Page 46 of All Scot and Bothered
At a time like this, she couldn’t thank the stars enough that her band of Rogues were of one mind in a crisis.
That this wasn’t their first brush with death or tragedy.
Alexandra was a doctor of archeology, not medicine, but a decade of fieldwork had granted her a great deal of opportunity to learn more than her share of emergency medical training. She had her gloves off and sleeves rolled up before any of them as she checked an older woman slumped in the hallway. The duchess’s soft, doe-like features became grim as she found no breath or pulse. She closed the old woman’s eyes and moved into the switchboard room where the wall-sized panels had toppled over, trapping a few ladies inside the room and landing on the leg of one screaming girl.
Francesca, who was strong and muscled for all her wiriness, was already directing those who stayed belowstairs to help lift the panels with the strength of their flanks rather than their backs.
Cecelia joined the effort, heaving with all her might and weight, but the panel refused to budge more than aninch, which caused the poor trapped girl to yelp with pain.
“Let it go,” Francesca directed. “We’ll have to use a different strategy to move it.” She shook out her arms as though they could take no more.
“No!” Cecelia cried over the injured girl’s plaintive sobs and the pleas of the imprisoned women in the room, begging to be let out. “No, they cannot be trapped in there. You lift! All of you. Lift!”
Alexandra nearly collapsed after a herculean effort, her features red and her shoulders trembling. “It’s too heavy, Cecil, we need leverage.”
“They can’t be left in there,” Cecelia panted, turning so the entirety of the weight was pressed against her back. “You don’t know what it’s like! They can’t be trapped belowground! Help me!”
Sweat and tears burned her eyes, blurring her vision almost as much as did the steam of exertion and dust gathering on her spectacles. Something in her back twisted and seized, but she let the agony fuel her as she pushed and strained with a desperation bordering on the hysterical.
Trapped underground. Was there anything worse? To fear that you might never see the sun again. That you stood in the room where your bones would be forgotten.
She knew what it was like. The terror and despair of it.
She had to get them out of the basement.
Help me. Help them. Please. Please… Please!Cecelia didn’t know if she prayed or screamed or both, but a beam of light appeared in her periphery and a tremendous blur of dark blue and gold flew forward and took the place at her side.
Cecelia didn’t register the terse, growling words, but the women behind the panels backed away, and Alexandra and Francesca joined in the effort once more. She could only make out male thighs the size of Stonehenge boulders bunching beneath fine blue trousers as they took up the burden next to her and heaved. The weight disappeared from her shoulders a few seconds before a mighty crash shook the basement.
Cassius Gerard Ramsay scooped the injured girl from the ground as if she weighed no more than a sack of grain.
The panels lay where he’d heaved them to the side, allowing the women trapped in the room to file out one by one beneath Francesca’s direction into the hall, where those who were able dashed toward the stairs.
Ramsay stepped out of the rubble and made for the exit, pausing only to lock and hold gazes with Cecelia for a breathless moment. He made a very quick assessment of her body from head to toe that left her still and trembling before returning his striking gaze back to hers.
Fire and ice. Fury and… distress? Relief? Vexation?
She hadn’t the chance to interpret before he strode away with all the alacrity his wounded burden could tolerate.
One of the other women, a middle-aged mother with the bones of a bird, leaned heavily on the wall as she fell behind the others making their getaway.
Cecelia did what she always had in a crisis, wiped her mind of all but the task at hand. Reaching for the woman, she draped the thin arm around the back of her neck and half carried, half dragged her up the stairs and out onto the lawn.
It might have been all of ten minutes, an hour, or perhaps an eternity before they’d sifted through the carnage of the manse to make certain everyone was out.
Cecelia wiped dirt and sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, panting with exertion as she wentback in once again after depositing a dazed and only partially dressed girl from upstairs on the front terrace. A cigarette girl, Melisandre, had fallen into her own wardrobe, cracking her head on a corner when the blast had occurred. But it seemed her confusion had as much to do with shock and a general personality trait than a head wound.
Though one could never be certain.
Cecelia thought she heard Ramsay say her name on the lawn, but her spectacles were too smudged with dirt and ash and possibly blood to see much in the bright afternoon.
Despite her growing sense of panic, she couldn’t leave anyone behind. So each time she deposited someone to the safety of the yard, she dove back into the manse with an increasing sense of doom.
She had to find Jean-Yves and Phoebe.Every time she searched, someone else reached for her, needed her, distracted her from her aim.
The aftermath wasn’t as dire as she’d initially feared.
And yet it was worse than she’d ever imagined.
