Rose

by Martin Cruz Smith

It was no shock to learn that Maypole didn’t understand women. Someone in the Bible hadn’t either. Blair knew he didn’t; he hadn’t met enough ordinary women to shape an informed opinion. There had been the crib girls, who were indentured, which meant practically slaves even if they were in California. Natives in Brazil, who were slaves. Ashanti, on the other extreme, who all dressed and acted like the Queen of Sheba. It wasn’t the normal range from which to make even a biblical judgment.

  The Rose for whom I would give all. He checked the date on the entry. January 14. Four days before Maypole disappeared. If Rose Molyneux had also disappeared, the vow would make more sense. Instead she had gone nowhere, and denied any tragic romance with Maypole, no matter how obsessed he was with her.

  She says that Hannays are crazy. Must be, for having ruled so long, since the Conqueror, eight hundred years in Wigan, by custom and by law for being bishops, sheriffs, magistrates, ready to send down or ship off any threat to their authority. It’s not a way she says she’d live.

  Bold stuff from a pit girl, Blair thought.

  A sound like rocks rolling in a flood drew him to the window to see the miners fill the street, shoulder to shoulder, on their trudge home. Wagons and carriages made way. Shoppers and maids shrank into doorways to escape the touch of coal. Some of the miners had lit their pipes, embers bright in the dusk, little lamps for the road. A pebble rapped off Blair’s window. He couldn’t see who among the dirty caps and dark faces had thrown it.

  That deserved a second brandy. The warmth of it grew as he deciphered Maypole’s next words.

  I have been toughening my hands with brine and secretly practicing the walk of a miner, even the drilling, in an old tunnel. Bill Jaxon, reluctantly, has been a help. His cooperation is essential, but it is based purely on his Rose’s mood, not on my mission. I feel like the Pilgrim who sets out on the long journey through the Slough of Despond, into the Valley of Humiliation, to the Hill Difficulty. My muscles ache; even my bones are bent from training. I will only be going a mile down, yet I approach the day with as much excitement as if I were setting off for Africa, the price of my ticket the cost of a pick and lamp. Thus I put my trust in God.

  Trust in God? Often a miner’s last mistake, Blair thought.

  And in my Rose.

  Now, that was faith.

  The backyards of Scholes were black ditches with boilers, turnip plots, sties, ashpits.

  George Battie was bent over a tub, shirt off, braces hanging to his knees, to wash his hands by the light of a paraffin lamp. His house was no larger than an ordinary miner’s, but as a pit underlooker he was afforded a longer, flagstoned yard, with beds of bare rosebushes and what Blair presumed was a garden shed.

  As he let himself in the alley gate, Blair saw two small girls chasing back and forth on the stones, their frocks so long that they seemed to move without benefit of feet. Each time a rose thorn snagged them, the girls squealed and jumped with mock surprise. Battie was as huge as a statue among them, his arms and torso gray from coal dust, face black and eyes rimmed red. Vulcan at home, Blair thought. At this time of year, the girls hardly ever saw their father in the daylight. In the dark he left for the mine and in the dark he returned.

  “Mr. Blair, good of you to come.” Battie applied a bristle brush to his palms. “I’m sorry, you caught me ‘in between.’ When I was young and ambitious I used to have a proper wash every night. Almost died of pneumonia. Have you found Reverend Maypole?”

  “No.”

  “You’re still asking questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question? Why are you asking about Harvey Twiss? Wedge says you were at the pit.”

  “Twiss was a winder who left his post.”

  “Twiss had nothing to do with the cause of the fire.”

  “He didn’t sign for a lamp. According to the coroner’s inquest, the lamp system is foolproof. Every lamp is numbered. Each man was supposed to sign out a lamp before going down, even rescuers. Twiss proved the system didn’t work.”

  “Mr. Blair, you know your way around mines, so you have to know a coroner’s inquest is a fine shower of piss. Girls!”

  Battie dried his hands with rags and, still bare to the waist, motioned Blair to pick up the lamp and follow him to the garden shed. The girls trailed after. He opened the door and entered to a sound more like lapping water than clay pots. The girls held their breath until Battie reappeared with a white dove on each hand.

  “Fantail pigeons. Some prefer acrobatic Tumblers or racing Homers, but I love the Fancies. Each one thinks she’s a queen, or a princess at the very least.”

  The birds had delicate heads and extravagant tails of crisp snowy white. They preened and spread their feathers as if Battie were their mirror. He set them on the girls’ shoulders, and immediately there was a flurry of wings from a hole in the roof of the shed and two more doves lit on Battie’s hands.

  “See, they fix on you. When you buy a new pair, you keep them in their nests, feed and water them until they mate, and then the family’s yours. You cull the squabs for pigeon pie, but we like to keep as many as we can.”

  “Pretty,” a girl said.

  “Like miniature swans.” He turned to Blair. “Harvey Twiss was my wife’s brother. Did you think Wedge would make anyone like Harvey an engine winder without a push?”

  “I didn’t know you were connected.”

  “In Wigan everyone’s connected.” Battie turned his hands so that the doves climbed his fingers. “Did you know that Albert Smallbone’s father was a poacher?”

  “No.”

  “Him and Albert used to sneak out at night. I used to sneak out with them. Pheasant was easiest because they don’t roost high up and if you’ve gentle hands you can pluck them one at a time. Ferrets for rabbits. Albert and I had a pair of spades, and our job was to dig up the ferret before he ate the rabbit. My father would have tattooed me if he knew, but it was the most fun I ever had, flitting like a goblin in the moonlight.” He smiled at the girls as they chased each other, birds hanging on and flapping. “The lamp system, that’s just to make the company sound safe and the families feel better. There are times when we’ve had to brick in bodies and come up with a number later by sorting out lamps. Were we right? Who knows? But the women think we do. Or pretend to. Were the men dead when we laid the final brick? God, I hope so. But sometimes it’s them or all the men in the mine. You hear a blower of gas and it’s the breath of Hell. The funny thing is, the last thing you’ll probably ever see is a dead canary.” Battie’s smile came and went. “It’s a short dash through the smoke from the winding house to the cage. Twiss went down, took a lamp off a body he found in the tunnel and joined the crowd coming from the yard. When they caught up with us at the coal face, I knew at the sight of him that Twiss had broken the regulations. There was nothing to be gained by putting all that in an inquest. He’d lost his boy, and a few days later he had his head crushed by the London train. Anyway, he didn’t cause the explosion.”

  “What did?”

  “I don’t know. It was where a shot was going to be. But the fireman, Smallbone, wasn’t there. Neither was Jaxon or they would have been dead.”

  “Where were they?”

  “As I remember, Smallbone says he was injured by a falling rock and Jaxon was helping him out.”

  “He can’t remember if it was his right leg or his left.”

  “Because he’s probably lying. If he doesn’t have a shot to fire, Albert’s a great one for nesting in holes where his sleep isn’t bothered by the sound of picks. We’ll never know because anyone who could tell us whether Albert left the coal face is dead. And it’s a difficult subject to bring up at an inquiry when Smallbone and Jaxon were celebrated heroes. Anyway, what set off the explosion had to be a shot, a lamp or a spark. But no one was there. That’s what I go over again and again.”

  The girls balanced doves on their heads like plumes, pointed at each other and laughed.

  “Twiss
was killed by the London train?” Blair asked.

  “On the London and Northwest track. It was night. A coal train might have seen him in time, but passenger trains go twice as fast. The constable said poor Twiss was so drunk he probably didn’t feel a thing. I don’t see what any of this has to do with finding Reverend Maypole.”

  “It’s the cage. After the explosion you sent messengers to the top. The cage should have been up there to bring rescuers back, but they had to wait because someone else had already taken the cage down. It wasn’t Twiss; he went down after them. So who took the cage?”

  “It could have gone down empty.”

  “It could have been the Prince of Wales. You said Twiss took a lamp from a body in the tunnel.”

  “I asked him because I knew no lampman would let a winder sign out a lamp. He took it off a dead man in the Main Road.”

  “After the explosion, were all the lamps accounted for according to the numbers in the lampman’s ledger?”

  “Every lamp for every man. This time the numbers match. Why are you dragging in Maypole?”

  “Because I think he got as far as the winding house, and when the explosion happened he seized his opportunity. It was a short dash to the cage, as you said.”

  “But the Reverend was not allowed in the Hannay yard, not during working hours. It’s an easy thing for a miner to slip in, there are no guards and he’s only one more dirty face, but a clergyman is something else.”

  “That I haven’t figured out,” Blair said.

  “And where did Maypole go if he did take the cage? No one saw him in the pit and no one saw him come out.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Twiss stole a safety lamp. What lamp did the Reverend use if all the other lamps in the pit were accounted for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s a fascinating theory, Mr. Blair—up to a point.”

  Considering the theory’s shortcomings, Battie’s reaction struck Blair as exquisitely polite.

  “Maypole was training in an old tunnel to go into the mine. Where do you think those tunnels would be?”

  “Anywhere. You could be standing on them. It’s all a honeycomb underneath the houses, and you can go for miles if you know how they connect.”

  Which was the story with everything in Wigan, Blair thought. “Twiss was drunk when he died. Who was he drinking with?”

  “Bill Jaxon. Jaxon said Harvey went off by hisself.”

  “Ah. Very melancholy, no doubt?”

  “And inclined to rest his cheek on a cold rail. You don’t plan to drink with Bill, I hope.”

  “I avoid Bill Jaxon when I can.”

  “The first sensible thing you’ve said tonight.”

  “I want to come out to the pit tomorrow. There is one place he could have gone.”

  “Come early. I’d like to see, too.”

  The girls circled Battie, crying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

  “A second,” he promised them. He told Blair, “I don’t want to leave you with a false impression. The inquest isn’t real; it’s only an official version, a procedure for the owners to blame the miners and open up the pit. But on our side, if the pit was shut, if they said it wasn’t safe for us, know what we’d do? Rather than starve? We’d fight to go back down again, so we’re guilty too.”

  The girls begged, “Be an angel, Daddy, be an angel!”

  Battie reentered the shed. Dark smells of boiled beef and burned dripping drifted across the yards. From the direction of the street, calls to tea vied with the tin horn of a rag man. Battie reappeared with a line of doves perched on each black outstretched arm. As he let his arms drop an inch, the doves fluttered, giving the illusion that he was taking wing.

  “You just caught her. She was going,” Flo said.

  “Going where?” Blair asked, but the big girl ducked inside the kitchen door, leaving him on the step. How he had gone from Battie’s yard to Rose’s he wasn’t sure. He seemed to have dream-walked and found himself at her back door. It opened again with Rose on the threshold, a shawl round her shoulders, the velvet ribbon at her neck, a hat on red hair that was half pinned and wild.

  “The siren herself,” he said.

  “Did Bill see you?” She looked over Blair’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know. We’ll find out. There’ll be kisses for you and kicks for me.”

  She brought her eyes down to him. “ ‘Siren’? I don’t remember singing for you.”

  “Well, I was coming here anyway. I am Odysseus shipwrecked. Dante stuck in the ninth circle of Wigan, looking for a glass of gin. My feet led me.”

  “I don’t think it was your feet.”

  “I get your meaning,” Blair admitted.

  “My meaning is I don’t need your condescension.”

  The blue color cast on her was more than an effect of the night. She had half washed after the day’s work, leaving carbon dust like kohl around her eyes and a faint metallic shimmer on her brow. Rose Molyneux, the muse of industry, with a sooty sheen made visible by the pale skin underneath.

  “If you want me, say so,” she said.

  “If you put it that way, I do.”

  “One minute. Then you’re gone.”

  “Then I’m gone.”

  He had graduated to the rank of company because she took the gin into the parlor, perched on the edge of a chair and gave him the settee. She was unwilling to light a lamp that might show him to the street, so they sat in the dark except for the glow cast by the fireplace. Though there were no goblets of gold, she could have reigned at Darius’s table, alternately giving the king kisses and taps. She made her own rules. Where Flo had gone, or how two girls managed a house alone when every room in Scholes was stuffed with lodgers, he didn’t ask. She flavored the gin with tea; that was her nod to etiquette.

  “You found Reverend Maypole?”

  “I’m getting to know Maypole, but I haven’t found him.”

  “How’s that, getting t’know him?”

  “From his journal.” This was the first Blair had told anyone. “It’s full of notes and thoughts. It’s full of you. It’s interesting, seeing you through two sets of eyes.”

  “Different sets of eyes. You’re nowt like him.”

  “What was he like?”

  She gave him the full pause and let him hang for a moment.

  “Good.” In the shadow that hovered around her, the fire lit only her eyes.

  “Rose, I don’t even know what you really look like. I haven’t seen your face clean except that first night, when I was too addled to notice. You’re always in the dark or decorated with dust.”

  “It’s dark when I leave work, and if you have skin in Wigan you wear coal. Should I wash my face for you?”

  “Sometime.” He sipped his gin and looked around the room. England was giving him the ability to see in the dark. Pasteboard photographs were stacked by a viewer on the sideboard. He leaned back to pick out the gilt title of Every Gentlewoman’s Guide to Poetry on a shelf. In a carpetbag were balls of red and orange yarn.

  Rose said, “Flo makes her own hats and knits her own shawls.”

  “I remember. But we were talking about you.”

  “We were talking about the Reverend Maypole.”

  “His obsession with you. The night before he disappeared, you were walking up Scholes Lane with him and he pulled off his collar. I’m still wondering what that was about.”

  “I’m still saying it never happened.”

  “Maypole wanted to go down into the mine.”

  “Is that so?”

  “He was a pilgrim. He had the Hannay pit confused with the Slough of Despond. He thought you were some kind of angel.”

  “I won’t be blamed for what men think.”

  “But why would he think that?”

  “Find him and ask him. That’s what you’re paid to do.”

  “Actually, no. What I’m discovering is that Maypole doesn’t matter, dead or alive, foun
d or disappeared. Not to the Bishop. What matters to him is Charlotte. When she gives up her engagement to Maypole, the Reverend can rot and Hannay wouldn’t care. He’ll pay me, send me on my way and I’m done.”

  “You sound pleased.”

  “It’s a relief if I don’t have to find a body. Sometimes I think I’ve just been hired to drive her crazy.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I seem to do it without even trying. She’s cold, though. There certainly wasn’t any passion between her and Maypole—not on her part.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want passion. Maybe she wanted a marriage where she was free.”

  “Well, she won’t have that with Rowland. I didn’t believe it when I heard about an engagement to him. They’re first cousins. I thought that was frowned on.”

  “Not for them, not for nobility.”

  “Well, it’s what Hannay wants.”

  “And Charlotte?”

  “At least she’ll be rid of me.”

  “You’ll be sad t’see the last of her?”

  “Hardly. Anyway, she’s as good as sold.”

  “ ‘Sold’? That sounds African.”

  “It is. Here’s to the upper classes.” He touched his glass to hers.

  Rose watched him as she drank, then took off her hat and let it drop to the floor. Not exactly a commitment to stay. A gesture of her own royal interest, Blair thought, the same way Charlotte once dropped shears into a pocket of her skirt.

  “ ‘An angel’?” She allowed a smile to suggest itself.

  “Well, we can’t help what men think.”

  “And himself a pilgrim? In the ‘Slough of Despond’?”

  “The Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation, the Hill Difficulty. What pilgrims need is some bouts of dysentery, malaria and yellow jack.”

  “Said he like a devil. You’re living up t’your reputation.”

  “Or ill fame.”

  “Rowland’s the one with the great reputation, isn’t he?” Rose asked.

  “Oh, his reputation is glorious. Explorer, missionary, humanitarian. He took some troops and a guide and found a slave caravan in the Gold Coast. There were a dozen raiders with about a hundred captives from the north on their way to Kumasi. Men yoked together to stop them from escaping. Women and children, too. Rowland started picking off the raiders one by one. He’s a hell of a shot.”