“Miss Bennet!” Susie cried.
“I am well!” Elizabeth answered quickly, though her heart was beating hard enough to shake her voice. She lifted her foot free with some difficulty and stepped back onto firmer boards. “The flooring is rotten here. No one else should come down until we know where it will bear weight.”
She lowered the lantern toward the broken place.
At first, she saw only mud.
Then something gleamed.
Elizabeth froze.
The light trembled in her hand, and for an instant she thought the glimmer might be water catching the flame. But the shine remained too warm, too yellow. She crouched carefully, keeping one hand upon the shelf, and brushed aside a smear of mud with the tip of a broken splinter.
A small round object emerged.
Gold.
She stared at it, unable to make sense of what she saw. It was a coin, or seemed to be one, though unlike any coin she had ever handled. Smaller than a guinea, heavier-looking, and marked with a profile so worn by age and mud that the face appeared almost ghostly.
“What is it?” Susie called from above. “Did you find something?”
Elizabeth did not answer immediately. She touched the coin with two fingers and lifted it from the mud. Beneath it, another faint yellow edge showed between the broken boards.
Then another.
And another.
“Miss Bennet?” Susie’s voice had gone thin.
Elizabeth slowly rose, the muddy coin resting in her palm. She looked from it to the collapsed plank, then to the damp earth below where more gold glimmered faintly in the lantern light.
“I think,” she said very carefully, “you had better fetch Mr. Philips now, John.”
John vanished at once.
Susie remained above, gripping the edge of the trap door. “Is it money?”
“I… I believe so.”
“You mean, like something foreign?”
Elizabeth held the coin nearer the lantern. The profile upon it was strange and severe, the lettering around the edge not English. Not French. Not anything she could read at a glance.
Her pulse quickened.
“I do not know,” she whispered. “But it is very, very old.”
She crouched again, no longer caring about the mud soaking the hem of her gown. With the splinter, she moved a little more silt aside and saw where the water had undermined the old flooring. Beneath the rotten planks was not merely packed earth, as she had expected, but broken stone and fragments of what looked like tile. Something harder lay below, perhaps an older floor, perhaps a foundation, perhaps some forgotten remnant of the city that had existed before London became London.
The coin in her palm seemed suddenly impossibly heavy.
Above her, Susie whispered, “Miss Lizzy, please come back up.”
Elizabeth ought to have obeyed. Everything sensible urged her to retreat, wait for Mr. Philips, and allow men with tools to decide what lay beneath the cellar.
Instead, she looked down at the glimmering line in the mud and felt curiosity burn brighter than fear.
“One moment more,” she murmured.
