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The silence was eerie. He could hear the miners breathing and a rhythmic whooshing that he finally recognized as his own pulse.

Then one of the miners swung his pickaxe at a stone. Another did the same. There was no room for them all to work at the rock fall, and West realized that what the rest of them were there to do was clear the smaller pieces of stone out of the way. He lifted the shovel and began to shovel them into one of the smaller corves.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, more miners arrived from the surface. Soon there was another bucket brigade. The confined tunnel was crowded with workers. By silent consensus, the men swinging pickaxes were relieved by others, and took their places removing buckets.

There was an odd lack of hierarchy. Bray gave no orders. West gave no orders. Everyone simply knew what he or she was here to do, and worked to do it. West's shoulders and back began to ache. He had no experience of this sort of work, and after a time he could see that his method of filling buckets wasn't as efficient as it could be, and tried to work with smaller movements. The palm of one of his gloves split. He could feel his hands blistering.

But they’d cleared several feet of rock from the fall already. He tried not to allow himself to hope. Hope was a thing that caused pain. But still... if they could maintain this pace, even if forty feet of the main road had collapsed, they could dig through it in perhaps eight hours… and surely that meant that there was still time to rescue the men.

There was a sharp cracking noise. For a split second everyone froze. And in the lantern light, he saw a terrible, impossible thing: The very rock of the ceiling only a few feet ahead seemed to be bending downward. One of the huge supporting timbers snapped in half.

Someone seized his arm and pulled him around, jerking him out of his trance. “Run!”

A deafening roar shook the air. He tripped on a rough rock and slipped, hitting his shin and knee. Suddenly there was no light. Another unseen person grabbed him under the armpits, almost shoved him to his feet and dragged him back into a run. A few moments later he thought he could feel by the cooler air that he’d reached the bottom of the shaft. There was another crash from deeper in the tunnel. A lantern bobbed toward him.

“We must get out now.” Bray’s face was so blackened with coal dust that only the whites of his eyes caught the lantern light. “The main road is giving way. Everyone must get aboveground. Here.” He seized the edge of the basket.

“No. I shall go up last.” He caught glimpses of a man with a gash on his head, and another miner who was limping. “Help me get them into the basket.”

They heaved them into the corf. Behind them were more sharp cracks. A cloud of dust puffed outward, blinding him and setting everyone hacking. Whoever had pulled him away from the fall, whoever had pulled him to his feet in the tunnel, had saved his life.

Bray touched his arm. "We must go."

“But the men. We cannot leave them.”

“Men?” One of the other miners spoke for the first time. “What men?”

“The trapped men.”

“They are not men.” Bray’s voice was exhausted. “They are boys.”

Chapter Nineteen

Rows of closed shutters and knocker-less front doors made St. James Square appear abandoned. Most of their aristocratic neighbors had left town for the country. And that was just as well, because the traffic and noise that was being inflicted on the square by the renovation of March House was unreasonable by any standards.

Every day, from early summer dawn almost to late summer dusk, dray carts rolled up to its front and back doors. Workers swung through the scaffolding that still covered its facade and carried hods of tiles across its roof. The pounding, clattering, hammering and sawing was continuous and very nearly intolerable.

Since Pomona had turned in her manuscript, she’d spent every day with her mother and Monsieur Mazarine, looking through sample books of fabrics and wallpapers and being harangued by her mother about the entrance hall walls, which Lady Alford was determined would be covered in black marble. Pomona was growing equally determined they would not be. So she welcomed any chance to escape--especially if it was to meet with Mr. Wynde about her next book. At least she would be able to speak to someone about something other than bespoke carpets.

Thought it was already publication day for The Specter of Venice, she still had only a few disorganized ideas for her next book. She hoped that she could make them sound like an actual plot when Mr. Wynde asked her about it.

As they traveled east, she pushed down the window. It wasn’t yet noon, but it was already stifling inside the black lacquered carriage. They passed the slight bend in Leadenhall Street. And then what she saw startled her: Outside the Thetis Library, there was a queue stretching along the pavement toward the corner. There were dozens... perhaps even a hundred or more... of people standing there, all apparently waiting for something.

“Stop. Please.” She banged on the ceiling of the carriage in case Jones the coachman hadn’t heard her. He brought the horses to a halt.

She pushed the window all the way down. A crowd of gaily-dressed women—chattering, fanning themselves, impatiently shuffling forward—were waiting their turns to be admitted into the library. What was happening? Pomona leaned as close to the open window as she dared.

A gaggle of ladies exited the library, all clutching parcels, and hurried off up the street. The queue on the pavement advanced slightly as a harassed-looking clerk at the door allowed a few more customers inside.

Just then, a pair of young ladies walked past close to the coach. Pomona jerked back from the window, hoping that they wouldn’t see her. One of them—a young lady in a pink spencer and fashionable poke bonnet—was speaking in dramatic tones. “… said that it is quite the most shocking novel that has ever been published!”

“But how can she have read it already?” The second young lady had light brown curls peeking from beneath a pale green bonnet.

“She has not read all of it, of course! She sent Barclay out to buy it first thing this morning—before it was sold out at the book shop in Bond Street. Then she sent a servant to me with a note saying that there is a most blood-chilling scene in a marsh, and that she cannot put it down, and that I must read it instantly, or she will be too terrified to sleep again.”

“My goodness!” gasped the second lady. “Perhaps I ought not to read it at all!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Charlotte! Do not be such a goose! I for one refuse to believe that The Specter of Venice can possibly be more shocking than The Necromancer.”