Rose (5 page)

“The idea occurred to me.”

“Bishop Hannay advanced you funds to perform a task. If you don’t, I’ll have to ask for those funds.”

“I’ll rest in Liverpool and return,” Blair said. The hell I will, he thought, I’ll be on deck and at sea.

The conductor said, “Then you’ll have to buy another ticket in the station.”

“I’ll buy it from you.”

“That may be the way you do things in America,” Leveret said. “Here you buy tickets in the station.”

When Blair pushed himself to his feet, he found his legs frail and his balance untrustworthy. He fell in one long step to the platform, stood and gathered his dignity. The last disembarking travelers—shopgirls with hat-boxes—leaned away as he reeled by at a leper’s pace into the station. A stove sat between two empty benches. No one was at the ticket window, so he leaned against the windowsill and hit its bell. At the same time it rang he felt a shudder; he turned and saw the train pulling away from the platform.

Leveret came in the station door with Blair’s pack under his arm. “I understand it’s been a long time since you were in Wigan,” he said.

Leveret had the long face and shamble of an underfed horse, and he was tall enough to have to duck under shop
signs. He led Blair up the station steps to a street of shops of greasy red brick. Despite the gloom of gas lamps, the sidewalk was crowded with shoppers and outdoor displays of waterproof coats, Wellington boots, silk scarves, satin ribbons, Pilkington glass, paraffin oil. Stalls offered sides of Australian beef, glutinous tripe, herring and cod arrayed in tiers, iced baskets of oysters. The smells of tea and coffee insinuated like exotic perfumes. Everything lay under a faintly glittering veil of soot. The thought occurred to Blair that if Hell had a flourishing main street it would look like this.

They slowed by a storefront with the newspaper placard
LONDON SLASHER
. “The local newspaper,” Leveret said, as if they were passing a brothel.

The Minorca Hotel was in the same building. Leveret ushered Blair up to a second-floor suite furnished in velvet and dark paneling.

“Even a rubber tree,” Blair said. “I do feel at home.”

“I reserved the suite in case people would be visiting you in the course of your inquiry. This way you have an office.”

“An office? Leveret, I have the feeling that you know more about what I’m supposed to do than I do.”

“I care more about this investigation than you do. I’m a friend of the family.”

“That’s nice, but I’d appreciate it if you stopped calling this an ‘investigation.’ I’m not the police. I’ll ask a few questions that you have probably already asked, and then I’ll be on my way.”

“But you’ll try? You took the money for it.”

Blair felt his legs start to buckle. “I’ll do something.”

“I thought you’d want to get started right away. I’ll take you around now to Reverend Chubb. You saw him at the station.”

“And more fun than a barrel of monkeys, from what I saw.” Blair aimed himself into a chair and sat. “Leveret,
you found me on the train and you have dragged me here. Now you can go.”

“Reverend Chubb—”

“Does Chubb know where Maypole is?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the point in talking to him?”

“It’s a matter of courtesy.”

“I haven’t got time.”

“You ought to know that we’ve warned the ship’s captains in Liverpool that if you show up there with any funds, they’ve been stolen.”

“Well, so much for courtesy.” Blair gave Leveret a broad wink. “The English are so grand to work with, such a smug little nation.” Talking was exhausting. He let his head loll back and shut his eyes. He heard scribbling.

“I’m putting down addresses,” Leveret said. “I wasn’t trying to offend you about the captains, but I do want to keep you here.”

“And a great pleasure it is.” Blair sensed welcome oblivion on the rise. He heard Leveret open the door. “Wait.” Blair stirred from his torpor for a moment. “How old is he?”

Leveret took a moment.

“Twenty-three.”

“Tall?”

“Six feet. You have the photograph.”

“An excellent photograph. Weight, about?”

“Fourteen stone.”

Almost two hundred pounds, to an American. “Fair hair,” Blair remembered. “Eyes?”

“Blue.”

“Just in case I bump into him on the stairs. Thanks.”

His eyelids dropped like leaden gates. He was asleep before Leveret was out the door.

When he awoke, it took Blair a moment to comprehend where he was. The fever had ebbed, but in the dark the
unfamiliar furniture seemed suspiciously animated, especially chairs and tables so draped in tassels and cloths that they were virtually dressed. Standing, he felt lightheaded. He thought he heard horses but when he made his way to the window and looked down on the street he saw only people, which puzzled him until he realized that half of them wore clogs. Clogs were leather shoes with wooden soles protected by iron rails that could last a workingman ten years. The perfect sound for Wigan: people shod like horses.

It was eight o’clock by his watch. The thing to do, it seemed to him, was to talk to the smallest number of locals in the shortest amount of time and get out of town. In Africa he had marched with eyes sealed shut with infection, with feet covered in sores; he could overcome a little chill to get out of Wigan.

He read Leveret’s note on the table. Reverend Chubb’s address was the parish rectory, John Maypole’s seemed nearby, the widow Mary Jaxon’s was in Shaw’s Court, Rose Molyneux’s was in Candle Court. There was no address for Miss Charlotte Hannay.

The widow Jaxon sounded like the best choice, more likely to be home, readier to gossip. As he picked up the paper he caught sight through the open bedroom door of a man in a mirror. Someone in a slouch hat, bad beard and eyes staring back like two dim candles.

Blair was not quite as ready for an excursion as he’d imagined. He had no sooner climbed into a cab before he passed out. Between black spells he was vaguely aware of shopping streets giving way to foundries, the sharp fumes of dye works, a bridge, and then row upon row of brick houses. He revived as the carriage pulled up.

The driver said, “This is Candle Court.”

Blair said, “I wanted Shaw’s Court.”

“You told me Candle Court.”

If Blair had made a mistake, he didn’t have the strength to correct it. He got out and told the driver to wait.

“Not here. I’ll be on the other side of the bridge.” The driver turned his cab around briskly in retreat.

The street was a paved trench between row houses built for miners by mineowners, two stories side to side, under a single roofline of Welsh slate so that it was impossible to tell one house from another except by their doors. It was a maze of shadow and brick. The gas jets of streetlights were far apart, and most illumination came from the paraffin lamps of beerhouses and pubs, or open windows where sausages, oysters or hams were for sale. Everyone else seemed to be at the evening meal; he heard a sea sound of voices within.

According to Leveret the Molyneux girl lived at no. 21. When he knocked on the door it swung open.

“Rose Molyneux? Miss Molyneux?”

As he stepped into a parlor the door closed behind him. Enough of the street’s faint light entered for him to see chairs, table and a cabinet filling the tight space. He had anticipated worse. Miners’ houses usually had families of ten or more, plus lodgers stepping over and on top of each other. This was as quiet as a sanctuary. Relatively prosperous, too. The cabinet displayed ornamental pots: a ceramic Duke of Wellington, with his hooknose, was the only one Blair could identify.

The next room was lit by a rear window. Heat and the aroma of milk and sugar emanated from a kitchen range. A large pan of hot water sat on top. Blair opened the oven and raised the lid of the pot inside. Rice pudding. Two plates for it lay on a table. Washtubs crowded in the corner and, curiously, a full-length mirror. A hooked rug softened the boards of the floor. On the wall opposite the range a flight of stairs rose to a quiet bedroom floor.

Feet shuffled outside. Blair looked through the window at a miniature yard with a washboiler, slopstone
for washing and a pig rubbing against the slats of its pen. The pig raised its eyes yearningly. Someone was expected home.

Blair knew that to wait outside would be self-defeating because any loitering stranger was, until proven otherwise, a bill collector to be avoided. He went into the parlor to sit, but neighbors were passing by the front window and he couldn’t lower the curtain without drawing attention: a lowered curtain was a public notice of death among miners. Odd he remembered that, he thought.

He retreated to the kitchen and sank into a chair set in the shadow of the stairs. The fever was between swings, leaving him limp. He told himself that when he heard the front door open he could return to the parlor. As he tipped back into shadow the wall pushed his hat forward over his face. He closed his eyes—just for a second, he told himself. The sweetness of the pudding scented the dark.

He opened his eyes as she stepped into the bath. She had lit a lamp but turned the wick low. She was black with silvery glints of mica, and her hair was twisted up and pinned. She washed with a sponge and cloth, watching in a full-length mirror not in admiration but because fine coal dust had insinuated itself so completely into the pores of her skin. As she washed she progressed from ebony to blue, and from blue to olive, like a watercolor turning to a lighter color.

She stepped into a second tub and directed a pitcher’s stream of water over her face and shoulders. As she turned within the confines of the tub her movements were a private, narrow dance. Steam hung as an aureole around her face, water ran in braids down her back and between her breasts. Minute by minute she transformed from black to gray to shell-like pink, though her eyes
revealed a cool disregard for the flesh, as if another woman were bathing.

When she was done she stepped out of the tub onto the rug. For the first time Blair noticed a towel and clothes laid over a chair. She dried herself, raised her arms and let a chemise slip over her and stepped into a skirt of linen that was thin but of good quality, what a maid might steal from a house. Finally she released her hair, which was dark copper, thick and vigorous.

As Blair let his chair settle forward she stared into the dark like a fox startled in its den. If she cried for help, he knew that the house would quickly fill with miners happy to mete out punishment to any stranger who violated the privacy of their hovels.

“Rose Molyneux?”

“Aye.”

“Bishop Hannay asked me to look into the matter of John Maypole. Your door was open. I came in and fell asleep. I apologize.”

“When did you wake up? If you was a gentleman you’d have spoke up right away.”

“I’m not a gentleman.”

“That’s clear.”

She looked toward the front door but made no move to it, and though the shift clung damply to her, she left her dress on the chair. Her eyes were dark and direct. “I know nowt about the priest,” she said.

“On January 18, Maypole was seen talking to you, and then he wasn’t seen again. Where was that?”

“Scholes Bridge. I told the constables. He asked me to a social, a dance with songs and lemonade.”

“You were friends?”

“No. He asked all the girls. He was always at us for one thing or another.”

“What kind of things?”

“Church things. He was always trying to save us.”

“From what?”

“Our weaknesses.” She watched his eyes. “I fell into a coal car, that’s why I had t’wash.”

“Did you go to the social?”

“There was no social.”

“Because Maypole was missing?”

She gave a laugh. “Because there was an explosion down the pit. Seventy-six men died that day. Nobody here gave a damn about a priest.”

Blair felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his chair. Seventy-six men had died the same day Maypole vanished from sight and Leveret hadn’t mentioned it?

From next door came a cannonade of clogs down a stairway. Bricks between houses were a membrane so thin that the stampede sounded as if it had descended the steps above Blair’s head. A bead of water like a ball of light ran down the girl’s cheek, coursed down her neck and disappeared. Otherwise she was still.

“No more questions?” she asked.

“No.” He was still trying to assimilate the news of the explosion.

“You’re really not a gentleman, are you?”

“Not a bit.”

“Then how do you know the Bishop?”

“You don’t have to be a gentleman to know the Bishop.” He got to his feet to go.

Rose said, “What’s your name? You know mine, I don’t know yours.”

“Blair.”

“You’re a bastard, Mr. Blair.”

“That’s been said. I’ll see myself out.”

He was so dizzy the floor seemed to be on a slant. He guided himself with seat backs through the parlor to the front. Rose Molyneux followed as far as the kitchen door, more to make sure he went than to say good-bye. She was framed by the sash and the kitchen light, white muslin and red hair. From the house on the other side
came a volley of cabinets slamming and domestic denunciations joined by the wails of a baby.

“It’s a small world, Wigan?” Blair asked.

Rose said, “It’s a black hole.”