Rose (19 page)

The underlooker hit the cage bell and said, “The numbers
agree, Mr. Blair. Seventy-six lamps, seventy-six men. That’s what matters.”

Blair was still trying to get his breath. “It’s hardly a mystery.”

“What?” Battie called back.

“Why the ponies die. Fear.”

An unhappy smile stole onto Battie’s face. Then he disappeared under the top of the cage as it descended, gathering speed but moving smoothly, anchored by the pony hanging underneath.

Blair went over to the sorting shed. A locomotive was shifting a train of loaded wagons away from the siding. Connected only by chains, the wagons slapped together as they transmitted the stop-and-go of the engine. Pit girls walked alongside, collecting larger pieces of coal that fell.

Over the shed itself a cloud of coal dust glittered in the sun. Blair didn’t see Rose Molyneux at the siding tippler or among the women picking rocks and dirt from the belt or tending the coal as it cascaded through the grates. The first time he had seen them at work had been in the dark. In daylight their uniforms—work shirts and pants, head covering of flannel shawls and rolled-up skirts—were neither male nor female but fashion for hermaphroditic drudges. He did recognize the large form of Rose’s friend Flo as she disengaged from other women at the bottom of the chute and came his way.

“It’s t’gentleman caller,” she said and nodded toward the tower. “Ah saw thi ride t’carousel.”

Blair swung the pack off his shoulder. “I have something for Rose. Is she here?”

“She is, but she got hurt. Not bad. She’ll be back later, ah can’t say when.” Flo put out a black hand. “Give it t’me, ah’ll pass it on.”

“I want to give this to Rose myself. I have to talk to her.”

“Well, ah can’t say when she’ll be back.”

“When do you quit work? I’ll talk to her then.”

“Five. But it wouldn’t do for her t’talk then, not when t’men are up.”

“Then I’ll meet her in town.”

“No. T’best place is Canary Wood. It’s t’trees closest t’pit. She’ll meet thi there after work.”

“I’ll look for her in Wigan if she’s not there.”

“Rose will be there.”

Flo seemed pleased with the negotiation. Also, suddenly afraid to trade more words. “I mun t’work,” she said.

“If you mun you mun.”

“Aye.”

She edged toward the coal chute. She was too large to slip away on light feet, though, and no shawl or black smudges could hide the satisfaction in her backward glance.

Blair had walked halfway back to Wigan when he came to a halt. Most of the road was by fields black with fresh-turned earth. His plan was to find the widow Mrs. Jaxon; according to Maypole’s journal, he called on her the day he disappeared. Other people saw him later, but maybe he had said something to the woman.

Yet Blair found that he had stopped walking, as if the power to do so had left his legs. Rather than the dark fields, he saw the pony thrashing on the chain. Fear welled up like the dark of the shaft, but it wasn’t fear of falling. Something worse: the way the mare whipped its head back and forth as it struggled to escape. The sweat of its terror covered him still.

He found himself on the ground on his knees. It wasn’t malaria. The horse was gone, replaced by a memory of a paddle steamer pushing between black seas and a gray sky. The hoarse sound of the waves vied with the uneven churning of side-wheels as the ship made way, wallowed, made way. The captain held the Bible flat to read in a wind that was strong enough to lift beards. Six sailors
shouldered a plank on which lay a body wrapped in a muslin sheet. They lifted the plank and the body shot out like a wingless angel through the air. The little boy pulled himself up on the railing to watch.

Above the water the descent stopped. The plank had snagged the sheet and it had unwound in a fluttering white arc down to the knot that secured the body within the first turn of the cloth. As the ship plodded forward, the body sank into a wave, reappeared and swung into the side of the ship, sank into a wave, reappeared again. Because she was weighted with lead he heard her hit the ship.

A sailor cut through the sheet. Released, it immediately trailed behind and, dropping, whipped as if escaping grip after grip. The body, covered by a foamy wave, was quickly out of sight, although he thought he saw the sheet on the water for a minute more. Blair, a gold miner whom the boy and his mother had met on deck, patted him on the head and said, “These things happen.” It was young Blair’s experience as he grew that things like that happened all the time.

Now he bent over and sobbed. The goddamn pony, he said to himself. The sheet unwinding from the plank, his jacket whipping back and forth. The cage slamming against the guide wires, her hitting the side of the ship. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried, except that now memory was born kicking painfully from the inside out. The fucking pony.

“Are you all right?”

Blair raised his head. A blurry Leveret looked down from a carriage that Blair hadn’t heard come.

“Sure.”

“You seem upset.”

“Leveret, you are one sharp observer.” Blair rolled onto his back; he wouldn’t have been surprised if his eyes flowed out. His ribs were racked as if they weren’t used to this form of exercise. He’d been walking along,
remembered that burial at sea and suddenly turned into a fountain.

“Can I help you up?”

“If you want to help, tell me that I’ve been dismissed, that the Hannay family no longer needs my services.”

“No, the Bishop says he is very satisfied with your work. He wants you to continue just the way you are.”

Blair sat up. “What about Charlotte Hannay? He wants me to stay away from her?”

“The opposite. The Bishop wants you to talk to her again.”

“You told him what happened?”

“He says you should turn the other cheek.” When Blair laughed through his wet face, Leveret added, “However, the Bishop says that if you don’t possess sufficient sympathy to do that, you should feel free to defend yourself from attack.”

“The Bishop said that? He knows that his daughter despises the sight of me?”

“I told him what happened. Charlotte and Earnshaw had already reported to him in detail. The unpleasantness of the episode in the garden has been thoroughly described.”

“The episode in the garden!” What an English way to describe anything from murder to a fart, Blair thought. He pulled himself to his feet. “Hannay is mad,” he said.

“The Bishop says that Reverend Maypole’s disappearance is too urgent and important a matter for any personal considerations to interfere. He seems to be more convinced than ever that you are the right man for the job. He said there may be a bonus for you.”

Disgustedly Blair threw his pack onto the carriage and climbed up to the seat next to Leveret. “I don’t want a bonus and I have no idea how to do ‘the job.’ Your Chief Constable Moon thinks Maypole will never be found. He’s probably right.”

Leveret sniffed. “Have you been riding? Were you thrown by a horse?”

Blair thought the question over. “Close.”

He changed clothes at the hotel. He felt strangely invigorated and cleansed. Colors were rawer, fresher, more vibrant to his eyes. He bought a magnifying glass at a stationer’s for reading Maypole’s journal. He even had an appetite and talked Leveret into visiting a Scholes eating house for rabbit pie and pickled eel.

The air inside was a cloud of pipe smoke so sharp it made the nose wince. Crutches and a cripple’s cart parked by tables where old men in caps and stained scarves played games of dominoes between arguments, mixed with younger workers taking the day off. They ate their pies with clasp knives, an etiquette that made Leveret stiff and fastidious. Blair was used to Arabs and Africans eating with their hands. He also had a weakness for this sort of tableau, the timeless scene of luckless men gambling, the same here as in Accra or Sacramento. With the games came two rhythmic choruses, the pop of men drawing on their clay pipes, the slap of ivory tiles.

The beer was dark and sent an almost visible ripple through Leveret. He still wore stamps of plaster and appeared slightly crimped, as if he had been posted. He whispered, “I haven’t been to one of these places since I used to sneak in with Charlotte.”

“She used to come here?”

“When we were children. We both loved eel pie.”

“Charlotte Hannay? I can’t see that.”

“You don’t know Charlotte.”

“A grim little mollusk.”

“No. She … at least she used to be the opposite.”

“A fish?”

“Adventuresome, full of life.”

“Now she’s full of opinions. Isn’t she a bit young to be so much smarter than everyone else?”

“She’s educated.”

“What does that mean?”

“The classics, science, French, Latin, a little Greek—”

“I get the idea. Does she know anything about miners and pit girls?”

“It’s a Hannay tradition to slip into town. When he was young, the Bishop himself was always in the working part of Wigan. Boys used to leap over old shafts. It was a dare, you know? Some wouldn’t jump at all. Hannay was the champion.”

“Well, they were his shafts, weren’t they? Maybe that should be a requirement for ownership, jumping over an open shaft. Did Maypole come here?”

“For a time. He wanted to eat like the miners and suffer with them. But he told me that he discovered that miners actually eat quite well. Roast beef, mutton, ham, and of course great quantities of beer. John couldn’t afford it and he went back to living like a curate.”

“Most people went to his church?”

“No. I don’t know if you noticed, but in the newspaper office there was a book called
Lancashire Catholics: Obstinate Souls
. That’s because Lancashire has remained the most Catholic county in spite of the Reformation. We’re also the most Methodist. We’re the most at whatever we are. In the Middle Ages Wigan was a refuge for runaway slaves. In the Civil War we were Royalist. Not like Southerners.”

“Southerners?”

“London people. Southerners are convenient people; they do whatever is convenient for them. Mining is not a convenient sort of occupation.”

“Did Maypole ever wear clogs?”

“For rugby, yes, because the other men did.”

“I didn’t see them in his room. Do you ever wear clogs?”

“Good Lord, no.”

“Did you as a kid?”

“My father would never let me. Remember, he was the estate manager before me. Being the son of a miner, it was a great step up for him, starting as a clerk, rising to assistant manager, then manager. He said, ‘No more bowlegs for this family.’ My grandfather had legs like hoops from hauling coal as a boy when his bones were soft. In one generation the Leverets sprouted up.”

“Like evolution?”

Leveret thought. “Improvement, my father said. My mother’s father was a lockkeeper and I would spend all day at the canal—a canal’s a fascinating place for a boy, between fishing, horses and boats—until my father put an end to the visits. He was a great friend of Chief Constable Moon, and Moon always believed in the improvement of workers in general and miners in particular. Although Moon says improvement starts at the end of a stout club. An intimidating man. A chief constable is an important figure in a town like Wigan.”

“Moon is a goon in a uniform.”

“Rather catchy.” Leveret suppressed a smile.

Blair nodded toward a corner table. “See the man cutting sausage? Face black with coal. Coal in his hair, his nails, every crevice of his skin. Moleskin vest falling off his back. Speaking a language unintelligible to any other Englishman. Wearing clogs. Bring him back an hour from now, washed, shaved, in London clothes, sounding like a London man, in shoes, and you wouldn’t believe he was the same man. He couldn’t convince you. But is that improvement?”

“The clothes make the man?”

“And soap,” said Blair.

“Do you know what people believe here? People believe that English woolens are the best insulation for tropical heat. They do. They think it’s the advantage that English explorers have. You have to be English to understand.”

“No doubt. That’s why I don’t understand why the
Bishop is more convinced than ever that I’m the right man for the job. If I’m not finding Maypole, what am I doing right?”

Leveret strained for a positive answer. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “Although I think your approaches are imaginative, I can’t say that I feel we are any closer to finding John or discovering what happened to him. After the argument you had with Charlotte I was certain that the Bishop would let you go. Instead he was quite clear that it was her duty to cooperate. In fact, he wanted me to tell you that while Charlotte might resist at first, you mustn’t be discouraged.”

“Maybe I can catch his daughter where there are no weapons. Or roses.”

“Charlotte can seem difficult because she has so many causes and takes them so seriously.”

“Like Maypole. Tell me, what kind of relationship did she have with him?”

“They shared the same ideals: to better Wigan through education, sobriety, sanitation.”

“If that doesn’t win a girl’s heart, what will? What I meant was, did they ever hold hands, kiss, dance?”

“No, nothing the least coarse or physical.”

Sometimes Blair wondered whether he and Leveret spoke the same language. “Were Maypole and Charlotte happy? I’m not talking about the higher contentment of doing good, I mean the lower contentment of another warm body.”

“They didn’t think that way. They were allies, fellow soldiers fighting for the same social goal.”

Blair tried a different tack. “Tell me, did you ever see any disagreement between them? We’re talking about a woman with a, let’s say, flammable temperament.”

Leveret hesitated. “Charlotte could be impatient with John, but that was because she wanted to help so many people.”

“Maybe also because she’s the daughter of a bishop and he was a lowly curate?”

“No, she has never had anything but contempt for class distinctions. That’s why she doesn’t live in Hannay Hall. She refuses to have a servant.”

“Exactly, she just orders everyone around. How did John Maypole get on with Hannay? What did the Bishop think of his daughter marrying someone who wasn’t an aristocrat?”