The Halifax Connection (40 page)

“Do you think it be true?”

They could hear their mistress’s steps approaching on the stairs.

“All we can do is hope,” Aggie said, and turned to go.

It was a good thirty-minute walk to Madame’s house on South Park Road, past St. Paul’s and the marble yard and the Catholic convent; past the corner at Spring Garden Road where, for no reason whatsoever, not even the smallest curve, Barrington started calling itself Pleasant Street; and finally westward, away from the wind. Her hands grew painfully cold, clutching the parcels Miss Susan had sent along with her, but otherwise it was lovely to be outside.

She found Madame sitting in her favourite chair by the fire, wrapped in a shawl to her knees. She had a touch of the grippe, but mostly she seemed depressed. She wanted Sylvie to read poetry
for her—Gray’s “Elegy,” and Wordsworth, quiet, meditative things with a lot of sadness in them. Twice Sylvie saw her nodding in her chair, and after an hour or so she said it was enough.

“You read well, Sylvie. You are improving all the time. What would you like to take home with you?”

“Another of Lord Lytton’s, if I might, Madame.”

“Take
Harold
, then. It is his best.”

Sylvie crossed the room and plucked a beautifully bound volume off the bookshelf. She had read Lord Lytton’s
Pelham
, because it was about a young aristocrat; she thought she might learn something of their lives. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not picture Erryn Shaw in Henry Pelham’s world. Oh, in little things, perhaps: the fine clothing, the ways of speech, the careful attention to small courtesies. But otherwise, no. Despite its pleasures and comforts, Pelham’s world seemed shallow to her, even silly. She did not see how a man with spirit could ever be content there.

But then, he had not been content, had he?
I went my own way, and before anyone really noticed, even me, I’d turned myself into a considerable misfit.

She straightened the shelf a bit and turned back to Madame. It was still early, but already the parlour window was dark. Thick snowflakes swirled endlessly against it, catching the light from Madame’s seven lamps.

The old lady was fussing with her reticule. “Did Susan give you anything extra?” she asked. “For bringing the parcels?”

“No, Madame.”

“Here, then. Take this.” Her outstretched hand held a ten-cent coin. “Go on, take it, lass. You had a long way to walk in the cold. And watch yourself on the streets now. Even in a blizzard there are villains out, and few decent folk around to be watching them.”

“Thank you very much, Madame.”

Ten cents, what marvellous good luck! A week’s pay, after board and lodging, was all of thirty. She slipped the coin into the pocket of her thin coat and walked out into the wind. A carriage waited
in the street, the driver huddled under a cape, the horses standing with their heads down. Snow clung to their harness and lay draped like a blanket across their backs.

Odd, she thought, and wondered whom they might be waiting for. Madame was not going out, as far as she knew, and the house across the street was dark. She slowed her pace as she approached, remembering Madame’s warning, and stopped altogether when the carriage door opened and a figure stepped out, draped in an immense hooded cloak.

It was almost dark. For a moment the figure was only a tall silhouette in the falling snow. It could have been anyone, yet her heart leapt with hope. Then he flung his hood back and bowed with a flair and grace she had only seen in one man, ever.

“Miss Bowen, it’s an utterly abominable day for a lady to be walking. May I offer you a ride in my carriage?”

Erryn!

She took two running steps toward him, then caught herself. Weeks had passed, after all; perhaps she was no more than an acquaintance to him now. And he was not, as Madame said, of her station.

“Mr. Shaw! Oh, it’s so good to see you! Are you all right?”

“A
bit the worse for wear, my heart—but yes, I’m all right. And you?” He took her hands. Even in the poor light he seemed thinner and bonier than she remembered. “Miss Susan and Madame are treating you well?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’ve thought of you every single day since I left the
Saguenay.
I feared it would take forever until I might see you again, and thank you properly for what you did. Be hanged, but that’s a mean wind. Let’s get inside.”

He helped her into the carriage and pulled the door shut with a satisfying whack.

“Winter,” he went on, “was invented by the devil. Thought he could bottle it up and pack it back to his own bailiwick, cool
things off a bit. He was a dumb sod. He didn’t do himself one scrap of good, and he made all the rest of us miserable. What are you smiling at?”

“You.”

“Oh, dear, I’m babbling again, aren’t I? Here. I brought you a present.”

He picked up a wrapped parcel from the seat beside him and handed it across to her. A large parcel, in fine paper and ribbons, of the sort Miss Susan sometimes brought home. She took it wonderingly.

“Go ahead, open it.”

“Here?”

“Please.”

She would have preferred to open it in her room, slowly and with infinite care, savouring every moment. But she untied the ribbons and peeled back the paper, and caught her breath. Inside was a cloak, hooded like his own but designed for a lady, long enough to reach her ankles, and made of the most exquisite wool, soft and thick and impossibly rich. She could scarcely imagine what it must have cost.

“Oh, my heavens …” She stroked it ever so lightly, conscious as never before of how thin her little mantle was, how the wind sometimes cut through it like a knife. “It’s beautiful, Mr. Shaw, and awful kind of you. But it’s so … so grand, and you hardly know me … I mean, perhaps I shouldn’t …”

“Oh, but you should. If a man is delivered from death by his friend, what can he possibly do except bring her something grand? Otherwise it might seem he did not value
her
gift—and hers was more precious than any.” He smiled, but his gaze was intense and serious. “Take it, my heart, and wear it contented. You’ve earned it.”

For a moment she said nothing, overwhelmed by his generosity, and also by the enchanting thought that it might be more than generosity or even gratitude. She thanked him repeatedly and then, unable to resist, slipped out of her mantle and put the cloak on.

“Ohhh …” She snuggled like a kitten in a muff and saw that he was pleased. “I feel like I’ve just grown fur.”

He smiled. “You look utterly dazzling, Sylvie Bowen. Will you join me for supper? I have a table reserved at Compain’s, and for once we can talk to our hearts’ content, and not be sent running by a church bell. Will you come?”

Sylvie was not vain, but she felt like the grandest lady in the world, walking into Compain’s famous eatery on the arm of Erryn Shaw, wrapped in her beautiful new cloak. Compain’s was the smallest of the city’s good hotels, but everyone said its restaurant was the best in all of Nova Scotia. It was still early, tea time really rather than supper, but because it was storming outside, all the chandeliers were lit, and everything shimmered in their brilliance.

Erryn ordered wine for them. Survival, he said, was a proper cause for celebration. But he had shadows under his eyes now, and a worn look about him—not haggard, precisely, but damaged and spent.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Erryn?” she asked softly. “You look awfully thin.”

“I was born thin.”

“Well then, thinner.”

He smiled, laid the menu down, and reached across the table to take her hands. “I’ll be fine, Sylvie. Really, I will—thanks to you.”

“I only did what anyone else would’ve done.”

“I’m not sure the Richelieu Steamship Company would agree. One of their chaps came to see me, you know, in the hospital. He said you were a most resourceful young woman. Said if you’d made even one mistake, like going to find an officer instead of running straight to the pilothouse yourself, I mightn’t have survived.

“I can scarcely tell you what it was like in the river, Sylvie. Those ages and ages, holding on to that broken piece of wood—I’m sure it
measured out in minutes, but it felt like all eternity—watching the
Saguenay
sail on, so fast, so indifferent. Knowing no one could hear me shout. Knowing I could have made it, that he hadn’t killed me, that he was gone, but I was going to die just the same, because the benighted boat was leaving me behind …” He shook his head. “It was like screaming into an abyss, ‘Please! I’m here! I’m here!
Please!’
And nothing answers. Nothing cares. I felt … oh, the absurdity of it all, the sheer absurdity … but more than that, Sylvie, I felt such despair … I don’t know what kept me fighting then, staying afloat. I was so cold, and there seemed to be no point in it—”

“Maybe he did,” she said very softly.

He stared at her. “What?”

“Your great-uncle. Maybe he were there. In the river. In the little ship you sent him.”

He studied their linked hands for a very long time. “Do you think that’s possible?” he said finally.

“Do you?”

“No. Not for a second. Not in my wide-awake, rational mind, that is. The rest of me … the rest of me isn’t nearly so sure as to what’s possible and what isn’t. Not anymore. Whatever else, the old cove was a fighter. He never would’ve sunk till he was stone dead.” He lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them each in turn. “But it was you who got me fetched from the river. It was you who stayed with me all night. And for one poor, drowning scarecrow, that was miracle enough.”

Supper came a few moments later, a glorious supper, strips of beef in a wine sauce, roasted potatoes, carrots with a glaze that tasted of honey. Erryn had ordered chicken and offered her a slice in return for a strip of beef, an exchange that felt playful to her, and also strangely intimate.

For a time they said little, content to revel in their food. He seemed exceptionally hungry; she wondered if he had been getting enough to eat.

“Did they take good care of you?” she asked. “In the hospital?”

“Oh, quite,” he said. “But I turned up with a frightful grippe, from being chilled so badly, I suppose. And then pneumonia, and then a cough that simply wouldn’t stop. I wanted to leave anyway, but the nuns told me to get back into bed and be quiet. So I did.”

They ate every crumb, and drank every drop of wine. By then all the old enchantment was back. She found it difficult to do anything except look at him, difficult not to reach across the table and stroke his face. And yet something had changed. There was an easiness between them now—not trust, exactly; she would not go so far as to call it trust—but a kind of certainty nonetheless … or perhaps just a lessening of uncertainty.

“They have a delightful custom back in Quebec,” he said. “It was dreamt up by the men of the garrison, I’m sure, but now everybody does it. At the start of the social season, each young man will ask a girl to be his companion for the season—to go sleigh riding and skating, and to the theatre and the balls. She doesn’t have to promise to love him or to marry him or anything—she can be someone else’s companion next year. But if she agrees, then he has a lass to take to all the entertainments, and she has a young man to take her, and so she becomes his muffin.”

“His
muffin?”

“That’s what they’re called. Muffins. Because they’re sweet and warm and comforting, I suppose—”

“Every muffin I ever met got eaten before the day was out.”

He laughed right out loud, as though it tickled him enormously to have her throw some pleasantry back at him.

“These muffins never get eaten. Honest. It’s against the law. They get fed, though, all sorts of good things, ices and pastries and great chocolate truffles. They quite enjoy their … what do you suppose they call it? Muffinry? Muffinage? Muffinhood? In any case, I think it’s a grand custom, and we ought to import it to Halifax.” He inclined his head very gracefully. “Would you be my muffin for the winter, Sylvie Bowen? I would be so very pleased and honoured.”

She could find no words to answer him. In itself, the offer was wonderfully sweet and flattering. But beyond this small circle of candlelight and dreams, it was absurd. He knew nothing of the world she lived in, she thought, nothing whatever. They had not grown closer on the
Saguenay;
they had merely, in the face of death, forgotten their separation.