“Mr. Leveret, if we closed a pit every time we found a whiff of firedamp, England would freeze.” He took the ledger from his pack and noted the time, location and amount of gas. “We watch the firedamp, we chase the firedamp, and we don’t let it blow us to kingdom come.”
From here the road got worse, which didn’t slow Battie in the least. “This is a ‘sit,’ ” he said at a place where the ceiling buckled, and made a note in his book. “This is a ‘creep,’ ” he said where the floor rose, lifting the track. “There’s pressure up and down. We have limestone above and gritstone below. We haven’t lost the coal yet, though.”
The farther they walked the more Blair understood that Battie didn’t need the map. The man knew the Hannay Seam the way a riverman knew a river. Probably his father and grandfather had worked the same coal. A man like Battie knew where the black banks twisted left, right, up and down, or plunged from sight at a geologic fault. He knew the Hannay Seam’s density, cohesion, water content, luster, lighting point and ash. He could follow it in the dark.
Leveret was falling behind. Blair was about to ask Battie to relent when the underlooker stopped on his own and set his lamp by a coal pillar. He spread his map across the floor and pointed to two lamp numbers. “This is where we found these two lads. They were the nearest casualties to the cage except for the boy and pony.”
A trail of numbers led to the west coal face, still twice as far as they had gone so far. The victims on the Main Road had fallen in groups, some huddled in refuge holes.
Leveret arrived, gasping and covered in coal dust as if he’d been dragged behind a pony.
“I’m … fine,” he said and sank to his knees.
Blair and Battie returned to the map.
“Were they burned?” Blair asked.
“No. No one was burned until we get to the end of the Main Road, close to the face. The lads here were stretched out like they’d gone to sleep.”
“But facing the air? Running when they’d dropped?”
“Right.” Battie seemed darkly satisfied. “Mr. Leveret, your friend here knows something about coal.”
“They were crushed?” Leveret asked.
“No,” Battie said. “When firedamp explodes it turns to afterdamp. Carbon monoxide. The strongest man in the world could be running through here at top speed, but two breaths of that and he’ll drop to the floor. Unless you drag him out, he’ll die. In fact, I’ve seen rescue attempts where one, two, three men will drop trying to pull one man out.”
The floor jumped, followed by a roar that rolled through one end of the tunnel to the other. Pebbles rained in the dark.
Leveret was on his feet. “Fire!”
“Just blasting, Mr. Leveret. There’s a difference. When there’s an explosion you can feel it in Wigan. I’ll let you know.” Battie rolled up the map and added, “There won’t be any more demonstrations like that, I hope, Mr. Leveret. Around the men, I mean.”
Battie’s lamp led the way again, pausing only as he mentioned that three miners had died here, four there, all trying to outrun afterdamp. It wasn’t an unsafe mine, as mines went, Blair thought. It was dirty and close and uncomfortable, of course, but tunnels were kept clear, tracks well maintained, and Battie seemed to be a punctilious supervisor. It was just that all mines were an inversion of the natural order, and coal mines in particular were stupid and deadly.
The tunnel started to plunge. It would go deeper as the whole underground strata tilted south, Blair thought. The seam had likely first been worked as an easy outcropping north of Wigan. Roman troops had probably dried their sandals by fires of Hannay coal. With each step down, he was more aware of heat. The mine’s breath parched the throat even as the skin turned to a slough of black sweat.
The tunnel opened into a crypt-sized chamber where a boy walked a pony on a ring of track, making a ghostly carousel. When the pony stopped, a man silvery with coal dust, naked except for improvised kneepads and clogs, emerged from a low tunnel and hooked full tubs to the animal’s harness. Giving Battie the briefest of nods, he disappeared like an apparition back into the tunnel, pushing an empty tub ahead of him. Pony and boy vanished in the opposite direction.
“Hot.” Leveret found his voice.
“Tea, sir?” Battie offered a tin flask from his pack.
Leveret shook his head and dropped to the track in exhaustion. The first time in a mine was always the worst, no matter how fit you were, Blair thought. Even with malaria, he was simply doing what he had done all his life.
Leveret said, “Sorry to be so clumsy.”
“No bother, sir,” Battie said. “Miners get too comfortable. They know a single spark is dangerous, but they will come skating down the rails here on the irons of their clogs, sparks flying like fireworks. Or sneak away from work into a side tunnel and sleep like a field mouse.”
“Sounds quite cozy,” Leveret said.
Battie said, “Sometimes. There was a pony here the day of the fire. Dropped and blocked that tunnel. We found ten men on the other side.”
“Afterdamp?” Blair asked.
“Yes. You know, I read a London paper that said the greatest modern fear is being buried alive. There were advertisements for coffins with speaking tubes and semaphores. Why would they worry about being buried alive in London?” Battie turned to Leveret. “Better?”
“I’m ready to move.”
“Good.”
They ducked into the tunnel that the miner had vanished into. There were rails and just enough room for a crouching man to maneuver a tub through a gallery of wooden props. Through the tunnel came a concussive sound, as if a wave of surf had curled and crashed.
Leveret asked, “What’s that?”
“The roof falling in,” Battie said.
“Good Lord,” Leveret said, and Blair heard him trying to backtrack.
Battie said, “No, that was normal, Mr. Leveret. That’s the system.”
“System?”
“You’ll see. A cave-in is a sharper noise, a mix of timbers and stone, usually,” Battie said. “You’ll see what I mean.”
On either side now their lamps lit not so much tunnels as a honeycomb of pillars of coal a little like the columns of a black mosque. At the edge of conscious hearing Blair became aware of a new sound: crystalline, percussive, distorted and amplified by the vagaries of rock. Battie led the way for ten more minutes, and suddenly he and Blair crawled out into a narrow tunnel, the length of which was populated by shadowy figures wearing only pants and clogs, some only clogs, covered by a film of dust and glitter, swinging short, double-pointed picks. The men had the pinched waists of whippets and the banded, muscular shoulders of horses, but shining in the upcast light of their lamps what they most resembled was machinery, automatons tirelessly hacking at the pillars of coal that supported the black roof above them. Coal split with a sound nearly like chimes. Where the coal seam dipped, men worked on knees wrapped in rags. Other men loaded tubs or pushed them, leaning into them with their backs. A fog of condensation and coal dust rose from them.
Blair looked at his compass. “You’re working backwards.”
“Correct,” Battie said.
The miners were attacking the inner wall of the west face, working back toward the pit eye and not along the outer wall, as Blair had expected. The outer wall didn’t exist; it was a low space that receded into impenetrable murk.
Battie opened his map. “I think you’ll appreciate this, Mr. Blair. This is the Lancashire system. We drive the main tunnels, the roads, through the coal to the border of the vein. We cut smaller tunnels to connect the roads and circulate the air, and then we start working backwards, as you say, to get the rest of the coal, just leaving enough stone pillars and props to hold up the roof until we’re clear. The props collapse and the roof does fall—that’s the sound we heard—but by then we’re gone.”
“This is where victims were burned?” Blair asked.
“Along this coal face, but about fifteen yards in.” Battie faced
the worked-out void behind the miners. “That’s where we were two months ago. That’s two thousand tons of coal. Anyway, no one is allowed in old workings. Those are pit rules.”
The line of miners swung their picks at a relentless pace. Blair had seen the same phenomenon around the world: deep-shaft miners worked as if sheer physical effort could mesmerize the mind. In this case, perhaps there was also a sense that they were cutting their way back to the shaft. A bull’s-eye lantern might have cut the murk, but the dim glow of a safety lamp was hardly better than an ember and barely lit the man holding it. Beyond the perimeter of the coal face it was impossible to say how far the worked-out area extended behind the miners, or whether the roof was six feet or six inches high. Blair picked up a stone and threw it sidearm. The stone was swallowed by the dark, its sound lost in the din of the picks.
“How far in is the roof up?” he asked.
“Ten yards some places, a hundred yards in others. It could stay up a month, a year. It could come down while we’re here,” Battie said.
Leveret caught up with them, gasping, worse for the wear in the last, low stretch of tunnel. Blood smeared his forehead, and sweat and coal dust made black soup around his eyes. “What could come down?” he asked.
“Nothing. Leveret, I couldn’t be prouder if you had found Livingstone.” Blair gave him a handkerchief. “A few minutes and then we’ll head back.”
For every man with a pick, another shoveled the coal and loaded it in tubs. Every twenty yards the track split into short parallel lines so that tubs could pass. Into a coal pillar a man cranked a drill that was a barrel of cogs steadied by an iron brace that reached from floor to roof. He was a head taller than any other man along the coal face, and though the drill must have weighed forty pounds, he handled it easily. Black powder poured from the bore hole. The rod turned so smoothly the man could have been drilling into cheese.
Because of the poor light and the fact that they were so black with dust, Blair didn’t notice at first that the man wore bandages on both his legs. At the sight of Blair he stopped work. “Still looking for Reverend Maypole?” Bill Jaxon asked.
“You never know,” said Blair.
He was amazed that Jaxon was capable of walking after last night’s fight in back of The Young Prince, but he reminded himself that miners took pride in the amount of pain they could ignore. With his long hair tied back, Jaxon looked like a statue by Michelangelo, but carved from coal, not marble.
“Still got your clogs on?” Blair asked.
“Want to try them?” Jaxon answered.
At Jaxon’s side appeared a gnomish figure that Blair recognized as an ebony version of Smallbone, his drinking partner from The Prince. Smallbone cradled a long tin box. Jaxon unscrewed the top leg of the brace and extracted the bore rod from the hole. From the box Smallbone took a long straw that he slid in the hole and puffed into with his eyes closed. A jet of dust flew out. Blair enjoyed seeing a specialist at work. Next, Smallbone brought out a ten-inch waxed paper tube from the box.
“What …?” Leveret asked.
“Gunpowder. He makes the shots himself,” Jaxon said.
Battie said, “Smallbone is a fireman. On the surface a fireman puts out fires. Down here a fireman fires the shots.”
The bore hole had a downward slant. With a wooden rod Smallbone pushed the paper tube in as far as it would go, carefully punctured its end with a copper needle and fed in a fuse, a “slow match” of rough cotton cord soaked with saltpeter. He led the cord out and tamped the hole with clay so that one foot of fuse hung free. Very homemade, Blair thought.
In the meantime, Battie had moved his lamp along the roof in search of firedamp. “It looks clear,” he said.
“Shot!” Jaxon yelled.
The shout was passed along. All the miners in sight gathered their tools and moved to the Main Road tunnel out of the line of fire. Battie led Leveret and Blair. Jaxon followed with his drill while Smallbone stayed at the hole alone.
Battie advised Leveret, “Look the opposite way, sir, and open your mouth.”
Blair watched Smallbone pass the lamp slowly along the roof and down the wall to satisfy himself there was no gas, a sign of intelligence better than any written examination. He knelt by the dangling fuse and blew against the flame of his lamp until it flared in response and tilted toward its protective gauze. He blew harder and the flame grew brighter and pushed until a tongue of fire penetrated the wire screen and reached out to the cord. On his third breath the fuse end reciprocated with an orange bud of light.
The fireman returned with quick, short steps and had joined the group for five seconds when the tunnel behind him erupted with a clap like thunder and swirling billows of black dust. The blast was more powerful than Blair had expected. The miners rocked like men on a deck, while the report divided into echoes that subdivided into other tunnels. One by one the men shook their heads and opened their red-rimmed eyes wide.
“Doubling up on the charge, Mr. Smallbone?” Battie said. “Do that again and you can find employment in another pit.”
It was the first hint of hypocrisy Blair had seen in the underlooker, and Battie seemed uneasy at his own protest. Everyone—owners and underlookers—knew that miners were paid only by the tubs they filled, not by the time they spent picking at deep, hard coal. That was why firemen blasted in spite of firedamp. Smallbone’s shot had dropped a wide shelf of coal to the floor and fractured the wall besides. The miners dug reviving snuff from their tins and returned to work. Jaxon shouldered his drill and brace and moved down the tunnel to start the next hole. As he moved, an avenue of admiration formed around him.
Smallbone, with no chagrin, lingered by the fallen shelf and expanded to Leveret. “Yer German dynamite, well, it’s a fart in t’wind.”
“I thought it was powerful,” Leveret said. “I’ve read about it in scientific journals.”
“On German coal,” Smallbone said. “This is English coal.”
Nothing like a pit as a leveler, Blair thought. Where else could you find an estate manager discussing explosives with a naked miner? He noticed that Battie was contemplating the worked-out void again, where airborne dust still shivered from the blast.
“About twenty more yards along the face, that’s where I think the explosion was. How far in, Mr. Blair, I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a thousand times.”
“You think it was touched off by a shot?”
“No. Only Smallbone was firing shots at this end of the face. He and Jaxon, the man with the drill, would be dead, too. They lived to save a half a dozen men, thank God. There was a spark. Someone did something incredibly stupid. Some fool forced open his lamp to light his pipe. Or pulled the top off just for more light to swing a pick by. There was gas. A real ‘blower.’ And there was a complication. The blast unsettled some waste—stones and small coal—that we’d bricked in. Gas loves waste. After we aired the blower out, gas leaked from the waste until we bricked it up again. Had to if we wanted to bring in lamps to search.”
“How big a section did you rebrick?”
“Maybe two foot high, three wide.”
“Show me.”
Battie stared into the void. “We had the mines inspector here and we had the inquiry. It’s all done with, Mr. Blair. So what are you after? Clearly, you know your way around a mine, but it’s very unclear to me why you’re in this mine. What are you looking for?”
“There’s a man missing.”
“Not here. After the fire there were seventy-six lamps and seventy-six bodies accounted for. I made sure of that.”
“Each and every one identified? There was enough left of them to tell?”
“They were identified officially by the coroner—every one, Mr. Blair.”
“All from Wigan? I saw some Irish in town.”
“There were some dayworkers from outside.”
“And nobody’s been in there since?”
“It’s against the rules. Anyway, nobody would go with you.”
“I hate coal mines,” Blair muttered. He held his lamp out to opaque eddies of suspended dust. “Could you check the map one more time?”
While Battie was distracted with his satchel and sorting through it for the map, Blair stepped into the dark.
The way was surprisingly open for the first steps, and blackness swam around him. But within a few feet the roof lowered steeply and pressed him first into a crouch and then down to all fours, crawling on the floor and pushing the meager light ahead, he and the lamp invisible from behind. Battie’s blinded, furious shouts and curses chased after him ineffectually.
Dust rolled like waves before the lamp. Above the lamp was a faint nimbus, like a ring around a moon. It was the scope of Blair’s sight and knowledge. He held his compass to the light, aiming west.
Once he stopped at the sound of an abandoned timber giving way with a slow tick, like a clock. The roof was settling, but easing down. That was why miners preferred wooden preps to iron, for the warning.
Twice he had to correct around stone pillars. At one point he had to squeeze on his stomach through a rockfall, but the other side was clear up to where a whole section of subterranean roof had collapsed and the air was foul enough for the flame of his lamp to start sputtering. He backed away and followed the line of the collapse south. Overhead, the roof was moist and glittered like stars. It was like navigating, he thought, in a world where everything was solid.
He struggled around gritstone slabs that had crept up from the floor. What he wanted to avoid was falling in a pocket and having his lamp go out.
His foot was caught. When he tried to pull free, he heard Battie’s voice close behind him. “You’re a miner, Mr. Blair.”
“I have been.”
He lay still and let Battie pull himself level. The underlooker had a lamp, though all Blair could see in its light was Battie’s eyes.
“The Bishop’s man, they say. Wants a tour. Not so unusual. The board of directors comes by. They turn around before we’re a hundred yards into a tunnel. A big thank-you. Other appointments, wrong clothes. Not you.”
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