Bread and Roses, Part Four: The Silence of the Canary

4.1 The canary stops singing: a grim Christmas

In the months after the night of the ball, you barely see Kate close to.

She still comes for Martha, but always at the times you are least likely to be at the door: early, in heavy fog, standing at the corner by the low wall with her flat cap pulled down; or at dusk, just before dark, swinging Martha’s bag onto her shoulder and turning away. You come to the door and she steps aside and goes round you, as practised as dodging a falling lump of coal in the screening shed, and will not even give you her eyes.

Martha is caught between you, made to walk between two cold walls.

She does not want to embarrass her sister, and she cannot give up the small brightness of the school. She has grown taller and gone quiet. When she has finished her sums she pushes the book across to you, her eyes bright, waiting for you to nod. After school she lingers, and when the room is empty she says quietly, “Miss… my two little sisters want to come as well. They say sitting on a bench listening to you is better than picking coal at the colliery.”

Your hand stops on the chalk.

Since the night of the ball your father’s anger has gone into every letter. He no longer writes duty and decency, only humiliation and disgrace. The fire snaps in the grate as if counting your crimes for him. You are to come home before Christmas, and before next Christmas you are to be engaged — to that kind-hearted Baron, yes, the one whose nose Kate broke, a man of good birth, decent and generous, who on hearing of your charitable work not only did not pursue the matter but put further money into the colliery.

If you do not come home, you will be cut out of the family trust.

Your father has delivered his final terms.

Your mother’s heart is softer and she does not dare cross him. She does not appear; she has money or cloth sent quietly: a small bag of coins left on the corner of your table with a chink, a roll of fine cotton pushed into the cupboard smelling of camphor. Touching the clean cloth only makes you emptier, as though someone has cut you out of the house and left you hanging by a thin line.

Christmas comes nearer, and the coalfield has a little colour forced into it.

Rough wreaths of pine go up at the doors of the cottages; a few crooked candles stand in the windows of the public house, the wax running down the glass like frozen syrup. What the street talks about most is output before the holiday. It is what the kind-hearted Baron has asked for. As a new shareholder he has produced a new slogan: one more tub of coal, one more degree of warmth in the grate, one more thickness of bread.

The colliery works flat out, machines and men on continuous shifts, the steam so thick it could drown the town. And in the middle of the festivity — the canary in the pit dies.

The children bring the news into the school; an old collier told them at the door. “The little bird’s stopped singing.” He points towards the pit head, his fingertip shaking with the cold. “The flame in the Davy lamp’s gone blue. That’s no good sign.”

You hear gone blue and a chill goes down your back. You know that is the limit of this age: no instruments, no alarms, only the colour of a flame and the breathing of a small animal. Firedamp has no colour and no smell; only when it becomes fire do people realise, too late.

The old collier says he went to the foreman. The answer was one line: “There’s no stopping before Christmas.”

That line falls like a bolt going home. The figures in the ledger outweigh the bird’s body, and they outweigh the warning.

Standing at the school door, you think suddenly of Kate calling you little canary. It was not a joke. It is the plainest rule in a pit: what falls first is always the smaller thing, the thing overlooked earliest.

One morning before Christmas the first snow comes to Wales.

It is not fully light. The flakes are fine as salt and lay a greyish white over the flagstones. Thin icicles hang from the eaves. You push open the school door, the hinge creaks, cold gets into your cuffs and the backs of your hands come up in small points.

You are about to light the stove when the ground shakes under you.

Not an earthquake. A dull sound coming up out of the ground, as though a great bell had been struck inside the earth. The benches shift slightly; the chalk box jumps. Snow powder sifts off the eaves into your hair, cold as fine needles.

Outside there is one blank moment of silence, as if time had been stopped.

The next, the street boils over.

The crowd pours towards the pit head.

4.2 The shock, and the second fall

You run with them. The lanes are packed with women with shawls over their heads, their skirts wet with snow-water and coal dust and stuck to their calves. Men in thick wool coats knock you half a step sideways with their shoulders.

Outside the pit head it is worse. The winding gear has not stopped; the rope runs through the sheave with a rattle that hurts to hear. Men are sending ropes down, and the ropes come back gripped black with wet coal. Others push out with stretchers, and the stretchers are covered with coarse cloth. You hear women crying, and screams that break off and are cut up by the cold wind.

A small canary cage has been set on a wooden box with its door open, and the ball of yellow feathers inside does not move. Beside it an old collier says something in Welsh, half a curse, half a prayer.

You understand why the bird died first. You learned it from a book: the worst thing in a pit has no smell. After an explosion the flame may already be out, and what stays in the roads is the afterdamp, the poison gas afterwards, with carbon monoxide in it. It does not catch in the throat or sting the nose. It only makes a man drowsy, as though somebody had laid a warm blanket over his face, and then he does not wake again. A canary breathes fast and is small, and goes down first. Rats run first too, and if they cannot get out they stiffen first. And after that, men.

Somebody in the crowd shouts, “Are they all up, the ones that went down?” Another voice answers at once, “The gas is still there! Don’t go down again! You’ll die!”

And in all that noise you suddenly think of Kate.

You see the weeping women around you and you let out a breath, and are immediately ashamed of that small relief. Kate is a woman, and the Mines Act does not allow women below; at another moment the ban is a locked iron door, and now it is like a straw to hold to — it has kept her alive.

And at that moment you look back and see your father coming through the mud. Another gentleman is with him in a heavy wool coat with the fur at the collar neatly trimmed, a cane in his hand, his gloves white.

It is the man he calls the kind-hearted Baron.

The moment he sees you, out comes that concern practised at balls, the tone far too soft. “Miss Isabel, what a shock for you. A place like this… you should not stay long.”

You look at his white gloves, at the silver head of his cane. The noise at the pit head is gnawing at your ears. You think of the tablecloth going over in the ballroom, and of laughter inside white gloves.

Something goes hot in your chest. “Should not? They are here every day.”

The Baron behaves as if he has not heard, and keeps trying to make it a decent sort of comfort. “Accidents happen. What matters is keeping the losses down and settling people’s minds. Your father will manage it properly.”

“Keeping the losses down?” You almost laugh, and your throat closes. “Is a life a line in a ledger?”

Your father speaks at last, holding down his displeasure. “Isabel. Calm yourself.” His eyes go past you to the winding gear and the pit head, as though looking at an account that will need settling. He is anxious about people, and more anxious about figures: how long production stops, how much compensation, whether the press will come, what to tell the other shareholders.

You are about to say more when somebody comes out of the crowd at a run.

It is Martha.

Her hair is wild, her face all coal dust and tears run into black streaks, the front of her dress soaked, as though she has rolled through mud. She runs too fast and nearly goes down in the slurry; her knee gives and she forces herself up. She sees the Baron’s white glove as though seeing something to hold on to, throws herself at him and catches his wrist.

“Sir — please—” Her voice is hoarse and thick with crying. “Save — save my sister—”

The Baron’s body stiffens instinctively. He looks down at that small hand, the coal dust packed between the fingers, the black shining at the edges of the nails. In that second you see distaste go clearly across his face. Breeding and decency keep him from shouting or swearing; he only shakes his arm with exactly the force of don’t dirty me.

Martha is thrown off, staggers two steps, nearly falls into the slurry.

She does not cry out. She only makes one short intake of breath, as though a hand had closed on her throat. Then she turns to you, and her eyes catch hold of you, hard, as though she has finally found something that will not slip away.

“Isabel!”

She almost runs into you, her fingers clutching your sleeve.

“Kate’s gone down!”

Martha cannot get her breath. “When it fell the first time, somebody didn’t come up. She said… she said she could see a light still down there. So she went. She said if you wait for the foreman to nod, they’ll all be dead by then…”

There is a sound in your ears like a gas lamp shrieking inside its glass.

You want to ask how could she, want to ask isn’t she a woman — and you know what Kate is like. She can put her fist into a white glove for a stranger, and she can stake her life for the people below.

Martha’s fingers tighten until she is nearly tearing your cloth. “She hadn’t been down long — and it fell again. The second time. Stone coming down like rain. The winding gear stopped, everyone ran, somebody said the gas was back… She’s still down there. Isabel, she’s still down there!”

When that lands, every other sound seems to draw back a foot. The rope still rattles, the crying still rises and falls, and you cannot hear any of it. You only see that black pit mouth, like a mouth opened wide.

Your father is talking to the foreman, tapping a finger at the air as though counting something. Not names. Figures.

You lift your head slowly, past the crowd, to the headgear. The great iron frame stands there in the daylight, frighteningly quiet. And you think of what Kate said.

There’s nothing good under the sun either.

No. There has never been anything good under this sky. Except Kate.

4.3 The gates shut: your father’s order

When the iron gates of the colliery close, the sound is dull and heavy, and it cuts the crowd in two.

Inside the gates are the lights of the office and the engine house. Outside are the crying, the black slurry, and faces packed with coal dust.

Guards stand under the eaves with sticks on their shoulders, their boots planted in the mud. The families press up against the bars and put their fingers through to catch hold of somebody, and catch nothing but cold.

When your father comes out of the office his collar is still straight and his gloves are still clean. The manager follows him with a few clerks holding ledgers and folders. Your father’s eyes pass over the crowd outside and settle on the bar of the gate, the guards, and the telegraph box that has been shut away.

“Seal it,” he says quietly to the manager. “Nothing goes out except through me. Nobody is to talk. No reporters in, no idlers in.”

You are standing beside him with Martha’s grip still on your sleeve, and there is one thing going round in your head: Kate is still down there.

You look at that white glove of his and think of the same white in the ballroom, and of the splits Kate showed when she pulled her gloves off. Those hands are under the ground now, perhaps feeling broken timber, broken stone, wet mud, and no light anywhere.

“This should be reported. Let a rescue party in.” You try to keep your voice ordinary.

Your father looks at you at last, the line between his brows deeper. “Isabel, don’t make trouble. A rescue follows procedure. The equipment first.”

“The equipment?” You can hardly take the word in. “There are people buried down there.”

Your father’s voice drops, as though instructing a child who does not understand. “Of course I know there are people. That is precisely why rumours must not fly about. Once a colliery’s name is damaged, the share price, the contracts, the loans all go with it. And then who is going to find the compensation?”

You hear him exchange lives for reputation, for share price. In that second your chest feels buried in snow. You remember that your name is Hargreaves too; you remember that in the screening shed the name could make a foreman smile and cross out a stoppage. And now it means to control you another way: to make you silent, to keep you standing inside the gate.

Outside the crowd presses forward again and crying and swearing run together. The guards push back with their sticks and the bars ring. You see Martha struggling in a gap, trying to get through to you, and the sticks holding her off.

You step forward and put yourself between the sticks and Martha. The guard hesitates and looks for your father.

Your father’s face darkens at once. “Step back.”

You do not step back. You lift your voice a little so the people outside can hear it. “She is looking for her sister. Her sister is down the pit.”

Your father’s eyes go black. “What do you think you are doing here? Do you imagine standing in the mud makes you one of them?”

You can smell the scent on him, so clean it stings. And you understand suddenly that if you take one more step back, you will have buried Kate underground yourself. You look at your father, and do what he has done to you: you answer with silence.

His mouth tightens. “Then don’t use my name. Don’t use this family’s name for your charity games again.”

The sentence lands like a slap; your father throws it down and walks away, out towards the Baron, who is waiting.

You take Martha’s hand, and you see a man standing by the pit head. His cap is pulled low, his coat is old, there is mud on his boots. He is holding a list, the paper gone soft with the damp. His eyes stay on the pit head.

Somebody says to him quietly, “Checkweighman.”

You have heard of the post. A man the colliers elect to watch the weighing and the ledgers, to see that the owners do not steal a shovelful. And here he is now, and what is written on his list is not weights. It is names.

You go over. The checkweighman looks up at you with nothing ingratiating in his eyes and nothing afraid; there is only exhaustion.

“Miss Hargreaves.” He says your position, and there is no respect in his tone. “You’re standing in the wrong place.”

“I’m standing here,” you say. “Show me the list.”

He glances outside; your father’s figure has gone. So the list is handed over, the paper cold and damp, some of the ink already spread. You run your eye down it and see surnames you know, and several names crossed out — crossed out means brought up, alive or dead, either way up.

You have not yet seen Kate, or her surname. Rees.

You give the list back, and your voice is hoarse. “Let me check them off.”

The checkweighman looks at you as though weighing how much blood and swearing you can take. He pushes a lantern into your hand; the handle is cold, and his voice is offhand. “Take the families’ names down.”

You take the lantern. The flame jumps once inside the glass and the light shakes badly. You turn and look at the gate; the bar is still across, like an obstinate hard bone.

You do not say anything more. You carry the lantern back into the crowd. Slurry splashes up the hem of your skirt and the cloth gets heavy and sticks to your calves. Somebody recognises you and the swearing comes at once; and somebody else catches your sleeve and asks for a name, asks for news. You write the names down fast, the nib scratching the paper.

Another man is carried out on a stretcher. A corner of the cloth lifts and shows a boot black and shining. The crying goes straight through the air. You watch that blackness at the pit head, waiting for the next stretcher, the next name.

You do not see Kate.

Time begins to be a real enemy, coming closer step by step.

4.4 “A woman brings a curse”: Martha’s tears

On the third night it begins to rain, and on the fourth morning the rain stops and the cold deepens, and the coal dust and snow-water run into one slurry.

The shelter has been put up on the windward side, a few lengths of canvas pulled tight on ropes, the corners lifting and slapping. Inside there are blankets, damp and smelling of old wool. A tea urn stands against a wooden box, its side hot to the touch, and the iron ladle rings on the rim.

They are all families here: women, old people, crying children. Some pray, hoarse; and behind the praying, some swear.

You have been here for days, and your fingers are black where ink and coal dust have mixed. You keep the list for the checkweighman: who comes, who is carried out. Every time a stretcher goes past and the cloth is lifted, there is one more smell in the air: wet cloth, blood, coal smoke.

Again and again you look for Kate among the names, and again and again you get a blank.

The rumours grow in those days too. They need no evidence, only a mouth and a grievance.

At first it is whispering, that somebody should not have gone down. Very soon it turns, as though it has found an easier target — women. Somebody points at the pit head and swears: “Women bring bad luck!” Somebody worse raises his voice on purpose, so everyone under the canvas will hear: “She went down a pit, of course there’s a judgement on it, of course heaven’s angry. Look — it fell in, didn’t it.”

For a moment you almost think you are back in the ballroom. There, white gloves kneaded the women of the pits into an illustration. Here, black slurry paints them into a disaster.

Laughter and cursing are different, and they run on the same logic: push the weakest out in front to take the blow.

Martha has been holding her teeth together all this time. She has left her sisters with a neighbour and stays by the canvas herself, red-eyed, refusing to let a tear go. When she hears people cursing Kate her shoulders come up as if she means to fly at them, and she forces it down.

Until an old man comes over with his scarf wound tight, his voice sharp and his words sharper. “If your sister had known her place and stayed on the surface, the men wouldn’t have lost their heads. She’s done for all of us.”

Martha’s face goes white. She makes no sound, and the tears come down in strings. She scrubs at them with her cuff and only makes it dirtier.

“That’s enough,” you say.

It is not loud, and it lands like an iron ladle on the urn; several heads come up.

The old man is still about to laugh when your eyes pin him. “The gas down there does not know a man from a woman. A falling roof timber does not know a man from a woman. You are pushing this onto women because you don’t dare ask the people you ought to be asking.”

His mouth moves and nothing comes out at once. Somebody beside him coughs and turns his head away. Somebody says quietly, “She’s the shareholder’s,” as if to remind you to shut your mouth.

You do not step back.

You walk to the middle of the canvas and look at the women round the blankets. Their hands are all busy: passing water, wiping a child’s nose, covering their own mouths so the crying does not get out. And they are all quiet, quiet as though fate had ruled that all they may do is wait.

You ask them: “What are you waiting for? For the bodies to be carried out? For them to give you permission to cry?”

Somebody answers quietly, “Women can’t go down a pit.”

You ask again: “They say you can’t, so you can’t? Kate went down. She didn’t ask anybody’s permission. She only asked whether there was anybody below.”

“We’d die down there,” someone says, her voice shaking. “There’s gas.”

“We would not.” You say it word by word. “We are not going to rush at it. First we get the list straight. We get water and cloth ready by the winding gear. We clear the ground round the air way. We hold the place where the spare lamps and ropes and stretchers are kept. Who can bandage? Who can read? Who can run for a doctor, a minister, a newspaperman? Stand out.”

There is a small stir under the canvas. Somebody pulls a blanket tighter on her shoulders, somebody knots her shawl, and the all we can do is wait in their eyes loosens a little. You see a young woman bite her lip and nod; you see an old woman put her beads away in her sleeve; you see Martha lift her face, the tears still there and no longer falling, her eyes as though somebody had polished them.

You take the women towards the gates, and the guards’ sticks come across at once. The wood presses into your chest. You look up at him. “I want the checkweighman. Now.”

The checkweighman is by the winding gear, grey in the face, his eyes full of exhaustion. He sees the women behind you and his brows move. “What do you want?”

“Put them in teams,” you say. “Let them do what they can do. Are you short of hands down there? Short of rope? Short of lamps? Short of people to clear a road? Tell me.”

He stares at you for a while, and in the end pushes the list into your hands.

You take the sheet and press your fingers over the names one by one. Kate’s name is not on it, as if the ground had swallowed it.

You say to the checkweighman: “I’m going down.”

He does not refuse at once. He only looks at you. “You’re a woman.”

“I’m a person,” you answer, steadily. “And I hold a first-aid certificate.”

You produce the piece of paper your parents thought useless, and it stops his mouth.

Now there is a line of people standing behind you. The women in blankets throw the blankets back over their shoulders and show the coarse skirts underneath; shawls are re-knotted, the knot at the side of the neck; someone tears the cloths by the tea urn into strips and winds them round her wrists for bandages. Their eyes are swollen and the ends of their noses are blue, and they stand up straight, like posts driven into the ground.

You push the list back to the checkweighman and take a spare lantern from beside him. You turn to the women. “Anyone who can bandage, on the left. Anyone who can read, with me. Anyone who can fetch and carry, on the right. If your family is still down there, say the name.”

The names come one after another into the cold air. By the last of them, the voices have gone hoarse.

Martha stands at the front, her eyes still wet, her hand a fist, the knuckles white. She does not cry out. She only sets her chin up, stubbornly.

The guards raise their sticks again to stop you, and the wood comes across the women’s chests and presses into the coarse cloth. Somebody is pushed back half a step and comes straight back. You see the stick shaking slightly in front of that line of shoulders, and the guard’s eyes going back and forth — he can hold one or two, and he cannot hold a line.

You walk up to the stick and lift the lantern a little, and the light goes onto his face, onto the sweat on his forehead. You do not shout and you do not plead. You say one thing: “Stand aside. You’re not blocking troublemakers. You’re blocking the people who came to get them out.”

You push the lantern an inch further forward, and the flame shivers.

The stick has to come up, and the women press forward with you like a wave getting up.

You lead them to the pit head.

The black hole of the shaft is like a mouth opened wide, and wind comes pouring out of it. Your lanterns crowd close and the light shows the oiled shine on the rope, and coal dust drifting in it like fine black snow. Somebody knots a rope at her waist and the coarse cloth wrinkles under it; somebody hitches her skirt up and pins it at the knee, awkwardly, and quite decidedly.

The winding gear begins to turn and the rope runs rattling over the sheave, and the sound sets your teeth on edge.

You step onto the wooden plate, your sole finding the wet cold grain of it first, then the stone lip of the shaft, worn slippery by countless boots. You can feel somebody behind you holding your sleeve, holding it tight, as though tying herself to you.

You do not look back. You only lower the lantern so the light lies on the one inch of road in front of your feet.

At the moment you go down, the crying and the praying outside are cut off. There is only the rope rubbing, the timber creaking, and your own quick breathing.

You step into that narrow shadow, leading a group of women who are shaking and will not go back.

You have gone down the pit.

4.5 Down below: knocking out “little canary”

Going deeper along the side roads, the dark lies on your face like wet cloth.

The flames in the Davy lamps shrink to the size of a bean, and a fine mist forms inside the glass and runs down the curve in drops, ticking on the iron ring.

At first you take that sound for water seeping, and your heart drops: below ground, the thing most feared is the water getting louder. It often means another stratum has loosened, that the road under your feet could fall.

You keep the line in order, step by step: two people to a lamp, nobody standing within a foot in front of a lamp; at every prop you chalk a short line on the timber so that nobody loses the way coming back; at a junction, you send somebody who can write to put the direction and the time on paper and tie it to the rail with cord.

You have the women who can bandage tear their shawls into strips, tie them round their own waists first and hand them on. You have the two strongest carry wedges and a short crowbar, and where there is a heap of broken stone you wedge it first, then lever, then move it, never dragging at it by force. You taught levers in the classroom: fulcrum, arm, resistance. The children looked lost; these women learn it fast. They use their bodies as levers every day, and nobody has called it knowledge.

Now and then a sweetish smell drifts along the road, like ripe fruit shut in a barrel. It does not sting; it makes you want to close your eyes.

You call a halt at once and have everybody fall back to a gap of two props and hold the spacing. You raise the lamp to your eyes and watch the colour of the flame and the way it moves. The light shakes and you shake with it. You learned it in a classroom: firedamp has no sound. It only presses a person down slowly, and makes going under look like resting.

You point at the flame in the Davy lamp and tell every one of them: “Watch the light. If the colour goes blue, don’t crowd forward. With more people the breathing is faster and the air goes faster. We go slowly. The lamp goes first, and we follow the lamp.”

You also do what you had thought only people upstairs did: you turn confusion into order. You stop the rescue men you meet on the way and get it clear from them — which side road they went in by, which one has fallen worse — the way you would press a child in class on the steps of a sum.

What you contribute begins to show. Not a heroic charge; you twist scattered fear into a rope that can be used. You put the lists in order and take down the families’ names; you mark the junctions and write on paper where there is gas, where the roof has come down, where an answer was heard; you dig the stone out of the fallen roads and carry it out basket by basket, and pass the stretchers out hand to hand.

Time goes quickly, and when the road has been cleared, a deeper dark opens ahead.

This is where the second fall buried them.

“Keep going.”

You have decided. You take the women into the dark.

Further in, the world gets quiet, the lamps get smaller, the air seems to have weight. Somebody begins to shiver, teeth knocking together in small clicks. You hear a girl behind you draw in her breath as though she is going to cry, and press the crying back down. And then she sings a line.

Very low, like carrying a spark against her chest, afraid of blowing it out.

“As we go marching… marching…”

Coming out of her throat, the line is not fine, and a little off the note. And it lands in the narrow road and gives the footsteps a beat. Your boots go over the wet rails, splash, splash, and slowly fall in with as we go marching.

Another woman picks it up, her voice hoarser, like somebody who has cried for several nights under canvas. “A million darkened kitchens… a thousand mill lofts grey…” There she catches in the throat, as though seeing her own grate, seeing the dust in the screening shed. She does not stop; she pushes the voice through. “Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses—”

There is no sun in a pit. Only lamps, and dark. And hearing that word, something goes warm in you.

Then more of them come in. Some can only hum the tune, some only repeat. The singing starts like a thin line and thickens as it goes forward, until it is thick enough to hold up the caving in of a chest. Their voices come together into one wave:

“For the people hear us singing: bread and roses, bread and roses.”

You see Martha singing too, her voice shaking and steadier than it has ever been.

She sings our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes — and the tears roll two wet lines through the coal dust on her face, and her voice gets lighter: “Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.”

And you understand suddenly that this song is not being sung to the stone down here. It is being sung to yourselves.

To keep you from going to sleep in the dark, from scattering in fear. You are like a flock of little canaries down a pit for the first time, your throats still unsteady, and determined to sing anyway. The singing goes out along the pipes and the rock and is carried off by the rails, past one side road and another, like holding out an invisible lamp to anyone who might still be alive.

And at that moment, in the last of the singing, you hear another kind of sound.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

Very light, very far, like water dripping on iron. At first you take it again for seepage.

But it stops for a breath and comes again, the spacing as though somebody had counted it deliberately. You put up a hand, and the singing drops at once, as though you had pressed it back into their chests. In the dark there is only the last shiver of the rope and your breathing.

Tap — tap-tap — tap. Tap — tap-tap — tap.

You give the lantern to the woman beside you and crouch down and put your ear against an old water pipe.

The iron is cold, and the cold goes straight into the cheekbone. The rhythm comes along the metal until your teeth ache with it. You close your eyes and break it into syllables, the way you teach children to sound out a word: short, long, short; a stop; again.

“Lit—”

Your heart runs with it, and at some point you understand what it is repeating.

“Lit—tle—ca—na—ry.”

You lift your head, your voice hoarse. “Over here.”

The women’s lamps come across one by one, the rings of light laid over each other, and the dark takes a step back. You follow the knocking into a narrower side road, where broken timber and spoil have built half a wall, the broken ends of the props like bitten bone. You have the two strongest set the wedges first, then lever the broken timber up, little by little; you have the rest fall back a yard so that falling stone does not come down on their feet.

At last a gap is opened. You put the Davy lamp through; the flame shivers, and holds. You set your teeth and get through the opening sideways, and the wet cold coal mud goes over your shoulder and your face.

Inside is a small space made by the fall, with several people huddled in it, their faces black with coal, half conscious.

Kate is at the front. She is thin, hollowed out, nearly wasted away. She is half kneeling there, covered in mud, her cuff torn, the back of her hand grazed, the splits in her calluses filled black with coal mud.

And she lifts her head, and those eyes in the lamplight are as steady as ever. Only when your eyes meet does something give in her at last, as if she has let out a breath she has been holding a long time.

“Little canary.”

Her lips move. The breath behind it is so faint it is almost inaudible, and she gets the words out anyway, with the edge you know in them, and a tremor under it.

“I heard you singing at last.”