The Halifax Connection (61 page)

So that’s why Janes is watching me: he knows now that I’m Erryn’s friend.
Erryn had never mentioned the man. They talked a great deal about the war, but always in its broader aspects: the news from the States or from England, the political climate here. He never asked her about anyone at the Den, not even once. He took the small bits of information she brought him with a graceful mixture of gratitude and sublime indifference; he praised her courage and cautioned her to be careful; he never gave anything away.

But he was interested in Maury Janes—he had to be. And Janes, therefore, was interested in her.

So she was not especially surprised when, a few days later, she found him still in his room late in the morning. She offered the usual polite knock before entering to do the room, and stepped back quickly as he opened the door.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir. I’ll come back later.”

“No, come in. I’m not going out today. You might as well do it now.”

He did not busy himself with papers at his desk or pick up a book. He sat boldly in his chair, watching her. She knew he would speak to her; he would start something unpleasant. He did not even wait very long to do it.

“Your name’s Bowen, ain’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I hear it said you’re a real little Yankee.”

She stopped working long enough to glance at him. “Don’t know who told you that, sir. I’m English.”

“You know what I mean. I hear you want the Yankees to whip us. Take all our niggers away. Blow the good ship
Alabama
right into the sea. I hear you’re real cozy friends with that Yankee woman who serves us dinner. Is that true, Miss Bowen?”

He did not get this from his Grey Tory friends. Whatever they knew about her aunt’s death or her probable loyalties, they did not know all of this. Nobody
could
know it, unless they sat at the downstairs supper table every night.

Damn Harry Dobbs and his runaway mouth. Damn him anyway.

“You’ve been talking with young Dobbs, have you?”

“Why d’you say that?”

She laughed, a small and slightly scornful laugh. “He’s got Yankees and Rebels on the brain, that one. To listen to him, there ain’t a soul in town who ain’t all tangled up being one thing or the other.”

“You saying it ain’t true?”

“Depends what you mean by true. I get on with Breault. You got to work, sir, you get on with your mates if you can—don’t matter where they come from. But I got nothing against your countrymen, sir. Nor against you.”

“You got something against the
Alabama.”

“Dobbsy told you that too, did he? Well then, did he tell you why? My aunt Fran is dead because of the
Alabama.
She were all the parents I had, and she took sick in Nassau and died. We never would’ve been there except they burned our ship.”

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “But sometimes, in a war, innocent people get caught in the middle. No one meant for your aunt to be hurt.”

“So people tell me. But were it someone you loved, dying like that, m’appen you’d be a time forgetting too.”

She went on with her work, quietly, methodically. If one thing useful ever came from her father’s drunken rages, she thought, it was this: she could move around a man as though he were not even there. Dust, sweep, carry; empty the basin, straighten the bed. Notice nothing, least of all his attention.

“But if you had your druthers,” Janes persisted, “you’d want the Yankees to beat us down, ain’t that true?”

She gave the bedcover a wicked two-hand tug. “If I had my druthers, Mr. Janes, I’d have a nice easy job and a room with a fire and a mess of books. That’d be my druthers.”

“Maybe so,” he said, “but it ain’t what I asked you.”

“I can’t answer what you asked me. Back in England, when I worked in the mill, a lot of my friends kept saying the North were right, and I thought m’appen it were true. Now I come here and a lot of people be saying the opposite. What’s a poor soul to make of it, then, between scrubbing stairs and fixing beds and staying out of Miss Susan’s hair? I ain’t like Dobbsy, sir. I don’t know everything yet.”

He laughed then, just a little. “You’re a plucky little snippet, ain’t you? I reckon that’s what Shaw likes about you.”

She straightened sharply, turning to him with what she hoped would seem to be the right sort of silly, girlish surprise. “You’re acquainted with Mr. Shaw?”

“Yeah.”

His gaze went over her, top to bottom, returning to her face, evaluating everything, not even troubling to hide the fact.
Plucky, my ass. You’re a she-cat in bed, I expect, and not bad to look at from the neck down. That’s what he likes, same as any man would …
She dropped her eyes and turned away.

“Mr. Shaw and I are good friends,” he went on. There was a warning in his words, but it was not, she thought, particularly political. It was a man’s warning to a whore to remember her place.

She knew he was not altogether reassured, neither as to her real opinions nor as to her possible influence on Erryn Shaw. He was undoubtedly a smart man, and the relentless bareness of his room suggested that he was a cautious one—extraordinarily cautious, in fact, leaving nothing to chance, assuming nothing was safe. Even a tiny misstep would make him suspect her, and perhaps Erryn as well.

Yet now, she thought, she dared not let him be. He was one of Erryn’s targets; he had to be. Erryn would never be friends with such a man. He would not touch the sorry bugger with a pole unless there was a reason for it. Each time she cleaned his room, she searched it. He was human like everybody else. Maybe once he would leave something. Maybe just once.

But he never did.

June was almost gone. In the States, three huge battles had been fought, battles everyone talked about, their names as common as the days of the week. The Wilderness. Spotsylvania. Cold Harbor. Bloody slaughters, all of them, and nothing had been decided. Now the armies were dug in at Petersburg, and the Confederates and their friends began to speak again of victory.
The Union campaign was a total failure, they said; General Grant had achieved nothing except a stalemate, and this at an appalling cost. The Northern population would never tolerate such losses. Elections were coming in November and Lincoln would be turfed out. An independent Confederacy was only months away.

So it surprised Sylvie, passing Aggie Breault in the hallway one quiet, rainy morning and seeing a smile on her face. Aggie paused, glanced around, and said, very softly: “Have you heard? We sunk the
Alabama.
It’s all they’re talking about in the parlour. I guess it was in the morning papers.”

“What?”
Sylvie whispered.

“Yes. Just outside of Cherbourg harbour. Seems she went in for repairs and couldn’t get out again before a Union warship caught her there. Semmes was stuck. He could come out in the open and fight, or he could hunker down and hide till the war was over. He came out, and he got beat.”

“They sunk her?”

“Lock, stock, and barrel. And we didn’t lose a man. We had some wounded, but no one killed.”

It seemed impossible to Sylvie, recalling that lean grey shark of a ship, set low in the water and bristling with guns.

“And do you want to know something else?” Aggie went on. “Our ship had some chains draped around her hull, covered up with planks. And now Semmes is whining to all and sundry that the fight wasn’t fair. He says Captain Winslow should have told him about the armour.”

“Told him?”

“Yeah. Told him. You know: Hello there, Captain Semmes. We know you’ve sunk a couple of hundred of our merchantmen and whalers and poor little fishing boats, none of them armed with anything bigger than the captain’s pistol and a skinning knife for the cook. But one mustn’t be unfair, so before you come out to fight us, we have to tell you … Do you believe it, Sylvie? Do you bloody believe it?”

She believed it. Back in Rochdale, every time the workers wanted something, however little, the mill owners howled that they were being ruined, that the very bread was being snatched from their babies’ mouths. For men who went through life with every advantage, “fair” was merely more of the same.

“Did they get the bugger?”

“Captain Semmes? No, he got rescued. He’s safe in France. But I reckon he’s out of the war. Nobody’ll be crazy enough to give him another raider.”

“Well, that’s something. Thanks for telling me, Aggie. It’s the best news I’ve had in a while.”

“Dobbs is out running errands. I told him to buy me a couple of papers. I’ll leave them on your bed when I’m done.”

“Thanks.”

For the first time in months they both truly, full-heartedly smiled.

The papers were there as Aggie promised when Sylvie went up after evening chores were done. She considered taking them down to the kitchen, where the light would be better, and then decided no, she wanted to read them undisturbed by other people’s conversations, or by Harry Dobbs’s silly Rebel nattering. She settled on the bed as close to the little lamp as she could, leaving the door open in case she might be wanted.

It was, she thought, a small bit of justice at last. In New Brunswick, the
Chesapeake
pirates had walked laughing from the courtroom. Here, George Wade had made it clean away. Jamie Orton went up against the Supreme Court for helping him to do it, and did not get so much as a rap on his well-bred knuckles. But the
Alabama
, at least, was at the bottom of the sea.

She was pleased when she heard Aggie’s heavy steps on the stair. Perhaps they would talk; perhaps they would begin to be
friends again. But Aggie did not come to the attic. She turned down the hallway on the boarders’ floor and rapped smartly on one of the nearer doors.

Sylvie recognized at once the voice that answered. “Yes, what is it?”

“There is a messenger here for you, Mr. Janes. I offered to bring the letter up, but he said he was to place it personally in your hands.”

“I’ll be right down. Thank you.”

“Very good, sir.”

Sylvie blew out her lamp and slipped onto the landing, watching as Aggie wearily returned downstairs, as Maury Janes emerged from his room, carefully locked it, and rushed after her. Whatever his message was, she thought, he wanted it very badly.

Never had it seemed so difficult to creep down a stairwell, so clumsily time-consuming to turn a key. Thankfully, the light was on inside. Janes too had a
Chronicle
, but he had not been reading the news of the day. It lay flung open on the shipping news. She searched the columns desperately, but nothing had been marked. She lifted it aside. Beneath it was a piece of notepaper. It had been folded many times, as though he normally kept it tucked away, perhaps in his pocket. She copied it frantically and laid it back as she found it, knowing she dared not look for more. She replaced the newspaper and slipped to the door. There was no sound in the hallway. She opened the door a crack, saw no one, stepped out, and sped to her room like a ghost. She had not yet stopped trembling when she heard Maury Janes return.

After a while she lit her lamp again and reread what she had found: merely three names and three addresses, each of them in a different Northern city. Nothing more. No hint as to who these men were or why they mattered to Maury Janes.

But matter they did, she was sure of it, and even surer after she passed it on to Erryn. She did not tell him how she had come by it, only that Janes had left his room and forgotten it.

He took it carefully. He was a good actor, but she was coming to know him rather well. He was, she thought, both pleased and appalled.

“Sylvie, you didn’t … he wasn’t still in the building, was he?”

“Yes. But he were busy.”

“Oh, God … Sylvie … Sylvie, please, please don’t do anything like that again! Not with any of them, and most especially not with him!”