Free Hills End by Ivan Southall Page A

fault,’ squeaked Harvey. ‘She’s the one who made the fuss.’
    â€˜It wasn’t my fault. I—I couldn’t help it. I—I didn’t want anything to happen to Butch.’
    â€˜Girls,’ snorted Harvey. ‘That’s what my dad says— women! ’
    â€˜But what are we going to do?’ asked Maisie.
    Paul and Adrian both shrugged. They didn’t know. Neither did Frances.
    They sat down again and when Paul put his hand out behind him he was sure he touched water. He felt nervously with his fingers and he was right. A little stream of water was trickling into the cave.
    He heard Gussie sniffling quietly, trying to hold back her tears.
    Â 
    On the face of the bluff, Miss Godwin clung to an outcrop of rock, fighting for breath and for the courage to go on. Her fingers were numb, her feet were numb, and she was so very, very weak.
    She was afraid to look up and afraid to look down. She didn’t know where she was, but she realized that this outcrop was the difference between life and death, that if she had not found it her body would already be broken on the rocks beneath. And she knew something more. Never, never, could she climb back up again. She didn’t know where to climb. She didn’t know how she had come to be here. She had to continue going down or slowly lose consciousness and die when she fell. These thoughts were not crystal clear. They were like dreams in her exhausted mind and she had to battle to hold on to them. Her only real desire was to give up, to fall and have done with it all.
    She clung to her rock, groaning, panting, enduring the blows of wind and rain, feeling rather than thinking that it might have been a tragic way to die, an awful way to die, but still noble. It was a hero’s death. Only a hero or a fool would have tried. Perhaps, then, it was a fool’s death.
    What a terrible thing! Not a fool! Not the wise Miss Elaine Godwin, not the brave Miss Godwin. She couldn’t be a simple fool.
    They’d say she’d thrown her life away. They’d say she’d tried to be a heroine but should have known she wasn’t strong enough. They’d say you’d think God would have looked after such a frail little woman. Makes you wonder, some of them would say, whether there is a God?
    She clung to her rock and at last began to pray, fighting against her exhaustion to frame the thoughts.
    Slowly she became aware of the details of the bluff. The storm, instead of a nameless force pounding against her, became what it was—only water and wind, enemies that she could defeat. Finally, she looked down, through eyelids slitted against the blast. At the foot of the bluff, thirty or forty feet beneath her, a vast drift of wind-driven hail had piled up like a carpet of snow. Then she fell.
    Her scream was never heard by a living soul. She felt nothing except the awful convulsion of her heart and a momentary impression of space and a deep sadness that God hadn’t answered her.
    Suddenly, she seemed to be suffocating and she believed it was the moment of death. She didn’t fight. She surrendered limply.
    Gradually, she realized that something strange had happened. The storm was still with her, with all its violence and coldness. The bluff was still there, too, and so were the hailstones and so was she.
    She was alive, buried to the hips in crumbling hailstones. She wept a little and said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you’, and struggled out of the hailstones, down a slope of melting ice to the desolate rock pan.
    She was unhurt, not even her clothes were torn. ‘Thank you,’ she said aloud, her head bowed into the storm. ‘I shall manage on my own now, thank you.’
    Then she staggered through the boulders and the gaps, through deepening pools and runnels, bent almost double, searching for Christopher, calling for him, apparently not aware that the water was becoming deeper and everywhere was flowing