Kathleen didn’t answer. She looked green. Bushell had read, had heard of the conditions in which the miners lived. Running up against the reality was like a kick in the face.
“You’re not a wealthy man, then?” he said.
McGaffigan stared at him, then laughed raucously. “Oh, sure and I am. This here is just me summer home, you know. Come winter, the missus and me, we takes an airship to our Florida mansion, and brings the young ‘uns with us.”
Bushell smiled, enjoying the miner’s pungent sarcasm. “One for you. But if you haven’t the money for a better house, how did you come by the train fare for your trip to New Liverpool? How did you manage to pay your hotel bills, you and all your friends?”
McGafflgan’s face went hooded, wary. “All the lads roundabout, we been pitching in sixpences and shillings and the odd half a crown as we could, all these past months,” he said at last. “Do it with enough of us, do it long enough, and in the end you have yourself a fair pile o’ brass.” Methodically, he began to wash his back. The water in the basin was now as black as he had been. Bushell marveled that it would still clean him. Pale skin did emerge from under the coal dust, though. Samuel Stanley said, “If you all clubbed together to pay for your journey, you’ll have the accounts of the money you collected, I expect. Who keeps those? We wouldn’t mind having a look at them.”
“Don’t recall offhand, I’m afeared,” McGaffigan answered casually, as if he’d been asked what he had for supper night before last. “D’you happen to remember the feller’s name, Maggie?”
“No,” his wife said, in the same sharp tones she’d used at the front door when she’d denied he lived there at all. “I never heard it, that I know of.” She smiled a quick, false smile. Kathleen Flannery exhaled sharply through her nose. That meant she had to take a deep breath a moment later, which made her look even less happy. Bushell didn’t so much as bother looking over at Stanley. He could read his adjutant’s thoughts, knowing they matched his own: Percy and Maggie McGaffigan were both liars, but the man of the family at least brought a certain amount of skill to the game.
“Thank you so much for your help,” Bushell said dryly.
Percy McGafflgan’s eyes kindled for a moment; not only could he use irony, he also recognized it when he heard it. He finished washing himself, dried his muscular upper body, and put back on a long-sleeved, collarless cotton shirt that, like everything else in the mean little house, had seen better days.
“Is that all?” his wife asked. “Our supper’s just about ready.”
“Only a couple more questions,” Bushell told her before turning back to Percy. “Where does the Michael O’Flynn who went with you to New Liverpool live?”
“Red Mike, you mean? He’s out on Colliery Road - number 29, I think, unless I misrecall.”
“That is a help,” Bushell said, meaning it this time. “One more thing, and we’ll leave you be for the evening: do you know a man from up in the Six Nations named Joseph Kilbride? If you do, have you seen him in the last few days?”
“I know a Daniel Kilbride, but he was born in Charleroi, same as me,” McGaffigan answered. “Poor devil had his leg crushed in a cave-in a couple-three years ago. He’s been on the dole ever since, tryin’ to raise a family on ten quid a week. Now I’ve got it hard, like all us working blokes do, but oh, Mother Mary, I pity the likes o’ poor Daniel - and too bloody many like him there are, too.”
Bushell thought he was telling the truth, but doubted his own judgment. To check it, he asked Maggie McGaffigan, “Have you seen this Joseph Kilbride?”
“That I haven’t,” she said. “I never heard o’ the man, nor wanted to, neither.” The pride and relief with which she spoke convinced Bushell that here, at least, she wasn’t lying. He left the McGaffigans’ home neither elated nor cast down; he hadn’t expected to come away with much in the way of new information, and so wasn’t unduly disappointed when he didn’t. It got very quiet when he and his companions came out onto Lantern Way. The children in the street stopped their games and stared at them. So did the couple of miners who’d carried chairs out onto their lawns to try to escape the heat - and, no doubt, the smells - inside their houses.
“They’ll all grill the McGaffigans as soon as we’re out of sight,” Stanley muttered out of the side of his mouth.
“How can you imagine such a thing?” Bushell said, as if incredulous. Stanley chuckled softly. Bushell was looking across Lantern Way, not at the men there but at the houses. While those on this side leaned to the left, those on that leaned to the right, so as to be parallel to them. He wondered how many tunnels, and how deep, had been gnawed in blackness through black seams of coal under Charleroi, and how many had fallen in upon themselves to make the very ground ripple and buckle and the houses built upon it list like ships on a stormy sea or drunken men.
Kathleen Flannery also spoke in a low voice, but one filled with fury: “Any man who lives like this but isn’t a Son of Liberty, he’s the crazy one.”
“Something to that,” Sam Stanley said. “If you’ve got nothing, you go with anything that offers you hope of better.”
When a man of manifest conservatism like Stanley could speak such sentiments, the squalor of Percy McGaffigan’s home, of Percy McGaffigan’s life, had to have bitten deeply into him. But Bushell shook his head. “If your roof leaks, you don’t burn down your house to fix it.” He kicked at a clod of dirt. “Oh, maybe you do, if you’re twenty-five or so and don’t know better. But then you have to live in the ruins you made yourself, and that teaches you something - or it should.”
“There’s more wrong with McGaffigan’s house than the roof,” Kathleen said, “and you may take that literally or metaphorically, as you please.”
Bushell raised an eyebrow. “The idea, Dr. Flannery, is to convince me that you’re not a Son of Liberty, not that you are.”
“If you don’t know by now that I’m not - “ She stopped and glared at him. “But I don’t turn a blind eye to misery or injustice, unlike some people I could name.”
“You want to think before the next time you say something like that to an officer of the Crown.” Bushell spoke so quietly, Kathleen had to lean forward to hear what he said. When she did, she rocked back as if he’d slapped her.
Samuel Stanley pulled out the map they’d got from Chief Lassiter. “Let’s see whether we’re closer to Rothrock’s house or to Red Mike O’Flynn’s,” he said, changing the subject the best way he could find. It worked. “Here, let me have a look at that,” Bushell said. In his army days, he’d learned to have an enormous amount of respect for maps. With them, you could do anything. Without, you’d wander in the desert like the children of Israel, and likely never come to the Promised Land. Kathleen Flannery bent over the map, too. She stabbed out a red-painted fingernail. “There’s Coker Drive,” she said. “It’s only a couple of blocks over, and then a couple down toward the river, too.” She grimaced. “I’m going to have tired feet tonight.”
“We’ll all have tired feet tonight,” Bushell said, accepting the tacit truce. “All right, we’ll go talk with Mr. Anthony Aurelius Rothrock. Let’s see if he sings a more interesting song.”
Rothrock’s house was also on a block built back to back. Unlike McGaffigan’s, it faced not Coker Drive itself but the alley behind it, giving him and his family a charming view of lavatories and dustbins. Someone had put naphthalene in the outhouses, so the reek that came from them was half barnyard, half mothballs. It was stronger if marginally less unpleasant than straight sewage would have been. Where McGaffigan’s house listed to the left, Rothrock’s leaned forward, so that the wall at the base of the roof overhung the door by a startling and rather alarming amount. As he had in Doshoweh, Bushell wondered what an earthquake would do to the place. Then he thought again of all the tunnels worming under Charleroi, and decided the whole town might well plunge into the abyss. From what he’d seen here, he wondered if that might not be the best thing that could happen to it. He knocked on the door; like McGaffigan’s, Rothrock’s house was innocent of bell. The door didn’t open. Instead, a middle-aged man with a walrus mustache, a stubbly chin, and a surly expression stuck his head out the window and glowered at him and his companions. “Who the hell’re you?” he growled, the slur in his speech arguing he’d been home long enough to knock back more than a couple of drinks.