Page 49 of The Disgraceful Duchess

So this was the man who'd ignored his letters? But there was no time to bring that up, or even think about it. “Do you mean that there are miners trapped down there?”

“Yes, your grace. I have had some of my ablest workers with me, but they are at the end of their strength. They can do no more.”

West glanced at the gathered miners. Many of those he could see in the torchlight were sitting on the ground, their heads in their hands. Others simply stared at the ground. Each person seemed to be in his—or her, he reminded himself—private bubble of grief. Only once before had he seen men so stricken by exhaustion and despair. And that had been at Waterloo.

Yet this was peacetime. And these were his tenants. He beckoned the young groom over. “Go back to the castle. Tell the kitchen to pack as much food as is on hand, as quickly as possible. And bring it back here, along with anyone you need to help you do it.”

“Yes, your grace.” His expression was shocked. “Right away, your grace.” He mounted his horse, wheeled about and was gone.

He turned to Bray and Davey. “What can be done now?”

“Now?” Davey spat on the ground again. “The time to do something was two years ago, when I made my report about the roof timbers.”

“Very well.” West had no idea what he was doing. He only knew that he couldn’t do nothing. He picked up an abandoned shovel, strode to the huge basket woven of inch-thick sapling trunks that was suspended above the mineshaft—it was somehow larger than it seemed from even a few feet away—and climbed into it. “I shall go and dig. Who is with me?”

For a moment there was no response. Then faces began to turn toward him. A ripple seemed to pass through the collapsed miners. He glanced up at the machinery of the windlass and at the thick hemp rope that seemed to be the only support for the basket. Was this flimsy-seeming arrangement normal? All he knew was that he couldn’t leave and go home to his bed in the castle knowing that there were men trapped underground.

Just when he’d begun to think that nobody would join him, Bray came toward him. The basket swayed as he stepped into it. "They will put their tools into the corf."

"'Corf'?"

Bray nodded at the wooden basket. Other miners began to climb to their feet. Though there was no further discussion, two men slid away the timbers that had been holding the basket—corf—relatively still.The empty drop beneath West’s feet became uncomfortably real. How far down did the shaft go? He had no idea. All he’d seen were old ledger entries showing how many bushels of coal had been sold, and at what profit.

The corf descended perhaps five or six feet and stopped. Another miner seized the rope in his hands, swung out into space, and looped one foot through the rope to support himself. As more rope was let out, the next three men did the same, faster and more casually than West would have thought possible.

The descent began. The torchlight above dwindled until it was a point of orange light high above. Bray had brought a lantern, but all it illuminated was the passage of the shaft—at first brick-lined, but soon rough-hewn rock. West heard the breathing of the men clinging to the creaking rope above his head, and the eerie whistling of drafts through cracks in the rock.

A distant trickle of water grew louder and louder. A cold draft struck his face and blew through the fabric of his shirt sleeves. He could feel a large empty space next to them. The basket spun on the pitch-scented hemp rope. There was a scraping noise above. He looked up to see that one of the miners riding the rope had stuck out a casual foot to touch the side of the shaft and stop the spin.

He swallowed hard. He’d never experienced the sensation of spinning in space before. He didn’t care for it. It seemed ludicrous that an operation that extracted coal on this scale had to rely on two oversized baskets on either end of a rope.

“Have we now reached the mine?”

“No, your grace. This is the old works.” Bray held up his lantern. He saw a pitch-black hole gaping in the wall of the shaft. “We are now just shy of fifty feet down. This was the Clee Seam. When it was exhausted the old duke ordered the shaft to be dug deeper. ’Twas well before my time here, of course.”

The basket dropped another few feet and began to spin. West heard a miner’s boot scrape to stabilize it again. “But does not having a second works directly below the first increase the risk of flooding or collapse?”

Bray cleared his throat. “It is possible, your grace.”

“Is that what caused this?”

“It… it is possible.”

In other words, yes. West’s intuition had been right: The old duke must have been so tyrannical that even now, his people were afraid to tell him bad news—or share their honest opinions, even when he asked for them directly. The only man who’d spoken up at all had been the foreman, Davey, and that was only because he’d been so obviously furious that he was unable to control himself.

The massive rope creaked again. In the darkness, a ghostly shape that was the other corf slipped past them, going up. Above he heard a miner grunt as he adjusted himself on the line. Beyond the sphere of lanternlight, the darkness was so absolute that West's eyes began to play tricks and invent details to fill the emptiness. The farther they descended below the abandoned older works, with their eerie drafts, the staler the air became. It made his skin crawl. “How deep do we go now?”

“We have measured it at a hundred and eighteen feet, your grace.”

A hundred and eighteen feet of rock above the trapped miners’ heads. He fought off a suffocating sensation. He must not allow himself to be fanciful.

“Almost there now,” added Bray.

A few seconds later the basket landed on solid ground. But his surge of relief that the spinning, sickening motion had stopped was short lived. He and Bray clambered out. The miners who’d silently ridden the rope down slid and jumped off it. Their boots crunched on the splintered rock at the bottom of the shaft. They lit more lanterns. Now he could clearly see the large horizontal tunnel that led back towards the coal face.

This was the main road. The walls and ceiling were supported by massive timbers placed every six feet or so. The air felt stale. And as if that weren’t claustrophobic enough, they’d walked only twenty or thirty feet before the main road began to slope downward.

The miners were silent as they made their way down the tunnel. “We have heard nothing,” said Bray. “If they had… if they had managed to make their way to the far side of the fall, we might be able to hear tapping. Or voices.” He held up his lantern. Just ahead the main road was blocked by huge tumbled slabs of stone and splintered timbers.