The Halifax Connection (26 page)

It took Erryn a moment to understand. When he did, he was both profoundly offended and profoundly relieved. The figure was a monk—or, more precisely, a Monck.

“That’s bloody clever, mates,” he said, hating himself. “Pity it’s not the real thing.”

“A
great pity,” Gavin said. “But what I’d like to know, Mr. Shaw—who is that son of a bitch speaking for, anyway? A man sure has to wonder.”

The coolness Erryn had encountered in the bar was more comprehensible now. It had not been personal, merely political. He was English. And which damn side were the English on, anyway?

Gavin hanged the paper governor neatly and tapped the figure to make it sway. It bobbed a little and hung rigid.

“Stiff-necked bugger, that Monck. Doesn’t even make an interesting corpse.”

That will be Lord Monck to you, Mr. Gavin.

“What’s your view of it, Erryn?” Follett asked wearily. “Is he really speaking for London, do you think?”

Erryn shrugged. “Oh, I suppose he thinks he is. But from what I’ve heard, he has almost no political experience—and none whatever for a situation like this. He’s an Anglo-Irish nobody who took the post because he needed the money.”
And because he didn’t want to bleed it out of his tenants, but we won’t mention that little detail.

“Then why in God’s name did they give it to him?” Kane demanded.

“Well, quite a few of the people who should have taken it were afraid of wrecking their careers if things went to hell over here. Monck was handy. He’s an old friend of Palmerston’s, apparently. And he had no career to wreck.”

Dear Lord
, Erryn thought,
I’ll soon have to join Madame in the sailors’ church and do penance for all of this.

“Patronage politics,” Gavin said scornfully. “That’s one of the reasons we parted company with the Yankees.”

“Yes. An admirable objective.” Erryn made a point of pulling out his watch. “I fear I must take my leave, gentlemen. Jack, I’d be honoured if you’d join me for lunch tomorrow. We can go over any last-minute matters.”

They shook hands all round, and Erryn left them and walked quietly down the stairs. He felt light-headed and unexpectedly weary, like a man recovering from a fever. How good it would be to have a quiet pot of tea, perhaps at Chez Maurice, and buy a flower, and walk with Sylvie Bowen down to the Irish Stone. “I’ll go with you,” he had offered, “if you’d like to see it one last time before we leave.” Tomorrow night they would take the paddlewheeler to Quebec, and then the Grand Trunk to Maine, and finally a coastal steamer back to Halifax. Two glorious days to spend in her company, away from the Confederacy and all its works, maybe three if the weather turned bad or Madame needed rest.

Finally he would have his furlough.

But not just yet. Three British redcoats stormed into St. Lawrence Hall just as he was about to leave it and almost bowled him over.

“Why, lookit, lads, it’s Erryn Shaw!”

A huge, sweaty hand gripped his and another slapped his shoulder. “Hullo there, Shaw! What bloody good luck! We’re off for a drink or two!”

They had already been drinking, obviously. They were loud, boisterous, altogether friendlier than Erryn had ever encouraged them to be.

He knew them, of course. St. Lawrence Hall was not merely Little Richmond; it was also the headquarters of the British army’s North American commander, Sir Fenwick Williams, and his staff. The general operated out of a large suite of rooms on the first floor, a small distance down the hall from Jackson Follett.

It was a fine, comfortable lodging, of course, appropriate for a man of his rank. It was central and convenient for his duties. But its presence there led, predictably, to continual fraternization. Any day of the week one might find Southerners sitting in the bar with English redcoats, having dinner with them, going off together for an evening’s performance at the Theatre Royal just a block away.
Most of the Englishmen in the Hall were officers, born of the best families; they looked upon the well-bred Southerners as men of their own kind. Inclined already to be pro-Confederate, this ongoing personal contact only made them more so.

“Come on, Shaw. We got to cheer the lads up. I’ve heard it’s a bloody graveyard in there.” He nodded toward the bar at the far end of the foyer. “You’ve read the papers, I suppose?”

His companion did not give Erryn a chance to reply. “Hell, Bob, the whole world’s read the papers.” Then, to Erryn himself: “Have you talked to poor old Follett yet?”

“I spoke with Mr. Follett briefly, yes.”

“What did he say about it? Did he think it would’ve worked?”

“I fear you shall have to ask him yourself.”

The officer guffawed and slapped Erryn’s arm a second time. “Course it would’ve worked. Why else would the GG get himself all in a flap? It’s a damn shame he ever found out. We could have had ourselves a fine old dust-up with the Yankees.”

“We could have indeed.”

“Hell,” said another, “even if he did find out, why go running to them first thing? I mean, he could always say the source was unreliable and he had to look into it. A man’s got to cover his arse. That doesn’t mean he has to give the buggers anything.”

“Come on, Shaw. The drinks are on us.”

“I’m sorry, gentlemen. I’d love to join you.” That was lie number three hundred and eleven for the day, more or less. “I have a prior engagement. With a very charming lady.”

“Oh, well, in that case, you shan’t join us—we shall join you.”

“I think not.”

“Selfish bugger, ain’t he?” They laughed and parted like old friends.

How typical they were, he thought, watching them go. They were like a hundred others he had known, patrician officers—in England there was no other kind—young, generous, easy to get on with, a trifle shallow, living for the day and the hour. Decent
enough men, in their own way, but painfully unaware of what the world was really like for most of the people who lived in it.

We could have had a fine old dust-up with the Yankees …

Oh, no doubt. And how many young men riding innocent into town to buy a sack of meal and swept away by the press gangs, never to be heard of again? How many old ones, later, like those he had seen in London, without legs or hands or faces, ragged and shivering in the streets, with a little flag beside their begging bowl? How many asylums full of children with nothing to eat? None of those three men would ever think to ask.

And if it were himself in that scarlet coat, his head full of drums and glory, sitting in a foreign outpost without half enough to do, desperate for adventure and promotion because, if you had made the military your life, what else was there? Then what?

I wouldn’t be like that, wanting war for its own sake, not ever … which is probably why I didn’t go.

Well, he reflected, it was a nice, comforting thing to tell himself, but deep down he was not sure. There were those paintings on his bedroom walls, after all. There was his boyhood hero, the admiral, as mangled as Nelson and almost as renowned, the man he had wanted so long and so passionately to emulate.

The man who swore at him: “Get out of here, God damn you, what the devil are you staring at?”

That was where it began. The first bewildered “oh,” the first uncertainty, the first hint of a war god’s clay feet. Not recognized as such, not then, not for years, but still the beginning.

Was that why the old man did it?
Unconsciously, perhaps, not willing to say the thing plainly, or even to think it, yet driven nonetheless by some hidden and desperate intent:
Don’t, lad, don’t! Whatever you do, don’t follow after me… !

It was this possibility, never considered before, that moved him to buy two beautiful roses to take down to the riverbank later, when he went with Sylvie for a final visit to the Irish Stone. One rose he placed on the stone, alongside Sylvie’s small bouquet. For
the other he brought a model ship, small and very sturdy. He tied the rose to its single mast and set it adrift in the St. Lawrence. Then he took out his flute and played till the tiny craft was lost from sight.

“Will it reach the sea, do you think?” Sylvie wondered.

“No. Likely as not some youngster will find it washed up in the reeds half a mile away. But …” He shrugged. “It’s like the old Romans pouring wine in the ground for the spirits … or like you said about Nassau, about things going round and coming back again. Maybe it will count for something.”

It was a day of peculiar and uneasy perfection, the air hot and sensual with perfume, so warm a human might well be tempted to stretch out on the grass like a sunning cat. All around them the hills lay in a riot of colour, and wherever the autumn light struck the water, it danced.

Yet Erryn sensed the end of it hovering just out of sight. There was an oddness to the light, as when storms were in the air, and he was quite certain that if he climbed to the very top of Mount Royal and looked to the northwest, he would see black clouds prowling in the distance, with wind riding on their backs and the ice of winter in their eyes.

“Will you play another song or two?” Sylvie asked. “It be so beautiful, the way you do it, as if… as if you knew magic or something.”

He smiled. She was not a lady, as the world measured things. She said “bloody” and even “bugger” and never thought twice about picking up a messy pastry with her fingers. Yet she could pay a compliment as graceful as any lady might have dreamt of, and all the sweeter for being utterly sincere.

He found them a patch of grass that was free of stones and briers. It would have been pleasant to sit watching the river, but he preferred to keep an eye on the path and the docks, just in case.

No one came to trouble them. They sat close, their shoulders brushing warm in the sun. He needed both hands for his flute, and that, he decided, was likely just as well. After three or four pieces he stopped to kiss her, a few gentle, decidedly careful kisses. She
returned them equally carefully, as if she knew how dangerous this all was—the flawless day, the utter, deceptive tranquility of the place, the loneliness in both of them. All tinder, he thought. If they were somewhere safe instead of here …

But they were here and that was the end of it.

“I wish Fran had met you,” she said. “She would have liked you awfully, I think.”

“She was a good judge of character, then, I take it?”

“You’re not very humble, Erryn Shaw.”

“Yes, I am. I’m so humble it doesn’t even bother me when people don’t notice it.”

She smiled faintly and then looked away. Not at the city sprawling across the hill before them, he suspected. Not at anything in particular.

“You have faith in things, don’t you?” she said. “I don’t mean religious things. I mean … life things. The future. Other people. Dreams. You believe when you set out to go somewhere you’ll get there, and when you have something of your own you’ll be able to keep it.” She paused, just for a breath. “It must make the world look very different.”

“Different from …?”
Different from the way it looks to most everybody else, of course.
That was the sort of thing Matt Calverley used to say to him, when they were just beginning to be friends.
You don’t know what it’s like. You just don’t know!
It was true, at least to a point, but it did not matter nearly as much as Matt expected.

“And you don’t have faith in such things?” he asked softly. “Not ever?”

“Oh, sometimes, I suppose. A little. But never … never way deep down, the way you do. The way you seem to.”

“Why?”

She answered slowly, thoughtfully, as if she were sorting her explanation even as she gave it.

“It’s not … it’s not because I think bad of people, or that I think the world’s a horrid place. I don’t. Honestly, I don’t. It’s just that
things … things
change.
Like ice melting. Or like a fog coming in. You look at something and it ain’t what you were looking at a little while before.”

He thought about answering, but even as he chose the words his mind was taking a step back, hearing the truth in her own. Things did change. He himself had changed quite a lot in his still rather young life. He waited then, and listened.

“After it happens a few times,” she went on, “you get … wary, I suppose. When I were a kid, I could believe in anything. Like when I first went to school. I were so happy, as if a door opened, with a whole other world just lying on the other side. And then it were gone, like that, and I got put in the mill, working for Pa’s whiskey, living for the day I’d be grown up and could get out. That be freedom, see, being grown up. M’appen I’d go far away, or marry someone handsome and brave, a soldier who’d take me to India … Oh, I could dream of anything, I could. Then I got this.” She touched her face. “Fran took me to Rochdale, and there we dreamt of Canada. All those years slaving in that bloody mill, we held on to one thing, going to Canada, until I got sick from the cotton and the mill closed because of the war. And then nothing were going to get us out except a miracle.

“We still thought it would happen somehow. Or Fran did, anyway. I weren’t so sure anymore. But she were right, it did. One day we found a little notice in the newspaper, about a Yankee ship wanting cabin passengers. We had twenty-one quid between us, Fran and me, and the
Osprey
would take us to Nova Scotia for twenty.”

The
Osprey?
But the
Osprey
was … Oh, my God! …
He went taut and unmoving, the way a hare might, sitting quiet in the sun, looking up suddenly into the eyes of a fox.

“You came on the
Osprey?”
he whispered. “Not on an immigrant ship?”

“No. Fran wouldn’t go near those ships. She said too many people died on them. She said we had to save for something better, but with one bloody thing and another we never had enough. And
then we found the
Osprey.
Oh, she were beautiful, Erryn—you must have seen her in Halifax—she were something from a storybook. We thought we had our miracle, see. We thought we’d made it, and all the bad things were behind us.

“They told us about the Southern pirates before we left. That’s why the fare were so cheap. But we had no choice except to go, and anyway, it’s such a big ocean …”