Rose (23 page)
Authors: Martin Cruz Smith
“I don’t sneer at you.”
He didn’t. Rose had seemed a liar and coquette before. Now she was a different person. She had become real. Being real, she didn’t have another ready word. Neither did he. They were trapped like two people who had encountered each other in the dark, neither wishing to back away. He felt her soft exhalation and the brush of her hair on the side of his cheek. The sponge in her hand rested motionlessly on his thigh. He didn’t know who would have moved first if Flo hadn’t returned.
“Success,” she announced as she marched down the
stairs, oversized pants hanging from one hand and a cap and shapeless jacket in the other. “Everythin’ but a silk scarf.”
Immediately Blair felt himself subside into uncomplicated pain. Rose sat back silently and wiped her brow while Flo bustled around the kitchen. Blair didn’t understand what had transpired, but he did know that the moment was gone and that without its tension he was progressively more drunk.
Rose got to her feet and gave the sponge to Flo. “Dry him, dress him, take him back t’his hotel.” She untied her apron and went up the stairs that Flo had just come down.
“Sure.” Flo was surprised by Rose’s retreat but still full of momentum. She said to Blair, “Your shoes are full o’ muck, but you can wear clogs.”
“Great.” It was his last coherent word.
In the middle of the night Blair woke and lit the lamp in his hotel room. The flame burned away some of his stupor, though the oversweet taste of gin coated his tongue.
The visit with Mary Jaxon and her neighbors, and memories of being bodily transported by Flo had the quality of dreams rather than actuality. The fight in the slag pit, especially, seemed more hallucination than fact, except that his hands were raw with scrapes and one leg was bruised black.
When he approached the mirror, he saw that the hair above one ear had been cropped. He lifted the hair and turned to see out of the corner of his eye a semicircle neatly stitched, the edge faintly colored blue from coal dust that couldn’t be removed. Not Bill Jaxon’s mark. Her mark.
While his head throbbed, Blair opened Maypole’s journal, attempting for a second time to make sense of the entries the curate had written the week before he disappeared. The weave of vertical and horizontal lines was a maze of India ink and they were in transposed letters. If the lines had simply been in Latin they would have been safe from him. Codes were different. Miners knew codes;
old Blair had kept a notebook of claims before they were registered, hidden in a variety of ciphers: keyword, picket fence, Porta’s and pigpen.
Jbn uid spt dpg tib spo
.…
Blair had it. The Augustus code, a one-letter shift in blocks of three—baby’s play. Maypole was an Oxford man? He should have been ashamed of himself.
“I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
“My beloved spake, and said unto me,
6
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
“ ‘Let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
“ ‘Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that soil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.’ ”
These are words I wish I could say to her.
As there were no vineyards around Wigan, Blair assumed that Maypole had slipped into the Bible, and while he could easily identify Charlotte as, say, the murderous Judith, who cut off the head of an Assyrian and hung it on a bed, he didn’t see her as a vixen.
She tells me how people visit the pit yard to gawk at the women as if they were another race. Can coal dust and pants make people so blind? Don’t her intelligence and spirit shine through that disguise? She charges that my cassock is a stranger costume than any pants she might wear, and though I rebuff her accusation, in private I begin to agree.
Blair remembered the last time Maypole was seen, running after Rose Molyneux and pulling off his ecclesiastical collar.
“Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, thy two breasts are two young roes which feed among the lilies.
“How much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!”
Why was Maypole coding what was in the Bible? Blair wondered. Unless it had some particular power for him. The Song of Solomon really shouldn’t be placed in the hands of young curates, he decided. The Good Book ran like a railroad on a track of sanctified slaughter, and then out of nowhere came Solomon’s verses of love. He pictured conductors shouting, “Don’t look out the windows at the naked man and woman! We’ll be pulling into Isaiah and the degradation of Zion in five more minutes!”
The lines switched to plain text.
“It is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, ‘Open to me, my love, my dove: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.’
“My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.”
The next entry shifted to a different cipher, too much for Blair’s headache. One thing was clear, though. If this was the fiancé of Charlotte Hannay, he was a man in trouble.
Blair lifted a leech from a jar and set it in a row of its companions feeding on his bruised and swollen hip. Not that he expected leeches to draw anything but subcutaneous bleeding. He lay on his side to keep deeper blood from pooling, wearing only a loose shirt and socks, his skin red from the overstoked fire of his hotel sitting room. Since his veins swam in aspirin, arsenic and brandy, he expected the worms to soon swoon and drop.
Leveret had delivered a bound copy of the coroner’s report, and Blair had sent him off for a list of pit girls who had attended the Home for Women. Where else could Rose have learned how to stitch a wound? What better place to meet John Maypole?
The report weighed an imperial pound.
Being the Inquest of the Coroner’s Jury into the Circumstances and Causes of the Explosion at the Hannay Pit, Wigan, Lancashire, Jan. 21, 1872, held at the Royal Inn.
The site didn’t surprise him. Inquests were held in a local public room, which usually meant any inn with space
enough to seat the jury, witnesses, bereaved families and interested parties.
The first page was a foldout map of the Hannay mine, the scale fifty yards to an inch, marked with arrows to show how fresh air arrived from the down shaft, branched from the tunnel called the Main Road, and circulated through cross tunnels to the far periphery of the coal face. Ventilation returned through the Back Road tunnel until it was sucked up a diagonal channel called a dumb drift to join the up shaft far enough above the furnace so that the tainted, gassy air wouldn’t explode.
The map was also marked from “1” to “76” to indicate where men had died. There was a capricious quality to mine explosions because blast and smoke underground could multiply like a dozen locomotives racing through tunnels, suddenly swerving from a likely victim to chase down a less fortunate man half a mile away. Also, in the insidious alchemy of a blast, the methane that fueled a fire was always followed by afterdamp—carbon monoxide—and no man was safe until he had reached the surface ahead of the spreading gas.
Death certificates followed. Blair’s eye skipped around because there were so many.
1. Henry Turton, 8 years, pony tender. Attempting to aid his pony, Duke, he became tangled in the reins and was carried to the bottom of the shaft.…
23, 24 and 25. Albert Pimblett, 62, his son, Robert Pimblett, 41, and grandson Albert, 18, found side by side and apparently unmarked in the Main Road. It is surmised that as one succumbed to gas, the others stayed to help, and so all perished. They were identified by their wives.…
45. In the Main Road, an Irishman called Paddy, no other name known. Age unknown. He was identified by a Fenian tattoo.…
48. William Bibby, 14. Identified by his brother
Abel, who had not gone to work that day because of a headache …
53. Bernard Twiss, 16. Burned. Recovered at the coal face by his father, Harvey, who failed at first to recognize him. Identified later by red cloth he used to hold up his pants …
66. Arnold Carey, 34. Found burned and disfigured at the coal face. Identified by his wife, who recognized his clogs.…
73. Thomas Greenall, 54. At the coal face. Burned and mutilated, recognized by the fact that he had previously lost a finger.…
74, 75. George Swift, 21, and John Swift, 20. Burned and mutilated. Identified by George’s belt buckle and John’s watch …
76. A dayworker known as Taffy. Age unknown. Identified by a black tooth …
A missing finger, a watch, a tattoo. It was enough to make a man take personal inventory.
The thirteen members of the jury were listed: three bankers, two retired Army officers, a builder, one insurance agent and six shop owners, all of a social caste that turned to the Hannays the way flowers heeded the sun. A jury of one’s peers.
George Battie was the first witness.
C
ORONER
: As underlooker, you are one of the employees most responsible for the day-to-day safety of the Hannay pit and the men who work in it, is that not true?
B
ATTIE
: It is, sir.
C
ORONER
: Last week seventy-six men died in that mine. Every home in Wigan lost a husband, a father, a brother, or at the very least a friend. Their widows are gathered here today, asking how it is possible that
such a mass calamity could have been allowed to occur. We will hear testimony and opinion from survivors and rescuers, experts who were called immediately to the scene of the disaster, as well as experts who visited the pit later, agents for the mine owner and miners’ union, and finally from Her Majesty’s Mines Inspector. However, you may be the most important witness of all, since you were the individual charged with the safety of those victims.
Blair could see Battie strapped into a Sunday suit, facing the questions like a pony staring down a shaft.
C
ORONER
: What did you do on the morning of January 18 to ensure the safety of the men in the Hannay pit?
B
ATTIE
: I am always first man down pit at 4:00 in the morning to hear the report of the night underlooker whether there have been accidents or complaints since the previous day. There were none. I then checked the barometer and thermometer.
A
ARON
H
OPTON
, E
SQ
.,
counsel for the Hannay pit: Why
is that?
B
ATTIE
: If the barometric pressure falls, gas creeps out of the coal. When that is the case, I caution the men against setting off any shots that might ignite the gas. The barometric pressure did drop that morning and I issued such a caution as the men came down the cage. I then visited workplaces to make sure that the caution was understood, paying particular attention to districts of the coal face I knew to be fraught with gas. As I did so, I also examined the ventilation to be sure that every part of the mine had access to good air, and that every workplace had two routes of escape.
M
ILES
L
IPTROT
, E
SQ
.,
counsel for the Hannay pit
: Did you examine where the explosion originated?
B
ATTIE
: Yes, sir. That is, I believe I can estimate where the explosion took place, and I did inspect that area the morning of the fire.
E
NOCH
N
UTTAL
, E
SQ
.,
counsel for the Hannay pit
: Did you detect gas that morning?
B
ATTIE
: Yes.
I
SAAC
M
EEK
, E
SQ
.,
counsel for the Hannay pit
: Determined by?
B
ATTIE
: Passing my lamp across the coal face and observing a lengthening of the flame. I moved a brattice—
H
OPTON
: Brattice?
B
ATTIE
: A frame of wood and canvas for directing ventilation. And I told Albert Smallbone—
L
IPTROT
: That would be the fireman at that location?
B
ATTIE
: Yes, sir. I told him to watch the gas and not to fire any shots.
N
UTTAL
: To set off any gunpowder for the easier getting of coal?
B
ATTIE
: Yes, sir.
M
EEK
: Describe, Mr. Battie, where you were and what you did when you became aware of an explosion?
B
ATTIE
: I was at my desk at the bottom of the shaft at 2:45 in the afternoon when the floor jumped and hot clouds of coal dust shot from the tunnels. The ponies were in a turmoil. One carried a boy to his death in the cistern beneath the cage shaft. The cage arrived almost at once, seconds too late for the poor boy.
H
OPTON
: Go on.
B
ATTIE
: I wrote a note for the pit manager, explaining the situation, and sent the cage back up. Then I took men with rescue supplies that are always at the ready—picks and shovels, litters and splints, brattices and timber, block and tackle, canaries in cages—and started with them into the Main Road because that is the main artery of fresh air. The first men and ponies we encountered were rushing out. I soon began to find
brattices that had been blown out of position, disrupting the inward draft of good air and allowing afterdamp to spread. We repaired the canvas to improve ventilation and push the gas back. Only as the quality of air improved could we move forward. It is one thing for fate to take a life; it is another matter altogether for the leader of a rescue party to endanger more lives through recklessness or haste.
Five hundred yards in, we found men who had succumbed to gas and fallen face forward unconscious to the floor, a sign they had fallen while running. We turned them on their backs so they could breathe and tended some twenty men in this fashion as proper ventilation took hold. All survived. Another fifty yards on, however, the canary in the cage I held dropped, and we now started to find men stretched out on the floor, unmarked by violence but beyond any ministration. We also started to meet cave-ins and were forced to dig through obstructions, propping up rock as we went, rigging block and tackle to move fallen props. There were pockets of good air as well as gas, and we were able to extricate another eighteen men alive, besides finding the bodies of thirty-five more.
C
ORONER
: What about the canary? Canaries are sensitive to carbon monoxide, hence their use in mines. You said the canary in the cage you held dropped to the bottom of its cage. Were you progressing with a dead canary?
B
ATTIE
: We had three cages. Only one was in the lead. When it dropped, it was handed back to revive while one of the other canaries was handed to the front. We were indeed slowed by thicker concentrations of gas, which required men as well as birds to take turns in the lead. Five of us were overcome and had to be carried out. However, we were reinforced by survivors who chose to participate in the rescue rather than to run for safety. Smallbone had been injured by a rockfall
and was being assisted to my office by William Jaxon when the explosion took place. Both joined us and took such extreme risks I had to restrain them.
H
OPTON
: They heard cries for help?
B
ATTIE
: After an explosion, timbers make all manner of sounds. However, from a thousand yards on there were no more survivors.
L
IPTROT
: And you advanced quickly?
B
ATTIE
: It was 3:45 when Jaxon and Smallbone joined us, but our progress slowed despite their efforts. If you can’t see the bird in the cage and the flame in your lamp sinks to a nub, you order everyone back until fresh air lifts the flame again, because dead rescuers are no help at all.
N
UTTAL
: You cite the zeal of Smallbone and Jaxon. Why do you think they pressed so hard?
B
ATTIE
: The explosion was at their district of the coal face. When we emerged at the near end of the face, the bodies there were singed. With every step, the destruction was more severe. Midway, the victims were burned. Some were buried under coal tubs thrown off the track, others blown by the force of the explosion into old workings. The far end of the coal face was Smallbone and Jaxon’s station. Had they been there at the time of the explosion nothing would have been left of them.
M
EEK
: Who was the last victim recovered?
B
ATTIE
: A dayworker, a Welshman we called Taffy.