The Black Country was different than Wales had been, and they did things differently here, but a coal mine was a coal mine and Hammersmith looked without thinking for the familiar signs. He did not think of his childhood, not of the ponies clopping through the long, dark tunnels, not of the rats crawling over his legs, not of the silence or the loneliness. He simply followed the depressions in the snow of Sutton Price’s boots and looked for the dark shape of a pit.
And, eventually, there it was, a snow-covered mound, a scabbed-over black maw that had recently been scraped open. The snow around it was trampled and had been smoothed back over by a fresh accumulation. Hammersmith ducked and entered carefully. He listened, but heard nothing. He backed slowly down the wooden rungs and into the mouth of the seam. It was warmer here, and he sank down, rested with his back to the dirt wall, gave himself a few minutes.
He was in no shape to deal with a murderer and he knew it.
61
The train depot had sunk five inches into the tunnels beneath Blackhampton. Each tremor had driven the small building another inch into the ground. Calvin Campbell and Hester Price were inside when the first tremor hit, moved out into the snow before the second tremor, but had stayed inside since then. The building was solid and unadorned, and there was nothing inside to fall on them, except the ceiling. There were no shelves or statues or lamps, just three squat benches bolted firmly to the planks of the floor. And so they sat inside and listened to the earth tremble and the wind howl. Hester nestled against Calvin and he put his arm around her, and they stayed like that through three successive tremors, riding the depot as it sank.
“The train should have come,” Hester said.
“It’s the storm,” Calvin said.
“Will it still come tonight?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
He took his arm back and stood, stretched, and went to the tiny window, the glass shattered and crunching underfoot, snow piling up on the sill. There was nothing out there, no sign of an oncoming train. Only snow.
And, somewhere on the periphery of Calvin’s vision, a glint of metal.
–
The old horse was dead. Frozen solid, standing upright in its tracks. The American steadied his Whitworth against its back and took aim at the tiny black square in the front wall of the depot. The horse was already cold, and the fingers of the American’s right hand were stiff and tingling. He rubbed them against the leg of his trousers, but the friction only made them sting. He lowered the rifle and turned toward the young horse. Its black eyes followed him as he reached out and put his hand against its warm belly. It snorted, but didn’t stamp its hooves, didn’t move. Maybe it couldn’t. He supposed the beast was warmer on the inside and thought about cutting it open, but he needed that horse to get away from the village once Campbell was dead.
His fingers were limbering up a bit. They still stung, but he could move his trigger finger easily and that was all he needed. He withdrew his hand from the young horse’s belly and set the Whitworth back across the dead old horse’s back, pointed it at the depot, hunched down, closed his eyes, and made himself still. He opened his eyes and stared down the sight at the depot’s window and saw the blank white face of Calvin Campbell staring back at him.
The American pulled the trigger.
–
Another tremor hit the depot and the boxlike building bucked and swayed just as Hester Price rose from her bench in the middle of the room and approached Calvin Campbell. The big Scotsman was staring hard out the window and, when the building began to sink into the earth, he grabbed the windowsill. Hester heard the crinkling of broken glass and she drew in a last sharp breath, worried that Calvin had cut himself.
There was a whistling sound and then a faint pop from somewhere far away, and Hester’s knees gave out and she fell.
–
Calvin heard the distinctive whistle of a hexagonal Whitworth bullet and ducked, though he knew it was too late. If you heard the whistle, you were already dead, you just didn’t know it yet. But the tremor was shaking the ground hard, and he hoped that might be enough to throw off the shooter’s aim.
He let go of the windowsill and turned and saw Hester falling, the top of her head open like a bowl full of gore and Calvin fell, too, fell toward her, reaching out, trying to put himself in the path of the bullet that had already passed him.
He went down on his hands and knees and scrabbled across the floor, grabbed Hester up in his arms, leaving some essentials of her behind, and crabwalked with her to the wall. He didn’t cry out, didn’t make a sound, but his mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, as wide as it would go. His throat was tight, unrelenting, and it kept his grief bottled in his chest. He cradled Hester, protected her, and waited for Grey Eyes to come and finish the job.
Waited for his death and welcomed it.
–
The American immediately understood that he had missed. The bullet had passed right by Calvin Campbell and on into the building. He tried to adjust for the next shot, but the ground was shaking under him and he couldn’t hold the rifle still.
The young horse whinnied behind him, and he turned just in time to watch it disappear, pulled all at once down into the ground. The old horse toppled toward him and he tried to move, leapt to the side, but he wasn’t fast enough. He hit a high drift, sending spumes of snow into the air, and the horse fell against him with a loud whuff, pinning his leg and hip.
He couldn’t tell if anything was broken; there was no sensation at all, he was so cold. He pushed out against the old horse, but stopped and turned his head at a wrenching sound nearby. The back wheels of the carriage sank into the ground, and then its long wooden tongue lifted up and the entire thing tipped back and rolled away, out of sight somewhere below.
The American panicked and hit the old horse, beat his fists against it, reached for the Whitworth and smashed its butt against the horse’s back, but the beast didn’t budge.
He was surrounded by a roaring sound, as if he had stumbled into the fast-moving stream of a waterfall, plummeting blind through the churning foam, and then he was actually falling and the horse was falling with him and the world went dark around him and the sky receded.
He hit the floor of the shaft below him, hit it hard, and the horse came a second after. It landed heavily on his right foot. The foot jounced violently to the side, twisted like something strange, some inanimate thing that wasn’t connected to him, and there was a crunching sound and a blinding flash of pain that ended deep in his right shoulder.
He looked up and saw a mountain of ice and snow and dirt funneling down at him, on top of him. His open mouth filled with it, and his eyes shut automatically.
62
Day was worried about the boy’s bare feet. He had taken off his tattered gloves, shoved them on the ends of Peter’s feet, but he doubted they did any good. Still, it had made the boy giggle to see that he had monkey paws, and he had not complained about the cold.
Dr Kingsley also seemed to be struggling, carrying the girl through the snow. She hadn’t awakened yet, and that worried Day, too. Henry was the only one of them who seemed to be doing all right. Jessica had woken up and asked to be put down, but Henry had refused. He trudged along with her, polite but stubborn, his large body hunched over the schoolteacher as much as possible to protect her from the blowing snow.
The tremors hit them hard. Both Day and Kingsley fell down, dropping the children. Day heard a rifle’s report, but the crack of it echoed back and forth around them and he couldn’t locate it. He motioned to the others to stay down. Henry stood where he was, unaffected by the tremor, sheltering Jessica with his arms.