“How long has Silcock been in?”
“Since six this morning. I told you we’d warned him off twice before and he wouldn’t admit to the men who he was until just before the ceremonies.”
“You could have told me as soon as you got there.”
“And miss Lord Rowland? I only trust you’ll remember to tell his Lordship and the Bishop how helpful Chief Constable Moon was to you and brought you personally to carry out your private investigation. Mr. Leveret, will you make sure of that?”
“Of course.”
“How did it happen?” Blair asked.
“You’ll notice there’s no bridge here. We tell them not to, but some fools will cross by walking on the gates, usually when they’re staggering out of a beerhouse. Silcock must have fallen in. He makes an example, doesn’t he?”
“The Chief Constable likes examples,” Leveret said.
“It’s what people remember,” Moon said.
Across the top of Silcock’s skull wet hair splayed from a gash that was open to the bone.
“How’d he manage that?” Blair asked.
“The boat was tied up in the lock for the night. He must have hit it on the way down.”
“Didn’t the boatman see him?”
“No.”
“You’re telling me that the boatman cranked the paddle onto a man’s leg and didn’t notice?”
“I’m telling you that the boatman was so drunk he wouldn’t have noticed the parting of the Red Sea. He was drunk, his wife was drunk, their children were drunk. Probably the dog and cats were drunk too. Right, Mr. Leveret?”
Leveret, however, had vanished. As the boat wallowed a jet of water arced from the “up” gate the length of the basin. Blair realized that if Silcock’s leg wasn’t jammed in the paddle and draining the lock to some extent he would have drowned already. Of course if he wasn’t trapped he wouldn’t drown at all. One of those ancient conundrums. And Wigan did seem to be the sort of place where people slept on the tracks and slipped down old shafts, so why not swim in a canal lock?
Moon shouted down until he got Silcock’s attention. “Silcock, there’s a man here with questions for you.”
Fish-eyed, Silcock gasped up from the water.
Blair tried to imagine him dry, with a bowler and a deck of cards. “Can you move the people away?” he asked Moon.
“These people get little enough entertainment. No pageants, no lords or bishops, no great apes.”
True enough, this was the sort of audience that appreciated public dramas, be it a train wreck or a hanging. This was a tribe the Bible did not mention. Men in plug hats, the descendants of Gypsies and Irish navvies, the dark captains of the waterways, and women in blowsy skirts white with ground bone or orange from iron ore. They had assembled before Blair’s arrival and were intent on staying for the duration of the performance. Which wouldn’t take much longer.
Blair told Moon, “While I talk to him, you can send for a fire pump or a pump from a mine.”
“And try to lower the Leeds–Liverpool Canal? I think not.”
“Back up the boats and open the gate.”
“Re-hitch twenty horses and twenty boats? Not at this point.”
“Amputate,” shouted a man in the crowd.
“Underwater?” another voice asked reasonably.
“Help me.” Silcock grabbed for a diver and almost pulled him under.
Moon said, “Mr. Blair, I’d say you have the stage. If you have any questions, there’s no time like the present.”
Blair asked, “Can you at least get me a rope?”
A boy on the deck eagerly volunteered a mooring line. Blair made a noose and lowered it to Silcock, who slipped his head and arms through, gaining a quarter inch above the water, and fought off the tiller as it swung his way.
“Let the tiller be,” Blair called down. “Don’t think about it.”
Silcock focused on Blair. “What should I be finking about?”
“Who did this to you?”
“I don’t know. I only come back to Wigan last night and I fell in, I suppose, and split my head. I don’t remember.”
“Were you drunk?”
“I hope so.”
“What pubs did you go to?”
“I don’t know. I was drunk after the first one.”
This drew a laugh from the men on the far side of the lock, which lifted his spirits.
“After the last?”
“I slept for a while, I fink. Then I got up and fell in.”
“Can you think of any enemies?”
“I can fink of a lot,” Silcock claimed, playing to the crowd.
The boat wallowed sideways and chased him under. Being the objects of public attention, the family on board gathered close and watched with acute interest, father and mother both soberly sucking pipes now, the girls lined up with bows in their hair, the boys preening for friends on the bank.
“It’s a wonderful example,” Moon said. “A felon brought down by the hazards of trespass on private property.”
When Silcock came up on the rope, he had lost the little ground he had gained. Blair gave up on subtlety. “What about Maypole?”
Even in extremis, Silcock was baffled. “What?”
“You saw a Reverend Maypole here in December. You approached him after a rugby match and caught the attention of Chief Constable Moon, who ran you out of town.”
Silcock squinted at the Chief Constable. “I might’ve made conversation wiff the man, that’s not a crime.”
Blair said, “You offered to introduce him to a variety of vices. Which vices in particular?”
Silcock took cognizance again of his greater audience; it was an age, after all, of gallows orators.
“Entertainments, maybe. One man’s meat, anover man’s fish.”
“Girls or boys?”
“Buggery’s a bit upper-class for me. Anyway, cards was what I had in mind.”
“Why would you approach a clergyman at all?”
“He played rugby. That’s a queer taste for a churchman. If he liked that, maybe he’d like somefing else.”
“You threatened him if he told the police.”
“Never. I fink I said, ‘No harm done.’ Those were the words. But not a minute went by before the Chief Constable here had me by the neck. For doing nofing but passing the time wiff a priest. Is that fair?”
He went under. Blair dug in his heels and hauled. When Silcock came up, the rope screwed his head into his shoulders and he had to twist his head to talk. “This is a difficult fing, being saved.”
The diver outside the lock surfaced and rolled, exhausted, onto his back.
“Are you still game?” Blair asked.
“I’m drowning,” Silcock said.
“Are you game?”
“Yes. I’m game.” His eyes clung to Blair’s as if they were hands.
“Did anyone in Wigan point out Maypole to you?”
“The people I associate wiff do not attend church. Not in my circles.”
“Your circles?”
“Travelers, sportsmen, men who like the fancy.”
“The ‘fancy.’ You mean fighting circles?”
“Pugilistic circles.”
“With gloves?”
“Bare-knuckle. Gloves take away the featrical aspect.”
“The blood?”
“Where there’s blood there’s silver. When you stop a fight for cuts, you bet again. Makes for more action all around.”
“Rugby?”
“Not a real bettor’s sport. More for miners. I like dogs, cocks, dogs an’ rats, ferrets an’ rats.”
“Purring? You know, the way miners fight with clogs?”
“S’good.”
A diver hauled himself out, walked to Moon and shook his head. Silcock watched as water lapped his nose, the shelves of his eyes.
“Get some other men in,” Blair told Moon.
Moon said, “There’s no point warning a man off if I treat him like a bab when he
does come back.”
“Ask me somefing else,” Silcock said.
“Who’s the best at purring you ever saw?”
“A poser. Overall, McCarfy in Wigan.”
“You never saw Jaxon?”
“Not in action. I’ve heard of Jaxon.”
“What did you hear?”
“He’s best, according to some. At purring.”
“Who said so?”
“A man named Harvey said he worked wiff Jaxon.”
“Was Harvey his first name or last?”
“I don’t know.”
“A miner you played with?”
Silcock went under and his hair lifted like underwater grass. Blair pulled him up, though he felt Silcock’s arms almost wrench from their sockets.
Silcock said, “I wouldn’t play wiff a miner. Get me cards all black and bent?”
“Harvey was too clean to be a miner?” To Moon he added, “Get some divers in the water.”
Moon did nothing but magisterially motion for no one else along the lock to move.
“Clean and unlucky.” Silcock lifted a smile. “Never knew a man wiff a worse run of luck. I stuck to him like his best friend.”
“He was clean but he worked at the mine with Jaxon? How did you meet Harvey?”
“Cards. If I could do nofing but play cards with Harvey, I wouldn’t be here.”
He went under again. Silvery bubbles erupted from his mouth. Blair wrapped the rope around his back and heaved, to no effect. The drowning man’s eyes were wide above ballooning cheeks, purple from Blair’s pulling.
Blair didn’t see Leveret return, didn’t notice the Hannay estate manager at all until he fitted a foundry wrench the size of a man’s leg onto the shaft of broken nut and hauled on the handle as if he were pulling an oar. He adjusted the wrench jaws and hauled again. A deep sound issued from the bottom of the lock and the boats lined up outside the gate shifted from side to side. Moon looked at him and colored while Leveret turned the wrench more furiously.
Other hands helped Blair pull Silcock out and pump the water from his lungs. Out of the lock, Silcock was a small, sopping figure, a rag still wrapped around the rope. Water had magnified him.
Leveret walked across the lock with the wrench. “That’s what my grandfather, the lockkeeper, would have done.”
When Blair got back to his hotel room, he went to the brandy on the stand by the bedroom window. Because the room was lit, he was faced with a reflection that looked like a man underwater.
In his almost last moments, when Silcock had claimed whatever dignity he could, bantering from his end of the rope like a sailor on a yardarm of a sinking ship, until only his nose was above water and then only his hands trying to climb the rope, he had telegraphed his fear to Blair. Blair’s hands trembled as if he were still getting the message.
The sluice gate had been so tight it had broken Silcock’s anklebone. He was no innocent victim, God knew; by Silcock’s own account, he was a thief, a cheat and a drunk when he hit the water. Though Blair had talked to the family on board, all of them had been inside the cabin because the lock always filled so slow, it was dark, and no one had heard a sound like a head bouncing off a gunwale.
Someone had laid open Silcock’s head, dragged him down into the water of the lock, cranked the gate paddle onto his ankle like the bar of a rat trap and removed the crank. Or, as Moon maintained, Silcock fell headfirst from the gate, hit the gunwale on the way into the water and was swept into the draining paddle before it could close. As Silcock boasted even after his rescue, he couldn’t start to list his enemies. He had never seen Bill Jaxon, and Blair knew from his own experience that Bill couldn’t swim. Nothing had been gained by saving Silcock except that the wretch was alive, and that Blair’s palms burned from the rope.
First the horse at the pit, now Blair. Nothing was safe. One moment they were prancing along the green grass, and the next they were sucked under, as if water and mines were alive. He had a comic image of himself roped to everything in sight: Saint Blair, patron of the disappeared.
He carried his glass to the parlor and to the coroner’s report. There was no Harvey, first name or last, among victims of the Hannay explosion listed, though he was sure he had seen the name before. He went through the list of survivors. No Harvey. Through the witness list. No Harvey. Which pointed out how peculiar it was for Silcock to say that anyone who worked with Bill Jaxon was clean enough to play cards. Men in a coal mine weren’t clean. Even brakemen and wagon men who worked on the surface were dusted black.
Did it matter? Silcock had nothing to do with Maypole aside from a single conversation after a rugby match and some suggestions that the curate had turned down.
He laid the coroner’s report aside to study Leveret’s list from the Home for Girls Who Have Fallen for the First Time. Rose Molyneux’s skill at surgical stitching was not something picked up by the annual lacing of a Christmas goose; someone had trained her. Not at the Home, though; no Molyneux had ever registered there.
He was at a dead end. A day with nothing to show but a new enemy in Chief Constable Moon. That was his talent, as Earnshaw had said: making enemies. A bizarre day illuminated by the deliverance of Silcock and the even more miraculous emergence of Rowland. Who had been in the wilderness. Before whom all bowed. Who by now would be in London.
Gorillas had been discovered only thirty years earlier. The first gorilla hide had been shipped ten years ago. Now there were gorilla hands in Wigan. And the wreck of Nigger Blair. Not washed up on the sands of Zanzibar, but on a bishop’s leash.
Why should he care? No one else cared about Maypole. He wasn’t a detective or a patron saint. It wasn’t like him at all.
He returned to the bedroom for the brandy. Rather than face his reflection again, he turned the light down and saw a wall of wrecked, soiled, ruined clouds falling on the town. On the street, specimen bottles shone in the chemist’s shop, stacks of tinware towered inside a dry-goods store, blank faces loomed in the milliner’s window. In the alley by the milliner’s, a piece of metal caught the streetlamp. He thought it might be a coin on the ground until it shifted and he recognized the brass toe of a miner’s clog.
Blair stepped back and watched for ten minutes, long enough for his eyes to see legs in the shadow of the alley. It didn’t take a man that long to answer a call of nature. He wasn’t smoking, so he didn’t want to be seen. He could be anyone, but if it was Bill Jaxon that was fine, because now Blair knew where Bill was. Jaxon wasn’t about to batter down the doors of Wigan’s most respectable hotel; as long as Blair stayed in the Minorca, a ship in port, he was safe.
He filled a glass of brandy and tried to concentrate on Maypole’s journal. The sight of densely interwoven lines made him think of the priest bent over the page, like a giant doing needlepoint. He still hadn’t uncoded the ink-spotted entries for January 13 and 14, and the only reason to think they might be worth the effort was that they were such knots. Untangled, they were still nonsense, but he reminded himself that Maypole was only a curate, not a devious miner. The lines looked like a Caesar code of transposed letters in blocks of four, which should have been no more than middling difficult, starting with the most frequent letters, doubled letters, common combinations. The problem was that some combinations seemed so different as to be in another language. Ignoring the blocks and reading the lines again and again for the rhythm, he felt a familiar voice in his inner ear, and then the first small words provided the vowel that evoked a name that turned a key that unlocked the rest.
But King Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of the Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites.
So a childhood listening to religious fanatics hadn’t been wasted. Brandy didn’t hurt, either.
His wives turned away his heart after other gods, for Solomon went after Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.
The abomination of the Ammoni
tes? There was a title for a lawyer’s card, Blair thought. Maybe Milcom could join Nuttal, Liptrot, Hopton and Meek.
Love undid Solomon, the wisest of men. But is it love or clear vision? Solomon saw these women for how beautiful they were. As I feel my own eyes open I sense how dangerous clarity can be. If I have been blind, so has everyone else in Wigan. Perhaps blindness is safety, but now my eyes are unsealed, what can I do?
Blair wished his eyes were opened. At what point had Hannay switched from a quiet inquiry into Maypole’s whereabouts to public humiliation of his daughter? Charlotte Hannay might be a nasty bundle, but the process made Blair feel small.
If, instead, it is my imagination and not my eyes, is that wrong? Was it a sin for Solomon to see the beauty in another skin, darker eyes, a fuller mouth? Someday, perhaps, C. and I will see the Holy Land. Every night, though, I am visited by the dreams of Solomon. It is not the Holy Land of Our Lord’s blessed agony, which I have imagined like a series of lantern slides, each scene motionless and serene, an awesome progression from Gethsemane to Golgotha, which is a contemplation, in fact, on death. Instead, every sense of mine is alive, and each dream has the color and tactile vibrancy of revelation.
To Blair, English middle-class character was a coin. Heads: cool, asexual persona. Tails: the visions of the sexually deprived. If Rose Molyneux batted her eyes at Maypole, as a flirt casually bats her eyes at any male, who knew what romance a curate could create in his mind? Unless, of course, they read his journal.
In my dreams I am as dark, sweat as hard and laugh as freely. And escape with her, slipping all the weight of class and learning. If I had the courage to follow her.
A curate refusing a bishop’s daughter for a coal-yard belle? Not likely, and yet.…
Each morning, before light, I hear them pass. Her and a thousand others, with the sound of their clogs like a river of stones. As the psalm says, they seem “made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.” It is a psalm written for Wigan. I found the sound of their passing so odd when I first arrived, and now it seems as natural as the dawn that follows. Later, as I prepare for Low Mass, a counter-tide of sheep floods the streets before carriage traffic starts. Christ was a carpenter. He knew the labor and sweat of the men to whom He preached. All morning I attend my rounds with half the heart I should, ashamed that I have never shared the work of Wigan miners. I have the man and only lack the place in which to gain sufficient skill to pass as one of them. Just for a day.
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