Forever and Ever (4 page)

She straightened, turned—and started; she hadn’t known he was so near. She held the piece of paper up to her bosom, like a shield. “I’ve decided to employ you,” she said briskly, “on a conditional basis. If you agree to the terms of the labor contract, you can start immediately.”

“Conditional? Based on what?”

“Based on what your last employer has to say about your work.” She tapped the form against her chest with one fingernail, but when he followed the gesture with his eyes, she dropped her hand to her side. “You’ve no objection to my writing to the mine captain at Carn Barra, have you?”

“Why? Don’t you believe me?” Neither of his last two short-term employers had bothered to check his—Jack’s—references.

“It’s not a question of believing you.”

“Isn’t it?” She was singling him out, he was sure of it. She’d hire any man who looked able-bodied, who would sign her labor contract and take five pounds for every backbreaking fathom he dug for her. He went a step closer, and although she didn’t give ground, everything about her seemed to shrink from him. Two days ago she’d twinkled her eyes at him, smiled up into his face like an angel. Today she acted as if his miner’s garb had a bad smell. “Isn’t it?” he repeated, moving even closer, closer than was allowed, not only by courtesy but by everything she believed ought to keep them apart, the wide, gaping social void she was sure separated them. “Are ee sartin it isn’t only that ee wants t’ put me in my place, Miss Sophie?” he asked softly, nastily.

During the endless minute they glared at each other, he had time to notice that the top of her head came up to the bridge of his nose, and that the clear blue of her irises turned smoke gray when she was angry. And that he could make her blush by looking at her mouth.

“It’s customary,” she said, enunciating carefully, never taking her eyes from his.

He could imagine them standing by the sunny window all morning, each waiting for the other to back down. He lifted his hand toward her. She didn’t move, but her face froze—until he pinched between his thumb and forefinger the paper she was still holding to her breast. He took it from her, then held out his other hand. Another second crawled by. She laid the fountain pen on his flat palm, taking pains not to touch him.

She’d made notations on the form, filling in his name and the date, the wage she was offering, the term of their agreement—two months. He used the windowsill, as she had; without reading the fine print, he signed the contract at the bottom: John Lawrence Pendarvis.

“I want a copy,” he said as he handed it back.

She nodded coolly. “Stop in after the first core, and I’ll see that it’s waiting for you.”

“Thanks.”

She was glad to put some distance between them, but she made a point of not hurrying back behind her desk. She found a key inside the little netted purse she’d earlier thrown on the desktop, and used it to open the kneehole drawer. From it she took another key, and used that one to unlock a large steel safe behind her chair. Distracted again by the bustle, Connor didn’t notice what she was rummaging around in the safe for until she turned and held out two one-pound notes to him.

When she smiled at him with her mouth but not her eyes, he knew she’d seen what he should’ve hidden: that he hated this, that even though it was part of the game, he could hardly bring himself to reach out for the money she was offering him across her desk.

But he took it, his advance or “subsist,” and stuffed it in his pocket without looking at it. “You’ll want a receipt,” he said tonelessly.

“That’s not necessary.”

“You trust me to repay you?”

“I wouldn’t say that.” The humorless smile widened. “I’ll keep it back from your first month’s wage.”

He probably deserved that. He stuck his miner’s hat on his head and started to leave.

“Find Mr. Andrewson and tell him I’ve hired you,” she instructed, absently running one hand along the top of her leather chair. “The tutman you’ll be working with is Tranter Fox. I think he’s at the seventy level today; the mine captain will take you down to him.”

“Yes.” He’d be damned if he’d call her
ma’am.

After a pause, she said in a softer voice, “Tranter’s a Cornishman, like you. Everyone likes him. I hope you’ll— I should think you’d— I don’t know why you wouldn’t get along.”

It was the first kind thing she’d said to him. A hint of a smile hovered at the corners of her lips. She was backing off a bit from the hostility with which they’d begun—wishing him well. He ought to smile back, meet her halfway. That would be practical. Expedient.

But pride was still his downfall, and he was still smarting from the insult of her disillusionment. The dismay in her voice when she’d said, “You’re a
miner
?” Two days ago he’d been a man, and she’d treated him like one; today he was a
miner
, and so far beneath her she didn’t want to stand next to him.

Instead of smiling, he touched his helmet in an insolent salute and walked out.

***

Clinging to the sides of a clay-caked ladder, sweating, eyes smarting, descending and descending and descending, Connor remembered why he hated mines. It wasn’t the heat, oppressive at thirty fathoms, nearly intolerable at seventy. It wasn’t the constant dampness or the dirt and mud and rubble, or the pitch-blackness, or the confinement for hours a day in places no roomier than a coffin. It wasn’t even the relentless, body-breaking labor that progressed so slowly and yielded so little.

What he hated about mining was the shameful waste it made of a man’s life. Over his head, the whole world “at grass” went about the business of fighting wars or making children, selling shoes, harvesting fields, painting pictures, reading newspapers, dancing, debating, laughing, weeping—and always oblivious to the subterranean sweatshop underfoot, the ceaseless industry of men picking and hammering, breaking and blasting, tutworking and tributing, and dying young so that there could be pennies and teakettles and trinkets for the vital, unaware souls above.

It was no life for a man, no life even for an animal. Looking around at the murky blackness, diffused only by the pale glimmer of candles miners stuck to their hats with bits of clay, Connor thought they might as well be worms—glowworms, glowing yellow instead of green, burrowing holes in the stone and slag at the rate of an inch a day, crawling and winding, throwing away their short turn on the earth by choosing to labor in the darkness. His body despised it and his spirit recoiled from it; the only reason he could bear it even for these few short months was because of the possibility of reform at the end of his servitude as an impostor. That was the slim hope that kept him going.

At Wheal Looe and at Tregurtha, the mines where he’d worked in the spring, he’d learned early that reticence was his best defense against revealing how truly ignorant he was about the craft of mining. Almost anyone can flail away at a granite wall all day with a pickax, but only a seasoned copper miner can speak knowledgeably to his mates on the subjects of killas and elvans, adits and winzes, flucans, sollars, and slickensides. So Connor had gotten into the habit of shutting up while he labored under the ground, thereby earning himself the reputation of a man of very few words.

But at Guelder, it was clear within five minutes of meeting his new partner that he wouldn’t have to feign taciturnity. Even if he’d been chatty as a magpie, it wouldn’t have mattered—because Tranter Fox wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise.

***

“Pendarvis, eh? Now there’m a name to sing out wi’ pride. And from Trewythiel, you say! My blessed saints, that’s only bird spit from Tregony, where yers truly were born and reared. Did ee ever work at Wheal Albert? No? Bless yerself, Jack, for there’m a cesspool o’ bleakness and blighted hope if ever I saw it. Squandered half a year there onct, back when I were tender and green, thinkin’ I’d get rich tributing. Judas! Never set foot in Tyward parish, boy, there’m my advice to you. Hand me that mallet whilst ee’re only setting there. Think there’m any point in sinking this winze further? They’ll be comin’ up on it from the gallery below; mayhap we can let Moony and ’is mates hook up to us, and catch our croust early, what say? Have ee met Moony yet? Oh, he’m a right smart lad, like you, but sink me if I don’t cadge ’im every time into doing half my work for me. He never suspicions a thing! Haw! Yer candle’s blinkerin’, take this un quick. No, no, we’ll settle up later. So what was it you was askin’ me? Oh, how I lost Martin Burr, my last partner. He’m startin’ to get about now, I seen him at the George last night, but still on is crutch, you know, and ’is daughter had to come and get ’im when he fell over the stoop. That were the bitters he’d drank, though, not ’is broke legs. How’d he do it? Fell off a ladder at the thirty level and breaked ’em both. William Stark said he heared ’em go, crack, crack, and him two galleries down at the time. William might be having us on. But every man could hear Martin bleatin’ and carryin’ on after, that’s sartin. Never heared such howling this side o’ hell, and never wish to again. Nobody could get him up till Miss Deene said to send the kibble bucket down for ’im, so that’s what we done. Should’ve ought to’ve seed ’im, Jack, all on his back, nothing but two breaked legs sticking up over the bucket top, slow rising fathom after fathom, like he were on ’is way up to heaven. But howling all the way, mind; I were clear ashamed of im, carrying on like a mewly girl.”

Like a high mountain waterfall that never dries up, not even in the hottest months of summer, Tranter Fox never stopped talking. It was a double advantage: Connor could keep his inexperience to himself unobtrusively, and find out all about Guelder mine without asking a single question.

By lunchtime, he’d learned that the mine had been doing well since Miss Deene had inherited it from her father nearly three years ago, a circumstance that had come as a surprise to almost everyone. Not that she weren’t known for having a corking good head on ’er shoulders, Tranter assured him. It was just that she was a woman, and she was young, and she’d been sent away to school from the time she was twelve until she turned eighteen, and that “furrin” experience had naturally distanced her from the small, tightly knit community of her birth.

“Now, some o’ the miners squirm under her rule, so to say, because she’m a lady and not a man. Others’ll defend ’er to their death on account o’ their wages have went up since she took over. Me, I like er. She treats me square, she don’t ask fer what I can’t give, and she works as hard at grass as any man I know. And plus she’m a sight easier on the eyes.”

Tranter said this with a sooty, gap-toothed grin and a twinkle in his own small black eyes. He was a tiny Cornishman, barely five feet tall, but tough and strong, agile as a monkey. He called Connor “son” and “young fellow,” although he himself was barely thirty. Jack’s age. He’d been underground for twenty years, he claimed—his first job was hauling water to Wheal Virgin tin miners at the age of nine—and Connor found himself involuntarily listening for the whistle of tubercular lungs or the soft wheeze of incipient pneumonia. But the little miner seemed healthy, and when he wasn’t talking, he was singing. Hymns, mainly—“Abide with Me” was one of his favorites—interspersed with profane drinking songs. He was a tiring but likable companion, and by the time they slacked off and climbed down to the eighty level to eat lunch with Moony Donne and his crew of tributers, Connor had decided that, as mining partners went, he could have done much worse.

Lunch, which the miners called their “croust,” was a hasty, haphazard meal taken in the coolest, driest place at hand, sitting on gunpowder kegs or the odd bits of plank they toted around with them. Connor hadn’t brought any food, so the others shared their bread, cheese, and bacon with him; Tranter Fox even gave him dessert—half an apple and a piece of toffee. Over the clang of the stamping mill and the noisy rhythm of steam engines endlessly pumping water out of the bowels of the mine, the conversation was typical miners’ talk, about the richness of the lodes they’d dug or wished they were digging, how much money they hoped to earn at week’s end when their ore was dressed and weighed, which man was tireder, which was stronger, which worked the longest hours. Not suprisingly, Sophie Deene was a favorite topic, a subject of great fascination, and Connor heard plenty of lewd wishful thinking—although not as much as he might have expected. Whether they liked her or not, to a man they seemed to respect her, and the only reason he heard for their dislike was that she was a woman.

At eighty fathoms the air was hot, thick, and unhealthy; a sickly vapor composed of candle smoke, gunpowder fumes, and stale oxygen floated damp and sluggish, visible in the candlelit dimness. One of Moony Donne’s men swallowed a piece of bread wrong and went into a coughing fit. It reminded Tranter—“Miss Deene’s contractin’ fer a new ventilator,” he announced for Connor’s benefit, and the others nodded, muttering, “Aye,” and “She is that,” sounding proud of it, proud of her. “’Tis naught but a six-foot cylinder, a pipe, and a valve,” Tranter went on, “but onct it’s up, they say it’ll suck out a couple hundred gallons of air in a minute.”

“Is that a fact?” Connor marveled. He would make a note of the improvement in his report to the Rhadamanthus Society, but his cynical side wasn’t impressed. Studies had begun to come out in the trade press lately associating air quality and miner efficiency; a man named Mackworth had written an article claiming that by reducing the temperature in deep mines through improved ventilation, owners could save twelve pounds per fathom in labor costs. Miss Deene might very well be trying to clean up the air at Guelder, but Connor doubted if her motives had very much to do with the health of her miners’ lungs.

The afternoon passed in a blur of tedium and fatigue. When his core ended, he climbed the endless series of long, nearly perpendicular ladders to the surface, feeling as if his feet were encased in lead. There was nowhere to stop, nowhere to rest; at seventy fathoms, there were four hundred and twenty vertical feet of ladder to climb in bad air, and thirty miners climbing doggedly behind him, all wanting out, anxious for a breath of clean air and a mouthful of hot tea or cold beer. It was exactly like a treadmill, and nearly as pointless and punitive, although the men condemned to climb it had committed no crime. Except poverty, and an absence of choices, and a social system that sentenced them to low pay and a lifetime of drudgery.