She wanted Tom. She wanted him physically with a need so great it stunned her, but she also wanted more. She wanted to spend more than these few stolen hours in his arms. She wanted to wake up beside him in the morning, to bear his children, to grow old alongside of him. God help her, she’d done exactly what she’d vowed not to do.
In spite of all her resolutions to the contrary, Zelda realized that she’d fallen in love with Tom Chapman. She was embarrassed and ashamed of herself for backing him into a corner the way she had, but she couldn’t help herself. Some demon insisted that if she pushed hard enough, he’d admit that he loved her too, that he wanted nothing more than to spend his life with her.
You are such a fool, Griselda Ralston. Just like he said, he’s never misled you. You knew from the beginning that he was planning to leave. So why does it tear you apart now to hear him reaffirm it?
It was just before noon the following day when the mine whistles blew, the special signal that meant there’d been an accident at the mine.
Zelda was in her cellar darkroom, enlarging the negatives from a set of photographs she’d taken the week before, and at the first ominous whistle, her heart seemed to stop beating.
Virgil, against the doctor’s orders and Zelda’s frantic protests, had returned to the mine, but he was on the night shift and still asleep upstairs.
Tom.
Tom was in the mine right now.
A Distant Echo: Chapter Twenty-One
She’d watched from the tiny window in her attic room as he had left for work in the early dawn, his canvas lunch bag over his shoulder. He’d sensed her eyes on him and had turned to give her a jaunty wave, their quarrel forgotten.
God, oh, please, God, no, not Tom. Terror held her immobile.
“Zelda? Zel, where are you, lass?” Virgil’s urgent voice broke the spell. She dropped the negatives she still clutched and raced up the narrow stairs to the kitchen where Virgil, clothing tugged on any which way, was already shoving his feet into boots. “Trouble up at the mine,” he said. Their eyes met, and in her father’s blue gaze Zelda saw a reflection of her own fear.
“C’mon, lass, let’s see what’s going on.”
Out on the street, it seemed as if the entire town was running, just as they were, for the mine entrance. White-faced women, their aprons still on, carrying babies over their shoulders and dragging toddlers along by the arm. Men like Virgil who’d been sleeping after their night shift, staggering out of their houses, wild-eyed and rumpled. In everyone’s faces Zelda read the same awful dread that made her heart hammer and her lungs feel as if she couldn’t draw enough breath.
There was already a sizeable crowd gathered near the mine entrance, and it was impossible to sort out fact from fiction.
There’d been a cave-in, some said, or an explosion, no one knew for sure which. Miners were trapped. No one could say how many. Estimates ranged from four to two dozen. A rescue team had been sent in, but so far no one had come back out.
All that they could do was wait and pray.
Tom was working alone on a coalface inside a narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel. There was barely room to swing his pick, and for some time he’d been working on his knees, wearing kneepads he’d devised for the purpose. Sweat trickled down his forehead, and he stopped once to tie a bandanna around his head to keep it from running into his eyes.
His partners, Joe and Augusto - Torro - had proven to be fine men to work with. They were inordinately proud of their ability to mine more coal in one shift than most other miners could in two, and Tom had earned their respect by working just as hard as either of them.
Just now they were in a larger chamber some distance away. They’d set a dynamite blast a short while before. Tom could hear them joshing one another in their native Italian. At intervals, Torro would break into song, his rich tenor echoing eerily through the caverns of the mine. Often they’d laugh uproariously at a shared joke.
They were easy men to get along with, always good-natured. They’d labeled him Tomasso, generously offering delicacies their wives had baked, always politely speaking English when he was nearby. But Tom was well aware of the powerful and private bond not only of language, but of deep comradeship. He understood, because it was the same bond he shared with Jackson.
There in the bowels of the mine, he missed Jackson badly. The dirty, mind-numbing labor would have somehow been easier if Jackson shared it, but, of course, he didn’t wish his friend were there. He wouldn’t wish this job on his worst enemy.
Tom raised the pick and took another vicious swing at the coalface, bringing a satisfying amount of black boulders raining down around him. Like the rest of the miners, he’d developed a sense for what were the natural sounds of the mine: the groaning of timbers; the routine series of whistles and warning sounds that accompanied the blasting that loosened the coal so it could be worked; the rumble of the coal cars along the tracks; the welcome echo of the voices of his fellow miners; and the continual, maddening trickle of water.
When the rumbling began, it came more as a sensation than a sound, a peculiar tingling in his hands and feet, and Tom stopped in mid-swing, alert and alarmed by the feeling. In another second, it escalated into a roar, and pieces of coal began to tumble down all around him. The floor shook and the walls of the cavern seemed to vibrate. Mercifully, his lamp stayed lit, and after an endless moment, the noise stopped abruptly.
Tom, his hands trembling and every cell in his body anticipating the entire low roof tumbling down on him any second, dropped his pick. He began to scrabble toward the main tunnel that would give him access to the chamber where his partners were.
“Joe? Torro?” Tom hollered as loud as he could. He listened, but there was no response.
In another minute, he reached the larger opening of the tunnel. Normally, he could have stood upright there, but the roof and floor had mysteriously become closer together. The timbers that supported the roof groaned and cracked ominously as he moved along, crablike, to the mouth of the larger chamber where his partners had been.
His feeble light barely penetrated the dimness, but it was immediately evident that a large portion of the roof had caved in.
Unspeakable horror filled him. Dust rose in a choking cloud, and even as he crouched there, another one of the timbers crumbled and toppled, releasing a small landslide of debris into the already littered area.
“Joe? Where the hell are you?” His lamp wasn’t bright enough to reveal the entire chamber, and at first, he couldn’t find any sign of either of the men. Horror and slippery fear twisted in his gut, and his first instinct was towards survival.
Run! Run, toward the daylight, the fresh air…
Instead, he crawled into the scant four feet of space that was all that was left between the collapsed roof and the jumble of coal and rock. “Joe? Torro?”
This time, a muffled groan came, and Tom scrabbled towards the sound.
Joe lay trapped beneath a timber, half-buried under chunks of coal. He turned an agonized face toward Tom’s light.
Tom put his shoulder to the timber, straining with every ounce of muscle in his body to move it, but it didn’t budge an inch.
“Leave me, leave me. Go to Torro. He’s buried under there –” Joe’s eyes indicated a pile of rubble some yards away. “He can’t breathe under there.”
Tom crawled over frantically. Augusto’s arm and one shoulder were above the rock, but the rest of him was buried. Tom had barely begun to free him when another tremor shook the rocks beneath him, and like an accordion, the distance between floor and roof lessened once again.
Joe began to pray in Italian, and Tom cursed in a steady stream, more frightened than he’d ever been. He fully expected the narrow passageway to close completely, trapping them all forever beneath tons of rock. But after an endless moment, the mountain seemed to stabilize once more.
On all fours, with his back pressed against the roof, Tom dug as he’d never dug before. Throwing debris aside, he freed Augusto’s
head and shoulders, frantically trying to ascertain whether the other man was breathing.
He wasn’t.
With a last, herculean effort, Tom managed to get him entirely out from under the rock. Cramped in the narrow space, he clumsily turned Augusto from his stomach onto his back, clearing his mouth, checking for a pulse.
None. No sign of life. His forearm was obviously broken, and beneath the coal dust, his face was already purple. As well as he could in the limited space, Tom began the Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation techniques he’d been taught in the armed forces. Breath into Augusto’s mouth, pressing on his chest, he counted one, two, three, four. Augusto’s mouth tasted of garlic and coal dust.
Breathe, damn you, breathe - five, six…you’re strong like a bull, Torro, now breathe…You’ve got four little kids at home, you have to breathe - breathe. Press, three, four, five.
Tom kept hitting his head on the roof, feeling the coal dust filter down his neck and back, into his eyes, his nostrils, and throat.
Dimly, he heard the welcome sound of other miner’s voices, and he was aware that several men had crawled into the chamber and were frantically heaving at the timber that held Joe pinned. There was noise, a lot of it, wood cracking, men swearing and panting, “He’s free, careful now, drag him out –”
“Gotta get out, she’s gonna go again –”
Two men crawled over and said something to him, but Tom couldn’t answer. He was blowing his very life into Augusto’s inert body.
He could hear Joe frantically calling Augusto’s name, and then the sound gradually faded, and the men beside him scuttled away.
Tom maintained the rhythm, breathing, counting out loud, “Three, four, five, six…”
“Leave off, lad, he’s dead. We’ve got to get out of here. The roof’s going any second!” Close at his elbow, Tom heard the Welsh voice of Smiley Williams, filled with urgency, but he was so intent on what he was doing he couldn’t answer.
“Tom, lad, he’s a goner I say. Leave off now. We’ve got to get out of here quick. No telling when she’ll go again –”
Smiley’s hand was on his arm, trying to pull him away, but Tom shrugged him off, leaning over to cup Augusto’s cheeks and breathe into his lungs.
All of a sudden, Augusto’s limp body jerked spasmodically, and he drew in a ragged breath and then another, and moaned. Sweat was dripping off Tom, oozing from every pore. He was panting as if he’d run a marathon, and he knew he was grinning like a fool.
“Son of a gun, he’s breathing, Smiley. Torro’s breathing. Let’s get him out of here. His arm’s broken. I’ll try to steady it. See if you can get hold of his belt.”
Hauling Augusto’s inert body between them, they somehow wormed their way backwards to the opening where others were waiting, eager to help.
The small group of men had barely gotten Augusto’s inert form out of the area when an ominous rumble sounded and the floor beneath their feet shook.
They cursed and scrambled along as fast as they could. When at last they felt relatively safe, Smiley gasped, “That’ll be the rest of the roof comin’ loose back there. We made it just in time. You don’t half-cut things tight, do you, Tom, lad?”
Smiley’s white teeth glimmered in a smile, and he shook his head. “Never saw the likes of that before. I’ve seen dead men, but I never saw one come back to life the way this one did.”
When they reached the main tunnel, Tom used his own belt to stabilize Augusto’s broken arm. He watched as the man was loaded on a stretcher and covered with a blanket, then placed on a coal car. The pit pony started off at a trot. A few hundred yards down the main tunnel Doctor Malcolmson was waiting with his medical bag ready.
“Doc, you tell that tough Eytie he’s got Tom Chapman to thank when he comes around,” Smiley declared in a loud voice. “Tom here put his mouth right over Augusto’s and breathed into him, and damned if he didn’t come back from the dead. Never saw the likes of it.”
“What exactly happened?” The rotund doctor was puffing to keep up with the mine care and the stretcher.
“He stopped breathing for a time. There was no pulse,” Tom reported. “I performed CPR and he’s breathing again, but I have no idea how long it was before respiration began. It seemed an eternity. He may well have brain damage.”
“You a medical man, son?”
The doctor’s light shone full onto Tom’s face and he shook his head. “No, I just have basic first-aid training.”
“Whatever you did undoubtedly saved this man’s life. Very commendable.”
Together, the band of miners and the group of rescuers who’d come into the mine made their way quickly to the entrance. They faltered a moment when they caught sight of the crowd assembled behind a barricade the North West Mounted police had erected.
A huge cheer went up, and weeping women broke through the barricade and came running to embrace their black-faced men.
The sunlight blinded Tom. He turned his face up to it. He’d never realized before that sunlight had a taste, the delicious taste of freedom. He stopped and drew in a deep draught of fresh air and coughed up coal dust from deep in his lungs. He was shivering in the aftermath of the accident, relieved beyond belief to be out of the mountain.
He skirted the family groups, making his way to the lamp-house to turn in his light and collect his check.
“Tom. Oh, Tom, thank God you’re all right.” Zelda took him by surprise, catapulting into his arms with such a force he staggered backwards several steps. Tom’s filthy arms closed around her, and he could fee her thin body trembling.
Close behind her was Virgil, his craggy face split into a grin. “Had a bit of excitement under there, did ya?” He clapped a scarred hand on Tom’s shoulder, his fingers digging in. “Glad you’re out safe, son.” There were tears in his blue eyes, and Zelda was weeping openly.
“Give me your lamp. I’ll turn it in for you.” Virgil reached over Zelda’s shoulder and deftly unhooked the contraption, bearing it proudly toward the lamp-man’s shack.
Zelda’s arms were tight around his neck.
For the first time in his life, Tom knew what it felt to be part of a family, and the feeling brought a suspicious tightness to his chest. He had to swallow hard against the hot wash of tears that threatened. He cleared his throat and smiled down at Zelda, holding her a little away from him, aware all of a sudden how filthy he was.
“Hey, Zel, you’re getting your pretty dress all dirty.” Tom tipped her face up with his blackened fingers, leaving dirt marks on her chin. “C’mon now, what’re you crying about? It was nothing at all, just a little bump.”
Tears were streaming down her cheeks and she sniffed and swiped at them with the back of her hand, giving him a ferocious look. “Don’t you lie to me, Tom. I’ve been around mines all my life. I heard what the other miners on your shift said. You stayed behind to help Mr. Rossi, and the roof very nearly caved in on you. They’re all saying you’re a hero, but I think you’re nothing but a---a damned pigheaded fool. You might have died in there.”
He’d never heard her swear before.
She wrapped her arms around his waist, oblivious to the oily coal dirt that had already embedded itself on her dress and her skin, oblivious as well to the smiling glances of neighbors who were watching.
She looked up at him, tears still pouring down her cheeks, her brown eyes locked on his. “I’m so glad you’re safe, because I love you, Tom Chapman,” she said in a fierce voice.
A Distant Echo: Chapter Twenty-Two
Tom and Zelda walked to the hospital that evening.
Tom was concerned about Augusto Rossi, plagued by visions of a coma or severe brain damage from the time the man had spent unconscious.
The hospital was small, and as they approached the men’s ward, he could hear a number of voices, male and female, rising and falling in a jumble of excited Italian and English.
Hesitantly, not knowing what to expect, he entered the small ward with Zelda, who clutched t
he bouquet of roses she’d cut from Virgil’s bushes.
Augusto and Joe were in adjoining beds, but it was impossible to catch more than a glimpse of either man. They were surrounded by visitors, and there were garden flowers, bottles of wine, and baskets of food strewn everywhere.
Joe had a gauze bandage covering one eye and a sling on his arm. But he waved his free hand exuberantly when he spotted Tom and said something emphatic in quick Italian.
Everyone turned around and stared at him and Zelda. Then a plump and very pretty young woman, barely five feet tall and obviously very pregnant, leapt up from her seat beside Augusto and came bustling over.
“Tomasso!” She flung her arms around his waist, drawing his head down so that she could plant a smacking kiss on each of his cheeks. “I am Maria Rossi,” she announced, holding his hands in each of hers and gazing up at him with dark, soulful eyes. “Never can I thank you enough for what you did for my Augusto.” She turned to Zelda with a warm smile. “You are Mrs. Tomasso?”
Zelda blushed and shook her head. Mrs. Rossi looked from Zelda to him and drew her own conclusions. “Ahhhhh, soon, soon. What is your name?”
Zelda told her and Maria took on of Zelda’s hands and one of his, drawing them over to the assembly.
“Come, come, meet everyone.”
Instantly, they were surrounded. It seemed that half the miners in town were gathered around the two beds. They were introduced, and everyone soon sorted out who Zelda was. Many of them knew Virgil, and because Frank was a small town, they’d undoubtedly heard of Zelda’s exploits, but, of course, no one mentioned them. Tom noticed, however, that she attracted a few long, curious looks.
To Tom’s immense relief, Augusto was awake. He had a badly broken arm, cracked ribs, and bruises to every square inch of his body, but he seemed to have suffered no mental problems from the accident.
Pale beneath the coal dirt the nurses hadn’t been able to remove completely, he was also groggy from the drugs the doctor had administered. He didn’t remember anything except the first rumble and fall of rock, but Joe and the other miners had told him in great detail what had occurred. He reached out a shaky hand and shook Tom’s, his strong face solemn.
Now and Forever: Time Travel Romance Superbundle Page 82
