Rose (45 page)

She started to go and he grabbed her wrist. It was disorienting for him to talk to a Charlotte with wild red hair and the strength of a pit girl, as if he had hold of two women at the same time.

“You’re put out because I fooled you.”

“You did. I preferred
your
Rose Molyneux to the one I just met. More than Charlotte Hannay. How did you do it?”

“It wasn’t hard.”

“Tell me. People have been trying to kill me, thanks to your game. I’d like to know.”

“Attitude. I covered my hair, dropped my shoulders,
wore gloves so no one would see calluses from working at the pit. And I’m taller in clogs.”

“More than that. Your face.”

“Pinched for Charlotte Hannay, that was all.”

“And the language?”

Charlotte put her hand on her hip and said, “As if tha knew owt aboot t’way we speighk in Wigan or at t’Home fer Wimmen. Ah’ve oonly heard it aw me life.” She added in her normal voice, “I acted.”

“You acted?”

“Yes.”

“And Flo acted?”

“Flo is a pit girl. She was my wet nurse’s daughter. We used to come into town together and play Wigan lasses.”

“It was fun?”

“Yes. In masquerades that’s what I always was. Not Bo Peep or Marie Antoinette: a pit girl.”

“And the family always had the tunnel from the cottage?”

“My father used it for his visits to Wigan, for his girls and fights when he was young.”

“Does your father know about this charade?”

“No.”

She tried to wrench loose and he pinned her to the wall. In the light, between her flaming hair and mourning dress she was one woman, then the other.

“How did you find Rose?”

“She came to the Home for Women last year. She was from Manchester and she was pregnant. She’d just started working at the pit. She wasn’t on the register at the Home. I couldn’t persuade her to stay.”

“You noticed that you looked alike?”

“I was amused by our physical similarities, and I began to think how odd it was we could look so much alike and yet lead such different lives. Then she lost the baby and had a fever and would have lost her place at the pit, so I went in for her. She had no old friends here; the other girls hardly knew her. It wasn’t as difficult as
I thought it would be. It was just for a day, and then for a week, and after that we took turns.”

“Rose liked the idea of trading?”

“I put her in my house. She much preferred wearing nice dresses and eating sweets to sorting through coal.”

“What a social revelation. Bill Jaxon’s sweet on
her?
”

“Yes.”

“Which was an arrangement I was upsetting, coming to the house in Wigan, but you didn’t want to warn me. Why did
you
want to trade and play the pit girl?”

“Aren’t you the one who said I was a princess, that I had no idea of real life? Admit it, you were wrong.”

“And that’s where Maypole comes in. The poor bastard. That’s why he had to be a miner, once he knew about you. I wondered where he got the idea.”

She sank against the wall. “He came by the pit and saw me.”

“No one else ever recognized you?”

“No one else there knew Charlotte Hannay.”

“Then he had to match you. ‘My Rose,’ he wrote. That was you.”

“I’m sorry about John. I tried to talk him out of it. It was only going to be for a day, he said.”

“He went to Bill Jaxon to change places. Bill must have been upset to learn that Maypole had found out, but he was willing to help for love, for
his
Rose, the real Rose Molyneux, so she could go on eating chocolates while you went slumming.”

“It wasn’t slumming. It was freedom to have a voice that asked for more than a cup of tea. To have a body that had desires and could satisfy them. Who wore her arms bare and cursed out loud when she felt like it.” She met his eyes. “Who had a lover.”

“Some fool who knew no one.”

“Better than that.”

“How big a fool was I?” Blair asked. “How many people knew? Flo, Maypole, Smallbone, Bill?”

“That’s all.”

“Does Rowland know he’s marrying a pit girl? That will please the new lord of the manor.”

“No.”

“Why are you marrying him? Why did you give in?”

“I changed my mind. What do you care? All you want to do is go back to Africa.”

“Not to leave you to him. You think Rowland’s only an unpleasant cousin who will make an unpleasant husband. He’s not. He’s a murderer. I’ve seen him kill Africans who walked to the right instead of the left. And he’s an arsenic addict. I’m half one myself, so I know. He’s worse. He’s insane. If he gets one glimpse of Rose in you, you’re dead.”

“That was acting.”

“Not all of it. I liked the Rose in you. He’ll hate it. A shrewish, prunish Charlotte might survive a year or two with him, but you won’t.”

“I was pretending with you.”

“It was real. Enough was.”

“What does it matter? I don’t have a choice. I’m not really Rose, I’m Charlotte Hannay, who is marrying in two weeks.”

“When you were Rose, you asked me to take you with me to Africa.”

“I remember.”

“I’ll take you.”

Someone else seemed to be speaking for him, some other half of himself, because he was as astonished as Charlotte, who caught a hint of his self-surprise.

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.” He didn’t want to think about it; the subject defied rational thought.

“You liked Rose that much?”

“I was getting to.”

“You liked the girl who drinks gin and pulls you into
bed. What about Charlotte, someone who keeps her clothes on and has a functioning brain?”

“She can come, too. I’m offering you an escape.”

“It’s the strangest proposition I’ve ever heard. I’m flattered, Blair. I am.”

“As soon as I collect from your father we can go.”

She scooped hair from her eyes. “What a pair we’d make.”

“We’d be deadly.”

She looked down the tunnel as if she could glimpse a picture of the future forming in the dark. Blair could almost see it himself, some vision looming closer, dissolving as it came into view.

“I can’t.”

“Why not? When you were Rose, you wanted to.”

“That was Rose. I’m a Hannay.”

“Oh, that
is
different.”

“I mean I have responsibilities. The Home.”

“No, you mean the class difference, education, you having a real name, Rose being a footloose girl from Manchester, and God knows what my real name is. How could you entertain a trip with me when you can lock yourself up in a grand hall with a killer? I must have been joking. Perhaps I was, but I did like your imitation of a woman. It was the best one I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re impossible.”

“I think we both are.”

“Well, we didn’t get very far, did we?”

“No.” Blair agreed. He ignored the sadness in her laugh. As far as he was concerned, they were back at that point where every word between them was a stab.

She looked away, this time at nothing. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Disappear?”

“Your men seem to do that. I’ll miss the wedding, but I’ll leave you a wedding present.”

“What is that?”

“Maypole.”

“Do you know where John is?”

“Let’s say I know where to find him.”

Night seemed to have welled from the shaft of the Hannay pit and flooded yard, sheds and tower, as if everything up to cloud level was silent and underwater. There was no clamor of railway wagons, no coal tubs ticking to the top of the sorting shed or rush of coals down sorting screens, no bantering of women, no line of miners murmuring toward the cage. The contrast was a blackness where locomotives sat dead on their rails and the winding tower was an unlit beacon amid a ring of shadows.

A secondary light escaped from the small upper door of the winding house where cables ran to the top of the tower. The cables were still; the cage was below and probably hadn’t moved for hours. Inside the winding house, the winder would be staring at the dial of the indicator, or puttering around the great, immobile engine, keeping himself awake by oiling pistons and rods.

Air escaped from the up shaft, the draft driven by the pit furnace a mile below. Whether miners worked or not, the fires of the furnace stayed fed or the draft would die and the ventilation of the mine would fail.

There were two furnacemen below, Blair remembered Battie saying, the winder and perhaps a stoker above.

The lamp shed was locked. He returned from the
blacksmith’s forge with a bar and jimmied the shed door open. He set his knapsack and bull’s-eye lamp unlit on the counter and opened the grate of a potbellied stove to a bed of half-dead coals whose glow lit the shelves. In their cages, canaries shifted and fluttered anxiously as he took a can of caulking and a safety lamp.

He walked to the tower platform, pulled the signal rope twice and heard the bell ring inside the winding house for “Up.” A winder was supposed to stay at his post, not even leaving for a call of nature. At most, the man might glance out the door at the platform rather than assume the signal was coming from below; Blair doubted it, but he kept his lamp dark and stood behind a leg of the tower as the great wheel overhead began to turn and the cable stirred from the ground.

He waited for the cage to make its mile trip. The furnacemen wouldn’t hear it; the roar of a pit furnace covered all other sounds. As soon as the cage rose and came to a stop level with the platform, he jumped on between the tub rails and pulled the signal rope once for “Down.”

Every descent was a controlled plunge, especially in total darkness. Midway the cage seemed to float and tap against the guide wires, a sensation of flying blind, even while the mind knew it was dropping in a steel cage. As if he ever really knew where he was. He winced. What was the speech he had given Leveret about the method of triangulation and the making of maps? That was the way he had pursued his amateur investigation, except that two of his points, Rose and Charlotte, were the same.

Pressure rose from the soles of his shoes to his knees. Round iron wire stretched as the cage shuddered between the guides and touched down at the pit eye.

There was being underground and there was being
alone
underground, when there was no distraction from the fact that a million tons of rock stood where the sky should be. The work of hookers and drawers pushing tubs, and farriers and stableboys tending the horses,
usually created the illusion that the pit eye, underlooker’s shed and stables were merely a subterranean village. Without this activity that reassuring illusion was gone, and a person had to accept how far from the rest of the world he was.

A burning safety lamp stood in a pail of sand at the platform. The heat and smell of horses was, as always, overwhelming. He opened his box of matches—illicit in a mine, but who could stop him now?—and lit the safety lamp he had brought from the yard. A flame leaped behind the wire mesh. He shouldered his knapsack and found the central black tunnel called the Main Road. This was where a conscious choice had to be made to travel fearfully or set off as if the earth were his.

He had studied the plan of the Hannay pit so long that a copy was imprinted in his head. A map was everything when walking in a mine. Of course, there was also the simple method of keeping the draft at his back. He kept his head low and found a rhythm that put his feet on every second tie of the track. Wooden props creaked more audibly without the workaday sounds of horses and wheels. Timbers settled, dribbling dirt. He raised his safety lamp and the flame lengthened to suggest a hint of methane.

Traveling in a miner’s crouch made his strapped ribs feel as if they were rubbing together, but without having to buck the traffic of ponies and tubs he made good time. He moved past refuge holes, side shafts and brattices, the canvas panels that directed air. Past where Battie had found the first two victims of afterdamp the day of the fire. Past where the tunnel plunged to the turnaround where a pony had dropped and trapped ten men on the other side. Into a lower, narrower tunnel another five hundred yards. To the coal face, with its pillars of coal and blacker void where the pillars had been stripped away.

Short-handled picks and shovels lay where they had
been left the day before. Blair chose a pick and automatically moved his lamp along the roof, finding a pulse of gas with the flame at a crack or two. Nothing like the gas on the day of the explosion. Then it had been damp and unseasonably warm. As the barometer dropped, gas had seeped out of pillars, roof and shot holes. In the whole length of the tunnel, lamp flames had started to separate from their wicks, all the sign that a fastidious underlooker like Battie needed to ban shots for the day.

Sometimes men were pulled off a gassy stretch of the coal face, but evacuate the mine? Never. Men swung picks or pushed tubs, boys went on leading ponies, all aware that in a gas-charged atmosphere a single spark could set off methane like a bomb or, after the firedamp turned to afterdamp, smother every one of them. Miners always went on working. After all, a man who came a mile underground had already made certain decisions about safety. Besides, they almost always went home at the end of day.