Chapter 8 #2
John tested the ladder with one foot, then shifted his weight upon the first rung. It creaked but held. “Best go slow, miss. And if it gives even a little, come straight back.”
Elizabeth nodded and lowered herself carefully through the opening.
The ladder was damp beneath her shoes, and each rung complained as she descended.
The lantern cast wavering light over rough brick and stone, revealing a space smaller than she had expected—hardly a room at all, more a low chamber beneath the cellar, perhaps once used for coal, wine, or provisions requiring a steadier coolness than the rooms above.
Empty shelves lined one wall, their boards warped and blackened with age.
A few lumps of coal lay scattered in one corner, and the floor beneath her feet was a patchwork of old planks half-buried in silt.
“It is not very exciting,” she called upward, though her voice sounded strange in the little chamber. “Unless one is passionately interested in damp shelves.”
Susie’s anxious face appeared above. “Then come back up.”
“In a moment.”
“Stay here, John,” she heard Susie say, “just in case she needs help.”
Elizabeth lifted the lantern higher and took several cautious steps.
The walls were wet to the touch in places, shining faintly where the light struck them.
The flood had clearly reached even here, forcing water up through the lower chamber and leaving behind mud, straw, grit, and the faint smell of the river.
It was astonishing to imagine such force beneath an ordinary London house, as though the Thames had reached invisible fingers under the city and stirred things that had slept undisturbed for generations.
Her next step sank.
Elizabeth gasped and lurched backward, catching herself against the shelf as one foot broke through a softened plank. The wood crumbled beneath her shoe, not snapping cleanly but giving way like wet paper, and cold mud surged around the edges.
“Miss Bennet!” Susie cried.
“I am well!” Elizabeth answered quickly, though her heart was beating hard enough to shake her voice. She lifted her foot free with some difficulty and stepped back onto firmer boards. “The flooring is rotten here. No one else should come down until we know where it will bear weight.”
She lowered the lantern toward the broken place.
At first, she saw only mud.
Then something gleamed.
Elizabeth froze.
The light trembled in her hand, and for an instant she thought the glimmer might be water catching the flame. But the shine remained too warm, too yellow. She crouched carefully, keeping one hand upon the shelf, and brushed aside a smear of mud with the tip of a broken splinter.
A small round object emerged.
Gold.
She stared at it, unable to make sense of what she saw. It was a coin, or seemed to be one, though unlike any coin she had ever handled. Smaller than a guinea, heavier-looking, and marked with a profile so worn by age and mud that the face appeared almost ghostly.
“What is it?” Susie called from above. “Did you find something?”
Elizabeth did not answer immediately. She touched the coin with two fingers and lifted it from the mud. Beneath it, another faint yellow edge showed between the broken boards.
Then another.
And another.
“Miss Bennet?” Susie’s voice had gone thin.
Elizabeth slowly rose, the muddy coin resting in her palm. She looked from it to the collapsed plank, then to the damp earth below where more gold glimmered faintly in the lantern light.
“I think,” she said very carefully, “you had better fetch Mr. Philips now, John.”
John vanished at once.
Susie remained above, gripping the edge of the trap door. “Is it money?”
“I… I believe so.”
“You mean, like something foreign?”
Elizabeth held the coin nearer the lantern. The profile upon it was strange and severe, the lettering around the edge not English. Not French. Not anything she could read at a glance.
Her pulse quickened.
“I do not know,” she whispered. “But it is very, very old.”
She crouched again, no longer caring about the mud soaking the hem of her gown.
With the splinter, she moved a little more silt aside and saw where the water had undermined the old flooring.
Beneath the rotten planks was not merely packed earth, as she had expected, but broken stone and fragments of what looked like tile.
Something harder lay below, perhaps an older floor, perhaps a foundation, perhaps some forgotten remnant of the city that had existed before London became London.
The coin in her palm seemed suddenly impossibly heavy.
Above her, Susie whispered, “Miss Lizzy, please come back up.”
Elizabeth ought to have obeyed. Everything sensible urged her to retreat, wait for Mr. Philips, and allow men with tools to decide what lay beneath the cellar.
Instead, she looked down at the glimmering line in the mud and felt curiosity burn brighter than fear.
“One moment more,” she murmured.
But before she could touch the earth again, the nearest shelf gave a low crack from the damp-swollen wall.
That was sufficient.
Elizabeth rose at once and went back to the ladder, clutching the coin in one hand and the lantern in the other. By the time she emerged into the cellar, her gown was filthy, one shoe was nearly black with river mud, and Susie looked as though she had aged five years in five minutes.
Elizabeth opened her hand.
The gold coin lay in her palm between them.
For several seconds neither woman spoke.
Then Susie whispered, “Good heavens.”
Elizabeth looked back toward the dark opening in the floor. “Yes,” she said softly. “I believe I have found something.”
The solemnity of the moment held for perhaps two seconds.
Then Susie let out a laugh that sounded almost hysterical, and Elizabeth, who had been holding herself together by sheer force since the rotten plank had given beneath her foot, began laughing as well.
It was not precisely amusement. It was nerves, relief, terror, exhaustion, and the absurdity of standing in a cellar covered in mud with what appeared to be ancient gold in her hand while the house above them still needed linens sorted and supper planned.
“Oh, look at me,” Elizabeth said when she could speak again, glancing down at her ruined gown. “I have discovered treasure and destroyed a perfectly serviceable dress. Mama would find one of these events far more interesting than the other.”
Susie pressed one hand to her mouth, still half laughing and half horrified. “Miss Lizzy, I thought you were going to break your neck.”
“I very nearly broke only my shoe, which is not at all the same thing.” Elizabeth wiped the edge of the coin carefully against the least muddy portion of her sleeve, then looked back toward the opening. “There is more down there.”
Susie’s smile vanished. “No.”
Elizabeth had already taken one step toward the trap door, but Susie caught her arm with surprising strength. “No, Miss Lizzy. You were fortunate enough the first time.”
“But if there are more coins—”
“Then they will remain there,” Susie said firmly. Her face was still pale, but her voice had recovered its housekeeper’s authority. “Whatever it is, it has been beneath this house for goodness knows how long. It will still be there in an hour. There is no need to hurry yourself into a grave.”
Elizabeth looked longingly toward the opening, then down at the coin in her hand. Susie was right, which was the most aggravating sort of argument because it left no room for useful contradiction.
“I detest patience,” Elizabeth said at last.
“I had observed as much.”
“It is an overrated virtue.”
“Only by those who do not possess it.”
Elizabeth gave her a sidelong look. “You have been housekeeper for two months and already moralize like Mrs. Hill. It is a dreadful warning of what authority may do to a person.”
Susie might have answered, but at that moment the sound of the front door opening echoed faintly from above, followed almost immediately by Mr. Philips’s voice.
“Lizzy?”
Elizabeth turned toward the cellar stairs. “Down here!”
There was a brief silence, and then several sets of boots began clattering downward with far more haste than dignity. Mr. Philips appeared first, his usually composed face sharpened with alarm, John following close behind him and looking both guilty and breathless.
“What on earth has happened?” Mr. Philips demanded. “John came to tell me you had found some sort of hidden door. Lizzy, what have you done to yourself?”
Elizabeth looked down at her mud-streaked gown, filthy hem, and one blackened shoe. “I have made a discovery!”
“You look as though you were dragged through the Thames.”
“That was not my intention.”
Mr. Philips strode toward her, irritation and fear warring visibly across his face. “Were you down there? Tell me you did not climb down into some unknown hole beneath a flooded cellar without waiting for me.”
Elizabeth winced. “I would prefer not to tell you that.”
“Elizabeth!”
“But look.” In her eagerness, she thrust out her hand too quickly. The coin slipped from her muddy fingers, struck the stone floor with a small ringing sound, and rolled in a bright arc toward Mr. Philips’s boot.
“Oh!” Elizabeth dropped at once to retrieve it, mortified by her own clumsiness. The coin had come to rest in a shallow crack between two stones, and she had to tug off her worn working-glove to pry it free.
She closed her fingers around it and rose, only to find herself face to face with the most handsome man she had ever met.
For one breathless instant, Elizabeth forgot the coin, the cellar, the mud upon her gown, and even the horror of her uncle’s scolding.
The gentleman stood close enough that she could see the rain still darkening the shoulders of his coat and the sharp intelligence in eyes fixed, not upon the gold in her hand, but upon her face.
His expression was grave, almost severe, yet something in the sudden stillness between them made her pulse skip a beat.
Behind her, Susie let out a little gasp. “Mr. Darcy!”