Rose (34 page)

“That Charlotte thinks I’m lower than the pox, is that progress, too?”

“It helps make up her mind. The sooner she helps you, the sooner you’ll be gone, and then you’ll both be happy.”

The miniature Peacocks led the way. If England didn’t have the fantastical variety of life that Africa did, Blair admitted some relief on encountering insects that weren’t intent on sucking, stabbing or boring into him. He looked at his compass and caught Lydia Rowland at his elbow.

“Have you been successful in your search for Reverend Maypole?”

“No.”

“Do you have suspicions?”

The word was innocent on her lips. The butterflies circled her as if she were delicious.

“No.”

“But Blair has been working hard,” Hannay said. “I understand he has been interviewing people from every level.”

“That is wonderful to hear,” Lydia said. “I visited the poor once with Reverend Maypole, and his parishioners were good people with the most patience and the brightest children. We sometimes forget while we go on with our daily lives that we are being made comfortable
by men who are hard at work beneath the very ground we walk on.” She faltered at the thought. “There might be men chipping at coal underneath us at this very moment.”

“That’s profound to contemplate,” Leveret said.

“We’re a bit far from the pits,” Hannay said.

“Violets,” Lady Rowland said to change the mood.

Lydia brightened gratefully. “ ‘A violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye!—Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky.’ Another flower?”

“Hemlock,” Charlotte said. She had come up the path so quietly that no one had noticed. Or she had dodged from shadow to shadow, Blair thought, because she was in a sort of anti-sundress of black silk with matching bonnet, boots and gloves, a cross of the sporting and the funereal. A glare lurked within the shadow of her veil like a flame in a safety lamp. Blair was struck by how young she was despite such grim attire.

At a knoll where the jagged stones of a wall were set into high grass like dragon’s teeth, gamekeepers unrolled a Turkish carpet and set out from a hamper a blinding service of silver and mother-of-pearl. The hampers disgorged rabbit pies, Cumberland sausage, potted duck, savory pies, porcelain jars of chutney, sauce and mustard, biscuits, cheeses and corked bottles of wine. The gamekeepers imitated footmen, carving pies and handing out plates, and then retired behind the wall. Hannay bowed his head and asked God’s blessing on people who were, it struck Blair, already generously blessed. Nevertheless, he felt the site’s undeniable appeal, the walls of stone adding a backdrop to the roll and toss of high grass in the wind. A lark lifted from a nest and rose vertically, trilling like a waterpipe. Air played with the ribbons on the brim of Lydia Rowland’s hat as she bent her neck in prayer. When they began to eat and Lydia lifted her veil, kid gloves still on, she delicately cut her rabbit pie and
raised each forkful to her bow-shaped mouth. In contrast to Charlotte, who refused to raise her veil to drink or eat.

“Do you ever eat?” Blair asked her.

“When I can stomach it.” She asked her father, “Why do you persist in inflicting Blair on me?”

“To find my missing curate. You know that. To drag Reverend John Maypole from wherever he is hiding. Or until it no longer matters whether we find him or not.”

“What do you have against John?”

“What do I have against Maypole?” Hannay repeated the question and answered it idly. “Not his idealism, because that is a natural stage of a man’s life. Not his stupidity, because the greatest fool can sound wise if he simply sticks to the breviary and the Bible. But one thing I did not appreciate was his obsession with reform. Which leads to social agitation, which is not welcome in a Hannay mine.”

“Your uncle means unions,” Lady Rowland told Lydia.

“Blair is going to find him, though,” Lydia said. “I feel quite sure this will all have a happy ending.”

In the distance, two shots sounded as quickly as a fusillade. The dogs liberated themselves with a sudden tug and escaped in the direction of the sound, their leashes dragging after them.

“Cousin Lydia, what is a happy ending to you?” Charlotte asked. “Marriage, baby, house calls, balls? Have you considered that it might simply be the chance to have your own life?”

“I do.”

“Pit girls are freer than you. They make a pittance, but have you ever made a penny? Would you uncover your arms, pay your own rent, wear pants?”

“Who would want to?” Lady Rowland asked.

“Perhaps she wouldn’t, but would she dare? Or would freedom crush her life like an empty hatbox?”

“She has all the freedom in the world. Also expectations and obligations,” Lady Rowland said.

“To keep her dance card full but not tiresome, to be bright but not clever, to order dresses from Paris but store them for a year so she will be fashionable but not French.”

“And to marry well and be a benign influence on whoever that man is, yes.”

“Well, Cousin,” Charlotte turned back to Lydia, “you can start with Blair. You pretend to be interested. Scrub him and groom him and teach his tongue softer words until he pads by your side like a lapdog.”

Lydia’s eyes welled with hurt. A nearer round of gunshots approached. She shook at the sound and her tears spilled.

Blair said to Charlotte, “Your father’s paying me or I wouldn’t be within a thousand miles of this hill. If you’re so free, why are you here?”

“Who said I was free?”

Blair escaped. He left the Hannays and Rowlands, climbed the stones, hiked along the wall and watched clouds arrive from the sea. They could be ships bearing him away, he thought. As a boy he had watched clouds, wondering about their routes, and here he was again, as if a day hadn’t passed. They sailed overhead while their shadows slid across the hills from west to east. A kestrel hung on the breeze, watching for mice. If the little hawk could stay at this latitude, Blair thought, what points would it pass over? Newfoundland, the Aleutians, Lake Baikal, Minsk, Hamburg, Wigan.

He sank into the grass, closed his eyes and listened to the far-off trill of larks, the oboe calls of crows. Beneath him he could almost hear the trooping of ants, the tunneling of moles and worms. He felt his eyelids and hands relax. Grass was better than a bed. He was only aware of falling asleep when he awoke to see a man with a shotgun silhouetted against the sun.

“ ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils.’ And you.”

Blair rose to his elbows. Rowland had eyes as blue as the sky at his back.

“I see daisies, no daffodils.”

“No matter.” Rowland had hair of tarnished gold worn wild, old tweeds, high boots. He broke the breech, extracted smoking cartridges, and smoothly fed in new ones.
Dispassionately
—that was the word that came to Blair’s mind—which carried both the denial and residue of passion. Rowland reminded him of Maypole’s painting of Christ the carpenter. Christ with a gun. The spaniels came running up, one with a bloody magpie in its mouth, the other with a lark.

“I wasn’t really hunting. It’s just that a gun lends punctuation to a walk.” Rowland patted the dogs and they nuzzled close, smearing his boots and trousers. “You’re somewhat far afield, aren’t you? Dreaming of home?”

Blair had been dreaming of the hills outside Kumasi, of palm fronds shifting before a rain and the muezzin’s call to prayer.

“Yes.”

“I often come here, too. Out of sight of human habitation. Sometimes I think of Adam. The hunting he must have had in the Garden of Eden. All the animals freshly created. We can search the earth and never know its like.”

“I don’t think there was any hunting in the Garden of Eden. Adam survived on fruit, anything but apples. No sex and no blood—I think those were the rules.”

“No hunting?”

“Not at first.” Blair got to his feet. “Remember, it was only after the Flood that God let Noah hunt and put the fear of man in animals.”

“You’re with the Bible Society now?”

“With the Bishop.”

“So I’m told.”

Rowland’s attention was distracted by sweat on his brow. From a snuffbox he emptied white powder into his palm, twice as much arsenic as Blair had ever seen in one hand before, and ate it in a single swallow.

“Malaria?” Blair asked.

“What a good guess.”

“No guess at all.”

But there was more. Rowland proceeded to wipe the wet residue from his palm onto his cheeks. Blair had heard of women using arsenic to lighten their complexions, but not men.

“White faces frighten the natives,” he said.

“I think in your case that’s gilding the lily.”

“You look like hell too, Blair.”

“White man’s graveyard.”

“West Africa?”

“Wigan.”

Rowland brushed the muzzle across Blair’s chest. “You could be right.” His eyes trailed along the wall. “Are my mother and sister here, too?”

“And the Bishop and your cousin, Charlotte. I thought you were going to bask in glory in London for a while, educate the Royal Society, write a book, entertain the Queen. Why are you back?”

“Something I saw.”

“What?”

Rowland smiled and said simply, “Something wrong.”

When the two men joined the picnic, Lady Rowland and Lydia were overwhelmed with surprise and delight, but Blair saw nothing so innocent on Hannay’s face. Charlotte’s greeting to her cousin was a cold kiss through her veil.

It was all strange to Blair. He knew nothing about families. All the same, after the first flurry of excitement
and the Hannays and Rowlands had settled back down on the carpet, it struck him how distant they were with one another. Of course, Rowland was at least ten years older than his sister. From what Blair had heard about the English of their class, children were almost instantly shipped off to school, so they might hardly be friends. Charlotte took the farthest corner of the carpet, a still life in black. Lady Rowland was the most natural; she sat close enough to her son to stroke his hand, as if to reassure herself that he had returned in the flesh.

Hannay distributed champagne with the mock solemnity of a Mass. “The father of the Prodigal Son said, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ Even better than a Prodigal Son is a nephew who returns bearing honor and fame.”

Rowland said, “That is me, I assume, not Blair.”

“That is not amusing. Please,” Lady Rowland said. “How was London? Tell us about your reception at the Society. How did they like the gift?”

“Those frightening hands,” Lydia said.

Hannay said, “Since you decided to return, Rowland, Reverend Chubb would like you to meet some workingmen. Not a bad idea.”

“Blair says you must have shipped the rest of the gorilla in another box. Is that true?” Charlotte asked.

“Blair would hardly understand what an explorer does,” Lady Rowland said. “No disrespect to Blair, but he was your father’s employee in Africa. He worked for money. Isn’t that true, Blair?”

“Still am and still do,” Blair said.

“Such a wonderful familiarity with all of us,” Rowland said.

“Do you feel the slave trade will be coming to an end soon?” Lydia asked her brother.

“Only when Britain protects free men,” Rowland said.

“Britain shipped eight million slaves to the Indies and America,” Blair said. “Walk around Liverpool and see the African heads carved over the doors. Britain is simply pulling out of the business.”

“If that doesn’t show you the difference between idealism and the man who works for cash, what does?” Lady Rowland asked Charlotte.

“What happened to your head?” Rowland asked Blair.

Blair knew that out of them all, Rowland would be the one to sniff out blood.

“Maybe he tripped in the dark,” Charlotte said.

“Which reminds me,” Rowland said, “is Maypole dead yet?”

Hannay said to Charlotte, “Not dead, but almost buried. Until Maypole is, Blair will be hard at work.” He gave the gamekeepers a nod toward the hampers. “My God, I’ve worked up another appetite.”

As soon as the hampers were open, the spaniels stole meat and raced around the perimeter of the party, dodging the efforts of gamekeepers to catch them. Blair helped Leveret chase them up the hill, and when one of the leads tangled between rocks, free the leash and take the dog in hand.

“Leveret, what the hell is going on?”

The estate manager had been almost perky since the incident at the canal. His face fell at Blair’s tone. “What do you mean?”

“I was supposed to find Maypole. Now it’s either find Maypole or look until Charlotte loses interest?”

“Breaks her engagement to Maypole. That’s what the Bishop wants.” Leveret kept his head down and worked busily with the leash even though it was unsnagged. “Then you can go on your way, I suppose.”

“Why wouldn’t she? He’s disappeared, missing for months. Sorry, Leveret, but I know there was no great
romance there, not on her part. She has a walnut for a heart, as far as I can see. Why shouldn’t she get engaged to someone else?”

Leveret whispered in a rush, “The Bishop wants her to marry Rowland.”

“Her cousin?”

“Nothing unusual about that.”

“Rowland?”

“The Bishop seized on this idea as soon as John disappeared. Charlotte is resisting. Rowland is a change from John.”

“From Christian martyr to mad dog.”

“Do you know the hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm? ‘I was made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.’ It seemed to John to especially evoke miners and pit girls. Lord Rowland does not share that sympathy.”

“The hundred and thirty-ninth?”

“It was John’s favorite. He started every sermon with it.”

Leading the spaniel along the wall, seeing the black Hannays and the golden Rowlands together, they did seem complete to Blair. Like a completed puzzle, he thought, though exactly what the puzzle was, he still didn’t know. Complete and beautiful, the Hannays in their somber wool and ebony silk, the Rowland women in petal-like folds of crepe de chine on the little field of the Persian carpet, on the greater carpet of the hill.