Rose (38 page)

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Fine, I’ll drive Charlotte to it.”

“That’s beneath you. You wouldn’t do that.”

“Nothing is beneath me. I’m wet, I’m burned and I’m ready to leave. Like Earnshaw. Earnshaw was a setup, wasn’t he? The great reformer? He was brought by Hannay to keep Charlotte entertained. You told me Earnshaw wasn’t courting, so you knew everything.”

“Charlotte is wealthy and attractive.”

“Charlotte has the allure of a young asp. Anyway, I don’t like being another Earnshaw, and I don’t like being part of the setup for Rowland.”

“He’s the future Lord Hannay.”

“He is a homicidal maniac. What a family!” Blair combed his hair with his fingers; it occurred to him that the horse was better groomed. “You told me that Charlotte has her own cottage on the grounds. Where?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I want to talk to her, to reason with her.”

“It’s the quarry cottage. Back on the lane, past the Home, you’ll see the quarry, and then you can’t miss the house. What if she won’t talk to you?”

“Well, I still have my original option. I find Maypole wherever he’s rotting or hiding. Hannay didn’t pay Maypole to disappear, did he?”

“John wouldn’t, no more than you.”

“You never stop hoping, do you?”

The lane was two furrows in a blanket of last year’s leaves. Beeches green with moss and black with soot held back a tangle of thorns dripping water. Half a mile on, one side opened to a meadow with a flock of sheep white against a backdrop of trees, while the other side offered glimpses of houses on Wigan Lane, no longer distant but approaching the perimeter of Hannay Hall.

One last turn brought Blair over a hill and along a stone wall that protected the traveler from falling into an
abyss where the entire other side of the hill had been carved out. He stopped to look from the height of the carriage he had borrowed from Leveret The drop was at least a hundred feet, the gritstone wall overgrown with algae and desperately hanging shrubs, the bottom a dismal lake lost in shadow. The house that seemed to go with the quarry, though, made a contrast. Its bottom story was built from dun-colored quarry stones, but the upper façade was white Tudor, a chevron of black beams capped with a cheerfully coxcombed red-tile roof. Between cottage and quarry were a small stable, greenhouse and dovecote. Around the house itself was a border of rosebushes that were bare and daffodils just opening their hoods. Smoke trailed from a tall brick chimney. Everything about the house seemed inviting.

When Blair knocked at the door there was no answer. Since he had seen the smoke, he went back to the kitchen door. There was no response there, either. Through the window the kitchen was dark, a long table set for one, a pastry on a plate beside an exotic orange. In the hallway were candlelight and a young woman in a white dress that mirrored the flame. He saw her clearly only for a moment before she blew the candle out.

From her red hair he had thought at first that she was Rose, but her face was too round. In a way she resembled both Charlotte and Rose; yet Charlotte would have regarded him with cool outrage, Rose with the languid indifference of a cat. All he had seen staring out of this girl’s eyes was panic.

He called through the door, again received silence in return, and he could almost feel the easing of floorboards as she retreated deeper into the hall. The quality of her dress, a watered silk, suggested a specimen of the upper classes. Her fear, though, made him speculate that she might be one of Charlotte’s charges from the Home for Women, a fallen pit or factory girl hiding in the cottage
from a righteous father. Whichever, neither rapping nor calling could entice her to the door.

He gave up and drove away. Rain steamed off his horse. He remembered that he looked like a Gypsy, a tinker, trouble of one sort or another. Not the kind of face that opened doors.

To a degree, not finding Charlotte at home was a relief. He didn’t know what he had expected to say to her, whether to explain his relative innocence about the Bishop’s motives, or to give the devil in himself full rein and whip her toward Rowland. If he had received anything but aristocratic contempt from Charlotte, detected a single heartbeat of human softness or warmth, anything like Rose, it would be different. At the knacker’s drop he had offered to leave Wigan, and Charlotte had thrown the offer back in his face as if she were picking up a rag on a stick.

His mood was accompanied by a darkening wind and a scrabbling of branches overhead. He lit the carriage lamps, though he trusted more to the horse’s good sense than what he could see. Why he had even contemplated a second offer of truce to Charlotte he no longer knew.

The grounds were coming to an end; by his compass, the lane was bearing north, away from Wigan. A gust picked leaves and swirled them around him like bats. When he was beginning to think he had lost his way, the road showed two brilliant, parallel lines of light, and from far ahead came the low beat of thunder.

In that blinding instant it struck Blair how extraordinary in their different ways Charlotte and Rose were, and how nothing but the most ordinary prettiness shone from the face of the girl in the house. Charlotte and Rose were fashioned in opposite ways, but both were gold, just as the third girl was dross.

The north gate was of wrought iron that had long ago rusted open. Tall beeches had been replaced by evergreens
limping in the wind. Following Leveret’s instructions, Blair paced off fifty steps and found himself waist-high in bracken. In the beam of his bull’s-eye lamp, over a wave of ornate ferns, was a birch, always the first tree growing on coal slag.

At the tree he heard a ping of rain on metal. He tracked the tapping to a three-foot iron square that he swung back on a hinge, and the ping was blown away by a draft rising from below. He lowered the lamp slowly. Methane loved old pits, and he wanted to leave Wigan on foot, not through the air. Unlike a miner’s lamp, a bull’s-eye lantern was not designed for reading gas because the flame was enclosed in metal and aimed through a lens. All he could go by was the color. The light stayed a safe yellow as it picked out a tunnel floor ten feet down. There were no rails, placing the mine back to a time when coal was dragged in sledges. Blair went to the carriage and returned with a rope that he secured to the birch. He rigged the lamp through his belt and went hand over hand down the rope into the shaft.

The floor was wet and slick, the timbers of the walls and roof bowing from age and rot. The open area of the pit eye was supported by freestanding pillars of corrupted stone; he thought a hard breath might bring them down. The tunnel was a miniature operation compared with the Hannay pit, but the genesis of Hannay industry. There were hundreds of mines like this around Wigan, and thousands of even earlier ones, “bell pits” that were nothing but holes hollowed out for coal until they collapsed.

Feeling one-eyed, he followed his lamp into the tunnel. He saw no footprints, but the fact that the shaft cover had opened at all suggested that the mine had been visited recently.

As the tunnel dipped, water striped the walls at the angle of descent. Toadstools fringed the ceiling. On damper walls glittered a remnant of coal carved out and
hauled away long ago. His light caught a tail vanishing into a hole; there would be rats, mice, beetles; nature abhorred a vacuum. As the roof lowered, he fell into a miner’s stooped walk. Big men had trouble learning the gait. “
My muscles ache
,” Maypole had written.

The tunnel ended fifty yards on, where the coal strata had abruptly dipped and dropped out of reach, and dust had accumulated against a gritstone wall. A freestanding pillar of coal was left in the middle of the tunnel, and Blair imagined the temptation it must have been to miners who were paid only by the coal they brought out. Still, it was important to come out alive.

He searched in sweeps of the light. Pearly, half-formed hands of stalagtites reached down from the roof. A black pool lay underneath. In the ebony powder at the pillar’s base was the horseshoe print of a clog iron. Scuff marks on the stone floor could have been made by someone trying to get used to the stiff, rocking action of clogs. But more than walking had been practiced. The walls were scarred with pick marks that ran straight as a chord and then scattered in clumsy imitation.

The tunnel had the chill of a crypt. Blair shivered and treated himself to a sip of brandy. When he put the flask away, he saw another curiosity, a brattice—canvas stretched on a wooden frame—leaning against the end wall. Brattices were used to direct ventilation between tunnels. This was a single, primitive tunnel with no need for brattices at all. Unless it was hiding something behind it.

As he approached the canvas a timber knocked off his hat. When Blair twisted to catch it, he was blown off his feet. He spun through the air and rolled end over end. The tunnel filled with powder smoke; he was choking on it even while he didn’t know whether he was up or down. His eyes smarted, blinded. His head rang as if his eardrums had burst.

On hands and knees, he crawled around the floor,
found the lamp, still lit, and burned his fingers before he got it upright because he could tell only by touch. He crawled in the other direction, feeling his way until he reached water falling through the shaft. He looked up into the rain with his eyes wide open until they were washed enough for him to see. His body felt slapped by a giant hand, though he found no blood or broken bones, only a round hole that ran through his shirt, his jacket and the oilskin of his raincoat. He wet a handkerchief, tied it over his nose and mouth, and went unsteadily back into the tunnel.

In the atmosphere at the end of the tunnel, smoke and dust still swirled and eddied. The canvas had been knocked aside from a device with a fat, wooden stock and a short, flared barrel that sat like a cannon on a steel ring. It was called a spring gun. Below the trigger ran a chain with rings tied to strings. Blair brushed dirt away. The strings were attached to cords stretched across the tunnel floor. When a man tripped a cord, as he had, the gun swiveled in his direction and the trigger snapped shut. A spring gun wasn’t for game, but for poachers. A mankiller, outlawed, but still used.

Blair aimed his lamp along the muzzle. In the coal pillar just behind where he had stood was a steel rod an inch in diameter, and driven so firmly into the coal that it couldn’t be budged. But for his stumble, he would be bleeding to death. Born and died in Wigan. Funny when he thought about it. To leave, go around the world and come back home for this. With his penknife he cut off a piece of trip string. It was woven cotton, the sort for wicks and fuses.

Hearing returned as the sound of water insinuated itself, dripping with clocklike regularity from the roof to the smooth, pulsing surface of the pool below.

He had never before experienced the panic of being trapped underground. Standing in what should have been his grave, he felt fear blow down the back of his neck.

* * *

It was midnight when Blair got back to his room. He tore off his shirt. A red sear ran along his ribs.

He pulled off the rest of his damp clothes, poured himself a brandy and went to the window. The street was black and yellow, wet stones reflecting lamps. A constable in a helmet and cape shuffled up Marketgate as slowly as a sleepwalker. He stared into the void behind the shops. There was no reflection off brass toe caps to see, no knock of clogs to hear.

Traps had an anonymous character. Anyone could have set the spring gun. Maypole’s journal and the height of the pick marks on the tunnel walls indicated Jaxon. But the use of fuse string as trip wire and the slyness of the trap suggested Smallbone, that one-man factory of homemade explosives. As a former poacher, Smallbone would be familiar with spring guns.

This didn’t exhaust the possibilities. George Battie had been a poacher and he didn’t want the coroner’s inquest reopened. And who had directed Blair to the tunnel but Leveret? He had proof of nothing. He could have been assassinated! by the Temperance League or the Wigan Brass Band.

He touched the welt, proof of only one thing. It was time to go.

At the dry-goods store, Blair bought the stout sort of luggage covered in American canvas called a Railway Companion, along with rope, bath towels, a four-inch length of one-inch-wide rod, a pair of wrenches and a pound sack of gunpowder. He didn’t buy one, but noticed miner’s safety lamps at attention on a shelf. Then he drove out to Hannay Hall and detoured to the Home for Women.

This time he approached the mock castle of the Home from the garden side. Through the long windows at the stairs he saw gray uniforms rushing to class or catechism, a stir like pigeons in a stone dovecote. Damp weather had cleared the benches outside. No one, not even a gardener, was visible on the long slope of the lawn between the Home at the top and the hedge at the bottom.

On the near side of the hedge was one small, recognizable figure. In a black dress and leather gauntlets, Charlotte Hannay was again pruning her roses. Her wide-brimmed hat sagged in the mist and copper strands of hair stuck to her cheek. Between trees and garden was a space of twenty yards. Blair knew she saw him coming, though she didn’t look in his direction. The raw welt on his ribs asked to be coddled, but he had the sense that no weakness should be revealed to Charlotte Hannay.