The work was slower than Bell anticipated. It wasn’t purely through the reluctance of his sappers, although there was certainly plenty of that. The hole itself was awkward to work in, and the soil kept shifting as they went, sometimes eradicating the last half hour of excavation. Bell presumed the newly discovered secondary chamber was the problem, but he still had not clapped eyes on the damnable hole, so it was all supposition. Certainly the digging did not go smoothly. More than once, he had a sense of the malevolence of inanimate objects when small setbacks dogged their way every other minute.
The brands were lit, and work continued beneath a darkening sky late into the evening, the flickering light and stink of burning pitch being no strangers to men used to mining their way under enemy fortifications. It brought with it an association of hovering danger, however, and their low spirits sank further.
Presently, they touched upon the supports they had themselves placed there during the earlier part of the repairs, and Bell knew they must be close on to where Archer had been caught by the accident. An accident he had deliberately caused, Bell reminded himself.
Hensley cleared the men out so he could inspect the site more closely, and went down into the hole with a brand, one of the younger lads holding another behind him. He muttered and swore under his breath, and none could be sure if it was in dismay at the ruin of their work or at being in a dank pit at gone midnight.
Bell squatted by the breach to observe their progress. There was little to be seen but the yellow light of the brands and the shadows they cast. Hensley and the boy were little more than silhouettes themselves, despite being barely three yards down. Bell squinted and wafted the fumes from the pitch torches away. His eyes watered and he blinked hard to clear them.
“The earth is soft here,” called Hensley. “There’s a sink; I can see a wee valley in the soil where it’s drained dow…”
A pause and the light moved sharply.
“It’s subsiding, Major! Back, boy! Get out!”
Bell saw the nearest silhouette resolve into the lad as he turned and crawled up the incline toward him. Behind, he could see the other brand clearly now, but Hensley himself was little more than a fragmented chiaroscuro of jagged moments.
“Move yourself, lad! The floor is shifting!”
Then Hensley’s light was gone with a growl of ruffled flame.
Bell reached forward and grabbed the boy’s outstretched hand, pulling him clear to sprawl on the raw earth behind them. Bell’s attention was purely on the hole.
“Hensley!” he bellowed into the void. “Answer me, if you’re able! Hensley!”
There was no reply.
Bell was not a man given to vacillation. He shrugged off his coat and snatched the torch from the boy’s shaking hand. Without a second’s further deliberation, he descended into the pit.
Decisive was Major Bell, but not impetuous. He went slowly, testing the way with his heel as he went. In a moment he found himself at the edge of an open sinkhole, perhaps four feet across. Immediately he lowered himself onto his chest and lay prone at the hole’s perimeter, testing below the lip with his hand. It seemed solid enough, and that would have to do. If Hensley was buried in soil and unable to escape, every passing second would sour what breath remained in his lungs until it poisoned him.
Bell crawled forward to look down into the void.
“Hensley! Can you hear me, man?”
Only silence.
Bell looked back up the tunnel entrance. The man were milling around there, fearful and useless. The sight sparked fury in his breast.
“God’s teeth, what a damned crowd of old wives you are!” he roared at them. “Rope and lanterns! A man’s life is in the balance! Green! Ryder! Owen! Ready yourselves! Boy!” He glared at Hensley’s torchbearer. “Come back here and bring that brand with you!”
More afraid of the major than the dark hole, the lad quickly climbed down to join Bell.
“Cast your light into the hole,” ordered Bell. “Throw it in.”
The torch flared as it fell, and came to rest no more than a pike’s length beneath. In its uncertain light, Bell could make out stone walls, and a mound of earth directly below the breach. He narrowed his eyes and looked as far hither and thither as he might. This was no cellar, he concluded; it was a tunnel. An old, old tunnel. He had studied the city’s stonework enough to know the medieval style well, and even the Roman. This looked a great deal more like the work of the latter.
“Where is that rope?” he demanded, and then without waiting for an answer, crabbed himself sideways over the edge of the hole, hung there awkwardly by his upper arms and then, trusting to providence more than good sense, he let himself fall.
The stonework was ancient, but the floor was earthen, and the second thing Major Bell noted were the tracks.
The first was that Hensley was missing.
The earth mound was bedded on a layer of worked stone, the section of the tunnel’s arched ceiling that must have been weakened by the breaching explosion and subsequently collapsed during the repair works. The soil had spread out and to Bell’s eye scarcely seemed deep enough to bury a child, never mind a full-grown sapper.
By the time he was surveying the tunnel floor, a cry of “Heads below!” was halloed down, followed on the moment by a tail of rope. As Green descended, Bell called up to Owen: “Send my regards to Captain Harker and ask him to attend with a detachment of men. Make sure My Lord Fairfax is informed that we have discovered a tunnel here, one that has been used but recently. We are starting a search of it. When you’ve sent the messages, gather arms for we four, pistols if you can find them. My sword hangs by my coat.”
While Ryder climbed down to join them, bringing Bell’s sword and a pair of crowbars as weapons for himself and Green, Bell examined the soil floor by the steadier light of an oil lantern. The tunnel hadn’t simply been used, he could see; it had been frequented. Tracks led back and forth, creating a slightly hardened path in the earth, a path disrupted by the collapse. The tracks milled around the untidy heap of soil and fallen stones.
A flattening in the top of the pile showed where it had been struck by some weight: Hensley. It was plain to see where he had rolled down to the tunnel floor. The marks led southeasterly, in the general direction of the old Roman fort that had once stood more or less where the minster cathedral now loomed.
“Major,” said Green from the far side of the heaped debris.
Momentarily fearing the worst — perhaps he had missed Hensley’s body in his initial search — Bell joined Green. It struck him then: perhaps finding Hensley dead there wasn’t the worst eventuality. Perhaps the worst was what those damnable drag marks in the earth were suggesting to him.
That suggestion only grew in strength when he saw Green’s discovery. A pitch brand, very deliberately extinguished by being thrust into the loose earth.
Owen reappeared then at the lip of the hole above. “Major, Captain Harker is leading a patrol. I sent horse after him, but there’s no way to know when he’ll be fetched.”
Bell snorted vexatiously. “And My Lord Fairfax?”
“Has been informed, sir. I am waiting on his pleasure.”
“I regret we have no time for his pleasure. Master Hensley is missing, and may have been taken by Royalist sympathizers. Have you the weapons, at least?”
Owen brought down cavalry sabers with him, no pistols being found. Seeing his men there, filthy-faced with blades thrust into waistbands, Bell felt more like a pirate king than an officer of the Parliamentarian army.