Rose (42 page)

“Constable’s coomin’!” the stableman shouted from above.

Not fast enough. Bill tore open Blair’s knapsack.

“No,” Blair said weakly.

Bill unwrapped the telescope and swung it against the
wall. As the brass tube bent, broken glass poured out like sand. He tossed the tube aside and gave Blair another kick in the head.

What Blair knew next was that the lanterns had gone. He lay without moving until he was sure he was alone in the dark. He didn’t feel for damage. He didn’t particularly want to know. Some of him was numb. He wished it all was.

It would have been simpler to push him off the drop. He remembered his mother falling from the ship. In retrospect the waves seemed warm and restful, certainly softer than the knacker’s floor.

He told himself that if he could reach a wall, he could find the door, and if he could find a door, he could reach the street. But the effort of lifting his head made it swim, and his last conscious act was not swallowing the tooth in his mouth.

Water woke him. The stableman had returned with a lantern, bucket and sheets.

“There was no constable coomin’, you know, but Bill was going to kick thi inside out. In fact, I think he did.”

Were those his own hands, Blair thought, so red and amphibious? He washed them with the last water in the bucket before he put his fingers in his mouth, found the empty socket and pushed the tooth back in.

The stableman toweled him with the sheets. “You can go t’constable but it won’t do thi any good. We’ll all stick up for Bill, and you were messin’ with his girl, he says.”

“Rose?” Blair tried to speak without moving his jaw.

“Who else?”

The lightest touch on flesh felt like the edge of a blade. What Blair waited for was the more pointed response of a fractured arm or rib moving in separate directions.

“Your head looks lahk a meat pie.”

Blair grunted with nausea, agreement and lack of surprise.

“Ah washed the coal dust out of the cuts as best ah could so you won’t look like a miner for the rest of your life, but you’ll want t’get sewed up and on a train as fast as you can. Bill won’t rest until you’re gone. Ah’ve kept your clothes as neat as I could and saved your hat and shoes and pack. I’m truly sorry about the looking glass. Can you stand?”

Blair stood and passed out.

When he woke again, he was in the cart. He was dressed and the cart was rolling, so that was progress. He held the slits of his eyes open to see a lamp pass overhead.

The stableman was pushing the cart by himself. He looked in and asked, “Is there anything else I can do for thi, Mr. Blair? Something ah can get?”

Blair muttered, “Macaroni.”

“Maca …? Oh, I get it. Macaroni. Lahk in Africa. That’s a good one, Mr. Blair. We’re almost there. Ah’ll get thi to thy room, don’t worry.”

The stableman had made a bed of sheets, but the jostling of the cart made Blair feel as if he were being rolled directly over cobblestones. He struggled to lift his head. “Maypole?”

“No one knows. Forget him. Ah’ll tell thi, Mr. Blair, ah’ll miss thi more.”

He heard someone say,

It was better than last rites.

His eyes were swollen shut, his limbs distant and unresponsive. If he raised his head, he was nauseated from a swelling on the brain. He wheezed through a nose that had been broken at leisure and reset in haste, and slept profoundly or couldn’t sleep for more than a minute before the work of breathing or the prick of a stitch summoned his attention. When he heard miners walk to work in the morning, he dreamed of clogs and winced, as if his head were a cobblestone.

Tea and laudanum were forced through his lips. Laudanum was liquid opium, and the images flowed through his mind, a great unraveling of memory. One moment he
was in bed in Wigan, the next stretched at his ease on a red hill in Africa, and the next burrowed for safety’s sake as deep underground as he could go.

A miner in uniform climbed down into Blair’s pit, took off a brass helmet to protect its ostrich plumes and tentatively touched the wall.

“Can you hear me? It’s Chief Constable Moon. You’re living very high, Blair, very high. I’ve never had a room like this to myself. Look at this wallpaper. Feel the flocking. Soft as a virgin’s bum. Am I right, Olive? Soft as a virgin’s bum? The maid wouldn’t know, Blair. No more than you.” As he buffed his helmet with his sleeve the plumes turned every move into a flutter. “Well, I suppose it was a slip on the stairs? An accident? I just want to be sure you aren’t shamming, taking the Bishop’s money and lolling about in bed with only a broken head and maybe a rib or two. Bad enough you should upset honest working people, accosting women and provoking the men, but when you take advantage of a local girl you can’t come tugging the sleeve of the law for protection. The men here protect their own.” He leaned close. “Fact is, I found it hard to believe you really were the famous explorer, but you certainly look like Nigger Blair now.”

Blair saw in his inward eye a field of daffodils with a pit girl walking through them, gathering a bouquet. She was at the crown of a hill; he was at the bottom, blinded by the sun. No matter how much he called, she didn’t hear.

Leveret joined him in the hole.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, but I wanted to tell you that Charlotte has acquiesced to marrying Rowland. Actually, she agreed the day after you were found in your … condition. The Bishop is very pleased, in good part thanks to you, and you’re free to go as soon as you
are able. I have recommended an extra bonus for you and a letter obliging the Bishop to sponsor your return to the Gold Coast. You’ve earned it.” Leveret knelt on the coal. “I have a confession. I knew when you came that the Bishop’s interest was more in forcing Charlotte’s hand than in finding John Maypole. I did hope, though, that you might find him.” Leveret’s voice dropped. “So you got involved with a woman. You’re only human.” He added, “I envy you.”

An ember chimed the hour. He thought of Charlotte’s cottage, where a redheaded girl hid in the dark.

Dark was comfortable. He heard in the tunnel not Leveret, but someone more familiar: old Blair, of all people, stumbling in a beaver coat and a whiskey fog, whistling and offering bits of song.

He dropped into a chair and let his coat slide, revealing a black front and an ecclesiastical collar. A book of faded red hung in one hand, a lamp in the other. He screwed up the wick and held the light over Blair.

“More poetry. How is your medieval French? Not too good, you say? As good comatose as conscious? Fair enough. I’m told we should read to you to keep your mind alive in case it is alive.” He opened the book. “Smell that?”

A rose, Blair thought.

“A dried rose,” said old Blair.

A pony fell down the shaft, its white tail and mane snapping like wings, ticking first bricks and then timbers on the way down. The horse’s tail trailed out behind.

* * *

Old Blair returned. Blair was happy to see him not only back from the dead but trading up, exchanging his moth-eaten fur coat for the crimson-lined cape of a bishop. The old man was anxious. After offering some pleasantries and getting no response, he sat silently in the dark of the tunnel for an hour before pulling his chair nearer. A visitor to the comatose is practically alone, and words have a license they usually lack.

“You’re right about Rowland. I only hope he breeds a son as fast as possible. Then he can poison himself, for all I care, but he will marry Charlotte first. She has the strength of the Hannay line. It either goes through her or becomes a feeble caricature, and we’ve enough families like that, with heirs too dim-witted to speak to anyone but their nannies, or else as queer as Dick’s hatband. Long after Rowland is food for worms, Charlotte will have Hannay Hall to run, like a republic if she wants. Old families have odd problems.” Blair smelled a soft scent of roses again. “And curious prizes. Remember, last visit I was reading you the
Roman de la Rose
. I hope you weren’t expecting the Bible. The
Roman
was the great poem of the age of chivalry.” Blair heard a rustle of pages. “Once there were hundreds of copies, but we consider ourselves fortunate to have a surviving one that has been in the family for five hundred years. Too bad you can’t see the illustration.” Blair imagined a brilliantly painted scene of an amorous couple in a canopied bed framed by flowers of gold leaf that glittered and shifted in the lantern’s flame. “It’s allegorical, of course. Decidedly sexual. The poem is set in a garden, but instead of a Tree of Good and Evil, at the center is a single rosebud that the poet passionately desires. You couldn’t write like this now, nor publish it. All the Chubbs and Mrs. Smallbones in the land would rise up against it, banish it, burn it. I’ll translate as I go, and if you find it excruciatingly dull, lift a hand or bat an eye.”

Blair made a pillow of the coal to listen. It was the sort
of antique, endless tale that grew like a concentric garden, and his mind wandered in and out, catching and losing sight of the story. Venus, Cupid, Abstinence played hide-and-seek from hedge to hedge. Narcissus paused by a pool.

He tried to use his time in the dark to good effect by going over the day of the fire. He had a new advantage. The pieces of information he had were scattered like the tiles of a half-seen mosaic, and he had tried before to bring a perspective to the little that he knew. Now that his own brain was scattered, he let each small, separate glimpse expand.

He could see Maypole join the miners’ early-morning trudge to work. It was black and wet, and the curate was dressed for the pit in clothes borrowed from Jaxon, his inadequate chin hidden in Jaxon’s scarf.

They moved over Scholes Bridge through Wigan and, still before dawn, across the fields. Maypole hung back but stayed part of the group, identified as Jaxon by his size and by Jaxon’s mate Smallbone walking at his side.

Blair lost them in the lampman’s shed. Did Smallbone pick up both men’s lamps? Did “Jaxon” get his own, tucked into a scarf? From the murk of the yard they descended into the black of the shaft. Inside the cage, close bodies smothered the weak nimbi of safety lamps. “Jaxon” coughed and everyone turned away.

At the pit eye, miners gave George Battie, the underlooker, no more than a wave as they headed for the tunnels. “Jaxon” and Smallbone were quick to move out of Blair’s sight, although once they were in the tunnel, they stopped for “Jaxon” to set something right with his clogs, while other miners, who might notice that “Jaxon” was suddenly as clumsy as a curate, went ahead.

Better yet, the damp weather had brought methane out of the coal. Since Battie had prohibited shots until the gas cleared, the fireman and “Jaxon” had a slack day, hewing coal for lack of their usual labor, but at a slow pace, not exerting themselves enough to strip. They worked at the farthest reach of the coal face, where no one could see beyond his lamp for more than a few feet. On this day, Smallbone could have been working with anyone. The real Jaxon came into the yard later and slipped into the winding house in case of problems.

If someone on that coal face had noticed that the Bill Jaxon below was, so to speak, not himself, that his costume or acting had slipped in the dark even for a second, no one on the surface would ever know now that all those men were in their graves. There might be no mystery to Maypole’s vanishing at all if so many hadn’t vanished with him.

What happened then? He tried to imagine further, but he saw Maypole’s journal, and the script of vertical and horizontal lines that filled every page confused his eye. Sentences looked not so much like words as a trellis of spiky canes that even as he watched began to show red buds.

Old Blair, as if he understood French, translated in Hannay’s distinct, rolling cadence: