Rose

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Fooking glorious?”

  “He is,” Rose said.

  He thought of her watching Bill fight, the sound of wooden soles on naked flesh, the gore smeared on skin. How did Bill and Rose celebrate afterward? An interesting choice of words, “fooking glorious.” And they talk about savages in Africa, he thought.

  “Did Bill Jaxon ever threaten Maypole?”

  “No. The Reverend only wanted t’save my soul; he didn’t have any interest in the rest of me.”

  “That’s what you keep telling me.” Blair turned the picture on the table for her to see better. “But that’s not a picture of the soul.”

  Rose studied it more closely. “I extra washed, and then I get t’studio and they wipe that muck on my face. I look like an Irish potato farmer.”

  “You look ferocious with that shovel. Dangerous.”

  “Well, I never touched a hair on Reverend Maypole. I don’t know why he had a picture of me.”

  “I like the picture. I even like the shovel. It’s far more interesting than a parasol.”

  “Gentlemen don’t cross the street to meet a girl twirling a shovel.”

  “I’ve crossed jungles to meet women with plates in their lips.”

  “Kiss any?”

  “No.”

  “See!”

  As coal collapsed it sent a shower of sparks up the chimney. Rose stared at the grate. She was small for moving steel tubs, Blair thought. Her face was as delicate at rest as it was wild when animated. What sort of life did a creature like her look forward to? Gin, babies, beatings from a man like Bill? This was her all-too-brief flowering, and she seemed determined to make the most of it.

  “I should be getting on t’Bill and Flo,” she said. “I don’t think he likes you.”

  “Bill didn’t mind Maypole.”

  “Bill likes t’rule the roost. Maypole let him.”

  “Well, they played together.”

  “You’d have thought the rules of rugby were laid down by Christ t’hear Maypole preach.”

  “What did he preach to girls?”

  “Chastity and higher love. Every mother had t’be the Virgin Mary. Every girl who sported was Mary Magdalene. I don’t think he ever had a real woman.”

  “Now, I’m not a gentleman—”

  “We all know that.”

  “—but I have the feeling that for a man like Maypole, there was nothing more attractive than a woman in need of saving.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did he ever call you Rose of Sharon?”

  “Where did you hear that?” The question was so casual that it stood out like a half-driven nail, a small slip.

  “Did he?”

  “No.”

  “You said he never had a real woman. You don’t count his fiancée, Miss Hannay?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve met her?”

  “I don’t meet the Hannays any more than I’ve been to the moon. But I’ve seen the moon, I have an opinion about it. Have you met her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “She’s thin on charm.”

  “Thin on everything, but she has money, clothes, carriages. Going t’see her again?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Sounds like you can’t resist her.”

  “Compared with you, she’s a thorn, an icicle and sour wine.”

  Rose watched him silently from across the table. He would have liked to see her face clean. He’d seen her bathe, but what he remembered was her body within a glowing sheath of water. He hoped the image didn’t shine from his eyes.

  Rose said, “You have t’go.” She added, “You’re not so sick as you say.”

  Later, at his hotel, Blair asked himself if he was crazy. He had hidden the reason for his return to Africa from everyone with a right to know: Bishop Hannay, the Royal Society, even the innocuous Leveret, and now he had blurted everything to a girl who would spread this most irresistible of stories to all the pubs in Wigan, whence it would quickly work its destructive way to Hannay Hall. What a combination he had given her—slavery and racial mixing! The tragedy of the young black wife. The poignancy of a white father and his half-caste issue, set against the barbarism of an African jungle and the rapaciousness of Arabian traders. England itself would go to war to save that child if she were white. What was he thinking? To impress a coquette like Rose Molyneux by telling the truth?

  Look at the lies she had told in return. The only treasure John Maypole possessed was a picture of her, and she said he only wanted to save her soul?

  Consider the house. How was it that while all the other homes on Candle Court were stuffed with families and day lodgers like herrings in a net, Rose and her friend Flo had an entire well-furnished house to themselves? How did honest girls pay for that?

  Her secrecy. She’d made him quit the house alone and said she would wait till he was out of sight to leave herself.

  Was it her revenge for his first visit, catching her in her bath? Was it his fever? Though he didn’t feel that ill. Sometimes a brain that was warm made inspired choices. The reason he hadn’t told her about finding Maypole’s journal was that the book was the only advantage he had over her.

  He had to laugh, though. If she could do this to him, what had she done to Maypole?

  “An ounce of quinine?”

  “Two ounces,” Blair said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Quinine is what keeps the British Empire going.”

  “Very true, sir.” The chemist added a second weight on one side of the beam scale and tapped more white powder onto the other. “I could break this into any number of doses wrapped in rice paper for easier swallowing.”

  “I drink it with gin. It swallows very easily.”

  “I daresay it does.” The chemist poured the quinine into an envelope. He frowned. “Might I ask if you are doubling up, though?”

  “A bit.”

  “Have you considered Warburg’s Drops? A combination of quinine, opium and sloes. Plums to you, sir. Very smooth going down.”

  “A little too sedative.”

  “If it is a pick-me-up you’re after, then might I suggest arsenic? Clears the head wonderfully. Some of our veterans have had excellent results.”

  “I’ve tried it,” Blair said. Arsenic could be used for almost anything: malaria, melancholy, impotence. “Sure, I’ll take some of that, too.”

  “The Bishop is paying, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  The chemist cleaned the scale on his apron, and from the drug run, the long set of drawers behind the dispensary counter, brought out a jar of actinic green to mark it by color as poison. The shop itself was tinged an underwater hue by cobalt-blue bottles arrayed in the window. Dried botanicals scented the air and a coolness emanated from two creamware urns with perforated lids for leeches. The chemist poured out a pyramid of chalky powder. Blair dipped in his finger, licked it and let the bitter taste sting his tongue.

  “You appreciate the importance of temperate dosage, sir?”

  “Yes.” I’m eating arsenic in front of you, Blair thought. How temperate can a man get?

  “A little coca extract for vigor?”

  “I might be back for that. Quinine and arsenic for now.”

  The chemist filled a second envelope and was giving them both to Blair when the scales swayed and glass stoppers jiggled. Starting at the top shelves and moving to the bottom, brass measures and stone mortars, poison rounds and perfume jars began to tremble as a heavy resonance shook the plate-glass front of the shop. Outside, a mover’s steam-powered van lumbered by, a two-story locomotive with boiler, black stack and rubber wheels that made the cobblestones of the street groan. Behind his counter, the chemist moved quickly from side to side to reach up and keep first one leech urn and then the other from falling.

  Blair opened the envelopes, poured lines of arsenic and quinine across his palm and tossed them into his mouth. As the van passed he saw Leveret’s c
arriage outside the hotel. He pocketed the envelopes and left.

  “You seem revitalized today,” Leveret said.

  “Yes.” And motivated, Blair thought. He had to show progress before any rumors were spread by Rose Molyneux. If she started to entertain friends with lurid reports of his half-African daughter, the news would not take long to reach Wigan’s monitors of virtue, and then not even Bishop Hannay could ignore the scandal of miscegenation. What had he told Blair about the name Nigger Blair? “Discourage it.” The Bishop would drop him without paying another penny.

  “Today’s Wednesday?” Blair climbed up into the carriage seat.

  “Right,” Leveret said.

  “Maypole was last seen on a Wednesday. Wednesday afternoons he always went to the Home for Women. You wanted me to pay a courtesy call on Reverend Chubb, we’ll do that. Then let’s talk to police. There’s a Chief Constable Moon we should see.”

  “We should at least inform Charlotte that we’re going to the Home.”

  “We’ll surprise her.”

  As they drove, Blair became aware that besides being uncomfortable about etiquette, Leveret sat a little stiffly.

  “You’re all right?”

  “Yesterday’s tour of the pit took a toll, I’m afraid. My grandfather was a miner. He always had stories, but now I know what he was talking about. Explosions, falling rocks.” He lifted his hat to show off bandages. “Low roofs.”

  “Nice. Gives you panache.”

  Beyond the entrance to Hannay Hall was a smaller gate and a meandering path. As they progressed, Blair realized they had entered a private park. Trees—plane, chestnut and beech—became regularly planted, footpaths were edged in purple crocus and the carriage joined a swept avenue at the end of which sat a small fortress. A mock fortress, he saw as they approached. Three stories of brick with limestone parapets, decorative towers and loopholes filled with stained glass, the whole surrounded not by a moat but by various colors of primroses. Two young women wearing plain gray dresses with no bustles sat in a garden arbor. A third girl, also in gray, emerged from the door with a swaddled baby.

  Leveret said, “This is the Home for Women. It was a Hannay guest cottage.”

  “A cottage?”

  “The Prince of Wales stayed here once. Hannays have always done things in the grand style. Wait here.”

  Leveret went inside. Through a window opened to the warm air Blair saw young women in gray uniforms around a blackboard scribbled with rows of arithmetic. He was aware of being an interloper of the wrong gender, and he wondered how, even armored by a clerical collar, Maypole had felt. Through the next open window he saw a class huddled around prosthetic limbs wrapped in bandages. Some of the students had the robust frame and red cheeks of pit girls; others were sallow from life in the mills. They sat stiffly and unnaturally in their uniforms, like girls posing in paper wings for a Christmas pageant.

  Leveret returned and followed Blair’s gaze. “Charlotte wants them to have professions. Nursing is one. She insists that they read, too.”

  “Poets?”

  “Economics and hygiene, mainly.”

  “That sounds like Charlotte.”

  Leveret spoke hesitantly, as if about to commit an act he knew he would regret. “She’s in the rose garden.”

  They went around a side of the Home where a lawn sloped down between rounded masses of rhododendron to the terminus of a boxwood hedge. From the other side rose two sharp, familiar voices.

  Earnshaw was saying, “It is simply my conviction, Miss Hannay, that charity can be overdone and that the best intentions often lead to the worst results. Your father tells me that you have argued for paying pit girls and mill girls not to work during the last stage of pregnancy. What is that if not an invitation to immorality and sloth? Don’t you think women, as much as men, should suffer the consequences of their acts?”

  “Men don’t get pregnant.”

  “Then consider the inevitable outcome of educating women above their husbands and above their class.”

  “So that they might be dissatisfied by life with a drunken, ignorant lout?”

  “Or by life with a perfectly acceptable and sober man.”

  “Acceptable to whom? You? You marry him. You speak of these women as if they were cows waiting for a bull with four good legs.”

  Blair came around the hedge to a garden of pea-gravel paths and rosebushes so bare and severely pruned that they looked like iron rods. Charlotte Hannay and Earnshaw stood at the central, circular bed. Was this the woman “black and beautiful” who had invaded the mind of John Maypole, the figure who led the curate to suspect that a pit girl in corduroy had more life than a lady? Blair doubted it. Charlotte was an example of how silk could subdue a small woman, her bosom compacted by stays, her legs swimming somewhere within a bustled skirt of purple silk, pruning shears poised in a hideous purple glove. Blair removed his hat. Did her eyebrows arch at the sight of him or were they pinned high on her forehead because her hair was combed so tautly under a sun hat as black as crepe? He saw a coppery flame at the nape of her neck, but she could have been a novitiate for all he could tell of her hair’s color. At her side was Earnshaw’s beard shining in the sunlight. Behind them at a respectful distance was a nurseryman in a smock and straw hat holding a sack of dripping liquid manure.

  Leveret said, “If we could beg your indulgence, Blair has a question or two.”

  Earnshaw suggested to Charlotte, “I can return later. Or would you rather I stayed?”

  “Stay, but I can manage visitors by myself,” Charlotte said.

  “She could probably geld visitors by herself,” Blair muttered to Leveret.

  “What was that?” Earnshaw demanded.

  Blair made a vague gesture toward the building. “I was just saying that this must be a golden opportunity for all these women.”

  “If you were a reformer or a pedagogue, Miss Hannay might conceive some interest in your opinion. Since you are a confessed associate of traders in flesh, your opinion could not be less welcome.”

  “Wrong,” Charlotte Hannay said. “Since Mr. Blair is such a depraved individual, his opinion is all the more valuable. Blair, speaking from your wide experience, what will more likely keep young women in a condition of financial need and sexual peril, the ability to think as an independent person or, as Mr. Earnshaw insists, training for domestic service so that a penniless, ignorant maid can bring a brandy to her master in his bed?”

  She was remarkable, Blair had to admit. Like a sparrow chasing men around a garden. “I’ve never had a maid,” he said.

  “Surely in Africa you had female servants. You must have taken advantage of them.”

  Had rumors from Rose already reached her? Blair wondered.

  “Sorry, no.”

  “But you have a reputation as a man who will try anything at least once, from ostrich eggs to snake meat. Supposedly no man in England knows more about African women than you. Mr. Earnshaw, who knows nothing about either African women or Englishwomen, says it is unnatural to educate a woman above her station.”

  “To make her unfit and unhappy in her station,” Earnshaw explained. “It’s unfair to her and unhealthy for England.”

  “Like God, he proposes to create women fit for only one station. Like a politician, he presumes to speak for England when, in fact, he speaks only for those allowed to vote—men.”

  Earnshaw said, “If I might ask, what has this to do with Blair?”

  “Blair,” Charlotte asked, “is there another tribe anywhere that degrades women as thoroughly as the English?”

  Earnshaw protested, “Miss Hannay, think of any Muslim country. Polygamy, women dressed like tents.”

  “While in England,” Charlotte said, “a man is allowed by law to beat his wife, force himself physically on her and dispose of her property as his own. You’ve been in Africa, Blair. May the most vicious Muslim legally do that?”

  “No.”

  Charlotte asked, “What better witness
than a man who has infamously used women of every race? Testimony from the Devil!” She moved on to the next bare stems and asked the nurseryman, “Joseph, what do we have here?”

  “Tea roses, ma’am. Pink Carriere. Dooble-white Vibert. Red General Jacqueminot. Wi’ mulch an’ gravy.” He indicated the sack he held. “Cow droppin’s soaked wi’ ground hoof an’ horn. It’ll be beautiful, ma’am.”

  White, red, yellow, pink; it was amazing what future blooms were expected. Yet it was clear to Blair that Charlotte at a young age was already everything she would be, a prickly armature of thorns.

  Over her shoulder she asked, “Oliver, why are you bandaged like a veteran of the Crimea?”

  “I went down the pit with Blair yesterday.”

  “Be glad you weren’t a girl.”

  “Miss Hannay, why do you dislike me so much?” Blair asked. “I haven’t had a chance to earn so much contempt.”

  “Mr. Blair, if you saw a slug on a flower petal, how long would you let it stay?”

  “I’ve done nothing—”

  “You’re here. I told you not to come and yet you did. You either have no manners or no ears.”

  “Your father—”

  “My father threatens to close the Home for Women at the first sign of scandal, but he is willing to hire you, a man who would embezzle a Bible Fund. The story is well known, along with tales of foul habits and black harems. My father did not choose you for this task because you possessed any investigative skills; he chose you because you are the most loathsome individual on not one but two continents. He chose you because the choice of you is in itself an insult to John Maypole and me.”

  “Oh.” Blair felt wound in the web of an industrious little spider. “So where do you think John Maypole is?”

  Charlotte dropped the shears into a pocket of her skirt and turned to Earnshaw. “I might as well get this over with; otherwise we’ll have him following us forever like a tradesman with a cigar.” She faced Blair. “Where Reverend John Maypole is at present I have no idea. Until it is proved otherwise, I assume he is well and that he will make the reasons for his absence known when he cares to. In the meantime I will carry out the work we began together in the full anticipation of his return.”