He waited for the cage to make its mile trip. The furnacemen wouldn’t hear it; the roar of a pit furnace covered all other sounds. As soon as the cage rose and came to a stop level with the platform, he jumped on between the tub rails and pulled the signal rope once for “Down.”
Every descent was a controlled plunge, especially in total darkness. Midway the cage seemed to float and tap against the guide wires, a sensation of flying blind, even while the mind knew it was dropping in a steel cage. As if he ever really knew where he was. He winced. What was the speech he had given Leveret about the method of triangulation and the making of maps? That was the way he had pursued his amateur investigation, except that two of his points, Rose and Charlotte, were the same.
Pressure rose from the soles of his shoes to his knees. Round iron wire stretched as the cage shuddered between the guides and touched down at the pit eye.
There was being underground and there was being alone underground, when there was no distraction from the fact that a million tons of rock stood where the sky should be. The work of hookers and drawers pushing tubs, and farriers and stableboys tending the horses, usually created the illusion that the pit eye, underlooker’s shed and stables were merely a subterranean village. Without this activity that reassuring illusion was gone, and a person had to accept how far from the rest of the world he was.
A burning safety lamp stood in a pail of sand at the platform. The heat and smell of horses was, as always, overwhelming. He opened his box of matches—illicit in a mine, but who could stop him now?—and lit the safety lamp he had brought from the yard. A flame leaped behind the wire mesh. He shouldered his knapsack and found the central black tunnel called the Main Road. This was where a conscious choice had to be made to travel fearfully or set off as if the earth were his.
He had studied the plan of the Hannay pit so long that a copy was imprinted in his head. A map was everything when walking in a mine. Of course, there was also the simple method of keeping the draft at his back. He kept his head low and found a rhythm that put his feet on every second tie of the track. Wooden props creaked more audibly without the workaday sounds of horses and wheels. Timbers settled, dribbling dirt. He raised his safety lamp and the flame lengthened to suggest a hint of methane.
Traveling in a miner’s crouch made his strapped ribs feel as if they were rubbing together, but without having to buck the traffic of ponies and tubs he made good time. He moved past refuge holes, side shafts and brattices, the canvas panels that directed air. Past where Battie had found the first two victims of afterdamp the day of the fire. Past where the tunnel plunged to the turnaround where a pony had dropped and trapped ten men on the other side. Into a lower, narrower tunnel another five hundred yards. To the coal face, with its pillars of coal and blacker void where the pillars had been stripped away.
Short-handled picks and shovels lay where they had been left the day before. Blair chose a pick and automatically moved his lamp along the roof, finding a pulse of gas with the flame at a crack or two. Nothing like the gas on the day of the explosion. Then it had been damp and unseasonably warm. As the barometer dropped, gas had seeped out of pillars, roof and shot holes. In the whole length of the tunnel, lamp flames had started to separate from their wicks, all the sign that a fastidious underlooker like Battie needed to ban shots for the day.
Sometimes men were pulled off a gassy stretch of the coal face, but evacuate the mine? Never. Men swung picks or pushed tubs, boys went on leading ponies, all aware that in a gas-charged atmosphere a single spark could set off methane like a bomb or, after the firedamp turned to afterdamp, smother every one of them. Miners always went on working. After all, a man who came a mile underground had already made certain decisions about safety. Besides, they almost always went home at the end of day.
Two weeks had passed since Blair’s first visit. In that time the coal face had moved backward in that curious Lancashire system of retreat, leaving a gallery of coal pillars that would slowly collapse under the weight of the earth above. Slowly in the sense of not immediately. Sometimes in a week, sometimes in a year, sometimes seemingly never. When the workings finally did cave in, they did so with a thunderous clap that sent waves of coal dust rolling to the pit eye.
The roof where he and Battie had crawled appeared clear for the first few yards; Blair couldn’t see farther through the ambient dust. He took a bearing from his compass. Pick in one hand and lamp and compass in the other, he crept forward into the void.
He remembered Maypole’s journal entry, “I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places.” When the curate reached the coal face, did he understand how grudgingly the Lord opened the veins of the earth?
As the roof angled down, he went backward through evolution, from standing to crouching to his knees. The knapsack made progress twice as difficult until he removed it and tied it with his jacket to his leg; even so, he could move only by pushing the lamp ahead and following, a one-man train through the rubble. Sections of the roof had fallen in tomblike slabs. At one place he felt no floor at all, so he crawled along an edge to firmer ground, where he wiped his compass to reorient himself. His hands and sleeves were coated in black dust; he breathed it, choked on it, blinked to keep his eyes clear. Everything was warm: coal heated from pressure.
By now Blair was sure he had veered to the right or left, gone too far or hadn’t gone far enough. The stones had shifted like a collapsed deck of cards—roof fallen in one place, floor crept up at another. He was sure he had missed what he had come for until his lamp flame seemed to lift its eyes, and through the dust he smelled the aromatic rot of methane.
Within the mesh guard of the lamp, the reddish-orange nub became a taller, yellow flame with ideas, a flame with aspirations. Blair set the lamp where it was. As long as the flame stayed a flame and didn’t become a blue-white column, he was on the right side of an ephemeral line. He crawled forward and saw a hastily patched wall of bricks and mortar a yard high and two yards wide. He brushed dirt off a brick to read “Hannay Brickworks” in embossed letters; they were the same bricks, the same wall that he and Battie had found before.
He hiked himself on his elbow and dragged his knapsack close. As Battie had described it, this was not a blower, merely gas that had accumulated in waste stones and coal behind the bricks. In the intensified light he saw the telltale crack on the upper row of bricks behind which methane, lighter than air, would lurk. Lying on his side, he pulled the can of caulking out of his knapsack. He levered open the lid with his pocketknife and scooped the resinous tar out of the can with the blade of his knife, smeared the crack and lay back to see the effect. If the caulking was “Good enough for the Royal Navy!” it ought to be good enough for the Hannay pit.
Slowly the flame of the safety lamp cooled to its usual modest orange. Blair tapped the bottom row of bricks with the tip of the pick. Since methane was lighter than air, explosive gas should be confined to the upper space behind the wall, and it would be safe to remove a bottom brick. Theoretically. Which was why mining was both an art and a science, he told himself, because miners, like artists, died young.
Lying on his side, Blair delivered a more solid tap to the base of the wall. As two bottom bricks separated, he saw his own shadow rise up the wall, and when he looked back at the lamp he saw a flame tall enough to lick the cap. He dropped the pick and pressed himself as deep into rubble as he could. Billows of methane lit softly in shades of blue, floating on the heavier air, lapping under the low roof, enveloping him in liquid light. He lay still. Waving a jacket helped when gas wasn’t lit; when it was lit, oxygen fed it. He held his breath to keep fire out of his lungs until the burning gas spread, broke and scattered into imps that slipped into crannies and disappeared.
The flame of his lamp settled again, although the smell of methane was pungent, as if he had plunged into a swamp. He pulled out the loose bricks and reached inside. His fingers felt around until they found, buried by stones, something that was
not a rock. He pulled it out and replaced and caulked the bricks, then rolled closer to the light to examine a charred and twisted safety lamp. The lamp was constructed so that it was impossible, short of disassembling it, to remove the safety gauze, but the gauze was gone, ripped out. He rubbed the lamp base and held it to the light. Scratched into the brass was a number: 091. This was the lamp that “Jaxon” had signed out the morning of the explosion. No wonder Smallbone and the real Bill Jaxon had volunteered to make their way back to the coal face, for fear of someone else finding the lamp or any other sign of Maypole. To have to rebrick a wall was a godsend to the two men.
The explosion was clear enough now. After Smallbone had brought Maypole down, he had taken the opportunity to “lark” in a middle tunnel—his habit, Battie had said—leaving Maypole alone at the darkest end of the coal face when he had never been down a deep pit in his life. What kind of spiritual experience was that? Did he fall to his knees in prayer, or did he start to feel the weight of the earth above him, listen to the timbers, sense the air start to thin? He had no friend to guide him as Flo had guided Charlotte, and he would have been warned to stay clear of other miners, so he had neither experience nor companionship as solace. And the miners, had they wondered how oddly “Jaxon” was acting? But who would have dared question as volatile a character if he felt antisocial?
The first time in a pit, men were often so afraid of their lamp going out that they would wind the wick up until someone shouted “Turn her down!” Then they would overwind the other way, snuff the flame and be left in the dark. Did Maypole strike a match? Was that what he had done? Or had he yielded to the temptation of setting off a shot by himself? Jaxon had bored holes into the coal the day before. Smallbone’s tin box of prepared charges was at Maypole’s feet. Had he slipped one of those paper tubes of gunpowder into a hole and experimentally tamped it with his pick instead of a fireman’s rod of non-sparking brass?
Then there was such a thing as spontaneous explosion. From methane, from the heat generated in coal as it was crushed, from the combustibility of coal dust in the air. It happened.
But what Blair believed most likely had happened was that a careful, dutiful Maypole had done nothing worse than tap the coal face with his pick, hear the firedamp whistle out, and then instinctively, like the good man he was, run to warn the other men working the coal face. Which, as the inspector of mines had said, no experienced miner would have done, because running pressed the flame through the mesh of the safety lamp to the very gas a man was trying to escape.
Probably that was what had happened. Maypole, in his innocence, had tried to warn the other men, and probably they smelled the gas, saw Maypole running with his lamp toward them and begged him to stop. All it took was one blue tip of flame pressed through the safety gauze. The force that ripped out the gauze and twisted the lamp like taffy put him and no one else at the point of the explosion. Where was the rest of Maypole? There might be parts, atoms of the man, but not enough for worms. It was too deep for worms, anyway, as Rose Molyneux had said.
In his journal Maypole had cited Job. “I went mourning without the sun. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat!” Well, that prediction was true enough, and he had taken seventy-six other men with him. And when the heroic rescuers Smallbone and Jaxon found Maypole’s lamp they bricked it away for eternity and scratched the same number—091—onto the lamp Jaxon had brought, so that the lamp system itself would prove that every man had been accounted for.
Blair replaced and caulked the bricks, stuffed the lamp into his knapsack and crawled back through rubble to the coal face. He got to his feet, looking not so much like a miner now, he thought, as a stick of charcoal. He didn’t feel vindicated; he felt sad, because in the end he admitted that he and Maypole had shared so much in common.
He staggered to the Main Road, keeping the welcome draft in his face. After a taste of methane, even foul air was an improvement. He was climbing the incline to the turnaround when the rails began to vibrate underfoot. He thought it might be from a rockfall until he heard a squeal of metal wheels. Out of sight, a train of tubs was moving.
A train was half a ton of slackly chained iron-plate tubs that at first push rolled in a lethargic, uncoordinated way. Blair backtracked and looked for room to let them pass by. He heard the train drop into a straightaway, smooth out and gather speed. He wasn’t gathering speed himself. Between his strapped ribs and the weight of his knapsack, he stumbled over railway ties, outpacing the poor glow of his safety lamp. The rails resonated underfoot. Runaway trains were one of the more common causes of fatalities in pits; with momentum, tubs tended to carry and drag whatever they met. He saw them careen around the head of the incline, chains banging, filling the low shaft. He dove into a refuge hole as the lead tub clipped his heel and the train whipped by in the direction of the coal face.
After the reverberation of the tubs receded, he heard a rhythmic scraping, like a knife being sharpened. He looked with one eye from the refuge hole. A figure in a skater’s crouch, outlined in yellow, a lamp in one hand and a pick in the other, was sliding sideways on the irons of his clogs down an incline rail.
Blair pulled himself in as Bill Jaxon passed, silk scarf at his neck, his back to the refuge hole. He took one-legged strides and balanced on sparks that faded like a comet burrowing through the ground. Blair felt a burning stab and realized that the only reason he hadn’t been seen was that he was lying on his own lamp. He unbent onto the track and patted out the charred circle on his jacket. He was halfway to the cage and could reach it long before Bill could turn around from the coal face. He had just topped the incline, however, when he heard clogs following at an easy lope. Jaxon hadn’t gone to the coal face at all. He had just flushed him out.
“Rose told me she met you!” Bill called. “I want to hear about it!”
There was no chance of outracing Jaxon the remaining distance to the cage, or of hiding. His lamp would lead Bill right to him, yet he couldn’t put it out without being blind. He pictured the Main Road he was on, the Back Road, and all the short side tunnels that connected the two main tunnels. The next side tunnel was covered by a brattice to keep air flowing straight, and he slipped through it toward the Back Road.
A moment later he was joined by Bill’s voice. “Good try, but don’t you think I know t’pit better than you?”
The Back Road carried return tracks and spent air to the furnace. An oily wind, directed by more panels of canvas, pushed Blair’s back. He pulled panels into the tunnel as he moved to block Bill’s view of his lamp. Doing so, he hit his head on a low beam and was so dazed for a moment that he didn’t know which way to go. From a wetness welling in his ear he was aware that a scar had opened.
“All you had t’do was leave us be,” Bill called.
Blair moved as best he could while he heard Jaxon smashing the brattices he had left behind. He ducked through a side tunnel back to the Main Road. Through other side tunnels he heard Bill running parallel on the Back Road. There was a small advantage in that shoes were quieter than clogs, though an ant could claim the same edge. Within a few steps, Jaxon would be crossing to the Main Road.
A solitary coal tub stood on the track. Blair put his shoulder to it and pushed it downhill toward the coal face. As he looked over his shoulder, Bill’s lamp appeared above him on the Main Road.
Blair put his lamp into the tub, let it go and ducked to the side. The grade was mild; the tub didn’t gather speed, but it didn’t stop either. The glow of Blair’s safety lamp bounced along the roof. In pursuit, Bill skated down the rail in graceful, burning strides.
In the black, Blair fumbled through a side tunnel to the Back Road and lit the bull’s-eye lamp from his knapsack. The match burned bright and the lamp’s narrow beam shot ahead, fueled by the tinge of methane in the air.
After a hundred feet he dared return to the Main Road. His feet were heavy as andirons, his lungs wheezing in imitation of punctured bags. The stink of the stables w
as sweet, though, and the dim lamp in its pail of sand was the candle of a sanctuary. The cage sat waiting at the pit eye.
He heard Bill returning up the Main Road, furious. How he had caught the tub and returned so fast, Blair didn’t understand, but he had. Blair stepped onto the cage and hit the signal rope.
As the cage lifted, Bill ran at full tilt out of the road and raced past the stable stalls. From Jaxon’s eyes, Blair saw that he was gauging a leap for the rising cage, at the last moment saw that he would fall short, and instead flew the width of the shaft.
Blair sank to the floor of the cage, cradling his lamp and knapsack on his knees as it rocketed up. Through its open side, the beam lit a blur of damp, undulating stone, and even though he knew he was headed for a yard of coal and slag he smelled grass and trees.
As the cage slowed, he pulled himself to his feet. The approach seemed endless. Finally, the cage inched up to a lakelike glimmer of lamps and a touch on his face of a genuine breeze. Locomotives crouched, sphinxes in the yard. The flag on the tower was a crescent moon.
As he stepped onto the platform, Albert Smallbone slipped from a tower leg and hit him with a shovel.
Blair stretched out on his back, the square edge of the shovel pressed under his jaw, Smallbone at the other end.
“Have you ever hunted with ferrets?” Smallbone asked. “Hardly worth it. Worse than criminals. The ferret chases t’rabbit to the end of a hole and then proceeds t’eat him. Not what you sent him down for. If the leash on him breaks, you have t’start digging with a spade t’save some supper for yourself. Anyway, you’re my rabbit now, and Bill will be up in a mo.”
The cable speeded. Blair couldn’t see how much was left because whenever he shifted, Smallbone pressed the shovel blade against his neck. His upended knapsack and its contents were spread around Smallbone’s feet.
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