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work in difficult places, that’s absolutely true. Your company, when you control your language, isn’t disagreeable. It’s pathetic to see you reduced to this condition. Tomorrow you’ll be boiling your boots and dining on them. Or dining on the citizens of London. No, you’re not a rabbit.”
    “Then get me out of this place.”
    The Bishop put his hands together in a way that on anyone else would have looked like prayer; on him it was simply concentration. “You’d ship to New York out of Liverpool?”
    Blair nodded, for the first time with a little hope.
    “Then there might be something for you on the way,” Hannay continued.
    “What’s on the way?”
    “Wigan.”
    Blair laughed, surprised that he had the strength. He said, “Thanks, I’d rather starve.”
    “Wigan is mining country. The world is full of mines, you said so yourself.”
    “I meant gold mines, not coal.”
    “But you started in coal mines.”
    “So I know the difference.”
    “A hundred pounds,” Hannay said. “And expenses.”
    “You owe me the hundred. Expenses in Wigan? You mean all the meat pie I can eat?”
    “And a place on next year’s expedition. They’ll be mustering in Zanzibar and attempting to cross the continent from the east coast of Africa to the west, aiming for the mouth of the Congo. I can’t guarantee theposition—I’m only a sponsor—but I will speak for your character.”
    Blair refilled his glass and tried to keep the decanter steady. This was all he could have hoped for, weighed against Wigan.
    “Just to look at a coal mine? There are a hundred better men for that already in Wigan.”
    “No. What I want you to do is for the Church.”
    “Lectures? Lantern slides of Africa? Missionaries I have admired, that kind of thing?”
    “That would strain credulity too much. No, something better suited to your nature, your curiosity, your peculiar background. Something private. I have a young curate in Wigan. A Low Church kind of curate, the evangelical kind. Practically Methodist, almost Wesleyan. A zealot for preaching to fallen women and convicted men. The problem is not that he’s a fool but that I can’t find him. Like the white rabbit, he has gone down a hole and disappeared.”
    “You mean he went in a mine?” Blair asked.
    “No, no, just that he’s vanished. It’s been two months since he was seen in Wigan. The police have asked questions, but our constables are local lads trained mainly for subduing drunks and finding poachers.”
    “Bring in a detective from the outside.”
    “Miners despise detectives as strikebreakers, which they usually are. You, on the other hand, blend in. You did it in Africa as well as a white man could.”
    “You could get someone from London.”
    “Someone from London would be lost. They wouldn’t understand five words a Lancashireman said. Your mother was from Wigan, wasn’t she? I seem to remember the two of us sitting at a campfire in the middle of the Sudan and your confiding that information.”
    “We’d talked about everything else.”
    “It was completely natural. My home is Wigan. It’s amutual bond between us. You lived in Wigan before your mother took you to America.”
    “What’s your point?”
    “That when someone in Wigan speaks to you, you will comprehend what he’s saying.”
    Gin and port was not a bad combination. The chills faded. The mind focused.
    “There’s more to it,” Blair said. “You’re not going to all this trouble simply for a wayward curate. Especially a fool.”
    Bishop Hannay sat forward, pleased. “Of course there’s more. The curate is engaged to my daughter. If he was outside a pub and skulled by an Irishman, I want to know. If he was saving a prostitute and seduced in turn, I want to know. Quietly, through an agent of mine, so my daughter and I and the rest of the nation won’t be reading about it in the newspapers.”
    “Anything could have happened. He could have fallen down a shaft, into a canal, under a coal