Treachery (51 page)

Behind me, in the darkness, Nell gives a choking sob. ‘And I you,’ she croaks. ‘In another life—’

I make a gentle shushing sound, but it seems to me as if the noise comes from some other person. As the flames crackle the last few inches, I muster a final surge of energy and wrench my arms back, struggling with all my remaining strength against the rope that holds me to the pillar. I escaped Rowland Jenkes once; perhaps that gave me a false confidence, the belief that I could do it a second time. The rope bites into my flesh, rubbing it raw, but he has made it secure; I cannot save myself this time. Nell has taken up her prayers again. I think of the woman I did once love, and perhaps still do, far away; would she ever hear of my death, or care one way or another? Perhaps she is dead herself by now; I will never know.

The flame nearest me touches the powder around my feet and flares up; I writhe away as a sudden shock of heat scorches the left side of my body. There is no time to think; I pull my knees in, turn my face away from the flames and brace myself for the grand conflagration. In the thick darkness Nell screams, one long, piercing note, and the last thought that passes through my smoke-dazed mind is that at least the explosion will make that stop.

TWENTY-TWO

But the scream continues, boring through my skull, insistent and drawn out, until she runs out of breath and the note collapses into a protracted fit of coughing. I remain still, curled tight away from the kegs, every muscle tensed, awaiting the white-hot blast. After a long pause, I lift my head. Smoke grates against my throat, my eyes. There is nothing but blackness and the curtains of smoke. I let out a sudden, amazed bark of laughter.

‘Bruno?’

‘It didn’t happen,’ I say, jubilant. My own voice is harsh now from the fumes. ‘The powder must have been too damp. It didn’t take. Thank
God
.’ I almost mean it. I laugh aloud again, my eyes streaming with tears.

‘So – we are safe?’ she asks, her voice small and shaky.

‘Safe?’ My euphoria quickly subsides; we still have no way of freeing ourselves and there is precious little air in this undercroft. Already I can feel my head swimming from breathing in the smoke. And what of Jenkes and Doughty? They cannot be too far along the tunnel. They will be expecting an explosion; when it does not come, will they return and silence us some other way, or are they in too much of a hurry to escape? ‘We are in better shape than we would have been if these barrels had ignited, that much is certain,’ I say.

‘I feel dizzy,’ she says. ‘My throat hurts.’

‘Take short breaths. We’re going to get out soon,’ I say, trying to sound convincing. ‘Can you move your hands at all?’ Unlike me, her hands are bound in front; she has a better chance of wriggling free. My throat is also scorched and my mouth dry and cracked; I would give anything for a sip of water. Drake’s men will come eventually when they realise that no one has left the island, but they might wait hours, by which time we could have been poisoned by the smoke, or slaughtered like animals by Jenkes and Doughty, if they return.

‘I can move them a little.’ Her voice floats, disembodied, through the darkness. ‘But I haven’t the strength.’

‘Try,’ I say, with more force than I intend. ‘If you can free your hands, you can untie us. It’s our only chance – they have bound me too tight to move.’

She does not reply. I am afraid she has passed out, until I hear a scuffling noise, accompanied by a series of grunts and hard breathing, the sound of exertion. After a few moments she gives a sharp cry that might be pain or triumph, or both.

‘I have one hand free!’ she exclaims.

‘Quick, then – untie us.’

There is a longer delay; she must first free her other hand, then find the knots that hold the rope binding us to the pillar. I curse again the loss of my knife. I listen to her scrabbling fingers, biting my tongue against my impatience, reminding myself of all she has been through. I make reassuring noises as she swears an oath, then half-sobs in frustration; when at last she falls still, I fear she has given up or collapsed, until I feel the rope around my chest slacken and I am able to lean forward, away from the pillar. She crawls through the smoke, trailing coils of rope, and hurls herself into me, burying her face in my neck, gasping or sobbing. I remind her gently that my wrists are still bound behind me. With shaking hands she unties them and finally I can stretch my stiff arms and shoulders, though I am encumbered by Nell clinging to me like an infant.

I prise her away as gently as I can.

‘We need to get out,’ I say, trying to impart a sense of urgency without alarming her further. ‘Are you burned?’

‘Scorched a little on one side, but not badly,’ she says. ‘But it’s hard to breathe in here. My throat …’

‘Don’t speak, then.’ I hold her by the arms until I am sure she can stand alone. Inside my doublet I find my tinder-box and the candle I saved from the lantern. I can see nothing but smoke and blackness in the undercroft, so I place my hand on the rough surface of the pillar and take a few steps to my left, to be certain I am away from the gunpowder. We were remarkably fortunate – the barrels must have grown damp from being stored underground too long – but I do not want to take any chances. The flint strikes sparks and after a couple of attempts the candle lights, a feeble glow in the smoke.

‘Stay there,’ I instruct her. I grope my way fruitlessly along the walls until I reach the stone stairs we descended from the church. Relief ripples through my chest, allowing me briefly to forget my aches and pains. Shielding the candle, I climb until I can push against the stone over the entrance. It does not move. Cursing, I climb a few steps higher so that I can wedge my shoulder under the slab and use the whole weight of my body to force it upwards. I groan with the effort, all my muscles straining. Again, nothing. Jenkes has sealed it somehow. I run my fingers all around the edge, but I cannot make out any bolt or padlock. It must have some secret locking mechanism impossible to see in this light. After one last push, I concede defeat.

Holding my candle carefully behind my hand, I climb down and call to Nell. It is difficult to tell whether the smoke is beginning to subside, but my breathing seems fractionally less effortful. Through the haze I see her figure emerging, tentative, towards me. I reach for her hand.

‘The entrance is sealed,’ I explain. ‘We have no choice but to use the tunnel.’

‘But – those men are down there!’ The whites of her eyes flash at me in the darkness, rolling like a spooked horse. ‘They’ll kill us if they find us following them.’

‘They’ll be long gone by now,’ I say, with a firmness I do not feel.

‘Can’t we just wait here? Drake will come for us eventually, won’t he?’ She grips my arm, her face close to mine.

‘Eventually is no good. This air will poison us if we go on breathing it for much longer. You said you felt dizzy – that’s the smoke. I feel it too. If we pass out here we may not wake again. We have to take our chances. Come.’

I lead her towards the entrance to the tunnel, feeling my way with my feet so that we do not fall down it. The candle flame is no more than a fuzzy halo, barely penetrating the smoke. A loose brick skids as I kick it, then another, until I can feel a welcome breath of cool, damp air drifting up from the open shaft.

‘I will go first,’ I say. If Jenkes and Doughty are down there waiting, better I come upon them; I will at least put up a fight. ‘Watch your step – come right to the edge of the hole – that’s it. There – you see those rungs?’ The mouth of the tunnel gapes, a bottomless pit in the faint light. Attached to one side I can see iron staples set into the wall. From here I can only make out the first two, but I have to assume they continue all the way down. ‘Climb down on those. Tie the bottom of the cloak around your waist. We’ll be doing it blind, though. I’ll have to put the candle out as we climb.’

I sit among the loose bricks, my legs dangling over into the empty space. She moves alongside me and I hand her the candle.

‘Take this. When I have gone down a few rungs, use it to find your footing, then blow it out and tuck it in your bodice. Keep it secure – we will need it. You will have to feel your way down. Can you do that?’

She looks up, biting her lip, gives me one miserable nod. I position myself on my knees, facing the wall of the shaft, then lower my foot to the first iron bracket and the other foot further still, to the next. Groping in the thin light, I step down another, and another, amazed each time that they hold my weight. The metal feels ancient; rusted and grainy, gnawed by age and damp. But five rungs in, the air is clearer. I look up and see Nell’s foot casting about for the first rung; she finds it and makes her footing secure, then extinguishes the light with a sharp puff. Darkness covers us.

I lose track of how far we descend, or how long it takes. The air grows colder the further down we climb and soon I am shivering, despite my wool doublet; I can hear the scrape of my breathing, my chest burning with each lungful. Moisture trickles down the walls of the shaft; in places the iron rungs are slippery with moss or weed. Stepping to the next rung, and the next, becomes an act of pure will. It feels as if we are descending to the frozen depths of the earth where Dante found the Devil himself devouring Judas Iscariot. At any moment I expect Nell to give up, to let go her hold on the rungs and tumble on to me, dragging me down with her to the bottom of the pit, but she keeps a tenacious grip and a steady pace. I dare not call out to her, in case Jenkes and Doughty are anywhere within earshot; though I can hear her laboured breaths, she makes no complaint.

At length, just as the muscles in my arms are about to mutiny, I put my foot down to find there are no more iron rungs, only an uneven rock floor sloping gently downwards. I step off to find myself in a tunnel, just high enough for me to stand, if I hunch over, and wide enough that I can touch the sides with my arms outstretched. There would be a limit to how much contraband you could smuggle through a tunnel this small, I think, peering ahead into the blackness. A whole cargo might take several journeys. God, a man would have to be determined – or desperate – to make a living this way. I whisper to Nell to watch her step. She arrives beside me, flexes her arms, and hands me the candle. I pause, straining to hear anything beyond the constant drip of water. When I am as satisfied as I can be that there is no movement ahead of us, I strike the tinder-box; the flame takes several attempts to catch, and gutters dangerously, but it holds and we are able to press on with its weak cone of light showing the path.

The tunnel is rough-hewn, rudimentary and in poor repair; fissures gape in the walls and roof and the water seeps in relentlessly, in some places no more than a trickle, but elsewhere a steady stream, pouring down the rock and along the floor. I think of those monks five hundred years earlier and the force it must have taken to hew this escape route out of the living rock. Here and there the passage is scattered with rubble where parts of the tunnel have subsided; I try not to think about the weight of the sea above us, the walls pressing in, the fact that I have no idea how far we have come or how much longer we must continue in this dank, subterranean trough. Instead I keep my breathing steady and concentrate on each step, guarding the candle flame and keeping alert for any sound that would betray the presence of another human. I can feel the pressure of Nell’s hand on my back, her fingers clutching at my shirt as if she fears I would leave her behind.

‘Who was the woman?’ she says, out of nowhere.

‘What?’ I almost miss my footing and stumble, then turn, holding the candle up to look at her. Her hair hangs loose, the ends scorched a little on one side; her face is smeared with soot but her eyes have regained some of their fire.

‘Which woman?’

‘The woman in Oxford. The man with no ears said you risked your life for her once.’

‘More than once,’ I say, without thinking.

‘Did you love her?’ Her tone is accusing.

‘It was a long time ago.’ I turn back to the path ahead and continue walking, partly to hide the smile. Of all the things she could choose to worry about at present, it is the thought of another woman that preoccupies her. I find this oddly endearing. A woman’s mind is a strange thing indeed.

I have barely taken five steps when I freeze, and the smile dies on my lips. A distant rumble reaches us from somewhere up ahead. I have been half-expecting this since we entered the tunnel; I did not believe that Jenkes and Doughty would leave anything to chance. Perhaps they took more explosives with them to seal off the tunnel once they reached the end. That rumble, I realise with a sickening certainty, is the sound of the rock collapsing, trapping us down here – or, worse, cracking open the roof of the tunnel to let the thousand tons of water above us surge in. I hesitate, stiff with fear, heart racing, awaiting the great onrush of the sea through the darkness. Moments pass; the water does not come. At length I allow myself to exhale and motion for Nell to continue.

Some yards further on, I find the source of the sound: a section of the wall has fallen, almost blocking the tunnel with debris. Water is gushing through the crack; not fast enough yet to cause a problem, but the fissure is a deep one and the pressure of the water could burst the wall open further. I wedge the candle into a crevice in the rock wall, where it flickers precariously, and begin to pull the fallen rocks away with both hands.

‘We need to hurry,’ I say, hurling lumps of stone behind me; more tumble into the gaps I have made as fast as I can clear them.

‘Are we in danger?’ she asks, crouching alongside me and grabbing at a rock.

I glance sideways at the water coursing through the cleft in the tunnel wall. ‘Until we get out, we cannot assume ourselves safe. Help me here.’

We work in silence until we have cleared a gap large enough to crawl over. The candle gutters out as she tries to pass it through to me on the other side and it takes some time to spark the tinder-box into life again. The tunnel is pitched into blackness and I have the uneasy sensation that I can hear someone breathing close by. I reach up to help Nell through the gap; she hauls herself down, slipping on loose rocks, wincing as she turns her ankle upon landing beside me, but without complaint. She stands unsteadily, resting a hand on my shoulder, her breath coming in ragged gasps, and I see that she is weak. Her treatment at the hands of Jenkes and Doughty has injured her, perhaps more than I can see, and though she pushes on valiantly, I realise she is in pain. I can only hope she will be strong enough to reach the end of the tunnel – though I have no idea where the end of the tunnel might be, or what awaits us there.