The Halifax Connection (48 page)

Erryn Shaw was beautiful. And as she stroked him and admired him to distraction, and thought to herself:
Mine, mine, all mine, maybe only for now, but all mine!
—even as she did so, she thought also that beauty had very little to do with it.

“Are you happy, Sylvie Bowen?”

“Yes.” She thought perhaps “happy” was too small a word. She settled on one elbow and played with his hair. “And you, Erryn?”

“Utterly, except for one thing: I shall have to take you off to a cold attic room in the Danners’ boarding house, and come back here and sleep alone.”

“I fear there’s no help for that,” she said.

“We could get married.”

She stared at him, wondering if she had misunderstood him, knowing she had not.
“Married?”

“Why, yes,” he said wryly. “People have been known to do that sort of thing, when they like each other well enough.”

She almost believed it. In truth, she believed it more because he said it lightly, as a thing between friends, than if he had thrown himself on his knees with protestations of love. She felt a flash of savage, overwhelming joy. It faded as comprehension came. He was being, of course, the perfect gentleman.

And did it matter? she thought darkly. She could accept him anyway, take what happiness there was to be found in it, try to make him happy in return. End the mortal loneliness, the ache that went right to her bones sometimes, for someone to be close to, someone to touch and to love.

But there was her face. There was the question of rank too, but it did not matter here the way it did in England. And he was never going back; he had made that very clear to her more than once.
Whatever else she doubted in him, this much she was sure of: he wanted his life in the theatre more than he wanted his social place. And she could learn the ways of the higher folk, perhaps, if she really tried, just as Susan Danner had. But the scars … no, the scars would never go away.

She remembered how one of the boarders had regarded her yesterday, the new one, Mr. Janes. He looked offended, as though she had no right to be standing there, young and otherwise desirable, with such a face; as though it were unfair to
him.
And there had been so many others down through the years: the fascinated ones who stared, the pitying ones who could not wait to look away.

How would a man feel ten years hence, a man as proud and gifted as this one, having bound himself to such a face? Merely out of duty, and forever?

He caught her hand and nuzzled it. “What do you say, then, Sylvie Bowen? Could you love this poor lonely scarecrow well enough to marry him?”

“I love you more than anything,” she told him, very soft. “I would marry you gladly, I would, only …” She touched her cheek. “Only there’s this, see? Aunt Addie told me once there’d be no sense my getting married, because there weren’t a man on earth could wake up every morning of his life looking at this face.”

It was hard to read his eyes in the firelight, but it seemed that something darkened in them.

“I think,” he said, “it is a very bold soul who speaks for every man on earth.” Lightly as a feather, his fingers played across the spot she had touched. “The first time I saw you, on the rue St-Antoine, stepping out of a carriage, I thought you were enchanting. Nothing has made me change my mind. You have scars on your face, yes, and that is a cruel place to have them, but they’re not what I see when I look at you. I see your hair, and all I want is to touch it. I see how your body moves like running water, and how, when you laugh, it lights up the whole lonely world. I see
you
, my heart, and you are all that matters. Only you.”

If he had been someone else, someone who was less a magician with words, it would have been easier to believe him. Even so, she almost did.

“Do you know what I grieved for,” he went on, “when I was lost in the river? Besides the thought of dying? It was that I would never have your love, never know you as I wanted to. Never lay down beside you. I know we’re … different … in some ways. You’ve lived in a world I can scarcely imagine, and you aren’t at all sure what to make of me. But in spite of it, we seem to love the same things in life, and I think we love each other. Leastways, I love you.”

“And I love you, Erryn; I do! You’ve been everything to me a lass could wish for! At first I thought you were just being kind, but I know now it be more. Only I … I don’t want for you to ever feel beholden, see? I don’t want you spending time with me, or laying down beside me, except because you want to. I know what it’s like now, to have that. I don’t ever want less. I don’t want … duty. Not from you, Erryn—it would purely break my heart.”

His eyes fell for a long, brooding time. She wished she could take her words back, trade them for something harmless and vague. But it had always been her way to be honest, most especially with people she cared for.

“Duty?” he murmured at last. “You fear it would come to that?”

“I don’t know. It weren’t that I … I’m sorry, Erryn, I just … don’t know.”

To her astonishment, he smiled a little then, and drew her to nestle close against him. “And how could you, after all? Everything you ever put your faith in was taken from you, one way or another. So why should you put any faith in this? I do see it, love, I do. And I can wait. God knows I expected a lot, asking you so soon. But you haven’t said, ‘No, go away, you big bony troll,’ so I’ll wait. I’ll walk out with you Friday afternoons, and babble at you, and take you to bed every chance I get. And I’ll ask you again, as often as I have to, and one day you’ll be sure.”

She wept then, fast in his arms, more tempted than ever to tell him yes. But he had spoken the truth: she had no faith in it, not deep down. She adored him; she believed him honest; she believed, even, that he loved her in some measure. But she had no faith that it would last.

As long as they were free, she could take whatever love and happiness he offered in the certainty that it was real, and whatever became of it, became. Maybe she would grow sure of him, like he said; maybe they would marry. If they did not, if in the end he did not want a mill girl with a ruined face, he would wish her well and walk quietly away. And then all this sweetness would never turn to poison—to sorrow, yes, but not to poison, not to mere icy duty or bitterness or cruel names.

It was hard beyond bearing, but there was no other way.

E
VER SINCE
M
ORRISON’S
party, back in Montreal, the image of Maury Janes’s face had remained clear in Erryn’s memory—plain and rather square, with a thin line of mouth and straight, dull brown hair. An altogether forgettable face, except for who he was and what he had promised:
If this goes off like it should, it’s going to end the war…
Half a million men were trying to end the war and could not. Such a promise made Janes impossible to forget.

Erryn spotted him immediately on arriving at the Waverley. He was standing somewhat aside from the crowd, talking quietly with Al MacNab and a burly brute Erryn recalled well from Montreal: George Kane, the one-time police marshal of Baltimore. Jackson Follett’s right-hand man.

God almighty. Two of them already, and I just got in the door. I think it’s going to be a long night.

“Mr. Shaw! Good to see you again! How are you?” Janes strode over to him at once, smiling like an old friend, shaking his hand as though he meant to wring it off and keep it.

“I’m well, thank you. And yourself?”

“Just fine, sir, just fine. Glad to see you’re still in one piece. I heard you got knifed on the boat coming over. Damn rotten business. Did they ever get the son of a bitch?”

“They didn’t. I did.”

Janes laughed roughly and clapped him on the arm. “I guess you Brits are tougher than you look.”

“Positively indestructible,” Erryn murmured. He leaned closer. “Did you just get in?”

“No, we came Saturday. I know you said to call on you, but it was just my luck Mr. Kane was heading off to Halifax the same day I was. Made everything right simple. Soon as we landed, he took me over to meet Al MacNab. Hell of a man, MacNab, but I reckon you know that. Never saw anybody get more things done in less time. He got us a nice place to stay, told me to come by Monday morning and he’d get me all set up, and damned if he wasn’t as good as his word. I do appreciate your offer, though. I’ll say one thing for you folks up here, you all are damnably obliging.”

“Well, the offer still stands, Mr. Janes. If I can help in any way at all, be sure to let me know.”

“That man,” Jack Murray muttered over his punch, “is a mouth on wheels.”

Erryn smiled faintly. “Men have said the same about me once or twice.”

Jack laughed. “Yes, but you’re
interesting
, Erryn. Janes is … to tell you the truth, when I first met him, a couple of days back, I thought he was dumb as a brick.”

“And do you still think so?”

“No. I’d say he’s rather shrewd, actually, in his own horrid Yankee trader sort of way. Sam Slick in person, and all that. His father was from Massachusetts, did you know?”

“Yes, he told me.”

Erryn would have liked to say more, to remind Jack that it really did not make a lot of sense to judge men by their origins. But the entire Grey Tory community judged him by his own, and therein lay much of his security.

An aristocrat
, his best friend Cuyler had said to him once,
an aristocrat is like God. He doesn’t need to explain his existence; he simply is.

The comment was cynical and irreverent (Cuyler was often both), but it contained a good deal of truth. Sons of the English ruling class turned up routinely in the colonies, doing nothing in particular, merely travelling and socializing with their peers. When Erryn Shaw arrived in Halifax, no one doubted that he was one of them. He had a princely education and impeccable good manners; he had an intimate knowledge of aristocratic life. When he spoke, casually and in passing, of a party at Windsor Castle, of dukes and duchesses come to tea; of seeing, through the window of his boyhood study, the great Lord Wellington old and sad, walking in his father’s garden in the rain, it was obvious that he spoke from lived experience.

Oh, people wondered about him, he supposed—wondered just how blue his blood really was, and why he would spend his time on something so dubious as a playhouse, and why he never went home. But as long as he did not aim to marry one of their daughters, or involve himself in their business affairs, the Canadians would neither pry nor judge. Financial difficulties could strike the best of families; and everyone knew there were not enough military commissions and political appointments to go around. Some members of the aristocracy, younger sons in particular,
did
spend part of their lives like God, simply being there. Halifax was content to take him as he was.

Season after season, the business lords and their families patronized his theatre. The garrison officers worked with him on amateur plays and concerts, and bought him drinks and took him out to dinner. Because he liked to be companionable, he rarely discussed politics in social situations. Still, he never made a secret of his distaste for American slavery, or of his admiration for English Radicals such as Cobden and Bright. The whole town knew of his long friendship with Constable Calverley, an unrelenting leveller of the meanest possible origins.

So, when he shrugged it all aside and involved himself more and more on behalf of the Confederate elite, it seemed to him that someone should have asked him some hard questions. Had the circumstances been reversed, Matt Calverley would certainly have done so.

But the Grey Tories took him at his word—or rather, he supposed, at his blood. They did not believe he was returning to the world of his peers; they believed he had never really left it. All the rest had been temporary and trifling, merely the sort of thing young gentlemen did—consorting with low-life a way of learning about the world, running a playhouse a mere diversion, like seducing ballerinas or chasing the great auk in Timbuktu. Now there was something important at stake, and he, as the best of his kind always did, was showing his mettle when it mattered.