Rose (17 page)

“The last day he was seen was a Wednesday. Meetings for the Home were on Wednesdays. Did you see him there?”

“No. I happened to be ill that day.”

“Miss Hannay has a frail constitution,” Leveret said.

She didn’t appear frail to Blair. Small of frame, but not frail. “When was the last time you saw him?” he asked.

“Sunday services.”

“Sounds romantic. And not a word since?”

“No.”

“Did he ever talk to you about his visits to the coal mines? To the Hannay mine?”

“No.”

“The pit girls there?”

“No.”

“Or indicate any frustration that he couldn’t extend his ministry down into the mine itself?”

“No.”

“He liked to preach, didn’t he? At the drop of a hat?”

“He felt he had a calling,” Charlotte said.

“And wanted to be part of the working class, at least long enough to preach. Did he ever mention a miner named Bill Jaxon?”

“No.”

“Did he have any history of melancholia?”

“No.”

“Did he like to roam the countryside? Swim in the canal? Take lonely walks on slag heaps or high cliffs?”

“No. His only pastime was rugby, and he did that to reach the men.”

“But you didn’t spend much time with him outside meetings, did you? You had a spiritual relationship.”

“I hope so.”

“So he could have a tattoo of the Royal Navy and you wouldn’t know.”

“No, no more than you would know whether any of the women you debauched had a brain or a soul,” Charlotte answered passionately, toe-to-toe. Put a pair of clogs on her and she would be a dangerous creature, Blair thought. Earnshaw and Leveret faded from his conscious view.

“Was Maypole intelligent, would you say?”

“Intelligent and sensitive.”

“So he knew he would break your heart if he disappeared and didn’t even drop a line?”

“He knew I would understand whatever he did.”

“Lucky man. That’s the kind of woman
I’ve
always needed.”

“Stop it,” Earnshaw said from somewhere, but Blair felt an accelerating rhythm of mutual loathing and knew Charlotte Hannay felt it also, like a crescendo heard by two.

“Did he mention wealthy relatives who might be old and sick?” he asked.

“No.”

“Pending lawsuits?”

“No.”

“Spiritual crises?”

“Not John.”

“Anything pending but your wedding?”

“No.”

“Mail is delivered twice a day. I understand that lovers write each other every post. Did you keep his letters?”

“If I did, I’d rather put them in the hands of a leper than deliver them to you.”

“No sense he felt he might have been missing out on simple pleasures?”

“Simple as in animal? No, that particular depth is your level, Mr. Blair.”

“I meant simple as in human.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Human weakness. This is the Home for Fallen Women, Miss Hannay, so there must be some humans here. Maybe Maypole met one.”

Charlotte stooped to snip a long stem with her shears. With more force and speed than he expected, she stood and whipped the stem across Blair’s face, which immediately burned.

“You will leave now,” Charlotte said. “I will have dogs here next time and I will have them set on you if you ever dare return.”

“I personally will set on you if you return,” Earnshaw said.

Blair felt blood wet his cheek. He plopped his hat back on.

“Well, regretfully, I must be going. Thank you for all your help. My best to your father.” As he walked away he paused by the nurseryman. “Knew a man in the Gold Coast raised roses. Retired sergeant major. Roses big as a platter. Used guano. Guano’s the key.”

Leveret retreated in reverse, leaving excuses. “I had no idea, no idea. So sorry.”

As they went around the hedge, Blair used a handkerchief to mop his face and motioned Leveret to stop and be silent. They heard a furious Charlotte Hannay on the other side.

“And you, Mr. Earnshaw, do you have any idea how obnoxious it is to offer your protection before it’s asked?”

“I was merely supporting you.”

“When I’m so weak that I need support I will let you know.”

Smiling through the blood, Blair walked up the lawn.

“Now you’ve set
them
to arguing,” Leveret said.

“It doesn’t matter how much people like that argue; they’re moralists. They were made for each other.”

At the river, Blair washed his face. The clouds were high and edged sideways by the sun, and although the cuts on his face burned, he felt strangely braced.

Leveret was distressed. “You can’t speak to people like Charlotte like that. That was a terrible scene. The language was unforgivable, Blair. You goaded her.”

Blair picked out a thorn. In his reflection on the water’s surface he saw three gouges, otherwise only scratches, and felt a hot sense of satisfaction.

“I goaded her? That’s like accusing somebody of goading an asp.”

“You were cruel. What were you getting at with insinuations about John’s being human?”

Blair dried himself on his jacket and put a dab of arsenic in his palm. “What we are, Leveret, is a sum of our sins. That’s what makes us human instead of saints. A perfectly flat surface has no character. Allow some cracks, some flaws and shortcomings, and then you have contrast. It’s that contrast with impossible perfection that makes our character.”

“You have character?” Leveret asked.

“Tons.” Blair put his head back and threw the powder in. “It turns out that Maypole might have, too, in a demented, religious sort of way.”

“Questions like that can ruin a man’s reputation.”

“I’m not interested in his reputation. I’m more of a geologist, I look for feet of clay. So I find it interesting that a penniless curate managed to connect to a girl with so much money.”

“Everything in Wigan is connected to the Hannays. Half the people work for the Hannays. Besides the Hannay mines, the Hannay Iron Works manufacture boilers, iron plate and locomotives. There are the Hannay Cotton Mills and Hannay Brick Works. They build their own chimneys to burn their own coal to spin their own yarn on a quarter of a million spindles. I haven’t traveled the world like you, but I would venture to say that the Hannays are one of the most efficient industrial complexes anywhere.”

“And making a fortune.”

“And providing employment. Well-paid employment compared with average wages. But there’s more to the Hannays than commerce. The family supports the Church, which means paying for clergy and organs and pews. The Ragged Schools for poor children. Evening Schools for men. Dispensary for the Sick. The Explosion Fund, the Widows and Orphans Fund, the Clothing Society were all started by Bishop Hannay himself. Without the Hannays there would be less work in Wigan
and very little charity. Everyone is connected to the Hannays, including you. Or did you forget?”

“The Bishop doesn’t let me forget.”

“Charlotte has probably gone to him already and told him about our disastrous visit. He’ll have to discharge you now.”

“I won’t spend any more delightful days with the sanctimonious Miss Hannay? Bring my money and I’ll be gone.”

“You don’t understand her situation.”

“I understand that she is a rich young woman whose hobbyhorse is a charity for poor girls she dresses up in Quaker gray. She probably knows as much about real life in Wigan as she does about the moon. It doesn’t matter, because she’ll be the richest spoiled brat in England when her father dies.”

“Not quite.”

The way Leveret said it made Blair pause.

“You just described the Hannay empire.”

“Yes, but Bishop Hannay is also Lord Hannay. When he dies, the estate will pass with the title. A woman cannot inherit the title. Everything—land and properties—will go to the nearest male heir, her cousin, Lord Rowland, who will become the next Lord Hannay. Charlotte will be well settled, of course.”

“You mean rich.”

“Yes, but whomever she marries—John Maypole or anyone else—would have full disposition of whatever she inherits.”

Blair watched bees buzz by with golden satchels of pollen. Which explained Earnshaw, he thought, though he hovered by Charlotte Hannay more like a beetle than a bee.

The visit of the Municipal Committee for Health and Sanitation to Albert Court, a U of two-story redbrick housing, was a form of war. All the residents stood in
the middle of the courtyard as disinfectors dressed in white smocks and caps rolled in caissons bearing bright pumps and canisters of polished brass. At every third or fourth house, a disinfector manned the pump while his partner unreeled the hose, dashed into the front door and sprayed a poisonous mist of strychnine and ammonia. The stench was choking, but Reverend Chubb, in command, a red committee sash over his cassock, issued directions like a general oblivious to the smoke of battle. The residents were women and children; Blair noticed that a number cradled birdcages. Among the committee matrons in official sashes he recognized Mrs. Smallbone, her skirt of black bombazine adding a menacing bounce to every stride. She dug into a boy’s head with a comb and signaled to two other committee members, who bore down on the boy with water and carbolic soap. Chubb acknowledged the arrival of Leveret and Blair in the courtyard with no more than a flicker of his concentration.

Blair remembered having his own head clipped and washed, hands clamping his neck to hold him still as if he were a dog. It was the smell of the soap that did it.

“Medicine doesn’t taste good,” Chubb said.

“It wouldn’t be medicine if it did, would it?” Blair asked. “Shouldn’t there be a medical officer in charge?”

“He’s ill. Fumigation can’t wait. If these people insist on crowding five in a bed with lice-ridden bedclothes, not even bothering to use the sanitary facilities the landlord provides, creating a miasma from which spreads cholera, typhus and smallpox, then community measures are called for. A sink of pestilence affects us all. Think of the mince rats.”

“Mince rats?” Blair didn’t want to think about them.

“Some of the houses will have to be sealed and left with sulfur candles.”

“Where do the people from those houses go?”

Chubb marched ahead. “The children should all be in school, where they can be properly inspected.”

Certainly some of the residents had crusted bare feet and ragged clothes, just as some houses had split doors and broken panes. Most, however, looked merely angry, rousted from homes that showed lace curtains in the windows and thresholds that must have been zealously scrubbed with stone to be clean at all. Chubb seemed to send in the fumigators on an arbitrary basis.

“How does he know which houses to attack?” Blair asked Leveret.

Leveret whispered, “Simple. He wouldn’t dare break into a miner’s house. The miners would break into the Town Hall. In defense of the people here, there are only two privies for two hundred occupants.”

Chubb returned. “Sufficient, if there is social discipline. Look at their clothes. Rags, probably infested. If it were up to me, we’d burn them.”

“Too bad you can’t have an auto-da-fé,” Blair said.

“That’s a papist practice. There has always been an obstinate core of them here. The Hannay family, as the Bishop told you, was once, long ago, Roman. And of course we have Irish among the miners—Irish and pigs.”

“They go together?”

“Filth and immorality go hand in hand. Squalor breeds disease. No doubt, Mr. Blair, in your travels to the sinkholes of the world you have noticed that smell itself is pestilential. I know that in time these people will come to appreciate the effort we make on their behalf.”

“Maypole used to do this?”

“He was on the committee for a time.”

The cart rolled forward, leaving in the air an acrid taste that coated the lips.

“Reverend, you’re a born missionary. You mean Maypole quit.”

“He was disobedient. He was young. Rather than stamp out pollution, he sheltered it.”

“You mean, the Home for Women?”

“Home for Women Who Have Fallen for the First Time,” Chubb corrected him. “As if in Wigan there is such a thing as women who have fallen
only
for the first time. It is a dangerous thing for even the most hardened man to save a fallen woman. A young curate’s interest in such a pursuit has to be suspect. Philanthropy has masked weakness more than once. It is not the woman who is saved, but the savior who goes under.”

“Are you thinking of any particular woman?”

“I don’t know any women that
particular
. I washed my hands of Maypole and his ‘Magdalenes.’ ”

Blair walked to stay abreast of Chubb and the disinfection carts. “Otherwise he was satisfactory? He conducted services, did sick calls, that sort of thing?”

“Yes.”

“He seemed to have little money.”

“Men do not join the Church to make money. It is not a trade.”

“He was broke.”

“He didn’t yet have a living, a post as a vicar and the remuneration that comes with it. He was of good family, I was given to understand, but his parents died when he was young, leaving him little. What did it matter? He was about to marry far above his station.”

“Did he give you any indication that he was considering some sort of adventure, that he might leave?”

“Leave? When he was engaged to the Bishop’s daughter?”

“He seemed happy?”

“Why shouldn’t he be? As soon as they married it was preordained that he would rise to the highest ranks of the Church.”

“What about his preaching at the mines? Do you know anything about that?”

“I warned him that open-air sort of thing was for Wesleyans. Unfortunately Maypole had Low Church leanings.
Like his playing at rugby. What I needed was a man to serve Communion, visit the sick, take food to the deserving poor. That is enough work for two.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask the police?”

“We don’t want to overly bother the police. It’s not a scandal unless we make it one. If Chief Constable Moon hears anything, he’ll tell us.”

“Tell me, do you still want to find Maypole?”

“I don’t know that I care. Saint Maypole, here and gone. I serve at the Bishop’s pleasure, of course. We all do. But tell him when you see him that I’ve waited long enough. I need another curate.”