Then everything stopped.
For an instant, the only sound to reach her ears was the pervasive hiss of escaping steam.
Then screams rent the night.
Pandemonium followed. Shouts and yells came from farther up and back in the train, and footsteps pounded along the corridor outside the compartment door.
Therese hauled in a breath and started to slowly straighten, then Parker was there, lifting the cases and small trunks that had landed on Therese’s back and stacking them on the seats she and Therese had occupied until Therese could draw back enough to check the children.
Nanny Sprockett had clutched Horry to her cushioning bosom; the little girl’s eyes were wide, drinking in all she could see, but as no one in their compartment had started screaming, she hadn’t, either.
Therese switched her gaze to Spencer and Rupert, hoping she hadn’t hurt them when she’d fallen on them. Both stared back at her, as wide-eyed as their sister and—thank God—transparently unharmed. Therese swallowed a rush of near-debilitating relief.
Someone ran down the corridor, banging on each compartment door. “Everyone out! Everyone out!”
“Mama?” Spencer whispered.
Therese managed a reassuring smile and leaned forward to drop kisses on his and Rupert’s foreheads. “Hold on, my darlings.” She glanced briefly at her staff; blank-faced, Parker was busily stacking the fallen luggage on the seat, while Nanny was speaking bracingly to the nursemaids, instructing both girls on what they should carry when leaving the train. Therese looked at Spencer and Rupert and met both boys’ eyes. “All of us are all right. We’ll get out shortly, and you must be sure to stay with Nanny and Gillian and Patty. Can you be brave and do that?”
Eyes huge, both bit their lips and nodded.
Warily, Therese pushed upright and, with Parker’s help, got to her feet.
“Here, my lady.” Parker handed Therese her bonnet. “Safest place for it’s on your head.”
“Indeed.” Therese settled the bonnet and, ignoring a twinge at the back of her head, quickly tied the ribbons beneath her chin. All of them struggled into their coats and bundled the children into theirs. “Now.” Therese surveyed their company. Parker and the nursemaids had gathered the luggage. Like her, the other women were shaken, but uninjured.
From the wails and screams coming from outside, not everyone had been so lucky.
Therese didn’t want to subject her children to the mayhem outside, but there was nothing for it; they had to leave the train. She nodded to Gillian and Patty. “Let’s see if we can open the door.”
Her phrasing proved prophetic; the door slid a few inches, then stuck.
The girls struggled to jiggle and push it on, then a dark-coated figure appeared in the gap. “My lady?”
“Morton.” The relief in the compartment was palpable.
“Is everyone all right?” Morton asked.
“Yes,” Therese replied. “We’re all unharmed. How are you and Dennis?”
“Just a few bruises, my lady. Now, if you and the ladies will just sit tight, Dennis and I will take care of this door. The conductors are getting everyone off the train.”
Therese debated, but couldn’t not ask, “What happened? Do you know?”
Morton and Dennis were poking at the base of the door. “Not sure, my lady,” Morton huffed. “A collision of sorts. The carriages ahead of this one are crumpled, and I heard one of the conductors say the engine’s off the tracks.”
The pair used something to scrape at the door’s base, then they grunted and heaved, and with a gravelly grating noise, the compartment door finally slid open far enough for those inside to squeeze out.
People, mostly men—some of whom looked as if they shouldn’t have been in the first-class carriage—were scouting up and down the narrow corridor. Therese gave them the benefit of the doubt; they might have been trying to help others get out.
Therese took charge. She instructed Morton to use his bulk to block the passageway heading to the front of the train, then sent Parker, carrying several small trunks and cases, to lead the way down the corridor to the external door at the end of the carriage. Therese took Spencer’s and Rupert’s hands and followed Parker, with Nanny Sprockett falling in behind her, leaving Gillian, Patty, Dennis, and Morton, all ferrying the rest of the luggage, to bring up the rear.
Parker reached the outer door, looked down at the ground below the iron steps, then the experienced and unflappable dresser calmly set the luggage she carried on the carriage floor, swung around and went quickly down the steps, then dropped the last few feet to the ground. Parker held up her arms. “If you’ll pass me the cases, my lady?”
Releasing the boys’ hands, Therese did so, then she told the pair to wait and went down the steps herself. Like Parker, she had to drop the last little way to the ground.
Immediately, she looked up and held up her hands, beckoning the boys to her. Bravely, they sat on the threshold, then at her signal, one after another, they pushed off and dropped into her arms. She caught first Spencer, then Rupert, and lowered them safely to the ground.
Nanny Sprockett took their place. The older woman bent and held Horry out and down to where Therese could almost reach her. When Therese was ready, Nanny Sprocket let go, and Horry fell the last few inches, and Therese grasped her daughter’s little body and quickly drew the girl into her arms. Holding Horry close, Therese stepped back to stand with the boys; she was reassured to feel their hands clutch her skirts while Parker helped Nanny Sprockett to descend.
In short order, the rest of their party got out of the carriage. They gathered the luggage and quickly moved away from the carriage steps, allowing others to climb down. Therese recalled that the train had been fairly full.
Carrying Horry, with the boys still clutching her skirts and pressing close on either side, she crossed a roughly flat space to the bottom of the slope of a rising embankment. Their small company halted there, several yards from the tracks. Looking around, Therese swiftly took stock.
A nightmarish scene met her eyes. They were out in the country, and the sky wasn’t clear; there wasn’t even faint moonlight or starlight to alleviate the pitch-blackness of the surrounding night.
A cacophony of sounds enveloped them, shouts, commands, wails, and crying overlaying the persistent hiss of escaping steam. The tang of hot metal and the sulfurous stench of burning coal wafted from the front of the train.
Someone, presumably the train conductors, had set lighted storm lanterns on the ground along the line of carriages, and people were gathering around each lantern, using the light to examine injuries and, in some cases, bind up wounds. Those circling the lanterns constantly cut off the light, then revealed it again, playing havoc with people’s night vision.
Therese put her back to the carriages and looked sideways toward the front of the train. The noise from that direction was ten times worse. Increasingly, people were drifting that way, forming a milling rabble. She peered past the shifting bodies and the splotches of lanternlight; what she saw made her blood run cold.
Some way ahead, the massive locomotive that had pulled the long train lay on its side, angled off the rails, the underside of the engine facing the rest of the train. Steam hissed and sputtered from the massive boiler, creating acrid clouds that hung over the scene, lending it a surreal quality. The coal car that had followed the engine had sheered off the rails in the other direction; she could see only a rear corner of the coal car, but the leading first-class carriage had clearly plowed into it and was now a crumpled mess of twisted and buckled iron and steel, precariously tilted half on and half off the rails. The second passenger carriage had run headlong into the first. The front of the second carriage was concertinaed, but the car remained more or less on the rails. The third carriage, the one they’d been in, had butted into the rear of the second, but wasn’t terribly badly damaged.