The beer was dark and sent an almost visible ripple through Leveret. He still wore stamps of plaster and appeared slightly crimped, as if he had been posted. He whispered, “I haven’t been to one of these places since I used to sneak in with Charlotte.”
“She used to come here?”
“When we were children. We both loved eel pie.”
“Charlotte Hannay? I can’t see that.”
“You don’t know Charlotte.”
“A grim little mollusk.”
“No. She … at least she used to be the opposite.”
“A fish?”
“Adventuresome, full of life.”
“Now she’s full of opinions. Isn’t she a bit young to be so much smarter than everyone else?”
“She’s educated.”
“What does that mean?”
“The classics, science, French, Latin, a little Greek—”
“I get the idea. Does she know anything about miners and pit girls?”
“It’s a Hannay tradition to slip into town. When he was young, the Bishop himself was always in the working part of Wigan. Boys used to leap over old shafts. It was a dare, you know? Some wouldn’t jump at all. Hannay was the champion.”
“Well, they were his shafts, weren’t they? Maybe that should be a requirement for ownership, jumping over an open shaft. Did Maypole come here?”
“For a time. He wanted to eat like the miners and suffer with them. But he told me that he discovered that miners actually eat quite well. Roast beef, mutton, ham, and of course great quantities of beer. John couldn’t afford it and he went back to living like a curate.”
“Most people went to his church?”
“No. I don’t know if you noticed, but in the newspaper office there was a book called Lancashire Catholics: Obstinate Souls. That’s because Lancashire has remained the most Catholic county in spite of the Reformation. We’re also the most Methodist. We’re the most at whatever we are. In the Middle Ages Wigan was a refuge for runaway slaves. In the Civil War we were Royalist. Not like Southerners.”
“Southerners?”
“London people. Southerners are convenient people; they do whatever is convenient for them. Mining is not a convenient sort of occupation.”
“Did Maypole ever wear clogs?”
“For rugby, yes, because the other men did.”
“I didn’t see them in his room. Do you ever wear clogs?”
“Good Lord, no.”
“Did you as a kid?”
“My father would never let me. Remember, he was the estate manager before me. Being the son of a miner, it was a great step up for him, starting as a clerk, rising to assistant manager, then manager. He said, ‘No more bowlegs for this family.’ My grandfather had legs like hoops from hauling coal as a boy when his bones were soft. In one generation the Leverets sprouted up.”
“Like evolution?”
Leveret thought. “Improvement, my father said. My mother’s father was a lockkeeper and I would spend all day at the canal—a canal’s a fascinating place for a boy, between fishing, horses and boats—until my father put an end to the visits. He was a great friend of Chief Constable Moon, and Moon always believed in the improvement of workers in general and miners in particular. Although Moon says improvement starts at the end of a stout club. An intimidating man. A chief constable is an important figure in a town like Wigan.”
“Moon is a goon in a uniform.”
“Rather catchy.” Leveret suppressed a smile.
Blair nodded toward a corner table. “See the man cutting sausage? Face black with coal. Coal in his hair, his nails, every crevice of his skin. Moleskin vest falling off his back. Speaking a language unintelligible to any other Englishman. Wearing clogs. Bring him back an hour from now, washed, shaved, in London clothes, sounding like a London man, in shoes, and you wouldn’t believe he was the same man. He couldn’t convince you. But is that improvement?”
“The clothes make the man?”
“And soap,” said Blair.
“Do you know what people believe here? People believe that English woolens are the best insulation for tropical heat. They do. They think it’s the advantage that English explorers have. You have to be English to understand.”
“No doubt. That’s why I don’t understand why the Bishop is more convinced than ever that I’m the right man for the job. If I’m not finding Maypole, what am I doing right?”
Leveret strained for a positive answer. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “Although I think your approaches are imaginative, I can’t say that I feel we are any closer to finding John or discovering what happened to him. After the argument you had with Charlotte I was certain that the Bishop would let you go. Instead he was quite clear that it was her duty to cooperate. In fact, he wanted me to tell you that while Charlotte might resist at first, you mustn’t be discouraged.”
“Maybe I can catch his daughter where there are no weapons. Or roses.”
“Charlotte can seem difficult because she has so many causes and takes them so seriously.”
“Like Maypole. Tell me, what kind of relationship did she have with him?”
“They shared the same ideals: to better Wigan through education, sobriety, sanitation.”
“If that doesn’t win a girl’s heart, what will? What I meant was, did they ever hold hands, kiss, dance?”
“No, nothing the least coarse or physical.”
Sometimes Blair wondered whether he and Leveret spoke the same language. “Were Maypole and Charlotte happy? I’m not talking about the higher contentment of doing good, I mean the lower contentment of another warm body.”
“They didn’t think that way. They were allies, fellow soldiers fighting for the same social goal.”
Blair tried a different tack. “Tell me, did you ever see any disagreement between them? We’re talking about a woman with a, let’s say, flammable temperament.”
Leveret hesitated. “Charlotte could be impatient with John, but that was because she wanted to help so many people.”
“Maybe also because she’s the daughter of a bishop and he was a lowly curate?”
“No, she has never had anything but contempt for class distinctions. That’s why she doesn’t live in Hannay Hall. She refuses to have a servant.”
“Exactly, she just orders everyone around. How did John Maypole get on with Hannay? What did the Bishop think of his daughter marrying someone who wasn’t an aristocrat?”
“A bishop and a curate don’t ordinarily have much to do with each other. Also, John is a reformer, which the Bishop does not necessarily approve of. The marriage was going to be an enormous step down socially for Charlotte. However, since she couldn’t inherit the title or land, the question of whom she married wasn’t all that important.”
“Tell me, how is it that Hannay is both a bishop and a lord?”
“Well, there were three brothers. Being the second, the Bishop went into the Church, and Rowland’s father, the youngest brother, made a career in the Army. When the older brother died without issue—sons, I mean—the Bishop succeeded to the title.”
“And after the Bishop?”
“Charlotte’s brother would have been next in line, but he died in a riding accident two years ago. Rowland’s father died in India a dozen years ago, so it would appear that Rowland will be the next Lord Hannay.”
“Charlotte’s out of the picture?”
“As a woman, yes. The Bishop never mentioned any of this to you?”
“Why would he?”
“After his son’s death he was distraught. That was when he went off to Africa with you. It might be why he thinks of you so fondly.”
“ ‘Fondly’?” Blair had to laugh at that.
“Charlotte changed too. She was riding with her brother when he fell. It was after the accident that she began to turn into someone more serious—which was what appealed to John, of course, when he came to Wigan.”
“Of course.”
Blair actual
ly felt a twinge of sympathy until Leveret added, “You’re not unlike her brother in a way. I can’t think why she despises you so.”
“Kismet. Did Maypole pick Charlotte or did she pick him? You don’t have to explain mating rituals, just tell me who asked who.”
“Considering their different social stations, it would have been impossible for John to ask her. But he worshiped Charlotte.”
“So you can’t imagine Maypole in love with someone he might have met in a place like this? A flesh-and-blood dirty working girl from Wigan?”
“That’s a peculiar question to ask.”
“What’s the weekly rent for a Hannay company house at, say, Candle Court?”
“Three pounds.”
“The weekly wage for pit girls?”
“Tenpence a day. Before deductions. After, maybe five shillings a week.”
“Who said England was against slavery? Which leaves a couple of pit girls nearly three pounds short of making the rent, let alone paying for food and clothes. You’re sure Maypole never helped a girl in that kind of situation?”
“There was no one but Charlotte. Blair, there must be other lines of inquiry.”
“Other lines? To really question people would take a police campaign, which would be public and which the Hannays refuse to do, so I follow the feeble lines that I have.”
“Which are?”
“Envy. Reverend Chubb dislikes his overly fortunate curate so much that he brains him with a candlestick and hides him in a crypt.”
“No.”
“I don’t think so, either. Money. Mr. Earnshaw, member of Parliament, listens to Maypole’s passionate appeal for pit girls, but what really catches his attention is that his friend is engaged to a wealthy woman. Earnshaw secretly takes the train to Wigan, slits Maypole’s throat, goes back to London and then returns to Wigan as the white knight of Temperance to court the grieving Miss Hannay.”
“No.”
“Probably not. Then there’s you, honest Oliver Leveret, who always loved Charlotte Hannay and must have been shocked when she perversely chose his best friend to share her bed and bank account. You, who are supposed to help me and have done nothing but describe a saint who never existed. That Maypole I never could find. But John Maypole wasn’t a saint. He disobeyed Chubb. He lusted after pit girls. Most likely he considered Charlotte Hannay an expendable witch. You suspected something was happening. One week before he disappeared you asked him about it, and when he said everything was fine, you knew it was a lie. You are my last line, Leveret.”
Leveret reddened as if he’d been slapped. “John did tell me not to be concerned. How did you know I asked?”
“What made you ask?”
“He was so agitated.”
“Exactly what did he say?”
“That he was experiencing a spiritual crisis. That miners were closer than priests to the ideal of Heaven. That minute to minute he swung from ecstasy to despair. But he did assure me that he was fine.”
“That sounds fine to you?”
“I knew John was human. So am I. If I loved Charlotte, I never aspired to her. No one was happier for John when their engagement was announced.”
“Let’s get back to ecstasy and despair. Was the ecstasy a working girl? Was the despair Charlotte Hannay?”
“There was only Charlotte.”
“Both? Quite a woman.”
“Blair, do you actually suspect me?”
“No, but I think it’s time you started helping. Can you do that?”
Leveret’s color rose to the roots of his hair. “How?”
“Get me the inquest for the Hannay explosion.”
“That would be the coroner’s report. We discussed this before. There is a copy at our offices here in town, but to be kept there at all times, as I told you.”
“Bring it to my hotel.”
“Why?”
“It makes me feel I’m doing something. I don’t understand England. I do understand mines.”
“Anything else?”
“I need your carriage.”
“That’s all?”
Blair remembered King Solomon. “You haven’t had any black women passing through Wigan, have you? African women?”
“No.”
“Just a thought.”
As Blair drove toward the Hannay tower, miners and pit girls trudged home in the opposite direction beside the road. Riding in Leveret’s carriage literally put him in a class above. He saw neither Flo nor Bill Jaxon. No one raised their eyes. They might have been sheep or cattle in the gloaming.
He missed an equatorial sun and a sharp division between day and night, but he admitted that English light had eccentric charms. Thunderheads towering so high that a train of coal wagons looked like a fold on the landscape. Sparrows that tumbled from high to low, from light to dark, around hedgerows and chimney towers. There was a stillness that no locomotive could shake, a stirring that no veil of soot could hide.
Everything was contradiction. Bishop Hannay, who didn’t care for Maypole, wanted him found. Charlotte Hannay, Maypole’s fiancée, wouldn’t help. The more Blair infuriated her, the happier the Bishop seemed to be. Leveret was correct when he said that Blair didn’t understand. Day by day he understood less.
Close to the Hannay yard was a rise of leafless, dun-colored willows and oaks swaying in the wind over a lower canopy of brambles and gorse. Blackthorns showed white buds; otherwise this last remnant of Wigan forest was as drab as a feather duster. There was no access by road and no sign of Rose Molyneux. Blair tied the horse and found a footpath that wandered between bushes. As thorns reached out he pushed them away with his leather pack.
The wood was nesting for moles, foxes, stoats; there was little wild woodland left around the mines, and Blair could almost feel the concentrated animal activity around him. Within minutes he reached what he judged to be the center of the little wood, a small clearing around a silver birch, and saw a finch sitting on a branch pour forth a stream of musical notes. He was dumbfounded, as if while touring an urban ruin he had stumbled into an ancient, miniature chapel, and the finch itself was pulling the bell ropes.
“It’s a canary,” Rose said.
She slipped out from the shadow of a willow, though with the fading light, her shawl and so much coal dust on her face she was a shadow of herself. A food tin hung in her hand.
Blair asked, “How is that?”
“They escape from the pit, or sometimes they’re let go and this is the first wood they fly to. They mix with the birds here.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Not for me.”
Her hair hung loose in red-brown coils, her corduroy coat was velvet with coal dust, and she wore a satin ribbon around her neck to balance her ensemble. One hand was bandaged, and he remembered Flo had said she’d had an accident.
“You’re hurt?”
“We weren’t serving tea t’day, we were sorting coal. Sometimes there’s a sharp stone on the belt. What did you have t’tell me?”
The birch lit up. Startled, the bird flew away, followed by a clap of thunder. In that moment of illumination Blair realized that he had never seen Rose Molyneux before in a good light. She was always half covered with dust or weakly lit by a candle or lamp. The lightning showed a forehead as high as Charlotte Hannay’s but over brighter eyes, and as fine a nose but with a more relaxed and fuller mouth, red against her black cheek. She seemed taller than Charlotte, but beyond that she was more physically present, a civet compared with a domestic cat.
“I want you to return something for me,” Blair said. From his pack he took the pair of clogs that had been delivered to his hotel. “These were left for me by Bill Jaxon. I saw him win them off an Irishman he kicked half to death. I know Jaxon is your beau. I think he has the idea that I have designs on you, and these clogs are a warning that if I don’t leave you alone he will kick me half to death. Tell Jaxon that I got the message and that I don’t need any clogs.”
�
��They’re handsome ones. Shamrocks.” She looked at the stitching and the brass-studded toes.
“Well, they didn’t bring the Irishman any luck.” He held out the clogs but Rose still didn’t take them.
“Bill scares you?”
“Bill certainly does scare me. He’s violent and he’s not half as dumb as he looks.”
“Oooh, he’ll like that description.”
“You don’t have to repeat it to him.”
“Maybe it’s clogs that bother you? Are you getting swell now? You’d prefer pistols or swords?”
“I’d prefer having no trouble at all. The only reason I talked to you in the first place was to ask about John Maypole.”
“You came twice,” Rose said.
“The second time was because of the photograph Maypole had of you.”
“And you said you wouldn’t bother me again.”
“I’m trying not to bother you, believe me.”
A few raindrops began to fall through the trees. Rose was oblivious, picking up spirit like an actress on a stage. “If I was Miss Hannay it would be different. If I was a lady, you wouldn’t come throwin’ clogs in my face. You wouldn’t be badgering me with questions like a poorhouse inspector.”
“Rose, your friend Flo arranged for us to meet here. I’m not throwing clogs, I’m trying to give them to you. And as for Miss Hannay, you’re twice the lady she is.”
“Just say you’re a coward. Don’t give me sweet words.”
Blair lost patience. “Will you take the damn clogs?”
“See? Is that how you speak t’a lady?”
Nothing with Rose went as he hoped. As the rain began to beat down, hair stuck to her sooty brow, yet he was the one who felt bedraggled. “Please?” he asked.
She placed her hands behind her back. “I don’t know. A famous explorer like you, you can answer t’Bill yourself. You have all the world to hide in if Wigan isn’t safe enough.”
“What do you want, Rose?”
“Two things. First, a ride t’town. You can set me down when we’re close. Then you must promise never t’come t’my house or bother me at work again. I don’t need another Maypole.”
Rose Page 15
