The Halifax Connection (30 page)

You thought you was so damn smart, didn’t you, Mr. Shaw?

He gulped with pain as Zeb Taylor pulled the knife free to strike again. He reached instinctively, missing the man’s wrist but deflecting the blow. He had no vanity left; he sucked in his breath and shouted, “Ho! Guard! Help!” with all the voice he had. It seemed no more than a harsh, unimpressive croak.

Taylor cursed at him. “Not much stomach for a fight, have you, you little Brit bastard?”

His second try captured Taylor’s knife hand. He held on desperately as the man’s left hammered at his face and belly—a hand like human steel, fast and brutal. He tried to parry the blows, but too much of his strength and attention was focused on the weapon. At this rate he was going to be battered senseless, and then it would be over anyway: Taylor could stab him at his leisure, cut his head off if he wanted to, toss him in the river, and go back to his bed. Erryn’s brief, half-formed intention to somehow disarm the man
went out like a snuffed candle. All he cared about now was survival, any way that he could manage it.

He had one chance, he thought. Maybe one. He brought his knee hard into Taylor’s groin. It was a clumsy, glancing blow, but enough to hurt, enough to make his attacker falter for a moment. In that moment he grabbed Taylor’s left wrist and shoved forward as hard as he could, pushing them both away from the railing. Erryn had always been powerful—thin and oddly proportioned, but powerful, and his great reach served him well now. He swung Taylor around as they grappled, and then bent, reaching fast between the man’s legs to lift him bodily. It was like trying to hoist a small horse. He almost buckled, gulping for air and for courage. Taylor was an ordinary man, not fat at all; how was it possible he could be so heavy?

You have to do it, Shaw, somehow you just have to … !

Taylor’s free hand came at him like a club, more vicious than before. Erryn straightened, clinging to every scrap of will he possessed. Bone smashed into his face, his throat, his side. He tasted blood, but he kept going—heaved, shoved, heaved again, almost losing Taylor’s knife hand, almost losing his balance, dimly aware of a growing agony in his side, of the strength draining out of him with every heartbeat, of the hard knowledge that he would once again be a killer. All the while, with a terrible clarity, he was aware only of distances: the few inches between his throat and the knife, the few feet between them both and the railing. Taylor’s curses came at him in gulps, snarling and bitter. For the first time Erryn sensed fear in the man, and it heartened him. They hit the rail hard. For a moment they were poised, almost motionless, like dancers. Erryn slammed him backward, bracing for one last mortal heave, and hearing, even as he did so, the sudden, sharp crack of splintering wood.

All his life he had prided himself on his quickness, but his enemy was quicker now, and equally desperate. The knife clattered harmlessly on the deck as Taylor’s arms whipped around
him, panicked arms made of iron, the man’s weight tipping him, folding him like soft taffy as the railing gave way. Erryn had a fragment of time to understand, and another to protest, silently and pointlessly, that it was a mistake, it was not what he intended—!

Then they struck, and the river took them down together.

I
T HAD BEEN
a glorious evening in the saloon, the sort of evening Sylvie Bowen used to dream about when she was a very young girl, when such evenings seemed barely possible even as a dream. The singing had been as fine as any she had ever heard, even in church. And there was Erryn Shaw’s flute, an enchanting thing made—or so it seemed—of wild birds and wind and running water. (“How beautifully he plays,” Madame whispered to her in a quiet moment. “We must be sure to thank him for it.”) Best of all there was Erryn himself, to watch and admire to her heart’s content, as elegant as ever, and here, in the sorcery of the music, looking lean and serpentine and powerful.

He made it all seem easy, winning Madame’s approval, talking gracefully with her when she came to thank him, complimenting her, making her laugh. As if he had a gift for winning things,
Sylvie thought, not just good manners or charm but a kind of magic. As if maybe, centuries and centuries before, one of his ancestors had bedded down in the woods with the elfkind and he had just a tiny, tiny whisper of the blood.

The hard part of the evening came afterwards. It seemed forever before Sylvie was able to get away. After such glorious entertainment no one wanted to sleep, not even Madame. Several of the women remained behind in the grand saloon for a considerable time, enjoying the company of the men. They came back laughing and chattering just when most of the others were ready to turn in.

Any other time Sylvie would not have minded. Indeed, she would have enjoyed seeing Madame Louise so animated, and listened with great interest to the conversations of her betters. It was, after all, one of the few real pleasures in the life of a servant.

There was, for example, a Mrs. Wallis, travelling to Quebec to visit her sister. She thought the singing very fine and the flute exceptional, but she did not approve of making songs about creatures such as silkies.

“They don’t exist. And if they did, it would be the wickedest thing imaginable, turning a man into a fish. God made men and He made fish, and He didn’t make them to be changing places.”

Madame started to reply, but a younger lass was faster.
“A
silkie’s not a fish, ma’am. He’s a seal.”

“Doesn’t matter in the least. He’s a perversion of nature.”

A perversion of nature? Oh, my, my, I must tell Erryn. I wonder what he’ll say.

Then there were the Misses Bedard, trying to decide which of the lads from McGill was the most attractive, and why, for one had finer hair and the other had broader shoulders and a third was said to be very rich. There was Mrs. Foster, the Grey Tory from St. John, thinking it a great pity they hadn’t sung “The Bonnie Blue Flag”
as a tribute to the brave, outnumbered heroes of the South—especially since she had made a personal request for it.

Sylvie sighed, trying to control her impatience. At least an hour passed before Madame was ready to go to her berth. By then nearly everyone else had done the same, and there was only the stewardess to deal with, a sturdy, brisk woman in her late thirties. She was an altogether admirable stewardess, courteous, thoughtful, and busy. Still, for Sylvie she represented authority, to say nothing of respectability—those stern, unyielding boundaries of a proper lady’s life. Sylvie tried to imagine their conversation.

“Was there something you needed, miss?”

“No, m’um.”

“But where would you be going, then, miss? It’s very late.”

“Out on the deck.”

“But miss, most everyone’s abed, except for them”—and here she would point to steerage, out behind the cargo bay, whence, even through two sets of doors and mountains of freight, boisterous noises could be heard—“and Lord knows what sort they might be. You can’t be going out on the deck alone, miss.”

“Oh, I won’t be alone. My young man is waiting for me.”

At which point, Sylvie thought, the stewardess would turn pale, march over to wake Madame Louise, and ask her if she knew that her servant was playing the harlot behind her back.

No, it would never do; she would have to slip out. Funny, she thought, how a woman could be done in with factory dust or starvation or disease or drink, and no one would bat an eye, but the whole bleeding world bent over backward to save her from a handful of kisses.

The ladies’ cabin filled less than a third of the middle deck; the rest was taken up by passenger baggage, freight, and, at the stern, the cabin for the steerage passengers. Sylvie could hear them clearly
the instant she slipped out into the cargo bay—a general hubbub of voices, children crying, the clattering sound of something being dropped. A frail lamp outlined mountains of boxes and crates piled in uneven rows. But there were no ruffians about, only two immigrants standing by the rail in the passageway, laughing and talking in a language she did not understand. They seemed to be great friends, totally absorbed in their conversation. Sylvie was light, slender, and quick on her feet, and the steady slapping of the paddlewheel was far louder than the soft steps of a woman or the small rustle of her dress. She waited until her eyes had completely adjusted to the darkness, then she crept past them and up the stairs to the deck.

She thought Erryn would be right there, waiting, eager to see her, maybe catching her in his arms even as she appeared. But she could see no one at all; the deck seemed utterly deserted. She fought back her first rush of disappointment. He might be off to the side, perhaps. The night was pitch-black, without a star, and only the gimballed candles were lit now in the grand saloon, leaving small, timid pools of light, no bigger than a pair of pillows, just below the stern windows. It would be hard to see anyone who had wandered more than a few feet away.

“Erryn?”

There was no answer, no movement, nothing but the steady slapping of the wheel and once, briefly, a harsh masculine laugh from the passageway below. She looked through the stern windows into the grand saloon with its rows of stateroom doors, all shut tight like the gates of palaces. She looked up where the puffing funnel was barely a silhouette against the black, descending sky.

Had she missed him? Had he come out and grown bored with waiting and gone off to his bed? She had not been terribly long, an hour and a half, or possibly two, and he knew she had to wait on Madame … No, probably he had not come at all. He had shrugged off his promise like a drop of rain and gone to his bed …or elsewhere. Perhaps he found the other ladies far more pleasing, the
ones who gathered around him after the concert, flashing their jewels and their eyes.

Always it was the same, she thought. Always she allowed herself to hope, to imagine that something might have changed, that this time, with this man, it might be different … and always she was wrong. Always the hurt was new and unbearable, as though it had never happened before.

She knew he was not there; to imagine otherwise was absurd. Yet she walked to the far side nonetheless, and then slowly back toward the stern, trailing her hand along the rail for balance in the darkness. The tears came slowly, quietly, at first, and then more and more bitterly. For the smallest moment she scarcely noticed the splinter tearing at her hand; it was only another hurt. For yet another moment she felt only bewilderment: what on earth was
that?
She felt at her hand and found it wet, not as with water but with something sticky. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and looked down. Right beside her, the upper railing was gone, its jagged end thrust out into nothing like a tree trunk broken in a storm.

Oh, my God …

She ignored a wild impulse to lean out across the water and scream Erryn’s name. Instead, she sped back down the passageway, past the two foreigners who still smoked by the paddlewheel, praying they were honest immigrants and would not try to grab her. She did not knock on the door of the pilothouse, she wrenched it open and yelled at the two men inside.