Two. A second fuse lighted and popping and sparkling as the flame worked its slow, carefully calibrated way down to its blasting cap.
Three. Fewer bullets now searching out the hunkered Dinglians below, most of the guns now trained on the most important target of alclass="underline" Stryver. For it had not taken long for the Outlanders to glean the reason for all of the activity upon the dam. And so the objective narrowed. Stryver would have to be stopped. For only in killing the collier, in halting the destruction of this dam, could the greater, more important objective of the Tiadaghton Project be achieved.
Four. This stick was very nearly lost, for Stryver’s foot kicked it and it rolled halfway down the incline. As Stryver slid down to retrieve it, a bullet grazed his knee. As he was climbing back up, cylinder in hand, a bullet ricocheted off his boot. As he was planting the stick, a bullet ripped a gaping hole in his right arm. It was difficult for him to steady his hand to light the fuse, to steady his nerve to keep going. Joper saw it. Joper knew what must be done and Joper sallied forth from his covert and scrambled up the side of the dam to relieve his partner.
Five. This one was Joper’s doing. And it took three lucifers to successfully engage the fuse as Stryver began to move himself toward safety. Seconds later, as Joper slid down to number six, Stryver’s chest was torn open by an Outland bullet, his life coming to sudden end.
Six. Joper taking a bullet in the stomach. Joper coughing blood upon the sixth fuse, lighting it with a weak and quivering hand. Joper cursing the unseen gunmen, cursing the Tiadaghton Project, cursing the Bashaws, cursing the God that never smiled upon himself or his family. Joper praying to that very same God for deliverance.
Seven. Lighted as Joper’s world fell away. As Joper descended into unconsciousness, his body sliding down the dam, his arms outstretched like our crucified Christ.
There was one final fuse to be lighted, one final cylinder of nitroglycerin that was to take out the bottom section of the dam. Would the first seven be sufficient to the purpose of reducing the level of the floodwaters? Ephraim wondered. But only for a moment. In that next instant the youngest of the six Scadger brothers was up and moving in a zigzag foot pattern toward the dam, dodging a swarm of bullets to take the box of lucifers from the most recently slain of the two colliers, and to light the last fuse that would give his valley home every chance for survival.
Just then an explosion. Not here. Not this dam. But the one farther upriver: the Tiadaghton Dam. A great blast was followed by a second and then a third, each explosion shaking the valley and ushering in the deluge — the great “Diluvian” that was to take Dingley Dell out of the present and put it forever into the past.
The flood had come.
Chapter the Penultimate
agwitch signalled his men — those still alive — to follow him to what was left of Blackheath. The entrance to the mine was several hundred feet above the valley floor, overlooking the town. There was a good chance of survival at that height. Two men rose and quickly followed their leader as bullets continued to fly toward them — toward them and the Scadger brother who put flame to the final fuse.
And then he was dead. Ephraim Scadger was shot cleanly through the head. Mel was witness to it. Mel watched as his brother crumpled and then fell, as he rolled and tumbled to the bottom of the sloping dam. Mel wanted to go to him; he wanted to cradle his brother in his arms, to say goodbye to his youngest brother, just as he had said goodbye to Solomon, the oldest of the Scadgers. But he knew that it could not be. He knew, as well, that there was a man who lay near him who was alive and who very much needed his help. It was the deputy named Elwes. He had been shot in the leg, and though thankfully no place else, was unable to walk without assistance.
Mel crawled over to Elwes and helped him to his feet. They would try to make it out before the blasts began, and before the waters of the swollen Thames made their way to the southern portion of the valley. Mel put his arm round the grateful young man’s shoulders, as his own shoulder protested with jarring pain, and as he bid goodbye to his fallen brother with a tearful final glance, and as he nodded his respect to the fallen colliers.
In the distance, the rumble of the raging, rushing, roiling floodwaters could be heard. Yet here for just a moment more was silence, all the guns now stilled, the Outland gunmen having fled for their own lives, knowing what was coming. Together the two Dinglian men, one a fruit picker and fashioner of bows and fletcher of arrows, the other a novice deputy sheriff and former poulterer, began to hobble away. They had got no farther than a few hundred yards from the dam before great gashes were suddenly ripped out of its side, explosively torn from that manmade wall that had redirected a river to the far side of a valley, where its clean, powerful current was needed in the extraction and processing of iron and coal, where industry transformed Arcadia. Now the dam was nearly gone and now it was urging the wild waters of the Thames in its death throes to return. “Come this way, this way again, I pray! Out through this opening. Out and away.”
I watched, transfixed, standing upon the flat roof of the asylum as the great wave rolled in — a massive, surging comb of water, turned brown from alluvial shearing of the Tewkesbury Cut, turn browner still from all the earth it had scoured up from below. Within the wave there churned and tumbled everything that had stood or lain within its path to the north, both the inanimate and the animate: uprooted trees, a horse trough, an old harrow, the side of a barn, a pony-chaise without its pony, paddock palings still linked together, an abandoned, insentient cow, and that most tragic sight of alclass="underline" a Dinglian man riding the waters in arm-flailing terror — riding the waters to his imminent death.
The waters swept over the entire valley, immersing the downs and the agricultural fields and the charred apricot orchard; toppling and dismantling Mrs. Wang-Wang’s proud pagoda; sweeping away the black sticks that had once been Alphonse Chowser’s lifelong pride. I could see it all from my perch upon the roof of the asylum, in the company of my brother and his family, along with Maggy and Vincent, and Vincent’s brother George; near Chivery and all of Newman’s other attic companions; each of the four Pilkins and Jemima’s embittered brother Walter Skewton who had not let off celebrating with hoots and whoops the death of his medical tormenters upon the Summit, even as the approaching waters put thoughts of everything but the flood from the minds of all of the rest of us. Hannah Pupker stood next to me. Although her look was vacant, her brain still muddled from the drugs she had been given, she took my hand, and squeezing it tight, refused to let go.
There were several hundred of us wedged tightly together upon the Bedlam rooftop, several hundred Dinglians and their silverware and their shaggy dogs and their squirming, indignant cats. Just as hundreds more of their kinsmen and kinswomen clung to their spots upon the pitched All Souls roof two blocks away, and hundreds others stood and lay upon all the floors and stairs of the church’s sheltering campanile. And there were still others: still more Dinglians that had crowded themselves into the church’s sanctuary, for several of the town’s carpenters at Graham’s behest had taken immediately to the task of boarding over the stained glass windows and closing off every other place that the waters could invade.