The Halifax Connection (20 page)

“Miss Bowen.”

“Oh, Mr. Shaw. How nice to see you again.”

There was not a trace of warmth in her voice. She might as well have been speaking to the milkman, polite and matter-of-fact:
Three gallons today, thank you. Put it on our bill.
Only her eyes betrayed her for a small, perilous moment before she lowered them.

He said all the usual things—
The pleasure is all mine, I trust you’re well, etc., etc.—
and offered to take her to see the clowns in Place Viger.

“Thank you, Mr. Shaw. But there’s not enough time for anything like that.”

“But it’s Sunday. So it’ll be High Mass, won’t it? I thought a High Mass took more than an hour.”

If she wondered how an English Protestant happened to know this, she gave no sign. “There’s no Mass at all,” she said. “Mass be in the morning Sunday. It’s only Benediction.”

But you said … !
He stifled his involuntary wail of protest. “And how long is Benediction?”

“Maybe twenty minutes.”

“Oh.” Time to walk to Place Viger and turn around and walk back again. He forced himself to smile. “Well, no clowns, then. Where would you like to go instead? We could have tea. Chez Robert has wonderful sweets and pastries. Or we could just walk about and eat ices, and try not to get hit by a turnip.” He placed one arm over his breast and bowed elaborately, gracefully. “I am at your command, my lady.”

Her mouth crinkled, just a tiny bit, such a tiny bit that he was not absolutely certain if he had seen it or if he merely wished to see it.

“I’m most always inside with Madame,” she said. “It’d be nice to walk.”

It was the briefest twenty minutes of his life. He bought them
tourtières
, and a pair of beautiful, mouth-watering apples. She ate hungrily, with obvious pleasure. They wandered up to the Champ-de-Mars, where there were benches and a vendor selling strawberry ice. They found a spot to sit. By this time the bell was ringing again at Bonsecours, and scarcely anything had been said between them except pleasantries.

Through it all she remained cool to him—altogether proper and polite, thanking him for the food, answering freely to everything he said, and yet cool, distant, a stranger—a stranger she had not been on the riverbank two days before.

He did not believe she was the sort to tease, to blow hot and cold merely to pique a man’s interest. He had not offended her in any way, as far as he knew. Which left the gloomy probability that she had given it all some thought and decided he was not the sort of man she would invite into her life—too much the fine young gentleman, perhaps, the sort who seduced and abandoned servant girls for sport.

“Are you afraid of spiders, Miss Bowen?”

“Spiders?” She regarded him as though he were daft. “Scraggy little things no bigger than my fingernail? Course not.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Because there’s a big black one sitting”—he reached very slowly, very carefully—“right on your collar.”

“Oh.”

She did not react at all except to turn her head as he nudged the spider onto his finger. It panicked, of course, and dashed madly across his wrist and over his sleeve. Astonishing, he thought, how the little buggers could run.

“Don’t kill it,” she said quickly. “Please.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. I rather like them, actually. Back home I had a friend who kept them for pets. The last time I saw him he had twenty-three.” He smiled. “Now you really think I’m daft.”

“No,” she said. “I think you might be the sort what makes up stories.”

“Me? I never told a fib in my life.” He plucked the creature off him with a dead leaf and dropped it in the bushes.

“He really had twenty-three spiders?”

“He probably had more, but they kept moving around. We got bored trying to count them and gave up.”

That glorious little crinkle was playing on her mouth again. He went on:

“They were his second hive, or swarm, or whatever it is you call a bunch of spiders. His landlady killed off the first ones. He had an arrangement with the maid, you see: he left her tuppence every week and she left his spiders alone. One day the maid was sick and the landlady came to do his room. Of course she saw all the spiderwebs hanging in the corners, and being one of those who look on cleanliness as next to godliness, she fetched herself a great godly broom and swept them all to perdition. When he came home, he found one poor spider scared half to death, hiding under his pillow. All the rest were gone.”

“What did he do?”

“He told the landlady someone had been in his room and taken his personal property. She went all into a dither. First the maid had left his room a shameful mess, and now someone had robbed him—and him her favourite tenant, too, a fine young constable who always paid his rent on time and didn’t steal the silverware … Well, the poor lady was practically beside herself, until he told her what it was he’d lost. Then, I understand, things got interesting. I wouldn’t have minded being a spider on the wall myself. But he won the day when he called her a heretic.”

“A heretic
?”

“Quite. She put her foot down, you see. She told him no,
absolutely not, nobody could keep spiders for pets, she wouldn’t stand for it, it was unnatural. So he asked her, wasn’t she a Christian? ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘You’re a heretic. You’re saying God didn’t make spiders.’ ‘I’m saying no such thing,’ she said. ‘Of course God made spiders.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘then you’re saying God went around making unnatural stuff. That makes you a worse heretic.’

“Well, he turned the thing upside down and inside out till the poor lady didn’t know what she believed. Besides, it meant a lot to her, having him in the house, old as she was and living in a rough part of town. So she went back to her parlour and he went out for a beer, and that was the end of it. Nobody bothered his creatures again.”

All the time he was telling the story Sylvie was watching him—cautious, he thought, unsure of him, but also intrigued. Bit by bit her coolness left her, falling away like a forgotten shawl. He was sure now she had never really felt it; she had only wrapped it around herself for safety.

“So why did he pick spiders? Instead of a cat or something? Did he ever tell you?”

“He said they were elegant, and they killed flies. Said he hated flies.”

“I can understand that.” She stood up—regretfully, it seemed. “I must go back, Mr. Shaw.”

“Will Madame Louise be in a good mood, do you think? Being Sunday and all, and having been to church twice?”

“Why?”

He tucked her arm into his as they moved quietly onto the street. “Because I would like to meet her. Reassure her that you are in the hands of an honourable gentleman from a perfectly respectable family, and persuade her to let me take you to the concert.”

“She’d be horrified.”

“Dear heavens, am I as ugly as that?”

“Oh, no, you’re not ugly at all, you look perfectly fine. I mean she’d be horrified at me. Going down to the river when she told me not to. And meeting you like this.”

“Well, we don’t have to tell her about the riverbank. You can say I helped you rescue a poor old man who got knocked over by a carriage on the street.”

She regarded him very dubiously indeed.

“Well,” he said cheerfully, “I did rescue a turnip.”

“Mr. Shaw.”

“Erryn. Please.”

“Erryn. I’d like to walk out with you. I’d like it more than most anything. But Madame …” She paused, searching for words. “Madame has been so kind to me. I don’t want to make her angry.”

“But—”

“She’s a good woman, please don’t ever think different. But she told Miss Susan right out she didn’t want someone who’d be flirting with the lads every time she turned around. I think she were frightfully unhappy with her husband, and she hasn’t much use for it at all—young folks walking out, I mean, and courting and such. She told me once I were the only young woman she knew who had any sense. And she’d think I’d lost it all, taking up with a man on the street. Especially one so … so fine and well bred like yourself.”

Especially? But of course. We should all keep to our own …

“But I thought you worked for someone else. A Miss Susan, you said, wasn’t it? So even if Madame got annoyed at you, would it matter very much?”

“It might. She can’t read anymore, and she used to love it. She has a house full of books. She says after I go back to Miss Susan, I should come on my half day to read to her. I read to her every day now, since we’ve been travelling together. When I don’t know what a word means, she tells me, and tells me how to say them. She says I be learning fast, and if I take care of them I might have books to take home with me, to read by myself. She says even a
poor lass can make something of her life here in Canada, if she has a bit of ambition.”

She had stopped walking, and turned to him. “It be a chance for me, see, though I suppose it don’t sound like much, with you having all the books you want. But I love reading more than anything. If I can go every week, I can learn all sorts of things, m’appen enough to get some other work. She has a piano, too, and I could hear her play—I’d die for that. But if she gets mad at me, and won’t let me come, then I’ve lost it all. Then I just make beds and scrub dirty floors. Nobody’ll ever hire me for anything else, not with this face. So …”

She looked at the cobblestones, and at a wheelbarrow going by, and then at him again. He knew her fear was exaggerated. Madame was old and almost blind, apparently at odds with many of her kin. Surely she would be glad to have someone come to read to her, and talk, and admire her Mozart sonatas. Surely she would not give it up simply because Sylvie had befriended a stranger in the street. Surely she would do no more than sniff, and offer up a proper wise-old-lady lecture, and then the world would go on as before.

Surely.

But maybe “surely” wasn’t good enough. Maybe, when you had nothing, “surely” was only hope concealing terror. Nobody knew for certain what those who were stronger might do when they got angry. Madame could buy herself another Sylvie Bowen as fast as laying down a coin.

He opened his mouth to speak, to say it was all right, he understood, but she spoke first.

“If we lived here, it would be different. But it’s just a visit. After she’s finished her novena, we’ll be going home. And I won’t see you anymore, anyway. So …” She met his eyes, openly, honestly, the way she had on the riverbank. “So if you came to the church again, and spent an hour with me once or twice, I’d like it awfully. And I’ll always remember it.”

He was ready for most anything, but not for this.

“You’re going home?” he said. “I thought you lived here, you and Madame. Where is home, then?”

Nassau, where her aunt was buried? No, it couldn’t be; she said she would never put a flower on the grave. Quebec? No, Madame was not French; it was her husband who was French.

England? Oh, please, God, not England …

“A
long way,” she said. “In Nova Scotia. Halifax.”

“Halifax?”
He laughed, and took her hard by the shoulders. “Sylvie Bowen, you’re a veritable sorceress! You can say a single word and make the whole world perfect!”

“I’m going a thousand miles away, and the whole world’s perfect? Well.” She drew his hands away and turned to walk again.

“I live there.” He was grinning like a cat in a creamery, and he did not care.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“I ran the theatre on Grafton Street, before it burned in ’61. I live on Morris, about a block from the Governor’s Grounds. When I’m flush I eat dinner at Compain’s, and when I’m poor I eat at Corey’s. And I’ll wager five bob the Miss Susan you work for is Susan Danner, Jack Danner’s wife. They keep that fine four-storey boarding house on Barrington, the one they call the Den. Now do you believe me?”

She stopped again. “You never said a word.”

“Neither did you.” He brushed her hair back from her forehead, lightly. “I think we’ve talked about everything in the world except ourselves. How are you travelling home? By way of Portland, I suppose?”

“Yes, from Quebec. Madame has a sister-in-law there, in a convent, one of those dreadful strict ones where they let you see somebody once or twice a year, and you have to talk to them through a screen. We’ll take the night boat, and go and see her, and catch the Portland train the same afternoon.”

“Which boat? I mean, which day? I’m heading home myself. It would be grand if we could go together.”

“Thursday.”

“I’ll move heaven and earth to be on it,” he said, and was rewarded with a flash of sheer shameless pleasure in her eyes. Too late, she looked away and changed the subject.

“So you ran a theatre?” she said wistfully. “That must have been wonderful. Did many people come?”

“Most of our shows were packed. Though I must tell you, it wasn’t much of a theatre—just a big bare room, really, the upper floor over Richey’s Warehouse. We had a raised stage at one end, and wooden benches for the audience, and some pot-bellied stoves so they didn’t all freeze to death. The actors had to dress in a little hole in the back of the warehouse, and come up the back stairs to the stage. But I brought in some fine touring companies from the States, and every year the lads from the garrison and I would put together a decent amateur production. It wasn’t London, but it was all right. Have you ever been to the theatre?”

“No. Madame says her cousins and their friends do plays sometimes, at their parties, and even at the balls at Government House. But I’ve never seen a play. I’d love to, someday.”

Madame’s cousins at Government House? That brought him up short, until he recalled how Sylvie had first described the blind woman’s family:
Merchants, the lot of them, and a great proper clan of rich Presbyterians to boot, except for the one who ran off and married a French-Canadian Papist from a Boston merchant brig.

Oh, hell, he thought.
That’s
who Madame Louise was. Bloody damned hell.

The connection had never crossed his mind. It should have, he supposed, but he had been thinking so much of other things, and he had simply assumed that Sylvie and Madame lived in Montreal, or at least somewhere in the West. And so none of those other people had ever crossed his mind—the other widow who was named Louise, the other clan of rich and proper Presbyterians—the clan of Halifax timber magnate David Scott, whose daughter had indeed, many years ago, eloped with a junior officer from a
Yankee merchant ship, to the universal horror of her kin. David Scott, whose sister married Douglas Orton, and who had himself wed a sister of the same house. Living in Halifax, there was but one person Madame Louise could be: Louise Doreen Mallette. David Scott’s daughter.