The Battle of the Strong: A Romance of Two Kingdoms — Volume 1Parker, Gilbert
General
The Battle of the Strong: A Romance of Two Kingdoms — Volume 1
Parker, Gilbert
Anglo-French War, 1793-1802 -- Fiction; Channel Islands -- Fiction
Where was he now? His feet were free; he began to move them about. He
remembered that he had been flung on the stone floor of the bakeroom.
This place sounded hollow underneath--it certainly was not the bakeroom.
He rolled over and over. Presently he touched a wall--it was stone. He
drew himself up to a sitting posture, but his head struck a curved stone
ceiling. Then he swung round and moved his foot along the wall--it
touched iron. He felt farther with his foot-something clicked. Now he
understood; he was in the oven of the bakehouse, with his hands bound.
He began to think of means of escape. The iron door had no inside latch.
There was a small damper covering a barred hole, through which perhaps he
might be able to get a hand, if only it were free. He turned round so
that his fingers might feel the grated opening. The edge of the little
bars was sharp. He placed the strap binding his wrists against these
sharp edges, and drew his arms up and down, a difficult and painful
business. The iron cut his hands and wrists at first, so awkward was the
movement. But, steeling himself, he kept on steadily.
At last the straps fell apart, and his hands were free. With difficulty
he thrust one through the bars. His fingers could just lift the latch.
Now the door creaked on its hinges, and in a moment he was out on the
stone flags of the bakeroom. Hurrying through an unlocked passage into
the shop, he felt his way to the street door, but it was securely
fastened. The windows? He tried them both, one on either side, but
while he could free the stout wooden shutters on the inside, a heavy iron
bar secured them without, and it was impossible to open them.
Feverish with anxiety, he sat down on the low counter, with his hands
between his knees, and tried to think what to do. In the numb
hopelessness of the moment he became very quiet. His mind was confused,
but his senses were alert; he was in a kind of dream, yet he was acutely
conscious of the smell of new-made bread. It pervaded the air of the
place; it somehow crept into his brain and his being, so that, as long as
he might live, the smell of new-made bread would fetch back upon him the
nervous shiver and numbness of this hour of danger.
As he waited, he heard a noise outside, a clac-clac! clac-clac! which
seemed to be echoed back from the wood and stone of the houses in the
street, and then to be lifted up and carried away over the roofs and out
to sea---clac-clac! clac-clac! It was not the tap of a blind man's
staff--at first he thought it might be; it was not a donkey's foot on the
cobbles; it was not the broom-sticks of the witches of St. Clement's Bay,
for the rattle was below in the street, and the broom-stick rattle is
heard only on the roofs as the witches fly across country from Rocbert to
Bonne Nuit Bay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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