The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet Read online

  A week went by and the moon waxed to full, still in relatively cloudless weather; so bright was the beautiful silver orb that one could read by it, and that despite the belching chimneys of Manchester, not far away. As luck would have it, the wind favoured them by blowing the smoke eastward into Yorkshire.

  Then the moon, rising later each night, began to wane, and no child had yet been seen. That made it more likely that the poor Children of Jesus were now imprisoned; despair began to invade the hearts of the searchers, so buoyed up with enthusiasm when the search had begun.

  Ned Skinner wanted none of search parties; he preferred to work on his own, and had his own theories as to where to look. While the three groups of men were still what he considered too far south, he was mounted on Jupiter and prowling high up the Derwent, particularly where a strong tributary fed into it. Fitz hadn’t wanted him to ride, protesting that his outline against the starry sky would give his presence away, but Ned took no notice. That was the chief problem with the three search parties as far as he was concerned: they went on foot, leading their horses, and it made them far too slow.

  He had his own spyglass, a more powerful instrument than any Fitz owned; it had belonged to a sea captain much attracted to voyaging into the kinds of places where a sailor might need to check whether the natives on a beach were carrying human heads. From horseback height its range was over long distances, yet at close quarters it was crisp and clear, for it telescoped for accurate focus, and this was by no means the first time it had come in handy during Ned’s nocturnal adventures.

  The moon was waning now, so it was rising later. However, the twilight didn’t fully bleed away until shortly before the moon came up, and Ned had no intention of leaving his hiding place until twilight was gone. He had taken over a cave, but it was a simple, probably wind-hewn declivity in an outcropping of soft rock. It had room for him and Jupiter, and he had made several trips to stock it with food for him and the horse. No sweet grass on the moors!

  Full darkness had fallen when he ventured out, the eastern sky already silvering to herald the imminence of moonrise. Perhaps at no other moment would even his sharp eyes have discerned the white glint of falling water on the tributary, miles to his west. His thumbs pricked; he stiffened in the saddle enough to transmit his change of mood to Jupiter, which shook its head. He reached forward to pat its neck.

  “Easy, old man,” he said quietly.

  They moved at a trot until the waterfall came entirely into view: about fifty feet high, and containing a good volume of water that widened at its base into a broad pool. Its only possible source could be a large spring, probably not far above the cliff over which it tumbled. Were it closer to other spectacular attractions it would have drawn visitors, but it sat amid some miles of uninspiring hills, gorges and moors. The Peak, away to the south, was about as far as visitors went unless they were poets, writers, painters or other peculiar folk enamoured of desertion wherein to rove and roam. At night, suchlike were usually tucked up in a warm bed at an inn or a farmstead. Certainly none such were abroad this night. He had it all to himself.

  Finding a patch of shadow from an overhang, Ned slid from Jupiter’s back and prepared the animal for one of the waits he inflicted upon it occasionally. Then, quieter than a stalking cat, he edged toward the pool, keeping in the shadows.

  The pool’s margin was limestone, polished to a slight sheen in a yard-wide ribbon that led from the side of the waterfall to the grass, in which it persisted for about a hundred more yards before dwindling to invisibility. A path worn by little feet! On the border between the grass and the limestone he paused, head cocked, listening, but could hear nothing alien over the sound of the falling water. He reached into the left pocket of his greatcoat, and into the right, to make sure his pistols were ready, and his knives. Following the path to the edge of the waterfall, he discovered that it dived behind the curtain of water, and was dry because the wind blew the spray eastward.

  He passed through a huge opening to enter a vast cavern lit by amazing lamps as well as candles reeking of tallow. Fairly level, the floor was filled with plain wooden tables at which little robed figures stood over basins and bowls, mortars and pestles, apparently engaged in mixing substances together, or grinding them to powder. At one side of the cave and close to the entrance was a huge alcove containing a very hot coal fire, iron rods holding iron cauldrons and pots over the shimmering, shivering surface. A strange-looking cupola blocked off the top of the alcove, its pinnacle sprouting a wide metal tube that led, braced on brackets, to the outside air behind the falls. Whatever its principle, it was efficient, for there was hardly any smoke in the cavern. Near it were condensers for distillation, and a whole table devoted to filtering liquids through cheesecloth or cloth. The Children of Jesus laboratory, wherein Father Dominus made his cure-alls!

  In this dim environment the children had pulled off their cowls—all boys, Ned decided, for they all bore the little bald spot of a tonsure on the crowns of their heads. Girls were never tonsured that he had heard of. Almost thirty of them, with a big lad roaming from table to table—features coarse, eyes pitiless. They were afraid of him, and flinched or shuddered when he approached. Not Mary’s Brother Ignatius, he decided. This one had no heart.

  Getting past Brother Jerome (for so one boy had addressed him) was difficult, but Ned succeeded when the youth went to the fire and roared for more coal—that must be an exercise, the lugging of sacks of coal! At its rear the cave tapered down to a high, quite wide tunnel. A short passage, it opened into another vast, artificially lit cavern, in which were more tables. These contained bottles being filled through funnels from ladles dipped into ewers—the girls! Longer hair, no tonsures. They were working in a frenzy, though no one supervised. That meant Brother Jerome must have charge of all of the children. Where was Father Dominus?

  The air was filled with odours, all sorts from disgusting to sickly-sweet; did Father Dominus make women’s perfumes as well as the traditionally foul things that cured ailments? Somewhere in the mélange Ned’s nose identified one particular smell, a smell he knew, sniffed regularly. Gunpowder! Ye gods, what was the old bugger up to? The moment he inhaled it, Ned knew why the caves in the south had subsided: Father Dominus in the guise of Guy Fawkes had blown them up! That meant he must have been using them too, and realised when he met Charlie that he would have to abandon them. What better way than gunpowder? He was an apothecary, he would know how to make it. Even I, thought Ned, could make it if I knew the correct proportions of the ingredients, which are just sulphur, saltpetre and powdered charcoal. So simple, so destructive…

  Where was the gunpowder? Then he saw that the passageway between the laboratory and the bottling cave was wider than it looked; its sides were stacked with small barrels. But where was the trail of powder that led to the detonating cask? Gunpowder was black as pitch, the floor covered in black dust—was the whole floor the trail? No, it would fizzle. Though air got in, the bottling cave felt more stifling than the laboratory one. Producing noxious fumes and smoke from a big fire, the laboratory would have to be closest to the outside air.

  First thing to do, he decided, was to eliminate Brother Jerome. Sooner or later he would come down the passage to see what the girls were doing. Ned moved into the most lightless spot near the end of the short corridor, and pulled out a knife. It would have to be quick and efficient; let the youth shout once, and Father Dominus might appear. Brother Jerome would be easy to deal with, but Father Dominus was as intelligent as he was crazed, and until he could find the fuse trail, Ned wanted the old man oblivious to his presence. For he had to get the girls out; that was what Fitz would want him to do above all else. The boys were on the far side of the kegs of explosives, and would fare at least a little better. The girls would either be buried under falling rock or immured in blackness to perish slowly, perhaps in agony from injuries. An insupportable thought.

  Sure enough, here came Brother Jerome. He never knew what had happened to him,
so quick the knife that went in under his rib cage and twisted up to the left to pierce his heart. He dropped like a stone, voiceless.

  Ned stepped out of the shadows and walked up to the nearest of the tables, at which six little girls were counting pills into small round boxes. The pills were lavender in colour, a sure sign they were for kidney trouble. Everyone knew that.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said quietly, “and don’t cry out. I’m here to save you. Do you see those kegs stacked in the passage? They’re full of gunpowder. If you’re here when it blows up, you’ll die. I want you to go among the other tables and tell the girls to move into the waterfall cave—truly, I mean you no harm!”

  They stared at him round-eyed, never having seen a man so big or so burly, and perhaps something of his strength resonated within them as comforting, for none cried out, or tried to run. A more ruthless man than Ned Skinner would have been hard to find, yet in that moment he radiated truth as well as strength. What he could not know was that they were hideously aware of gunpowder and its dangers, for they had made it, seen two of their number die, and suspected that they would all become its victims. They had noticed the change in Father Dominus, and feared him desperately. Father had taken to calling the girls wicked, unclean, polluted, and ranted that women were creations of Lucifer. Sister Therese had vanished; at first they had thought she had gone to Mother Beata, but then Brother Jerome began to boast that he had twisted her neck, and that they believed implicitly.

  Soon all the little girls were hurrying through the keg-lined corridor, spilling out of it among the boys, who looked bewildered, though some looked displeased. When Ned appeared in the wake of the last girl, they bleated and milled about, a few boys trying to slip past him into the passage. But he could always deal with boys.

  Out came a pistol; he brandished it. “Go on, get out into the fresh air! This place is going to come down! Stay here and you’ll be blown up. Out! Out!”

  Since the only path to freedom led into the open air, they began streaming under the waterfall and into the night, while Ned went back to locate the gunpowder fuse.

  As he walked he cocked his pistol, flipped the frizzen back off the powder pan and into position for the spark, then curled his finger around the trigger, carrying the firearm straight and fully horizontal; once the powder in the pan was exposed, the weapon couldn’t be tilted in case the hole carrying the spark to the charge became blocked.

  Some paces short of the passageway stood Father Dominus, face twisted up in fury and frustration, a blazing torch in his left hand.

  “You interfering fool!” the old man screamed. “How dare you steal my children?”

  Ned shot him in the left chest, deeming that the easiest way out of an invidious situation. But Father Dominus had a fanatic’s strength, and hurled the torch backward into the passageway despite his mortal wound. “I am dead, and you will die with me!”

  No, thought Ned, unperturbed. I’m too far from the blast, and moving at a run toward the waterfall. But the vagaries of cavern design carried some of the stupendous explosion forward into the laboratory cave, which collapsed together with most of the hill, honeycombed by Father Dominus’s caves. Ned felt the boulder strike his legs and pelvis, and a colossal agony; I am done for after all, he thought, but it is worth it, to have done this one last good turn for my dearest Fitz.

  The explosions echoed across the moors and came clearly to the searchers working their way slowly around The Peak.

  The three leaders had gathered for a conference when the great booming noise reached them.

  “That’s no cave subsidence,” said Fitz. “Gunpowder!”

  They had horses with them; Charlie and Angus ran to get their parties mounted while Fitz rode north grim-faced, his own men after him as soon as they could. Ned had intended starting at this end, Fitz was thinking—pray God he’s all right! Pray God the children are all right!

  Leaderless and rudderless, the children hadn’t fled the scene save to run beyond the range of falling boulders; they were huddled together, weeping, when Fitz and his group rode up, and let themselves be wrapped in blankets the men carried, given water liberally laced with rum.

  Fitz moved among them in search of a cognisant face, and chose a little girl about ten years old because she was acting rather like a mother hen toward the others.

  “I’m Fitz,” said the man who never let people outside the near family use his Christian name. “What’s your name?”

  “Sister Camille,” she said.

  “Have you seen a very big man named Ned?”

  “Oh, yes! He saved us, Fitz.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “He said the passage was stacked with gunpowder and we would die unless we ran outside. Some of the boys tried to stop us, but Ned waved his pistol at them and we all ran. The gunpowder exploded just the way it did when we were making it. Sister Anne and Brother James were killed then, and my eyebrows got burned off. So when Ned told us it would blow up, we knew it would. I think Ned didn’t expect us to believe him.”

  Fitz’s heart had plummeted. “Is Ned still inside, Camille?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie and Angus were riding up with their men, rejoicing at the sight of all those little brown-robed figures.

  “Bad news,” Fitz said to the other two. “Ned found this cave, and got the children out just in time. Father Dominus had stuffed it with gunpowder—he actually forced the children to make it! A boy and a girl were killed in the process. Can you credit the depth of his villainy? Ned hasn’t come out.” He drew a breath, balled his hands into fists. “I must go in to look for him. Charlie, tell Tom Madderbury to ride to Pemberley. We’ll need the barouche for Ned—I doubt we’d get him into a fully closed carriage. Also carts and wagons to bring the children. Hot food in hay boxes for the children. They’ll sleep after water laced with rum, but we can’t keep them here. The best place to put them is the ballroom—have Parmenter light fires at that end of the house to make sure it’s dry. And tell Madderbury to make sure everybody knows the children will be part-blind from living in dim light. Their full sight will come back, but it will take time. We must have the wooden stretcher with the slight curve for Ned in case his back is broken, splints of other kinds, bandages, wadding, compresses, laudanum as well as the strongest opium syrup. Make sure Marshall is waiting for us. He can see the children too.”

  Charlie went off at once; Fitz turned to Angus. “It wasn’t difficult to shed Charlie, but now I must ask you to step back, Angus. I must go in alone.”

  “No, I insist I go with you.”

  “Angus, you can’t! There’s no point in losing more than one man if more landslides are to come. It wasn’t a natural convulsion, but the result of an explosion, and we don’t know enough about the effects of explosions in enclosed places to run unnecessary risks. If I think it’s safe, I’ll tell you. And keep Charlie out.”

  Seeing the good sense in this, Angus waited outside, and when Charlie would have rushed in after his father, persuaded him that one death, if death there had to be, was preferable to two. Only reminding Charlie of his mother deterred him.

  The waterfall was gone, though the pool was still there, and the cavern entrance was revealed as yawning. A torch in his left hand, Fitz entered a world of rubble and rocks; like most Peak District caves, it was dry and wind-blown, of little interest to sightseers. He didn’t understand that it had been hidden by a waterfall, so wondered why no one had ever noticed it.

  “Ned!” he called. “Ned! Ned!”

  Where he stood was reasonably safe, he thought, but where once there had probably been a vast cavern was now an immense heap of boulders interspersed with smaller, sharper rocks, and much rubble. Strain his ears though he did, he could hear no trickling earth or groans from overtaxed stones: nothing to suggest a further fall. He moved onward, treading lightly, warily.

  “Ned! Ned! Ned! Ned!”

  “Here,” said a weak voice.

  Following the s
ound, Fitz discovered Ned lying half under a boulder that concealed his legs and lower torso from sight.

  “Ned,” he whispered, sinking to his knees.

  “Are they safe? Did they all get out?”

  “Every last one. Don’t speak, Ned. First we have to get this almighty stone off you.”

  “I doubt that will make any difference to the outcome, Fitz. I’m done for.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “No, the simple truth. Bladder and bowels are squashed flat. Hip bones too. But you can try. You won’t rest if you don’t try, will you?”

  The tears were pouring down Fitz’s face. “Yes, Ned, I have to try. It is my nature. We’ll dose you with opium first.”

  Charlie appeared at his father’s shoulder. “Pater—no, I refuse to use that ridiculously pretentious term, even if it is Darcy custom and tradition! Papa is good enough for most men, and good enough for me. Papa, what is to be done?”

  “Papa is good enough for me too, Charlie.” Fitz got to his feet, heedless of his tears. “Did the opium come? I think we can lever the stone off him with two or three stout men and stout iron poles. Have we any with us?”

  “Yes. We had no idea whether we might have to shift rocks, so we included them.” He looked wry. “And a keg of gunpowder.” He knelt on one side of Ned, his father on the other.

  “What happened to Father Dominus, Ned?” Fitz asked.

  “I shot the old bastard in the heart. Should have gone down like a stone, but he didn’t. Carrying a torch, threw it into the passage. Must have heard me, and piled up powder in front of the detonating keg. I swear there was none when I walked through it back to the front cave.” Ned groaned, reached for Fitz’s hand. “I’m glad I lived to see you again.”

  “Take heart, you’ll see years more of me.”

  They decided not to move him until the barouche came, which was at dawn, lending some natural light to the shambles inside the cave. Fitz hadn’t left Ned’s side, though Charlie moved back and forth; Angus had inherited the duty of caring for the children.