Smallbone drew the gag from Blair’s mouth and held it high. Other men pushed his head forward while Bill looped his scarf around Blair’s neck and tightened it until their foreheads touched.
Blair said, “I could have let you drown.”
“Your mistake.”
Smallbone snapped the rag down and Bill kicked Blair twice before he had a chance to move. Each leg was numb and bloody. He sank to his knees in stupefaction.
“Need a hand?” Bill asked.
When Blair reached up, Bill hit him and Blair felt his nose split. Blood sprayed his chest. Two seconds, he thought, and he already looked like a sheep who had taken the high dive.
He pushed himself up. The problem was that as his clogs broke the crust of the floor they skated clumsily on the sheep fat underneath. Bill, on the other hand, moved with sinuous ease. Muscles bunched and released. He spread his arms, retied his scarf around his neck, feinted and, as Blair slipped, tapped him lightly on the center of his forehead, slowly spun and kicked savagely at the same place, but Blair had rolled away.
“You’re not going to stop this?” Blair asked the miners, but they pushed him back toward Bill, ringed around him like dogs in a pack.
Bill had the strut of a champion, the glory of a white body on a red floor, raking his long black hair with his hands. A massive torso pivoting on a pinched waist, with the smile of a man who was turning sport to art. He merely leaned and Blair backed away and fell.
“Need a hand?” Bill asked again.
Blair rose unsteadily on his own. Bill rushed him, lifted him clear of the floor and carried him into a wall. Blair was crushed, his arms caught on the other side of the bigger man’s back. He pulled Bill’s head back by the hair, butted him and twisted free.
Miners blocked the door by the cart. Blair looked up at the edge of the drop, where he had stood before with Charlotte, and where the stableman now stood. A scream would have to rise like a siren over the drop and above the pens to reach the houses around.
Bill shook his head and rolled his shoulders, showing no more than a blush on his brow.
“Have you noticed something?” Smallbone asked Blair.
“What’s that?”
“You’re not worried about Maypole anymore.”
Bill approached almost on the toes of his clogs while Blair slid sideways in retreat. Bill feinted as if to scoop up Blair’s front leg, and as Blair leaned back he took a second, longer stride forward and kicked Blair on the inside of the thigh, continued moving in, and with the other clog kicked Blair in the small of the back. Blair stepped in and hit him square on the mouth. It was as ineffective as punching a man armed with swords. Bill kicked him in the middle of the chest and he rolled against the wall.
Cats “purr.” What did that have to do with kicking? Blair wondered. Or killing somebody with brass-tipped wooden shoes? He found himself standing up again, using the wall. He was as red now as if he had been skinned. He ducked and Bill kicked a white hole into the plaster. When Blair tried to tackle him, Bill skipped aside, tripped him and kicked him on the side of the head. Blair was still rolling, or the blow would have pushed his brains out his ear.
“That’s enough, Bill,” one of the miners said.
Smallbone said, “Bill’s not through.”
Bill’s clog tagged Blair’s chin—not squarely, but enough for him to find a tooth loose under his tongue. Buttons, teeth—he was coming undone like a rag doll. He was dizzy, while Bill was spinning like a whirling Dervish. Another kick and Blair found himself against the opposite wall. He got up again. It seemed to be his role in the drama. A kick in the ribs propelled him halfway across the floor and into a butcher block. A cleaver would be handy now, he thought. He crawled up the block and held on.
“Are tha goin’ t’kill him?” someone asked.
“He’s still standing,” Bill said.
If that was the issue, Blair thought, he was willing to lie down. Before he could, Bill gracefully leaped through the air and kicked him so hard he felt he had been shot from a cannon. He folded over. Bill kicked out his knees from behind. Well, I’m down now, he thought.
It didn’t matter. As he curled up, Bill kicked his side, his arm, his leg. This was the way iron was forged when it was cold, by pounding. Blair trembled, and it wasn’t from cold.
“Constable’s coomin’!” the stableman shouted from above.
Not fast enough. Bill tore open Blair’s knapsack.
“No,” Blair said weakly.
Bill unwrapped the telescope and swung it against the wall. As the brass tube bent, broken glass poured out like sand. He tossed the tube aside and gave Blair another kick in the head.
What Blair knew next was that the lanterns had gone. He lay without moving until he was sure he was alone in the dark. He didn’t feel for damage. He didn’t particularly want to know. Some of him was numb. He wished it all was.
It would have been simpler to push him off the drop. He remembered his mother falling from the ship. In retrospect the waves seemed warm and restful, certainly softer than the knacker’s floor.
He told himself that if he could reach a wall, he could find the door, and if he could find a door, he could reach the street. But the effort of lifting his head made it swim, and his last conscious act was not swallowing the tooth in his mouth.
Water woke him. The stableman had returned with a lantern, bucket and sheets.
“There was no constable coomin’, you know, but Bill was going to kick thi inside out. In fact, I think he did.”
Were those his own hands, Blair thought, so red and amphibious? He washed them with the last water in the bucket before he put his fingers in his mouth, found the empty socket and pushed the tooth back in.
The stableman toweled him with the sheets. “You can go t’constable but it won’t do thi any good. We’ll all stick up for Bill, and you were messin’ with his girl, he says.”
“Rose?” Blair tried to speak without moving his jaw.
“Who else?”
The lightest touch on flesh felt like the edge of a blade. What Blair waited for was the more pointed response of a fractured arm or rib moving in separate directions.
“Your head looks lahk a meat pie.”
Blair grunted with nausea, agreement and lack of surprise.
“Ah washed the coal dust out of the cuts as best ah could so you won’t look like a miner for the rest of your life, but you’ll want t’get sewed up and on a train as fast as you can. Bill won’t rest until you’re gone. Ah’ve kept your clothes as neat as I could and saved your hat and shoes and pack. I’m truly sorry about the looking glass. Can you stand?”
Blair stood and passed out.
When he woke again, he was in the cart. He was dressed and the cart was rolling, so that was progress. He held the slits of his eyes open to see a lamp pass overhead.
The stableman was pushing the cart by himself. He looked in and asked, “Is there anything else I can do for thi, Mr. Blair? Something ah can get?”
Blair muttered, “Macaroni.”
“Maca …? Oh, I get it. Macaroni. Lahk in Africa. That’s a good one, Mr. Blair. We’re almost there. Ah’ll get thi to thy room, don’t worry.”
The stableman had made a bed of sheets, but the jostling of the cart made Blair feel as if he were being rolled directly over cobblestones. He struggled to lift his head. “Maypole?”
“No one knows. Forget him. Ah’ll tell thi, Mr. Blair, ah’ll miss thi more.”
He heard someone say,
“ ‘For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.’ ”
It was better than last rites.
His eyes were swollen shut, his limbs distant and unresponsive. If he raised his head, he was nauseated from a swelling on the brain. He wheezed through a nos
e that had been broken at leisure and reset in haste, and slept profoundly or couldn’t sleep for more than a minute before the work of breathing or the prick of a stitch summoned his attention. When he heard miners walk to work in the morning, he dreamed of clogs and winced, as if his head were a cobblestone.
Tea and laudanum were forced through his lips. Laudanum was liquid opium, and the images flowed through his mind, a great unraveling of memory. One moment he was in bed in Wigan, the next stretched at his ease on a red hill in Africa, and the next burrowed for safety’s sake as deep underground as he could go.
A miner in uniform climbed down into Blair’s pit, took off a brass helmet to protect its ostrich plumes and tentatively touched the wall.
“Can you hear me? It’s Chief Constable Moon. You’re living very high, Blair, very high. I’ve never had a room like this to myself. Look at this wallpaper. Feel the flocking. Soft as a virgin’s bum. Am I right, Olive? Soft as a virgin’s bum? The maid wouldn’t know, Blair. No more than you.” As he buffed his helmet with his sleeve the plumes turned every move into a flutter. “Well, I suppose it was a slip on the stairs? An accident? I just want to be sure you aren’t shamming, taking the Bishop’s money and lolling about in bed with only a broken head and maybe a rib or two. Bad enough you should upset honest working people, accosting women and provoking the men, but when you take advantage of a local girl you can’t come tugging the sleeve of the law for protection. The men here protect their own.” He leaned close. “Fact is, I found it hard to believe you really were the famous explorer, but you certainly look like Nigger Blair now.”
Blair saw in his inward eye a field of daffodils with a pit girl walking through them, gathering a bouquet. She was at the crown of a hill; he was at the bottom, blinded by the sun. No matter how much he called, she didn’t hear.
Leveret joined him in the hole.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, but I wanted to tell you that Charlotte has acquiesced to marrying Rowland. Actually, she agreed the day after you were found in your … condition. The Bishop is very pleased, in good part thanks to you, and you’re free to go as soon as you are able. I have recommended an extra bonus for you and a letter obliging the Bishop to sponsor your return to the Gold Coast. You’ve earned it.” Leveret knelt on the coal. “I have a confession. I knew when you came that the Bishop’s interest was more in forcing Charlotte’s hand than in finding John Maypole. I did hope, though, that you might find him.” Leveret’s voice dropped. “So you got involved with a woman. You’re only human.” He added, “I envy you.”
An ember chimed the hour. He thought of Charlotte’s cottage, where a redheaded girl hid in the dark.
Dark was comfortable. He heard in the tunnel not Leveret, but someone more familiar: old Blair, of all people, stumbling in a beaver coat and a whiskey fog, whistling and offering bits of song.
“ ‘Maintes genz dient que en songes
N’a se fables non et menconges.…’ ”
He dropped into a chair and let his coat slide, revealing a black front and an ecclesiastical collar. A book of faded red hung in one hand, a lamp in the other. He screwed up the wick and held the light over Blair.
“More poetry. How is your medieval French? Not too good, you say? As good comatose as conscious? Fair enough. I’m told we should read to you to keep your mind alive in case it is alive.” He opened the book. “Smell that?”
A rose, Blair thought.
“A dried rose,” said old Blair.
A pony fell down the shaft, its white tail and mane snapping like wings, ticking first bricks and then timbers on the way down. The horse’s tail trailed out behind.
* * *
Old Blair returned. Blair was happy to see him not only back from the dead but trading up, exchanging his moth-eaten fur coat for the crimson-lined cape of a bishop. The old man was anxious. After offering some pleasantries and getting no response, he sat silently in the dark of the tunnel for an hour before pulling his chair nearer. A visitor to the comatose is practically alone, and words have a license they usually lack.
“You’re right about Rowland. I only hope he breeds a son as fast as possible. Then he can poison himself, for all I care, but he will marry Charlotte first. She has the strength of the Hannay line. It either goes through her or becomes a feeble caricature, and we’ve enough families like that, with heirs too dim-witted to speak to anyone but their nannies, or else as queer as Dick’s hatband. Long after Rowland is food for worms, Charlotte will have Hannay Hall to run, like a republic if she wants. Old families have odd problems.” Blair smelled a soft scent of roses again. “And curious prizes. Remember, last visit I was reading you the Roman de la Rose. I hope you weren’t expecting the Bible. The Roman was the great poem of the age of chivalry.” Blair heard a rustle of pages. “Once there were hundreds of copies, but we consider ourselves fortunate to have a surviving one that has been in the family for five hundred years. Too bad you can’t see the illustration.” Blair imagined a brilliantly painted scene of an amorous couple in a canopied bed framed by flowers of gold leaf that glittered and shifted in the lantern’s flame. “It’s allegorical, of course. Decidedly sexual. The poem is set in a garden, but instead of a Tree of Good and Evil, at the center is a single rosebud that the poet passionately desires. You couldn’t write like this now, nor publish it. All the Chubbs and Mrs. Smallbones in the land would rise up against it, banish it, burn it. I’ll translate as I go, and if you find it excruciatingly dull, lift a hand or bat an eye.”
Blair made a pillow of the coal to listen. It was the sort of antique, endless tale that grew like a concentric garden, and his mind wandered in and out, catching and losing sight of the story. Venus, Cupid, Abstinence played hide-and-seek from hedge to hedge. Narcissus paused by a pool.
“ ‘Ce est li Romanz de la Rose,
Ou l’art d’Amors est tote enclose.’ ”
He tried to use his time in the dark to good effect by going over the day of the fire. He had a new advantage. The pieces of information he had were scattered like the tiles of a half-seen mosaic, and he had tried before to bring a perspective to the little that he knew. Now that his own brain was scattered, he let each small, separate glimpse expand.
He could see Maypole join the miners’ early-morning trudge to work. It was black and wet, and the curate was dressed for the pit in clothes borrowed from Jaxon, his inadequate chin hidden in Jaxon’s scarf.
They moved over Scholes Bridge through Wigan and, still before dawn, across the fields. Maypole hung back but stayed part of the group, identified as Jaxon by his size and by Jaxon’s mate Smallbone walking at his side.
Blair lost them in the lampman’s shed. Did Smallbone pick up both men’s lamps? Did “Jaxon” get his own, tucked into a scarf? From the murk of the yard they descended into the black of the shaft. Inside the cage, close bodies smothered the weak nimbi of safety lamps. “Jaxon” coughed and everyone turned away.
At the pit eye, miners gave George Battie, the underlooker, no more than a wave as they headed for the tunnels. “Jaxon” and Smallbone were quick to move out of Blair’s sight, although once they were in the tunnel, they stopped for “Jaxon” to set something right with his clogs, while other miners, who might notice that “Jaxon” was suddenly as clumsy as a curate, went ahead.
Better yet, the damp weather had brought methane out of the coal. Since Battie had prohibited shots until the gas cleared, the fireman and “Jaxon” had a slack day, hewing coal for lack of their usual labor, but at a slow pace, not exerting themselves enough to strip. They worked at the farthest reach of the coal face, where no one could see beyond his lamp for more than a few feet. On this day, Smallbone could have been working with anyone. The real Jaxon came into the yard later and slipped into the winding house in case of problems.
If someone on that coal face had noticed that the Bill Jaxon below was, so to speak, not himself, that his costume or acting had slipped in the dark even for a second, no one on the surface would ever know
now that all those men were in their graves. There might be no mystery to Maypole’s vanishing at all if so many hadn’t vanished with him.
What happened then? He tried to imagine further, but he saw Maypole’s journal, and the script of vertical and horizontal lines that filled every page confused his eye. Sentences looked not so much like words as a trellis of spiky canes that even as he watched began to show red buds.
Old Blair, as if he understood French, translated in Hannay’s distinct, rolling cadence:
“I seized the rose tree by her tender limbs
That are more lithe than any willow bough,
And pulled her close to me with my two hands.
Most gently, that I might avoid the thorns,
I set myself to loosen that sweet bud
That scarcely without shaking could be plucked.
Trembling and sweet vibration shook her limbs;
They were quite uninjured, for I strove
To make no wound, though I could not avoid
Breaking a trifling fissure in the skin.
“When I dislodged the bud, a little seed
I spilled just in the center, as I spread
the petals to admire their beauty,
Probing the aromatic flower to its depth.
The consequence of all my play
Was that the bud expanded and enlarged.
“Of course the rose did remind me of my pledge
And say I was outrageous in demands,
But ne’ertheless she never did forbid
That I should seize and strip and quite deflower
The bloom from off her rosy bower.”
Blair opened his eyes.
The curtains were closed, framed by light like shadow in reverse, stirred from a draft. Rain tapped on the windowsill. Coal shifted in the grate. He sat up carefully, as if his head might split. A pitcher and basin of water sat on the night table. Empty chairs were pulled close to the bed, and the door to the sitting room was ajar.
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