The Halifax Connection (52 page)

For at least a minute the woman said nothing at all. She looked at her hands, at Sylvie’s face, at her hands again. When she finally spoke, her voice was flat, as if she were holding in a torrent of anger.

“Let’s go upstairs. We need to talk.”

“All right.”

In their attic room, Aggie challenged her even before the door
had properly closed. “Your gentleman friend is Erryn Shaw. Isn’t he.” Despite her choice of words, it was in no way a question.

“Yes,” Sylvie admitted, “but he’s not really my—”

“Erryn Shaw is a Confederate agent.”

Aggie was joking. She had to be. Such a lunatic statement could not be anything except a joke. But there was no lightness in her manner at all, no laughter. Her face was rigid with anger.

“That’s crazy, Aggie! He doesn’t know anything about the war. He’s never cared enough to find out—!”

“That’s what he tells you. Or maybe it’s just what you decided to tell me. What did he really say, Sylvie Bowen? ‘Go make friends with the big Yankee woman at the Den and find out what she’s up to’?”

“How can you say a thing like that?”

“Well, what should I say, with you carrying on like you’re all on our side, and hanging about with a miserable Rebel hireling behind my back?”

“Now you bloody listen, Aggie Breault! I don’t know who’s been telling you what about Erryn Shaw—”

“Nobody had to tell me anything! I’ve known about him for months! Every Union agent in the colony knows. He’s one of MacNab’s flunkeys—has been from the start. He couriers for them, helps them raise money, goes to all their dinners at the Waverley, and drinks toasts to Jeff Davis. God in heaven, Sylvie, it’s no secret! Your walking out with him was the damn secret!”

It was a rare wind-still night, not even a whisper tugging at the eaves. Somewhere in the walls a mouse scurried and squeaked; nothing else moved at all. Sylvie sank onto the edge of the bed, knotting her hands in her lap.

Nobody had to tell me anything! I’ve known about him for months!

It was not that she believed it. She could not—would not—believe anything so shattering simply on another person’s word. It was that the words explained so much: Erryn’s vagueness about his activities and his friends; his preference for spending their time
in quiet places; his supposed indifference to the war, an indifference she found astonishing in a man so apparently passionate about everything else in the world. It explained nearly everything … and left an absurdity that nothing in the world could explain: Erryn Shaw himself. The man who spoke to her so many times of his separation from the privileged world of his family and his peers.
My father was of the old school. There wasn’t much we agreed on … I will not, under any circumstances, go back to take my proper place in the social order … I don’t care much about rank; as a way of living, it’s not worth it.

A man did not abandon the world view of position and privilege without a good deal of thought. He might lose his place in the world through misfortune, or be forced out of it by his enemies, but he did not discard its principles blindly; in the ordinary course of things they offered him far too much. He had to look beyond the ordinary to discover what they took away.
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.

Erryn wanted his freedom. He wanted to make his own decisions and choose his own friends. He wanted a life in the theatre, whether it was appropriate to his breeding or not. He wanted nobody chopping at him, ever. This much Sylvie believed without question. Whatever he might have lied about, he hadn’t lied about that.

So how could he support the Grey Tories and the Southern slave keepers? He had seen their sort of world close up, and he had walked away from it. Was he foolish enough to believe the war somehow
was
for freedom, beyond the freedom of the few to go on controlling the many? Could he possibly be so naive?

“Are you really telling me you didn’t know?” Aggie said.

“He wouldn’t work for the Confederacy, Aggie. He just wouldn’t.”

“He does. He’s gone to the West three times now, carrying messages, meeting with traitors like Vallandigham and Jackson Follett.
And he helped John Braine get out of the country, too—we’re all but certain of it.” The housemaid chewed on her lip a little and went on, very softly: “Folks will do a lot of things for money, you know. Things we might think they’d never do.”

“For money?”

“That’s right, Sylvie. Money. Young Mr. Shaw’s been living pretty high since the war started, despite his theatre being gone—”

“He gets money from his father!”

“And he hasn’t touched it. Two years running now, he’s just cashed in his father’s notes and put it all in the bank. And now and then a little extra, too.”

“I thought that sort of information were private!”

Aggie shrugged. “I’ll tell you what a friend of mine thinks, Sylvie—you can make of it what you like. My friend figures Mr. Shaw has some natural leanings to the Southern gentry, being a gentleman himself, but mostly what he wants is to live well and somehow get his hands on another theatre. He isn’t trained for any real work, and if he was, we all know what real work pays. So the war’s his golden opportunity. He can live off the fat of the South—sleep late, drink the best liquor in town, eat at the good hotels,
and
stash his old man’s money away to buy himself his own playhouse.”

“No,” Sylvie said. “I know him. He wouldn’t.” But bit by bit the tears began, and she could not force them back.

Aggie sat down beside her. “Did you tell him anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“About the Den. About me.”

“No. I promised I wouldn’t say anything about you, remember? And anyway, he never asked.”

But he did, she remembered now. Every time they met, he asked about the Den—casually, of course, as though he merely wanted to share her life, but he always asked. The remembrance was sharp and cold as a knife.

“If you saw for yourself,” Aggie said, “would you believe it then?”

Sylvie said nothing, and the other went on quietly: “There’s a
man in town named George Kane, come in a few days ago from Montreal. He’s a Marylander, and a diehard Rebel—one of the top men they’ve got up here. The Grey Tories have been treating him like a king. They gave him a seat at the opening of the legislature, and a big, fancy sleighing party. Sunday night there’s a farewell dinner for him at the Halifax Club, before he heads off to Bermuda. I been told it’s very exclusive, only for the inner circle. Erryn Shaw is going to be there. You could trade half days with MacKay. She’d be glad to be free when it isn’t Sunday for a change, and the shops are open—”

“And what then? I should go down to the Halifax Club and see for myself? It’s a men’s club; they wouldn’t let me in the bloody door. And if they did, and I saw him there, what would it prove? Nothing more than that he socializes with those people. It doesn’t prove he works for them.”

Aggie muttered something under her breath and got to her feet, throwing her arms up in frustration. “For pity’s sake, those aren’t just social gatherings! They’re … they’re
meetings
, really. It’s where they all share information and make deals and talk strategy. God almighty, girl, that’s how your ruling class does it, how they’ve always done it! They run the world from their banquet tables.”

“And your ruling class doesn’t?”

Aggie laughed then, just a little. “They try. We make it as hard for them as we can. It’s one of the reasons the Southern lordlings don’t like us.” She shoved the chair close and sat again, facing Sylvie. “Anyway, what are you going to do about this? About your gentleman friend?”

“Talk to him. Ask him. What else can I do?”

“Ask him how, precisely? ‘Oh, by the way, the Yankee spy over at the Den says you’re working for the Rebels’?”

“No, of course not. I’ll just say I heard it.”

“From who? He knows what a chambermaid’s life is like, Sylvie, he isn’t stupid. The only reason he could hide this for so long is
because you live like a hermit. You see us, and Madame Mallette, and him—that’s all.”

“I see the boarders sometimes.”

“And they have as much reason to start talking to you about Erryn Shaw as they have for running down the stairs in their underwear. Even if
they
happen to know him, why on earth would they think
you
do?”

Sylvie had no more answers. She knew, even as she offered them, that the few she had found were as feeble as old straw. Now they were gone, and she sat like a mouse in a corner, waiting for the cat.

“He’s a good man, Aggie.”

“Never said he wasn’t. Trouble is, he’s their man.” The housemaid leaned forward, her eyes like agate, her work-hardened hands like chunks of tree. There was no cruelty in her, Sylvie thought, merely a relentless toughness, of the sort the world kept pretending to find only in men. “I need to know where you stand on this, Sylvie Bowen. And I don’t reckon you can know yourself until you’re satisfied as to the truth.”

It was as hard as anything she had ever done, writing the letter, telling Erryn she was sick—nothing serious, just a bad case of grippe, but Miss Susan said she had to stay in bed. She was very sorry; she hoped to see him Friday next. Aggie gave it to one of the boarders, along with a coin and a plea to pass on both to a good, reliable messenger boy.

The day was all but intolerable. It did not get better when, around noontime, Aggie passed her in a hallway and murmured: “Mr. Shaw came by with a basket of fruit for you. I put it on your bed.” She ran up to the attic the first chance she had. On the top of the basket, under a bit of tissue wrapping, was a darling cotton pussycat with a striped tail and a bonbon in its paws. Under it, and all around, were more chocolates, and a half-dozen oranges—
fresh off a ship from the Caribbean, no doubt, and probably too costly for words. There was also a note.

She picked up one of the oranges, stroked it lovingly, wiped away the tears that kept spilling over it. He was so good to her. From the very first, walking into the scrub by the Irish Stone, wanting not to frighten her, he had been always, unfailingly, good to her. As the sun sank away behind the Citadel, she could think of nothing except him, wondering how they would have spent the afternoon, what they would have talked about; wondering if his landlord was still in Yarmouth, if they would have gone to his house, if they would even now be lying on the rug in front of the fire. Their time together was the only beautiful thing she had; how could she have given any of it up?

I have to know.
Her mind kept repeating the words, holding on to them as to a post in a storm. She had to know. Only she did not want to know, because her mind also told her that Aggie was worldly and experienced; Aggie probably had a large circle of Union agents around her, agents with all manner of links and ties and ways of knowing who was doing what. If they said Erryn was working for the Rebels, then probably he was.

Still, she had to know, and because of it she did all these things it should have been impossible to do. She lied to the person she loved most in the world. She gave her precious, irreplaceable half day away. She stood Sunday evening in the weak kerosene lamplight
of the cellar while Aggie wound a long scarf tightly around her breasts, tied her hair up, and helped her into a pair of Harry Dobbs’s trousers and a loose hooded jacket. Last of all, Aggie taped a bandage over her scars and hung her left arm in a sling.

“There,” she said, holding up a small mirror. “Just a poor messenger who fell on an icy street.”

At any other time, for any other reason, the disguise would have intrigued her; now she found it shabby. She found the entire business shabby. It was acceptable, perhaps even admirable, to spy on one’s enemies. It was horrid to spy on one’s friends.