Rose (44 page)

Blair had Leveret’s carriage and had rolled over every hole on the way, or so his ribs said. He tied the horse and went in the shop door, ringing a bell above it.

“Busy, busy. Look around, look around,” a voice called down the stairs over a wail that sounded like a baby being bathed.

The population of Wigan, perhaps of the whole British Isles, seemed to inhabit the shop’s walls, tables and multiplicity of frames. The usual personages gathered in unusually democratic assembly: the Queen, royal family, Wellington, Gladstone, plus such regional honorees as a lord mayor, members of Parliament, local matrons in fancy dress, washed faces in a workshop, prize cows,
atmospheric studies of fishermen and nets, London from a balloon and a locomotive wreathed in garlands at a Hannay pit. An aquiline Disraeli faced a melancholy Lincoln; the preacher Wesley thundered to a music-hall Juliet. In a self-portrait a photographer with spiked mustache and brows smugly held a shutter cord. And everywhere were Wigan pit girls, in individual and group portraits, and in
cartes de visite
the size of playing cards. They posed singly and in pairs with a variety of shovels and sieves, with sooty faces and clean, but always dressed in trademark shawls, heavy shirts, vestigial skirts rolled and sewn out of the way of pants and clogs. In one or two instances the same model was shown in matched pictures of herself in filthy working garb and cleaned up in a Sunday dress to show that one day out of seven she could be a female.

When the bawling went on for five more minutes, Blair climbed the stairs to what looked like the backstage of an opera. Peeling backdrops of Scottish highlands, ancient Rome, the Grand Canal, Trafalgar Square and turbulent seas leaned against one another in the illumination of a whitewashed skylight. Stuffed parrots and silk flowers drooped over file cabinets. Fake banisters, urns, mantels, chairs, rustic stumps and country stiles were arrayed along one wall. Along the other were a black curtain and posing stands that looked partly like calipers, partly like instruments of torture.

The window at the front of the studio was hung with cloths and tapestries, and here the photographer was posing two children, a girl of about ten who leaned against a balustrade as stolidly as an ox against a post, while a baby already half her size screamed and squirmed against the sash that secured it to a chair. A toy monkey on a wand was attached to the camera tripod. The photographer popped out of the camera’s cloth to rearrange the girl’s arms. He may have waxed his mustache
à la française
, but he sounded Lancashire to the core.

“Gentle curves, dear, gentle curves.”

Sitting to the side, out of the camera’s view, was a heavy woman with the glower of a duenna holding something wrapped in bloody paper. The butcher’s wife, Blair thought, paying in trade.

“Watch t’monkey, please.” The photographer rushed back to his camera and jiggled the wand. Blair recognized Hotham from the photograph downstairs. Apparently self-portraits were easier; his hair was plastered forward in poetic curves, but he had the white eye of a drowning man. As he ducked under the cloth the baby thrashed from side to side and howled.

“If we don’t like the picture, we don’t pay,” the mother said. “No picture, no pork.”

“Lookit, Albert.” The girl smirked as her little brother waved four limbs at once.

Blair lifted his hat and pulled down the scarf that had muffled him to the eyes. His face was shadowed with bruises and stubble, the cut on his brow livid, his hair cropped and the scalp tracked with dried blood where it had been repaired. The girl’s mouth formed a mute and anxious O. The baby ceased its noise, rolled forward and gaped. They remained in these positions when the shutter was released.

From under his cloth the photographer said, “Not quite what I had in mind, but very nice.”

Hotham accommodated Blair as a customer who looked as if he might choose to shatter every frame in the shop.

Blair said, “You photograph girls.”

Nervously the photographer patted his hair with fingers that smelled of developer and spirit lamp. “Proper cards, in good taste. Portraits on request.”

“You also sell them.”

“I do
cartes de visite
. Visiting cards, if you will, sir. Very popular, sold at all t’stationers, passed between friends and business associates, collected by connoisseurs.”

“Of women.”

“All sorts. Religious tableaux, the Queen, all the royals. Divas, celebrities of the stage. Gaiety ladies and ballet dancers, women in tights, very popular with the soldiers.”

“Workingwomen.”

“Match girls, needle girls, fisher girls, iron girls, ladies’ maids, milkmaids, whatever pleases your fancy.”

“But your specialty?”

“Pit girls. I should have known what you had in mind. For discriminating gentlemen there is nothing like a Wigan pit girl. Some say pants on women are a social scandal. All I say is, buy a card and judge for yourself, sir, judge for yourself.”

“Show me.”

Hotham pointed to the different portraits and
cartes
on view. Blair had already studied them, and the photographer sensed his disappointment. “I have hundreds more. This is the premier pit girl studio in t’country.”

“I’m interested in a particular one.”

“Give me her name, sir. I know them all.”

“Rose Molyneux?”

A tentative smile. “Red hair, very pert, classic vixen?”

“Yes.”

The photographer plunged into a counter drawer. “I have them organized, sir, categorized and alphabetized.”

“She has a friend named Flo.”

“Yes. I even have some of them together. See?”

He stood and placed four
cartes
on the counter. Two were with Flo, Flo grasping a heavy shovel and Rose holding a coal sieve like a tambourine. Two were of Rose alone, one with the shawl pinned coquettishly at her chin, the other with the shawl open and her head tilted in coarse suggestiveness toward the camera.

Except that it wasn’t Rose. Not Blair’s Rose. It was the girl hiding in Charlotte Hannay’s cottage.

Blair produced from his jacket the photograph he had
brought. The Rose he knew with a scarf turned into a mantilla that hid half her face. “Then who is this?”

“Unfortunately I don’t know.”

“You took it.” Blair turned to the studio’s name in elaborate scrollwork on the reverse of the card. He didn’t mean it as an accusation, though the photographer took a cautionary step back.

“In December, yes. I remember her, but I never got her name. She was remarkable. I think she came in on a dare. The girls do, sometimes. I asked for her name because I did want her back.” Hotham cocked his head at the picture. “What a tease. She had a flash, you know, a pride. She didn’t even tell me what pit she worked at. I showed people the photograph and asked, but with the Christmas trade coming on and all, and then the explosion in January, I forgot about her. Sorry.”

“Did you ever ask Reverend Maypole?”

“Now that you mention it, I showed him a picture because he did know so many of the girls. He said he didn’t know her.”

“That was all he said?”

“Yes, but you know, he was so taken with the likeness that I gave it to him.”

At the office of
The Wigan Observer
Blair searched through the book
Lancashire Catholics: Obstinate Souls
until he found the reference he was looking for.

The newspaper editor had been watching Blair from under his visor since he had entered. “It’s Mr. Blair, isn’t it? You were here two weeks ago?”

“How many Candle Courts are there?”

“Only one.”

“Built by the Hannays?”

“For miners. Some of the oldest houses in Wigan.”

“Still owned by the Hannays?”

“Yes. Remember, you were here with Mr. Leveret reading newspapers about the explosion? I want to apologize because I didn’t recognize you then. With your own book on the counter? I must have been blind.”

You’re speaking to the blind, Blair thought.

From the distance of the alley, Blair kept pace with the miners’ march home through the street. It was a Saturday, fun in the offing and a day’s rest ahead. Between corners, he followed them by the sound of their clogs, a tide of rocks. The calls of street musicians and candy vendors joined in. Overhead, doves took flight against the evening.

Mill girls were going home, too, but they made way for the pit girls. He saw Rose and Flo pass under a streetlamp. Flo pinned a paper flower to her shawl and danced a jig around the smaller woman.

When Blair lost sight of them he was afraid that they would turn off to a beerhouse or pub. In back of Candle Court, he loitered in the alley until a lamp was lit in Rose’s kitchen. Flo looked out the window—no, admired herself in the glass as she replaced her shawl with a plush hat with velvet flowers. She turned to talk, vanished from
sight and returned a minute later to the window, pensively at first, then with increasing interest in her reflection, finally with impatience. She added the paper flower to the garden in her hat and was gone. Blair was at the back door in time to hear the front door open and shut. No one answered his rap, and the back door was locked.

The neighboring houses sounded like carousels of clog stomping and shouts. He waited for a peak to drive in a windowpane with his elbow. When no one appeared in alarm waving a poker, he unlatched the window and climbed in.

No one had started tea. The parlor was dark, with no candle in the front window to let the faithful know that a priest had come to serve the Eucharist, so he lit his own bull’s-eye lamp. He opened the closet and kicked the floor for hollow boards. He hadn’t actually seen Rose either enter or leave the house, but he was expanding the parameters of the possible, he thought. Most people, for example, would think it impossible to live in the dark or underground, yet in Wigan half the people did.

There were no false boards in the kitchen, either, but the pantry floor sounded like a drum, and under a hooked rug Blair found a trapdoor that opened up to a ladder and released an upwelling of black, brackish air. He quickly went down the rungs and shut the door before anyone in the tunnel would feel a draft, and he aimed his lamp low so that the beam wouldn’t carry far.

Laid long before the use of rails and tubs, the tunnel floor was polished from the ancient dragging of sledges weighted with coal. The walls, rock streaked by tracer seams of coal, transmitted distant reports of the life just overhead: the muffled slam of a door, the trotting of a cab against a sibilant background of subterranean water. Timbers propping the ceiling moaned with ancient fatigue. By the time he had paced off a quarter of a mile his compass said that the tunnel ran northeast, toward Hannay Hall. He knew that fresh air must enter along the
tunnel or it would have been permeated with gas, and fifty yards on he heard street sounds filtering down from an overhead grate almost overgrown by bushes. After another fifty yards the tunnel widened into confession stalls and benches carved out of the living rock. A remnant seam of coal was cut into a series of black chapels with crude altars, shadowy crucifixes and the perpetual attendance of black Madonnas carved in bas-relief. Ahead, where the tunnel narrowed again, he saw a lamp. He shielded his own light until the other lamp disappeared at a curve in the tunnel, which allowed him to move faster and chance more noise. He was aware that the person ahead was traveling silently and quickly, familiar with the way. He started running, dodging water that had collected in the middle of the floor. The tunnel dipped and bent to the side as he expected, but when he came around the curve he was confronted by two lamps aimed at him.

Blair’s own lamp lit two women very much alike. One was the girl he had seen dressed in silk at Charlotte’s house, though now she wore the drab clothes and pants of a pit girl. The other was Charlotte in her usual ebony silk dress and gloves, but her hair was loose and red and her chin was smudged with coal.

The two were almost identical in features, height and color, but totally different in expression: the girl from the house regarded Blair with the blank eyes of a rabbit caught in the light of a train, and Charlotte glared at him with pinpoint fury. Otherwise they were images in a distorting mirror that made each woman half of the other.

“It’s him. What do we do now?” the girl asked.

Charlotte said, “If I had a gun I’d shoot him, but I don’t.”

Blair said, “You probably would.”

The girl said, “He knows.”

Charlotte said, “Better go home, Rose. Now.”

“This is t’last day, then?” the girl asked.

“Yes.”

Blair made room for the girl to pass in the direction he had come from. As she edged by he saw the subtle difference of less forehead and more cheek, and watched her fear melt to a pouty anger. “Bill’ll have yer skin,” she said.

“Third time’s the charm,” Blair said.

She left him with the ghost of a spiteful glance. “He’ll bury you, too, where t’worms can’t reach.”

Rose Molyneux slipped around the curve, and he heard her clogs hurry into the dark. His eyes stayed on Charlotte, waiting for an explanation. She twisted from the beam of his light.

“If that’s Rose, who are you? Did I catch you in transition? Were you changing yourself from a flame back into a lump of coal?”

Charlotte said, “It was all coming to an end anyway. The days were getting lighter.”

The tunnel was cool as a crypt. The steam of her breath was no more ephemeral than she was, Blair thought. “That’s true. I never saw the Rose I knew in the light. Except for the first time, when I was blind drunk.”