Rose Page 5

  Leveret stood, grabbing his bowler to keep it from being snatched by the wind. “I’ve never been up here before,” he said. “Look at the clouds, like ships from the sea.”

  “Poetic. Look down, Leveret. Ask yourself why this seems to be an especially senseless jumble of streets. Look at the map and you see the old village of Wigan that was the church, marketplace and medieval alleys, even if the green is overlaid now by cobblestones and the alleys are turned into foundry yards. The oldest shops have the narrowest fronts because everyone wanted to be on the only road.”

  Leveret compared eyesight and map, as Blair knew he would. People could no more resist maps of where they lived than they could portraits of themselves.

  “But you’re looking at other places,” Leveret noticed.

  “Triangulation is the mapmaker’s method. If you know the position and height of any two places and you see a third, you can work out its position and height. That’s what maps are, invisible triangles.”

  Blair located Scholes Bridge, which he had crossed the night before. In the dark and with his fever, he hadn’t appreciated how completely the bridge divided the town. West of the bridge was prosperous, substantial Wigan, an orbit of business offices, hotels and stores topped by the terra-cotta coronets of chimney pots. East of the bridge was a newer, densely packed community of miners’ row houses with brick walls and blue slate tiles. North from the church, avoiding the bridge completely, a boulevard of well-to-do town houses with a blaze of gardens ran to a thickly wooded area. A note on the map read, “To Hannay Hall.” South lay the battlefield smoke of coalpits.

  What was obscured to the eye but apparent on the map was that Wigan was vivisected and stitched back together by railways: the Wigan and Southport, Liverpool and Bury, London and Northwest, and Lancashire Union lines extended with sweeping geometric curves in every direction, connecting to the private tracks that ran to the mines. Haze veiled the southern horizon, but on the map Blair counted a full fifty active coalpits, incredible for any town.

  He turned his telescope to the miner’s row houses across the bridge. Perhaps they had been erected on straight lines, but since they were built over older, worked-out mines where underground props rotted and tunnels gave way, the walls and roofs above had shifted in turn until the houses presented a rolling, sagging, slowly collapsing landscape that was as much a product of nature as man-made.

  Leveret said, “I heard the story about the Bible Fund. And the, the …”

  “Debauchery?”

  “Fast living. However, it seems to me from a careful reading of the facts that you’ve been a champion of the African.”

  “Don’t believe what you read. People have many reasons for what they do.”

  “But it’s important to let people know, otherwise you’ll be misjudged. It sets an example.”

  “Like Hannay? Now there is one hell of a bishop.”

  “Bishop Hannay is … different. Not every bishop will support costly expeditions to the far corners of the world.”

  “It’s a luxury he can afford.”

  “It’s a luxury you need,” Leveret pointed out gently. “Anyway, no matter how private your reasons for doing good in Africa, don’t let people paint you quite so black.”

  “Leveret, let me worry about my reputation. Why didn’t you mention the explosion at the Hannay pit in the information about John Maypole?”

  Leveret took a moment to adjust to the change in subject.

  “Bishop Hannay felt that information didn’t apply. Except that everyone was so occupied with the explosion that we didn’t take proper notice at first that John was gone.”

  “You read Dickens?” Blair asked.

  “I love Dickens.”

  “Miraculous coincidence doesn’t bother you?”

  “You don’t like Dickens?”

  “I don’t like coincidence. I don’t like it that Maypole disappeared on the same day as a mine explosion. Particularly when the Bishop chose me, a mining engineer, to find him.”

  “It’s simply that we didn’t pay sufficient attention to John’s disappearance because of the explosion. The Bishop selected you, I believe, because he wanted someone from the outside whom he could trust. Your mining background is appropriate for Wigan, after all.”

  Blair was still unconvinced. “Was Maypole ever down in the mine?”

  “It’s not allowed.”

  “He could only preach to the miners when they were up?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But he did preach to them?”

  “Yes, as soon as they came to the surface. And to pit girls. John was a true evangelist. He was of selfless, absolutely stainless character.”

  “He sounds like someone I would cross streets of deep mud to avoid.”

  With red ink Blair initialed the addresses of John Maypole, the widow Mary Jaxon and Rose Molyneux.

  His mind stayed on Rose. Why hadn’t she called for help? Why hadn’t she even dressed? Her clothes were on the chair. Instead she had stayed in her damp chemise. When she had looked toward the door, was she as afraid of being discovered as he was?

  John Maypole’s room was near Scholes Bridge in an alley of brick walls leaning together so acutely that their rooflines almost touched. Between them a slice of gray air dropped onto Leveret and Blair. Maypole was obviously the sort of evangelist who chose to mingle with his congregation day and night, a man who was willing not only to descend to the depths but to sleep there.

  Leveret opened a room furnished with bed, table and chairs, cast-iron range, chest of drawers, washbasin, chamber pot set on linoleum of a dark, indecipherable pattern. Blair lit an oil lamp hanging on the wall. Its wan illumination reached to the glory of the room, an oil painting of Christ in a carpenter’s shop. Jesus appeared delicate and unaccustomed to hard work, and in Blair’s opinion His expression was overly abstracted for a man handling a saw. Shavings curled around His feet. Through His window was a glimpse of olive trees, thorn-bushes and the blue Sea of Galilee.

  Leveret said, “We left the room as it was, in case he returned.”

  A pewter crucifix hung in the center of another wall. On a shelf leaned a Bible, well-thumbed theological books and a single slim volume of Wordsworth. Blair opened the chest drawers and felt through the black woolen cassocks and suits of a poor curate.

  “John wasn’t interested in material goods,” Leveret said. “He owned only two suits.”

  “And they’re both here.” Blair returned to the shelf, flipped through the Bible and books and stood them upright. They stayed. They hadn’t leaned long enough for the bindings to warp. “Is anything missing?”

  With a deep breath, Leveret said, “A journal. John recorded his thoughts. It’s the one item that’s gone. It was the first thing I looked for.”

  “Why?”

  “In case it might tell where he was going or what he was thinking.”

  “Have you ever read it?”

  “No, it was private.”

  Blair walked around the room and to the window, which was dirty enough to serve as a shade. “Did he ever have visitors?”

  “John chaired meetings here for the Explosion Fund and the Society for the Improvement of the Working Classes, not to mention the Home for Women.”

  “Practically a radical.” Blair sniffed. “He didn’t smoke?”

  “No, and he didn’t allow smoking here.”

  “Leveret, you described yourself in your letter as not only Maypole’s friend but his confidant. Which suggests that he confided in you. What?”

  “Personal matters.”

  “Do you think this is a good time to hold out, after he’s been gone for two months?”

  “If I thought that the sentiments John shared with me in the intimacy of friendship had anything to do with his disappearance, naturally I would divulge them to you.”

  “How intimate were you? Damon and Pythias, Jesus and John, Punch and Judy?”

  “You’re trying to provoke me.”
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br />   “I’m trying to provoke the truth. The sort of saint you describe doesn’t exist. I’m not writing his tombstone, I’m trying to find the son of a bitch.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use that language.”

  “Leveret, you’re a specimen, you really are.”

  Even in the dusk of the room, Blair saw the estate manager’s face heat to red. He lifted the painting and felt the back of the canvas. He paced off the linoleum: ten by twenty feet, ending in walls of whitewashed brick. He touched the plaster ceiling; seven feet high in one corner, six in another. He went to the center of the room and knelt.

  “Now what are you doing?” Leveret asked.

  “The way Bushmen teach their children to track is to give them turtles as pets. The father releases the turtle and the child has to find it by following scratches the turtle claws make on bare rock.”

  “You’re looking for scratches?”

  “I was looking for blood, actually, but scratches would do.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Not a damn thing. I’m not a Bushman.”

  Leveret pulled out his watch. “I’ll leave you now. I have to invite Reverend Chubb for tonight.”

  “Why will he be there?”

  Leveret answered reluctantly. “Reverend Chubb has expressed some concerns about your fitness.”

  “My fitness?”

  “Not your intelligence,” Leveret said quickly. “Your moral fitness.”

  “Thank you. This promises to be a delightful dinner party. Will there be other guests concerned about my moral fitness?”

  Leveret backed toward the door. “A few.”

  “Well, I’ll try to stay sober.”

  “The Bishop has faith in you.”

  “The Bishop?” Blair could hardly keep from laughing.

  The night before, darkness had softened the row houses on the eastern side of Scholes Bridge; now daylight and soot outlined every brick and slate. The mystery cast by gas lamps was replaced by a meanness of block after block of back-to-back construction that showed in leaning walls and the reek of privies. The daytime sound was different because women and children were in the streets and the din of their clogs on stone rang through the singsong of vendors and tinkers. Miners wore clogs, mill workers wore clogs, everyone in Scholes wore clogs. What had Rose Molyneux called Wigan? A black hole? It was a loud hole.

  John Maypole had met her at the bridge. It was a logical place to follow the martyr’s steps.

  It wasn’t quite the Via Dolorosa. The corner beerhouse was a parlor with long tables, barrels of beer and cider, and the commercial hospitality of pickled eggs. Blair introduced himself to the owner as Maypole’s cousin and suggested that the family would reward good information about the priest, last seen two months ago at the bridge.

  The owner reminded Blair that in January dark came early. And, as the man put it, “Your Maypole might be a curate, he could be the Pope with a bell on, but unless a man comes in with his mates for a drink he’s pretty much invisible this end of Wigan.”

  A butcher’s shop looked out on the next block. The butcher was Catholic, but he recognized Maypole from rugby. He said the curate had been walking at a stiff pace with the Molyneux girl, lecturing her or being lectured by her.

  “She’s a Catholic girl, she stood right up to him. It caught my eye how Maypole was pulling off his choker—you know, his ecclesiastical collar.” He paused significantly. “In a furtive manner.”

  “Ah.” Blair brushed a fly away.

  The fly returned to a swarm browsing on what looked like torn flannel: tripe. Pigs’ feet and black pudding lay under a glass as scummy as a pond. The butcher leaned across to whisper. “Priests are human. The flesh is weak. It never hurt a man to wet his willy.”

  Blair looked around. He wouldn’t have been too surprised to see a willy or two hanging from hooks. “They looked friendly, then? I thought you said that one seemed to be lecturing the other.”

  “That’s Rose, complete with thorns, as the saying goes.”

  The butcher was the last person who recalled anyone resembling Maypole. These things happened in Africa, Blair thought. Missionaries vanished all the time. Why not in darkest Wigan?

  He spent the afternoon asking about his missing cousin John Maypole at the Angel, Harp, George, Crown and Sceptre, Black Swan, White Swan, Balcarres Arms, Fleece, Weavers’ Arms, Wheelwrights’ Arms, Windmill, Rope and Anchor. Along the way he bought not new but old clothes from a “shoddy shop.” “Shoddy” were clothes so old they were ready to be torn up and used as fertilizer; in fact, they were more valuable as fertilizer than as clothes. Perfect miner’s clothes.

  By six he was in a pub called The Young Prince. Outside, the establishment looked to be falling down. Corner bricks had dropped like rotted teeth; slate tiles had skated off the roof. Yet the interior boasted a mahogany bar, a glowing hearth and the Young Prince himself, mounted on a pedestal beside the door. The Prince was apparently a fighting dog of some renown, a bull terrier white when alive, now stuffed and turning gray with immortality.

  Miners were just arriving. A few had been home, washed and returned in clean caps and white silk scarves. The majority, however, had stopped on their way from the pit to rinse their throats first. Where their caps tipped back was a peek of white skin and hairlines tattooed from coal scars; the older men smoked long clay pipes and wore scars on their foreheads as blue as Stilton cheese. Blair ordered a hot gin for his fever, which was returning in a spiteful manner, as if it had left him alone too long, and listened to arguments about racing pigeons, the decline of rugby, whether a ferret or a dog could kill more rats. This was edifying company, he thought. He had once spent a day listening to an Ethiopian describe different ways to skin and cook a snake, which was a discourse by Socrates compared with this.

  This was not a job for him, he thought. He was serious with Leveret: Maypole was too opposite. How could he retrace the steps of a man who was practically a martyr? The curate was an Englishman who saw the world as a battle between Heaven and Hell, whereas he saw it as geology. Maypole thought of England as a shining lamp unto all nations, which to him was like claiming that the world was flat.

  Blair became aware that he had been joined at his table by a familiar face, Mr. Smallbone from the train, except that he had traded his suit for a miner’s moleskin jacket, and a leather pouch like the kind used by bookmakers at racecourses hung from his shoulder. His prominent nose, set off by black smudges on his cheeks, was in crimson bloom.

  “I’m not drinking,” Smallbone said.

  “I can see that.”

  “I came in with the lads, I didn’t spend a penny, I was only being sociable. It’s a very friendly situation, The Young Prince.”

  “That’s what you tell Mrs. Smallbone?”

  “Mrs. Smallbone is another story.” Smallbone sighed as if his wife was a volume to herself, then brightened. “You’ve come to the right place, especially tonight. Oh, if you’d gone to The Harp.”

  “I was at The Harp.”

  “Irish. Is it me or is it dry in here?”

  Blair caught the barman’s attention and held up two fingers.

  “The fights at The Harp. Every night it’s one Irishman biting off the nose of another Irishman. They’re good men. Oh, there’s no one better for digging a hole than an Irishman. But for the day-in, day-out getting of coal there’s nothing like a Lancashireman.” Smallbone sighed as the gins arrived and took his before it hit the table. “Your Welshman, your Yorkshireman, but above all, your Lancashireman.”

  “Underground?”

  “So to speak. Your health.”

  They drank, Blair half his glass at a go, Smallbone with a careful, parsimonious sip—a man for the long haul.

  “You must have known the men who died in the fire.”

  “Knew them all. Worked with them thirty years, fathers and sons. Absent friends.” Smallbone doled himself another sip. “Well, not all. There are always miners from outside Wigan. Daywo
rkers. You never even know their last names. If they’re Welsh you call them Taffy, if they’re Irish they’re Paddy, and if they’re missing two fingers you call them Two Pints. As long as they can get coal, that’s all that matters.”

  A group of women entered. Respectable women were relegated to an area called the snug; their bustles would upset glasses if they even tried to make their way to the bar. These four, however, pushed through. Boldness was not the only difference: from the waist up they dressed in woolen head shawls and flannel shirts, but their sack skirts were rolled up to the waist like cummerbunds and sewn to stay permanently out of the way of their corduroy pants. Their hands were blue on one side, pink on the other, their faces raw and damp from washing.

  The bartender didn’t seem surprised. “Beers?”

  “Ales,” said the big girl with ginger hair. She told the other girls, “He’d forget his balls if they weren’t in a bag.” Her eyes roamed the pub until she noticed Blair. “You’re a photographer?”

  “No.”

  “I do photographs. My friend Rose and I pose in work clothes or Sunday dresses. We’re very popular.”

  “Rose who?”

  “My friend Rose. No artistic poses, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” Blair said.

  “Call me Flo.” Ale in hand, she approached his table. Her features were plain, but she had painted her lips and cheeks with enough rouge to look like a tinted photo. “You’re American.”

  “You have a good ear, Flo.”

  The compliment brought pink to her face. Her hair seemed to spring electrically from her shawl. She put Blair in mind of Queen Boadicea, the mad queen of the Britons who almost drove Caesar’s troops back into the sea.

  She said, “I like Americans. They don’t stand on ceremony.”

  “I don’t stand on any ceremony at all,” Blair promised her.

  “Not like someone from London.” There was a dramatic quality to Flo; London was clearly her equivalent of a nest of lice. “Members of Parliament who want to put honest girls out of work.” Her gaze swooped down on Smallbone. “And the little arse-kissers who help them.”