The Halifax Connection (60 page)

“Is there anyone you specially want to know about, Erryn? At the Den?”

Her voice was soft, scarcely more than a murmur, and his mind was still on other things. He answered idly, without much thought.

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“I mean Rebels. There be a dozen of them in the place if there be one.”

“Rebels?” In a breath he forgot the sailboat. He forgot even his own desire. “Whatever do you mean?”

“I’m the chambermaid, remember? I go in their rooms.”

“You
clean
their rooms—”

“That don’t stop me from doing other things. I done it before.”

“You’ve done what before?”

“Go through their things. For letters and such. Names. Anything that might be important.”

He stared at her, and saw that she was utterly in earnest. He opened his mouth, and closed it again, defeated. For one of the few times in his life, he truly had no idea what to say.

“There ain’t much good about being a scrubmaid,” she went on softly, “but there’s this much, anyway. I can help you.”

“No.”

“Erryn—”

“Absolutely not. It’s too dangerous.”

“No, it ain’t. They never know I look at their stuff. And if they ever find out, all they can do is complain to Miss Susan. They ain’t going to drown me in my scrub pail.”

“For God’s sake, it’s not a matter for joshing!”

“Sorry. But they ain’t, just the same.”

“You’ve been … you’ve been doing this for someone else?”

“Till a while back. Till it got out that I was seeing you.”

God in heaven. Doing it for Aggie Breault, no doubt: Matt was certain the housemaid was one of Jabin Romney’s agents.

“I see.” He scrambled for something useful to say. “Sylvie, I’m asking you to forget about this. Please. I don’t want to be afraid for you, my heart. I don’t want to lie awake every night wondering if you’re all right. I don’t want to think of some bastard like … oh, God, like any of them, walking into his room and finding you going through his mail. It’s that simple, Sylvie. Let it be. Please. For me.”

She said nothing for a time. She looked at her hands, and then at him, and at her hands again. “And if I were your best mate, Erryn,
the one with the spiders you told me about, you’d be scared for him too, wouldn’t you? But you wouldn’t tell him to let it be.”

He could almost hear Matt’s voice murmuring at his elbow, soft as it had been that night at Corey’s, affectionate, persuasive:
You know, mate, the old man is looking for some spies …
God almighty, but Sylvie Bowen had a deadly aim.

“I’m scared for
you
, Erryn. I been scared ever since I saw you with those people at the Club. I thought you were on the other side then, but it didn’t matter; the other side’s dangerous too. So I don’t see as how I can let it be. How I can walk through those rooms every day thinking you might need some little thing I could just pick off the table, need it desperately, maybe, and I be just walking by, too much of a scaredy-cat to look.” She paused. “I can’t do that, Erryn. I know you’re being gallant and all, but I can’t. Besides, I don’t want a war here either.”

“But if something happened to you—”

“Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll be careful. And it’s safer for a woman, anyway. Southerners are full of all these silly notions, treating women like we’re made of glass—”

“Southerners,” Erryn said grimly, “come in all shapes and sizes, just like Englishmen. And those who are up here plotting our ruin aren’t likely to be their best.”

“No.” She played her fingers across the back of his hand, over and over, her touch as cool and gentle as silk. “I lost Fran because of them. I’ll not lose you too, if there be anything I can do to stop it. I’ll bring you what I find. It might not be much. It weren’t, before. But it all helps. That’s what I were told, anyway. It all helps.”

There was nothing he could say. It was clear she had decided on the matter before she ever spoke of it. It was clear also that she considered it a duty, something she owed not only to Erryn Shaw, because she loved him, but also to Fran’s memory, perhaps even to life itself.
I don’t want a war here either.

There was nothing at all he could say.

I
N THE WEEKS SHE
had been away from it, Sylvie had almost forgotten what the ice house was like—the cellar room damp and chilly as a grave, the ice blocks so cold they hurt her fingers right down to the bone. She had found it bearable before, because of Aggie Breault’s company, because they could talk and laugh together and be friends. But Aggie was not her friend anymore, merely a polite acquaintance, a faultlessly correct workmate who made a point of being too busy for conversation. She passed on Miss Susan’s orders without a smile or a trace of affection; she came as late as possible to their attic room and feigned sleep the moment she was abed.

Now in the ice house they worked together in absolute silence. Like mules on a coal cart, Sylvie thought. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. It grew unbearable. Disheartened, she sat back on her heels, rubbing her fingers together, trying to warm them.

“Won’t you talk to me anymore, Aggie?”

There was no reply.

“Aggie, I just want to—”

“I don’t see as how we have much to talk about, Sylvie Bowen.”

“There be a whole world to talk about, last time I looked.”

Aggie said nothing.

“I ain’t changed my mind about anything,” Sylvie went on. “Just because I care for Mr. Shaw don’t mean I can’t think for myself. I won’t do anything to hurt your friends. I promise you, not ever!”

“I’d like to believe that,” Aggie said grimly, “but I don’t. And I reckon you wouldn’t either, if you were me.”

“Maybe not. But you’re the only friend I got here. And you were so kind to me, when I were sick—it don’t seem right now, us never talking, never laughing anymore.”

Aggie picked up a half-melted block of ice and slammed it savagely onto the shelf.

“Aggie,
please …
!”

The older woman made as if to continue working and then stopped abruptly. “All right, tell me this. When you found out what he was doing, you told me you couldn’t accept it. You said mill owners and slave owners were all of a kind, getting fat off other people’s blood, and a man who was helping them was no man you could love. So what the devil’s changed, Sylvie Bowen? Why can you love him now?”

“I never stopped. I tried to, but I couldn’t. I mean, if you’d found out Charlie were doing something wrong, you couldn’t’ve stopped either—”

“Doesn’t mean I’d have stayed with him, or left him and then took him back!”

“He says he wants to marry me.”

Aggie threw up her hands. “Right. I’ll believe
that
when I see it. Anyway, even if it’s true, after what you told me, why would you want to marry
him?”

Sylvie looked away. “I’m scared, Aggie.”

The hardest thing, saying it, was knowing it was true. It was irrelevant; it had not affected her decisions, and she hoped it never would. But it was nonetheless true.

“Scared? Scared of—”

No doubt Aggie was going to say “Scared of what?” and then remembered. She started moving ice again.

Sylvie went on, very soft. “I’ll never get other work, not with this face. Never get another offer either, ’cept maybe from some old brute who just wants a servant he don’t have to pay. So it be this, Aggie—” She made a wide gesture, taking in the dismal ice house and everything around it. “It be this for all my life, whatever I got left, or it be Mr. Shaw.”

“And the money the Johnny Rebs are paying him.”

“I don’t care about his money. I want a bit of living before it’s over. A bit of being happy. I never had any yet, ’cept for that time I spent in the West with Madame, and sailing on the
Osprey
, before they burnt her. All the rest’s been work and people fighting. It were mill clatter screaming in my ears for years on end, and now it’s chamber pots and scrub pails. Nothing sweet. After a while a body could die for the taste of something sweet.”

“And you suppose I don’t know that?”

“I suppose you do, Aggie Breault. Better than most anyone.”

In the stillness that followed, they could hear voices at the door upstairs, and tramping feet. It was Mr. Timmins with fresh ice, no doubt. Soon young Dobbs would be packing it down and their time alone would be over.

“Look,” Aggie said finally, “if you want me to say I like what you’re doing—well, I don’t. No matter what you say about which side you’re on. But …” She glanced up the stairwell, wiped her sleeve across her face, and sat on the pipe beside Sylvie. “I’m not passing judgment. I’m not God. Wouldn’t want to be, to tell you the truth—I’d be too damn confused. I can’t be your friend the way I was before. We can’t … we can’t
talk
the way we did. Surely
you know that. But we can be … I guess a bit like two lads who used to know each other, sitting on opposite sides of a picket line, trading coffee and tobacco. You say good morning, I say good morning. You don’t shoot, I don’t shoot. Fair enough?”

It was not what she had hoped for, but she knew it was the best she would get. “Fair enough.”

Maury Janes travelled light. Although he always paid two weeks’ rent in advance, he kept with him only a single medium-sized carpet bag. It contained no secret pockets, or anything else of interest to a spy—or at least, Sylvie corrected herself, nothing of obvious, suspicious interest. Many travellers carried firearms; two boxes of bullets in Janes’s pack proved only that he was one of them. He carried a map of the United States, but it was not marked in any way, and he was, after all, an American. Indeed, the oddest thing about the man was that he had been here so long and yet had nothing personal around him—no books, no letters, no trifles of any sort, nothing to suggest a life beyond his room. He was not poor. He had decent clothing, money to buy spirits in the parlour, money to socialize with the likes of Alexander MacNab and the Ortons. He had spoken of them at meals, Aggie told her, back when Aggie was still telling her such things. He had even described for the other boarders Jamie Orton’s splendid mansion out on the Northwest Arm. He described it, Aggie said, like a man who was fixing to get himself one like it. And yet he travelled almost as if he were a fugitive, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice and leave no trace behind.

Nothing else about him bothered her. She did not like the way he looked at her face, but this was true of half the men who had ever crossed her path, and many of the women. It was something she no longer cared about much. Janes made little mess and few demands. From a chambermaid’s perspective, she would have traded half the guests in the Den for more of him.

But when she returned from her illness, she sensed a change in the man. She did not see a great deal of the guests now that it was summer. She might pass him in a hallway, or bring something to his chamber after supper. It was the briefest possible contact, yet she knew he was watching her differently than before, speculatively, measuring her in some way. Then little MacKay, fascinated that Sylvie had a follower, took to passing on bits of gossip about Erryn Shaw. It was very little, and most of it came by way of Harry Dobbs, who believed everything he heard, indiscriminately. One thing he had heard was that young Mr. Shaw was awfully good friends with their boarder, Mr. Janes. They were always out drinking and sporting together, Dobbs said. And did she know that back in March, when Mr. Janes was away, he was off to New Brunswick with Mr. Shaw?

“Dobbsy thinks it was something about the war,” MacKay whispered.

“He thinks everything’s about the war. A dog couldn’t cross the street to mess a post but he’d think it was about the war.”

“Sanders says it might come here. The war, I mean. They scare me sometimes, her and Dobbs. They’re always talking about it. Do you think it will?”

“No.” She reached carefully and drew the blanket to her chin, wishing, as she always did, that it were Erryn lying warm beside her. “It won’t come here. We got good leaders. They’ll see it doesn’t happen.”