Forever and Ever (7 page)

Why did she feel relieved when he chuckled at that? She couldn’t imagine, but he had a warm, low laugh, and the mellow sound of it went a long way toward dispelling the tension in the air between them. In truth, she was glad the things she’d said, and the stiffness with which she’d said them, hadn’t insulted him. Jack Pendarvis was proud, she’d begun to realize, and as prickly about his dignity as she was about hers. So. They had something in common.

He put his hand out again—to help her into the pony cart, she thought, so she took it. But instead he kept her hand in a light, firm clasp while he said softly, suggestively, “You’ll have to tell me someday what other things my society has
provoked
in you, Miss Deene.” Impudent! Before she could think of a response, he added, “Are you going to lend me that book, after all?”

She pulled her hand forcibly out of his. “No, I am not.”

“Why not?”

“I fear the subtleties would be lost on you.”

“Ah, now, Miss Deene.” He shook his head sadly. “That’s a hard thing to say to a man you just finished apologizing to.”

“
Apologizing.
Why, I did no such thing. How you could possibly—” The white flash of his teeth silenced her; with a start, she realized he was teasing. Thoroughly confounded now, she set her foot on the high step and reached for the reins. Mr. Pendarvis put his hands on her waist, but she sprang up into the seat with such alacrity, she barely felt them. “Good night to you, sir.”

“G’night, Miss Deene. Be careful going home. Have you a lantern? There’s a moon tonight, but it’s still dark as a blathering sack.”

The Cornish idiom arrested her, and brought home something, one of the many things, that puzzled her about this man. Sometimes, because of his manner or a certain irony or self-consciousness in his speech, it was almost as if he were
playing
at being a “poor, uneducated copper miner.”

She sighted down her nose at him. “I’ve had my clerk write to the mine agent at Carn Barra, and I expect a reply any day now. It will be interesting to find out what sort of worker you were in your last place.”

No reaction; all he did was stick his hands in his pockets and raise his eyebrows at her. She thought he looked amused.

She was tired of looking at him. Without another word, she slapped the reins down and Val took off—so quickly, Sophie’s neck snapped back uncomfortably. She hadn’t gone far before she began to think of all the things she should’ve said to him. To put him in his place.

V

The hole Connor fell through was big enough to swallow a horse.

Or so Tranter Fox estimated while he was hauling him out of it. “Didn’t ee spy that great plank, Jack? ’Tis yer own fault fer slitherin’ down in thur when any man can see there’m a board wide as two counties acrost un. Did ee slip? Christ, ee’re heavy. Quit heavin’ and give over yer arm. Now take yer feet t’ squinch out o’t. That’s it, that’s it. There you be. Phaw! Ee’re one bleedin’ mess, Jack, sink me if you ain’t.”

The murky glow from the candle in Tranter’s hat—Connor’s had gone out—shed just enough light to reveal the literalness of his words: Connor was a bleeding mess. His left side felt fiery-hot, and warm blood was running down the inside of his left arm and dripping off his fingers.

“Best go up,” Tranter advised. “Ee don’t look hale, not a’tall, and wounds’re like to fester quick down here in the hot and wet. Go up, get Annie Whited t’ tend you, there’m a brave lad.”

“Who’s Annie Whited?”

“One o’ the bal girls, but she knows sommat o’ nursing and the like. We go to ’er fer snicks and breaks, whereas surgeon’s the one fer awful things, bleedin’ t’ death and whatnot.”

But Connor stayed down, resuming work on the pit they had been costeaning since yesterday. The stinging pain in his side was bearable, and he could still swing his pickax. Besides, he and Tranter were a team, their fortunes linked not only by the mining contract they’d signed, but by the comradeship they’d forged while they sweated and labored together under the ground. They got paid by the fathom; if Connor deserted him, his partner’s wage would suffer.

By lunchtime, though, his shoulder had stiffened so much, he couldn’t hold on to his drill. “Go up, man,” Tranter berated him. “Are ee daft? Quit moolin’ and get up to grass. I ha’n’t no use fer a corpse on my spell, and I ain’t carrying un up if ee swoons on me.”

There were only four hours left on their core. Connor decided to go up.

By the sixth ladder, he was dripping with sweat and his left hand slipped and slid, leaving bloody prints on every other rung. At the mine entrance, the sudden cool air made him light-headed; blinking in the blinding sunlight, he had to lean against the open trapdoor for a minute to get his bearings. On the far side of the rubble-strewn yard, past the engine house and a couple of outbuildings, the bal girls or “maidens” dressed the mined ore with bucking irons, bruising and hammering the metal into pieces no bigger than fingertips. Annie Whited would be among them, and the only question in Connor’s mind was whether he should go there as he was or wash up first in the changing shed. A mule pulling a wagonload of chains and bell cranks rumbled out of the way, and he spied the grass captain twenty yards away, having a chat with his employer.

She saw him at the same time. She wore a pale lavender dress with a square collar, white, and a violet sash around her waist. He watched her shade her eyes with her hand, frowning at him, then suddenly reach out and clutch Andrewson on the wrist, cutting off whatever he was saying. Andrewson turned, saw Connor. The expressions on their faces confused him until he looked down and saw the blood. There was a lot of it, soaking through the coarse linen of his smock, staining the left side the color of rust. It surprised him—he didn’t hurt enough to have bled that much. But when he looked up again, too quickly, he almost lost his balance from dizziness.

Sophie was bearing down on him, with the grass captain hurrying along in her wake. “What happened?” she demanded from ten feet away. “Are you hurt badly?”

“No,” he denied, then added, “I doubt it.”

She stopped in front of him, wide-eyed, taking him in at a glance. “How did it happen?”

“I fell through an old adit.” He felt a mixture of belligerence and embarrassment, the former because she permitted such a hazard to exist, the latter because an experienced miner would have avoided it. “Fox pulled me out. I scraped my side, that’s all, and cut my arm on the plank over the hole. It’s nothing.” She’d gone pale; she had the long tube of a rolled-up map in one hand, and she was unknowingly crushing it between her fingers. “Tranter said Annie Whited could fix me up. I’ll just go and wash up, then find her.”

“I sent Annie home an hour ago,” Andrewson said. “She was drunk,” he explained, shrugging, when Sophie turned to him.

“Dr. Hesselius had to go to Tavistock this morning,” she said, dismay in her voice. “I heard him say so at my uncle’s house last night. He’ll be gone by now.” She and Andrewson stared at Connor helplessly.

“I’ll go and wash,” he said again, and started around them for the changing shed.

“Go with him,” he heard her tell Andrewson. “Then bring him back to my office.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The sight of him, slow and stiff-legged and bloody, attracted a number of grass workers on the short walk across the yard to the changing shed. The men went in with him and wanted to know, while Andrewson helped him out of his hardening smock, all about his mishap. Gritting his teeth against the stinging shock of cold water sleucing off his open cuts, he explained what he’d done—fallen into a drainage hole through his own clumsiness. No one made fun of him; everyone had advice on how best to take care of his wounds. Slightly cheered, he accepted the clean shirt Andrewson threw over his shoulders, and together they made their way back across the yard to the countinghouse.

After the bright noonday sun, the small inner office was shady and relatively cool. “I don’t know where she’s got to,” Andrewson muttered, seeing the room was empty. “Set and wait for her, I guess—I’ve got something that needs tending to.” And he gave a nod and was gone.

Connor wanted to explore; the walls and shelves of Sophie Deene’s office were covered with the paraphernalia of her trade, maps and ore samples, crosscut diagrams, books on mining and copper speculating—as well as a smaller but more interesting array of personal items, such as a framed sketch on the wall of the man he was sure now was her father, a thick, mannish fountain pen in an inkstand on her battered desk, an amateurish, pink-glazed clay sculpture of a rose—a Guelder?—that she used for a paperweight. The subtle odor of roses couldn’t be from the vase of purple flowers on the window ledge; this was a vaguer scent, softer and yet more pervasive. Her scent.

She bustled in then, putting an end to his inquisitive survey of her effects. She carried a basin of water and a clean white towel over one arm, and he speculated that, as the lady owner of Guelder, she probably had a private lavatory all to herself somewhere on the mine premises. “Sit down,” she commanded, setting basin and towel on the edge of her desk.

A boy came in, sandy-haired, tall and gangly, holding out a paper-wrapped parcel to her. “Annie had this in ’er tuck-away, Miss Deene,” he said, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his skinny neck.

“Thank you, Matthew.”

The boy shifted from foot to foot while she opened the parcel and rummaged around in its contents. “Miss Deene?”

“Yes?”

“I’ll be fourteen on Wednesday.”

“Happy birthday,” she said distractedly, holding a brown bottle up to the light and squinting at it.

Matthew blushed. “No, ma’am, I mean, I’ll be able t’ go down then. Wi’ my dad. If you can use me, that is.”

“Oh.” She glanced at him briefly. “Tell the grass captain, then. And come to me again on Wednesday, and we’ll discuss your wages and so on.”

His face brightened. “Yes,
ma’am
,” he exclaimed, and for a second Connor thought he was going to salute her.

“You could hire him at ten,” he mentioned after the boy had gone, trying not to wince while he shrugged off his shirt.

“Legally, yes. But I don’t send children down in my mine.”

“That’s noble of you.”

She sent him a look. “Matthew’s parents wouldn’t agree with you. He can earn three times as much in the mine as he does now as a jigger. They’d have happily seen him underground at nine. Will you come over here, please? It’ll be easier for me if you’re sitting on the desk.” She slid a pile of papers back from the corner, and he got up and went to her.

Together they examined his injuries. His scraped side hurt worse, but his arm was probably more serious; he’d torn a gash in it, probably on the rough wooden plank, that ran from just under his armpit to the crease in his elbow.

“The bleeding’s almost stopped. But I have to clean it, which will probably make it start again.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

She looked up. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Not particularly.”

“I’ve done it before. When Michael Tavist smashed his hand with a hammer, I’m the one who bandaged it for him until Dr. Hesselius came.”

He smiled at the pride she couldn’t quite keep out of her voice. “Have at it, then, by all means.”

“Hold still, then; even if it hurts, hold still.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He did well, bore it all with manly courage, until she started dabbing something brownish and evil-smelling on the cuts in his side. “Ow.
Ow.
What the hell is that?”

“Please don’t swear.”

He squeezed his smarting eyes shut for a second. “What . . . is that?”

She glanced down at the glass vial in her hand, then back up to his face. “I have no idea.”

For the barest second, they almost smiled at each other. Then a man barged through the open doorway, and the rare friendly moment was gone.

It was Jenks, the mine captain. A stocky, compact bull of a man, he had a fierce black beard that seemed to bristle when he was angry. The mine shafts daily rang with his shouted profanities, which were famous for their variety and vulgarity, and Connor had often wondered how he tempered his obscene utterances for the benefit of his ladylike employer.

“Murdoch’s team and Bean’s team didn’t meet up,” he announced without a greeting. With only the briefest glance at Connor—who must have presented a curious sight, half-naked, perched on the edge of Miss Deene’s desk, and still bleeding from her amateur ministrations—Jenks stomped past both of them to the opposite wall, where a huge map of the whole of Guelder mine stretched between rough pieces of lathe for frames, and slammed his meaty fist down on a faint series of lines in the lower left corner. “Didn’t meet up!” he repeated, incredulous. “They’re six feet apart if they’re an inch, the toads, hang me if they’re not.” He hammered his fist down again.

Toads? Hang me?
Connor wanted to laugh, but Jenks’s eyes, glittering with fury, kept his face sober.

Sophie set down the bit of flannel she’d been daubing his ribs with and went to look at the map. From Connor’s vantage, there was nothing to see but a lot of vertical and horizontal scratchings made with a piece of charcoal, with a lot of erasures and overwriting. She and Jenks had a hurried conversation, pointing at lines, pressing their faces to the map, as if they could change the bad news by getting closer to it. Ignorant as he was, Connor got a rough idea that two teams of tributers had been simultaneously sinking shafts, one beneath the other, perpendicular to a crosscut above the southwest lode, preparatory to opening the lode so it could be worked for ore. They hadn’t “met up,” which meant the shafts, being driven from above and below, had failed to connect. Missed each other. By a fathom.

No wonder Jenks was angry.

Sophie and the mine captain were the same height, but Jenks outweighed her by about seven stone. He was an intimidating man when roused, spreading ire like sparks from his whole beefy body; underground, the men gave him a wide berth when he was on a tear, which was often, and not a few were really afraid of him.

“Mr. Jenks,” Sophie said quietly, making no effort to stand back, out of the way of the almost visible aura around him of frustration and anger. “How did this happen?”

“I don’t know yet. Each man is blaming the other. I suspect it’s Bean who’s off worse, but it could be it’s the both of ’em.”

“If it’s both of them, a likelier reason for the error is that the specifications were wrong to begin with.”

Jenks opened his mouth, shut it, and turned a darker shade of beet red. A vein popped out in his forehead. Connor watched its erratic pulsing and wondered if his head was going to explode.

Sophie turned back to the map. “The vein stone in that portion of the southwest is soft. Relatively. How long do you think it will take to align the two shafts?”

Jenks considered. “A week.”

“With both teams working?”

“No, the one. And o’ course, it’ll change the angle.”

“By how much?”

“Three, four degrees. Maybe five.”

“Try for three. Put both teams on it, one working at either end, and get it done in four days. If you can.”

Jenks squinted hard at the map, then at his boss. “Four days?”

“If you can.”

The livid vein pulsed more slowly until at last it disappeared. “Three and a half,” the mine captain rumbled.

“Even better.”

“I’ll make it a race. I’ll tell ’em the team that drives first to the meet point gets an extra half crown per foot for each man.” He dipped his big, shaggy head. “That is, if you agree.”

“Why, that’s an excellent idea, Mr. Jenks. I’m glad you thought of it.”

Connor wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it: Jenks, who never smiled and always scowled, actually grinned at her, showing a mouthful of large, perfect white teeth.

“What happened to you?” he asked on his way out.

“Slipped on a plank. Fell in an adit at the forty.”

“Hmpf.” Without even a sympathetic head shake, Jenks stomped out of the room.

Sophie was staring at the map again. She’d been calm and unruffled in front of Jenks, but now she was nibbling her bottom lip, one hand on her hip, unconsciously twisting a lock of hair with the other.

“Is it a serious setback?”

She turned, and the worry line between her brows smoothed out. “Oh, no,” she denied, moving back to him, retrieving the flannel and rinsing it in the basin. “It’s the sort of thing that happens often enough that it would be foolish to get upset about it.”

“But it’s a nuisance.”

“A bit more than that.” She pressed her lips together, as if she’d said more than she intended. “Six feet in four days without blasting must seem like fast work to you, Mr. Pendarvis,” she mentioned, changing the subject as she leaned over him again and resumed cleaning the scrapes on his side.