Doug, looking down at Lindy standing unhappily below, said doubtfully, 'Well, I don't know — it could get a bit iffy—'
Andrea followed his gaze, then said contemptuously, `Oh, if Lindy doesn't fancy it she can just wait here, can't she?'
Wait alone here, in this sinister temple to who knew what dark deity, with the shadows encroaching on her as the light from the others' lamps disappeared behind the Cataract?
`No, no, I'm coming,' Lindy said hastily.
`Fine, why not?' Ally's tone was a little too hearty, but Doug came down to help her — well, haul her up as she scrabbled awkwardly for footholds.
Once she was up, in fact, it was straightforward enough and the passage which yawned darkly ahead was wider than the one they had come in by. At its mouth Doug paused.
`Now look, we haven't checked this out. Caving can be seriously unpredictable, so don't crowd us, right? And remember what I told you at the start — mind your head, don't get left behind, and don't under any circumstances wander off the main drag, even if you see the Taj Mahal in calcite ten yards down a side passage. OK?'
Lindy was all too ready to promise, and Andrea nodded solemnly. They set off in single file, Ally leading.
They had to splash along through a shallow stream, but otherwise the going was easy. Here and there another opening gave a glimpse of labyrinthine passages, created millennia before, when the rushing waters which had hollowed them out fell again in some later subterranean convulsion. Once Doug shone his torch into a crevice and a miniature cave sprang briefly to light, a tiny fairy cave with pink crystals forming a little forest of stumpy stalagmites. Lindy almost enjoyed that.
`Just think,' Andrea said, 'we could be the first people ever to see that. It's sort of weird, isn't it?'
`Maybe,' Doug said, 'but you can bet people will have gone behind the Cataract before. You more or less have to dive nowadays to find virgin territory.'
The tunnel was getting smaller now, both lower and narrower. Lindy swallowed hard, trying not to think of suffocation and entombment, but even so when Ally stopped suddenly her heart missed a beat.
Ahead, in the light of his miner's lamp, they could see that the floor, which had been sloping gently, started to shelve more steeply and the roof dipped dramatically down. The little rivulets at their feet were running faster now and a loose stone from above, disturbed by their passing, bounced down and clattered on Ally's helmet.
He lowered his voice. 'It looks as if it might be going into a shaft. Doug, you'd better take the girls back while I check to see if it might be worth a proper expedition with ropes. Don't go singing rugby songs at the top of your voice, will you — I don't fancy being under a roof-fall.'
With a wistful glance Doug turned back obediently, shepherding Andrea and Lindy in front of him. Lindy was thankful to turn back; she was shivering now, only partly with cold.
It was even colder when they stopped moving. Neither Lindy nor Andrea had the purpose-made protective clothing the men wore, and now Andrea, annoyed at being sent back, started shivering ostentatiously.
`It's too cold to stand still,' she complained. 'Can't we explore here, just a little bit, while we're waiting?'
`We-e-ell.' Doug hesitated, looking back down the tunnel to where he could still see the light from Ally's lamp receding. 'Oh, he'll be a minute or two yet. I saw a cross-passage just along here, and if we stay in sight of the main passage we won't miss him when he comes back. Lead on, Lindy — maybe we'll find the Taj Mahal after all.'
Stamping to try to bring some feeling back into her numb toes, Lindy walked back to where the passages met, not far from the fairy cave. The other rose sharply, at right angles to the one they were in, and she could see that only a little further on there was a fork.
`In here?'
`Yes, why not? It won't do any harm to sus out this one as well, if we're going to come along here another time.'
At least, at least, he wasn't suggesting they should follow it now, so once Ally rejoined them, surely they would head back. With her spirits lifting just a little, Lindy led the way, her head bent to let the light from her borrowed helmet illuminate the uneven footing. At the fork, she paused.
`Which way?'
Doug peered into both, then considered. 'I don't think the right-hand one goes anywhere, from the feel of the air. Stick your head in there, Lindy, and make sure, and I'll go on a little further down the other one.'
Andrea promptly attached herself to him, and Lindy unwillingly walked a little way into the right-hand opening. She couldn't say she was afraid when she didn't even know herself what she was afraid of.
This hardly seemed more than a deep crevice, with projections and rock buttresses making it narrow, though it was high overhead when she looked up. As Doug had said, the air was very still and without the draughts it wasn't quite so cold. When she looked straight ahead the light from her lamp seemed to bounce off a solid wall of rock.
`I think it's a dead end,' she called, as much for the reassurance of hearing another voice reply as to share information.
`Fine. Come round here, then,' Doug called back. `There's a nice calcite flow you might like to see.'
She turned. The beam from her head light swung in a low arc, picking up a glimpse of something white, down near the ground behind a projecting rock. Stalagmites, perhaps?
She swung back. No, not stalagmites. There seemed to be some rags in the corner there, and—
The terror she had been fighting engulfed her. Her screams, in that confined place, produced echoes which crashed endlessly about her, terrifying her still more with their amplification. Her hands hiding her face in horror, she stumbled blindly out, blundering into Doug who grabbed at her.
`What's happened? What's the matter? Lindy, stop it! You're all right!'
He shook her, but somehow she couldn't make herself stop. Andrea, coming up behind and pale with alarm herself, took in the situation and slapped her face hard. The shock silenced her; Lindy stopped screaming and subsided into hysterical sobs.
Ally's voice came from the outer passage. 'What the hell's going on? Is it Lindy? She could have started a roof-fall, the silly cow.'
Doug had his arm round Lindy's heaving shoulders. `Panic attack,' he said briefly. 'It's OK, Lindy — it affects some people that way. You should have told us you were feeling bad.'
Lindy shook her head vehemently. 'No, no!' she gasped between sobs. 'There, there!'
The beams from the powerful lamps converged as their heads turned to follow her pointing finger, giving a harsh theatricality to the scene.
Lying in the corner formed by the rough buttress, still clad in rags stiff with dirt, still with a pair of rotting sandals grotesquely clinging to its bony feet, its skull empty-eyed and grinning hideously, was a human skeleton.
They did not pause to take in details, did not even speak. With one accord, like the frightened children they so nearly were, they turned and fled.
On the day after Lindy's ordeal, Juliette Darke was lying on a rug in the orchard of her grandmother's house in Ambys, near Limoges, feeling the heat of the sun soak into her, gently loosening all the knots of tension. Already her olive skin — sallow under the cool northern skies — was turning gold.
Overhead, the dappled shade of the apple trees cast patterns of shadow on her half-closed eyelids, though in the still heaviness of the Sunday afternoon the leaves were barely moving and even the crickets' grating cry seemed muted.
In the dark interior of the shuttered house she could hear the sounds of Grandmère stamping about her kitchen, swearing at the cat and the stove, clattering pots and plates, as she assembled her speciality, Civet de Lapin au thym, for the family meal this evening. Everyone would be there, Elise Daubigny's wiry black hair was showing signs of grey and her small bony frame had started shrinking but her will was as strong as ever and not one of her large sons would have had the courage to defy a maternal edict. Altogether there would be twenty-three people of three generations gat
hered in Juliette's honour around the long table on the terrace, spread already with a starched tablecloth so white that looking at it in the strong sunlight was almost painful.
The dark little mews house in London which had insidiously become Juliette's prison seemed strangely insubstantial in her mind, like a nightmare from which she had drifted back into this comfortable, drowsy state.
I've left him for ever, she said to herself, shaping the words with her lips as if to reassure herself that this, at least, was no dream. It's all over. I've escaped.
She had planned it with infinite care, so that he could have no suspicion. She had packed an item at a time, always with an excuse ready to explain if need be why she should be going into the cupboard where the suitcases were kept.
Then, when he had gone to his weekly meeting at the headquarters of the computer company which employed him to work from home, she had broken a window, hoisted her luggage through it and fled. She had left no note; he would be able to see what she had done on the surveillance cameras when he came home. She had been icily calm until she reached the airport; then she had started shaking so much that she couldn't hold the medicinal glass of brandy she had prescribed for herself.
‘Tu ne lui as pas dit?' Elise Daubigny had said, her thick black brows shooting up almost to her hairline, when her granddaughter explained briefly the reason for her sudden visit. 'You haven't told him?'
She was astonished, but so pleased that for once in her outspoken life she didn't say too much. She nursed a consuming hatred for the English who in the name of freedom had destroyed her native city of Limoges and killed her parents, and it pained her to think that Juliette, her favourite among the grandchildren (largely because she didn't see her often enough to notice the flaws she regularly pinpointed in the others) was making the same mistake as her mother in marrying one of the swine. And Juliette was very like her mother, with the same creamy olive skin, oval face and delicate features; if her eyes had been brown instead of dark blue, she would have been Marguerite all over again.
Elise's mouth still twisted with bitterness when she thought of Marguerite, the precious only daughter in a family of boys, who had defied her widowed mother by going to work in England, been fool enough to marry a perfidious Englishman with blue eyes like Juliette's, and had come home sick and heart-broken — as Elise had bluntly warned her that she would — only to die.
That was fifteen years ago, and Marguerite's memorials were a plaque in the family vault and this child who, apart from her eyes, had little that was English about her appearance. She was pretty like her mother, and foolish like her mother too, courting inevitable disaster with an English husband when there were honest Frenchmen like her third cousin Valery — Elise liked to keep marriages within the extended family — who had only taken plump, stolid Anne-Marie when it was clear he couldn't have Juliette.
It was three years since she had last seen Juliette, and it was all too clear what that marriage had done to her. The sparkle had gone; she was nervous, too thin, and sorely in need of good food and good wine and the soothing village tranquillity in which Ambys had basked for the past six hundred years.
`If you had not left him, he would have killed you. They are all murderers, these English. Like your father,' she said mercilessly. 'Here in France you will recover.'
So Elise, who was up every morning by half-past six, and who disapproved of sunbathing, or indeed almost any form of leisure apart from sitting down outside the front door in the cool of the evening and commenting acidly on the antics of one's neighbours, had left la petite to sleep late this morning, and spread the rug under the tree herself so that Juliette could rest after a proper nourishing lunch of Elise's good soup, bread from M. Moreau's bakery and the cheese that Mme. Bouchet made herself with milk from her little herd of goats.
Banished from the kitchen, Juliette lay in the orchard with her eyes half-closed and thought about the past and the future.
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Mourning the Little Dead Page 26
