Rose (37 page)

In Rose, hard work had created grace, the curved muscularity of a wild animal, the lightness and, for her size, the strength. More lithe than thick, steel like a dancer through the legs, an arch to lift both their bodies. Then she turned and devoured him as he devoured her, demanding that nothing be held back. He was besotted with her, soaked, gilt in her black dust, her breasts washed pink from his mouth.

What were they now? English? Africans?

Lost, Blair thought. Something about making love muddled time and space, rearranged them like limbs. No
past, no future, and the present so attenuated that he could breathe fifty times within a second. Bent over her, running his finger between her shoulder blades and down her spine, he could feel time shudder to a halt.

She turned. Her hair, a mop dark with sweat, swept back. The glint of coal dust on her face, her lips swollen, her brow white. Despite her darkness she was lit by a faint reflection of lamplight from his body, the way the moon was sometimes lit only by reflection from the earth, a ghostly illumination called an “ashen glow.” In that faint light appeared—for a moment—a disturbing, secondary image of someone finer.

“You call this love?” Blair asked.

“I call it fair and equal,” Rose said. “You’re a mess, Mr. Blair. You need someone like me.”

“And what would Bill Jaxon do?”

“Bill wouldn’t know till we were gone. Then he could kick in somebody else’s head for spite.” The flame guttered. She slipped from the bed, knelt by the nightstand and lit a new candle. She didn’t move like a woman who wore bustles. It was a paradox that hard work had given her so much grace. Fresh wick light in her hair, she jumped back on the bed. “We could be gone before anyone knew.”

“Gone? I thought you were happy here.”

“I was until you dressed me all in gold. What do I need t’know for Africa?”

“Some pidgin English.”

“Not what we talk in Wigan?”

“Not really. Swahili for general travel. Twi is what the Ashanti speak. If you can read a map, shoot the sun and stay dry in the rainy season, you’ve pretty much got it licked. Then it’s largely a matter of knowing the difference between pyrite and gold and taking quinine in every conceivable form.” He touched the stitches on his head.
“The surgery you’ve got. You’d do fine in Africa. You could be an Amazon.”

“Then I don’t need you? I could go without you.”

“Of course. Just follow the trade winds. That’s what trade is, just winds and currents.” He put his hand on her heart and slid his palm down. “Coal south from Liverpool on the Canary current.” Diagonally up. “Palm oil west from Africa on the equatorial current.” Across. “Gold east from the Americas on the Gulf Stream.”

“It’s very simple when you put it that way.”

“That’s about all I know,” Blair said.

“And you know other routes?”

“Yes.”

“Take me.” She placed her hand on his. “Take me from Wigan, Mr. Blair, and I’ll love you t’the day I die.”

The furnace was as yellow as the vent of a volcano, its light so intense that Blair pulled down the brim of his hat to shield his eyes. The design was plain, a fire grate in an arch of bricks mortared three deep in the stone, an approach ramp lined in brick to separate the fire from a tunnel that ran to seams of Hannay coal. Although the furnace was half a mile underground, its dimensions were outsized: two men abreast could have walked onto the grate, and the fire sucked air with a thirst that tugged at Battie and Blair.

Battie shouted, “It always seems a contradiction to burn oxygen to build a draft, but that’s what draws more air from the cage shaft and blows the foul air out. We have to draw fresh. If we introduced foul air full of gas directly into the fire the furnace would explode.”

“You drift it?”

“Right. We channel foul air in a shaft we call the dumb drift that joins well up the chimney, where the updraft’s cool enough so gas won’t ignite. Good air in, foul air out—that’s our ventilation. Twenty-four hours we have to keep it going or the pit stops breathing, and then any man down here would be dead.”

A golden plasma floated over a bed of brilliant coals that themselves seemed to shift as if animated by the
heat. The furnace fed on Hannay coal mined from the Hannay seam, a dragon that thrived by consuming itself. A coal bunker had been hacked out of stone at the end of the ramp, where two stokers in gauntlets and sacks with holes cut for their arms waited with a tub of coal. There were always two stokers in case one swooned, Battie had explained.

“Six tons of coal a day we burn in there,” Battie said. Once again the underlooker had left his hat in his office and tied a handkerchief on his head.

Blair squinted, trying to look into the furnace and protect his eyes at the same time. “The ashes?”

“Fall through the grate to be collected and dumped. It’s been emptied twice since the accident.”

“Could we look anyway?”

“For what?”

“Buttons, bones. Clogs would be burned, but clog irons might be caught in the grate. Maybe nails.”

Battie looked at the stokers, just out of earshot. “That would be wonderful news down pit, that the Bishop’s man is sifting for bodies.”

“Tell them whatever you want.”

Battie motioned Blair to follow him down the ramp to the stokers, who had been watching with gaping curiosity.

“Men, this is Mr. Blair, a special visitor to the mine. He’s an American who likes to examine every cranny and stir every pot. Do we have a spoon?”

The “spoon” was a long shovel. Battie took off Blair’s hat and replaced it with a canvas hood with a view plate of smoked mica. “Mr. Blair, you are a great pain in the fundament,” he muttered. He shoved onto Blair’s hands a pair of padded canvas gloves that reached to the elbow. “You’re going to have to do this alone. I won’t roast a man for a lunatic whim. Wait.” He picked up a wooden bucket and poured water over Blair’s hood and gloves.

Dripping, Blair took the shovel and climbed back up the ramp. Despite the view plate the coals burned white, too bright to look at directly. Like the sun. The heat was stunning, a physical blow.

When stokers threw coal they did it from a safe distance. Blair stabbed the fire directly at the grate. Superheated air forced itself down his throat. Coals rang like glass bells under the shovel’s blade. Within his shirt, he felt the hairs of his chest stand and curl. But the beauty was overwhelming. Molten gold shimmering in its own consummation, fold lapping over radiant fold, sparking as he thrust the shovel, looking for what on the dragon’s tongue? A gleaming thighbone, a well-picked rib? Vapor exploded around him and he realized that someone had thrown water at him from behind. He dug away, trying to scratch down to the red of the grate. There was a tug at his arm, and at his side he found Battie in hood and gloves wrapped in steam. Battie pointed. What he was saying, Blair couldn’t tell until the underlooker dragged him from the furnace and Blair realized that the shaft of his shovel was on fire and the iron of the blade was a dull, angry red.

The stokers met them halfway down the ramp, doused Blair’s shovel and his hood with water. Only when he took off his gloves did he notice that they and his shirt-front were scorched.

“Have you been to Hell before?” Battie asked. “You seem used to the work.”

“I didn’t find anything.”

“Nor will you, not without shutting down the fire. Is insanity a requirement for an explorer?”

Blair staggered down the ramp, dizzy from the flames, almost hilarious. “Now I know what toast feels like.”

Battie followed. “Absolutely mad. Mr. Blair, I’ll keep my eyes open. If I find anything more suspicious than the cinder of a cricket’s dick, you’ll be the first to know.”

* * *

A morning downpour greeted Blair at the surface, and for once he didn’t care because he felt as if he were still smoldering. The yard was an inky pond. Steam hung over engines and horses and the sorting shed, obscuring the screens and pit girls under the overhang. Smoke emanated from kiln, forge and engine chimneys. Devil’s weather, he thought, and welcome.

He found his mackintosh under the carriage seat, pulled the coat around himself and staggered to the lampman’s shed. Battie had said that after the explosion all the lamps had been accounted for. Blair didn’t doubt him, but there was a way to check. He didn’t remember all the safety lamp numbers listed in the coroner’s report but he recalled two: 091 signed for by Bill Jaxon and 125 by Smallbone. What if either lamp had never been signed out again? It was just an idea and he didn’t know where it led, but he went through the lampman’s ledger until the pages were almost as wet as he was. Safety lamps 091 and 125 had been signed out every working day since the explosion. Blair decided he was about as good a detective as Maypole was a miner.

The window of the shed streaked with rain, and this reminded him of Maypole’s journal, the lines reading down as well as across. What was it the poor son of bitch wrote the day before he disappeared?
“Tomorrow is the great adventure!
”

Blair found Leveret at Hannay Hall, in the stables, a brick court with a tower and a portcullis, like a defendable castle. The estate manager was in the courtyard, kneeling on wet cobblestones in gum boots and duster, intent on the task of grooming a giant Shire mare, combing mud from her “feathers,” the long hair around the hoof. The giant horse rested her muzzle on Leveret’s back. Despite the rain, beast and man both looked content.

In a corner, a farrier hammered a red ribbon of iron on
an anvil. As stalls were mucked out, horses clopped across open passageways; one side seemed given to workhorses, the other to hunters. It was a scene stately and bucolic, Blair thought. Where gentry massed in hunting pink to ride to hounds. Maybe where generations of Hannays had deflowered maids. It was odd how he now looked at things through Rose’s eyes.

He was feverish, whether from malaria or the furnace he couldn’t tell. Rose kept coming unbidden to his mind because he didn’t know if she had been serious or playing when she suggested leaving with him. It wasn’t only his feeling responsible for someone’s rash decision. It made her real. Perhaps what made her more than a series of moments all in the present was—because of her suggestion—a sense of her future. If it took the setting of her bed and a smudge of coal transferred from her skin to his—well, that was the coarse nature of man. He had promised nothing. Perhaps it had all been a joke of hers. Or a mystery, like her house. It left him distracted. Stabbing at the furnace, he had thought of her. He tipped his head back and let rain cool his face. “ ‘The deeper the shaft, the greater the heat’ is a miner’s rule.”

“Blair!” Leveret blushed. “I’d never heard that.”

“You don’t have enough stablemen to do the grooming?”

“Yes, but I enjoy it. To manage an estate, you can’t just keep your eyes open, you have to put your hands on.” Leveret snapped mud off the comb with each pass; where he had combed, the hair was white and silky. “I’ve worked in every part of the estate. Farming, stables, sheep, gardens, even the brewery. I was raised to be the estate manager. John used to say I was like Adam in the Garden of Eden, because Adam was put there to oversee Eden, not to own it. I feel fortunate that Bishop Hannay has so much faith in me. I’ve never aspired to be a Hannay, I wouldn’t want to be a Hannay.”

“Maypole could have owned it—some of it.”

“Charlotte’s income is all.”

“Quite a lot for a curate with two suits to his name.” Even as Blair spoke, Rose returned to mind. What dowry could a pit girl bring? Wages? A jar of coins, money she had earned, which lowered its value in the eyes of the world. Better an heirloom that came with family prospects, expectations a man could borrow against. “When we went down into the mine you said something I should have asked you about. You said you had been down into a mine before, an old one about ten feet deep.”

“An abandoned pit on the Wigan side of the grounds.”

“Did you ever mention it to Maypole?”

“That’s why I went down. He asked if I knew of one, so I took him.”

“When?”

“It was after the New Year. John was curious. There are a number of tunnels here, actually, some used as priest holes—hiding places—when the Hannays were Catholic hundreds of years ago. This tunnel is inside the grounds at the north gate, about fifty yards to your right as you leave.” Leveret shifted and picked up the opposite hoof. “I feel I’ve served you badly. I’ve served John poorly, too.”

“You have been conspicuous by your absence. Except for the picnic yesterday, and you were busy with dogs then. You’re always busy with four-legged animals.”

“Just hiding my embarrassment because I didn’t tell you everything when you first arrived on the train.”

“You didn’t tell me about Charlotte. About the Bishop’s getting her to give up on Maypole and agree to Rowland.”

“I’m afraid so. This gives you such a wrong impression of the Hannays and of Charlotte. You’ve caught them at a bad point.”

“And I’m sure the sun shines on England most of the time. So it’s me or Rowland in a way. Charlotte is stuck with me until she agrees to marry him? In the meantime I’m stuck with them?”