Caroline Anderson, Sara Morgan, Josie Metcalfe, Jennifer Taylor

by Brides of Penhally Bay Vol. 01 (lit)

  She heard him chuckle and it gave her the impetus to push onward the next few inches and the next until suddenly there was nowhere to go because she was confronted by a pile of rocks.

  ‘Adam…?’ she quavered, feeling sick. She’d come so far that she’d begun to believe that he was right, that she would be able to do this and come out safely at the other end. ‘It’s no good. There’s a blockage in the way.’

  She was almost certain that she heard him swear at the other end and realised that she must actually have been nearing the end of her journey before she’d come to her enforced halt because radio reception was becoming much clearer.

  Was this where it was all going to end? Was she finally going to have to find out whether she had the courage to end things cleanly, or would she chicken out and force Adam to listen to her deteriorate as dehydration took its fatal toll? One thing she knew was that she wouldn’t be able to make herself switch the radio off. She would want to be able to hear his voice until the last possible moment. Or would the battery die before then?

  ‘Maggie, how big are the rocks and how many of them are there?’ Adam demanded, dragging her out of her spiralling thoughts and sending her off in another direction.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she said, unable to care that she sounded utterly defeated. ‘I can hardly go around them.’

  She’d managed to stay upbeat all the way through her mother’s treatment without once cracking, knowing she needed to borrow her strength. Now she just didn’t seem to be able to find anything left to dredge up for herself.

  ‘Of course it matters!’ he snapped. ‘You might not be able to go around them, but they might be able to go around you.’

  ‘What?’ Her brain was too tired to work out what he’d just said.

  ‘Keresik, listen to me,’ he said patiently. ‘If the blockage is a small one, with relatively small rocks, you should be able to pass them past your body one by one until your way is clear again. Now, have another look and tell me what you see.’

  ‘Some of them are quite big,’ she said when she’d had a closer look. ‘But the ones they’re holding up look relatively small.’

  Even so, the sheer quantity of them was daunting. It would take so long to move them all, one at a time, dragging, rolling, pushing and sliding to pass them through the tiny space between the softness of her body and the immovability of the granite surrounding her.

  She hardly dared to allow herself to hope that this wasn’t the disaster it had looked at first sight. The prospect nearly had her sobbing with frustration, but the only way she would know if the job was possible was if she did what she’d had to do ever since this whole incident had begun…take everything one step at a time, one rock at a time, until she discovered what she could achieve.

  And with Adam waiting for her, bullying her into continuing the fight, even as he encouraged her, how could she not give it her best effort?

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘I’VE done it!’ Maggie exulted as she finally pushed the last rock past her hip and forced herself forward, ignoring the fact that she’d just gathered a few new bruises.

  ‘Good girl,’ Adam praised softly, but she was beyond telling him off. ‘I knew you could do it,’ he added, and suddenly she was sure he meant it because he’d always believed in her, right from when they’d been teenagers.

  What she didn’t know was why—after all, he’d been nearly three years older when their friendship had first started, and to teenagers that could be a gap as vast as an ocean, especially when the older one was about to leave to begin professional training.

  Well, if—when—she got out of there, she thought with new determination, she was going to make sure that she asked him exactly what he’d seen in the skinny little girl she’d been, but that sort of conversation was going to have to wait until she’d had about a gallon of water to drink, something hot to eat and the longest, deepest, hottest bath she could find, with about a yard of scented bubbles on the top, because otherwise she was going to be so stiff and sore in the morning and…

  As she reached her hand forward again she caught sight of the time and groaned aloud when she realised that it already was morning.

  In fact, in about half an hour it was going to be sunrise and time she would normally be getting up to get ready to go to work to start her next shift.

  ‘Maggie? Keresik?’ Adam called, and it took a moment for her to realise why his voice sounded different.

  ‘Adam! I can hear you!’ she exclaimed. ‘I can hear you without the radio. How far away are you?’ Her hands were suddenly shaking so much that it was almost impossible for her to find the switch on the torch to turn it off.

  And there it was—not just the vague glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel that there should have been this early in the morning but the biggest, brightest most beautiful glare that she’d ever seen that told her that the generator had been moved and there were people up there, waiting to help her.

  That was the moment that told her that the end of her ordeal was in sight, and the sense of relief that hit her was so powerful that for several long moments she was totally unable to move a muscle.

  ‘Come on, Maggie the Mole. Don’t be frightened of the lights,’ he murmured softly into the radio, rather than calling down to her for everyone to hear, almost as though he was trying to coax a shy animal into the open. ‘Come on up so I can collect the hug I’ve been waiting for all night.’

  ‘You might not want to hug me when you see how dirty I am,’ she warned as she started moving again, her arms and legs feeling strangely leaden so that she had to force them into dragging her body over those last few remaining yards.

  ‘I’ll take my chances,’ he promised with a smile in his voice that she couldn’t wait to see in person.

  And then, suddenly, she was emerging from the top of the ventilation shaft and there were hands reaching for her from every direction, grabbing her sore elbows and making her squeak with pain until Adam growled at them to let her go. And then he wrapped his arms tightly around her, surrounding her with his own warmth, and was lifting her completely off her feet and whirling her round and round in a kaleidoscope of light and laughter and applause.

  She was totally unable to hear a single word he was saying because of the voices around them and she had no idea why the lights seemed to be flashing until Adam finally lowered her to her feet and she realised that there must have been a dozen people pressing towards them with what looked like a forest of cameras and microphones all pointing in her direction.

  ‘Maggie!’

  ‘Miss Pascoe!’

  ‘Over here, Maggie!’

  It was a good job that he had his arm wrapped around her shoulders to steady her or she would have fallen over with shock.

  ‘What are all these people doing here?’ she asked, then didn’t care what his answer was when he smiled at her like that.

  ‘Do you want me to get rid of them?’ he asked with a devilish glint in his eye.

  ‘Please!’ She glanced down at herself and could have cried when she saw the state of her uniform, the smart green she’d always worn with pride now dusty, stained and torn. ‘I look disgusting, and they’re all taking photos!’ she wailed, burying her face against the shoulder of his borrowed jacket. He laughed aloud before he held up a commanding hand.

  As if by magic, the cacophony died away until there was only the steady thrum of the generator powering the lights and a few indignant calls from the birds that had been woken too soon by the artificial dawn.

  ‘As you can all see,’ Adam said, his strong voice carrying easily right to the back of the crowd laying siege to them, ‘Maggie’s out and she’s safe and well. We’ll be saying a special thank you to all the rescue crew in the Penhally Arms this evening, but for now she just needs a little time to catch her breath.’

  He started to turn away, wrapping the blanket he was handed around her shoulders to shelter her from the sharp breeze blowing in from the ocean below, before tucking h
er against his side with what felt like an extremely possessive arm.

  Behind them there was a renewed storm of shouting when the media circus realised that they’d just neatly been balked of an immediate interview with her, but there was an impressive wall of rescue squad personnel wearing high-visibility clothing standing guard, preventing them from getting any closer.

  Not that Maggie felt she had anything much to say.

  She’d only been doing what a paramedic was trained to do when she’d stabilised Tel and prepared him for transport to St Piran’s, and it had just been common sense to escort the other lads out to the surface when she’d had to collect more supplies.

  As for her journey up the ventilation shaft…the only remarkable thing about that was the fact that Adam had been able to persuade her to attempt it in the first place.

  ‘Maggie?’ The young voice was accompanied by the feeling of someone tugging on her tattered sleeve, and she turned to find Jem Althorp standing there with his mother.

  ‘Jem! And Kate!’ she exclaimed in surprise. ‘I thought you’d both be back home by now, tucked up in bed.’

  ‘I couldn’t go to sleep,’ Jem said earnestly. ‘Not until I knew they’d got you out of the mine safely.’

  ‘I took him home to feed him and get him clean and warm, but we couldn’t stay there, knowing you were still down the mine. We both wanted to be here,’ Kate said. ‘I had to be here to thank you for looking after him for me, and…and to apologise for shouting at you earlier. I—’

  ‘Kate, don’t worry about it. Just take him home and put it all behind you,’ she advised. ‘You’ve got a remarkably brave boy there, and he deserves a medal for staying down there with Tel.’

  All the while they had been talking, Adam had been edging her gently away from the noise and the people until they’d said their goodbyes. Then he quickened his pace, leading her along the grassy slope and through the gate at the far side of the field until the lights and the people were left behind, the intrusive cameras kept firmly at bay by the determined efforts of the rescue squad, who had been there almost from the beginning of her ordeal.

  In the shelter of a solid Cornish stone hedge he finally drew her down to sit beside him on the short-cropped grass and a tiny corner of her mind reasoned that there must have been a flock of sheep there until recently. Had they been taken to a field closer to the farmhouse ready for lambing?

  ‘Here,’ Adam said. ‘You’re probably ready for this.’ He held out a bottle of water.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ she said, suddenly realising just how dry her throat was, and reached for it, only to realise that her battered and bruised fingers were too sore to unscrew the top.

  ‘Ah, keresik, let me do that for you,’ he offered with a catch in his voice as he took the top off and handed it to her.

  ‘Oh, that tastes so good,’ she said when the cool liquid had slid down her throat. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so thirsty.’

  ‘Is there anything in your pack that I can put on your hands for you?’

  ‘My pack!’ She’d completely forgotten that she’d been dragging that up the shaft with her, attached by what was now a very dirty length of bandage.

  She suddenly started to laugh as a ridiculous image leapt into her mind.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he asked with a frown, clearly wondering if she’d finally cracked under the strain.

  ‘I’d completely forgotten about my pack…that I’d tied it to me…And if you hadn’t seen it before you swung me round…’ She laughed helplessly.

  ‘We wouldn’t have had any difficulty getting rid of the press because I’d have flattened the lot of them with it.’ His deeper laughter joined hers in joyous earlymorning harmony as the day brightened steadily around them. ‘I couldn’t believe how heavy it was. What do you paramedics keep in there? Bricks?’

  Suddenly Maggie remembered putting the souvenir pieces of rock in the pack before she’d started that last climb and reached for the appropriate pocket.

  Adam had to take over when her fingers were too clumsy to open it but then she burrowed down inside until she felt the rough texture of the two rocks and pulled the bigger one out into the strengthening light.

  ‘Not bricks exactly,’ she said. ‘But just before I started climbing that awful ventilation shaft I saw this and thought it would be a pretty memento. Do you recognise what it is? Isn’t that what they call Fool’s gold because so many people mistake it for the real thing?’

  Adam examined it, turning the heavily streaked rock over and over in his hands.

  ‘It might be an idea to show it Young George,’ he suggested with a strange little smile.

  ‘Well, he does know more than most about the mines around here,’ she agreed easily. ‘He’ll enjoy a chuckle when he realises that the only bit of treasure I salvaged from my time down there was a bit of iron pyrites.’

  ‘It could be.’ But he was still smiling mysteriously as he continued. ‘Young George and I were talking when you were asleep. He’d had a chance to look at the old map and it reminded him that the mine’s original name was Wheal Owr. That was corrupted over the years and ended up being anglicised to Wheal Owl.’

  ‘So, does owr mean owl?’ She was always interested in anything to do with the history of the region.

  ‘No. Apparently owl is kowann in Cornish.’

  ‘So owr is…?’

  ‘Gold,’ he said with a significant glance at the rock in his hand. ‘The mine was originally called Wheal Gold and it looks as if you brought up a piece of the evidence as to why it got its name.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’ she exclaimed, and traced a bright vein with a tentative fingertip.

  ‘I wonder,’ Adam said reflectively as he turned it over in his hand. ‘Do you think there would be enough in here for a wedding ring…or two?’

  ‘A wedding ring?’ Maggie wasn’t sure what she was hearing. It had been a very long night and she could easily be hallucinating or…

  ‘Is it such a hard question, keresik?’

  She wouldn’t have believed that he could sound so uncertain. When he’d been eighteen he had seemed to have all the answers and a year ago…

  ‘While I was…down there…you said Caroline was in a coma. So how long was it before…?’

  ‘She’d already been comatose for months by then, but her mother just couldn’t let go, couldn’t bear to lose her only daughter when she looked as if there was absolutely nothing wrong with her…as if she’d just wake up at any moment.’

  Now she could see that the shadows she’d glimpsed in his eyes were sadness and regret for a wasted life.

  ‘I suppose I felt guilty because I’d never really loved her, so I just let her mother go on hoping but…’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t let it go on any longer, not after I’d seen you again and realised just what had been missing in my life all that time.’

  He took one of her grubby, scraped hands in his and held it gently against his face, a full day’s growth of prickly dark beard making him look like the perfect illustration of a pirate.

  ‘It took me a while to persuade Caroline’s mother that it was time to let go, and then there was my contract to work out, but I knew what I wanted—to come back to Penhally and persuade you that you still loved me enough to give me a second chance. What I didn’t know was whether you’d allow me to get close enough to explain where everything had gone wrong.’

  ‘And within minutes of setting eyes on you, I’m trapped down a mine and a captive audience,’ she said wryly, loving the way his eyes gleamed in the light of the new day. ‘Did you really mean it? That you wanted to move back to Penhally? I thought you were only here as a locum?’

  ‘They’re desperately short of staff, with two of them disappearing off to Italy last month. I’m here as a short-term locum and there’s a retired GP from another practice who’s been helping out. So there’s a permanent position for me at Penhally Bay Surgery if I want it, but I wasn’t going to commit myself to it in case yo
u didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. It would have been too painful to see you and not—’

  ‘You mean, you wouldn’t have tried to change my mind?’ she teased.

  ‘Of course I would,’ he said very seriously. ‘I meant what I said when you were down there—that you had to get out of there safely because I need you in my life as much as I need air to breathe. And I would love to settle in Penhally permanently with you…unless you’d rather go somewhere else?’

  ‘It might seem rather unadventurous, but I like living here,’ she said, while the realisation was slowly dawning that he might really have meant that comment about the wedding rings to be the forerunner of a proposal. Or had he?

  ‘That’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to travel abroad at some stage,’ she added uncertainly, not really knowing where this conversation was going. Was he just asking if she’d mind if he moved back to Penhally, that it wouldn’t matter to her if she saw him around the place on a daily basis? ‘Um, the furthest I’ve been from home was that course in London.’

  ‘In which case, I’ll accept the permanent position,’ he said with a new sense of purpose in his voice, ‘but I’ll work to the end of my present contract first—that will take me to the end of March. Then I’ll start the new one at the beginning of May. That means I’ll be giving the practice nearly a month and a half’s notice that I’m going to be away on my honeymoon for the whole of April. Well, at least they’ll know that I’m going to be back full time before the summer visitors start flooding into Cornwall and the practice goes manic. But perhaps you’d rather wait?’ he added hastily, so he must have seen the frown of puzzlement on her face.

  ‘Wait for what?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry, Adam, but my mind must be fuzzy with lack of sleep. What would I be waiting for?’

  ‘Oh, keresik, have I done everything wrong?’ he demanded, looking quite stricken. ‘Here I am asking whether you’d rather wait a few more months and be a June bride when I haven’t even proposed properly.’

  ‘Proposed?’ she whispered, wide-eyed as he suddenly shifted to his knees on the grass in front of her.