The Sleeper
Page 29
Hilary wouldn’t know that she was just a blur to him, thought Ashby. Karen, however, would. ‘Liebling,’ he said, ‘are the rocks up there tightly jammed together? If so, we are going to need a pry bar.’
Beck shone the light up above them, Ashby reaching to feel how tightly packed the rocks were. ‘I left a drill steel below us,’ he said.
‘Get it,’ replied Beck.
Would there be enough time? ‘I’ll need the light.’
Again those sounds came up to them, a grinding, a popping, a distant screeching and sighing of what must be wood on wood … ‘I’ve matches and a candle stub,’ said Hilary, ‘but am not sure the matches will be of any use. The tin box is in the right pocket of my trousers, the candle also.’ Were they all to die in an instant run to grass*, a cave-in that reached right to the surface?
Ash came near, she immediately realizing that he couldn’t see a blessed thing clearly. Catching him by the hand, she let him feel the rope that bound her wrists, then guided his hand to that pocket. ‘Now hold me,’ she said. ‘Let me feel you’re really with us.’
And raising her arms, let him slip his head between them, her cheek now pressed to his, he firmly pulling her against himself, the ground below them stirring.
Parting, she looked steadily at him before whispering, ‘Tu vas à gauche, je vais à droite.’
‘What was that you said?’ demanded Beck.
‘Only that …’
Deep within the mine something more gave way, Beck telling them to hurry. As timber after timber failed, the ground underfoot began to stir, and all at once the fissure above them emptied to reveal the light of day perhaps a good twenty to thirty feet away, but with ledges here and there that the jointing and the sheeting had caused.
Grabbing Karen, Ashby boosted her up and told her to climb out and run as fast as she could away from them. ‘Don’t look back. Just run, my darling. Try to tell anyone you meet that there’s going to be a cave-in.’
Again and again the sounds of yielding timbers came up to them from far below as Beck lifted his gun and shone the light fully at Hilary, she darting to the right and yanking on the rope as Ashby darted to the left, the gun going off, the torch falling. Grabbing something—anything—Ashby brought it down hard, tearing Beck’s left cheek open, Hilary flipping the rope over the German and yanking on it.
Falling back, blinded by blood, Beck shrieked at them, Ashby silencing him with a rock.
‘Now you first,’ he said, cutting the rope, ‘and then myself, but do you always buy up old mines?’
‘Never again.’
They climbed and ran. They had to. Hand in hand, Karen saw them getting closer and closer to herself, the land behind them suddenly falling in with a terrible roar as clouds of dust rose up.
Wetherby Cottage was perfect for writing, thought Hilary. It was now late in November and, having a new group of students to teach, Ash was as happy and busy as ever, Karen happy, too, and off at a school of her own nearby. The mine had been sealed, for Herr Beck had also died in the cave-in that had destroyed forever all evidence of that early mining. All, that is, but the bronze fibula, the cloak pin she had found on the floor of that cave.
Green with verdigris, its design was of a racing stallion whose back and hindquarters gracefully curved round and along to the hinge upon which the pin could open and close.
Holding it, feeling it, living that far deeper past yet trying hard not to, Hilary looked out of the bay window of her study. Even though overgrown and still needing heaps of attention, the garden was lovely.
Mrs. Mary Anne Livingston’s body had been recovered, and sad though it had been, the funeral attended. Ash’s wife had been killed by someone as yet unknown, her body sent home to her father, and though Karen and he would always think of her, and he of Daisy Belamy, the past did seem over, except in the novel that had yet to get anywhere. ‘I’ve too much of the truth,’ she said softly to herself. ‘What I now know only intrudes.’
Although the threat of war was ever close, MI6 and MI5 had gone their ways, the latter focusing far harder here at home on the German threat, though she would never be a part of either, for Ash had given Karen and herself something to think about, and in another few months her days and nights would be filled.
‘It’s twins,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m sure it is, and so is Karen.’
Taking up the fibula again, she shut her eyes as she ran a thumb over it. Cornwall was always casting up its history, and she had to wonder if in that far-distant past of Celts and quoits and standing stones, a miner hadn’t come all the way from Hallstatt after the salt mines there had been buried. Viewed with suspicion, he would have had to go before each of the kings of Dumnonia. Which of them had he convinced that the tin might also be taken right from the granite? Had he proved it to a council of tribal elders, the chief Druid looking suspiciously on and scheming how best to make use of the knowledge?
When Ashby found her, she was as though a thousand miles away and he knew it would be best to leave her at it.
‘Let’s give our Pin a darned good walk,’ he said to Karen, she to hug the golden retriever as she always did when just home from school, but when they passed the MG, she told the dog to jump in.
‘Daddy, I’ll drive,’ she said, and though it was now quite dark and she had driven at night only once before, he handed her the keys, but said, ‘Just down the lane. When we get to the bridge, we’ll park and take a walk by the pub, and from the door you can say hi to Mr. Banfield and old George. They’d both like that.’
On 9–10 November, the world had awakened to Kristallnacht, and on 24 November, Poland had begun to mobilize. Ashby knew that war would soon happen and that he should take Hilary and Karen to the States, but with the baby coming and Karen nicely settled, he also knew that none of them would want to leave. Besides, along with the school, there were the boys, and they would need him more than ever.
* Sedgemoor, site of the defeat, in 1685, of the Duke of Monmouth
* A cave-in that reached right to the surface
About the Author
J. Robert Janes is a mystery author best known for writing historical thrillers. Born in Toronto, he holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author. In 1992, Janes published Mayhem, the first in the long-running St-Cyr and Kohler series—police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France. The sixteenth in the series, Clandestine, was published in 2015.
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Copyright © 2015 by J. Robert Janes
Cover design by Madeline Clark
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