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pasteboard. Twenty rugby players in makeshift uniforms of sweaters and shorts posed in two rows, one sitting and one standing, before a painted backdrop of a garden. Instead of shoes, they wore clogs with leather uppers and wooden soles. The men were slope-shouldered, powerful, some with legs as bowed as a bulldog’s. The middle man in front marked the occasion by holding a rugby ball on which was written in white ink, “Wigan 14–Warrington0.” The group was balanced by the placement of the only two tall men at opposite ends of the back row. One was dark, with thick hair and a fierce glare directed at the lens. The other was fair, with eyes as placid as a veal calf’s. By this figure was the notation in Leveret’s hand “Rev. John Maypole.” Etched on the reverse was “Hotham’s Photographic Studio, Wigan. Portraits, Novelties, Stereoscopics.”
    Even taking into consideration the dramatized language of letters, Leveret’s words were a eulogy. A confused eulogy, since he didn’t know what tense to use in writing about the missing curate, past or present, dead or alive. It also struck Blair that for such a public figure as Maypole there was little indication of much hue and cry when he disappeared.
    He studied the photograph again. About the other men there was a worn quality. In the youngest this was a gauntness around their eyes, in the oldest a trademark smudging on the foreheads and hands that wasn’t ordinary dirt. By comparison, John Edward Maypole’s hair was brushed back from a smooth brow. A chinless quality marred his profile, but made him look more sincere.
    Blair put the letter and picture away. He liked the name. Maypole. A good English name with both rustic and erotic connections, a hint of maids honoring pagan gods as they braided garlands around an ancient symbol of fertility. He doubted such a picture had ever come to the curate’s mind, no more than thought could penetrate solid marble, he decided. The same could probably be said for the “inconsolable soul mate,” Miss Charlotte Hannay. Blair imagined different possible Miss Hannays. A virtuous Miss Hannay with a corset and a bun, dressed in mourning just in case? A pretty and brainless Miss Hannay who would ride a pony cart to visit the poor? A practical Miss Hannay ready with bandages and remedies, a local Florence Nightingale?
    The dark sky turned darker, not with clouds but with a more pungent ingredient. From the window, Blair saw what could have been the towering effluent plume of a volcano, except that there was no erupting volcanic cone, no mountain of any size, in fact, between the Pennines to the east and the sea to the west, nothing but swale and hill above the long tilt of underground carboniferous deposits. The smoke rose not from a single point but as a dark veil across the northern horizon, as if all the land thereafter was on fire. Only closer could a traveler tell that the horizon was an unbroken line of chimneys.
    Chimneys congregated around cotton mills, glassworks, iron foundries, chemical works, dye works, brick works. But the most monumental chimneys were at the coal pits, as if the earth itself had been turned into one great factory. When Blake wrote of “dark Satanic mills,” he meant chimneys.
    The hour was almost dusk, but this darkness was premature. Even Earnshaw stared through the window with some awe. When enough chimneys had passed one by one, the sky turned the ashen gray of an eclipse. On either side private tracks connected pits to the canal ahead. Between the pall and the lines of steel lay Wigan, at first sight looking more like smoldering ruins rather than a town.
    Coal was worked into the town itself, creating coal tips that were black hills of slag. On some, coal gas escaped as little flames that darted from peak to peak like blue imps. The train slowed along a pit as a cageload of miners reached the surface. Coated in coal dust, the men were almost invisible except for the safety lamps in their