“I told them to put him in one of the visiting footmen’s rooms for now,” said Elizabeth, appearing at Darcy’s side. “Here, drink this.” She handed him a cup of beer.
He immediately drained it. “Thank you. I had not realised how thirsty I was.”
“Or cold, I should wager. Put this on before you freeze.” She held out his green coat, which she must have had Vaughan bring down from his dressing room.
Darcy did as she bade him, though it was not the coat that produced the powerful feeling of warmth in his breast, but her beloved compassion. That warmth was instantly usurped by the same lurching feeling that had plagued him all night, and since he could not seize her to him to eradicate it, as he wished to, his only other recourse was to keep running away. “I must return to the search. Two men are still unaccounted for.”
Another hour passed before anyone remarked on the futility of the exercise. Even if they were fortunate enough not to have already suffocated, the sheer amount of rubble was more than this many men could shift in a fortnight, and as the night wore on, more and more mutterings to that effect reached Darcy’s ears. With a mounting sense of repugnance, he comprehended that the instruction to cease the search could only come from him.
“They will not stop until I tell them to,” he confided to Elizabeth on one of her many forays out of doors to help distribute refreshments.
“Then pray tell them. They are exhausted.Youare exhausted.”
“And condemn two men to death? I cannot do it.”
She squeezed his hand. “Yes, you can, because you must.”
He closed his eyes for a second, taking strength from the feel of her grip and bracing himself for the grim task, when a shout went up from the other side of the toppled wall. Darcy heard Elizabeth suck in her breath, and he held his with her while they waited to hear what had been found. It was not a body. It was not a person at all.
“There is a bloody great hole down here!” someone shouted.
“We know that you clodpole! Where do you think the rest of the library disappeared to? Up the Devil’s arse?” shouted Howes.
Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully to stifle a laugh and hastily marshalled the girls back indoors.
“No, sir,” the man called back. “I don’t mean downwards. I mean alongways. Looks like a tunnel.”
“How far underground is it?” came another voice—Jacobs’s.
“Hard to tell in the dark.”
In short order, a lantern had been lowered into the newly exposed cavity, and the architect had peered down after it.
“It is impossible to say with any certainty until I can look in the daylight,” he reported to Darcy. “But from what I can see, it bears a very striking resemblance to a drift mine.”
“That is not possible,” Darcy replied flatly. None of his forebears were fool enough to dig a mine under their own house.
Jacobs shrugged. “As I say, sir, I shall have to investigate more in the daylight. But it would explain an awful lot.”
It explained nothing to Darcy. He felt as though he were back in the dream state of earlier, where nothing made sense, and he had no power over any of it. So preoccupied was he with attempting to recall whether his father had ever mentioned mines on this part of the estate that it was a moment before the rising tide of shouts around him broke into his consciousness.
“Is it true?” Howes bellowed furiously from nearby.
Following his gaze, Darcy saw someone jogging towards them from the house. The shape materialised into Matthis.
“They have been found, sir!” he puffed as he arrived in front of Darcy. “According to his wife, Mr Ferguson has complained about these two lads before, for being work-shy. We sent a few footmen to look for them in case they were never here. And it turns out they were not. One was in his bed, the other was in the alehouse.”
A chorus of extremely vulgar oaths passed around the men, along with the clatter of two dozen tools being thrown down. Darcy did not object in the slightest. He would have shared their outrage had not he felt a bone-deep relief that he would not be required to give the command to cease searching for them.
The men quieted themselves when Elizabeth and her trusty legion of maids returned, this time with steaming hot toddies for everyone. As Darcy watched her move among the men, handing them drinks and thanking them all with her indefatigable vivacity, the strange feeling he thought had finally gone returned with a vengeance. It did not help that the ruin of the east wing loomed over her in the darkness like some monstrous beast with a mouthful of broken teeth—a hellish memorandum of what almost was. It disposed him to keep his departing speech brief, though he doubted any of the men would object, given the hour. He expressed his and Elizabeth’s sincere gratitude, commended their endeavours, and sent them home with very little ceremony.
He returned inside to discover that the saloon had been returned to perfect order. As he perched on one of the sofas, holding the plate of food Matthis had given him, he fancied he could be forgiven for thinking he had dreamt the whole disaster. If his wife were not moving about the room covered from head to foot in mud and dust, he would almost have believed it. He set the plate aside, his appetite long fled.
“I have had a room made up for you, Mr Jacobs,” Elizabeth said. “Matthis will show you.”
Jacobs thanked her and, also declining any supper, excused himself directly to bed, leaving the family alone. The room was so silent, Darcy’s ears began to ring, but then Georgiana said, quietly, “I never thought it would actually fall down.”
“None of us did,” Elizabeth replied.
