She turned carefully, holding onto anything she could to steady herself one-handed as she shone the torch into the other aperture…and shuddered at what she saw.
‘The other one is much narrower, not much wider than my shoulders, and probably too low to do anything more than crawl. That one slopes up and out of sight. It certainly wasn’t the one I came down to get here.’ And it definitely wasn’t something she was comfortable looking at. She’d thought climbing under the train in the underground had been bad, but that tunnel was a sight to stop the breath in her throat completely…a living nightmare.
‘Maggie, you’ve cracked it!’ Adam exulted, exhaustion apparently a thing of the past. ‘The boffins were looking at the map while you were describing what you could see, and they’ve pinpointed exactly where you are!’
‘And?’ Maggie held her breath, hardly daring to believe that there might be a happy ending to this whole disaster.
‘And it looks as if you’ve just found your own way out,’ he said, his words almost falling over each other in his hurry to get them out. ‘What you’ve just described is an upcast…a ventilation shaft that was needed to bring fresh air into the area where the men were working and to dissipate some of the heat, so it led all the way from the mine out to the surface.’
‘A ventilation shaft?’ She looked from one tunnel entrance to the other. ‘They both look a bit big for that.’
‘That’s because you’re accustomed to modern ventilation,’ he said with a smile in his voice. ‘It’s the same with modern mining. They could now drill a narrow shaft and put forced ventilation in, but the fact is, instead of the whole job being done with pick and shovel, much of the work is done by machinery run on compressed air, so that’s being pumped underground at high pressure, and helps with regulating the air quality and temperature better.’
‘But…’ Her eyes widened as she looked back at that narrow shaft with the first awful presentiment of what was coming.
‘In a mine as old as this,’ he continued eagerly, ‘the ventilation shaft would have needed to be bigger and would have been cut by hand by a man with a shorthandled pick…or it could even have been a young lad all those years ago. You did say that it was just a bit wider than your own shoulders?’
‘Yes, but…’ She was having to fight so hard to breathe that she could barely form the words, her eyes mesmerised by the opening that seemed to be shrinking as she looked at it.
‘Then that’s the answer!’ he exclaimed, clearly delighted with the solution they’d come up with. ‘That’s your way out of the mine.’
Her throat closed up completely, leaving her standing there, shaking her head wildly. She almost fell in her hurry to get as far away from it as possible, but even with her back pressed against the unyielding stone she was too close.
It had been bad enough making herself climb into the adit and knowing that five boys had already made their way through it recently. There had also been the spur to the professional side of her, knowing that at least one of them had been injured, possibly dying.
But this? It was totally impossible! She’d never be able to—
‘Maggie?’
His call snapped her out of her blind panic, the tone of his voice telling her that it wasn’t the first time he’d said her name.
‘I couldn’t,’ she croaked, not caring that there was a shrill note of terror in her voice. Adam, of all people, knew how much trouble she had with enclosed spaces. He would understand that a tiny space like that would be a challenge too far.
‘Maggie…it’s the only way,’ he said gently, persuasively. ‘You’re so slight that you’d easily be able to wriggle your way—’
‘No, Adam, I can’t!’ She dragged in a shuddering breath. ‘I’ll just have to wait here until the rescue team can excavate the tunnel out again and…and pray that it doesn’t rain too hard.’
‘That’s not an option any more, Maggie.’ His voice was deadly serious. ‘I couldn’t tell you before, but they’ve failed every time they’ve tried to shore up the roof of the tunnel. That rock layer is so unstable that they’d be putting their own lives in danger if they were to continue. You can’t expect them to do that if there’s a viable option. Most of them are married men with families. It wouldn’t be fair.’
‘But…’ Her eyes flew towards the larger tunnel, hidden behind that deceptive overhang, and she was close to tears.
She’d heard the sounds of excavation going on and had been so certain that it was only a matter of time before they broke through the blockage and helped her out. To learn that the tunnel was now permanently blocked was a disaster, especially if her only alternative was to force herself to climb into that.
‘Maggie, I know I blotted my copybook a year ago, but will you trust me one more time? I promise you, I’ll be here for you every inch of the way and I’ll be the one waiting at the surface when you come out at the other end.’
The thought of emerging into the freedom of a grassy hillside with nothing but the wide night sky over her head was so seductive, especially with the prospect of Adam waiting for her when she got there, but first she would have to go in there and…
‘I can’t do it,’ she whispered as helpless tears began to stream down her gritty cheeks. ‘Oh, Adam, I wish—’
‘You can do it,’ he argued fiercely. ‘Trust me, you can. You’re the strongest, most courageous woman I’ve ever known, and I love you.’
‘You…’ That was a completely different feeling of breathlessness. ‘You love me?’
‘Of course I love you,’ he confirmed, with the simplicity of complete conviction. ‘I’ve always loved you, right from when you were a shy little fifteen-year-old gazing up at me with those enormous hazel eyes and that incredibly generous heart. I wasn’t in the least surprised when you told me you’d given up your chance at medical school to be with your mother, but I need you to do something for me now.’
‘Something for you?’ She was still reeling from his declaration. All these years she’d never known exactly what he’d felt for her; had believed that the love had all been one-sided.
‘Yes, keresik.’ There was a strange hoarseness to his voice that made her ache inside with the need to comfort him, but he was far too far away. ‘I need you to trust me enough to at least give it a try, because I couldn’t bear to lose you, not when we’re so close to having everything we could ever want.’
‘What if it’s blocked?’ she blurted, putting one of her greatest fears into words. ‘What if I were to get part way along it and there was no way out?’
‘Then we’d start excavating from the other end until we got to you,’ he said with utter sincerity. ‘Some of the mining engineers are already on their way up to the surface to get to the other end of the ventilation pipe, to make certain it’s not hidden in the middle of a gorse bush.’
This was so hard.
Well, in one way it wasn’t hard at all. She desperately wanted to be out of the mine and wrapped in Adam’s arms, but…It looked as if the only way she was going to get there was to thread herself into that horribly small ventilation shaft and inch her way up however far it was to the surface, praying all the way that there weren’t any obstructions to stop her getting there.
‘Can…can I think about it for a minute?’ she asked hesitantly, all too aware that there was a large group out there who’d been up all night working to get first the boys and then her out of this old Cornish mine.
Then there was Adam, who’d been there for her right from the moment this whole mess had started.
‘Of course you can, keresik, but, please, don’t take too long,’ he warned gently. ‘We’re all exhausted, you included, and there’s that rain band getting closer with every hour.’
She hadn’t really needed the reminder. She could hardly forget that she was facing the choice between battling against a phobia that could paralyse rational thought and even compromise sanity, and the alternative of drowning.
Her abject terror was so grea
t that she knew she wasn’t going to be able to stop herself sobbing out loud for much longer. There was only one way she could prevent everyone hearing her loss of control, so she deliberately broke the connection that had been her lifeline throughout the night and then switched off the torch.
She wasn’t absolutely certain how long she wept, but one thing she did know by the time she’d blown her nose was that it hadn’t done anything to help her make her decision.
That was purely down to one question—did she love Adam enough to want to spend the rest of her life with him, enough to trust him to do everything he could to take care of her and keep her safe?
‘Of course I do,’ she said aloud into the darkness, even as she quailed at the thought of what she still had to do to get to the security of his arms.
But the decision was made, and now she only needed to prepare herself for the task ahead.
Taking her pack with her on her back would be impossible…unless she could use a length of bandage to tether it to her somehow and drag it along the tunnel behind her. She’d already made certain that she wasn’t going to lose the torch or the radio by taping them to her but…
‘Oh, Adam,’ she whispered into what had become a very eerie silence now that all work had stopped on trying to excavate the tunnel mouth. ‘I do trust you, but how can anyone know whether this ventilation shaft will be clear all the way up?’
And if she were to get stuck part way? What then?
There would be no point in shuffling her way back down the shaft only to drown, but even though Adam had said that they would dig her out if necessary, the chances of that being successful—that she wouldn’t be crushed by a rock-fall in the process—were pretty remote.
She buried her face in her hands, not liking where her thoughts were going but knowing that, if the worst came to the worst, it might be her only option.
She switched the torch back on and reached for the pack, knowing that there weren’t any powerful opiates in it that would ease her way into the hereafter, but there was something else that might do the job just as effectively.
‘Left side down, head down and legs up,’ she murmured, voicing aloud the imperatives for preventing death by air embolism, knowing that positioning a patient’s body that way would force the air accidentally introduced into the circulatory system to rise into the right atrium of the heart and stay trapped there, preventing it from entering into the pulmonary arteries.
She’d drummed the facts into herself during her training, knowing that as little as ten millilitres of air could be fatal for a frail patient. So far, she hadn’t needed to use the information in practice and it was an awful thought that she was even contemplating reversing it as her fail-safe plan if everything went horribly wrong.
The prospect of lying there, trapped every bit as much as a body buried in a coffin, was too much to think about now, especially when she still had to bring herself to start that journey.
Even so, she grabbed what she would need and slid it into the top pocket of her uniform, knowing that once she was in the shaft it would be too late to secondguess herself.
Then, before she finally switched on the radio again and had the possibility of dozens of people listening in, she shuffled to the far side of her little prison and relieved herself with a wry grin.
‘That’s what I think of mines!’ she muttered as she pulled herself together again, disgusted with the state of her once-smart uniform. Then she reached for the radio to let Adam know that she was ready to give it a go.
‘Maggie! Dammit!’ he exploded, sounding halfdemented by the time she spoke to him. ‘Don’t do that to me again! I’ve been going mad, not being able to talk to you…hear your voice…Lord! Let’s get this over with! I need to hold you and I don’t think I’m going to be letting go any time soon.’
‘That sounds all right with me,’ she said with a smile as she imagined how good that would feel—to be in Adam’s arms, knowing that it was where she belonged. ‘I shall hold you to it, but first I’ve got to pile up a few more rocks. I made the heap tall enough to look into the shaft, but not high enough to climb into it.’
It didn’t take long to place a few more rocks on top because there weren’t many more that she could manage, not without the crowbar that had triggered this whole situation.
There was another small piece of that same glittery rock she’d found earlier and she tucked it into her pack, actually looking forward to the time when she could give it to Jem as a souvenir.
‘OK. I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be,’ she announced, but suddenly she was shaking so badly that she couldn’t even climb onto her little construction.
‘Maggie?’ Adam called, sounding far calmer than she ever could. ‘Did you know that the children’s corner in the surgery has got a book called The Adventures of Molly the Mole?’
‘A children’s book? In the surgery?’ she repeated, nonplussed.
‘That’s right. But I think they’re going to have to change the name soon. How do you think The Adventures of Maggie the Mole sounds?’
‘Awful,’ she said, but he’d made her chuckle and released her from the shakes.
This time when she went to climb up, it was as easy as if she were stepping up into the cab of the ambulance, ready to set off to the next casualty, knowing only the bare bones of the situation she was about to face.
Climbing into the shaft was every bit as bad as she’d thought it would be and she had to focus on the basic mechanics of what she was doing rather than where she was doing it.
The second her feet finally left the floor she froze for several long seconds, overwhelmed by what was ahead of her.
Her face was just inches from the rock. In fact, all of her that wasn’t directly in contact with the granite was just inches away from it, and that situation wasn’t going to change until she finally reached the surface…if she ever reached the surface.
She touched the contents of that top pocket through the fabric, almost as though touching a talisman. She didn’t know whether she would be able to bring herself to use it, even if her situation became dire, but there was a grim sort of comfort just in knowing that it was there.
‘How’s it going, keresik?’ Adam asked, his voice sounding strangely intimate in the confines of the shaft, reminding her all too clearly of his husky endearments when he’d taken her to his bed a year ago.
‘Well, I’ve started,’ she reported, not certain whether she should concentrate on what she was doing or whether allowing her mind to wander would make the time pass more quickly.
‘And I’m up here waiting for you,’ he said. ‘We’ve found the top of the shaft.’
‘And removed the gorse bushes around it?’ she said, inching forward and upward, using her elbows, knees and feet to propel herself along, sometimes crawling, at other times forced to drop to her belly and conscious with every tug at her waist that her pack was following along behind her like a reluctant dog.
‘No gorse,’ he said. ‘This time it was brambles with vicious thorns. I think the plant must have been here since the ventilation shaft was excavated because we nearly needed the jaws of life to cut through the stems.’
Maggie knew that he was keeping up the inconsequential chatter to help keep her mind off where she was and what she was doing, but the one thing that was keeping her going was the fact that he was there, waiting for her, and that he’d told her that he loved her.
She refused to contemplate the possibility that he’d only said that to give her the courage to climb this narrow shaft. He’d asked her directly whether she trusted him, and she’d known without a question that she did.
So, if he’d said that he loved her, then he did. The only thing she didn’t know was what part he wanted them to play in each other’s lives.
It was probably too soon to know. After all, they’d only met up again this afternoon—or rather yesterday afternoon, as it was now somewhere near five o’clock in the morning—for the first time since their eventfil
led meeting a year ago. Before that, it had been nearly ten years since they’d seen each other.
What if it was nothing more than the adrenaline overload that was making the two of them feel such an emotional connection…each of them apparently equally drawn to the person they’d known at a time when life had seemed so much safer and more settled and so full of endless possibilities?
Her internal debate seemed to have been going on interminably without any hope of getting any answers. How could she ask Adam what he thought when he was probably surrounded by members of the rescue squad standing by in case they had to start digging her out?
‘Hey, Maggie the Mole, how are you doing?’ Adam asked, and she couldn’t help smiling at his nonsense. If nothing else, she was going to have to hug him just for keeping her spirits up.
‘I feel a bit like a hamster or a gerbil, doomed to keep running for ever on a little exercise wheel, only in my case it’s a rock-hard slope that’s doing dreadful things to the knees and elbows of my uniform and—Ow!’ she exclaimed when she didn’t watch what she was doing and accidentally hit her head on a protruding knob of granite.
‘What’s wrong, Maggie? What happened?’
‘Just hit my head,’ she grumbled as she paused in her seemingly endless trek. ‘It wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been the same place as it got hit before.’
‘On your goose egg?’he asked sympathetically. ‘Ouch! I’ll have to give it a kiss better when you get here.’
The kiss sounded a wonderful idea but she was beginning to wonder if she’d ever collect it.
‘It’s probably bigger than a goose egg now,’ she told him as she rested her forehead on her hands for a moment, suddenly realising just how exhausted she was. ‘You’ll be able to see it on all the maps. “Maggie’s Tor”—and it’ll be twinned with Mount Everest.’
Caroline Anderson, Sara Morgan, Josie Metcalfe, Jennifer Taylor Page 46