Page 76 of The Cornish Inheritance

Hitching up her skirts, she scrambled up the rocks and inserted her head and shoulders into the hole. The tunnel on the far side looked much the same as the first. But what if she got stuck? She probably had wider hips than Nat, being a girl, and he’d looked a tight fit.

She kicked out with her legs, to the sound of fabric ripping, wriggled as fast as she could, mainly out of rising panic, and she was through, an easier fit than Nat had been with his wide shoulders. He helped her to her feet on the other side and, for just a moment, they stood gazing into one another’s eyes. If she looked anything like he did, with his dirt smeared face and clothes, then not even her own mother would recognize her in the street.

“Onward,” Nat said, and set off along the tunnel. Adit.

Caroline, holding tight to his coat tails, struggled along behind him, only now she had something more to think about than how frightened she was. No, terrified. Now she had that kiss to think of. And how much she’d liked it. Had he meant it as more than a means of shutting her up? Had it made him feel the way it had her? Did she want him to do it again? Yes, she did. She wanted to feel that glorious shiver run through her body, so strong it had pushed aside her terror. She hugged the feeling to herself like a comforting blanket as she trudged along the tunnel. Adit.

After a bit, a thought broke through her ruminations on that kiss, and she tugged Nat’s coat to get him to halt. “Do you have your pocket watch? We need to know how much time we have left before the tide cuts us off.” Saying it out loud, although she’d been thinking it for a while, somehow made the reality of what might happen to them much more real. If only she hadn’t said it.

He frowned. “I came out in too much of a hurry. I’d say we might have to abandon any idea of going back to the beach and make our way up to the Wheal Jenny workings instead. This adit should connect to them still, if we’re lucky, and it hasn’t been completely blocked by another fall of rocks. I think we’re probably safe here from the sea. We’ve climbed for long enough that we should be well above high tide level, but we can’t go back that way unless we wait for the tide to go back out again, which won’t be until late evening.”

Small comfort. At least the threat of drowning like rats in a drain had retreated.

Caroline heaved in a lungful of the damp air. “Yves!”

She listened hard. Nothing. Or was that the faintest sound? It could have been dripping water, a falling stone… anything.

“Yves!” Nat called, his voice louder and stronger than hers.

Another faint sound.

Nat’s eyes lit up. “Did you hear that?”

“Was it an echo?”

“No. I don’t think it was. Come on.”

They hurried now, their boots scraping the rocks, their light bouncing around the low roof of the tunnel. Water ran down walls, stained here and there with the blue of more copper. If Yves had been this way, he’d have liked that.

Nat halted, his finger to his lips. They both listened.

Nothing.

“Yves!” Caroline shouted.

“Caroline!” His voice carried faint but clear through the echoing tunnels. “Help!”

“Yves! We’re coming. Hang on.”

Nat sped up, with Caroline stumbling along behind him in near darkness, expecting at any moment to fall flat on her face but, for once, her terror ignored.

“Caroline!” Yves’s voice grew louder, but high with fear.

Nat came to such a sudden halt that Caroline crashed into him. She steadied herself and squeezed past him. The inky surface of water twelve feet across reflected in the candlelight, nearly filling the tunnel floor from wall to wall. A good three feet below them, Yves’s small, pale face stared up from water that covered him to his neck, his hands clinging limpet-like to the rocky wall of the water-filled shaft he must have fallen into. He hadn’t been able to get out because the water level was too low.

“Caroline,” he whimpered, and one hand came away from the rock as he reached toward her.

“Hold on,” she cried, throwing herself down onto her front and reaching for his hand. “I’m here.”

But she couldn’t reach him and his remaining hand was slipping.

Nat dropped with a thud to the wet ground beside her and reached his longer arm for Yves’s hand, automatically using the right one. She saw his fingers close around Yves’s wrist and he heaved, his face contorted in a grimace of pain. Yves’s other hand slipped off its precarious grip on the rock, and, for a moment, all the boy’s weight hung from Nat’s right hand. Caroline stretched for him, their fingers touching as Nat gave a grunt of pain.

With a concerted heave, Nat pulled Yves partly out of the water and Caroline managed to snare his other hand, gripping him as tightly as she could. Together, they dragged the little boy further out of what had been going to be his watery grave. Nat’s other hand closed around Yves’s arm and the boy slid up over the side of the shaft to lie beached on the tunnel floor.

Caroline gathered him into her arms, holding his freezing body against her.

He might have been nine years old and a brave adventurer like his hero Robinson Crusoe, but he burst into tears, his whole body shaking violently.