A Catch of Consequence

by Diana Norman

  ‘My sheep?’

  ‘Na,’ he said, ‘Wully Bolam’s.’ He said that after William the Conqueror had subdued Northumberland—and it had taken some doing—he’d scorched it. Huge areas, of which this moorland was part, had been described as ‘waste’ in the Domesday Book. ‘They’re still waste.’

  She presumed they were heading for the Raby mine but there was no sign of slag heaps or the stark chimneys and wheels denoting a colliery such as had lined the road out of Newcastle.

  However, it was a long time since she’d gone walking other than at Betty’s behest or to trail behind Aaron’s theatrical carts and it was not unpleasant to be suiting her own purpose for once, especially on a day like this.

  Butterflies bounced along with them. Peregrines winnowed the air before disappearing in a stoop to kill; grouse whirred from under her feet. Some red deer posed as if for their portrait under a hangar of trees, then galloped away.

  The moor concealed lush, steep little valleys with fast-flowing streams that had to be crossed by stepping stones. Hedley didn’t offer his hand; he would turn to see that she and Tantaquidgeon were safely over, then go on. He walked in silence and with a roll of the shoulders as if he were breasting a heavy sea. Makepeace wondered if he’d been born angry or had anger thrust upon him, as hatred had been thrust on her.

  They’d negotiated another valley and come to the top when he pointed. And there it was in the distance, a mound on which stood a black tangle of chimneys, frames, wheels and huts, laid out untidily against the sun like the dropped stitches and pulled wool of a child’s attempt at knitting. It had the weary stillness of abandonment.

  Now she got her bearings. From where she and the mine stood on the same height, the ground dropped away to the road that had brought her from Newcastle. From here it looked as if someone had drawn it through dust with a wavering finger. Beyond it was the straight, dark-blue pencil line of the sea. They had come along the upper two sides of a pentangle of which the other three were the track from the house to the road, the road itself and, presumably, a track from the road to the mine.

  She’d passed the damn thing yesterday and hadn’t seen it.

  They walked towards it. Nettles grew around the buildings; machinery rusted quietly in the sun. Weeds were beginning to forgive a slag mound and covering it in a haze of green.

  ‘Not but a step fra the sea’s edge,’ Hedley said, furiously. ‘With a wagonway, we could get the coal to the staiths wi’out crossin’ any land but Raby’s.’ He spat. ‘Ah deor, words fail me.’

  They didn’t, though. Makepeace had no chance to find out what staiths were; now he’d begun to talk, he didn’t stop, his Northumbrian accent becoming stronger and shooting the penultimate syllables of sentences upwards like grapeshot at pigeons’ nests.

  He removed boarding from under a rusted crane to reveal a great hole in the ground. ‘Here’s the main shaft.’ A stone was pressed into Makepeace’s hand. ‘Chuck it doon.’

  She leaned over the hole and let the stone drop. After what seemed a long wait she heard a tiny, echoing splash. Hedley said: ‘That’s watter. Watter. She drowned her bloody self when the roof came in.’

  The shaft had been dug on his grandfather’s initiative, he said, with the Headingtons reluctantly paying for only minimal equipment. After the roof fell in they’d refused to provide any at all. ‘A decent pump, one decent bloody steam pump and we’d still have her dry but Headington would only afford us a horse gin.’

  Still standing on the edge of the shaft, Makepeace was given a brief history of coal. Hedley said it had first made its appearance on the human stage in the thirteenth century when monks had started gathering the strange, black mineral pebbles scattered along the coast and using them for fuel. Once it was realized what enormous deposits lay around Tyne and Wear—as well as the ease of shipping them down the rivers—the great exploitation began under Elizabeth and James I. At first it was by drift mines, shallow slanting passages to get at what lay near the surface; then, as that ran out, by deep, vertical shafts like this one.

  Vast fortunes had been made from coal. Newcastle and its industries—salt, glass, brewing, brick-making, the metal trades, shipping—had been built on it and were growing fast. London fires depended on it and a thousand ships ferried sea coal down the Tyne to the Thames.

  ‘There’s talk it’ll run out,’ Hedley said, ‘but that’s blethor. We’ll all have to go deeper, mind. The colliery at Walker’s just sunk a shaft a hundred fathoms.’

  Makepeace wasn’t interested in other collieries, only this one. She peered again into the depths. ‘There’s still coal down there?’

  He thumped on the stem of the crane, making it shudder. ‘Think on a wall,’ he said. ‘Bloody eighteen yard of coal face, smooth, hard as diamond, colossal. That’s what my father and me saw down there. We were following a small seam through rock and there she was. Rich? I been down pits twenty-seven year an’ never glimpsed richer. I tell you, we stood there gowfed. An’ then dust started tricklin’ over wor heads an’ we heard the creakin’ an’ we knew she was comin’ in. The quicker the dust trickles, the faster you run. We bloody ran. Down comes the roof behind us, followin’ like a juggernaut intent on wor destruction. How we got out wi’ wor lives is a bloody miracle.’

  His voice changed into that of a lover mooning over an unattainable mistress. ‘She’s under rock and water but she’s still there, black as deeth, and I know which direction she bides. Her or me, I’m havin’ her.’ He straightened up. ‘Make us partners, we told Headingtons, invest an’ we’ll dig you a fortune but lug-brained louts divvn’t listen.’

  He jerked his thumb. ‘Come on, pet, we’ll go down.’

  She drew back. ‘Down there?’

  He clicked his tongue at her stupidity. They moved away from the pit head and walked down the hill to a clearing hidden from it—more tumbledown huts, more nettles. ‘All began here.’

  She wouldn’t have noticed this other entrance to the mine if he hadn’t led her to it, a narrow cave overhung by ferns. It was where his grandfather had noticed that a small section of hillside had given way and exposed a stratum of coal. They’d begun the dig horizontally—‘a drift, it’s called’—following the coal seam as it went deeper until, at last, they had approached it more directly by sinking the shaft.

  Hedley brought out various items from the bulging pockets of his coat: a tinderbox, candles, and a cap of quilted leather he told her to put on.

  For a moment, as she took off her linen cap, the sun on her hair made him blink. ‘That’d set off fire-damp,’ he said and led the way. Almost immediately, the entrance became a tunnel little over four feet high so that they both had to stoop.

  Hedley paused, looking back. ‘What’s doing?’

  She turned to see that Tantaquidgeon wasn’t following. ‘Come on,’ she called to him. He didn’t move.

  It was so unusual, she went back. ‘What’s the matter?’

  There was no expression on the Indian’s face, there never was but, looking at it, she saw the deep creases carved into the bronze of his skin.

  He’s got old, she thought, and I haven’t noticed. Under her gaze he folded his arms and turned away.

  Behind her, Hedley said: ‘Don’t make him.’

  ‘He’s gone into fire for me before this,’ she said, defensively.

  ‘We all have wor demons, mebbe his lies underground.’

  Perhaps it did. She turned and left him, feeling naked.

  The tunnel sloped downwards, turned, flattened and sloped again, never at any point rising above back-breaking level. ‘High enough to get out coal,’ Hedley said, his voice echoing back to her. ‘Coal counts, not bodies.’

  The place was a labyrinth, other tunnels gaped to right and left; she lost her sense of direction. As they went deeper they were passing among small pillars, hand-hewn four-cornered piers of jet which glistened wetly as Hedley’s candle went by. ‘Coal,’ she called. ‘Is this coal?’

  ‘Ay. Ke
eps the roof up.’

  She hurried to catch up with him. ‘Isn’t it worth something?’

  ‘A bit.’

  After a while he stopped and held the candle low so that it shone on a black and motionless pool of water ahead covering the tunnel floor as it went on and downwards. ‘Flood,’ he said. ‘Same watter as at the bottom of the shaft.’

  There was a niche in one of the walls with a bench fixed across it. He told her to sit. He sat beside her and put the candle down. She was in his classroom—he was a teacher who believed in physical experience. ‘See, pet,’ he began, ‘the earth doesn’t appreciate being violated, she’ll keep her coal if she can . . .’

  ‘She’, apparently, had terrible ways of killing the human moles who tried to rob her, sometimes crushing them, sometimes flooding their tunnels to drown them. There was a noxious fume called ‘choke-damp’ that took miners’ breath and lives, and ‘firedamp’ which caused explosions so strong it could blow men’s bodies hundreds of feet up vertical shafts into the open air.

  ‘Wor Peter were killed like that at Walker’s,’ he said, heavily, ‘me brother.’

  She wasn’t ready for other people’s tragedies. The silence was broken only by the far-off, echoing drip of water. Around her the walls were decorated with little stalactites of mineral salts that showed whitely brilliant in the light of the candle.

  ‘How d’you know the wall of coal you and your father saw doesn’t run out further on?’ she asked.

  He grunted, amused, and raised the pitch of his voice into a parody of upper-class English. ‘ “Are you dowsers of coal, you Hedleys? Can you divine it? Surely, it’s too far north to be a significant field.” I saw it. She’s there, I smelled her.’

  He stretched and stood up. ‘One more thing. Folk that send men down mines do it lightly. They need to know what light is—and dark. Don’t be feored, I’m dousing the candle for a minute.’

  She saw him lick his fingers, then the flame went out.

  Black. It wasn’t darkness like a moonless night, not mere absence of light, it was a presence that pressed upon the eyelids, it was the coffin lid coming down, the withdrawal of self, of hope, of God. In that moment she knew what death actually was; it wasn’t death because she was aware but she saw the unawareness that awaited her.

  She lost Dapifer then. Is this where you are, Pip? Is this what you know? But he didn’t know anything; he was in eternal insentience.

  There was the scrape of a tinderbox and a tiny waver of light as the candle lit. Hedley started to say something, then stopped, put down the candle and went to his knees beside her. ‘I’m sorry, pet, I’m a clown. You seemed unafeored . . .’

  She thumped on his shoulder with her fist. ‘He was the most alive person I ever knew, oh God, and they sent him into . . . there isn’t a God, I saw it, just nothingness.’ The loneliness was intolerable.

  He sat down, one arm around her so that she could weep onto his jacket. It smelled of coal dust and iron.

  ‘Obliteration,’ he said, after a bit. ‘Whiles I thought the same.’

  When her weeping grew less fierce, he withdrew his arm and produced a kerchief. She blew her nose into patches of machine oil.

  ‘But see, bonny lass,’ he said, ‘the candle lit up again. Persephone comes yearly out the shadows and you’ll do the same.’ He retrieved his handkerchief, gave her face a couple more wipes with it and put it away. ‘Give us your hand and I’ll take you home.’

  With her hand in one of his, the other holding the candle, he shuffled with her out of the tunnel.

  Air and birdsong and the smell of bracken blasted themselves at her and for a moment she put back her head, letting sunlight wash through her. Then she was hurt by her body’s surrender to physical contentment as if, like a child, it had not been paying attention to the grown-up business of mental agony. Merely being alive was a helpless betrayal of the dead.

  She noticed Hedley walk up to the statue that was Tantaquidgeon and talk to him, a squat, dark shape beside the tall Indian. She experienced a sudden nausea at the intimacy he and she had shared below ground. She’d exposed her soul, her husband, to a damn quarryman.

  Anyway, it was her job to comfort Tantaquidgeon, not his.

  ‘Anybody could get the coal out,’ she said, nastily, ‘they wouldn’t need you.’

  ‘They could try, pet,’ he admitted, ‘but they wouldn’t find her, they’d need to know where she lies.’ He was dismissive, absent-minded, walking off in a hurry to be home. He’d shown her the difficulties so that she would know what she was selling and why she must sell it; she was no longer his responsibility.

  She took a last look around, trying to imagine the maze beneath her feet, the stone-blocked, water-filled tunnels lying in the dark acres between here and the shaft. Damn the man, he was right; you’d need to know which direction to dig in.

  As she began to trail after him on the path back, she was still shaken, prepared to blame him for momentarily extinguishing more than light. It was a terrible thing he’d done merely in order to teach her a lesson for enquiring into his trade.

  Common-sense and the sweetness of being above ground gradually brought her balance back. The lesson had been well learned; she’d seen the locality, heard a little of its history, and absorbed more knowledge about the working of mines by actually being in one than if she’d attended fifty lectures.

  She called out to him. ‘How much money would it need to get the mine producing?’

  ‘Ten thousand pound,’ he called back. ‘At least.’

  She had a sudden image of the careless piles of guineas on Almack’s’ gaming tables. A resentful layer added itself to her stratum of hatred, this time at the sheer bloody wastefulness of those who excluded her.

  When Hedley left her at the door of the ugly house, she was too preoccupied to say goodbye.

  ‘Wife died givin’ birth,’ Betty said, serving rabbit stew. ‘Only got the one and had him eddicated. The boy’s gone for a lawyer in Newcastle. Andra said he di’n’t want his chil’ down a pit draggin’ coal wagons at eight-year-old, like he was. Sent down to join his pa, Andra was, when work run out here. We both known slavery, Andra an’ me.’

  ‘He’s a talker, I’ll give him that,’ Makepeace said.

  ‘Put a spark back in you,’ Betty said defiantly. ‘It’s nice to see you eatin’.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Another betrayal by the body—being hungry.

  ‘It’s his brother give us the coneys, tha’s what. One got killed in the pit, this ’un’s Jamie, lives in one o’ the but ’n’ bens down the track, got two childer.’ Betty, also, had been absorbing local knowledge.

  ‘What sort of man d’you reckon him, Bet?’

  ‘Billie?’

  ‘Andra. Clever? Or mad?’

  Betty raised her eyebrows. ‘You was out with him all mornin’, what you reckon?’ Then she said, ‘Bit o’ both, mebbe.’

  Which wasn’t helpful.

  The scales of Makepeace’s opinion were out of level all night, first on one side, then the other. He couldn’t know whether the mine was worth the enormous investment of ten thousand pounds; the wall he and his father had seen might be just that: a freak seam of coal behind which was just more rock. But if it didn’t run out, if it went on to form the equation: Wealth equals Power equals Ability to Harm . . . what then?

  Fighting Catty through the courts would be the least of it. Makepeace’d buy newspapers and blacken the bitch’s name with them. Buy politicians as well and get a certain Major thrown out of the army . . .

  The cupboard bed became a bloodbath: Catty’s metaphorical nose exploded as Makepeace’s heel went into it; Conyers’s metaphorical liver spilled onto an executioner’s table. The images became more and more ridiculous as sleep continued to elude her; she knew they were ridiculous, a childish recompense to herself. But they’re all I’ve got.

  She got out of bed, tiptoed round the small truckle bed one of Betty’s new friends had provided f
or Philippa, and laved her face in the ewer to start weighing the argument over again.

  It all depended on the person of Andra Hedley. Prophet or crackpot? Even supposing she could procure the ten thousand pounds, he would have to be her security; she had no other.

  The moon was full; usually it was a searing reminder of the times she and Dapifer had looked at it together; but tonight it was kinder to her. It was light at least, and today she had come to value light.

  Nobody was left in total blackness for ever, hadn’t he said? Tapers were relit and poor old Persephone, perhaps led by a continuity of lights, from the chandeliers of Almack’s to a miner’s candle, staggered out of Hell’s tunnel to wreak revenge on the shites who’d sent her there.

  Yes, that was it.

  She carried her decision back to bed like a drunk trying not to spill his tankard. Waking the next morning, she found it slopped and the whole thing began again.

  Another look at Hedley might make up her mind one way or the other.

  She went up the track and took the turning off it that led to the but ’n’ bens, which turned out to be a row of two-roomed cottages.

  Most of them were deserted but two at least were neatly kept and appeared to have been converted into one dwelling to judge from the identical paint on four pairs of shutters and one of the doorways which had been filled in with bricks. Vegetable plots were laid out along the backs and two toddlers were playing on the hill beyond them that hid the ruin of the big house. Hens pecked at feed a woman was scattering on the bare earth outside her front door. She nodded good morning at Makepeace. ‘Andra?’

  ‘How d’you do. Yes.’

  ‘Plodgin’ wi’ his fire engines, end o’ raa.’ She indicated the last cottage in the row.

  If she’d said the man was cavorting with a dragon, it would have been believable; smoke issued in strong, regular puffs from the cottage’s open door and windows. Makepeace could hear clanking as if scales rubbed against each other, and the wheeze of giant breathing.

  She approached carefully—into wet heat. It wasn’t smoke, it was steam. Peering through it, she saw that the two rooms had been knocked into one, giving the ceiling an unfortunate pot belly. Rough shelves held metal objects, springs, wires, tubes and God-knew-whats.