Caroline Anderson, Sara Morgan, Josie Metcalfe, Jennifer Taylor

by Brides of Penhally Bay Vol. 01 (lit)

  Years of practice meant that it took mere seconds to fashion an impressive sling to support his hand up against his opposite shoulder. Not knowing how seriously Tel was hurt meant she daren’t take the time to apply a splint.

  ‘Is that more comfortable?’ she asked, and received a grateful nod. ‘Well, if your friends give you a hand, do you think you could climb out over the pile in front of the tunnel to give me a bit more room? I need to be able to get closer to Tel to see what the rocks have done to him. Has he been talking to you at all since they fell on him?’

  ‘He’s moaned a couple of times,’ said one of the lads.

  ‘And Jem felt his neck a couple of times to see if he’s still got a pulse, and you said he has, so that means he’s still alive, doesn’t it?’ said another, as the two of them scrambled over the rocks to get out of the confining space, almost forgetting to take their injured friend with them in their eagerness. At the last moment, each of them held out a hand towards Chris and took his arms to help him to keep his balance without disturbing his injured hand.

  Once they were out of the confining space, all three of them were obviously keen to move away from it and Maggie knew how they felt. She wasn’t in the least bit keen to stay in there either, even though she knew she had to.

  For just a second she flicked the torch beam out of the narrow tunnel and up the stope towards the darker shadow of the adit at the top…the tunnel that led to the opening into the outside world where Adam was waiting to hear what was happening…And the one thing she wanted most in the whole world was to get out of there as fast as she could and throw herself into his arms.

  ‘And that just shows how being down here is messing with your mind,’ she muttered under her breath. Adam may have been her hero when she’d been looking up to the handsome senior at school and weaving forever-after fantasies around him, but he’d developed feet of clay since. He certainly wasn’t a person she could trust with her heart, but she didn’t have any option but to trust him with her safety.

  ‘Stay close, lads,’ Maggie warned as the three of them disappeared out of sight behind the pile of rocks. This was no time for losing concentration, she reminded herself sternly as she banished Adam from her mind. She had an injured child who was relying on her to stabilise him, ready for the moment when the rescue team arrived. ‘I wouldn’t be able to cope if there were any more injuries, so don’t go wandering off.’

  She turned the torch back to focus on the last ablebodied youngster. ‘Jem, it’s your turn to climb out of here,’ she said encouragingly, but he shook his head, the pale face topped with that dark shock of hair set in determination.

  ‘I’m staying in here with Tel,’ he said stubbornly. ‘He knows me…and anyway you might need my help.’

  Maggie was torn between wanting to hug the boy for providing her with company in this awful place and fearing that she would let herself down in front of him with a major panic attack.

  ‘Well, a second pair of hands could come in useful so we’d better see what we can do for him,’ she said, and bent to clear a small space among the smaller rocks so she could kneel as close as possible to the unconscious youngster, then dipped her shoulder and slid the all-important rucksack to the ground.

  ‘Is his heart still beating?’ Jem demanded, clearly concerned as her gloved fingertips probed once more for the too-rapid beat of his carotid artery. ‘I was checking it before I climbed up the stope but then the torch got bust and it got dark outside so there wasn’t any light coming in any more, and the others didn’t know where to look…’

  Maggie didn’t need to be reminded just how dark it was or how far away the entrance was from where she was kneeling, and the only way to banish it from her mind was to concentrate on the messages her fingers were sending her mind and her conversation with this bright youngster.

  ‘Yes. His heart’s still beating, Jem,’ she said, remembering once more to smile her reassurance.

  As for the dark pool seeping out from under him, all she could hope was that there was a fair amount of water mixed in with it. If it was only blood, the youngster must be close to critical with that amount of loss.

  Either way, it was imperative that she put a collar on him to immobilise his neck. If the lad woke up and tried to move, it could be too late to protect his spinal cord. Then she needed to get some replacement fluids into him to give his heart some volume to pump around.

  ‘Right, Jem, if you want to make yourself useful, can you hold the torch for me, please? If you point it this way, I’ll be able to find what I need to protect his neck. Then I want to put up a drip to get some fluids flowing into him,’ she explained as she unzipped the relevant compartment and tilted it towards the light to find and pull out a cervical collar, then locate a giving set and a unit of saline. ‘That way, everything will be ready to give him any drugs he needs.’

  ‘It’s a good job he doesn’t know you’re going to stick a needle in him,’ Jem commented with glee as he watched her swab his friend’s grubby arm then slide the needle in, hitting the vein she was looking for first time in spite of the limited lighting. ‘Tel doesn’t like needles. He says just looking at them makes him feel sick, but I think he’s scared they’ll hurt.’

  ‘You don’t mind them, though?’ she asked, quite taken with this self-possessed young boy. He was certainly far braver than she would have been in a similar situation.

  ‘Nah,’ he said dismissively. ‘I watch all the medical programmes on TV…not just the fiction ones but the real ones in real hospitals, too…so needles don’t bother me. Do you want me to hold that bag of water up, too?’

  ‘That would be great,’ she confirmed. ‘And it’s not just water in there—it’s called saline because it’s had a small amount of salt added to it.’

  ‘Salt?’ he exclaimed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because our bodies don’t work very well if they don’t have the right amount of salt. It causes problems if we eat too much of it, but we also need to have it replaced if we’ve been losing fluids.’

  ‘Otherwise you can get cramp?’ he suggested brightly. ‘Like I did after last sports day when we were running and got very sweaty when the sun was so hot?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Maggie exclaimed, keeping up the conversation while her fingers covered as much of Tel’s body as she could reach, searching for any obvious injuries. ‘It’s very similar to that.’

  She paused to sit back on her heels, delighted to confirm that, apart from a large goose egg on the back of his head, her young patient didn’t have any obvious cranial injuries. As far as she could tell, the swelling was nothing more than a surface haematoma. If he was lucky, he would wake up with nothing worse than a mammoth headache and suffer from the effects of concussion.

  But none of that was as daunting as the enormity of the next task she faced before she could complete her survey of Tel’s injuries. There were an awful lot of rocks that had spilled into the mouth of this cramped tunnel and she was going to have to find out exactly how many of them were pressing down on him to know what the likelihood was that he was in danger of developing crush syndrome. Only then would she dare remove the pressure from Tel’s ribs and legs.

  And none of it was going to happen if she just sat here looking at it, she prompted herself. It seemed highly unlikely that Adam and Mike would have cleared enough from the heap by the entrance yet to be joining her any time soon. So that meant it was her job.

  ‘Jem, are you OK, holding that for a while?’ she asked with a shiver as the dank cold seemed to seep into her bones, suddenly realising that having to shift those rocks might have a good side to it. At least the physical activity would help to warm her up. ‘I need to try to shift a few of these rocks so I can see where this blood’s coming from.’

  ‘Otherwise all the…the saline will be leaking out again?’ he suggested cheerfully.

  ‘You’ve got it.’ She smiled across at him, strangely proud that he’d remembered the word she’d taught him, and wondered if that was w
hat life would be like if she had a son of her own.

  Unfortunately, the image that flashed into her head was a child with Adam’s dark sapphire eyes and mischievous grin, and she knew that prospect was a complete impossibility. It wouldn’t matter how much she still loved him or how attracted he was to her, she would never break her own code of ethics and sleep with a married man…not unless he was married to her. And that could certainly never be the case with Adam because he was already married to the elegant longlimbed beauty with the curtain of blonde hair that she’d seen in the wedding photo beside his bed.

  She gave herself a shake and a silent talking-to for wasting time with painful memories and pointless day-dreaming, and reached for the first rock, surprised as ever how very heavy even a relatively small piece of granite could be.

  It was fairly easy to shift the smaller stuff that had rolled away from the pile and she quickly cleared a space right down one side of Tel’s body. Unfortunately, that only told her that, battered and bruised as it was, that leg wasn’t the one that was bleeding. It did, however, tell her that the position of the rocks made crush syndrome unlikely, so that was one good point at least.

  ‘We’re getting there,’ she reassured Jem, conscious that he was following her every move as she reached for one of the larger rocks poised atop the whole heap piled against the wall of the tunnel.

  ‘Careful!’ Jem called, as she set off a minor avalanche as soon as she gave the rock a tug.

  It seemed to take for ever before everything stopped moving and even then there were odd creaks and groans as the debris settled into its new position.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Are you guys all right?’ demanded an instant chorus at the opening to the tunnel.

  ‘We’re OK,’ Maggie said when she could draw breath in the dusty atmosphere, knowing they needed reassurance from the only adult in the vicinity. For several very long seconds all she’d been able to imagine was that she was about to be buried alive, and her throat had closed up completely.

  ‘Jem, can you shine the torch over a bit?’ she asked, hoping they couldn’t hear how much her voice was trembling with gratitude that it had only been a rearrangement of the rocks that were already there and not a fresh fall. It was bad enough that she was down here, having to cope with a lifelong phobia—at least she had the mental reassurance that at any time she had the option of climbing back up the stope to get out. She definitely couldn’t cope if she knew she was trapped down there, like Tel.

  Her thoughts suddenly flashed back to that awful afternoon in the London underground when a man and a woman had fallen—or jumped—off the platform into the path of an approaching train.

  Maggie had been certain that she wouldn’t be able to deal with squeezing herself between the rails, with the dark smelly bulk of the train just inches above her head, while she tried to staunch the bleeding from the girl’s partially severed arm. Only the fact that Adam had been there, calmly talking her through the whole ordeal, had kept her rational enough to do what had to be done.

  Even having Adam with her wouldn’t be able to keep her sane if she were trapped deep underground, so she would just have to get moving and get everyone out as fast as possible. And that meant starting all over again, laboriously clearing the little stones and rocks first, and then tackling the bigger ones until she could find and deal with the injury that was causing Tel’s blood loss.

  ‘None of the rocks hit you, did they, Jem?’ she asked as she settled into a rhythm for grabbing the next rock and stacking it out of the way against the opposite wall of the tunnel.

  ‘Nah!’ he said dismissively. ‘But I bet you got a few bruises on your legs. I saw some of them hit you. Are you all right?’

  ‘I might be all the colours of the rainbow in a day or two,’ she conceded, her breathing becoming slightly laboured with the repetitive effort. Or was it the start of air hunger? a little voice inside her head suggested insidiously. Were they running out of air? Would all of them pass out because there wasn’t enough oxygen to support…?

  Enough! she admonished herself silently. Adam and Mike were widening the entrance. There was plenty of air coming in. Concentrate on talking to Jem and moving the rocks to find out where his friend was injured. There wasn’t time to think about anything else. ‘But bruises are quick to heal,’ she continued lightly, ‘especially if you’re reasonably healthy, so it’s not really a problem unless it causes a major bleed.’

  ‘Anyway, you’re a girl, so you wouldn’t be a haemophiliac, would you?’ he said knowledgeably. ‘We learned about haemophilia when we had a boy in our class who had to be careful that he didn’t fall in the playground and Miss Venning was telling us about the Russian king whose children had it. They got it from our Queen Victoria, didn’t they?’

  ‘She was a carrier of the condition, I believe,’ Maggie agreed.

  ‘It always seems odd,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that a woman can give her children a blood disease or…or colour-blindness, without knowing about it because it doesn’t affect her.’ He switched the bag of saline from one hand to the other, and the way he was bracing it against the wall told her that although his arms were obviously beginning to ache, he wouldn’t be complaining. ‘And eye colour is another thing,’ he went on. ‘There’s someone in Mr Tolliver’s class who’s got one blue eye and one brown one. It’s really cool. Mine are just brown, ‘cos both my mum and dad’s were.’

  ‘Well, mine turned out a mixture of green and brown,’ Maggie volunteered, and found herself wondering pointlessly what colour her children’s eyes would have been if she’d married Adam. She knew that brown was dominant over blue, but would her hazel eye colour have been dominant over his dark sapphire blue or vice versa?

  ‘Maggie…?’ called a voice in the distance, and even though it was distorted by echoes, her heart recognised it and gave an extra thump.

  Adam!

  Had he and Mike cleared enough of the entrance already?

  Was he on his way down to join her?

  Her knees complained when she straightened up enough from her cramped position to call over the mound of rocks that still blocked the entrance to the tunnel.

  ‘Adam,’ she called back, suddenly guiltily remembering that she’d been going to keep up a running commentary for those left outside. ‘We’re OK.’ Well, that was true up to a point, and it would be even better once she’d finished shifting these rocks and could see where Tel’s injury was.

  ‘How many injured?’ he shouted—at least, that’s what it sounded like when she’d unscrambled the echoes.

  ‘Two,’ she yelled back, horrified to find that her exertions had left her panting. She’d honestly thought she was fitter than this. She certainly wouldn’t allow herself to think about her disappointment that he obviously wasn’t on his way down to help her yet. ‘One minor and one major.’

  Suddenly, the fact that he was a married man didn’t matter. She was just so grateful that he was there and that he was checking up on her safety that, had he been close enough, she could have thrown herself into his arms without a qualm.

  ‘Coming out?’ he asked, and she had to take a guess at the first part of the question.

  For a second she contemplated the order that things should be done and balanced them against what was possible. She had another bag of saline, but the rate that the first one was emptying meant that it wouldn’t last very long. Then there were the three boys waiting at the bottom of the stope. She certainly couldn’t guarantee how much longer their patience would last, and if they tried to climb that treacherous stepped wall without adequate lighting, there was no knowing how many injuries they could end up with.

  ‘Five minutes,’ she shouted back, and from the muted cheer from the other lads she knew they had been following the exchange.

  ‘You’re never going to be able to shift all those rocks in five minutes,’ Jem said a minute later, after she’d resumed her efforts with the slowly diminishing heap. ‘And we can’t just go
and leave Tel down here. We can’t!’

  ‘Jem, I’ve got no intention of leaving Tel down here,’ she said quickly, stricken that he’d been left thinking that it was even a possibility. ‘I’m hoping that I can clear enough rocks away to find out where the blood’s coming from, and stop it. But I’m going to need to fetch some more saline and I’ll need to bring a backboard down to put him on before he can be carried out, so I may as well get the rest of you out of here at the same time. Your parents are probably all waiting up at the mouth of the stope, terrified that they’re never going to see you again.’

  ‘Oh.’ He subsided, and she saw his grubby forehead pleat in a thoughtful frown before she turned to choose the next rock to pit her puny muscles against. There was just one last big one that, thankfully, had landed between Tel’s legs and had prevented several others from hitting him, but if she tried to move it, she risked setting off another avalanche. But if she could just remove some of the smaller ones and slide her hand in underneath, she might be able to discover whether the bleeding was in the upper or lower half of his leg.

  It was closer to ten minutes before she’d achieved her aim and was able to explore the wet proof that the injury was in his lower leg before she realised that her gloves had been totally shredded by her exertions with the rough granite.

  ‘Damn,’ she muttered under her breath as she quickly pulled her hand out and stared at the evidence. Hopefully, Tel was too young to have any of the more serious blood-borne infections, because the blood coating her scratched and grazed fingers couldn’t help but find plenty of ways into her own system.

  Well, she certainly didn’t have any water to spare to wash her hand off and there wasn’t enough time or sterile wipes to do the job, or light enough to see how thorough a job she was doing, so she was just going to have to get on with it and hope for the best.

  The fact that his foot was facing in the wrong direction told her that there had been some sort of serious damage to his leg, but until she completed her examination she wouldn’t know whether it was a dislocation of one of the joints—with all the concomitant dangers of impingement of nerve or blood supply, a femoral break—with the danger of life-threatening blood loss, or damage to the tibia or fibula, or both.