Rose (13 page)

He struggled around gritstone slabs that had crept up from the floor. What he wanted to avoid was falling in a pocket and having his lamp go out.

His foot was caught. When he tried to pull free, he heard Battie’s voice close behind him. “You’re a miner, Mr. Blair.”

“I have been.”

He lay still and let Battie pull himself level. The underlooker had a lamp, though all Blair could see in its light was Battie’s eyes.

“The Bishop’s man, they say. Wants a tour. Not so unusual. The board of directors comes by. They turn around before we’re a hundred yards into a tunnel. A big thank-you. Other appointments, wrong clothes. Not you.”

“So I’ve broken the rules,” Blair said.

“You’ll never be allowed back down this pit.”

“So I might as well see.”

Battie was silent for a moment, then hitched himself forward on his elbows. “Bugger all,” he muttered. “Follow me.”

For a barrel-chested man, Battie was an eel at sliding over and around rockfalls, rising boulders, holes. Blair scrambled to keep the irons of the soles of Battie’s clogs in sight until the underlooker’s progress slowed and became uncertain.

“Should be here. It changes all the time, though. I can’t …”

Battie stopped. Blair pulled closer and set his lamp next to Battie’s. The doubled glow showed a yard-high gap between roof and rubble that was filled by a wall of bricks of the maroon variety used for Wigan houses. About forty bricks in all. The mortaring looked sloppy—hasty might be a better word.

Battie asked, “Have you ever had to rebrick after an explosion, Mr. Blair? You don’t know what’s lurking on the other side. Could be firedamp, could be afterdamp, could be both. You do it in turns. Hold your breath, lay a brick, back out and let the next man lay his. Jaxon and Smallbone. Each with a rope around his waist.”

“This was where the explosion was?”

“Next to it as far as we could tell.” Battie craned to
look at the roof. “It will all fall in sometime. Not soon enough for me.”

Like a watermark, the impressed words “Hannay Brickworks” appeared on a brick, then on a second and a third. Blair caught a rotting odor of firedamp, like marsh gas. As the lamps grew brighter he saw that the mortar between the top bricks was cracked, perhaps from Smallbone’s shot or from one days earlier. Battie’s face shone, his eyes widening.

In the lamps the flames lengthened to blue columns. The wicks themselves went out, but enough gas had already infiltrated to ignite and float in the gauze like plasma. Illuminated, Blair thought three thoughts. To blow the lamps out would press the fire through the safety gauze and set off the surrounding gas. To wait was useless because as the safety gauze heated the wire itself began to glow like an orange web of fuses. Third, he had worked very hard to kill himself.

As it didn’t happen immediately, he remembered that methane was lighter than air. He started scooping out the rubble at the base of the brick wall and pulled out loose rocks and dust to a depth of a foot. He took a lamp by the base and, balancing the flame within, set it down in the hole as straight up and down as he could. Hairs burned off the back of his hands as he did so. Battie understood. Just as carefully, he did the same with the second lamp, so that they stood side by side in the little excavation, two brilliant spears of blue cupped by bristling red wires.

The spears burned steadily for a minute, then pulsed and shortened reluctantly, from the bottom to the top. Wires dulled from gold to gray. The first flame seemed to swallow itself in a gulp of tarry smoke. The other vanished a second later, leaving Blair and Battie in utter darkness.

“No gentleman would have thought of that,” Battie said.

Blair became aware of Leveret desperately shouting
his name; he had forgotten about the estate manager. Miners were calling also. Stiffly, like two men swimming in black shallows, he and Battie followed the sound.

Hannay Hall was barely visible through greening branches. Between tree roots lay pools of violets. As always, after Blair had been down a pit, the color of flowers seemed as intense as polished gems. Most miners were the same in this regard, and he sometimes thought it was a mercy for them to come and go in the dark, not to be tantalized by senses whetted by deprivation.

He followed a gravel path along a wall of yews and around a lily pond to the conservatory, an Oriental pavilion of iron and glass. Entering, in one step he left cool England for a steamy world of palms, mangoes and breadfruit trees. Pink hibiscus unfurled. Spotted orchids hung from plaques of moss. A path edged with aromatic jasmine and orange bloom led to Bishop Hannay, who sat by a garden table on which lay newspapers and a cup of Turkish coffee. In his linen shirt Hannay resembled a viceroy enjoying colonial ease. Around him was subdued activity: gardeners tapping pots to listen for the hollow note of a dry fern, sub-gardeners spraying with water syringes the size of rifles. Above him a forest of date palms lifted glossy fronds as large as fans.

“All you need is a fruit bat,” Blair said.

Hannay gave Blair a long study. “Leveret says you two were down in the mine. He came back looking like a
casualty. I gave you permission to visit the pit, not to lead a chase through it. What on earth were you doing?”

“What you hired me for.”

“I asked you to look for John Maypole.”

“That’s what I was doing.”

“In the mine?”

“It never occurred to you?” Blair asked. “You have a curate who happens to disappear on the same day as seventy-six other men die in your mine and you think there’s no connection? Then you happen to hire a mining engineer to look for the missing man? It seems to me you might as well have pointed where to go, so I went.”

At a discreet distance a boy sprayed a rainbow over banana palms. Each bead of water hung and sparkled within a luminous arc of hues.

“And you found Maypole?” Hannay asked.

“No.”

“So he was never down there?”

“I can’t say that. Your man Battie is a competent underlooker, but he can’t identify everyone who comes down a cage at the start of a shift. Six days a week their faces are black.”

“Those men grew up together. They’d know each other in the dark.”

“But you also have dayworkers from outside Wigan, men whose real names no one even knows. Dayworkers arrive from Wales, Ireland, everywhere. They come into Wigan, rent a bed and look for work. Didn’t Maypole like to preach at the mine surface?”

“He was fanatical,” Hannay said. “Worse than a Methodist.”

“Well, he may have taken his preaching underground. When I came back from the mine I read the newspaper accounts again. Twelve of the dead were dayworkers. Another ten were badly burned. Maybe one of them is Maypole, but you won’t find out without exhuming the bodies.”

“Blair, all anyone in Wigan expects from life is a proper burial. Miners scrimp so that when they die they’ll be drawn in a decent hearse with black plumes and matched black horses. And you suggest that a bishop uproot the recently departed?”

“If Maypole is in one of those graves, the sooner we dig him up the better.”

“There’s a pleasant prospect. The last Wigan riot was less than twenty years ago. The miners looted the town and the police locked themselves in the jail until the militia arrived. And that was over a small matter of wages, not the desecration of graves, thank you.”

“Or …”

“Or what?”

“Or Maypole took off and is happily spending your Bible Fund in New York or New South Wales, in which case I’ll never find him. At least you know one thing: he’s not in your mine now. That was the point, I suspect. You didn’t want to reopen the inquiry into the explosion, but you didn’t want your curate discovered dead in a Hannay mine. And the way you set me up by telling poor Leveret to omit obvious information like a disaster that took seventy-six lives on the same day, it all seems like my idea.”

Hannay listened without a change of expression. No, he didn’t look like a viceroy, and certainly not like a bishop, Blair thought. Something far more powerful, a Hannay in his dominion. At a barely audible thump, Hannay looked down at his newspaper, where a drop of water had hit and spread; he looked up at panes clouded by condensation.

“Humidity. Maybe we should have a fruit bat.”

“Or a tapir rooting around the pots,” Blair suggested.

“Yes. What fun we could have here if you stayed. Don’t you think you should linger in Wigan and search out your family background?”

“No, thanks.”

“As I remember from our campfire conversations, your father was anonymous and your mother died when you were young. Blair is not a Wigan name.”

“It wasn’t hers. An American took care of me, so I took his name. I have no idea what hers was.”

“Which makes you a regular curiosity. You have no idea of who or what you are. A blank slate. Sometimes I think that’s why you have such an obsession with maps, so that at least you know
where
you are. Well, that’s fun for you, but what about poor Charlotte? She’ll want more proof than your speculation.”

“I’ve done what a mining engineer can do. I want to be paid and I want to go back to Africa. That was our bargain.”

“Our agreement, Blair, was that you would conduct a diligent search, aboveground as well as below. I think you’re doing extremely well. If you could just find something more definite.”

“Do you want to dig up the graves?”

“Good Lord, no. We’re not ghouls or resurrectionists. Carry on. Quietly. Console Charlotte. Speak to Chubb. I’ll let you know when you’re done.”

On his way back, Blair saw the same golden carpet of daffodils. This time he noticed that the trunks of the beech trees themselves were black from coal soot. On the bark were moths as dark as miners.

Blair went from Hannay Hall to Wigan and John Maypole’s room in the alley near Scholes Bridge.

He knew Portuguese traders in Sierra Leone—the worst men in the world—who had plaster saints on bureau altars. These men sold liquor, rifles, still the occasional slave, yet they felt a communality with saints who, before their enlightenment, had themselves often lived lives of deep venality. After all, saints included murderers, prostitutes, slaves and slave owners. A statuette
was a reminder that no one was either perfect or beyond redemption.

A portrait of Christ, however, was a different matter. Who was going to measure up to that? Yet Maypole had risen from his bed every day under the ceaseless scrutiny of the character in this painting. The olives and thorns seen through the window and the wood shavings around His feet were rendered with better than photographic precision. The Savior Himself looked less like a Jewish carpenter than a blue-eyed, underfed London clerk, but His gaze filled the room with limpid, impossible expectations.

Blair went through the contents of the room in the same order he had with Leveret. The closet with two suits. The range, chest of drawers, washbasin. Bible and books. The simple possessions of a dedicated curate. This time, however, he had murderous resolve. There was nothing like a visit to the Bishop to give him more faith in his own cynicism.

He had accepted Maypole’s reputation as pure white, but no man was so good. Everyone had secrets. Saint Francis must have eaten a sparrow or two. Saint Jerome in his hermit’s cave probably whiled away the hours with some private vice.

He riffled through
Re-reading the Bible, Early Italian Poets, Sesame and Lilies, The Utilitarian Christian, The Athletic Christ, Taking the Gospel to Africa
, which sounded like good reading for the high-minded, though wasted on him. Ransacked and examined the backs and undersides of the drawers. Emptied the dry sink of bowl, knife and fork, tin and wooden spoons. Opened the ovens and groped inside. Upended the bed. Peeled back the edge of the linoleum. Turned over the painting and probed the frame with a penknife. Which left nothing but the brick walls.

Not that he was different, Blair admitted. If anyone examined his history, what would they find? He didn’t
have a history, only a geographic location. His memory wasn’t a blank, but his English and American memory was a bare room compared with the richness of his African experience. English coal miners trudged through their tunnels; the black gold miners of Brazil sang in time to the hammering of their drills.

The African climate had a mesmerizing effect on him. The dry season and the wet season had rhythms—one of insects, the other of rain—that kept him in thrall. His status as a white among the Ashanti kept emotional attachment at the right pitch, first the testing and then acceptance, but never true inclusion, always a distance.

The apparent simplicity of his work—mapping rivers and examining rocks—masked its real intent from the Ashanti. Perhaps this was the lie that impelled him to help them, the knowledge that missionaries weren’t the threat. The real threat was his surveys, which would lead to gold sluices, navigable streams and railroad grades, and would change the Ashanti more than any Bible.

England, land of bricks. There were whitened Tudor bricks, red Elizabethan bricks, orange Georgian bricks, blue railway bricks and the blackened cottage bricks of Wigan. Maypole had scrubbed his walls, revealing their mottled colors and uneven surface. Blair could trace fault lines stepping from brick to brick, but testing each brick by hand might take all day and night.