The Halifax Connection (39 page)

“Bloody damned hell.”

Was it war, then? Had someone already made the irreversible blunder? Or was someone about to make it? Were they going to blow his small grey city into the sea?

Surely not, he told himself; neither government wanted war. Yet he could not stop fear from seeping through him like a winter fog.

He handed the glass back to MacNab. “What do they want, do you suppose?” he asked.

“They want to pay us back,” Jack Murray said grimly. He and his dinner companion had rushed out along with the others. He
was standing now almost at Erryn’s shoulder. “It was our lads took the
Chesapeake
, and they mean to slap us for it. They’ll have some outrageous demand to make, you can bet on it, and God knows what they’ll do if we don’t comply. Damn, I wish the Squadron was still here.”

“Quite,” Erryn agreed. But he wondered if they might be safer without it.

“Whatever the buggers want,” James Orton muttered, “they don’t mean us well or they’d be firing their salutes by now.”

The ships came on, steady and serene. They fired no salutes, but neither did they fire anything else. More people came and clustered on the waterfront. The Town Clock tolled a quarter of the hour and then the hour. Two in the afternoon, the seventeenth of December, 1863. Would it be written in the history books one day, Erryn wondered, as the day the world ended here?

Surely not …

He raised the glass again. On the lead vessel it was now possible to read a name, faint at this distance, but decipherable. It was, indeed, the
Chesapeake.
The Confederates would have painted over any identification when they captured the ship, which meant the Yankees had promptly painted it back again. Yes, he thought, they were rubbing it in.

But they were not shooting, and that was what mattered.

“It’s the
Chesapeake,”
he said.

Orton snatched the glass from his hand, stared for a long moment, and cursed. He was a steady, churchgoing man; he hardly ever cursed.

“They never got away from Sambro, then,” MacNab said wearily. “The bastards must’ve been waiting for them, right outside the harbour.”

“The poor laddies,” Orton said. “The poor brave laddies.”

Oh, God, have pity on me, please.

Erryn pulled up his collar as something grey and mean from Newfoundland swept in across the channel and ripped at his
sleeves and his hair. He wanted to go home and crawl into bed, or, failing that, find a tea room with plenty of hot tea and a big, roaring hearth. Instead, he had to stand in this God-benighted wind, keeping this pack of God-benighted arseholes company …
Matt, when this is over, I’m going to strangle you, I swear it.

“We need to send a man to Sambro, right off,” Orton was saying. “Find out whatever we can.”

“Shaw’s right here,” MacNab said. “He can go.”

“No,” Orton said sharply. “Not Shaw.”

Erryn went absolutely rigid. It was not a reasoned fear, but instinct, pure and immediate, knotting his belly and steeling his every nerve, all of it too quick for thought, even as Orton’s voice went on without a pause, “For pity’s sake, MacNab, he just came from the hospital. He’s been two days on the road. He must be dead on his feet. I’ll send Harper.”

There was honest concern on Orton’s face and in his voice, perfectly clear and obvious as soon as Erryn’s brain had the few needful seconds to perceive it. Not suspicion. Empathy. Slowly his fear drained away, leaving him utterly exhausted.

“I appreciate that, sir,” he said. “I’m not up to scratch yet, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t worry your head about it, lad.”

Out in the harbour, the American ships were dropping anchor some distance from the docks. A small boat pulled away from the sloop, heading for the shore. It was soon blocked from view by the larger vessels lining the waterfront. Al MacNab leaned over to say something to his clerk, who scurried off. Ten or fifteen minutes later he came back at a run. The landing party, he said, consisted only of a petty officer and two guards. They appeared to be heading directly to the U.S. consul’s office on Bedford Row.

“Well,” David Strange observed, “it would seem they want Mr. Lincoln’s permission before they twist the lion’s tail.”

“They won’t get it,” Erryn said.

Much of the city appeared to agree with him. Activity was starting again all along the waterfront, unevenly but distinctly, like a great perambulating sigh of relief. Men disappeared back into warehouses, carts began to move, hack drivers jumped onto their vehicles and offered their services to the dispersing crowd, many of whom were in a hurry now, remembering neglected duties.

“Gentlemen,” Erryn said, “I’m afraid this vessel is about to founder. If you’ll forgive me, I’m heading home.”

“I’ll not only forgive you,” Jack Murray said, “I’m going to take you there myself.”

Erryn did not argue. He let Jack hire them a carriage and sank onto the seat like a rag. He tried to listen as Jack babbled on about the sad death of Major Harrington, and what a splendid funeral they gave him; about a certain Mrs. Gentry, who was in town to raise money for medical supplies, such a lovely creature, pity she was married. Most of all he talked about the Yankee spies in town. Every week there were more of them, he said; you could hardly sit down in a restaurant or talk on the street without some damned eavesdropper lurking nearby.

That’s what I used to worry about too: eavesdroppers. Now Jamie Orton says don’t send me to Sambro and I think my life is forfeit before he can even explain why.

He wondered if it would always be like this now, if every wrong word would freeze him in his tracks. If he would always be looking over his shoulder, till the end of the war, maybe till the end of his life. If he had lost a part of himself forever.

He knew it was not Zeb Taylor’s knife that lay at the heart of his loss, but Zeb Taylor’s words.
My brother had you figured from the start.
He had always liked Brad Taylor. They had shared meals, joshed each other, even spoken of the theatre, of a play Brad had seen in Kentucky and how awful it was. Yet through it all, Taylor had been watching him, doubting him, waiting for him to make the inevitable, fatal mistake … and the possibility of it had never crossed his mind.

You have faith in things, don’t you?
Sylvie told him by the Irish Stone.
I don’t mean religious things. I mean life things. You believe when you set out to go somewhere you’ll get there, and when you have something of your own you’ll be able to keep it …

Maybe not, anymore. Maybe never again.

“W
ELL, IT’S
going to be war now for sure.”

Sylvie, still on her knees by the drainage pipe, sat back on her haunches and stared at Harry Dobbs, who had just tramped down the stairs with the first fresh block of ice and was now shoving it into place with a huge grunt of satisfaction.

“What the devil are you talking about?” Aggie Breault demanded.

“I’m talking about the bloody Yankees, that’s what,” Dobbs said. “They didn’t catch the
Chesapeake
at sea like we figured. They went right into Sambro harbour. Do you believe it? Right into the harbour, and boarded the ship and took it over. And that ain’t the half of it. There was a schooner there from Halifax, and they boarded it too, at gunpoint, and they got a bunch of prisoners now, and they’re going to hang them as pirates—”

“And they come and told you all about it, I suppose,” Sylvie said scornfully.

“It’s all over town. Timmins just come with the ice, and he heard it from half a dozen people already. He says for sure it means a fight. And the Yankees bloody well know it. There’s two more of their ships come in this morning. We got five of the devils in the harbour now, and one of them’s a bloody
frigate.
Oh, it’s war all right.”

Sylvie threw her scrub rag back into the bucket and wrung her hands to warm them. She wondered how a man could pass on news like this and be stupid enough to sound pleased about it.

“It don’t have to mean war,” she said.

“Course it does. Sailing into one of our harbours like that and taking ships? Taking Englishmen prisoner? That’s an act of war. There’s no way we’re going to stand for it.”

“You don’t know the prisoners are Englishmen,” Aggie said. “You couldn’t possibly know.”

“They were all from here, what took the
Chesapeake.
Every one of ’em but the captain. That’s what Mr. Timmins says.”

Miss Susan’s voice came sharply down the stairwell. “Dobbs! What are you doing down there? I don’t want this ice melting in the hallway!”

“Yes, m’um. I’m coming.”

“Lord,” Aggie muttered when he had disappeared up the stairs, “that boy don’t have the sense God gave a flea.”

Sylvie got to her feet, emptied her bucket, and brushed loose hair from her face with her sleeve. “I wish I knew what be going on out there, I really do.”

“Well, we know one thing,” Aggie said. “We know those American ships poor Dobbsy is so worried about were trading salutes with the Citadel this morning. Odd how he didn’t hear it.”

“Maybe he thinks it don’t mean anything.”

“Yeah, but when the
Dacotah
didn’t salute yesterday, he thought it meant everything.”

“Do you suppose it happened like he said?” Sylvie asked then, very soft. “They went into Sambro harbour?”

For a time the only sound in the cellar was Harry Dobbs’s boots tramping back down the stairs, the thump of another block of ice on the fresh-scrubbed stone.

“I don’t know,” Aggie said at last. “But even if they did, those men are pirates. England wouldn’t start a war over a bunch of pirates, would she?”

No, Sylvie thought. Not over pirates. Not over a harbour violation either. Wars might be set off by trifles, but the trifles were never the real reason, they were only the excuse; that much she was sure of. But what the powerful people in both countries really wanted—now there was a whole other question. There were men here who hoped for war; probably there were Americans who did too. Every now and then a colonial paper would reprint some flaming editorial from New York or Chicago, howling insults against England and talking like all of North America was United States property by divine decree. And the nitwits here were just as bad, hating the States because they had overthrown the lords and put government in the reach of ordinary people, and that meant the end of human civilization.

How plentiful were such men in either country? She did not know. But she doubted they cared a fig about the
Chesapeake
, or Sambro harbour either. They cared only about themselves.

More news came to the Den as the day went on, and it soon became clear that Harry Dobbs, as usual, had only part of the story. Aggie Breault learned more from conversations overheard in the parlour and the family quarters, and passed it on to Sylvie in the hallway.

Yes, she said, the Yankee gunboat
Dacotah
had sailed into Sambro harbour, seizing both the
Chesapeake
and the coaling
schooner that Al MacNab had sent with supplies and two local engineers.

“But the Rebels saw the ship coming,” she went on, “so of course they all bolted into the woods. It seems the only prisoners our boys got was a fellow they found sleeping on the schooner, and the two engineers, who never bothered to run.”

“Why not?”

“I guess they thought they were safe, being Canadians. And they hadn’t really done anything yet.”

Sylvie cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Well, legally they hadn’t,” Aggie said.

“So they’re all somewhere down by Sambro? The pirates?”

“All except Captain Braine. Apparently he ran out on his crew a couple of days before and nobody knows where he is.” She paused and added quietly, “I guess some folks here are hopping mad because we took your lads, and they’d maybe make trouble if they could. But Miss Susan says the men in charge intend to talk. On both sides. That’s what she’s heard, anyway.”