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‘It’s all right,’ said Adam. ‘Thank you for helping me today. I won’t forget it.’ The bus had arrived while they were talking and he reached over and shook Ernest’s hand before he got on. He meant what he’d said – it was a long time since he’d felt he had a friend.
On Sunday Daniel took his son to church. Adam was surprised. He vividly remembered the division in the house in London between his mother’s devout Christianity at one polar opposite and his father’s outspoken atheism at the other. According to Daniel there couldn’t be a God who would allow the world he’d created to be so unfair, so cruel to the vast majority of those who had the misfortune to be born into it. And since his mother’s death Adam had been inclined to agree with his father. The God to whom he had once prayed to find his father work and watch over his family seemed like a foolish figment of his childhood imagination, a cardboard cut-out figure with his big white beard and all-seeing eyes.
‘Why are we going, Dad?’ he asked as they walked up the hill together in the cold bright morning, leaving the mine and the streets of grey terraced houses behind them.
‘Because your mother would have wanted it,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s one of the only ways we can honour her memory.’
Adam nodded, accepting the explanation. ‘Does Edgar know we’re going?’ he asked. Like many of the miners, Daniel’s cousin was not a religious man. Church for him was where the owners and the managers went: its doctrines of social respect and obedience were useful tools to buttress their control of the workforce.
‘Yes, he knows. And he understands why,’ said Daniel. But Adam sensed an unease in his father’s voice that belied the certainty of his response.
The church was beautiful. It was smaller and simpler in design than the church in Islington, made of an old silvery-grey stone that was cold to the touch. There was no stained glass and the morning light poured in through the high leaded windows of the clerestory. The brick floor of the nave was uneven, worn down by centuries of use, and the carvings on the oak-wood chancel screen were primitive and mysterious – flat ancient faces with thin mouths and opaque eyes. The building was timeless, far removed from the ugly excrescence of the mining town stretching out behind it down the hill.
It was a family church built and maintained through the centuries by the Scarsdale family. Their huge marble mausoleum surrounded by iron railings and encrusted with black names and dates dominated the churchyard; and inside, a baroque tomb of two seventeenth-century ancestors carved in relief, lying side by side on a stone bed in the south transept, struck the only unharmonious note in the church’s architecture.
The empty front pew was reserved for the present occupants of Scarsdale Hall who had not yet arrived when Daniel and Adam took their seats at the back of the church. They came in just before the service was about to start: the father, a straight-backed, thin-faced man in his fifties with a long aquiline nose and a short clipped grey beard and moustache, was dressed in the severe formal fashion of thirty years before, and had on his arm a younger wife, who moved slowly up the aisle, her movement sharply constricted by a wasp-waisted hobble skirt that reached narrowly down to her ankles. The wilting sleeves of her silk blouse dripped with expensive lace and a wide-brimmed hat covered with artificial flowers was perched on the front of her head at just the right angle to show off her conventionally pretty face.
They were an ill-assorted couple, Adam thought: the husband making no effort at ostentation and the wife self-consciously fashionable and excessively over-dressed for the simple country setting. And behind them came their younger son, Brice, a boy of Adam’s age in an expensive suit with a carnation in his buttonhole and a gold-topped walking cane and pearl-grey silk hat in his hand. He looked very like his mother and yet he hadn’t inherited her good looks. The slightly drooping edges of her full mouth conveyed an impression of sensuality but the same feature on her son gave him a look of bored condescension, and while her dimpled chin was pretty, his small version made him seem weak and petulant.
Adam liked the parson, Mr Vale. He seemed down-to-earth and preached an inclusive gospel based on the second commandment, although there were precious few miners there to hear him. They were either Methodists attending the chapel on the other side of the valley or non-believers like Edgar, who saw the sabbath as an opportunity to catch up on sleep after the heavy demands of the working week. None of the family had been out of bed when Daniel and Adam had left for church in the morning.
The parson was waiting at the lychgate in his surplice with his daughter beside him when the congregation came out after the service. She was the most beautiful girl Adam had ever seen; she stopped him in his tracks at the door of the church, staring at her wide-eyed over the gravestones. She was dressed in a plain black dress with lace-up Oxford shoes and a bonnet. Nothing special, nothing fancy – just dark liquid eyes and rich dark hair and skin like white honey and a way of looking about her that seemed shy and tender all the same time. Adam thought that if he had been asked to write down every feature of the perfect female face then each one would have been hers, and yet he had never imagined her face in any of his dreams.
He stayed just outside the porch feasting his eyes on her, memorizing her, and prayed that she wouldn’t look back in his direction. He didn’t want to embarrass her but he didn’t want to stop watching her – the way she bent her slender neck forward to listen to her father, smiling in a way that lit up her face from inside as he spoke to the parishioners passing through the gate. And she didn’t notice him, didn’t feel his gaze. Someone else did instead – the owner’s son, Brice Scarsdale, the boy with the gold-tipped cane and the weak chin. He’d been standing watching the girl too and now he realized suddenly that she had another admirer.
He left his parents and came over to Adam. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked angrily, twirling his stick.
‘Adam Raine,’ said Adam evenly. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Never mind that. Don’t you know it’s rude to stare at a lady?’ Brice demanded angrily.
‘Yes,’ said Adam, looking him in the eye. ‘But you were doing the same.’
‘How dare you!’ said Brice. ‘Why, I’ve half a mind to—’ He raised the stick but then dropped it, remembering where he was. ‘You should learn some respect for your betters,’ he said and turned abruptly on his heel, walking quickly over to his parents, who were at that moment climbing into their chauffeur-driven motor car. And as they were driven away, Adam had the exquisite pleasure of being introduced to the parson’s daughter. Miriam was her name and she smiled at him as he took her hand.
In the afternoon there was a visitor at the house in Station Street. Luke Mason, the boy who’d spoken to Adam after the fight, was at the door holding a football under his arm.
‘Do you want to play, Ernest?’ he asked. ‘It’s a fine day. An’ thy friend can come too if ’e wants,’ he added, nodding to Adam.
Adam did want to; he could think of nothing that he wanted to do more, in fact. Days sitting on the bus or in classrooms had left him pent up with nervous energy. And he liked football. It had been one of the street games he’d played growing up, although the makeshift balls they’d used had been nothing like the heavy dark brown leather object that Luke was carrying.
What’s it made of?’ Adam asked.
‘It’s a rubber bladder inside an’ then tanned leather on top, eighteen sections of it all stitched together. Look, you can see the seams: it’s beautiful work,’ said Luke, holding the ball out for Adam to inspect. ‘Our team won it two year ago when we won the Mines Cup. Not the proper one, mind, but the one for kids our age. ’Twas the match ball an’ we won in the last minute. It was a great day, weren’t it, Ernest?’ said Luke with a faraway look in his eye, remembering past glory.
‘Yes, it was,’ said Ernest, smiling. ‘There’s never been a better.’
‘Who scored the goal?’ asked Adam.
‘Rawdon. An’ ’twas Ernest that gave ’im the cross,’ said Luke. Adam liked the way Luke wanted to tell everything correctly, to ensure that everyone got the credit he deserved.
‘Will Rawdon be there today?’ asked Adam.
‘Yes, but there won’t be any trouble. I can promise thee that. It’s the game that matters,’ said Luke. And Adam believed him.
The football pitch was on the edge of the town. It was surprisingly well kept with nets behind the goals, benches for spectators, and a single-storey wooden pavilion for changing with a green and white scoreboard on the outside.
There were about fifteen boys already there when they arrived and they started playing almost straightaway. Adam was on Luke’s team. He could see Rawdon down at the other end of the field, standing between the other side’s goalposts.
‘You look like a runner,’ said Luke. ‘So try it on the wing. See what you think.’
The game was played at a frantic pace and the tackling was hard. Like the ball – when Adam headed it he felt as if he’d been hit with a lead weight, and Luke laughed. ‘Hurts the first time, don’t it? But you’ll get used to it.’
Several times they had to stop to reinflate the ball’s bladder and the boys drank water from the standpipe. Some of them had brought oranges and they ate them, leaning with their backs against the pavilion. Adam recognized several from the day of the fight but they were friendly now, united in their love of the game and the exhilaration of running in the open air after a week of working in the mine.
Near the end, when the score was tied at one apiece, Adam got the ball far out on the right and, instead of passing it as he had done up to then, he ran at the other side’s full back, feinting to the outside and then cutting back in, leaving his opponent wrong-footed as he went past. He looked up but there was no one on his team nearby and so he ran on, heading towards the goal where Rawdon stood waiting for him, holding out his arms to make himself big and cut off the shot.
Adam could see that Rawdon had positioned himself well and that the angle was too tight to score. He’d taken one too many strides and his only hope was to go round the goalkeeper. And so at the last moment, just as he was about to collide with Rawdon, he twisted his body to the left, kicking the ball away from Rawdon’s outstretched hand. Rawdon had already committed himself and, charging forward, he knocked Adam to the ground. It was a mirror image of what had happened on the day of the fight. One of the defenders rushing back was in time to kick the ball away and out of danger.
As Adam got to his feet, he found himself surrounded by the other players. They were arguing amongst themselves about what had happened; about whether Rawdon had committed a foul, whether there should be a penalty kick.
‘’E ran into ’im. There wor nowt Rawdon could do about it,’ said one.
‘Rawdon took ’is legs. The new kid would’ve scored if ’e ’adn’t,’ said another.
There was no referee to make the decision and Adam couldn’t see how they were going to resolve the dispute until Luke stepped in.
‘What do you think, Rawdon?’ he asked. ‘Was it a penalty?’
Rawdon hesitated, surprised to be asked. The rest of the players fell silent, waiting. Adam could see that it was a clever move by Luke. Would Rawdon take his own side or would he want to look fair? And the second choice also gave him a chance at glory if he could save the penalty kick.
He glanced at Adam, looking him up and down for a moment, and made his decision. ‘I reckon it was,’ he said. ‘But e’s got to take it. Not thee, Luke. You know our rules.’
‘Good,’ said Luke. ‘I agree.’ And he handed the ball to Adam, pointing at the almost invisible white spot painted into the muddy grass twelve yards from the goal.
Adam took four steps back and braced himself, trying to concentrate on the ball and not look at Rawdon, who was staring at him from the goalmouth. He’d decided to go to the left. He didn’t know why but he was certain of his decision, and yet the knowledge didn’t stop his heart thumping in his chest. It felt like a hammer beat, but there was no time left to calm down. It was just a kick, he told himself as he got ready to run; just one stupid kick, and yet in that instant he wanted it to succeed more than he could ever remember wanting anything. Perhaps he wanted it too much, which was why he half slipped as he went forward, scuffing the shot so that it lost most of its power as it travelled towards the middle of the goal. It should have been easy to save but Rawdon had read Adam’s intentions too well. He dived hard to his right and watched helplessly as the ball rolled past his feet into the net.
Adam’s team cheered. They’d won the match and it didn’t matter if the new boy had got lucky. He’d played well and he’d made the chance for himself. They laughed, clapping him on the back as they walked off, and even some of the other team’s players joined in. But Rawdon stood watching him with a look of concentrated hostility. He waited, leaning against a goalpost, until they were alone, facing each other.
‘It don’t matter what ’appened,’ he said, looking Adam in the eye. ‘It don’t matter how many goals you score. You don’t belong here wi’ us. An’ you niver will.’
He didn’t wait for a response but walked quickly away, limping slightly as he went.
‘What happened to Rawdon?’ Adam asked Ernest as they began the walk home. ‘Luke said he used to score goals so why’s he the goalkeeper now?’
‘He hurt his leg down the mine,’ said Ernest. ‘The pony he was driving got scared of something and bolted. And then pulled up short and kicked back – britching, we call it. Rawdon caught his leg in the limmers—’
‘Limmers? What are they?’ asked Adam, interrupting.
‘The shafts they put on the pony’s harness to link him up to the tubs. You don’t know anything, do you?’ said Ernest, smiling. ‘Any road, Rawdon broke his leg in three places. He must’ve been in agony – he was white as a sheet when they brought him out but he didn’t cry out at all. Rawdon’s always been a brave lad, I’ll say that for him. And then the hospital didn’t do a good job with the operation, or at least that’s what Rawdon’s father Whelan said, although I reckon he was just after trying to duck out of the responsibility. He should have been watching out for his boy. Rawdon was only thirteen when it happened and maybe he wasn’t ready for the tubs, although I suppose you’ve got to start somewhere. Except maybe with him it would have been different.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Adam, not understanding.
‘Because of the football. Rawdon was really good, better than you can imagine. He could go round you before you knew what had happened, like he was picking your pocket,’ said Ernest, smiling at the memory. ‘And a lot of us thought he’d end up playing for one of the clubs, earning proper money, having a life that the likes of me can only dream about. But the mine’s got a way of claiming you back when you’re thinking of escaping it, and it’s got Rawdon for life now, whether he likes it or not.’
‘I suppose it would’ve been different if he’d stayed at school,’ said Adam. ‘Then he wouldn’t have got injured.’
‘I suppose,’ said Ernest. ‘But it’s not the way here. I got good marks at school and my mother would have liked me to go on, but my dad wouldn’t hear of it. Bought me a pair of moleskin trousers and a cloth cap for my fourteenth birthday and took me up to the manager’s office to sign on the next day. And that was that.’
‘And you work while I sit in school,’ said Adam. ‘But it’s not easy to be different, you know, Ernest. You don’t belong anywhere. People resent you.’
‘Like Rawdon?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t worry about him. He resents everyone. Play football like you did today and you’ll be all right,’ said Ernest, clapping Adam on the back.
But Adam did worry. Not just about Rawdon but about who he was, where he was going. He was an outsider, living in a town that he was striving to escape, learning Latin and Greek at the board school so he could move away and better himself, while everyone else in Scarsdale had their gaze fixed forever inwards, their lives dominated by the mine. It was like a magnet drawing men and boys down deeper and deeper into its black passages, while the women and girls slaved away in their mean box-like little houses to service their needs. Adam saw how Annie, Edgar’s wife, toiled ceaselessly, washing clothes, baking bread, cooking meals, maintaining everything in a constant state of readiness for her menfolk, who often returned home at different hours of the day or night as their shift times changed from week to week. Sometimes she didn’t go to bed at all but just dozed on a chair in front of the fire ready to jump up and wait on them when they came in. And perhaps the constant activity was a good thing, keeping her distracted from the gnawing fear that one day Edgar or Thomas or Ernest wouldn’t come home at all, falling victim instead to one of the terrible underground accidents that seemed to happen almost every week.
The mine was cruel and the mine was king. And yet Adam had never once been inside it. He knew that he was frightened of it – terrified even. It was the embodiment of his worst childhood nightmares when he’d dreamed over and over again of being stuck fast in a narrow space in the pitch-black darkness unable to move, buried alive without hope of rescue. And yet he hated the fear too. Adam was brave by nature and his secret shamed him, becoming a challenge that he had to overcome. If he gave into it he wouldn’t be able to hold up his head in front of the boys his age who worked down the mine every day. He needed to understand their experience; he needed to know what he was working so hard to try to get away from.
He waited a few days, screwing up his courage, and then asked his father to show him the mine. He had been anticipating opposition but instead Daniel seemed pleased by the request – once he had got over his initial surprise at being asked; he knew full well his son’s fear of going underground.
‘Come to the pithead tomorrow morning and I’ll show you round,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot to learn and it won’t hurt you to miss one day of school.’
Chapter Five (#ulink_068aa5e4-d08e-57cb-a948-d8272c3067cd)
At first Adam was alone as he walked down the street from Edgar’s house, but by the time he reached the station he had become part of a crowd of miners all heading the same way towards the valley bottom with their snap tins and drinking flasks dangling from their hands. The rising sun was shining on their backs and they seemed happy and carefree: laughing, smoking, jostling each other – a sea of cloth caps moving towards the headstocks whose wheels were running fast now, hauling the cages up and down the shafts. The men’s mood increased Adam’s sense of isolation – none of them could imagine the dread he was feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had to force himself to go on, placing one foot in front of the other.
Further down the road, they started to meet miners coming the other way, returning home from the night shift. They were black with coal, blinking bleary eyes in the sunlight as they shuffled wearily along. And now the road became a path, winding its way through a grey barren waste ground littered with the detritus of the mine – discarded feed sacks for the ponies, broken coal tubs and timber props, pieces of rusting machinery whose purpose Adam couldn’t determine. Railway lines snaked here and there with the main line running on towards the screens area where Ernest worked.
Adam could see him with a group of other boys and men, standing on either side of a wide belt of moving coal, their hands in a constant flurry of motion as they pulled out stones and rubbish and threw them aside, although not fast enough to satisfy a corpulent red-faced man in a low round-crowned black hat who was standing on a gantry above the screens, shouting at the workers below, berating them for being too slow or too careless with a stream of profanity that never seemed to end.
It looked like terrible work, Adam thought. As fast as they worked, the coal kept on coming, tipped down a series of chutes on to the sorting belts by tippler machines. On and on, hour after hour, until it was time to go home and catch a few hours’ sleep before beginning again. Adam wondered at his friend’s patience and good humour. If he were in Ernest’s shoes he thought he’d go mad within a week or at least throw a lump of coal at the slave-driving tyrant up above; anything to make him shut up if only for a moment.
‘Not easy, is it?’ said Daniel, who had been looking out for his son and now came up to him, observing the appalled look on his face. ‘But at least the screens are above ground – I suppose there’s that much to be said for them.’
‘Why does he have to shout like that?’ asked Adam, pointing up at the fat man, who was now threatening to dock the screen workers’ wages if they got up to any more of their ‘damned dilly-dallying, playin’ the fool on his lordship’s time’.
‘Because that’s the way he is,’ said Daniel with a smile. ‘Atkins’s bark’s worse than his bite but you’re right – no one likes him much. Except the manager maybe – the cleaner the coal the more money it gets. And make no mistake – money’s what this is all about. Sell the coal to the highest bidder and pay as little as you can to get it out of the ground, which is where I come in, of course – trying to make sure that the men get what they deserve, which isn’t easy when you’re dealing with people who worship profit margins like it’s their religion. Come on. I’ll show you where I work.’
The weighing office was one of a group of mismatched buildings standing at different angles to each other around the base of the headstocks. Through an open door Adam glimpsed the blazing red fire of a blacksmith’s forge and the acrid coal smoke mixed in his nostrils with the tarry, oily smell of the huge steam engine that was powering the headstock pulleys. Close up, the clank of the pistons, the hiss of expelled steam and the general roar of the machine made it hard for Adam to hear what his father was saying, and Daniel had to shout to make himself understood as he described how the tubs of coal came up out of the cage with the collier’s motty tags attached, ready to be weighed.
‘The owner’s man weighs them and then I do the same so the colliers can be sure they’re getting paid properly for the coal they’ve mined,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s a big responsibility but I like that they trust me.’ The pride in his father’s voice gave Adam pleasure. He had refused to buckle in the face of a terrible adversity and now here was his reward. But Adam sensed a new humility in his father too – it was as if suffering had added a new dimension to his personality, taught him that life was precarious and had to be treated carefully.
‘So, are you ready?’ asked Daniel, handing his son a lamp. Adam nodded, swallowing. He was sweating and his hands were shaking so he found it hard to attach the lamp to his belt as his father was doing.
‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ said Daniel, looking hard at his son.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Adam. He’d used up almost all his stock of bloody-minded determination to get this far and he didn’t think he’d be able to try again if he turned back now. And he needed to be able to look at himself in the mirror without having to turn away – he couldn’t bear to be less than he hoped he was. It was a virtue and a fault that he would carry with him all his life.
‘Where do we light it?’ he asked, pointing at his lamp.
‘We don’t – the overman does that down below. And if it goes out then we have to walk back to the lighting station to get it relit. You can’t have any fire inside the mine – it’s far too dangerous.’
‘Because of the gas?’ Adam asked, shuddering as he remembered Edgar’s account of the two boys trapped by fallen rock after an explosion.
‘Yes. You can’t smell it and you can’t see it, but it’ll explode if it gets near a flame. More miners have lost their lives from gas explosions than roof falls so we have to be careful all the time. Back when I was young miners used to take canaries down – once they stopped singing you knew it was time to go. But now they make the lamps so the light expands when there’s gas about. They’re ingenious these inventors – that’s something I’d like to have been if I’d had the brains,’ Daniel said wistfully.
Adam was grateful to his father for his flow of chatter. Daniel wasn’t talkative by nature and Adam knew that he was trying to keep him distracted from the ordeal ahead. But now there was no escaping it. Wreathed in jets of steam, they had joined a group of miners climbing up the wooden stairs leading to the cage platform; for Adam they were just like the steps going up to a monstrous gallows. He looked up as if expecting to find the noose, but instead saw the spokes of the great wheel flickering in the sunlight as it pulled the cage up to the top of the shaft.
The men inside walked out and the banksman beckoned them inside. Adam hesitated, looking wildly around. Away down below he could see bottles of tea left to warm beside the steam engine that was driving the mechanical screens. At that moment his life felt just as insignificant. He wanted to run back down the steps and up the hill away from the mine, putting it behind him forever, but he couldn’t. He’d come too far to turn back. With a last despairing glance back at the sunlight, he took a deep breath and followed his father inside the cage and closed his eyes.
All around him the men were talking, without a care in the world. He could hear an electric bell ringing somewhere down below and one nearby answering it and then the clang of the gate as it slammed shut, and they were falling, slowly at first and then faster, faster than he would have thought possible. He was going to die – he was sure of it. He felt his stomach lifting up into his mouth and his feet coming up off the floor and someone – it had to be his father – holding him by the back of his collar, and then the brake kicked in and they were down below.
Adam opened his eyes. There was a little light coming down the shaft and he could dimly see the faces of the miners queuing up at the lighting station. He was relieved to see that they paid him no attention – clearly no one except his father had noticed his distress in the cage on the way down. With their lamps lit, the miners walked away down one of the three sloping tunnels that radiated off the maingate, as the central area around the cage was called. Almost immediately they became no more than tiny points of light in the inky blackness before disappearing from view.
It was cold and Adam shivered, unprepared for the sudden change in temperature. The anxious sweat was now freezing on his skin. But he felt better – he’d overcome his fear, proved to himself that he was no coward. His overactive imagination had been the real enemy, he realized: the mine was never going to be as terrible as he’d built it up to be in his mind’s eye.
They went first to the stables, which were still in the main landing area, not far from the cage. Daniel had made friends with the ostler and he took them from stall to stall, describing the merits and demerits of each pony. Some were hard workers; some liked to go on strike, refusing to move if you harnessed them up to too many tubs. And some could give you trouble, britching and kicking if you didn’t get in there first and show them who was boss.
‘Like the one that hurt Rawdon?’ asked Adam.
‘Whalen’s boy? ’Twas ’is fault what ’appened to ’im,’ said the ostler, his face darkening. ‘Ridin’ on the back o’ the pony when ’e shouldna done. That’s how accidents ’appen. An’ then the pony ’ad to be put down when ’e didna need to be. Whalen made sure o’ that, damn him.’
The stables were clean and well kept and the ponies were clearly well looked after, but Adam still felt sorry for them, living their lives in the God-forsaken darkness, hauling coal up and down through the dusty black tunnels until their strength gave out and they were put to merciful sleep. It seemed wrong, not what they had been born for, but that was true of the miners too, although at least they got to leave the pit at the end of the day when their work was done.
‘Do they ever get out, have time up above?’ Adam asked.
‘Aye, they goes up once a year for respite. They ’ave races and the men bet on ’em. They’re good days, they are. But it’s hard to get ’em back down afterward. Needs all thy strength to push ’em into their boxes.’
‘Perhaps it would be better if they didn’t know,’ said Adam pensively.
‘Know what?’
‘About the sun and the wind and the rain. Then they wouldn’t miss them.’
‘O’ course they don’t miss ’em. They’re ponies, for Chrissake,’ said the ostler, sounding irritated. ‘He’s a contrary lad, thy boy, ain’t ’e?’ he added, turning to Daniel.
‘That he is, Joe. That he is,’ said Daniel, affecting a false jocularity that jarred on Adam. ‘But he doesn’t mean any harm, do you, Adam?’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Adam uneasily. He was sorry that he’d got on the wrong side of the ostler, who seemed a good man, genuinely concerned for the welfare of the animals in his care. It wasn’t the first time since he’d come to Scarsdale, Adam realized, that he’d put people’s backs up just by being himself. His different voice, his book learning as they called it, made people suspicious of him or even dislike him – like Rawdon, who’d wasted no time becoming his sworn enemy for no reason at all except the spurious one that their fathers had been rivals for the same job. Adam wondered where Rawdon was now – he’d be working somewhere in the mine and Adam hoped that their paths wouldn’t cross. He didn’t want Rawdon to see him when he felt at such a disadvantage.
‘Where’s Edgar working?’ Daniel asked the ostler, changing the subject.
‘In Oakwell,’ said the ostler. ‘Same as before. ’E doesna stop carpin’ about it, but ’e’s earnin’ good money. There’s good coal in there still even if you has to work hard to get it out.’
‘All right, Oakwell it is,’ said Daniel. ‘Thanks for showing my boy around, Joe.’
