by Maren Smith
“What do you mean, ‘of course’?” Her faith in his abilities struck him as nothing short of humbling.
“I left a note for the Brodys,” she explained. “I told them exactly where we are. If we aren’t back by sundown, I’ve directed them to summon the constable and come directly to our rescue.” She patted his cheek again. “Of course, I was thinking more along the lines of a cave-in, but...”
Her voice trailed away, but Leverton didn’t care. He could have laughed; he could have kissed her, too. Fumbling in the darkness, he did both, accidentally missing her mouth entirely as he planted a huge, wet one right across the bridge of her nose. He didn’t even care. Together, they watched as that single crack of light disappeared completely under a layer of dirt, leaving them truly alone in the dark.
Without the sun, it very quickly began to turn rather chilly.
“Hm,” Elspeth softly said as Leverton settled himself as comfortably as possible to wait.
“What?”
“Oh...nothing.”
“Come on.” He meant to pat her hand, but got her leg instead. “Spit it out. What?”
“Well.” She drew a contemplative breath. “It just occurred to me to wonder...Can the Brodys read at all, do you think?”
Chapter Seven
“Here’s a torch,” Elspeth said helpfully, as if he could see her. As if he could even see the ground he was crawling over.
“That makes five torches,” he said, trying to maintain a strict mask of cheerfulness. “How about the flint? Have you felt anything like that yet?”
They were both on hands and knees, sweeping their fingers back and forth across the cut-stone floor in total darkness. Even Leverton, although his hands were absolute agony, joined in the search, but he was still bleeding and everything he touched came away feeling sticky and wet.
“I’ve got it!” Elspeth suddenly crowed from somewhere to his right. He sat up at the same time that she swiveled around, and they cracked heads in the darkness.
“Ow!” He grabbed her head first, more to make sure he wasn’t going to get cracked again, and then he explored his own throbbing lip. Great, now he was bleeding there, too.
“Are you okay?” she whispered, as if a reduction in vocal volume could somehow also lower the level of pain.
He felt along the front of his mouth, but contrary to how it felt, all his teeth were still firmly attached. “Fine, thank you.”
“Good.” She cheered up. “Stay back, then. I’m going to try lighting one.”
That she didn’t immediately whack her fingers was as surprising as the instant shower of sparks that ever so briefly cast back the darkness to illuminate the tiny area they huddled in. It was just enough for him to see Elspeth was half a foot too far from the tinder to do any good. She shifted in the darkness and then tried again. This time, the tinder caught. So did the pocket of his coat, but at this point he was far beyond caring about the little things. He lit one of the torches off those errant flames before she could pat them out.
“Sorry,” she said, wincing slightly.
He waved her apology aside. “That coat is the least of our worries.”
With the torch in hand, he stood up, holding their light high enough to illuminate as much of the underground room as possible. It looked like a cellar, stacked with old crates and barrels, statues (like the one holding the spear that had somehow miraculously avoided skewering him in the fall) and bags of burlap. Four pillars of stone lent support to the cut-stone ceiling but, judging by the roots dangling through the mortar between the bricks, twice that many would still not be enough to keep the ceiling and walls from crumbling in on them for very much longer. Buried as it was under the short hill, time might have forgotten this old Roman structure, but nature had not.
“We need to get out of here,” he said, rather unnecessarily.
“Leverton...”
“Yes, I know. I’m sorry.” Shaking his head at himself, Leverton frowned up the length of the walls to the hole, blocked by those two planks and only Jack knew how much dirt on top of that.
“Leverton,” Elspeth said again.
He rubbed his chin with one hand, and then fingered the handle of the mallet he still carried, slung through his belt like a highwayman’s pistol. “Maybe if we stack the barrels and crates like one gigantic pyramid...”
“Leverton, look.”
It was the strangeness of her tone that finally caught his attention. When he turned around, he found her bent over one of the burlap sacks, holding it open with one slightly shaking hand.
“What is it?” He came back to her, holding the torch aloft while he parted the folds. All that he saw was sparkling. He blinked twice, hardly believing his eyes.
“It’s money,” Elspeth affirmed. She reached into the bag and pulled out a cup that shone like gold and glittered all around the sides with inset gems. “Silver, gold...jewelry... diamonds. Leverton, I think we’ve found our bog pirates’ hidden hoard.”
Dropping the folds of the sack and handing the torch to Elspeth, he turned to the chest directly in front of him. His mallet made very short work of the padlock, and when he swung the lid up, he found more of the same, sparkling riches that confounded reason. He had to touch it—dipping slowly into the box and emerging with a handful of cold coins and a veritable rainbow array of gems—just to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating.
“No wonder Rome fell,” he finally said. “They left all their money here.”
“They didn’t exactly leave England of their own accord.” Elspeth put the cup back as she’d found it. “We aren’t all milquetoasts, you know. It took a few hundred years, but eventually we captured them all and either, you know...” she ran a finger along her own lovely throat, making a very disagreeable sound as she did so. “Or we sent them running home with their tails properly tucked.”
His eyes narrowed slightly as he studied her. “Are you calling me...a milquetoast?”
Elspeth blinked, drawing back in surprise. “Of course not. All I meant was, this would take merely one jolly good surprise attack, one without any survivors and, voila, here we are.” She gestured with the torch, including the entire tomblike room, but Leverton never took his eyes off her. “This chamber isn’t exactly obvious, you see.”
Leverton dropped the lid back on the chest, resting one hand on top of it as he faced her. “You are, aren’t you? That milquetoast comment was directly squarely at me. You think I’m a milquetoast!”
“Oh, hang!” she snapped, almost throwing the torch as she threw both hands up in the air. “One would think we had more urgent things to do than argue!”
“Don’t change the subject!” he snapped right back. “Do you, or do you not think of me as—”
“Fine!” she shouted. “You did grab me awfully quickly, you know!”
“I was trying to comfort you!”
“But I wasn’t panicked. I knew I’d left a note!”
That was almost funny enough for him to laugh. Almost. “For people who can’t read. But you don’t hear me calling you an addle-patted git, now do you?”
Even in the torchlight, he could see the rise of red rushing to her cheeks and the flashing of her eyes. “I am not a git. I never said they couldn’t read. I said I don’t know whether or not they can. There’s a difference.”
“Not when you’re buried thirty feet underground!”
“Oh, fine!” she shouted, throwing her hands up into the air all over again. Her eyes were not just flashing anymore. Now they were flooding, too. “We’ll just chalk this up as being all my fault, shall we!”
Leverton squared his shoulders, trying to toughen himself for the sight of that single tear that escaped over her lashes and spilled quickly down her cheek. His tone softened anyway. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She turned sharply away from him, all but slapping the tear from her face, she swiped at it so vigorously. She probably would have stormed away if he hadn’t caught her shoulder. “Elspeth.” He took a seat on that chest full of m
oney and pulled her down onto his lap, holding her there with one hand upon her knee and the other balanced lightly upon the side of her hip. She stayed as he placed her, but stiffly. “Elspeth, I blame Jack, squarely and solely, but I also don’t appreciate the disparaging remarks. I do not think you are addle-patted, and I certain do not think of you as a git.”
Ever so gradually, some of the stiffness went out of her back. She sniffled, knuckling the tears from her cheeks again but much more gently than before. “It wasn’t my intent to call you a milquetoast, either. At least, not until after you made me angry.”
The implication still stung, but willing to let the argument die, Leverton took the high road. “Obviously, I took offense where none existed. I apologize.”
“You should.” The set of her shoulders softened and, after a moment, she turned her head to look at him. Her lashes were damp and her chin wobbled, but she nodded anyway. “But you were wounded,” she conceded. “Loss of blood can make anyone take things the wrong way.”
Great. He wasn’t merely a weakling, he was lightheaded and feeble, too. Leverton bit his tongue and kept the shaky peace.
“Here.” Elspeth sniffed and patted her leg. “Give me your hands.”
He obliged, but only because he didn’t want to spark another argument. Turning his gaze back to the ceiling, he studied the problem of how to get back up to the hole while she ever so gingerly prodded the torn flesh across his palms and the knuckles of all eight fingers. Only his thumbs had escaped injury and yet, oddly enough, still hurt anyway.
“We have to get you out of here or these are going to get infected.”
“Don’t worry.” He patted her knee. “We’ll have run out of air long before that happens.”
She glanced up from his hands, following his stare to the ceiling. “We need more light.”
Pushing back to her feet, she gathered up the extra torches and began to circle the room, fitting all five into the wall sconces and igniting them. There was now almost enough light to banish the shadows completely, but they were also burning oxygen much, much faster. Curling tails of smoke were rising from the torches, developing into a thin mist of grey.
Standing up, Leverton went to stand beneath the hole. He kicked a few loose stones out of the way, and then the bigger clumps of grass and dirt that had fallen in yesterday when Elspeth almost had. When the floor was as clear as he could make it, he began to count out the number of crates. “If we can reach those planks, then maybe we can set them on fire. Or, at the very least, maybe we can weaken them enough for the weight of the dirt above to collapse them. We’ll have air again, at any rate. You might also be able to stand on my shoulders and reach the top, heaving yourself up onto the grass, and then you could go for help—”
“There’s an alcove here,” Elspeth called from across the room.
“You’ll have to take your clothes off, of course,” Leverton said, more to himself as he rubbed his chin again. “You can’t exactly climb onto my shoulders with skirts on.”
“Leverton...”
He held up one authoritative hand. “For once, Elspeth, don’t argue. Our balance will be precarious enough as it is, and at that height, to fall will break both our necks.” He grabbed hold of the nearest crate and tried to push it into place, but a quick test of his strength barely budged it an inch. “Never fear.” He grunted. “I’ll not send you scampering across the lawn in your all-together.” He turned only far enough to cast her a quick and, hopefully, reassuring smile. “You can wear my clothes if you like. And the whole time you’re changing, I promise I’ll keep my eyes closed.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Trust me.”
“Or,” she interrupted, thoroughly unimpressed by his magnanimous offer, “we could use the door.”
When he snapped around, she reached behind the pillar that was blocking his view of the poorly lit wall and, rusty hinges squealing, pulled open a half-rotted door.
“Or we could use the door,” Leverton crowed, abandoning both his plan and the crate as he scrambled over a mound of bulky, treasure-filled sacks to join her. He grabbed a torch and then rounded the pillar to look inside. “Or at least we could... if only it weren’t caved in.”
Disappointment crushed them both as they gazed up that narrow stretch of a staircase that was, after only three steep steps, completely buried under rock, square-cut foundation bricks and massive amounts of dirt.
“Maybe if we dump out one of the barrels...” Elspeth began.
“We could break it and use the slats for digging,” Leverton finished, and then looked at his hands. He clenched them once, trying not to wince.
“Can you dig?” she asked, not unkindly.
“If the Brodys can read, then in about six hours, they’ll find your note and in about eight hours, with any luck and the constable in tow, they might find us.” Leverton looked up at the smoke filling the upper dome of the buried cellar. “In about five hours, we’re going to run out of air.”
“Less than that, if we leave the torches burning,” she corrected, helpfully.
Setting the torch into the nearest wall sconce, Leverton held out his hands to her, wounded palms up. “Help me bind them. I can dig.”
Elspeth bent, pulling up the layers of her skirts until she found the ties of her underskirt and quickly wriggled out of it. He was grinning by the time she straightened, the thin, white fabric in her hands as she ripped the weakest seam apart. “What?”
“It’s nothing.” But his smile didn’t diminish, and when she only stood there, watching him and waiting, he finally shook his head at himself and said, “Sooner or later, I knew I’d get you out of your clothes.”
* * * * *
It was almost night when, stooped and bent, Sylva Ackart shuffled her way through the cemetery towards her husband’s grave. Her knees popped, but she lowered herself to kneel anyway. Crossing herself once, she clasped her hands and bowed her head to pray. She wasn’t even halfway through her first Hail Mary when the sound of ripping roots had her opening her eyes and a bloody, bandaged fist suddenly punched up through the grassy grave. The filthy fingers clawed once at the air and thick streams of hellish black smoke rose up from the ground all around it.
Sylva screamed. It had been thirty years since she’d last scrambled to her feet so quickly and, waving her arms frantically above her head, she fled the cemetery.
Leverton roared as he broke through the thick blanket of grass, sucking hard at the fresh air as he clawed his way back up onto solid ground. A thick billow of smoke came up out of the hole he’d made, but he didn’t collapse—by sheer force of will, he didn’t collapse. Crawling on his knees, he turned around and dove headfirst back into that hole far enough to grab Elspeth’s arm. Only when she lay coughing and gasping on the grave next to him, did he finally roll onto his back and simply luxuriate in the joys of breathing. Dimly, he thought he heard an old woman’s hysterical screams, but the sound was already fast receding and frankly, he had other concerns on his mind.
Between ragged coughing fits, he managed to pant out, “We...we need to...get the con...constable.”
Covered in dirt, her face every bit as streaked with smoke and sweat as his own, Elspeth opened her eyes. She tipped her head back to look at the stone grave marker not six inches from the top of her head. Groaning, she not only sat up, but crawled completely over the top of him to get off the grave.
“I think we’ve come up through the cemetery,” Leverton finally noticed. Sitting up brought on another burst of coughing, but he crawled to his knees anyway. The screaming, which had been fading but which now was building in volume and proximity again, began to take on a whole new meaning. “Oh, dear.” He reached over to grab Elspeth’s arm. “Time to run now.”
Elspeth both coughed and groaned as he stood up, forcefully heaving her onto her own feet alongside him. “Why?”
“The people of Penny’s Weight are coming.” He bodily turned her around to see for herself. “And they have pitchforks.”
It
was dusk, but not dark by any stretch of the imagination when they tumbled over the fence that separated the cemetery from the empty sheep’s pasture. Tired as they both were, they never would have got away if Elspeth hadn’t taken him straight into the nearest bog. Night was rapidly falling, and no one had brought a source of light. Lining up along the fence that bordered the bog’s edge, the concerned citizens of Penny’s Weight watched after them until Leverton could no longer hear their panicked voices, much less see them.
“We need to get help before we run into Jack,” he panted, holding onto Elspeth’s hand to keep from accidentally losing her in the growing darkness.
“We have to get home before the Brodys find my note. If they come looking for us and run into that mob...” Elspeth didn’t finish her thought, but she didn’t have to. When they changed direction, he put all his effort into following each of her steps exactly and did his best not to slow her down.
Night was well and truly upon them by the time the lights of Motteldine Hall drew them in from the bog. There was a candle burning, it seemed, in every single window of the house. But it wasn’t until they had staggered up the road and passed through the front gates that Leverton realized why.
The entire local constabulary, all three of them, were standing on the front lawn, talking with Jack and both the Brodys. Annie had her face buried in her apron, openly weeping while her husband tried unsuccessfully to console her.
“In western bog,” Jack was saying. “Lord only knows why they’d gone out there.”
“You saw them go down?” the lead constable asked.
“That I did, m’lord. She fell in first—what with that gimpy leg o’ ‘ers—and ‘e went in straight after ‘er.”
Leverton opened his mouth to call out, but Elspeth beat him to it.
“Liar!” she bellowed, and everybody standing on and in front of the porch jumped half out of their skins. Edward Brody grabbed his chest, and Jack fell backwards up the steps, almost as if he were trying to hide behind the old man.