Rose (26 page)

What would the first drink of water in a year be like? What is water to the soul? What is astonishing about a primal act is the wholeness of two bodies, as he was astonished to find himself in a bed and made complete by a mere pit girl. He was aware of her sooty hands and face, and of his hands and face growing as dark, but mostly of her eyes, which watched him with a glow of triumph.

Sweat shone on her brow and welled around her eyes, making the lids darker, the whites brighter, avenues to a gaze that drew him in. Should an ignorant girl be shallow? There was a depth to Rose he was unprepared for, but now had fallen into. More than fallen: plunged.

Pain washed away. Or he had gone to a level where pain could not follow, a level that was all Rose, where he felt himself gladly disappear, then reappear, his whole body hard as a stone she clung to, then shudder and dissolve from stone to flesh.

“How old are you?” Rose asked.

“Thirty, thirty-two, somewhere there.”

“Somewhere? How can you not know?”

Blair shrugged.

She said, “I hear people go t’America and start over. I didn’t think they forgot that much.”

“I started early and I forgot a lot.”

“You know where you are now?”

“Oh, yes.”

She had lit the smallest blue flame on the lamp and sat against pillows packed against the pipes of the headboard. She exhibited—if that was the word—a complete lack of shame. Quantitatively—and he was an engineer, after all—she had a slim, almost wiry body with sharply pointed breasts and a twist of brown, not red, hair at the base of her stomach. Her eyes, in turn, looked across her body and met his gaze with an unblinking assertion that there was yet more he would have to recognize and contend with.

“I don’t mean Wigan,” she said.

“I know.”

He sat against the foot of the bed, his bad leg trailing to the boards on the floor. Flo might be out another hour or all night, she told him.

“You have a house to yourself? How do you manage that?”

“That’s my business.”

“You’re not a simple girl.”

“You wanted a simple girl?”

“I wanted no girl at all. That’s not what I came for. That’s not what I thought I came for.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t know.” He couldn’t explain to himself what had guided his hand to her. “All I know is that your madman Bill is out in the rain looking for me.”

“You’re safe here.”

“That doesn’t sound likely.”

“Do you want t’go?”

“No.”

“Good.”

In their voices was the excitement shared by two people who had cast off from shore in a small craft onto high seas in the dark with no plan at all. She wasn’t his equal, he reminded himself. He had seen four continents; she had spent her life close by the mines. Yet
from the platform of this bed they seemed to be equals. Now her claims of distinction—like the velvet ribbon she wore even in pants—didn’t look ridiculous. Was he misleading himself, or was it intelligence aimed from her eyes?

“You’ve been living like a grandee. Can you bear t’spend the night here?”

“I’ve been living like the dead. Yes, I’d rather be here.”

“ ‘Living like the dead’? I like that, I know what you mean. Working at the pit, sorting coal, I feel like a chambermaid in Hell.”

“Do you hate it?”

“No. Working in a mill, that I’d hate. The noise? I’ve friends who hardly hear anymore. Air so full of cotton you can’t breathe? Wearing skirts around all those spinning gears? You lose a leg, choke t’death or die of consumption. And for less money. I’m lucky.”

“You could be a domestic.”

“Be a maid? I know that’s more respectable, but I’d rather have my self-respect.”

Talk died for a second because they didn’t know each other, he thought. They had nothing in common, had gone through no period of wooing, only found themselves impelled toward each other, like planets falling into a mutual gravitational pull.

“How many maids have you seduced?”

“How many men have you seduced?”

She smiled, as if that erased the questions. “Was it different, having a white girl again? Or is it true what they say, that all cats are gray in the dark?”

“I haven’t had all that many women, but all were different.”

“How?”

“Touch, smell, taste, motion, heat.”

“God, you’re a scientist. And what do I taste like?”

He ran his hand over her flank and across her belly, then licked his palm.

“Rose. A slightly burnt rose.”

She shifted to one elbow. Though her brow hid in the tangle of her hair, the jet picked out in her irises scattered bits of brown and green. And though coal dust lay like a resident shadow across her face, her body had a redhead’s extreme fairness, with veins so blue around the swell of her breasts that he could almost watch her pulse.

She ran her hand up his leg and held him there. “I see you’re alive again.”

Rose was no ordinary girl, Blair thought. He had brought a year’s hunger to her bed and yet her passion matched his, as if a single night would have to feed the rest of her life, too. She had the abandon that willingly, consciously accepted damnation if she could find someone to be damned with.

As
she
was
someone
. Not dismissable, not a tourist’s photographic curiosity, nor a silhouette standing on a slag heap. As real as any Hannay.

Was it love? He thought not. Their bodies beat together with a ferocity more like anger, like crazed, sweating cymbals. He felt his eyes starting, the muscles of his shoulders straining as her nails traveled the groove of his back.

White smeared black, the sheets spread infinitely from side to side. Above the bed was ordinary space. Within her a deeper place. Not Wigan. A different land altogether.

“You’re starting t’heal.”

She straddled him and parted the hair from the cut on his head.

“That’s my plan,” he said.

“It’s a brilliant plan if you can stay away from Bill.”

“That’s the major part of the plan—at least, it was.”

She hopped off Blair and was back a moment later with a shawl. She sat on his chest and turned his head to the side.

He asked, “What are you doing?”

She spat on the wound and blew on coal dust from the shawl. “What miners do,” she said.

A piano piece by Mendelssohn was followed by a brass band playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” while children costumed in huge paper collars and cotton beards as martyrs of the Reformation marched onto the stage of the Theatre Royal.

“The children are orphans of miners. The benefit is for them,” Leveret whispered to Blair. They stood in the rear of the theater, under a bust of Shakespeare with pen in hand. The theater bowed to all the Bard’s plays, with murals of tragic figures and ardent lovers, on the proscenium the sight of Othello the Moor poling a gondola across the Grand Canal.

Blair had arrived late and kept his hat on the blued stitches on his head. He saw Hannay in a box seat; the Bishop seemed to be looking down from his height at a simpleminded but profoundly amusing comedy.

Leveret explained, “Queen Elizabeth has the prettiest dress and all the red hair. You can tell Bloody Mary by the blood on her hands.”

“Reminds me of Charlotte.”

“Wycliff, the martyr, is tied to a stake, naturally. That’s why most of the children are carrying torches.”

“That’s the way I feel.”

“There will be two tableaux, one religious, one cultural.”

“Wonderful, but why did Hannay ask me here?”

Leveret was evasive. After some hesitation he said, “I have the list you asked for.”

“Of Women Who Have Fallen for the First Time?”

“Yes.” Leveret handed him an envelope as covertly as if he were passing French postcards.

Two executioners in black hoods led the martyrs out. A string quartet played “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.” Walter Fellowes of the miners’ union reported on the status of the Widows’ Fund, and the quartet finished the first half of the program with “Annie Laurie.”

During intermission, Wigan gentry moved down the staircase to the lounge. This was the class whose coaches stood outside the draper’s and milliner’s on Wallgate and Millgate, whose servants polished the brass and swept the sidewalks every morning, who invested in government funds at 5 percent—in other words, people who wore shoes instead of clogs. When Blair thought of the effort involved in dressing for a charitable event like this—the lacing of corsets, the mating of hooks and eyes on boned bodices, the hoisting of crinoline cages to squirming waists and laying of petticoats on top—every woman represented a battery of chambermaids with bloody fingers. The final effect was a flow of ladies in watered silk, foulard and grosgrain in hues of fuchsia and grenadine, accompanied by men who in their cravats and black suits seemed as static as burned trees. Some of the younger women affected the “Alexandra limp,” after the princess left lame by rheumatic fever. As Blair’s own leg was stiff, he felt to some degree in style.

He was mystified about what was supposed to transpire in the theater, although he was aware that around him there was a whisper of anticipation. In the center was Lady Rowland, wearing the erotic glow of a woman accustomed to masculine attention. Her black hair, veined with silver, pillowed a hat with a green stone.
Blair couldn’t hear the banter, but he saw the way she skillfully led it with her fan, rewarding each sally with the appreciative smile of a mature and extravagantly attractive woman. On an outer ring of her solar system bobbed Chief Constable Moon, resplendent in a black frock coat with black silk braids that hung from his shoulder to his cuff, carrying a dress helmet with a black ostrich plume. Blair didn’t think word of his nocturnal visit to Rose Molyneux could have reached Moon already, but he kept a distance from the Chief Constable anyway.

A coterie of younger admirers surrounded Lydia Rowland, and if the mother glowed, the daughter, with less effort, glittered. A circlet of white roses framed her golden hair and blue eyes, with their gaze of crystalline innocence. Was it innocence or unconsciousness? Blair asked himself.

He was so mesmerized that it took him a moment to notice Charlotte Hannay and Earnshaw in a corner. It had to be punishment for her to be in the same room with Lydia Rowland, for where her cousin shone, Charlotte was a pale figure in a dour, purplish gown, her hair a margin of angry red under a tangle of black lace. Here she was, the local heiress, and she could as well have been a governess or an émigrée from some cursed Middle European state. Earnshaw was at her side, his beard looking as brushed as his suit.

Charlotte’s response to some riposte from Earnshaw was a basilisk stare that would have plunged a normal man into silence, but the member of Parliament maintained a confident air of satisfaction. Which was why politicians were assassinated, Blair thought, because nothing else would faze them.

“So the benefit is for orphans?” he asked Leveret.

“A special subscription for their pageant.”

The band had come downstairs and lined up in front of bowls of punch and trays of meringues. The blue serge
and brass buttons of their uniforms brought out the English pinkness of their cheeks. Behind the table hung oversized paintings on uplifting themes: the Sermon on the Mount, the Quelling of the Waves, Judith Bearing the Head of Holofernes. Blair became aware of Bishop Hannay and Lydia Rowland at his side.

“The Sermon is such a peaceful painting, Mr. Blair, don’t you agree?” Lydia asked. “The crowd, blue skies and olive trees, and Jesus in the distance.”

“The wrong painting for Blair. He’s not a man for fair weather,” Hannay said. “He’s one for storms and sharp knives. We don’t want him too tame. I wish we had more than Temperance punch, Blair. From what I understand, you’ve earned it.”

“How is that?”

“Rumors have reached me that you are actually beating people to extract information.”

“That would be terrible, Your Grace, but he hasn’t, I promise,” Leveret said.

“Why not? If Blair is finally getting interested, that’s good.”

Blair looked at the black worn by other guests. “I should have dressed differently.”

“No, you’re blending in very well,” Hannay said. “Leveret, don’t you have a little surprise to see to?”

“Yes, Your Grace.” Leveret rushed off.

From different points across the gallery, Blair sensed the icy regard of Lady Rowland and an electric loathing from Charlotte Hannay. He felt the cut on the side of his head. He didn’t feel that he was blending in.

Although Hannay drew Blair aside, the presence of a bishop created a kind of vortex. All heads turned to the Bishop, though few guests were secure enough in social status to approach. It did strike Blair as a public place to hold a private conversation.

Hannay said casually, “Give me the benefit of your
opinion. Who among the women here would you say was a shining light? Who is a diamond among dull stones?”

“Lydia Rowland, I suppose.”

“Lydia? Lydia is a stunning girl in an ordinary way. Next month the London season starts. My sister will take Lydia down to London to present her at court, pay calls at the right houses and drive in the right carriages and dance at the right balls until she attracts a husband. No different from the customs of tribes we’ve met. No, I don’t mean Lydia. What do I care about Lydia?”