She arrived at the village entrance light-headed and with her lungs burning, but there were indeed a few pony wagons to take the elderly who wanted to look for loved ones. She recognized one of the women from the meeting she had organized and was given a space next to her on the back of the wagon.
She clasped the older woman’s hand. “What happened, Mrs. MacTavish?”
“Collapse,” Mrs. MacTavish said, her face pinched with worry. “Tunnel collapse at the north pit.”
“How many men in the tunnel?”
“Don’t know.”
The twenty minutes it took to reach the northern shelf at a quick trot were spent in tense silence.
Men and women had gathered around the redbrick building covering the heapstead of the north pit. The first person she recognized was Mhairi, sitting with a blank expression and her knees hugged to her chest against the brick wall. Her sister was next to her and had put an arm around her shoulders, but Mhairi gave no sign of noticing her. A few paces away, Mrs. Burns was holding Rosie Fraser. “Dear God, it’s Hamish,” Hattie said, to no one in particular, and her heart turned cold like a lump of ice.
It was Hamish, Mr. Boyd, and another man. It had been their final day of charting the pillar mining tunnels Rutland had ordered them to dig off the existing maps, and the ceiling had come down, separating them from another pair of workers on the other end of the tunnel. The pair had made their way back to the cage unharmed and come up to ring the alarm. Now they flanked Lucian, who was studying a map. “I propose we drill a shaft, aiming at the original path of the tunnel,” he said and tapped his finger on the map. “There is a chance they are trapped inside an air pocket.”
“But if that part of the tunnel’s still intact, won’t the ceiling come down if we drill through from above?” one of the younger men objected.
“It will, in part,” Lucian said grimly. “But if we don’t do it, they are lost with not even a chance. If you vote in favor, I’ll have the engineers ordered here by afternoon.”
After some discussion, the miners voted in favor of the risky rescue attempt, because there was not much to lose. Judging by the looks on the women’s faces, no one expected anyone to come up alive. Shock lay over the scene like fog, numbing all sound and the senses. Hattie wanted to go to Mhairi, but she was in her sister’s arms, and words seemed inadequate. Lucian strode past her with his face in harsh lines; he appeared not to see her.
“Lucian.” She recoiled when he turned to her. His eyes were wholly different, as though the man inside had been replaced with a coldhearted stranger. He had the same inhuman coldness about him when Rutland was mentioned, and it scared her.
“What will you do?” she whispered.
Lucian was looking past her at the horse he had borrowed. “I must go to Auchtermuchty. Will you be all right for a few hours?”
“Yes,” she said, feeling wretched. “Would it be useful to organize a soup kitchen here?” she asked. “Or at the site where you’ll begin to drill?”
“Meals, ale, and blankets near the drill site are useful,” Lucian said. “The community will know what to do. Give them a hand if you wish.”
He galloped off, and watching him disappear, she had to battle a rising panic. She must breathe. She must be calm. She must make herself useful and forget that they were all powerless now. She must not think of Hamish and the men fifteen feet below ground in the dark. He will dance with Mhairi again, she thought, and pictured him spinning the girl, their blue eyes laughing. He had to finish his novel. She turned and blindly searched for Mrs. MacTavish. I should have sketched him and Boyd while I still could. Her knees felt weak and she moved on to the next pony wagon slowly as if through treacle. The mining women’s pain surrounded her and squeezed her chest, and there was nothing, nothing she could do but to keep calm and carry on. She knew that if it were Lucian in the tunnel, ripped from her forever, she wouldn’t bear it.
The small telegraph office in Auchtermuchty was empty except for the clerk dozing behind his windowpane. The screams and the sound of women crying had to be inside Lucian’s head. The feeling of rocks crushing his chest—in his head. So he breathed, in and out, by sheer force of will.
“A telegram to Dundee,” he said.
The clerk was young, his upturned face pale and soft. It morphed into a dead, pale face with a halo of blond hair, and Lucian blinked, and blinked again.
“Sir?”
He focused on the painting on the wall behind the clerk. A glen, sweeping hills, open spaces. He dictated the message to Mr. Stewart, a mining engineer. Then he requested the name of a physician in Dundee, one who had experience in bone setting.