happening. How could it be happening? Men were shouting. Barking like a pack of dogs. She couldn’t make out words, only anger and the shuddering blows on the door above.
She followed the main driveshaft with her eyes, saw it disappear through a dark hole in the brickwork on the other side of the looms. Perhaps she could crawl to it, in the shadowy, dusty space below the gears. Through there. Perhaps through there.
She wriggled under the rollers on her belly. Ambitious as a snake, now she slithered like a snake, like a worm, wet with sweat in the sticky heat, prickling with fear as the frames rattled and whirred around her. She could see a lad through the turning machinery, chink of light across his eager face, but he was staring towards the office. They all were. Staring like wolves at the henhouse. Waiting for the door to give. So they could drag her out.
She crawled on, broken fingernails clutching, on through a great spatter of that guard’s blood, on under the great shaft that brought power into the shed, twinkling with grease as it madly spun, dust puffing from the floor with her every whimpering breath.
At any moment, she expected the delighted scream. There she is! At any moment, she expected rough hands to close around her ankle. Bring the bitch out! Her sweating back tingled in anticipation of it. Her chest heaved, coughing and shuddering from the dust as she struggled on, biting her tongue, trying to smother the desperate fear.
When she finally reached the hole in the wall, she almost sobbed with relief. Clutched at the ragged bricks and dragged herself through, tumbled into a dark passageway, sprawled in ankle-deep water and took a fetid mouthful, spat it out, retching.
The place was dark, only a flickering glimmer at the edges of damp bricks, throbbing with the noise of machines, echoing with distorted screams. There was light ahead, a winking light, and she eased towards it, sodden boots slopping and slurping in the mud, the clattering growing louder, something moving up ahead.
One of the great waterwheels that turned the driveshaft. Whirring, creaking, thrashing timbers, light stabbing between the black beams, water foaming as the slats of the wheel plunged into the river, showering spray as they thrust out again in a rain of shining drops.
The wheel might have been four times as high as a man. There was no way through it. But between its endlessly moving timbers and the slimy wall of the mill, there was a gap. A gap beyond which she saw muddy daylight, the faintest hint of a shingle beach.
She glanced back down the shadowy tunnel. No sign of pursuit. But the door would not hold for ever. They would be coming. And if they caught her …
Could she slide between the wheel and the wall? Was it possible?
She pressed her tongue into the roof of her mouth as she tried to judge the gap. What if she did not fit? Would she be dragged under and drowned? Dragged into the gears and ripped limb from limb? Would her skull be crushed like a walnut between wheel and supports? Would she be slashed, cut, nipped and nibbled as she struggled to get free, bleeding to death from a hundred wounds while she was spun helplessly over, and over, and over? She thought of that guard’s despairing wail as his arm was crushed by the machinery. But there was no other choice.
She pressed herself against the wall, breath shuddering through her teeth with fear and exhaustion, and slowly, by tiny degrees, eased one shoulder around the corner. She lowered one filthy boot into the river, fishing for the bottom, fishing, sodden petticoats clinging to her trembling leg as she eased in to the thigh and found mud. She wormed herself on, sticking to the corner, clinging to it with her shoulder blades as if her life depended on it. Which it did.
She tried desperately, pointlessly to suck herself in, suck herself flat, clutching at the sodden grip of her sword, chewing on her lip with fearsome concentration, sunlight flashing and flickering through the spinning bars. She trusted to her footing on the muddy river bottom and gradually, gradually slipped her other leg in, taking a fistful of her petticoats and dragging them hard against her in case they floated into the wheel and snatched her to her death. Killed by her own clothes fleeing a textile mill. There was a joke there somewhere.
She gasped as