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hands. The train slid past a tower topped by a headgear that, even in the subdued light, Blair saw was painted red. On the other side, figures crossed single file across the slag, taking a shortcut home. Blair caught them in profile. They wore pants and coal dust too, but they were women.
    The track bridged the canal, over barges heaped with coal, then traveled by a gasworks and a rank of cotton mills, their high windows bright and the chimneys that drove their spinning machines spewing as much smoke as castles sacked and set ablaze. The locomotive slowed with its own blasts of steam. Tracks split off to goods sheds and yards. In the middle, like an island, was a platform with iron columns and hanging lamps. The train approached at a creep, gave a last convulsive shake and stopped.
    The Smallbones were up at once and in the aisle, ready to engage the forces of darkness. Earnshaw pulled a bag off the rack overhead. “Getting off?” he asked Blair.
    “No, I think I’ll ride to the end of the line.”
    “Really? I would have thought that Wigan was your sort of place.”
    “You’d be wrong.”
    “I hope so.”
    Earnshaw joined the Smallbones outside on the platform, where they were greeted by a priest in a cassock, making a happy circle of wraiths. At something Earnshaw said, the priest lifted an owlish gaze toward the train. Blair sat back, and the group’s attention was diverted by the arrival of a tall man in a bowler.
    Blair was two hundred pounds ahead—well, one hundred pounds ahead. Passage from Liverpool to the Gold Coast was ten pounds, and he knew he’d have to use a different name and disembark north of Accra, but doctors always ordered ocean voyages, didn’t they, so he’d recuperate on the way. With luck, he could be gone tomorrow.
    He replaced his hat over his eyes and was attempting to get comfortable when a hand prodded his shoulder. He tipped the hat back and looked up. The guard and the tall man from the platform stood over him.
    “Mr. Blair?”
    “Yes. Leveret?” Blair guessed.
    Silence seemed to be Leveret’s form of assent. A young man and a creature of contradiction, Blair thought. Leveret’s bowler was brushed but his jacket was crushed. His striped silk vest looked uneasy. His earnest, deep-set eyes pondered Blair’s lack of movement.
    “It’s Wigan.”
    “So it is,” Blair agreed.
    “You don’t look well.”
    “You’re an astute observer, Leveret. Not quite well enough to rise.”
    “You were thinking of staying on, from what I hear.”
    “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 shopsigns. 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,