The Wedding Night by Linda Needham

Author:Linda Needham [Needham, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Jack and his team bosses clambered over the rubble, their lanterns casting fitful shadows inside the tunnel.

“It shouldn’t have fallen, sir,” Gadrick said, craning his neck toward the roof of coal a dozen feet overhead.

“Hellfire,” Jack said, sliding his hand along a ridge of glistening new coal, “a new seam.”

They were a thousand feet into the incline shaft that had once been the main Shalecross seam, a vein so ancient that it had been opened in the thirteenth century. It had played out centuries ago and now functioned as a faithful friend, holding back the mountain above it to allow the miners to follow the crosscut passageways into other seams. The walls and the roof had been tightly shored up, were minutely and frequently inspected. The shaft was ready for the installation of the new steam-winding system that would drag coal trams up the rails to the main shaft and then into the pit brow more quickly and far more safely.

And now old Shalecross had given up a secret stash of coal she’d been hiding just beyond the shell of rock. Odds were that the stash wasn’t large and needed only more supporting, but it had caused a room-sized collapse into the main tunnel—impossible to predict, impossible to shore against.

But the responsibility was his alone, and it made him ill to think of the lives that were at stake.

“Richmond must have suspected it when they were measuring for the new track, sir,” Wilson said, leaping out of the way of the brigade of workers who were pulling loose coal and rock away from the fall. “He didn’t want anyone but his crew to follow him in here.”

How deep this new roof of coal descended along the tunnel, only time and toil would tell. He prayed that Richmond and his men had been far beyond it when it fell in. Even then, without fresh air circulating from the venting system, the coal gas might kill them. There was no time to waste.

“All right, I want every coal tram in the entire colliery on these tracks.” Jack tossed a clod of coal into an empty tub. “Then bring everyone you can find into the tunnel. We’ve no winch, no windings to help us. We’ll dig the men out of here the old-fashioned way: loading one tram after the other until the rubble’s gone.”

Jack gave the job to his best team bosses, then rounded up a crew of young men who had more courage than sense and led them with his maps to a shaft that ran parallel to Shalecross Number Four for two hundred feet before swinging east and diving deeper into the mountain.

“There’s twenty feet of solid rock between us and the Shalecross tunnel, gentleman,” Jack said, hanging his lamp on a timberpeg. “We’re going to dig a connecting tunnel, and with any luck, we’ll be shaking hands with Richmond before noon.”

God help them if it took longer. Twelve hours was just about how much air the men had to sustain them.

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