Rose by Martin Cruz Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

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 shopshave 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 shiftedin turn until the houses presented a rolling, sagging, slowly collapsing landscape that was as much a product of