The Halifax Connection (27 page)

Erryn felt shaken to his bones. He had wondered sometimes how Sylvie’s aunt came to be buried in Nassau. Merchant ships travelled far and wide with their cargoes, but emigrant ships usually sailed straight to a single destination, most often New York or Quebec. For such a vessel Nassau would be hundreds of miles off course. But he had never asked her about it. The subject was likely to be painful, and the explanation as predictable as it was tragic. High winds, no doubt, a damaged vessel blown off course, a quick docking for repairs, just as the epidemic was beginning, before the warning flags were up.

Just fate. Just the hard, cold fortunes of the North Atlantic. Not the war. They had never spoken of the war. He had consciously avoided ever bringing it up.

“So you were on the
Osprey
when she was captured?”

“Yes—”

“Did they hurt you?”

“No. Not … that way. But Fran wouldn’t be dead if it weren’t for them. She’d have the life she worked for all those years—friends, and a bit of money to live decent, and maybe Captain Foxe calling on her like he said he would. They took it all away. They burned our ship and dumped us off in Nassau. We were waiting for another ship out when she got sick.”

“Christ, love, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry …”

“She were always the strong one, never scared of nothing in the world, except what might become of me. And then she were the one who died.” Sylvie turned—almost unconsciously, he thought—to stare at the Irish Stone. “It were so fast. They had a row of white
houses along the beach where they took her. A quarantine station. Like this one used to be, I suppose. They wouldn’t let me go inside—not even inside the fence.”

“Oh, Sylvie, my poor heart …”

She drew away from him, brushing off the two small tears that slithered down her cheeks. “Can we start back now? Please?”

“Yes, of course.”

He thought she meant to change the subject then, but she did not. Bit by bit, in no particular order, she told him more of it, perhaps nearly all of it, from a grey morning on the Mersey to a windswept grave in the Bahamas. And he saw that she simply found it easier to speak if she was walking, easier to fend off grief with her eyes on the path or the river, with her voice held carefully even, like her steps.

He walked close by her side, asked a small question now and then, and otherwise let the story unfold. Aunt Fran and Captain Foxe and the snobs who wondered where she got her money. The long chase and the failing wind, the
Osprey’s
burning sails tumbling into the sea, and poor Pepper the cat going down with his ship. Nassau glittering in the Caribbean sun, drunk with Rebel gold. The hospital and the terrible waiting, the hope when they told her Fran was better, the blind, reckless, stupid hope. The nurse explaining why she couldn’t have any of Fran’s things back, not one tiny thing to remember her by.

“You have her love,” he said. “You will always have that.”

“No,” she said bitterly. “I have the memory of it. And a memory ain’t the same.”

They were almost at the sailors’ church. She had talked about it all this long way and she had not cried at all.

“Everybody says we should forgive our enemies. Madame, too. She says if we don’t, we give them power over us. But I won’t ever forgive the Rebels for what they did to Fran. Not ever. I can’t.

“Anyway …” She turned, offering him a small, melancholy smile and brushing one hand softly up and down his sleeve. “I
don’t believe in futures anymore, or anything being sure, or safe, or mine. And it ain’t because I don’t like you, Erryn. I like you awfully. But I think you know that already.”

“Well,” he said wryly, “I’ve rather suspected. But consider the possibility, Miss Bowen, that I may not be especially certain of the future either, or of anything being sure, or safe, or mine.”

This, he saw, surprised her. He wondered if she even saw the exile, the thin, unlovely scarecrow, the theatre manager without a theatre, the artist misfit who would not easily find a soulmate anywhere; or if she only saw a gentleman’s son, proud and privileged, for whom everything came at the snap of a finger.

“Will you be on the boat tomorrow night?” she asked.

“Yes. That much of the future you can depend on.”

“Will you play your flute for Madame? She loves music so.”

“And she has a soft spot in her heart for those who play it, perhaps?”

“Perhaps.”

“I would be delighted.”

He really could not kiss her on the street, not in the bright, sunny late afternoon, with carriages rattling by, and great trundling carts whose bored, curious drivers watched anything about that might be interesting; not with fine ladies hurrying past with their purchases, and worshippers beginning to drift down the street from the sailors’ church, some of them still murmuring their prayers. No, it simply would not do.

He did, however, lay a brief, chaste kiss against her forehead, and another, much less brief and chaste, against her hand, and watched her disappear into the old church with a deeply troubled heart.

God help us, he thought, she had endured so much. He ached for all she had endured, the cruelty and the endless work and the betrayals of fate, getting knocked down and getting up and getting knocked down again, as if being poor and cold and hungry were not misery enough all of itself. And then the
Alabama.
Raphael bloody Semmes and his God damn Rebel sons of bitches.

I won’t ever forgive them for what they did to Fran. I can’t.

Many things about her life were alien to him, things he had never experienced, even remotely; things he could only reach for with his imagination and try to understand. But he understood loss, the disbelief of it, the pitilessness, the darkness in his soul as he stared at Cuyler’s wrecked body lying on a slab, Cuyler his best-loved friend, who had laughed and sported with him just two days before, Cuyler who was only twenty-three, with the whole world before him, waiting to be conquered.

Forgive? No, never. Oh, maybe in the Christian sense, letting them be, leaving them to God—yes, he could forgive to that extent; he could walk away, with twelve years behind him and the worst of them dead. But
personally
forgive? Speak to them, allow them into the circles of his life? Never. Sylvie Bowen’s bitterness toward the Rebels was something he quite understood.

And what of you, Erryn Shaw, when she finds you among them? What of you?

S
YLVIE
B
OWEN STOOD
quietly on the deck of the
Saguenay
as the big sidewheeler edged away from the jetty, where a few last faithful stay-behinds stood waving goodbye. Most had already gone, streaming back up the hill on foot, on horseback, or in fine, hurrying carriages that were soon out of sight. The sun was far behind the mountain, and already great parts of the city were wrapped in shadow. The steamer moved easily onto the great back of the river, past the bridge and the railway yards and the abandoned Irish Stone. So small the memorial appeared now, from the deck of the steamer, so very small and lonely; in no time at all it had vanished in the scrub. She wondered if she would see Montreal again … if she would ever see any of this again.

She leaned against the rail, watching the bluffs along the shore grow distant and ever darker, and the last traces of the city slip
away. It had been a grand adventure, her journey with Madame. She could have imagined nothing like it back in England—this landscape almost savage in its beauty; this new and fascinating freedom, limited by Madame’s plans, by Madame’s every wish, but nonetheless real, for even Madame could not command the river. Six weeks, a thousand miles, and everywhere unexpected wonders, not least of them a man who smiled at her.

It was ending now. Not over, but ending, like the Indian summer. In three days at most they would be back in Halifax, and she would be back at the Den. She did not look forward to it. Halifax she liked well enough, for all that some found it scruffy. The sea was endlessly varied, what little she saw of it; and the fortress town had a hard, cold splendour that seemed to her the stuff of poetry. But Susan Danner’s boarding house was a wearisome and lonely place. It was better than the Lancashire mills, of course it was—no cotton fluff, no smoke, no hideous noise, no dangerous machinery. They had decent food to eat, and as much of it as they wanted. For all of this she was grateful.

But a servant’s life was bound to her household. She had no life outside except for a few precious hours once a week—too few, so far, for Sylvie to have made friends in the city. Fran, her lifelong friend, was lost to her, and in the Den she had found none. She got on, day by day, but there was no closeness, not even the militant worker comradeship she had shared sometimes in England, which had mostly been impersonal but always intense. It did not help that she was bookish when her fellows were not; that she was new to the work, and had to be shown things, when they were already run off their feet. And then there was her scarred face, all the worse because she had to wear a stupid white bonnet with her hair tied back. Little Annie MacKay, the timid, illiterate scullery maid, who was terrified of everything from thunderstorms to mice—little MacKay would flinch sometimes when she turned and found Sylvie unexpectedly beside her. She would laugh and try to make it nothing, just startlement, but she never met Sylvie’s
eyes. There was no hope of friendship there. Dinah Reeve, the housemaid, had a follower and would marry after Christmas; she was interested in absolutely nothing else. Sanders the cook was a proper flaming Baptist, the sort who frowned on every kind of pleasure and never shut up about the Lord. The only man among them, other than the master, was Harry Dobbs. He was twenty-odd and full of himself. He behaved himself under the Danners’ roof, but Sylvie never wanted to meet him on a dark road at night.

For weeks she had simply lived from day to day. No matter how quickly she learned, it never seemed to be quickly enough. Reeve could whip a sheet around a mattress in seconds, with every corner tucked neatly out of sight. All of them could run up and down the stairs, wipe, carry, scrub, polish, or pack things up faster and more neatly than she could. Miss Susan might well have dismissed her except that it was summertime and workers were hard to find, domestic workers hardest of all. Nobody wanted to be a servant.

When she was abruptly summoned from her scrub pail to the parlour on a quiet September afternoon, she felt sure it was the end. She was terrified, and almost relieved. Maybe there was something better, somewhere. Maybe.

But her mistress said nothing to her. She spoke instead to the strange woman who sat in the parlour rocker, dressed entirely in black. The woman looked to be sixty or so, and she squinted as though there was something wrong with her eyes.

“This is Bowen,” Miss Susan said. “I think she’ll suit.” She introduced the older woman as her sister-in-law, Louise Mallette.

Louise Mallette seemed decent enough, although she asked a lot of questions. She told Sylvie not to call her M’um but Madame, and she said it differently, with the stress on the last bit, the way the French Acadians did. She knew Sylvie had been in the mills—Miss Susan must have told her—but she wanted to know what sort of work she had done there, and for how long, and why she came to America.

“There were no more work, Madame. We had to leave or starve.”

“We?”

“My aunt and me, Madame.”

“Ah, yes. Frances. My sister-in-law mentioned her. They were friends once, many years back. Your aunt died in Nassau, I understand. Because the American Rebels took your ship and left you there.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“A
truly villainous business, this war. I’m told you can read, lass.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“You went to school, then?”

“Only for two years, Madame. But my aunt were always borrowing things for us to read. And there were classes sometimes in the Mechanics Hall, in Rochdale. I went to those when I could.”

The woman handed her a small book, the meditations of a saint with a peculiar, European-sounding name. She read aloud as she was asked, losing her nervousness almost at once in the simple pleasure of the words, stumbling over a few that were difficult, but only a few. It was religious writing, different from anything she had heard in church, or anywhere else. She wondered if it might be Papist.

They let her read quite a long bit, and she suspected she was being tested in some way. Perhaps she was supposed to protest. Sanders would, no doubt. Sanders would drop a Papist book quicker than a hot coal, before anything inside could jump out and gobble up her soul.

“Thank you, that will do,” Madame said at last. “You read well. Have you ever served as a lady’s maid?”

“No, Madame.”

“Well, you’re obviously intelligent, and my sister-in-law tells me you’re well behaved. She’s offered me your services for a journey to St. Catharines, in the West. My sight is very poor. You’ll have to attend me day and night, take care of my clothing and possessions, look after the travel arrangements, everything. And you’ll
have to read to me every day; I have few other comforts. Do you suppose you can do that?”