The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

Squaring her shoulders, Elizabeth marched on without seeing anything around her. “I may have offended Fitz unforgivably, but at least I have made it impossible for Caroline to be anywhere I am. That is why Fitz is so angry.”

“Well, Lizzie, a lot of people in London have put up with Miss Caroline Bingley because you and Fitz do-you’re leaders in society far beyond Westminster. When these people notice that Caroline no longer has the entrйe to a Darcy function, I predict that invitations to the best houses will cease. In a year’s time, Caroline and poor Louisa will have to retire to Kensington, with all the other tabbies.”

Elizabeth burst out laughing. “Angus, no!”

“Angus, yes.”

“Thank you for cheering me up so splendidly! The thought of Caroline and Louisa relegated to Kensington is delicious.”

“Yet she isn’t the crux of the matter between you and Fitz?”

“It’s easy to see that you’re a journalist-pick, poke, pry, chip, hammer, chisel.”

“That is no answer, Elizabeth.”

“I think Fitz has a mistress,” she blurted.

Jane’s response had been instinctive and horrified; his was calm and considered. “Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“The Darcy pride. Also, Fitz is in the vanguard of what he calls ‘moral improvement’-a shocking prude, your husband! If he had his way, he would legislate a man’s right to a mistress out of existence. But since he cannot do that-even archbishops have mistresses-he will make the punishment for harlotry more far-ranging as well as more severe. His first order of business will have been to make sure his own life is above any suspicion. No Augean stables for Fitzwilliam Darcy! He intends to crack down on mistresses as well as common prostitutes.” Angus took her arm and tucked it through his own. “As proprietor of the foremost political paper in the kingdom, my dear, I am in a position to know everything about every important man. Whatever is going on between you and Fitz is very much your own business, but I can assure you that there is no third party involved.”

When they came beneath the small library windows, Fitz emerged to join them.

“I see you’re feeling better,” he said to Elizabeth.

“Thank you, yes. Visiting Jane turned out to be rather a wearying ordeal. She was upset about Lydia, but Mary’s plight left her prostrate. I came home with a frightful headache.”

Angus released Elizabeth’s arm, bowed to her, and walked away in the direction of the stables. The sound of Charlie’s whoop came clearly; both parents smiled.

“You missed Caroline’s departure,” Fitz said.

“The headache was quite genuine, if you are implying that it was a ploy.”

“Actually, no, I was not,” he said in tones of surprise. “I knew where you were going, and what your reception would be. The Bingley ladies understood. They know Jane too.”

“I hope you don’t think I regret what I said to Caroline,” Elizabeth said, voice hard. “My detestation of that-that sad apology for a woman has reached its zenith, and I cannot bear to see her. In fact, I don’t know why I didn’t do this years ago.”

“Because it involved an unforgivable insult.”

“Sometimes the thickness of a hide makes an unforgivable insult necessary! Her conceit is so monumental that she believes herself to be perfect.”

“I dread telling Charles Bingley, and won’t spare you.”

“Do your worst,” she said, sounding unperturbed. “Charles isn’t a fool. The vagaries of family gave him a malignant sister, and he knows it well. When those same vagaries gave you unacceptable relatives by marriage, you removed them from your life. What is so different about my removal of Caroline Bingley? Sauce for the gander, Fitz.” She shot him a minatory look. “Why did you provide so poorly for Mary? You’re immensely rich and could easily have afforded to compensate her properly for the seventeen years of peace she gave you. Instead, you and Charles agreed on a paltry sum.”

“I had naturally thought that she would come to live with us at Pemberley or Jane at Bingley Hall,” he said stiffly. “Had she, over nine thousand pounds would have yielded her an income well in excess of her needs.”

“Yes, I do understand your reasoning,” she said. “However, when she refused those alternatives, you should immediately have settled a much larger sum on her. You did not.”

“How could I?” he asked indignantly. “I insisted that she think about her situation for a month, then come back to me. But she never did come back to me-or inform me of her plans. Just hired an unsuitable house in Hertford and lived without a chaperone. What was I to make of that?”

“Since Mary is a Bennet, the worst.” Nodding regally-thus depriving him of the opportunity to do so-Elizabeth walked into the house and left him to go wherever he pleased.

At a loose end after the unsatisfactory conclusion to their investigations, Angus, Charlie and Owen scattered like balls on a billiards table. Angus returned to the company of those in his own age group, Charlie suffered a fit of guilty conscience and went to his books, and Owen decided to explore Pemberley.

Charlie could understand a stranger’s desire to see peaks, tors, rocking stones, gorges, cliffs, tormented landscapes and caves, but, having grown up at Pemberley, never thought it worth a tour of its sights.

The Welsh countryside was wilder than Derbyshire, at least in its north, so the Welshman took profound delight in the lush woods that lay between the palace-he could never think of it as a mere house-and the tenant farms that lay in the Darcy purlieu.

What fascinated him were the English oaks, incredibly old and massive. His reading had led him to believe that none had survived the ship-building that started with the eighth Henry, or the huge increase in house and furniture construction, but clearly the oaks of Pemberley’s woods had never experienced the axes, saws and wedges of tree-fellers. Well, he thought, within the bounds of this mighty estate, the King’s word would not count for half as much as the word of a Darcy, especially were the King a pop-eyed German nobody.

The situation among the Darcys fascinated him too, for he was as sensitive as educated, and could feel the tensions that tugged at civilities like a strong tide at an old jetty. It went without saying that he adored Mrs. Darcy, though closer and longer exposure to Mr. Darcy had softened his initial detestation. If one was a great man, he reflected, one probably knew it, and acted not the part but the essential truth of it. Angus said Mr. Darcy would be prime minister, possibly shortly, and that made him a demigod. However, he would not be easy to live with.

The good thing was that Charlie and his father were building a rapport that certainly had not existed when Charlie first went to Oxford. Most of that was due to maturation, but some of it to the lad’s natural tendency to see all sides of a question-a quality that made his scholarship formidable. The year away had seen him move farther from his mother, and that too was a good thing. She was a reminder of a painful childhood that he was rapidly outgrowing.

“Ho there!” said a young and very imperious voice.

Startled, he looked around, but could see no one.

“Up here, dolt!”

Thus directed, his gaze found an oval face framed by a mop of disordered chestnut curls; two eyes of a colour he could not discern glared at him.

“What happens now?” he asked, having three sisters of his own. For Charlie’s sister she certainly was, with that hair.

“You get me down, dolt.”

“Oh, are you stuck, scruff?”

“If I were not, dolt, you wouldn’t know I was here.”

“I see. You mean you would have pitched stones or nuts at me from your hiding place.”

“Nuts at this time of year? You are a dolt!”

“How are you stuck?” he asked, beginning to climb the oak.

“My ankle is wedged in a crevice.”

“That’s the first elegantly phrased thing you’ve said.”

“A fig for elegant phrases!” she said scornfully.

“Oh, dear. Definitely inelegant.” His face was now level with her feet, and he could see the wedged ankle. “Take hold of a stout branch with both your hands and give it all your weight. Once your legs aren’t bearing your weight, bend your knees. My, you have got it stuck!” When he lifted his head he realised that he was looking straight up her skirts, and gave a cough. “When you’re free, kindly gather up your skirts. Then I may help you down while preserving your modesty.”

“A fig for modesty!” she said, starting to go limp at the knees.

“Just do as you’re told, scruff.” He put his hands around her lower leg and eased the foot sideways until it came free.

Instead of preserving her modesty by bunching her skirts around her closely, she gave a wriggle that perched her on his shoulders, then slid down his length and eventually reached the ground. There she waited until he stood beside her.

“I must say, dolt, that you did that deedily.”

“Whereas you, scruff, behaved with a complete lack of propriety.” He looked at her closely. “You’re not a scruffy schoolgirl, though you act like one. What are you, sixteen?”

“Seventeen, dolt!” She stuck out a grubby hand, its nails bitten to the quick. “I’m Georgie Darcy, but I quite like being called a scruff,” she said, smiling.

“And I’m Owen Griffiths, but I don’t like being called a dolt.” He shook her hand. Her eyes, he discovered now, were a light green, the colour of new leaves; he had never seen their like before. She was, of course, beautiful. No child of those parents could be ugly.

“Charlie’s Oxford tutor! I’m glad to meet you, Owen.”

“I think it should be Mr. Griffiths,” he said gravely.

“I know it should be, but that makes no difference.”

“Why do we guests never meet you?”

“Because we are not yet out. Schoolroom misses with Mr. Darcy for father are sequestered.” She looked wicked. “Would you like to meet the Darcy girls?”

“Very much.”

“What time is it? I was stuck up that tree for ages.”

“Tea time in a schoolroom.”

“Then come and have tea with us.”

“I think I should ask Mrs. Darcy first.”

“Oh, pooh, nonsense! I’ll take the blame.”

“I suspect you take the blame often, scruff.”

“Well, I’m not a very satisfactory daughter,” she said, the curls bouncing as she engaged in a complicated skip down a flagged path. “I come out next year, when I am eighteen, but Mama despairs of my taking.”

“Oh, I am sure you will take,” he said with a smile.

“As if I care! They will lace me into stays that push up my bosoms, style my hair, smear lotion all over my face, make me use a parasol if I go into the sun, forbid me to ride astride, and generally make my life a misery. All to procure a husband! I can do that without a London season because I have ninety thousand pounds settled on me. Did you ever hear of a man who demanded to look at the teeth of a filly worth half that much?”

“Er-no. Except that I don’t think the age of a filly is in much doubt, so he probably wouldn’t look anyway.”

“Oh, you are the kind of man who throws cold water!”

“Yes, I fear I am.”

She gave another skip. “They will bully me into simpering and forbid me to say what I think. And it will all be wasted, Owen. I don’t intend to marry. When I’m of age, I’ll buy a farm and live on it, perhaps with Mary. They say,” she confided in a stage whisper, “that I’m very like her.”

“I’ve never met Mary, Georgie, but you’re definitely like her. What would you do with your life, if you were free to choose?”

“Be a farmer,” she said without hesitation. “I like the feel of the earth, causing things to grow, the smell of a well-kept barnyard, the sound of cows mooing-well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll never be allowed to be a farmer.”

“No matter whom you marry, you could emulate Marie Antoinette and have a little farm to play in.”

“Play? Pah! Besides, I like my head on my shoulders. She was a very silly woman.”

“My father is a farmer in Wales, but I confess I couldn’t wait to leave the barnyard and the cows. They have to be milked, you know, at a dismally early hour.”

“I know that, dolt!” She went suddenly misty-eyed. “Oh, I do love cows! And dirty hands.”

“They have to be clean to milk,” Owen said prosaically. “Also warm. Cows dislike cold hands on their teats.”

They entered the house by a back door Owen had not dreamed existed, and began to climb a chipped, battered staircase.

“What could you possibly like better than a farm, Owen?”

“Academia. I’m a scholar, and hope one day to be an Oxford don. My discipline is in the Classics.”

She mock-retched. “Erk! How indescribably boring!”

They had passed down several interminably long and musty halls, and now faced a door badly in need of paint. How extraordinary! The parts of Pemberley open to guests were magnificently kept up, but the unseen parts were neglected.

“The schoolroom,” said Georgie, entering with a flourish. “Girls, this is Charlie’s tutor, Owen. Owen, these are my sisters. Susannah-Susie-is almost sixteen, Anne is thirteen, and Catherine-Cathy-is ten. This is our governess, Miss Fortescue. She’s very jolly, and we love her.”

“Georgiana, you cannot invite gentlemen to tea!” said jolly Miss Fortescue, not because she was overly circumspect, Owen divined, but because she knew it meant trouble for Georgie if word reached her mama.

“Of course I can. Sit down, Owen. Tea?”

“Yes, please,” he said, unwilling to give up this wonderful chance to meet Charlie’s sisters. Besides which, the tea was just what he loved-three different kinds of cake, sugared buns, and not a slice of bread-and-butter anywhere.

An hour with the female Darcys enchanted him.

Georgie was a nonpareil; if she could be prevailed upon to wear a fashionable dress and speak on socially acceptable sorts of subjects she would take London by storm even without those ninety thousand pounds. With them, every bachelor would be after her, some of such looks and address that Owen didn’t think she would be able to resist their blandishments. Later on, he changed his mind about that. Solid steel, Georgie.

Susie was blonder than the others, though she had escaped colourless brows and lashes; her eyes were light blue and her silky hair flaxen. Extremely proud of her talent, Miss Fortescue brought out her drawings and paintings, which Owen had to admit were far superior to the usual scribbles and daubs of schoolgirls. By nature she was quiet, even a little shy.

Anne was the darkest in colouring, and the only one with brown eyes. A certain innate hauteur said she was Mr. Darcy’s child, but she also had Elizabeth’s charm, and was very well read. Her ambition, she said without false modesty, was to write three-volume novels in the vein of Mr. Scott. Adventure appealed to her more than romance, and she deemed damsels in castle dungeons silly.

Cathy was another chestnut-haired child, but whereas her brother’s eyes were grey and Georgie’s green, hers were a dark blue in which flickered the naughtiness of an imp-no malice. She informed Owen that her father had slapped her for putting treacle in his bed. Of repentance she displayed none, despite the slap, which she regarded as a mark of distinction. Her sole ambition seemed to be to earn more slaps, which Owen read as Cathy’s way of demonstrating that she loved her father and was not afraid of him.

It was clear that the four girls were starved for adult company; Owen found himself sorry for them. Their station was that of high princesses, and like all high princesses, they were locked in an ivory tower. None of them was a flirt, and none of them considered her life interesting enough to dominate the conversation; what they wanted were Owen’s opinions and experiences of that big outside world.

The party broke up in consternation when Elizabeth walked in. Her brows rose at the sight of Mr. Griffiths, but Georgie leaped fearlessly into the fray.

“Don’t blame Owen! It was me,” she said.

“It was I,” her mother corrected automatically.

“I know, I know! The verb ‘to be’ takes the same case after it as before it. He didn’t want to come, but I made him.”

“He? Him?”

“Oh, Owen! Honestly, Mama, you’re so busy correcting our grammar that you never get around to scolding us!”

“Owen, you’re free to have tea in the schoolroom at any time,” said Elizabeth placidly. “There, Georgie, are you satisfied?”

“Thank you, Mama, thank you!” cried Georgie.

“Thank you, Mama!” the other three chorused.

Holding the door, Owen allowed Elizabeth to precede him. She continued up the interminable corridor to a more imposing set of double doors, and once through them, he found himself in what the Darcys called the public parts of the house, apparently because they were open to inspection by strangers when the family was not home.

“You are wondering why so much of Pemberley is not kept up,” she said, leading the way to the blue-and-white Dutch Room, full of Vermeers and Bruegels, with two Rembrandts in proudest place, and, hidden by a screen, a Bosch.

“I-er-” He floundered, not knowing what to say.

“It will be refurbished after Cathy comes out-eight more years. Though it doesn’t look very nice, structurally it’s perfectly sound. What’s lacking is a new coat of paint, and some replaced balusters and stair treads. A Darcy of generations ago decreed that the non-public parts of the house should be refurbished no more often than every thirty years, and that has become an unwritten law. When Cathy leaves it will be twenty-seven years since the last time, but Fitz says that will be long enough. I confess I’m looking forward to it, and won’t let the colour be brown. So dark!”

“Does that include the servants’ rooms?” he asked.

“Oh, dear me, no! The permanent servants live two floors up. Their rooms are done at ten-year intervals, like all the public parts of the house. They’re cheerful and well-appointed-I always feel that servants should be made very comfortable. The married ones live in cottages in a small village only a walk away. People like my own maid, Hoskins, and Mr. Darcy’s valet, Meade, have suites.”

“You must consume a great deal of water, ma’am.”

“Yes, but we’re lucky. Our stream is absolutely pure, having no settlements on it between here and its source. There is a huge reservoir in the roof-it stands on iron pilings. That gives our water the power to flow through pipes all over the house. Now that water closets have been invented, I’ve persuaded Fitz to install them adjacent to every bedroom, with some in the servants’ quarters too. And now that powerful pumps are available, I want a supply of hot water to the kitchen and to some new, proper bathrooms. This is an exciting age to live in, Owen.”

“Indeed it is, Mrs. Darcy.” What he did not ask was where all this potential waste was to go, as he knew the answer: into the river below Pemberley, where the stream would not be pure anymore.

“Your daughters are delightful,” he said, sitting down.

“Yes, they are.”

“Have they no exposure to the outside world?”

“I am afraid not. But why do you ask?”

“Because they’re so starved for news. Why aren’t they allowed to read newspapers and journals? They know more about Alexander the Great than about Napoleon Bonaparte. And it seems a pity that they’re not permitted to meet men like Angus Sinclair. He would surely do them no harm.” He stopped, horrified. “Oh, I do beg your pardon! I must sound critical of your arrangements, and I don’t mean to.”

“You are absolutely right, sir. I agree with you wholeheartedly. Unfortunately Mr. Darcy does not. For which I have my own sisters to blame. My parents permitted us free rein from a very early age. It did Jane and me no harm, but Kitty and Lydia should have been curbed, and were not. They were more than hoydens, they were flirts, and in Lydia’s case, a tendency to associate unchaperoned with officers of a militia regiment led to shocking trouble. So when we had our own girls, Mr. Darcy decided that they would not be allowed to mix in the world until they officially came out at eighteen.”

“I see.”

“I hope that your heart is proof against the charms of, say, Georgie?” Elizabeth asked with a twinkle.

He laughed. “Well, the man who would inspect a filly’s teeth did she have half as many as ninety thousand pounds does not exist.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That was how Georgie put her situation to me.”

“Oh, I despair of her! I cannot cure her indelicacy!”

“Don’t try. The world will do it for you. Under that brave front lies a great deal of vulnerability-she thinks she’s like her Aunt Mary, but in truth she’s more like Charlie.”

“And over-dowered. They all are, though Georgie is worst off in that respect. The others have a mere fifty thousand pounds each. It was not our doing, but Fitz’s father’s. The money was left in trust for any daughters Fitz might have. We fear fortune-hunters, of course. Some are so charming, so irresistible!”

“Well, I cannot see Georgie falling in love with a fortune-hunter-or Anne, for that matter. The most vulnerable is Susie. Cathy is more likely to dupe her seducer than run off with him.”

“You cheer me immensely, Owen.” The purple eyes gleamed at him as mischievously as Cathy’s. “It is tea time. Can you eat a second tea?”

“Easily,” he said.

“You are twenty-five, I believe?”

“Yes. Twenty-six in October.”

“Then you’re safe for at least another five or six years. After that, your figure won’t run to second teas. Gentlemen set in their early thirties, finish growing from calves to bulls.” M more and more as time went on. Now that her life was regular, she could mark off each interval between the delivery of fresh food as one day, though she could not be sure it really was. If it was, then at the end of thirty pencilled strokes on her wall (including those first estimated seven), she began to despair. Wherever her prison lay, no one had found it, though she was sure people would be looking for her.

Things had happened which caused a lump of terror to rise in her doughty breast; how much longer would Father Dominus bother to keep her alive? For all his talk about the Children of Jesus, she had seen no evidence of their existence beyond Brother Jerome, Brother Ignatius, and Sister Therese, all hovering on the brink of puberty, and though Ignatius and Therese spoke freely of their fellow Children, it seemed to Mary that there was an element of the unreal about what they said. Why, for instance, did no child attempt to run away, if they did indeed have the freedom to venture out of the caves? Human nature was adventurous, particularly in the young-what escapades she and Charlie used to get up to when he was a boy! Somewhere she thought that perhaps Martin Luther had said were he to be given a child until he turned seven, he would have the man. In which case, how young were the Children of Jesus when they were taken? Neither Ignatius nor Therese was prepared to confide in her fully; much of what she had pieced together came from what they refused to say. Yet the old man fed his disciples extremely well, clothed them, doctored them, allowed them considerable liberty. That they worked for him without being paid indicated that he exploited them, as did his neglect of their education.

At first she had hoped that the book he was dictating to her would answer some of these questions, but after thirteen sessions he was still absorbed with the conundrum of God and the evil of light. A pattern was emerging: of a circular progress through his riddles akin to what was said of people hopelessly lost-that they walked in circles and always wound up where they started. And so it was with Father Dominus’s book. He didn’t seem to know how to get off the track he wandered and go in a straighter line.

He had also curbed her contact with Ignatius and Therese. Now she walked to the underground river on her own, while Ignatius stood guard at the beginning of the tunnel and returned her to her cell when she emerged. Their communication dwindled to greetings and farewells; clearly he had been told not to say anything to her beyond those civilities. Removal of Therese was stranger. In her talks with Father Dominus not related to dictation Mary had realised that he despised the female sex, mature or immature. Affection would show in his face when he spoke of the boys, but the moment Mary introduced the girls into their conversation he would stiffen, the expression he wore would change to contempt, and he would brush her aside as if she were some noxious insect.

Then Mary’s courses began to flow, and she was obliged to ask Therese for rags, as well as come to some arrangement about soaking and boiling them after use. It seemed Therese had to request the fabric for these rags from Father Dominus, who beat her with a stick and called her unclean. The rags were forthcoming, handed over by a tearful Therese together with the story of the old man’s reaction, but that was to be her last contact with Therese. After it, Camille brought her daily necessities, and would not succumb to Mary’s blandishments, though the frightened blue eyes held yearning.

That tipped the scales in Mary’s attitude toward him. Until then her sense of self-preservation had prompted her to go softly, never to antagonise him, but such control was alien to Mary’s frank nature, and the bonds that tied her tongue were frail. When next he appeared to give dictation, she flew at him verbally, since the bars on her cage did not permit of any other opposition.

“What do you mean, you awful old man,” said Mary, snapping the words, “by calling an innocent child unclean? Do you doubt your power over a little girl’s mind, that you would whip her with a rod? Disgraceful! That child manages a kitchen capable of producing good food for fifty stomachs, and how do you thank her? You pay her no wages, but that is no surprise, since you pay no wages to any Child of Jesus! But to beat her! To beat her because she asked for rags for my courses? To call her unclean? Sir, you are a bigot and a disgrace to your calling!”

He had reared up in outrage, eyes rolling in his head, but when Mary mentioned rags and courses, he flung his arms about his head, hands blocking his ears, and rocked in his chair.

For perhaps a minute she surveyed him angrily, then she sat down on her chair and sighed. “Father, you are a fraud,” she said. “You think yourself a son of God, and you keep these children to worship and adore you. I acquit you of being greedy for profits from your nostrums, for I believe that you spend them on good food and other comforts for your followers. Your expenses must be considerable, even including fodder for your donkey train and coal for the fires I presume you need in your laboratory as well as in your kitchen. Nothing you have dictated to me thus far has told me why you are here, or how long you have been here, or what you intend to achieve. But you disappoint me bitterly, to take out your spleen on an innocent like Therese-and for no better reason than her sex. The female sex is God’s creation in equal measure to the male sex, and how He has designed our bodily functions is His business, not yours, for you are not God. Do you hear me? You are not God!”

His hands had dropped from his ears, though the look on his face said he didn’t like either Mary’s subject matter or the tone of her voice. But he didn’t get up and run; instead, he swung to face her, thin lips peeled back from perfect teeth.

“I am God,” he said, fairly calmly, and smiled. “All members of the male sex are God. Females are the creation of Lucifer, put on earth to tempt, seduce, corrupt.”

She snorted derisively. “Rubbish! Men are not God, any more than women are. Males and females both are God’s creation. And did it ever occur to you that it is not women who tempt and seduce, but men who are weak and unworthy? If there is a devil in humankind, it is in men, who strive to corrupt women, then blame women. I have had some experience of the devil in men, sir, and I assure you that it needs no lures thrown out by women. It is already inborn.”

“This conversation is pointless!” he snapped. “Kindly pick up your pencil, madam.”

“I will do that, Father Dominus, if you give me a new subject. Thus far I have given you nigh on two hundred pages of text, and only the first fifty are fresh and original. After that, you merely go over the same ground. Move on, Father! I am very interested in the genesis of Cosmogenesis. It is time you told your readers what happened after you entered the Seat of God in your thirty-fifth year. Why, for instance, did you enter it?”

She had caught him; he stared at her in amazement, almost as if he had received another visitation. Mary breathed a silent sigh of relief. It was in his power to kill her, and perhaps for a few moments when she had castigated him so bitingly he had contemplated having Brother Jerome pitch her down her privy well to certain death, but, all-unknowing, she had saved her life by showing him where he was going wrong. The brain that once must have been as formidable as any in the whole country was softening, a gradual process of which perhaps he had some awareness, yet knew not how to remedy it. Would he, back in his heyday, have whipped poor little Therese? Or thought the female sex unclean? Mary didn’t know, but wanted to. Now, with any luck, she might find out, for he was grateful enough at her criticism to come to the conclusion that her life was worth sparing. He wanted to write this book, but he didn’t know how. A mind that could invent lamps and cure-alls apparently did not have the ability to plan a verbal construction. As long as she guided him in his literary work, he would keep her alive.

“Proceed as follows,” he said. “‘Lucifer’s greatest stratagem in his bid to control the destiny of men was his invention of gold. Consider its qualities, and be consumed with admiration for the subtlety of Lucifer’s mind! It is his own colour, brilliant and yellow as the Sun. It never tarnishes. It is malleable and ductile enough to be worked into all manner of objects. It is as permanent as it is heavy. It contains no imperfection. As long as men have existed, they have worshipped gold, and in doing so, worshipped Lucifer. Men kill for it. They hoard it. They base the economic prosperity of their societies on it. They conquer for it. They demonstrate their wealth by loading it upon their own selves and the bodies of their women, who hunger for it as an adornment. It goes into the tombs of the chieftains and emperors to tell future generations how great the power of the dead man.

“‘In my thirty-fifth year I was entrusted with the custody of the gold hoarded by a man given entirely over to Lucifer, though I did not see it at the time. This gold was in many forms-coins, jewellery, ornaments, objects. My master removed the precious stones from the jewellery and gave me the gold mountings, chains, pieces. I was to melt it down, remove any impurities, and cast the gold into ingots. Then I was to bring him the ingots. But the actual refining of the ingots had to be conducted in complete secrecy, so much so that my master refused to let me tell him whereabouts I would do this work.’”

His face had taken on a dreamy look; Mary scribbled with her pencil and said nothing, waiting out the pause.

“‘He knew I would not betray him, for he owned my soul. I remembered the moors and caves of the Peak District, and found a huge cave that now functions as my laboratory. It was perfect for my purposes, even including, in close proximity, a hidden cave in which I could stable the donkeys which brought in my requirements during the nights. When I had set myself up, I gave my helpers poisoned rum to drink, then threw them down a hole into the darkness. For six months I toiled, melting down the gold into ten-pound ingots-a smaller size than is usual, but I needed something of a weight that I myself could carry. I was young then, and wiry.

“‘And when my work was done, I went to explore the caves, and so found the dark Who is God. It was a revelation in many ways, far beyond the pillars of Cosmogenesis. For I looked on the gold ingots and saw them for what they were-the work of Lucifer. The property of Lucifer. The instrument of Lucifer. And I understood that my master was Lucifer’s servant in every way. Therefore he should not have his gold. I took it and I hid it far from the laboratory cave, and I never went back to my old master.

“‘I remained with God in the darkness for many moons. How much of Lucifer’s Sun time passed, I do not know. But when finally I emerged I was changed. Gold had no power over me, or any other of Lucifer’s tricks. Stark white spiders weaved their colourless strands over the gold, a mouldering that threw Lucifer’s power in his face as of no moment, a nothing. And there it sits to this day, in the darkness of God, rendered null and void.’”

Putting down her pencil, Mary stared at Father Dominus with awe and a new respect. “You are a singularity, Father,” she said. “You are a bigot and a tyrant, but you have had the strength to withstand the lure of gold.”

Working his muscles as if they hurt, he got to his feet. “I am tired,” he said on a whisper. “Copy that, please.”

“Gladly, but more gladly still if you would send me Therese.”

But, as was his wont, he had disappeared in a twinkle, and she could not be sure he had even heard her.

What a story! Was it true? Father Dominus could and did lie, but somehow this tale of gold had the ring of truth about it. Yet who could this mythical master have been, to have accumulated so much gold that it took Father Dominus six months to refine it? And would he really permit the publication of something that described with no emotion the murder of a number of helpers?

Her dinner came-a beefsteak with mushrooms, creamed potatoes, and, for dessert, a slice of steamed treacle pudding. A reward for putting her dictator on the right road again, she divined. Not one to look gift horses in the mouth, Mary demolished the meal with real enjoyment, and felt the strength flow into her. Perhaps he wasn’t mad, she thought, stomach full and attitude unusually benign.

Which did not last beyond the morrow, when Father Dominus came looking dishevelled and sleepless, sat down in his chair and proceeded to give her a treatise on the chemistry of gold and how to refine it. It seemed she had to ask him how to spell every fourth or fifth word, so larded was it with abstruse terms, and that shredded his temper.

“Learn to spell, madam!” he shouted, jumping up in a rage. “I am not here to serve as your lexicon!”

“I can spell extremely well, Father, but I am not an apothecary or a chemist! When I ask you to spell a word, that word is strange to my experience! If your subject were music, I would not need to ask how to spell glissando or toccata, for I am a proficient in music. But what you have dictated to me today is a closed book.”

“Pah!” he spat, and vanished.

Her menu went back to bread, butter and cheese, though she had exchanged the small beer for water-over the top of his objections. To Father Dominus, water meant typhoid and typhus; the three percent intoxicant in small beer as well as its brewing process made it safe to drink. And in that belief he was by no means alone; most families took their children straight from milk to small beer. Mary loathed it, and had only got her water after she pointed out to him that the streams flowing through the caves were as pure as water got.

From Ignatius, still appearing to let her out of her cage and let her walk into the river tunnel, she began to receive alarming signals that all was not well in the world of the Children of Jesus.

Lantern in hand, boots on her feet, she put her fingers on the rough wool of his sleeve and forced him to look at her face. “Dear Ignatius, what is the matter?”

“Not allowed to talk to you, Sister Mary!” he whispered.

“Nonsense! There is no one to hear us. What is it?”

“Father says we have to be out of the Southern Caves quick-smart, and there’s so much to do! Jerome’s too ready with his cane, and the little ones can’t keep up.”

“How little are the little ones?”

“Four-five-something like that.”

“Where is Therese?”

“Gone today to the Northern Caves. Her new kitchen’s ready.”

“And what about me? Am I to be moved?”

He looked hunted, miserable. “Dunno, Sister Mary. Now go!”

When she came back he hustled her into her cell, picked up her boots, and disappeared around the screen. Mary’s heart sank. That did not bode well, the confiscation of her boots, which Ignatius had taken to putting outside the tunnel entrance.

Father Dominus when he came was as restless as a child put on a stool to wear a dunce’s cap, and his dictation when finally it came was worthy of a dunce’s cap-disjointed, rambling, and bearing no relation to gold, God or Lucifer. In the end she asked him, voice as humble as she could make it, to spell out a list of abstruse terms for her, so that in future she would not need to break his concentration by requesting help. Thirty-two words into the list, he suddenly leaped up and whisked himself away.

For a while Mary tried to convince herself that all of this was the result of a geographical dislocation; it must surely be worrisome to have to supervise fifty-odd children in a move of some miles from a cave system that had been their home for years to a new one that perhaps they feared more, as it evidently contained both the laboratory and the packing cave. And the gold? No, she could not assume that. The gold was wherever God dwelled, and what he had said offered insufficient information to decide on a locality.

On the following day Brother Jerome appeared with her bread and water, though no butter, cheese or jam. Pale eyes watching her contemptuously, he held out a hand. “Gimme your work.”

Silently she passed it through the bars, a miserably small set of pages compared to their earlier sessions, which had kept her so busy copying that she had little time for worry or idle thought.

One day steak, mushrooms and pudding, now bread and water, she thought. What is happening? Has that frail mind crumbled? Or is my new regimen merely a symptom of the fact that I am now miles away from the kitchen? Water aplenty can be collected everywhere, but bread and what one puts on bread come from a kitchen.

Father Dominus erupted screaming from behind the screen during her second day of bread and water, the pages she had given Jerome clutched in one hand.

“What is this? What is this?” he shrieked, beads of foam gathering at the corners of his mouth.

“It is what you dictated to me the day before yesterday,” Mary said, her voice betraying no fear.

“I dictated to you for two hours then, madam-two hours!”

“No, Father, you did not. You sat on your chair for two hours, but the only usable information you gave me is written down there. You rambled, sir.”

“Liar! Liar!”

“Why would I lie?” she asked reasonably. “I am quite intelligent enough to know that my life depends upon pleasing you, Father. Why therefore would I antagonise you?” She had an inspiration. “In fact, I thought you in sore need of sleep, and judged that tiredness caused this lapse in your concentration. Was I wrong?”

Two little pellets stared at her with the bluish, milky glassiness of skimmed milk, but she stared back unintimidated. Let him stare!

“Perhaps you are right,” he said finally, and stormed off with no intention, it seemed, of dictating to her this day.

His mind was failing, of that she no longer had any doubt, but whether it might be called madness was moot.

“Oh, if only I could establish sufficient rapport with him to talk rationally about the children!” she said to herself, perched on the edge of her bed. “I still have no idea why he acquired them, or how, or what happens to them when they attain maturity. Somehow I have to cozen him into a softer mood.”

Of Brother Ignatius there was no sign, nor did Jerome appear to replenish her supply of bread, down to half a loaf. An instinct had caused Mary not to waste water on washing her face or any part of her body: she might need what she had to drink, and that sparingly. With no dictation to copy and every book read at least several times, that day dragged, especially because she had not been let out for exercise. Sleep came slowly, was haunted by dreams, and lasted but a short time.

When Father Dominus appeared he was carrying a fresh loaf of bread and a pitcher of water.

“Oh, how glad I am to see you, Father!” Mary cried, smiling her best smile and hoping that it held no element of seduction. “I languish with nothing to do, and am looking forward to the next chapter of your Cosmogenesis.”

He sat down, apparently having decided that her smile was not seductive, but instead of putting the bread and water jug on her shelf, he put them on the floor beside his chair. His message, she was sure, was to tell her that receiving this largesse depended entirely upon her own conduct during their interview.

“Before we start the dictation, Father,” she said in her most winning voice-quite an effort for Mary-“there is so much I wish to understand about the darkness of God. Lucifer is self-apparent, and I agree with your philosophy wholeheartedly. But as yet we have not discussed Jesus, Who must be writ large in your cosmogeny, else you would not have christened your followers the Children of Jesus. There are fifty of them, you say, thirty boys and twenty girls. Those numbers must have a significance, for nothing you have said to date lacks import.”

“Yes, you are intelligent,” he said, pleased. “All numbers of import must end in no number-that is, what the Greeks called zero. A nought, we write in Arabic numbers. Not only is zero no number, but in Arabic it has no beginning and no end. It is eternal. The eternal zero. Five plus three plus two are ten. The line that never meets itself and the circle that always does.”

He stopped; Mary blinked. What utter nonsense! But she said in tones of awe, “Profound! Amazing!” She hesitated for as long as she thought she dared, then said, very delicately, “And Jesus?”

“Jesus is the offspring of a truce between God and Lucifer.”

Her jaw dropped. “What?”

“I would have thought that self-evident, Sister Mary. Men could not bear the formlessness and facelessness and sexlessness of God, but also refused to be completely taken in by Lucifer’s wiles. God was getting nowhere, and Lucifer was getting nowhere. So they met on a rock in the sky that briefly turned into a star and forged Jesus. A man, yet not a man. Mortal, yet immortal. Good, yet evil.”

Mary couldn’t help the sweat that broke out all over her body, nor the shudder of revulsion that precipitated her off her chair. “Father, you blaspheme! You are anathema! Apostate! But you have answered all my questions, even those I have not asked. Whatever you want with those children, it is evil. They will never be let grow up, will they? The little girls talk of a school in Manchester run by Mother Beata, who will train them as abigails, but there is no school, no Mother Beata! What do you do with the boys? Of that I have heard nothing, for Brother Ignatius is too dull and Brother Jerome too cunning to tell me. Wicked! You are wicked! I curse you, Dominus! You stole your children too young to be under cruel masters, which means you bought them for gin-money from their godless parents, or from the parish overseers! You exploit their innocence and think your duty acquitted because you feed, clothe and physick them! Like calves fatted for the table! You murder them, Dominus! You kill the innocent!”

He had listened to her diatribe in amazement, so stunned that he was speechless. What opened his mouth on a torrent of words was her accusation that he murdered the innocent; if she had needed any proof, his hideous tantrum proved it. Screaming shrilly, screeching, spitting, his body convulsed with the enormity of his rage, he called her bitch, strumpet, seductress, Lilith, Jezebel, the names of a dozen other biblical temptresses, then began again, and again, and again. While Mary, beside herself, shouted him down with one single accusation over and over.

“You kill the innocent! You kill the innocent!”

It seemed not knowing what else to do, he picked up the ewer and pitched it at the bars, showering Mary with shards and precious water. Then he turned blindly, blundering into the screen, and ran away shrieking curses on her head.

The screen tottered and fell, it seemed incredibly slowly, its upper border catching something beyond it and ripping that down too. An immensity of light poured in, so brilliant that Mary flung up an arm to shield her eyes. Only when she was sure she could cope with such intensity did she open her eyes to look upon a vista that, under different circumstances, would have awed her with its beauty. Wherever she lay at least a thousand feet above the surrounding countryside, which spread into the moors and weird rocks of peaks and tors. Derbyshire! Many miles from Mansfield!

A wind whistled into the cave, a wind that must have been excluded by a sheet of dark green canvas that now lay on the floor beyond the screen. So that was why her prison had been perpetually filled by a soft, moaning whine! Not a window left open on a crack, but a sheet of canvas that somewhere had not been entirely efficient, and gaped a tiny crack in the seal.

Oh! she thought, shivering, I will perish from the cold long before I can die of thirst!

She could not reach the cave mouth, of course; it lay a good twenty feet away, and the bars still confined her. The bread lay beyond her reach, the water was drying rapidly in that terrible wind. Where did they enter and leave? In the right-hand wall there was nothing, but in the left-hand one three tunnel maws loomed; her exercise route, and two others farther away. Beside the farthest was a pile of tallow candles and a tinder box; that must be the tunnel that led far underground in the direction of the Northern Caves. The middle one, she decided, communicated with the old kitchen next door. Oh, what had happened to Therese? To Ignatius? They were dangerously close to puberty, which Mary’s instinct told her was Father Dominus’s boundary. Once a child crossed it into manhood or womanhood, he or she was disposed of. All she could hope was that, coming at the hands of a skilled apothecary, death was swift and oblivious. No need, surely, to resort to violence. Though, after listening to those warped and twisted concepts of God and the Devil, some tiny part of her wondered if perhaps they were indeed fatted calves, and sacrificed at puberty to a lightless god. No, surely not!

But who, her relentless mind went on, can predict the quite unpredictable vagaries of a mind as diseased as Father Dominus’s? Not every madman was a raving lunatic, though Father Dominus could upon occasion manifest himself a raving lunatic. At other times he seemed as sane as she was herself, capable of producing facts in a logical order, and even, once or twice, convincing Mary that his Cosmogenesis had some merit, given his experiences.

I need to see these children! she told herself, knowing that there was scant chance of its happening. I want to talk to them, not in furtive whispers with one ear tuned for Father or Jerome, but over sweet hot chocolate and delicious cakes, all the goodies that permit children to abandon their defences. I need to know that, having named them after a hybrid demigod half dark and half light, they are not spoiled in the sense that perishable food spoils; that their innocence is still there, still intact. If he needs them as mules to toil for him, and has not bothered to educate them in Cosmogenesis, then they will have survived. The danger is that these sole disciples need to be educated in his philosophy, or theology, or whatever it is he classifies it as. Certainly it is not a sane man’s ideology, and arises out of inadequacies in himself. But what sort of brain could witness utter darkness and be moved to worship it as God? Or brand all light as evil?

Calmer after a while, she gazed around her little prison. Yes, the ewer on her table still held water, enough if she drank very sparingly to last for a number of days. Of food she had an elbow of stale bread. Well, food was not nearly as necessary for life as water. Admitting that her need now was far greater than ever before, she shook and rattled every bar in her cage, to no avail. They were mortared into the cave walls; if she had had any kind of implement, even a spoon, she might have tried to chip at the walls, but with the regimen of bread and water had come a demand for her spoon, her only eating implement.

Tears ran down her face; she sobbed for some time. Then, exhausted, she slumped upon the side of her bed and put her head in her hands. The pencil marks said she had been in this place for about six weeks, and it seemed she was doomed to die after all. No Child of Jesus would come to help her; they had gone to the Northern Caves, including Therese and Ignatius.

But despair passes, especially in the Marys of this world. Her shoulders squared, she sat up, jaws tight. I will not accept my fate tamely! she said to herself. I will drink two mouthfuls of water, then I will sleep. When my strength returns I will try to loosen the bars, this time at the big door they use to go in and out of my cell. Perhaps it is weaker.

A plan she followed precisely. But the big door did not yield, and its lock was beyond her, as was the lock on the shelf. If only she had her mending kit! The little hooky device that unpicked stitches might have worked the internal apparatus of the big door’s lock. But she had absolutely nothing.

I have finally reached the end of my tether, she thought, but I refuse to give in. I am in the Hand of God, yes, but also in my own hand. As long as I have water to drink, I will not yield to permanent despair.

LYDIA TOO HAD realised that she was a prisoner, not long after Ned Skinner had delivered her to Hemmings and the clutches of Miss Mirabelle Maplethorpe. More experienced than any of her sisters, Lydia quickly recognised the woman’s origins as a bawdy-house. But never as one of the whores who did the actual servicing. Miss Maplethorpe ran the whores and made sure they serviced in whatever way a gentleman patron desired. What was Fitz about, to employ a woman like her? Mama had been given Mary; she was palmed off with a madam. Which perhaps meant that Fitz regarded her with as much contempt as he did fear that she might overset his plans. The bars on the windows indicated fear, but Miss Maplethorpe indicated utter contempt.

Not that Miss Maplethorpe was uncivil: far from it. The only thing Lydia was denied was her freedom. With an unlimited supply of wine, port and cognac at her command, it seemed that Fitz truly expected her to sink into a state of permanent inebriation. Whereas the truth was that Lydia belonged to that peculiar sort of bibber who could, if they wished, stop drinking entirely. And now was definitely the time to stop drinking; she had to find out what was going on!

However, she decided to keep her sobriety a secret. At first she emptied the bottles out of her bedroom windows, but the fluid stained the bricks of the outside wall. Then she found that if she poked the neck of a bottle between the bars of a ground-floor window, its contents fell into the earth of a garden bed and soaked away. She had plenty of time alone in which to do this, time she could pretend was spent drinking. No one, it seemed, chose the company of a drunkard.

She had been in residence for a week when Ned Skinner came a-calling-now! Now was her moment! Spilling a little brandy on her dress, Lydia lolled in a chair and waited. Sure enough, Ned strolled in with her keeper, bent to peer into her face, caught a whiff of the dress, and straightened.

“Foxed,” he said.

“She always is. Come, we may talk next door.”

As soon as she was certain they had settled in the adjoining drawing room, Lydia tiptoed to the communicating door, opened it a fraction, and listened. As she was looking at the backs of their heads, she was safe enough.

“How are you managing?” Ned asked.

“Oh, she’s no trouble. Starts to drink at breakfast and keeps on drinking until she passes out, but she likes to be bedded too. My men are kept busy enough servicing her. Clever of you, Ned, to recommend I bring male helpers.”

“Mr. Darcy says her booze intake is to be regulated somewhat.”

“Why, in God’s name?”

“Her sisters are paying her a visit in ten days’ time.”

“I see. But as regulating her intake will cause tantrums, wouldn’t it be better not to regulate it at all? Let her sisters see what she really is.”

“Mr. Darcy does not wish that.”

“And Mr. Darcy is your idol.”

“Exactly.”

“Have you found any trace of the other sister, Mary?”

“None whatsoever. She’s vanished from the earth.”

“I can assure you that she hasn’t turned up in a brothel, unless it be south of Canterbury or north of the Tweed, and that’s highly unlikely, given her age. Beauty is well and good, but thirty-eight summers make a female body stringy or blowsy, all depending. From what you say of her, stringy.”

“Yes, she’s stringy. Flat-chested too.”

“Then no brothel anywhere,” said Miss Maplethorpe.

“How long can you look after this one, Mirry?”

“Another two months. Then I must hie me back to Sheffield. Aggie is strict, but loath to use a horsewhip.”

“Could you send Aggie as your replacement?”

“Ned! She’s too vulgar. Mrs. Darcy and Mrs. Bingley would see through her. No, I think you must look inside a Bedlam.”

“How will those women be any less vulgar? I’ll ask Mr. Darcy to advertise.”

“Excellent. You’ll find someone, you have the time.”

“I must go, Mirry.”

“Tell your idol that Mrs. W. is safe and well. Indeed, she must have the constitution of an ox to have weathered so much poison. For taken in the amounts she takes it, booze is very poisonous. I have a bet that her mind will go before her body does. Would you like me to lace her port with a port-tasting potion from Father Dominus?”

“Who?”

“An old apothecary dolled up as a friar. He supplies me with a very good abortifacient, and the Old Master apparently had some of his poisons on hand. Also physicks to drive one mad, or induce a paralysis. I’m surprised you don’t know him. Thick with the Old Master, he was.”

“I was too young, Mirry, and when the Old Master was present, I hid. I must say you do not look your age, m’dear.”

“Thank Father Dominus!”

“Mr. Darcy would not approve, so no potions, Mirry.”

“I do believe you worship that man as fools worship God!”

“Then do not blaspheme.” He got up. “Now about the iron bars-”

Much though she would have loved to hear the rest, Lydia shut the door and raced to her chair, fell into it to loll with great realism. But no one entered. Not long after, she heard the sound of hooves on the gravel drive, and sat up indignantly.

Oh, they were villains! And though it seemed Fitzwilliam Darcy had some scruples, he was heartless. Well, she had always known that. Sending George off to one war after another! Oh, George, my George! How can I live without you? Sober! she thought savagely. That is how I will live-sober.

I am no mean actress, Lydia thought ten days later. What hoops I have made them jump! Especially that cow Mirry the Moo. Tears, tantrums, hours of screaming and screeching-it took real courage to go on with my performance when that yokel Rob threatened to choke me if I did not shut up. Well, I did not shut up, and Mirry the Moo was obliged to send him out of the house for fear that he really would choke me. I let my best language loose-peculiar, how people dislike that. In my opinion, scratches and bites are far worse, and I gave plenty of those.

Thus it was that when the splendid Pemberley equipage drew up at the Hemmings door a little after lunch, Lydia was almost beside herself with excitement. Now her keepers would get their well-deserved comeuppance!

The perfect lady’s companion, Miss Maplethorpe stayed only long enough to see the visitors comfortably settled, then left them alone with Lydia. The moment the door shut behind her, Lydia sat up straight and dropped all pretence of drunkenness.

“Oh, that is better!” she exclaimed.

Jane and Elizabeth had been amazed to see the change in their little sister-she looked so well! Every vestige of puffiness had vanished from her face and figure, she was clean from head to feet, and clad in a fashionable dress of ice-blue lawn. Her flaxen hair was done up in a bun on the crown of her head with tendril-like curls framing her face, and whatever she had used to darken her brows was quite unexceptionable. She appeared what she had not appeared in years: a lady.

Jane looked at Elizabeth and Elizabeth looked at Jane; the improvement was remarkable, not to mention most welcome.

“Better?” Jane asked.

“I am sober,” Lydia assured them. “I had to be sober, to tell you what is going on.”

“Going on?” Elizabeth asked, frowning.

“Yes, yes, going on! Your heartless snob of a husband has abducted me, Lizzie-I am a prisoner in this awful place.”

“How are you a prisoner?” Jane asked.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Jane, have you no eyes in your head? Don’t the bars on the windows speak for themselves?”

“What bars?” Jane barked, even her tranquil temper tried.

Eyes screwed up against the glare of a fine summer’s day, Lydia realised that she could not see the silhouette of the bars through the diaphanous curtains. In such a hurry that she tipped her chair over, she ran to the nearest window. “Come, they are here! Come and see the bars for yourselves!”

Jane and Elizabeth followed, anxious expressions on their faces. But now that she was at the window, Lydia could see no bars. Where were the bars?

“Oh, how cunning!” she cried. “The cruel, scheming lot! Oh, they make me out to be a liar! Jane, Lizzie, I swear to you that until today there have been bars over every ground floor window in this house!” Eyes glittering, fists clenched, Lydia ground her teeth, a hideous sound. “I swear it on my husband’s dead body! There were bars!”

Elizabeth pushed the window up and examined the bricks on all sides of it. “I can see no places where there might have been bars, dear,” she said gently. “Come and sit down.”

“There were bars, there were! I swear it on George’s grave!”

“Lydia, it was your imagination,” said Elizabeth. “You have not been yourself of late. If you are sober now, surely you must see that this window was never barred.”

“Lizzie, I am not drowned so deep in drink that I have taken to imagining things! These windows were barred. All of them!” A desperate note crept into her voice. “You must believe me, you must! I am your sister!”

“If you are truly free from the effects of the wine, dear, why can I smell it on your breath?” Elizabeth asked.

“I had a glass or two with my breakfast,” Lydia said sulkily. “I needed it to scrape up my courage.”

“Dearest Lydia, there are no bars,” said Jane in her softest tones. “You are looking very well, but you still have a long way to go before you are cured of your drinking.”

“I tell you, I am a prisoner! Mirry the Moo won’t let me go outside without her!”

“Who?” asked Elizabeth.

“Mirry the Moo. I call her that because she’s a cow.”

“You do an injustice to a very nice lady,” said Elizabeth.

“No lady, she! Mirry the Moo is the proprietress of a bawdy-house in Sheffield.”

“Lydia!” cried Jane on a gasp.

“She is, she is! I overheard her talking to Ned Skinner ten days ago, and she made no secret of it to him. What’s more, he knew all about her. They were talking of dosing me with poison, or something to paralyse me, or send me mad. All of which means that Fitz knows about them too.”

“I think it is time you produced some proof of these wild statements,” Elizabeth said grimly.

“With the bars gone, I’ve lost my proof!” Lydia began to weep. “Oh, it isn’t fair! If you don’t believe me, who will? Lizzie, you’re a sensible woman-surely you can see that I’m a threat to your precious Fitz?”

“Only by your intemperate behaviour, Lydia. How can you expect to be believed when you accuse Fitz of murder and call him names even the most depraved of women would not? I cannot credit these allegations about Miss Maplethorpe-or Mr. Skinner!-because you look so well cared for-cared for properly for many days. No, I do not believe you, Lydia.”

By the time that Elizabeth had finished speaking, Lydia was in floods of noisy tears.

“Come, dearest, weeping won’t help,” said Jane, hugging her. “Let us ring the bell. A cup of tea will do you more good than all the wine in creation. You grieve for George, we know that.”

The comprehensive look Miss Maplethorpe gave Lydia when she came in spoke volumes. “Oh, dear! Has Mrs. Wickham been trying to tell you that there are bars over the windows?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth.

“A part of her delusory state, Mrs. Darcy.”

“She says you keep a house of ill fame in Sheffield,” said Jane.

That made Miss Maplethorpe laugh. “How did she ever get that into her head, I wonder?”

“She says she overheard a conversation between you and Mr. Edward Skinner.” Jane sounded so aggressive that Elizabeth was startled.

“How extraordinary! I’ve met Mr. Skinner only once, when he brought Mrs. Wickham to Hemmings.”

“Where did you live before you came to Hemmings? What kind of work did you do?” Jane asked with rare persistence.

“I administered the women’s Bedlam on Broadmoor, then I cared for a relative of the Marquess of Ripon,” said Miss Maplethorpe. “I came with glowing recommendations, Mrs. Bingley.”

“A women’s Bedlam? I thought men and women were cared for in the same institution,” said Jane, apparently unimpressed by the glowing recommendations.

“That is so,” said Miss Maplethorpe, looking a little harried, “but it is still necessary to have a supervisor for the women.”

“I didn’t know there was a Bedlam on Broadmoor,” said Jane.

“Indeed there is! There is also a Marquess of Ripon,” said Miss Maplethorpe tartly.

“One reads in the letters of Argus that mad people in a Bedlam are shockingly mistreated,” said Jane. “Like animals in a menagerie, only worse. Sightseers pay a penny to tease and torment them, and the staff resort to torture.”

“Which is why I left Broadmoor to go first to the Marquess, whose relative died, and then to come here.” Miss Maplethorpe’s face had gone to flint. “And that is all I have to say, Mrs. Bingley. If you have further complaints, I would appreciate it if you addressed them to my employer, Mr. Darcy.”

“Thank you. Might we have some tea?” Elizabeth said hastily. She took Miss Maplethorpe to one side. “I have a question too, Miss Maplethorpe. Is Mrs. Wickham’s mind permanently deranged?”

“It is too early to tell. I trust not.”

“But if it is, what kind of care will she need?”

“The kind she receives now at Hemmings, but, alas, those bars would have to become a reality. It appears that she is-er-very fond of the company of gentlemen. I have already had to persuade her to return home on several occasions. If this is a new sort of symptom, I am sorry to have to tell you of it, Mrs. Darcy.”

“Pray don’t think it comes as a shock,” Elizabeth said. “She has ever been so.”

“I see.”

“She says she isn’t drinking very much.”

“That is true. She has improved.”

“Thank you!”

Casting Miss Maplethorpe a speaking glance, Elizabeth returned to Jane and Lydia, whose tears had ceased.

Though by nature she was shallow, wild-and self-centered, apart from her devotion to the late Captain George Wickham-Lydia had sufficient intelligence to understand that she had boxed herself into a corner. The one thing she had not counted upon was the silent removal of the bars; in their absence she could see that her own conduct did not predispose Jane and Lizzie to believe her tale. Resolving to keep sober had improved her outward appearance-and her underlying health-so much that she did not look the victim of an abduction. Quite the opposite. And tears, she soon saw, would not benefit her. Her plans to be freed must now depend upon her own actions; neither Lizzie nor Jane would support her, let alone conspire to spirit her away from Hemmings. Therefore no more tears, no more references to abductions, imprisonment, or Ned Skinner.

Though it was not the tea hour, Miss Maplethorpe sent in an excellent tea to which all three sisters applied themselves with enthusiasm. Lydia chatted away quite brightly, allaying what fears Jane and Elizabeth still felt. Fancy Jane flying at Mirry the Moo! But it had not lasted, of course. Jane always believed the best of people, even if they were standing on the gallows.

Since she knew nothing of Mary’s disappearance from Ned Skinner’s custody, Lydia concentrated upon that subject.

“At first I thought she would simply appear after indulging in a fit of abstraction,” said Jane.

“She was prone to those,” said Lydia. “Always had her head in a book and desperate for access to bigger libraries.”

“But it is now four weeks since she vanished,” Elizabeth said, “and I for one no longer think there is anything voluntary about her absence. Fitz agrees. He has managed to have two-thirds of each shire’s constables put to searching for her, and the advertisement has circulated from one end of England to the other. With a hundred pounds reward. Many people have lodged information, but none has led, even remotely, to Mary.” Her face had gone very stern. “We begin to fear now that she is dead. Fitz is convinced of it.”

“Lizzie, no!” Lydia cried, taken out of her own troubles.

Elizabeth sighed. “I still hope,” she said.

“And I,” said Lydia. “Mary could give lessons in stubbornness to a mule. What worries me is leaving the search to the constabulary-Jane, Lizzie, they’re bumbling fools!”

“We agree,” said Jane. “For that reason, Lizzie and I tend to make Fitz’s life a misery. Though Charlie and Angus still go out every day.”

“Angus?” said Lydia.

“Angus Sinclair, publisher of the Westminster Chronicle. Lizzie says he is in love with Mary.”

“Jane, no! Truly?”

The ladies remained another hour, then left in plenty of time to reach Bingley Hall by sunset; Elizabeth was staying there that night, and looking forward to seeing the boys, if not Prissy.

“What do you think about Lydia?” Jane asked as the chaise negotiated a particularly bad section of road.

“I’m puzzled. She looks very much better for her weeks at Hemmings. I didn’t think her deranged.”

“Despite the bars.”

“Yes. But what puzzles me most, Jane, was your attack on Miss Maplethorpe. So unlike you!”

“It was the look she gave Lydia when she first came in,” Jane said. “You were seated at more of an angle than I, so it’s possible that your interpretation of the look wasn’t the same as mine. What I saw was derision and contempt.”

“How extraordinary!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Her manners were all that might be expected, Jane. Very ladylike.”

“I am convinced it is an act, Lizzie. Nor do I believe that she ever saw a Bedlam.” Jane laughed. “Mirry the Moo! If that is not just like the old Lydia of Longbourn days!”

“I’m sure that Matthew Spottiswoode and his York agency would have gone into Miss Maplethorpe’s background thoroughly.”

“Then we must visit regularly, Lizzie.”

When Elizabeth returned to Pemberley she did something she had never done before; she sent for Edward Skinner, who, said Parmenter, was at home.

Their interview got off to a bad start, however, when it took Ned an hour to report. Elizabeth mentioned his tardiness, at her most imperious.

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Darcy, but I was engaged in some manual labour when your summons arrived, and had to make myself respectable,” he said without a vestige of apology in his voice.

“I see. What do you know of Miss Mirabelle Maplethorpe?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Wickham’s companion at Hemmings.”

His brow cleared. “Oh, her! I only met her the once, and scarce recollect being given her name.”

“In which case, you know very little of her?”

“Nothing whatsoever, ma’am. Mr. Spottiswoode knows more.”

“Then I shall apply to Mr. Spottiswoode.”

“That would be best, ma’am.”

“You’ve been at Pemberley longer than I have, so you must be aware it’s a hive of gossip. Have you heard any rumors about Miss Maplethorpe?”

“Only that Mr. Spottiswoode was lucky to find her.”

“Thank you, Mr. Skinner. You may go.”

And I have not advanced a friendship there, thought Elizabeth. Why does Fitz esteem him so?

She went in search of Matthew Spottiswoode, an easy business, as he never left his desk unless accompanied by a Darcy. Elizabeth was as fond of him as she was put off by Ned Skinner, and could not credit that he was guilty of any transgression in the matter of the hiring of Lydia’s companion. Only Jane’s peculiar reaction to the woman had spurred her to make enquiries, for Jane was the world’s least suspicious creature. Of course Elizabeth might have gone to Fitz, but he was her last possible resort. They could not meet these days, it seemed, without quarrelling, and, having been so shockingly insulted by Lydia, he would not welcome an older sister’s questions. Lydia was also costing him a great deal of money.

“Matthew,” she said, entering the steward’s office, “tell me what you know about Miss Mirabelle Maplethorpe.”

A man in his late fifties, Matthew Spottiswoode had spent his entire life in service to a Darcy of Pemberley. First, Fitz’s father as an under-steward, and then Fitz as an under-steward followed by elevation to the stewardship itself. His education was somewhat lacking, yet eminently suited to his profession, as he was brilliant at arithmetic, wrote a literate letter in a copperplate hand, kept impeccable books, and had the sort of brain that stored away facts which he could trot out at a moment’s notice. He was a happily married man who lived on the estate and had the felicity of seeing all his children in service to Pemberley.

“The lady who is caring for Mrs. Wickham?” Mr. Spottiswoode asked now, having no trouble identifying her.

“The very same. Mr. Skinner sent me to you.”

“Yes, I hired her through the employment agency for ladies in York that I am accustomed to use-Miss Scrimpton’s.” He looked at his mistress shrewdly. “It was a very hasty business, but I was singularly fortunate, Mrs. Darcy. The agency had just that moment accepted Miss Maplethorpe as employable. Since Mr. Darcy was very anxious that Mrs. Wickham be settled at Hemmings immediately, I went through Miss Maplethorpe’s recommendations, and found them so suited to our needs that I did not bother to look farther afield. Miss Scrimpton had no other lady on her lists even remotely suitable.”

“Kindly tell me about her recommendations, Matthew.”

“Well, she had letters from persons such as Sir Peter Oersted, Viscount Hansbury, Mrs. Bassington-Smyth and Lord Summerton. Her two actual employers were first-for many years-the Bedlam on Broadmoor, where she supervised the female inmates and their nurses. A very glowing document! Her second place was in eastern Yorkshire, caring for a relative of the Marquess of Ripon. This patient, a lady, had just died. The persons who gave her personal letters of recommendation had all suffered a relative in the Bedlam.” He coughed apologetically. “You understand, Mrs. Darcy, that those having insane relatives are peculiarly sensitive about the fact. I did not feel it politic to bother them, as their letters were all genuine, I do assure you.”

“I see. Thank you, Matthew.”

Well, that was that. Miss Maplethorpe was cleared of all suspicion. Jane must have imagined the look-or, more likely, Lydia had been insufferably rude to her companion, and not endeared herself.

The noise of merriment from the schoolroom made her smile; she opened its door to find Owen having tea with the girls, and wondered if he had succumbed to the charms of Georgie. But if he had, she decided later, he was concealing it well enough to be called crafty, and she did not think him crafty. The real reason behind the visits, she realised, was pity. Well, something had to be done, no matter what Fitz said! Owen may not be in danger of falling in love, but her girls were so inexperienced that she could not say the same for them. Susie positively melted when Owen looked at her, and Anne was not much better.

Ned Skinner left the house a worried man. What on earth had pushed Elizabeth Darcy to make enquiries about Mirry? Not anything Lydia could have told her, and the job on the bars had been excellent. The workmen had quietly replaced every brick with a hole in it.

The bars would have to remain off, a shame. Mrs. Darcy and Mrs. Bingley would visit Lydia often, and Lydia, Mirry had informed him in a wrathful note brought by courier, was pretending to be drunk! That indicated that she was not at all dependent upon the bottle, the scheming little hussy!

What could be done about Lydia? As far as Ned was concerned, only one fact mattered: that she was out to ruin Fitz’s public career. She had said it, and she meant it. But it could not be allowed to happen, no matter how drastic the solution might have to be.

Of course Fitz and Spottiswoode were unaware of Mirry’s true identity. Men like Fitz, Ned knew painfully well, were too exalted to understand how some aspects of the world functioned. His own function was to shield Fitz from all things beneath his notice, and when Fitz-in a tearing hurry-not like him at all-decided Lydia had to have a companion, Ned had known how to engineer the choice. A true lady’s companion, Ned knew (though Fitz did not), would never be able to restrain a tartar like Lydia.

The woman Ned had in mind was Miriam Matcham, who ran a brothel in Sheffield that he had known from birth. Though she informed him that she could give him only a few months, she was paid more than her brothel duties earned her in a year. She put him in touch with a man who could forge all manner of documents, and together they invented a history for Mirry. Broadmoor was wild and remote, why shouldn’t it have a Bedlam? And who in Derbyshire would know whether it did, or didn’t?

Now Mrs. Darcy, of all people, was asking questions! Poking her nose where it didn’t belong. As if Lydia herself were not enough of a problem! Cunning as a fox, unscrupulous and immoral, without the steel of a Mirry or the brain of an Elizabeth Darcy.

He went to Hemmings to find out what exactly was going on, a long ride that instinct told him not to break by staying at an inn, though he had not, as yet, put together the pieces of a murderous jigsaw in his mind. He slept for some hours in a field where Jupiter could graze, then went on. And for every mile of the way his mind dwelled on Lydia, how to solve the terrible problem she had become. If she could stop drinking at will, then she was very dangerous, could not be shut up the way Mrs. Bennet had been, in a delicious haze of comfort and cronies. His thoughts continued to skirt around the ultimate alternative, but by the time he reached Hemmings the pieces made an appalling sense, and he was convinced it was the only alternative. Remained but when, and how.

“Oh, Ned, I am so glad to see you!” Miss Maplethorpe cried when he slid into the house through the back door, having left Jupiter in a grove of trees with a loosened girth, a horse blanket against the dewy chills, and sweet grass to tear at.

“Is she, or is she not, permanently drunk?” he asked in the kitchen, with no ears listening.

“As far as I can tell, she’s more often sober than drunk, but she’s an actress would make a fortune on the stage. At the moment she’s sober and strutting around as if she owned this place. But what am I to do if she decides to go for a walk?”

“Go with her, Mirry.”

“And what do I do if she decides to drive into Leek? Or Stoke-on-Trent?”

“Go with her. But that isn’t what you’re asking in truth, is it? You want to know if you can use force.”

“Yes, I do.”

When she deemed his silence overly long, she dug him in the ribs. “Well? Am I to use force, or not?”

“Not. I don’t know what you did to make both her sisters smell a rat, but you did something. Lydia’s not some scragged moggie out of the gutter like your girls in Sheffield, Mirry. You should be walking on eggshells.”

“Oh, shit! I knew it was too easy!”

“So much money for too little work, you mean?”

“Yes. Give me proper instructions, Ned, or whistle for your lady’s companion. Then see what happens! Your fine madam will be in some fellow’s bed quick as lightning! You know how I keep her at Hemmings. My-er-helpers are nigh exhausted servicing the bitch.”

“Well, that’s why you brought them, after all. Instructions-let me see…If the little hussy goes out in the carriage, you go with her. If she walks, you walk with her. And feed your fellows Spanish fly or whatever else they need to keep on fucking her.” He began pulling on his gloves, so big that they had to be specially made for him. “Only remember that all it will take to bring you down is one enquiry to the Marquess of Ripon.”

“I don’t give a bugger about the Marquess of Ripon! Remember, my name’s not Mirabelle Maplethorpe.”

“Perhaps the informant would have something to say about Miss Miriam Matcham.”

“I wish you’d find someone else to do your dirty work, Ned!”

He paused with his hand on the door, and laughed. “Be of good cheer, Mirry! I hear that even in New South Wales they have bawdy-houses. No, no, I’m teasing! You’re safe with Ned Skinner.”

When he reached Jupiter he didn’t tighten the girth; he took the saddle off completely, changed the bridle for a halter and tied the horse so that it could move to graze but not emerge from the shelter of the trees, the bases of which were hidden from the house by a tall hedge. Jupiter taken care of, Ned lay at full length and dozed for a while. He came awake in a trice; there was noise from the house, men coming and going as if hurried.

Darkness fell. Ned Skinner continued to watch. Yes, he was right! They were quitting the place! A wagon arrived and was loaded with the best of the furniture and carpets, drove off with two of the five men travelling on its box. At midnight Mirry emerged with a birdcage in one hand and a frilly parasol in the other, just as the carriage came from the stables. She stepped into it, followed by her maid, and two more of her henchmen sat on its box. The equipage rolled away, leaving Lydia and one man behind. No, Lydia was to be left alone. The fifth man soon appeared in the trap, geeing his fat pony to an awkward trot. He probably had the silverware, thought Ned cynically.

What could Lydia be doing, not to have raised the alarm? There were lights in the drawing room and lights in an upstairs bedroom; she was there, then, but drunk or sober? Drunk, he decided. Sober, she would have screamed the place down.

The thing was, what to do? He had to come to a decision right at this moment, well before a new dawn arrived and Lydia embarked upon a walk to-Bingley Hall? Yes, Bingley Hall. Of course she would encounter someone on the road, someone who would either convey her to her destination or to the constabulary in Leek. Ah, but there was no constable in Leek! Like his fellows, he was searching for Mary. No matter. Once she was seen, Lydia would be entirely removed from his control.

The overriding drive in Ned’s life was his love for Fitz. No one else could command his devotion. And what did it matter if half of what he did for Fitz was unknown to Fitz? Love carried no sort of conditions in Ned’s mind; it was something so pure, so powerful that it needed no acknowledgement. Lydia Wickham was out to ruin Fitz’s public career-a great man brought down by a silly, brainless bit of a thing not fit to lick his boots.

Tonight. If it were to be done at all, it must be done tonight, while she was alone in the house, deserted by servants and companion. Did she have any jewellery? Any money? He doubted the latter, but jewels were a possibility. Two of her sisters were very wealthy, so they could have gifted her with some pretty pieces. Not that it really mattered, only that it would seem more logical. Furniture missing, carpets missing, silverware missing, jewellery missing…

He brought out his watch and saw that the time was a little after one. Almost an hour before he had to decide.

“What do you say, Jupiter old man?” he asked the horse.

Hearing its name, it lifted its head to look at him, nodded, and went back to its grazing. Jupiter says yes, he thought. Good old Jupiter says yes.

The idiots hadn’t even locked the house behind them! Ned pushed the front door open and entered softly. A slight glow from the drawing room enabled him to locate a candelabrum; he lit a fresh candle from a burning wick and went to the stairs, which did not creak. Hemmings was a good house.

The sound of snores guided him to Lydia’s bedroom; even if of late she had been sober, tonight she was certainly drunk. Sure enough, there she was, sprawled on the covers of her bed, in a pink muslin day dress. A pretty wench, he thought, gazing at her without a flicker of desire. Such a profusion of near-colourless hair spilling around her-a nuisance, considering what he had to do.

There were plenty of pillows. He chose the stiffest of them, over-stuffed with down, climbed onto the bed and straddled her, the better to come at her head. It was not an ideal way to kill anyone, for the deep mattress yielded more than the pillow did. Only a very strong man could do it, but Ned Skinner was superlatively strong. He put the pillow over Lydia’s face and held it there, sitting his rump on her to immobilise her despite her feeble little struggles. For a full quarter of an hour by the mantel clock he did not relax, then judged her dead. Suffocation was slow, he was aware of that.

Removing the pillow revealed that her eyes had bulged a trifle, their whites webbed with red veins, and her mouth was open on sadly discoloured teeth. He sat heavily on her chest now, to make sure that she could not draw a breath. She did not, for Lydia Wickham was dead. Fitz was safe from this latest Bennet peril.

In the morning a butcher or a grocer would arrive, wonder why there was no answer to his knock, then his calls, and finally his hollers. After that, discovery was inevitable. Two branches of candles burned in the room; by their light he searched for money and jewellery. Her empty purse lay on the dressing table, together with an empty grey tin box that had probably held her jewels. How splendid! They had stolen everything.

Half past two by his watch; dawn would come in about two hours. Jupiter made ready for the road, Ned Skinner mounted and cantered off. He was going straight home, but not by the customary route. He skirted around Pemberley, and finally came down on it from the north. Only someone actually following him would have known where he had come from; and no one had followed. As always in the aftermath of such sickening deeds, he kept his mind absolutely fixed upon the memory of Fitz’s beardless cheek pressed against his own infant pate. The first lovely thing in an awful life.

Curiously, it was Ned himself who brought the news of Lydia’s demise to Pemberley, and that lay at Elizabeth’s door.

The southern Peak District had become the focus of the search for Mary, for that was where the caves were located, and everyone had decided that Mary was imprisoned in a cave. Only the most visually spectacular of them were known; visitors thronged to go through them, each holding a candle-lamp, every group blackening their beauty a little more from the smoke. But many caves never saw a candle, and no one dreamed of their existence or extent.

When Ned rode in on Jupiter, he saw Mrs. Darcy in the stable yard, and tipped his hat to her courteously. To his surprise, she beckoned him over when he had dismounted.

“Mr. Skinner, could you spare the time from your search to call in at Hemmings and see how Mrs. Wickham is doing?”

The hair rose on the back of his neck; had his eyes been a lighter colour she might have noticed their pupils dilate, but their blackness saved him. The request had taken him completely aback. For a moment he simply stared at her, amazed, then he turned his reaction to good purpose by looking at her in puzzlement.

“Do you have a feeling, Mrs. Darcy?” he asked.

“A feeling? Of what sort?”

“Oh, I don’t know, exactly. A presentiment or some such?” He looked apologetic. “I suppose it was the look on your face, ma’am. With all the to-do about Miss Mary, I confess I had clean forgotten Mrs. Wickham.”

She thought more kindly of him, and put a hand on his arm. “Dear Mr. Skinner, perhaps I do have a presentiment. How acute of you to see it! I hate to ask you to make the ride, but Angus and Charlie are staying somewhere, and it is a week since Mrs. Bingley and I visited her. Miss Maplethorpe promised to write, but has not. I worry that something is amiss.”

“Think nothing of it, Mrs. Darcy. Jupiter and I will start at once. He’s a good lad, my horse. The only one can carry me.”

Thinking of the horse, she had a qualm. “Are you sure? Ought not Jupiter to rest?”

“No, ma’am. He and I are up to the ride.”

And he managed to make his escape before the sweat on his brow became noticeable. Oh, the wretched, wretched woman! A thorn in Fitz’s side for twenty-one years now, and a thorn in Ned Skinner’s side too. Still, he reflected, making sure Jupiter had a drink of cool water, Lydia had to be discovered anytime now, and this was probably the best way. Despite which thought, he rode the miles to Hemmings with a hideous weight in his belly and a grey veil before his eyes. Let her have been found already, please!

Luck was with him. The afternoon was drawing on when he rode into the Hemmings driveway and saw several vehicles choking it. A group of respectable-looking men were gathered just outside the front door; he dismounted and joined them.

“What’s amiss?” he asked.

“Who are you to make it your business?” asked a man officiously.

“Mr. Darcy of Pemberley’s personal aide, by name of Edward Skinner. What’s amiss?”

Fitz’s name worked wonders, of course. The officious man shed his arrogance at once. “Constable Thomas Barnes of Leek,” he said, fawning. “A tragedy, Mr. Skinner! Robbery, murder and mayhem!” A phrase he had been waiting half a lifetime to utter.

“Mrs. Wickham?” Ned asked, concerned. “Very fair, youngish.”

“Is that the lady’s name? Dead, sir. Done to death.”

“Oh, dear Jesus! She’s Mr. Darcy’s sister-in-law!”

Huge consternation reigned. It was some time before Ned could get a lucid story out of them, interspersed as it had to be with his own explanation as to why Mr. Darcy’s sister-in-law was living so far from Pemberley. Most were present only to poke and pry, and took absolutely no notice of Constable Barnes. They soon took heed of Ned Skinner, who told them to leave very softly, but with such a look in his eyes! Brrr! That reduced the group to Dr. Lanham, Constable Barnes, and two shire odd-job-men who held their tongues.

Their reconstruction of events was considerably plumped out by Ned’s account of who should have been at Hemmings, and were not. A few skillful remarks from Ned soon led them to the conclusion that Miss Maplethorpe and her staff had set upon poor Mrs. Wickham, done her to death, and absconded with everything of value the house held. Also, as Ned pointed out after a walk to the stables, a barouche carriage, two matched thoroughbred horses, a pony and a trap. What was worse than anything else, these villains had been Mr. Darcy’s employees!

“I must return to Pemberley as soon as possible,” said Ned at the end of half an hour. “Dr. Lanham, may I leave it to you to convey Mrs. Wickham’s body to Pemberley tomorrow?” A few guineas changed hands. “Constable Barnes, may I ask you to write a full report for Mr. Darcy?” A few more guineas changed hands. “Thank you, gentlemen, particularly for your tact and discretion.”

And all that went better than I could have hoped, thought Ned, riding away. The story of ruthless employees will spread far and wide. Serves you right, Mirry! Your cowardice has convicted you, for all that the lawyers prate of being innocent until found guilty.

He was happy, very happy. Fitz was freed from all threat, and no one would dream of associating him with Lydia’s death.

He reached down to pat Jupiter’s steaming neck. “You were right, old man. That was the time to kill her, while someone was on hand to take the blame. Steady on, now! Just to Leek for you, my dear good boy. I’ll hire a chaise-and-four at the post house and travel like a lord the rest of the way. You’ve done enough.”

When he finally reached Pemberley a little before midnight, he was surprised to find Parmenter up and waiting for him with a message from Mr. Darcy.

“The master wishes to see you this moment,” the old man said, oozing curiosity. “I am to bring you dinner in the small breakfast room when you’ve seen Mr. Darcy. Is Miss Mary found?”

“Not to my knowledge. And thank you for the dinner. I could eat any horse save Jupiter.”

Fitz was in his parliamentary library, and alone-a relief. That probably meant that Mary had not been found, but what could Fitz have to say to him? A Fitz who looked white and worn, plucked at the strings of Ned’s heart-who was lumping fresh cares on him? Was it that wretched wife?

“Ned, I have disturbing news,” Fitz said.

Ned went to the port decanter and filled a red wine glass full to its brim-it had been a very long and anxious day, and Jupiter was in a strange inn’s stables, though the grooms had been threatened with murder if they so much as looked the wrong way at Jupiter.

“Tell me your news first, Fitz. I have ill news too.”

“Matthew Spottiswoode has had a letter from Miss Scrimpton-the tabby who runs a ladies’ employment agency in York. It seems Miss Scrimpton encountered the Marquess of Ripon somewhere in York, and ventured to tell him that Miss Mirabelle Maplethorpe was proving as good a companion to her client as she had to his deceased relative. But Ripon denied all knowledge of insane relatives, dead or alive, and of Miss Maplethorpe. Whereupon Miss Scrimpton discovered that there are no female inmates in the Bedlam on Broadmoor, which is for the most violent of males only.”

Fitz got to his feet, held out his hands. “What can it mean, Ned? Is someone trying to get at me through Lydia? But it all happened so quickly-none of it makes sense!”

“It makes some sense to me,” Ned said grimly. “I have to tell you that Miss Maplethorpe is an imposter-or, at least, that her being an imposter fits well with her activities at Hemmings.” He stopped, drained his glass, poured another. “No, I’m not reduced to guzzling your best port, Fitz, but my news is the worst. Mrs. Wickham has been murdered.”

“Jesus!” Fitz sank into his chair as if his legs had lost all power, the lock of stark white hair that had recently appeared in his jet-black mop falling over his brow. His eyes were wide, but only shock gave him pause; his intelligence was superior and still functioning. “You imply, murdered by Miss Maplethorpe?”

“Yes, assisted by the five men she had with her as helpers. I thought it odd that she was the only female apart from her maid, but she has a certain authority about her, so I didn’t question it beyond wondering. After all, she came recommended as a lady with experience of-er-wild patients. They were all in the plot, apparently.”

“Plot? How do you know of any plot?”

“Mrs. Darcy seems to have had a feeling that all was not well at Hemmings, Fitz. This morning she asked me to go there and see that all was well. By the time I got there, the local doctor and constable had arrived. I was able to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of events. What happened we will never quite know, but we think that the original plan was for a simple robbery. The best of the furniture is gone, the carpets, the silverware, the barouche and its horses, the pony and trap, and, we think, some jewellery. As to how-the local doctor says she was suffocated with a pillow by one man, while another sat on her chest.”

Fitz had slumped; he made a retching sound. Ned poured a big glass of port, and handed it to him. Finally, his own glass filled again, he sat down. “Drink it, Fitz, please, else it will have to be cognac.” Watching Fitz drink, he saw a little colour return to his face, and sat back, relieved. Fitz would do now. “Did Mrs. Wickham own any jewels?” he asked.

“It seems so, yes. A sapphire and diamond set Elizabeth never wore, and gave to her when she moved to Hemmings. Poor woman! Oh, poor, poor woman! Apparently Jane gave her a rope of pearls. As Lydia has had no opportunity to pawn them, Miss Maplethorpe must have taken them if they aren’t there.” He got up and began to pace restlessly. “What an awful year this has been! Two of my wife’s sisters gone. One is certainly dead. The other? I must presume her dead too.”

“Not yet, Fitz. One gathers they were very unalike. Mrs. Wickham imprisoned in a bottle, Miss Mary game for anything.” He grinned. “I never knew Miss Mary conscious, but she fought even when unconscious.” He stretched, winced.

“I am a selfish brute, Ned! Eat, and then go home to sleep.”

“Mrs. Wickham returns to Pemberley tomorrow with the Leek doctor. It will be late, but the doctor will see it done.”

“Thank you. You must be sore out of pocket.”

“That does not signify.”

“It does to me. Render an account, please, Ned.”

As soon as Ned had gone, Fitzwilliam Darcy got to his feet and walked to Elizabeth’s rooms. When he scratched softly on her door, she opened it herself and stood back for him to enter, giving him a keen glance.

“I knew it was you. Ned brought bad news, didn’t he?”

“Yes.” He went tiredly to one of a pair of armchairs and sat down, patting the seat of the other. “Sit down, Elizabeth.”

“Is it very bad?”

“The worst. Lydia is dead.”

How peculiar! It had struck him like a thunderbolt, whereas she looked almost unaffected save for her eyes, which widened. “Oh! I must have had some idea of it, because it comes the way an old friend does, an old friend one hasn’t seen for years. I’ve been waiting, but knowing too. I just-felt that all was not right. Ned noticed it this morning.”

“You don’t usually suffer from premonitions.”

“I agree, I don’t. Every time Charlie was ill, I was wrong!” She produced a smile and glued it to her mouth, which felt as if set in stone. “I used to bury him regularly. But he always got better. I used to fancy that he didn’t care for life over-much, but knew that if he died I would die as well, and it was knowing that made him recover.”

“A rather muddled explanation, my dear.”

“I daresay it is. Despair and Charlie were tied together in those days, yet look at him now. He has shed his childhood like an old skin. I am so happy for him-and for you, Fitz.”

Only a few candles burned, making a halo of fiery light around her head and throwing her face into shadow. He screwed up his eyes in an effort to see her clearly, and thought, My sight is going. “I have been unkind to Charlie,” he said, voice not as steady as he wished. “Unkind to you as well, Elizabeth.”

“You are unkindest to yourself, Fitz. Tell me everything that happened-and please, I beg you, don’t spare me. Once George Wickham was dead, it was only a question of time before Lydia died. How she loved him! Of all five of us, she loved best and most. Without him, she had no reason for being.”

“It wasn’t suicide, even in the remotest way. She fell victim to a nest of thieves, though I smell several rats. Suffice it to say that Miss Maplethorpe was an imposter, her manservants her minions, and that they planned to rob Hemmings-furniture, silver, carriage, horses, and jewellery. The things you and Jane gave her when she went to Hemmings. Lydia must have surprised them in the act, and they murdered her. Apparently she was drunk at the time. The doctor said she reeked of wine and spirits. They suffocated her with a pillow, so they may have wanted to make her death seem a natural one. Certainly that is out of the question.”

“Jane took against Miss Maplethorpe,” said Elizabeth. “Jane, who never takes against anyone! The day we saw her, Lydia wasn’t drunk, though pretending to be in front of Miss Maplethorpe. She was full of some tale about bars over the windows, but there were none, nor had there been. I looked closely. The hold on sobriety is frail, I am told, so perhaps, not succeeding in persuading Jane or me about the bars, she went back to her old ways. I don’t know, except that, like you, I smell rats.”

“Elizabeth, there were bars over the windows,” Fitz said, his face horrified. “They were supposed to be removed before Lydia was sent to Hemmings. It had been the home of a madman. Why didn’t Miss Maplethorpe explain?” He took her hands, she thought absently. “I keep asking myself, why Hemmings? How could a nest of thieves plan such a thing when Lydia was moved there in such a hurry? It was less than a week between that dreadful scene in the dining room and her removal to Hemmings! Yet they were ready with the lady’s companion, and their plan-how is that possible?”

“And Lydia was murdered? Fitz, it makes no sense!”

“Perhaps Miss Maplethorpe enlisted with Miss Scrimpton’s agency prepared to take the first opportunity that came her way-at the moment my mind inclines that way, for it does make some sense. The jewels were worth about three thousand pounds, if Jane’s pearls are the ones I believe she gave away. The furniture and silver would not be worth more than a thousand pounds, though the carpets were rather fine-I bought them new for two thousand. The barouche and its pair of matched horses represent the most valuable thing they stole-about four thousand. The pony and trap was negligible.”

“A total of about ten thousand pounds,” said Elizabeth.

“Yes. A good haul, I suppose, even for professional thieves, who will certainly know where to dispose of their loot for the best price. If they lose about a third to the fellow who buys from them, then they have indeed prospered. Miss Maplethorpe will pay her men two hundred pounds apiece, and emerge about five thousand pounds the richer. It may be that she saw far grander pickings, since my name was associated with the position. I don’t know, except that she certainly displayed no patience. Scarcely a day on the agency’s books, and she was on her way to Hemmings.”

He began to stroke the smooth skin of the backs of her hands rhythmically; it calmed and soothed him, and he wondered why they had taken to quarrelling every time they met. A part of the trouble, he knew, was his inability to tolerate her perpetual teasing, the habit she had of making fun of him. In the days when his passion had burned white-hot, he had suffered it, divining that for some reason beyond his understanding she thought it did him good to be teased, tormented, made fun of. But the longer they were married, the harder it had become to bear this capricious flightiness, and finally he had begun to round upon her each time she belittled him. At this moment, however, she was not moved to mock, so it was very pleasant to be with her, feel his blue devils dissipate.

“You have a very powerful mind, Fitz,” she was saying. “Bend it to this conundrum. There must be a better answer! When you find it, we can rest.” She moved her head, the halo dissolved and he saw that her beautiful eyes were filled with tears. “Poor, poor little Lydia! Such a bad business, right from the beginning. Who believes in fifteen-year-old love? We did not, Jane and I. Nor did Papa, though he was too indolent, too indifferent to his duties as a parent to curb her. We judged her elopement moral laxity, but I see now that it was the only way she could keep her George. She loved him with every part of her! And he was such a villain, such a liar. His father did him no service, to raise him alongside you as if the pair of you were equals. His expectations were nonexistent, while you were heir to one of the largest fortunes in England. I remember him from Longbourn days as naпve, grossly under-educated-yes, I know he went to Cambridge, but he learned nothing there, or at his school. Certainly his entire plan was to use his looks and charm to marry money, but at every turn he was foiled. So I suppose with Lydia came a certain measure of security, through our connection to you.”

“You don’t believe that I was instrumental in sending him to his death?” he asked.

“Of course not! He was a soldier by profession and died in battle, so Lydia said.”

“Only three sorts of soldier die in battle, Elizabeth. One is the brave man who dares all. One is the hapless wretch who stands in front of a ball or a bayonet. And one is the lazy cur who finds a secluded spot to sleep the battle away-without first ascertaining whether his spot is in range of the enemy’s artillery.”

“Is the third way how George Wickham died?”

“So I’m told by his superiors. But Lydia will never know that now.” He got up, kissed her hands. “Thank you for your understanding, Elizabeth. Her body is coming to Pemberley. We’ll bury her here.”

“No, it must be Meryton. Jane and I will take her.”

“With Mary still missing? Are you sure?”

“You’re right. Oh, she will hate to be buried here!”

“She can always vent her spleen at me by haunting Pemberley. She’ll have plenty of company.”

A groom from Pemberley located Charlie, Angus and Owen in Chapel-en-le-Frith, a village as old as its Norman name, and situated an easy ride from the cave district, which was why Charlie had chosen it. As the groom caught them before they set out for a day spent underground, they abandoned their plans and rode home.

Apart from forging a strong friendship, Charlie and Angus had a liking for caves in common-a liking that Owen refused to share. As his revulsion was more fear than detestation, he was, the other two informed him frankly, a dashed nuisance, especially when the cave under exploration was more a tunnel than a chamber. So Owen rarely went caving; he preferred to pass his time at Pemberley with the Darcy girls. With them he felt useful; he could ride (astride) with Georgie, function as a candid critic of Susie’s art, help Anne with her Classics, and try to talk Cathy out of some harebrained prank sure to see her sent supperless to bed. As luck would have it, the day they were sent for was a caving day for Owen, who had ridden from Pemberley at dawn and joined his two friends for breakfast. Now they were all returning to Pemberley-what a relief!

All three were mystified by Fitz’s curt summons. The groom knew nothing, and had been ordered not to ride back with them, which suited the trio very well-they could speculate aloud in peace. From which it could be deduced that they did not ride in an abstracted worry, but rather with an eye to any likely hole in a hillside or gorge, of which there were many, though not all proved to be more than a single small room. Angus had devised a system whereby they didn’t make the mistake of exploring the same opening twice; those they had examined bore a bright red rag firmly fixed outside.

“There’s one without a rag,” said Angus suddenly. “Oh, I wish we had better maps! I have written to General Mowbray for army survey maps, but so far not a squeak from the man. Which probably means they do not exist.” He marked the cave as best he could on his map, noting the look of the terrain in the vicinity. “It’s somewhat off the beaten track as caves go, Charlie,” he said anxiously.

“Don’t fret, Angus, it will be attended to as soon as we go a-caving again,” said Charlie in a soothing voice.

Angus was not looking very Puckish these days, Charlie thought. His hair had less apricot in it, and the creases in his cheeks were threatening to become fissures. Any doubt he had experienced about the depth of Angus’s affection for Mary had vanished; the man was head over heels in love, and quite demented by worry. Over five weeks, and not a sign of her anywhere. If she were still alive, she had to be held in a cave. Of course she might have been spirited several hundred miles away, but why?

Under the lee of a curling cliff they encountered a bizarre procession coming toward them on foot, and courteously drew off the bridle-path they were following to let it pass. Perhaps thirty small forms clad in brown habits, hoods pulled right over their heads, walked two abreast behind a little old man clad in the same fashion, save that his hood was pulled back and he wore a large crucifix on his chest. He looked somewhat like a Franciscan friar. In the rear came two bigger children pushing a hand cart loaded with boxes that clinked as if they contained bottles.

“Hola, Father!” called Charlie as the friar drew level with him. “Where are you going?”

“To Hazel Grove and Stockport, sir.”

“For what reason?” Charlie asked, not sure why he asked.

“The Children of Jesus are on His business, sir.”

“And what business is that?”

“Follow me.” The friar stepped aside. “Children, walk on,” he said, and the children obediently walked on.

How miserable they seem! Angus thought, watching them as they passed. Shoulders hunched, cowls entirely hiding their faces, and their eyes fixed upon the ground. Flinching and shivering as if in distress, even emitting faint moans. Then he saw that the friar was moving toward the hand cart, and followed.

“Halt!” the old man cried. The procession halted. One gnarled hand indicated the boxes. “Pray open any of them that you wish, sir. They speak of the purity of our intentions.”

A box of blue bottles was labeled CHILDREN OF JESUS COUGH SYRUP, and a box of green bottles were a remedy for influenza and colds. A sluggish brown liquid proclaimed itself an elixir for the cure of diarrhoea. A box of clear bottles contained red liquid that said CHILDREN OF JESUS PAINT FOR BOILS, ULCERS, CARBUNCLES & SORES. A box of tins were an ointment for horses.

“Impressive,” said Charlie, concealing his smile. “Does this mean you make nostrums and potions for diseases and ailments, Father?”

“Yes. We are on our way to make deliveries to apothecary shops.”

Charlie held up a tin of horse ointment. “Does this work?”

“Pray take it and give it to your stable master, young sir,” said the friar.

“How much do you charge for it?”

“A shilling, but it will retail for more. It is popular.”

Charlie fished in his waistcoat pocket and produced a guinea.

“This is for your trouble, Father.” He managed a trick he had learned from his father, of looking very sympathetic, yet all steel underneath. “It’s such a beautiful day, Father! Why do your boys wear their cowls up? They should be getting some sun.”

Rage danced in the pebbly blue eyes, but the answer was smooth and reasonable. “They have all suffered from bad masters, sir, and I have to physick them with a lotion that reacts badly in the sun. Their skins would burn.”

Angus intervened. “Father, have you seen a lost lady in your travels?”

The rage died, the eyes widened innocently. “Of what kind is this lady, sir?”

“Tall, thin, about forty, reddish-gold hair. Handsome.”

“No, sir, definitely not. The only lady we have seen was poor Moggie Mag. She was bringing home rabbits for her cats and lost her way, but we set her upon it.”

“Thank you, Father,” Angus said. “Whereabouts do you and your children live?”

“In the Children of Jesus orphanage near York, sir.”

“A long way to walk,” said Charlie. “Given that there are no monasteries anywhere in this part of England, where do you stay?”

“We beg for alms and we camp, sir. God is good to us.”

“Must you go as far afield as Stockport to hawk your wares?”

“We do not hawk, sir. The apothecaries of this part of England like our remedies best. They’ll take everything we can manage to bring with us.”

The three men prepared to ride on, but the friar held up a hand to detain them, and addressed Charlie.

“When I thank God for this guinea, sir, I would like to mention its donor’s name. May I ask it?”

“Charles Darcy of Pemberley.” Charlie tipped his hat and rode off, the others following.

“The Children of Jesus,” said Angus. “Have you ever heard of them, Charlie? I haven’t, but I’m not from these parts.”

“I’ve never heard a whisper of them. Still, if they really do hail from York, that would account for my ignorance.”

“Except,” said Owen thoughtfully, “why are they on a bridle-path? A bridle-path through wild and desolate country? Surely this is not the main route from York to Stockport? They look like Roman Catholics and may be trying to avoid several kinds of odium and petty persecution-the kind of thing that happens to Gypsies. The friar said they camped and begged for alms, which likens them to Gypsies.”

“But no one could mistake them for Gypsies, Owen, and they’re little children-boys, I hazard a guess. One very small fellow must have had a bee inside his cowl, and dropped it long enough for his companion to shoo the bee. A boy, and tonsured. People in rural fastnesses tend to be kind-’tis in cities that the quality of mercy is shoddy,” Charlie said. “I shall ask my father to make enquiries about them. As an MP, he must know the location of all orphanages.”

“They’re not Romans, Charlie,” Angus said, splitting hairs. “Monastic orders don’t sell a remedy for impotence, and most of the boxes on the cart were full of that. It also answers why the old man can sell his Children of Jesus wares as far afield from York as Stockport. ’Twould seem to me that his remedy works, else he’d not concentrate upon it.” He grunted. “Children of Jesus! One of the very many Christian sects that afflict northern England, do you think, Charlie?”

“I do, though the prize for the most perspicacious question must go to Owen-what are they doing on this bridle-path?”

Once the three riders were out of sight, Father Dominus again halted his progress.

“Brother Jerome!” he called.

Lifting his skirts, Jerome came at a run, leaving Ignatius to mind the cart.

“Yes, Father?”

“You were right, Jerome. I should not have brought the boys out into daylight, no matter how deserted our route.”

“No, Father, not wrong, just mistaken,” said the only literate Child of Jesus, who took care to be obsequious in all his dealings with the old man. “They have been naughty, they needed a special punishment, and what better than a day in the light of Lucifer? It is besides the shortest way to the shops.”

“Have they been punished enough?”

“Given that we have encountered Mr. Charles Darcy, I would say so, Father. Ignatius and I can take the hand cart on by ourselves once the boys are back in the Northern Caves. They may not like living there as much as they have the Southern Caves, but today’s ordeal will reconcile them,” said Jerome, at his oiliest.

“Brother Ignatius!” Father Dominus called.

“Yes, Father?”

“Jerome and I are going to take the boys back to the Northern Caves now. You will remain at this end of the 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. Give me time, give me time!

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. Murder! It mazed the mind, that such a pathetic soul as Lydia could have been done to death.

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 Jane’s. Aunty Kitty, a shallower woman, seemed to regard the death as at least partly a blessing, for it meant she could spend the summer at Pemberley after all. The people with whom she associated had not been on Pater’s invitation list this year, since he was expecting great things from the Commons and Lords.

“I am delighted that Kitty is here,” said Elizabeth to her son and to Jane. “She’ll give Georgie a little much-needed town bronze. I don’t quite know why, but Georgie loves her.”

“She’s a widgeon, Mama!” Charlie laughed. “Georgie likes any person who isn’t run-of-the-mill, and Aunt Kitty is so elegant.”

“I hope she can persuade Georgie not to bite her nails,” Jane said. “It ruins her hands, which are quite beautiful.”

“Well, I’m off to find a cave that Angus has lost,” Charlie said, kissed his fingers to the ladies, and vanished.

“I’m glad Lydia is buried here,” said Jane. “We’re close to her, and can put flowers on her grave.”

“She had few flowers in her life, poor little soul. You’re right, Jane, it is good that she’s buried here.”

“Don’t pity her for lacking the things she pitied us for having,” said Jane. “Lydia loved life in army towns, she loved riotous parties and the company of men-the intimate company of men. She pitied us for leading staid, virtuous existences.”

“All I can remember is how she loved George Wickham.”

“Yes, but despite her declarations to the contrary, Lizzie, she had a fine old time of it when he was away.” Jane looked angry. “No word of her assailants, I suppose?”

“No, not a whisper.”

When the body of a lad about fifteen years old came floating down the Derwent River, it attracted attention only because Miss Mary Bennet, closely connected to Pemberley, was missing. A shire constable was sent to look at the bloated, horrible remains, which the local doctor said could have drifted downstream for miles, for the lad had been dead at least three days. The doctor was of the opinion he had drowned, as he bore no marks of foul play. The body sported only two oddities: the first, a bald spot had been tonsured into the crown of his hair; and the second, he was circumcised. Otherwise the lad was well nourished and bore no evidence of a hard master, which made it unlikely that he had been a worker in a factory, mill or foundry, or a soldier. As the corpse was naked and therefore without a name, the constable wrote it down as “Male Youth. A Jew.” He forwarded his report to the superintendent and sent the body for burial as a pauper. No need to worry about consecrated ground: no Christian, this one.

However, when a second adolescent body was found at the foot of a cliff not far from the first, news of it was conveyed to Mr. Darcy, together with the constable’s report on the first. Fitz called in Charlie and Angus, but not Owen, who, consumed with guilt, had gone home to Wales, leaving some sore hearts in the schoolroom and a militant sparkle in Georgie’s eyes.

Fitz looked grim. Then he explained why he had summoned them. “Youths and children die with quite depressing regularity,” he concluded, “especially at this time, when the Poor Laws are so abused. But this pair are out of the usual way. Both are about the same age-fourteen or fifteen. Pubescent, but not long such. One is male, the other female.” He shifted in his chair uncomfortably. “Neither bore the stigmata of enforced child labour-no weals from injudiciously plied whips or crops, and no broken skin. The lad has gone to a pauper’s grave already, but the girl has had a rigorously prosecuted post-mortem at my instruction, and she has no broken bones or scars from old injuries. Both were well fed and healthy to look at. The girl was healthy in all respects. No stroke or apoplexy felled her untimely.”

“So she didn’t fall from a cliff,” said Angus, whose Argus ears were pricking.

“She did not. She was put there to make it seem she had, and I suppose were Mary not missing, a constable wouldn’t even have been notified. She would simply have gone straight to the paupers’ burying ground.”

“Pater, when you sent for us after Aunt Lydia’s death, we encountered a very peculiar group of people,” said Charlie, looking at Angus. “However, I think Angus should tell you. If I do it, you’ll think I exaggerate.”

“Not at all,” said Fitz, surprised. “You recount events well, Charlie. But let Angus tell of this, if you like.”

“We encountered a procession of-we think-male children led by an old man,” said Angus. “He called them the Children of Jesus, and said they came from an orphanage of that name near York.”

Fitz frowned. “An orphanage run by religious?”

“Roman Catholic, perhaps. They looked Franciscan, though the shade of brown was wrong.”

“The Children of Jesus orphanage, run by quasi-Franciscan friars and located near York. Such an institution does not exist, near York or anywhere else north of the Thames, I would think. ‘Children of Jesus’ doesn’t sound right. It would be ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus’ or ‘Mary Immaculate’ were it Roman. Romans are not fixated upon Jesus as an entity the way some Protestant sects are-I mean the ones which talk so much of Jesus that there is hardly a mention of God. The name Children of Jesus sounds as if it were made up by a someone unschooled in theology.”

“Then we were right to doubt them!” Charlie cried. “It was the old man-a very fishy person. Never looked one in the eye.”

“We were riding down a bridle-path,” said Angus, “that Charlie knew of, certainly, but we met no one except the Children of Jesus on it. How would a friar from York know of it? The old man said he was an apothecary, and was very quick-too quick!-to show us his wares, stacked on a hand cart. Perhaps fifty boxes of elixirs and nostrums of all descriptions-look anywhere you like! he said, and gave Charlie a tin of horse ointment. The labels all read CHILDREN OF JESUS this or that. Who knows? Perhaps the old man believes CHILDREN OF JESUS gives his remedies a certain cachet.” He cleared his throat and looked apologetically at Charlie. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you, but I rode over to Buxton to visit the apothecary shop, and was surprised to find the proprietor very keen on ‘Children of Jesus’ products. Swears by them! So do his customers, who are prepared to pay almost anything for ‘Children of Jesus’ choler elixir.” He looked impish. “It cures impotence. If the old man opened a shop in Westminster and sold that alone, he would make a fortune.”

When the laughter died away, Charlie spoke. “I think the old man is mad,” he said. “There was an eldritch quality to him, and I never saw thirty-odd little boys so demure and well-behaved as his were, not in all my life. They so winced and quivered when I asked to let them remove their cowls that I’m sure they didn’t want their faces on display to him. I think the old man terrorises them. Oh, how afraid I was of some of my schoolmasters! Though I fancied him mad, an even greater fear. The only things that ever petrified me when I was a little boy were you, Pater-sorry!-and the occasional lunatic who crossed my path. Sane people are terrified of mad people because their conduct can’t be predicted and they can’t be reasoned with. To little boys, that old man might be Satan.”

“To the apothecary in Buxton, he was Father Dominus,” said Angus. “I haven’t quite finished recounting my adventures, Charlie. Father Dominus always comes during daylight hours to be paid, but the goods are invariably delivered in the middle of the night, and by children in religious robes. My informant had never heard of a delivery during the day. He seemed to think that the children were refugees from bad masters whom Dominus had taken under his protection.”

“Curious,” Fitz said, steepling his fingers and putting their tips against his mouth. It made him look like a prime minister. “Where do they come from, since it isn’t York?” he asked. “If normally they go by night, that might account for their strange behaviour when you met them in broad daylight, but they must hail from somewhere, and there they will be known.”

“I’m sorry I lumped you in with lunatics, Pater.”

Fitz glanced at his son with a smile in his eyes. “I do have sufficient imagination, Charlie, to realise why a little boy would lump me in with lunatics. I must have been extremely forbidding.”

“A lot less so these days, Pater.”

“We must divide up our forces to deal with this,” Fitz said, amusement gone. “Angus and Charlie, you’ll concentrate on the caves. It may be that Father Dominus uses a cave in his wanderings, and if Mary is still alive, we must presume she’s being held in a cave. Whether there is any connection between her and the Children of Jesus is unknown, but if you work assiduously, perhaps some evidence will come to light. Angus, how long can you remain here?”

“As long as I have to, Fitz. I have good deputies to deal with matters in London, and my journalists must be having a mouse’s time with the cat away in Derbyshire. Unpolished prose.”

“Good. We must pray that things come to a head before all of us have to go, whether we want to or not. If Mary isn’t found before Oxford goes up and Parliament comes out of its summer recess, then I think there’s very little hope for her.”

“What of the orphanages?” Charlie asked.

“They go to Ned. It’s just such a job as he relishes, up on that monstrous black horse and riding from one place to another,” Fitz said dispassionately.

“By the way, Pater, while Angus was riding to Buxton, I was engaged in making some enquiries of my own,” said Charlie. “I asked about a procession of children who may or may not have been clad as religious. Farms, hamlets, villages, I asked. But the procession, even as a group rather than a line, never emerged at either end of our bridle-path. The only settlement in the direction from which they were coming is Pemberley, and we know they were never at Pemberley. I think that means they came down to it from Stanage Edge, though they were never in Bamford. And its far end is Chapel-en-le-Frith.”

“You are implying they entered a cave?” Fitz asked.

“Either that, or they crossed the open wilderness between the caverns and north of The Peak.”

“Did they look as if they were carrying food? Water?”

“Under their robes, Pater, who knows? Water is easily found anywhere, but I’ve never heard of a group unencumbered by tents or caravans camping in the open. The moors are cruel.”

“That they are. I shall ask Ned what he’s heard.”

Nothing, as it turned out when Fitz spoke to Ned.

“No matter how popular Father Dominus’s remedy for impotence may be, Fitz, I’ll go bail he’s up to no good. Yet it makes little sense, does it? Here’s a fellow with genuine cure-alls aplenty up his sleeve, hauling in fat profits, apothecaries clamouring for all he can supply them, while he’s tramping a bridle-path that leads to naught save Pemberley. In charge of a group of children who seem not to be ill-treated. What’s his goal?” Ned asked, frowning.

“Charlie deems him a madman, and that may be the simple truth. Nothing about the business makes a shred of sense. In fact, it makes the circumstances surrounding Lydia’s death look clear as crystal. Now you say you can find no sense either, Ned.”

“More important, where is this factory of his? And he must have a warehouse. An orphanage would be a very clever disguise, wouldn’t it?”

Fitz looked alert. “You’re right, it would. Orphanages are at the discretion of the Parish, but not every parish has one. I know certain philanthropists endow orphanages. I think we may discount workhouses and poorhouses-they contain indigents of all ages. I’ve written to all the religious denominations owning a central authority, and will receive answers in the fullness of time, but there may be institutions quite unconnected to any religion.”

“Rest easy, Fitz! Jupiter and I will ride from place to place, even as far afield as York. Orphanages and charity homes are not as numerous as apples on a tree.”

“Unless the tree be a pear.”

“When you joke, Fitz, you’re worn out,” Ned said, smiling. “That wretched lock of white hair! I swear it grows wider daily.”

“Elizabeth thinks it makes me look distinguished.”

“All the better in a prime minister, then.”

“You’ll need plenty of gold. Here.” Fitz tossed Ned a bag of coins, deftly caught. “Find them, Ned! I’m grieved to see Elizabeth pining.”

“Peculiar, isn’t it?” Ned asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well, this whole business started over Mary’s letter to Charlie-the one I purloined and copied. You were so upset about it! But looking back from whereabouts we are now, it hardly seems worth a tenth of what you made of it.”

“Don’t rub it in, Ned! I was too sensitive about the possible outcomes, busy thinking months-sometimes years-ahead. I should have waited on events, I see that now. You were in the right of it when you said I was making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“I don’t remember saying that,” Ned said, wrinkling his brow.

“You didn’t use those words, but that was what you meant. I ought to listen to you! You’re usually right, Ned.”

Ned laughed, a big sound. “It’s the poker up your arse, Fitz. Makes it a painful business to back down.”

From another man, a mortal insult: from Ned, a loving truth. “Punctilious to a fault, eh? Pride in my ancestry was ever my besetting sin.”

“And ambition.”

“No, that’s a later besetter. Still, if I had waited on events I wouldn’t have asked you to watch Mary, and we would have lost her at Mansfield.”

“I lost her anyway.”

“Oh, cease and desist, Ned! Though if we do find her, she may write her wretched book with my blessing. I’ll even pay for its publication.”

“The result will be the same, whether you pay or the publisher does. No one will read it.”

“That was what you said!”

THERE WERE ABOUT three tablespoons of water left in the bottom of her ewer, though thirst had not been the torment Mary had busily imagined. The cave was bitterly cold, especially at night; the screen may have been put there to conceal what lay outside her bars, but the canvas had excluded the wind that blew eternally, save for that ever-present moaning whine. Her only defence was to draw her heavy velvet curtain closed, but it was far from adequate. In winter she would not have survived a week. However, there could be no denying the fact that this chill did not provoke a consuming thirst. If she paced her cell, she grew warmer-but thirstier.

She now wore every item of clothing they had left her, dirty as well as clean: four pairs of woolly socks, four flannel nightgowns, one flannel over-robe. No gloves, and her hands were very cold. The scrap of bread had been eaten already, before it grew too stale to gnaw. Easier to follow the passage of time now that she could see daylight. Her stomach must have shrunk, for she felt no hunger pangs.

To her horror, rats came to feast on the loaf of bread Father Dominus had kicked aside on his last visit to her; when they had finished it they didn’t leave, just cruised the dark hours waiting for a far tastier meal-her own dead body. They did not look like the few rats she had seen before. They had been black and fierce, whereas these were small and grey, easily intimidated. Creatures of the moors, obviously.

It was only now that time hung so heavily upon her that she realised how busy and occupied she had been during most of her incarceration. Producing a page of perfect copperplate devoid of any error was a vastly different task from ordinary writing, when one could cross out a word, or over-write it, or pop in a carat-mark and put a forgotten word above. Much and all though she had condemned Father Dominus’s ideas, setting them down error-free on a page had taxed her, as it would have taxed any but a professional scribe, one of those persons who copied out an aspiring author’s prose to render it fit for a publisher’s eye.

Now it seemed as if all her woes had descended at once. She had nothing to occupy her time, and that fact loomed largest on her list. It was like being back caring for Mama, existing in a limbo of idleness, yet far worse; she had no music to console her, and no books she had not read at least a dozen times. Add to that inertia her lack of food, exercise and water, and-oh, dreadful!

The days when she had found prayer a compensation had long gone, though now, with naught else to do, she prayed, but to pass the time rather than with any confidence that prayers were things God answered. Were I Mama, she thought, I would find release and comfort in sleep; Mama had always been able to do that. But I am not made in Mama’s mould, so I cannot sleep the hours away.

So to keep her mind off the cold, she began to dissect her conduct since Mama’s death had liberated her, and came to the conclusion that all her efforts had been ludicrous. Not one thing had gone to plan, which hinted at one of two things: either Satan was conspiring against her, or else her aspirations, her ability to be practical, and her own person, were wanting. Since it hardly seemed likely that she was important enough to earn so much of Satan’s attention, the second alternative was obviously the correct one.

I was obsessed with Argus, and I thought if I wrote a book confirming his theories and observations, I would impress him so profoundly that he would be eager to meet me. Well, I will never know now whether things might have fallen out that way. I do have a crusading spirit in respect of the poor and downtrodden, but who am I to think that anything I do can help them? I see now that my research was not thorough enough, even including the allocation of my financial resources. I should have corresponded with several publishers first of all, and learned how much exactly my book would have cost me to publish. And, since I had reconciled myself to living with Lizzie at Pemberley when my funds were all used up, why did I deny myself at least a few of the comforts a gentlewoman expects when she travels? Some of it was to appear no better off than those I wished to interview for my book, but I am ingenious, I could have devised a scheme whereby I travelled quite comfortably, yet seemed when divorced from the activity of travel to be, say, a penurious governess. Some of it lay in the sheer euphoria of being free at last to do as I pleased, but more of it lay in an abysmal ignorance of the world at large. There was never a need on my part to have so many guineas in my reticule, for I had my letter of credit and could have withdrawn two or three guineas at a time.

Hindsight, Mary Bennet! Experience has given you wisdom, but the vagaries of chance have put your life at peril. It seems you cannot even ride the public stage-coach without disaster, and what is that compared to your present predicament?

A sensible woman would have accepted Mr. Robert Wilde’s very sincere proposal of marriage, but what did you do, pray? Why, you looked at him as if he had grown another head, and then snapped it off! But you know the reason for that full well-you could see that it would have been an inappropriate union-he younger than you, wealthier, more appealing to the opposite sex. And face it, Mary, you were right to refuse him! He will find a more suitable wife, one whom he can love without being ridiculed, which would have been his fate had he married you.

From Robert Wilde her mind skipped to Angus Sinclair, who had said no word of love. He had offered friendship, and that she had felt able to accept. It was he whom she missed upon her travels: the kindred sense of belonging, the receptive ear turned her way to listen to whatever she said. Yes, she had missed him acutely, and known that were he with her, the adventures would have taken on new dimensions. Mr. Robert Wilde’s face she found hard to remember, but Mr. Angus Sinclair’s sprang immediately into her mind like a portrait done by a master.

She was missing dearest Lizzie too, though Jane not as much. Jane cried so, and tears accomplished nothing, changed nothing. The only tears Mary respected were those of the deepest, sharpest, most harrowing grief, and one could not compare those tears to the tears of Jane. No, Lizzie was the sensible and sensitive one-why was she so unhappy? When I get out of this, Mary resolved, I am going to discover the cause of Lizzie’s unhappiness.

At night, huddled in her chilly bed, a slightly angular ball trying to warm just one spot, she wondered about the origins of her prison cell. Seizing the opportunity during one of Father Dominus’s more approachable moods, she had asked why he had ever needed to construct such a thing, only to be rebuffed. Not by a refusal to enlighten her-that would have been more understandable. No, Father Dominus had denied ever building it! When she pressed him for an explanation, he had said he owned no theories about it at all, and changed the subject. So who had made a cage in a cave? A cave, what’s more, that lay far from any accessible chamber, if she could believe Ignatius and Therese. Who had built it, and why? Robbers? Refugees? Kidnappers? She would never know, it seemed. But to wonder liberated her mind a little, let it drift into sleep. And when she was free, she would try to find out.

When I get out of this, she kept saying to herself-never if I get out of this. Three tablespoons of water left, and she was still saying when, not if.

The new dawn was a sunny one, she saw when she tugged her curtain back for the morning look, then closed it to cut the wind. Cold, so cold! Her lips were dry, their skin crusted and flaking. Do I, or do I not?

“I do not count on Thee to provide, O Lord, except to give me strength and ingenuity,” she said, and drank the last of her water.

No sooner had she set the empty ewer down than there was a roar in the bowels below her, a huge shudder that threw her flat; dazed, she climbed to her feet and saw that the wooden seat of her commode had twisted, splintered. The hole beneath it was still there, but instead of the sound of running water came a column of dust that billowed about her.

Another noise followed, this one inside her cell-harsh and metallic. She ran to the curtain and pulled it back to reveal the bars. They had buckled! When she tried to open the big door, it swung inward on its hinges, squealing, its lock sheared where the mortise entered its socket. Mary ran through it-if more of this subsidence was to come, let her be outside the cell, not in it! Then, remembering how cold she was, she steeled herself to return to the cell and take her two blankets. More layers to warm herself.

“Thank you, dear Lord,” she said then, safely outside again.

There were two more openings in the left side wall of this foyer cavern, as well as the one she had used for exercise. She looked into each, and saw blackness. A stack of tallow candles of the cheapest sort lay beside the far tunnel, together with a tinder box well stuffed with dried mosses almost as fine as wool. But not for one moment did Mary contemplate either. She was no Ariadne with a ball of twine wending her way through the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, and after that upheaval in the depths, who knew what had happened in the tunnels?

No, she would enter the world directly, from the aperture, no matter how precipitous the terrain outside. She went to the edge of the opening. Not a cliff, thank God! A pile of rocks spread downward and, at the top of the cave, a massive boulder leaned; it must have helped the dark green canvas conceal the cave to anyone on the moor below. She was nothing like a thousand feet up, she saw now, but rather about three hundred feet. The wind buffeted and tore at her, but the landslide was dry, and she had some protection from the blankets once she managed to wrap them around her shoulders. The position of the sun told her that she was looking north across a desolation of moors, conical peaks and ragged rock formations; nowhere could she see a house or settlement of any kind. Therefore when she reached the bottom she must turn toward the south and, some instinct said, the west rather than the east. If habitation there were, it would lie that way. Oh, for her boots!

The rocks were difficult to negotiate, and bit into her hands when she had to cling for dear life with toes groping for a foothold below. Ten minutes into her descent saw her quite warm from the effort; off came one blanket, which she tossed downward as some protection against wearing her socks out. Her strength had dwindled alarmingly, but Miss Mary Bennet was not about to be defeated by her own bodily shortcomings. She kept scrambling down, occasionally falling, but always halted by a protruding boulder too soon to sustain injury.

It seemed to take forever, but at the end of about an hour Mary was standing on rank, strappy grass that only the hungriest sheep could fancy. Her socks had held up under the harsh treatment, but they wouldn’t last if her walk was one of many miles. This had to be the Peak District of Derbyshire, she thought, and wished she knew whereabouts Pemberley lay. But as she did not, she set her course around the base of the low hill in which her cave sat, and hoped that some sort of civilisation lay close at hand.

At first it did not look auspicious; the countryside seemed as wild and deserted as it had to the north, and Mary’s spirits sank. No road, no track, no path…But after she had tramped about five miles, wincing as the sharp-stoned ground cut into her feet, her sensitive nose scented the foetid commingling of barnyard aromas-pigs, cows, geese, horses. Yes, yes! This way did lead to habitation! To people!

Farmer William Hawkins saw a scarecrow coming down the lane, staggering and tottering. Tall, skinny, dressed in rags, with the hair of a fairground clown, reddish and sticking up, and a face like a fairground skellington, just the bones. Transfixed, he watched until the scarecrow came close enough to see it was a woman; then he realised who she had to be, and whooped so loudly that Young Will came bolting out of the barn.

“’Tis Miss Mary Bennet,” said Farmer Hawkins to his son. “Oh, look at her feet, poor soul! Arms up, Will, we’ll chair her to the house. Then you can climb on the pony and go find Mr. Charlie-he’s hereabouts, searching them caves.”

Mary was put into a wooden armchair by a kitchen fire, given water and then broth. By the time that Young Will found Charlie and Angus, Mary had regained sensation in her limbs, felt warm, cosseted, alive. The broth was skimmed off a true farm soup, always on the hob, added to with whatever came to hand that day, and it was delicious. Only a little of it had made her feel sated, but she knew that would pass; in a few days she would be eating huge meals to heal her body’s travails.

Then Angus burst through the door, his face wet with tears, his arms out to enfold her in a hug. Much to her astonishment, Mary found this treatment exactly what she might have wanted had she dreamed of wanting it, which she had not.

“Oh, Mary, if you but knew the despair we have all felt these past weeks!” he said into her hair, which smelled of tallow and dust, and somewhere underneath, of Mary.

“Set me down, Angus,” she said, recollecting herself. “I am very glad to see you, but I cannot stand for long, even with a gentleman supporting me.”

Obedient to her every whim, he put her in the chair. “I can imagine that our despair is as nothing compared to yours,” he said, understanding she was not yet ready for declarations of love. “Where have you been?”

“In a cave, the prisoner of a mad little old man who calls himself Father Dominus.”

“So he is up to no good! Charlie, Owen and I met him with about thirty little boys, carrying his wares.”

“The Children of Jesus,” she said, nodding. “Where is Charlie, if he was with you today?”

“Gone home to fetch a carriage for you.” Remembering his manners, Angus turned to the Hawkins family and thanked them for their kindness to Miss Bennet. They would, of course, have the hundred-pounds reward. “No, no, Mr. Hawkins, I insist!”

Mary’s head was nodding. Angus moved behind her and let her head lie against him, as the chair back was low. She was still asleep when Charlie and the carriage arrived, so Angus carried her to it and bundled her in furs; she felt very cold. Mrs. Hawkins had peeled off her socks and washed and dressed her feet, but Angus and Charlie were anxious to get her home, where by the time they arrived Dr. Marshall would be waiting.

“Are you well enough to give us all your story, Mary?” Fitz asked a day later as the group assembled in the Rubens Room before dinner. Though she was too thin, it was clear that her basic health was unaffected by her ordeal; a hot bath, her hair washed by none other than Hoskins herself and the loan of one of Lizzie’s gowns made her look quite breathtaking, Angus decided. Too thin she might be, but the clean line of her flawless bones was better emphasized. Only heavily bandaged feet bore testimony to her sufferings.

If Mary had one virtue greater than others, it was her reluctance to complain coupled to her dislike of occupying the central position on a stage. So without self-pity or florid embroidery, Mary told her story. She had no idea that Ned Skinner had been taking her to Pemberley when Father Dominus struck; in fact, she remembered nothing between being evicted from the Friar Tuck and waking some days later in the cave, a prisoner. Both the ladies and gentlemen found it hard to credit that she had been stolen for no better reason than to act as a scribe for a book about his outlandish beliefs.

“Though originally he stole me to experiment upon me,” she qualified, resolving that nothing she said would paint him madder than he truly was. And what was madness anyway? “He told me that I had been dying from a swelling of the brain-apparently his skills as a physician were developed enough to diagnose this from my appearance as I lay on the bank where he found me. It seems he had concocted a remedy for swelling of the inner organs, but had no one upon whom to test it. So he stole me, fed me his concoction, and cured me. Then I became his scribe. At first his Cosmogenesis, as he calls it, fascinated me-a truly original concept wherein God is the darkness, and all light is evil. His term for the author of evil is not Satan or the Devil, but Lucifer. How much Cosmogenesis owes to his encroaching blindness I know not, but certainly it contributed. Though he never said so, I gathered that light was painful to him. Ignatius said once that whenever he set out to collect payment from apothecary shops, he wore spectacles with lenses darkened by smoke.”

“So the boys we encountered behaved as they did because they abhorred light,” said Charlie. “I put it down to fear of him.”

“Fear of him is something new as far as the children are concerned, and even so, it is the girls who fear him more. Events occurred that provoked him into calling them unclean.”

“What happened to you, Mary?” Fitz asked.

She looked wry. “My undisciplined tongue, of course. I had kept it under rigid control, understanding that to antagonise him might earn me a death sentence. But when he informed me that Jesus was the result of a cynical collaboration between God and Lucifer, I could not remain silent. I called him wicked and evil, and he ran away, cursing me. That was the last time I saw him. I was left to die-and would have, had the subsidence not occurred.”

“I think he decided to abandon you after he met us,” said a horrified Charlie. “I told him I was Charles Darcy of Pemberley and asked after you. He must have panicked.”

Mary’s interrogation at Fitz’s hand continued for several hours, yet neither he nor Angus felt that, at its end, they knew much about anything except Cosmogenesis. Surely she must have had some kind of contact with the children! But no, she maintained that she had not.

“Give it up, gentlemen!” she said at last, tired and a little angry. “I cannot embroider the facts. You have seen thirty little boys, I have seen only the two you saw pushing the hand cart. Believe the testimony of your own eyes, not my hearsay, for hearsay is all it is. I was kept in a barred cell, and moved no farther from it than a tunnel that led downward to an underground river. Wherever the children were kept gave them no excuse to see for themselves the woman of whom Therese and Ignatius talked. When I asked Father Dominus about the cell, he denied building it. Whoever did, he said, did so before his time. All I can tell you is that the poor children were shifted to some new location, and disliked it. Father’s reasons for the move are unknown to me, but they were not very recent. It seems an old plan of his.”

“Let us cease and desist,” Fitz said, eyes on Mary’s face. “You have had enough. You were right to think a subsidence occurred. Though the public caves were not affected, the movement was felt everywhere, and for the time being all inspections of the caves are cancelled. We must presume that within the area are many caves as yet undiscovered, and that somewhere in them are the Children of Jesus. The question is, did the subsidence occur where they are, or completely elsewhere? The old man’s dementia is apparently increasing, so we cannot know whether he has locked them up, or still lets them roam free. Provided, that is, that they are still alive.”

There was no point in shielding Mary from anything. Fitz told her-and, perforce, Elizabeth, Jane and Kitty-about the two dead bodies. This, coming hours after learning of Lydia’s death, almost overset Mary. To her own surprise, she held out her hand to Angus, and was given it. Such a comfort!

“The dead girl must be Sister Therese,” she said, blinking at tears. “I am sure of it. I never did believe there was a Mother Beata. I think that once the girls matured, they were to be killed. Yes, the girl’s body belongs to Sister Therese, and I insist that she be buried in decent circumstances. Mourners, a stone at her head, consecrated ground.”

“I’ll see to it,” said Angus. “Fitz has bigger things to do, Mary. How, I don’t know, but we have to find those poor children. If Father Dominus’s madness has progressed beyond human values, then he won’t care about the children.”

“Did he give you any reason why he has the children, Mary?” Elizabeth asked. “It seems he fed them well, clothed them-doesn’t that suggest he loved them, at least in the beginning? I know you say they’re terrorised, Charlie, but if he had always had that effect upon them, they would not have joined him. From what you say, Brother Ignatius loved him, Mary.”

“Brother Ignatius was simple. I think Father Dominus deliberately kept all his children simple-certainly they were never taught to read or write. He told me that he stole them from bad masters, but if Sister Therese and Brother Ignatius bore no sign of ill-treatment, perhaps he stole them at a very young age from their parents, or-or even bought them from their parents or the parish overseers. Parish care can be cruel, depending upon the rapacity of the overseer. It would not have been hard to acquire them at a very young age if there was money in it. As to whether he would have killed all of them upon maturity, we’ll possibly never know, for Ignatius was the oldest of the boys, and Therese the girls.” Mary sighed and clutched Angus’s hand harder. “If he is mad, and I for one don’t doubt that, then to be adored by these simple little people must have contributed to his high opinion of himself. Don’t forget that they worked for him, and were paid nothing. The gospel of St. Mark says, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’ If Father Dominus believed himself chosen, one can make some sense of it.”

“Much will be answered if we find them,” said Fitz.

“May I say something about their being found?” Mary asked.

Fitz stared at her, smiling slightly. “By all means.”

“Don’t look in places where the caves are well known, but farther north. If the first body was Brother Ignatius, then he floated down the Derwent, yet was still north of the caves people visit. In the bowels of my prison was a stream, I could hear it flowing strongly, then saw it on my exercise walks. Until I talked to Angus and Charlie, it hadn’t occurred to me that these underground rivers are just that-under the ground. So my stream was much deeper than I had imagined. Go to the north, where all is desolation. These children are like moles, they can’t tolerate the light of day. Search by night.”

The gentlemen were staring at Mary in admiration, and Angus was bursting with pride.

“What a head you have on your shoulders!” he said.

“If I do, then why do I get into such dreadful scrapes?”

Fitz took over, disliking loss of purpose. “The moon is coming up for half, so we can search at night for quite some time. I have spyglasses, and may be able to locate more. It’s quite a dry summer, which means less cloud.”

“I shall have prayers said for the children in churches of all denominations,” said Elizabeth. “They’ll haunt my sleep until they’re found, but if they’re found dead, I’ll never sleep well again. Fitz, may I have the funds?”

“Of course,” he said at once. “Like you, Elizabeth, they haunt my sleep. I’ll call in Ned and put him to work as well. His eyes are very sharp, and he works best at night. In the meantime, those from Pemberley who search will carry tents and camp on the moors. Riding back and forth takes up too much time, though we’ll keep horses with us. I must ask the ladies to limit their use of carriages and riding horses, for I want the grooms as searchers. Huckstep will come with us and leave a deputy here with two grooms. I’ll also commandeer footmen and gardeners if you tell me how many you can do without.”

“Take whomsoever you want,” said Elizabeth.

“Though,” she said to her husband later that night, “I don’t believe that method will answer this conundrum. Mary was freed by a natural convulsion in the earth. My prayers will do as much good as your men.”

“I believe in God,” he said ironically, “but a God of sorts only. My God expects us to help ourselves, not make Him do all the work. Faith is too blind, so I’ll put my trust in men.”

“And in Ned Skinner most of all.”

“I have a premonition about that.”

“Why did you oppose Mary’s crusade so bitterly?”

His manner grew stiff. “I am not at liberty to say.”

“Not at liberty?”

“The more so, now our son is prospering.”

“Cryptic to the last.”

He kissed her hand. “Goodnight, Elizabeth.”

“Well, Lizzie,” said Jane over breakfast next morning, “though we cannot actively help the men in their search, there are still things we can do.” The large amber eyes looked stern. “I am going to assume that the children will be found alive and safe. That their health will be unimpaired.”

“Oh, splendidly said, Jane!” cried Kitty. “They will be saved, I’m sure of it too.”

“You’re leading up to something,” Elizabeth said warily.

“Yes, I am.” Jane answered. “Lydia has left a hole in my heart that only time and apprehension of her murderers will mend. But consider this, Lizzie! About fifty children between four and twelve who probably don’t remember any life except the one they’ve had with Father Dominus. What will happen to them when they’re found?”

“They’ll go to the Parish if theirs can be located, or to orphanages wherever there are vacancies,” said Kitty with composure, spreading butter thinly on unsweetened wafers.

“Exactly so!” cried Jane, sounding wrathful. “Oh, my temper has been sorely tried of late! First Lydia is done to death by thieves who can’t be found, now we have fifty-odd children who have never known the joys of childhood!”

“There are few joys of childhood to be found on the Parish, or in the orphanages, or walking England’s roads because they have no parish,” said Mary dispassionately. “The comfortably off are privileged, and can give their children joys-if, that is, they don’t spoil them on the one hand, or beat them mercilessly on the other.” She got up to help herself to a second plate of sausages, liver, kidneys, scrambled eggs, bacon and fried potatoes. “All too often, children of any class are regarded as a nuisance-seen, but not heard. Argus says that it’s cheaper for pauper females to feed their babies gin than milk, as they’re too dried up to give them suck. The poorest children I saw on my brief travels were infested with vermin, had rotten teeth, crooked backs and shockingly bowed legs, bore atrocious sores, were hungry, wore rags and went barefoot. Joys, Jane? I don’t think poor children have any. Whereas children of our own class tend to have too many, which makes them expect joys-and gives them a perpetual discontent that follows them all of their lives. Comfort should be ever-present, and joys merely an occasional treat. Save for the only joys that truly matter-the company of brothers, sisters and parents.”

How could we have forgotten Mary? Elizabeth wondered. Just such an encomium as she would have come out with in Longbourn days, save that this one is wise. Where, along her way, did she pick up wisdom? She never used to have any. Her travels and travails, I suppose, which doesn’t say much for the sheltered life of females of the first respectability. Jane is wincing because she knows very well that her sons are grossly over-indulged, especially when their father isn’t home to discipline them. And then they go to Eton or some other public school to be tormented and thrashed until they’re old enough to turn into tormentors and thrashers. It is a vicious circle.

“We’re drifting off the subject,” said Jane with unusual asperity, “which is the Children of Jesus.”

“What do you want to say, Jane?” asked Elizabeth.

“That when the children are found alive and well, the gentlemen will lose interest in them immediately. Fitz will donate one of his many secretaries to sort them out, return them to their proper parishes, or their parents, or put them in orphanages. Except that we know orphanages are already overcrowded. There won’t be room for them, especially because, from what Mary says, they won’t know their parents or their parishes. So they’ll end up more miserable than they were under Father Dominus’s care, for at least he fed and clothed them, and they seem not to have suffered illness.”

“You want to build an orphanage,” said Kitty, revealing that she had unsuspected powers of deduction.

Elizabeth and Mary stared at their flighty widgeon of a sister Jane in amazement, with the pleasure of finding an ally.

“Quite so!” said Jane. “Why separate the poor little things when they have been together for years? Mary, you’re the one who Angus said had a head on your shoulders. Therefore you are the one who should deal with the practicalities-how much it will cost to establish an orphanage, for example? Kitty, you frequent all the best houses in London, so you should seek donations to the Children of Jesus orphanage. I will engage to speak to Angus Sinclair and beg that he publish their plight in his journal. I will also speak to the Bishop of London and imply that one of our aims is to eradicate any Papist, Methodist or Baptist tendencies the children may have picked up from Father Dominus, whose theology, Mary says, is apostate. The Bishop of London is no proselytiser, but it is an irresistible opportunity for the Church of England.”

Jane’s eyes were glowing as huge and yellow as a cat’s, and her face was quite transfigured. “We will break new ground in the care of indigent children! I’ll choose the staff myself, and supervise all aspects of the orphanage’s progress in future years. You’ll share this duty with me, Lizzie, which is why I suggest that the orphanage be situated halfway between Bingley Hall and Pemberley. I think Fitz and Charles should buy the land and pay for the building of a proper institution. No, I refuse to hear of our using an existing house! Ours will be designed for its specific purpose. The money Kitty brings in will be invested in the Funds to provide income for wages, food, clothing, and a proper Church of England school as well as a library.”

By this, Elizabeth was gasping. Who would ever have guessed that Jane, of all people, possessed so much zealotry? At least it would keep her from having too much time to spend missing Charles. Only she, Elizabeth, foresaw opposition from the gentlemen. Mary thought the orphanage a splendid idea, but deplored its small scope and thought they should be building several. Kitty sat bending her not very powerful mind to the problem of how to obtain donations from the Mighty, very attached to their money. And Jane was utterly convinced her plan would succeed.

“To think that all of this originated in Mary’s strange obsession with the poor,” Elizabeth said to Angus, who rode to Pemberley to (he had explained to Fitz and Charlie) write an urgent letter to London; his real reason was to make sure his Mary had not decamped. “It’s been like a pebble thrown upon a snowy slope,” Elizabeth continued. “Instead of coming to a harmless halt, it’s rolled, gathering a huge coat of snow, until it threatens to overwhelm us. I’m glad that Jane seems to have tossed off all desire to weep herself into the vapours, but at least when she did that, we all knew where we stood. Nowadays anything may happen.”

Angus laughed until Elizabeth’s reproachful expression told him she couldn’t see a funny side. “Jane is probably right,” he said then. “We would cheerfully have handed the children to the parish overseers and forgotten them. Logic says that they were too young to know what a parish is when they were abducted-or sold-and may not remember any parents. So a Children of Jesus home is actually an excellent idea. I imagine Mary is in favour?”

“And that’s all that really concerns you, you lovesick Scot! Yes, of course she is, though she envisions orphanages being built all over England,” said Elizabeth, smiling. “However, I cannot see Fitz consenting to schemes that would beggar him in a year.”

“He shouldn’t have to, or be asked to. The mills of any government grind even slower than those of God, for exceeding fine takes time, especially in Westminster. I see Fitz’s most pressing task as flogging his parliamentary colleagues into a radical program of changes to the lower end of society. He can always trumpet what happened in France-the Lords are prone to listen to that argument. All people resist change, Lizzie, but change will have to come. Not all of it will be in favour of the poor, thanks to take-out payments in many parishes. Some have hardly an employable man or woman on their lists, so attractive is the thought of being paid a pittance not to work. The poor-rates are soaring.”

“Go and find Mary,” she said, tired of the poor.

His contrary beloved did look pleased to see him, but not in the guise of a lover. Yet. Some of her reactions since her return had given him hope, but his innate good sense warned him against endowing them with too much significance. He could only imagine what it must have been like for her during her imprisonment, and thus far had not been able to talk to her for long enough to discover just how deep in fact were the wellsprings of her unquenchable determination. So he attributed her reactions to a realisation of her feminine weakness, when in reality she had come to no such realisation. Mary knew she was not a weak female; Angus still harboured a man’s illusions about it.

“We found the subsidence,” he was able to tell her. “It seems the caves extend much farther than anyone had counted on, but now their extent will remain unknown. The innermost caverns are quite blocked by immense falls of rock. What is something of a mystery is why the subsidence occurred at all.”

“And the underground river?”

“We can hear it, but it’s changed course.”

“When do you move north and search by night?”

“Tonight. The day has been relatively cloudless, so we have hope that the moon will shine. We’ve amassed a number of what Fitz calls spyglasses. He’s asked farmers with flocks grazing in the region to bring them farther south. Less moving forms to confuse us when we search by night.”

“My goodness!” said Mary, impressed. “It sounds like an army manoeuvre. I never thought of sheep. Don’t they sleep at night?”

“Yes, but any untoward noise startles them.”

“Are there deer?”

“I imagine so.”

“The children won’t be easy to see in their brown garb.”

“We are aware of that,” he said gently.

It had been agreed that the search parties (there were three, one each for Fitz, Charlie and Angus) should concentrate upon the bases of peaks, hills and tors, but also carefully inspect the banks of the Derwent and its tributaries. It was the biggest river in the region, and flowed strongly, even in summer. Since Brother Ignatius (if indeed it were he) had been found floating on it, that argued some proximity, if not to the river itself, then to some tributary or underground stream that fed into it.

The first night was an eerie experience, for few settled men, be they labourers or gentlemen, were used to moving through the night on foot, and surreptitiously at that. While it was up, the half moon radiated a colourless light that drenched the landscape without enlivening it; even after the moon set, a glow suffused the heavens from the light of more stars than most had ever dreamed existed. With their eyes used to the darkness, it was easier to see than Angus, for one, had thought possible. The few deer could be identified as what they were, especially if a man had a spyglass. What were more surprising were the dogs that roamed in search of quarry-rabbit, shrew, rat and, later in the year, lambs. Once they had been pets or working dogs, Fitz explained, either abandoned or in search of better food than their masters had given them, and they were savage, all signs of domesticity lost.

Then Charlie had a bright idea, which was to dress the small child of a Pemberley groom in brown robes and ask him to walk near the river bank for some distance, then turn and walk into more moorish terrain. The seven-year-old had no fear, and thoroughly enjoyed his perambulations, especially because he was allowed to stay up far past his usual bedtime. Tracking him gave the searchers some idea of what they would see if a Child of Jesus appeared.

A week went by and the moon waxed to full, still in relatively cloudless weather; so bright was the beautiful silver orb that one could read by it, and that despite the belching chimneys of Manchester, not far away. As luck would have it, the wind favoured them by blowing the smoke eastward into Yorkshire.

Then the moon, rising later each night, began to wane, and no child had yet been seen. That made it more likely that the poor Children of Jesus were now imprisoned; despair began to invade the hearts of the searchers, so buoyed up with enthusiasm when the search had begun.

Ned Skinner wanted none of search parties; he preferred to work on his own, and had his own theories as to where to look. While the three groups of men were still what he considered too far south, he was mounted on Jupiter and prowling high up the Derwent, particularly where a strong tributary fed into it. Fitz hadn’t wanted him to ride, protesting that his outline against the starry sky would give his presence away, but Ned took no notice. That was the chief problem with the three search parties as far as he was concerned: they went on foot, leading their horses, and it made them far too slow.

He had his own spyglass, a more powerful instrument than any Fitz owned; it had belonged to a sea captain much attracted to voyaging into the kinds of places where a sailor might need to check whether the natives on a beach were carrying human heads. From horseback height its range was over long distances, yet at close quarters it was crisp and clear, for it telescoped for accurate focus, and this was by no means the first time it had come in handy during Ned’s nocturnal adventures.

The moon was waning now, so it was rising later. However, the twilight didn’t fully bleed away until shortly before the moon came up, and Ned had no intention of leaving his hiding place until twilight was gone. He had taken over a cave, but it was a simple, probably wind-hewn declivity in an outcropping of soft rock. It had room for him and Jupiter, and he had made several trips to stock it with food for him and the horse. No sweet grass on the moors!

Full darkness had fallen when he ventured out, the eastern sky already silvering to herald the imminence of moonrise. Perhaps at no other moment would even his sharp eyes have discerned the white glint of falling water on the tributary, miles to his west. His thumbs pricked; he stiffened in the saddle enough to transmit his change of mood to Jupiter, which shook its head. He reached forward to pat its neck.

“Easy, old man,” he said quietly.

They moved at a trot until the waterfall came entirely into view: about fifty feet high, and containing a good volume of water that widened at its base into a broad pool. Its only possible source could be a large spring, probably not far above the cliff over which it tumbled. Were it closer to other spectacular attractions it would have drawn visitors, but it sat amid some miles of uninspiring hills, gorges and moors. The Peak, away to the south, was about as far as visitors went unless they were poets, writers, painters or other peculiar folk enamoured of desertion wherein to rove and roam. At night, suchlike were usually tucked up in a warm bed at an inn or a farmstead. Certainly none such were abroad this night. He had it all to himself.

Finding a patch of shadow from an overhang, Ned slid from Jupiter’s back and prepared the animal for one of the waits he inflicted upon it occasionally. Then, quieter than a stalking cat, he edged toward the pool, keeping in the shadows.

The pool’s margin was limestone, polished to a slight sheen in a yard-wide ribbon that led from the side of the waterfall to the grass, in which it persisted for about a hundred more yards before dwindling to invisibility. A path worn by little feet! On the border between the grass and the limestone he paused, head cocked, listening, but could hear nothing alien over the sound of the falling water. He reached into the left pocket of his greatcoat, and into the right, to make sure his pistols were ready, and his knives. Following the path to the edge of the waterfall, he discovered that it dived behind the curtain of water, and was dry because the wind blew the spray eastward.

He passed through a huge opening to enter a vast cavern lit by amazing lamps as well as candles reeking of tallow. Fairly level, the floor was filled with plain wooden tables at which little robed figures stood over basins and bowls, mortars and pestles, apparently engaged in mixing substances together, or grinding them to powder. At one side of the cave and close to the entrance was a huge alcove containing a very hot coal fire, iron rods holding iron cauldrons and pots over the shimmering, shivering surface. A strange-looking cupola blocked off the top of the alcove, its pinnacle sprouting a wide metal tube that led, braced on brackets, to the outside air behind the falls. Whatever its principle, it was efficient, for there was hardly any smoke in the cavern. Near it were condensers for distillation, and a whole table devoted to filtering liquids through cheesecloth or cloth. The Children of Jesus laboratory, wherein Father Dominus made his cure-alls!

In this dim environment the children had pulled off their cowls-all boys, Ned decided, for they all bore the little bald spot of a tonsure on the crowns of their heads. Girls were never tonsured that he had heard of. Almost thirty of them, with a big lad roaming from table to table-features coarse, eyes pitiless. They were afraid of him, and flinched or shuddered when he approached. Not Mary’s Brother Ignatius, he decided. This one had no heart.

Getting past Brother Jerome (for so one boy had addressed him) was difficult, but Ned succeeded when the youth went to the fire and roared for more coal-that must be an exercise, the lugging of sacks of coal! At its rear the cave tapered down to a high, quite wide tunnel. A short passage, it opened into another vast, artificially lit cavern, in which were more tables. These contained bottles being filled through funnels from ladles dipped into ewers-the girls! Longer hair, no tonsures. They were working in a frenzy, though no one supervised. That meant Brother Jerome must have charge of all of the children. Where was Father Dominus?

The air was filled with odours, all sorts from disgusting to sickly-sweet; did Father Dominus make women’s perfumes as well as the traditionally foul things that cured ailments? Somewhere in the mйlange Ned’s nose identified one particular smell, a smell he knew, sniffed regularly. Gunpowder! Ye gods, what was the old bugger up to? The moment he inhaled it, Ned knew why the caves in the south had subsided: Father Dominus in the guise of Guy Fawkes had blown them up! That meant he must have been using them too, and realised when he met Charlie that he would have to abandon them. What better way than gunpowder? He was an apothecary, he would know how to make it. Even I, thought Ned, could make it if I knew the correct proportions of the ingredients, which are just sulphur, saltpetre and powdered charcoal. So simple, so destructive…

Where was the gunpowder? Then he saw that the passageway between the laboratory and the bottling cave was wider than it looked; its sides were stacked with small barrels. But where was the trail of powder that led to the detonating cask? Gunpowder was black as pitch, the floor covered in black dust-was the whole floor the trail? No, it would fizzle. Though air got in, the bottling cave felt more stifling than the laboratory one. Producing noxious fumes and smoke from a big fire, the laboratory would have to be closest to the outside air.

First thing to do, he decided, was to eliminate Brother Jerome. Sooner or later he would come down the passage to see what the girls were doing. Ned moved into the most lightless spot near the end of the short corridor, and pulled out a knife. It would have to be quick and efficient; let the youth shout once, and Father Dominus might appear. Brother Jerome would be easy to deal with, but Father Dominus was as intelligent as he was crazed, and until he could find the fuse trail, Ned wanted the old man oblivious to his presence. For he had to get the girls out; that was what Fitz would want him to do above all else. The boys were on the far side of the kegs of explosives, and would fare at least a little better. The girls would either be buried under falling rock or immured in blackness to perish slowly, perhaps in agony from injuries. An insupportable thought.

Sure enough, here came Brother Jerome. He never knew what had happened to him, so quick the knife that went in under his rib cage and twisted up to the left to pierce his heart. He dropped like a stone, voiceless.

Ned stepped out of the shadows and walked up to the nearest of the tables, at which six little girls were counting pills into small round boxes. The pills were lavender in colour, a sure sign they were for kidney trouble. Everyone knew that.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said quietly, “and don’t cry out. I’m here to save you. Do you see those kegs stacked in the passage? They’re full of gunpowder. If you’re here when it blows up, you’ll die. I want you to go among the other tables and tell the girls to move into the waterfall cave-truly, I mean you no harm!”

They stared at him round-eyed, never having seen a man so big or so burly, and perhaps something of his strength resonated within them as comforting, for none cried out, or tried to run. A more ruthless man than Ned Skinner would have been hard to find, yet in that moment he radiated truth as well as strength. What he could not know was that they were hideously aware of gunpowder and its dangers, for they had made it, seen two of their number die, and suspected that they would all become its victims. They had noticed the change in Father Dominus, and feared him desperately. Father had taken to calling the girls wicked, unclean, polluted, and ranted that women were creations of Lucifer. Sister Therese had vanished; at first they had thought she had gone to Mother Beata, but then Brother Jerome began to boast that he had twisted her neck, and that they believed implicitly.

Soon all the little girls were hurrying through the keg-lined corridor, spilling out of it among the boys, who looked bewildered, though some looked displeased. When Ned appeared in the wake of the last girl, they bleated and milled about, a few boys trying to slip past him into the passage. But he could always deal with boys.

Out came a pistol; he brandished it. “Go on, get out into the fresh air! This place is going to come down! Stay here and you’ll be blown up. Out! Out!”

Since the only path to freedom led into the open air, they began streaming under the waterfall and into the night, while Ned went back to locate the gunpowder fuse.

As he walked he cocked his pistol, flipped the frizzen back off the powder pan and into position for the spark, then curled his finger around the trigger, carrying the firearm straight and fully horizontal; once the powder in the pan was exposed, the weapon couldn’t be tilted in case the hole carrying the spark to the charge became blocked.

Some paces short of the passageway stood Father Dominus, face twisted up in fury and frustration, a blazing torch in his left hand.

“You interfering fool!” the old man screamed. “How dare you steal my children?”

Ned shot him in the left chest, deeming that the easiest way out of an invidious situation. But Father Dominus had a fanatic’s strength, and hurled the torch backward into the passageway despite his mortal wound. “I am dead, and you will die with me!”

No, thought Ned, unperturbed. I’m too far from the blast, and moving at a run toward the waterfall. But the vagaries of cavern design carried some of the stupendous explosion forward into the laboratory cave, which collapsed together with most of the hill, honeycombed by Father Dominus’s caves. Ned felt the boulder strike his legs and pelvis, and a colossal agony; I am done for after all, he thought, but it is worth it, to have done this one last good turn for my dearest Fitz.

The explosions echoed across the moors and came clearly to the searchers working their way slowly around The Peak.

The three leaders had gathered for a conference when the great booming noise reached them.

“That’s no cave subsidence,” said Fitz. “Gunpowder!”

They had horses with them; Charlie and Angus ran to get their parties mounted while Fitz rode north grim-faced, his own men after him as soon as they could. Ned had intended starting at this end, Fitz was thinking-pray God he’s all right! Pray God the children are all right!

Leaderless and rudderless, the children hadn’t fled the scene save to run beyond the range of falling boulders; they were huddled together, weeping, when Fitz and his group rode up, and let themselves be wrapped in blankets the men carried, given water liberally laced with rum.

Fitz moved among them in search of a cognisant face, and chose a little girl about ten years old because she was acting rather like a mother hen toward the others.

“I’m Fitz,” said the man who never let people outside the near family use his Christian name. “What’s your name?”

“Sister Camille,” she said.

“Have you seen a very big man named Ned?”

“Oh, yes! He saved us, Fitz.”

“How did he do that?”

“He said the passage was stacked with gunpowder and we would die unless we ran outside. Some of the boys tried to stop us, but Ned waved his pistol at them and we all ran. The gunpowder exploded just the way it did when we were making it. Sister Anne and Brother James were killed then, and my eyebrows got burned off. So when Ned told us it would blow up, we knew it would. I think Ned didn’t expect us to believe him.”

Fitz’s heart had plummeted. “Is Ned still inside, Camille?”

“Yes.”

Charlie and Angus were riding up with their men, rejoicing at the sight of all those little brown-robed figures.

“Bad news,” Fitz said to the other two. “Ned found this cave, and got the children out just in time. Father Dominus had stuffed it with gunpowder-he actually forced the children to make it! A boy and a girl were killed in the process. Can you credit the depth of his villainy? Ned hasn’t come out.” He drew a breath, balled his hands into fists. “I must go in to look for him. Charlie, tell Tom Madderbury to ride to Pemberley. We’ll need the barouche for Ned-I doubt we’d get him into a fully closed carriage. Also carts and wagons to bring the children. Hot food in hay boxes for the children. They’ll sleep after water laced with rum, but we can’t keep them here. The best place to put them is the ballroom-have Parmenter light fires at that end of the house to make sure it’s dry. And tell Madderbury to make sure everybody knows the children will be part-blind from living in dim light. Their full sight will come back, but it will take time. We must have the wooden stretcher with the slight curve for Ned in case his back is broken, splints of other kinds, bandages, wadding, compresses, laudanum as well as the strongest opium syrup. Make sure Marshall is waiting for us. He can see the children too.”

Charlie went off at once; Fitz turned to Angus. “It wasn’t difficult to shed Charlie, but now I must ask you to step back, Angus. I must go in alone.”

“No, I insist I go with you.”

“Angus, you can’t! There’s no point in losing more than one man if more landslides are to come. It wasn’t a natural convulsion, but the result of an explosion, and we don’t know enough about the effects of explosions in enclosed places to run unnecessary risks. If I think it’s safe, I’ll tell you. And keep Charlie out.”

Seeing the good sense in this, Angus waited outside, and when Charlie would have rushed in after his father, persuaded him that one death, if death there had to be, was preferable to two. Only reminding Charlie of his mother deterred him.

The waterfall was gone, though the pool was still there, and the cavern entrance was revealed as yawning. A torch in his left hand, Fitz entered a world of rubble and rocks; like most Peak District caves, it was dry and wind-blown, of little interest to sightseers. He didn’t understand that it had been hidden by a waterfall, so wondered why no one had ever noticed it.

“Ned!” he called. “Ned! Ned!”

Where he stood was reasonably safe, he thought, but where once there had probably been a vast cavern was now an immense heap of boulders interspersed with smaller, sharper rocks, and much rubble. Strain his ears though he did, he could hear no trickling earth or groans from overtaxed stones: nothing to suggest a further fall. He moved onward, treading lightly, warily.

“Ned! Ned! Ned! Ned!”

“Here,” said a weak voice.

Following the sound, Fitz discovered Ned lying half under a boulder that concealed his legs and lower torso from sight.

“Ned,” he whispered, sinking to his knees.

“Are they safe? Did they all get out?”

“Every last one. Don’t speak, Ned. First we have to get this almighty stone off you.”

“I doubt that will make any difference to the outcome, Fitz. I’m done for.”

“Nonsense!”

“No, the simple truth. Bladder and bowels are squashed flat. Hip bones too. But you can try. You won’t rest if you don’t try, will you?”

The tears were pouring down Fitz’s face. “Yes, Ned, I have to try. It is my nature. We’ll dose you with opium first.”

Charlie appeared at his father’s shoulder. “Pater-no, I refuse to use that ridiculously pretentious term, even if it is Darcy custom and tradition! Papa is good enough for most men, and good enough for me. Papa, what is to be done?”

“Papa is good enough for me too, Charlie.” Fitz got to his feet, heedless of his tears. “Did the opium come? I think we can lever the stone off him with two or three stout men and stout iron poles. Have we any with us?”

“Yes. We had no idea whether we might have to shift rocks, so we included them.” He looked wry. “And a keg of gunpowder.” He knelt on one side of Ned, his father on the other.

“What happened to Father Dominus, Ned?” Fitz asked.

“I shot the old bastard in the heart. Should have gone down like a stone, but he didn’t. Carrying a torch, threw it into the passage. Must have heard me, and piled up powder in front of the detonating keg. I swear there was none when I walked through it back to the front cave.” Ned groaned, reached for Fitz’s hand. “I’m glad I lived to see you again.”

“Take heart, you’ll see years more of me.”

They decided not to move him until the barouche came, which was at dawn, lending some natural light to the shambles inside the cave. Fitz hadn’t left Ned’s side, though Charlie moved back and forth; Angus had inherited the duty of caring for the children.

Madderbury, the groom who had ridden to Pemberley, returned with the carriage, and informed them that enough carts and wagons would shortly arrive for the children. Dr. Marshall had been summoned, and would bring a nurse with him.

Three strong men wielding poles levered the boulder off Ned in one move, which left Fitz and Charlie staring in horror at the mess below Ned’s waist. He cannot survive, thought Fitz. But by sliding the six-foot-long wooden stretcher under Ned’s body they managed to lift him and lug him to the conveyance; the open nature of the barouche enabled them to lift him over the doors and put the stretcher diagonally from one seat to the other, the only way the vehicle could accommodate his formidable length. Fitz sat with him, opium ready, while Charlie sat on the box to make the coachman’s task more difficult with his constant orders to mind this, and avoid that.

It took many hours, though the summer’s day had not yet ended when finally the barouche reached Pemberley. Dr. Marshall was waiting. One look at the injuries saw the doctor praising their good sense in keeping Ned as flat as possible. The crush nature of the injuries had prevented massive bleeding, but, “There is no hope,” he said privately to Fitz as soon as the initial examination was over. “I did a year in the Peninsula with Sir Arthur Wellesley, so I’ve seen this kind of injury before. The wound is ragged, open, and contaminated by bowel contents. He’s lost blood, so I won’t bleed him myself. However, he won’t take more opium until he has spoken to you and Mr. Charlie. No one else. And he asked that it be soon. He knows he’s dying.”