“I know that,” Bushell replied grimly. “Before long, the Britannia will sail for Victoria, and then Charles III will make his speech about the virtues of unity - at which time our chief symbol of unity had better be there behind him.”
“As I said, everyone’s doing everything he can,” Bragg answered.
“I know,” Bushell said. “But if we come up short, losing The Two Georges or having to ransom it won’t be everyone’s fault. It’ll be mine.”
Bushell sat bolt upright in bed. “God in heaven, I am an idiot!” he said before he was more than half awake. The early-morning sun was sifting its way through the curtains in front of the window. He looked at his watch again. It was a little past six.
He telephoned the Charleroi constabulary headquarters and got the promise of a steamer in fifteen minutes. He used the time to get dressed and hurry downstairs. Once there, he went over to the front desk, got a sheet of notepaper and an envelope from the clerk, and scrawled a few quick sentences telling what he was up to. He handed the clerk the sealed envelope, saying, “Give this to Mr. Stanley the Negro gentleman traveling with me - directly he comes down.”
“Certainly, sir.” The clerk stuck the note in a pigeonhole.
The constabulary steamer pulled up a couple of minutes later. To Bushell’s relief, Sergeant Vining was not at the wheel. “Take me to Michael O’Flynn’s house on Brattice Street,” he told the constable who was. If anyone knew where Joseph Kilbride really intended to go, O’Flynn was likeliest to be that man.
“Yes, sir,” the constable said, and slid out into traffic. After a moment, though, he asked, “Is it O’Flynn himself you need to speak to?”
“If I’d wanted to talk to Percy McGaffigan, I’d likely have asked you to go to his house instead,” Bushell answered.
“Yes, sir,” the constable repeated. “But O’Flynn will be down in the mines by now, not all snug in his bed.”
“So early?” Bushell said. “How long is a shift in the mines?”
“Seven, seven and a half hours,” the constable said. “But that’s just work at the coal face. Then there’s the travel to it, which can be a mile, or two, or three, going along underground. The miners don’t get a ha’penny for that, and it takes ‘em a goodish while to manage: not all the tunnels are tall enough to walk upright in, you see.”
“So I do,” Bushell said slowly. “Yes, you’d better take me to the mine, then.” The more he heard about what miners had to endure, the better he understood why their politics inclined toward the radical. What they had now was disastrously bad.
The rattle and clank of the coal-breaking and coal-sorting machinery dinned in his ears as the constabulary steamer glided to a stop in front of the offices outside the upper opening of the mineshaft. The constable said, “They’ll be able to tell you in here where in the mine O’Flynn is working today.”
Bushell took out his badge as soon as he got out of the steamer. It worked its usual magic on the clerks in the office, a set of men who wore their white shirts, collars, and ties with an air of special pride, as if to proclaim to the world - and to themselves - that they weren’t miners. “I’ll have him located for you in a moment, sir,” one of them said, flipping through a large box of cards. “O’Flynn, Michael F. That would be Level D, Corridor 3. We’ll have to send a man down to bring him out. It will take some time.”
“I haven’t got time to waste,” Bushell said. “Get me a guide and a helmet or whatever you use, and I’ll go down there after him.”
The clerk stared at him in something approaching horror. “But, sir, you’ll ruin your suit!”
“Worse things have happened,” Bushell answered. By the look on the clerk’s face, he couldn’t think of any offhand.
He was, however, good at doing as he was told. He found Bushell an aluminium helmet with a battery lamp, then said, “Let’s go over to the infirmary, sir. One of the miners there should be able to take you where you need to go.” He seemed confident the infirmary would have patients in it. And so it did. A gray-haired fellow who was getting a gashed arm sewn up and bandaged said, “Yeah, I’ll get him down there.” He looked Bushell over. “Let him see how the other half lives, what working for a living is really like.”
“Thanks.” Bushell stuck out his hand. “Tom Bushell.”
The miner shook hands with him. His grip was as strong as the stone with which he labored. Bushell squeezed back, hard enough to gain some small measure of respect. “Rufus Fitzwilliam,” the miner said. He picked up his helmet from the medicine cabinet where it rested and set it on his head. “Come on, let’s go to the cage.”
Bushell followed him to the lift that took men down in to the mine. It did look like a cage, with a plank floor, and sides and top of steel mesh. A tall man would have had to stoop to stand upright in it. “Level D,” Fitzwilliam called to the operator. To Bushell, he said, “Usually we’re all jammed in here like tinned herrings. I head down with just two in the box, it’s like going on holiday.”
“If you say so,” Bushell answered. Halfway through the sentence, the floor of the cage dropped away from beneath his feet. His stomach tried to crawl up into his throat. Doing his best to keep his voice casual as he plunged down into the lightless shaft, he asked, “How deep are we going?”
“Level D? Oh, about fifteen, sixteen hundred feet, something like that,” Fitzwilliam answered casually. It seemed less, partly because the lift was descending so fast. Increasing air pressure made Bushell’s ears pop several times. Without warning, the cage slowed abruptly; the floorboards pushed hard against the soles of his feet. For a horrid moment, he imagined he felt the planks giving away. Then the cage stopped and the sensation, if it had been real, vanished.
Rufus Fitzwilliam reached up and flicked on his helmet lamp. Bushell imitated him. Fitzwilliam bent down and unlatched the door to the cage. “Come on out,” he said, chuckling slyly. “You’re not one of those chaps who go all balmy for fear of being shut in, are you?”
“No,” Bushell answered, to the miner’s disappointment. Under any normal circumstances, that was true. But, when he stepped out into the mine and thought of better than a quarter of mile of rock above his head, suspended only by the stone walls of the tunnel and by stout support timbers, he had to wonder if he’d told a lie.
His lamp and Fitzwilliam’s cast pale beams through the gloom. Globes were strung along the roof of the tunnel, too, but so far apart that they shed only a dim light.
Bushell looked around. Except for Fitzwilliam, he saw no one. “All right, where’s O’Flynn?” he asked. Fitzwilliam laughed. “We have us some traveling to do first, Mister RAM.” He pointed into the black pit of a tunnel mouth. “He’s about a mile and a quarter, maybe a mile and a half, down that way.”
“Lay on, Macduff,” Bushell said. When the miner stared at him in incomprehension, he waved for him to lead the way. The bluff gesture helped hide his own dismay. When you thought of what miners did, you thought about them going down into their shaft and digging out the coal. What you didn’t think about unless you were a miner, Bushell supposed - was what happened after you’d dug out all the coal from right around the bottom of the shaft.
The Charleroi constable had talked about travel time to the work, but what he’d said hadn’t fully sunk in. Now it did. And a mile and a quarter or a mile and a half deep underground was not the same as a mile and a quarter or a mile and a half along a smooth sidewalk with trees all around and a breeze in your face.
Fitzwilliam stepped into the tunnel down which he’d pointed. “Watch your head, Mister RAM,” he said.