Rose (47 page)

The cable speeded. Blair couldn’t see how much was left because whenever he shifted, Smallbone pressed the shovel blade against his neck. His upended knapsack and its contents were spread around Smallbone’s feet.

“The first time you went digging with George Battie, I told Bill you’d be back down pit. He didn’t believe me. Bill’s not bright, but he’s beautiful, an element of nature. Like his Rose. I’m a more thoughtful man, like you, but we have t’appreciate people for what they are.”

Blair grunted to hold up his end of the conversation.

Smallbone said, “Rose told us what she told you, which wasn’t the sort of thing t’say to a suspicious man. Weren’t we lucky t’get here when we did? Like I was lucky t’be taking a rest from the coal face when the whole pit went t’hell. You know, people have always struck me as the most fascinating of subjects. Rose is not so persuasive to me, but she has her way with Bill. It’s Samson and Delilah. I never would have let Maypole take Bill’s place, but she liked her special days in the rich house all to herself, and once Maypole got wind of what was up, she was afraid he’d expose her and Miss Hannay. We didn’t do anything wrong. None of us did. All we did was help a preacher get a taste of the real world.”

“He wasn’t ready for it,” Blair whispered against the shovel.

“You’re right there. All I asked him t’do was sit still while I took a rest. That wasn’t too much t’ask, I thought. But now you see our situation. Bill, Rose and me, we’ve done nothing wrong, but we’d be charged for seventy-six deaths. Not even Mrs. Smallbone would pray for me,
and, believe me, she prays for everyone. God knows, we tried t’warn you off.”

“Like you warned Silcock?”

“That was a botched job. He leeched onto Harvey after the fire, and we couldn’t know what Harvey had said in his condition. Nothing, as it turns out, I suppose. He didn’t drown. No harm done.”

“Twiss?”

“We took him for a walk. In Harvey’s grief and such, I think it was a mercy.”

“Bill tried to kill me.”

“Bill’s heavy-handed, but the idea people might suppose his Rose and you were intimate was a provocation.”

“And the spring gun?”

“An inhuman device. I hated to set it.”

“You couldn’t know I’d find the mine. Anyone could have tripped the gun.”

“But no one else did. It was a message. The truth is, you could have left Wigan anytime, and you didn’t, and now it’s too late.”

The cable made an ascending note. Blair knew that if he called to the winding house, Smallbone would cut him off, and even if he didn’t the winder probably wouldn’t hear anything over the popping of pistons and valves. So what would it be? A trip to the railway line where he could lay his weary head on a track like Harvey Twiss?

The cage rose to the platform and shook as two clogs stepped off and blocked Blair’s view. They were familiar clogs with brass caps that shone like spear points of gold. With them aimed at Blair, Smallbone immediately hit the signal rope and the cage started back down.

“That was a good run,” Bill said.

“Good as a Christian athlete?” Blair remembered his first conversation with Jaxon at The Young Prince.

“Almost.”

The winder must wonder why the cage kept going up
and down, Blair thought, but it was all the more reason for him not to leave his post.

“You were with Twiss when the gas exploded,” Blair said to Jaxon.

Bill looked at Smallbone, who watched the shaft swallow the cage and said, “It doesn’t matter.”

They weren’t going to march to any railway tracks or canal, Blair realized. When the cage hit bottom, they would just drop him in after and he’d be one more casualty of a late-night stroll in Wigan. He saw himself plunging down the shaft. “I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth I know not where.” Well, he would know.

“What do you think happened?” Blair asked.

“The explosion? My opinion?” Smallbone said. He kept his weight on the shovel and his eye on the descending cable. “It’s all a laugh. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and He’s splitting His sides while He does it.”

Blair looked at the twisted brass that had been a safety lamp. “Did Maypole know?”

“Maybe; he certainly had a bright light t’see by. The truth is, a miner who thinks he’s not working in his own grave s’fool. I knew that of Maypole. I’m surprised t’find out you’re one, too.”

He nodded to Bill, who drew back his clog to kick Blair over the edge, but was distracted by someone crossing the dark yard without a lamp.

Smallbone squinted to make the figure out and called, “Is that Wedge? Battie?”

Charlotte answered, “I talked to Rose.”

“Get rid of him,” Smallbone told Bill, who kicked Blair over.

Charlotte was in pants and shirt and carried a long-handled shovel, the kind used for sorting coal. When she hit Smallbone the shovel blade made the sound of a Chinese gong.

Blair had caught a steel guide rope and tried to climb
back up. Smallbone was felled by another blow from Charlotte. She was a blur, wielding the heavy shovel like a two-handed sword. Blair reached from the rope to the platform, where Bill waited for him. Charlotte dug the shovel into Bill’s back, and when he didn’t budge she threw it at his head, getting his attention. He turned and backhanded her. Blair watched her drop as he crawled onto the boards. He picked up the loose shovel and when Bill turned back to him, he swung it with all his might at Bill’s knee, like a man’s first chop at a tree. Bill tilted to the side. Blair tossed him the shovel. As Bill caught it with both hands, Blair stepped forward and with his fist hit him at the point where his brows met. Bill stepped back where there was nothing but air and balanced, one foot on the edge. His scarf snapped around him in the downdraft. When he dropped the shovel, it rattled off his foot and moved him another millimeter over the shaft The shovel chased the cage, the blade singing off stone.

“Ah got thee, Bill, me boy.” Smallbone wrapped his hand on Jaxon’s.

Reaching for Smallbone had the reaction of tipping Bill the opposite way. Despite Smallbone’s grip, the angle continued to change the wrong way, and Bill’s clog slid. The iron he had skated on was moving over the worn wood of the platform edge.

“Fooking Maypole,” Bill said. He added, “That’s it.”

His eyes rolled back and the rest of him followed. He made one stroke with his free arm and fell.

“Jesus,” Smallbone said.

He scraped crabways across the boards and tried to free himself from Bill’s grasp, and then he disappeared over the lip too.

A breeze moved ahead of Blair, making a froth of daisies. He had been on the trail before, so it was easy to follow, even easier when marked by a satin ribbon snatched from a skirt or by the cough of a gun ahead.

Meadows led to higher slopes of sheep separated by rows of black rocks. He wore a Harris tweed jacket over what felt like new ribs, and he breathed without a twinge air that seemed to buzz with life, as if the opalescent glint of insects in flight were a low field of electricity that charged every object in sight. From time to time he stopped to slip the knapsack off his shoulder and focus his new telescope on a hawk hovering over a tumbledown cairn or a lamb nosing through heather.

He turned the glass to the final hill, where wind combed grass up to a picnic set under clouds as white and still as columns. The Oriental carpet of the Hannays was spread out as before. Lady Rowland and Lydia again were dressed as genteel, animated flowers, the mother’s ensemble the velvet mauve of an American aster, and the daughter in a lavender dress of crepe de chine, her golden hair gathered into a sun hat, the muted colors reflecting the ambiguous state the family now inhabited. The men—Hannay, Rowland, Leveret—were in black. Drowsy flies crawled over the remains of potted duck, savory pie,
biscuits and stirrup cups of claret. A musk of gunpowder lingered in the air.

At the sight of Blair, Lady Rowland blushed with irritation, and Lydia, like a gilded statue, looked around for a cue.

“The very man,” Rowland said.

Hannay sat up stiffly and shielded his eyes. Blair noticed signs of disrepair on the Bishop, a sugary stubble on the jaw.

“A face to cheer us up. Good. The rest of us are inconsolable, but you, Blair, seem fully recovered. Shaved, healed, in the pink.”

“Better yet, paid,” Blair said. “Outfitted and on my way back to Africa, thanks to you. I’m sorry about your daughter.”

“It was unexpected.”

Lady Rowland said, “It was a bitter disappointment.” She didn’t sound disappointed. If anything, satisfaction lurked in the corners of her mouth.

Lydia shimmered like flowers, a table arrangement brought out of doors. She asked, “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow. Your uncle has kindly employed me to finish my survey of Gold Coast mines, though I was thinking of staying a while longer to search for my mother’s family. She was from here. I’ll probably never have another chance.”

“I’m surprised you stayed as long as you did,” Hannay said.

“It’s beautiful country.”

“From an old Africa hand, that’s a compliment,” Rowland said. “You have risen from the grave. I heard you stayed in our old house for a week before moving back to the Minorca. You have truly infested the complete environs. Sort of a black cousin.”

“The arsenic’s holding out?”

“The pharmacist is a good man. You know him well yourself.”

“One more thing we share.”

“The last thing. How are you on irony?”

“Mother’s milk.”

“Chief Constable Moon tells me about a pair of miners who fell down a Hannay shaft two weeks ago in the middle of the night. They were found in the morning when the cage came up. They were dead, mangled from the impact and from hitting walls on the way down, according to the coroner.”

“What a gruesome story,” Lady Rowland said. “Why would the Chief Constable bother you with a story like that?”

“He knows my interest in unusual phenomena.”

“Two drunks falling down a well doesn’t sound unusual.”

“What’s unusual is that two experienced miners could have fallen down a shaft at the very pit where they worked. The same two men were heroes in the explosion at that pit in January. If that isn’t irony, what is?”

“Or a moral tale,” Blair said.

“What is the moral?” Lydia sounded lost.

Lady Rowland said, “That’s it, dear, we’ll never know. The lives those people lead are so different.”

Rowland wasn’t done. “It was the same night, in fact, that Charlotte disappeared, so we have irony
and
coincidence. Perhaps it’s the coincidence we should concentrate on.”

Leveret said, “There would have to be a connection. Charlotte didn’t know the miners, had probably never seen them.”

“She was familiar with pit girls. My uncle is closing the Home for Women at my insistence.”

“If that satisfies you,” Blair said.

“Nothing satisfies me. I have earned fame. I carry a great name; at least I will. But it is as if I had been
promised a garden in the center of which is a tree with a certain apple. All my life I have expected to bite into that apple, and now I am told that the garden is mine but that the apple has been stolen by someone else. My satisfaction has been stolen.”

“You still get the coal,” Blair said.

Hannay said, “Blair had a fall of his own some weeks ago. I visited him. He was delirious most of the time. His recovery is remarkable.”

“Thank you,” Blair said. It was true; even the malaria had abated. No more brown piss, his water was pure as a mountain spring. “Perhaps it’s the air.”

Lydia said, “You should take up residence in Wigan.”

“I’m tempted. Quit gold for the homier pursuit of coal.”

“What precisely do you know about your mother?” she asked.

“Nothing precise. We were sailing to America when she died. She told people on the ship she was from Wigan. She could have been a maid, a mill or shop girl, a pit girl.”

Lady Rowland said, “There must have been a name on the baggage or something.”

“She didn’t have any baggage. If she had any papers, she tore them up or threw them away.”

Rowland said, “She was in trouble. Or perhaps she didn’t want you coming back to bother relatives.”

“That’s what I always thought,” Blair said. “Yet here I am.”

Hannay poured a glass of wine for Blair, who took it but remained standing. The Bishop said, “You should see Rowland shoot. His aim is extraordinary. He has been decimating the animal population.”

“We went shooting together in Africa. He decimated the population there too.”

“Your health.” Leveret raised his glass to Blair. “I’m glad you’re still here.”

He had said not a word about Blair’s visit to the stable or taking a carriage two weeks before, when everyone else supposed he was too damaged to rise from bed.

“A curious thing,” Hannay said. “We always dreaded Charlotte’s arrival at the table or at any outing. Now I’ve come to realize that she was, in fact, the center of every event. Without her everything seems pointless.”

“Life goes on,” Lady Rowland said.

“But life is not the same.” Hannay watched Rowland open a box of cartridges. “Nephew, your hands are shaking.”