“What’s your name again, child?”
“Anna. Anna Price.”
“The boy shared a name with you.”
“Yes.”
Kingsley waited, looked nervously at the black bag on the table, aware that time was passing and that someone might be bleeding downstairs. But he was loath to interrupt whatever Anna was experiencing and equally uncomfortable about leaving her alone in the room with the body of her brother.
“He could talk a little bit,” Anna said. “Only some words. And he could walk a bit, too, but he fell down a lot. He said my name. But he was sick. He coughed and he cried too much. He said my name when he was crying, but I didn’t help him.”
Kingsley reached out and laid his hand lightly on her shoulder, and she turned and buried her face against him and he felt her small body convulsing with grief. He hugged her and felt his throat constrict with the memory of Fiona, sobbing, inconsolable at the death of her mother. He had felt useless then and he felt useless now. Anna said something, but the folds of Kingsley’s waistcoat smothered her words.
“What did you say, Anna?”
She pulled her face away from him and looked up. Tears streamed down her cheeks and snot coated her upper lip. Her eyes were bright pink, bloodshot and swollen. “I put him there,” she said. “Peter and I did that.”
“Put him where, child?”
“In the well. We threw him into the dark, and he never liked being in the dark. But we did it anyway. He was gone already and we didn’t know what to do.”
Kingsley pulled back, horrified and confused. He put his hands on the girl’s shoulders and pushed her away, held her at arm’s length and looked at her livid eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, to try to understand what she was saying, but then the world opened up and collapsed around them.
The roof broke open with an earsplitting roar, and the wind and the snow and the ice banged into the room and filled it, and the spidery black sky came crashing down. Anna was torn from Kingsley’s grip as something hit him hard in the back and sent him stumbling across the room. He heard her screaming from somewhere nearby. He hit the wall and spun around and gasped as a tree thrust itself at him too fast for escape.
Icy branches punctured the plaster wall all around him and pushed through into the next room, and Anna Price stopped screaming and the world became curiously silent.
57
It sounded like a freight train bearing down on him, and Hammersmith was half turned, off balance, when the tremor reached him and threw him face-first into a drift. It buried him completely as snow shook loose and caved in over him. It was womblike under there, but cold crystalline light filtered through the white blanket. Hammersmith panicked and windmilled his arms, pushed himself up, and shook himself off. The handful of bloodstained rags that Rose had given him lay partially buried at his feet. Hammersmith touched his fingers to his head. They came back clean. No fresh blood. The wound was healing already. Or was frozen stiff. He turned and tried to see the inn with its giant protective tree through the falling grey sky, but it was invisible. He was alone.
It was possible that something had happened at the inn. The majority of the noise had come from that direction, not far behind Hammersmith. He remembered what he’d been told, that the villagers routinely shoveled snow off their roofs in the winter before their buildings became dangerously heavy. Nobody had done much shoveling in the past two days. He shook his head and turned and continued on the way he had been going. He left the rags in the snow, the red turning to pink and slowly disappearing under fresh snow.
Somewhere ahead of him was the killer of Oliver Price. He was sure of it.
–
Vicar Brothwood threw himself upon the altar as the entire church tipped and dropped several inches into a tunnel.
The building weighed nearly three hundred tons, a fact the vicar wasn’t privy to, but he had known for years that it was only a matter of time before the ground gave way under much of the village. It was, after all, a coal-mining village. What could one do except trust in the Lord and pray for the best?
The pews, which Henry had hastily put back in place, now slid across the center aisle and tapped against the pews on the other side of the sanctuary. The latter pews were fastened to the floor and held their ground against the heavy tide. Brothwood counted three sick men who had been knocked to the ground. The others, perhaps a hundred people, had stayed in place, even as pews and candlesticks and bibles skated smoothly past them. Brothwood smiled to see that a handful of people had slept through the disaster.
He ran to help the three men back onto their pews and sent up a silent prayer of thanks. Then he crossed his fingers, hoping the building would stay put just a little while longer, just until the people of Blackhampton were back on their feet.
–
A small tree, bigger than a sapling, but not more than five or six years old, had fallen across Day and knocked him into the snow. Its trunk was as big around as his leg, and he lay there, catching his breath. Henry reached down and grabbed the tree, flung it aside, took a fistful of Day’s torn overcoat in his massive paw, and pulled the inspector to his feet.
“Thank you, Henry.”
“What happened, do you think?”
“This village. They’ve dug tunnels all under it, chiseled out the coal in the ground. Everything’s sinking now. There’s nothing to hold it all up.”
“That tree didn’t sink; it fell.”
“Its roots weren’t anchored. It was top-heavy.”
“Other trees fell, too. Look.”
“Indeed.”
They had left the road, cut cross-country toward the train depot, hoping to make better time, but the snow was deeper here and it had been a hard, slow slog. Day had lost count of the tremors they’d felt, but the tree line was a shaggy crosshatch of felled trees, their roots now exposed to the air like some other hidden forest made suddenly visible and vulnerable.
“Look.” Henry pointed through the grey at the village on the other side of the road, not far, but in another world, on the distant horizon, made so by the storm.
Day squinted and saw a fuzz of smoke. He galumphed along through the snow hoping for a better view. “Henry, is that the inn?”
“It’s a tree, sir. A big one.”
“But under the tree, Henry?”
“Under the tree, that’s a house, but it’s all gone now, isn’t it?”
“Henry, that’s the inn. Nevil’s in there! And Dr Kingsley!”
Day galloped ahead, sending sprays of powder up on either side, but not moving very quickly despite the energy he was expending. Henry opened his overcoat and checked the little box inside. Baby bird Oliver looked up and chirped, snug in his nest, warmed by Henry’s body heat and the tangle of straw in the box. Henry closed the box again, made sure it was securely tucked away, buttoned his coat, and then strode along easily after Day.
58
Sutton Price helped his daughter down the rungs, took a lantern that hung from a hook on the wall, and lit it. Opened the shutter and grabbed Virginia’s hand. He pulled her into the black mouth that led to the warren of tunnels and away from the active seam. He moved along, slow and steady, matching her pace. She seemed unperturbed by the darkness, the damp, the strange echoes of their footsteps that faded away from them under the earth.
At least here it was warm.
Neither of them spoke until they reached a place where the tunnel widened out and formed a sort of unnatural cavern, roughly ten yards around. No digging had been done there in a generation, but it had been inhabited. There was a bedroll, unkempt and dirty, kicked against one wall, and evidence of a recent fire in the center of the room. A thick coil of rope, a stout wooden crate, and three jars of water kept the bedroll company. The entrance to another tunnel across from them led to more tunnels. Between the coal and ashes of the campfire and that other tunnel mouth there was a mound of settled dirt. The mound was six feet by three feet and rounded across the top. Two short sticks had been lashed together in the shape of a cross and stuck into the cavern floor at one end of the mound. A trench had been dug next to the mound, also six feet by three feet. An upright shovel rested against the wall, its blade biting into the dirt floor.