the mine’s ventilation system. They couldn’t sit and wait for it to explode.
‘You go first,’ said Rawdon. ‘I’ll follow.’
‘Why?’ Adam asked, surprised.
‘It doesn’t matter. Just do it,’ Rawdon said irritably.
Something in Adam always rebelled against being told what to do when he wasn’t given a reason for doing it, and he was about to argue the point further – but then stopped, biting back his words, as he suddenly grasped where Rawdon was coming from. With his damaged leg Rawdon was clearly the one most likely to fall and logically that meant he should climb behind. If he went first he would bring Adam down when he fell; going second, he would fall to his death alone.
‘I’ll not go too fast,’ he said, looking Rawdon in the eye as if making a promise.
Rawdon nodded brusquely and then turned away, picking up the lamp. ‘Here, you’re going to need this – fasten it on to your belt,’ he said, showing Adam how the attachment worked.
‘Thanks,’ said Adam. He breathed deeply, wiped the sweat from off his hands, and began to climb.
To begin with, he made the mistake of looking up above his head, trying to measure the distance to the top. It quickly made him giddy and he had to hold still, waiting for the nausea to pass. And looking down was worse: below Rawdon the black water at the bottom of the shaft seemed to rise up to meet him. Slowly he trained himself to keep his eyes fixed straight ahead on the damp bricks passing slowly by as he climbed higher and higher up the rungs of the ladder.
But even if Adam wasn’t looking down at Rawdon, he could still hear him, and it was obvious from his laboured breathing and half-stifled cries of pain that the climb was taxing him to the limit of his endurance. Again and again Adam had to force himself to wait so that Rawdon wouldn’t get left behind in the darkness.
It quickly got colder as they neared the top so that the rusty red side rails felt icy in their sore hands, and as they gripped them harder, the iron brackets cemented into the damp wall seemed to give. Only one needs to come away, Adam thought, only one, and it will all be over. And part of him welcomed the thought – an end to the pain and the struggle and the terrible fatigue as they fell down, down, down into nothingness.
But it wasn’t Adam who fell; it was Rawdon. And it wasn’t a loose bracket or a broken tread that made him lose his footing; it was a rat. They’d heard them scuttling away into niches in the sides of the shaft as they climbed but this one was different. Perhaps it was sick and that was why it stayed lying on the tread as Adam went past it without noticing, but it was alive enough to react fiercely when Rawdon’s hand, following behind and reaching for the rung, came down on its back. The rat’s head shot round and it bit down hard on his wrist. Rawdon screamed – a terrible gut-wrenching scream that reverberated up and down the shaft – and pulled away, throwing the rat off so that it flew back against the opposite wall and then fell, turning over and over, bouncing off the masonry until it landed with a splash in the sump at the bottom that the boys would have heard if they had been listening.
But they weren’t. As the rat let go of Rawdon’s wrist, Rawdon let go of the ladder. Falling back, he instinctively grabbed hold of one of the steel guides that the cage used for its descents, and after a moment he was able to loop his feet around it too. But that was the limit of his good fortune. The guide was just too far away from the ladder for him to be able to reach it with his hand. He realized immediately that there was nothing he could do to save himself and he clung to the guide with his last remaining strength only in order to prepare himself to fall.
Adam had climbed back down opposite Rawdon and now turned half to face him, keeping one hand behind him on the ladder as he tried to measure the distance between them. The light was poor and he couldn’t risk trying to unfasten the lamp from his belt but he guessed that Rawdon was about five or six feet away.
‘There’s a chance,’ he said.
‘No, there isn’t,’ said Rawdon. ‘I’m fuckin’ done for and I’m not takin’ you with me if that’s what you’ve got in mind.’ It cost him an effort to speak and his words came in gasps. Adam wondered how much longer he could hold on.
‘Listen, I think I can get hold of your hand if you reach it out as far as you can. And if I can do that, I can swing you round on to the ladder.’
‘No, you can’t. You’re not strong enough.’
‘Try me,’ said Adam, forcing a smile. And without waiting for a response, he reached out towards Rawdon with his hand, pushing away from the ladder so that his other hand was stretched out behind him, hanging on to the rung.
He was looking straight at Rawdon, willing him to try. He could see the cold sweat on Rawdon’s forehead and the tears that were forming in his eyes. ‘Do it,’ he said, making it sound like an order. And Rawdon closed his eyes and let go, reaching out across the abyss.
Adam felt Rawdon’s hand close on his own in a death grip and the next moment he felt a pull on his arm and shoulder the like of which he had never known before, but somehow they didn’t rupture; somehow he managed to keep hold of the ladder at his back as he swung Rawdon in and felt him stick firm as he caught hold of a rung one or two below where he was standing.
Afterwards they shook, each trembling uncontrollably one above the other as they gripped tight on to the ladder, waiting for their strength to return. And then slowly, very slowly, they climbed the remaining rungs, edging past the empty cage hanging on its steel rope, until they got to the surface and emerged out into the twilight of a day that had come so close to being their last.
‘You saved my life,’ said Rawdon simply as they stood together at the mouth of the shaft, looking back down into the darkness. His voice was quiet and he sounded bemused, as if he was examining a strange artefact he’d just found, uncertain what to make of it.
‘You’d have done the same,’ said Adam lightly.
‘Would I?’ said Rawdon, as if it was a question to which he did not have the answer.
He shook his head and turned away; and stumbled down the stairs to the standpipe at the bottom where he drank greedily before he sank to the ground, dully watching Adam as he did the same. A moment later his eyes closed and he was asleep where he sat, overcome with exhaustion.
Adam could see no sign of anyone at the pithead, but there was a light coming from the stores building. Leaving Rawdon where he was, he pushed the door open: it wasn’t locked – not like the last time Adam had been inside when he’d helped to steal the dynamite for the fishing expedition. That carefree day seemed light years away now, as if it belonged to a different world.
Inside, an area had been cleared in the centre of the floor with the mine equipment pushed back against the walls, blocking the windows, and in the open space eight trestle tables had been set up in two lines facing the door. On each one a man was lying, covered up to his neck by a white sheet that smelt strongly of carbolic acid. Adam stopped in his tracks, unable for a moment to go forward as he wondered if his father was among the dead.
What light there was in this makeshift morgue came from a few oil lamps and guttering candles set up here and there, and the darkening shadows creeping in on the areas of isolated light around the bodies reminded Adam of the Rembrandt paintings of anatomical lessons in seventeenth-century Amsterdam that he had once seen in a book at school. But there was no sign of any doctor here; only Parson Vale, who was trying to console several women who were sitting on folding chairs beside the bodies of their dead husbands or sons. Some were clearly beyond the reach of comfort, crying out their pain as they rocked backwards and forwards, unable to cope with their grief, while at the opposite extreme another woman sitting closer to the door was still as a statue, making no sound at all. Taking a few steps forward, Adam recognized her with a jolt as Annie, and the body beside her on the table was Edgar’s.