The Halifax Connection (37 page)

For the next couple of hours, no one had much chance to talk. Two meals had to be served, to thirty-seven people, dining on two different floors, all separate from the kitchen. It was mostly Sylvie
and Harry Dobbs who carried the pots and platters up, and the dirty dishes back down. By nine-thirty the Danners and their guests were down to chocolates and brandy. At ten Aggie and Jonathan returned to the kitchen.

“Miss Susan says we can eat now,” Jonathan told them. “And Mr. William’s butler says we should behave like Christians now, and leave a bite for him.”

He was smiling, just a bit. Sylvie glanced at the chowder pot, still half full, at the racks of lamb still lying on the plates. They could all eat twice over and there would be plenty left.

“What’re they saying up there, anyway?” she asked. “About that ship?”

“Nothing. Not a peep. They say one thing, they’ll get Madame all upset and spoil her birthday. They say the other, and Mr. Jamie’ll skewer them for it later.”

“How well do you know them, Jonathan?” Aggie questioned. “Are they all for the South, like Mr. Jamie?”

“Madame isn’t.”

“I know Madame isn’t. I mean the rest of them.”

He shrugged. “Near as I can tell, they split nicely in three: one batch Union, one batch Confederate, one batch don’t-care-poppycock. Trouble is, Mr. Jamie’s the head of the family, so the Union sort and the don’t-cares don’t argue with him much.”

“Except Madame,” Sylvie said.

“No,” Jonathan said, “not even Madame. There’s no point. It’d be like arguing with a tree.”

“So why’s he like that, anyway?” Aggie persisted. “So keen for the Southerners, I mean. Do you know?”

“The rich stick together. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Madame’s rich,” Sylvie said.

“Madame’s been through a few storms,” Jonathan said. “Makes people think when they get kicked around a bit.”

Sylvie shook her head. “In Rochdale, there were big arguments about the war, even in the mills. John Bright came and gave a talk
in the Mechanics Hall one night. He’s in the Parliament and all, and he’s rich. He’s got more bloody money than you or I can dream of. And he spoke for the Union and we cheered him and signed this big long letter to send to Mr. Lincoln, saying we were behind him even if it meant no cotton for the mills, because we were working people, and slavery kept working people down, didn’t matter where. And when we came out of the hall, some of our own mates called us horrid names, and said why should they go hungry for the sake of some bloody niggers.” She paused, searching for words. “It’s rich and poor, maybe, but it ain’t
just
that. It’s … I don’t know … like you said about Madame … it’s
thinking
…” She wished Erryn were here; he would know what words to use. And then she wondered if he bothered his head about any of these things, ever. He never so much as mentioned the American war. Once, she’d asked him very tentatively for an opinion, and he merely shrugged. He didn’t know, he said, he hadn’t paid much attention. It was one of the few times he had ever disappointed her.

“Let’s go eat,” Jonathan said. “A meal like this doesn’t come every day.”

They descended on the nearby table, where the others were piling their plates. Two hours ago she had been dreaming of this feast. Now she scarcely cared if she ate or not.

“You’re right, Jonathan.” Harry Dobbs sat down expansively before a plate that looked laden enough for two. “Let’s eat by all means. It’ll be army biscuits next week, likely.” The silly ass actually sounded pleased.

“Do you think they’ll come here?” MacKay whispered to no one in particular. As at so many other times, she seemed frightened and bewildered.

“Will who come here?”

“The pirates.”

“Oh, come on! They’re privateers, not pirates!” Dobbs said. “And I rather hope they do come. It would be something to see!”

“And the whole Yankee fleet behind them, I suppose?” Sanders flung back at him. “You’d like to see that as well, would you?”

Dobbs shot her a defiant look, but said nothing. However great an ass he was, he knew, as did every Haligonian who was sane and past the age of five, that every warship in the Atlantic Squadron was gone, sailing weeks ago for their winter posting in the Caribbean.

Except for a few old, unimpressive cannons on the Citadel, the city was defenceless against an attack from the sea.

F
ROM THE DECK
of the mail packet
Delhi
, Erryn Shaw watched Halifax glide closer, bit by bit, a ribbon of buildings strung along a grey shore, with the mound of the Citadel rising hard at its back. In the winter morning it seemed all black and grey, but at least it was there, visible, a small miracle after five days of fog and gales. For a brief while the cloud cover broke, the water sparkled, and the spire of St. Paul’s and the dome of the Town Clock shone proudly in a pool of winter light. Erryn stayed by the rail despite the wind, admiring everything he saw. George’s Island passed with its bare slopes and stone batteries, and then the busy wharves of the South End, Corbett’s and Wood’s and the West India Company, all suddenly as familiar as old friends. More than any time since he had left England, he felt as though he were coming home.

They docked at Queen’s Wharf with barely a bump. As always, Her Majesty’s mail sacks disembarked first; he was the first of the passengers to follow. He would have liked to go to his rooming house, have a hot bath and a long nap, and then find Sylvie Bowen and invite her to dinner. But alas, those were the governor’s guineas rattling in his purse, and Lord Monck, worldly and dutiful soul that he was, expected him to earn them. He picked his way through the waterfront crowds and the mud to Alexander MacNab’s Dry Goods Emporium on Hollis Street.

Although other Grey Tories in Halifax were more socially prominent and more personally committed, for sheer energy and usefulness to the cause MacNab outranked them all. He was a large man, almost as tall as Erryn himself, and easily twice his girth. Receding hair and sagging jowls gave him something of a bulldog look, which rather suited him. He had scrapped his way from obscurity into the ranks of the Halifax elite. Now, in his fifties, he was one of the richest men in town, but everything about him was still hard-edged and always slightly challenging. It did not help that he had been born with a hair-trigger temper, and he never made much effort to control it.

Erryn found him already on his way out, his coat wrapped over his arm, talking to a deferential and harassed-looking clerk. Erryn remained discreetly at a distance, but he could still hear anger in MacNab’s voice, and numerous references to things amiss, and the clerk saying “yessir” to everything, indiscriminately. MacNab was still talking as he turned away: “I want it packed before you leave tonight, do you understand, before you—Well, I’ll be damned! Mr. Shaw. Good to see you back.”

“Thank you. How have you been, sir?”

“Can’t complain.” MacNab had a crunching handshake, and a bear’s paw to wield it. His gaze raked Erryn from head to toe, as
though he were examining a piece of damaged merchandise. “You look like hell, Shaw. No offence, but I’ve seen livelier washed up on the pier. What the devil happened to you, anyway? I never could make much sense of it in the newspapers.”

“I got myself a knife wound and a very cold bath in the St. Lawrence. They fished me out again, but it was a near thing.”

“Did you know the son of a bitch?”

“No. He went over the side with me, and they never found him. Some sod who called himself John Hill was missing from steerage after, or so the police told me, but no one knew anything about him. He was just a ruffian, no doubt, with his eye on my purse.”

“You don’t suppose it was some damned Yankee agent?”

“Now why would I suppose that?” Erryn murmured, very dry. “What with our neutrality laws and all?”

MacNab laughed and slapped him lightly on the arm. “Why indeed? So fill me in, for Christ’s sake. Did you come by Portland? The buggers must be mad as hornets down there.”

“I did, and they are, though I couldn’t make any more sense out of their newspapers than you could make out of ours. Is it true the men who took the
Chesapeake
were Canadians?”

“Half true. The captain’s a naval officer from Kentucky. Duly commissioned, by the way, with a letter of marque, legal as can be. The piracy charge is rubbish. But most of the crew was recruited in New Brunswick, and a few around Shelburne.”

“No wonder the Yankees on the
Delhi
wouldn’t talk to me.”

“It’s a hell of a kick in their teeth—and right before Christmas, too. Listen, I was just on my way over to the Waverley for lunch. Come with me. Jamie Orton will be there, and some other lads. They’ll be glad to see you.”

“Thank you, I will. But first I’d better give you these.” Erryn unbuttoned an inside pocket and withdrew two envelopes. “Our friends in Quebec sent some letters for you.”

“Ah, good. Give me a minute, will you?”

MacNab flung his coat over a counter and took the envelopes away with him. Idly, Erryn glanced over the store’s interior. MacNab’s Dry Goods Emporium was large, classy, and profitable. It had made the man a good deal of money before the war, but now, supplying blockade-runners with overpriced goods had raised his profit margin from high to astronomical, a fact he demonstrated by building himself a splendid three-storey mansion—not out on the Northwest Arm, where most of the rich people lived, but right in the heart of the city, on Barrington, where he could stay close to his business … and where, of course, the whole world could walk by every day and admire it.

Erryn admired it as well, on the way to the Waverley. It was almost finished, MacNab said; the workmen were installing the floors and the panelling. Erryn judged it a beautiful home, and he said so.

“Well, thank you, lad. You could have one of these yourself, you know, a few years down the road. You’ve got the smarts for it. You just have to stop drifting and settle down.”

Erryn said nothing. He merely gave MacNab a quiet sidelong glance—somewhat amused, somewhat haughty—the glance of a man who had three or four such houses back in England, and finer ones, ready to occupy any time he felt like it. MacNab changed the subject.

The Waverley House in Halifax, like St. Lawrence Hall in Montreal, was the preferred gathering place of Southern Confederates and their allies—couriers, political agents, businessmen, spies, military and naval officers, and, above all, blockade-runners. New men came with every ship, a fact that must have driven the Union agents crazy. But some in the dining hall were known to Erryn, and greeted him with smiles and handshakes—one of them a man of approximately his own age, with sandy
brown hair and a boyishly attractive face, who leapt to his feet and strode full across the room to meet him.

“Erryn! You’re back! God damn it, you’re a welcome sight!”