The Halifax Connection (66 page)

T
HE FIRST WORD
of the fight on Grafton Street reached the Den with the Wednesday morning deliveries. Working alone, Sylvie heard none of it, but once or twice in the halls she noticed small clusters of boarders whispering among themselves, and she supposed there had been news from the war. It was close to lunchtime when Aggie Breault, with a small wag of her head, signalled Sylvie to join her in the cellar. She spoke quickly, before Sylvie could begin to frame a question.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t know if any of this is true. I’ve heard three stories already, and they’re all different. But I wanted to tell you before Dobbs got going on it in the kitchen. It seems there was a fight late last night, over by the soap factory. They’re saying Erryn Shaw’s been hurt, and Maury Janes is in jail for it.”

“Erryn’s hurt?”

“That’s what I’ve heard. But don’t go thinking the worst now, Sylvie. Mr. Winters just come a few minutes ago with the chickens, and he told me he talked to a fellow who was right there. This fellow didn’t see the fight, but he saw most everything that happened after. And he said if Mr. Shaw was hurt bad they’d have taken him into the tavern and sent for a doctor, but instead they just took him off in a carriage. He said like as not they drove him home.”

Sylvie forced herself to be calm. Fights were hardly rare in the mill towns, and many a man was carried off senseless by his friends and was back at his job the next day, laughing about it. But even as this bit of comfort came to her, a darker thought came hard on its heels.

“It were Mr. Janes who attacked him?”

“The police arrested him for it. But apparently he was yelling his head off that some ruffians jumped them and then ran away. So far, nobody seems to know for sure.”

If it was Janes, she wondered, had she been the cause of it?

“It’s your half day today. Will you change with me? Please, oh, please, Aggie! I have to know if he’s all right!”

“I can’t. I have to—I’m sorry, Sylvie, I just can’t. Look, I’m sure he’s all right—probably in his own bed right now, with a wet towel wrapped around his head. I might be able to find something out. I’ll do what I can. All right?”

“You’ll try really hard? Please?”

“I will.”

She watched Aggie disappear up the stairwell and considered what to do. There was no point in asking Miss Susan for a bit of time off; such things simply were not done. She could, of course, just take off her bonnet and her apron and walk out the door. Erryn lived on Morris Street; she could be there in twenty minutes. But the act would be irrevocable. She would lose her place here. Worse, she would never get a reference, and no one else would hire her without one. Miss Susan would look down at her
with scorn and dismay:
After all we’ve done for you, Bowen, really, I am appalled …
And if it was as Aggie said, just a street fight, and all Erryn had to grieve him was a headache? No, she thought, she had to wait until she knew more.

But it was hard waiting, and guilty waiting too, listening to Harry’s mindless rant at lunchtime.
They say the poor man’s head was split open like a melon … The constable probably did it himself, just so he could hang it on Mr. Janes. He’s a real low-life, that Calverley, his mother was the worst whore on Barrack Street.

“That will be enough, Dobbs!” Sanders said grimly.

This silenced him for all of a minute or so, then he was off again. For once Sylvie was thankful to go back to cleaning rooms. Aggie returned late from her half day and had little to report. No one she spoke to really knew what had happened. But two things were all but certain, she said: Mr. Shaw was not dead and he was not in the hospital.

“So he’s all right, Sylvie. He must be all right.”

The day ended, and another rose. The newspapers reached the Den, and finally she had a few scraps of information, spare and dry as old bones. There had been an altercation Tuesday night on Grafton Street, the papers said. A Halifax resident, Erryn Shaw, and a certain Mr. Janes, from North Carolina, had been attacked. Their unknown assailants had escaped, but both men were now in custody pending further investigation into a possible smuggling operation.

That was all. When Miss Susan summoned Sylvie to the parlour shortly after lunch, she rushed in, expecting news of Erryn, or perhaps even Erryn himself. Instead, she found an aging policeman with her mistress. For a brief moment she went icy with fear.

“Bowen, this is Constable Dufours. He is here to collect Mr. Janes’s belongings. It seems Mr. Janes will not be returning to the Den. Will you please go with the constable and assist him?”

“Yes, m’um.”

Dufours nodded to her faintly but said nothing until they were inside the boarder’s room and the door was closed. Then he turned to her at once, speaking with a faint French Acadian accent. “Your name is Bowen? Sylvie Bowen?”

She stood very still. “Yes, sir.”

“Then I have a letter for you. I was asked to pass it on by … by someone trustworthy. He said I should place it into no hands but yours.” The constable held out a small, sealed letter.

“Oh, thank you so much, sir.” She tucked it into her pocket, and helped him with his simple duty; heaven knew there was little enough to collect in Maury Janes’s room. When she had seen him out and returned to prepare the room for its new tenant, she sat in the cane chair and carefully opened her letter. It was, to her surprise, in an unfamiliar hand, and very brief.

She reread the letter twice, cherishing its tenderness, surprised that he would send so deeply personal a message through the
medium of another. Then, reading it yet again, she began to suspect why. Under all the careful crafting of his words, under all the love and sweetness, there lay a quiet, pervasive fear. He was going away, and he was afraid he might not come back.
I am sorry for this, my heart, sorrier than I can ever say.

He had warned her once, the first time they walked out together after he’d told her of his work, “I can’t always predict what I’m going to do, or where I’m going to be. One day I might just have to go, without a word of explanation. If you don’t hear from me, you mustn’t ever think it’s because I want it so. It’s just … it’s just the nature of the game.”

Only none of it was a game, and she had known as much right from the beginning. Now she knew it differently. Now she knew it as if she stood before an abyss.

She folded the letter carefully and put it back in her pocket, and went on with her work, trying not to be afraid, trying not to notice how the bright summer day seemed wrapped in shadows.
He’ll make it back
, she promised herself over and over.
He’s strong, he is, and real smart. He knows what he’s doing. He’ll make it back!

Each day she made the same promise, every morning, every night. He would make it back. She would walk out of the Den on a Friday afternoon and he would be there, waiting. Laughing. And if he asked her once more to marry him, only once, she would say yes.

There was no surprise in the thought. There was not even a flicker of uncertainty. She did not know if her doubts had slipped away over time without her noticing or if this sudden threat of loss had burnt them up like dry leaves. They were simply gone. She would marry him, and give him what was left to her of life and time. And if he failed her as she once feared—she did not think he would, but if he did—well, that was a risk too, a risk like any other. It was the price one paid for love, for hope, for anything that mattered. It was, as he might have called it, the nature of the game.

E
RRYN HAD NEVER
seen a small room sparkle quite so brightly. There were candles everywhere, and bouquets of brilliant autumn flowers. Better still, there was comradeship and laughter, and a place of safety in which to enjoy it. The estate of Colonel Hawkins was tucked into a cove along the Northwest Arm, modest by the standards of his neighbours but even more discreetly sheltered. The house itself lay well back from the water’s edge, and near it, half hidden among the trees, was a fine guest cottage. He had built it for visiting relatives, he said, but after the American war began it proved to have other, more interesting uses.

The old warhorse had been terribly matter-of-fact when he asked Erryn to come by. Things were changing in the war, he said; there were some matters they needed to discuss. “I’ll send my coachman for you. He’s absolutely trustworthy, so you won’t
need to bother with a disguise. Oh, and bring your new bride, I should like to meet her.”

Erryn went, not knowing what to expect; he half wondered if he was going to be subjected to a grilling, or even dismissed, for having revealed his activities to Sylvie and Madame Mallette. He certainly had not expected bunting, and presents, and a table laid out for princes. Least of all had he expected to see Matt Calverley, dressed in a velvet waistcoat and grinning like a boy with stolen apples.

“Well,” Matt said, “you didn’t really think I’d let my best mate go and get himself married and not give me a chance to kiss the bride?”

They laughed and embraced. Erryn turned and took Sylvie’s hand. “My heart, I would like you to meet my dear, dear friend, Matt Calverley.”

She curtsied and let him kiss her cheeks in turn, affectionately. “You aren’t, by chance, the one who keeps the spiders?”

“He is,” Hawkins said. “And do you want to know the strangest thing about it? The man is sane. His room is crawling with those horrid, scrabbly, long-legged things. He likes them.
He feeds
them. And he’s actually quite right in his head. The world, Mrs. Shaw, is filled with marvels.”

It was an evening Erryn would remember for the rest of his life—just the four of them, not even a servant. They drank toast after toast, and ate plates of rich food, and laughed at everything. He could not judge for the others, but he knew that for himself the previous months were still raw in his mind, and gave his happiness a particularly fierce and burning edge. The ugliness of Maury Janes’s plot, the long weeks of quarantine, his fear for himself and the others, for Sylvie if she were left all alone again—everything lay like a black swamp at his back, traversed but still too close to bear contemplation. So he gave himself over completely to the moment, to the joy of Sylvie laughing by his side, to the pleasure of his companions’ open affection.

From time to time they spoke about the world, about the war in the States that was still dragging on, despite gains by the
Northern armies. Mostly they spoke about the delegates who had come back from Charlottetown just two days ago, and what they had accomplished there. It was Hawkins who had gone to the celebration dinner at the Halifax Hotel. The others listened, fascinated, to his account.

“You know, before they left, I thought they might accomplish something, but not a whole lot. I mean, Brown and Macdonald have hated each other for twenty-five years. French and English aren’t the best of friends either, much of the time. The West is a thousand miles away. We need to make a nation here. I don’t think anybody understands that better than Lord Monck. But I told him it would take those men years to get it done, maybe decades. Last night I changed my mind. They’ll do it, and they’ll do it quickly.”

“Because of the war,” Matt suggested.

“Not really. Oh, the war was a spur, no queston. But listening to those chaps last night, Brown especially, talking about what we could become—not just what we want to leave behind, but where we want to go. Something happened to them in Charlottetown, a kind of … I’d almost say a kind of vision, a discovery.”

“I’ve heard they spent most of their time there enjoying themselves,” Erryn said, “to the point where the puritans in town got all offended and wrote surly editorials about it.”