Eighteen

The Egyptian went to the pit in the morning, on Sunday.

They never hauled coal on the Lord’s day, even in those first days, and the buildings were empty, the mine deserted.

He walked along the lane, and cut across Ox Leys and into Great Ox. Just as he came through the fence into Great Ox, a shuddering caught hold of him. It shook him as if he were caught in a storm. He stopped, prayed. Walked on. Stopped again beneath the lip of the hill, the pulley building in front of him, set on a scar of red clay. He had seen his mother die of diphtheria, and it was like that, the shaking, the cold.

He prayed as he thought of his duty.

Aubrete met him. They stood in the pit house and the Egyptian looked at the empty horse gin, the empty harness, the circular walk that the exhausted horse made all day.

‘This way,’ Aubrete said.

A foul breeze blew out of the mouth of the mine. The rope hung loosely over it, descending into the shaft. Men and boys were lowered every day by this rope. There were no engines, no cages, only the rope knotted at intervals, and, at each interval, a plank of wood passed through the knot. Every day, a man would sit astride each knot of rope, each plank of wood, and they would each take a boy on their lap, and the rope would judder downwards and then stop, as the next man and boy above them climbed on. When one hundred and eighty men and something approaching one hundred and twenty boys were stacked, a human chain, on the rope, the horse would begin to turn the pulley in earnest, and they would pass down. Down, down … nine hundred feet into a dark lit only by candles.

On a good day, when the air tasted decently, the candles would burn quickly, and a man could use twelve a day. On a bad day, when the air was bitter, the candles burned slow. Three a day, each man.

The Egyptian stood at the top of the shaft, knowing what was necessary, and afraid of what was necessary. Horror lapped at his feet with the foul air. A three-candle day, God’s Sunday.

‘I must go down,’ he said.

Aubrete shook his head. ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘There’s no man to operate the pulley. And no man at the pit bottom.’

The Egyptian turned to him with a face full of sickness. He could feel the hands of the Gate clutching at him. He knew what was happening in the village. He knew why the typhus was going to come to the knot of cottages on the coast path, directly above the Peacock Vein that ran out under the sea. He knew why a boy called Thomas Rogers would fall forty fathoms in this very pit, this week. He knew why the priest’s wife would contract consumption this summer, and lie, a yellow shadow of her former self, in an upstairs room, while her husband took the vestry minutes when the mine owners met.

‘I must make a sacrifice at the bottom of the hole you have made,’ he said. ‘To appease the spirit you have wounded.’

Aubrete blanched at his blasphemy. ‘Do it here, now, at the top,’ he said.

‘Sir, it won’t work,’ he replied. ‘You will still have flood. You will still have bad air.’

Aubrete took out ten full shillings and put it on the ground.

‘Do it here,’ he told him.