Rose (41 page)

“The English are good soldiers … they’re fighting for beer and silver-plated spoons and Pears soap. They don’t know why they’re fighting, they’re just sent. But I know. I know the maps I draw bring more troops and railway engineers and hydraulic hoses to wash out the gold. I’m worse than a thousand troops or ten Rowlands.”

“At least you’re doing something. You’re out in the world, not playing with—what did you call it—a dollhouse?”

“It’s not a dollhouse. I was impressed by the Home. You’re helping those women.”

“Perhaps. I think I’ve educated a girl, and then she steps out the door and goes right back to the man who ruined her. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a miner, a footman or a shop boy. I’ve learned that a girl will believe anything a man says. Anything.”

“Sometimes it’s the other way around. I met a girl here who could convince a man she was the Queen of Sheba.”

“She convinced you?”

“Almost.”

“But that’s a flirtation. I mean otherwise sensible women with babes in arms who listen to a man declaim that the moon is a round of bread that goes best with ale and a feather pillow.”

“That’s not believing, that’s wanting a man and a feather pillow.”

“So what other landmarks do you search for?” Charlotte looked up.

“I travel everywhere. A poor man’s odyssey. I used to do this when I was a boy and made up stories. See Virgo chasing Leo, instead of the other way around? What did the ancient Greeks make of that? Then a swim across the Milky Way over to Orion and his faithful Canis Major.”

“You had a poor but loving family?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t mine. A Chinese family fed me. Later I found out that the mother’s greatest fear was that one of her daughters would fall in love with me, a barbarian.”

“Did one of them?”

“No, I was a barbarian through and through. I did fall for one of them, though.”

“You seem to have a weakness for exotic women.”

“I don’t know that it’s a weakness. You were never in love with Cousin Rowland?”

“No, but I understand him. A Rowland is a Hannay without money. Not poor as you understand it. Worse. You were poor among poor. I mean, to be poor when the society you move in is rich. The humiliation when the family money has gone into gowns so that your mother and sister might attend the proper balls. Without my father’s assistance, the Rowlands would live in three rooms in Kew. Rowland doesn’t see the stars, he only sees money.”

“Don’t marry him.”

“My father will shut the Home if I don’t. I’ll never have sufficient funds to start another. I’m as trapped as Rowland.”

“It sounds as if you’re more trapped than the girls in the Home. They may suffer the consequences, but they did have some fun. Did you have any fun with Maypole?”

“I don’t think I gave John a moment’s fun.”

“Yet he loved you.”

“I thought you said he was infatuated with a pit girl.”

“That’s one more thing I haven’t figured out. Are you cold?”

“No. What constellation is that triangle?”

He followed her hand across the stars. “The Camelopard.”

“What is a camelopard?”

“A giraffe.”

“I thought so. I’ve seen pictures of camelopards and thought they looked like giraffes. So they
are
giraffes. I can go to my grave with that question off my mind.”

“Were you going to jump? At the knacker’s drop?”

“No, I didn’t have the nerve.”

“Not that time, you mean?”

“I’m not at all sure
what
I mean.”

They were silent. The sound of a cab horse below seemed far away.

She said, “I abused John. He would have accepted such a meager marriage and let me go my own way. He was too good, too pure, a Christian snowman.”

“Not a complete snowman.” He thought of Rose.

“Better than me.”

“Earnshaw?”

“Hideous. I wish I had made him suffer.”

“If you couldn’t make him suffer, no one could. I mean that as a compliment.”

“Thank you. For your sake, I should tell you that you’ll never find John Maypole. Where he is exactly I don’t know, but I do know that he’s gone. I’m sorry you became involved. You’re an interesting man. I’ve been unfair.”

She came to the edge of the parapet. An ashen light from the street crept up to her face. “I’ll leave you to your stars,” she said.

He felt the briefest touch on his hand and then she was gone, descending swiftly down the ladder to the stairs of the belfry.

Blair found Jupiter again. The moon Io was still suspended to one side. On the other side, Ganymede and Callisto merged into blue twins. Europa had risen clear of Jupiter like a stone cast by a giant arm.

But his mind still turned on Charlotte. When she had stood in the faint light from below she had been a completely different Charlotte, and a new thought had been born. He was too distracted to work out longitude by the Jovian moons. Now he had no idea where he was at all.

What swam into Blair’s mind was Rose, when he caught her paler than pale reflection. And the girl in Charlotte’s cottage. How she had hidden in the dark like a maid caught trying on her mistress’s dress. In silhouette there was a shadowy resemblance to Rose, but whether it was a matter of height or a glint in her hair he couldn’t say. He saw again the interrupted tea on the kitchen table, a plate without a book, without even a lamp. What struck him was that in spite of her fear she hadn’t said a word to Charlotte about a strange man at the window.

He packed the telescope and tripod into his pack, climbed down into the belfry and rushed down the tower steps. The service was over, the church a barrel of black except for watery votive candles at side chapels. When he went out the door there was no sign of Charlotte at the front of the church or among the gravestones at the back. Most likely she had a carriage near his hotel.

The fastest way was the alley by the butcher’s stalls. Blair was running after her when he tripped and his hat flew. A foot came out of the dark and kicked him in the stomach. He rolled and tried to breathe while other feet continued to stomp and kick. An oil rag was pushed and tied into his mouth, almost stuffing his tongue down his throat. Hands tied belts around his wrists and ankles and
threw him onto a wooden plank, which began to roll. A cart, he thought. Crossing the street there was enough light for him to see that the cart’s side walls were red. Though it had no horse, the cart gathered speed to the sound of a dozen clogs on cobblestones.

Bill Jaxon looked over a side of the cart and said, “He can see.”

A sack was pulled over Blair’s head. Within it a pungent cloud of gunpowder stung his eyes and stopped what little breath he had. The cartwheels crushed shells, slid on sheep muck, raced from alley to alley. The procession squeezed through a door and flew down an incline. He hoped they would only roll him around town to scare him and let him go. Maybe it was a good sign that Jaxon wasn’t alone. Heavy doors opened and the cart lumbered into the echo of a tunnel. Blair couldn’t think of any functioning mine in the middle of town. His hand felt a loose peg on the cart floor. It was smooth and split on one end and woolly at the other, and he understood that the red he had seen on the cart wasn’t paint, and that he was back at the knacker’s drop.

The sack came off with a handful of his hair. This time he was at the bottom of the drop where, during the day, the knacker waited for sheared sheep to fall and break their legs, the easier to kill and butcher. There was no knacker now and no sheep, though the floor was ridged with crusts of accumulated fat and gore. A pair of butcher blocks stood at the side, red as altars. Lanterns hung on meat hooks. On the walls, ancient whitewash was barely visible through layers of black and new sprays of pink.

Bill Jaxon stripped to a silk scarf and brass-toed clogs. Blair recognized Albert Smallbone. He could tell that four others were miners by the masks of coal dust on their faces, and a man with a brush mustache he remembered as the stableman from the Hannay mine, the man he had helped with the pony. They tore off his clothes,
ripping his shirt so that buttons sprayed the floor. As they knocked him on his back and dragged off his pants, he wished the miners wore real masks, which would have meant they were worried about being identified. But they didn’t seem to think this was a problem.

“Tha’ve a dark face neow, like oos.” Bill gave his words the full local twist. Dark from the sack’s gunpowder, not coal, though, Blair knew.

Bill made a muscular dancer prancing in anticipation. Pulled upright, Blair felt small and naked, daubed with blood from the cart and floor. The men forced a pair of clogs on his feet and pushed the clasps shut.

“Ah’ll keep an eye for constables,” the stableman said, and ran off.

Bill said, “See what ‘appens when tha messes with a Wigan girl? Tha wants t’be a Wigan lad, tha mun learn t’purr.” He told Smallbone, “Pull t’cork.”

Smallbone drew the gag from Blair’s mouth and held it high. Other men pushed his head forward while Bill looped his scarf around Blair’s neck and tightened it until their foreheads touched.

Blair said, “I could have let you drown.”

“Your mistake.”

Smallbone snapped the rag down and Bill kicked Blair twice before he had a chance to move. Each leg was numb and bloody. He sank to his knees in stupefaction.

“Need a hand?” Bill asked.

When Blair reached up, Bill hit him and Blair felt his nose split. Blood sprayed his chest. Two seconds, he thought, and he already looked like a sheep who had taken the high dive.

He pushed himself up. The problem was that as his clogs broke the crust of the floor they skated clumsily on the sheep fat underneath. Bill, on the other hand, moved with sinuous ease. Muscles bunched and released. He spread his arms, retied his scarf around his neck, feinted and, as Blair slipped, tapped him lightly on the center of
his forehead, slowly spun and kicked savagely at the same place, but Blair had rolled away.

“You’re not going to stop this?” Blair asked the miners, but they pushed him back toward Bill, ringed around him like dogs in a pack.

Bill had the strut of a champion, the glory of a white body on a red floor, raking his long black hair with his hands. A massive torso pivoting on a pinched waist, with the smile of a man who was turning sport to art. He merely leaned and Blair backed away and fell.

“Need a hand?” Bill asked again.

Blair rose unsteadily on his own. Bill rushed him, lifted him clear of the floor and carried him into a wall. Blair was crushed, his arms caught on the other side of the bigger man’s back. He pulled Bill’s head back by the hair, butted him and twisted free.

Miners blocked the door by the cart. Blair looked up at the edge of the drop, where he had stood before with Charlotte, and where the stableman now stood. A scream would have to rise like a siren over the drop and above the pens to reach the houses around.

Bill shook his head and rolled his shoulders, showing no more than a blush on his brow.

“Have you noticed something?” Smallbone asked Blair.

“What’s that?”

“You’re not worried about Maypole anymore.”

Bill approached almost on the toes of his clogs while Blair slid sideways in retreat. Bill feinted as if to scoop up Blair’s front leg, and as Blair leaned back he took a second, longer stride forward and kicked Blair on the inside of the thigh, continued moving in, and with the other clog kicked Blair in the small of the back. Blair stepped in and hit him square on the mouth. It was as ineffective as punching a man armed with swords. Bill kicked him in the middle of the chest and he rolled against the wall.

Cats “purr.” What did that have to do with kicking? Blair wondered. Or killing somebody with brass-tipped wooden shoes? He found himself standing up again, using the wall. He was as red now as if he had been skinned. He ducked and Bill kicked a white hole into the plaster. When Blair tried to tackle him, Bill skipped aside, tripped him and kicked him on the side of the head. Blair was still rolling, or the blow would have pushed his brains out his ear.

“That’s enough, Bill,” one of the miners said.

Smallbone said, “Bill’s not through.”

Bill’s clog tagged Blair’s chin—not squarely, but enough for him to find a tooth loose under his tongue. Buttons, teeth—he was coming undone like a rag doll. He was dizzy, while Bill was spinning like a whirling Dervish. Another kick and Blair found himself against the opposite wall. He got up again. It seemed to be his role in the drama. A kick in the ribs propelled him halfway across the floor and into a butcher block. A cleaver would be handy now, he thought. He crawled up the block and held on.

“Are tha goin’ t’kill him?” someone asked.

“He’s still standing,” Bill said.

If that was the issue, Blair thought, he was willing to lie down. Before he could, Bill gracefully leaped through the air and kicked him so hard he felt he had been shot from a cannon. He folded over. Bill kicked out his knees from behind. Well, I’m down now, he thought.

It didn’t matter. As he curled up, Bill kicked his side, his arm, his leg. This was the way iron was forged when it was cold, by pounding. Blair trembled, and it wasn’t from cold.