Rose (20 page)

“A bishop and a curate don’t ordinarily have much to do with each other. Also, John is a reformer, which the Bishop does not necessarily approve of. The marriage
was
going to be an enormous step down socially for Charlotte. However, since she couldn’t inherit the title or land, the question of whom she married wasn’t all that important.”

“Tell me, how is it that Hannay is both a bishop and a lord?”

“Well, there were three brothers. Being the second, the Bishop went into the Church, and Rowland’s father, the youngest brother, made a career in the Army. When the older brother died without issue—sons, I mean—the Bishop succeeded to the title.”

“And after the Bishop?”

“Charlotte’s brother would have been next in line, but he died in a riding accident two years ago. Rowland’s father died in India a dozen years ago, so it would appear that Rowland will be the next Lord Hannay.”

“Charlotte’s out of the picture?”

“As a woman, yes. The Bishop never mentioned any of this to you?”

“Why would he?”

“After his son’s death he was distraught. That was when he went off to Africa with you. It might be why he thinks of you so fondly.”

“ ‘Fondly’?” Blair had to laugh at that.

“Charlotte changed too. She was riding with her
brother when he fell. It was after the accident that she began to turn into someone more serious—which was what appealed to John, of course, when he came to Wigan.”

“Of course.”

Blair actually felt a twinge of sympathy until Leveret added, “You’re not unlike her brother in a way. I can’t think why she despises you so.”

“Kismet. Did Maypole pick Charlotte or did she pick him? You don’t have to explain mating rituals, just tell me who asked who.”

“Considering their different social stations, it would have been impossible for John to ask her. But he worshiped Charlotte.”

“So you can’t imagine Maypole in love with someone he might have met in a place like this? A flesh-and-blood dirty working girl from Wigan?”

“That’s a peculiar question to ask.”

“What’s the weekly rent for a Hannay company house at, say, Candle Court?”

“Three pounds.”

“The weekly wage for pit girls?”

“Tenpence a day. Before deductions. After, maybe five shillings a week.”

“Who said England was against slavery? Which leaves a couple of pit girls nearly three pounds short of making the rent, let alone paying for food and clothes. You’re sure Maypole never helped a girl in that kind of situation?”

“There was no one but Charlotte. Blair, there must be other lines of inquiry.”

“Other lines? To really question people would take a police campaign, which would be public and which the Hannays refuse to do, so I follow the feeble lines that I have.”

“Which are?”

“Envy. Reverend Chubb dislikes his overly fortunate
curate so much that he brains him with a candlestick and hides him in a crypt.”

“No.”

“I don’t think so, either. Money. Mr. Earnshaw, member of Parliament, listens to Maypole’s passionate appeal for pit girls, but what really catches his attention is that his friend is engaged to a wealthy woman. Earnshaw secretly takes the train to Wigan, slits Maypole’s throat, goes back to London and then returns to Wigan as the white knight of Temperance to court the grieving Miss Hannay.”

“No.”

“Probably not. Then there’s you, honest Oliver Leveret, who always loved Charlotte Hannay and must have been shocked when she perversely chose his best friend to share her bed and bank account. You, who are supposed to help me and have done nothing but describe a saint who never existed. That Maypole I never could find. But John Maypole wasn’t a saint. He disobeyed Chubb. He lusted after pit girls. Most likely he considered Charlotte Hannay an expendable witch. You suspected something was happening. One week before he disappeared you asked him about it, and when he said everything was fine, you knew it was a lie. You are my last line, Leveret.”

Leveret reddened as if he’d been slapped. “John did tell me not to be concerned. How did you know I asked?”

“What made you ask?”

“He was so agitated.”

“Exactly what did he say?”

“That he was experiencing a spiritual crisis. That miners were closer than priests to the ideal of Heaven. That minute to minute he swung from ecstasy to despair. But he did assure me that he was fine.”

“That sounds fine to you?”

“I knew John was human. So am I. If I loved Charlotte,
I never aspired to her. No one was happier for John when their engagement was announced.”

“Let’s get back to ecstasy and despair. Was the ecstasy a working girl? Was the despair Charlotte Hannay?”

“There was only Charlotte.”

“Both? Quite a woman.”

“Blair, do you actually suspect me?”

“No, but I think it’s time you started helping. Can you do that?”

Leveret’s color rose to the roots of his hair. “How?”

“Get me the inquest for the Hannay explosion.”

“That would be the coroner’s report. We discussed this before. There is a copy at our offices here in town, but to be kept there at all times, as I told you.”

“Bring it to my hotel.”

“Why?”

“It makes me feel I’m doing something. I don’t understand England. I do understand mines.”

“Anything else?”

“I need your carriage.”

“That’s all?”

Blair remembered King Solomon. “You haven’t had any black women passing through Wigan, have you? African women?”

“No.”

“Just a thought.”

As Blair drove toward the Hannay tower, miners and pit girls trudged home in the opposite direction beside the road. Riding in Leveret’s carriage literally put him in a class above. He saw neither Flo nor Bill Jaxon. No one raised their eyes. They might have been sheep or cattle in the gloaming.

He missed an equatorial sun and a sharp division between day and night, but he admitted that English light had eccentric charms. Thunderheads towering so high that a train of coal wagons looked like a fold on the
landscape. Sparrows that tumbled from high to low, from light to dark, around hedgerows and chimney towers. There was a stillness that no locomotive could shake, a stirring that no veil of soot could hide.

Everything was contradiction. Bishop Hannay, who didn’t care for Maypole, wanted him found. Charlotte Hannay, Maypole’s fiancée, wouldn’t help. The more Blair infuriated her, the happier the Bishop seemed to be. Leveret was correct when he said that Blair didn’t understand. Day by day he understood less.

Close to the Hannay yard was a rise of leafless, dun-colored willows and oaks swaying in the wind over a lower canopy of brambles and gorse. Blackthorns showed white buds; otherwise this last remnant of Wigan forest was as drab as a feather duster. There was no access by road and no sign of Rose Molyneux. Blair tied the horse and found a footpath that wandered between bushes. As thorns reached out he pushed them away with his leather pack.

The wood was nesting for moles, foxes, stoats; there was little wild woodland left around the mines, and Blair could almost feel the concentrated animal activity around him. Within minutes he reached what he judged to be the center of the little wood, a small clearing around a silver birch, and saw a finch sitting on a branch pour forth a stream of musical notes. He was dumbfounded, as if while touring an urban ruin he had stumbled into an ancient, miniature chapel, and the finch itself was pulling the bell ropes.

“It’s a canary,” Rose said.

She slipped out from the shadow of a willow, though with the fading light, her shawl and so much coal dust on her face she was a shadow of herself. A food tin hung in her hand.

Blair asked, “How is that?”

“They escape from the pit, or sometimes they’re let go
and this is the first wood they fly to. They mix with the birds here.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Not for me.”

Her hair hung loose in red-brown coils, her corduroy coat was velvet with coal dust, and she wore a satin ribbon around her neck to balance her ensemble. One hand was bandaged, and he remembered Flo had said she’d had an accident.

“You’re hurt?”

“We weren’t serving tea t’day, we were sorting coal. Sometimes there’s a sharp stone on the belt. What did you have t’tell me?”

The birch lit up. Startled, the bird flew away, followed by a clap of thunder. In that moment of illumination Blair realized that he had never seen Rose Molyneux before in a good light. She was always half covered with dust or weakly lit by a candle or lamp. The lightning showed a forehead as high as Charlotte Hannay’s but over brighter eyes, and as fine a nose but with a more relaxed and fuller mouth, red against her black cheek. She seemed taller than Charlotte, but beyond that she was more physically present, a civet compared with a domestic cat.

“I want you to return something for me,” Blair said. From his pack he took the pair of clogs that had been delivered to his hotel. “These were left for me by Bill Jaxon. I saw him win them off an Irishman he kicked half to death. I know Jaxon is your beau. I think he has the idea that I have designs on you, and these clogs are a warning that if I don’t leave you alone he will kick
me
half to death. Tell Jaxon that I got the message and that I don’t need any clogs.”

“They’re handsome ones. Shamrocks.” She looked at the stitching and the brass-studded toes.

“Well, they didn’t bring the Irishman any luck.” He held out the clogs but Rose still didn’t take them.

“Bill scares you?”

“Bill certainly does scare me. He’s violent and he’s not half as dumb as he looks.”

“Oooh, he’ll like that description.”

“You don’t have to repeat it to him.”

“Maybe it’s clogs that bother you? Are you getting swell now? You’d prefer pistols or swords?”

“I’d prefer having no trouble at all. The only reason I talked to you in the first place was to ask about John Maypole.”

“You came twice,” Rose said.

“The second time was because of the photograph Maypole had of you.”

“And you said you wouldn’t bother me again.”

“I’m trying not to bother you, believe me.”

A few raindrops began to fall through the trees. Rose was oblivious, picking up spirit like an actress on a stage. “If I was Miss Hannay it would be different. If I was a lady, you wouldn’t come throwin’ clogs in my face. You wouldn’t be badgering me with questions like a poorhouse inspector.”

“Rose, your friend Flo arranged for us to meet here. I’m not throwing clogs, I’m trying to give them to you. And as for Miss Hannay, you’re twice the lady she is.”

“Just say you’re a coward. Don’t give me sweet words.”

Blair lost patience. “Will you take the damn clogs?”

“See? Is that how you speak t’a lady?”

Nothing with Rose went as he hoped. As the rain began to beat down, hair stuck to her sooty brow, yet he was the one who felt bedraggled. “Please?” he asked.

She placed her hands behind her back. “I don’t know. A famous explorer like you, you can answer t’Bill yourself. You have all the world to hide in if Wigan isn’t safe enough.”

“What do you want, Rose?”

“Two things. First, a ride t’town. You can set me down when we’re close. Then you must promise never t’come
t’my house or bother me at work again. I don’t need another Maypole.”

Comparison with Maypole was an unexpected sting.

“Rose, take the clogs and I will never bother you again.”

“I’ll take them on that account only.”

While Blair led her out, the storm arrived with a heave of tree boughs. He asked himself why he was leading the way when Rose knew the path through the wood better than he did, but she seemed to expect it, like the princess of a tiny kingdom.

“Ah went down pit when ah were six. They lifted us oop an’ down in baskets. Ah worked a brace o’ canvas an’ frame t’let air in. Otherwise folk below coodn’t breathe, they’d die.

“When ah was eight ah was big enough t’draw coal. That means drag it. Ah had a chain went around m’neck an’ between m’legs t’sledge, same as me mum an’ all m’sisters. Ah was a strung lass an’ ah’d draw forty, fifty pound o’coal. No ponies in that pit. So tight tha could barely squeeze through.

“Was it hot? Up face, where they took t’coal, everyone was stripped. Like Adam an’ Eve. Tha were crawlin’ through water an’ muck. Things happened t’girls. That’s wha there was t’big Reform an’ Parliament put all t’girls on top o’pit. Not because of our work but because of our morality. That’s how ah become a pit girl.

“Ah didn’t mind t’work. Sortin’ coal. Tippin’ tubs into wagons. Cold in t’winter. Tha danced just t’stay warm. There’s worse than freezin’. M’first girl, when she coom t’work on the brew she was caught b’tween wagons an’ was crooshed. She was ten. T’owners an’ t’managers coom by t’give us five shillin’s for her. That’s t’death rate. Five shillin’s fur oldest girl, three shillin’s fur each girl after.”

“What did you do?” Blair asked.

“Tha genuflect an’ say, yessir, nosir, three bags full, sir.”

When the kettle rattled, Mary Jaxon moved it to a cold burner and put in a tea ball to steep. The center of any miner’s home was a cast-iron range. Its fender was polished to a shine. The smell of bread emanated from the oven. The design of the house was the same as Rose Molyneux’s, but in Mary Jaxon’s kitchen there were a dozen children packed on the stairs to stare at the visitor.