Rose (3 page)

No protest or exit line came to Blair’s mind. Perhaps he had been expelled and the expulsion had been so swift that he had missed the kick. In the silence he calculated how much he owed for his miserable lodging. Besides the clothes on his back he owned nothing that didn’t fit into a pack. His only valuable possession was his surveying equipment: chronometer, brass sextant, telescope.

“What are your prospects?” Bishop Hannay asked, as if Blair had been wondering aloud.

“There are other mining companies in London. The East India Company or an Egyptian interest. I’ll catch on.”

“Any employer will ask for a recommendation, and you’ll be publicly infamous before a week is out.”

“Or go to New York or California. There’s still plenty of gold there.”

“Not without a steamship ticket. Your hat is soaked. You didn’t have enough for a cab here.”

“For a bishop you are a mean son of a bitch.”

“I’m Church of England,” Hannay said. “That gives me a great deal of latitude. That’s why I tolerate you.”

“I’ve engineered Hannay mines in America, Mexico, Brazil. You’re the one who sent me to Africa.”

“Asked, not sent, and you were off like a shot.”

“I’m not asking for money, not even what the Society owes me. Just a ticket to New York, nothing more.”

“That’s all?”

“The world is full of mines.”

“And like the white rabbit, you’ll pop down a hole and
never be seen again.” To emphasize his point, Hannay dropped his own frame into the chair opposite Blair.

“Right.”

“Well, I would miss you, Blair. You may be many things, but a rabbit is hardly one of them. I do feel responsibility for you. You’ve done some good work in difficult places, that’s absolutely true. Your company, when you control your language, isn’t disagreeable. It’s pathetic to see you reduced to this condition. Tomorrow you’ll be boiling your boots and dining on them. Or dining on the citizens of London. No, you’re not a rabbit.”

“Then get me out of this place.”

The Bishop put his hands together in a way that on anyone else would have looked like prayer; on him it was simply concentration. “You’d ship to New York out of Liverpool?”

Blair nodded, for the first time with a little hope.

“Then there might be something for you on the way,” Hannay continued.

“What’s on the way?”

“Wigan.”

Blair laughed, surprised that he had the strength. He said, “Thanks, I’d rather starve.”

“Wigan is mining country. The world is full of mines, you said so yourself.”

“I meant gold mines, not coal.”

“But you started in coal mines.”

“So I know the difference.”

“A hundred pounds,” Hannay said. “And expenses.”

“You owe me the hundred. Expenses in Wigan? You mean all the meat pie I can eat?”

“And a place on next year’s expedition. They’ll be mustering in Zanzibar and attempting to cross the continent from the east coast of Africa to the west, aiming for the mouth of the Congo. I can’t guarantee the
position—I’m only a sponsor—but I will speak for your character.”

Blair refilled his glass and tried to keep the decanter steady. This was all he could have hoped for, weighed against Wigan.

“Just to look at a coal mine? There are a hundred better men for that already in Wigan.”

“No. What I want you to do is for the Church.”

“Lectures? Lantern slides of Africa? Missionaries I have admired, that kind of thing?”

“That would strain credulity too much. No, something better suited to your nature, your curiosity, your peculiar background. Something private. I have a young curate in Wigan. A Low Church kind of curate, the evangelical kind. Practically Methodist, almost Wesleyan. A zealot for preaching to fallen women and convicted men. The problem is not that he’s a fool but that I can’t find him. Like the white rabbit, he has gone down a hole and disappeared.”

“You mean he went in a mine?” Blair asked.

“No, no, just that he’s vanished. It’s been two months since he was seen in Wigan. The police have asked questions, but our constables are local lads trained mainly for subduing drunks and finding poachers.”

“Bring in a detective from the outside.”

“Miners despise detectives as strikebreakers, which they usually are. You, on the other hand, blend in. You did it in Africa as well as a white man could.”

“You could get someone from London.”

“Someone from London would be lost. They wouldn’t understand five words a Lancashireman said. Your mother was from Wigan, wasn’t she? I seem to remember the two of us sitting at a campfire in the middle of the Sudan and your confiding that information.”

“We’d talked about everything else.”

“It was completely natural. My home is Wigan. It’s a
mutual bond between us. You lived in Wigan before your mother took you to America.”

“What’s your point?”

“That when someone in Wigan speaks to you, you will comprehend what he’s saying.”

Gin and port was not a bad combination. The chills faded. The mind focused.

“There’s more to it,” Blair said. “You’re not going to all this trouble simply for a wayward curate. Especially a fool.”

Bishop Hannay sat forward, pleased. “Of course there’s more. The curate is engaged to my daughter. If he was outside a pub and skulled by an Irishman, I want to know. If he was saving a prostitute and seduced in turn, I want to know. Quietly, through an agent of mine, so my daughter and I and the rest of the nation won’t be reading about it in the newspapers.”

“Anything could have happened. He could have fallen down a shaft, into a canal, under a coal wagon. Maybe he dipped into
his
Bible Fund and ran off with Gypsies.”

“Anything. But I want to know.” From under his chair the Bishop drew a cardboard envelope tied with a red ribbon. He untied it and showed Blair the contents. “John.”

“His name is John?”

“His Christian name. Also, fifty pounds in advance for any costs that you incur.”

“What if he walks into church tomorrow?”

“You keep it all. Get a decent meal in you and some more medicine. I’ve had you booked into a hotel in Wigan. The bills will go to me.”

“You mean, the bills will go to Hannay Coal?”

“Same thing.”

A hundred pounds was still owed him, Blair thought, but fifty pounds was generous. The Bishop was a host who offered a spoon of honey for a spoon of bile. Blair
was sweating so hard he was sticking to the back of the chair.

“You think I’ll do this?”

“I think you’re desperate, and I know you want to return to Africa. This is an easy task. A personal favor. It’s also a form of minor redemption.”

“How is that?”

“You think I’m the hard man, Blair? Anyone but you would have inquired about my daughter, what condition she was in when she realized that her fiancé had gone to ground. Was she distressed? Hysterical? Under a doctor’s care? You ask not a single word.”

The Bishop waited. Blair watched rain tap on the window, collect in beads, coalesce and then sluice to the bottom of the pane.

“Very well, how is your daughter?”

Hannay smiled, getting the performance he was paying for. “She’s bearing up, thank you. She’ll be relieved to know you’ve consented to help.”

“What’s her name?”

“It’s all in there.” The Bishop closed the envelope, tied it and placed it on Blair’s lap. “Leveret will be in contact with you at the hotel. He’s my estate manager. Good luck.”

This time there was no doubt Blair was being dismissed. He stood, steadying himself with the chair, holding on to the envelope and its precious money. “Thank you.”

“You overwhelm me,” Hannay said.

On his way out Blair had negotiated the globe and was at the door when the Bishop called after him.

“Blair, since you will be working for me and near my home I want to remind you that some parts of the public do think of you as a sort of explorer. You have a reputation for getting close to the natives, first in East Africa, then in the Gold Coast. Picking up the language is one
thing; dressing like them and acting like them is something else. People like to call you Nigger Blair. Discourage that.”

Blair rode in a railway car as hushed and polished as a hearse, with oil lamps that were as low as candles. He thought all he was missing were lilies on his chest. It didn’t help that mourners seemed to have climbed in with him, because the rest of his compartment was occupied by two men and a woman returning from a Temperance rally. They wore militant black with red sashes that said “Tea—the Drink That Cheers and Not Inebriates.” Since he still hadn’t shaved, he hoped that he made a traveling companion too unsavory to speak to, but they eyed him like vultures presented with a dying lion.

Though Blair had invested in quinine and brandy, fever came in tides that lifted him from crest to crest of sweat and left him exhausted between waves. Not that he could complain. Malaria was the minimum, the price of admission in Africa. There were far more extravagant tropical souvenirs for the unlucky—sleeping sickness, marsh fever, yellow jack, unnamed exotic diseases that caused hemorrhaging, paralysis or swelled the tongue like a pig’s bladder until the air passage was choked. In comparison, malaria was minor discomfort, a sneeze, a bagatelle.

He rested his forehead against the cold window. Outside passed the bucolic scene of a farmer plowing behind
a shire horse, man and beast plunging into a sea of mud. The English monsoon. Mud rose in brown waves, carrying the farmer away. When he closed his eyes, a conductor shook him and asked if he was ill. My eyes are as yellow as your brass buttons; does that look well to you? Blair thought.

“I’m fine.”

“If you’re sick, I’ll have to put you off,” the conductor warned.

There was a moment of embarrassment among the teetotalers after the conductor left. Then the one across from Blair licked his lips and confided, “I was once as you are, brother. My name is Smallbone.”

Smallbone’s nose was a rosy knob. His black suit shone, the sign of wool revived with polish. Blue lines tattooed his forehead. The blue was permanent, Blair knew: dust in the scars every miner collected from coal roofs.

“But my husband was saved,” said the woman at his side. She pressed her mouth into a line. “Weak and worthless though we may be.”

There was no access to another compartment unless he crawled along the outside of the train. He considered it.

“Would you mind if we prayed for you?” Mrs. Smallbone asked.

“Not if you do it quietly,” Blair said.

Smallbone whispered to his wife, “Maybe he’s a papist.”

“Or a thug,” said the other man. He had a full beard with a black, curly nap that crept nearly to his eyes. An almost Persian beard, Blair thought, one that Zoroaster would have been proud of. “I would have said a cashiered officer until you opened your mouth, which pronounces you American. I can see that you are usually clean-shaven, which is the habit of artistic types, Italians or French.”

The miner’s wife told Blair, “Mr. Earnshaw is a member of Parliament.”

“That must account for his manners.”

“You make enemies quickly,” Earnshaw said.

“It’s a talent. Good night.” Blair closed his eyes.

Gold was what drew the British. The Ashanti had so much that they seemed the Incas of Africa. Their rivers were flecked with gold, their hills veined with it. What better investment than a man with a tripod and sextant, auger and pan, and bottles of quicksilver? Let heroes discover the source of the Nile and the Mountains of the Moon, slaughter lions and apes, baptize lakes and peoples. All Blair searched for was pyrite and quartz, the telltale glitter of aurora.

In a feverish dream he was back on the golden sea-sands of Axim. This time Rowland was with him. He knew the Bishop’s nephew was insane, but he hoped the ocean would soothe his blue eyes. The sea breeze tugged at Rowland’s golden beard. Surf rolled in with the steady pace of wheels. “Excellent,” Rowland murmured. “Excellent.” At Axim, women panned the sands with wooden plates painted black to let the sun find the gold. Naked, they waded into the water to rinse the sand away, and rose and fell in the waves, holding the pans high. “Wonderful ducks,” Rowland said and raised his rifle. A pan flew and the woman who had been holding it sank into a reddening wave. While he reloaded, the other women waded for shore. Rowland shot again, methodically, casually. As a woman fell, gold dust dashed across the sand. He rolled her with his foot so that she was dusted with sparkling flecks. Blair gathered the remaining women to lead them to safety, and Rowland reloaded and turned the rifle on him. He felt the barrel press against the back of his neck.

Sheer terror brought Blair half awake. It was sweat on
his neck, not a rifle. It was only a dream. Rowland had never done anything like that—at least not at Axim.

We live equally in two worlds, an African had told Blair. Awake, we plod on with our eyes downcast from the sun, ignoring or not seeing what lies around us. Asleep, eyes open behind their lids, we pass through a vibrant world in which men become lions, women become snakes, in which the vague fears of the daytime become, through heightened senses, revealed and visible.