Rose (28 page)

They rode along the canal in the Chief Constable’s carriage, all black lacquer and brass like an undertaker’s coach. Blair kept his hat on despite the pricking on his temple where stitches rasped against the hatband. Leveret had come along at Moon’s insistence. The afternoon had narrowed to a tunnel of dark clouds. Mill chimneys were lit sideways like columns along the Nile.

Moon was still thrilled by the event they had left. “Quite a sight, those hands. Educational, as Mr. Earnshaw said. What do you think, Mr. Leveret? Should we show those hands to every naughty boy in Wigan and scare some improvement?”

“Is that what you’d do?” Blair asked.

“Made all the women take a step back, didn’t they? I’d say having a pair of hands like that to show would improve behavior all the way around.”

“Ask Lord Rowland. Maybe he could get you another pair. The Royal Society could have one pair and you’d have the other. Use them at school or in the home.”

“You’re being humorous? Is Mr. Blair being humorous?” Moon asked Leveret, who squirmed on his seat like a tall man trying not to be noticed. “One of the things I liked about your father was that he had no sense of humor at all.”

“He didn’t,” Leveret agreed.

“I always knew where he stood, and I’d like to think I know where you stand.”

Leveret looked out the carriage and nodded.

“I wasn’t joking,” Blair told the Chief Constable. “You’re at least the scientist that Rowland is.”

Moon swung the weight of his attention from Leveret to Blair. “But it must deeply impress the natives when Rowland stands up to a giant ape.”

“It does, I’m sure. He not only stands up to the ape, he tracks it, traps it and blows its head off.”

“Lord Rowland is a marksman, I hear. And specimens, as Mr. Earnshaw was saying, are the beginning of zoology.”

“Taxidermy.”

“Well, whatever you call it, it’s the start of science and civilization, isn’t it?”

Blair let it go. He had thought Rowland was in Cape Town or Zanzibar, halfway round the world. It was a shock to see him in Wigan, hailed like the Second Coming. He also smarted from the idea that he had misread Earnshaw. If the man wasn’t a suitor, why was he wasting Charlotte Hannay’s time? He poured powder across his palm.

“Arsenic?” Moon said. “I don’t believe that in his expeditions Dr. Livingstone uses that, does he?”

“He uses opium.” Blair tossed the dose down and felt a bitterness spread through his mouth and brain. “Tell me about Silcock.”

“Sort of a thug, sort of a sport. If he didn’t take your money at cards, he’d catch you in the alley afterwards. I warned him off Wigan twice in January, the second time after the fire. Anyway, we have him in a corner now.”

“Has anyone asked him about Maypole?”

“No. Have you ever been in trouble with the law yourself, Mr. Blair?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you have the look. Not quite a wolf in sheep’s clothing. More like a wolf with a scarf around his neck. Someone might say, ‘Oh, he’s wearing a collar.’ I would say, ‘No, he’s planning to eat.’ When I hear you had a dust-up with Bill Jaxon and got the better of him, it inclines me to think my instinct was right.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Everywhere. I hear he thinks you’re after a favorite girl of his. You’re not so stupid as that, are you?”

Blair felt a frying along the sutures that Rose had sewn. Could be arsenic, could be Moon.

“Not so stupid, surely, as that?” Moon repeated. “The women are worse than the men. A fact. Are you aware that in the infirmaries of the British Army most of the beds are filled with victims of venereal disease passed on by prostitutes and loose women?”

“It’s passed both ways, isn’t it?”

“But innocently or professionally, that’s the difference.”

“In peacetime I thought it was the soldier’s profession to pass venereal disease.”

“You have your joke again, Mr. Blair, but in the south of England loose women are isolated in special hospitals for their own good. Here in the north there is no control.”

“How would you identify them? Bare arms? Pants?”

“It’s a start.”

“You mean pit girls?”

“I mean that pit girls are females who have reverted to the wild state. It’s not just a matter of dresses or pants. Do you think Parliament would investigate these women if it was just a matter of pants? Pants are merely a symbol of civilization. Do I care whether they wear pants or seashells or go about stark naked? Not a fig. But I care about the rules. I can tell you from sad experience that civilization is nothing but rules adopted for the general good. I don’t know how it is in the South Seas, but once an Englishwoman has dressed in pants she has divorced herself from decency or the considerations due her sex.
Granted it’s only a rule, but it’s what separates us from the apes. The pit girl has her allure, there’s no denying that. The Bishop himself, when he was a young man, before he was a man of the cloth, used to slip into town through the old Hannay tunnels to call on the girls. Was it Saint Valentine said, ‘Give me chastity, Lord, but not yet’?”

“Saint Augustine.”

“Well, that was Hannay. More than one girl had to leave Wigan with her ticket punched, if you get my meaning.” Moon leaned forward intimately. “I ask you, how do Africans civilize their women?”

Blair sat back. “I’ve never heard it put that way before. You’re a regular anthropologist.”

“A policeman has to have an open mind.”

“They scarify them, put plugs in their noses, plates in their lips, weights on their legs, cut off part of their sexual organs.”

Moon pursed his lips. “Does it work?”

“The women think it’s normal.”

“There you are,” Moon said. “Best rule of all.”

Canal traffic had to stop at locks to rise or fall to the next stretch of water, but it was clear to Blair as he scrambled down to the towpath that the last lock in Wigan was not functioning at all. Boats idled bow to stern in long lines on either side of the lock, and on the towpaths a crowd had gathered, boatmen joined by patrons from canalside beerhouses, boat children spread out on the banks above.

The boats themselves were marvels of design; fifty-foot “narrow boats” were capable of carrying twenty-five tons of coal or, for pottery factories, flint and bones. More, each boat was a home with a six-foot cabin into which a family of seven typically squeezed, the bows of their boats decorated with fanciful white castles or red Lancashire roses. Despite the imminence of rain there was an atmosphere of a crowd diverted by a street
pantomime. Tow horses, Clydesdales, stood forgotten at their lines. Dogs raced back and forth on boat decks. Moon, Leveret and Blair had to push their way through.

A boat aimed upstream was in the south lock. Its crew—father, mother, two boys, three girls, agitated dog, goat with enormous teats, two molting cats—were on deck and looking over the stern tiller at a man chin-deep in water. His clothes swam around him.

A lock was a simple affair of two basins—one for “up” traffic, the other for “down”—each with two pairs of gates. The dimensions, however, were exacting; the boat was seven feet across and the lock was eight feet across, leaving six inches of clearance on either side and about a foot at either end. The boat was tied forward until the bow fender nudged the gate; otherwise the man in the water couldn’t have been seen at all.

Water level in the locks was controlled by “paddles,” built into the lock gates, that had to be cranked up or down. But it was an old lock, pounded by boats every day; the “up” gate leaked in noisy sprays and the level was perceptibly rising. It wasn’t a bad problem in normal circumstances; water level would equalize with the “down” gate open. Now the motion of the water rocked the boat against the walls and thumped it against the downstream gate. Each time the man in the water had to go under and then climb back up to a tenuous handhold on the punched and splintered oak of the gate or the slime-covered bricks of the lock wall.

Moon said, “Somehow Silcock seems to have caught his foot in a paddle in the ‘down’ gate. The lock isn’t big enough for Silcock and the boat, but we can’t open the ‘up’ gate without raising the water and drowning him. We can’t open the ‘down’ gate because the boats behind are packed so tight. He’s trapped himself very smartly.”

“Why don’t you crank the paddle off his foot?” Blair asked.

“That’s the obvious solution,” Moon said. “Every boat
carries a crank—a ‘key’ we call it, as Mr. Leveret could tell you, one of his grandfathers being a lockkeeper—but the boatman managed to rip off the ratchet nut the key fits on. We could have a hundred keys, but none will work.”

Blair saw divers in the water outside the downstream gate. Moon said, “The men are diving for the nut, but this canal, with all the coal dust that fell in it, is black as the river Styx. We’re waiting for another; in the meantime, how does the old saw go: ‘For want of a nail a horse was lost, for want of a horse a battle was lost’?”

“How long has Silcock been in?”

“Since six this morning. I told you we’d warned him off twice before and he wouldn’t admit to the men who he was until just before the ceremonies.”

“You could have told me as soon as you got there.”

“And miss Lord Rowland? I only trust you’ll remember to tell his Lordship and the Bishop how helpful Chief Constable Moon was to you and brought you personally to carry out your private investigation. Mr. Leveret, will you make sure of that?”

“Of course.”

“How did it happen?” Blair asked.

“You’ll notice there’s no bridge here. We tell them not to, but some fools will cross by walking on the gates, usually when they’re staggering out of a beerhouse. Silcock must have fallen in. He makes an example, doesn’t he?”

“The Chief Constable likes examples,” Leveret said.

“It’s what people remember,” Moon said.

Across the top of Silcock’s skull wet hair splayed from a gash that was open to the bone.

“How’d he manage that?” Blair asked.

“The boat was tied up in the lock for the night. He must have hit it on the way down.”

“Didn’t the boatman see him?”

“No.”

“You’re telling me that the boatman cranked the paddle onto a man’s leg and didn’t notice?”

“I’m telling you that the boatman was so drunk he wouldn’t have noticed the parting of the Red Sea. He was drunk, his wife was drunk, their children were drunk. Probably the dog and cats were drunk too. Right, Mr. Leveret?”

Leveret, however, had vanished. As the boat wallowed a jet of water arced from the “up” gate the length of the basin. Blair realized that if Silcock’s leg wasn’t jammed in the paddle and draining the lock to some extent he would have drowned already. Of course if he wasn’t trapped he wouldn’t drown at all. One of those ancient conundrums. And Wigan did seem to be the sort of place where people slept on the tracks and slipped down old shafts, so why not swim in a canal lock?

Moon shouted down until he got Silcock’s attention. “Silcock, there’s a man here with questions for you.”

Fish-eyed, Silcock gasped up from the water.

Blair tried to imagine him dry, with a bowler and a deck of cards. “Can you move the people away?” he asked Moon.

“These people get little enough entertainment. No pageants, no lords or bishops, no great apes.”

True enough, this was the sort of audience that appreciated public dramas, be it a train wreck or a hanging. This was a tribe the Bible did not mention. Men in plug hats, the descendants of Gypsies and Irish navvies, the dark captains of the waterways, and women in blowsy skirts white with ground bone or orange from iron ore. They had assembled before Blair’s arrival and were intent on staying for the duration of the performance. Which wouldn’t take much longer.

Blair told Moon, “While I talk to him, you can send for a fire pump or a pump from a mine.”

“And try to lower the Leeds–Liverpool Canal? I think not.”

“Back up the boats and open the gate.”

“Re-hitch twenty horses and twenty boats? Not at this point.”

“Amputate,” shouted a man in the crowd.

“Underwater?” another voice asked reasonably.

“Help me.” Silcock grabbed for a diver and almost pulled him under.

Moon said, “Mr. Blair, I’d say you have the stage. If you have any questions, there’s no time like the present.”

Blair asked, “Can you at least get me a rope?”

A boy on the deck eagerly volunteered a mooring line. Blair made a noose and lowered it to Silcock, who slipped his head and arms through, gaining a quarter inch above the water, and fought off the tiller as it swung his way.

“Let the tiller be,” Blair called down. “Don’t think about it.”

Silcock focused on Blair. “What should I be finking about?”

“Who did this to you?”

“I don’t know. I only come back to Wigan last night and I fell in, I suppose, and split my head. I don’t remember.”

“Were you drunk?”

“I hope so.”

“What pubs did you go to?”

“I don’t know. I was drunk after the first one.”

This drew a laugh from the men on the far side of the lock, which lifted his spirits.

“After the last?”

“I slept for a while, I fink. Then I got up and fell in.”

“Can you think of any enemies?”

“I can fink of a lot,” Silcock claimed, playing to the crowd.

The boat wallowed sideways and chased him under. Being the objects of public attention, the family on board gathered close and watched with acute interest, father
and mother both soberly sucking pipes now, the girls lined up with bows in their hair, the boys preening for friends on the bank.

“It’s a wonderful example,” Moon said. “A felon brought down by the hazards of trespass on private property.”

When Silcock came up on the rope, he had lost the little ground he had gained. Blair gave up on subtlety. “What about Maypole?”

Even in extremis, Silcock was baffled. “What?”

“You saw a Reverend Maypole here in December. You approached him after a rugby match and caught the attention of Chief Constable Moon, who ran you out of town.”

Silcock squinted at the Chief Constable. “I might’ve made conversation wiff the man, that’s not a crime.”