Rose (48 page)

“It’s the malaria,” Lady Rowland said. “We’ll go to London, see the doctors and stay for the season. Rowland will be the most eligible man there. He’ll have to run from the women.”

“And vice versa,” Blair said.

“It won’t be the same without Charlotte,” Lydia said. “I was always intimidated by her because she was so intelligent, but I was thrilled by her because I never knew what she would say next.”

“Whatever are you talking about?” Lady Rowland asked. “Dear, you will have a glorious season of your own, and we won’t remember any of this. Even Mr. Blair will fade from memory.”

“Did the detectives find anything?” Lydia asked.

“No.” Her mother shot a glance at the gamekeepers and repeated more softly, “No. Your uncle engaged the best private agency in Manchester. There wasn’t a sign. You have to think of the family now.”

“Blair could look,” Lydia said.

“Yes, Blair was such a great success at finding Maypole,” Rowland said. “Uncle, would you please read the letter that came today?”

The Bishop’s eyes stayed fixed on the wall that marked the horizon. His hand fumbled absently for a letter he took from the breast pocket of his coat and handed it to Leveret.

“Go ahead,” Rowland ordered.

Leveret unfolded the paper. He swallowed and read aloud:

Leveret looked at the envelope. “It bears a Bristol postmark from three days ago.”

Blair said, “I would have sworn Maypole was dead.”

“Not according to that letter,” Rowland said.

“It is John’s handwriting,” Leveret said. “These are his most personal sentiments. I’ve heard him say some of the same words.”

Rowland said, “Hundreds of ships have left the port of Bristol in the last three days. They could be anywhere in Europe by now, or playing missionary in any slum in the south of England.”

“Do you think they’re married?” Lydia asked.

“Of course they’re married,” Lady Rowland said. “It doesn’t matter, your uncle will cut her off. He has to. She spited the family to run off with a madman.”

Blair asked, “That’s all Maypole wrote? Nothing about why he disappeared or where he went?”

“That’s all,” Leveret said.

Lydia said, “We have been waiting for a letter from Reverend Maypole for months, haven’t we?”

Lady Rowland said, “He must have been communicating secretly with Charlotte all that time. We called off the detectives. There’s nothing to be gained from finding two runaways.”

Leveret removed his hat as if discovering what a warm lid it was. Pinpoints of blue marked his skin at the hairline. “Do you think you’ll need help in Africa?” he asked.

“No. Sorry.”

“The question is,” Rowland said, “whether Blair was in on it with Maypole from the start. I saw the way Charlotte looked at him when I came with the gifts for the Royal Society.”

“The monkey gloves?” Blair asked.

“Earnshaw told me how Blair was always after her, turning her against me.”

“She didn’t act overly fond of me.”

“You were both acting. You were Maypole’s agent all along.”

“Your Grace?” Blair appealed for a rebuttal from the Bishop, but Hannay seemed hardly to be listening.

“You never found out about your mother?” Lydia tried to change the subject.

“No, I suppose not. Maybe I prefer the mystery.”

Rowland said, “Some mystery. A slut gets pregnant by a shop boy, has the brat, is worn goods, gets with child again, though not by any man thick enough to marry her, begs a ticket to America and ends her short, ugly life on the way. I might be wrong on a detail or two, but I would consider this mystery solved. Don’t try to lend her dignity by calling it that.”

Blair counted the two steps it would take to cross the carpet, one in the mustard and one in pie, to reach Rowland, who raised his shotgun and said, “No palm trees or natives to hide behind now, are there? What do you think of my detective work? I think I finally have you. Your mother was a willing whore, a syphilitic, nameless nobody, the sort of garbage ships throw overboard at sea every day. Is that close enough?”

Blair shrugged. “You know, I have often said the same—and worse—for years. Because I was abandoned, whether she could help it, whether she died or not. It helps to hear the words from you because it reminds me how stupid and venomous they are. Especially stupid. Because she was no more than a girl, and when I think about how abandoned she must have been, without a penny after she got her ticket, no baggage, friendless, powerless, fatally ill before she got on board and knowing that she would probably die at sea, I appreciate how much courage it took for her to escape from here. So the one thing I know about my mother is how brave she was, and since I didn’t understand that until I came to Wigan, I suppose it was worth the trip.”

He finished his wine and set it down. It felt wonderful not to have every bone an aching worm. The shotgun
started to transmit Rowland’s tremor and sweat rolled off his face.

“You shoot too much, dear,” Lady Rowland said. “It makes you feverish.”

Hannay leaned forward with a heavy whisper. “Rowland, if you ate less arsenic, your hands wouldn’t shake. If you were any whiter you could be a snowman, and if you were any more insane you could be Archbishop of Canterbury. My advice is to marry while you still have the wits not to climb the drapes. Responsibilities come first; madmen are not admitted to the House of Lords. You can go mad once you’re in.”

“May I?” Leveret eased the shotgun from Rowland’s hands.

“Well, I hate to go,” Blair said.

He slipped the knapsack over his shoulder and started down the path the way he had come. He had gone a hundred yards when he became aware of someone wading through the grass after him. He turned and faced Hannay.

“Your Grace?”

“Thank you, Blair. So rare of you to bow to me in any way. About the letter.”

“Yes?”

Hannay had it in his hand. He unfolded the single page and scanned the lines.

“It’s well done. All the Maypole ticks and flourishes. The question is, do I believe it?”

“Do you?”

“Not for a moment.”

Blair said nothing. Hannay blinked. In his eyes was salt water. His coat shook in the wind, loose as a sail.

“Not literally,” the Bishop added.

“What does that mean?”

“Not word for word. People sometimes ask me whether to believe in Genesis. Were Earth and the Heavens created in six days? Was Eve fashioned from
Adam’s rib? Not literally. It’s a message, not a fact. The best we can do is try to understand.”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Hannay refolded the page and pressed it flat in his breast pocket.

Blair looked back from the path. Hannay rejoined the picnic and it continued, barely audible from this distance. The scene had reestablished the languor of an English family set between English hills and English clouds, the sky as liquid as a pool.

From the bottom of the hill he looked back again and they were as tiny as figures in a bead of water.

In the haze of a Liverpool afternoon the African steamship
Blackland
parted from the North Landing and rode the ebb tide out the Mersey. Heavy with goods, low in the water, it nudged through the coal barges and ketches of the Long Reach, bearing north to begin with, then bending west and finally south to the open sea.

The
Blackland
was a doughty ark of civilization fat with Manchester cloth, Birmingham buttons, Bibles from Edinburgh and, from Sheffield, pots, pans, nails and saws. From London came
Punch, The Times
and communiqués from the Colonial Office issuing imperial orders and franchises, not to mention the mailbags of personal letters that made foreign service bearable. Packed with excelsior in wooden crates were cognac, sherry and trade gin, as well as quinine, opium and citric acid. From the hold wafted the perfume of the palm oil it carried on return trips.

The captain made a bonus on the fuel he conserved, and at best the
Blackland
made eight knots, which seemed none as it fought the oncoming swells of the North Atlantic. At the Bay of Biscay, however, the Canary current would surface and sweep the ship toward Africa. The
Blackland
would visit Madeira, execute a cautious swing around the emirates of the western
Sahara, where Europeans had for centuries believed that the sea boiled and the earth ended, and, borne by the warm equatorial current, begin its African calls.

Passengers gathered in the first-class cabin at four for dinner and at seven for tea, and on their first night out stayed on deck late before retiring to their cramped berths. Coal soot spread by the engine stack made the ship into a locomotive under the ocean night.

Ahead of the stack, though, the rail was a balustrade for constellations as brilliant as freshly lit fires, familiar stars prized because they would soon be traded for the Southern Cross.

Finally, singly and in groups, the passengers tired and went below. Wesleyan missionaries already praying for Zulu souls. A doctor, not too well himself, dispatched to the smallpox epidemic in Grand Bassam. Salesmen versed in tinware, drugs, gunpowder, soap. A lieutenant headed for Sierra Leone to drill Jamaicans shipped for African duty. A new consul for Axim. Creoles in frock coats and beaver hats.

And last on deck, bound for the Gold Coast, a mining engineer named Blair and his wife, whom he called Charlotte, except when he called her Rose.

I would like to thank Christopher MacLehose and Anne O’Brien for setting me on the road to Wigan, Kristin Jakob for the flowers, Jean Sellars for the proper attire, George Thompson for the poetry, and Ian Winstanley for the world underneath the surface.

Most of all, I owe Joe Fox, who for five books over fifteen years lit the way.

By Martin Cruz Smith:

THE INDIANS WON

GYPSY IN AMBER

CANTO FOR A GYPSY

NIGHTWING

GORKY PARK
^*

STALLION GATE
^*

POLAR STAR
^*

ROSE
^*

HAVANA BAY
^*

DECEMBER 6

WOLVES EAT DOGS

STALIN’S GHOST

THREE STATIONS