Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore

Chapter 30

Their drowsy morning was interrupted by the sound of a bell clanging hard and fast in the distance.

“It sounds like a fire bell …” Hattie murmured, and turned in Lucian’s arms. She faltered. Lucian’s whole body had gone still and his stare was vacant. He did not seem alive.

“Lucian—”

He was on his feet like a shot and grabbed his robe.

“What is it?” She detangled herself from the sheets and joined him at the window. He didn’t acknowledge her; his eyes were searching the horizon in the direction of the mine. “An accident,” he then said, his tone cold as a tomb.

Mhairi came into view below the window, running down the path toward Heather Row with her apron strings flying behind her. She was moving at the reckless, mindless speed of someone running for her life. Then Miss Clara was following her. And Mrs. Burns. All the while, the bell kept tolling.

Hattie felt nauseous. “We have to help,” she said, and pulled her chemise from the back of the armchair. It released Lucian from his numbness. His hand clamped around her arm hard enough to startle her. He released her at once, but his face was white as bone.

“Stay here,” he said.

“But—”

He shook his head. “Trust me.”

He began to dress, his movements quick and mechanical, as if he were an automaton.

She reached for her chemise. “I’m coming with you.”

His head snapped toward her. “Unless you want to see things that will haunt your nights, I advise you to stay here.”

She felt sick. She kept getting dressed. Lucian clenched his jaw. “Very well,” he bit out. “I cannot stop you. But forgive me—I’ll get one of the horses and ride ahead. If you must go all the way to the site of the accident, try and get one of the pony wagons.”

She was still wrestling herself into a walking dress when she heard the thunder of hooves, and a glance out the window confirmed that Lucian was galloping toward the village.

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. Mac-Tavish?”

“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.

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.

When she woke late the next morning, Lucian was at the table with his back turned to the bed, and he was writing something. The sight of the turned back immediately dampened her overall sense of relief.

“Would you like to join me at breakfast?” she asked when she was dressed.

He glanced up. “I’m not hungry,” he said. “Would you mind ordering something to the room?”

“I think a change of scenery shall do me good,” she said, suddenly impatient with his abrasiveness and how needy and unloved it made her feel. “I shall go alone.”

She ordered a full Scottish breakfast despite her lack of appetite. She listlessly leafed through the paper with yesterday’s news while waiting for her meal. Until one of the headlines made her blood freeze in her veins. She sat in quiet shock for a long moment before she could fold the paper and make her way back up the stairs.