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Opening her mouth to ask him to move faster, Diana hadn’t made a sound when she felt the vibration and heard the rumble that her body recognized before her brain.
“Watch out!” she called, crouching and throwing her arms up to cover her head. And then there was nothing but the roar of violent collapse and the taste of violent earth in her mouth.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
DIANA
NOVEMBER 1918
Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God … Diana was sure she was screaming, but her ears caught only a whimper. Her ears and mouth were full of dirt, and everything was dark and damp, and she couldn’t see, and she couldn’t move—
That was not her whimper. Awareness kicked her brain into gear. She spit out loose dirt and croaked, “Austin? Are you all right?”
“Miss—Miss Neville? I lost my torch.”
“So did I.” To her shock, Diana could hear that her voice was steady. Nothing like a child depending on you to keep you calm. “Not to worry, the tunnel only goes one place. We can’t get lost.”
Which was true enough—except Diana rapidly realized that the main fall had come down between her and Austin. No wonder his voice was so muffled and far away sounding.
She took a couple minutes, chatting inconsequentially as she moved, to try and work out how much debris lay between her and the boy. Too much to move quickly on her own, she decided.
“Austin, I need your help.” Best to give people a mission, she’d found. Being responsible for someone else could, as she well knew, allay the worst of fear. “I’m going to need help to dig my way out of here. You need to get out of the tunnel the way you got in and get back to the school. You’ll probably meet Mr. Weston on your way. Tell him what happened, and that he’ll need some kind of tools to dig through to me.”
“It’s so dark.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But I really need the help.”
Though she knew she couldn’t distinguish such small sounds through the muffling dirt, Diana imagined the gulping swallow that preceded Austin’s slightly firmer, “Yes. I’ll go. Miss Neville?” He sounded suddenly and sweetly concerned. “Are you all right in the dark?”
“Oh yes. The dark doesn’t frighten me.”
True. It wasn’t the dark that disturbed her as she heard the faint sounds of Austin’s movements fade away completely. It was the pressing, squeezing, all-encompassing sense of being trapped, of the earth moving all around her, wrapping around her subtly, sneakily, just waiting to draw her deeper into itself until she was trapped forever, gasping for air and light and life … Her head spun, cold sweat broke out along her hairline, and if it hadn’t already been completely dark, her eyesight would have dimmed.
“Deep breaths,” the doctor had advised. Diana counted and breathed, and counted and breathed, and slowly, slowly she forced herself to take stock of her condition and surroundings. She was sore and her left shoulder and arm had twisted painfully, but she didn’t think she was bleeding anywhere or that she’d hit her head. All she had to do was wait.
She’d had to wait before, in much less comfortable circumstances. At least a three-story chateau hadn’t fallen on top of her now, and she wasn’t trapped with wounded men she couldn’t get to, and there weren’t enemy soldiers on their way who might get to her before her own people. She just had to … wait.
She will come.
The thought was not hers. Diana could swear she felt the breath of the phrase like cobwebs against her skin. And not just once; the words continued to murmur like a hope, a promise, a prayer: She will come, she will come, she will, she will, she will …
Much sooner than she expected, Diana heard the sound of someone moving through the tunnel on the other side of the fall. “Weston?” she called.
“It’s Michael Murray, Miss Neville. Joshua rang the farm and told us what was happening. I saw the young lad squeezing his way out of the tunnel and ran him back to the school in the automobile. Don’t you worry, lass, we’ll get you out of there right quick.”
She could already hear the movement of earth on the other side. She imagined Joshua’s grandfather shoveling away, the solid farmer passing out buckets of dirt along the tunnel to Weston, and yet he still managed to keep up a flow of words directed at her. She wondered if Joshua had told him that she was claustrophobic.
Diana wasn’t passive—she used her hands to dig what she could from her side. The moment of breakthrough came with a shaft of light from a torch and the nearly imperceptible feel of moving air. She closed her eyes and offered up a wordless thanks. Then she reached up toward the opening and began to dig away from it.
She knew the familiar shape and weight of the coins the moment she touched them. More medieval coins? Since she wasn’t going to die today, Diana went ahead and pocketed the ones she found among the debris. Then her fingertips touched something unusual. Not stone or metal but a stiff oval about the size of her palm. As the opening widened enough for Mr. Murray’s face to come into view, there was just enough light for Diana to realize she had no idea what she was holding. She managed to fit it into her empty trouser pocket and focused on squeezing through the hole before her.
Never had she been happier to step into the open air—not even in Viliers-Bretoneux when, after fourteen hours of being buried, she’d been so traumatized, exhausted, and hungry she hadn’t felt more than a dull relief. She stepped away, to allow Mr. Murray to follow her out, and prepared to thank Luther Weston. Standing next to Weston was the face Diana most wanted to see—but not when he was feverish and ill.
“Joshua Murray.” She summoned her best nursing voice. “What do you think you’re doing out of bed in the middle of November—in the middle of the night—when you have influenza?”
He was pale and shivering but steady on his feet. “Do you really think I’d stay in bed knowing you were caught underground? Use your common sense, woman.”
His teasing tone was no more serious than her scolding one, and Diana assumed Weston was rolling his eyes as Joshua wrapped his arms around her. Beneath the heat of his fever she felt a trembling that matched her own. Despite knowing what awaited her back at the school, despite her ever-present fear for all the sick boys and adults under her care, Diana felt the same thing she had on her first day at the moors: the assurance that she had come home.
