‘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 great 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 through out 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 here after, 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 second-guess 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 half-demented 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, over whelmed 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, some times 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 event-filled 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.’
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.
The Doctor's Bride by Sunrise Page 14
