The Halifax Connection (24 page)

For a moment she considered lying, making up an entire life history: a loving family, a tragic accident … a train wreck, perhaps. Oh yes, a train wreck would serve perfectly, smash her face and kill everyone else, all except Fran, and then the two of them off to the mills because what else could a lone woman and an orphan child do?

The idea died even as it was conceived. She was not at all sure she could carry it off, but more importantly, she knew it would serve for nothing. She did not want him to like some other lass who had never existed; she wanted him to like her, and probably he would not anyway, he could not. So no, there was no point in telling him anything but the truth.

“We lived in a mill town. A place called Darwen. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there—”

He shook his head no.

“It weren’t much. Just the factories and the cottages and some fancy houses for the sods who ran the place. And a church, of
course, and lots of taverns. You could get your comfort in one place or the other. Nobody cared which, as long as you didn’t bring it to work the next day.

“My ma took her comfort from God, and my pa took his from a bottle. He drank everything they earned, and when my two brothers were nine, he put them in the mill and drank everything they earned too. He beat on her at least once a week. Some women left their men when it got bad enough, but she wouldn’t. Her husband were her cross, she said, and she must bear it.”

Sylvie had been looking mostly at her plate as she spoke, or at her hands, or at the rain-battered window. Now she looked full at Erryn’s face, and was surprised to find neither horror nor pity, only a kind of watchful, driven intensity. He said nothing, and she went on:

“I got to go to school for two years. Then he put me in the mill too. There weren’t any laws then about how old you had to be; those came later. And that were the worst of it, Erryn, having to leave the school. It weren’t the mill, or even the fighting, except for the last bit. But when I couldn’t go to school anymore, then I had nothing to look forward to, ever. There were the mill and there were home, and the mill were likely to kill us, and still it were better than home.”

“Did your father beat you, too?”

“Sometimes. Mostly the older ones. But Ma always got between them, so she took the worst of it.”

She stared at the window again. She had begun her tale without the least reluctance. It was old history, after all; she was past it. So why was it suddenly so hard to go on?

“You spoke of ‘that last bit’ of fighting,” Erryn murmured, very soft. “It ended badly, didn’t it?”

“He killed her.”

“My God.” His hands slid quickly across the table, but she pulled hers away before they touched.

“Please,” she whispered. “I don’t want to cry.”

“Forgive me. I meant only … Please, go on. I’m sorry.”

“There ain’t much more. He went crazy that night. I don’t know why, what were different, except something were. We were all screaming—Ma, me, the little ones. I went at him with the water pitcher. If I’d got his head, I might have knocked him out, but he saw me, and so I only broke it on his shoulder. He took it away so fast, like my hands were made of paper.”

She touched her fingers to her cheek, half consciously. “He gave me this. With the pitcher. What were left on it. When I woke up, he were passed out on the floor, and Ma were dead. The neighbours got the sheriff and they took him away. He got hanged, and we got scattered around to whatever relatives would take us. My aunt Fran took me to live with her in Rochdale. It were another mill town, bigger and dirtier than Darwen. Fran were so good to me, but the mill were horrid. They paid the women so little, we couldn’t hardly get by. It took forever to save enough to get away.”

“To America.”

“Yes. Like Fran’s old friend, Susan. She went years before, when she were twenty or so—she and her brother. He had a bit of money from the navy. One day Fran wrote to the Bishop of Halifax, bold as brass, asking about her old family friend, thinking m’appen he’d know what’d become of her. That’s how we found out she were Susan Danner now. She’d made herself a good life, she even had her own inn—a mill girl, just like us. We lived on that for years.”

She wished he would give her a clue to his thoughts. But he sat very quietly, leaning back in his chair, one long, thin hand wrapped around his wineglass, the other out of sight on his lap. As though he had backed off. As though he did not know what the hell to say.
Dear God, the girl’s nothing but factory trash …
well, he would not
say
it, of course not, he would not even let it show. Damn actors, anyway.

“So,” she said. “That’s where I come from.” She made herself smile, and took another sweet from the plate. “Now it’s your turn.”

“My turn.” He shifted in his chair, played some more with the wineglass. He looked troubled, but even while she ran the obvious, hurtful reasons for it through her mind, she did not entirely believe them. His unease seemed born of something else, something older and altogether his own.

He looked up and met her eyes. “Once, many years ago, a friend of mine said to me, ‘There’s a whole lot of different handbaskets a man can go to hell in.’ He said it to be kind, because he’d been through hell and he knew very well I hadn’t, no matter how sorry I felt for myself when I set my mind to it.

“I don’t know if he was right about the handbaskets. Maybe a little bit. In any case, mine was a gilded one, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. I had anything a child could want, except companionship. I didn’t get much of that. My father was in the army, and mostly gone. My mother was a great lady, and lived the social life expected of her. She kissed me good night from time to time, and told me to be sure to say my prayers. Our tutor was a grand old cove, but he was positively ancient. Our nurse, with whom we spent most of our time, was rather like a brick fence: the protection is nice, but you can’t say much for the conversation. So I went my own way, and before anyone really noticed—even me—I’d turned myself into a considerable misfit. By the time I hit sixteen or thereabouts, my father was in complete despair. I’m sure if he’d believed in changelings, he would have thought the trolls brought me.”

“Lord save us, why? I think a man’d be pleased to have a son like you.”

“Well, that’s very kind of you to say. But my father was of the old school. God save the king and the rest of you do as you’re told—that sort of thing. There wasn’t much we agreed on. But what finished it was my choice of career. Young men of my rank become military or naval officers. They go into politics. Or they take a sinecure, and live like parasites at the country’s expense—”

“What’s a sinecure?”

“A posting where you get paid for doing nothing. Or almost nothing—reading a few reports and signing a few papers, two, three times a year. I could have done that. I could have taken up the law, or maybe even taught classics at Cambridge. But running a theatre? For my life’s work? It was beyond him. It
shamed
him. It was like a daughter deciding to be a courtesan. Inconceivable.”

“Didn’t he
like
the theatre?”

“Oh, I’m sure he did. He liked a good roast of beef too. That didn’t mean he wanted me in a butcher shop.” He made a small, bemused gesture and leaned his elbows on the table again. “It was all very mad, Sylvie. He came up to London once, to bring me to my senses. Of course, it was much too late. We did nothing but quarrel. By the time I left England, we weren’t speaking at all. We don’t write.” He paused as though to say something more, and then did not.

“Will you go back, do you think?”

“Never.” He spoke without anger, without a trace of defiance, but with an absolute finality. Never.

But, she thought, if he was of high rank, surely there would be land, property, an inheritance? Surely he would go back for that?

“Do you have brothers and sisters?” she asked.

“An older brother, a younger sister. Both married and living frightfully proper lives.”

Again he was silent for a time, as if he was considering whether to speak of some matter or not. This time, perhaps, he did.

“You’ve spoken honestly, Sylvie, so I will do the same. Nearly everyone who knows me thinks I’m doing what young men of the aristocracy traditionally do: they travel abroad for a while, have a few adventures, sow a few wild oats in the colonies, and then go home and take their proper place in the social order. There’s a gentleman in Halifax who thinks the burning of the Grafton Street Theatre was the best thing that could have happened to me; now I’ll settle down and build my fortune. I don’t argue with him, but I mean to have another theatre as soon as I can manage it.
That’s where my fortune is, and it’s likely to be a lean one. I get a bit of money every year from my father: even an impossible son can’t be left to starve in the wilds of America. But I don’t expect to inherit much. And I will not, under any circumstances, go back to take my proper place in the social order.

“So …” His smile was both easy and a trifle sad. “So I am as you see me, Sylvie Bowen, nothing more … and hopefully nothing less.”

She was left without words, unable to read the implications in his, everything from honesty and honour to a warning that if she were an adventuress she was wasting her time. She could not be glad for what he had lost; she was not sorry he was here to stay. As for his personal handbasket to hell, how gilded it must have been, to think his fortune a lean one with such fine clothes on his body, and gold rings on his hands, and money coming over from England as a matter of course. Money he was simply given. For nothing. For being somebody’s son.

She had no wish to hurt him, or to sound like a fool, and any response she could think of promised to do the one thing or the other. She made a pretence of remembering the time.

“Oh, heavens,” she said, “it’s getting dark out. Mass must be long over.”

He pulled a watch out of his pocket and glanced at it briefly. “For some time, I fear,” he said. “Will Madame be more forgiving because of the rain, or more impatient?”

“Madame is never impatient. Well, almost never.”

He packed the remaining delicacies into a small box the host had given him and handed it across the table with a smile. “These might do for a bribe.”

“She’s fasting.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.”

“Do you make a habit of offering people bribes?”

“All the time.”

“And,” she said, “I suppose you always tell the truth.”

“Miss Bowen, though it embarrasses me to say so, I am a paragon of honesty and virtue. A veritable walking miracle. After the good Lord made me, he broke the mould.”

“And a flaming good thing, too. I couldn’t imagine two of you in the world.”

“Of course not. How would you choose between us?”

“Oh,” she said, “I’d sit on a park bench, with one of you on one side and one of you on the other, and let you go on about it. Be as good as going to the theatre.”

Amusement danced in his eyes. He reached both hands to capture hers, and this time she let him.

“It’s nearly dark,” he murmured, “and everybody out there is running heads-down in the rain. If I were to kiss you in the street, will you promise not to batter me with a wet umbrella?”

His hands were warm, lean like the rest of him yet surprisingly beautiful, with the perfect, balanced symmetry of a hawk’s wing. She had wanted other men in her life—quite a few of them through the years, always from a distance. She had lain sometimes in her cot and run her own hands across her body, wondering how it would feel to have this man do it, or that one, whoever had caught her attention at the time, because he was nice to her, or handsome, or new in town, or merely because he existed. Sometimes desire was like the wind or the rain, it just came.

She wondered how much her face gave away, if Erryn Shaw could guess what it meant to have his fingers whispering over the back of her hand, to have the offer of a kiss. She wished she were a lady from a novel, or at the very least a woman like Fran, worldly and subtle and sure of herself. There was an art to all of this, no doubt, a raft of clever things such a woman would know how to say.

“It’s Madame’s umbrella,” she said. “What could I possibly tell her if I broke it?”

They went into the storm and were instantly driven together, holding on to each other for safety as well as shelter, laughing as
gusts of wind splashed rain into their faces, yelping with indignation as unsuspected puddles swallowed their feet, reaching the feeble shelter of the church wall and turning to each other as with a single mind.

Not laughing at all now. He brushed wet hair back from her face with one hand. His mouth whispered across her forehead, her cheeks, the tip of her nose, all of it easy, playful, unbearably delicious. She abandoned Madame’s umbrella on the cobblestones and wrapped herself against him, the heat from his body leaping through her wet clothing as fire through grass. He smelled of sweat and wet fabric and a rich, unfamiliar cologne, and he was still trying, a trifle clumsily, to hold his umbrella over her—an absurd little gesture, but utterly adorable. He kept saying her name, saying beautiful things, that she was lovely, enchanting, and she held him harder and allowed herself, just for a little while, to believe it all.

They kissed—how many times she could not afterwards have said, but many—and after a bit she told him to put the bleeding thing down and they stood with rain spilling over their faces and dripping off their hair, wrapped in fire. She supposed it was shameless to embrace a man so. But she would have sold her soul to have Erryn Shaw, to have him for herself, and all her longing went into those kisses, all her years of longing, all her certainty that this was temporary and must be taken with both hands, for whatever small time it might be in reach.

It was he who ended it, drawing back and cupping her face in his palms. His voice, always so honeyed, had an edge of harshness now; it surprised her.

“Sylvie … God forgive me, my heart, you are utterly drenched.” He found the umbrella and hoisted it again.

“I’m all right,” she said.

“Ah, yes,” he said, and brushed another kiss across her forehead. “But whatever will you tell Madame?”