The African offered to cure him so he would have memories and dreams.
Blair said, No!
He opened his eyes. On his lap was a Temperance pamphlet. “Drink drowns all feelings of Sorrow and Shame! Drink turns the Labourer into the Sluggard, the Loving Father into the Prodigal! Does this sound Familiar to You?”
It certainly did. He would never get back to the Gold Coast. With open eyes, with the clarity of fever, he saw that Hannay’s promise was like a bauble dangled above a child’s hand. Missionaries were the rage, and none of them would accept a man with Blair’s reputation as a member of his team, no matter what the Bishop said, and Hannay knew it. So all that was really being offered was the hundred and fifty pounds, one hundred of which was already owed him. Which left whatever he could steal from expenses.
Wigan? A single minute spent there was money wasted. Blair thought he might even forget the hundred pounds that was owed. He could stay on the train to Liverpool and catch the first steamer to West Africa. The problem was that as soon as he set foot in the Gold Coast, the consulate would have him put back on board the ship. If he went into the bush to find his daughter, soldiers would follow. They had before. In which case she was better off without him.
He saw her dancing on a mat, winding and unwinding herself within her mother’s golden cloth back in his house in Kumasi. The girl glowed from the threads. An entire language was spoken by the hands during a dance, and her hands said: No, go away. Stop, stay there. Come here. Closer, closer. Dance with me.
He had no talent as a dancer, whereas Ashanti seemed to have extra joints in their bodies just for dancing. She would cover her mouth because he was so clumsy. He watched her dance and wondered, Where am I in her? She had distilled everything that was decent in him and he wondered what she had done with all the rest. Perhaps there was some other child, black on the inside. It wasn’t the gold that made her shine; the glow came from herself. If she was at all a mirror of him, why was the mirror brighter?
“The prostitute, at least, plays a traditional role in society. She is a fallen woman, perhaps weak, perhaps depraved, usually ignorant and poor, pawning her greatest prize for a few coins. A pathetic creature but understandable. The pit girls of Wigan, however, are a far greater threat for two reasons.” Earnshaw paused.
His eyes closed; trying to sleep, Blair listened to the ties passing underneath to the endless formula “wiganwiganwiganwigan,” over a trestle bridge “africafricafrica,” then again “wiganwiganwigan.”
“For two reasons,” Earnshaw went on. “First, because she has traduced her very sexuality. She has denied it and perverted it. A prostitute is, at least, a woman. But what is a pit girl? I have seen pictures of them for sale throughout England. Freaks wearing mannish pants, looking at the camera with mannish stares. The reaction of any decent woman is repulsion and disgust. Indeed, the instinctive reaction even of fallen women is the same.
“The second reason is that pit girls do the work that should be done by men. There is no other instance in industrial England of women shouldering labor meant for the stronger, more responsible sex. By doing so, the pit girl steals food not only from men but from the families of those men. Wives and children are the victims, a suffering to which mineowners turn a blind eye because they can pay less to a pit girl than they would to a man.”
“The union is with you,” the miner said. “The lasses are a danger to labor and a threat to the institution of family life.”
Earnshaw said, “Parliament has twice before tried to chase them from the pits and failed, which has only made the women more brazen. This time we cannot fail. Christ has made this my crusade.”
Blair looked through slitted lids. Earnshaw’s brows looked electrified, as if Jehovah had anointed him with a lightning bolt. Besides his wiry beard, subsidiary tufts exploded from his nostrils and ears. Blair thought of suggesting butter to train the beard, the way Somali women groomed their hair, but Earnshaw didn’t look receptive to new ideas.
As afternoon faded the conductor came through the car to turn up the lamps. Earnshaw and the Smallbones perused their Bibles. Blair’s pulse was too rapid for him to sleep, so he opened his knapsack and extracted the envelope Bishop Hannay had given him. He had removed the money before without bothering with the rest of the contents, which consisted of two onionskin pages and a photograph of a rugby team. The pages were written in the meticulous hand of a bookkeeper. Blair glanced at the signature at the end. O. L. Leveret, Hannay’s man. He returned to the beginning.
I write these words as a friend and confidant of Rev. John Edward Maypole, whose disappearance and continued absence has deprived the Wigan Parish Church and the town of Wigan of a vigorous and earnest spirit.
As Curate of our Parish Church, Mr. Maypole assisted Rev. Chubb in every regular parish duty, such as services, instruction in the Catechism, Bible School, calls on the sick and poor. On his own, Mr. Maypole gathered the funds and founded the Wigan Home for Single Women Who Have Fallen for the First Time. It was during his work for the Home that he met a soul mate in Bishop Hannay’s daughter, Charlotte. They were engaged to be married this July. She has been inconsolable. Otherwise it is the working class that has most keenly suffered the absence of Mr. Maypole. He was a constant visitor to the poorest households, and although much of his social work was among women, he was a man’s man who could take the rugby field with the brawniest miner, play fair and hold his own.
I apologize if what follows sounds like the contents of a police blotter. It is merely an attempt to reconstruct John Maypole’s activities on January 18, the last day he was seen. He performed the Morning Service for Rev. Chubb, who was ill, and from then until noon visited convalescents. Dinner for Mr. Maypole was bread and tea taken at the home of Mary Jaxon, widow. In the afternoon he gave Bible class at the parish school, delivered food to the town workhouse and visited the Home for Women, where he oversaw instruction in nursing and domestic service. By this hour the workday was done. Mr. Maypole spoke to returning miners, inviting them to a social at the Parish rectory the following Saturday. The last person he is known to have invited was Rose Molyneux, a pit girl at the Hannay pit. He was not seen afterward. Since he often took tea alone with a book and had no obligations for the evening, Mr. Maypole may well have concluded what was for him a normal day. Likewise, the following day, because his duties and interests were so wide and various, his absence was not commented on until evening, when Rev. Chubb asked me to visit John’s rooms. I reported that his housekeeper told me that his bed had not been slept in. Inquiries through the police have, since then, proved fruitless.
It is the desire and expectation of the Parish Church, of the Hannay family and of John’s friends that any questions into his whereabouts be conducted in a manner that ensures that no scandal or public sensation attaches to the modest, Christian life he led.
O. L. Leveret, Estate Manager, Hannay Hall.
The photograph was stiffened with pasteboard. Twenty rugby players in makeshift uniforms of sweaters and shorts posed in two rows, one sitting and one standing, before a painted backdrop of a garden. Instead of shoes, they wore clogs with leather uppers and wooden soles. The men were slope-shouldered, powerful, some with legs as bowed as a bulldog’s. The middle man in front marked the occasion by holding a rugby ball on which was written in white ink, “Wigan 14–Warrington 0.” The group was balanced by the placement of the only two tall men at opposite ends of the back row. One was dark, with thick hair and a fierce glare directed at the lens. The other was fair, with eyes as placid as a veal calf’s. By this figure was the notation in Leveret’s hand “Rev. John Maypole.” Etched on the reverse was “Hotham’s Photographic Studio, Wigan. Portraits, Novelties, Stereoscopics.”
Even taking into consideration the dramatized language of letters, Leveret’s words were a eulogy. A confused eulogy, since he didn’t know what tense to use in writing about the missing curate, past or present, dead or alive. It also struck Blair that for such a public fi
gure as Maypole there was little indication of much hue and cry when he disappeared.
He studied the photograph again. About the other men there was a worn quality. In the youngest this was a gauntness around their eyes, in the oldest a trademark smudging on the foreheads and hands that wasn’t ordinary dirt. By comparison, John Edward Maypole’s hair was brushed back from a smooth brow. A chinless quality marred his profile, but made him look more sincere.
Blair put the letter and picture away. He liked the name. Maypole. A good English name with both rustic and erotic connections, a hint of maids honoring pagan gods as they braided garlands around an ancient symbol of fertility. He doubted such a picture had ever come to the curate’s mind, no more than thought could penetrate solid marble, he decided. The same could probably be said for the “inconsolable soul mate,” Miss Charlotte Hannay. Blair imagined different possible Miss Hannays. A virtuous Miss Hannay with a corset and a bun, dressed in mourning just in case? A pretty and brainless Miss Hannay who would ride a pony cart to visit the poor? A practical Miss Hannay ready with bandages and remedies, a local Florence Nightingale?
The dark sky turned darker, not with clouds but with a more pungent ingredient. From the window, Blair saw what could have been the towering effluent plume of a volcano, except that there was no erupting volcanic cone, no mountain of any size, in fact, between the Pennines to the east and the sea to the west, nothing but swale and hill above the long tilt of underground carboniferous deposits. The smoke rose not from a single point but as a dark veil across the northern horizon, as if all the land thereafter was on fire. Only closer could a traveler tell that the horizon was an unbroken line of chimneys.
Chimneys congregated around cotton mills, glassworks, iron foundries, chemical works, dye works, brick works. But the most monumental chimneys were at the coal pits, as if the earth itself had been turned into one great factory. When Blake wrote of “dark Satanic mills,” he meant chimneys.
The hour was almost dusk, but this darkness was premature. Even Earnshaw stared through the window with some awe. When enough chimneys had passed one by one, the sky turned the ashen gray of an eclipse. On either side private tracks connected pits to the canal ahead. Between the pall and the lines of steel lay Wigan, at first sight looking more like smoldering ruins rather than a town.
Coal was worked into the town itself, creating coal tips that were black hills of slag. On some, coal gas escaped as little flames that darted from peak to peak like blue imps. The train slowed along a pit as a cageload of miners reached the surface. Coated in coal dust, the men were almost invisible except for the safety lamps in their hands. The train slid past a tower topped by a headgear that, even in the subdued light, Blair saw was painted red. On the other side, figures crossed single file across the slag, taking a shortcut home. Blair caught them in profile. They wore pants and coal dust too, but they were women.
The track bridged the canal, over barges heaped with coal, then traveled by a gasworks and a rank of cotton mills, their high windows bright and the chimneys that drove their spinning machines spewing as much smoke as castles sacked and set ablaze. The locomotive slowed with its own blasts of steam. Tracks split off to goods sheds and yards. In the middle, like an island, was a platform with iron columns and hanging lamps. The train approached at a creep, gave a last convulsive shake and stopped.
The Smallbones were up at once and in the aisle, ready to engage the forces of darkness. Earnshaw pulled a bag off the rack overhead. “Getting off?” he asked Blair.
“No, I think I’ll ride to the end of the line.”
“Really? I would have thought that Wigan was your sort of place.”
“You’d be wrong.”
“I hope so.”
Earnshaw joined the Smallbones outside on the platform, where they were greeted by a priest in a cassock, making a happy circle of wraiths. At something Earnshaw said, the priest lifted an owlish gaze toward the train. Blair sat back, and the group’s attention was diverted by the arrival of a tall man in a bowler.
Blair was two hundred pounds ahead—well, one hundred pounds ahead. Passage from Liverpool to the Gold Coast was ten pounds, and he knew he’d have to use a different name and disembark north of Accra, but doctors always ordered ocean voyages, didn’t they, so he’d recuperate on the way. With luck, he could be gone tomorrow.
He replaced his hat over his eyes and was attempting to get comfortable when a hand prodded his shoulder. He tipped the hat back and looked up. The guard and the tall man from the platform stood over him.
“Mr. Blair?”
“Yes. Leveret?” Blair guessed.
Silence seemed to be Leveret’s form of assent. A young man and a creature of contradiction, Blair thought. Leveret’s bowler was brushed but his jacket was crushed. His striped silk vest looked uneasy. His earnest, deep-set eyes pondered Blair’s lack of movement.
“It’s Wigan.”
“So it is,” Blair agreed.
“You don’t look well.”
“You’re an astute observer, Leveret. Not quite well enough to rise.”
“You were thinking of staying on, from what I hear.”
“The idea occurred to me.”
“Bishop Hannay advanced you funds to perform a task. If you don’t, I’ll have to ask for those funds.”
“I’ll rest in Liverpool and return,” Blair said. The hell I will, he thought, I’ll be on deck and at sea.
The conductor said, “Then you’ll have to buy another ticket in the station.”
“I’ll buy it from you.”
“That may be the way you do things in America,” Leveret said. “Here you buy tickets in the station.”
When Blair pushed himself to his feet, he found his legs frail and his balance untrustworthy. He fell in one long step to the platform, stood and gathered his dignity. The last disembarking travelers—shopgirls with hat-boxes—leaned away as he reeled by at a leper’s pace into the station. A stove sat between two empty benches. No one was at the ticket window, so he leaned against the windowsill and hit its bell. At the same time it rang he felt a shudder; he turned and saw the train pulling away from the platform.
Leveret came in the station door with Blair’s pack under his arm. “I understand it’s been a long time since you were in Wigan,” he said.
Leveret had the long face and shamble of an underfed horse, and he was tall enough to have to duck under shop signs. He led Blair up the station steps to a street of shops of greasy red brick. Despite the gloom of gas lamps, the sidewalk was crowded with shoppers and outdoor displays of waterproof coats, Wellington boots, silk scarves, satin ribbons, Pilkington glass, paraffin oil. Stalls offered sides of Australian beef, glutinous tripe, herring and cod arrayed in tiers, iced baskets of oysters. The smells of tea and coffee insinuated like exotic perfumes. Everything lay under a faintly glittering veil of soot. The thought occurred to Blair that if Hell had a flourishing main street it would look like this.
They slowed by a storefront with the newspaper placard LONDON SLASHER. “The local newspaper,” Leveret said, as if they were passing a brothel.
The Minorca Hotel was in the same building. Leveret ushered Blair up to a second-floor suite furnished in velvet and dark paneling.
“Even a rubber tree,” Blair said. “I do feel at home.”
“I reserved the suite in case people would be visiting you in the course of your inquiry. This way you have an office.”
“An office? Leveret, I have the feeling that you know more about what I’m supposed to do than I do.”
“I care more about this investigation than you do. I’m a friend of the family.”
“That’s nice, but I’d appreciate it if you stopped calling this an ‘investigation.’ I’m not the police. I’ll ask a few questions that you have probably already asked, and then I’ll be on my way.”
“But you’ll try? You took the money for it.”
Blair felt his legs start to buckle. “I’ll do something.”
“I thought you’d want to get started right away. I’ll take you around now to Reverend Chubb. You saw him at the station.”
“And more fun than a barrel of monkeys, from what I saw.” Blair aimed himself into a chair and sat. “Leveret, you found me on the train and you have dragged me here. Now you can go.”
“Reverend Chubb—”
“Does Chubb know where Maypole is?”
“No.”
“Then what’s the point in talking to him?”
“It’s a matter of courtesy.”
“I haven’t got time.”
“You ought to know that we’ve warned the ship’s captains in Liverpool that if you show up there with any funds, they’ve been stolen.”
“Well, so much for courtesy.” Blair gave Leveret a broad wink. “The English are so grand to work with, such a smug little nation.” Talking was exhausting. He let his head loll back and shut his eyes. He heard scribbling.
“I’m putting down addresses,” Leveret said. “I wasn’t trying to offend you about the captains, but I do want to keep you here.”
“And a great pleasure it is.” Blair sensed welcome oblivion on the rise. He heard Leveret open the door. “Wait.” Blair stirred from his torpor for a moment. “How old is he?”
Leveret took a moment.
“Twenty-three.”
“Tall?”
“Six feet. You have the photograph.”
“An excellent photograph. Weight, about?”
“Fourteen stone.”
Almost two hundred pounds, to an American. “Fair hair,” Blair remembered. “Eyes?”
“Blue.”
“Just in case I bump into him on the stairs. Thanks.”
His eyelids dropped like leaden gates. He was asleep before Leveret was out the door.
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