Free The House Above the River by Josephine Bell

“I think I can get my foot on the rock.”
    â€œRock?”
    â€œYes. It’s rock all round me. There’s hardly any earth. Can you give me a pull? A hard one?”
    â€œNo. I’m the wrong way round. I daren’t try to get up.”
    â€œAll right. Just hold on, and I’ll do the pulling. Let me have my right hand.”
    Unwillingly he began to shift his grip, but he felt her fingers close on his arm with a firm clasp. A second later she came up out of the hole. He let go her other wrist to grasp at her shoulder, and she fell forward on top of him.
    For a few moments they lay still, panting. Then Giles freed himself, got up and lifted her to her feet. She did not faint or cry, only stood, leaning against him, shivering.
    â€œWe must get back to the house,” he said, gently, but did not take away his supporting arms.
    â€œHenry. What happened to Henry?” was all she managed to say. And then, “My teeth won’t stop chattering.”
    Henry. Giles had forgotten him. What had the blighter been doing, not to help them? He had been standing there, on the other side of the clearing. He must have seen Susan fall. But he had vanished. He had not helped. He had just gone away.
    And then Giles saw him, in company with another man, running from the direction of the château. They carried a long coil of rope between them.
    â€œDon’t hurry!” Giles called to him. The sharp sarcasm in his voice brought Henry to a dead stop. He came on again slowly. As he drew close, Susan lifted her head, but she did not move, and Giles still held her close.
    â€œI didn’t go right down, Henry,” she said. “Giles got me out.”
    There was a dull note in her voice that Giles did not like. She must have suffered more shock than she was showing at present.
    â€œYou seem to have had a landslide or something,” he said to Henry. “The rain, perhaps.”
    â€œNo.” Henry seemed to have some difficulty in speaking. The other man, in a blue labourer’s blouse, said nothing.
    â€œWhat d’you mean?”
    â€œIt should be covered. There is a cover.”
    â€œIt was covered with branches, unsecured at the ends, and a thin covering of earth and grass. Luckily one of the branches neither broke nor slipped, and Susan got her arm over it as she fell. Otherwise …”
    Henry was staring into the hole.
    â€œIt goes down sheer for fifty feet,” he said. “Then on in a rough tunnel, not so steep, for a quarter of a mile. It comes out at the entrance to our little creek, at low tide. At high, the last bit is under water.”
    â€œYou know this place?”
    â€œOf course. It has always been here.” He turned to his companion and spoke to him in the Breton dialect. The man grunted and began to move in and out of the trees beside the clearing.
    Susan stood away from Giles. She had stopped shivering, but she was still very pale. Her arm, the one that had taken her weight as she fell, was beginning to ache at the shoulder. She wondered if she had injured the joint, for when she tried to lift her hand to her hair, she found she could not do so. With an effort she said to Henry, “Is this the place where smugglers used to come up in the old days? And where they took kidnapped Germans down to the sea in the war? Francine tells ghastly stories about that.”
    â€œYes. This is the place.”
    The man came back presently. Henry appeared to give him some detailed orders, for presently he lifted his beret in acknowledgement and. went off towards the house. Henry shouldered the coil of rope.
    â€œYou have hurt your arm, Susan,” he said. “Can you walk back?”
    Giles pulled off the scarf he was wearing round his neck.
    â€œLet me make you a sling,” he offered. But Susan had turned away.
    â€œOf course I can walk,” she said, shortly, moving ahead of the two men. They fell in behind her, Giles last, and soon