Red, White and Blue (Book Two of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Seventeen: Bearing it

Cambridgeshire, 1877:

It would not normally have been the sort of thing to bring a shy girl out of herself: being forced to work in an underground fire mine, being whipped if you didn't get enough work done, smuggling food and medicine into the mines via the tiny passage that led so fleetingly up to the outside world.

But Ellini was good at it.

In some ways, she healed down in the fire-mines. She learned to respect herself a little – for the good she was doing others – and trust her abilities more. She got stronger and quicker, and learned to move without making a sound. She learned to use the underground currents of air to carry her scent to the gargoyles when she wanted to be discovered, or whip it away when she wanted to remain invisible. She even learned to pick up some of their language and mimic their calls to one another.

The demons didn't feed their slaves enough, or really know how to treat their wounds and illnesses, so sneaking out of the fire-mines to scavenge food and medicine from the surrounding villages was essential. One girl could do it for a couple of hours without being missed.

Fortunately, the villagers of Cherry Hinton left regular offerings of bread and fruit for Charlotte Grey – who they considered to be the guardian spirit of the caves – in the hopes that she would send any lost children or wandering sheep safely out of her tunnels and back to their homes.

But the villagers' usefulness didn't end there. When certain things went missing from their storerooms over and over again, they began to take the hint, and included them in their daily basket of offerings. One venturesome local even included reading material – newspapers, penny-dreadfuls, sermon compilations.

The penny-dreadfuls had wonderful titles, like The Death Ship, The Murderer at the Old Smithy, or The Bandit Monk of Italy. The girls liked them, but Ellini preferred the papers. The papers had been good to her – although they had made her cry more than once, informing her of the deaths of Joel and Alim.

But she would always be grateful to them for informing her that Jack Cade had survived the massacre at the Delhi Cantonment, and was now being detained – not held captive – at a prominent and respectable new-breed retreat, which 'the editors decline to name, out of respect for the great man's privacy'.

And day by day – as far as there was any way to measure the passage of time down here – her hair failed to turn white-blonde. It wasn't just immune, though; it seemed to drink the hell-fire up. When she was happy or excited, or glowing with that masochistic fervour which enabled her to endure anything for the sake of her sisters, her hair would get so hot that it was painful for anyone to touch it. 

And yet Matthi couldn't get enough of it. She was often loosening it out of its tidy, practical plait, and running her fingers through it, as though warming her hands by the fire.

"Perhaps it only burns the wicked," Ellini suggested, on one of these occasions. "They say that about the flames of the Phoenix, you know."

"I did know, clever clogs," said Matthi, planting a small kiss at the base of her neck. "I was a reader too, remember? But it'd be a strange definition of wicked that spared me."

They were sitting beside the black lake, where the slave-girls spent most of what could laughingly be called their 'leisure time'. This was another large cavern, with a lake of black water at the centre. It was a place that the gargoyles avoided, so it had become the slave-girls' sanctuary.

Sometimes the lake was on fire; sometimes it bubbled mysteriously, or became criss-crossed with unaccountable ripples which made you think there was something alive down there, groping its way through the dark water.