S. Parris - Treachery

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.