The Halifax Connection (53 page)

The Halifax Club was as magnificent as any building in the city, three storeys tall and wonderfully ornate. It reminded her of pictures she had seen in books, of the marvellous palaces in Europe. The club had opened only a year ago, and still had everywhere the look of fresh-cut stone, the scent of fresh-cut wood. It was, of course, a male domain, so utterly a male domain that the porter gave the thin young messenger with the bandaged face and broken arm only the barest, mildly sympathetic glance—unable, Sylvie thought, even to imagine that the messenger might be other than he seemed.

“I have a letter for Mr. Shaw, sir. Erryn Shaw. I was told to bring it here.”

A thousand times Sylvie had played this moment over in her mind. She would tell him about her letter—whomever it was she had to tell—and he would frown and shake his head.
I’m sorry, Mr. Shaw is not among our guests tonight.
Or better still:
Erryn Shaw? I’m sorry, I’m not acquainted with the gentleman.

“Mr. Shaw is at dinner. I will see that he gets this. Are you expecting a reply?”

“Yes. But it’s not urgent.”

“Very good.”

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“It’s frightfully cold out there, sir, and I been walking for hours. Do you have a water closet?”

Almost anywhere this would have been a perfectly reasonable request. Whether it was reasonable here, or shockingly inappropriate, she had no idea. The porter merely nodded and led her down a hallway and around a corner, motioning to a door. She slipped inside, waited until his footsteps had faded away, and slipped out again.

The dining rooms, Aggie had told her, were on the second floor. She crept down the hallway. When the porter was looking elsewhere, she ducked down an adjoining passage to search for a way up. It was easy to find, a magnificent winding staircase that again made her think of palaces. She passed a pair of well-dressed gentlemen, who glanced curiously at her but kept walking. Perhaps they assumed that anyone who made it past the porter had business here of some sort. A liveried servant seemed more curious still, but he also seemed in a frightful hurry, so he kept going too.

The place was truly beautiful. For all that her mind was on hard and troubling things, she could not help but notice. Everything was of fine wood, mahogany perhaps, polished until it shone. The lights were all in graceful cornices.

She came to what was clearly a dining room, with many tables and groups of men, and the wonderful smells of good food wafting out of it. But a moment of scrutiny was enough to tell her it was not the room she was looking for. The guests were scattered, some entirely alone, lingering over a cup of coffee or reading a newspaper. She hurried on, trying doors very gently, finding most of them locked. Then a burst of loud masculine laughter came from the far end of the hall.

She edged the door open just a crack, recognizing the voice even before she saw him. It was Erryn’s voice, cultured, powerful, filling the room like an orchestra.

“… can be no response to this heroic struggle, on the part of the people of British America, except our wholehearted and unconditional support. We share more than our common English heritage, for by now, in this modern world, we share our English heritage with many. But with the men of the South we also share tradition, and a love of tradition. We share a talent for military brilliance—no one, surely, would deny that General Lee is the Wellington of our day. We share a common history. Thousands of our people had their fill of Yankee bullying seventy-five years ago, and they haven’t learned to like it any better in the interim—”

Laughter and applause swept round the table. Sylvie stood rigid, staring. Erryn always dressed well, but he was clothed tonight in garments finer than she had ever seen on a man except in photographs; he looked like a prince. The gathering was small, perhaps fifteen men, all richly dressed as well, the table shimmering with crystal and silver. She recognized James Orton, and another who had come to Madame’s birthday dinner but whose name she had never learned. The rest were strangers, most of them in their fifties. This was the elite, she thought, just like Aggie said. The inner circle. The leaders of the Grey Tories.

And Erryn was with them.

She crept away and waited for him in the anteroom by the entrance. She thought she would challenge him the moment he appeared. She would say, “I hate you, you lying hypocrite!” and stalk away. But his face filled with concern when he saw her—with astonishment first, for he saw through the disguise in seconds, and then with concern—taking in the bandaged face, the left arm hanging limp in a sling.

“God in heaven, what’s happened? Are you hurt?”

“No. I’m perfectly all right.” She got to her feet. She could not meet his eyes; she could not bear to see the emotion in them. She
swept past him into the hallway and out into the street. The sling went into a tangled knot in her pocket, the bandage with a wrench onto the ground. By then Erryn had caught up with her, still pulling on his coat.

“Sylvie, my heart, what’s happened?”

She stopped still and faced him. “What are you doing here, Erryn Shaw?”

“Doing here? Nothing. Having supper. Are you all right, love? Why on earth are you dressed like that?”

“How else would I get into your cozy little Confederate club?”

“Confederate …? Sylvie, this is the gentlemen’s club—”

“I’m not talking about the bloody house! I’m talking about that pack of Grey Tory plotters you were with. How can you work with those people, Erryn?
How can you?”

“We were only having supper—”

“No, you weren’t! I heard you! I heard you telling them how noble they were and how the whole of British America were on their side. And I’ve heard other things too, before tonight. That’s why I came—because I didn’t believe it. I didn’t think you could do such things—”

“You were upstairs?” he asked, very soft.

“Yes, I—”

“Let’s get a carriage, shall we? For a bit of privacy?”

The club, like the big hotels, usually had two or three coaches waiting for customers around the supper hour. Erryn led her to one of them and helped her inside.

“Morris and Birmingham.”

“Very good, sir.”

He climbed in, gently pulling the door shut.

“I’m not going home with you,” she said.

“I had to tell him something. It doesn’t matter. We’ll go wherever you wish.”

She waited to see if he would speak, if he would explain himself. He said nothing, merely looked at her, his thin face all bones and shadows.

“Well,” she said finally, “we have privacy now. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Instead of answering, he had questions of his own. “Are you really all right, Sylvie? You’re not sick?”

“No.”

“Then won’t they be missing you at the Den? I thought you weren’t allowed to leave except on your half day.”

“I traded my half day.”

“I see.”

That hurt him, she saw. It hurt him quite a lot, and angry though she was, she could not help but feel sorry.

“And the clothes?” he went on.

“We have a lad working there,” she said. “I took some of his.” She paused and then leaned forward desperately. It was only fair to tell him, to explain. “I had to know, Erryn. There were a big story in the papers about Mr. Kane, and all the fuss they be making over him, giving him a fancy farewell party. And then I heard a couple of the Southerners in the parlour talking about it, and they mentioned you. That you’d be there, see. That you were … well, one of them. And I had to know. So I got Sunday free, and sneaked some of Harry Dobbs’s clothes out of the laundry—”

“And put a bandage on your face to hide the scars, and put your arm in a sling to explain the bandage, and got yourself past the porter with some wild story or another.” He smiled then—a small, sad smile, but altogether genuine. “My compliments, Miss Bowen. I dare say you’ve done it well.”

“What are you doing with those people, Erryn?”

He ran his hands over his face, slowly, like a man who had no idea what to say. “It’s a small city, my love. You can’t stay in society and avoid them. Half the men who signed John Tobin’s memorial belong to the Halifax Club, you know. They do business with Alexander MacNab. They doff their hats to James Orton on the street. There’s no way around it.”

“They don’t stand up in public and talk about the glorious Confederacy and how we owe it our undying support!”

“No. But preaching to the converted never changed the price of tea, so far as I’ve ever noticed.”

“Are you telling me you didn’t mean the things you said?”

“You asked me, back in Montreal, what I thought about the American war. I said I really didn’t know. What I should have said is that I think all wars are destructive and stupid. There’s right and wrong on both sides, and where you end up is just a matter of where you were born. If my wonderful old great-uncle had been born French, he’d have fought for Napoleon. Would that have made him wicked? Or were we the wicked ones? It was the kings and lords of Europe who wanted the French Revolution crushed. They were scared silly that its ideas might spread, and they might lose their power—”

“That’s very clever, Erryn, but if you really believed it, you wouldn’t touch the Southern Rebels with a ten-foot pole. You weren’t born there. You were born in England, and England is neutral. Anyway, you can say what you like about right and wrong on both sides, but there’s a whole lot more wrong on theirs. They broke up a country that didn’t need breaking up, just to keep their slaves. They started the bloody shooting. Now they’re up here trying to drag us into it too! If you think war is stupid and destructive, why are you helping the people who want to start another one?”

“It’ll never come to that. There’s a few hotheads who want it, maybe, but most of the men I was with tonight simply think the Confederates are rather like us and they want to cheer them on.”

“And what do
you
want, Erryn Shaw?”

He thought for a time before he answered. “I want my life back. I want a theatre, and the work I was born to do. I could go to Montreal or New York and hope somebody would hire me—probably somebody would. But the only home I have left in the world is here. All my friends are here.
You’re
here.

“I get work from MacNab from time to time. A shipment goes astray, he sends me to Saint John to find out what happened to it. He wants a good new dealer on the Lakes, he sends me to Montreal to line one up for him. So I make a bit of money. I stay on good terms with the people who’ll be my patrons a few years down the road. Sure, a lot of them are Grey Tories, but the fact is, even the hotheads among them aren’t going to start anything. They aren’t strong enough. And whatever happens in the States is going to happen with or without the participation of one long-legged English troll. So …” He shrugged. “So I drink a few toasts to Jeff Davis. It makes the old coves feel good. Ten years from now no one’s going to care a fig.”

She stared at him, wordless. A part of her almost accepted it. He was not
really
a Confederate supporter. He was not
doing
anything—not anything that would matter much. Attending a few dinners, making a few speeches to men who already believed everything he said. Not especially admirable, but not beyond forgiveness either, in a pitiless world. Just surviving, just riding out the storm.

The best liars, Fran always said, were the ones who told you as much of the truth as they could.

“What else are you doing for them, Erryn?”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw that room,” she flung back bitterly. “That weren’t just a few old coves having supper. That were men with money to burn, men as own shipping companies and banks and God alone knows what else, all decked out to the nines with a table they’d set for the Queen. So they give you work sometimes? You go off to Saint John to find out what happened to a shipment? That be clerk’s duty, Erryn Shaw, and nobody gets asked to dinner by the likes of them for doing clerk’s duty! Even a chambermaid knows as much!”

“No,” he said, a trifle sharply. “I get invited because I have a pack of relatives who run around in wigs. I’m quite aware of
that.” He laughed then, one of those small, soft laughs he tossed out sometimes, like a boy who never stayed serious for very long. “I’m very fine company, too, you know. That always helps.”

Oh, yes, it helped. It could make his every word seem reasonable. The trouble was, his terribly reasonable words felt … they felt
rehearsed
, she thought, as though he had known he would face these questions sooner or later, and carefully made up the best answers he could. Worse still, his answers, good as they were, were not quite good enough.

She knew scarcely anything of the lives of the upper classes—how they behaved among themselves, their social rules, their games, the meaning they might attach to a kindness or a snub—it was all uncharted territory. But she felt she knew a few things about power, things that cut across social lines, and probably across centuries and nationalities too; things that held for the ruffians in the streets of Rochdale and for the silk-clad lords of the mills. The powerful never gave you something for nothing. Favours were passed out in return for favours received or in expectation of favours to come.