The Halifax Connection (33 page)

Matt’s relationship with Romney was delicate. There was, to begin with, the question of English neutrality, a profoundly slippery question, clear in principle but fuzzy at the edges, shifting its meaning as the balances of power in Europe shifted, and as the war itself became more ferocious and harder to predict. Scarcely anyone who was paying attention was
really
neutral; certainly Matt was not. Yet he considered it his duty to seem so, at least
publicly, to do nothing that might embarrass his superiors, whether in Spencer Hall or in London. Secondly, and fundamentally, he was a Canadian, and Romney was the agent of a foreign state. Questions of neutrality Matt would bend from time to time; questions of nationality, never.

So he was careful. He liked Romney, and he had come to respect the man’s quiet resolve. But he never hinted that he himself might be anything more than a friendly city constable who thought the Union had the right of it in the war. No doubt Romney knew better. Indeed, it was probably because he knew better that he so readily accepted the boundaries Matt set. There were a remarkable number of things Constable Calverley claimed to know nothing about, and after he had made such a claim once or twice, Romney never asked him again.

Still, Matt shared with the American everything he felt he could, not least his knowledge of the city. He took no money, of course. He merely grinned once and said, “Oh, well, one day I might need your help to catch a footpad.” To which Romney solemnly nodded, as if such a request, from an experienced policeman to an expatriate bank clerk, were the most reasonable notion in the world.

The police station was lodged in the grubby heart of the Halifax waterfront, in the triangle where Upper Water Street veered northwesterly to cut off Bedford Row. It was a busy, noisy, rambunctious part of town. Within two blocks in various directions were the city docks, the market, Her Majesty’s ordnance yard, six banks, the customs house, and the provincial legislature, along with scores of ironstone warehouses and all manner of tradesmen and shops: cobblers, tackle makers, a chocolate factory, imported fashions, grog shops, eateries, and numerous taverns and houses of ill repute.

Tucked among them on Hollis Street was a decaying three-storey rooming house with sombre Scottish dormers and creaky stairs. Matt Calverley had taken lodgings there many years before, a scrappy, half-grown youth with his first real job. He held it more than once on credit, for Mrs. Kramer could not bring herself to pitch him out, young as he was and trying hard to make himself a life. Now he could afford something better, but he had no wish to move. He liked the old woman, for all that she was not much of a cook. He liked his room, tucked in the back away from the worst of the noise and the sea wind. And he liked his spiders. He doubted he could move them without half of them getting lost or killed, and he was not at all sure anyone else would let him keep them.

A lot of people thought he was crazy, having those small crawly things around on purpose. They would laugh uneasily if he mentioned it, or make a dumb joke that proved they did not believe him. After all, he was a grown man and otherwise appeared normal. He was a police constable, for God’s sake. He kept
spiders
?

Erryn Shaw’s eyes had lit up like a boy’s. “What a smashing idea!” he had said. “Can I see them?”

It was precisely at that moment that Matt was satisfied they could be friends. Real friends, deep-down-to-the-bone friends, for whom an English manor house and a Barrack Street brothel were merely places they used to live, places that shaped them, of course, but that they had long ago left behind. It was not because of the spiders, of course; they would have been friends even if Erryn Shaw hated spiders, or if he were scared to death of them. But that was when Matt
knew.

He wondered sometimes if they were fated to be friends or if it was only chance—if it might never have happened at all except for the dust-up in Mahoney’s Bar back in ’55. He thought about it often, as a man would think about those occasions that completely changed his life. It began on an ugly November night, just after seven. The night guard was coming on duty and Matt was
supposed to be going home. But the guards were two men short, with a terrible grippe making the rounds, and word had just come of a robbery over on Bedford Row. The victim, one Colin Downs, had stumbled into the police station severely battered and covered in blood. The men who attacked him, he said, were in Mahoney’s Bar, drinking their ill-gotten money as quickly as they could.

Matt did not necessarily believe him. Downs was something of a low-life himself, and not very bright, the sort who might be driven to the law from honest desperation or from thoughtless, stupid malice, or from anything imaginable in between. Still, it required a look, and Stan Coffin and Tom Perreault were the only men at hand. They were both past fifty, decent, ordinary chaps, and Mahoney’s was famous for its rough crowd. It was not the worst place in town—that honour was claimed by three or four different ratholes on Barrack Street—but it was, without question, the worst place on the waterfront. Stan turned to Matt with one of the saddest, most hangdog looks he had ever seen.

“I say, Matt, you wouldn’t consider coming with us, just for a bit? It ain’t but a block, and I’d sure feel better walking in there if there was three of us. Especially if one of ’em was you.”

“Sorry, lads,” Matt said. “I’m off-duty.” He gave them half a minute to feel sorry for themselves and then added, “I might come down to Mahoney’s for a drink, though.”

They walked in quietly, poor battered Downs hanging close to their sides. He never needed to identify his attackers. Halfway across the room a hulking brute in a sheepskin roared to his feet. “Look! The flamin’ little bugger’s gone and fetched the guard!”

And the fight was on. The big man overturned his table and came straight for them, howling obscene promises of death and dismemberment. Matt gave him a billy stick across the midsection followed by a knee to the chin as he buckled, and then paid him no more attention. There were three others right behind him. Constable Coffin tackled one to the floor, got a manacle on him, and cuffed him to a table leg. Matt was grappling with another when
he heard a panicked yell behind him. “Christ, man, look out!” Then something hit him—something hot, sticky, and reeking of onions, splattering onto his neck and over the back of his head. Furious, he brought a deadly right into his opponent’s jaw, and by then Constable Perreault was there to pin the man’s arms.

It was one of those moments when Matt hated bars, hated drink, and purely hated men in packs. The whole place rattled with laughter and hoots:
Bloody good toss, mate!—Ten shillings says he can’t do it again!—Och, look at the constable, ain’t he a pretty sight!

Hot gravy was running down the inside of Matt’s collar. A chunk of greasy carrot slithered out of his hair and sat for one hideous moment squarely on his nose. He flung it aside with his cuff, turning to the crowd from whose ranks, somewhere, the mess had come. He knew it was pointless, but he spat the outraged question nonetheless.

“Who the God damn bloody hell threw that?”

To his complete astonishment, someone answered.

“I did, sir.”

It was the bony Englishman from the theatre, Shaw his name was, if Matt remembered it right. A man who never brawled, never made trouble, indeed a man who was rarely seen in ratholes such as Mahoney’s. Before Matt could begin to imagine what this meant, the Englishman added, with a small, easy gesture: “He had a knife.”

Matt spun round and saw the brute in the sheepskin trying to get to his knees. He had stew all over him, and blood running down from his cheek and his ear. Beside him lay a copper tureen. Nearby, still in reach of his fumbling hand, was an eight-inch blade.

God almighty, I thought I put him out!
Matt slammed his boot across the knife and then bent to seize it, remembering the harsh warning shout, realizing that this maniac had been a mere foot or two from his back. He felt chilled all over, as if he had fallen through a frozen lake … and been pulled back again, a breath before he drowned.

He walked over to the Englishman and held out his hand. “Thank you, mate. You’ve done me a damn fine turn. It’s Mr. Shaw, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and you’re most welcome. I’m sorry I splattered you, but it was all I could think of at the time.”

They shook hands like old friends.

“It was your supper, I suppose?” Matt asked.

“It’s replaceable.”

“We have to take these dumb buggers to jail, but if you’ll join me after, I’ll buy you a better one, and a bottle of the best wine in town.”

“That’s most kind of you.” Shaw surveyed the room: the crowd, volatile as crowds always were; two night guards, neither of them as young as he used to be; four captives, all crazy drunk and mad as hell, quite possibly with friends in the room or in the streets. “If you wish,” he added, “I could just as well tag along and save you the trouble of coming back here.”

Well, Mr. Shaw, I see you can toss a courtesy as smoothly as a soup tureen…

They sat up for hours that night, talking, and from their last weary handshake at four in the morning they never looked back. Still, Matt was cautious. He was intrigued by his new friend, and liked him intensely, but he was nonetheless cautious, always holding back a measure of trust. Then Erryn came to see his spiders, grinned at them, let one of them scuttle across his hand, and the last wall came down.

“Is it your spirit creature, do you suppose?” Erryn asked.

“Spirit creature?”

“Like the Indians have—leastways in the stories I used to read. The creature who comes to a young man in his vision, when he goes off to fast and become a grown-up. An animal comes to teach him and he takes its name. Black Hawk, Running Wolf, that sort of thing.”

“I was named after an Apostle, Erryn.”

“Oh, that’s what our parents name us for, when we’re too small to fight back. Saints and ancestors and pretentious virtues. Like Prudence, for God’s sake. Who’d ever want to be burdened with a name like Prudence? Or that poor sod in Massachusetts, Increase Mather. Imagine what the other lads must have called him when he was little. Here, Inky. Run, Inky. Stinky Inky. No, the Indians had the right idea—we should take our own names. Would you be Spider-Something, do you think?”

Matt laughed a little, softly, at a loss for what to say, remembering all at once a room over on Barrack Street—a room where half the time he could not sleep because the noise went on all night, a room with a spiderweb in the corner, just below the ceiling, a web he watched sometimes for hours because there was absolutely nothing else to do. The winters came and went, the strange men, the ships, the cholera, the Temperance Society, the Church, the state, the law. The spider survived them all, and so did he.

Spirit creature.

“Do you know much about Indians, Erryn?”

“Bugger all, to tell you the truth. Just books I read as a boy, probably half of them nonsense. I hoped to learn a bit about the Mi’kmaq here, but they seem to keep pretty much to themselves.”

“I suppose they think it’s safer that way. I been told they were friendly enough when the first of us came. Traded, visited, let us have land all over. Of course, it dawned on them that we kept on coming and more of their land kept going, so they started to fight back. And they got damn near wiped out.”

“There was an Indian war here? I never knew that.”

“Oh, it was nothing so gallant as a war. There were some skirmishes, of course, an attack here and there. Then General Amherst invited them to a parley and made peace. Said we’d leave them alone, and brought along a whole raft of blankets as a gift. They all smoked the peace pipe and went home happy. Only what Amherst didn’t tell them was that his blankets came from folks who had the smallpox.”

“Good God.”

“They had no resistance, I guess. They died in droves. After that they backed off.”

Erryn Shaw looked at him, and then at a spider hanging by the window, and then at Matt again. “Rule, Britannia, eh?” he murmured.

Matt said nothing. Nothing seemed to be necessary.

“Will we ever get past it, do you think?” Erryn went on. “Not just England. Us. Humankind.”

“I don’t know. But the day we decide we can’t, that’s the day we’re finished.”

“You’re a frightfully practical man, you know.”

People said that sort of thing a lot, but Matt did not think it was true. He was not practical at all; he was a dreamer. The practical sort, growing up as he did, would have taken to crime, or found a likely whore to live off, or at the very least run away to sea. The practical sort would have drunk everything in sight to forget how much he hurt.

The practical sort … hell, he thought, the practical sort would be dead by now.