When he awoke, it took Blair a moment to comprehend where he was. The fever had ebbed, but in the dark the unfamiliar furniture seemed suspiciously animated, especially chairs and tables so draped in tassels and cloths that they were virtually dressed. Standing, he felt lightheaded. He thought he heard horses but when he made his way to the window and looked down on the street he saw only people, which puzzled him until he realized that half of them wore clogs. Clogs were leather shoes with wooden soles protected by iron rails that could last a workingman ten years. The perfect sound for Wigan: people shod like horses.
It was eight o’clock by his watch. The thing to do, it seemed to him, was to talk to the smallest number of locals in the shortest amount of time and get out of town. In Africa he had marched with eyes sealed shut with infection, with feet covered in sores; he could overcome a little chill to get out of Wigan.
He read Leveret’s note on the table. Reverend Chubb’s address was the parish rectory, John Maypole’s seemed nearby, the widow Mary Jaxon’s was in Shaw’s Court, Rose Molyneux’s was in Candle Court. There was no address for Miss Charlotte Hannay.
The widow Jaxon sounded like the best choice, more likely to be home, readier to gossip. As he picked up the paper he caught sight through the open bedroom door of a man in a mirror. Someone in a slouch hat, bad beard and eyes staring back like two dim candles.
Blair was not quite as ready for an excursion as he’d imagined. He had no sooner climbed into a cab before he passed out. Between black spells he was vaguely aware of shopping streets giving way to foundries, the sharp fumes of dye works, a bridge, and then row upon row of brick houses. He revived as the carriage pulled up.
The driver said, “This is Candle Court.”
Blair said, “I wanted Shaw’s Court.”
“You told me Candle Court.”
If Blair had made a mistake, he didn’t have the strength to correct it. He got out and told the driver to wait.
“Not here. I’ll be on the other side of the bridge.” The driver turned his cab around briskly in retreat.
The street was a paved trench between row houses built for miners by mineowners, two stories side to side, under a single roofline of Welsh slate so that it was impossible to tell one house from another except by their doors. It was a maze of shadow and brick. The gas jets of streetlights were far apart, and most illumination came from the paraffin lamps of beerhouses and pubs, or open windows where sausages, oysters or hams were for sale. Everyone else seemed to be at the evening meal; he heard a sea sound of voices within.
According to Leveret the Molyneux girl lived at no. 21. When he knocked on the door it swung open.
“Rose Molyneux? Miss Molyneux?”
As he stepped into a parlor the door closed behind him. Enough of the street’s faint light entered for him to see chairs, table and a cabinet filling the tight space. He had anticipated worse. Miners’ houses usually had families of ten or more, plus lodgers stepping over and on top of each other. This was as quiet as a sanctuary. Relatively prosperous, too. The cabinet displayed ornamental pots: a ceramic Duke of Wellington, with his hooknose, was the only one Blair could identify.
The next room was lit by a rear window. Heat and the aroma of milk and sugar emanated from a kitchen range. A large pan of hot water sat on top. Blair opened the oven and raised the lid of the pot inside. Rice pudding. Two plates for it lay on a table. Washtubs crowded in the corner and, curiously, a full-length mirror. A hooked rug softened the boards of the floor. On the wall opposite the range a flight of stairs rose to a quiet bedroom floor.
Feet shuffled outside. Blair looked through the window at a miniature yard with a washboiler, slopstone for washing and a pig rubbing against the slats of its pen. The pig raised its eyes yearningly. Someone was expected home.
Blair knew that to wait outside would be self-defeating because any loitering stranger was, until proven otherwise, a bill collector to be avoided. He went into the parlor to sit, but neighbors were passing by the front window and he couldn’t lower the curtain without drawing attention: a lowered curtain was a public notice of death among miners. Odd he remembered that, he thought.
He retreated to the kitchen and sank into a chair set in the shadow of the stairs. The fever was between swings, leaving him limp. He told himself that when he heard the front door open he could return to the parlor. As he tipped back into shadow the wall pushed his hat forward over his face. He closed his eyes—just for a second, he told himself. The sweetness of the pudding scented the dark.
He opened his eyes as she stepped into the bath. She had lit a lamp but turned the wick low. She was black with silvery glints of mica, and her hair was twisted up and pinned. She washed with a sponge and cloth, watching in a full-length mirror not in admiration but because fine coal dust had insinuated itself so completely into the pores of her skin. As she washed she progressed from ebony to blue, and from blue to olive, like a watercolor turning to a lighter color.
She stepped into a second tub and directed a pitcher’s stream of water over her face and shoulders. As she turned within the confines of the tub her movements were a private, narrow dance. Steam hung as an aureole around her face, water ran in braids down her back and between her breasts. Minute by minute she transformed from black to gray to shell-like pink, though her eyes revealed a cool disregard for the flesh, as if another woman were bathing.
When she was done she stepped out of the tub onto the rug. For the first time Blair noticed a towel and clothes laid over a chair. She dried herself, raised her arms and let a chemise slip over her and stepped into a skirt of linen that was thin but of good quality, what a maid might steal from a house. Finally she released her hair, which was dark copper, thick and vigorous.
As Blair let his chair settle forward she stared into the dark like a fox startled in its den. If she cried for help, he knew that the house would quickly fill with miners happy to mete out punishment to any stranger who violated the privacy of their hovels.
“Rose Molyneux?”
“Aye.”
“Bishop Hannay asked me to look into the matter of John Maypole. Your door was open. I came in and fell asleep. I apologize.”
“When did you wake up? If you was a gentleman you’d have spoke up right away.”
“I’m not a gentleman.”
“That’s clear.”
She looked toward the front door but made no move to it, and though the shift clung damply to her, she left her dress on the chair. Her eyes were dark and direct. “I know nowt about the priest,” she said.
“On January 18, Maypole was seen talking to you, and then he wasn’t seen again. Where was that?”
“Scholes Bridge. I told the constables. He asked me to a social, a dance with songs and lemonade.”
“You were friends?”
“No. He asked all the girls. He was always at us for one thing or another.”
“What kind of things?”
“Church things. He was always trying to save us.”
“From what?”
“Our weaknesses.” She watched his eyes. “I fell into a coal car, that’s why I had t’wash.”
“Did you go to the social?”
“There was no social.”
“Because Maypole was missing?”
She gave a laugh. “Because there was an explosion down the pit. Seventy-six men died that day. Nobody here gave a damn about a priest.”
Blair felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his chair. Seventy-six men had died the same day Maypole vanished from sight and Leveret hadn’t mentioned it?
From next door came a cannonade of clogs down a stairway. Bricks between houses were a membrane so thin that the stampede sounded as if it had descended the steps above Blair’s head. A bead of water like a ball of light ran down the girl’s cheek, coursed down her neck and disappeared. Otherwise she was still.
“No more questions?” she asked.
“No.” He was still trying to assimilate the news of the exp
losion.
“You’re really not a gentleman, are you?”
“Not a bit.”
“Then how do you know the Bishop?”
“You don’t have to be a gentleman to know the Bishop.” He got to his feet to go.
Rose said, “What’s your name? You know mine, I don’t know yours.”
“Blair.”
“You’re a bastard, Mr. Blair.”
“That’s been said. I’ll see myself out.”
He was so dizzy the floor seemed to be on a slant. He guided himself with seat backs through the parlor to the front. Rose Molyneux followed as far as the kitchen door, more to make sure he went than to say good-bye. She was framed by the sash and the kitchen light, white muslin and red hair. From the house on the other side came a volley of cabinets slamming and domestic denunciations joined by the wails of a baby.
“It’s a small world, Wigan?” Blair asked.
Rose said, “It’s a black hole.”
In the morning Blair found himself feeling strangely better. Malaria did that, came and went like a houseguest. He celebrated with a bath and shave and was eating a breakfast of cold toast and dry steak when Leveret arrived.
“There’s some terrible coffee on the table,” Blair offered.
“I’ve eaten.”
Blair went back to his meal. He’d had nothing but soup or gin for a week and he intended to finish the remains on his plate.
Leveret removed his hat respectfully. “Bishop Hannay is up from London. He has asked you to dinner tonight. I’ll gather you here at seven.”
“Sorry. I don’t have anything to wear.”
“The Bishop said you would say that and I should tell you not to worry. Since you are American, people will assume you don’t know to dress for dinner.”
“Very well, you can go back to His Grace and tell him that his insult has been delivered. See you at seven.” Blair returned to his steak, which had the texture of incinerated rope. He became aware that his visitor hadn’t moved. “You’re just going to stand there? You look like a doorstop.”
Leveret edged toward a chair. “I thought I’d accompany you this morning.”
“Accompany me?”
“I was John Maypole’s best friend. No one can tell you as much about him as I can.”
“You assisted the police?”
“There hasn’t been a real investigation. We thought he was away, and then … well, he still may be away. The Bishop doesn’t want the police involved”
“You’re the Hannay estate manager, haven’t you got things to do, cows to tend, tenants to evict?”
“I don’t evi—”
“What’s your first name, Leveret?”
“Oliver.”
“Oliver. Ollie. I know Russians in California. They’d call you Olyosha.”
“Leveret will do.”
“How old are you?”
Leveret paused, like a man stepping into high grass. “Twenty-five.”
“The Hannay estate must be quite a responsibility. Do you evict aged tenants personally or do you have a bailiff for that?”
“I try not to evict anyone.”
“But you do it. You get my point? No one is going to talk confidentially to me if I have you at my side.”
Leveret looked pained. Besides making his point, Blair had meant to offend him; if brushing him aside with a paw left him scratched that was fine, but Leveret seemed to take the exchange as his own fault, which irritated Blair more. The man had an inward expression, as if the failing of the world was due to himself.
“I was in Africa, too. In the Cape Colony,” Leveret said.
“So?”
“When I heard you might be coming here, I was thrilled.”
* * *
Blair visited the newspaper office next to the hotel and Leveret followed.
Eight pages of The Wigan Observer were posted on the wall, announcing auctions of farm stocks and sawmills, vivid church pantomimes, complete railway timetables. Advertisements, too, of course. “Glenfield’s Starch Is the Only Kind Used in Her Majesty’s Laundry.” The Illustrated London News was also offered; its front page was devoted to the Lambeth Slasher.
“You notice there are no washday encomiums from the Slasher,” Blair pointed out. “Now there would be an endorsement.”
Punch, The Coal Question and The Miners’ Advocate were offered to men, Self-Help, Hints on Household Taste, The Englishwoman’s Review to ladies. There were local histories like Lancashire Catholics: Obstinate Souls, and for the popular reader a selection of sensational novels about Wild West cowboys and Horse Marines. Glass cases displayed stationery, fountain pens, stamp boxes, steel nibs, India ink. A wooden rail divided the shop from an editor in an eyeshade scribbling at a desk. On the walls around him were framed photographs of derailed locomotives, gutted houses and mass funerals.
Blair called Leveret’s attention to the railway time-table in the newspaper. “Have you noticed this? Time-tables are the most reassuring information of modern life. Yet according to The Observer, same page, we read that five local people were run over in separate railroad accidents on Saturday night. Are these regularly scheduled executions?”
“On Saturday night workers drink, and to find their way home they follow the tracks.”
“Look at this, steamship notices that include free transport to Australia for female domestics. In what other nation would a ticket to a desert on the far side of the world be a lure?”
“You’re not an admirer of England.” The idea pained Leveret, so that he almost stuttered.
“Leveret, go away. Count the Bishop’s sheep, set mantraps, whatever you usually do, but leave me alone.”
“Can I get you something?” the editor said. His speech was lengthened by the Lancashire “o” and shortened by a “g”: “soomthin’.”
Blair pushed through the gate of the bar to study the photographs more closely. It was always educational to see what gas and steam could do to metal and brick. In one picture a building façade was sheared away like the front of a dollhouse, exposing a table and chairs set for tea. In another a locomotive had propelled itself like a rocket onto the roof of a brewery. Two pictures were labeled “Unfortunate Victims of the Hannay Pit Explosion.” The first was of the coal-mine yard. Standing figures were blurred while the bodies laid on the ground were in deathly focus. The other was of a long line of hearses drawn by horses with black plumes.
The editor said, “Miners believe in a proper send-off. The Illustrated London News covered that one. Still the biggest disaster of the year so far. Intense interest. You must have read about it.”
“No,” Blair said.
“Everyone read about it.”
“Do you have copies of that edition?”
The man pulled out a drawer of newspapers hung on rods. “Most of the inquest nearly verbatim. Otherwise you have to wait for the official report of the mines inspector. You seem familiar.”
Blair flipped through the newspapers. He had no interest in the explosion at the Hannay pit, but the editions that covered the accident, rescue attempts and inquiries into the disaster also covered the weeks after John Maypole disappeared.
In the February 1 issue, for example: “There will be a meeting of the patrons of the Home for Single Women Who Have Fallen for the First Time despite the absence of Rev. Maypole. It is thought that Rev. Maypole has been called away by urgent family affairs.”
In the February 5 issue: “Rev. Chubb led prayers for the souls of parishioners who tragically lost their lives in the Hannay Pit Explosion. They are now with Christ. He also asked the congregation to pray for the safety of the curate, Rev. Maypole, who has not been heard from for two weeks.”
And on February 23: “All Saints Parish Church 21–St. Helen’s 6. Marked by William Jaxon’s two tries, the victory was dedicated to the Rev. John Maypole.”
The rest of the editorial columns were taken up with the disaster. An engraved illustration showed rescuers assembled around the
base of a pit tower that was decorated at the top with a Lancashire rose.
“Could I buy these?”
“Oh, yes. We did special editions.”
“I’ll pay for the gentleman,” Leveret said.
“And a notebook, red ink, black ink and your best local map,” Blair said.
“An ordnance survey map?”
“Perfect.”
The editor wrapped the purchases without taking his eyes off Blair. “The Hannay pit explosion was a major story. It’s things like that put Wigan on the map.”
On the way out, Blair noticed among the books for sale one titled “Nigger” Blair, with a cover illustration of him shooting a gorilla. He had never worn a mustache and never seen a gorilla. They got his slouch hat right, though.
New country was best seen from a high point. Blair scrambled through a trapdoor to the open top of the Parish Church tower, startling pigeons off the finials. Leveret struggled to pull his long frame through, picking up feathers and dust on his bowler as he did. It was midday, but the sky was as oily as dusk. When Blair opened and spread his map, granules of dirt immediately, visibly appeared on the paper.
Blair loved maps. He loved latitude, longitude, altitude. He loved the sense that with a sextant and a decent watch he could shoot the sun and determine his position anywhere on earth, and with a protractor and paper chart his position so that another man using his map could trace his steps to the exact same place, not a second or an inch off. He loved topography, the twists and folds of the earth, the shelves that became mountains, the mountains that were islands. He loved the inconstancy of the planet—shores that washed away, volcanoes that erupted from flat plains, rivers that looped first this way, then that. A map was, admittedly, no more than a moment in that flux, but as a visualization of time it was a work of art.
“What are you doing?” Leveret asked.
From a chamois purse Blair unwrapped a telescope; it was a German refractor with a Ramsden eyepiece, and easily his single most precious possession. He turned in a slow 360 degrees, sighting off the sun and checking a compass. “Getting my bearings. There’s no north indicated on the map, but I think I’ve got it now.” He drew an arrow on the map, an act that brought him a small, reflexive satisfaction.
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