Rose (6 page)

In the morning Blair found himself feeling strangely better. Malaria did that, came and went like a houseguest. He celebrated with a bath and shave and was eating a breakfast of cold toast and dry steak when Leveret arrived.

“There’s some terrible coffee on the table,” Blair offered.

“I’ve eaten.”

Blair went back to his meal. He’d had nothing but soup or gin for a week and he intended to finish the remains on his plate.

Leveret removed his hat respectfully. “Bishop Hannay is up from London. He has asked you to dinner tonight. I’ll gather you here at seven.”

“Sorry. I don’t have anything to wear.”

“The Bishop said you would say that and I should tell you not to worry. Since you are American, people will assume you don’t know to dress for dinner.”

“Very well, you can go back to His Grace and tell him that his insult has been delivered. See you at seven.” Blair returned to his steak, which had the texture of incinerated rope. He became aware that his visitor hadn’t moved. “You’re just going to stand there? You look like a doorstop.”

Leveret edged toward a chair. “I thought I’d accompany you this morning.”

“Accompany me?”

“I was John Maypole’s best friend. No one can tell you as much about him as I can.”

“You assisted the police?”

“There hasn’t been a real investigation. We thought he was away, and then … well, he still may be away. The Bishop doesn’t want the police involved”

“You’re the Hannay estate manager, haven’t you got things to do, cows to tend, tenants to evict?”

“I don’t evi—”

“What’s your first name, Leveret?”

“Oliver.”

“Oliver. Ollie. I know Russians in California. They’d call you Olyosha.”

“Leveret will do.”

“How old are you?”

Leveret paused, like a man stepping into high grass. “Twenty-five.”

“The Hannay estate must be quite a responsibility. Do you evict aged tenants personally or do you have a bailiff for that?”

“I try not to evict anyone.”

“But you do it. You get my point? No one is going to talk confidentially to me if I have you at my side.”

Leveret looked pained. Besides making his point, Blair had meant to offend him; if brushing him aside with a paw left him scratched that was fine, but Leveret seemed to take the exchange as his own fault, which irritated Blair more. The man had an inward expression, as if the failing of the world was due to himself.

“I was in Africa, too. In the Cape Colony,” Leveret said.

“So?”

“When I heard you might be coming here, I was thrilled.”

* * *

Blair visited the newspaper office next to the hotel and Leveret followed.

Eight pages of
The Wigan Observer
were posted on the wall, announcing auctions of farm stocks and sawmills, vivid church pantomimes, complete railway timetables. Advertisements, too, of course. “Glenfield’s Starch Is the Only Kind Used in Her Majesty’s Laundry.” The
Illustrated London News
was also offered; its front page was devoted to the Lambeth Slasher.

“You notice there are no washday encomiums from the Slasher,” Blair pointed out. “Now there would be an endorsement.”

Punch, The Coal Question
and
The Miners’ Advocate
were offered to men,
Self-Help, Hints on Household Taste, The Englishwoman’s Review
to ladies. There were local histories like
Lancashire Catholics: Obstinate Souls
, and for the popular reader a selection of sensational novels about Wild West cowboys and Horse Marines. Glass cases displayed stationery, fountain pens, stamp boxes, steel nibs, India ink. A wooden rail divided the shop from an editor in an eyeshade scribbling at a desk. On the walls around him were framed photographs of derailed locomotives, gutted houses and mass funerals.

Blair called Leveret’s attention to the railway time-table in the newspaper. “Have you noticed this? Time-tables are the most reassuring information of modern life. Yet according to
The Observer
, same page, we read that five local people were run over in separate railroad accidents on Saturday night. Are these regularly scheduled executions?”

“On Saturday night workers drink, and to find their way home they follow the tracks.”

“Look at this, steamship notices that include free transport to Australia for female domestics. In what other nation would a ticket to a desert on the far side of the world be a lure?”

“You’re not an admirer of England.” The idea pained Leveret, so that he almost stuttered.

“Leveret, go away. Count the Bishop’s sheep, set mantraps, whatever you usually do, but leave me alone.”

“Can I get you something?” the editor said. His speech was lengthened by the Lancashire “o” and shortened by a “g”: “soomthin’.”

Blair pushed through the gate of the bar to study the photographs more closely. It was always educational to see what gas and steam could do to metal and brick. In one picture a building façade was sheared away like the front of a dollhouse, exposing a table and chairs set for tea. In another a locomotive had propelled itself like a rocket onto the roof of a brewery. Two pictures were labeled “Unfortunate Victims of the Hannay Pit Explosion.” The first was of the coal-mine yard. Standing figures were blurred while the bodies laid on the ground were in deathly focus. The other was of a long line of hearses drawn by horses with black plumes.

The editor said, “Miners believe in a proper send-off. The
Illustrated London News
covered that one. Still the biggest disaster of the year so far. Intense interest. You must have read about it.”

“No,” Blair said.

“Everyone read about it.”

“Do you have copies of that edition?”

The man pulled out a drawer of newspapers hung on rods. “Most of the inquest nearly verbatim. Otherwise you have to wait for the official report of the mines inspector. You seem familiar.”

Blair flipped through the newspapers. He had no interest in the explosion at the Hannay pit, but the editions that covered the accident, rescue attempts and inquiries into the disaster also covered the weeks after John Maypole disappeared.

In the February 1 issue, for example: “There will be a meeting of the patrons of the Home for Single Women
Who Have Fallen for the First Time despite the absence of Rev. Maypole. It is thought that Rev. Maypole has been called away by urgent family affairs.”

In the February 5 issue: “Rev. Chubb led prayers for the souls of parishioners who tragically lost their lives in the Hannay Pit Explosion. They are now with Christ. He also asked the congregation to pray for the safety of the curate, Rev. Maypole, who has not been heard from for two weeks.”

And on February 23: “All Saints Parish Church 21–St. Helen’s 6. Marked by William Jaxon’s two tries, the victory was dedicated to the Rev. John Maypole.”

The rest of the editorial columns were taken up with the disaster. An engraved illustration showed rescuers assembled around the base of a pit tower that was decorated at the top with a Lancashire rose.

“Could I buy these?”

“Oh, yes. We did special editions.”

“I’ll pay for the gentleman,” Leveret said.

“And a notebook, red ink, black ink and your best local map,” Blair said.

“An ordnance survey map?”

“Perfect.”

The editor wrapped the purchases without taking his eyes off Blair. “The Hannay pit explosion was a major story. It’s things like that put Wigan on the map.”

On the way out, Blair noticed among the books for sale one titled
“Nigger” Blair
, with a cover illustration of him shooting a gorilla. He had never worn a mustache and never seen a gorilla. They got his slouch hat right, though.

New country was best seen from a high point. Blair scrambled through a trapdoor to the open top of the Parish Church tower, startling pigeons off the finials. Leveret struggled to pull his long frame through, picking up feathers and dust on his bowler as he did. It was midday,
but the sky was as oily as dusk. When Blair opened and spread his map, granules of dirt immediately, visibly appeared on the paper.

Blair loved maps. He loved latitude, longitude, altitude. He loved the sense that with a sextant and a decent watch he could shoot the sun and determine his position anywhere on earth, and with a protractor and paper chart his position so that another man using his map could trace his steps to the exact same place, not a second or an inch off. He loved topography, the twists and folds of the earth, the shelves that became mountains, the mountains that were islands. He loved the inconstancy of the planet—shores that washed away, volcanoes that erupted from flat plains, rivers that looped first this way, then that. A map was, admittedly, no more than a moment in that flux, but as a visualization of time it was a work of art.

“What are you doing?” Leveret asked.

From a chamois purse Blair unwrapped a telescope; it was a German refractor with a Ramsden eyepiece, and easily his single most precious possession. He turned in a slow 360 degrees, sighting off the sun and checking a compass. “Getting my bearings. There’s no north indicated on the map, but I think I’ve got it now.” He drew an arrow on the map, an act that brought him a small, reflexive satisfaction.

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?