Rose (39 page)

“Do they ever bloom?” he asked. “You seem to get most of your pleasure from cutting them back.”

She gave him not a glance. The rose garden was a perfect setting for her precisely because there were no roses. A rose garden should have roses as pink as English faces, Blair thought. If there were, though, she probably would decapitate them. With her pruning shears’ curved blades, Charlotte Hannay put him in mind of a figure from the French Revolution, one of those women who happily attended Madame Guillotine. Her dress glistened as if she had been in the garden all morning, although there were few clippings in the basket that straddled the path. Except for her pallor and habitual frown, she could have made a not unattractive young woman, he thought, though that was like saying a wasp made a pretty insect except for its sting.

“Didn’t I warn you not to come here again?” Charlotte asked.

“You did.”

She snipped off a long cane with red barbs. Switch in one hand, shears in the other, she straightened up.

“You intend to whip me, neuter me, or both?” Blair asked.

“Whatever would serve as a best reminder.”

She tossed the cane toward the basket and bent over the next plant. She trimmed the top twigs, making a way to reach in and prune the middle stems. Though the gauntlets protected her to the elbow, the silk sleeves of her arms were torn.

Blair said, “No need, anyway. I’m leaving Wigan. You’re not the only one, apparently, who’d like to see me go.”

Charlotte didn’t bother to respond. As she trimmed dead wood, he noticed that her work slowed to a meditative pace. He expected her to charge him with prowling outside her cottage too, but she said not a word about it.

Blair said, “I think in time I could have found Maypole.
What I have discovered already is that I’m more interested in finding him than anyone else. It’s clear this is not about a missing man. All your father wants is for you to give up a dead engagement and then I’m free to go back to Africa. Am I correct so far?”

“It doesn’t actually matter.”

“You don’t care if I find Maypole. You would have helped me if you did. I got interested in him and his fate, but that’s not worth being killed for. It makes me feel stupid to admit it. Anyway, I apologize for being used against you. I had no idea this was about you. The main thing is, I want to go and you want me to go.”

Charlotte bent among the stems. With each snip, Blair pictured another red rose dropping. “The main thing is,” she said, “I won’t marry Rowland.”

“Marry who you want. The problem is, the longer I’m here, the more I find. He had another life besides you. I think you want me to go now rather than later. Just tell the Bishop you’re no longer interested in Maypole. Then the Bishop blesses me and sends me on my way, and you and I are square.”

“You are a worm, Blair.”

“That’s not the answer I was looking for.” He felt a rush of blood as if she had hit him. “Very well, do you know a pit girl named Rose Molyneux?”

Wind pressed the brim of Charlotte’s hat. Blair realized that she must be cold in her thin dress and shoes. But where was she colder, he wondered, inside or out?

“I don’t recall the name.”

“Reverend Maypole was infatuated with her.”

“I doubt that.”

Blair glanced toward the Home. “She has some skill at surgery. I thought she might have picked it up in one of your classes. Maypole might have met her here.”

“Describe her,” Charlotte said.

“Physically, I’d have to say she was ordinarily attractive. She has red hair and a great deal of spirit, and that
sets her apart. I wouldn’t say she was intellectual, but she’s quick-witted and direct. A free spirit. You rescue these girls, so you must have a fair opinion of them.”

“I rescue them because they are not free, because they are working girls who are abandoned by their suitors or abused by their fathers. Otherwise the babies go to the orphanage, and the mothers, who are usually not much more than children themselves, descend in three steps—from Reverend Chubb’s care, to the workshop, to prostitution. We make them free.”

“Well, Maypole thought Rose was a free spirit without your care. He was taken with her.”

“And was this regard reciprocated?”

“No. I think Rose was flattered by Maypole’s attentions, but that’s all. I don’t think she had anything to do with his disappearance. The affair was mainly in his head.”

“As if you knew John Maypole.”

“What I’m getting at—”

A cane snapped. Charlotte threw it lightly aside. “Let me guess. That I will be embarrassed by revelations of Reverend Maypole’s romantic attachment to another woman—an earthy, working-class woman—unless you end your inquiry? Is that right?”

“More or less, since you put it that way.”

“Devoid of emotion as I allegedly am, I can work these things out.”

“Good. Do you remember what your father said about closing the Home if there was a public scandal? I think Maypole’s infatuation would qualify as that. All your saintly work will be undone.”

Charlotte approached a bush with canes already pruned to the nub. While she removed her gauntlet to feel for shoots, a liqueur of water and compost swam into her shoes.

“Let us be clear. You would force me to marry Rowland so that you could collect money from my father and
go back to Africa? If that’s the case, I’ll give you money and the ticket.”

“But you can’t give me the work in West Africa your father can, and that’s what I need.”

“You are lower than a worm. You are an extortionist.”

“It’s not hard. I haven’t seen one tear, one sign of human sympathy from you for that poor bastard Maypole. Not one word of help for me. Now you can find him on your own, if you care.”

“Perhaps you are simply too ignorant to understand the dimensions of the damage you could do. This is the only haven in the north of England where women pregnant out of wedlock are not treated as criminals or outcasts. We turn them from victims into employable, useful persons. Can you grasp that?”

“This is a dollhouse where you dress poor girls in gray dresses. Your little world. You’re the gray princess, the coal princess. What fun they have, I’m sure.”

“You’d wreck it all to get at me?”

“Unless you tell your father what he wants and I get what I need. As soon as I’m gone, you can change your mind. Or don’t.”

Charlotte turned her back on Blair and moved to a plant already cut to a single Y of bare canes. She ran her hand lightly over the barbs in a slow, reflective search for shoots, until Blair realized she wasn’t going to say anything more to him, that he had been dismissed.

Blair lowered himself by rope down into the mine and followed the same route as the night before, wrenches in his belt, taking care to sweep the floor with the light of his bull’s-eye lantern for new trip wires. The spring gun sat at the end of the tunnel, the rod it had shot still lodged in the coal. The gun looked more like a stepson of a cannon than a rifle, and the sight of it made him wince.

He studied the pick marks on the wall as if he were an archaeologist in an ancient tomb. Miners used short-shafted
picks because they worked in cramped conditions, and, all things being equal, the height of the work tended to indicate the size of the man. The marks were unusually high from the floor, Bill Jaxon’s height, and expertly straight as a taut string, except where they went suddenly askew. At the same height but off line and badly hit: too hard, too soft, or off the point. As the mishits went on, however, they improved. Jaxon and Maypole were both big men. He imagined the miner instructing the curate on the stroke and rhythm of the ancient craft of hewing coal. But why? If Maypole just wanted to slip underground to preach, he only needed to look like a miner, not attempt the work. Winning coal with a pick was not something learned in a day or a week. Real miners would turn him out as a fraud and a danger.

A mystery never to be solved, Blair decided. The spring gun was all he’d come for. It was an ungainly forty pounds of hardwood stock and iron barrel on a base made from an iron wheel. Even after he unbolted the gun from its base, the barrel made hard carrying under a roof that stooped to four feet in places. He laid the gun near the pit eye, went back for the base and was returning when an apparition of a spider the size of a man dropped through the shaft and hung in midair.

“Who is that?” Reverend Chubb blinked at the dark and made vaguely swimming motions with his arms and legs. His hair, tie and wattles swayed as he hung. A hand from above held onto his belt.

“Is it Blair?” a voice asked.

“It is too black down here,” Chubb said.

“It’s me.” Blair set the base down beside the gun.

“Good work, Chubb,” the voice said, and the Reverend rose again like an angel on a wire. Blair pulled himself up the rope to the surface, where Chubb stood dizzily reassembling his loose parts. Rowland kicked the shaft cover shut and leaned against the birch in a
negligent way, like a poet who happened to be carrying a shotgun rather than a poem. His yellow hair was uncombed, his eyes bright as crystal set off by red lids.

“Very disagreeable and uncomfortable,” Chubb muttered to his chin.

“The work of a moment,” Rowland said, “for which you have my gratitude, which is no small matter when you consider that I will be Lord Hannay and your living will be dependent on my goodwill. Otherwise you will eke out your final years like a cockle sucking on a pier.”

“I was pleased to oblige,” Chubb said.

“That is the wonderful thing about the established church,” Rowland told Blair. “They do oblige. What are you doing here? We found a carriage standing in the lane and began beating the bushes for the driver.”

“Looking for Reverend Chubb’s missing curate. Chief Constable Moon suggested that he might have fallen down an old shaft.”

“There are a thousand abandoned shafts in Wigan.”

“I can only try.”

“Well, we’ll prove the veracity of your claim. Moon is with us. Besides, there’s something I want to tell you about. You’ll join the party.”

They moved through stands of larch and oak. Beside Rowland, Blair, Chubb and Moon ranged gamekeepers on either side. Amid a fine rain fell heavier drops from branches. Wet leaves muffled the men’s steps and soiled their trouser cuffs.

After being underground, Blair enjoyed the open air in spite of the company. Rowland bragged about his shotgun, a gift from the Royal Geographical Society. It was the custom product of a London gunmaker, with narrow double barrels and a breech engraved with lions and elands like the head of an elegant cane.

A woodpecker made an undulating flight across a clearing and alighted on the trunk of a larch fifty yards
on. The bird crossed its black-and-white wings behind its back and had started to probe beneath the bark when Rowland fired and nailed its head to the tree. “A tight pattern,” he said.

A finch panicked across the clearing. “Too far,” Blair said.

Rowland shot and the bird split like a pillow, golden feathers wafting to the ground.

The advantage with arsenic, Blair thought, was that it did hone the eye and induce illusions of omnipotence; he wished he had brought some himself. Of course the peak was usually followed by a trough.

The keepers ran forward to pluck the kills and stuff the fluffs and feathers into silk sacks.

Rowland reloaded as he walked. “There is a use for everything and employment for every man. England’s strength is specialization, Blair. One man collects iron, another tin, another rags, another bones. One man collects horse manure for fertilizer, another dog shit for dye works. Feathers make fish lures. Nothing wasted, everyone gainfully employed. I think it will be wonderful to be Lord Hannay.”

Moon loomed at Blair’s shoulder. “First you fish in the canals. Now I understand you have been popping in and out of holes.”

“You told me Maypole might have fallen in a shaft.”

“I’m flattered you took my suggestion so much to heart. I have to warn you, though, that this side of Wigan is practically a Swiss cheese. There are tunnels, they say, that go all the way to Candle Court.”

“In Catholic days,” Chubb said, still smarting.

You don’t put the local vicar down a hole like a ferret even if you are lord of the manor, Blair thought. Which would be precisely why Rowland did it, to establish his exception to all rules. It was the way the Hannays did everything.

Rowland said, “I’ve been teasing Chubb about
evolution. The problem with the Bible is that it claims we are all created in the image of God. It makes a great deal more sense that we share a mutual ancestor with the apes, and that the races of man show the same scientific evolution from Negroids and Asiatics to Hamites, your Arabs, and Semites, your Jews, to the modern Anglo-Saxon.”

“I’ve seen too many Englishmen tip over canoes.”

“There are different English, just as there are ladies and pit girls. There’s a reason those women do that sort of work. It’s natural selection. I forget, Blair, what was your mother?”

“I forget, too.”

“Anyway, it gives me a sense of welcome and confidence to have representatives of the Church and the law at my side. To know that they look forward to a time when I will be truly home. Of course the Bishop will be Lord Hannay for many years to come, I’m sure. We wish him the longest possible life.”

A starling passed with the flight of a stone skipping on water. Rowland fired and the bird turned a cartwheel. He asked Blair, “Take you back to Africa?”

“It certainly does. Too bad you can’t have some dead pachyderms lying around the grounds.”

“Shooting is the pinprick of reality, Blair. Otherwise everything is dull. A little bang, a little blood, and things come to life. Are you following this, Chubb? You might be able to use it for a sermon.”

“I don’t understand why you want Blair along, my lord.” Chubb was stumbling after them.

“Because Blair knows what I’m talking about and you don’t. Moon, do you?”

Moon swept a branch aside for Rowland. “I have some appreciation, milord.”

“Then we’ll have some interesting times. But, Moon, you should have seen Blair in the Gold Coast. There are plenty of English on the coast, but in the interior there
was only Blair. And Arabs, but they don’t count. Not much of a marksman, but he knew his way. Spoke the lingo like a pasha. See, there are two Blairs. The mythic Blair in Africa and the life-size Blair here. Have I done your portrait, Blair? Is your nose too long or out of joint? It’s just that in Africa you had a certain style. It’s sad to see you so reduced. There you go, looking at your compass again.”