The Halifax Connection (32 page)

“I’ll be right back,” she whispered fiercely. “I promise!”

She did not know whom she might find to ask for help, and she did not care. Anyone would do. Her second try found the steward’s door. He opened it half asleep, but he said yes, he would fetch the captain right off, and she fled back to Erryn Shaw’s side. He was as she had left him, ashen and shivering. The thought that he might die—that he was perhaps already dying—closed like a cold wind around her, turning everything to ice.

Please, God … oh, please, please …

She had known that she might lose him. Indeed, she considered it all but inevitable. He might court her, even care for her a little, but in the end he would go his own way, perhaps with a laugh and a kiss, or perhaps without a second thought, the way you walked away from a kitten you had cuddled on the street. She would lose him, of course … but it had never crossed her mind that she might lose him to death. She had thought him invincible.

She slid her hand like a feather down the side of his bruised face, puzzled by her blindness. How was it possible that she had forgotten death? Forgotten her mother, and the poisoned air of the mill, and the graves scattered right here on the bank of this river? Forgotten Fran, smiling and asking for some oranges, no longer there when Sylvie came back, never there again? Was it because they were powerless and poor? Because wanton, stupid, pointless death was the headsman of the poor? Because however much she liked Erryn Shaw, or even loved him, she had always seen the image of pride and power more than she had seen the man?

Now only the man was left, desperately hurt, broken, shivering with fever. Just a bit of bone and blood. Maybe with a soul, the way the church folks said, or maybe not; but no lord, no elfkind, only another animal as fragile as herself. The yellow jack could take him, or a knife, or the black darkness of the river, and he would be gone just like the others. Forever.

No.

It was empty defiance, of course. God was not likely to listen, nor was anyone else, but she would say it anyway.
No.
She lifted the covers and slid gently into the bunk, wrapping as much of her body as she could against his own, the way Lucy Brady had wrapped her son when they carried him home from the mill in Rochdale. It was cold in the tenement that night, far colder than the
Saguenay;
they could see their breaths like puffs of smoke. Lucy laid her boy on a blanket and covered him with her coat, an old dress, some rags, everything she had, finally herself. Her own warmth, holding back the night.

“It’s all right, Erryn. I won’t leave you. I promise. You’ll be all right.”

The captain did not return. He had just left after all, pronouncing the patient fine. What would he think now, except that she was a silly, panic-stricken girl? She fitted the coverings tightly around him again and then lay very still except for a whisper now and then:
It’s all right, love, you’ll be all right.
She did not care what the ship’s men might think if they came in, all proper and appalled:
What the devil do you think you’re doing, miss?
Whatever they thought, it did not matter. She wrapped Erryn close, and after a long time she no longer heard his teeth knocking, and after a much longer time she realized he had stopped trembling; his chest was rising and falling quietly against her—unevenly, but quietly—and he had begun to sweat.

She took the oilskin away and stood upright again, barely daring to hope. The captain did come by at last. He was sorry, he said, there was trouble in the engine room. Now, what seemed to be the matter?

When she told him, he did not seem concerned. It was common, he said, just a bit of fever, nothing to worry about. He laid his hand across Erryn’s forehead, looked briefly at the bandaged wound, and nodded, satisfied. Sylvie listened until the last of his steps faded down the hall, and turned again to the thin figure on the bunk.

He was asleep. The cold, deathlike thing that closed on him had backed away—maybe not very far, but it had backed away. She watched him, one hand lying soft against his shoulder, until dawn light crept across the windows … dawn light, and foggy bits of farms, and finally a harbour, grey and rugged, sodden with October rain.

T
HERE WERE
only a handful of people by the graveside: a widowed mother, a few friends, three discharged soldiers from the United States Army, who had never met Sandie Douglas but who came just the same to honour a fallen comrade. Matt Calverley stood alone, somewhat apart from the others. He barely heard the simple, familiar prayers. He thought of the years he had known Sandie, the times they had been hungry together or cornered in some rathole, the things they had stolen. They were gifted thieves, back when they were boys. Sandie had joked about it on his last furlough home. Barrack Street was far enough away by then; they could find it amusing being respectable, tramping around in uniforms and earning honest money. “If there was a jail for the squeaky clean,” Sandie said, “they’d lock us both up in two minutes flat.”

And then he had gone all serious, right in a breath. “You know what I think about sometimes, Matt, old boy? When the camp’s gone quiet and most everyone’s asleep? I think nothing’s changed much at all. It was always a war, surviving. We’ve just gotten better at it.”

He had joined up for a three-hundred-dollar bounty, re-enlisted because he said some wars were more worth fighting than others, survived malaria and Gettysburg, and then took a mortal wound in a skirmish so small no one even gave it a name. Crippled and in pain, he came back to Halifax to die. He was not alone. Every week or so there was a notice in one newspaper or another, someone’s son or brother wounded, or killed, or finally safe home. There were thousands of Canadians in Mr. Lincoln’s army—or more likely tens of thousands—a fact too often forgotten under the blustering of the Grey Tories. Joseph Howe’s own son had gone to fight, and a regiment raised in Boston in ’61 had so many Nova Scotians in it they nicknamed it the Highlanders. There were New Brunswickers too, and Islanders, and young men from the West, most of them working in the States when the war began. Others marched across the border for money or adventure or faith in the cause; a much smaller number (again, no one knew quite how many) were taken against their will by dishonest crimps, drugged or bashed on the head, and woke up in a Yankee uniform. All of them were part of it now.

Erryn Shaw, too.

Wind tugged at Matt’s sleeves and whipped about his uncovered head, tore spatters of dirt off the grave mound and spun them willy-nilly over the mourners’ feet and into the grass. He looked away, out to sea. It was impossible to keep them apart in his mind, the dead and the wounded. It was impossible not to wonder if Erryn might also be coming home to die, this time or the next time, or if one day he might never come home at all.

And it will be your doing.

It would not be, of course, not really. Recruiting men for this work was no different from a sea captain signing up a crew: he
wanted good people, the best ones possible, and if one or two were his friends, all the better—they would be the men he could especially depend on. It was not his fault if one day a hurricane swept over them and the ship went down.

Funny, Matt thought, how the logic of the mind and the logic of the heart sat at opposite sides of a man’s being, and never quite met in the middle.

Earth fell hard on the wood of Sandie’s coffin, a terrible, melancholy sound, one Matt had heard far too often of late. He turned to go, and was surprised to find another man standing alone, even farther back from the others than himself.

“Mr. Romney.”

“Constable. Figured I’d find you here.”

Jabin Romney was heavy-set and well into his forties, generally unshaven, with the look of a man who rarely slept enough. He was the most important Federal agent in Halifax—that is, he was the most important Federal agent who was recognized as such. That others equally important came in secret, and were replaced when the nature of their business became known or even suspected—this Matt took for granted. Romney’s particular role required openness; he was the man to whom anyone could go to trade information for money.

Matt did not envy him this role. To begin with, the use of paid informers was almost universally despised. Worse, in a place like Halifax, Romney’s job could drive a man crazy. Like any port, the city was full of transients, people whom no one really knew, people whom no one could vouch for. Like any garrison town, it numbered among its permanent inhabitants many who lived on the edge of the law, in a dirty world where violence, drunkenness, prostitution, and general desperation were the order of the day. Any of these people might stumble on a piece of useful intelligence and rush to sell it for a meal or a bottle or a day’s peace. Many were equally capable of inventing information they did not have, and offering the Yankee anything they thought he might be
dumb enough to buy, right up to and including General Lee’s beard in a brown paper bag.

Matt had encountered similar nonsense himself, but he had the great advantage of knowing the city and its denizens from boyhood; he had a decade of experience as a policeman, and a street rat’s instincts for the game. Poor Romney had been a bank clerk before the war. No wonder he looked permanently spent.

Romney nodded faintly toward the gravesite. “You knew him?”

“He was an old friend.”

“I’m sorry.”

Matt said nothing, and Romney went on: “Did you go to Major Harrington’s funeral last week?”

“Now why would I do that?”

“I thought you were an extraordinarily curious man.”

Matt laughed a little, dryly. “They wouldn’t have liked it much, me and my curiosity turning up. I heard all about it, though. Coach and six, all matched and decked out in black. Parade five blocks long. Half the Halifax Club come to pay their respects, and the Archbishop of Charleston himself saying the Mass.” He looked back at Sandie Douglas’s lonely grave, at the handful of mourners now drifting away, an even dozen if you counted the minister and the American spy. And Sandie was a Halifax man. Major Harrington was a Southern Rebel, an ordnance specialist sent abroad to obtain weapons. “It could make a man bloody cynical, watching this war unfold.”

“You got that right,” Romney said. “Most of the time, anyway.” He turned his hat around in his hands, brushing off invisible bits of dust. “You wouldn’t happen to know a flossie girl named Jessie Bedard, would you?”

“You mean personally?” Matt murmured, and was amused to see Romney blush.

“Oh, no, not at all, constable! I meant did you know anything
about
her—”

“I do. And I was only joshing you, mate.”

“Would you believe her if she told you something quite outrageous?”

“Maybe. But only if it wasn’t going to come back on her. She wouldn’t rat on anyone who might break her head a couple of weeks down the road. Someone passing through, well, that might be different.”

Romney nodded faintly, his only acknowledgment. He never said thanks, and Matt was glad of it. They were, after all, only making conversation.

“Captain Wilkinson’s back in town, with some of his boys. I suppose you heard.”

“I heard,” Matt said. “Word on the docks is he’s likely to get command of a blockade-runner.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. He’s a damn fine seaman. Well, good day to you, constable.” Romney put his hat back on and moved away, a worn and sorry-looking figure, bending slightly against the wind.

He had arrived in Halifax in the fall of ’61. Partly from scuttlebutt and partly from a few casual conversations with the man, Matt had learned that he was—or at least claimed to be—a bank clerk from somewhere in Maine. He had no pre-war experience in dealing with such matters as conspiracy or deceit. He had no legal or investigative training. He had no particular charm or persuasive skills; indeed, he was almost timid toward others. He seemed, on the surface, a most unlikely candidate for his job. Yet, more than two years later, he was still here, and appeared to have the full confidence of the American consul, Mortimer Jackson, who was himself competent, energetic, and alert.