Rose (14 page)
Authors: Martin Cruz Smith
He remembered the gardeners in the greenhouse tapping the pots. With Maypole’s wooden spoon he started rapping the bricks, row by row, wall by wall. Well-mortared bricks responded with a solid sound, while the looser bricks were almost silent. Though more than a few were dislodgeable, they hid nothing.
Blair worked his way to the last wall until he had to remove the painting and lay it on the bed to continue. Below the nail, a brick in the center sounded dead. Blair dropped the spoon and, fingers on the corners of the brick, drew it out.
Behind was an open space, a poor man’s vault.
There were no coins or notes, no jewels or heirlooms, nothing but a leather notebook with a clasp. He opened the clasp and looked at the frontispiece, which read, in a modest and precise hand,
This is the property of Rev. John Thos. Maypole, D.D. If found, please return to the Parish Church, Wigan, Lancs
.
Blair leafed through the pages. They ran from the previous June to January, and each week showed the same virtuous parade. On Mondays: morning service, call on parish sick and needy, evening service; Tuesdays: morning service, young men’s Bible study, evening service, Temperance League; Wednesdays: morning service, afternoon prayer at Home for Women; Thursdays: morning service, Bible study at Ragged School, evening Mass, Society for Improvement of the Working Class; Fridays: morning service, sick calls, workshop prayer, evening service; Saturdays: morning service, christenings and burials, miners’ prayer, rugby, workers’ evening social; Sundays: Communion service, Bible study, pensioners’ tea,
“dinner with C.”
Hardly a week of fleshly pleasures, Blair thought.
“Dinner with C.”
—which Blair took to mean dining with Charlotte Hannay—was the capper.
In the margin of every page were cryptic notations of a different tale:
TSM-1d, Bd-2d, Ba-2d
. Because Blair himself had come close to starving, the figures were easy to decipher. Tea with sugar and milk one penny, bread twopence, bacon twopence. In the midst of all his good deeds and while engaged to one of the wealthiest women in England, the Reverend John Maypole had been living on drippings and crust.
Maypole had also used the poor man’s trick of writing both horizontally and vertically, economically filling every page with a dense, interwoven pattern of words and rendering the act of reading like unraveling a sleeve. Patiently Blair plucked out stern remonstrations like
Unworthy Thoughts, Vanity, Denial
The kind of cold shower a curate was expected to turn on himself.
In the first week of December, however, this had changed.
Wed. C. ill and bedridden, so, instead of “Home” to prayer meeting at the pit, brief wds. on the “Working Jesus.” my suspicions confirmed.
Thurs. Mass. Ragged Sch., Soc. for Imp. Evening Service. At the meeting Oliver asked if I was well. (
That would be Leveret, Blair thought
.) I lied. Difficult to sustain concentration. In total confusion and shame.
Sun. After Morning Service confronted her. She is totally wo guilt. Accuses me of hypocrisy! Carried on, but can’t confess, certainly not to Chubb. Spent the day in Hell.
What happened at the workplace meeting, and which woman he had confronted, Maypole didn’t say. On December 23, however, the journal was clear enough.
Sat. Mass. She has a point. One cannot go among people as a Roman or a Pharisee
.
Sun. Chubb ill and so allowed me to give the sermon, which was, I believe, the best I’ve delivered. On Job 30:28,30—“I went mourning without the sun. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.” How like the miners’ workplace! She was right.
Christmas! Infant savior, snowy day, starry night. First an innocent pantomime for the miners’ children and then midnight service. Even Chubb cannot dwell on death at this great event. I feel reborn, at least in contemplation. A generative turmoil of the soul.
Sat. Mass. Rugby vs Haydock, played in mud and snow. Bill magnificent as usual. Afterward, I was
accosted by a so-called “sportsman” called Silcock, whom I had seen before at the fringe of matches. That I was a clergyman who enjoyed the sweat of honest games seemed to insinuate to him that I was also interested in more sordid entertainments, and he offered to introduce me to vices worthy of my interest. I offered to introduce him to the police and he left, shaking his fist and threatening to take my head off “at the dog collar.”
Mon. Mass. Parish calls. The New Year and Chubb warns again about the “Sink of Pollution” that I am sinking into. That “Sink” is despairing mankind!
Thurs. Mass. Ragged Sch. I have been practicing in the hole. Alone, only for an hour at a time but agony such as I have never known, and can barely lead the evening service.
Fri. Chubb now in a fury over “insubordination,” i.e., my going down to London and speaking to a parliamentary comm., where a cabal of reformers and the miners’ union are trying to “save” women from employment at the pits, in consequence of which they would be forced into the mills or prostitution. I knew Earnshaw at Oxford, now an energetic MP. Unfortunately his interest was not matched by his sympathy.
Sun: Chubb felled by another attack of croup and left it to me to read the sermon. Trusting to let the Bible choose, the first passage I saw was Isaiah 45:3, and so I spoke on a divinely inspired message: “I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.” Which brought to mind my favorite psalm.
Whatever the psalm was, the entries for the following days were code and in such an agitated tangle of lines as to be illegible, more the scribblings of a conspirator than a diarist. When Blair turned the page, he was back where
he had started, the last week Maypole was seen in Wigan, starting on January 15.
Mon. The Song of Solomon has never been more apt:
“I am black but comely,
O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
because the sun hath looked upon me.”
The Queen of Sheba came to test Solomon, and he answered all her questions and she gave him gold, spices and precious stones. She was African and Solomon had, of course, black concubines.
Tue. “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor,” says Solomon. What of the hellfire that Rev. Chubb blows in the face of any miner who slakes his thirst with beer?
At one time I was like Chubb. I admired scholarship and single-minded preparation for the world to come. Wigan has taught me differently. Now I would say that foremost are the warmth of family, friendship and the light at the end of the tunnel. All else is vanity!
We have two worlds here. A daylight world of houses with servants and carriages, shopping for kid gloves and fashionable hats, annuities, and rides across the countryside. And another world led by a tribe that labors underground or in pit yards so obscured by steam and soot that every hour seems like dusk. In circumstances of mortal danger and with the sweat of great physical effort, the second world wins wealth and ease for the first. Yet for the inhabitants of the first world, the second world is literally invisible except for the daily parade of black and exhausted men and women returning through Wigan to the alleys of Scholes. (Here the writing again became almost
impossible to read.) How to enter that second world? This is the key.
The puffed-up barrister may have his house and parlor. But the miner, in the words of the psalm, “was made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.” The lady begs the praise of her maid. Instead, the pit girl lifts her eyes to the Lord and sings, “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made!” It is a wonderful, secret, most favorite psalm.
Wed: Call on Mary Jaxon, widow. Home for Women. The duties of a curate suddenly seem small and safe. I feel as though I am setting off from a world of comfortable verities and traveling to another, realer land. Tomorrow is the great adventure!
The remaining pages were blank. Inside the back cover Blair found a photograph the size of a playing card. The picture was of a young woman, a flannel shawl angled Gypsy fashion to reveal only half her theatrically smudged face. She wore a man’s rough work shirt and pants. A skirt was rolled and sewn at her waist, and both hands rested on a shovel. Behind her was a crudely painted landscape of hills, shepherds and sheep. Printed on the other side was “Hotham’s Photographic Studio, Millgate, Wigan.”
The photographer’s magnesium flash caught the boldness of the subject’s eye. In fact, the misshapen clothes accentuated the litheness of her body, the heavy shawl only framed the bright curve of her brow, and although she was half hidden and there was no identification of the subject either by the photographer or Maypole, Blair recognized no Queen of Sheba but Rose Molyneux returning the camera’s gaze.
Rose and her friend Flo were leaving the house; though they hadn’t cleaned the coal dust from their faces, they had exchanged their shawls for velveteen hats. Even as Flo hulked in the door to block Blair’s way, her eyes shifted impatiently over his shoulder to the brassy salute of a candy vendor’s bugle on the street outside.
Rose said, “It’s the African explorer.”
“Ah thought he was a photographer last night,” Flo said.
Blair asked, “May I go with you? Buy you a round?”
The women traded looks, and then as coolly as a queen making plans, Rose said, “Flo, you go on. I’ll talk t’Mr. Blair here for a minute and then I’ll find you.”
“Tha sure?”
“Go on.” Rose gave her a push.
“Don’t be long.” Flo balanced to polish a clog against the back of a trouser; she had switched to fancy ones with brass nails. A gay bouquet of silk geraniums festooned her hat. Blair made way for her, and as she hauled herself out into the street he thought of a brightly dressed hippo hitting the water.
Rose let Blair in and quickly closed the door. The front room was dark, and the coals in the grate were dim bars of orange.
“Are you afraid of Bill Jaxon seeing you with me?” he asked.
She said, “You’re the one who should be afraid, not me.”
The rhythm of her words was Lancashire, but it was obvious that she could leave out dialect when she wanted to; otherwise she would be speaking in ancient “ah’s” and “tha’s.” So she had some education. Most workers’ homes had only a Bible. She had books on the parlor shelves that actually looked read. The coals produced a soft ringing. In spite of them, he shivered.
“You look pot,” Rose said.
Blair said, “It’s been a full day.”
She hung her hat on the rack. Released, her hair was a full Celtic mane. Coal dust gave her face a faint sheen and, like extravagant makeup, made her eyes look even larger. Without a word she turned and went into the kitchen, the same kitchen he had found her in two nights before.
“Should I follow you?” he called.
“Parlor’s for company,” she called back.
He hesitated at the kitchen threshold. A kettle was on the stove; in miners’ homes there was always a kettle of steeping tea on a hot stove. Rose lit an oil lamp and turned the flame low.
“And what am I?” he asked.
“That’s a good question. Peeping Tom? Police? Reverend Maypole’s American cousin? The man at the newspaper says he recognized you for an African explorer.” She poured tea and gin into a cup and set it on the table. “So, Mr. Blair, what are you?”
Rose kept the light so low that the air was smoked glass, and a scent of carbon lingered on her. Her eyes stayed on him as if to read his mind; likely she could predict the thoughts of most of the denizens of her small world. Probably she was the most seductive creature in it, and that was disconcerting, too, because it gave her confidence.
Blair supplemented the cup with quinine powder. “Medicine. I’m not contagious. It’s just a reminder to us all not to sleep in tropical swamps.”
“George Battie says you’re a miner. Or maybe from the Mines Inspectors Office.”
Blair drained the cup; the fever made him feel as if he had a slight charge of electricity. The last thing he was going to do was let Rose ask the questions. “You told me that Reverend Maypole talked to all the pit girls.”
Rose shrugged; her shirt was flannel, as stiff with soot as a snail shell. “Reverend Maypole was very evangelical,” she said. “A regular threat t’break into preaching anytime. He was always about the pit yard. Men didn’t want to come up for fear of an earful about the sanctity of labor. They’d stay down. Not just Hannay pit, but at all the mines.”
“I meant pit girls, not men.”
“He preached t’pit girls, mill girls, barmaids, shopgirls. Fanatical. But you knew your cousin, right? I mean, you rushed here from Africa out of concern.”
“I’m from the California branch of the family.”
“People say you were born in Wigan. You must be going ’round t’all your childhood haunts, knocking up relatives.”
“Not yet.”