Page 27 of Stolen By the Cruel Duke
When they arrived at the mine, they were greeted by the foreman, a stout, ruddy-faced man with a large mustache called Mr. Greaves.
“A pleasure to meet you,” Phineas said, shaking his hand. “I am the Duke of Rhinebeck.”
The foreman’s eyes widened, and he wasn’t the only one. Iris also had to hide her surprise. The Duke of Rhinebeck was one of her father’s most illustrious allies, and one of the few Phineas didn’t seem hell-bent on ruining. From everything Iris had heard about him, he was a man of honor, despite his association with her father.
Father has always been able to be charming when he needed to...
“Your Grace!” the foreman sputtered, bowing low. “It is an honor to have you visit our mines. His Lordship has told me you are an investor of the soundest judgment. I hope that you will be impressed today by our little operation.”
“I have no doubt I will be,” Phineas said graciously. “And this is my wife, the Duchess of Rhinebeck. She will also be touring the mines today.”
The foreman couldn’t quite keep the disapproval from his face as he bowed to Iris. “Her Grace will be accompanying us?” he asked uncertainly.
“My wife is the one with the most astute judgment,” Phineas explained smoothly. “Without her, I would have made many unwise investments.”
Iris couldn’t help but smile. She liked this version of her that Phineas painted.
“Very well,” the foreman said reluctantly. “But I should warn you, it is not a pleasant place for ladies.”
He wasn’t wrong about that.
Iris had never thought of herself as a particularly fearful person. After all, she’d had to be brave to protect her sisters from their father for all those years. But as the door to the cage that would take them down to the mines closed, and the pulley system jerked and began to carry them down into the darkness, she felt fear creeping up her spine.
She determinedly didn’t take Phineas’s hand, but she barely breathed for the whole journey down into the mine. Once theyhad reached the bottom and the door was pulled open, her fear only grew.
“The tunnels are very low,” Mr. Greaves informed them as they exited the cage. “You’ll have to crouch in order to walk.”
Phineas glanced at Iris, but she shook her head. “I’ll be fine,” she murmured.
Crouching, she stepped out of the cage. All around her was thick dust, and immediately, her eyes watered. Her lungs burned, and she coughed loudly.
It was very dark in the mines, but the men were carrying lanterns. These illuminated just a little ahead of her so that she was able to make out turns just as she reached them, but they also cast large shadows on everything, which made the tunnels more spooky.
Meanwhile, the sound of hammers hitting coal was all around them, reverberating through her head. After a quarter of an hour crawling through the tunnels, Iris felt as if the sound had seeped into her, rattling her very bones.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Phineas whispered to her as they crept along another dark, damp tunnel. In the torchlight, his eyes looked soft and worried.
“I’m not as fragile as I look,” Iris muttered back.
Truthfully, she was afraid. She felt it would be unbearably inconsiderate to admit that, especially when she’d been here for only a few minutes, while the miners had spent most of their lives down here.
Phineas smiled slightly. “Of that, I was already certain.”
Then they turned a corner, and a horrifying sight met her eyes. Men were hunched over, their hammers raised, chipping away at the coal inside the tunnels. Their faces had turned completely black from the coal dust that filled the air. In between the sounds of their hammers, she could hear their hacking coughs, which seemed to accompany every single one of their movements.
Worse still were the people who were running back and forth, stacking the coal into wheelbarrows and then wheeling them away, to somewhere, she assumed, where the coal was lifted up into the daylight. The people running these wheelbarrows were?—
“Children!” she gasped.
It was unmistakable. Children were scurrying back and forth, covered from head to toe in soot, coughing and squinting through the dark to see where they were going. The one closest to her, who was stacking coal into a wheelbarrow, looked as if he couldn’t be more than seven years old.
“Those are children,” she said to the foreman, who was holding his lantern up high to inspect the work.
“Yes, Your Grace,” he confirmed, nodding disinterestedly. “Children are the ideal height to run the coal, as they don’t have to bend over in the tunnels. They can move quickly. See? They don’t have the strength to hammer, though,” he added, shaking his head, as if it caused him much grief to think he couldn’t employ children for every task in his mine. “It’s a right shame because we can pay them a pittance compared to the adults. The mines would be a whole lot more profitable if we could have children hammer. But, alas, it just ain’t possible.”
“Yes, what a shame you can’t exploit children even more abominably than you have their parents,” Iris snapped.
The foreman gaped at her, clearly shocked by her words. Then his face reddened.
