Rose (32 page)

Back in the alley, the way became ever more foul from sheep. Blair came to the knacker’s house and pen he had noticed on his first trip to Maypole’s. For all the signs of sheep, the pen was empty. Fluffs of sodden wool clung to the chute that ran into the house. Because the house was a terminus without shutters or door, he saw Charlotte within. He checked the impulse to call her name because he could tell she was standing on the edge of the knacker’s drop.

What knackers did was to drive sheep off a drop of thirty feet or so to break their legs and make them that much easier to kill. Blair crept close enough to see that an enterprising Wiganer had used the shaft of an old mine. Work had just finished because a faint lantern revealed walls and floor that had been plastered and whitewashed, butcher blocks, meat hooks screwed into walls, and a blood trough that ran below the hooks and emptied into a pail. Blood and offal covered the floor and smeared the walls. What light reached up from the drop had a rose-colored hue.

The toes of Charlotte’s shoes were over the edge and she leaned forward, headfirst. A dive at that distance would do the job, Blair thought. Although he saw her mainly in silhouette, he imagined her white brow pointing down, her dress snapping out behind her.

“Ashanti don’t have sheep,” Blair said. “Goats, yes. Monkeys, guinea fowl, lizards, too.”

She balanced, eyes forward, concentrating like a tightrope walker on her next step.

“And grasscutters, which are giant rodents, and forest
snails, also giant. A knacker in Kumasi would have a real menagerie.”

When he moved in her direction, she teetered more toward the drop. He retreated a step and she straightened. Magnetic repulsion, he thought, the best example he’d ever seen.

“The snails take enormous cunning. Set out cornmeal and lie in wait by moonlight.”

“And elephants?” she asked softly. “Do you shoot them, or do you wrestle them to the ground?”

“Snails are more in my line.”

“But not gorillas. You didn’t like Rowland’s gift, or is it that you don’t like my cousin Rowland?”

Although her voice was small, it had its usual allotment of contempt. Under the circumstances, he took this as a good sign.

“I just wonder what Rowland did with the rest of the gorilla.”

“You don’t like him,” Charlotte said.

“And Earnshaw, what happened to him?” Blair asked. “He’s not interested in the abattoirs of Wigan?”

“Mr. Earnshaw has returned to London.”

On schedule, as Hannay had said? Blair wondered. When he tried to look at Charlotte, she turned her face away. Her dress was spotted and soiled at the hem, and her shoes were ruined. At least the draft rising from the old shaft seemed to press her away from the edge. He was surprised that the red reek—the oily, airborne taint wherever blood or animal matter was processed—didn’t knock her back. She was tougher than he had thought.

“Blair, what kind of a name is that?” she asked. “You are supposed to have been born in Wigan. I looked at all the church records. There were no Blairs.”

“It wasn’t my mother’s name.”

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your father’s name?”

“No one knows.”

“Haven’t you tried to discover who they were?”

“No.”

“You’re not curious? You’re more interested in John Maypole than you are in yourself?”

“As soon as I find Maypole, I can leave Wigan. That’s what I’m interested in.”

“You’re the most anonymous man I’ve ever met.”

“The fact that I’m not interested in Wigan does not make me anonymous.”

“But you are. Not American, African or English. Perhaps you’re Irish. Celtic hermits used to sail away from Ireland, letting Providence set their course, praying to be cast ashore in distant lands so they could become anonymous. Do you feel Irish?”

“Sometimes cast ashore, but not Irish.”

“Then there were penitential pilgrims who wandered to the Holy Land to atone for the worst crimes, murder or incest. Do you have something to atone for?”

“Nothing that grand.”

“You haven’t been in Wigan long enough, then.”

He tried to circle and inch closer, but she seemed to sense his every move, like a bird ready to take flight. A little dark bird with an umbrella in one wing.

“You don’t like anonymity,” Blair said.

“I envy it.” Her voice dropped. “I envy it. How close are you to finding John?”

“Maypole? I don’t know. It would help if you told me something about him.”

“I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”

“Anything. He didn’t hint about any big plans or fears?”

“John was always full of great plans. He had a great heart.”

“Had?”

“See, there you go, picking my words apart.”

“Only trying to understand whether I’m looking for
someone dead or alive. Who left on his own or under pressure. Why do I feel I’m the only one who wants to find him?”

“What do you mean?”

“The Bishop hired me to find Maypole, but now he seems to care more about your forgetting him.”

“Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“No. Just tell me, do
you
want me to go on looking?”

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s not pretend it does.”

“You were engaged to him. You loved him.”

“No. John wanted to help me. I let him, and that was weak of me.” She spread her arms wide.

“Maybe I can help you,” Blair said.

“Is that pity I hear?” she asked as if he had offered her a handful of worms.

“How can I help?” He resisted the urge to try to snatch her back from the drop.

“Can you fly?” Charlotte took a deep breath, turned and planted her toes on the ground and her heels over the edge. With her back to the drop and the poor light, the draft pressed her dress around her so it appeared she was falling. “When my father was young, he used to leap over shafts.”

“I heard. You’re as crazy as he is.”

“You’re hardly one to talk. Is it true that you’re fighting with miners?”

“No.”

“And seeing a pit girl?”

“No.”

She lost her balance for a moment. Her arms wavered. Dirt ticked off the wall of the drop and a stone echoed from below.

“I’ll leave Wigan,” Blair said.

“What makes you think I’d care whether you left Wigan?”

“I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“My father will find someone else just as terrible as
you. Worse, if possible. Thank you for the offer, though. It makes your lies complete.” She raised her umbrella with both hands as a counterweight and stepped from the edge. Blair offered his hand. She ignored it and walked through the dark and muck of the house as if she were crossing the rug of a parlor.

“You’ve done this before,” Blair said.

“As a girl, a hundred times.” At the door she looked back. “Was the famous Blair afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t think you’re lying about that. That’s something.”

It was a wet dusk when the miners returned from the pits. The warming smoke of chimneys created a new layer of clouds, like the smoke of battle after a city had been razed to the ground.

From the belfry of the Parish Church, Blair focused his telescope from street to street, lamp to lamp. Rain had dissipated to a drizzle that made stones shine and reflected sound. What looked like white smoke rose from a crumbling wall, moved laterally in the wind, turned on itself, scattered, regrouped and wheeled around and around the roofs. Doves.

More doves appeared as miners opened more dovecotes. Dogs barked. A darker plume of smoke approached the London & Northwest station. Horse cabs rolled at a trot down Wallgate to the station. When Blair lifted the telescope he could follow the transit of coal trains across every quadrant of the horizon. It could have been the Russian steppes or the Great Wall of China for all it had to do with him, he thought. He was annoyed that Charlotte Hannay had tried to find his name in a church register. Why would she bother, unless Hannays maintained a feudal interest and thought of everyone in Wigan as a serf and everyone who left it as an escapee.

He found the blue slate roof of Candle Court. The row
was all Hannay houses. He had checked at the company office on his way to the hotel, and Molyneux had been the name on the rent roll since the previous October. Every week Rose and Flo paid in rent six times what they made.

Doves returned to their yards. Night spread in gray and black bands of smoke and haze. In front of dry-goods stores, clerks cleared sidewalks of dolly tubs and hoes. Bone barrows made the rounds of stalls behind Town Hall. Butchers locked their shutters.

Maypole had always intercepted pit girls at the Scholes Bridge, the main crossing between the miners’ neighborhood and the center of Wigan. Blair borrowed the tactic with the use of a telescope. At six, he spied a row of black dresses with bustles making a snakelike parade that appeared and vanished at different points, to finally emerge on Wallgate and march to the door directly below him. A church society that looked like a witches’ coven, he thought.

The image of Charlotte on the edge of the drop continued to distract him. She had been so desperate that in spite of himself he had felt sympathy, until she stamped on it. Which was fine, he preferred his dislike pure.

At seven, Bill Jaxon passed under the lamp at Scholes Bridge. He was alone and, for all his size, moved quickly out of sight. Blair swept the streets and alleys with his telescope until he found him at the butcher stalls. From the stalls he had an improved view of the front entrance and side exit of the hotel. Blair had left the lamps burning in his room so that Bill would have something to watch. The safe thing would have been to stay in his room. He decided that safer still was to plunge ahead, find Maypole and leave Wigan completely.

There was a flaw in this reasoning, he knew. It was a little like Charlotte Hannay standing at the drop.

Smallbone lived on a narrow street that had half subsided into ancient mines and left the remaining houses leaning
as if arrested in the act of collapse. A shout answered Blair’s knock and he let himself in.

Though the parlor was unlit, Blair was aware of the gaze of Mrs. Smallbone multiplied in portraits and pictures of different Temperance assemblies; the smaller frames had rounded glass that magnified her severe, unrelenting eyes. Chairs were draped in crepe. A table wore a black skirt, as if half of Mrs. Smallbone were present. As he passed he touched the keys of a harmonium. Ivory: the elephant’s graveyard discovered in Wigan. The air itself was pungent with a gritty, oddly familiar scent.

Smallbone was at the table of a kitchen identical with those of Mary Jaxon and Rose Molyneux—a small room ruled by a massive range and warmed by the grate—except that his had been turned into a kind of bomb factory. A rack of strings soaked in great pots of saltpeter on the range. Rope lines of fuses hung from wall to wall to dry. On the floor was the source of the smell that Blair had recognized: small open kegs of gunpowder. Grains of it covered the floor planks and table, and a shadowy haze of it hovered in the air. On the table were empty flutes of waxed paper, a scale and coin-shaped weights, and a coffee mill. There was stature to the scene and to Smallbone, as if he were sitting in no mere miner’s kitchen but was a business magnate among glowing foundries and volcanic chimneys.

If Smallbone was startled by his visitor, he recovered well. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said. “I wish Mrs. Smallbone was here. She’s out for the evening. She’s a woman for good works. I think tonight it’s the improvement of ladies of loose morals, or stoning them t’death. She runs the north of England for the Queen, that’s all I know for certain.”

“May I?” Blair slapped rain from his hat into the basin.

“How are you feeling?” Smallbone asked. He seemed to think Blair should be crippled.

“Good.”

“You seem to be. Well, I wish I could offer you something on such a nasty night. Mrs. Smallbone left me bread and tea t’dip it in. Us being a Temperance house.”

Blair had brought brandy from the hotel. He set it on the table. “Is this a mistake, then?”

Smallbone’s nose quivered like a root for water, as if it could smell through glass. “Not that I don’t deserve a drink, mind, after a day’s work and the long walk back in the rain.”

“I know that Dr. Livingstone, the missionary, advised red wine for chills.”

“Well, there you are.”

Smallbone found two cups and, with the interest of a fellow chemist, watched Blair pour. The miner’s face was washed to his collars, his hands clean to the cuffs, the lids of his eyes red from the occupational irritation of coal dust. With his first swallow, his eyes teared with relief. “Mrs. Smallbone is probably praying over some heathen right now. Reverend Chubb is probably kneeling at her side. They’re pulling the oars for both of us, bless them.”

“To Mrs. Smallbone.”

They drank to her.

“You don’t mind if I go on?” Smallbone asked. “I make my own shots and I make extra to sell on the side.”

“I wouldn’t want to bring business to a stop.”

“Thank you.” He produced a long clay pipe and topped the tobacco in the bowl with an ember from the grate.