Lindle looked from Bell to Hensley and back again, as if realizing he had said the wrong thing and meant to repair matters. “Aye,” he said, but he sounded unconvinced by his own words. “It fell in upon him.”
By the time Bell arrived at the works, the other sappers had already dug the unlucky Archer out and laid him prostrate on the trammeled grass. Bell was relieved not to be able to see any blood beyond a few scratches, and no obvious injuries, but the group standing around Archer was sullen and quiet, and Bell suspected the man might have suffocated before he could be rescued. He was surprised, therefore, to see Archer stir.
“Give the man some air!” barked Bell. “Back away! Let him see daylight!” He knelt by Archer as the circle of men loosened. “Are you hurting, lad?” he asked more gently. “Are you in pain?”
Archer said nothing. His head lolled this way and that, and his eyes opened to show little but the whites. His mouth worked slowly, as if trying to speak.
“He’s mazed,” said one of the sappers behind Bell. “The hole’s had him. He’s mazed for good.”
Bell turned on the speaker in a fury. “Shut your damned mouth! I’ll have none of that superstition!”
That quieted them all, for “superstition” and “papistry” were the same in Bell’s vocabulary, and it wasn’t wise to be identified with either in his eyes. Bell was in the ugly state of having both sympathy for the king, and a loathing of what Charles had come to be. Charles had been corrupted and the kingdom defiled by the wiles of the Catholic harlot Henrietta Maria, this Bell knew to be true. With heavy heart, he had turned his back upon his king.
Quelling his anger, Bell turned back to Archer. “Archer, lad… can you hear me? Are you with me?”
“Did I… ” Archer’s voice was barely a whisper. His gaze wandered until it found Bell’s face, but barely focused on him at all. “Is it out? I tried to stop it. Is it out?”
Bell frowned. “Is what out? The tunnel collapsed on you, Archer. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“The tunnel collapsed…?” Archer sighed. His eyes closed slowly. “Good… good… didn’t think I was strong enough. Managed it, then… good… ”
Bell regarded Archer curiously. Did he understand the man correctly? In any case, if Archer was saying what he seemed to be, it was better the men didn’t hear it. They were like lions under fire, but the first hint of deviltry, and they would just as easily turn into old women.
They were behind schedule as it was, and Bell was tired of making excuses to My Lord Fairfax. The new governor of the city doubted the Royalists would try and retake the city, but if they did, he had no wish to defend it with a gaping hole in the wall. Every few days he would inquire as to the state of the repairs.
The truth was that Bell’s men had done too good a job of demolishing it in the first place, but they could hardly admit to that. So, Bell had a well worn rondo of reasons to trot out: the site was being made safe; the materials they gathered were unsuitable or inferior; they’d been commandeered for urgent work elsewhere.
The last was the truest: Bell and his engineers had done any number of small civil works, mainly to repair houses and shore up properties damaged during the hostilities. The York folk had been glad of the end of the siege, and Fairfax had gained a gold coin reputation for refusing to allow the rabidly Protestant members of his army to strip the city’s churches of their gilt and ornament, and to put out the stained glass of the minster cathedral. Thus, the occupying army was regarded favorably by the locals, and Fairfax was keen that long would that goodwill persist. Repairing a roof here and buttressing a wall there was thereby smiled upon by Bell’s superiors.
But all the goodwill within the city walls could not hide the gaping hole that might let in those without.
Bell had a litter made up, and Archer was transported back to the hospitium, where a bed was made for him on the bottom floor. Once he had ordered one of the boys to fetch an army surgeon (he certainly didn’t intend to pay a fee if he could avoid it) and ushered the rest of the men out of the door, he returned his attention to Archer.
“Archer? You may speak freely now. What happened in that hole?” He hesitated, then added, “Did you bring on the collapse yourself, lad? Did you do something to the props?”
Archer’s eyes were almost shut. “I did, aye. I put the mattock butt to the prop and levered it. All my weight. Did I do it?”
“You did. But why? We’ll just have to dig it out again.”
Archer’s eyes opened wide and he stared up at Bell with naked horror. “No!” He grabbed Bell’s sleeve. “No! You must not, Major! It mustn’t be opened again! Bury it! Bury it deep!”
The fear was unmanning Archer, making him whine like a child. Bell had seen suchlike before from men under fire or frighted by oncoming pike and sword. That a man usually as bloodless as Archer should find such bane in a pit in the ground was passing strange.
“This hole, you’ll be talking about the one that opened up under the tunnel we made, is that it?”
Bell’s measured tone seemed to reassure Archer. He fell silent for some moments, recovering his wits. Then he said, “It’s old, in there. The air even. It didn’t smell bad. Just old. Old as Noah.”
Bell considered; it was no secret that the city had a Roman history. Why, hadn’t Constantine, the first Christian emperor himself, gained his laurels there? It was not beyond belief that the sappers had found some ancient Roman cellar in their excavations. Bell’s men were countrymen by and large, and prone to a countryman’s fancies. He may have cowed them with his disgust at the very mention of the supernatural, but that didn’t mean they’d stopped believing in it.
Bell could now imagine the sequence of events, from the discovery of the old cellar or whatever it was, through the excitation of the men’s imaginations, and so to the womanish hysteria. He had some experience in dealing with such nonsense, and as soon as the surgeon came to tend to Archer, he would shame the men back into work by showing them what a gaggle of fools they were.
The sappers were at first blush surprised and then mutinous about returning to the hole to clear it. Bell was an old hand at commanding men who did not seek contact with the foe with enthusiasm, however, and had already settled on the strategy to use. First, he almost offhandedly mentioned how important fixing the breach was to My Lord Fairfax, who was popular with the troops. He leavened this statement of regret with a passing reference to mutiny and what happened to mutineers in that happy time.
Leaving the men’s clearly very active imaginations to envisage how unpleasant it must be to finish one’s days kicking the air before an audience of grim-faced comrades, Bell moved swiftly on to what a simple job it was, and how, when the fearful chamber was reopened, he himself would willingly be the first man in.
Here he smoothly moved into his third dialectic mode, by mocking a hypothetical bunch of wan cowards who could not bear the terrors of a shallow hole. The men grew quiet, and seemed shamed by the time he finished talking. He decided the time was right to shift from the oratorical to the practical.
“We start now,” he said, hefting a spade. “I’m tired of excusing listless work to the governor. This time tomorrow, I want the foundation excavated and surveyed, ready for repair.”
The men watched him start digging at the loose earth where the collapse had brought in the sides of the crater made by the exploded mine. The day was wearing on, and they knew the task would take them into darkness. Hensley told one of the lads to fetch brands for the evening, for they would surely need them. Then he gathered the other boys and set them to carrying earth in baskets to the spoil heap. Slowly and unwillingly, the men took up their tools and joined Bell.