Free The Rough Collier by Pat McIntosh Page B

another. And another. And between the stoops are what we call the rooms. Each hewer works in a room by his lone, wi’ a bearer to carry the coal away as he howks it out. The deeper the coal gets, the bigger the stoops and the narrower the rooms has to be.’
    ‘To hold the roof up,’ Alys nodded. ‘I see. So there must be a point where it is not worth hewing any deeper.’
    ‘Aye,’ said Phemie, looking up with grudging admiration. ‘Because you canny take out enough coal to justify the work. That was what happened to my da. Arbella made him go into the pit, and someone had took out too much coal and the roof came down while he was viewing it.’ Alys made a small sympathetic sound, and Phemie shrugged. ‘I was seven, I can scarce mind him,’ she said dismissively, and went on, ‘And that was where Arbella and Thomas wonderful Murray couldny agree.’
    She looked round her, and Alys did likewise. They were well above the house here, high enough to look down at the thatched roofs of stables and dwellings. Children played in the trampled space between the two rows, and a group of women were eyeing them covertly from the door of one cottage. Fifty yards away the winding-gear creaked loudly inside the next shaft-house, and an elderly man was pushing a small rumbling cart back and forward along a wooden roadway, adding huge shining black blocks to the upper coal-hill. Further uphill yet, a row of tethered ponies munched at the tussocky grass, ignoring all distractions.
    ‘Come up here,’ said Phemie. ‘You can see it all from here.’
    They tramped across the rough grass away from the coal-hill. Alys let go of the dog’s collar and he loped round them, grinning and sniffing at the wind. Some of the ponies broke off their grazing to stare at him, then decided he was no great threat and returned to more important matters.
    ‘There are the three ingoes,’ Phemie pointed. ‘There’s the one we use now, and there’s the mid one, and down there’s the very first one that Arbella’s sire cut when he first took on the heugh from this Sir James’s grandsire. Or maybe from that one’s father,’ she added, ‘I forget, what wi’ most of them being called James.’
    Alys nodded, identifying the three entries. They were smaller than she had expected, barely five feet high and braced with solid timbers, and from the furthest downhill of the three a channel of grey water spilled away down the slope towards the burn. Making a mental note not to let the dog drink from that stream, she sat on a relatively dry patch of grass and said, ‘So the men go in there to work. Do they walk all the way under the earth to the point where the shafts go down? How many men are there working at once?’
    ‘Aye, they walk. Or crawl.’ Phemie sat down beside her. ‘The roof gets lower further in. Sometimes we’ve more, times fewer, but for now we’ve four men at a time hewing and four or so bearing, so that’s eight at least in the mine, and two or three at the surface.’
    ‘In two shifts? Do they work by night as well?’
    ‘No the now, though we used to have two shifts.’ Phemie gave her another of those admiring looks. ‘You’ve a good understanding of this, mistress. You sure you’ve never seen a coal-heugh?’
    ‘My father is a mason. And my name is Alys.’
    They exchanged shy smiles, and Alys went on hastily, counting on her fingers, ‘Eight – eleven men, and the smith and his helper, the saddler, the chandler, a man to see to the ponies, the two who are gone with your missing man. Which reminds me, Phemie, I should like to speak to their kin if I may. I think your mother said they had kin here?’
    ‘The Patersons? Aye, their sister’s married on one of the colliers. She works in our kitchen.’
    Alys nodded, and looked down at her fingers. ‘There must be twenty men here. There are not so many households in that row of cottages.’
    ‘There’s ten houses. Five-and-twenty men all told, and a few laddies old