Rose (10 page)

Before he could answer, a new voice said, “Chloroform.”

A new arrival had slipped in through a service door. She was not much more than twenty but wore a matron’s soberly purple dress and long gloves and apparently had just arrived at the house because her hair of brooding Celtic red was dragged under a dark bonnet that shadowed a face of sharp features and small, severe eyes. Blair was put in mind of a fierce sparrow.

The men, all but Hannay, stood. He said, “Charlotte, how flattering of you to join us.”

“Father.” She took the chair that had been empty opposite Hannay and waved off a footman bearing wine.

The men sat.

“Chloroform?” Blair asked.

“That the Queen had chloroform for labor and made it acceptable not to give birth in agony will go down in history as her greatest gift.” Charlotte Hannay redirected her gaze. “Cousin Lydia, you look like a freshly picked peach.”

“Thank you,” Lydia said uncertainly.

Hannay introduced the table and said, “Charlotte doesn’t often join us for dinner, although we always hope. Remove your hat and stay.”

Charlotte said, “I just wanted to see your white African.”

“American,” Blair said.

“But your reputation is from Africa,” she said. “Slaves
and native women, isn’t that what you’re known for? What was it like to be in a position of such power? Did it make you feel like a god?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you have a charm that only works on black women.”

“Perhaps.”

“Mr. Blair is actually very charming,” Lydia Rowland said.

Charlotte said, “Really? I look forward to seeing that.”

“Many of us do,” Earnshaw said dryly.

“And you’ve been hired by my father to inquire after John Maypole. What a bizarre proposition,” Charlotte said.

“Tell him to go away, Charlotte,” Lady Rowland said.

Hannay said, “I’m sure Charlotte wants to know what happened to Maypole. After all, he was her fiancé.”

“Is, until I know otherwise,” Charlotte said.

“I know we will receive a letter from Reverend Maypole that will explain everything. You have to carry on,” Lydia Rowland said.

“I do. I just don’t carry on like you.”

Lydia Rowland blinked as if she’d been slapped, and for the first time Blair felt sympathy for the girl. She might be a fool, but in contrast to Charlotte Hannay a fool was positively attractive. He instantly saw Charlotte’s future: she had a mouth on which no smile would ever perch, eyes that would never soften, a body that would never be unbound from mourning. She might have arrived late but she was a proper mistress for the Cannel Room.

From his end of the table, Hannay said, “Charlotte, it seems to me that your devotion to Maypole grows in proportion to his absence.”

“Or in proportion to your inconvenience,” she suggested.

“Maybe Blair will put an end to both,” Hannay said.

Charlotte regarded Blair with, if possible, increased hostility. “You’ll do anything to get back to Africa?”

“Yes.”

She told her father, “Congratulations, you certainly have found your man. And, Blair, are you being adequately recompensed?”

“I hope so.”

Charlotte said, “You had better hope. My father is like Saturn, except that he doesn’t eat all his children. He lets them fight it out, and then he eats the survivor.”

Lydia Rowland put her hand over her mouth.

Hannay stood. “Well, it’s been a very successful party.”

The men moved to a library fully as large as the Royal Society’s. Two stories of stacks and chart drawers with an iron balcony surrounded birds of paradise in bell jars, tables of fossils and meteorites, a rose-marble fireplace, ebony desk and deep leather furniture. Blair noticed the steady gas glow of wall lamps. Apparently only the Cannel Room was lit with candles.

“The women are happy in the study.” Hannay poured port left to right. “The family has been building Hannay Hall for eight hundred years, so that now it’s a perfect monster. You exit from a Gothic gallery and enter a Georgian ballroom. Step out of a Restoration library and run into the plumbing of a modern water closet. The scullery dates back to the Black Prince. Pity the wretches who work there.”

“My aunt works there,” Fellowes said.

“Excellent.” Hannay proposed a toast. “Your aunt.”

“Very kind, milord,” Fellowes said.

They drank. Blair asked, “Do you mean there’s another library?”

“Yes. This was a chapel,” Hannay said.

“Roman Catholic,” Chubb whispered.

Hannay pointed to a small oil portrait of a long-haired man wearing an earring and a flamboyant Elizabethan collar. “The Hannays were resolute Catholics, hiding and running priests from here to the Highlands. The tenth
earl, whom you see there, was an abject coward who converted to save his neck and estate, for which his descendants eternally thank him. The chapel was allowed to go to rack and ruin. The lead was stripped, roof and windows fell in. Being in a back courtyard no one much noticed. I decided to make something of it.”

Earnshaw and Chubb were reduced to reverence by a framed manuscript of gilded Latin designed into Celtic knots. Leveret and Blair lingered over the fossils: a fiddlehead fern curled like the scroll of a cello, the cross section of a fossilized tree as iridescent as a peacock’s tail.

Hannay opened drawers with maps in Greek, Persian and Arabic drawn on tree bark, papyrus, vellum, and pilot charts written in Portuguese and Dutch. On them Africa evolved and grew from Egyptian delta, to Carthaginian empire, to indeterminate landmass guarded by boiling waters, to the saints’ names of a newly navigated but still ominous continent, to a modern, well-plotted coastline and beckoning interior.

“Africa does seem to be your special interest,” Earnshaw said.

“Not entirely. This is the prize of the library.” Hannay opened a velvet slipcase and as painstakingly as if he were lifting air brought out a book with a badly worn leather cover faded to a powdery mauve. He raised the front just enough for Blair and Earnshaw to read, handwritten on the frontispiece,
Roman de la Rose
. “Every fine medieval lady had her copy of
The Romance of the Rose
,” Hannay said. “This was written, fittingly enough, in 1323 for Céline, Dame de Hannay.”

“What is it about?” Fellowes asked.

“Chivalry, spirituality, carnality, mystery.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Would you like to take it home with you, share it with the wife?” Hannay handed it to him.

“No, no!” Fellowes backed away, horrified.

“Very well.” Hannay took it back.

“She doesn’t speak French,” Fellowes told Blair.

The library doors flew open. The book emitted a faint bouquet of roses as the room was invaded by Charlotte, still in her bonnet, driving her aunt and cousin before her like a demon.

Charlotte announced, “I want to know what new arrangements you’re making behind my back. Your Blair has probably the most loathsome reputation on the face of the earth, and you’ve hired him to foul the name of a better man under the pretense of an investigation. I would no more answer questions from Blair than I would willingly sit in stinking offal.”

“But you
will
answer them,” Hannay said.

“Father, when you rot in Hell. Since you’re a bishop of the Church, that’s not very likely, is it?”

She gave the company in the library a contemptuous rake of her small, hard-set eyes and marched away. If this were Joan of Arc, Blair thought, he’d light the first torch. Gladly.

Blair rose at the sound of clogs ringing on the cobblestones like gongs. In the light of the streetlamp he could make out miners and women heading to the pits on the south side of town, and mill girls in dresses and shawls streaming in the opposite direction.

He had dressed in the secondhand clothes he had bought the day before and had his coffee by the time Leveret arrived. They climbed into the estate manager’s modest one-horse gig and took the road south toward the Hannay pit. In dark fields on either side Blair could make out miners in the dark by the glow of their pipes and the mist of their breath. The fields smelled of manure, the air of ash. Ahead, from a high chimney, issued a silvery column of smoke that at its very peak was colored by dawn.

“Last night was a rare appearance by Charlotte,” Leveret said. “For weeks you can’t find her, and then she bursts onto the scene. I’m sorry that she was rude.”

“The nastiest little monster I ever met. You know her well?”

“I grew up with her. Not actually
with
her, but on the estate. My father was manager before me. Then I was John’s best friend when he came here and he and Charlotte
became allied. It’s just that she feels strongly about things.”

“Are there any brothers or sisters?”

“Deceased. Charlotte’s older brother had a hunting accident. Tragic.”

“So in the house it’s just the Bishop and her and a hundred and forty staff?”

“No. The Rowlands live at Hannay Hall with the Bishop, but Charlotte lives in a separate cottage. A nice house, actually. Very old. She lives her own life.”

“I bet she does.”

“She used to be different.”

“She
is
different,” Blair said.

Leveret laughed timidly and changed the subject. “I’m surprised you want to take the time to go down the mine. You were in such a rush to look for John.”

“I still am.”

There was no gate or clear demarcation between farmland and the Hannay pit. Miners on either side converged, and Blair found himself entering a yard lit by gas lamps and surrounded by sheds where sound and light seemed to have been stored and at that moment unleashed: the heavy breath and hoofbeats of horses pulling wagons across stones, the ember glow and rhythm of farriers shaping iron, the sparks and whine of picks being sharpened. Donkey engines chuffed out of railway sheds. Tram wagons, chained, not coupled, crashed together. Barely audible overhead, like a bow drawn across a cello, came a vibration from the cables running from the winding gears in the tower that stood above the shaft.

Metal tubs full of coal rolled off the cage onto a scale, connected to an “endless chain” and moved mechanically on rails up to the shed to be sorted and graded. Blair hopped off the gig and kept pace with the parade of tubs. Each full tub weighed, according to the scale, at least two
hundred pounds. The shed had a cover, no sides, more to protect coal from water than workers from weather. All the workers in it were pit girls. Those at the top unlinked arriving tubs, rolled them to a tippler, locked a tub in and slowly released a brake lever so that as the tippler rocked the tub disgorged a black stream of coal onto a conveyor belt where, by the light of a lamp, other women cleaned the coal of dirt and stones.

The pit girls wore flannel shirts, corduroy pants and vestigial skirts greasy with coal. Their hair was hidden in shawls from the dust. Their hands were black and their faces blurred from clouds of pulverized carbon that erupted as coal from the belt flowed down a slanted screen, or fell through to finer screens.

Cleaned and graded coal poured down a chute to the shed’s railway siding, where two girls manhandled the chute mouth over wagons. Blair recognized Flo from The Young Prince and Rose Molyneux.

Flo had a voice that sawed through the din. “It’s him.”

Blair shouted to Rose, “I want to talk to you.”

Rose turned toward him and put one hand on her hip. Her eyes were two prisms of concentration, accentuated by the black dust that covered her face. It was the sort of unhurried gaze a man might receive from a cat at ease on a chair she claimed for her own. She took in Blair, engine drivers, haulers and miners, as if they were all of equal unimportance.

“You look debonair,” she said.

He glanced down at his shabby jacket and pants. “For the occasion.”

Somehow she managed to imbue her own dirty apparel with stylish impudence. “Going down pit? You’ll be black as a pipe cleaner when you come back.”

“We have to talk.”

“Was it such a fascinating conversation the first time?”

“It was interesting.”

She held his gaze. In that moment he saw that she
knew she had the power to catch his eye when she wanted.

“Bill won’t like that,” Flo said.

“Bill Jaxon?” Blair asked.

Rose laughed at Blair’s reaction. “Did that make your pecker drop?”

“Blair!” Leveret shouted from a shed across the yard.

Because the lamp shed was where the miners were issued their safety lamps, it burned on the inside like a chandelier. On the lower shelves were lamp oil, rolls of wick cord and caulking in cans that read “Good Enough for the Royal Navy!” Hanging on the back wall, six canary cages sounded a chorus. Yellow heads peeked through the grilles.

“Maybe you should wait here,” Blair told Leveret. In the light he could see that under a borrowed leather jacket the estate manager wore a silk vest and white shirt, not to mention a nicely brushed bowler.

“No, I’ve always wondered about the mining experience. I’ve never been more than ten feet deep in an old mine before.”

“You could tie yourself into a sack of coal and jump up and down,” Blair suggested.