Rose

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “She has a friend named Flo.”

  “Yes. I even have some of them together. See?”

  He stood and placed four cartes on the counter. Two were with Flo, Flo grasping a heavy shovel and Rose holding a coal sieve like a tambourine. Two were of Rose alone, one with the shawl pinned coquettishly at her chin, the other with the shawl open and her head tilted in coarse suggestiveness toward the camera.

  Except that it wasn’t Rose. Not Blair’s Rose. It was the girl hiding in Charlotte Hannay’s cottage.

  Blair produced from his jacket the photograph he had brought. The Rose he knew with a scarf turned into a mantilla that hid half her face. “Then who is this?”

  “Unfortunately I don’t know.”

  “You took it.” Blair turned to the studio’s name in elaborate scrollwork on the reverse of the card. He didn’t mean it as an accusation, though the photographer took a cautionary step back.

  “In December, yes. I remember her, but I never got her name. She was remarkable. I think she came in on a dare. The girls do, sometimes. I asked for her name because I did want her back.” Hotham cocked his head at the picture. “What a tease. She had a flash, you know, a pride. She didn’t even tell me what pit she worked at. I showed people the photograph and asked, but with the Christmas trade coming on and all, and then the explosion in January, I forgot about her. Sorry.”

  “Did you ever ask Reverend Maypole?”

  “Now that you mention it, I showed him a picture because he did know so many of the girls. He said he didn’t know her.”

  “That was all he said?”

  “Yes, but you know, he was so taken with the likeness that I gave it to him.”

  At the office of The Wigan Observer Blair searched through the book Lancashire Catholics: Obstinate Souls until he found the reference he was looking for.

  During Elizabeth’s reign, Wigan was the heart of Catholic resistance, and when the Hannay family was sympathetic to their cause, a veritable rabbit warren of priests not only hid in the “priest holes” of the Hannay estate but were so bold as to travel through Hannay mines and hold services in the town itself. The tunnels were an underground highway, with the grandeur of Hannay Hall at one end and the most modest of working-class residences at the other. A burning candle placed in the window summoned faithful communicants to the house where the priest was expected, a beacon of religious courage that comes down to us now only in the names of Roman Alley (since demolished) and Candle Court.

  The newspaper editor had been watching Blair from under his visor since he had entered. “It’s Mr. Blair, isn’t it? You were here two weeks ago?”

  “How many Candle Courts are there?”

  “Only one.”

  “Built by the Hannays?”

  “For miners. Some of the oldest houses in Wigan.”

  “Still owned by the Hannays?”

  “Yes. Remember, you were here with Mr. Leveret reading newspapers about the explosion? I want to apologize because I didn’t recognize you then. With your own book on the counter? I must have been blind.”

  You’re speaking to the blind, Blair thought.

  From the distance of the alley, Blair kept pace with the miners’ march home through the street. It was a Saturday, fun in the offing and a day’s rest ahead. Between corners, he followed them by the sound of their clogs, a tide of rocks. The calls of street musicians and candy vendors joined in. Overhead, doves took flight against the evening.

  Mill girls were going home, too, but they made way for the pit girls. He saw Rose and Flo pass under a streetlamp. Flo pinned a paper flower to her shawl and danced a jig around the smaller woman.

  When Blair lost sight of them he was afraid that they would turn off to a beerhouse or pub. In back of Candle Court, he loitered in the alley until a lamp was lit in Rose’s kitchen. Flo looked out the window—no, admired herself in the glass as she replaced her shawl with a plush hat with velvet flowers. She turned to talk, vanished from sight and returned a minute later to the window, pensively at first, then with increasing interest in her reflection, finally with impatience. She added the paper flower to the garden in her hat and was gone. Blair was at the back door in time to hear the front door open and shut. No one answered his rap, and the back door was locked.

  The neighboring houses sounded like carousels of clog stomping and shouts. He waited for a peak to drive in a windowpane with his elbow. When no one appeared in alarm waving a poker, he unlatched the window and climbed in.

  No one had started tea. The parlor was dark, with no candle in the front window to let the faithful know that a priest had come to serve the Eucharist, so he lit his own bull’s-eye lamp. He opened the closet and kicked the floor for hollow boards. He hadn’t actually seen Rose either enter or leave the house, but he was expanding the parameters of the possible, he thought. Most people, for example, would think it impossible to live in the dark or underground, yet in Wigan half the people did.

  There were no false boards in the kitchen, either, but the pantry floor sounded like a drum, and under a hooked rug Blair found a trapdoor that opened up to a ladder and released an upwelling of black, brackish air. He quickly went down the rungs and shut the door before anyone in the tunnel would feel a draft, and he aimed his lamp low so that the beam wouldn’t carry far.

  Laid long before the use of rails and tubs, the tunnel floor was polished from the ancient dragging of sledges weighted with coal. The walls, rock streaked by tracer seams of coal, transmitted distant reports of the life just overhead: the muffled slam of a door, the trotting of a cab against a sibilant background of subterranean water. Timbers propping the ceiling moaned with ancient fatigue. By the time he had paced off a quarter of a mile his compass said that the tunnel ran northeast, toward Hannay Hall. He knew that fresh air must enter along the tunnel or it would have been permeated with gas, and fifty yards on he heard street sounds filtering down from an overhead grate almost overgrown by bushes. After another fifty yards the tunnel widened into confession stalls and benches carved out of the living rock. A remnant seam of coal was cut into a series of black chapels with crude altars, shadowy crucifixes and the perpetual attendance of black Madonnas carved in bas-relief. Ahead, where the tunnel narrowed again, he saw a lamp. He shielded his own light until the other lamp disappeared at a curve in the tunnel, which allowed him to move faster and chance more noise. He was aware that the person ahead was traveling silently and quickly, familiar with the way. He started running, dodging water that had collected in the middle of the floor. The tunnel dipped and bent to the side as he expected, but when he came around the curve he was confronted by two lamps aimed at him.

  Blair’s own lamp lit two women very much alike. One was the girl he had seen dressed in silk at Charlotte’s house, though now she wore the drab clothes and pants of a pit girl. The other was Charlotte in her usual ebony silk dress and gloves, but her hair was loose and red and her chin was smudged with coal.

  The two were almost identical in features, height and color, but totally different in expression: the girl from the house regarded Blair with the blank eyes of a rabbit caught in the light of a train, and Charlotte glared at him with pinpoint fury. Otherwise they were images in a distorting mirror that made each woman half of the other.

  “It’s him. What do we do now?” the girl asked.

  Charlotte said, “If I had a gun I’d shoot him, but I don’t.”

  Blair said, “You probably would.”

  The girl said, “He knows.”

  Charlotte said, “Better go home, Rose. Now.”

  “This is t’last day, then?” the girl asked.

  “Yes.”

  Blair made room for the girl to pass in the direction he had come from. As she edged by he saw the subtle difference of less forehead and more cheek, and watched her fear melt to a pouty anger. “Bill’ll have yer skin,” she said.

  “Third time’s the charm,” Blair said.

  She left him with the ghost of a spiteful glance. �
��He’ll bury you, too, where t’worms can’t reach.”

  Rose Molyneux slipped around the curve, and he heard her clogs hurry into the dark. His eyes stayed on Charlotte, waiting for an explanation. She twisted from the beam of his light.

  “If that’s Rose, who are you? Did I catch you in transition? Were you changing yourself from a flame back into a lump of coal?”

  Charlotte said, “It was all coming to an end anyway. The days were getting lighter.”

  The tunnel was cool as a crypt. The steam of her breath was no more ephemeral than she was, Blair thought. “That’s true. I never saw the Rose I knew in the light. Except for the first time, when I was blind drunk.”

  She started to go and he grabbed her wrist. It was disorienting for him to talk to a Charlotte with wild red hair and the strength of a pit girl, as if he had hold of two women at the same time.

  “You’re put out because I fooled you.”

  “You did. I preferred your Rose Molyneux to the one I just met. More than Charlotte Hannay. How did you do it?”

  “It wasn’t hard.”

  “Tell me. People have been trying to kill me, thanks to your game. I’d like to know.”

  “Attitude. I covered my hair, dropped my shoulders, wore gloves so no one would see calluses from working at the pit. And I’m taller in clogs.”

  “More than that. Your face.”

  “Pinched for Charlotte Hannay, that was all.”

  “And the language?”

  Charlotte put her hand on her hip and said, “As if tha knew owt aboot t’way we speighk in Wigan or at t’Home fer Wimmen. Ah’ve oonly heard it aw me life.” She added in her normal voice, “I acted.”

  “You acted?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Flo acted?”

  “Flo is a pit girl. She was my wet nurse’s daughter. We used to come into town together and play Wigan lasses.”

  “It was fun?”

  “Yes. In masquerades that’s what I always was. Not Bo Peep or Marie Antoinette: a pit girl.”

  “And the family always had the tunnel from the cottage?”

  “My father used it for his visits to Wigan, for his girls and fights when he was young.”

  “Does your father know about this charade?”

  “No.”

  She tried to wrench loose and he pinned her to the wall. In the light, between her flaming hair and mourning dress she was one woman, then the other.

  “How did you find Rose?”

  “She came to the Home for Women last year. She was from Manchester and she was pregnant. She’d just started working at the pit. She wasn’t on the register at the Home. I couldn’t persuade her to stay.”

  “You noticed that you looked alike?”

  “I was amused by our physical similarities, and I began to think how odd it was we could look so much alike and yet lead such different lives. Then she lost the baby and had a fever and would have lost her place at the pit, so I went in for her. She had no old friends here; the other girls hardly knew her. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. It was just for a day, and then for a week, and after that we took turns.”

  “Rose liked the idea of trading?”

  “I put her in my house. She much preferred wearing nice dresses and eating sweets to sorting through coal.”

  “What a social revelation. Bill Jaxon’s sweet on her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which was an arrangement I was upsetting, coming to the house in Wigan, but you didn’t want to warn me. Why did you want to trade and play the pit girl?”

  “Aren’t you the one who said I was a princess, that I had no idea of real life? Admit it, you were wrong.”

  “And that’s where Maypole comes in. The poor bastard. That’s why he had to be a miner, once he knew about you. I wondered where he got the idea.”

  She sank against the wall. “He came by the pit and saw me.”

  “No one else ever recognized you?”

  “No one else there knew Charlotte Hannay.”

  “Then he had to match you. ‘My Rose,’ he wrote. That was you.”

  “I’m sorry about John. I tried to talk him out of it. It was only going to be for a day, he said.”

  “He went to Bill Jaxon to change places. Bill must have been upset to learn that Maypole had found out, but he was willing to help for love, for his Rose, the real Rose Molyneux, so she could go on eating chocolates while you went slumming.”

  “It wasn’t slumming. It was freedom to have a voice that asked for more than a cup of tea. To have a body that had desires and could satisfy them. Who wore her arms bare and cursed out loud when she felt like it.” She met his eyes. “Who had a lover.”

  “Some fool who knew no one.”

  “Better than that.”

  “How big a fool was I?” Blair asked. “How many people knew? Flo, Maypole, Smallbone, Bill?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Does Rowland know he’s marrying a pit girl? That will please the new lord of the manor.”

  “No.”

  “Why are you marrying him? Why did you give in?”

  “I changed my mind. What do you care? All you want to do is go back to Africa.”

  “Not to leave you to him. You think Rowland’s only an unpleasant cousin who will make an unpleasant husband. He’s not. He’s a murderer. I’ve seen him kill Africans who walked to the right instead of the left. And he’s an arsenic addict. I’m half one myself, so I know. He’s worse. He’s insane. If he gets one glimpse of Rose in you, you’re dead.”

  “That was acting.”

  “Not all of it. I liked the Rose in you. He’ll hate it. A shrewish, prunish Charlotte might survive a year or two with him, but you won’t.”

  “I was pretending with you.”

  “It was real. Enough was.”

  “What does it matter? I don’t have a choice. I’m not really Rose, I’m Charlotte Hannay, who is marrying in two weeks.”

  “When you were Rose, you asked me to take you with me to Africa.”

  “I remember.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  Someone else seemed to be speaking for him, some other half of himself, because he was as astonished as Charlotte, who caught a hint of his self-surprise.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t want to think about it; the subject defied rational thought.

  “You liked Rose that much?”

  “I was getting to.”

  “You liked the girl who drinks gin and pulls you into bed. What about Charlotte, someone who keeps her clothes on and has a functioning brain?”

  “She can come, too. I’m offering you an escape.”

  “It’s the strangest proposition I’ve ever heard. I’m flattered, Blair. I am.”

  “As soon as I collect from your father we can go.”

  She scooped hair from her eyes. “What a pair we’d make.”

  “We’d be deadly.”

  She looked down the tunnel as if she could glimpse a picture of the future forming in the dark. Blair could almost see it himself, some vision looming closer, dissolving as it came into view.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? When you were Rose, you wanted to.”

  “That was Rose. I’m a Hannay.”

  “Oh, that is different.”

  “I mean I have responsibilities. The Home.”

  “No, you mean the class difference, education, you having a real name, Rose being a footloose girl from Manchester, and God knows what my real name is. How could you entertain a trip with me when you can lock yourself up in a grand hall with a killer? I must have been joking. Perhaps I was, but I did like your imitation of a woman. It was the best one I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “I think we both are.”

  “Well, we didn’t get very far, did we?”

  “No.” Blair agreed. He ignored the sadness in her laugh. As far as he was concerned, they were bac
k at that point where every word between them was a stab.

  She looked away, this time at nothing. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Disappear?”

  “Your men seem to do that. I’ll miss the wedding, but I’ll leave you a wedding present.”

  “What is that?”

  “Maypole.”

  “Do you know where John is?”

  “Let’s say I know where to find him.”

  Night seemed to have welled from the shaft of the Hannay pit and flooded yard, sheds and tower, as if everything up to cloud level was silent and underwater. There was no clamor of railway wagons, no coal tubs ticking to the top of the sorting shed or rush of coals down sorting screens, no bantering of women, no line of miners murmuring toward the cage. The contrast was a blackness where locomotives sat dead on their rails and the winding tower was an unlit beacon amid a ring of shadows.

  A secondary light escaped from the small upper door of the winding house where cables ran to the top of the tower. The cables were still; the cage was below and probably hadn’t moved for hours. Inside the winding house, the winder would be staring at the dial of the indicator, or puttering around the great, immobile engine, keeping himself awake by oiling pistons and rods.

  Air escaped from the up shaft, the draft driven by the pit furnace a mile below. Whether miners worked or not, the fires of the furnace stayed fed or the draft would die and the ventilation of the mine would fail.

  There were two furnacemen below, Blair remembered Battie saying, the winder and perhaps a stoker above.

  The lamp shed was locked. He returned from the blacksmith’s forge with a bar and jimmied the shed door open. He set his knapsack and bull’s-eye lamp unlit on the counter and opened the grate of a potbellied stove to a bed of half-dead coals whose glow lit the shelves. In their cages, canaries shifted and fluttered anxiously as he took a can of caulking and a safety lamp.

  He walked to the tower platform, pulled the signal rope twice and heard the bell ring inside the winding house for “Up.” A winder was supposed to stay at his post, not even leaving for a call of nature. At most, the man might glance out the door at the platform rather than assume the signal was coming from below; Blair doubted it, but he kept his lamp dark and stood behind a leg of the tower as the great wheel overhead began to turn and the cable stirred from the ground.