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“I’m sorry,” I said quietly, and, interpreting my words correctly, she burst into such a prolonged storm of weeping that I began to fear for her sanity. Eventually, I felt the first fraction of give in the knot at her wrists, and, although the light was so poor, I bent my head closer over my work. When her hands were finally free, Eleanor threw herself into my arms, causing me to cry out in pain. Begging my pardon, she set to work freeing her legs, which proved an easier task. We sat on the odorous mattress, leaning against each other.
“Will he kill us, Dita?” Eleanor’s tearful voice prodded into life the dark, poisonous snake of fear that lay coiled in my stomach.
“No, because we will find a way out before he returns.” I tried to infuse the words with a bright confidence I didn’t feel. I struggled to my feet and gazed around, trying to focus on the dim shapes I saw around the room. I noted and discarded the usefulness of a table, an old rocking chair, a mangle that appeared to have no handle and a dolly tub. There was an abandoned jumble of garden implements in one corner. An idea began to form. I felt my way carefully through them until I found what I was looking for. The hoe was rusted, but intact. I unwound the scarf from my neck and looped it through the head of the hoe. I wanted to tie it in place, but I couldn’t manage it with one hand. I took my makeshift flag back to Eleanor, and together, we achieved a reasonable knot that secured the bright strip of material in place. Although the coal chute had not been used for some time, that part of the cellar was still redolent with the scent of black dust. The entrance to the chute from the outside world was several feet above my head, but I managed to push the handle of the hoe upward and rest it on the steep slope of the brickwork. It stood upright with the tip onto which my scarf was tied, just poking out into the wintry sunlight above. I knew Cad would recognise it as my scarf if he saw it, but surely anyone who noticed it would find it strange and consider it worthy of further investigation. I pinned my hopes on that.
Eleanor drifted in and out of sleep, a circumstance that worried me. It seemed to indicate that Eddie’s blow to her face could have caused more damage than just bruising. I sat down next to her and commenced the long wait for something to happen. The sensation of being hidden away here, below a world that was turning and living and breathing without us, sent a trickle of fear down my spine. A pipe dripped somewhere beyond the range of my vision, the insistent noise branding itself into my brain. Maddening, infuriating, but, nevertheless, comforting because it reminded me that I was still part of that world. Cad will miss me, I told myself firmly. He will come.
But will he find you before Eddie gets back? Another voice, this one sly and insidious, nudged insistently at my consciousness with the question.
* * *
I sensed Eddie’s return even before I heard him. When footsteps rang out above my head and approached the cellar door, I did not allow myself to hope that rescue had arrived. I knew it was him. He stood at the top of the stairs, looking down into the gloom. He held a branch of candles aloft in one hand and their amber haze threw twisted, dancing demons into the depths of our prison. Grainy light played across Eddie’s features, lending them a harshness I had never seen before. The lines and planes of his face were thrown into sharp relief, almost as if he wore a mask, a caricature of himself. Fear rippled through my nerve endings and settled in the very marrow of my bones. He kicked the door closed behind him and descended the stairs. When he reached the bottom, he set the candelabra and a pitcher of water down on the table and turned to me with the same mischievous grin he always used in greeting. I was more frightened by that than by anything else he had done before.
“Has she been crying again? She never bloody stops.” He jerked his thumb toward Eleanor. I noticed, with a sinking heart, that he wore my scarf knotted around his neck in place of a cravat.
“I think she is seriously hurt, Eddie,” I tried to keep my voice calm. “The injury to her head seems to have caused this incessant sleepiness. It worries me.”
He sighed and came to sit next to me on the floor. Leaning back against the wall, so that our shoulders almost touched, he bent his long legs and leaned an arm across his knees. “This is a mess, Dita,” he said with a sad little shake of his head.
