Rose (40 page)

“Thanks for the walk. I’m off,” Blair said.

Rowland said, “Wait.”

From the mine, they had gone east through the first stands of trees and southeast through a screen of willows to the slag heap of another abandoned mine. Birches, as if they preferred to slum, grew on the slag. Behind the trees was a box hedge and a house.

Rowland climbed the pile. The wind was warmer, and the sky, if anything, was lower and darker than before. His face had a malarial shine. He pointed to a greening copse of alders another fifty yards on and directed Moon to lead Chubb and the keepers in that direction and scare the game up. Again he asked Blair to wait.

“I didn’t tell you about the reception at the Royal Geographical Society. I wish you could have been there. I think every member of the Society was. Some of the royal family, too, to show their interest in items African and geographic and antislavery. We began with a champagne and an exhibit of the maps and intriguing artifacts. The hands of the gorilla were a great success. They wanted more parts, of course. At the end they hung a silver medal and ribbon around my neck and presented me with the gun. A brilliant affair. I could have stayed in London and been feted for the next six months, but I felt I should be here. You haven’t found Maypole.”

“No.”

“But you’ve found something. Charlotte can’t hate you this much for nothing. What is it?”

“You want to marry her?”

“That’s the whole point of your exercise. Have you learned anything that would help force the issue? The Bishop is not the only man who can send you to Africa.”

“You’d do that?”

“I would describe how you came to me full of contrition, begging for a second chance. Just tell me about Maypole.”

“Miss Hannay would want to keep the Home for Women going.”

“Who cares about her Home for Women? Keep her busy. Why not? I could shut it when I want. What is this information?”

Rose’s name was on Blair’s lips, but a hooting and cranking of noisemakers broke out among the trees. Moon and the gamekeepers could have been boys let out of school, he thought. A flock of redwings lifted, sleek black with chevrons of crimson. Rowland fired twice rapidly. The keepers kept up the din and, as the birds turned in confusion, Rowland reloaded and shot again while the men stomped through underbrush.

Blair walked around the hedge to the driveway of the house, noticing that the gravel was unraked and the flagstones leading from the driveway to the door were obscured by weeds. It was not a worker’s house but a full three stories of brick property isolated in a corner of the Hannay grounds; he would have said an estate manager’s house or the residence of a pretentious Hannay company officer. Wrought-iron balconies too grand for their windows decorated the front. An oppressive pediment of stone, a cap from Athens, weighted the brick façade. Ugly, empty, perhaps, but not in disrepair.

Rowland fired and a window shattered.

Blair asked, “Have you considered the possibility that someone’s inside?”

“I don’t think so. Do you know why I was in Africa?”

“I don’t know why the English do anything.”

Rowland aimed his gift from the Royal Society, fired and a second pane split.

“I had no occupation, only expectations. I went to make a name for myself, and who was there to get in my way but you. I return home and here you are again. That’s perverse.”

“I’m working for the Bishop, that’s all.”

“He says you’re helping us. I want you to prove it. What can this information about Maypole be?”

“Shall we go attack some barns?”

Rowland shot at two upper windows. One blew in, the other left a fang of glass.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Blair said. “You’re the next Lord Hannay anyway. There must be any number of eligible women who’d like a title. Beautiful, talented, as avaricious as you. Why do you want to marry Charlotte?”

Rowland’s eye wandered from Blair to take in the alders, the mist and the hills beyond, and a wistful expression appeared on his face. “Because I have imagined it all my life. Because she comes with the property.”

He shivered. Blair caught an overripe mix of cologne, sweat and garlicky breath, the scent the body surrendered when arsenic burned to the bottom of the wick.

“No, I don’t have any information. Nothing about Maypole, and as for Charlotte Hannay, she hates me,” Blair said. “I don’t think that’s news.”

As rain drummed, ringlets drooped on Rowland’s marble brow. Blair didn’t think about the house with broken windows. He imagined the dimmed lights of the map room of the Royal Society, the white rows of evening clothes, a medal around Rowland’s neck. He said, “Let me see your hand.”

Rowland put out his left hand. White streaks lined his nails, and the heel of his hand was a horny callus, trademarks of arsenic addiction. Did any member of the royal family notice them on the reception line? Blair
wondered. Would they have noticed antlers sprouting from Rowland’s head? When he scratched the palm, Rowland yanked it back in pain. Burning palms were another sign of arsenic collapse. “You’ll be dead in a year,” he said.

“So might we both of our diseases or our cures.”

“We have that in common.”

“If I felt better I’d shoot you now, but I don’t have the strength to drag your body anywhere.”

“It comes in waves. You’ll feel better soon.”

“I expect so.”

Blair left Rowland on the driveway and went around the screen of the hedge, controlling the urge to break into a run. By the time he was past the slag heaps, though, his stride lengthened and, gaining speed, he dodged through the willows on the far side.

Reference points were different in the rain, but Blair followed his compass. Water poured in when he opened the mine cover. He let himself down, found the spring gun and, like a man putting the shot with both arms, threw it up through the shaft onto the ground, then swung the base up and hauled himself out. Carrying gun and base, he waded through bracken to where the carriage was still tied, the horse nickering in the downpour. He opened the suitcase, the Railway Companion, and packed the gun and base in towels. Soaked and covered in mud, he whipped the horse onto the path as if Rowland might ride one more wave of energy and fly after him.

At the hotel, he assembled the gun on the threshold of his bedroom with three separate trip strings stretched into the sitting room and rigged between chairs. He approached the bedroom from different ways; each time he touched a string, the snout of the barrel swiveled in his direction and the flintlock slapped shut. He rammed home gunpowder, a linen wad and the rod and sat down in the dark to have some of his own arsenic and brandy.
But with the image of Rowland before him, arsenic lost its appeal. Brandy wouldn’t help either. The problem wasn’t malaria, he decided, it was fear. Between Bill Jaxon, Smallbone and Rowland, he was afraid to leave his room, afraid to answer the door without artillery.

He heard clogs marching home in the street below. The storm ended and the night went from dark to black, as if Wigan had been inverted over an abyss. He felt the fear lapping like water. Nigger Blair in a chair too afraid to move.

Finally he stepped carefully over the trip strings, uncocked the gun’s hammer, pushed the spring gun under the bed, went into his knapsack and from chamois cloth unwrapped a gleam, the brass tube of his telescope.

He went out the rear door of the hotel and took the darkest crossing of the street to the Parish Church, where the whisper of an evening service was taking place at the front pews. Reverend Chubb shuffled around the altar. While the congregation muttered a response, Blair slipped into the tower and climbed the stairs.

From the parapet at the top, the lack of a moon revealed how little illumination streetlamps actually cast. Wigan was a black lake, the sidewalks incidentally visible by the spill of window light.

For once, rain had succeeded in cleaning the air. Stars shone with a clarity and generosity that made the tower seem to rise toward them. He brought out both the telescope and a tripod of adjustable legs with brass fittings that he screwed into the bottom of the telescope and set on the wall.

It depended where a viewer was. Orion stalked the equator, where the Gold Coast lay. The stars of the Southern Hemisphere gathered in white archipelagoes, leaving dark seas in between. Wigan’s northern sky was more evenly ablaze, a bed of burning coal. Where a viewer was, however, depended on the planets—on
Polaris and the morning star, but most of all on Jupiter. It was white to the naked eye. To the telescope, though, the planet revealed rose-colored bands and three moons. Io, a pinpoint of red, hung to the left of Jupiter, and to the right were the gray pearls, Ganymede and Callisto.

As his eye continued to focus and adjust, Jupiter grew and intensified into a disk of roseate paper. Features sharpened: the Great Red Spot and ribboned currents light and dark. With nothing but addition, it was possible to determine the longitude of any visible place on Jupiter. Better, with Blair’s dog-eared book of Jovian tables and Jupiter’s moons, he could determine his longitude on Earth. This was the way navigators did it before the chronometer. It was the way, without an expensive watch, that Blair still did it.

In an hour the moons shifted. Io swung wider. Blair had once seen them through a big Newtonian telescope, which revealed colors that he had never forgotten, so that as Ganymede and Callisto overlapped they changed color to bitter, frozen blue. From Jupiter’s shadow rose the fourth and largest moon, Europa, smooth as a yellow stone.

“What are you doing?”

Blair glanced behind him. He had allowed his attention to depend too much on everyone in Wigan wearing clogs or boots; Charlotte Hannay had climbed the tower in shoes like slippers. She seemed dressed the same as she had been in the morning, perhaps a little more disarranged, although it was hard for him to tell in the dark.

He put his eye back to the telescope. “Finding out where I am. What are
you
doing here?”

“Leveret told me the different places that you went.”

Which meant she had been looking for him, Blair thought, although she didn’t seem ready to say for what.

“Why are you doing that? You can look at any map,” Charlotte said.

“It’s interesting. It calms the nerves. Jupiter has four
moons, and they’ve been observed for centuries. We know when each is supposed to rise according to Greenwich mean time. The difference in time is where you are. The longitude, at least. It’s a lovely fact: there’s this clock up in the sky that we can all check.”

Moons rose fast. Europa was already half into the light shared by its sister moons. He made notes on paper.

“You’re covered in dirt. Where have you been?” Charlotte asked.

“Poking around.”

“Exploring?”

“Yes, ‘walking up and down in the earth.’ That’s what Satan says in the Bible, which proves Satan was an explorer. Or at least a miner.”

“You’ve read the Bible?”

“I’ve read the Bible. When you’re snowbound in a cabin for the winter, you read the Bible more than most preachers. Although it’s fair to say I think missionaries are shills for millionaires who are trying to sell Manchester flannel to the world. Of course that’s just one man’s opinion.”

“So what else have you gleaned from the Bible, aside from the conceit that Satan was a miner?”

“God was a mapmaker.”

“Really?”

“Without a doubt. Nothing but maps. In the beginning a void, waters, heavens, earth, and then He lays out the Garden of Eden.”

“That is indeed the reading of a small mind.”

“No, of a fellow professional. Forget Adam and Eve. The important information is, ‘A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good.’ ”

“You are obsessed with gold.”

“So was God, obviously. Take a look.”

Blair moved to the side, but Charlotte waited until he was at arm’s length before she took his place at the eyepiece. She looked through the tube longer than he expected.

“I do see little white dots. I didn’t even know you could see that much,” she said.

“In Africa it’s even better because there are no lights at all. You can see the moons without a telescope. Straight up is best, of course. Lie down and you can feel the universe move.”

She stepped back into the dark. “You were shooting with Rowland today?”

“I watched him blast some inoffensive birds.”

“You didn’t tell him anything?”

“No. I don’t think you’re quite so terrible that I’d put you directly into Rowland’s hands.”

“So where are we? By the moons, I mean.”

“Well, I haven’t figured that out yet. You didn’t know about this escapade Maypole had in mind, to go underground with the miners, pursue them and preach to them during their miserable half-hour break for tea?”

“John wanted to preach in the yard.”

“No, down pit, a mile down at the coal face. What I don’t understand is what put it in his mind. Being a preacher is one thing; a masquerade is something else. You see what I mean? It’s not unusual for a curate to join miners in sports, but it would be unique for him to try to pass himself off as a miner. He wasn’t that imaginative. Where did he get the idea?”

“What else don’t you understand?”

“Why anyone would help him.”

He waited for her to mention the fright he had given the girl in her cottage. Since this was the second time that she hadn’t brought it up, he assumed that the girl hadn’t reported his visit.

“You can’t wait to get back to Africa, can you?”

“No.”

“It seems to have great allure. I’m beginning to understand how much you miss it.”

What is this? Blair wondered. A little light in the dark? Sympathy? Something besides withering scorn? It struck him that Charlotte’s voice wasn’t as tight as usual, and there was more shine to her eyes in the dark than in the day.

“You obviously care about the Africans,” she said. “We are supposed to send troops to help them, but all we do is shoot them.”