The Halifax Connection (36 page)

“Yes.” Slowly, Sylvie got to her feet. She was cold all through, and thoroughly grateful that, when they finished here, they would get to have some hot tea in a hot kitchen.

“Aggie, when you said the men go out to plot, what did you mean?”

“The men? Oh, those men. They’re Confederate agents, most of them.”

“You means spies?”

“And everything else. Weapons buyers, couriers, people to preach the Rebel gospel and raise money for the cause. Snoops to
keep track of who comes and who goes, and to tell their masters what everybody thinks. Out-and-out plotters too, trying to make trouble between the States and England. They’ve all got their noses into something.”

“I thought a lot of them were refugees.”

“That isn’t going to stop them from plotting.”

“I suppose you don’t like them much,” Sylvie ventured, a bit uncertainly. “You being from the North, I mean.”

“I can’t think of one blamed reason why I should,” Aggie replied. “Can you?”

“No. Nary a one.”

Aggie grinned, a big, warm grin, as comradely as a hug. “Well then, Sylvie Bowen, except for being bookish, I think you and I have a great deal in common.”

So the last of autumn passed, and winter came in with gales and fog and finally snow. On the twelfth of December, Madame Louise had her fifty-fifth birthday, and the Danners invited her to dinner.

One might have thought it was a fairly ordinary thing, having an aging relative over to dinner. But no; for three days running the Den was turned all but upside down. In the Danners’ personal quarters, all the furniture was moved and all the carpets were cleaned. Every painting on the walls was taken down and the heavy frames were carefully dusted. Every square inch of mahogany and oak was waxed until it shone; every ornament and piece of bric-a-brac was cleaned and polished—and there were, Aggie said, at least two million of them. The best china, already spotless, was taken out and washed again.

God knew Madame was a fine lady and wanted things done right, but this was topping it like royalty. Besides, the poor dear thing could hardly see. This was for the other guests, Sylvie
decided, for the Orton and Scott kinfolk; perhaps even for Jack Danner’s brother, William.

It was William who had moved the family up; this Sylvie had learned from servant gossip when she first arrived. The eldest son of a small merchant, Will Danner made money and powerful friends as a lawyer. He turned his earnings into a fortune through lucky investments, and won the hand of a Halifax beauty named Mary Scott—the daughter of shipping magnate David Scott; the sister of Louise Mallette; and the first cousin of yet another prominent lawyer and pillar of society, James Orton.

It was for them, all this fuss, but even for them it seemed too much. Polishing silver without a mark on it? Washing immaculate china?

“What are we doing this for?” she whispered at one point to Aggie Breault. “They don’t even need china. The place is so clean they could eat off the furniture.”

“You haven’t had much to do with high folk, have you?”

“Nothing at all,” she said, and then thought of Erryn.
Well, maybe a little.

“The way I see it,” Aggie said, “if you’re really high, you fuss with things because it’s expected, but if you miss something, the world isn’t going to end. You have your place. But if you’re just trying to get up there, like the Danners, then everything has to be perfect, and more than perfect. You have to be twice as Catholic as the Pope.”

“I thought the Danners
were
up there. More or less.”

“Oh, William is, pretty much. But for Jack I think it’s still ‘more or less.’ He’s just a small commission merchant, after all. As for this boarding house, it looks real fine to us, but to people who own shipping companies and run banks, it’s small change. And then there’s … well, Miss Susan’s background.”

Ah, yes. Miss Susan’s background. You would never guess it if you didn’t know, Sylvie thought; she dressed every inch the lady. She spoke like a lady too, not a trace of Lancashire about her,
never a hint of North Country dialect or working-class toughness. She had erased it all, and made herself over in their image. But still they knew.

“Will they ever really accept her, do you think?” Sylvie asked.

“Oh, I reckon so. There’s a few snots who won’t, but most of them will.” Aggie paused and then added pointedly, “As long as she never makes a single mistake.”

At that point Miss Susan’s steps could be heard in the hall and they fell silent. When she had checked on their progress and left again, Aggie had a question of her own.

“Do you ever see anything of the Ortons? At Madame Louise’s place, I mean?”

“No. I’ve never even met them. I saw Mr. Jamie on the street once, but Reeve had to tell me who he was. I know he’s all for the South, though. His son went off and joined their army last year.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. What does Madame think of it?”

“She’s never said. But she’s all for the North, so I doubt she thinks much of it. She says slavery is a great sin, and defending it by warfare is a greater one.”

“She actually said that? Good. I heard rumours she was on the Union side, but I never know what to make of rumours. Well, we might have an interesting time of it tomorrow night.”

As it turned out, they did indeed have an interesting time of it, but not for any of the reasons they expected. The guests began arriving around two, all very grand in their finery and fancy stones. Sylvie caught only glimpses of them, seeing them in the hall as they arrived or stealing a look through the parlour doorway as she passed. She tried to picture Erryn among them, in his wine-coloured waistcoat and gold cufflinks and spats. It was like picturing a hawk in a drawing room. A very well-behaved hawk, of course; he would perch with his wings carefully folded and he would
never peck a soul. But his bright eyes would not miss a flutter in the curtains, and there would be all that wild energy inside, restless, wanting to take wing, to snatch a choice hors d’oeuvre from the plate and soar away.

God, how she longed to see him again.

And maybe she would, one day soon. It was something to hold on to as she spent most of the long afternoon in the scullery, where Emma Sanders fussed and stormed like a clockwork toy that never ran down. Sanders was an exceptionally good cook. The dainties they sent upstairs by the plateful made Sylvie’s mouth water, and the meal they were preparing seemed fit, not merely for a king, but for a god. Racks of lamb, squashes baked with sugar and spices, Yorkshire puddings as light as a cloud, stuffed potatoes, pastries with chicken and cream, preserved vegetables in sauces, a great pot of chowder, duffs and trifles, bite-sized tarts made with brandy and nuts … it was truly divine. And this time they would get their share. Usually they ate the boarders’ fare, not the household’s—a fact that Sylvie accepted without complaint; it was nourishing food, decently prepared, and there was always plenty of it. But if Miss Susan was a hard mistress sometimes, she was also a shrewd one. She knew that her perfect evening required more than the servants’ best. Their best she expected as a matter of course. For this she needed perfection, and if she got it, they would get to feast.

So they worked like fiends. They had a bit of help. William Danner had loaned them his butler to help Aggie with the serving. And Madame Louise’s only manservant, who was also her coachman, put the horses up at the nearby livery and settled down in the kitchen, whence he would tend to the boarders and their dinner. He was somewhere in his forties, a gentle, quiet man named Jonathan Boyd, who made himself useful every way he could.

Sometime during the afternoon, the sun went down. Sylvie never noticed. She was inexperienced in the scullery and therefore given the meanest jobs, mostly fetching, chopping, and slicing, or
washing an endless accumulation of pots and utensils. Nothing she did pleased Sanders. If she worked quickly, she was too careless; if she took more care, she was too slow. She was a ninny, a simpleton, and what in the world was Miss Susan thinking of, hiring factory trash to serve in a proper household, she might as well put an old crow in a birdcage and expect it to sing.

After a while it was like the rattling machinery in the mill: you never stopped noticing, but you kept your mind on what you were doing and tried to shut it out. So it was that she did not hear Aggie’s steps running down the stairs, and only half heard her voice as she ran into the kitchen.

“Those dirty bastards have taken another ship!”

Sylvie did hear the cook’s response, loud and properly outraged. “See here, Breault, we do not use that sort of language in this house!”

“Language be hanged!” Aggie flung back. “Mr. Orton just came in, Sylvie. He said he’s just had word from Saint John. The Rebels took another one of our ships, went on board as passengers and took her over and killed a crewman and wounded a whole lot of others. They took the engine-room boys prisoner and dumped the rest off in Saint John and now they’ve gone raiding and he says they’re Canadians!”

“WHAT?”

At this, even Sanders went motionless, with a spoon half raised in her hand.

“Slow down, Mrs. Breault,” Jonathan said. “Start from the beginning. What ship? And what do you mean, they’re Canadians?”

“The
Chesapeake
, from Boston. Some passengers took her over on the high seas, they say they’re Confederates, but the crewmen they left in Saint John say they’re from here—”

“From here?”

“—and
Mr. Orton says he thinks it’s true, says he recognized one of the names they used. And anyway, Englishmen don’t sound like Southerners when they talk, and everybody knows it—”

Sylvie stared at her. “You mean there’s our own people gone pirating for the Confederacy?”

“You can’t call them pirates!” Harry Dobbs said. “It’s war and they got every right to take an enemy ship!”

“We ain’t at war,” Sanders snapped. “Our lads got no business taking anybody’s ships.”

“Well, they did,” Aggie said. “And they killed the engineer, and the captain says it was plain murder and the whole ocean won’t be big enough to hide them.”

“Oh, bloody damned hell.” Jonathan sat down on a kitchen bench and shook his head. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

The answer came from the doorway, where Miss Susan had arrived unnoticed.

“It means we might yet find ourselves at war,” she said. “But for the moment, we have guests, and they are your only concern. Is the boarders’ dinner ready to serve?”

“Yes, m’um,” Sanders said.

“Very well. Boyd, if you would be so kind, see to it. Bowen, you are to help him. As for this matter of the ships, it may be exaggerated, and until we know, it’s not our place to be spreading gossip.”

Never once had anyone heard Miss Susan express an opinion on the American war. She ran a boarding house where both Northerners and Southerners stayed; she was the soul of discretion. But now there was a bleakness in her eyes and in her voice, of a sort Sylvie had never seen there before—a bleakness she knew she would not find in the eyes of Jamie Orton. To this extent at least, Miss Susan had taken sides: she wanted no part of the Rebels’ war.