Obsession by Katherine Sutcliffe Page A

she clutched her throat with her hand and made a horrible sound—her husband’s name.
    “Thomas, Thomas! Someone help me hoosband!”
    Beyond her, the roof of the Whitefields’ house roared with fire.
    “Maria!” I shouted in Bertha’s face. “Where is Maria?”
    She stumbled away. I tried to grab her, to pull her back from the oncoming billows of choking smoke. Driven by fear, she flung me aside and dissolved into the haze.
    Maria squatted in the corner of the small room, much as she had the day I had found her at Menson. Fragments of burning thatch rained down around her, and the hem of the dress smoldered.
    I fought my way through the smoke and flames, swept her up and out of the house, clutching her in my arms, curling her into my chest to protect her from the sparks and spewing smoke.
    Running blindly through the blackness, I labored up the fell and along the footpath, lungs burning, legs cramping. I paused upon reaching the summit and looked back, down into the fiery hollow. The rumbling and roars had stopped, all but the snapping of burning thatch.
    Gently, I lay Maria on the ground, took her face in my hands, and searched her for injury. Her frightened eyes looked up at me, and her hands clutched at my shirt. For an instant…
    Turning, I ran back down the hill into the melee of screaming men and women. The cottages blazed, and I fought my way through the press of bodies who were frantic to reach the decimated mine. At last, I reached Richard’s cottage.
    Flames rose from the roof in snapping, lapping tongues, and even as I watched, it began to disintegrate.
    Shielding my face with one arm, I kicked open the door but was driven back by the wall of fire that appeared to have consumed the tiny house.
    “Lou!” I shouted, desperate to find some way in.
    She was curled up on the bed, holding her husband. Her head turned and she fixed me with stoic eyes, her face without fear, but with a calmness that lent a beauty to her features and hinted of the woman she had been in her youth. A smile touched her lips, then she was gone, beneath the hail of flaming timbers and thatch.
     
    “T HEY’RE ALL DEAD. A LL OF THEM. N O HOPE OF recovering them.”
    I stared out my bedroom window, at the pitch-black horizon that brightened occasionally with threatening weather. I thought of my grandmother and how pleased she would be about the mine. No more stench in the air.
    My body covered in soot, my hands singed by hot ash, I turned back and looked down at Maria.
    I had done everything humanly possible to help the buried miners and the men who had arrived for work shortly after the explosion. Alas, there had been nothing humanly possible that could be done to help. Thanks to a spark and a pocket of gas, the world one hundred feet below ground had ignited to turn the miles of shafts into oblivion.
    “I did what I could,” I said in a hoarse whisper.
    “Of course you did, darling.” Edwina took up a wet cloth and began to scrub my black hands. She looked as pale as I had ever seen her.
    “I don’t think you comprehend, Edwina. They’re dead.”
    “I understand.”
    “Thomas. Myron Heppleborn—he has four children and a little farm near Haworth. Craig Gosworth just got married. And John Milford’s wife is expecting their first child in another few weeks. Lou and Richard. All gone.”
    “Thank God you weren’t among them. You might have been, do you realize that? Had that explosion happened a few hours later…dear God, I shudder to think about it.”
    She tossed the filthy washcloths aside. “I’ll have Herbert bring you up a hot bath.”
    “I don’t want a bath. I want…” I shook my head and blinked.
    My eyes burned. The women’s faces had been seared into my grainy lids and their screams rang in my ears. The sense of helplessness continued to curdle in my stomach. But more than that—fear that I had almost lost Maria again. I shook with it.
    Not for the first time I thought of the dream, the voice that had