tunnel with the hand cart until Brother Jerome returns. There is food and beer enough on the cart.”
“What about Sister Mary?” Ignatius asked.
“What about her?” Jerome asked.
“She will be taken care of, Brother, have no fear,” said Father Dominus.
Brother Jerome, who aspired to donning Father Dominus’s habit when the old man died, understood the implication of that statement, but Brother Ignatius did not.
“Back to your cart, Brothers. Children, walk on!”
They resumed their progress, but not for long. At the hill gorge where sat the aperture Angus had marked on his map, they produced dirty tallow candles from their robes, lit the first one from Father Dominus’s tinder box, and filed inside, for it was narrow to enter, though much wider within. Last to come was Brother Jerome, who first made sure he obliterated all traces of their leaving the bridle-path, then pulled out some bushy shrubs by their roots and put them across the aperture until it was entirely filled in. From outside, the cave had disappeared. Inside, sufficient light still percolated to make Ignatius’s wait with the hand cart a bearable one, and he had a lantern for the night hours. It suited him to stay there, peacefully alone, though it never crossed the limited terrain of his mind to spend some of those hours freeing Sister Mary, not very far away. The walk in daytime had pierced him to the marrow, just as it had the little boys; only Jerome and Father could tolerate the brightness of Lucifer’s Sun, and that because God had specially armed them to war against evil.
The Children of Jesus had twenty miles of utter blackness to walk, but Father Dominus had catered well. At intervals there were stocks of imperishable food and candles, and water was never far away as the underground streams carved through the soft limestone.
Just a mile beyond the entrance loomed a side tunnel that led to the old kitchen and Mary’s cell, but they ignored it to tramp on. Sometimes even the smallest boy had to bend double, while the bigger ones crawled on their bellies, but the way remained patent from one end to the other, though not in a straight line; its kinks and twists were tortuous. The walk took a whole day, but they never stopped beyond short pauses to eat, drink and replace candles.
Eventually the walkers emerged into a series of wind-blown caverns dimly lit during daylight hours by narrow holes, many of them made at Father Dominus’s command, for the ground was a crust only feet thick, half of that a clayey subsoil; every hole had been planted outside with a bush that survived the constant wind, and no one dreamed that the Peak District caves extended so far north.
The entrance the Children normally used lay behind a waterfall on a tributary of the Derwent, and here outside the ground was solid rock that did not betray a footprint or the iron tyres of a hand cart.
The work to join the laboratory cave and the packing cave to the dozen chambers behind them had taken many years, for Father Dominus had first laboured alone, then after sending to Sheffield for Jerome, with some assistance. As the older of the boys grew strong enough, they too were put to the task, which finally began to quicken significantly. The ventilation holes consumed most of their time, and were always dug from the bottom upward, first with a pick, then, when the subsoil was reached, with a sharp-edged spade. The mystic in Father Dominus would much have preferred to keep the darkness, but he needed the caves to house his children in closer proximity to the place where they manufactured his cures.
What he had not counted on was a minor rebellion: the children refused to move, and in the end had had to be driven like sheep at dead of night across the moors, weeping, moaning, trying to run away. They hated the laboratory cave and the packing cave, and, though they could neither read nor write, were quite intelligent enough to understand that this move meant longer hours at their smelly, disgusting, sometimes dangerous work. Even after Therese was in her kitchen-much better appointed too!-they tried every night to return to their beloved Southern Caves. Then Father Dominus had an inspiration: to take the boys out into the light of day and force them to walk for miles. Jerome had objected, afraid that, even on a deserted bridle-path, they would encounter someone, but the old man dismissed the possibility with a sniff. He was too much an autocrat to respect sage advice when it was given. But of all people, Charles Darcy! That could spell ruin, after what Jerome had told him about Sister Mary, who was in all the newspapers. Fitzwilliam Darcy’s sister-in-law! And the woman had cursed him, called him apostate!
Huddled in his cell at the very top of his caves, Father Dominus rocked with grief, for near-blind though he was, this was one message writ in vivid scarlet upon the withered parchment of his brain-somewhere God had abandoned him, and Lucifer in the person of Mary Bennet had triumphed. His world was crumbling, but at least he knew why. Mary Bennet, Mary Bennet. Well, he and Jerome would survive. It was back to Sheffield for them, until all the fuss died down and he could return to build anew. God’s darkness riddled the Peaks, God could be found again. But this time, no children. They made his task too hard.
There was a fine tremor in his left hand that echoed the one afflicting his head. A new phenomenon.
Brother Jerome appeared, hesitating in the entrance to his cell. “Father? Are you well?”
“Yes, Jerome, very,” he said briskly. “Have the boys settled?”
“Like lambs, Father. It was the right thing to do.”
“And the girls?”
“Obedient. The boys have told them.”
“Sister Therese…Can Camille take charge of the kitchen?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Return to Ignatius first, Jerome. Deliver the potions, but when you and Ignatius reach the waterfall, it will be time to see that he meets with an accident. Then, later, you can send Sister Therese to Mother Beata.”
“I understand, Father. It will be as you wish.”
Despite the few mourners, Lydia’s funeral was sadder than her mother’s. Elizabeth, Jane, Kitty, Fitz, Angus, Charlie and Owen gathered in the old Norman church on the estate, and then at the graveside. For once Jane was not washed away by tears; she was too angry at Miss Mirabelle Maplethorpe’s perfidy.
A reward of five hundred pounds had been offered for the lady’s apprehension. Unfortunately no one with an artistic eye had ever seen her, so the notices that went up in town and village halls and post offices bore no picture of her.
June was now well advanced, and Mary had been missing for nearly six weeks. Though none confessed to pessimism, everyone secretly felt that it was highly unlikely she was still alive. So on that sunny, halcyon day when Lydia was laid to rest in the Pemberley burial ground, the identity of the next one to be laid there was very much in the forefront of all minds.
The youngest, yet the first of us to go, thought Elizabeth, leaning heavily on Fitz’s arm. Charlie had made as if to take her when the graveside ceremony ended, but stepped back quickly when his father kept possession of her and led her away toward the house. The friction between his parents had always grieved him, but he had been so ardently on his mother’s side that he could see nothing good in his father. Now he sensed a new array of emotions in Pater, softer and kinder than during, certainly, the past year, when Mama had begun fighting back. Though, thank God, she had abandoned her tendency to poke what she considered harmless fun at him-she was so convinced that he needed levity, owning none, and that she could inculcate it in him. Whereas Charlie knew that would never happen; Pater was proud, haughty and terribly thin-skinned. Did Pater and Mama actually think that he and his sisters didn’t know their parents had taken to fighting like a pair of cats?
Cheated of his mother, he took Kitty’s arm, and left Jane to Angus, who did not know the ordinarily weepy Jane.
A shadow loomed: Ned Skinner, as ever self-effacing, yet there in case Pater had need of him. Something about that association did not sit well with Charlie, but what it was, he had no idea. As if they had always known each other, when that was manifestly impossible. Pater had been about twelve at the time that Ned was born. Charlie knew a little more of Ned’s background than anyone else save Pater; that his mother had been a blackamoor whore in a brothel somewhere, and that Ned’s father had been the leader of a ring of criminals that had its headquarters in the same brothel. He had found these facts in Grandfather’s papers, but nothing further; someone had torn sheaves out of Grandfather’s diaries. When he complained to Pater, Pater said Grandfather had done it himself, in a fit of dementia just before he died. None of which answered why Pater and Ned were such warm friends, when it went so badly against the grain of Darcy of Pemberley to make a close friend out of such a man as Ned Skinner. Pater was stiff-rumped, no one who knew him could deny that. So why Ned?
Never having known Lydia, Charlie could not grieve for her, but he did understand his mother’s grief. And Aunt
