“I have to make certain that everyone gets out.”

A thrill of horror went through her. “No! Simon, come with me—”

“I’ll be out in five minutes,” he said brusquely.

Annabelle’s face contorted, and she felt tears of terrified fury spring to her eyes. “In five minutes the building will have burned to the ground.”

“Keep going,” he said to Mawer, and turned away.

“Simon!” she screeched, balking as she saw him disappear back into the foundry. The ceiling was rippling with blue flame, while the machinery in the building shrieked as it was warped by intense heat. Smoke poured from the doorways, erupting in black blossoms that contrasted weirdly with the white clouds overhead. Annabelle quickly discovered that resisting Mawer’s superior hold was useless. She drew in deep lungfuls of outside air, coughing as her irritated lungs tried to expel the taint of smoke. Mawer didn’t pause until he had deposited her on a graveled walk-way, delivering a firm order to stay where she was.

“He’ll come out,” he told her shortly. “You stay here and watch for him. Promise you won’t move, Mrs. Hunt—I must try and account for all my men, and I don’t need extra trouble from you.”

“I won’t move,” Annabelle said automatically, her gaze fixed on the foundry entrance. “Go.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She was motionless as she stood on the gravel, staring dazedly at the doorway of the foundry while a furor of activity raged around her. Men passed her at a dead run, while others crouched over the wounded. A few, like her, stood as still as statues, watching the blaze with empty gazes. The fire roared with a force that made the ground vibrate, gaining new and angry life as it consumed the foundry. A hand-pump engine pulled by two dozen men rolled close to the building—it must have been kept on the site for emergencies, as there had not been sufficient time to send for outside help. Frantically, the men sought to connect a leather siphon hose to an underground water cistern. Taking hold of long side handles, they began to pump in concerted effort, producing enough pressure in the engine’s air chamber to send a stream of water a hundred feet in the air. The effort was pitifully inconsequential against the magnitude of the inferno.

Each minute that Annabelle waited took the toll of a year. She felt her lips moving, shaping silent words…Simon, come out…Simon, come…

A half dozen forms staggered from the entrance, their faces and clothes smoke-blackened. Annabelle’s gaze raked over the emerging men. Perceiving that her husband was not among them, she switched her attention to the hand engine. The men had directed the hose to the adjoining building, drenching it in an effort to keep the fire from spreading. Annabelle shook her head in disbelief as she realized that they had given the foundry up for lost. They were surrendering all its contents…including anyone who may have been trapped inside. Galvanized into action, she ran to the other side of the foundry, desperately scanning the crowd for any sign of her husband.

Catching sight of one of the shop managers, who was taking inventory of the evacuated foundrymen, Annabelle hurried to him. “Where is Mr. Hunt?” she asked sharply, having to repeat the question before she had caught his attention.

He barely spared her a glance as he replied with distracted impatience. “There was another collapse inside. Mr. Hunt was helping to free a foundryman who was pinned by debris. He hasn’t been seen since.”

Despite the blistering heat that radiated from the foundry, Annabelle felt cold from her skin to her bones. Her mouth trembled. “If he was able to come out,” she said, “he would have by now. He needs help. Can someone go in there to find him?”

The shop manager looked at her as if she was a mad-woman. “In there? It would be suicide.” Turning away from her, he went to a man who had collapsed to the ground, and bent to shove a wadded-up coat beneath his head. When he thought to spare a glance back at the space where Annabelle had been, it was empty.

CHAPTER 26

If anyone had noticed that a woman was plunging into the building, they did not try to stop her. Covering her mouth and nose with a handkerchief, Annabelle made her way through billows of acrid smoke that drew streams of water from her squinting eyes. The fire, which had begun at the other side of the foundry, was eating its way across the rafters in voluptuous ripples of blue and white and yellow. More frightening than the scalding heat was the noise; the growling flames, the screeches and groans of bending metal, the clangs of heavy machinery as it snapped like children’s toys being crushed underfoot. Liquid metal popped and sprayed in occasional bursts of grapeshot.

Picking up her skirts in awkward bunches, Annabelle stumbled over the smoldering knee-deep rubble, calling out for Simon, her voice muted in the cacophany. Just as she despaired of finding him, she caught sight of movement in the rubble.

Crying out, she hurried to the long, fallen form. It was Simon, alive and conscious, his leg trapped beneath the steel shaft of a fallen crane. As he saw her, his soot-smeared face contorted with horror, and he struggled to a half-sitting position. “Annabelle,” he said hoarsely, pausing as he was wracked with coughing. “Dammit, no—get out of here! What the hell are you doing?”

She shook her head, unwilling to waste breath in arguing. The crane was too heavy for either of them to move—she had to find something…some make shift lever to dislodge it. Wiping her burning eyes, she hunted through a pile of castings and broken stone and a heap of counterbalance weights. Everything was covered with layers of oil and soot that caused her feet to slip as she moved through the wreckage. A row of driving wheels rested against the shuddering wall, some of them taller than she. She made her way toward them and found a stack of axles and connecting rods as thick as her fist. Grasping one of the heavy, grease-coated rods, she tugged it from the stack and dragged it back to her husband.