The Doctor's Bride by Sunrise

by Josie Metcalfe

  ‘Your turn, Chris,’ she said when they finally reached the mouth of the adit, surprised that so little seemed to have been achieved in the time she’d been down below with the boys. She’d been expecting to see the entrance nearly clear by now, with equipment being readied for getting Tel out. All that seemed to have been achieved was that the gorse bushes had been cleared away and a series of steel props had been set up to hold fresh pieces of timber up against the roof of the entrance.

  ‘Be careful of his hand,’ she called to the unseen helpers outside. ‘I’ve put a sling on him but he’s going to need X-rays of those meta car pals.’

  ‘Any more?’ asked the same deep voice, and she could see the silhouette of a head wearing a safety helmet against the bright lights that had been set up outside.

  ‘Just me this time,’ she said as she began to climb, only remembering as it caught against the roughness of the hewn rocks that she hadn’t been wearing her emergency pack when she’d come the other way—it had been passed through to her once she’d climbed through the hole.

  It seemed as though a forest of hands was reaching towards her to help her to her feet and even though the lights were bright enough to sear her eyes after the pitch black of the mine, the first face she focused on was Adam’s.

  ‘Well done,’ she saw him say, although the sound of his praise was completely lost under the cacophony of a generator and voices that surrounded her, the area apparently filled with people in bulky, high-visibility gear.

  She straightened up and filled her lungs with sweet, fresh air, relishing the ever-present tang of salt and wondering how she was ever going to be able to force herself do go back down that dank hole again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘No!’

  One piercing shriek cut through everything else, silencing everything other than the steady all-pervading throb of the generator.

  ‘Where’s my son?’ the shrill voice demanded. ‘What’s happened to my boy?’

  ‘Kate…’ someone said, and Maggie blinked. Was that dishevelled figure really Kate Althorp?

  As Maggie watched, the normally smart former practice manager flung aside the restraining hand that Nick Tremayne tried to put around her shoulders and pushed her way through the knot of helmeted rescuers at the entrance to the adit towards Maggie.

  ‘What have you done with my son?’ she demanded, glaring up at Maggie where she still stood on the heap of rocks. ‘They said there were only two boys hurt and—’

  ‘Kate,’ Nick began again, having caught up with her, and Maggie saw him wrap a supporting arm around her shoulders. ‘Take it easy. Give the girl a chance to catch her breath.’

  ‘What do you mean, give her a chance to catch her breath?’ Kate said, rounding on him furiously. ‘I want to know why she hasn’t brought my son up with the others. Is he the one that fell? Is he the one that’s badly injured? Nick, you know what it was like when I lost James. You were there with me. I can’t lose Jem, too. I couldn’t bear it…’

  ‘Kate!’ Maggie called over her tirade, easily able to empathise with her terror. ‘Jem isn’t hurt.’

  ‘He’s not…’ Relief warred with incomprehension, but it was anger that won. ‘If he’s not hurt, why didn’t you bring him up with the others?’ she demanded furiously. ‘Why did you leave my son down there?’

  ‘Because he refused to come up,’ Maggie said, knowing that the simple truth would give Kate pause. She reached out a hand towards the tormented woman, even though she was too far away for any physical contact. ‘Kate, Jem is the most amazing young lad I’ve ever met, and you should be proud of him. He didn’t want to leave his friend in case he woke up alone in the dark.’

  ‘Oh, God, help me…’ Kate sobbed, but when she turned towards Nick, obviously needing his support, he wasn’t there.

  ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,’ he said, striding towards Maggie with an accusing glare. ‘He’s only eight years old, for heaven’s sake! I’m going down to bring him up,’ he announced, intent on pushing his way through the rescue team already working systematically to clear the mouth of the adit.

  ‘I can’t let you do that, Dr Tremayne,’ said a man with a similar air of authority, but he was wearing the appropriate safety gear and in spite of his youth was obviously the leader of the rescue team.

  ‘You can’t stop me,’ the GP said belligerently, trying to stare him down. ‘I’ve been on more rescue missions than you’ve had hot dinners.’

  ‘That may well be true, Doctor,’ the younger man conceded graciously, ‘but in this case we’re going to need special equipment appropriate to the situation, and we know you haven’t had training in that. When we’re ready to bring the lads out, it will have to be my team that does the job. No one else here has the authority to go down.’

  Maggie could tell that the middle-aged GP was frustrated by his failure to get his own way. It had probably been years since anyone had gone against his authority, especially since he’d become the senior partner at the Penhally surgery.

  Idly, she noted that while he was leaner than either Adam or Mike—almost thin enough to squirm through the narrow entrance to the adit. That was probably because he had lost muscle tone since his age had stopped him being an active member of a rescue team. Even so, it wouldn’t be easy for him to get into the adit until the entrance had been cleared, to say nothing of the problem he would have once he got to the bottom of the stope and had to clamber over the rockfall and squeeze his long legs into the narrow tunnel where Tel was trapped.

  ‘Well, I hope you don’t think you’re going to be stopping me going down again,’ Maggie interrupted before Nick could draw breath to argue, suddenly aware with every fibre of her body that Adam had come to stand behind her. She hadn’t seen him move but somehow she just knew that he was there, silently supporting her in her fight to do what she knew had to be done. ‘Until you get that entrance cleared, I’m the only one small enough to get through who’s got the training to take care of Tel.’

  Not that she wanted to go back into the darkness again, feeling as if all that rock was pressing down on her and squeezing the breath out of her so that she had to fight for the oxygen her body needed to survive.

  ‘I’m afraid I will have to stop you,’ the team leader said firmly. ‘The last thing we need is amateurs bumbling about when everything is so unstable. Because time is of the essence, we’ve only done a make shift job of shoring up the entrance to the adit. We’ve made a start on clearing the access and it won’t be long before the entrance is safely open again. Then we’ll be able to take our equipment down and—’

  ‘So while you’re running about up here doing everything by the book to satisfy health and safety requirements, you’re quite happy to leave an eight-year-old boy down there in the dark, taking care of his injured friend who’s bleeding heavily and in danger of developing crush syndrome?’ Maggie demanded, so disgusted that he was even considering the idea, let alone trying to insist on it, that she didn’t think twice about exaggerating Tel’s condition if it made her point. ‘I think not!’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t allow you to go back down,’ he insisted. ‘I know you’re a qualified paramedic, but this is way beyond what you’re trained for…it could even lose you your job if you go down there again against my advice.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll be looking for another job,’ she said with scarcely a pang for the potential loss of a job that meant so much to her. She straightened her shoulders and tried to stand tall, knowing it was a futile gesture when everyone around her was at least a head taller but still hoping he would recognise how seriously she took her decision. ‘There’s no way I can twiddle my thumbs up here while the last of that unit of saline runs out and Jem is left alone and terrified because he doesn’t know what to do for his friend if he develops an air embolus.’

  She whirled back towards the entrance of the adit and there was Adam, exactly where she’d known he would be. ‘Adam, I need to take
some more saline down with me, and a backboard in case I manage to get Tel free before you can get down there. Perhaps there’s some sort of crowbar I could borrow to shift the last couple of rocks. I’ll also need a blanket to keep Jem warm…oh, and something for him to eat. He didn’t make it home in time for his tea and must be starving.’

  She paused to take stock, wondering what else she needed that she’d be able to negotiate down that treacherous stope single-handed, and saw Adam exchange glances with Mike who then nodded and hurried out of the circle of flood lights towards their ambulance to get the things she needed.

  ‘Maggie, are you sure about this?’ Adam asked softly when he turned back to her, careful to keep his voice below the sound of the generator so that it only carried as far as her ears. ‘I know how much you hate going into enclosed spaces and I virtually black mailed you into going down in the first place, so don’t feel that you have to— What?’ he demanded when she winced as he took her hands in his and squeezed her fingers.

  ‘Dammit, Maggie! What’s happened to you?’ he exclaimed when he saw the ragged, blood-stained fingers of her protective gloves. ‘What have you done to your hands?’

  ‘It’s not my blood, Adam,’ Maggie reassured him as he stared down in horror at the state of her hands, and she knew that she was largely telling the truth.

  Of course, there was no way she could have shifted all that granite without collecting a few scrapes and scratches, but she was touched that he should care that she might have been hurt. ‘It’s Tel’s blood. Because he’s trapped, I was having to use the Braille method of finding out where he was injured. I needed to find out where the blood was coming from…how serious the injury was.’

  ‘How badly is he injured?’ Adam asked as he helped her to strip off the shredded gloves, side tracked into throwing her a furious glare when he saw just how many scrapes and bruises there were on her hands. She clenched her teeth in preparation for the pain as she doused them in anti sep tic gel then struggled to pull on a fresh pair of gloves over the fierce stinging.

  Silently, he handed her some more gloves to stuff into the appropriate pocket of her pack. ‘Did the lad fall a long way?’

  ‘He didn’t just fall—he brought down some rocks with him,’ she explained, strangely warmed by his anger on her behalf. It had been a while since anyone had really noticed when she was hurt and showed that they cared. Even Mike tended to shrug off work-related injuries as part and parcel of the job they did.

  ‘He’s got a goose egg from hitting his head and I’m hoping that’s the reason why he’s unconscious, because I couldn’t find any obvious evidence of cranial fractures. I’ve put a collar on him and he’s on his second unit of saline. So far, it doesn’t look as if he’s in danger of bleeding out. Several ribs were broken when the rocks landed on him. He was having difficulty breathing when I got to him, but once I shifted the weight off his chest, that improved, and there’s no evidence of pneumothorax or flail chest. The other lads would have cleared the rocks earlier if they’d had light to see what they were doing. He’s also broken the tib and fib in one leg but they don’t feel massively displaced, so I think the blood loss is probably from several smaller gashes rather than anything major like an artery. There’s moisture seeping down the walls of the tunnel, so it probably makes the blood loss look worse than it is.’

  ‘Miss?’ said a hesitant voice behind her, and she turned to see a woman aged before her time, her face gaunt and white under the harsh lighting as she stood there with her hands knotted together. ‘They said you’ve been down the mine?’

  ‘Yes, I have. I’ll be going back down in a minute,’ she added, suddenly not needing to ask the question to know who the woman was. ‘You’re Tel’s mother, aren’t you?’

  She nodded. ‘Amanda Lovelace. Mandy,’ she supplied, then bit her lip before blurting, ‘Please, tell me what’s happened to my boy. You brought his three mates out with you. Does…does that mean he’s—?’

  ‘He’s unconscious,’ Maggie interrupted hastily, sparing her that dreadful final word. If she’d realised Tel’s mother was here she would have made certain she hadn’t been left so long thinking the worst. ‘He fell and hit his head and he’s cracked a couple of bones. That’s why it’s taking a bit of time to get him out—we need to get a stretcher down to him to carry him out safely, so we don’t do him any more damage.’

  ‘But he is alive? You’re sure he’s alive?’ She grabbed for Maggie’s hand with frantic fingers and it was difficult to control the wince as she, too, pressed on the cuts and bruises that were starting to throb mercilessly.

  ‘He’s breathing and his heart is beating,’ Maggie reassured her with a smile, sticking to the basics. ‘He’s got a bump the size of a goose egg on his head and he’ll probably have a monster headache when he wakes up, but—’

  ‘Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!’ Mandy exclaimed tearfully. ‘He’s always getting into scrapes with those other lads—takes after his big brothers, unfortunately, and his dad’s never there when he’s needed—but Tel’s not a bad boy, not really.’

  ‘Miss Pascoe?’ interrupted the incident commander, clearly ready for the next round in the battle. ‘I know you mean well, but I really must insist that you don’t put yourself in any further danger. You must realise what the consequences could be for your employment.’

  Maggie took a moment to promise Mandy that she would be told as soon as there was any more news about her son, then she turned to face the man who was rapidly becoming her number-one adversary.

  She knew he was only doing his job, but it wasn’t making things any easier for her. It was taking everything she had to stop herself thinking about the danger she was returning to. She would be only too delighted to stay up here and keep the man happy, but she knew she didn’t really have a choice but to go against his advice. There were two young lads down there, one of whom might still be bleeding from a wound she still hadn’t found, and the other was probably counting every second and every eerie creak and groan while he was waiting for her to return.

  ‘If losing my job is what it takes, so be it,’ she said stubbornly, her conviction that she was doing the right thing strengthened immeasurably by the thumbs-up signal Mike gave her as he delivered the supplies she needed, and the fact that Adam was once more standing right behind her.

  In fact, he was so close that she could feel the heat of his body radiating towards her and his breath teasing the vulnerable skin left exposed on the back of her neck by her eminently practical haircut. For one mad second she even contemplated leaning back against him, desperately needing to borrow just a little of his strength. Then she remembered, barely in time, that he was a married man and that she had no right to take anything from him, even on loan.

  That realisation was enough to stiffen her spine and her resolve to do what was right.

  ‘Feel free to report me for going against your advice if you must, but at the moment I’m not even on duty,’ she explained, almost ashamed how smug she felt. ‘My shift ended several hours ago, so now I’m just a member of the public who has a bit more training than most and just happens to be small enough to squeeze through very small spaces.’

  The man sighed heavily, reluctantly conceding that he wasn’t going to win the argument, especially with Adam and Mike backing her. ‘Well, if you’re that determined, you should be wearing one of these…’ he handed her a bright yellow safety helmet and checked that it fitted her head properly ‘…and you might as well have one of these, too,’ he said, and offered her a radio. ‘It’s the latest issue communication system—the new one that actually works for some distance underground—so hope fully you’ll be able to keep us updated on how the lad’s doing.’

  ‘And you’ll be able to let me know when your lot’s on the way down to get us out,’ she said, and tightened her grip on the neat piece of equipment as though it were a lifeline, realising that this one high-tech gadget might actually make what she was about to do just a little more bearab
le.

  ‘By the way…’ A sudden thought struck her as she was about to thread herself through the rough-edged gap in the rocks. ‘Make sure you tell your team to take it slowly as they come along the adit. Part way along, one of the roof supports is hanging down. I hit it on my way in the first time, but I’m short enough not to have knocked myself out on it. Your team mightn’t be so lucky. Then, just a bit further along, the ground drops away completely into a series of steep, ragged-edged steps. Apparently, it’s called a stope, and if you’re not expecting it…’

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ he said with a wintry smile. ‘We’ve actually got a contact from the Camborne School of Mines tracking down underground maps of the area. We were worried that we might have to find another way in if the entrance kept crumbling, but we’ve got the temporary shoring in place now, and it seems to be holding. In fact, we’re hoping to have you all out before anyone at Camborne has the time come up with the goods.’ He paused a moment and gave his head a single shake. ‘I still don’t approve of what you’re doing, but…good luck.’

  ‘Thank you…and thanks for this, too,’ she said holding up the radio, then threw him a distracted smile, suddenly aware how quickly time was passing. It was totally dark now, and she had absolutely no idea how long ago it had been since she and Mike had driven into the field in their ambulance.

  More to the point, how long had it been since she’d left Jem down there with Tel? However long it was, she knew it would feel a thousand times longer to a young boy, no matter how brave he was.

  Adam was waiting patiently to help her climb back into the awful blackness and the fact that his was going to be the last face she saw was the only thing that gave her courage when her claustrophobia once more tightened its grip on her throat.