The Halifax Connection (3 page)

He heard a shout somewhere nearby and pulled his attention sharply back to the moment. The corner of Prince and Argyle was not a safe place at midnight. He and Janes were both armed, and reasonably sober. Still, in this part of town a wise man kept his wits sharp and his eyes on the street, especially if his companion seemed to be thinking of other things.

“They’re all young and pretty, right, these ladies?” Janes asked.

“Young I’ll not swear to,” Erryn said. “I never ask a lass her age. But I’ll wager there isn’t one you won’t find pretty.”

It was a fine summer night, and many people were still abroad even at this hour. A carriage passed behind them, rattling along Argyle; men stumbled out of taverns with drunken laughter following them; a couple quarrelled bitterly somewhere behind a dim-lit upper window. They were moving into what were called the upper streets, those nearest to the fortress and the barracks. It was here—not along the waterfront, but here, in the military heart of the city—that one found the roughest part of town. Here were most, and the worst, of the brothels; the wildest bars; the dirtiest broken-down tenements. Here too, always, was violence.

There were, so Erryn had been told, more than four hundred liquor vendors in the city. He doubted that anyone ever counted the places used for prostitution. By day they were ordinary shops and taverns, boarding houses, even homes. Some were clean and well kept; others were collapsing hovels, reeking of dirt and disease. Officially they were illegal, but nobody bothered with them much. Halifax was an imperial outpost, and empires routinely courted the loyalty of their men with bread and circuses. Rum and brothels were merely a variation.

To the men’s left now, its door wide open to attract passersby,
was a tavern called the Grange. A tinny piano hammered out a tune Erryn could barely recognize, lost as it was in raucous talk and laughter. Janes paused on the street for a moment. Perhaps a dozen men were visible inside, most of them in uniform. Among them, in various states of undress, were several young black women.

Erryn knew what Janes would say before he said it.

“Well, there you have it, Shaw. Abolition in all its glory.”

Erryn said nothing. He had been opposed to slavery all his life, as most Englishmen were. He had not reversed his public stand when he began to work for the Confederates, but he had moderated it, showing himself ready to listen to a slave owner’s point of view; allowing that the future of the institution was, in the final analysis, their business and not his. Usually he found it easy. The Southerners who came here understood local opinion; most of them trod softly on the subject, whatever their personal opinions happened to be.

Maury Janes was not the sort of man to tread softly on anything.

“Back home,” he went on, “where they’re looked after, niggers live useful and productive lives. Set ’em loose, and they just turn into thieves and whores. And nobody can see it. Even your friend Orton can’t see it. Last week he give me a big lecture about how we could have the whole world behind us in our fight if we’d only stop dallying and free the slaves. Might as well tell a man how much fine new land he can get for himself by burning down his crops.”

“Did you tell him so?”
Christ, I would have paid a shilling to see Jamie Orton’s face.

“Nah. I was going to say something, but MacNab jumps right in and starts talking about the poor
Alabama
going down, and that was the end of it.”

They had reached Grafton. It was the first of the disreputable streets, and therefore the least disreputable. The Grafton Street Theatre had been here for years, before it burned in ’61. A soap
factory rose now on the land, a squat, foul-smelling place that saddened Erryn every time he passed it. Some distance beyond it was their destination, the fine frame home owned by Louise and Robert Flynn. Erryn knew them well; for years they had been among his theatre’s most devoted patrons. As it happened, they also ran a discreet and elegant bordello. Erryn had mentioned it to Janes a few days earlier, just in passing. It was the house most favoured by the city’s wealthier young gentlemen and by the ranking officers.

But, Janes suggested, they’d welcome anyone who had plenty of money, right?

“If they don’t know you, mate, you don’t get in the door.”

“They know you?”

Erryn had shrugged. “Most everybody knows me.”

“You wouldn’t consider an introduction sometime, would you?”

“Oh, certainly. Why not?”

Why not, indeed? Janes’s ship was in at last, his mission ready to move into its final, triumphant stage. It was time to celebrate, and what would please Janes more than a splendid dinner at the club and a visit to the most prestigious sporting house in town?

So it was that they came to be walking late on Grafton Street, on the night of the robber’s moon.

Afterwards, of course, the events of that night would be discussed all over town. Everyone knew how the trouble ended; less clear to them was how it actually began, whether the peace officers made an honest mistake, or whether, as some said, Constable Calverley purely hated the Johnny Rebs and would turn on them for any shabby reason he could find.

There were witnesses of a sort. A tipsy carter remembered passing the men at Prince and Grafton—two young chaps obviously out on the town, one of them tall and skinny, just like
Mr. Shaw who ran the theatre here before it burned. The men were talking and laughing, the carter said, and seemed on the best of terms. Up ahead, McKenna’s Tavern was noisy as a street brawl, but the honest shops were dark and still. The soap factory lay all along the street like a fortress wall.

There, everyone agreed, was where the footpads must have hidden: right across from the tailor shop, in the shadows of the factory gate. There was nowhere else they could have hidden, to come out behind the two men so silent and so quick. No one saw them attack, but one of the villains, it was supposed, took down Mr. Shaw with a blow to the head, and a dreadful blow it must have been, for he fell like a stone and did not stir again. Both then turned their attention to Mr. Janes, and obviously found him a handful. He was still on his feet when a door some yards away was suddenly flung wide. Lantern light bounced off the factory wall, and a single commanding voice roared into the night:

“Ho, you there, what the devil are you at?”

That was when tailor Robert Hillier, wakened by the ruckus, leaned out through the bedroom window above his shop. The ruckus stopped dead, he told people afterwards, and he heard a man growling right below him, “Bloody hell, Joss! It’s the guard!” He saw, just barely in the light from the constable’s lantern, two shadowed figures dashing away. Whether the peace officers saw them or not, well, that was anybody’s guess.

The man the robbers had not downed, the one who was later identified as Maury Janes, scrambled for something in the dirt—a pistol, maybe, Hillier thought—and then crouched by his companion’s side.

“Shaw, are you all right?”

There was no answer. The lantern was closer now, and Hillier could see the downed man lying limp as a rag. Janes rolled him clumsily onto his back.

“Shaw! Chrissake, what’s the matter, are you dead?” He groped at his companion’s face and chest. By then the policemen were
on him. Hillier recognized them both: young Connor, who was a two- or three-year man, and Matthew Calverley, the senior constable in the ward. Most everyone considered Calverley an honest man, as far as crime and criminals and such things went. But no one believed he was neutral in the matter of the American war. He favoured the Northerners, and now that the fighting had gone on for three long years, he did not trouble much to hide the fact.

“Here, you!” he said harshly, bending over the two men on the ground. “Well, damn me, anyway. If it isn’t Erryn Shaw.” He hauled the other man to his feet, and Connor shone the lantern close into his face. “Ah, yes. And another of his darling Johnny Rebs. What’s the matter, Jones? Your friends aren’t putting enough pennies in your war chest anymore, so now you have to rob them?”

“I wasn’t robbing him, for Christ’s sake! I was trying to see if he was hurt! And the name is Janes.”

“Right, mate. You can tell it to the judge.”

“Judge? What the hell do you mean, judge? We were attacked! What’s the matter with you idiots? You saw them yourself!”

“I know exactly what I saw. You were fighting with this man and now I find you digging for his purse—”

“You’re crazy! Somebody jumped us! Two of them come at us from behind! They ran away when they saw your lantern. Ask Shaw, for Christ’s sake! He can tell you!”

Matt Calverley took the lantern. “Watch the bugger, Connor.” He dropped to one knee beside the fallen man, shook him lightly by the shoulder. When there was no response, he bent to look more closely, and then cursed.

“Is he conscious?” Connor asked.

“No.” Calverley wiped his hand on his pant leg. “The son of a bitch smashed his head open.”

“Smashed his head open?” Janes wailed. “You dumb Brit bastard, I never touched him!”

By this point a handful of people had gathered in the shadows, scarcely more than shadows themselves. Several others stood framed in the light of the open tavern door. The tailor Robert Hillier stepped back a little from his window. He thought about shouting down to the policemen, to tell them what he had seen … or what he thought he had seen. But he was not absolutely sure. It was dark, after all, and he had just waked up. Maybe it was footpads he saw. Or maybe it was just a pair of street toughs, waiting to see what they could scavenge when the fight was over, and then running away when the constables appeared. Maybe that man Janes really had bashed poor Mr. Shaw’s head in, meaning to rob him, and then where would he be, helping the scoundrel to get away? No, he told himself, he would hold his peace. He could always speak at the trial later, if it came to one.

Calverley got to his feet again and turned to Maury Janes. “All right, let’s go.”

“Go? I ain’t going anywhere with you. Take your dirty hands off me!” He punched the constable hard in the stomach. A Halifax man would have known better, Hillier said afterwards. You never took Matt Calverley on when he had you two to one. You took him on—maybe—when it was the other way around.

Calverley buckled, but only a little. Then he struck back, once, twice. “You won’t come peaceable? Fine, you’ll come on your bloody arse!” A third blow followed, the bone-crunching sort that made everyone who heard it flinch. Janes sank to the ground like a sack of meal, and Connor promptly manacled his hands behind his back.

The constable wiped his arm across his face. “You lads,” he shouted at the gathered watchers. “I’ve tuppence for anyone who’ll run to the station and send us the paddy wagon. The rest of you find something else to do. It’s over—go on home.”

“Shouldn’t we take Mr. Shaw inside?” Connor asked.

“Into that rum-hole? He’s better off here. At least nobody’s going to puke on him. Keep an eye on things, will you? I want to
have a look at this ruffian’s pockets. Could be Shaw wasn’t the first he robbed tonight.”

Calverley took the lantern and knelt beside the prisoner. Hillier could not see clearly what he did, but he took his time about it, even troubling to remove the prisoner’s boots. Just then a small private carriage rattled down the street from the north, stopping almost beside them. The passenger jumped out before the driver had secured the reins.

“Lord help us, constable,” he said, “what’s happened here? No one’s been killed, I trust?”

“Colonel Hawkins. Good to see you, sir. No, no one’s dead, but I fear Mr. Shaw’s been battered rather badly.”

Hillier had not recognized the man from the carriage, but he recognized the name. James Fitzroy Hawkins was practically an institution in the city. He was retired from one of Britain’s famous lancer regiments—Hillier could never remember which—and was now commander of the Halifax militia.

“Can I be of help, perchance?” he offered.

“Actually …” Calverley, back on his feet, looked down at the injured man, still unmoving on the ground. “It’s a lot to ask, sir, but if you could take Mr. Shaw here to a doctor, then Connor and I could deal with this ruffian—to say nothing of the others who might be out tonight.”

“Why, certainly I could. Glad to be of help. I’ll wait till your wagon comes, though. In case that one’s got friends.”

By this point most of the strangers attracted by the fracas were losing interest. The passersby moved on; the tavern’s patrons drifted back inside or left for home. For a time it was almost quiet on Grafton Street. In his bedroom above the tailor shop, Robert Hillier rubbed his neck and poured a small shot of rum to help him sleep. When he heard hoofbeats and creaking wheels, he looked out one last time. It was the police wagon come at last, a lumbering hack whose worn-out horses must have shuddered every time they passed the soap factory. The officers loaded the prisoner first,
and young Connor climbed inside with him. Then Calverley and Colonel Hawkins picked up Erryn Shaw’s shoulders and feet, and eased him into the colonel’s carriage. The two men bid each other a weary good night and drove away in opposite directions.