“I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“My father will find someone else just as terrible as you. Worse, if possible. Thank you for the offer, though. It makes your lies complete.” She raised her umbrella with both hands as a counterweight and stepped from the edge. Blair offered his hand. She ignored it and walked through the dark and muck of the house as if she were crossing the rug of a parlor.
“You’ve done this before,” Blair said.
“As a girl, a hundred times.” At the door she looked back. “Was the famous Blair afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t think you’re lying about that. That’s something.”
It was a wet dusk when the miners returned from the pits. The warming smoke of chimneys created a new layer of clouds, like the smoke of battle after a city had been razed to the ground.
From the belfry of the Parish Church, Blair focused his telescope from street to street, lamp to lamp. Rain had dissipated to a drizzle that made stones shine and reflected sound. What looked like white smoke rose from a crumbling wall, moved laterally in the wind, turned on itself, scattered, regrouped and wheeled around and around the roofs. Doves.
More doves appeared as miners opened more dovecotes. Dogs barked. A darker plume of smoke approached the London & Northwest station. Horse cabs rolled at a trot down Wallgate to the station. When Blair lifted the telescope he could follow the transit of coal trains across every quadrant of the horizon. It could have been the Russian steppes or the Great Wall of China for all it had to do with him, he thought. He was annoyed that Charlotte Hannay had tried to find his name in a church register. Why would she bother, unless Hannays maintained a feudal interest and thought of everyone in Wigan as a serf and everyone who left it as an escapee.
He found the blue slate roof of Candle Court. The row was all Hannay houses. He had checked at the company office on his way to the hotel, and Molyneux had been the name on the rent roll since the previous October. Every week Rose and Flo paid in rent six times what they made.
Doves returned to their yards. Night spread in gray and black bands of smoke and haze. In front of dry-goods stores, clerks cleared sidewalks of dolly tubs and hoes. Bone barrows made the rounds of stalls behind Town Hall. Butchers locked their shutters.
Maypole had always intercepted pit girls at the Scholes Bridge, the main crossing between the miners’ neighborhood and the center of Wigan. Blair borrowed the tactic with the use of a telescope. At six, he spied a row of black dresses with bustles making a snakelike parade that appeared and vanished at different points, to finally emerge on Wallgate and march to the door directly below him. A church society that looked like a witches’ coven, he thought.
The image of Charlotte on the edge of the drop continued to distract him. She had been so desperate that in spite of himself he had felt sympathy, until she stamped on it. Which was fine, he preferred his dislike pure.
At seven, Bill Jaxon passed under the lamp at Scholes Bridge. He was alone and, for all his size, moved quickly out of sight. Blair swept the streets and alleys with his telescope until he found him at the butcher stalls. From the stalls he had an improved view of the front entrance and side exit of the hotel. Blair had left the lamps burning in his room so that Bill would have something to watch. The safe thing would have been to stay in his room. He decided that safer still was to plunge ahead, find Maypole and leave Wigan completely.
There was a flaw in this reasoning, he knew. It was a little like Charlotte Hannay standing at the drop.
Smallbone lived on a narrow street that had half subsided into ancient mines and left the remaining houses leaning as if arrested in the act of collapse. A shout answered Blair’s knock and he let himself in.
Though the parlor was unlit, Blair was aware of the gaze of Mrs. Smallbone multiplied in portraits and pictures of different Temperance assemblies; the smaller frames had rounded glass that magnified her severe, unrelenting eyes. Chairs were draped in crepe. A table wore a black skirt, as if half of Mrs. Smallbone were present. As he passed he touched the keys of a harmonium. Ivory: the elephant’s graveyard discovered in Wigan. The air itself was pungent with a gritty, oddly familiar scent.
Smallbone was at the table of a kitchen identical with those of Mary Jaxon and Rose Molyneux—a small room ruled by a massive range and warmed by the grate—except that his had been turned into a kind of bomb factory. A rack of strings soaked in great pots of saltpeter on the range. Rope lines of fuses hung from wall to wall to dry. On the floor was the source of the smell that Blair had recognized: small open kegs of gunpowder. Grains of it covered the floor planks and table, and a shadowy haze of it hovered in the air. On the table were empty flutes of waxed paper, a scale and coin-shaped weights, and a coffee mill. There was stature to the scene and to Smallbone, as if he were sitting in no mere miner’s kitchen but was a business magnate among glowing foundries and volcanic chimneys.
If Smallbone was startled by his visitor, he recovered well. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said. “I wish Mrs. Smallbone was here. She’s out for the evening. She’s a woman for good works. I think tonight it’s the improvement of ladies of loose morals, or stoning them t’death. She runs the north of England for the Queen, that’s all I know for certain.”
“May I?” Blair slapped rain from his hat into the basin.
“How are you feeling?” Smallbone asked. He seemed to think Blair should be crippled.
“Good.”
“You seem to be. Well, I wish I could offer you something on such a nasty night. Mrs. Smallbone left me bread and tea t’dip it in. Us being a Temperance house.”
Blair had brought brandy from the hotel. He set it on the table. “Is this a mistake, then?”
Smallbone’s nose quivered like a root for water, as if it could smell through glass. “Not that I don’t deserve a drink, mind, after a day’s work and the long walk back in the rain.”
“I know that Dr. Livingstone, the missionary, advised red wine for chills.”
“Well, there you are.”
Smallbone found two cups and, with the interest of a fellow chemist, watched Blair pour. The miner’s face was washed to his collars, his hands clean to the cuffs, the lids of his eyes red from the occupational irritation of coal dust. With his first swallow, his eyes teared with relief. “Mrs. Smallbone is probably praying over some heathen right now. Reverend Chubb is probably kneeling at her side. They’re pulling the oars for both of us, bless them.”
“To Mrs. Smallbone.”
They drank to her.
“You don’t mind if I go on?” Smallbone asked. “I make my own shots and I make extra to sell on the side.”
“I wouldn’t want to bring business to a stop.”
“Thank you.” He produced a long clay pipe and topped the tobacco in the bowl with an ember from the grate.
“You’ve got enough powder here to blow up half of Wigan.”
Smallbone said proudly, “All of Wigan.”
“All?”
“Because of the old mines underneath. Firedamp creeps up into closets and cabinets. We had neighbors who looked in the closet with a lamp and blew themselves up. But the rent is low.”
“They should pay you to live here.”
“I’ll tell that t’Bishop Hannay next time I see him.”
“Those are Hannay mines underneath?”
“Hannay mines, Hannay workings. Going back hundreds of years. When the Hannay were Catholic, they used t’run priests underground all the way from Hannay Hall t’Wigan. Catholics knew where t’go for Mass because there’d be a candle in the window. Shall I show you my secret?”
“Please.”
Smallbone scooped gunpowder from the open sack into the funnel of the coffee mill and started cranking. “Any idiot can buy gunpowder ready-made. It’s a government monopoly—fuses, too. Which sounds t’an idiot like a seal of approval, never stopping t’consider that where there’s monopoly, quality goes out the window. Then he makes a shot and it fizzles or kic
ks up late and blows off his head. See, an antimonopolist, an expert, understands that it’s air between the granules slows down a proper detonation. That’s why loose gunpowder will burn but won’t blow. So I grind it again because fine grains mean less air and your more dependable blast. Look.”
Smallbone pulled out the drawer of the mill and stirred the powder inside with his finger. “Fine as ground glass. Of course you need a brass mill or you’ll blow yourself up. And you have t’use the powder fresh, especially in rainy weather, or it soaks up water. I’ve been considering a touch of ammonium nitrate for added punch. What do you think, Mr. Blair?”
“I wouldn’t bother. You want to break up coal, you don’t want it to disappear.”
“An excellent point.” Smallbone emptied the drawer into his hand, poured a stream of powder from his fist onto a scale, sipped his brandy. “It makes my hand steady.”
When the scales balanced, he poured the gunpowder into a flute, twisted the ends tight and laid his finished shot in the canister.
“Harvey Twiss lived here?” Blair asked.
“Yes. That was a sad case, Harvey and his boy, Bernard.”
“The fire?”
“Harvey didn’t get over finding Bernard. We laid the boy right there in the parlor. Closed coffin. Bernard wasn’t a member of the Burial Club, but Mrs. Smallbone throws herself into these things. It was all done in crepe. Mauve. Ham and tea. Poor Harvey was already in his cups, half off his head at the funeral. We never should have let him wander off.”
“To lay his head on the track?”
“So they say.”
“It was Christian of Mrs. Smallbone to allow a sportsman to room here.”
“It was,” Smallbone agreed. “Also, the extra pennies didn’t hurt. Saintliness is an expensive business. Between letting the room, selling the shots and winning the bets on Bill we’re just able to afford Mrs. Smallbone’s attendance at Temperance rallies up and down the country. Of course they would be empty exercises without her.”
“Of course. Twiss was a good mate?”
“We weren’t close. A sportsman, but a reliable winder.”
“Were you surprised to hear that Twiss left the winding house to join the rescue? A winder never leaves the house because everyone else counts on him to run the cage. Twiss must have been through explosions before.”
“Maybe not with his boy down pit.”
“Maybe not.”
“In the confusion and all.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Pardon?”
“The one you hurt in the explosion?”
“I wasn’t hurt.”
“Before the fire.”
“Right, before. I’d forgot.” Smallbone relit his pipe. Tiny flashes lit his hands. “Now that I think about it, tonight’s issue was women of questionable morals. Mrs. Smallbone wants t’lock them all into hospitals as a sanitary measure t’protect the men. Reverend Chubb and the police say a loose woman is categorically identifiable by the exposure of her upper arms. The trouble is that all the pit girls in Wigan go about with bare arms.”
“That must keep Mrs. Smallbone busy.”
“It does. I tell her she could spare herself the worry and the pit girls the aggravation if she would reclassify whores according t’more pertinent parts of the anatomy.”
Blair refreshed their cups while Smallbone filled another flute of paper. The charge looked like a church candle.
“Between Mrs. Smallbone’s good works and rugby matches, you must have seen a good amount of Reverend Maypole.”
“An earnest man, very sincere.”
“And a great admirer of miners. Did he ever ask you to show him how to wield a pick?”
“No.”
“Maybe go down an old pit?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“One quality I’m proud of is my memory.”
“Which leg was it?” Blair asked.
“Leg?”
“That you hurt before the Hannay explosion?”
“Left. It was my left leg.”
“I thought it was the right.”
“It could have been my right.” Smallbone attacked the crank again. “It was a terrible blow. I leaned on Bill and we started for the pit eye.”
“Which way?”
“The Back Road.”
“The Main Road was closer to your workstation, and it had fresh, incoming air while the Back Road had foul. Why would you take the Back?”
“A tub was off the rails at the Main Road. It was easier to try the Back.”
“You were lucky. The men in the Main Road didn’t survive.”
“See, that was a good reason t’stay on the Back.”
“But you did turn to the Main Road. That’s the way Battie was coming with the rescue party, and that’s where you met him.”
“Bill heard them.”
“Bill was concussed, he said so at the inquest. When your ears are concussed, you don’t hear much. Lucky again. Were you waiting for George Battie?”
“For George Battie?”
“I’m just wondering what took you so long? A watch of one of the victims stopped at two-forty-five, when it was broken by the explosion. It took Battie more than an hour to locate bodies and clear the gas to reach the point where he met you and Jaxon. It was three-forty-five when you and Bill emerged from a cross tunnel midway onto the Main Road and met up with Battie. I’m just having a hard time understanding what happened. You must have been clear of the blast and gas, but you only got midway when you met Battie? I wondered what took you so long unless Jaxon was carrying you.”
“Where d’you get all this information?”
“The inquest.”
“I had a bad leg, that’s for sure.”
“Yet when you met Battie, you shrugged off the agony of this injured leg to join in the rescue. You ‘disregarded’ the pain, you told the coroner. Even so, can you explain what took you so long before you met Battie?”
Smallbone filled his fist with gunpowder. “You know, Bill Jaxon and I are heroes. Everyone agreed. The rest of that inquest is full of shite. Thirteen men in shoes deciding about miners? Lords and lawyers who know as much of us as Mrs. Smallbone knows of natives south of the equator? And expert witnesses who wouldn’t know coal from caramels? No one pays attention to a coroner’s report, and you shouldn’t either.”
Gunpowder streamed in a black line from Smallbone’s fist into a tube. His hand was steadier, Blair realized.
“All I want to know is why you and Bill left the coal face, why you took the Back Road, and what you waited for after the blast.”
Smallbone stacked weights on the scale for a double charge. “What you should do, Mr. Blair, is go back t’where you came from, either Africa or America. You have no idea what you’re stirring up.”
“You mean Bill Jaxon and Rose? Tell Bill from me that Rose is a lovely girl, but there’s nothing going on between us—just questions about Maypole, that’s all.”
“It’s not so simple. You can’t come t’Wigan and decide in three days who is who or what is what.”
“Unfortunately I can’t get out of Wigan until I find Maypole.”
“Then you could be here forever.”
On his way out the parlor, Blair noticed one picture not in the spirit of the somber portraits, a photograph of the Smallbones on a beach.
“Blackpool,” Smallbone said from the kitchen door. “On holidays. All of Wigan goes.”
On a shelf by the photograph was an engraved silver shaving cup. Blair held it to the kitchen light and read, “A. Smallbone. 3rd Place. Aquatics.”
“Handsome. From Blackpool, too?”
“Years and years ago,” Smallbone said.
“All the same, swimming in the open ocean? Winning third place at Blackpool? Where did you learn to swim like that in Wigan?”
“Canals. In a straight line I can swim forever.”
Afterward, standing in the back alley, Blair resisted the imp
ulse to go to Rose’s house. He realized he knew the way too well.
Ashpits steamed in the rain. Although windows were shut he heard an oath, a hymn, children screaming up and down stairs. Wigan was a miniature landscape that kept adding new dimensions: clouds, echoes, subterranean chambers.
Smallbone as a swimmer was a new factor. The attack on Silcock was a two-man job. Not the hitting over the head; that was simple. But carrying him to the canal, and there one man to drag him into the water to the bottom of the lock while the other cranked the gate paddle shut on Silcock’s leg. All next to a boat of witnesses who would swear they heard not a thing. That was sly; that was Smallbone’s sort of work.
He went over the lies Smallbone had told, but he also heard his own dissembling to Charlotte and Smallbone, mostly about Rose. Why would he care what Charlotte thought? Why should he care at all for a pit girl? He could feel the pull, though, as if she were a luxuriant vine that grew at night and reached in his direction.
“Bishop’s weather,” Hannay said.
Which meant that the night’s rain had evaporated into a morning of high, blue skies and green hills bright as glass. Atop his ecclesiastical gaiters and frock coat, the Bishop wore a broad straw hat for the expedition. In the same spirit, the Rowlands dressed like a pair of bouquets, Lydia in a dress and sun hat of tulip pink, the mother in a complicated outfit of peony red. In the breeze their silks, tulle and satin trim emitted scents of lavender, and their parasols shuddered like blown flowers. Blair kept pace in boots still damp from the day before. Behind him followed Leveret with a brace of yapping spaniels, and gamekeepers bearing wicker hampers.
“Poor Leveret, he does have his hands full.” Lydia covered her smile as Leveret prevented first one dog and then another from racing up the path. “Did you have dogs in Africa?” she asked Blair.
“No, too many things in Africa eat dogs.”
Hannay said, “That’s our Blair, always a cheery answer. Look around, Blair. Creation all fresh and new, literally humming with life. You were starting to look a little drawn; that’s why I ordered this day up.”
They crested a hill where butterflies trafficked above drifts of small, early daisies. What was disturbing was that at some level Blair felt that the day had indeed been ordered by Hannay. A westerly wind not only polished the hills but pushed smoke east, so that they could not even see evidence of Wigan’s chimneys behind them. The only thing that didn’t fit was himself: he felt like a poacher who had wandered into a garden party.
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