Читать книгу Regency Collection 2013 Part 1 - Хелен Диксон, Louise Allen, Хелен Диксон - Страница 53

Lily and Jack arrived back at the castle to find that the informal dance had become the ideal opportunity to announce Caroline’s betrothal to the world. Caroline was looking radiant, Susan and Penelope were hugging themselves with glee, Lady Allerton was viewing the happy couple tolerantly and only the prospective bridegroom appeared to be suffering any apprehension.

‘Caroline, I really feel I should have spoken to Lord Allerton before we announced this.’ His earnest face was anxious and did not lighten when Jack swung down from his horse and came over.

‘I imagine you had every intention of doing so before you said anything to my sister,’ he said, shaking Willoughby by the hand. ‘But ten minutes alone with her and she had undermined every very proper resolution you had formed.’ He added, straight-faced, ‘The girl is obviously a minx—I am amazed you are prepared to take her on.’

Ignoring his betrothed’s highly vocal protests, Willoughby cleared his throat and responded earnestly, ‘I will not have it so! I am afraid that the merest suggestion that Miss Lovell was not indifferent to my suit was enough to undermine every principle on my part and I most improperly spoke my mind.’

Trying hard not to catch Jack’s eye, and pretending she could not hear Penny’s stifled giggles, Lily followed the family party into the castle. All very mysterious, the attraction of one human being to another! At least one could be sure that the worthy Mr Willoughby was unlikely to be making love to his betrothed on the drawing-room carpet.

She felt the colour mount in her cheeks at the memory of Jack’s lovemaking on that wonderful evening. Was it better to have tasted such passion and then to have lost it, or never to have known it at all?

‘You are looking very thoughtful.’ Jack was watching her steadily, the dark gaze seeming to touch her skin like a whisper.

‘I was thinking what a momentous step it was for them, and hoping they will be happy.’

‘So was I.’ Jack lifted her hand in his, frowning down at it as it lay within his open fingers. His thumb rubbed idly across her palm and Lily shivered, but made no move away. ‘She has a knack of knowing what will make her happy, my sister, I have rarely found her mistaken. I only wish I had the same talent.’

Lily was still brooding over Jack’s dark mood the next morning when Caroline caught her after breakfast. ‘Would you like to go to the pit head today?’

‘That is kind, but surely you will be spending the day with Mr Willoughby?’

‘Jack has ridden over to see George so they can discuss tiresome things like settlements and endowments and reversions and goodness knows what else.’ Caroline smiled wistfully. ‘George will not even discuss the date for the wedding until all that is settled; he is mortified that I cajoled him into proposing before he had spoken to Jack. George,’ she added, with a hint of pride, ‘is very concerned for good form.’

‘Er, yes. I can tell.’ Lily could think of nothing to say to that.

Caroline’s eyes twinkled wickedly. ‘You are thinking that he is unlikely to prove very passionate?’ Lily stumbled into a hasty denial, but Caroline simply smiled. ‘I think part of the attraction for me is the thought of breaching those walls of propriety.’

‘Forgive me, but perhaps underneath the propriety Mr Willoughby really is not … er..is not very passionate.’

‘Oh, yes, he is,’ Caroline whispered as they entered Lily’s bedchamber. ‘Very.’ She looked around to make sure none of the maids were within earshot. ‘I pretended I had to dismount because my stirrup leather was twisted, so he helped me down and so we were standing very close together—and he kissed me!’

‘That was all?’

‘Well, yes. But it was wonderful, my toes tingled.’

Lily rang for Janet and changed into stout boots, reflecting that it was a very good thing that the sheltered Miss Lovell had no idea of what her guest had been doing with her brother. Kissing Jack led to rather more than tingling toes. Lily gave herself a brisk shake and, picking up her heaviest cloak, ran to join Caroline, who had taken the reins of a sturdy cob in the shafts of a gig.

‘Have you ever been below ground?’ Lily asked, watching the plume of smoke come closer.

‘Goodness, no,’ Caroline forked off the main track and took a smaller one over the shoulder of the hill.

‘But women work down the pit, do they not?’

‘Yes, but it is rough, dirty work. There is no safe, clean way to view a mine, I am afraid. Here it is.’

They had come little more than a mile and entered a different world. Great piles of slag formed a wall around the area, like black battlements. Stone huts and bigger buildings were scattered, seemingly haphazardly, and what appeared to Lily’s fascinated eye to be a hoard of figures went about their business in the midst of mud, straining wagon-teams, trucks on rails, groups of weary, filthy men and gaggles of children.

Near the centre of the chaos—which, as she watched, she realised was in fact perfectly orderly in its way—the stone chimney rose over the engine house and from it cables snaked out and over a structure with a great wheel laid sideways at the top of it.

‘Winding gear.’ Caroline pointed. ‘It takes the workers up and down and also the corves of coal. Not both at once, of course—if that happens there is a dreadful coming-together and people get hurt. The miners call it a wedding!’

She flicked the reins and the cob made its way through the outskirts of the area to where a sturdy building stood. ‘We will see if William Sykes, the manager, is in,’ Caroline explained. ‘He will show us around.’

The manager obviously kept a sharp eye on his kingdom, for he was at the door before they reached it, doffing his hat when he saw who it was. ‘Miss Lovell, good day to you, ma’am. What can I do for you?’

Lily found she had to concentrate to understand him, for his accent had a strong burr to it, and he rolled his r’s like a Frenchman.

‘This is Miss France, a visitor from London, who is interested in mining, Mr Sykes. I was hoping you might have time to show her around.’

‘Be glad to, ma’am. If you’ll drive a little closer, that would be better, the ground’s that clarty, you’ll not want to be walking on it.’

‘Muddy,’ Caroline translated as they followed Mr Sykes. ‘We all used to know a lot of dialect words, but Mama would discourage us from using them and I have forgotten most of the less common ones. Jack now, if you hear him talking to one of the miners, you would think it a foreign language.’

Mr Sykes found them a patch of flagged yard to stand on, away from the worst of the mud. Lily studied the miners with their loose canvas trousers and thick woollen shirts and smocks. They were short of stature—she supposed height would be a serious disadvantage underground—but under the black-grimed faces she thought they looked fit and well fed.

‘Is the money good?’ she asked the manager.

‘Three shillings a day for a collier,’ he replied, his eyes fixed on a disturbance nearer the pit head. ‘Compares well with a labourer around here. Excuse me a minute, ladies.’ He strode off to sort the problem out.

‘And the families have free coal and wages when the father is off sick,’ Caroline added. ‘The miners look down on the agricultural workers, believe me! And most of the family will work here; it all adds up.’ She gestured towards a group who were walking towards them and Lily realised that they were girls and young women, coarse skirts kirtled up to reveal trouser legs below.

‘What do they do?’ The women were as black with coal dust as the men.

‘Load and pull corves underground,’ Caroline explained. ‘The young lads do it too, or work the ventilation shutters. There’s Jinny Armstrong—her elder sister works at the castle. They’re a nice family.’ Caroline waved and the young woman came across.

‘I dinnet look to see yous here, Miss Caroline. Our Lizzy says yous to be wed to Master Willoughby.’

‘So I am, Jinny. I am showing the mine to Miss France, who is staying with us. Oh, excuse me, Lily, there is Mrs Sykes, come with her husband’s luncheon, I expect; I must just go and see how she does.’

Left alone with the girl, Lily found she was being regarded politely, but without deference, by a pair of intelligent brown eyes. An idea was lurking in the back of her mind—could she risk it without placing Jinny in a difficult situation?

‘Lord Allerton and his family have been very kind in explaining all about the mine to me,’ she remarked. ‘I am going to be investing some money in mines further south, and it is important I understand as much as possible.’

Jinny nodded. ‘I can see that you’d need to. Yous dinna want to be throwing your brass about.’

‘His lordship has been very helpful …’ Lily left the sentence trailing.

‘Aye, he’s a canny mon.’ Goodness knows what that meant, but it appeared to be approval.

‘The thing is, I need to see underground as well, only I don’t feel quite comfortable going down the mine with a man. But I can hardly say that to Mr Sykes, can I? It might hurt his feelings.’

Jinny appeared to accept this. Lily crossed her fingers and pressed on. ‘And then Miss Caroline pointed you out. Would you be able to take me down? I would pay you, of course, I understand it would reduce the amount you could be earning. Miss Caroline explained all that. Would five shillings be about right?’ It was more than the family would make in the day, and could be explained by Lily’s ignorance about mining, but it was not so much that it might make Jinny suspicious that she was being bribed to do something wrong.

‘Tha’s more than generous, miss. I’ll do it gladly, but yous canna be goin doon in those clothes.’

Lily was beginning to get her ear in now. ‘No, of course not. And Miss Caroline does not have anything suitable. Could you lend me something?’

‘Aye, I can that. I’ll send them up to castle by wor Lizzie. When would you be wanting to go down, miss?’

‘Would Monday be convenient for you? I don’t know what time—Miss Caroline hadn’t explained that.’

‘About four in the afternoon, miss. I fetch my da’s dinner then. If yous wait over yonder …’ she pointed to a small hut near the edge of the pithead area ‘… None of the men go over there.’

Caroline was walking back towards them, chatting happily to Mr Sykes. ‘Goodbye until Monday then, Jinny, and thank you.’

‘That’s a nice young woman,’ she commented to the manager.

‘Aye, Miss France. A God-fearing, hard-working family, the Armstrongs.’

He took them over to see the winding gear, and, despite his obvious misgivings, let Lily peep into the engine house. She was transfixed by the throbbing engine, the power of the great beams and the gush of water. ‘It is so much quieter than I imagined,’ she marvelled to Caroline as they drove back. ‘Like a great beast, breathing heavily.’

‘An expensive beast.’ Her friend sighed. ‘Jack says he wants two more if he is to open another pit, or go deeper with this one.’

‘Just how deep is the current pit?’ Lily asked. For some reason that had never occurred to her before. Being underground, the dirt, the thought of mixing with dozens of strange men—none of that concerned her. But why had she not thought about the depth? If she was frightened of anything, it was heights, and Lily had a sinking feeling that gazing down a deep hole in the ground would be no different to looking over the edge of a cliff. Terrifying.

‘I have no idea,’ Caroline said cheerfully. ‘I just know it takes several minutes when they go down on the rope, so it must be a long way.’

‘On the rope?’ Lily asked faintly. ‘You mean, there are baskets, or a cage or something hanging from a rope?’

‘No, I don’t think so. They make loops in the rope and the adults put one foot in that and hang on. The lads stand on their fathers’ feet, or ride on their backs. It’s called a bant, a group all going down together. It looks like a big bunch of grapes.’

‘Oh.’ Lily swallowed. Just what had she let herself in for?

Jack sat back in his chair at the head of the long oak table and regarded the scene before him with a certain benevolence. Negotiations with George Willoughby had proved highly satisfactory and he could congratulate himself that his sister was going to be well provided for in a marriage to a husband who seemed to adore her.

Jack smiled in self-mockery. He was becoming positively patriarchal, taking credit for an alliance that had been entirely of Caroline’s own making, and earlier he had caught himself thinking seriously about managing Susan’s come-out to her best advantage. Yet he could not even achieve a suitable match for himself and ensure the future of the title.

He moved his attention to Lily, producing a brooding expression that had Grimshaw nervously sniffing the Bordeaux decanter for signs of deterioration.

Lily, to his increasingly experienced and concerned eye, seemed nervous. Her reserve had become even more extreme, her complexion paler, and several times she had appeared to be on the point of asking him something. Jack was not at all certain he wanted to know what it was that was troubling her; he suspected it would be all his fault. But that was what you did when you cared for someone, was it not? However uncomfortable the results of trying to help were.

He chose his moment when they were in the drawing room and his family were poring over the fashion journals in search of wedding outfits. ‘Lily? Is something wrong?’

She started, blinked at him and then smiled, suddenly so much like his old Lily that he smiled back. ‘No, nothing at all. I was just making lists in my head and worrying about things I need to do. Very foolish at this time of night—I will dream about it now. Jack …’

‘Yes?’ He recognised the tone. It was the universal feminine tone he had come to dread and usually preceded remarks such as ‘I have been thinking …’ or ‘You know my allowance …’

‘There is no need to sound so wary! I was only going to say that Caroline took me to see the mine yesterday—no, do not frown at me! We were escorted by your manager, and did not go very close to the activity at all. And there were some things I wanted to ask, but did not think of until we left. How deep is the shaft?’

‘Nigh on two hundred feet. We will not go any deeper.’

‘Two hundred. Fancy that,’ Lily said faintly. ‘Why no deeper?’

‘Pumping out water is one problem, but ventilation is the other. There are all sorts of tricks one can use to force air through, but there comes a point when nothing will work.’

‘Is it just that you cannot get fresh air in, or is there gas? I had heard about new safety lamps.’ Lily was looking brighter again. Trust her to know about something he did not expect his own family to have heard about.

‘We do not get choke damp here, the soils are wrong and the shaft too deep, but we do get fire damp, and that is the one that causes explosions. I will buy the new lamps when they have been tested a little more, but even they will not help if there is a stray spark.’

‘So what can you do?’ She was curled up on the sofa now, facing him. Jack could feel himself sinking into the depths of those intelligent green eyes and had to stop himself reaching out and taking her hand. On the far side of the room the low voices of his family discussing Tuesday’s dance seemed a hundred miles away. He just wanted to be alone with Lily; if talking about mining was a safely neutral way to free her from her façade of polite reserve, then so be it.

‘We test for it and then create our own controlled explosions.’

‘Dangerous!’

‘Alarming, but not hazardous if one knows what one is doing. Which reminds me, I must talk to Sykes about seeing it is done again soon.’

Lily had gone pale. Jack yielded to temptation and gave her hand a comforting squeeze. ‘Truly, it is not dangerous.’

‘Oh, good,’ she responded earnestly. ‘That is a relief.’