The grotto was as black as the inside of a tomb when Barnaby woke. He fumbled for the tinderbox, lit a fresh candle, and placed it in the lantern. God, what time was it? He felt as if three decades had passed while he slept. His bones ached as if he were an old man.
His pocket watch told him it was midday.
Barnaby rubbed his face. Stubble rasped under his hands. A bath and a shave. Those were what he wanted most when they got out of here: a bath and a shave.
If they got out of here.
He looked at Merry, half-hidden in the nest of blankets. Asleep, she looked like a child. A rush of tenderness tightened his throat. Carefully, he tucked the blankets around her. Viscount’s granddaughter. Dancing master’s daughter. My wife.
Merry was right; they did suit each other.
We will dance every day, and laugh every day, and be happy, he promised her silently.
Barnaby stood stiffly. He could feel every bruise he’d gathered yesterday. He picked up the lantern and tiptoed across to peer into the next cave. The scene was unchanged: the great, tilted slab, the rubble on the floor, the blocked gap.
No, there had been a change. The gap was no longer entirely blocked. There was a small hole to the left, as if a mole had burrowed through.
Barnaby gazed at that hole for a long moment, and released his breath. We will get out of here.
He washed his face as best he could, and set out a sparse picnic, and woke Merry. After they’d eaten, Barnaby checked the gap again. The hole had grown to badger-size. If he held his breath and listened carefully, he heard muffled voices and the occasional chink of stone on stone.
By two o’clock the hole was as large as the one he and Sawyer had excavated. “Not long now,” he told Merry. But two o’clock became three o’clock, and Barnaby found himself increasingly edgy. He wanted Merry out of here. He wanted her safe and above ground. He wanted it now. “Let’s dance,” he suggested, before his edginess could become full-blown agitation.
At three thirty, while they were practicing the waltz, Lady Cosgrove returned. Barnaby didn’t see her arrive, but he saw the monkey sitting on the hamper.
“Charlotte!” Merry cried.
Barnaby retreated to the cave with the fossilized skeleton, so Lady Cosgrove could don her discarded clothing. He squatted alongside the skeleton and wished once again that he had a sketch pad and pencil. “I wonder what you were when you were alive? I wonder when you were alive?” He told the skeleton about the monkey that was actually Lady Cosgrove, and how Merry’s birthday was tomorrow, and she’d be visited by a Faerie godmother, and how she’d choose a magical gift, too. “Preposterous, don’t you think? And yet it’s all true. I saw the monkey with my own eyes.”
After fifteen minutes, he returned to the grotto.
“They’re shoring it with timber,” Lady Cosgrove said, fastening her nankeen boots. “Marcus says it won’t be long now.”
“He’s not helping, is he?” Barnaby said, alarmed.
“Sawyer won’t let him. He dragged Marcus back once in some kind of wrestling hold, and refuses to let him get close again. He says he promised you he’d keep Marcus out of danger.”
Barnaby nodded.
“Marcus is so cross with you about that.” Lady Cosgrove climbed to her feet, and stood on tiptoe, and kissed his bristly cheek. “But I’m not. Thank you.”
“Has anyone been hurt? There was a devil of a rockfall this morning.”
“No. Although I understand it was a close call.” She ran her fingers through her messy hair. “Do I look dirty enough? I didn’t have a bath.”
“You look as dirty as me,” Merry said. “But neither of us is a patch on Barnaby.”
Both ladies turned to examine him. Lady Cosgrove’s gaze took in his stiff hair, his stubbled face, his ripped coat and grimy breeches and scarred boots, before returning to his hair again. Barnaby resisted the urge to comb it with his fingers. He felt a blush creep beneath the stubble.
Lady Cosgrove grinned. “You would make a superb scarecrow.”
By four thirty, the gap was pronounced safe. Rudkin, the young groom, whispered instructions from the top of the slab. He looked almost as much a scarecrow as Barnaby. “His lordship says to take it one at a time. Quiet and slow, like.”
Lady Cosgrove wanted Merry to go first. “I’ve been gone the whole night and most of the day,” she hissed in an undertone, but Merry flatly refused.
“You have a child; I don’t.”
Lady Cosgrove gave in, and climbed the rope ladder and crawled through the timber-shored gap. Rudkin waited a long moment, then beckoned to Merry.
Merry took a deep breath.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Barnaby told her. “Just take it slowly.” And then—regardless of Rudkin watching them—he bent and kissed her.
Merry clutched him for several seconds, then pushed herself away and picked her way across the rock-strewn floor.
Barnaby watched her, almost afraid to breathe. He realized that he’d never understood fear before. This was true fear, this rib-squeezing, throat-choking emotion. He had the oddest sensation that his future had narrowed to a thin, fragile thread, and that the thread was about to snap, and when it snapped the whole world would collapse around his ears.
Merry climbed the rope ladder with quick agility and crawled out of sight through the gap.
The roof didn’t fall.
Barnaby released the breath he’d been holding. His future seemed suddenly to balloon, as wide as the oceans.
Rudkin beckoned to him.
Barnaby picked up the hamper and blankets and repeated Merry’s climb, just as silently, but less nimbly. He passed the blankets to Rudkin, and then the hamper, and hauled himself up onto the slab, half-afraid their combined weight would make it shift again.
It didn’t.
He crawled through the gap, glad of the boards holding the roof up, and blinked with astonishment. The men had been busy. The rockfall was almost entirely cleared, right down to the floor, and in place of the rubble was a rough barricade of wood. Planks and timbers were jammed every which way and braced with great beams. No wonder the giant slab hadn’t moved; half a forest was holding it in place.
A six-rung wooden ladder was propped up for him to climb down, held by a gardener, and in the larger cavern beyond, he saw the shadowy figures of at least half a dozen people. His eyes picked out Marcus and Sawyer and Lady Cosgrove. And Merry. Merry, safe and unharmed.
A sense of lightness came, as if wings had sprouted from his shoulders and he was hovering in the air.
Barnaby reached back for the hamper and handed it to the gardener, then tossed the blankets down. “After you,” he told Rudkin.
“Master says we’re to bring the rope ladder. He wants no one else coming here.”
Barnaby helped the groom haul the rope ladder up. “You go first. I’ll hand it down to you.”
“Yes, sir.” Rudkin scrambled down the ladder.
Barnaby dropped the bulky bundle to him, then climbed down himself. When his feet touched the ground, the sensation of lightness became even stronger. He was so buoyant that surely he was floating. He turned and looked up at the gap, at the wedged-in timbers, at the dark cavity where the roof had fallen.
There was a sharp crack of splintering wood. Everything went black.