‘Chief engineer? Who’s that then? Closest we had was Timon Bleaker,’ snorts Lazarus. He’s gruff still, but less so than the first time I met him.
‘Timon died in the collapse five years ago,’ says Jedadiah.
‘Never replaced. Your father didn’t deem it necessary.’ Lazarus’s lips thin.
‘We’re here.’ Jedadiah hangs his lantern on a nail in a wooden beam, then begins to uncoil the rope from his shoulder. He threads it through a metal circle lower down on a sturdy-looking post, and goes to tie it around my waist. I step back. He looks surprised, then grins. ‘Think I’m going to drop you into a hole and leave you there?’
‘Well, it would be the ideal time.’
‘It would hardly have been worth dragging you out of the lake, would it?‘ But he nods. ‘I’ll go first. Da, you send the miss down after me.’
‘Can you trust me?’ scoffs Lazarus, then laughs. ‘That better for you, Miss Miren?’
‘It’ll do.’ I’ve got my knives and a willingness to use them if required. But these men don’t need to know that. Best if they don’t, in fact.
Jedadiah wraps the rope around his own waist and disappears over the lip into the shaft. It doesn’t take long before I hear his boots hit bottom. He shouts for the rope to be pulled up.
The trip seems longer than it should, trying not to bang against the rough-hewn walls. I see a light below: Jedadiah has lit a torch. He unties me. ‘Right?’
I nod, a lump of uncertainty in my throat.
‘This way. And I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.’
The tunnel is short and the torchlight dances up ahead of us. A boot is the first thing I see, then a bright blue trouser-covered leg, then the hem of an amethyst jacket, a very fine waistcoat in emerald silk. Peacock hues; just such clothes as my uncle has worn every day since I arrived and, no doubt, quite some days before. The light licks up, picks out the silver chain of a fob, then a neck, dried out and narrow, the skin corrugated, and a face, thin, thin, thin, mummified. Empty sockets, thick dark hair sliding off the skull, but a surprising lack of decay.
‘Who... who is it?’
‘This, Miss Miren, is Liam Elliott. That waistcoat, that coat, that fob-chain: all his. And his hair, too, very fine that it was in life.’ He sighs. ‘I’m afraid this is your father.’
I kneel beside the body and carefully pull on the fob-chain. The thing comes reluctantly, dragging the weight of a round watch. I hold that silver circle in the palm of my hand, feeling its coldness almost sear the skin. On the top is an engraving, the double-tailed, Janus-faced mermaid, the O’Malley seal – a gift from my mother, no doubt – worn down, the details blurred as if the owner habitually rubbed it with his thumb, as surely as water will wear away stone.
31
I’m sitting at the white pine table in Lazarus Gannel’s small kitchen, nursing a mug of whiskey and milk. I’ve not said much since they led me out of the mine, except to answer when Lazarus asked if I wanted my father brought along too.
‘No,’ I said. ‘For the moment, leave him here. We’ll bury him properly when this is all finished.’
They asked no more and were silent in the almost hour it took us to walk back to the gatehouse. The last ten minutes they’ve spoken over the top of my head while Lazarus prepared drinks. Jedadiah sat beside me, his hand on mine, and all I could feel was the heat of him when I was so very, very cold. Cold as if I’d gone back into the black waters of the lake and drifted down with no thought of coming back up again. When the silver mug was put in front of me, I took a deep draught, not caring that it made me light-headed, not recalling until then that I’d eaten no dinner. I ask for and am given slice of bread and cheese. At last, I feel a single thought pushing to the forefront of my mind, a single question overtaking the whirlpool in my head.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? When I arrived? You knew he was dead then, why not say something?’ I hear my own voice but cannot divine my tone; I cannot tell how I must sound to them. Again, it’s like drowning with only that strange dullness the water brings to the ear. ‘I might have entered that house and been killed immediately.’
Jedadiah has the grace to look ashamed or something like it; Lazarus looks me in the eye and says, ‘That would have been some greeting, wouldn’t it? Miss Miren, I didn’t know you from a bar of soap. You’ve the look of your mother, yes, but who knows what you knew or did not know? What if you went straight to your uncle and told him? And here’s us trying to keep the fact we know something’s not right from him. Who knew what you’d do?’ He shakes his head and grins like a challenge. ‘Besides if you’d been killed so easily, what sort of girl would you be? Certainly not the sort of girl I took you for...’
‘Miren, this has been our home for over thirteen years. We all made agreements with your parents – your mother. She brought us here and the big house was already built, and our houses, just as she promised. We’ve taken those oaths seriously. We’ve been hoping she would return.’ Jedadiah shakes his head. ‘And you arrived, and you’ve done more than right by us, but those first weeks? All we could see was you getting closer to your uncle, you making excuses for him. And how he looks at you—’
‘How does he look at me?’ I ask sharply.
He lifts a brow as if wondering how stupid I might prove to be. ‘The way neither uncle nor father nor
