“So then I must have the blood. Or was there something else apart from the other four families that those wards were guarding against?”
Ghislain bit his lip and considered. Canny realized she could see his face quite clearly now, not just highlighted and outlined by the light of the candle, which had guttered and gone out, but in the radiance of the silvery, rain-washed twilight coming through the open window.
It was late. She had to be going.
“Well,” Ghislain said, tentative. “It wouldn’t be much of a ward if it wasn’t meant to guard against the Hames’ earth servants too, if any Hames happened to be still making them, and one happened to come this way.”
“I’m not made of earth.”
“No.” Now he was looking at her with troubled speculation. “What are you made of?” he said.
She made a small sound of sleepy displeasure, and he gathered her to him again. Canny muttered that he wasn’t doing a very good job of letting her go. Then she dozed for a while. She was roused by the first peeps of the dawn chorus—late, because of the rain. She lay doped with sleep and an unfamiliar ease of heart that warmed her from the inside out. Then she moaned and extracted herself from his grasp. “I have to go. I’ll be missed. The only way I can keep my freedom is to keep sneaking around.” She wouldn’t think about Cyrus Zarene and his testing bees and what he now knew. She was going to see Cyrus today—she’d have to act fearful and reproachful and try to make him grateful that she was keeping his bad behavior secret. Yes, she’d have to act—some more.
The floorboards were cold. Canny found her sneakers under the bed and crouched to lace them up. Her eyes were blurry and her fingers clumsy. Ghislain got down and helped her. Then he held her ankle and kissed her knee.
She waited, dumb and still, like a horse being shod. He let her go and followed her downstairs, out the door, and as far as the edge of the perfect lawn.
14
SHOLTO HAD FINISHED his porridge. Canny’s was cooling and forming a skin. “But I called her half an hour ago,” he complained to Susan.
“You go. I’ll chase her up,” Susan said, and watched him put on his oilskin and stomp off through the wet fields to the river path.
Susan went upstairs. She couldn’t hear the shower running. No one else was up. Even their hostess’s somehow forbidding door was sealed shut.
Susan found Canny still in bed and deeply asleep. The girl’s usually dry, witchy hair was stuck to her cheeks and neck as if it had been soaking wet when she’d climbed into bed. Susan lifted one long hank of hair so that she could see Canny’s sealed eyelid. She shook the girl.
Canny moaned.
“Did you have a bad night?”
“Mmmmf,” said Canny.
“Sholto’s gone to Massenfer. He’ll be back this afternoon and he’s going to expect to find you hard at work.”
Canny attempted to open her eyes. She squinted, then threw her arm over them.
Susan said, “Tell you what. I’ll make a start on the transcription, and as soon as you’re up, you can hurry to the apiary and take over from me.”
“Thanks,” Canny muttered, and heaved over, wound in her sheets as if these too had adhered to her overnight.
“Canny?” Susan said, wanting to ask the girl why she was wearing her clothes in bed. But Canny had gone under again.
* * *
CANNY DIDN’T GET TO THE APIARY TILL NOON. She kept a wary eye out for Cyrus Zarene as she crept into his house.
From the living room, she heard a magnified clunk and then Lealand Zarene’s voice.
“We pressed on to crosscut nine, which was about half a mile from the working face. Water was still seeping through from the shaft flooded in ’26, and the gateway was wet for about four hundred yards down from there. That wet patch was where we found the first intact bodies…” Clunk.
Canny peered around the doorframe. Susan was sitting at a highly polished table. The tape machine was before her. She was writing.
Canny went into the room. “Where is Mr. Zarene?”
Susan leaned back, laced her fingers together, and stretched. She said, “I expected you before now. Mr. Cyrus was heading over your way. You and he must have taken different paths. I’ve finished transcribing his interview. This is Sholto’s tape from late yesterday, of his interview with Mr. Lealand.” Susan got up. She tapped the pages. “When you finish with him, wind the tape all the way back and do Flossie Santini.”
“There’s a coal miner called Flossie?”
“Florentian Santini. Flossie. He still has his accent and is a bit exhausting to transcribe, so I thought I’d leave him to you.”
“Fine,” said Canny. She didn’t mean to sound surly, but it came out that way.
“Were you asleep all this time? Do you think you’re coming down with something?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
Susan flipped the rewind switch and let the tape spool back. “Just go from where I left off.” She pulled out the chair, inviting Canny to sit.
Canny sat and stared at Susan’s neat handwriting.
Susan said, “What are those marks on your neck?”
“Bee stings.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re off-color.”
“Could be.” Canny seized the opportunity that came her way—excuses were like a fog she wrapped around herself.
“That mead was delicious, thanks,” Susan said. “When you went to bed we finished the bottle.”
Which was what Canny had been counting on, inattentive chaperones last night and a late start this morning. She smiled at Susan. “I’m glad you liked it.”
When Susan had gone, Canny picked up her pencil and flipped the switch.
“… The shaft was wet for about four hundred yards down from there. That wet patch was where we found the first intact bodies. My father, Colvin, Uncle Talbot, my cousin Felix, and William Young, the union representative. They were all kneeling. They hadn’t even managed to get their breathers off their belts. They’d been stifled by chokedamp and had gone down where they stood. Or they had gone down defensively to brace against the blast—it would mostly have missed them, since they were just inside the crosscut.”
Canny paused the tape and scribbled down what she’d heard. Then she started again.
“Farther on the going was harder. There was burning debris and thick smoke funneling up the shaft. We found a shattered compressor. Its tank had ruptured and the kerosene had mixed with water, and although there wasn’t much air in the mine, the kerosene kept igniting periodically. Blue fire would run across the black water, then flame out. The bodies in that section were in a bad way, but we were able to retrieve three. Men kept going back with the stretchers, so eventually it was only—”
Canny paused the tape again. She found she been holding her breath. She wrote down what she remembered, then rewound to check that she’d got it all correctly. She had.
“—eventually it was only Mews and me. We went as far as we safely could. The bodies were hard to find. Hard to see. One was only recognizable as human from its thigh bone.”
Sholto’s voice. “But you brought what you could out?”
“Our stretcher held what was left of four bodies. Though we only knew it was four after the autopsy.”
“Mews told me that you insisted on going back in.”
“We were both pretty cut up at not being able to. Gas was building up in the mine again by that time, and it was deemed too dangerous to continue. I was off my head. The deputies slapped cuffs on me, put me in the back of a paddy wagon, and I spent the night in the cells in Massenfer. I was dozing in the cell when the vibrations of the second explosion woke me up. That was five hours after the search was called off, so another team could have gotten in and out again safely.”
Canny paused and caught up with the story. Then she turned the tape on again.
“There were two more explosions before they finally sealed the mine off, with eleven men still inside. Eleven bodies,” sa
id Lealand.
Canny listened to her brother’s businesslike noises of sympathy. She imagined Lealand staring coldly at Sholto. He must have, because Sholto quickly went on to something else. “You won’t take offense if I spend a few minutes checking various discrepancies in the accounts I have already?”
“Don’t you mean inconsistencies?”
“That’s a better word, yes.”
“‘Discrepancies’ is an accountant’s word.”
“Sorry. Okay—there was a storm raging at the time, but people in Massenfer report feeling the vibrations of the first explosion when they were sitting down to dinner.”
“That’s a discrepancy?”
“I’m just checking the timing. I don’t think any of my interviewees are being dishonest, obviously. Only—it’s thirty years ago now.”
“The storm was more over this end of the gorge. Also, I’m sure you can tell the difference between your house flexing in a westerly gale and in an earthquake.”
“Point taken,” said Sholto. “Okay. This next one is tricky. I don’t want you to take offense, but Mews got me wondering about the insurance policies. Apparently every Zarene in the mine had a large life insurance policy, taken out shortly before they all signed on.”
“Which looks suspicious since most of them died?”
“No. I don’t imagine a Zarene would insure Zarenes then arrange an accident.” Sholto sounded embarrassed.
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Lealand. “After the flood we were very aware of the possibilities of accidents. The Zarenes who signed on to earn money to pay lawyers and fight the dam project were insured so that, even if there was another accident, the rest of us wouldn’t lose the valley. It was cold-blooded caution. We had enough money to pay the premiums, but not enough for really good lawyers. My uncle Talbot was pessimistic. He was just seeing the possibility of calamity heaped on calamity. He didn’t want to lose everything.”
“Who were the beneficiaries of the policies?”
“A family trust.”
“That makes sense,” Sholto said, sounding a little disappointed. There was the rustling of papers.
Canny knew she should pause and try to work out what to write down. Did Sholto want his questions included? She should flip back and see what Susan had done. But she couldn’t stop listening.
Sholto’s voice. “I’m interested that, like several other people, you’ve mentioned the wet patch in the mine. Why do you think the fire didn’t flame out there?”
“It did. Nothing in the wet section was burned. My father and uncle and cousin Felix were all untouched. Dead, but untouched.”
Sholto cleared his throat. “In the disaster inquiry papers—which I reviewed again last night—Appleby, one of the accident inspectors, said that the mine burned from the working face to crosscut fifteen. Then the shaft was untouched by fire in the wet section, but burned up beyond that. Your cousin Cyrus was within a hundred yards of the mine’s entrance. He was blown up the gateway by the shock wave. His horses were killed, but not burned. But only a short way down from the dead horses there were signs of fire. The shaft was scorched from South Main, the big junction near the downcast, all the way down to the wet patch.”
“So?”
“No, wait, I’m not finished. The blast blew things up the gateway toward the surface. Appleby says the bodies and debris along the gateway from the wet section to the junction at South Main were as you’d expect, blown up the shaft, but they were burned as if the fire had come down the shaft.”
“The fire came up the shaft. The explosion was at the working face.”
“I have four different witnesses talking about two fires.”
“There couldn’t be two. The second explosion was nine hours later, once the gas had built up. It happened at three in the morning, while I was in Massenfer jail.”
“I said two fires, not two explosions. My four witnesses swear there were two fires, almost simultaneous, one traveling up the gateway from the working face—coal dust ignited by exploding methane gas—the other racing down the mine from the junction at South Main to the wet patch.”
“Impossible. Any explosion would consume all the methane and then would start a coal dust fire, which would rapidly use up all the oxygen, leaving carbon monoxide. That’s what killed most of the men, carbon monoxide. Chokedamp. Everyone in side tunnels untouched by the blast or fire—the chokedamp got them too. The men in the wet patch were killed by chokedamp. Two fires—that’s impossible, you must be able to see that.”
“If they were simultaneous—”
“How could they be?”
Sholto cleared his throat. There was more rustling. The creaking of someone wriggling around on a couch stuffed with horsehair. “Well,” he said nervously. “There would have been timers, I expect.”
“Timers?”
“Explosive devices,” muttered Sholto. “Dynamite.”
There was a silence. Canny looked at the tape. It was still spooling. There was tape hiss.
“Or perhaps,” said Lealand Zarene in a peaceful, mocking voice, “one of us was a foster child of fire, and when coal dust fire broke out in the mine after the explosion, the foster parent fire answered it by leaping forth and rushing to meet it headlong—like two rams on a hill.”
More silence, then, “What?” said Sholto.
“Two fires, with a wet patch between them, so they never locked horns.”
“What?” said Sholto again.
Then, “Explosive devices my arse,” said Lealand Zarene with dismissive contempt.
Canny listened to the little bit of tape after that. Sholto had tried to recover. He’d stammered and apologized and Lealand continued to sound scornful. Then Sholto had turned off the machine.
Canny wound back to listen again and this time kept pausing to faithfully transcribe every word. Question, answer, question, answer. Then she took a break. She went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water and drank it leaning against the kitchen bench. There was a bowl of apricots on the table. They were ripe and tempting, some overripe, with bruises that made their skin transparent. Canny plucked several out of the bowl and went back to her papers. She rewound the reel to its beginning and found Flossie Santini.
Mr. Santini, despite his unusual name, was not so interesting. He’d had some disagreement with management about the half-pie changes to safety measures after the flood in 1926. He’d survived the disaster because, like Lealand, he was on a different shift. He hadn’t been part of the rescue efforts, so his testimony was all about life in the mine before the disaster.
Canny dutifully transcribed what she heard and then spitefully added every cough and shuffle like stage directions. That would teach Sholto.
One of Flossie Santini’s stories made her laugh. He was complaining about how the Zarenes had come in and taken all the good jobs. One Zarene was promoted over his head, after only two years’ experience.
“Do you recall the name?”
“Cyrus, he was a chain runner. He survived, so I’m not speaking ill of the dead. Oh, and the other survivor, the kid, he was useless. He usually stuck by his uncle and father—Talbot and Colvin Zarene. He never lifted a pick, I swear. He used to walk around with a stick of chalk scribbling marks on the timbers and rock bolts. A zany. Baked in the head.”
“But he was drawing a wage?”
“Exactly. I’d come to the mine from Westport. I’d been a miner for six years. But the Bull Mine was a funny operation. Funny about the Zarenes. A mate of mine said they’d bring the mine luck. Said it with a perfectly straight face. Some luck!”
Canny rewound and scribbled, smiling to herself, imagining Zarenes turning up to sign on and flashing their tattooed forearms at any locals. And she imagined Ghislain with his chalk, standing guard over the Zarene patriarchs, and almost certainly telling the roof to stay in place.
* * *
SUSAN CAME BACK AROUND FOUR. “The rain’s stopped,” she said. “We won’t move the equipment today, but
you can carry the transcripts back to the guesthouse.”
Susan picked up the stack of papers, straightened its edges, and slipped it into a satchel. “I’ll box up the recorder and be along shortly.”
* * *
SHOLTO’S DAY HAD GONE QUITE WELL at first. He got to his appointment in good time, despite the greasy gorge road. The wife of his interviewee had kindly made him lunch. The interview was good, and unproblematic. Later he found what he was looking for in the county council records. He wasn’t being bamboozled by science, or strange stories.
Sholto had saved up his one unpleasant task for the end of the day. He had to place a call to Calvary in the Shackle Islands and tell his stepmother how Canny’d been out overnight.
He waited by the phone booths in the post office till his one lit up—the operator had gotten through.
When Sisema came on the line she didn’t sound alarmed, she sounded skeptical. “Whatever can be the matter?”
“This is a courtesy, really,” Sholto said. “Nothing is the matter. How are you and Da? I understand you had your picture on the front page of the Clarion?”
“You called to chat?” Sisema said.
“No. I called because I thought you should know that, a few days ago, Canny was out overnight.”
“Sholto!”
“Something upset her, and she stalked off, then got stuck up a rough hill in the dark. She chose to stay put, which was probably sensible. She’s fine now.”
“Did Susan upset her?” Sisema said.
“No. Of course not. There was an injured animal. She had to put it out of its misery.”
Silence. Then, “I can’t imagine Canny doing that,” Sisema said. Then, “And that’s what she told you? Might there have been somewhere else she was instead?”
“No. Where we’re staying there are only three houses. And there are no boys, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“There are always boys.”
“Here in Massenfer maybe. But where we’re staying there aren’t any. Besides, Canny isn’t interested in boys.”
“True.”
“And, Ma, you’ve seen the boys in Massenfer.”
Mortal Fire Page 23