Rose (43 page)

Blair opened his eyes.

The curtains were closed, framed by light like shadow in reverse, stirred from a draft. Rain tapped on the windowsill. Coal shifted in the grate. He sat up carefully, as if his head might split. A pitcher and basin of water sat on the night table. Empty chairs were pulled close to the bed, and the door to the sitting room was ajar.

He slipped his legs over the edge of the bed. His mouth was dry, his tongue almost adhered to his palate, but there was clarity to his mind, as if a wind had blown away a film of dust. He stood, and, holding on to chair backs for support, hobbled toward the closet. He remembered Livingstone, who thought he wouldn’t die as long as he kept moving forward, which was why he stumbled farther and farther into the African bush until his porters found him dead, kneeling at his prayers. Blair decided he wasn’t going to die quite yet, certainly not by making the mistake of praying.

Facing the closet mirror, he forgot about Livingstone and thought of Lazarus, who was four days dead before being miraculously raised. Which was what Blair looked like in the glass, a little ripe for resurrection. There were too many bruises to catalogue, blotches of eggplant
purple, and overall week-old, decaying shades of yellow as if he had died of jaundice or the plague. His ribs wore a patchwork of plasters, and above both ears there were shaved hair and stitches. He turned his head to see. Good needlework. One eyebrow was split, but his nose was human size and the tooth had rerooted, so he was alive.

From the hiding place behind the mirror he took Maypole’s journal and opened the book to the small pasteboard photograph of Rose.

“You’re awake.” Leveret was rushing in through the sitting-room door. “And up. Let me help you.”

As Blair slumped against the chair he clutched the book. “If you want to help, get me out of here. I have to hole up.”

Leveret caught him and eased him back toward the bed. “Africa? America? Where do you want to go?”

“Rowland showed me a house.”

The house was a sullen presence in red brick, as if it brooded on its isolation from every other structure on the Hannay grounds. Its driveway connected to a lane deep in weeds. Its hedge neither shielded the front windows from the western wind nor blocked a view of slag heaps. The rooms were empty of furniture. Thanks to Rowland, broken glass covered the floors. Dismal for a normal tenant, perfect for Blair.

Leveret set up a cot in the kitchen. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to do more than heat tea on the fire grate. The former occupants found it too wild and alone, and I can’t say that I blame them. You can’t grow anything in slag, not even your own vegetables, and without a proper windbreak you get the gales straight off the sea.”

“When’s the great wedding?”

“In two weeks. It won’t be as grand as the Bishop wished, perhaps, but he is eager to carry out the event as quickly as possible. He will perform the ceremony himself. You know, you’re free to go now. I could get you
rooms in London or Liverpool, and arrange for a medical man. I know you’ll want to get away from Wigan as soon as you get your legs under you.”

As Leveret hurried to the grate to lay sticks and coals, Blair dropped on the cot’s mattress into the smell of moldy horsehair. “Who were the former occupants?”

“Actually it was the Rowlands. The Bishop invited them to live in the main house only last year.”

“Up to then he kept them here?”

“Yes. I noticed that there’s been some damage recently. I could have a glazier here tomorrow. In fact I could furnish it for you.”

“No. No one but you. Rowland grew up here?”

“Not often. He was away at school most of the time. When he was here, he never got on with his uncle—or with Charlotte.” Leveret stared at flames, reluctant to rise from the grate into a chimney of cold air.

“So we were the cupids.”

Leveret waved smoke aside. “It takes a while. Inefficient, but there’s more than enough coal, you don’t have to worry about that.”

“How do you feel about it?” Blair asked.

“I despise myself.”

To test his legs, Blair tottered around the hedge to the slag tip and back. The great circle route, he told himself. A regular Magellan.

Inside, he studied maps of Wigan and the Hannay pit, both above- and underground. At night he pulled the spring gun to the center of the kitchen and rigged strings across the doors.

Leveret returned to remove Blair’s stitches. “From what I understand, the patient generally gets drunk first. This must hurt like the devil. I brought some Invalid’s Stout. It’s what miners dose their children with when they have a cough or influenza. You know, the stitching is so good I almost hate to cut it.”

“Leveret, this is not the time to develop a sense of humor.”

“Well, doesn’t it strike you as ironical that having been born in Wigan, you return only to be beaten almost to death?”

“Something that obvious isn’t ironical.”

“What is it?”

“Something that stupid? It has to be the hand of God.”

Leveret drew out a thread. “The Bishop has been asking about you. He wonders when you want to go. He is offering you your old position as his mining engineer and surveyor in the Gold Coast. You won’t have to join an expedition in East Africa or worry about the Colonial Office. This is quite a triumph for you.”

“Does Charlotte ask about me?”

“She asks for a report on your health each time I see her. When will you leave?”

“When I’m done.”

Birches crowned the slag white. What birches did that other trees could not was to tolerate the heat that coal in the slag still generated. Not only tolerate but flourish, with delicate branches tipped in green.

Blair waited until dusk, the right condition for reconstruction. He tied a strip of cloth cut from a sheet onto a limb, paced thirty feet and knotted a strip onto another birch, paced another fifty feet and tied a strip to a third tree.

The first strip was for the lamp shed, where a line of men stood in the morning gloom. Smallbone was inside, signing for himself and “Jaxon,” who waited outside the door.

The second strip was for the winding house, where Harvey Twiss, alone, oiled the ten-foot rods of the engine as they smoothly churned.

The third strip was for the winding tower and cage
shaft, where Smallbone and “Jaxon” boarded last and faced the wall.

He walked around the three strips of cloth from different points of view. As light failed, wind arrived. The strips shook, and Blair imagined the ground jumping. Black smoke poured out of the furnace shaft and, from the force of the explosion, from the cage shaft. The stokers underground fed coals as fast as they could to keep the furnace fire drawing air. Messengers from Battie arrived.

Standing in the dark among the slag heaps, Blair thought he was starting to see how things had happened. The one individual that a sportsman like Twiss would have allowed into the engine house was his champion, Bill Jaxon. What had these two men said to each other when they felt the blast? Bill’s rush through the smoke to the cage spoke of his fear of being found so far from the coal face where he was supposed to be.

Twiss would have feared for his son. Discipline might have been enough to keep the winder in the engine house except for Bill’s race to the cage, an example Twiss would have found hard not to imitate as soon as he could wind the cage back to the surface.

Lamps, what about lamps? Twiss had to lift one off a body lying on the Main Road. Bill Jaxon didn’t because he already had the lamp Maypole had paid for; passage to another world, “the price of my ticket the cost of a pick and lamp,” Maypole had said about his practice in the tunnel. The safety lamps at the dry-goods store were, except for the numbers scratched on the base, identical with the lamps at the Hannay pit. Now that the answer fell into place, Blair saw that Jaxon also would have had to bring one because he knew that in case of problems he couldn’t go to the lampman.

Smallbone was easier. Battie had mentioned the fireman’s habit of nesting in side tunnels whenever he could slip away from work. Since the underlooker had banned
shots for the morning because of the presence of gas, Smallbone had all the excuse he needed to leave the coal face and, incidentally, to survive and meet Bill coming the other way. What induced Smallbone to join Bill? He would have followed Jaxon to the moon, Blair thought, and they were miners, not cowards. And perhaps they wanted to be the first men on the scene for other reasons.

But why? Why would Bill agree to Maypole’s masquerade in the first place? Maypole had no money, Bill had little religion. What persuasion was left, then, but personal, a mystery when there was no person whom Bill cared about except Rose?

Most of the grounds were a plantation of mature beeches striped with soot and emerald lichen. In the early morning, following his compass, Blair made his way a half-mile to the stable, and then along the lane to the lip of the quarry, where he took cover behind a screen of hawthorn and watched the cottage of Charlotte Hannay.

Sun rested on the red tiles of the roof and, minute by minute, slid down the white upper face of the house. Wisps of smoke issued from a chimney. With iridescent wings, dragonflies rose from quarry water while empty hay wagons lumbered on the lane. Leveret drove by toward town at a smarter pace. An ice van came from the opposite direction. By nine, sunlight had moved down to the lower story of the house and spilled into the garden. A boy in a pony cart arrived to open the cottage’s stable and exercise a long-legged bay. An old gardener whom Blair recognized from the Home for Women wheeled a wagonful of compost to the greenhouse at the side of the garden.

In the afternoon the boy returned to lead the horse back into the stable. Alders overhung the quarry; a kingfisher hunched on a branch and studied the water below. By three, shadow had filled the garden and covered the front of the cottage. Full hay wagons plodded back on the lane,
slower than before. They had deep-dished wheels that made them waddle. Again Leveret appeared, glanced at the dark windows of the cottage and drove on. Darkness drew midges, which drew bats to the quarry pool.

Charlotte never showed herself. Once or twice he saw candlelight inside, so briefly that he wouldn’t have credited his eyes but for the chimney smoke. He watched until well into the night before he hiked back to his own mean lodgings.

The following day he did the same. The routine was similar. A steam tractor drawing a cocked plow rolled by. The boy mucked out the stables and ran the horse on a long lead. The kingfisher returned and pondered the quarry water as before. One difference was that a baker’s van stopped to leave a basket on the front step.

At midday the basket was still on the step. In the garden the daffodils nodded taller, brighter heads. In the hawthorns white buds spread by the hour. The horse was a four-legged statue in its enclosure.

The horse turned. At the house, the door opened as a woman emerged nimbly to pick up the baker’s basket and slip back in. But she couldn’t resist her moment of air, an opportunity to shake out her red hair in the sun, if only for an instant, long enough for Blair to recognize the girl he had seen inside the house a week earlier. Again she wore a silk dress, and again she could not resist a treat. Smoke drifted from the kitchen chimney. For tea, he thought, with fresh bread and jam.

The boy came by to take the horse back to its stall. Shadows swung over the front of the house. Farm wagons plodded along the lane. The sun fell and clouds faded. Midges were succeeded by bats, followed by stars.

Light showed in the parlor, a second in an upstairs room—gas sconces by their yellow cast, not the shaded candle of someone hiding. After a third one lit the downstairs hallway, the front door opened and Charlotte stepped out with a lantern in hand. She was unmistakably
Charlotte, from the dress of semimourning to the black lace smothering her forehead. She was Charlotte by her every brusque step and abrupt glance at the garden and the lane. When she crossed into the stable, he heard the horse’s throaty chuff of recognition, the way a pet demands grooming from a favorite person.

While she was in the stable, he moved from the quarry down to the lane’s stone wall for a better view. When she came out, she walked the length of the garden to the quarry’s edge and looked at the water long enough for him to grow nervous for his partner in astronomy; it was safer to contemplate stars than deep water.

The lamp in Charlotte’s hand brushed her features with a soft upward light, raising impossibilities.

Although it was opposite Wigan’s Market Hall, Hotham’s Photographic Studio had the bright colors and curlicued woodwork of a carnival booth. Signs announced
HOTHAM’S PORTRAITS, FROM SCIENTIFIC TO PATHETIC
and claimed
MACHINERY, BUILDINGS, GROUPS, CHILDREN AND ANIMALS OUR SPECIALTY
. The upstairs window was hung in heavy drapes that suggested the dark required by art. Behind the plate glass at street level were photographs categorized as “Natural, Comedic, Historic” and framed portraits of gentry and nobility with cards noting “By Kind Permission.”