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 be ha vi our 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 des per ate 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 safe keeping.
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, Ma
ggie?’ 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 in finitely 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 in finitely easier if she had been. The death she was facing could take many days before she finally succumbed to dehydration and starvation.
‘Maggie 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 black mailed 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.
The message relayed down to him just a few minutes ago was that Tel was in Theatre, already undergoing cranial surgery for the removal of a blood clot and, hopefully, the repair of the injury that had cause it.
Previous experience of similar cases told Adam that the boy would probably spend several days in Intensive Care in an induced coma while they waited for the swelling to go down. Only when his condition stabilised would they withdraw the drugs and wait to see if he regained consciousness; only then would anyone be able to judge how much permanent damage had been done by his fall.
The other injured youngster—Adam thought Maggie had called him Chris—would require some delicate jigsaw work to realign the broken bones in the back of his hand, but while his rehab would probably be long and painful if he was to regain his full range of motion, it was a far from life-threatening injury.
As for the rest of them, apart from a few nightmares to come about being stuck underground in the dark, they seemed to have escaped scot-free.
And, of course, the thought of the boys suffering from nightmares took him right back to Maggie and the terrible price she was having to pay, and the only thing he could do was play the whole situation over and over inside his head, wishing he could go back and do just one thing differently.
The trouble was, how far back would that train of thought take him? To the conversation at the entrance of the adit, when he’d coerced her into going into the mine against all her instincts? To a year earlier and the events of that meeting in London and the first time he’d persuaded her to put herself in danger? Or should he go all the way back nearly a decade to his failure to return to Penhally when he had been drawn back so strongly?
He needed to talk to her about all those things, to explain the what, the why and the where fore of each of them, but most of all he needed to take away the look of distrust in her eyes that had been there ever since she’d seen the photo on his bedside cabinet.
He sighed heavily at that memory and hoped that he would have a chance to tell Maggie about Caroline, cool, beautiful, elegant Caroline who, like every other woman he’d dated after he’d left Penhally, had been as unlike dark-haired elfin Maggie Pascoe as
it was possible to be.
Except he hadn’t realised that was what he’d been doing until he’d seen her again, sitting at the front of the lecture theatre when he’d walked in to substitute for his sick colleague.
He hadn’t been able to believe his eyes when he’d realised who she was, and from the wide-eyed expression on her face, she’d been equally surprised…and delighted?
It had been hard to concentrate on that first lecture when all he’d been able to think about had been that there would be a coffee-break coming up in an hour and a half and he would be able to speak to her for the first time since she’d been sixteen.
Oh, he’d seen her in the interim, briefly when he’d returned to be at his mother’s side while they’d waited to hear news of his father. It had been small consolation to either of them to learn that he had died a hero, helping to save the lives of the group of children who had been cut off by the tide that summer evening.
And so, after the memorial service in the church overlooking a deceptively tranquil sea, he’d helped his mother to pack up their lives and move across the country to be near the rest of her family while he’d returned to medical school—returned with an image of the commiseration he’d seen in Maggie’s beautiful hazel eyes to console him and a determination that one day he would return to Penhally to find the woman she’d become.
‘Adam?’ said a hesitant voice, and all the hairs went up on the back of his neck.
‘Maggie?’ he said, horribly aware that almost everybody around him had frozen in position at the knowledge that the woman they were toiling to rescue had chosen to contact him again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a voice that was far huskier than usual, probably as a result of the tears she’d been shedding in the silence of her isolation. She might think that she’d hidden the fact that she had been close to breaking point and had needed time to herself, but he’d known. The only thing he hadn’t been certain of had been whether she would turn the radio on again or whether she had seen her withdrawal as permanent.
The Doctor's Bride by Sunrise Page 9
