Rose (31 page)

“You were in the yard when the fire broke out?”

“Yes, and thank God I was. Every second counts in a
situation like that. Fortunately I was in a position to organize immediate assistance to the men below.”

“Exactly where?”

Wedge slowed for a step. “Here, in fact. I remember the blast as good as knocked me off my feet right here.”

It was too dark for Blair to estimate distances. “Was there any confusion?”

The manager splashed on. “Not a bit. As I told the inquest, a properly run pit is prepared for the unexpected. With my first breath I sent runners for help and medical assistance. Then I organized a corps of volunteers and, with the emergency supplies we had on hand, sent them down in the cage. They were on their way in less than five minutes.”

“You know a miner named Jaxon?”

“Jaxon was one of the heroes of the fire.”

“Did you see him before the explosion?”

“Waiting to go down pit with the others. He seemed to be out of sorts, quiet, wearing a muffler. Of course it was a wet day, which brings out the methane, which makes miners glum.”

Something stood out in Blair’s mind, though he wasn’t sure what. “There was a manager from another pit, a Molony, who said he saw the smoke from his pit.”

“No wonder.” Wedge waved his arms. “Smoke like that is half coal dust. Like volcano ash. Here in the yard you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Horses bolting everywhere, trains still rolling, and you’re trying to remember if you’re standing on a track or not. It takes a while to stop a loaded train. Now that I think about it, it was a dark, nasty day, but Molony saw our smoke, no doubt about it.”

“A messenger arrived from George Battie, the underlooker, so you knew the cage was working. But you had to get rescuers organized and that meant have them each sign out a lamp.”

“From the lampman, right. That’s the purpose of the
lamp system, to know who is down pit and who is up, especially during the mayhem of a fire.”

“But then the volunteers had to wait at the shaft for the cage to come up. Why was that?”

Wedge slowed and twisted his eyes back toward Blair. “Pardon?”

“Where was the cage? Battie’s messenger had come up. The cage should have been here, you shouldn’t have had to wait. Why wasn’t the cage still at the surface?”

“I don’t see that it matters. It didn’t hold us up for more than ten seconds.”

“When every second counted, as you said.”

“Not that much. It didn’t matter at the inquest, and it matters less now. Ten seconds, maybe twelve, who knows, and the cage came up and the properly assembled and equipped rescue party went down.”

“No experienced miner, no experienced rescuer, would have tried to go down without your direction?”

“That’s correct.”

“What about someone inexperienced, not a miner?”

“Mr. Blair, perhaps you’ve not noticed, but I’m aware who’s in my yard.”

“Where is Harvey Twiss?”

Wedge came to a halt. “Not here, not anymore.”

“Where can I find him?”

“Why do you want him?”

“Harvey Twiss was not on the list of rescuers, but according to the inquest report Harvey Twiss found his son. I assume you sent him down. I want to ask him about the explosion.”

“I didn’t send him down.”

“The report says he went down.”

“I didn’t send him.”

Blair was baffled. He didn’t know what they were arguing about.

“Where is he?”

“Harvey Twiss is in the Parish graveyard. The same
day he buried his boy, Bernard, Harvey laid his head on the railway track in time for the London train. Now they’re both in the ground, side by side, father and son. But I didn’t send him down.”

A rivulet of water ran off Blair’s hat. Feeling immensely stupid, he started putting together the pit manager’s hostility about Twiss and his touchiness about the cage. He squinted through the rain up to the tower, then followed the diagonal of winding cables down to the windowless brick structure of the engine house.

“Twiss was your winder?”

“The only bastard in the yard I couldn’t see. The only man I couldn’t keep my eyes on, and he abandoned his post.”

“When did you find out?”

“I caught him sneaking up with the boy in his arms. Both black as spades, but I was keeping a sharp lookout for him by then.”

“Then?”

“I discharged Twiss on the spot. No reason to be in the inquest report, nothing to do with the fire, but son or no son, he abandoned his post.”

Inside, the winding house was tall, built to accommodate a steam engine the size and design of a locomotive, although instead of driving and carrying wheels, the rods drove a single vertical eight-foot drum. As cable groaned off the drum and angled up through a door in the house peak, the slates of the roof hummed in sympathy.

Winding houses appealed to Blair, their great stationary engines like something powering the rotation of the earth. The Hannay machinery was handsome work—a drum of heavy iron, twin pistons and rods of yellow brass, the boiler of riveted steel—all huge and intricate and dwarfing the winder, a man with a pinched face who sat in a mourner’s dark hat, overcoat and gloves, a drop suspended from the tip of his nose, and with levers at
hand. His attention was so given to a white dial lit by two gas lamps that his only reaction to the entrance of Wedge and Blair was a tick of his eyes. Although he was in the center of an industrial yard, he could have been a creature interred in a tomb. By the door a sign said,
ADMITTANCE TO THE ENGINE HOUSE IS ABSOLUTELY RESTRICTED
. Signed,
THE MANAGER
. Another sign said,
DO NOT DISTRACT THE WINDER
.

“Don’t mind us, Joseph,” Wedge said. He shook water from his beard. “Joseph is watching the indicator.”

Indicators were familiar to Blair. It was a big word for a simple dial with a single hand. The face of the indicator was marked “S” at three o’clock for Stop, “T” at two o’clock for Top, “B” at ten o’clock for Bottom and “S” at nine o’clock again for Stop. The hand of the indicator was perceptibly inching counterclockwise to “B,” which meant that a cage of men or tubs was descending the shaft at speeds approaching forty miles an hour. When the hand reached “B,” Joseph would apply the brakes to slow the cage and stop at “S.” There were no automatic brakes. If he didn’t stop the reel, the cage would hurtle with undiminished speed into the bottom of the pit. The metal cage itself might be salvaged, but nothing inside it would survive. Or, going in the opposite direction, if he didn’t apply the brakes at “T,” the cage would overwind, crash into the headgear and catapult its contents off the top of the tower.

“No one else comes in?” Blair asked.

“Not allowed,” Wedge said. “The engine furnace is stoked from the outside.”

“No friends?”

“No.”

“No girls?”

“Never. Joseph is a Temperance man, not like Twiss. Free of vice and gossip and idle tales.”

As the indicator arrow hit “B,” Joseph switched to the brake lever until the dial came to rest at “S.” The moan of
the cable died. For a minute the cage would now stay at the bottom of the pit to be unloaded and loaded again.

Wedge said, “Joseph, Blair here has a question for you. The day of the explosion, you were stoking outside. On his own volition, short minutes after we felt the force of the explosion, Twiss ran out of this building and sent you in to run the cage. I did not see him do so, and I certainly did not send him down pit, isn’t that true?”

When Joseph nodded solemnly, Wedge shot Blair a look of vindication.

“You have a clean job indoors now, don’t you?” Wedge went on.

Joseph drew a handkerchief from his sleeve. Rain and the first gray, downcast light of day crept through the cable door. Blair wondered whether a little arsenic would be out of place. “When Harvey Twiss grabbed you and made you winder, was that before the first party of volunteers went down or after?” he asked.

“After,” Joseph said.

“So it’s all worked out for the best, hasn’t it?” Wedge said.

Joseph blew his nose. Blair was ready to go, but as if his own internal flywheel had been started, Joseph added, “Twiss was a victim of foul habits. Cards and drink. How Mrs. Smallbone put up wi’ him, ah’ll never know.”

A bell by the dial rang twice, signaling that the cage was ready to be brought up.

“Why would Mrs. Smallbone have to put up with Twiss at all?” Blair asked.

Joseph raised his eyes sadly, as if from a bier. “Twiss roomed at Smallbones’. Making a penny is not a sin, but letting a sinner into a Temperance house never led t’good.” He pushed the cable lever and the drum began its counterrevolution, ponderously to begin with and then with growing speed.

Now that he had light, when he got back outside and was alone, Blair paced distances from the engine house
to the shaft, to the overlooker’s shed, then to the middle of the yard. Rain was falling too hard for him to see more than an outline of the sorting shed, and nothing of Rose at all.

He saw Charlotte as soon as he returned to his hotel. She was leaving the chemist’s shop across the street, a small figure in a walking dress of an obscure color that he couldn’t distinguish as either purple or black. Her face wrapped in a bonnet and veil of the same inky hue, with matching umbrella and gloves, she could only be Charlotte Hannay or someone bereaved. What caught his attention was that she wasn’t moving at her customary brisk pace. An unopened umbrella hung in her hand, and she went only as far as the milliner’s window before she stopped and stood in the rain as if unsure in which direction to go. Or more likely, he decided, waiting for her carriage.

He avoided her the way he would walk around a spider, went up to his room, slapped off the rain, had a brandy for the circulation and spread out a map of the Hannay yard. What was clear to him now was that the yard had been a scene of blind confusion as smoke poured out from the explosion below. He was ever more impressed with the heroic efforts of George Battie in the tunnels underground, but Wedge was a poor witness as to what had happened above. The manager claimed he had dispatched a rescue party in a cage within five minutes of the explosion. Adding the time it would have taken Wedge to get his bearings, find wagons with horses that hadn’t bolted, collect volunteers and distribute safety lamps, Blair thought that fifteen minutes was a better estimate.

He opened Maypole’s journal, flipping through pages until he found the entry he wanted. Because the lines ran across one another, he had misread the words for
January 16. Not “How to enter that second world. This is the key,” but “Twiss is the key.”

If the one place in the Hannay yard that Wedge’s eye did not reach was the engine house, the possibility existed that with the connivance of the winder, Harvey Twiss, Maypole could not only have hidden there, but, obscured by the smoke of the fire, crossed unseen the short distance from the house to the shaft and descended in the cage to that realer world he craved just as it was exploding, an act equally idiotic and badly timed. In his fervor it might not occur to a would-be savior like Maypole that in a mine fire anyone who was not a miner was at best an obstacle.

The slightest chill pricked the hairs of Blair’s arms and he allowed himself another brandy. From the window he was surprised to see Charlotte Hannay still outside the milliner’s shop. She could exchange her bonnet for a hat, he thought—something in barbed wire, perhaps. The milliner herself bobbed out under an umbrella to pantomime an invitation of shelter. Charlotte appeared not only deaf to the offer but blind to traffic as she stepped off the curb. She crossed Wallgate in front of a milk cart, startling the driver. In his room, Blair threw up his own hand reflexively. A churn tumbled off the cart and spilled a white skirt over cobblestones. Without the least notice, Charlotte continued at the same abstracted pace into an alley on the hotel side of the street.

Blair had never had an opportunity to observe Charlotte Hannay apart from their confrontations, when she had always had the busy focus of a wasp. Perhaps it was the rain, but from the perspective of his window there was such a wet and beaten quality to her that he almost felt sympathy, and there was something dreamlike about the way she glided out of sight.

He went back to the inquest report and spread out the underground map of the pit. If Maypole did go down, what happened there? Thanks to Battie’s cautious advance on
the Main Road, no rescuers were overcome by afterdamp. All the bodies were identified, all the workings searched. Had Maypole, covered in soot, come back up the cage holding one end of a stretcher? Had he then wandered off in shock? The curate had preached so often about Hell, how had he liked his first taste of it? But wandered to where? Blair found himself back at square one. The more he speculated, the more far-fetched his theory appeared. On the other hand, no one had seen Maypole since. And it was all after the fact. Nothing Twiss or Maypole did or didn’t do could have affected the explosion itself.

He returned to the window. Diluted by water, dashed by wheels, the spilled milk was still a visible lace among the stones. A little stone lady, he thought, was what Charlotte Hannay was. He didn’t know why, but he picked up his hat and went out in search of her.

The alley was crowded with whelk and oyster stalls, sheep heads crowded together, tripe draped like rags. Blair pushed through to a row of fish barrows, salt cod stacked under canvas sequined with scales. There was no sign of Charlotte; it didn’t help that she was small and dark.

At the other end of the alley was an outdoor market of shoddy-clothes hawkers, mostly Irish, and tinsmiths, mostly Gypsies. Stitched and restitched greatcoats and overshirts hung like wet sails. Where the market forked, he chose the street that he realized led toward both Scholes Bridge and Maypole’s room. In the mud he found the dull imprints of clogs and the single impression of a lady’s shoe. Mixed in the mud were twists of sheep scat. He remembered the flock he had seen in the morning and the sheep Maypole had noted in his journal.

Beyond a court of small foundries was another track of clog-flattened mud and the imprint of a shoe so small it could have been a child’s slipper. Brick walls bowed and, overhead, rooflines almost touched, admitting a narrow
sheet of rain that disappeared into shadow. He stopped at Maypole’s door, sure he would find her visiting, but the room was as bare as he had left it days before, the portrait of Christ the carpenter still hanging in the dark, the boards of the floor dry except for the threshold, where someone had opened the door to glance in only minutes before.