The Halifax Connection (38 page)

“Jack! Good to see you!”

They shared a long, warm handshake, and afterwards Jack Murray gripped his arm, affection and concern both clear in his eyes.

“How are you, mate? You seem a trifle peaked.”

“I was fine until everyone started telling me how bad I looked. You lads keep this up, I’m likely to keel over dead.”

Murray laughed. “Always the same old Erryn.” He nodded to Erryn’s companion. “MacNab. I suppose you’re dragging him off to the privy council over there?”

“I am.”

“I’ll join you later, Jack,” Erryn said. “I want you to tell me everything that’s happened since I left.”

“You know about the
Chesapeake
, I suppose?”

“It’s all MacNab and I have been talking about.”

“It’s all anyone is talking about. Later, then.” He gave Erryn an airy half salute and walked away.

The privy council, as Jack Murray called it, was an alcove at the back of the dining room, somewhat apart from the crowd, where Jamie Orton sat with four companions. Orton was a Scot, the sort of Scot all the world’s twelve-year-olds imagined when they read about Wallace and Bruce and Bonnie Dundee: a giant of a man with red-gold hair and a great roaring laugh. At his side was his friend of many years, David Strange. Both belonged to old, well-established families, and between them had interests in nearly every Haligonian enterprise of importance, from shipbuilding to bank directorships to the choir of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church. Also at the table were Orton’s eldest son, Tobias, and Strange’s
nephew, Robert Collier, whom Erryn frankly considered a fool. In the place of honour was the English captain of a visiting blockade-runner.

The men were not, as it happened, talking about the
Chesapeake
at all. When the pleasantries had been concluded, Orton turned at once to Erryn Shaw, obviously picking up the conversation where they had left it.

“Well, laddie, we’ve heard everyone else’s opinion. Tell us what you think. What did this damned mess in Tennessee do to the Confederacy’s chances?”

“You mean the defeat at Chattanooga, I presume?”

“Aye.”

“It’s difficult to say.” Erryn frowned in the general direction of his plate. He believed, personally, that the Confederates were in a great deal of trouble. They had lost frightfully at Gettysburg and Vicksburg back in the summer. And then in November, just weeks ago, the new commanding general of the Union’s western armies, Ulysses Grant, had whipped them and run them headlong out of Tennessee, reversing their brief September triumph at Chickamauga.
There! Thought you were on your way back up, lads? Think again.

For Erryn, lying in his hospital bed in Quebec, recovering from pneumonia and dying of boredom, it was the best news imaginable. Maybe the war would end soon after all, and the danger would be over. He could live like a sane man again, get himself another theatre, and set about courting Sylvie Bowen in earnest.

Then he remembered the summer. He had felt the same way in the summer, after Gettysburg, and he had been dead wrong. War appeared to be one of those human endeavours where it was damnably, terrifyingly easy to be wrong.

“It’s a setback,” he went on. “Hell, it’s a bad setback. But it’s likely to make the Yankees overconfident. And the Confederates have more pluck, we all know that. They’ll stay with it until they win. Or until Europe gets fed up with the cotton famine.”

“Cotton famine doesn’t matter a damn,” the English captain said. “We’re getting cotton from Egypt now. It’s not as good, but it will do. And the Southern cotton that we do get in brings four times what it did before the war, so no one’s out of pocket very much. There’ll be no intervention over cotton.”

“What about intervention over liberty and justice?” Orton demanded. “Damn it, captain, we are the defenders of Western civilization. If England doesn’t stand up for the right, who will? And why in God’s name don’t we think of our own Anglo-Saxon people first? We went into India and China and the bloody Crimea—”

“That’s part of the problem, sir.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“The bloody Crimea. It was a costly war, and the Radicals aren’t letting anyone forget it. The government is wary now about getting in another. And as long as the Yankees keep winning battles, they’re only going to get warier.”

“In other words,” Erryn said, “the more the Confederacy needs help from England, the less likely she’ll be to get it.”

“That’s about it, Mr. Shaw. As I see the matter.”

It was how Erryn saw the matter also, from poring by the hour over English newspapers and English pamphlets, all of them he could get his hands on, and the colonial papers too, which often echoed the sentiments of London. Intervention was dangerous. Quite apart from other considerations, such as the morality of it, or which side one favoured, it was simply dangerous, a potential quagmire that could endlessly eat up lives and treasure, destabilizing the European balance of power and ultimately threatening the empire itself. Prime Minister Palmerston was an interventionist by temperament and a man who leaned decidedly toward the South. But the empire would always come first. “England has neither allies nor enemies,” he said once. “She has only interests.”

It was a damnably cynical sort of politics, Palmerston’s. It was also the best they could hope for, probably. Better a wary cynic in
power, just now, than any number of eager defenders of Western civilization.

“Palmerston’s too damned old,” Robert Collier said. “They ought to put him out to pasture.”

David Strange, who was past sixty and still running his shipping line like a well-oiled machine, gave his nephew a very sour look. Then he rose and pointedly changed the subject.

“Gentlemen, let me propose a toast. Here’s to a fast voyage and a safe haven for the
Chesapeake!”

“Hear! Hear!”

“You boys obviously know something I don’t,” Erryn said when they sat down again. “Everyone I spoke to in Portland seemed to think the
Chesapeake
was still in our own bailiwick, looking for coal.”

“She was, until yesterday,” Strange told him. “MacNab here sent a schooner out Wednesday night and found her just down the coast, at Sambro. He brought her all the coal she’ll need, and a couple of engineers too, so they could let the Yankee prisoners go. Couldn’t be the pleasantest thing in the world, standing guard in your engine room all day and all night with a loaded pistol.” He glanced at MacNab, who looked extraordinarily pleased with himself. “I expect the lads were on their way by dawn.”

“Well,” Erryn said, raising his glass again. “You’ve been Johnny-on-the-spot, as usual.”

“What the hell are you drinking there, Shaw?” MacNab grumbled. “It looks like water.”

“It is. Doctor’s orders. No spirits for a fortnight.”

“Christ. Remind me never to get myself thrown in the St. Lawrence.”

A waiter came, bringing steaming platters of food. Erryn glanced briefly toward the main part of the dining room and noticed, for the second time, that it seemed emptier than usual. Even now, a group of diners were hastily picking up their coats and preparing to leave.

Ships coming in, he thought. Anxiously awaited ones, no doubt, after five days of appalling weather. Outside, even the boardwalks on Barrington were covered with mud, and broken branches and wind debris lay scattered everywhere. How thankful everyone would be, and how eager, to see their vessels and their cargoes coming home safe.

He turned his attention back to the table, where young Tobias Orton was raising a matter he would have liked to raise himself, but dared not.

“I heard the damnedest thing this morning, talking with Tom Hogan. He’s just back from Saint John, and he says the Confederate captain on the
Chesapeake
is named Braine—John Braine, to be precise. There was a chap by that name came through here in the summer, remember? Selling advertisements for a business directory, supposedly for the Grand Trunk Railway. Only the directory never came out. You were frightfully annoyed, Strange, as I recall. Then we found the railwaymen had never heard of it, and Braine had made off with all the money. You wouldn’t suppose it’s the same man?”

“The captain of the
Chesapeake
is a commissioned officer in the Confederate navy. I’m sure the swindler is a different man altogether. It’s hardly an uncommon name.”

“Well, I hope you’re right. There’s been a lot of criticism of the hijacking, even from our own side. It won’t help if the man responsible turns out to be a common thief.”

“And there are no common thieves in the Yankee army, I suppose?” Orton flung back at him. “Or in our own? Christ almighty, a man’s got to look at the issues in a war, not at which side’s got the choirboys in the ranks.”

Indeed
, Erryn thought wryly.
And how I would love to remind you of it the next time you go on and on about Yankee ruffians and Southern cavaliers.

James Dougal Orton went on about such things rather often. More than any of the other Confederate supporters in Halifax,
he was involved in the struggle out of personal commitment. He was a lawyer by profession, a philanthropist by choice, a mover in the world of affairs, a man with an abiding sense of duty. Most especially, he was a man who believed in order and tradition. He neither liked nor trusted the polyglot world across the border—a world, as he saw it, of dishonest traders, shoddy goods, hare-brained ideologies, whiskey-barrel electioneering, and irreligious people, all of it growing worse as immigrants flooded in from the roughest and most dismal rubbish heaps of Europe.

The Southern Confederates at least were gentlemen, well bred and well spoken. They were men who went to church, and who took proper care of their wives and children. Slavery Orton disapproved of, at least in theory, but in practice he refused to pass judgment on a society a thousand miles away that he had never seen. Slavery was already in place, after all, had been in place for centuries; surely it was for the men who lived there to determine what to do about it. The Northerners could not run their own society properly; what right did they have to take cannon and sword and try to run somebody else’s? To him, it was England and Scotland all over again. It was more dull-eyed yeomen and brave cavaliers. It was Bonnie Prince Charlie and bloody King George …

A voice broke harshly into Erryn’s thoughts.

“Mr. MacNab, sir!”

Hurrying over to their table was a clerk from the Emporium—not the one MacNab had bawled out earlier, a different one, but he looked equally distressed. He was shouting even as he came. “There’s Yankee ships coming in, sir! Warships! Mr. Doane said come and tell you!”

MacNab’s big head shot upright. All conversation at the table ended as if snipped with a knife.

“What the devil do you mean, warships?”

“Two of them, sir. The signals are up on Citadel Hill, and half the town’s out running for a look. I wanted to come right off, but
Mr. Doane said no, go up to the hill and make sure. It’s Yankee warships, all right. I could see them clear.” He patted the spyglass still clutched in one hand. “They got another ship with them. Folks are saying maybe it’s the
Chesapeake.”

It was just as the young man had said: half the town was out for a look. Business had ground to a standstill on Water Street, the warehouses abandoned except for a clerk or two, delivery teams left drooping in their harnesses, the reins hitched hastily to posts and trees. People were strewn all along the quays and bunched in upper-storey windows. Here and there a spyglass passed from hand to hand. But they were not laughing or dressed in their finery, as they were when they gathered in May, when the Atlantic Squadron came back from the Caribbean. They stared, and talked quietly in huddles, or not at all.

The ships were well into the harbour channel now, passing Fort Charlotte at the tip of George’s Island. Erryn waited for a turn with the glass and studied them carefully. In the lead was a steamer he judged a merchant ship. From the descriptions he had heard in Portland, he thought it might well be the
Chesapeake.
Behind her came a sloop, and then a lean, low, speedy-looking sidewheeler with twin masts. Gunboats, both of them.