Wedge came to a halt. “Not here, not anymore.”
“Where can I find him?”
“Why do you want him?”
“Harvey Twiss was not on the list of rescuers, but according to the inquest report Harvey Twiss found his son. I assume you sent him down. I want to ask him about the explosion.”
“I didn’t send him down.”
“The report says he went down.”
“I didn’t send him.”
Blair was baffled. He didn’t know what they were arguing about.
“Where is he?”
“Harvey Twiss is in the Parish graveyard. The same day he buried his boy, Bernard, Harvey laid his head on the railway track in time for the London train. Now they’re both in the ground, side by side, father and son. But I didn’t send him down.”
A rivulet of water ran off Blair’s hat. Feeling immensely stupid, he started putting together the pit manager’s hostility about Twiss and his touchiness about the cage. He squinted through the rain up to the tower, then followed the diagonal of winding cables down to the windowless brick structure of the engine house.
“Twiss was your winder?”
“The only bastard in the yard I couldn’t see. The only man I couldn’t keep my eyes on, and he abandoned his post.”
“When did you find out?”
“I caught him sneaking up with the boy in his arms. Both black as spades, but I was keeping a sharp lookout for him by then.”
“Then?”
“I discharged Twiss on the spot. No reason to be in the inquest report, nothing to do with the fire, but son or no son, he abandoned his post.”
Inside, the winding house was tall, built to accommodate a steam engine the size and design of a locomotive, although instead of driving and carrying wheels, the rods drove a single vertical eight-foot drum. As cable groaned off the drum and angled up through a door in the house peak, the slates of the roof hummed in sympathy.
Winding houses appealed to Blair, their great stationary engines like something powering the rotation of the earth. The Hannay machinery was handsome work—a drum of heavy iron, twin pistons and rods of yellow brass, the boiler of riveted steel—all huge and intricate and dwarfing the winder, a man with a pinched face who sat in a mourner’s dark hat, overcoat and gloves, a drop suspended from the tip of his nose, and with levers at hand. His attention was so given to a white dial lit by two gas lamps that his only reaction to the entrance of Wedge and Blair was a tick of his eyes. Although he was in the center of an industrial yard, he could have been a creature interred in a tomb. By the door a sign said, ADMITTANCE TO THE ENGINE HOUSE IS ABSOLUTELY RESTRICTED. Signed, THE MANAGER. Another sign said, DO NOT DISTRACT THE WINDER.
“Don’t mind us, Joseph,” Wedge said. He shook water from his beard. “Joseph is watching the indicator.”
Indicators were familiar to Blair. It was a big word for a simple dial with a single hand. The face of the indicator was marked “S” at three o’clock for Stop, “T” at two o’clock for Top, “B” at ten o’clock for Bottom and “S” at nine o’clock again for Stop. The hand of the indicator was perceptibly inching counterclockwise to “B,” which meant that a cage of men or tubs was descending the shaft at speeds approaching forty miles an hour. When the hand reached “B,” Joseph would apply the brakes to slow the cage and stop at “S.” There were no automatic brakes. If he didn’t stop the reel, the cage would hurtle with undiminished speed into the bottom of the pit. The metal cage itself might be salvaged, but nothing inside it would survive. Or, going in the opposite direction, if he didn’t apply the brakes at “T,” the cage would overwind, crash into the headgear and catapult its contents off the top of the tower.
“No one else comes in?” Blair asked.
“Not allowed,” Wedge said. “The engine furnace is stoked from the outside.”
“No friends?”
“No.”
“No girls?”
“Never. Joseph is a Temperance man, not like Twiss. Free of vice and gossip and idle tales.”
As the indicator arrow hit “B,” Joseph switched to the brake lever until the dial came to rest at “S.” The moan of the cable died. For a minute the cage would now stay at the bottom of the pit to be unloaded and loaded again.
Wedge said, “Joseph, Blair here has a question for you. The day of the explosion, you were stoking outside. On his own volition, short minutes after we felt the force of the explosion, Twiss ran out of this building and sent you in to run the cage. I did not see him do so, and I certainly did not send him down pit, isn’t that true?”
When Joseph nodded solemnly, Wedge shot Blair a look of vindication.
“You have a clean job indoors now, don’t you?” Wedge went on.
Joseph drew a handkerchief from his sleeve. Rain and the first gray, downcast light of day crept through the cable door. Blair wondered whether a little arsenic would be out of place. “When Harvey Twiss grabbed you and made you winder, was that before the first party of volunteers went down or after?” he asked.
“After,” Joseph said.
“So it’s all worked out for the best, hasn’t it?” Wedge said.
Joseph blew his nose. Blair was ready to go, but as if his own internal flywheel had been started, Joseph added, “Twiss was a victim of foul habits. Cards and drink. How Mrs. Smallbone put up wi’ him, ah’ll never know.”
A bell by the dial rang twice, signaling that the cage was ready to be brought up.
“Why would Mrs. Smallbone have to put up with Twiss at all?” Blair asked.
Joseph raised his eyes sadly, as if from a bier. “Twiss roomed at Smallbones’. Making a penny is not a sin, but letting a sinner into a Temperance house never led t’good.” He pushed the cable lever and the drum began its counterrevolution, ponderously to begin with and then with growing speed.
Now that he had light, when he got back outside and was alone, Blair paced distances from the engine house to the shaft, to the overlooker’s shed, then to the middle of the yard. Rain was falling too hard for him to see more than an outline of the sorting shed, and nothing of Rose at all.
He saw Charlotte as soon as he returned to his hotel. She was leaving the chemist’s shop across the street, a small figure in a walking dress of an obscure color that he couldn’t distinguish as either purple or black. Her face wrapped in a bonnet and veil of the same inky hue, with matching umbrella and gloves, she could only be Charlotte Hannay or someone bereaved. What caught his attention was that she wasn’t moving at her customary brisk pace. An unopened umbrella hung in her hand, and she went only as far as the milliner’s window before she stopped and stood in the rain as if unsure in which direction to go. Or more likely, he decided, waiting for her carriage.
He avoided her the way he would walk around a spider, went up to his room, slapped off the rain, had a brandy for the circulation and spread out a map of the Hannay yard. What was clear to him now was that the yard had been a scene of blind confusion as smoke poured out from the explosion below. He was ever more impressed with the heroic efforts of George Battie in the tunnels underground, but Wedge was a poor witness as to what had happened above. The manager claimed he had dispatched a rescue party in a cage within five minutes of the explosion. Adding the time it would have taken Wedge to get his bearings, find wagons with horses that hadn’t bolted, collect volunteers and distribute safety lamps, Blair thought that fifteen minutes was a better estimate.
He opened Maypole’s journal, flipping through pages until he found the entry he wanted. Because the lines ran across one another, he had misread the words for January 16. Not “How to enter that second world. This is the key,” but “Twiss is the key.”
If the one place in the Hannay yard that Wedge’s eye did not reach was the engine house, the possibility existed that with the connivance of the winder, Harvey Twiss, Maypole could not only have hidden there, but, obscured by the smoke of the fire, crossed unseen the short distance from the house to the shaft and descended in the cage to that r
ealer world he craved just as it was exploding, an act equally idiotic and badly timed. In his fervor it might not occur to a would-be savior like Maypole that in a mine fire anyone who was not a miner was at best an obstacle.
The slightest chill pricked the hairs of Blair’s arms and he allowed himself another brandy. From the window he was surprised to see Charlotte Hannay still outside the milliner’s shop. She could exchange her bonnet for a hat, he thought—something in barbed wire, perhaps. The milliner herself bobbed out under an umbrella to pantomime an invitation of shelter. Charlotte appeared not only deaf to the offer but blind to traffic as she stepped off the curb. She crossed Wallgate in front of a milk cart, startling the driver. In his room, Blair threw up his own hand reflexively. A churn tumbled off the cart and spilled a white skirt over cobblestones. Without the least notice, Charlotte continued at the same abstracted pace into an alley on the hotel side of the street.
Blair had never had an opportunity to observe Charlotte Hannay apart from their confrontations, when she had always had the busy focus of a wasp. Perhaps it was the rain, but from the perspective of his window there was such a wet and beaten quality to her that he almost felt sympathy, and there was something dreamlike about the way she glided out of sight.
He went back to the inquest report and spread out the underground map of the pit. If Maypole did go down, what happened there? Thanks to Battie’s cautious advance on the Main Road, no rescuers were overcome by afterdamp. All the bodies were identified, all the workings searched. Had Maypole, covered in soot, come back up the cage holding one end of a stretcher? Had he then wandered off in shock? The curate had preached so often about Hell, how had he liked his first taste of it? But wandered to where? Blair found himself back at square one. The more he speculated, the more far-fetched his theory appeared. On the other hand, no one had seen Maypole since. And it was all after the fact. Nothing Twiss or Maypole did or didn’t do could have affected the explosion itself.
He returned to the window. Diluted by water, dashed by wheels, the spilled milk was still a visible lace among the stones. A little stone lady, he thought, was what Charlotte Hannay was. He didn’t know why, but he picked up his hat and went out in search of her.
The alley was crowded with whelk and oyster stalls, sheep heads crowded together, tripe draped like rags. Blair pushed through to a row of fish barrows, salt cod stacked under canvas sequined with scales. There was no sign of Charlotte; it didn’t help that she was small and dark.
At the other end of the alley was an outdoor market of shoddy-clothes hawkers, mostly Irish, and tinsmiths, mostly Gypsies. Stitched and restitched greatcoats and overshirts hung like wet sails. Where the market forked, he chose the street that he realized led toward both Scholes Bridge and Maypole’s room. In the mud he found the dull imprints of clogs and the single impression of a lady’s shoe. Mixed in the mud were twists of sheep scat. He remembered the flock he had seen in the morning and the sheep Maypole had noted in his journal.
Beyond a court of small foundries was another track of clog-flattened mud and the imprint of a shoe so small it could have been a child’s slipper. Brick walls bowed and, overhead, rooflines almost touched, admitting a narrow sheet of rain that disappeared into shadow. He stopped at Maypole’s door, sure he would find her visiting, but the room was as bare as he had left it days before, the portrait of Christ the carpenter still hanging in the dark, the boards of the floor dry except for the threshold, where someone had opened the door to glance in only minutes before.
Back in the alley, the way became ever more foul from sheep. Blair came to the knacker’s house and pen he had noticed on his first trip to Maypole’s. For all the signs of sheep, the pen was empty. Fluffs of sodden wool clung to the chute that ran into the house. Because the house was a terminus without shutters or door, he saw Charlotte within. He checked the impulse to call her name because he could tell she was standing on the edge of the knacker’s drop.
What knackers did was to drive sheep off a drop of thirty feet or so to break their legs and make them that much easier to kill. Blair crept close enough to see that an enterprising Wiganer had used the shaft of an old mine. Work had just finished because a faint lantern revealed walls and floor that had been plastered and whitewashed, butcher blocks, meat hooks screwed into walls, and a blood trough that ran below the hooks and emptied into a pail. Blood and offal covered the floor and smeared the walls. What light reached up from the drop had a rose-colored hue.
The toes of Charlotte’s shoes were over the edge and she leaned forward, headfirst. A dive at that distance would do the job, Blair thought. Although he saw her mainly in silhouette, he imagined her white brow pointing down, her dress snapping out behind her.
“Ashanti don’t have sheep,” Blair said. “Goats, yes. Monkeys, guinea fowl, lizards, too.”
She balanced, eyes forward, concentrating like a tightrope walker on her next step.
“And grasscutters, which are giant rodents, and forest snails, also giant. A knacker in Kumasi would have a real menagerie.”
When he moved in her direction, she teetered more toward the drop. He retreated a step and she straightened. Magnetic repulsion, he thought, the best example he’d ever seen.
“The snails take enormous cunning. Set out cornmeal and lie in wait by moonlight.”
“And elephants?” she asked softly. “Do you shoot them, or do you wrestle them to the ground?”
“Snails are more in my line.”
“But not gorillas. You didn’t like Rowland’s gift, or is it that you don’t like my cousin Rowland?”
Although her voice was small, it had its usual allotment of contempt. Under the circumstances, he took this as a good sign.
“I just wonder what Rowland did with the rest of the gorilla.”
“You don’t like him,” Charlotte said.
“And Earnshaw, what happened to him?” Blair asked. “He’s not interested in the abattoirs of Wigan?”
“Mr. Earnshaw has returned to London.”
On schedule, as Hannay had said? Blair wondered. When he tried to look at Charlotte, she turned her face away. Her dress was spotted and soiled at the hem, and her shoes were ruined. At least the draft rising from the old shaft seemed to press her away from the edge. He was surprised that the red reek—the oily, airborne taint wherever blood or animal matter was processed—didn’t knock her back. She was tougher than he had thought.
“Blair, what kind of a name is that?” she asked. “You are supposed to have been born in Wigan. I looked at all the church records. There were no Blairs.”
“It wasn’t my mother’s name.”
“What was her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your father’s name?”
“No one knows.”
“Haven’t you tried to discover who they were?”
“No.”
“You’re not curious? You’re more interested in John Maypole than you are in yourself?”
“As soon as I find Maypole, I can leave Wigan. That’s what I’m interested in.”
“You’re the most anonymous man I’ve ever met.”
“The fact that I’m not interested in Wigan does not make me anonymous.”
“But you are. Not American, African or English. Perhaps you’re Irish. Celtic hermits used to sail away from Ireland, letting Providence set their course, praying to be cast ashore in distant lands so they could become anonymous. Do you feel Irish?”
“Sometimes cast ashore, but not Irish.”
“Then there were penitential pilgrims who wandered to the Holy Land to atone for the worst crimes, murder or incest. Do you have something to atone for?”
“Nothing that grand.”
“You haven’t been in Wigan long enough, then.”
He tried to circle and inch closer, but she seemed to sense his every move, like a bird ready to take flight. A little dark bird with an umbrella in one wing.
“You don’t like anonymity,” Blair said
.
“I envy it.” Her voice dropped. “I envy it. How close are you to finding John?”
“Maypole? I don’t know. It would help if you told me something about him.”
“I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
“Anything. He didn’t hint about any big plans or fears?”
“John was always full of great plans. He had a great heart.”
“Had?”
“See, there you go, picking my words apart.”
“Only trying to understand whether I’m looking for someone dead or alive. Who left on his own or under pressure. Why do I feel I’m the only one who wants to find him?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Bishop hired me to find Maypole, but now he seems to care more about your forgetting him.”
“Is that what you’re asking me to do?”
“No. Just tell me, do you want me to go on looking?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s not pretend it does.”
“You were engaged to him. You loved him.”
“No. John wanted to help me. I let him, and that was weak of me.” She spread her arms wide.
“Maybe I can help you,” Blair said.
“Is that pity I hear?” she asked as if he had offered her a handful of worms.
“How can I help?” He resisted the urge to try to snatch her back from the drop.
“Can you fly?” Charlotte took a deep breath, turned and planted her toes on the ground and her heels over the edge. With her back to the drop and the poor light, the draft pressed her dress around her so it appeared she was falling. “When my father was young, he used to leap over shafts.”
“I heard. You’re as crazy as he is.”
“You’re hardly one to talk. Is it true that you’re fighting with miners?”
“No.”
“And seeing a pit girl?”
“No.”
She lost her balance for a moment. Her arms wavered. Dirt ticked off the wall of the drop and a stone echoed from below.
“I’ll leave Wigan,” Blair said.
“What makes you think I’d care whether you left Wigan?”
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