The Halifax Connection (41 page)

“Erryn, I couldn’t—”

“Oh. Do you have … another friend?”

“Another …? Dear heavens, no. But I … even if I had the clothes and pretty things to go to balls, there wouldn’t be any time for it. I have my half day Fridays, nothing more, and part of that goes to Madame. Most nights we’re busy till we fall into bed. And if we ain’t, Miss Susan lets us read or sew, or maybe even have a friend come by for tea, but we can’t go off anywhere. We might be needed, see. So …” It hurt to finish. How fine it must be to be Isabel Orton, to receive such offers as a matter of course, to accept one or refuse another purely as she chose, as if she were choosing between peach or strawberry pies. “So I can’t. It’s good of you to ask, it is. But I can’t.”

“And what of Fridays? Shall I not even have a muffin on Fridays?” He asked lightly and yet as though he meant it. “There are pleasant things to do sometimes on Fridays. And there is always dinner.”

It was as hard as anything she had ever done, not simply saying yes.

“I’ll go with you, Erryn, any time I can. You only got to ask. You don’t have to make promises.”

“But … but it’s not a promise! It’s just … muffinry …”

He leaned back in his chair. For a small moment she thought he was angry at her, and she unwished every word. But when he spoke, there was no anger in his manner, only quiet speculation.

“Well, it
is
a promise, I admit. For the winter. But you’re uncommonly fine company, Sylvie Bowen, and I’m selfish enough to want every bit of it I can get. You wouldn’t consider it? I know I’m a great ugly troll, but I’ll do my best to please you.”

“You’re not a great ugly troll! You look as nice as anyone, and if you didn’t, who would I be to care, with my face, and you always so charming and so good to me? I’d promise in a minute, I would, only …” She looked up, forced herself to meet his eyes and say it plain. “You be gentlefolk, Erryn Shaw, and I’m a scrub maid.”

“Ah, yes. My flaming relatives in wigs. Of course.” He made a small restraining gesture with his hand. “Wait, love! Please. Let me say this. I know you work as a scrub maid. I may go on like a blathering idiot sometimes, but I
had
noticed. And I know that, to most everyone, a friendship between us is unthinkable. No man of my rank would lower himself to such a thing, no woman of yours should be so foolish as to expect it. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

“Only … only people are more complicated than that. Odder, too. Oh, they can live by such notions, of course they can. It’s how my family got to be rich and important, and how I got to be born. But it’s like the old chap Procrustes I talked about—if any part of you doesn’t fit his bed, somebody chops it off. And if you let them, after a while there isn’t much of you left.

“So I don’t care a lot about rank anymore. Maybe in some things; a man can’t leave his whole past behind, I suppose. I’ll puff out my feathers and play the silly peacock like the rest of my peers, once in a while. But as a way of living, it’s not worth it. You get bored, and frightfully lonely. Besides, we’re not in England anymore.

“So …” He reached across the table once again and took her hands. “So, I would be very happy to have you for my muffin. We’ll be together when we can, and be happy, and those who disapprove can simply go and chase themselves. What do you say, my heart?”

His touch was playful yet sensuous, enchanting. It made her remember the day of the rainstorm, the way they had embraced, the blind, animal things she had felt. She wondered if what he had said was true. He meant it, at least for the moment, but was it true? And if it was not, did it really matter very much? Wasn’t a little happiness better than none at all?

No doubt Madame had asked herself the same thing, running off with her seaman. Now, year after year, she burned candles for her folly, and for his.
It’s safer to sail full rigged into a hurricane, Sylvie Bowen, than to love a man who is not of your station.

No doubt. But she could swim the whole bleeding ocean easier than walk away.

“I’d like that,” she said. “I’d like it more than anything.”

I
T HAD BEEN
, in Matt Calverley’s opinion, one miserable, bleeding bugger of a night. He shoved yet another piece of wood into the cast iron stove and shook the coffee pot irritably, as if rearranging its contents would make them heat faster. He had been working for almost thirty hours, and the day had just begun.

Across the room, François Dufours sat with his feet on his desk, leaning his chair back. Two constables from Ward Three stood by the stove, still in their greatcoats, trying to warm their hands; and Constable Neary was painstakingly writing his report of a stabbing yesterday evening in a tenement on Barrack Street.

They had not slept recently either. The entire police force had been on duty throughout the night, manning the station and patrolling the streets in case the
Chesapeake
pirates turned up. It was a reasonable precaution; had he been the man in charge, Matt
would have given the same order himself. This in no way prevented a small, cynical voice in the back of his head from telling him that mermaids and unicorns were going to turn up on the streets of Halifax sooner than Captain John Braine or his men.

“Those pirates got any sense at all,” Dufours said, “they’ll go to ground for a month or two. Leastways till it all blows over and the Yankees go and get mad about something else.”

At the stove, young Johnnie Delft turned a pinched face toward the room. “You figure it
will
blow over?”

“Sure,” Dufours said. At fifty-six he was the oldest of the city’s twenty constables. He had rheumatism in his hands and knees, and he was very heavy—hardly the sort to chase a thief or subdue a pack of drunken sailors. But he was a skilful detective, and, like Matt, he was respected as a mentor by the less experienced men.

“The Union’s got the Rebels on the run,” he went on. “They’d just be shooting themselves in the foot, starting a scrap with England. Besides, from what I’ve heard, everybody’s talking. The Yankee consul was back and forth all day yesterday, going out to the ships, and back to the lieutenant-governor and the mayor, and telegraphing Washington. They’ll be sensible about it, and if they are, there’s no reason for us to start something.”

“What about them going into Sambro harbour like they did?” Delft asked.

“What about us building Rebel raiders in Liverpool?” Matt replied. “We got dirt on our fingers too, mate. Seems to me we should all just say sorry, call it even, and walk away in opposite directions.”

Delft looked unconvinced, but before he could pursue the matter, Dufours went on, “Matt, when you was in Sambro yesterday, did you learn any more about this Captain Braine? Is he really the same sod was here in the summer, taking money for that directory what never got printed?”

“Well,” Matt said with a grin, “he ran off on his mates at La Have and took the ship’s strongbox with him. Sure sounds like the same man to me.”

“You were one of the lads was sent to Sambro, Matt?” The question came from Delft’s companion, Ed Grover. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yes. Neary and me, and Phineas Praed from the county office.”

“They only sent three of you? To arrest twelve armed men? What was that supposed to accomplish?”

The coffee pot was rattling on the stove. Matt poured a cup for each of them and fetched a pitcher sitting on the windowsill. The milk came out with little slivers of ice in it. He drank half his coffee at one go before he spoke.

“Well,” he said, “we might’ve got lucky and found one of them asleep, like the Yankees did.”

“Fat chance,” Neary grumbled over his notebook. “It was the whole constabulary we were needing, or better still, the militia. Sending the three of us was a joke.”

“Not a joke,” Matt said amiably. “Just politics. Nobody’s about to send the whole constabulary anywhere just now—nor the militia neither. And it looked bad for us to sit here and do nothing, with those rotters running free just a few miles down the coast.”

“You’re saying it was all for show?” Grover said, disgusted.

“No. Not as far as I was concerned. I’d have damn well hauled them back here, any of them I could get my hands on. But …” He shrugged. “I knew unless we could arrange for a miracle or two, it wasn’t going to happen.”

“Did you even get close?” Delft asked. “Did you see them?”

“We got close enough to think twice about getting any closer. They shot in the air at first, called us names, told us to go bugger ourselves and our bloody Yankee friends while we were at it, before we got our bloody stupid heads blown off. Then they started peppering the ground right in front of our feet. There was local lads mixed in with them too, so even if we could have found some decent cover and given them a fight, we’d have been shooting at men whose only crime was being related to the bastards.
Nobody was keen on that. Praed said there was nothing for it but to climb back on our sleigh and go home.”

“That’s a real shame, you know,” Grover said. “Three against twenty-odd? You could have been heroes. Could have had yourselves a nice funeral parade and a fifty-foot monument right in front of city hall.”

“And poems, too,” Matt added, “just like those poor buggers at Balaclava: ‘Pistols to the left of them, pistols to the right of them, volleyed and thundered—’”

“God love you, Matt,” Neary said, “you keep on like this, you’ll be getting as daft as that mouthy Englishman you used to hang about with.”

It was like a cloud passing over the room. No one responded. Neary ducked his head back to his report, quickly, like a man wishing hard that he were ten miles away.

The subject of Erryn Shaw was not one Matt wished to discuss with his mates. The friendship was over; he had made this clear to them months ago. He had no use for fair-weather patriots, or fair-weather friends, and even less for fair-weather radicals who were all for justice and other people’s rights as long as it was only talk. Erryn had gone over to the slavers and their Grey Tory friends, so be damned to him.

And if he had done it?
Matt wondered.
If it weren’t a pretended choice, but real—how would I feel then?
The question, considered seriously, seemed unmanageable, absurd. Erryn
wouldn’t.

But what if he had?

Erryn’s own words played across his mind now, words he had spoken of Jack Murray:
He didn’t really change, Matt; it was simply that I never knew him.
What if he, Matt, had never known his best mate as well as he thought he had? What if those eight years of talk and theatre and laughing at spiders were only a part of Erryn Shaw, and now, in a crisis, a different, more essential part emerged? How did people deal with such discoveries? For Erryn and Jack Murray, it was no great matter; they had never been more than
casual friends. But what if it were the person a man loved best in all the world?

In the States, he knew, some people steeled themselves and broke the bond outright. They burned the photographs, threw away the gifts, cut the name from the family bible. Others grew quietly apart, and found themselves one day on opposite sides of a chasm, a chasm they would never cross again, neither enemies nor strangers nor friends, but some improbable combination of all three.

And others stood and held. As he hoped he would have done.
You’re God damn bloody wrong, Erryn Shaw, but you’re my best mate still.

He fetched another cup of coffee and drank it black, only half listening to Dufours and Grover wondering what would become of the
Chesapeake
pirates if they were captured. Dufours said they were a sorry lot, and whatever they got, they deserved it. As to most of them, Matt thought, Dufours was undoubtedly right. The erstwhile captain, John Braine, was a common swindler whose list of victims stretched from Halifax to Ohio. His followers had taken the
Chesapeake
in a hail of bullets, and shot a civilian engineer point-blank in the face, a man who was almost certainly unarmed. Even some of the Grey Tories stood apart from them, calling them criminals and a disgrace to the Confederate cause.

Al MacNab thought they were bully good lads.

And what would I think of Erryn, if Erryn said the same? My best mate still?

God help him, he thought, but as to that question, he would damn near choose to die rather than have to answer it.