Pat McIntosh - The Rough Collier

‘Fleming?’ said Arbella, her voice suddenly much stronger. ‘I thought he was dying!’

‘So did I,’ said Michael. ‘Mistress Weir, I’m right sorry if he’s up here again making a nuisance of himself — ’

‘He’s barred himself into the office,’ said Phemie, ‘wi’ the great desk across the door, and Jamesie set three of the men to have an eye to the place in case he got out. They’d found — Simmie found — ’ She halted, and looked at Alys.

‘Wax figures,’ said Joanna into the hesitation, and shivered. ‘Jamesie told me. Little mommets, all clothed and stabbed through wi’ thorns. Who would make such things here, Mother? Is it all true, then? Mother, I canny believe it, that one of this household — ’

‘I’ll not believe it,’ said Arbella, and slammed her stick on the floorboards. ‘There’s none in my household would practise such a thing. Fleming has made them himself, to cast suspicion on us!’

Alys preserved her countenance, aware of Michael looking at her.

‘Where is Gil?’ she asked him quietly.

‘He went back to Belstane with Lady Cunningham. I think he expected to find you there, and he wanted a word with Mistress Lithgo.’

‘Aye, where is my good-daughter?’ asked Arbella, catching the name. ‘Phemie, my pet, where is your mother? Not in her stillroom yet, surely?’

‘She’s at Belstane,’ said Phemie, ‘locked up they tell us, seeing she went there to confess to poisoning Thomas.’ She watched with evident satisfaction as Arbella stared at her. The old woman’s mouth fell open, her pale clear skin went an unpleasant blotchy yellow, and it was suddenly obvious that she painted her face.

‘Beatrice?’ she said sharply, making some recovery. ‘Beatrice has confessed to — ’

‘She spoke to me last night,’ said Alys. ‘I do not believe it, madame.’

Arbella studied her narrowly, then said much as Phemie had done, ‘Why no?’

To Alys’s relief, she was spared the need to answer this. Yet again, shouting broke out in the colliery yard below the house. Phemie craned to see down the hill, and sprang to her feet with an exclamation.

‘He’s out! Fleming’s out! He must ha’ slipped by the watch. Where’s he making for?’

Alys jumped up to look, and through the writhing glass saw the running figures, the pursuit, the staggering quarry. He reeled down the hillside between the scatter of huts as though he was drunk, the colliers slithering after him through the grey mud, and suddenly changed direction and dived into the doorway of another low wide building like the upper shaft-house. Two men reached it almost immediately, and Alys waited for them to follow him in and drag him out into the light, but they checked in the doorway as if frozen where they stood. Another reached them, and two more, and all stood staring into the little building in what seemed to be dismay.

‘What has happened?’ Alys said in alarm.

‘He’ll have gone down the shaft,’ said Phemie. ‘That’s the low shaft-house. He’ll ha’ fell in, the state he was in.’

‘Just like his father,’ said Arbella slowly, with a strange emphasis. She bent her head, crossing herself. ‘What an end.’

Alys hurried forward into the dark, half crouched, thinking that this was less of a treat than she had imagined it would be a week ago.

‘He still lives,’ said Arbella ahead of her. ‘Mind how you go, mistress.’

Alys nodded, then realized the movement would not be seen.

‘I am minding,’ she said, stooping lower where the candle lit a low curve in the roof.

The mine stank. She had not expected this. Brought up with stone, she knew the scents of damp rock, of the blood-red, rusty water and strange colourless plants which one found in dark places, but she had not been prepared for the distant smell of human ordure and rotted food. And rats, which scrabbled in the dark. Ahead of her Arbella picked her way up the slope, moving freely and confidently like a fish in water.

‘I take it right kind in you,’ the old woman continued, ‘to agree to come below ground with me. If she’d been here I’d ha’ brought my good-daughter, you understand, but you’re near as herb-wise so she tells me, and by what Jamesie said the man still lives.’

He could be heard groaning, Jamesie Meikle had said, the shaft being no more than five fathom deep. This had earned a sharp response from Arbella, along the lines that she had watched them sink it before he was born or thought of. Ignoring this, he had declared that he would not risk sending a man down by the shaft, because the winding-gear was old and needed to be repaired. He would need to get someone to go in with him from the mid ingo. Alys understood this to mean the middle of the three entries, the one not in current use. At this his mistress had announced that she would go, commandeered Alys’s help, and ordered Jamesie to assemble what was needful to get the man out, alive or dead, and follow them in.

So now, her riding-dress and hat left in the office, the skirts of her kirtle belted up, and one of the miners’ hooded leather sarks over all to protect her from falling stones, Alys was groping her way up the surprisingly steep slope behind a similarly clad Arbella, wondering how wise this had been, errand of mercy or no. Whatever Gil resolved about the death of Thomas Murray, it seemed likely to inconvenience the Pow Burn household, and she was uncertain how much Arbella knew she had discovered. Quite apart from Bel’s message on the slate, she reflected. Her purse, with the gruesome find from the upper shaft-house, was in the office with her riding-dress, and though she might feel as if it was outlined in red ink nobody else had reason to notice it, which was a small comfort.

‘I’ll not have Will Fleming’s son fall to his death in my coal-heugh,’ said Arbella suddenly, as if there had been an argument, ‘and let folk say I did nothing about it. If this one is no more than half the man the father was.’

Alys made some mechanical answer. She was staring about her, moving cautiously. The candle flame leaped and flickered in surprising draughts, but showed gaping dark places to right and left, perhaps the rooms Phemie had described, which meant that the massive pillars of living rock between them were the stoops. The roof was uneven, but seemed to be the lower surface of a bed of sandstone, the flame striking tiny sparks in the grains of sand in its matrix. The tunnel walls were black, but only a section at knee height was coal. There were sounds — dripping water, the rattle of an occasional falling stone, a faint creaking now and then. A shout, presumably from the surface, which resounded eerily in the tunnels and spaces. And it was dark, darker than she would have believed possible, outside the patches of candlelight.

At least, she reflected, there were likely to be no owls underground.

There was a groan which echoed along the tunnel, and faint voices, sounding oddly flat. Of course, if we are close, she thought, we must hear the men at the top of the shaft even when they don’t shout.

‘Here he is,’ said Arbella. She had halted, and was holding the candle over a sprawled shape on the tunnel floor. ‘Bring your light, lassie, and we’ll see what ails him.’

The tunnel was wider here, and there were various items strewn about, a broken basket full of spare tools, a couple of coils of rope, two wooden buckets big enough to hold a ten-year-old child. A bundle of timbers lay just to one side of the patch of stones and earth which had come down the shaft, and on it, back ominously reflexed, lay Fleming. Alys came forward, turned up one of the buckets and fixed both candles on its base by dripping wax to secure them.

‘It does not look good,’ she said.