The Halifax Connection (34 page)

T
HE
D
EN ON
B
ARRINGTON
was bigger than many of the warehouses on Water Street, and plainer than most of them. Every line of the building was straight and severe, every window a blunt rectangle exactly like every other. The smooth-cut granite face had no hint of decoration. Sylvie could not help but wonder at the man who built it; why, with so much money to spend, he would not have got himself something prettier.

But then, as Fran used to say, the rich were peculiar. Perhaps he was one of those hard-bitten sods who never even noticed prettiness unless it wore a skirt. Whatever the case, when he died, the house was sold, and sold twice more before Jack Danner bought it in ’52. The rumour among the help—never confirmed, of course—was that Danner had mortgaged everything except his immortal soul to get it, and even so, the Scott family had to stand good for
the loan. If it was true, Sylvie thought, it certainly explained the Danners’ driving ambition.

She arrived back on a chilly late October afternoon. As usual, the boarding house was full. She walked through the back entrance into the familiar scrubbed hallway, the smell of chicken roasting, a piano tinkling idly in the boarders’ sitting room. But the first person she met was a stranger, a woman slightly older than herself, in servant’s dress, with the solid, muscled body of someone raised on a farm and used to plenty of work. She had plain, blunt features and big ears. She looked briefly at Sylvie’s face, at the travelling bag in her hand. She seemed bewildered, as if a guest had wandered through the service entrance by mistake.

“Good afternoon, miss. Were you looking for Mrs. Danner?”

“I’m Sylvie Bowen. The chambermaid. I work here.”

“Oh, it’s you! We were wondering when you’d be getting back.” She held out her hand, the same as men did when they met. “Howdy. I’m Aggie Breault. I’m real glad to see you. I’ve been doing most of the rooms of late. That woman Miss Louise gave us to replace you, she’s a sweet little thing, but she’s a hundred years too old.”

“Where’s Reeve?”

“Gone. Miss Susan’s in the stillroom, last I saw her. Watch out for her today, she’s eating nails.”

“Thanks,” Sylvie said. She hoped this Aggie Breault would prove a friendly sort, as she seemed. The Den had need of one.

She hurried to the maids’ quarters, up three flights of steep and narrow stairs, and changed quickly into her work clothes: plain dark brown dress, white apron, white cap—not a proper bonnet at all, just a silly round cotton muffin pinned to her hair. The room was gloomy as a cave, hunched up under the rafters with only a small dormer window. There was no grate, much less a stove; the only warmth came from the stovepipe passing through from the kitchen four floors below. Sanders had a room to herself, across the hall; the other three women slept here. The
smaller, nicer bed was Reeve’s—or, no doubt, Aggie Breault’s now. The old, lumpy one Sylvie shared with Annie MacKay. Their furniture consisted of one chair, one washstand and basin, one wardrobe, and one chamber pot.

She could not help but remember the fine hotel rooms she had stayed in with Madame, the even finer quarters the Danners had for themselves on the first floor. Soft beds with canopies they could close all around. Fireplaces in every room. Big windows, from which they could see the carriages on Barrington, and the running children, and the pretty stray cats; from which they could see the world, like anyone who lived in it.

This was the dark side of service. Oh, the work was hard, bitter hard, and always the same; but what could break a servant’s spirit was that she had no private life, no space that was her own, not even a factory worker’s tenement, just a cubbyhole like this one, of which her share was more or less the size of a coffin. If she had free time and wanted to read, or have a friend in for tea, the only place she could go was the kitchen, down in the basement, where there was barely a scrap of sunlight, and where she got in the cook’s way at the peril of her life. A servant was discouraged from courting, and sometimes forbidden it; many had no friends at all. In Lancashire the rich went begging for domestics; the women said bugger it and went by droves into the mills.

Sylvie picked up the small mirror on the washstand, saw that her hair was pinned back neatly and the cap positioned right … and saw also, even in this poor light, how well she looked compared with a year ago. It was a trade, she thought, the only trade she could have made; the mill would have killed her. That was all she could afford to think about: here she might survive. And maybe, just maybe, she would be able to move on. Every free afternoon now she would go to Madame’s house to read.
You’re a bright lass, Bowen. You could improve yourself a great deal with a bit of effort. Come every week, and I shall lend you a book to take home with you.

She would learn all manner of things, and then she would find some other kind of work. Maybe there was something else, even for a woman, even for someone with a ruined face. She
was
bright; that much she honestly believed of herself. And this was Canada, as hard and desperate a world as the one she had left, perhaps, but with one critical difference: the boundaries to a human life were not written in stone. There was a possibility of moving on.

But for the time being, there were only rooms to clean. Her mistress barely took a moment to say good afternoon. The boarders’ rooms were in dreadful shape, she said. Miss Louise’s housemaid had never been able to keep up, and Breault had too many other things to do.

“I want them done from top to bottom, Bowen, floors, windows, everything. You can manage two a day, can’t you, until they’re all shipshape?”

Two in a day? One big job was the usual, in addition to her other tasks. Each day, she cleaned out the grates in the ten guest rooms and brought up fresh coals. She heated water on the kitchen stove and carried it to every guest. She emptied and scrubbed their chamber pots while they were gone to breakfast; scrubbed their wash basins; cleaned up whatever they spilled or left about, anything from crumpled papers to men’s whiskers and women’s bloodstains. She aired out the beds and made them again, with every corner tucked tight and every blanket absolutely straight. She dusted the rooms from corner to corner, even the frames around the windows and the knobs on the bottom of the bedsteads. She scrubbed four flights of stairs and cleaned the servants’ privy and washing area below the basement. If the housemaid fell behind, she was expected to help clean the family bedrooms as well.

All of that, and the missus wanted her to shipshape two rooms a day besides?
Watch out for her today, she’s eating nails.

“You can manage that, Bowen, can’t you?” It was neither question nor request. Susan Danner rarely bothered with either.

She stood now with one hand on the banister and one foot on the step, as if pausing in flight. She was probably in her early forties—Fran’s age, more or less; they had been girlhood friends. She was beautiful, which must have helped a great deal in winning Jack Danner’s hand. She was also weary-looking, extremely so, and Sylvie wondered, not for the first time, what sort of bargain the Danners had made with each other when they married. He was a small commission merchant—prosperous certainly, but small; it was the Den that was making them rich. The Den, and the Lancashire mill girl who ran it like a man-o’-war.

“Yes, m’um. I can manage it.”

Sylvie was not at all sure how her fellows would receive her back at the supper table, but they were friendly enough, asking all sorts of questions: had Madame tried to make her Catholic, what were the riverboats like, did she see a lot of Indians? The meal was almost over when she got to ask a question of her own.

“So where did Reeve go, then? I thought she were staying till the New Year. Till she got married.”

No one looked at her.

“She was let go,” Sanders said bluntly.

“Dear heavens, why?”

“That is not your concern, Bowen.”

“Oh, tell her,” Harry Dobbs said. “She’ll find out anyway. Dinah’s laddie put himself on a steamer to points unknown and Miss Susan had to let her go.”

Had to
let her go? Nobody dismissed an experienced servant because her young man left her; more likely they would be grateful. Unless she was …
Oh, bloody hell
, Sylvie thought.
Bloody damned hell.

“He left her with a baby coming, is that it?”

“That’s enough!” Sanders snapped. “This sort of wickedness ain’t to be discussed at our table. I’ll have no more of it. Breault, bring us our dessert.”

There was no more of it until the women were alone in their room. Sylvie was the last to get in. She found little MacKay already curled up in the bed and Breault wearily tugging off her shoes in the light of the kerosene lamp. The new woman looked directly at her and spoke, very soft.

“I’m sorry about your friend, Sylvie Bowen.”

“My friend?”

“The housemaid. Reeve.”

“Oh. She weren’t my friend, really. We just worked together for a few weeks. But it’s so unfair, what happened to her. She were gone when you came, I guess?”

“Yes. More’n two weeks ago now. Dobbs says he’s heard she’s in the poorhouse.” She was silent for a breath and then added, “Men talk about these things.” As if Sylvie did not know.

“Where you from? The States?”

“New Hampshire. My dad’s got a big farm over there.”

“So how’d you end up here?”

“I lost my ma when I was twelve, and I had to raise all my brothers. I didn’t mind. I reckoned it was my duty, being the oldest. But when the last of them hit seventeen, I’d had enough, and I married Charlie Breault. He was Acadian, come down to work the harvest. He was big and shaggy and shy as a mouse, hardly said ten sentences to me before he was ready to head home. Then he up and asked me to come with him. I figured I’d never get a better offer, so I went. He was a good man.”

“Was?”

“He died, couple of years back. Drowned in a flood.”

“Oh. I’m very sorry.”

“Yeah, so am I. Was the saddest day of my life. You’re English, right? That’s what Sanders says. She calls you that little English snippet.”

It sounded funny, second-hand. Sylvie giggled. “She’s a bleeding ninny, that one. But yes, I’m English, from Lancashire. I were in the cotton mills, before.”

“Was it awful? We’ve got a bunch of mills in Lowell, across the border in Massachusetts. A lot of the neighbour girls went to work there. Some seemed to like it well enough. They’d made a bit of money, they said, and now they could get married with something of their own. Some couldn’t stand it and said they’d rather starve. A few got real sick. I’d’ve gone myself, I expect, but I couldn’t leave the boys.”

“It were pretty bad,” Sylvie said. “The noise were enough to kill you all by itself. The cotton fluff gets into your lungs and rots them. People died from it. And they got hurt from the machinery too, sometimes killed. We didn’t get paid much, either—not the women, anyway. I guess it’s better in the States.”

“Better, maybe,” Aggie said. “But nothing what it should be. Nobody treats working people fair.”

It was late and they were tired. They snuggled into their beds, but they went on whispering for another ten or fifteen minutes, easily, comfortably, as if they had known each other for years. Then, quite suddenly, after a small break in their talk, Sylvie heard a quiet snore coming from the other bed.

She pulled her blankets up snug and nestled closer to MacKay for warmth … and thought of Erryn, instantly, fiercely—the warmth of him wrapped against her, the scent of him, the glorious animal aliveness that she could never stop looking at, never stop wanting to stroke. It was like a flash of fire, remembering, but on its heels came the other memories, the search boats and the icy river, the thin body lying drunk with fever, carried down the pier to a waiting hack that turned and vanished in the rain.

Please God, let him live, that’s all I ask. Nothing else, not to touch him ever again, or to have him for my friend, nothing, just his life, please, please, please, just his life …