‘Hear, hear!’ said Adam as Jem sidled past him, climbing over his feet, and patted the embarrassed lad on the shoulder before he climbed out over the pile of loose rocks at the entrance.
‘Gwir kolonneckter, mebyon,’ said one of the older members of the team, obviously praising the eight-year-old as he emerged at the bottom of the stope. Seth Tregonning had been a tin miner in his youth and was one of the few people Maggie knew who could speak the Cornish language that sounded just right in this most Cornish of places.
‘What does that mean?’ Jem asked, beaming from ear to ear as a member of the team adjusted a safety helmet to fit him for the journey to the surface.
‘True courage, my boy,’ Seth translated in the slightly sing-song accent of the region, and there was a general murmur of heartfelt agreement.
The team leader cleared his throat and Maggie was amazed to see that he’d been as affected by his team’s response to the youngster as any of them.
‘Right, then, Seth, I want you to go up first with Jem because you’ll be able to move faster than the two with the stretcher, and we don’t want any hold-ups,’ he said with a swift return to his former briskness, and Maggie dropped to her knees again to finish putting the last of her equipment away in her pack, determined that she wasn’t going to be the cause of any delay in the evacuation.
‘The rest of you,’ he continued, ‘follow the stretcher up and be ready to help to smooth the ride up that wretched stope. Remember that everything is rough and has the potential to crumble under your feet. Adam, I’ll leave you in charge of making sure that Maggie gets out safely as soon as she’s picked up her stuff. OK?’
Out of the corner of her eye Maggie saw Adam’s long legs make short work of climbing over the mound at the entrance to the tunnel as he moved out of the way for the appointed team members to take opposite ends of the stretcher to start the journey back up to the surface.
In just a few more minutes…a quarter of an hour at the most…they would all be safely up in the fresh air again, with the wide night sky spread over their heads and a sharp February breeze bringing the scent of the sea in from the bay.
Then…what?
Adam had said that they needed to talk once this was all over. Did he mean tonight? Her heart gave an extra thump at the idea that he might suggest that she go back to his home. She had absolutely no idea where he was living. The local grapevine hadn’t passed that piece of information around yet.
Unfortunately, everyone in the town knew where she lived—in the same cottage she’d shared with her mother—and most of them would know by breakfasttime if his car was parked outside her place overnight.
Except the whole idea that the two of them would be spending any more time together tonight was complete nonsense. Adam was a married man and would obviously be going back to his wife. Any conversation between the two of them would have to wait until he found time in his busy life.
‘Ouch! Mind your knuckles, Pete,’ called the stretcher carrier at the front. ‘It’s bad enough that we have to hunch over so we don’t hit our heads, but this rough-hewn granite is evil stuff and your gloves won’t stop you making a mess of your hands if you hit the walls on the way through.’
Maggie glanced up with a wry smile, her own aching hands testament to that fact, and was just in time to see the last man out of the tunnel—was he the one called Pete?—step awkwardly on a rock that Jem had missed, twisting his ankle and throwing him off balance.
‘Careful, man!’ warned his colleague, as he fought to keep the stretcher stable. ‘Watch what you’re doing with those big feet of yours.’
The poor man muttered a curse and lurched forward a couple of ungainly steps before he got his balance back, but in those few seconds his shoulder had cannoned into the abandoned crowbar that she’d set up to support the bag of saline.
As if it was happening in slow motion she saw the moment when the length of hexagonal steel pivoted against the ancient timber bracing the roof of the tunnel, wrenching it out of the position it had held for more than a hundred years and sending it crashing to the floor with a hollow thud, narrowly missing the edge of the stretcher on its way down.
Somebody swore ripely into the brief silence after the echoes had died away, but what happened next was something out of Maggie’s worst nightmares as first one rock, barely the size of her fist, fell onto the dank floor, before tons of boulders followed it, cascading down in an avalanche that nearly deafened her in the enclosed space of the tunnel.
‘No-o-o!’ she shrieked, forced to scramble back into the depths of the tunnel as it began to fill with granite, shutting out the light of the torches at the bottom of the stope.
In pitch darkness and terrified that she was going to be trapped and injured just like Tel had been, she forced herself to retreat as fast as she could, her pack still miraculously clenched in her fist as she stumbled and ricocheted against the ever-narrowing walls.
Then, suddenly, the ground fell away underneath her and her head hit something totally unforgiving and the darkness became absolute.
CHAPTER SIX
MAGGIE groaned, wondering groggily why she’d woken in the dark and why she felt so awful.
Her head hurt…in fact, everything hurt.
And she was feeling so disorientated…as if her brain had been scrambled.
Had the ambulance been involved in an accident, or had she been injured by one of their patients? She’d escaped anything major so far, but attacks on ambulance staff by the very people they were trying to help were happening more and more, especially when the behaviour was fuelled by alcohol.
Or was she coming down with flu in spite of the jab she’d had in the autumn?
She reached out in the darkness to switch on the bedside light…and encountered a rough granite wall.
‘Maggie?’ Adam’s frantic voice crackled nearby and suddenly she knew exactly where she was and what had happened.
‘I fell,’ she croaked, terror stealing her voice as she remembered those last few seconds as the ground had seemed to disappear under her.
She didn’t remember landing, but the heavy throbbing of her head and the sensation of wetness in her hair was enough to tell her that she’d hit her head at some stage in the fall. ‘So much for the safety helmet,’ she muttered in disgust, although she supposed that it had hardly been designed with falling down a mine in mind.
What other damage had she done? Serious damage? Head injury? Broken bones? Internal bleeding?
It was so hard to do an examination of her own body when she couldn’t see a thing. It didn’t matter whether her eyes were open or shut, the blackness was absolute so she would have to rely entirely on her sense of touch…and knowing which bits hurt more than the rest.
How long ago had it happened? How long had she been unconscious? Minutes? Hours?
It wouldn’t really matter either way, she realised with a crushing sense of despair. It had taken several hours to find the boys and effect their rescue, and that had only been a matter of shoring up the entrance to the adit and clearing the fallen granite that had been blocking it. The rockfall blocking this tunnel was enormous, and the chances that the rescue team would be able to clear it quickly…well, there was no chance at all, she admitted grimly as the full horror of her situation flooded over her.
‘Maggie, please…!’ Adam’s voice crackled again and only then did it dawn on her that wherever it was, the radio had also survived the fall. Did the torch still work, too? She’d put it in her pack with the radio to leave her hands free, ready to climb up the stope for the last time.
Suddenly she was desperate to find that radio—her one link with the outside world. At least with the radio working she’d be able to speak to Adam and the dreadful all-encompassing blackness wouldn’t feel so suffocating.
She nearly rolled over to begin her search. Only her years of training made her pause, fear of the possibility of permanent paralysis making her stay completely still for just a little longer.
>
She had no idea how far she’d fallen, would never have moved an inch further back into that claustrophobic tunnel unless she’d been forced to by the rockfall, so would never have known that the ground dropped away not far from where Tel had been trapped.
So it was a case of moving just one limb at a time while she did a terrified check to find out how badly she’d been injured, and with each limb cleared with little more than bruising to report, it was time to focus on her head and neck.
Her hair did feel wet, and there was a bruise forming…perhaps she and Tel would be able to compare matching his-and-hers goose eggs…but whether the wetness was from blood or the water continuously seeping down the tunnel walls, she had no idea.
Her neck felt a little stiff, so she could be suffering the after-effects of whiplash from the blow to her head, but the vertebrae weren’t making any nasty crunching sounds and didn’t feel any different from when she’d rinsed her hair under the shower so many hours ago that morning.
Just the thought of a steaming hot shower was enough to make her whimper. It felt like for ever since she’d last been clean and warm. Every inch of her body felt cold and wet and covered in dust and grit.
‘But, dirty or clean, at least it feels as if everything is in working order…more or less,’ she whispered into the darkness. There was no echo to bounce back at her, but she refused to think the logical next step…that there wouldn’t be an echo in a space too small to bounce sounds back at her. The darkness was bad, but at least it was allowing her to fool herself that she wasn’t trapped in a space little bigger than a coffin.
‘Maggie? Can you hear me?’ Adam called again, and the note of utter misery in his voice sent her scrambling to follow it, using the sound to direct her search.
In the background she heard another voice speaking behind Adam’s, warning him that the radio had probably been damaged beyond use or buried under the rockfall, preventing her from using it. She could almost hear the implication that she was probably similarly damaged or buried, and suddenly knew that she had to get to that lifeline before Adam gave up trying to speak to her and she was left completely alone.
‘There!’ she muttered eagerly as her fingers encountered the familiar fabric of her pack. ‘Got it!’
In spite of the fact that it was pitch dark, she found herself closing her eyes as she concentrated on the pack, running her fingers over it as she pictured what was inside each of the compartments until she came to the fastening she’d last closed when she’d pushed the torch and radio in for safekeeping.
The radio was silent now, and her hands were shaking uncontrollably as she tried to remember which of the many buttons was the one she needed to press before she could speak to Adam. It was imperative that she let everybody out there know that she was still alive…before they all gave up hope and went home.
‘Maggie, keresik,’ Adam called, his voice hoarse and unutterably weary, and her heart leapt at the sound of that old endearment. She could remember telling him that it had been her father’s pet name for her mother, handed down through generations of their family from the days when they had all been Cornish speakers.
She’d teased him about his claim to be Cornish when his name was definitely Irish, as was the combination of deep sapphire blue eyes and dark hair. He’d told her the family tale that, instead of fleeing from certain starvation in the other direction, to America, the original Donnelly had come across the water at the time of the potato famine and married a beautiful Cornish girl who had taught him to speak Kernewek instead of Gaelic.
Maggie could also remember the first time he’d called her keresik, the very first time he’d kissed her on her sixteenth birthday, and the way her heart had soared that he’d thought of her as his darling.
‘Adam?’ she croaked, her throat thick with dust and emotion. ‘Adam, can you hear me?’
There were several seconds of utter silence that left her terrified that she’d left it too late…that everyone had given up all hope of finding her alive…and then the darkness around her was filled with a crackly cacophony of voices whooping and cheering in delight.
‘Quiet! Please!’ Adam ordered before demanding, ‘Maggie? Are you all right?’
She was just so glad to be able to hear his voice that she was fighting tears. It was several seconds before she could speak.
‘It’s dark, it’s dirty and I’ve just been deafened,’ she complained when she could finally control her trembling chin.
‘Just like a woman—always complaining,’ teased one of the men, and she couldn’t help joining in with the laughter at the other end.
‘Joking aside, what injuries have you got, Maggie?’ Adam asked, his tone telling her that he had switched into professional mode. ‘Can you start at the top and work your way down?’
‘I’ve got a bump on my head from when I fell,’ she replied obediently. ‘It’s painful and it might be bleeding because my hair’s wet, but there’s no apparent underlying fracture. I was unconscious for a while but I have no idea how long.’
‘About five minutes,’ he supplied, but there was an edge to his voice that told her that it had felt a lot longer than that. Was Adam suffering from the same guilt as Jem, convinced that it was his fault that she was injured because he’d persuaded her to go down there in the first place? Had he forgotten that it had been her own decision to go back into the mine to finish the job she’d started?
‘Apart from that,’ she continued, knowing that this wasn’t the right time to hold such a discussion, especially when there were so many other ears listening in, ‘I’ve got various assorted bruises and scrapes but, as far as I can tell, no broken bones.’
‘None? Are you sure?’ he persisted.
‘My X-ray eyes don’t seem to be working very well in the dark,’ she quipped, almost light-headed with relief. ‘I promise to let you take some as soon as you can get me out of here, if you think it’s necessary.’
‘I’ll bear that offer in mind,’ he said dryly. ‘Now, tell me, how much of the rock actually came into that tunnel?’ Suddenly all levity was gone. She was right back in the middle of a situation that couldn’t possibly have a happy outcome.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, belatedly feeling for the torch she’d tucked in her pack. Somehow, not being able to see how dire things were had stopped her thinking about them, but if she was going to have a hope of getting out of this mine, she was going to have to turn some light on her situation.
Her throat was already tightening again as she pulled the cold, smooth cylinder out of her pack and felt for the switch, dreading to find out just how confined the space was around her. She wasn’t certain whether the fact that Adam could speak to her on the radio would be enough to keep her claustrophobia under control if she was truly on her own.
She moaned and closed her eyes when she took her first look around her, her breathing instantly harsher and her pulse racing. It was infinitely worse than she’d imagined.
‘Maggie?’ Adam prompted, but she couldn’t speak. There were no words to tell him.
‘How far back are you in the tunnel?’ he persisted, then switched to coaxing. ‘Come on, Maggie, you said you’re not even badly hurt. All you’ve got to do is tell us where you are so we can get you out.’
‘You can’t…’ she whispered in despair, hardly caring that he might not be able to hear her. ‘No one can get me out.’
He muttered a word that she’d last heard when the two of them had been trying to wriggle their way under the underground train. That time he’d just caught sight of the pulsing spray of bright arterial blood telling them that the young woman was mortally wounded. They’d both known that they’d had just moments to stop her bleeding before her heart stopped for lack of blood to pump around her body.
Well, she wasn’t mortally wounded, but it would have been infinitely easier if she had been. The death she was facing could take many days before she finally succumbed to dehydration and starvation.
‘Ma
ggie Pascoe, where’s your backbone?’ he demanded sharply, surprising her with implied criticism and igniting a spark of anger.
‘My backbone is in the same place as the rest of me, in a hole about the same diameter as I am tall with no visible exits except the one near the roof that I must have fallen down.’ She drew in a sobbing breath but was determined that none of them would know how close she was to losing it. ‘It looks as if that last fall sealed me in here as neatly as a pharaoh in a pyramid.’
Her words were received with utter silence, almost as if they’d all stopped breathing while they’d taken in the significance of what she’d been telling them…that, like a pyramid, this mine had just effectively become her tomb.
Then, because she knew she was going to cry for all the things she was never going to achieve in her life, she deliberately switched the radio off.
Dammit, Maggie! No! Don’t do this! Don’t give up!
Adam railed inside his head.
It was so hard to stand there, unable to do anything to help with what was going on around him.
Maggie had effectively shut him out by switching off the radio and, after an initial bout of frantic activity to help clear enough space to position props above the entrance where the tunnel had been, he’d realised that he had to step aside and let the professionals do their job.
All around him the rescue effort had redoubled in pace, the space at the foot of the stope teeming with men whose single objective was to find a way of getting to the woman trapped inside the hillside.
She shouldn’t have been down there at all, Adam reminded himself as his guilt mounted by the minute. If he hadn’t persuaded her to go—virtually blackmailed her into it, using her sense of duty against her in the worst way—then she would have been safe now, up on the hill behind Penhally, trying to stay warm in the biting chill of a February night.
And at least one of those five boys would have died by the time the rescue team had reached them, he reminded himself, the latest report from St Piran Hospital fresh in his mind. Terrence Loveday’s injuries had been minimised by Maggie’s expert attention, his breathing eased by her physical exertions to remove the rocks against his chest and the danger of major blood loss and permanent injury to his leg averted by the fact she’d correctly stabilised the fractures and administered replacement fluids. She’d even accurately diagnosed the fact that his persisting loss of consciousness wasn’t just a symptom of concussion but of a slow bleed inside his skull from a damaged blood vessel.
Caroline Anderson, Sara Morgan, Josie Metcalfe, Jennifer Taylor Page 41