Misery

CHAPTER 1



For a moment Geoffrey Alliburton was not sure who the old man at the door was, and this was not entirely because the bell had awakened him from a deepening doze. The irritating thing about village life, he thought, was that there weren't enough people for there to be any perfect strangers instead there were just enough to keep one from knowing immediately who many of the villagers were. Sometimes all one really had to go on was a family resemblance - and such resemblances, of course, never precluded the unlikely but hardly impossible coincidence of bastardy. One could usually handle such moments - no matter how much one might feel one was entering one's dotage while trying to maintain an ordinary conversation with a person whose name one should be able to recall but could not; things only reached the more cosmic realms of embarrassment when two such familiar faces arrived at the same time, and one felt called upon to make introductions.

"I hope I'll not be disturber" ye, sair," this visitor said. He was twisting a cheap cloth cap restlessly in his hands, and in the light cast by the lamp Geoffrey held up, his face looked lined and yellow and terribly worried - frightened, even. "It's just that I didn't want to go to Dr. Bookings, nor did I want to disturb His Lordship. Not, at least, until I'd spoken to you, if ye take my meaning, sair." Geoffrey didn't, but quite suddenly he did know one thing - who this late-coming visitor was. The mention of Dr. Bookings, the C of E Minister, had done it. Three days ago Dr. Bookings had performed Misery's few last rites in the churchyard which lay behind the rectory, and this fellow had been there - but lurking considerately in the background, where he was less apt to be noticed.

His name was Colter. He was one of the church sextons. To be brutally frank, the man was a gravedigger.

"Colter," he said. "What can I do for you?" Colter spoke hesitantly. "It's the noises, sair. The noises in the churchyard. Her Ladyship rests not easy, sair, so she doesn't, and I'm afeard. I - " Geoffrey felt as if someone had punched him in the midsection. He pulled in a gasp of air and hot pain needled his side, where his ribs had beers tightly taped by Dr. Shinebone. Shinebone's gloomy assessment had been that Geoffrey would almost certainly take pneumonia after lying in that ditch all night in the chilly rain, but three days had passed and there had been no onset of fever and coughing. He had known there would not be; God did not let off the guilty so easily. He believed that God would let him live to perpetuate his poor lost darling's memory for a long, long time.

"Are ye all "right, sair?" Colter asked. "I heard ye were turrible bunged up t'other night."" He paused. "The night herself died."

"I'm fine," Geoffrey said slowly. "Colter, these sounds you say you hear... you know they are just imaginings, don't you?" Colter looked shocked.

"Imaginings?" he asked. "Sair! Next ye'll be tellin me ye have no belief in Jesus and the life everlastin'! Why, didn't Duncan Fromsley see old man Patterson not two days after his funeral, glowin" just as white as marsh-fire (which was just what it probably was, Geoffrey thought, marsh-fire plus whatever came out of old Fromsley's last bottle)? And ain't half the bleedin" town seen that old Papist monk that walks the battlements of Ridgeheath Manor? They even sent down a coupler ladies from the bleedin" London Psychic Society to look inter that "un!" Geoffrey knew the ladies Colter meant; a Couple of hysterical beldames probably suffering from the alternate calms and monsoons of midlife, both as dotty as a child's Draw-It-Name-It puzzle.

"Ghosts are just as real as you or me, sair," Colter was saying earnestly. "I don't mind the idea of them - but these noises are fearsome spooky, so they are, and I hardly even like to go near the churchyard - and I have to dig a grave for the little Roydman babe tomorrow, so I do." Geoffrey said an inward prayer for patience. The urge to bellow at this poor sexton was almost insurmountable. He had been dozing peacefully enough in front of his own fire with a book in his lap when Colter came, waking him up... and he was coming more and more awake all the time, and at every second the dull sorrow settled more deeply over him, the awareness that his darling was gone. She was three days in her grave, soon to be a week... a month... a year... ten years. The sorrow, he thought, was like a rock on the shoreline of the ocean. When one was sleeping it was as if the tide was in, and there was some relief. Sleep was like a tide which covered the rock of grief. When one woke, however, the tide began to go out and soon the rock was visible again, a barnacle-encrusted thing of inarguable reality, a thing which would be there forever, or until God chose to wash it away.

And this fool dared to come here and prate of ghosts!

But the man's face looked so wretched that Geoffrey was able to control himself.

"Miss Misery - Her Ladyship - was much 1oved, " Geoffrey said quietly.

"Aye, sair, so she was," Colter agreed fervently. He switched custody of his cloth cap to his left hand solely, and with his right produced a giant red handkerchief from his pocket. He honked mightily into it, his eyes watering.

"All of us sorrow at her passing." Geoffrey's hands went to his shirt and rubbed the heavy muslin wrappings beneath it restlessly.

"Aye, so we do, sair, so we do." Colter's words were muffled in the handkerchief, but Geoffrey could see his eyes; the man was really, honestly weeping. The last of his own selfish anger dissolved in pity. "She were a good lady, sair! Aye, she were a great lady, and it is a turrible thing the way His Lordship's took on about it - "

"Aye, she was fine," Geoffrey said gently, and found to his dismay that his own tears were now close, like a cloudburst which threatens on a late summer's afternoon. "And sometimes, Colter, when someone especially fine passes away - someone especially dear to us all - we find it hard to let that someone go. So we may imagine that they have not gone. Do you follow me?"

"Aye, sair!" Colter said eagerly. "But these sounds... sair, if ye heard them!" Patiently, Geoffrey said: "What sort of sounds do you mean?" He thought Colter would then speak of sounds which might, be no more than the wind in the trees, sounds amplified by his own imagination, of course - or perhaps a badger bumbling its way down to Little Dunthorpe Stream, which lay behind the churchyard. And so he was hardly prepared when Colter whispered in an affrighted voice: "Scratchin" sounds, sair! It sounds as if she were still alive down there and tryin" to work her way back up to the land o" the livin", so it does!"

CHAPTER 2-5

CHAPTER 2

Fifteen minutes later, alone again, Geoffrey approached the dinning-room sideboard. He was reeling from side to side like a main negotiating the foredeck of a ship in a gale. He felt like a man in a gale. He might have believed that the fever Dr. Shinebone had almost gleefully predicted had come on him at last, and with a vengeance, but it wasn't fever which had simultaneously brought wild red roses to his cheeks and tugged his forehead to the color of candlewax, not fever which made his hands shake so badly that he almost dropped the decanter of brandy as he brought it out of the sideboard.

If there was a chance - the slightest chance - that the monstrous idea Colter had planted in his mind was true, then he had no business pausing here at all. But he felt that without a drink he might fall swooning to the floor.

Geoffrey Alliburton did something then he had never done before in his whole life; something he clever did again. He lifted the decanter directly to his mouth, and drank from the neck.

Then he stepped back, and whispered: "We shall see about this. We shall see about this, by heaven. And if I go on this insane errand only to discover nothing at the end of it but an old gravedigger's imagination after all, I will have goodman Colter's earlobes on my watch chain, no matter how much he loved Misery."

CHAPTER 3

He took the pony-trap, driving under an eerie, not-quite-dark sky where a three-quarters moon ducked restlessly in and out between racing reefs of cloud. He had paused to throw on the first thing in the downstairs hall closet which came to hand - this turned out to be a dark-maroon smoking jacket. The tails blew out behind him as he whipped Mary on. The elderly mare did not like the speed upon which he was insisting; Geoffrey did not like the deepening pain in his shoulder and side... but the pain of neither could be helped.

Scratchin" sounds, sair! It sounds as if she were still alive down there and tryin" to work her way back up to the land of the livin'!

This by itself would not have put him in a state of near-terror - but he remembered coming to Calthorpe Manor the day after Misery's death. He and Ian had looked at each other, and Ian had tried to smile, although his eyes were gemlike with unshed tears.

"It would somehow be easier," Ian had said, "if she looked... looked more dead. I know how that sounds - "

"Bosh," Geoffrey had said, trying to smile. "The undertaker doubtless exercised all his wit and - "

"Undertaker!" Ian nearly screamed, and for the first time Geoffrey had truly understood that his friend was tottering on the brink of madness. "Undertaker! Ghoul! I've had no undertaker and I will have no undertaker to come in and rouge my darling and paint her like a doll!"

"Ian! My dear fellow! Really, you mustn't - " Geoffrey had made as if to clap Ian on the shoulder and somehow that had turned into an embrace. The two men wept in each other's arms like tired children, while in some other room Misery's child, a boy now almost a day old and still unnamed, awoke and began to cry. Mrs. Ramage, whose own kindly heart was broken, began to sing it a cradle song in a voice cracked and full of tears.

At the time, deeply afraid for Ian's sanity, he had been less concerned with what Ian had said than how he had said it - only now, as he whipped Mary ever faster toward Little Dunthorpe in spite of his own deepening pain, did the words come back, haunting in light of Colter's tale: If she looked more dead. If she looked more dead, old chap.

Nor was that all. Late that afternoon, as the first of the village people had begun wending their way up Calthorpe Hill to pay their respects to the grieving lord, Shinebone had returned. He had looked tired, not very well himself; nor was this surprising in a man who claimed to have shaken hands with Wellington - the Iron Duke himself - when he (Shinebone, not Wellington) had been a boy. Geoffrey thought the Wellington story was probably an exaggeration, but Old Shinny, as he and Tan had called him as boys, had see, Geoffrey through all his childhood illnesses, and Shinny had seemed a very old man to him, even then. Always granting the eye of childhood, which tends to see anyone over the age of twenty-five as elderly, he thought Shinny must be a11 of seventy-five now.

He was old... he'd had a hectic, terrible last twenty-four hours... and might not an old, tired marl have made a mistake?

A terrible, unspeakable mistake?

It was this thought more than any other which had seat him out on this cold and windy night, under a moon which stuttered uncertainly between the clouds.

Could he have made such a mistake? Part of him, a craven, cowardly part which would rather risk losing Misery forever than look upon the inevitable results of such a mistake, denied it. But when Shinny came in...

Geoffrey had been sitting by Ian, who was remembering in a broken, scarcely coherent way how he and Ian had rescued Misery from the palace dungeons of the mad French viscount Leroux, how they had escaped in a wagonload of hay, and how Misery distracted one of the viscounts guards at a critics moment by slipping one gorgeously unclad leg out of the hay and waving it delicately. Geoffrey had been chiming in his own memories of the adventure, wholly in the grip of his grief by then, and he cursed that grief how, because to him (and to Ian as well, he supposed), Shinny had barely been there.

Hadn't Shinny seemed strangely distant, strangely preoccupied? Was it only weariless, or had it been something else... something suspicion...?

No, surely not, his mind protested uneasily. The pony-trap was flying up Calthorpe Hill. The manor house itself was dark, but - ah, good! - there was still a single light on in Mrs. Ramage's cottage.

"Hup, Mary!" he cried, and cracked the whip, wincing. Not much further, girl, and you can rest a bit!" Surely, surely not what you're thinking!!

But Shinny's examination of Geoffrey's broken ribs and sprained shoulder had seemed purely perfunctory, and he had spoken barely a word to Ian, in spite of the man's deep grief and frequent incoherent cries. No - after a visit which now seemed no longer than the most minimal sort of social convention would demand, Shinny had asked quietly: "Is she -?"

"Yes, in the parlor," Ian had managed. "My poor darling lies in the parlor. Kiss her for me, Shinny, and tell her I'll be with her soon!" Ian then had burst into tears again, and after muttering some half-heard word of condolence, Shinny had passed into the parlor. It now seemed to Geoffrey that the old sawbones had been in there a rather long time... or perhaps that was only faulty recollection. But when he came out he had looked almost cheerful, and there was nothing faulty about this recollection, Geoffrey felt sure - that expression was too out of place in that room of grief and tears, a room where Mrs. Ramage had already hung the black funerary curtains.

Geoffrey had followed the old doctor but and spoke hesitantly to him in the kitchen. He hoped, he said, that the doctor would prescribe a sleeping powder for Ian, who really did seem quite ill.

Shinny had seemed completely distracted, however. "It's not a bit like Miss Evelyn-Hyde," he said. "I have satisfied myself of that." And he had returned to his caleche without so much as a response to Geoffrey's question. Geoffrey went back inside, already forgetting the doctor's odd remark, already chalking Shinny's equally odd behavior off to age, weariless, and his own sort of grief. His thoughts had turned to Ian again, and he determined that, with no sleeping powder forthcoming, he would simply have to pour whiskey down Ian's throat until the poor fellow passed out.

Forgetting... dismissing.

Until now.

It's not a bit like Miss Evelyn-Hyde. I have satisfied myself of that.

Of what?

Geoffrey did not know, but he intended to find out, no matter what the cost to his sanity might be - and he recognized that the cost might be high.

CHAPTER 4

Mrs. Ramage was still up when Geoffrey began to hammer on the cottage door, although it was already two hours past her normal bedtime. Since Misery had passed away, Mrs. Ramage found herself putting her bedtime further and further back. If she could got put an end to her restless tossing and turning, she could at least postpone the moment at which she began it.

Although she was the most levelheaded and practical of women, the sudden outburst of knocking startled a little scream from her, and she scalded herself with the hot milk she had been pouring from pot to cup. Lately she seemed always on edge, always on the verge of a scream. It was not grief, this feeling, although she was nearly overwhelmed with grief - this was a strange, thundery feeling that she couldn't ever remember having before. It sometimes seemed to her that thoughts better left unrecognized were circling around her, just beyond the grasp of her weary, bitterly sad mind.

"Who knocks at ten?" she cried at the door. "Whoever it is, I thank ye not for the burn I've given m'self!"

"It's Geoffrey, Mrs. Ramage! Geoffrey Alliburton! Open the door, for God's sake!" Mrs. Ramage's mouth dropped open and she was halfway to the door before she remembered she was in her nightgown and cap. She had never heard Geoffrey sound so, and would not have believed it if someone had told her of it. If there was a man in all England with a heart stouter than that of her beloved My Lord, then it was Geoffrey - yet his voice trembled like the voice of a woman on the verge of hysterics.

"A minute, Mr. Geoffrey! I'm half-unclad!"

"Devil take it!" Geoffrey cried. "I don't care if you're starkers, Mrs. Ramage! Open this door! Open it in the name of Jesus!" She stood only a second, then went to the door, unbarred it, and threw it open. Geoffrey's look did more than stun her, and again she heard the dim thunder of black thoughts somewhere back in her head.

Geoffrey stood on the threshold of the housekeeper's cottage in an odd slanting posture, as if his spine had been warped out of shape by long years carrying a peddler's sack. His right hand was pressed between his left arm and left side. His hair was in a tangle. His dark-brown eyes burned out of his white face. His dress was remarkable for one as careful - dandified, some would have said - about his clothing as Geoffrey Alliburton usually was. He wore an old smoking jacket with the belt askew, an open-throated white shirt, and a pair of rough serge pants that would have looked more at home upon the legs of a itinerant gardener than upon those of the richest man in Little Dunthorpe. On his feet were a pair of threadbare slippers.

Mrs. Ramage, hardly dressed for a court ball herself in her long white nightgown and muskrat's-nightcap with the untied curling ribbons hanging around her face like the fringe on a lampshade, stared at him with mounting concern. He had re-injured the ribs he had broken riding after the doctor three nights ago, that was obvious, but it wasn't just pain that made his eyes blaze from his whitened face like that. It was terror, barely held in check.

Mr. Geoffrey! What - "

"No questions" he said hoarsely. "Not yet - not until you answer one question of my own."

"What question?" She was badly frightened now, her left hand clenched into a tight fist just above her munificent bosom.

"Does the name Miss Evelyn-Hyde mean anything to you?" And suddenly she knew the reason for that terrible thundery feeling that had been inside her ever since Saturday Night. Some part of her mind must already have had this gruesome thought and suppressed it, for she needed no explanation at all. Only the name of the unfortunate Miss Charlotte Evelyn-Hyde, late of Storping-on-Firkill, the village just to the west of Little Dunthorpe, was sufficient to bring a scream tearing from her.

"Oh, my saints! Oh, my dear Jesus! Has she been buried alive? Has she been buried alive? Has my darling Misery been buried alive?" And now, before Geoffrey could even begin to answer, it was tough old Mrs. Ramage's turn to do something she had never done before that night and would never do again: she fainted dead away.

CHAPTER 5

Geoffrey had no time to look for smelling salts. He doubted if such a tough old soldier as Mrs. Ramage kept them around anyway. But beneath her sink he found a rag which smelled faintly of ammonia. He did not just pass this beneath her nose but pressed it briefly against her lower face. The possibility Colter had raised, however faint, was too hideous to merit much in the way of consideration.

She jerked, cried out, and opened her eyes. For a moment she looked at him with dazed, uncomprehending bewilderment. Then she sat up.

"No," she said. "No, Mr. Geoffrey, say ye don't mean it, say it isn't true - "

"I don't know if it is true or not," he said. "But we must satisfy ourselves immediately. Immediately, Mrs. Ramage. I can't do all the digging myself, if there's digging that must be done... " She was staring at him with horrified eyes, her hands pressed so tightly over her mouth that the nails were white. "Can you help me, if help is needed? There's really no one else."

"My Lord," she said numbly. "My Lord Mr. Ian - "

" - must know nothing of this until we know more!" He said. "If God is good, he need never know at all." He would not voice to her the unspoken hope at the back of his mind, a hope which seemed to him almost as monstrous as his fears. If God was very good, he would find out about this night's work... when his wife and only 1ove was restored to him, her return from the dead almost as miraculous as that of Lazarus. IN "Oh, this is terrible... terrible!" she said in a faint, fluttery voice. Holding onto the table, she managed to pull herself to her feet. She stood, swaying, little straggles of hair hanging around her face among the muskrat-tails of her cap.

"Are you well enough?" he asked, more kindly. "If not, then I must try to carry on as best I can by myself." She drew a deep, shuddering breath and let it out. The side-to-side sway stopped. She turned and walked toward the pantry. "There's a pair of spades in the shed out back," she said. "A pick as well, I think. Throw them in your trap. There's half a bottle of gin out here in the pantry. Been here untouched since Bill died five years ago, on Lammas-night. I'll have a bit and then join you, Mr. Geoffrey."

"You're a brave woman, Mrs. Ramage. Be quick."

"Aye, never fear me," she said, and grasped the bottle of gin with a hand that trembled only slightly. There was no dust on the bottle - not even the pa0try was safe from the relentless dust-clout of Mrs. Ramage - but the label reading CLOUGH amp; POOR BOOZIERS was yellow. "Be quick yourself." She had always hated spirits and her stomach wanted to sick the gin, with its nasty junipery smell and oily taste, back up. She made it stay down. Tonight she would need it.

CHAPTER 6(I)

Under clouds that still raced east to west, blacker shapes against a black sky, and a moon that was now settling toward the horizon, the pony-trap sped toward the churchyard. It was now Mrs. Ramage who drove, cracking the whip over the bewildered Mary, who would have told them, if horses could talk, that this was all wrong - she was supposed to be dozing in her warm stall come this time of night. The spades and the pick chattered coldly one against the other, and Mrs. Ramage thought they would have given anyone who had seen them a proper fright - they must look like a pair of Mr. Dickens's resurrection men... or perhaps one resurrection man sitting in a pony-trap driven by a ghost. For she was all in white - had not even paused long enough to gather up her robe. Her nightgown fluttered around her stout, vein-puffed ankles, and the tails of her cap streamed wildly out behind her.

Here was the church. She turned Mary up the lane which ran beside it, shivering at the ghostly sound of the wind playing along the eaves. She had a moment to wonder why such a holy place as a church should seem so frightening after dark, and then realized it was not the church... it was the errand.

Her first thought upon coming out of her faint was that My Lord must help them - hadn't he been there in all things, through thick and thin, never wavering? A moment later she had realized how mad the idea was. This was not a matter of My Lord's courage, but of his very sanity.

She hadn't needed Mr. Geoffrey to tell her so; the memory of Miss Evelyn-Hyde had done that.

She realized that neither Mr. Geoffrey nor My Lord had been in Little Dunthorpe when it had happened. This had been almost half a year ago, in the spring. Misery had entered the rosy summer of her pregnancy, morning sickness behind her, the final rising of her belly and its attendant discomfort still ahead, and she had cheerfully sent the two men off for a week of grouse-shooting and card-playing and footballing and heaven alone knew what other masculine foolishness at Oak Hall in Doncaster. My Lord had been a bit doubtful, but Misery assured him she would be fine, and nearly pushed him out the door. That Misery would be fine Mrs. Ramage had no doubt. But whenever My Lord and Mr. Geoffrey left for Doncaster, she wondered if one of them - or perhaps both - might not return on the back of a cart, toes up.

Oak Hall was the inheritance of Albert Fossington, a schoolmate of Geoffrey's and Ian's. Mrs. Ramage quite rightly believed that Bertie Fossington was mad. Some three years ago he had eaten his favorite polo pony after it had broken two legs and needed to be destroyed. It was a gesture of affection, he said. "Learned it from the fuzzy-wuzzies in Capetown," he said. "Griquas. Wonderful chaps. Put sticks and things in their smoochers, what? Some of "em look like they could carry all twelve volumes of the Royal Navigation Charts on their lower lips, ha-ha! Taught me that each make must eat the thing he loves. Rather poetic in a grisly sort of way, what?" In spite of I such bizarre behavior, Mr. Geoffrey and My Lord retained a great affection for Bertie. (I wonder if that means they'll have to eat him when he's dead? Mrs. Ramage had once wondered after a visit from Bertie during which he had tried to play croquet with one of the housecats, quite shattering its poor little head), and they had spent nearly ten days at Oak Hall this past spring.

Not more than a day or two after they left, Miss Charlotte Evelyn-Hyde of Storping-on-Firkill had been found dead on the back lawn of her home, Cove o'Birches. There had been a freshly picked bunch of flowers near one outstretched hand. The village doctor was a man named Billford - a capable man by all accounts. Nevertheless, he had called old Dr. Shinebone in to consult. Billford had diagnosed the fatal malady as a heart attack, although the girl was very young - only eighteen - and had seemed in the pink of health. Billford was puzzled.

Something seemed not at all right. Old Shinny had been clearly puzzled as well, but in the end he had concurred with the diagnosis. So did most of the village, for that matter - the girl's heart had not been properly made, that was all, such things were rare but everyone could recall such a sad case at one time or another. It was probably this universal concurrence that had saved Billford's practice - if not his head - following the ghastly denouement. Although everyone had agreed that the girl's death was puzzling, it had crossed no one's mind that she might not be dead at all.

Four days following the interment, an elderly woman named Mrs. Soames - Mrs. Rainage knew her slightly - had observed something white lying on the ground of the Congregational church's cemetery as she entered it to put flowers on the grave of her husband, who had died the previous winter. It was much too big to be a flower petal, and she thought it might be a dead bird of some sort. As she approached she became more and more sure that the white object was not just lying on the ground, but protruding from it. She came two or three hesitant steps closer yet, and observed a hand reaching from the earth of a fresh grave, the fingers frozen in a hideous gesture of supplication. Blood-streaked bones protruded from the ends of all the digits save the thumb.

Mrs. Soames ran shrieking from the cemetery, ran all the way into Storping's high street - a run of nearly a mile and a quarter - and reported her news to the barber, who was also the local constable. Then she had collapsed in a dead faint. She took to her bed later that afternoon and did not arise from it for nearly a month. Nor did anyone in the village blame her in the least.

The body of the unfortunate Miss Evelyn-Hyde had been exhumed, of course, and as Geoffrey Alliburton drew Mary to a halt in front of the gate leading into Little Dunthorpe's C of E churchyard, Mrs. Ramage found herself wishing fervently that she had not listened to the tales of the exhumation. They had been dreadful.

Dr. Billford, shaken to within an inch of sanity himself, diagnosed catalepsy. The poor woman had apparently fallen into some sort of deathlike trance, much like the sort those Indian fakirs could voluntarily induce in themselves before allowing themselves to be buried alive or to have needles passed through their flesh. She had remained in this trance for perhaps forty-eight hours, perhaps sixty. Long enough, at any rate, to have awakened not to find herself on her back lawn where she had been picking flowers, but buried alive in her own coffin.

She had fought grimly for her life, that girl, and Mrs. Ramage found now, following Geoffrey through the gates and into a thin mist that turned the leaning grave markers into islands, that what should have redeemed with nobility only made it seem all the more horrid.

The girl had been engaged to be married. In her left hand - not the one frozen above the soil like the hand of a drowned woman - had been her diamond engagement ring. With it she had slit the satin lining of her coffin and over God knew how many hours she had used it to claw away at the coffin's wooden lid. In the end, air running out, she had apparently used the ring with her left hand to cut and excavate and her right hand to dig. It had not been quite enough. Her complexion had been a deep purple from which her blood-rimmed eyes stared in a bulging expression of terminal horror.

The clock in the church tower began to chime the hour of twelve - the hour when, her mother had told her, the door between life and death sways open a bit and the dead may pass both ways - and it was all Mrs. Ramage could do to keep herself from shrieking and fleeing in a panic which would not abate but grow stronger with each step; if she began running, she knew, she would simply run until she fell down insensible.

Stupid, fearful woman! she berated herself, and then amended that to: Stupid, fearful, selfish woman! It's My Lord ye want to be thinkin" of now, and not yer own fears My Lord... and if there is even one chance that My Lady - Ah, but no - it was madness to even think of such a thing. It had been too long, too long, too long.

Geoffrey had led her to Misery's tombstone, and the two of them stood looking down at it, as if mesmerized. LADY CALTHORPE, the stone read. Other than the dates of her birth and death, the only inscription was: LOVED BY MANY.

She looked at Geoffrey and said, like one awakening from a deep daze: "Ye've not brought the tools."

"No - not yet," he responded, and threw himself full-length on the ground and placed his ear against the earth, which had already begun to show the first tender shoots of new grass between the rather carelessly replaced sods.

For a moment the only expression she saw there by the lamp she carried was the one Geoffrey had worn since she had first opened her door to him - a look of agonized dread. Then a new expression began to surface. This new expression was one of utter horror mingled with an almost demented hope.

He looked up at Mrs. Ramage, eyes staring, mouth working. "I believe she lives," he whispered strengthlessly. "Oh, Mrs. Ramage - " Suddenly he turned over onto his belly and screamed at the ground - under other circumstances it would have been comic. "Misery! MISERY! WE'RE HERE! WE KNOW! HOLD ON! HOLD ON, MY DARLING!" He was on his feet a moment later, sprinting back toward the pony-trap, where the digging tools were, his slippered feet sending the placid groumdmist into excited little roils.

Mrs. Ramage's knees unlocked and she buckled forward, near to swooning again. Of its own accord, seemingly, her head slipped to one side so her right ear was pressed against the ground - she had seen children in similar postures by the railway line, listening for trains.

And she heard it - low, painful scraping sounds in the earth - not the sounds of a burrowing animal, these; these were the sounds of fingers scraping helplessly on wood.

She drew in breath in one great convulsive gulp, re-starting her own heart, it seemed. She shrieked: "WERE COMING, MY LADY! PRAISE GOD AND PLEAD SWEET JESUS WE BE IN TIME - WE'RE COMING!" She began to pull half healed turves out of the ground with her trembling fingers, and although Geoffrey returned in almost no time, she had by then already clawed a hole some eight inches deep.