Rose

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “No, no!” Fellowes backed away, horrified.

  “Very well.” Hannay took it back.

  “She doesn’t speak French,” Fellowes told Blair.

  The library doors flew open. The book emitted a faint bouquet of roses as the room was invaded by Charlotte, still in her bonnet, driving her aunt and cousin before her like a demon.

  Charlotte announced, “I want to know what new arrangements you’re making behind my back. Your Blair has probably the most loathsome reputation on the face of the earth, and you’ve hired him to foul the name of a better man under the pretense of an investigation. I would no more answer questions from Blair than I would willingly sit in stinking offal.”

  “But you will answer them,” Hannay said.

  “Father, when you rot in Hell. Since you’re a bishop of the Church, that’s not very likely, is it?”

  She gave the company in the library a contemptuous rake of her small, hard-set eyes and marched away. If this were Joan of Arc, Blair thought, he’d light the first torch. Gladly.

  Blair rose at the sound of clogs ringing on the cobblestones like gongs. In the light of the streetlamp he could make out miners and women heading to the pits on the south side of town, and mill girls in dresses and shawls streaming in the opposite direction.

  He had dressed in the secondhand clothes he had bought the day before and had his coffee by the time Leveret arrived. They climbed into the estate manager’s modest one-horse gig and took the road south toward the Hannay pit. In dark fields on either side Blair could make out miners in the dark by the glow of their pipes and the mist of their breath. The fields smelled of manure, the air of ash. Ahead, from a high chimney, issued a silvery column of smoke that at its very peak was colored by dawn.

  “Last night was a rare appearance by Charlotte,” Leveret said. “For weeks you can’t find her, and then she bursts onto the scene. I’m sorry that she was rude.”

  “The nastiest little monster I ever met. You know her well?”

  “I grew up with her. Not actually with her, but on the estate. My father was manager before me. Then I was John’s best friend when he came here and he and Charlotte became allied. It’s just that she feels strongly about things.”

  “Are there any brothers or sisters?”

  “Deceased. Charlotte’s older brother had a hunting accident. Tragic.”

  “So in the house it’s just the Bishop and her and a hundred and forty staff?”

  “No. The Rowlands live at Hannay Hall with the Bishop, but Charlotte lives in a separate cottage. A nice house, actually. Very old. She lives her own life.”

  “I bet she does.”

  “She used to be different.”

  “She is different,” Blair said.

  Leveret laughed timidly and changed the subject. “I’m surprised you want to take the time to go down the mine. You were in such a rush to look for John.”

  “I still am.”

  There was no gate or clear demarcation between farmland and the Hannay pit. Miners on either side converged, and Blair found himself entering a yard lit by gas lamps and surrounded by sheds where sound and light seemed to have been stored and at that moment unleashed: the heavy breath and hoofbeats of horses pulling wagons across stones, the ember glow and rhythm of farriers shaping iron, the sparks and whine of picks being sharpened. Donkey engines chuffed out of railway sheds. Tram wagons, chained, not coupled, crashed together. Barely audible overhead, like a bow drawn across a cello, came a vibration from the cables running from the winding gears in the tower that stood above the shaft.

  Metal tubs full of coal rolled off the cage onto a scale, connected to an “endless chain” and moved mechanically on rails up to the shed to be sorted and graded. Blair hopped off the gig and kept pace with the parade of tubs. Each full tub weighed, according to the scale, at least two hundred pounds. The shed had a cover, no sides, more to protect coal from water than workers from weather. All the workers in it were pit girls. Those at the top unlinked arriving tubs, rolled them to a tippler, locked a tub in and slowly released a brake lever so that as the tippler rocked the tub disgorged a black stream of coal onto a conveyor belt where, by the light of a lamp, other women cleaned the coal of dirt and stones.

  The pit girls wore flannel shirts, corduroy pants and vestigial skirts greasy with coal. Their hair was hidden in shawls from the dust. Their hands were black and their faces blurred from clouds of pulverized carbon that erupted as coal from the belt flowed down a slanted screen, or fell through to finer screens.

  Cleaned and graded coal poured down a chute to the shed’s railway siding, where two girls manhandled the chute mouth over wagons. Blair recognized Flo from The Young Prince and Rose Molyneux.

  Flo had a voice that sawed through the din. “It’s him.”

  Blair shouted to Rose, “I want to talk to you.”

  Rose turned toward him and put one hand on her hip. Her eyes were two prisms of concentration, accentuated by the black dust that covered her face. It was the sort of unhurried gaze a man might receive from a cat at ease on a chair she claimed for her own. She took in Blair, engine drivers, haulers and miners, as if they were all of equal unimportance.

  “You look debonair,” she said.

  He glanced down at his shabby jacket and pants. “For the occasion.”

  Somehow she managed to imbue her own dirty apparel with stylish impudence. “Going down pit? You’ll be black as a pipe cleaner when you come back.”

  “We have to talk.”

  “Was it such a fascinating conversation the first time?”

  “It was interesting.”

  She held his gaze. In that moment he saw that she knew she had the power to catch his eye when she wanted.

  “Bill won’t like that,” Flo said.

  “Bill Jaxon?” Blair asked.

  Rose laughed at Blair’s reaction. “Did that make your pecker drop?”

  “Blair!” Leveret shouted from a shed across the yard.

  Because the lamp shed was where the miners were issued their safety lamps, it burned on the inside like a chandelier. On the lower shelves were lamp oil, rolls of wick cord and caulking in cans that read “Good Enough for the Royal Navy!” Hanging on the back wall, six canary cages sounded a chorus. Yellow heads peeked through the grilles.

  “Maybe you should wait here,” Blair told Leveret. In the light he could see that under a borrowed leather jacket the estate manager wore a silk vest and white shirt, not to mention a nicely brushed bowler.

  “No, I’ve always wondered about the mining experience. I’ve never been more than ten feet deep in an old mine before.”

  “You could tie yourself into a sack of coal and jump up and down,” Blair suggested.

  The safety lamps were eight inches tall, with brass caps and bases and, in between, a cylinder of brass gauze to cool the heat of the flame below the ignition point of explosive gas. The lampman lit and locked lamps for Leveret and Blair. Within the safety gauze, the flames were murky embers. Scratched into each lamp base was a different number that the lampman wrote into a ledger that he turned for Blair and Leveret. “That’s how we know who went down pit and who come up. Just in case. I should warn you, gentlemen, the Hannay pit’s a mile down, the deepest pit in Lancashire. If closets make you uncomfortable, best to think twice.”

  They went back into the dark to join men waiting under the tower at the pit head. The miners wore dirty wool jackets and moleskin pants; moleskin had no nap to rub the wrong way underground. Cloth caps and clogs, of course. Tommy tins of food hung on straps over their shoulders. The men lounged against one another with an ease particular to soldiers, athletes, miners. In spite of himself, Blair felt at home among them, just as Leveret showed signs of middle-class unease. Air whistled down the shaft—it was the ventilation intake for eight miles of workings underground—and the wind set the flames in the safety lamps trembling. Blair could just see the white warning fence around a ventilation upshaft fifty yards away; at the bott
om was a furnace that drove foul air from the pit and drew in good—at least, that was the theory.

  The wind subsided at the same time as the improbable sound of a freight train approached from beneath the ground. Blair watched the winding wheel slow, the vertical line of cable shake as the load lessened, a hook emerge, followed by a cage—an iron square with two wooden sides and ends open except for two loose chains. Immediately the chains were unhooked and tubs of glossy coal were rolled from the cage to the scale. Just as quickly, the miners pushed into the cage, taking the place of the tubs, putting their feet around the rails, and Blair and Leveret joined them.

  Everyone crowded in; miners were paid by coal they produced, not the time they spent waiting for a ride. They didn’t force Blair or Leveret to the open ends, and that was courtesy enough, Blair thought. In the glow of the lamps, fainter than candles, he saw coal dust on Leveret’s collar and knew the same inescapable smudges were on him.

  “Last chance. You’ll look like a pipe cleaner when we come back,” Blair said. He liked Rose’s expression. Another woman would have said “chimney sweep.” Leveret was tall, so “pipe cleaner” fit him.

  Leveret’s bravado was lost in the deafening clatter of a bell. One ring: going down.

  The cage started slowly, down through the round, brick-lined upper mouth of the shaft, past round garlands of Yorkshire iron, good as steel, into a crosshatched well of stone and timber, and then simply down. Down into an unlit abyss. Down at twenty, thirty, forty miles per hour. Down faster than any men anywhere else on earth could travel. So fast that breath flew from the lungs and pressed against the ears. So fast that nothing could be seen at the open end of the cage except a blur that could whip away an inattentive hand or leg. Down seemingly forever.

  Past the lamplight of an older landing. It could have been a firefly. Blair caught Leveret crossing himself and shook his head; the less movement the better. At its fastest, the cage dropped so smoothly that the men almost floated. In a shaft it was always the moment of greatest danger and greatest bliss. Blair thought that with their massed lamps they might resemble a meteor to a spectator, to a dazzled worm.

  Brunei, the great railroad engineer, claimed that the drivers of trains should be illiterate because only the unlettered man paid attention. Miners paid attention, Blair thought. The faces in the cage were more concentrated than the School of Plato for the way they listened to the unraveling of round steel cable, the slightest yawing of the cage, the growing pressure on the wooden soles of their clogs.

  They were slowing. At two minutes by Blair’s watch at an estimated average speed of thirty miles per hour, a mile down, the cage settled into a subterranean well of lights and stopped. At once the miners poured out, followed by Blair and Leveret, the latter in a state of confusion.

  For good reason. There was the converging traffic of underground roads, out of which emerged ponies in heavy harness and boys in caps and jackets, both beasts and tenders even more stunted by dim lamps hanging from the timbers. Behind each pony followed a row of loaded tubs on rails.

  There was the smell emanating from a long row of low pony stalls. Underground stables were always placed by the downshaft and built on planks, but they never totally dried out; instead, the pungent aroma of horse manure and urine seemed both ancient and distilled.

  There was the gale-force wind that whistled down the shaft, fresh air now tainted by the stable it passed through.

  There was the heat, the opposite of a dank cave. A stifling heat ripe with sweat, muck, carbon dust. A reminder that the earth was a living organism with a burning core.

  All these were sensory evidence that a visitor took notice of, sorted through, made order of. It took a minute for a visitor to comprehend that the pit eye was a hundred yards across. What the visitor had to simply ignore was the subtler, stronger report of his senses that a mile of earth stood over him, or that he was that far from escape. Blair checked his compass anyway.

  Just as there was a manager’s office on the surface, there was an underlooker’s office below, a square and simple room of brick. The underlooker was named Battie, a happy Vulcan in shirtsleeves, bowler and braces.

  Battie was expecting them; he had cleared his desk, spread a map and weighted the corners with lamps. On the north end of the map were the cage and furnace shafts. The south was a gridiron of large and small tunnels that ran to an irregular border.

  Battie registered with a noncommittal glance the different fashions of his visitors’ dress. “Mr. Leveret, Mr. Blair, will you please turn your pockets inside out?”

  Blair pulled out his watch, compass, handkerchief, penknife and loose change; Leveret produced a more substantial pile of watch, change purse, billfold, locket, comb, visiting cards, briar pipe, tobacco, matches. Battie locked the pipe, tobacco and matches in his desk.

  “No smoking, Mr. Leveret. I wouldn’t want you to even think about it.”

  The map was dated the day of the explosion and bore circles with numbers ranging from one to three digits. Lamp numbers, Blair realized. There were seventy-six victims in the fire and that was the total he counted. It wasn’t difficult because so many were clustered in a central tunnel, while others were evenly spaced along the coal face. One number, however, was right outside the underlooker’s office.

  “What happened here?” he asked.

  “The cage was up. The shaft itself goes farther down, you know. A boy had just come with his pony and tubs. When the smoke reached here, the pony backed over the edge. The boy tried to save it. That’s how they went— pony, tubs and then the boy.” Battie paused. He lifted the lamps and let the map roll up, and put it in a leather satchel along with a ledger. He replaced his bowler with a red bandanna tied around his forehead. In a second, he had regained his poise, as if he were about to stroll through a park. “Well, gentlemen, I have to make my rounds. If you still want to, we have a long way to go.”

  “You can wait here or go up in the cage,” Blair offered Leveret again.

  “I’m with you,” Leveret said.

  “ ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’?” Blair asked.

  “I won’t hold you back,” Leveret promised.

  Swinging his satchel, Battie led the way around the shaft and darted into the right-hand tunnel. “Tunnels we call ‘roads,’ ” he said over his shoulder. “When they’re as wide as this, it’s a ‘Main Road.’ ”

  There was nothing high about it, however, and as soon as they entered, Leveret was in trouble. The only light was the safety lamps, three flames so obscured by wire gauze that they barely lit the rails on the floor or the timbers on the ceiling, and when Leveret tried to avoid one he stumbled into the other, and he didn’t know when to step and when to duck.

  Battie slowed but didn’t stop. “When you want to turn around, Mr. Leveret, look for a sign saying, ‘Out.’ If you don’t find one, just follow the air in your face. If the wind’s at your back, you’re going farther in. Mr. Blair, you’ve done this before.”

  Blair hadn’t even realized he’d slipped into the miner’s stride: a half-crouch with the head up, steps unconsciously measuring the ties of the track.

  “When do we reach the coal?” Leveret asked.

  “We’re in it now. You’re in the middle of the Hannay Seam, one of the richest coal seams in England,” Battie said. “That’s what’s holding up the roof.”

  Black walls. Black roof, too, Blair thought, because coal cushioned timbers better than stone. The irises of his eyes had dilated so that dark became shadow, and shadow took on form. Ahead of Battie a shaggy outline and lamp came from the opposite direction.

  “Pony,” Battie said and stepped into a refuge hole that not even Blair had seen. Blair followed and they pulled in a startled Leveret the moment before a pony passed, a Shetland with sooty locks tended by a boy with a lamp and trailed by four full tubs. Leveret looked a little shorter.

  “Lost your hat?” Blair asked.

  “Actually, yes.” Mournfully Leveret watched the tubs ro
ll by.

  Blair asked Battie, “You can tell when someone’s been in mines before no matter how they’re dressed?”

  “With their first step. And whether they’re drunk or not. If they are, I send them up. You’re only as safe as the stupidest man in the mine.”

  To join the conversation, Leveret asked, “Why do the men wear clogs? I understand that most people in Wigan do, but I’d think that down in a mine they would be clumsy.”

  Battie said, “Rockfalls, sir. When the roof comes down on you it doesn’t crush a clog’s wooden sole the way it does a shoe. Then they’re easier to squirm and get your foot out of, too.”

  Leveret fell silent.

  Walking underground was called traveling. They traveled twenty minutes, encountering only ponies and tub trains. The road became lower and narrower and began to slant down, and the sound of the trains was muffled by the constricted breath of the wind and the press of weight on wooden timbers. Battie halted regularly to hold his lamp where stones packed into dry walls or timbers propped up the roof.

  He explained to Leveret, “When we cut the coal, we let out firedamp. A funny word, isn’t it, gentlemen?”

  “It is a funny word,” Leveret agreed.

  “As if it would put out fire.” Battie poked into a niche.

  “And it does?”

  “From the German Dampf. Meaning vapor. Explosive gas.”

  “Oh,” said Leveret.

  “Methane. It likes to hide in cracks and along the roof. The point of a safety lamp is that the gauze dissipates enough of the heat so that you won’t set the gas off. Still, the best way to find it is with a flame.” Battie lifted the lamp by a rough column of rock and studied the light wavering behind the screen of the gauze. “See how it’s a little longer, a little bluer? That’s methane that’s burning.”

  “Should we evacuate?” Leveret asked.

  The flame lit Battie’s grin as he pulled off his vest and fanned the rock. He went back in the tunnel and returned a minute later with a folded frame of canvas and wood that he opened into a standing panel that redirected the flow of air at the rock.