The white fingers of the clerk leafed through the ledger.
White hands, palms up in the mud. Dead eyes, facing skyward. Sweat ran down his face, and his collar was sticky.
The clerk nervously licked his lips.
“Do you hear a bell?” Lucian asked him.
“N-no, sir.”
He kept breathing. It was all in his head. That was the problem. After years and years, the lid had lifted, and he remembered—no, he was not remembering; it was as though he were there, as though it were happening. The accident, the way they had looked, the sense of terror—and the problem was, he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t beat back the visions, or the noise, and his body had to just endure it. He unlocked his jaw and gave up the message to the physician.
“Would that be all, sir?”
His heart beat too fast; he was aware of that. He was aware the way a bystander might be aware of someone else’s pulse. He refocused on the painting, the ridges and the sky. He thought of the day in Lochnagar, of Harriet screaming her rage into the world. Would that his own rage could have been relieved in such a way. But it wasn’t just his rage; he carried the unheard screams of dozens, and he had worked, all his life, to give them a voice. There was no peace without justice. Harriet, he thought. My Harriet.
He pulled another shilling from his purse. “No,” he said. “I need to send another one, to London.”
When Lucian returned, he seemed more withdrawn than before. Since the miners had agreed on a digging point, he stayed on the site of the accident to help supervise the early stages of the drill-tower erection and did not join Harriet at the inn until two o’clock in the morning. She watched when he emerged from the side chamber, his steps heavy in the shadows. Grooves bracketed his mouth. He looked a decade older, and it near brought her to tears.
“It’s not your fault,” she told him when he joined her under the covers.
“Try to sleep,” he murmured, then turned his back to her. His body was tense, as if to safely lock his distress in his muscles, but it still seeped from his silent form and deepened the darkness in the room.
The following day, she was busy with cutting vegetables, clumsily peeling potatoes, handing out bowls with stew, and holding Mhairi, who was now alternating between openly weeping on people’s shoulders and sitting around immovable like a statue. She tried not to think, not to feel. Once and again, she was overcome. Then she sought out Lucian among the men, and he acknowledged her, but she sensed a coldness in him that made him an unsafe place for her grief. So she returned to the cooking pots. In the near distance, the drill was eating into the ground, at this point a potential savior as much as possibly the final nail in the coffin.
He slept with his back turned to her for the second night, and she was afraid to ask him why.
On the evening of the second day, the drill broke through the ceiling into an air pocket, and a man was lowered down in a cage. When he was pulled back up again, his fist was raised toward the blustering sky in victory—all men were alive. The relief was so overwhelming, Hattie broke into tears, and she cried harder as she watched Hamish and Boyd stagger into the arms of the women who loved them.
Lucian had looked ready to fall to his knees with gratitude when the first man, smeared from head to toe in black, had appeared aboveground. This would remain his only display of emotion, and by the time they returned to the inn later that night, he had withdrawn back into his peculiar cold shell.
Again he came to bed and got under the covers still wrapped in his robe, and Hattie knew she would find no comfort in his embrace. He lay stiffly by her side and stared into nothingness.
She raised her head from the pillow. “Lucian,” she whispered, a knot in her throat.
His gaze flicked into her direction. “Yes?”
Her heart cramped. Such a dispassionate yes. “What have I done wrong?”
He was avoiding her eyes. “Nothing.”
“Everyone is safe,” she said.
He leaned over and kissed her brow, and his lips felt cold.
She tried falling asleep, hoping he would not notice the tears trickling across her cheek. Surely he loved her. Surely she hadn’t imagined the bond between them, or the warmth in his eyes when he looked at her. Perhaps this was his regular reaction to great adversity. But the situation had passed; the men lived. Perhaps he was plagued by guilt since he owned Drummuir; he did seem to feel guilty about something. Surely none of this meant that her secret fear, her deepest fear—namely that he enjoyed her but didn’t truly love and respect her—was true.