Rose

by Martin Cruz Smith

“The week before. He was always bringing an excuse for a drunken miner. I understood. Forgiveness is a young curate’s job, after all.”

  Moon made it sound like the drooling stage of a baby; Blair felt a dislike for the man.

  “Do you remember which miner it was that week?”

  “It was Bill Jaxon.”

  “Jaxon and Maypole played on the same rugby team, didn’t they?”

  “Ah, Bill’s a famous boy. He gets in scrapes. Miners do. That’s why they’re so good at rugby—what does a split nose mean to them? They say if you want a good rugby team in Lancashire, just shout down a shaft.”

  “What had Bill done to attract the attention of the law?”

  “He broke another man’s head for squeezing the wrong girl. I couldn’t blame Bill myself. You see, we get travelers who don’t know Wigan ways, who get confused.”

  “By what?”

  “Pit girls.”

  “How so?”

  Moon had his front teeth, but not the side, which made his smile wet and gummy. “Well, they do what they want, don’t they? Drink like men, work like men, live like men. And draw a certain sort of gentleman who travels up here by train to see an Amazon in pants. That sort of gentleman thinks he can take liberties, and then finds himself facing off with someone like Bill.”

  “Who was the Amazon in Bill’s case?”

  “A girl named Molyneux.”

  “Rose?”

  “The same. A pit girl, attractive in a sluttish way. A fairly new arrival in Wigan.” Moon appeared taken aback. “However do you know her?”

  “She was on the list you supplied Leveret of the last people to see Maypole.”

  “That’s right. I never liked it that Reverend Maypole wasted time with her. I warned him about oversocializing with miners, letting them drag him down to their level.”

  “What level is that?”

  “They’re good folk but they’re primitive. A fact, sir.” Moon shifted his attention to Blair’s cheek. “Know what miners use to clean wounds? Coal dust. So they end up tattooed like savages. You don’t want to look like them.”

  From the police station Blair walked so that Leveret would have time to bring word of his dismissal to the hotel.

  The night clerk poked into message boxes. “Sorry, sir, nothing for you.”

  “There has to be.” Blair couldn’t believe that the Bishop would not at least warn him after Leveret’s report or Charlotte Hannay’s complaint. “Look again.”

  The clerk ducked under the desk. “There is something, sir.” He brought out a heavy, unshapely package wrapped in brown paper and string. Written on the paper in a thick pencil was “For Mr. Blair. From a friend.”

  “Do you know who brought this?”

  “No, it was here when I came on. A gift, I suppose. Seems to be in two pieces.”

  The clerk waited expectantly for Blair to open the package. Instead he carried it up to his room, set the parcel on the sitting-room table, lit the lamps and allowed himself a quinine and gin. He told himself he had done his best, at least as much as the police had done for the saintly John Maypole. Tomorrow he would be in Liverpool booking passage, even steerage, to escape. In a year his three nights in Wigan would seem a passing dream.

  Reinforced with another gin, Blair loosened the string of the package and unwrapped the contents, which proved to be a pair of shoes. Not shoes. Clogs with stout leather uppers attached by brass nails to solid ash soles edged on the underside by horseshoe irons. Shamrocks were stitched into the leather and extra brass heads studded the toes. They were the clogs that Bill Jaxon had won from the Irishman.

  Out of curiosity, Blair sat down and pulled off his boots. He slipped on the clogs, closed the clasps and stood. Because wood didn’t bend, his feet rocked within, lifting at the heels. The sound of the clogs on the floor when he stepped was like rolling balls. But they fit.

  When Blair arrived at the Hannay yard, miners on the day shift were already below, but Battie, the underlooker, had come up in the cage to supervise the lowering of a pony, a mare with a milk-white mane and tail. The pony was in blinkers and trailed a harness with two extra-long cinches. While Battie attached a chain and hook to the bottom of the cage, a stableman with hay lured the little horse close to the platform.

  The underlooker noticed Blair. “Are you planning to take another tour of the pit? We won’t be crawling on our hands and knees again, will we?”

  “No.” Blair dropped his pack from his shoulder to the ground.

  Battie finished hooking the chain and stepped back. He wore a dusting of carbon powder. He shielded his eyes from the sun to peer at Blair’s face. “You’ve been crawling through brambles?”

  “I met a human bramble.”

  “Mr. Leveret with you? I don’t see a carriage.”

  “I walked out on my own.”

  “Carrying your pack all the way? You’re not still asking about Reverend Maypole?”

  “Still,” Blair said, although he had left a note at the hotel desk saying where he was headed, and hoped to see Leveret roll into the pit yard at any moment with word that the Bishop had fired him. “Did Maypole come here often?”

  “Yes. He was a preacher of opportunity, very good at drawing parallels from the Bible—workers in a vineyard and men in a pit, that sort of thing. I feel bad now.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid I told him that a pit yard was not a church. You can’t preach around rolling wagons and tubs. He was welcome to visit as a friend of the Hannays, but not as a minister. That was a week before the explosion. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  The cage rose, trailing its extra hook below while workmen laid planks across the shaft. The stableman was wiry as a boy, with a beaked nose and a fierce mustache. He walked the pony onto the planks, forced her to her knees, and then to her side. He folded her front legs into the forward cinch and strapped them tight, then did the same with a second cinch around the rear legs so that only her four hooves were free. He yanked the cinches to test their tension before he connected a ring in the harness to the hook hanging from the cage. At his shout, the cage rose and lifted the pony to a sitting position and then over the hole. The workmen pulled the planks aside, opening the shaft.

  “Pretty little horse,” Blair said.

  Battie nodded. “And expensive. I like Welsh ponies, but they’re in short supply. This one is all the way from Iceland.”

  “White as the proverbial snow.”

  “Well, the poor girl won’t be white for long.”

  The pony hung, trussed, between cage and shaft. Though the stableman tucked hay under her nose and held her reins, she rolled her eyes. A shadow of horse, cage and tower stretched across the yard.

  “It’s her first time. She’ll quiet,” the stableman called. “We don’t want her bucking when we send her down pit.”

  “Some of the ponies die their first month down,” Battie told Blair. “Maybe lack of light or air or proper mucking. A mystery. You forgot something?”

  Blair stepped onto the platform. “No, it was just something you said the other day. You showed me where you found the victims of the explosion, the ones who suffocated and the ones who were blown up. You said you’d ‘thought about it a thousand times.’ ”

  “Anyone would, a fire like that.”

  “It was the word ‘thought.’ As if there was something you were trying to figure out, going over it in your mind. You didn’t say ‘remembered,’ you said ‘thought.’ ”

  “I don’t see the difference,” Battie said.

  “There may not be.”

  “That’s why you came out here?”

  “One reason. Was there something you were thinking about?” Blair asked.

  The pony didn’t calm. Instead, she began to thrash until the cage above her swung against the guide wires like a jointed pendulum. Loose hay spilled, straws of gold sucked by the downdraft into the shaft. Once a pony went down a pit it wouldn’t come up again except once a year for a w
eek, until it was finally lame and hauled up for the knacker’s cart. In spite of her reins and all the stableman’s pulling, she twisted her head to bite the cinch. The cage ticked the tower’s wooden props.

  “I think about everything that goes on below. That’s what an underlooker does,” Battie said.

  “I’m not talking about accusations, but maybe something that didn’t make sense.”

  “Mr. Blair, perhaps you haven’t noticed, but a dark tunnel deep in the earth is not where you find sensible men.”

  The cinch broke. As the pony kicked more freely, she gyrated, which caused her to kick more violently. The stableman ducked her hooves and tried to pull her back over the platform by her reins so that if she broke or reared out of the bottom cinch she wouldn’t pour herself into the open shaft.

  “Pull her clear,” Battie shouted.

  But the weight of the horse started to drag the stableman toward the shaft. The irons of his clogs slipped across the platform. Battie grabbed him by the waist. Blair removed his jacket, threw it over the pony’s head and then held on to Battie.

  The three men clung to the reins as the pony thrashed and tried to shake the jacket off. Slowly the kicking stopped. The pony spun but ever more idly, sedated by blindness. Battie took the reins while the stableman fetched a hood, which he expertly slipped over the horse’s head even as he snatched Blair’s jacket off. Blair took it and staggered against a prop. Activity in the pit yard had ceased around the spectacle. Blair’s heart kicked. He was as covered in the horse’s lather as if he had rolled in foam.

  The stableman was furious. “Tha shouldna’ done that. Think ah don’t know me job?”

  “Sorry,” Blair said.

  “You made him look a fool,” Battie said. “He’d prefer to die.”

  More stablemen arrived to pull the pony to the platform and truss her with a new cinch. Across the yard, men again began to weigh tubs, drivers to back their engines into wagons, blacksmiths to beat iron. Battie shouted to the winding house. A tremor ran the length of the cable as it rose, but the pony in her hood was pacified. As the cable reversed and unreeled, she dropped from sight down into the hole, followed by the cage, which stopped momentarily at platform level for Battie to get on.

  The underlooker hit the cage bell and said, “The numbers agree, Mr. Blair. Seventy-six lamps, seventy-six men. That’s what matters.”

  Blair was still trying to get his breath. “It’s hardly a mystery.”

  “What?” Battie called back.

  “Why the ponies die. Fear.”

  An unhappy smile stole onto Battie’s face. Then he disappeared under the top of the cage as it descended, gathering speed but moving smoothly, anchored by the pony hanging underneath.

  Blair went over to the sorting shed. A locomotive was shifting a train of loaded wagons away from the siding. Connected only by chains, the wagons slapped together as they transmitted the stop-and-go of the engine. Pit girls walked alongside, collecting larger pieces of coal that fell.

  Over the shed itself a cloud of coal dust glittered in the sun. Blair didn’t see Rose Molyneux at the siding tippler or among the women picking rocks and dirt from the belt or tending the coal as it cascaded through the grates. The first time he had seen them at work had been in the dark. In daylight their uniforms—work shirts and pants, head covering of flannel shawls and rolled-up skirts—were neither male nor female but fashion for hermaphroditic drudges. He did recognize the large form of Rose’s friend Flo as she disengaged from other women at the bottom of the chute and came his way.

  “It’s t’gentleman caller,” she said and nodded toward the tower. “Ah saw thi ride t’carousel.”

  Blair swung the pack off his shoulder. “I have something for Rose. Is she here?”

  “She is, but she got hurt. Not bad. She’ll be back later, ah can’t say when.” Flo put out a black hand. “Give it t’me, ah’ll pass it on.”

  “I want to give this to Rose myself. I have to talk to her.”

  “Well, ah can’t say when she’ll be back.”

  “When do you quit work? I’ll talk to her then.”

  “Five. But it wouldn’t do for her t’talk then, not when t’men are up.”

  “Then I’ll meet her in town.”

  “No. T’best place is Canary Wood. It’s t’trees closest t’pit. She’ll meet thi there after work.”

  “I’ll look for her in Wigan if she’s not there.”

  “Rose will be there.”

  Flo seemed pleased with the negotiation. Also, suddenly afraid to trade more words. “I mun t’work,” she said.

  “If you mun you mun.”

  “Aye.”

  She edged toward the coal chute. She was too large to slip away on light feet, though, and no shawl or black smudges could hide the satisfaction in her backward glance.

  Blair had walked halfway back to Wigan when he came to a halt. Most of the road was by fields black with fresh-turned earth. His plan was to find the widow Mrs. Jaxon; according to Maypole’s journal, he called on her the day he disappeared. Other people saw him later, but maybe he had said something to the woman.

  Yet Blair found that he had stopped walking, as if the power to do so had left his legs. Rather than the dark fields, he saw the pony thrashing on the chain. Fear welled up like the dark of the shaft, but it wasn’t fear of falling. Something worse: the way the mare whipped its head back and forth as it struggled to escape. The sweat of its terror covered him still.

  He found himself on the ground on his knees. It wasn’t malaria. The horse was gone, replaced by a memory of a paddle steamer pushing between black seas and a gray sky. The hoarse sound of the waves vied with the uneven churning of side-wheels as the ship made way, wallowed, made way. The captain held the Bible flat to read in a wind that was strong enough to lift beards. Six sailors shouldered a plank on which lay a body wrapped in a muslin sheet. They lifted the plank and the body shot out like a wingless angel through the air. The little boy pulled himself up on the railing to watch.

  Above the water the descent stopped. The plank had snagged the sheet and it had unwound in a fluttering white arc down to the knot that secured the body within the first turn of the cloth. As the ship plodded forward, the body sank into a wave, reappeared and swung into the side of the ship, sank into a wave, reappeared again. Because she was weighted with lead he heard her hit the ship.

  A sailor cut through the sheet. Released, it immediately trailed behind and, dropping, whipped as if escaping grip after grip. The body, covered by a foamy wave, was quickly out of sight, although he thought he saw the sheet on the water for a minute more. Blair, a gold miner whom the boy and his mother had met on deck, patted him on the head and said, “These things happen.” It was young Blair’s experience as he grew that things like that happened all the time.

  Now he bent over and sobbed. The goddamn pony, he said to himself. The sheet unwinding from the plank, his jacket whipping back and forth. The cage slamming against the guide wires, her hitting the side of the ship. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried, except that now memory was born kicking painfully from the inside out. The fucking pony.

  “Are you all right?”

  Blair raised his head. A blurry Leveret looked down from a carriage that Blair hadn’t heard come.

  “Sure.”

  “You seem upset.”

  “Leveret, you are one sharp observer.” Blair rolled onto his back; he wouldn’t have been surprised if his eyes flowed out. His ribs were racked as if they weren’t used to this form of exercise. He’d been walking along, remembered that burial at sea and suddenly turned into a fountain.

  “Can I help you up?”

  “If you want to help, tell me that I’ve been dismissed, that the Hannay family no longer needs my services.”

  “No, the Bishop says he is very satisfied with your work. He wants you to continue just the way you are.”

  Blair sat up. “What about Charlotte Hannay? He wants me to stay away fr
om her?”

  “The opposite. The Bishop wants you to talk to her again.”

  “You told him what happened?”

  “He says you should turn the other cheek.” When Blair laughed through his wet face, Leveret added, “However, the Bishop says that if you don’t possess sufficient sympathy to do that, you should feel free to defend yourself from attack.”

  “The Bishop said that? He knows that his daughter despises the sight of me?”

  “I told him what happened. Charlotte and Earnshaw had already reported to him in detail. The unpleasantness of the episode in the garden has been thoroughly described.”

  “The episode in the garden!” What an English way to describe anything from murder to a fart, Blair thought. He pulled himself to his feet. “Hannay is mad,” he said.

  “The Bishop says that Reverend Maypole’s disappearance is too urgent and important a matter for any personal considerations to interfere. He seems to be more convinced than ever that you are the right man for the job. He said there may be a bonus for you.”

  Disgustedly Blair threw his pack onto the carriage and climbed up to the seat next to Leveret. “I don’t want a bonus and I have no idea how to do ‘the job.’ Your Chief Constable Moon thinks Maypole will never be found. He’s probably right.”

  Leveret sniffed. “Have you been riding? Were you thrown by a horse?”

  Blair thought the question over. “Close.”

  He changed clothes at the hotel. He felt strangely invigorated and cleansed. Colors were rawer, fresher, more vibrant to his eyes. He bought a magnifying glass at a stationer’s for reading Maypole’s journal. He even had an appetite and talked Leveret into visiting a Scholes eating house for rabbit pie and pickled eel.

  The air inside was a cloud of pipe smoke so sharp it made the nose wince. Crutches and a cripple’s cart parked by tables where old men in caps and stained scarves played games of dominoes between arguments, mixed with younger workers taking the day off. They ate their pies with clasp knives, an etiquette that made Leveret stiff and fastidious. Blair was used to Arabs and Africans eating with their hands. He also had a weakness for this sort of tableau, the timeless scene of luckless men gambling, the same here as in Accra or Sacramento. With the games came two rhythmic choruses, the pop of men drawing on their clay pipes, the slap of ivory tiles.