going to end the war.”

“Well.” Erryn saluted him with a lifted glass. “I wish you all possible success, Mr. Janes. But I fear I have to tell you that ending the war strikes me as somewhat”—he made a generous, apologetic gesture with his arms—“forgive me, somewhat … over-ambitious?”

“That’s right,” Janes agreed. “It’s going to be the whole damned Red Sea coming down on Pharaoh’s army. That was a bit over-ambitious too, wouldn’t you say?”

God bleeding almighty, now we’re in the Promised Land …

“Well,” he said again. It was all he could think of for a considerable moment. Well. “Then I must say, Mr. Janes, I will be truly honoured to welcome you to Halifax.”

Erryn wondered sometimes about the nature of lying. He wondered if there was some kind of limit, some critical mass of lies a man might tell, after which he became a liar by nature. And he wondered, if there were such a limit, if he might be approaching it. His count for the day was well into the hundreds, and going up fast.

He was back in Morrison’s astonishing garden with the host himself, Jackson Follett, and perhaps half a dozen Southern exiles. Sir Fenwick Williams, commander of the British garrison in Montreal, as well as commander-in-chief of all the British forces in North America, had just left the group, and was now some distance away, paying his compliments to the ladies.

Outwardly, the general’s behaviour could not have seemed more neutral. He had offered the Southerners nothing more than the usual polite greetings, the blandest political observations:
Her Majesty’s government is following events in the current conflict with great interest—God willing there will soon be a satisfactory resolution—et cetera, et cetera.
It was, however, widely understood that Williams’s
personal
inclinations were pro-Southern. This led to a long and lively debate as to how soon and under what circumstances England would enter the war.

“All she wants is a good excuse.”

The speaker was one of two military officers in the group, a lieutenant who had escaped from the Yankee prison camp at Johnson’s Island. He was still thin, weary, and malnourished. With a cool pride that Erryn deeply admired, he had come to the party in the plainest of garb, covered over with a frock coat of Confederate grey, sufficiently decent and clean to pose as a dress uniform.

No one else could have got away with such
lèse-majesté.
But the Southern fighting men were heroes here, disadvantaged merely by the fortunes of war. Their poverty was almost a mark of pride.

The lieutenant had complete faith in England’s support. All she needed to enter the war, he said, was a good excuse. “So the English people will accept it, and so the rest of the world can’t accuse her of meddling.”

Ah
, Erryn thought,
and when was the last time England ever cared if the world accused her of meddling?

“The
Trent
was a plenty good excuse,” said another. “I still don’t understand why she didn’t pick up the gauntlet then.”

“Because the Yankees backed down,” Follett said. “Lincoln let the envoys go, and bowed and scraped all over the place, and said sorry, sorry, sorry. I suppose in all fairness England felt she had to return the gesture.”

“Yes, but only because she never saw it as a threat, merely as an insult. She’s lord of the sea and she knows it. Here it’s different. In
North America the Yankees really are a threat. She might as well take them on now as later.”

It went on. The Southerners discussed this question endlessly, but they did not, in Erryn Shaw’s opinion, understand it very well. They assumed a deep and passionate commitment on the part of England to her North American colonies; and a natural alliance, based on blood, class, and cotton, between the Confederacy and England. Both of these assumptions were false.

The fact was, England did not care very much about North America at all. Her most lucrative commercial interests were in the Far East, and her great rivals for imperial wealth and power were in Europe. Of course, if her colonies here were openly attacked, she would defend them, simply because they were hers. Empires, by definition, could not afford to be attacked with impunity. But short of that, she was too busy elsewhere to want a war with the United States. When she lay awake at night brooding on the dark plots of her enemies, she did not worry about Yankees steaming across the Lakes to sack Toronto; she worried about the Portuguese in Africa, the Dutch in Southeast Asia, and the French just about everywhere.

As for the colonies themselves, they were not beloved in London, not anymore. They cost £200,000 a year merely to garrison, and thousands more for the salaries of imperial administrators. The glorious days of the fur trade were over, and nothing comparable had replaced it, just timber, fish, and the products of modest farms and factories—respectable exports, certainly, enough to make a good living for many, and small fortunes for some, but rarely the stuff of great fortunes. And the empire needed great fortunes—great coffers of money for her ships and her mushrooming industries, money for her pampered upper class, money for her wars. From Africa came diamonds and gold; from the Far East, spices, silks, and tea; from the west, mostly lumber and salt cod, alas. More and more, British North America was resembling an orphaned niece who ate too much and spun
too little. London could scarcely wait for her to grow up and leave home.