‘I met Caroline just before I qualified,’ he told her. ‘She was a trainee midwife in Obs and Gyn when I was doing my rotation there as part of my GP training.’
‘And?’ she encouraged, and he briefly thought that this felt far worse than when he’d had an impacted wisdom tooth removed.
‘And she got pregnant, and we got married,’ he added bluntly, not proud of the fact that he’d probably just shocked her, but they were the basic facts. ‘But…but you were in love with her?’
He could almost hear her pleading with him to agree, but he couldn’t lie to Maggie just to keep her belief in happily-ever-after intact. If she wanted him to tell the miserable tale, she was going to get the whole of it, warts and all.
‘I was in lust with her, certainly,’ he admitted, still shame faced about his shallowness. ‘You saw her in that photo. She was a beautiful woman.’
‘Was?’
He stifled a smile as he leant his head against the rough stone wall, his body curved around the radio to give their conversation a semblance of privacy in the noise and chaos surrounding him. Any other woman would have been ranting at him for being so superficial, but not his Maggie. She’d homed in on the one really important word in the whole sentence.
‘We weren’t really in a relationship at that point. It was just one of those things…a party and too much to drink…’ And every day such a deep unrelenting feeling of loneliness, an emptiness inside that had never been filled in spite of the fact that he had been surrounded by people enjoying them selves in one of most so phisticated cities in the world. ‘And a few weeks later she was standing there, telling me that she was pregnant.’
For a short while he’d hoped that marriage to Caroline and the fact that they’d had a child on the way would finally banish the loneliness, but before he’d been able to find out…
‘We bought the maisonette at auction—a decent-enough sized place for that part of London—but the only reason we were able to afford it was because it was in such a dreadful state. The elderly gentleman hadn’t been able to take care of it for years so it needed absolutely everything done to it…ceilings, walls, plumbing, electrics, new bathroom, new kitchen…the lot. And the last thing on the list, after all the really dirty jobs were finished, was to put a new carpet on the stairs.’
He could still picture that frayed old carpet, an in determinate grey with all the dirt and dust that had been trodden into it during the weeks that the work had been going on, and with ugly thread bare patches at the front edge of every step.
‘I was going to take the carpet up that weekend and we were going to have a ceremony to celebrate replacing it with a brand-new one, only somehow she tripped on one of the thread bare patches.’ He dragged in a quick half-breath, needing to get to the end of the tale. ‘I watched her fall down the stairs and saw her hit her head on the newel post.’
He heard Maggie’s gasp of shock. ‘Oh, Adam! How badly was she hurt? And the baby?’
‘She lost the baby that night.’ His tiny daughter had barely been as long as his hand, her lungs far too premature for her to survive. ‘Caroline was in a coma. The scan showed a subarachnoid haemor rhage from an aneurysm. They discovered that she’d had an arteriovenous malformation in her brain that had probably been there from birth. Totally asymptomatic, so no one had known it was there. The bleed was large and cat astrophic…there was massive irreversible damage to her brain.’
He would for ever blame himself that he hadn’t sorted the carpet out sooner, but working on Obs and Gyn in a busy London hospital had meant long days and feeling permanently exhausted.
‘If she’d been born with that malformation of the blood vessels in her head, the bleed could have come at any time,’ Maggie pointed out, entirely logically. ‘It could have been as a result of a car crash—even a relatively minor shunt if it whiplashed her brain inside her skull—or if she’d been mugged, it could have had exactly the same outcome. It could even have happened while she was in labour if her blood pressure had risen. Adam, you can’t blame yourself. It was a disaster waiting to happen.’
‘I know that in my head,’ he agreed. ‘My medical knowledge tells me that the chances that she’d survive into old age were extremely slim, given the fragility of those veins and arteries and the stresses that everyday living was putting on them. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling guilty, from feeling that if only I’d taken the carpet up just one minute earlier…’
‘I know all about those “if only” thoughts, the ones that go round and round inside your head interminably,’ she said, and when he heard the sadness in her voice he knew that she was thinking about her mother. ‘If only Mum hadn’t got cancer,’ she continued, and the connection between them felt almost as if he’d read her mind. ‘If only she’d gone to the doctor sooner. If only the doctor had seen the second tumour before it had a chance to metastasise, and so on and so on. But if you go down that road…’
‘But you can’t just forget it, as if it never happened,’ he objected.
‘No, but you can gradually put it in perspective by remembering all the good things that happened before that.’
‘Has it worked for you?’ he challenged, marvelling that they’d slipped almost seamlessly into the same sort of relationship that they’d had so many years ago. Once she’d got over her painful shyness around him she’d become the one person in the whole of Penhally with whom he’d felt able to discuss absolutely anything without worrying how she would react.
‘For the most part,’ she said thoughtfully and, as ever, honestly. ‘Some days are worse than others, of course. When something fantastic happens—a good save on a shout, for instance—and she’s not there when I arrive home, bursting to tell someone about it.’
Now he felt guiltier still, because he and Caroline hadn’t even had that sort of relationship, even though they’d been married. They’d been more like two small planets each confined to their own separate orbits.
‘So, when we met up last year, when you were substituting for the other lecturer?’ Maggie began again, clearly determined to have everything straight in her head.
‘Caroline was still on life support then,’ he admitted, ‘but only because her mother couldn’t bear to let her go. The woman I married was dead—she’d probably died within minutes of her head hitting that post—and that was several months before I saw you sitting at the front of that lecture hall.’
He was almost holding his breath as he waited for her verdict but knew better than to try to rush her. Maggie would take her time to assimilate everything he’d told her and then she’d make up her mind whether she was going to forgive him…forgive the two of them. He couldn’t bear it if all he was to have of her was the memory of the only time he’d held her in his arms, kissing her without having to hold back, knowing that she’d wanted him as much as he’d always wanted her.
‘I was a fool,’ she announced flatly, clearly angry with herself, but all he felt like doing was letting out a cheer. ‘If I hadn’t leapt to conclusions…’
‘Maggie, legally I was still married until the machines were switched off and she was pronounced dead,’ he pointed out, acting as devil’s advocate but needing her to address all the facts, not least the truth that they would, technically, have been committing adultery.
‘But you would have told me that if I’d given you a chance, wouldn’t you?’ she said with a depth of trust in her voice that humbled him. ‘If I hadn’t leapt out of bed full of self-righteous indignation and raced out of your place like a lunatic, you would have told me all of this then.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘MAGGIE?’ Adam called, and she was surprised to discover that she’d actually been dozing.
Was she actually becoming accustomed to being in such a claustrophobic place with the rumble of excavation work going on non-stop somewhere not too far away? Or had it been it a combination of the utter darkness surrounding her combined with sheer exhaustion that had allowed her to shut out the world for a
little while?
She gave a sharp laugh of disbelief that she could actually have slept away some of the precious time left to her. It was now…gone two o’clock in the morning, she noted from her watch, and the rain was due to arrive before midday. That meant that she had, at most, just—
‘Maggie, are you awake?’ he called again a little louder, and something in his voice told her that he didn’t just want to chat to her to pass the time away.
‘I’m awake,’ she confirmed as her stomach rumbled loudly, reminding her just how many hours it had been since she’d last eaten. Still, there was one good thing about not having enough to eat or drink…she didn’t need to go looking for a bathroom—at least, not just yet. ‘What’s been going on up there? Have the experts come up with a workable plan between them?’
‘No. Not yet,’ he admitted. ‘But they were hoping you could tell them about the rocks that make up the walls where you are, to see if they can pinpoint it more accurately.’
‘OK,’ she said dubiously. ‘But I don’t really know what I’ll be looking for. The last time I did any geography was at school, and the amount of geology I remember would fit on a postage stamp. Granite just looks like granite to me, but I’ll give it a go.’
It took several minutes before her eyes were accustomed to the light and she had to deliberately switch her mind off to the fact that the walls she was inspecting were within arm’s reach in any direction, but she still couldn’t see anything remarkable anywhere around her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Some of it’s stained brown where the water’s been running down it and there are those glittery metallic flecks all through it, but I can’t see anything that looks like a band of anything different. In fact, some of the loose rocks on the floor are more interesting—there are some lovely examples of iron pyrites.’
‘And you said you didn’t know any geology.’ He laughed.
‘Well, everyone’s heard of fool’s gold, haven’t they?’ she said.
She ran her fingers over a particularly pretty chunk while Adam was reporting her lack of success to someone in the background while she mourned the fact that she wouldn’t be able to give Jem a piece of it as a souvenir of his heroism.
‘Maggie, exactly how much loose rock is there? Enough to pile up and see if you can look back along the tunnel?’
‘I can only see the entrance to the tunnel from here because it’s up at roof height…above my head. I think you’re for get ting that I’m one of the shorter people of the world,’ she complained.
She heard him repeat her words and was startled when instead of laughter she heard someone seeming to get very excited at what she’d said. There was another heated discussion going on as she started collecting the larger chunks of rock to pile them directly below the aperture she could see above her head. It was galling to think that Adam would probably be able to reach it without even going up on tiptoe, but if she was going to be able to have a look along it, she was going to have to do some hard work first.
‘Maggie?’ called Adam.
‘Hang on!’ she panted. ‘I’m still building the Great Wall of China.’
‘Well, let me know when you’ve got it high enough for you to be able to pull yourself up into it. Are there enough rocks for that?’
‘There should be…some of them were pretty huge, and damn hard to land on,’ she complained. ‘It’s a good job my head was harder.’ She had no idea why everyone was suddenly so keen that she stick her head into this tunnel, but if there was the slightest chance that it would help them to get her out of here, she’d use every little scrap of granite to build as high as they wanted her to.
‘OK,’ she said, and briefly crossed her fingers that the whole shaky edifice wasn’t going to collapse as soon as she tried to put any weight on it. ‘It’s time to go mountain climbing.’
‘Be careful, keresik,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t break anything.’
It wasn’t until she was perched precariously on the top of the little cairn she’d constructed that she could see that there were actually two tunnel entrances opening into her little prison. One of them had been completely out of sight behind an overhang.
She climbed down to report her findings and an even more animated discussion erupted at Adam’s end.
‘Is there any way you can talk to us while you’re looking into each of the tunnels, to describe what you’re seeing.’
‘Yes, if I grow another arm,’ she joked, trying to work out the logistics of holding onto a torch, the radio and having a hand free to steady herself against the wall so that she didn’t overbalance. ‘Hang on a minute. I’ve got an idea.’
She reached for her pack and found a roll of tape, pulling a length off to strap the torch to one wrist and the radio to the other. Now, if she could only point each in the right direction to be of any use…
‘Right, one tunnel is bigger than the other and the floor of it is more gently sloping. I’m almost certain that it’s the one that Tel was trapped in because there are an awful lot of loose rocks in it, as though they’re the ones that rolled the furthest when the roof came down, and I can hear a lot of intermittent crashing and banging sounds coming from further along it, so that’s probably where you lot are.’
It was such a relief to find out that she hadn’t really fallen all that far and to know that that was the direction her rescuers would be coming from. Whether they would have a chance to move that much rock before the rain came was another matter, so she needed to give them all the information she could to see whether there was a quicker way to get to her.
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 pin pointed 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 short-handled 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 loo
ked 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.
The Doctor's Bride by Sunrise Page 13