Free Black Sheep by Susan Hill

and he went to them one by one, even those that were up on the top outcrop which took some scrambling to reach.
    William Barnes watched him from the farm gate. He had known the day would come but had hoped against it, not only because Ted was a good worker and had fitted from the start, but because he loved the place and the animals as if they were his own and had never had a bad day. The time he was half frozen to death had been all he had taken off work and even then he had struggled out before he was properly right.
    William sucked on his empty pipe, not being due any tobacco until two days hence. He could find another worker but his heart wasn’t in it, not only because one as good would be hard to come by but because he would miss Ted’s quiet, steady company. He could not speak about it, as he had not been able to say a word against the boy’s leaving. He had a duty in Mount of Zeal now his father and brothers were killed and sealed into their death chamber. His mother needed the wage, his sister was living at home and unlikely to get other work because of the shame that had had her dismissed from behind the shop counter. There might be a bit of money in compensation for the accident, but everyone knew how long that took, if it ever came in at all.
    He saw Ted coming down the track towards him, his face fallen in and brooding with the misery he felt. He reached the gate and stood beside William, and looked out at the hill, and neither of them could speak.
    He was due to go the next morning but while they were still in bed they heard a faint click of the back door latch.
    Gerda touched her husband’s side. ‘He couldn’t bear to leave by the light,’ William said.
    And it was in darkness that Ted reached the house on Lower, and slipped into his old room and lay on his unmade bed, and stared at the ceiling until morning.
    He was taken on at the pit and started the day they opened up again after the explosion and he dreaded going down into the bowels of the mine, and feared what he might see, and the fact that he would be shut in and close to the charred bodies of his father and brother. But he was sent a distance away, along quite a different working, and in any case, the end that had been blown up had been sealed completely and was not identified, save on papers in the management office. Ted would never know.
    They set him to work with the ponies at first so that he felt comfortable at once, though he pined, as he believed they did, for the light and air. He hated the taste in his mouth and the thick black dust he breathed in, and the smell on his skin.
    Evie had found him when she had come down to the kitchen early on his first morning back, and silently put her arms round him.
    â€˜Will you stay tonight, Ted?’
    â€˜I’m staying for good.’
    She had looked at him sharply. ‘No. I’ve lost too many.’
    â€˜You have me back.’
    â€˜And how long before that pit swallows you?’
    â€˜First accident for forty years and you know it.’
    â€˜And not the last. That pit is cursed now.’
    â€˜That’s superstition. You need the wages, you need me here.’
    He had set the kettle on and now it shrieked at them, breaking into their angry talk. Evie went to it, not wanting there to be anger but, all the same, unable to stop it from overwhelming her, when she thought about the mine, even more powerfully than her grief.
    Reuben’s voice had been silenced now. He sat, holding the black Bible on his lap, forming the words but only air came from his mouth. He was shrunken small and bent and thin as a twig so that the chair engulfed him. But when Ted came into the room his eyes brightened and he fumbled through the thin paper of the Bible pages to find verses the boy had always liked to hear. When he had them he nodded his head until Ted came over, sat down and took the book from him.
    â€˜
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the