Rose (18 page)

The cart rolled ahead, sunlight smeared over brass, and Chubb hurried to keep pace.

Chief Constable Moon had an indentation in the middle of his forehead. “Brick.” He pulled a sleeve back from a white scar that ran the length of a meaty forearm. “Shovel.” He lifted a trouser leg. His shin was cross-hatched with scar tissue and punched in as if shot. “Clogs. Enough to say that today when there’s a set- to with miners we wear stiff leather leggings. And what happened to you?” He peered at the scratches on Blair’s face.

“A rose.”

“Oh, well, we can’t report that, sir.”

“No.”

Moon’s uniform was blue, embroidered in silver at the collar and cuffs, and he had mobile features that suggested he enjoyed authority dispensed with nudges and winks. Blair himself enjoyed the luckless state of mind of a man with nothing to lose. Arsenic coursed through his veins like a secondary fever. Leveret had left to plead Blair’s case to the Bishop. By now Charlotte Hannay must have gone to her father and demanded his
dismissal. Moans issued from holding cells of whitewashed stone and straw bedding across the corridor, but the Chief Constable’s office offered the comfort of a tile fire grate, a desk of mahogany, deep chairs of Russian leather, gas lamps that illuminated maps of the worlds of Lancashire and Wigan. There was the prosperity of a new business to Moon’s office.

“Nice, isn’t it? The old station and town hall were damaged by the miners when we had some troubles a few years back. The Hannays, of course, were major contributors to the improvements.” Moon allowed himself a pause. “We want to set the Bishop’s mind at ease. It’s just a little late in the day. What with the Hannay explosion, the rescue, identifying bodies, accident inquiry, funerals, no one mentioned Maypole to us until long after. Well, I think they wanted to be quiet about it, don’t you? Young curate engaged to the Bishop’s daughter. Best solved privately. Never been a formal complaint, not in the log.”

“But you did ask about Maypole?”

“Using discretion. At railways, in case Maypole bought a ticket. Walked the ditches and canals. Sad business, but you never know. Of course it’s coal country. Old shafts everywhere. If a man walks in the dark and doesn’t know where to stop, then he might never be found.”

“Maypole had trouble with a man named Silcock. Is that name familiar to you?”

“An expert with a cosh. Preys on hotel guests, gentlemen who’ve had too much to drink. Has a fair, square-rigged look. That’s his guise.”

“Like Maypole?”

“Now that you mention it, in a general fashion. Anyway, we were on top of that We ran him out of Wigan the same day we saw him bother the Reverend.”

“You arrested him?”

“No, but we put the pressure on. Had to warn him twice, but he disappeared.”

“Have you located Silcock since then?”

“No.”

“Don’t you think you should have?”

“Someone else’s problem.” Moon shuffled his jaw back and forth. “Mr. Leveret couldn’t be with you?”

“He went to Hannay Hall to report on the day’s progress. Chief Constable, do you recall seeing Maypole the day before the explosion?”

“You have so many questions you could be a regular detective. No.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?”

“The week before. He was always bringing an excuse for a drunken miner. I understood. Forgiveness is a young curate’s job, after all.”

Moon made it sound like the drooling stage of a baby; Blair felt a dislike for the man.

“Do you remember which miner it was that week?”

“It was Bill Jaxon.”

“Jaxon and Maypole played on the same rugby team, didn’t they?”

“Ah, Bill’s a famous boy. He gets in scrapes. Miners do. That’s why they’re so good at rugby—what does a split nose mean to them? They say if you want a good rugby team in Lancashire, just shout down a shaft.”

“What had Bill done to attract the attention of the law?”

“He broke another man’s head for squeezing the wrong girl. I couldn’t blame Bill myself. You see, we get travelers who don’t know Wigan ways, who get confused.”

“By what?”

“Pit girls.”

“How so?”

Moon had his front teeth, but not the side, which made his smile wet and gummy. “Well, they do what they want, don’t they? Drink like men, work like men, live like men. And draw a certain sort of gentleman who
travels up here by train to see an Amazon in pants. That sort of gentleman thinks he can take liberties, and then finds himself facing off with someone like Bill.”

“Who was the Amazon in Bill’s case?”

“A girl named Molyneux.”

“Rose?”

“The same. A pit girl, attractive in a sluttish way. A fairly new arrival in Wigan.” Moon appeared taken aback. “However do you know her?”

“She was on the list you supplied Leveret of the last people to see Maypole.”

“That’s right. I never liked it that Reverend Maypole wasted time with her. I warned him about oversocializing with miners, letting them drag him down to their level.”

“What level is that?”

“They’re good folk but they’re primitive. A fact, sir.” Moon shifted his attention to Blair’s cheek. “Know what miners use to clean wounds? Coal dust. So they end up tattooed like savages. You don’t want to look like them.”

From the police station Blair walked so that Leveret would have time to bring word of his dismissal to the hotel.

The night clerk poked into message boxes. “Sorry, sir, nothing for you.”

“There has to be.” Blair couldn’t believe that the Bishop would not at least warn him after Leveret’s report or Charlotte Hannay’s complaint. “Look again.”

The clerk ducked under the desk. “There
is
something, sir.” He brought out a heavy, unshapely package wrapped in brown paper and string. Written on the paper in a thick pencil was “For Mr. Blair. From a friend.”

“Do you know who brought this?”

“No, it was here when I came on. A gift, I suppose. Seems to be in two pieces.”

The clerk waited expectantly for Blair to open the package. Instead he carried it up to his room, set the
parcel on the sitting-room table, lit the lamps and allowed himself a quinine and gin. He told himself he had done his best, at least as much as the police had done for the saintly John Maypole. Tomorrow he would be in Liverpool booking passage, even steerage, to escape. In a year his three nights in Wigan would seem a passing dream.

Reinforced with another gin, Blair loosened the string of the package and unwrapped the contents, which proved to be a pair of shoes. Not shoes. Clogs with stout leather uppers attached by brass nails to solid ash soles edged on the underside by horseshoe irons. Shamrocks were stitched into the leather and extra brass heads studded the toes. They were the clogs that Bill Jaxon had won from the Irishman.

Out of curiosity, Blair sat down and pulled off his boots. He slipped on the clogs, closed the clasps and stood. Because wood didn’t bend, his feet rocked within, lifting at the heels. The sound of the clogs on the floor when he stepped was like rolling balls. But they fit.

When Blair arrived at the Hannay yard, miners on the day shift were already below, but Battie, the underlooker, had come up in the cage to supervise the lowering of a pony, a mare with a milk-white mane and tail. The pony was in blinkers and trailed a harness with two extra-long cinches. While Battie attached a chain and hook to the bottom of the cage, a stableman with hay lured the little horse close to the platform.

The underlooker noticed Blair. “Are you planning to take another tour of the pit? We won’t be crawling on our hands and knees again, will we?”

“No.” Blair dropped his pack from his shoulder to the ground.

Battie finished hooking the chain and stepped back. He wore a dusting of carbon powder. He shielded his eyes from the sun to peer at Blair’s face. “You’ve been crawling through brambles?”

“I met a human bramble.”

“Mr. Leveret with you? I don’t see a carriage.”

“I walked out on my own.”

“Carrying your pack all the way? You’re not still asking about Reverend Maypole?”

“Still,” Blair said, although he had left a note at the hotel desk saying where he was headed, and hoped to see
Leveret roll into the pit yard at any moment with word that the Bishop had fired him. “Did Maypole come here often?”

“Yes. He was a preacher of opportunity, very good at drawing parallels from the Bible—workers in a vineyard and men in a pit, that sort of thing. I feel bad now.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid I told him that a pit yard was not a church. You can’t preach around rolling wagons and tubs. He was welcome to visit as a friend of the Hannays, but not as a minister. That was a week before the explosion. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

The cage rose, trailing its extra hook below while workmen laid planks across the shaft. The stableman was wiry as a boy, with a beaked nose and a fierce mustache. He walked the pony onto the planks, forced her to her knees, and then to her side. He folded her front legs into the forward cinch and strapped them tight, then did the same with a second cinch around the rear legs so that only her four hooves were free. He yanked the cinches to test their tension before he connected a ring in the harness to the hook hanging from the cage. At his shout, the cage rose and lifted the pony to a sitting position and then over the hole. The workmen pulled the planks aside, opening the shaft.

“Pretty little horse,” Blair said.

Battie nodded. “And expensive. I like Welsh ponies, but they’re in short supply. This one is all the way from Iceland.”

“White as the proverbial snow.”

“Well, the poor girl won’t be white for long.”

The pony hung, trussed, between cage and shaft. Though the stableman tucked hay under her nose and held her reins, she rolled her eyes. A shadow of horse, cage and tower stretched across the yard.

“It’s her first time. She’ll quiet,” the stableman called.
“We don’t want her bucking when we send her down pit.”

“Some of the ponies die their first month down,” Battie told Blair. “Maybe lack of light or air or proper mucking. A mystery. You forgot something?”

Blair stepped onto the platform. “No, it was just something you said the other day. You showed me where you found the victims of the explosion, the ones who suffocated and the ones who were blown up. You said you’d ‘thought about it a thousand times.’ ”

“Anyone would, a fire like that.”

“It was the word ‘thought.’ As if there was something you were trying to figure out, going over it in your mind. You didn’t say ‘remembered,’ you said ‘thought.’ ”

“I don’t see the difference,” Battie said.

“There may not be.”

“That’s why you came out here?”

“One reason. Was there something you were thinking about?” Blair asked.

The pony didn’t calm. Instead, she began to thrash until the cage above her swung against the guide wires like a jointed pendulum. Loose hay spilled, straws of gold sucked by the downdraft into the shaft. Once a pony went down a pit it wouldn’t come up again except once a year for a week, until it was finally lame and hauled up for the knacker’s cart. In spite of her reins and all the stableman’s pulling, she twisted her head to bite the cinch. The cage ticked the tower’s wooden props.

“I think about everything that goes on below. That’s what an underlooker does,” Battie said.

“I’m not talking about accusations, but maybe something that didn’t make sense.”

“Mr. Blair, perhaps you haven’t noticed, but a dark tunnel deep in the earth is not where you find sensible men.”

The cinch broke. As the pony kicked more freely, she gyrated, which caused her to kick more violently. The
stableman ducked her hooves and tried to pull her back over the platform by her reins so that if she broke or reared out of the bottom cinch she wouldn’t pour herself into the open shaft.

“Pull her clear,” Battie shouted.

But the weight of the horse started to drag the stableman toward the shaft. The irons of his clogs slipped across the platform. Battie grabbed him by the waist. Blair removed his jacket, threw it over the pony’s head and then held on to Battie.

The three men clung to the reins as the pony thrashed and tried to shake the jacket off. Slowly the kicking stopped. The pony spun but ever more idly, sedated by blindness. Battie took the reins while the stableman fetched a hood, which he expertly slipped over the horse’s head even as he snatched Blair’s jacket off. Blair took it and staggered against a prop. Activity in the pit yard had ceased around the spectacle. Blair’s heart kicked. He was as covered in the horse’s lather as if he had rolled in foam.

The stableman was furious. “Tha shouldna’ done that. Think ah don’t know me job?”

“Sorry,” Blair said.

“You made him look a fool,” Battie said. “He’d prefer to die.”

More stablemen arrived to pull the pony to the platform and truss her with a new cinch. Across the yard, men again began to weigh tubs, drivers to back their engines into wagons, blacksmiths to beat iron. Battie shouted to the winding house. A tremor ran the length of the cable as it rose, but the pony in her hood was pacified. As the cable reversed and unreeled, she dropped from sight down into the hole, followed by the cage, which stopped momentarily at platform level for Battie to get on.