The Halifax Connection (43 page)

Matt did not promise himself that he would bring them down. After twelve years, he knew better. Bringing one of these bastards down was like seeing a comet: it happened, but not very often. But he promised them a fight. With the hard anger that brooded softly in the bottom of his soul, an anger kindled and nurtured in his boyhood, which he had learned always to contain but which never altogether left him, he promised the Grey Tories of Halifax the fight of their God damn miserable lives.

E
RRYN
S
HAW KNEW
nothing of the Queen’s Wharf affair until it was over. He woke up Saturday morning feeling feverish and exhausted, came out to the kitchen for a hot cup of tea, and crawled back into bed. His landlord was determined he should stay there.

Erryn got on well with his landlord. Gideon Winslow was a widower now and past sixty, but in his prime he had been a fine tailor, and with his wife had raised three hardy sons. All of them were off in the world now, being sailors and farmers and Lord knew what, sending money home so he might live decently. He rented his spare room cheap, mostly for the comfort of having someone in the house.

He was not fond of cooking, and in any case Erryn never kept regular hours when he ran the theatre; nor did he keep them now. So the two men formed a simple understanding: Erryn was not to
expect regular meals as a boarder might, but, on the other hand, if he came home hungry, he was to help himself freely to whatever he found in the kitchen. Winslow always made sure there was something substantial—at the very least, a loaf of good fresh bread and cheese. Erryn appreciated the old man’s kindness, and also his flawless discretion. Winslow only asked about his background once or twice, very delicately, and when Erryn evaded the questions just as delicately, he never asked again.

For his part, Erryn tried to be a good tenant. He wiped his boots, he never smoked or spat tobacco, he did his drinking elsewhere, and he always paid his rent on time. From time to time he brought home delicacies to share—chocolates, fine sausages, oranges in the wintertime—and the old man would smile like a boy.

They were, therefore, more like friends than landlord and tenant. Winslow, proud as he was of his fine sons, never made the mistake of thinking Erryn Shaw was one of them. Still, he could be surprisingly protective. When Jack Murray came by on Saturday morning to take his friend down to Queen’s Wharf with the others, Winslow would not so much as invite him in.

“The lad’s sick in his bed,” he said. “You oughtn’t to be fetching him out, not on a day like this.”

Jack nodded sympathetically and went away. When Erryn rose shortly after noon, Winslow fried him up a plate of scrambled eggs and potatoes, and told him what he had done.

“Why, thanks,” Erryn said. “I would’ve gone, I suppose, but frankly, I’m glad I didn’t have to.”

Monday morning, when he learned of the prisoners’ release in the newspapers, he decided Winslow had done him a greater kindness than he knew. It would have been hard to see three men go at Matt Calverley, with himself standing by and pretending not to care. He was not at all sure he would have managed it.

He read the story again very carefully, assuring himself that Matt was, in fact, unhurt. He read the editorials. He went out for a breath
of fresh air and bought up all the other papers, poring over them with the same care. It was too early, perhaps, to speak of a pattern; this was only the first day. But except for a handful of the strongest pro-Confederate journals, a pattern was already emerging.

Halifax was not impressed.

Halifax, this supposedly Grey Tory town, this bastion of blockade-runners and spies, was raising its editorial eyebrows at the behaviour of James Dougal Orton. Whatever had the man been about? they wondered. Offering insult to the Queen by preventing the exercise of her lawful warrant? Attacking a peace officer in the performance of his duty? Helping an accused murderer to escape? Surely these were not the actions of a leading citizen and a man of the law. One after another the editors found themselves at a loss, unable to understand the descent of a gentleman of such lineage and reputation into what was scarcely better than the act of a hooligan.

“Welcome to the world, lads,” Erryn murmured, laying the paper aside.

He did not allow himself to feel too reassured; the only thing more changeable than the moods of the press were the winds of the North Atlantic. Still, it comforted him. The Grey Tories were a powerful minority; it was easy to forget sometimes that they were only a minority.

One week later, James Dougal Orton was arrested. The word on the grapevine was that Sheriff Cobb was feeling mean as a weasel, seeing how he had been made a fool of, and went over to the Northwest Arm in person to pick him up.

The cells beneath the police station were gloomy, dirty, and cold. Today they contained the usual assortment of brawlers and drunks; a woman named Malone, charged with keeping a common bawdy house; and a fourteen-year-old pickpocket who reminded
Matt rather sadly of his younger self. James Orton had a cell of his own, next to that of Malone and the women prisoners. He was sitting on his wood bunk with his coat wrapped around his shoulders, looking dignified and altogether untroubled.

As well he might, Matt reflected. He would be bailed out in an hour or two, and the odds were high he would never return. Matt pulled a chair into the cell, locked it again, and sat, resting his arms on the rickety chair back. Orton glanced at him without hostility, but also without much interest.

“I’d like to ask you a question or two, Mr. Orton.”

“There’s nae a thing I can tell you, constable, that Sheriff Cobb has nae heard already.”

“Well then, let’s just say if a lie is big enough, I prefer to hear it with my own ears. First off, the release of the
Chesapeake
prisoners was private information. Who told you about it?”

“I was nae told a thing about it. I went down to the waterfront to look after a wee bit of business. There was a crowd gathering, and I went by for a look. A few of the lads said they thought there might be something afoot with the
Chesapeake
, and so we stayed about to see.”

“And they were all there on business too, I suppose? Your lads?”

“It was nae my concern why they were there, so I did nae ask.”

“And the rowboat, with champion rowers on the oars?”

“For that, you must ask Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Payne.”

“Oh, I did. It was a pleasure outing, they tell me. They brought their boat all the way round from the Northwest Arm just to scuttle along the stinking jetties, and listen to the fishmongers scream, and dodge all the traffic coming in and out, purely because they enjoyed it. Man does that for pleasure, he belongs in the crazy house.”

Orton said nothing.

“How much did you pay them, Orton?”

“I paid nae man for anything.”

“Send him over to us, constable,” the bawdy woman Malone suggested. “We’ll soften ’im up for ye.”

“Now there’s a thought,” Matt said cheerfully, and saw the quiet indifference in Orton’s eyes harden into offence. The man’s moral priorities were curious, to say the least.

“So,” he went on, “we’re supposed to believe it was all … what’s that wonderful word they use in books? … oh, yes, serendipity. It was all pure serendipity, you being there, and all your friends, and even a rowboat just when you needed it. As for you jumping on me and knocking me down, I suppose that was serendipity too. You took a fit, I suppose, standing out in the wind?”

Orton refused to be baited. “I could nae let you shoot a man down in cold blood, constable.”

“What about Orrin Schaffer?”

“Who?”

“The engineer on the
Chesapeake.
The one George Wade shot in the face. In cold blood.”

“We can nae say he did it, constable. The man’s nae been tried.”

“No, he hasn’t. And you made damn sure he won’t be. You puzzle me, Orton, do you know that? Most times, a man might think you were a decent sod. You’ve done a good deed or two in this town, you talk as though you got a conscience. And yet you don’t seem to care a damn if you and your Grey Tory friends drag the whole country into someone else’s war—and not just in it, but on the wrong damn side. What the devil do you like about the Rebels, anyway? Do you think it makes men special, keeping other men as slaves?”

“Ah, for God’s sake,” Orton said sharply, “that’s nae the question at all—”

“Question or no, they’re still the side with the slaves.”

“And that’s a great misfortune, constable, I’ve never denied it. But it’s been around a long time, slavery has, and when the lads tell me it’s nae a thing to sort out easy, and that the Lord will make his will known in the matter in his own good time, it seems to me they have the right of it.”

“Well. I ain’t a godly man like yourself, but if I was, I’d have to wonder if maybe the Lord
did
make his will known, when Abe
Lincoln was elected president. Maybe the Lord nudged all those Yankee chaps to say, ‘Enough now, this slavery thing has gone far enough.’ Ever consider that possibility?”

Orton was a damn fool, but he was not altogether witless. “It’s possible,” he said. “There’s nae a man alive kens the will of the Almighty for certain. But I’m thinking when he wants slavery done away with, he’ll bring the wisdom of it to the slaveholders.”

“Ah. And when he wants thieving done away with, he’ll bring the wisdom of it to the footpads? Damn. I wish I’d known that before I took up an honest living.”

A rough laugh erupted from Malone, and a ripple of giggles from the other women. The prostitute got to her feet and ambled over, putting both rough hands on the bars. She was a few years shy of forty, already haggard and thin. Matt supposed she was sober from time to time, but he had never seen it.

“It’s a right sharp laddie you are, constable,” she said. “And handsome, too. You can come by and ask me questions any time you fancy.”

Strange, Matt thought, how some things never left you. He had walked out of Perrin Cray’s bar for the last time twenty-three years ago, with nothing of his own in the world except the ragged pants he wore and a shirt with one sleeve torn off, tied across his butchered arm so he would not bleed to death.

Cray’s was the bottom, the last in the downward spiral of his mother’s homes, if anyone could call such a clapboard ruin a home. In front, it was a broken-down tavern where even soldiers rarely came anymore, only the worst of the low-life; in back, a bare room that reeked of excrement and shuddered with every gust of wind, where the women took their trade and where they all slept afterwards on the floor, Cray and his horrid wife and their sons and daughters and nephews and grandchildren and Jane Calverley and her boy.

Time had taken the edge off most of his memories, even muddied some of them. But there were a handful of things that never
left him, that held, and always would hold, an immediate, shattering familiarity.

You’re a right sharp laddie, and handsome, too, come by any time you like…

He would never forget the voices—any of the voices, but most especially his mother’s. It was not the words that gnawed at him, or even the intent. It was the desperation, the emptiness he always heard beneath the coaxing or the mockery, the vulnerability of someone who had been beaten down too often and was never, ever, getting up again.

There were boys who whored on Barrack Street. The folks from the City Mission never talked about it in public, and neither did anyone else, but it went on just the same. Matt took up thieving instead. He neither blamed nor judged the others, but for himself, anything was better than such absolute vulnerability, even Rockhead Prison.