Seven

They wanted nothing to do with him.

They were going to be rich, now, the villagers told him. Even when he had come eight years ago with his father, and there had been a Red Fair on Poor Heart Hill—even when they had laid a ring of offerings on the tomb, and brought a good summer to the village and cured the filthy cholera here—even that counted for nothing now.

They had the new mine.

They were turning away from the crops. Not many were set to weed the wheat, so that poppies grew tightly in it, turning the lee side of the hill red. It pained the Egyptian to see it. It was blood in the crop, he thought. And there were rats where there had been no rats before.

He had met the man in the lane one spring morning, three days after he had arrived.

‘You again,’ the man had said. ‘Go back to your own country.’

‘I have no country except the one I’m in,’ the Egyptian had replied, stepping to the side to let the man pass.

The man raised his hand to him. He looked deeply into his face. ‘We don’t want your curses here,’ he had said.

‘I don’t curse,’ the Egyptian replied.

‘You buried the dead in your own land and laid curses on them.’

‘I’ve buried no man.’

‘You came to that pagan tomb.’

The Egyptian’s eyes had strayed to Poor Heart, where the pithead building housed the horse gin, whose wheel could be heard slowly grinding. The man had leaned towards him with a sly grin on his face.

‘We took that pagan grave away,’ he said. ‘We take coal out of that hill, and the money it makes feeds our children. We’re colliers now. You see that pit? ’Tis the 1800, for the century. You fear that name, Egyptian. That 1800 pit is money.’ He grinned. ‘We even got pennant stone a’tween the seams that be taken up to Bath for the paving of streets. We got coal and stone out of that hill. We don’t want no gypsies here no more.’

‘Who took the mine?’ the Egyptian asked.

‘Why?’ the man asked. ‘You cursing they, too?’

‘No …’

‘Overseers and Aubrete and parish clerk and Reverend Blake. You curse they family?’

‘No,’ the Egyptian objected. But the blow came. The man struck him across the shoulder, as if to force his way past, although the way was clear.

‘You go away from Christian folk.’ He spat on the ground. ‘We don’t need you no more.’

The Egyptian watched him go down the lane, the leather of the man’s shoe cracking at the misshapen heel, the shirt torn at the collar, the tin of cold tea in his other hand. He looked down at the soil by his feet.

‘God have mercy on you,’ he whispered.