Bumping Uglies

The Deepest Cut V

20th December 1796, The Lapal Tunnel, Lapal Village

Enda swung the pick and cursed when, for the hundredth time, it became lodged in the thick clay with a wet sucking sound.

"Conn!" He shouted over his shoulder into the dark confines of the tunnel behind him. When he received no response, he turned to scour the area for his friend who should have been ready with bucket and pick to trade places with him at the face of the tunnel.

Daylight was the best part of a mile of rough-hewn tunnel behind him and instead the scene was lit by the guttering dance of candlelight that was barely above pitch black. A combination of the wet environment and that the navvies were expected to buy their own candles both placed limits on their usage.

The dull orange of the thick seam of clay that Enda had been slogging through was coloured a deep fire-red in the light and it took Enda several seconds to remember that his friend would not, could not, be there.

Instead he paused for a moment, sucking deep breaths of foul wet air into his lungs and pondered the image of Conn swinging by the neck above the tunnel entrance. Enda had been surprised to learn that Conn had killed those women. Indeed, he couldn't really countenance that his friend had it in him.

Conn had neither the kind of violent humour nor the deep-seated carnal hunger for women that Enda would have thought necessary to do such things. Enda did not recall Conn once having been with the camp Jennies, nor joining him in lascivious tales of flesh and conquest over an ale.

And yet the foreman had found the evidence in their shack. Lord Dudley had conducted a trial, and, in the end, Conn had not denied it.

It must have been so, Enda shrugged to nobody. How much can you really know about a man, other than that which he will freely tell you?

Where the hell was Daragh? Enda gazed back down the tunnel, remembering now that the new man had cried off many minutes ago, in search of more wooden supports that would hold the roof until the arched brickwork could catch up with the digging effort at the face.

There was now some twenty yards of unsupported tunnel that Enda had been hacking his way through, narrow and low though it was. The powdered engineers and architects who had planned this work had not accounted for the soil conditions beneath this hill and so it had proved unsafe to excavate the tunnel to anything like the ideal dimensions. Enda snorted in derision at the thought of their pens, parchment and smooth un-calloused hands. What could they know of work and sweat and digging?

Enda could touch both sides of the tunnel by stretching his arms wide, and did so now, absently, as if to ground himself fully in the earth around and above him.

He knew that he would see none of the benefit of this work creating this marvel of the age. The wealth that followed the canals as they snaked across the countryside was hoarded jealously by the land owners and a newer, more aspirational, but no less venal breed of industrialists.

Once this hole had been dug, there would be others.

Enda felt a jolt, a shift in the earth through the tips of his outstretched fingers, infinitesimal but jarring as the tunnel above him collapsed and swallowed him like a morsel in the maw of a great malevolent beast.