Page 37 of Rescuing Rosie
Behind her, the summit of Loughrigg Fell was deserted. Everyone had left.
Chapter Fifteen
Ajolt of panic hit Rosie, and she stood up, looking around. The wind hit her sideways as she left the shelter of her rock, knocking the breath out of her. Where was the path down? She opened her maps app, hunched over her phone, but there was no reception.
Attempting to swallow down her fear, Rosie put on her backpack, collected the walking pole and climbed the short distance to the cairn, looking for the most obvious path leading away from it. She spotted a well-beaten track, and with a sigh of relief set off downhill, astonished at the speed at which everything had changed.
The mist was thickening fast and brought with it a cold that numbed her hands and face. The fierce wind threatened to bowl her over. But the puffer jacket and the effort of walking were keeping her warm, and she was glad of Ant’s spiky stick as she carefully made her way down the rocky path, hoping she’d soon be out of the cloud.
There was a faint thumping on the track behind her, and a runner (what the hell?) emerged out of the mist and overtook her, calling, ‘Hi! You okay there?’ He turned round and ran on the spot.
‘I’m fine!’ she shouted, raising her voice against the wind. ‘This is the way down to Grasmere, right?’
‘Yep,’ he called, ‘down here then right at the fork. Don’t stop for a picnic, there’s serious weather coming!’
Coming?This wasn’t ‘serious weather’?
Great. Rosie had no idea how far it was to the road, but she must surely be getting close. ‘Ninety minutes round trip,’ Veronica had said yesterday. Rosie had already done an hour or more of that.
‘Thanks,’ she called. ‘Full speed ahead!’
And then it started to rain. ‘Oh, that’s justperfect,’ she muttered, and stopped to put on Ant’s magical rain poncho. The moment she flipped the thing out of its hood, the wind snatched it from her hand and off it flew, disappearing into the mist like a dementor.
There was a moment of despair –how much does the universe hate me right now?– but she calmed herself, turned her back to the wind, fished again in the backpack and very carefully unzipped and put on the second poncho, which flapped and snapped in protest as she flailed about, trying to locate the neck and armholes.
Then she tackled the waterproof trousers, sitting down to put them on for fear of overbalancing. Man, but this wind wasinsane.
As she did up the pack again, she noticed the little torch, and thought about Ant. The ‘old woman’ whose insistence on her safety kit had turned out to be a blessing. Madison had called him ‘sweet’. He was. Mr Hill was far too serious, but he was kind and thoughtful, and probably just shy.
His major failing, however, was that he hadn’t warned Rosie of the most dangerous Cumbrian hazard of them all – his business partner.
Her waterproofs sorted, she picked up her pole.Onwards.
Some while later, Rosie reached ‘the fork’. And then, a little further on, another fork. The runner hadn’t mentioned a second fork, or distances. She tried her maps app again – still no reception. She turned right, as that path was the wider of the two.
Low-key panic was roiling in her stomach. This experience, this environment, thisweather– it was so alien to her she may as well have been on Mars. And she was alone. The sensible people were long gone from Loughrigg.
The team should be back with Ashley by now and would have discovered her absence. What would they do? Call out mountain rescue? And then she’d feel really,reallystupid, as they found her ten minutes from the road, and everyone would laugh behind her back at the dumb southerner in her silly pink clothes.
Onwards.
At last, to her relief, she came down out of the mist.
But then the thunder started.
That’s just taking the piss.
Rosie needed to move faster. The sky was now a disturbing shade of dark purple, and there was no shelter here, other than the occasional tree. But solitary trees were not recommended in a thunderstorm.
A little further on, her luck changed as she spotted a huge, gaping hole in the mountainside. She remembered Ashley mentioning ‘an interesting cave on the way down’. A slate mine? This must be it, and this must also mean she was going the right way.
The storm was intensifying, thunder rumbling and echoing around the mountains. Lightning flashed in the gloom, and she made her way towards the cavern’s shelter as the rain grew heavier, beating down on her hood, clattering on her waterproofs and backpack. Ferocious gusts of wind buffeted her, and she broke into a run.
Rain was pouring off the cave entrance like a waterfall, and as she reached the huge, dark space inside, she saw its floor was flooded, and that there were stepping stones around the edge and across the middle.
Seriously?
She stopped and checked her phone. Still no reception; it was just gone four o’clock. As long as the storm eased within the hour, which it surely would, there was plenty of time to cover the last part of the walk, down to the road. No problem. She just hoped the others weren’t too worried.
