Rose by Martin Cruz Smith

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 Charlottebecame 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