The Halifax Connection Read online

  Hawkins considered him for a small time, the way men considered strangers in a tavern or the morning sky at sea. “You’re all right, Shaw,” he said.

  “Why, thank you, sir.”

  “I wondered about you, you know,” the colonel continued. “When Calverley took you on. I knew you had the skills, of course. But I wondered how you’d wear.” A ghost of a pause. “I mean no offence.”

  “None taken, sir. If I’d had any sense back then, I would have wondered too.”

  If I’d had any sense back then, I wouldn’t have signed on at all.

  But no, that was quite untrue. He had done some good work, and he could never wish it undone. Still less could he wish that he had never gone to Montreal in the fall, or walked by the Irish Stone, or met a woman there, a woman with midnight hair and heartbreaking, melancholy eyes …

  But this much was true: when Matt Calverley took him on, he had not wondered in the least how he would wear. He had been … well, he thought, the kindest word would be “innocent.” He had looked upon it all as a passing adventure. He would be generously paid; he would be of service to his country in a time of crisis; he would not be bored. All of these things proved true. The trouble was, two and a half years ago he had little notion of what else might be riding on the same train.

  Two and a half years ago. February of ’62 it had been, winter as only the North Atlantic knew it. The whole of Halifax was gone grey as a stone, and the life he had fashioned there seemed over.

  BOOK ONE

  Halifax, February 1862

  CHAPTER 1

  The Review

  Our feet on the torrent’s brink, our eyes on the clouds afar, We fear the things we think instead of the things that are.

  —John Boyce O’Reilly

  THE WILD, PROUD MUSIC of pipes and drums soared out from the Grand Parade, echoing against the ironstone warehouses and wooden sheds of the waterfront, sweeping up through narrow streets to the stone casements of the Citadel and beyond. Four blocks away, amid the ruins of the Grafton Street Theatre, Erryn Shaw raised his head a little at the sound, but made no move to get up. Instead, he let his eyes travel one more time across the burnt-out lot; every detail of it tore at his heart. A gaunt stray cat sat shivering in the broken chimney. Indifferent citizens had dumped off piles of trash that tumbled about now in the bitter February wind. There was no snow. The ground was blackened and horrid, the charred beams lying strewn across each other like battlefield dead. Everything felt unbearably empty and abandoned; everything stank of old, wet ashes and decay.

  Seven weeks ago he had sailed for Bermuda, hoping to escape his sadness for a time, imagining that when he returned the rubble would be cleared away, and plans for rebuilding would be in the air. Instead, he found the owner had no money to rebuild; he had sold the land to a soap maker. As for those in the city with plenty of money, a theatre was not considered a good investment. It was unlikely to earn impressive profits, and it was, in any case, a thing of dubious respectability, the best of a long line of tainted livings, running down through the music hall, the tavern, the Barrack Street dive, and finally the whorehouse.

  Or so it seemed to Erryn Shaw, sitting on a few broken bricks in the rubble, wondering why his life kept going up in smoke. For eight and a half years the Grafton Street Theatre had been his work and his joy, his hope of mattering a little in the world. Now it was gone, and he had no idea how he might replace it. He felt devalued and defeated, and everywhere he looked he saw grey skies, grey water, and grey mud.

  It did not help that the entire Halifax garrison was on parade just a few blocks away, the drum rolls soaring to make a young man’s blood race, and the bagpipes keening to bring tears to his eyes—all of it so bright and glorious, the men proud as peacocks in their fine red coats and their furry black hats, with the whole city waving and cheering them on.

  Maybe I should have joined the bloody army after all, back in England, before any of this happened …

  Then he laughed, bitterly, shoved his hair out of his eyes, and got slowly to his feet. When he started thinking in those terms, even in self-mockery, it was time to go. The military life, God almighty, how he had dreamt of it when he was a boy. He knew every English warrior hero back to Boudicca; he had paintings of Nelson and Wellington hanging on his bedroom walls; and the fact that he loved books and plays and poetry just as much, and learned to play the flute before he was ten—none of this ever made any difference. He saw no contradiction in his dreams, though he was smart enough to wonder, even as a boy, how he would manage to have it all, the pipes and the drums and the waving banners, and the quiet charm of a study, and the glittering magic of a lighted stage, all of it in one lifetime, in one body. But he believed it was possible. When you were twelve and clever and the son of an earl, anything was possible. When you were past thirty and no longer the son of an earl, except by the irrevocable fact of blood, it was all very different.

  Erryn tucked his hands into the warmth of his pockets and started walking. He knew exactly where he would have found himself if he had joined the army with his peers—in the bloody Crimea, and more than likely dead, along with twenty-one thousand others, one out of every five who marched for queen and country, their young lives flung away in a war so bungled its stupidity was already legendary, so pointless it was rare to find an ordinary Englishman who understood what it was about, except that it had something to do with stopping the Russians.

  Now the drums were beating again. Now the same damn fools were screaming about stopping the Americans.

  The reviewing stand was packed to its edges with important people. In the very centre, in the place of honour, sat Sir Fenwick Williams, supreme commander of all the military forces in British North America. Immediately beside him were Vice-Admiral Alexander Milne, chief of England’s Atlantic squadron, and the Earl of Mulgrave, lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia. Ranged about were a veritable flock of dignitaries. Casually Matt Calverley picked out the mayor of Halifax; the captains of several English warships currently in harbour; Nova Scotia’s leading politician and beloved favourite son, Joseph Howe; the Roman Catholic archbishop, Thomas Devin, dressed to the episcopal nines and wearing enough gold to ransom a ship; a dozen or so members of the Halifax Club, who between them accounted for most of the best names and even more of the best money in the colony; and the United States consul, Mortimer Jackson, who was undoubtedly watching this display of British military pride with something more than casual interest.

  At Matt’s side, quite distant from the official ranks, was Colonel James Fitzroy Hawkins, commander of the Halifax militia. At breakfast, or possibly last night at supper, poor Hawkins had eaten something unidentified and nasty. Having no wish to embarrass himself by dashing away from the reviewing stand to throw up, or worse, he had respectfully declined his appointed place, and sat instead among the crowd, at the end of a bench, where a trim line of marines guarded a narrow passageway between the parade ground and the street.

  Matt Calverley was a sergeant in the colonel’s militia unit, and also served from time to time as his unofficial ADC. All afternoon he had kept a discreet eye on the officer’s welfare. Somewhat less discreetly, he also watched the crowd. He was not on police duty at the moment, but ten years in the Halifax constabulary had made him a peace officer down to his bones. He knew just how many grog shops lined the upper streets, and what an excellent business they did on festive days like this. He knew how volatile crowds could be, even at the best of times—and this was not the best of times.

  Three months ago a Yankee naval captain had waylaid the British mail packet Trent on the open sea and seized two envoys from the Southern Confederacy who were bound for postings in Europe. The whole British Empire howled at this slight to imperial dignity, and some members of the British government spoke openly of war. The Prince Consort, wiser than most of the world in the face of his own advancing death, dragged himself from his sickbed to defuse the crisis, ably helped by the U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln, w
ho thought one war at a time was quite enough. The envoys were released, the naval captain was censured, and the world went on just as before … only now vast numbers of Yankees were mad as hell at England and all her minions, and vast numbers of English, including many colonials in British North America, were mad as hell at the United States. War talk still heated up the taverns and the editorial pages, and drifted here and there through the crowd at the Grand Parade.

  “Aren’t they magnificent? Just absolutely magnificent? Why, they could whip absolutely anybody—especially those miserable Yankees!”

  Matt Calverley turned his head a little so as to identify the owner of this breathy feminine voice: Isabel Grace Orton. He had never met the woman personally, but he knew exactly who she was: the spoiled daughter of one of the richest men in town, the queen of the winter social whirl, and the dream of every lonely officer in the colony, all of whom were magnificent in her eyes merely because they wore a uniform.

  Ah, yes. Dizzy Izzy. I might have guessed. Matt did not like the Ortons. Undoubtedly, the Ortons would not have liked him, either, if any of them had noticed his existence.

  Beside him, Colonel Hawkins smiled. “I dare say she’s right, constable. We still have the finest-looking army in the world. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Below them, the Seventy-eighth Highlanders were marching onto the Grand Parade, while the pipe band soared into “Scotland the Brave.” The crowd was frantic with delight. The Highlanders were everybody’s favourites, with their splendid kilts and tall black hats, marching with absolute precision and yet always with grace.

  “Yes indeed, sir,” Matt said. “They do look grand. And they make the bloody best targets I’ve ever seen, too.”

  The old man glowered at him. “What the devil do you mean?”

  “Well, sir, when you go hunting, wouldn’t you just love it if all the deer had nice red fur like that, and great big ostrich feathers on their heads?”

  “You have no soul, Calverley.”

  Matt shrugged. Soul, in the sense that Hawkins meant it, was not something he felt in need of; his friend Erryn Shaw had quite enough for both of them.

  He forgot Hawkins, however, as an argument erupted nearby between a young dockworker, a woman who was probably his wife, and big Jack Fisher, who kept the Owl’s Rook Tavern on Albemarle. Fisher thought it was time for England to recognize the Southern Confederacy, send a few battalions to Boston, and teach the bloody Yankees a lesson.

  “And then what happens to us?” the dockworker demanded.

  “What do you mean, ‘what happens to us’?”

  “Ah, for Christ’s sake, look at a map. There ain’t nothing between us and the Yankees for a couple of thousand miles except a few broken-down forts and some trees—”

  “There’s fourteen thousand British regulars who just shipped through here a month ago!”

  “Sure,” said the woman, “and what did the Yankee president call up with his very first muster? Seventy thousand, wasn’t it, just with a snap of his fingers?”

  “They’re all busy with the Southerners—”

  “There’s more where they came from,” said the dockworker. “And they won’t take kindly to us teaching them no lessons.”

  “Poppycock. They’ll just bolt, like they did at Bull Run.”

  “Maybe. And maybe not. Myself, I’m not for finding out.”

  “Oh, come now!” A fourth person entered the argument, leaning over his companions to speak. This was another man whom Matt knew by face and reputation: Edmund Milroy, a midshipman from the vice-admiral’s flagship; one of those cocky, natural-born hotheads, the very sort who should have been prohibited by law from ever wearing a uniform. “You don’t think there’s any way we can avoid a fight with the Yankees, do you? It’s coming no matter what we do, so I say strike first!”

  “Midshipman.”

  This new voice was soft, cultured, yet it carried even over the music and the cheering, the way the voices of actors carried in a theatre. Standing at the end of the bench, beside Colonel Hawkins, was Erryn Shaw.

  “Sorry to butt in, mates, madam,” he went on, with a small nod to the dockworker’s wife, “but I knew this chap in India, you see, who was always trying to stop trouble by starting it first. One day we had to trek through some jungle and he cut both his feet off so he wouldn’t get them snake-bit. Of course, he wasn’t the brightest candle God ever lit, but do you want to know the strangest sorry thing about it? A few months later a cobra crawled up on him in his wheelchair and bit him dead. Colonel Hawkins, Constable Calverley, good afternoon. I trust you saved me a place?”

  Then, without waiting for an answer or taking the hand Colonel Hawkins extended, Erryn Shaw swung himself up into the grandstand, stepped carefully past both men, and sat down. He was a long, thin beanpole of a man, who looked as though a quick snap might break him into pieces, but Matt knew him to be far more sturdy than he looked. Beautiful he was not, however, by anyone’s measure. He had ragged blond hair and a large hooked nose, and today an aura of melancholy heavy enough to carry around in buckets.

  Matt grinned him an affectionate hello. Midshipman Milroy glared at him.

  “Your story is idiotic and utterly beside the point,” he said. “The British Empire is not some dumb nitwit you tramped about with in India.”

  “It ain’t beside the point,” the dockworker flung back. “A man’s a plain fool who goes looking for trouble, don’t matter where. There’s only one bunch needs a war here, far’s I can see, and that’s those Southern Rebels, and why the devil should we get ourselves shot to pieces for them?”

  Two or three voices answered him with approval: “Hear, hear!”

  “You have no idea what’s going on, do you?” Milroy said scornfully. “None of you.” He did not say, “None of you colonials,” but he might as well have done so. Colonials by definition could understand nothing, not even the colonies they lived in, quite as well as a genuine Englishman could. “The situation here is a powder keg waiting to go off. And who do you think is going to prevent it? Monck? That Anglo-Irish nobody who ended up in the governor general’s office because no sensible man in London would take the job? God almighty! The governorship of British North America is one of the prize postings in the empire, and they were turning it down like a plate of spoiled meat. They knew whichever sorry fool took it, he was going to be blamed for getting in a war God himself couldn’t stop. He was going to be drawn, quartered, and hung out to dry—”

  “Sure makes a man admire politics, don’t it?” Matt said cheerfully.

  “Do you think Monck’s going to stop what half a dozen of the best men in London knew they couldn’t stop?”

  This was entirely the wrong sort of thing to say in front of Colonel Hawkins. He towered to his feet.

  “That will be Lord Monck to you, midshipman. And you would do well to remember, sir, that important offices are not always offered first to men who have ability, but to those who are owed favours. It’s to Lord Monck’s credit that he would take on so difficult a responsibility. As for your best men in London, midshipman, do you think it’s to their credit that they refused?”

  Hawkins was only a colonel of militia now, but he was tall, stately, and impeccably dressed; he looked every inch the retired military gentleman he was. Young Milroy backed off fast.

  “I meant no offence, sir. I merely suggested that even Lord Monck cannot do the impossible.”

  “And you, I presume, know for certain what is possible and what is not? You must have a very close relationship with God.”

  “Ohhh,” murmured Erryn Shaw. The dockworker smiled so broadly Matt could see it through the back of his head. Milroy returned his attention to the parade ground.

  “A powder keg waiting to go off,” the colonel muttered bitterly, settling back on his bench, “and they send us idiots like that one, running around with torches.”

  Matt refrained from pointing out that imperial ambitions and idiots with torches had a tendency to turn up to
gether. After all, he liked the old man. Hawkins was a decent sort, as imperialists went. He was also one of those rare and necessary contradictions, a military man who genuinely loved and preferred peace.

  So Matt said nothing, but turned instead to talk to Erryn Shaw. He noticed in passing that Milroy’s bout of torch waving had made a grand impression on Isabel Orton. This was in no way surprising, since her father, James Orton, belonged to a group that had come to be called the Grey Tories: Canadians who actively supported the Southern cause; or, in plainer words, Confederate agents. Unofficial Confederate agents, of course. Officially, all British subjects were neutral—rather, Matt thought, the way all judges were impartial, all sheriffs honest, and all clergymen pure.

  “So, Mr. Shaw,” Matt said amiably. “What happened to you? Was your landlord moving the furniture again?”

  “No,” Erryn said. “I went by to have a look at the theatre.”

  “Now that was not a good idea.”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  Matt placed a brief, comforting hand on his shoulder. “Things’ll get better again, mate.”

  Things would, of course. This was a simple, banal fact of life. But it was not, Matt suspected, a fact Erryn Shaw was likely to acknowledge. When Erryn soared, he was an eagle, brilliant, tireless, almost out of reach. When he faltered, he was a shot crow, crashing straight down and landing in a sorry black huddle.

  “By the way,” Matt murmured to him very softly, “when were you last in India?”

  Erryn cocked an eyebrow at him but did not reply. Both of them knew perfectly well he had never been to India in his life.

  “You aren’t going to be marching?” Erryn asked. “The militia, I mean?”

  “The awkward squad? In front of Fenwick Williams himself? Not likely.”

  Lord in heaven, Matt thought, wouldn’t that put a crimp in the day. Except for Governor Monck himself, nearly every ranking Englishman in British North America was down on that reviewing stand, trying his damnedest not to notice that, for all the pomp and pageantry, for all the war talk and blustering, ordinary Nova Scotians did not seem particularly interested in fighting this supposedly inevitable war with the United States. The legislature refused to vote more than a pittance toward equipping a militia, and the citizens came out to drill without noticeable enthusiasm. Every senior officer was somebody’s great-grandfather, and most of the junior officers were young bloods from rich families, valuing their commissions mostly as marks of social status. Matt’s sergeant’s uniform was a merchant seaman’s discard with some chevrons tacked carelessly onto the sleeves. His men had no uniforms at all. They drilled with wooden sticks, and although he did his best to drill them well, after the high-stepping Highlanders they would look … well, there was no other word for it: they would look embarrassing.