Rose (30 page)

The second hand of his watch twitched under the crystal, the arrow of a compass seeking a new north.

Blair put the journal in a hiding place behind the mirror, left the lamp on, let himself into the hall, then
went down the hotel-restaurant stairs and out the rear entrance through the steam of the kitchen. He didn’t feel like a wolf, as Moon had described him. He felt like a goat walking in the track of another goat. Wasn’t that his method of finding Maypole?

Flo said, “Tha can’t come here.”

“I want to see Rose.”

“Wait.” She blew out the kitchen lamp and left him to stand in the dark outside.

He waited on the back step, above the mud of the yard, surrounded by the smell of slops and ashpits. To the west, the clouds had ignited into an electrical storm too far off for audible thunder. He couldn’t see individual strokes of lightning, only illumination in one valley of thunderheads and then another. Was it distance, he asked himself, or did the screen of smoke that rose from the lapping rooflines of chimney pots cut Wigan off? The town seemed to exist as a world to itself—and, as always, to be slightly on fire.

Rose came to the kitchen door so quietly he didn’t notice her at first. She wore a dress damp at the shoulders from her hair, and he saw the reason he hadn’t heard her approach was that she had rushed from her bath in bare feet. A scent of Pears soap surrounded her like an aura of sandalwood or myrrh.

“I took the alleys. I know the way now.”

“That’s what Flo said.”

“Flo—”

“She’s gone. Bill’s still looking for you.”

“I’m still hiding from him.”

“Then run somewhere else.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Bill will kick you t’death if he finds you here.”

“Bill is sure I’m not here. Did Maypole ever talk to you about different kinds of beauty?”

“You came t’ask me that?”

“Did he come seeking through the city, wandering through the streets to say he loved you?”

“Will you go?” Rose pushed him.

Blair leaned against her hands. “No.”

A curious torpor spread through his body, and he could feel the same lassitude in her, so that she pushed without force and they leaned together. Her hand slid up to his temple and brushed the hair where she had stitched him together.

“I heard there was almost a drowning. They say you helped the man and ruined the Chief Constable’s little show, which makes you more fool than hero. Now Moon or Bill will catch you and ruin my good work. You think it’s worth it?” She bunched his hair in her fist so that the skin burned. “Or d’you just want t’go back to Africa?”

“Both.”

“You’re a greedy man.”

“That’s true.”

Rose led him in. So much for Maypole, he thought. So much for Solomon, too.

Lovely was an inanimate word. Carnality was alive, and Rose had carnality from the thick, darkened curls of her hair to the fine coppery down where her neck sloped to her shoulder. It was the way the cheap dress shifted on her hips as she led him upstairs lit by the cat’s eye of a kerosene lamp turned down to its slit. It was stupid animal poetry. Better than poetry because appreciation entered every sense. She was victory over the mind. The Greeks placed physical grace on a level with the arts. Rose would have done well in ancient Athens. Or in Somalia or Ashantiland.

Not that she was a beauty. Someone like Lydia Rowland outshone her easily, but outshone her as a diamond might outshine a fire. A diamond was mere reflection; a fire was alive.

Nor delicate. Her shoulders were wide, the calves of
her legs muscled from work. Nor voluptuous. In fact, she was slight of body more than round.

What was it? The allure of the lower class? He didn’t think so; he was too lower-class himself to find any erotic quality in rough hands or thin cotton.

But she was all of a piece. She was
there
. In the hall he felt heat on the floorboards where her feet had stepped.

She made herself a small throne of pillows while he rested against the headboard. The room had more variations of shadow than any real light, but to him she looked like a happy jinni released from a bottle. His body stretched out, as pale and bruised as a body brought down from the cross.

“What would you do now if Bill came in?”

“Right now? I couldn’t move, I know that.”

“Bill’s big. He’s not bright, though, not like you.”

“I’m so bright I’m here with his girl.”

She sprang forward onto his chest, her hair wild around her eyes. “I’m no one’s girl.”

“You’re no one’s girl.”

While she was on him, she turned his head and examined his temple where it was shaved and stitched.

“Where did you learn nursing?” he asked.

“Sewing cuts is a good thing t’know around a mine, is all.”

She kissed him and sat back on the pillows, assembling herself with animal disregard for being naked. He became aware again of the fact that she seemed to have the house only for her own use. For all its age, it was built under a single slate roof that spanned the whole row of houses from corner to corner, looked out on a cobbled courtyard, and was surrounded by rows of other, almost identical houses and courts.

“Where’s Flo? She seemed to dematerialize.”

“That’s an expensive word. You went t’school.”

“You did, too. There are a lot of books downstairs.”

“I’m not much of a reader. It’s all rote in the schools
here. Remember the answer or they whip you with a rule. They beat me all the time. Name a country, I’ll tell you where it is. I know a hundred words of French, fifty of German. You’ll teach me Ashanti.”

“You think I will?”

“I know it. And dance like them, too.”

He had to smile because he could see only her, out of all Englishwomen, in a golden cloth with golden bracelets on her arms.

“You’re laughing,” she said.

“Not at you. I like the idea. Tell me, did you know the man who nearly drowned today? Silcock?”

“ ‘On the way t’St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives.’ But I never met a man called Silcock.” It was as firm a denial as he had heard from Rose, and he was relieved. “Tell me about the big affair today. The Hannays and Rowlands and a pair of murderous hands off a great ape, I heard.”

“It wasn’t the ape that was murderous. They should have had the hands of the Liverpool shipowners who made their fortunes off the slave trade and now send Rowland to Africa to shoot whatever moves and spread the word of God. The men looked like pallbearers, which is appropriate for the poor gorilla, I suppose. The women each wore a hundred yards of silk, and not one of them looked as good as you.”

“Well, I’ve nothing on.”

“A chain of gold would suit you fine.”

“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said so far.”

“If I ever get back to Africa, I’ll send one to you.”

“That’s sweeter yet.” She had the power to make her whole body look pleased. There were harems that could learn from Rose, Blair thought. “You’re not friends with our Chief Constable Moon.”

“Not quite.”

“I wouldn’t let you touch me if you were. He’s scary, isn’t he, like a fright mask? They say he wears iron
leggings for miners’ clogs. I wonder if he takes them off when he goes to bed. He told you about pit girls?”

“A menace to the country.”

“Him and Reverend Chubb. They think they’re guarding the gates of Heaven and Hell. They want us crawling t’them for charity, so they can punish us by handing out one crumb instead of two. They say they want us on our knees t’pray, but they just want us on our knees. The union is with them, is the sad part. As soon as they drive women off the coal chutes, the wages’ll double. Then it’ll be a blow for the working class, as long as the class is men. They ask me, ‘Don’t you want a home and kids, Rose?’ I say, ‘If I could have them without a great, slobbery man, yes!’ Let them rave about my pants. I’d shake my bare bum at them, too, if it made them madder.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?”

“Then they’d lock me up as a lunatic, of course. Moon would personally swallow the key.”

“How did you know about me and Moon?”

“You’ve got your spies, I’ve got mine. Right now I spy a little lie.” She stretched her leg up his. “You said you couldn’t move.”

Lamplight was golden in her eyes. He thought of brass toes waiting in the dark.

She wasn’t much more than a girl, but instead of fleshy weight and satiation, she offered abandon, the chance to leave gravity and exhaustion behind. As if he and she were crew and oars, and having made the trip once already, could now take longer strokes that dipped and left iridescent rings expanding in the air.

Why was this profound? Blair wondered. Better than philosophy or medicine. Why are we made to probe beneath the skin so far? Who was in control? Not him, but neither was she. What was frightening to him was how well they orchestrated, how tightly they
fit
, tumbling
slowly until the master explorer did not know up from down, his hands on the bedpost, feet against the bar, their breathing grown hoarser and more rhythmic while a rope wrapped around his heart, stiffening with every turn.

There was one more twist. He asked himself, was he following Maypole or becoming Maypole?

“I’ll think of you with native girls, won’t I?” she said. “I’ll be with some hairy miner. You’ll be surrounded by black Amazons.”

“When I am, I’ll think of you.”

She wrapped herself in a sheet and hopped from the bed, promising to find something for them to eat.

Idly Blair rose to an elbow and turned the flame up a half-turn. On the nightstand by the lamp, a mirror ball offered a smaller, foreshortened version of the room.

He leaned closer to the face in the ball. Africans had been trading with Arabs and Portuguese and Liverpool merchants for years, but there were people up the rivers of the interior who hadn’t ever had contact with the outside. When he had shown them a looking glass, they were first astonished and then wanted to protect the mirror at all costs because it was clearly a piece of them. Which impressed him, because he had always had trouble identifying himself.

He looked at the side of his head where the hair was shaved. Though the skin was black with a vitreous sheen, he could count eight stitches neatly sewn, and could even see, despite dried blood, that Rose had used red thread. Which was how Harvey came to him.

Blair remembered the inquest for the Hannay explosion and the death certificate for Bernard Twiss, sixteen, “recovered at the coal face by his father, Harvey, who failed at first to recognize him. Identified later by a red cloth he used to hold up his pants.”

Harvey Twiss.

Blair returned to his hotel and slept until the predawn clatter of miners passed below his window, followed by the muffled baas of sheep being herded into town, the tide and countertide that Maypole had written about in his journal. With this double alarm, he rose and dressed to ride to the pit.

At the Hannay mine, the mist was a steady downpour in the dark that Wedge, the manager, ignored. He had a ginger beard and brows that glistened like a hedgerow in the light of his lamp. Outfitted in mackintosh and Wellingtons, he led and Blair splashed in his wake across the yard. Beside the tub rails and railway lines that ran to the sorting sheds, other railway lines stretched across the pit yard to the mile-long complex that was the Hannay foundry, brickyard, lumber platform. Hannay-built locomotives, six-wheeled and pony four-wheelers, their boilers cowled in water tanks, stirred blindly without lanterns across the yard, hauling in wooden-bodied wagons spewing sand or hauling out wagons spilling coal. As a train stopped with the rapid fire of buffers colliding, a man ran alongside the wagons, setting brakes with a shunting pole. Simultaneously, coal carts and wagons pulled by heavy horses steaming in the rain
lurched over crossings. Miners emerged from the lamp shed with safety lamps dim as embers. Kerosene lanterns hung on poles. A circle of smoke and dust rose from around the yard, from the surface stables, workshops and sorting sheds where coal arrived still warm from the earth.

Blair couldn’t see Rose, and he had no intention of visiting her, playing the lord while she tipped coal, though Wedge saw where his gaze had wandered. “Women are the most extraordinary creatures. Work as hard as a man, paid half as much. But thieves! One of those frail little maids will tuck a forty-pound lump of coal in her knickers and skip all the way home. Some managers try to run their yards from a desk. You have to do the paperwork, but that’s what clerks are for. My experience is that if you’re not in the yard, the yard will walk away from you. Coal, cable, lamps, you name it. I keep my eye on everybody, and I make sure everybody knows it, including Mr. Maypole.”

“He came here often?”

“Often enough.”

“Maybe more than enough.”

“Could be. I tried to impress on him that a pit yard was not a pulpit, that sermons had their time and place. There are, I admit, among the miners, lay ministers who might lead meetings down pit, strictly during their tea. Methodists, in the main. The Bishop says if getting on their knees helps miners get out coal, it’s all right with him. I’m afraid, however, that Reverend Maypole took it the wrong way. Being a young clergyman and all, he thought it gave the other side an unfair advantage. I finally had to ask him not to come till end of day. Very embarrassing. But in the yard, spontaneous preaching can be a hazard.”