And every man, woman and child here carried a lighted candle.

A small trace would burn safely; a moderate amount would flash, scorching anyone in the vicinity; and a large quantity would explode, killing everyone and destroying the tunnels.

He took a deep breath. His first priority was to get everyone out of the pit as fast as possible. He rang the handbell vigorously while he counted to twelve. By the time he stopped, miners and bearers were hurrying along the tunnel toward the shaft, mothers urging their children to go faster.

While everyone else fled the pit, his two bearers stayed—his sister, Esther, calm and efficient, and his cousin Annie, who was strong and quick but also impulsive and clumsy. Using their coal shovels the two women began frantically to dig a shallow trench, the length and breadth of Mack, in the floor of the tunnel. Meanwhile Mack snatched an oilcloth bundle hanging from the roof of his room and ran for the mouth of the tunnel.

After his parents died there had been some muttering, among the men, about whether Mack was old enough to take over his father’s role of fireman. Apart from the responsibility of the job, the fireman was regarded as a leader in the community. In truth Mack himself had shared their doubts. But no one else wanted the job—it was unpaid and dangerous. And when he dealt efficiently with the first crisis the muttering stopped. Now he was proud that older men trusted him, but his pride also forced him to appear calm and confident even when he was afraid.

He reached the mouth of the tunnel. The last stragglers were heading up the stairs. Now Mack had to get rid of the gas. Burning was the only way to do this. He had to set fire to it.

It was evilly bad luck that this should happen today. It was his birthday: he was leaving. Now he wished he had thrown caution to the winds and left the glen on Sunday night. He had told himself that a wait of a day or two alight make the Jamissons think he was going to stay, and lull them into a false sense of security. He felt sick at heart that in his final hours as a coal miner he had to risk his life to save the pit he was about to quit forever.

If the firedamp were not burned off, the pit would close. And a pit closure in a mining village was like a failed harvest in a farming community: people starved. Mack would never forget the last time the pit closed, four winters ago. During the harrowing weeks that followed, the youngest and oldest villagers had died—including both his parents. The day after his mother died, Mack had dug up a nest of hibernating rabbits, and had broken their necks while they were still groggy; and the meat had saved him and Esther.

He stepped out onto the deck and tore the waterproof wrappings off his bundle. Inside was a big torch made of dry sticks and rags, a ball of string, and a large version of the hemispheric candle-holder the miners used, fixed to a flat wooden base so that it could not fall over. Mack stuck the torch firmly in the holder, tied the string to the base, and lit the torch with his candle. It blazed up immediately. Here it would burn safely, for the lighter-than-air gas could not gather at the bottom of the shaft. But his next task was to get the burning torch into the tunnel.

He took another moment to lower himself into the drainage pool at the bottom of the shaft, soaking his clothes and hair in the icy water to give him a little extra protection from burns. Then he hurried back along the tunnel unwinding the ball of string, at the same time scrutinizing the floor, removing large stones and other objects that might obstruct the movement of the blazing torch as it was drawn into the tunnel.

When he reached Esther and Annie, he saw by the light of the one candle on the floor that all was ready. The trench was dug. Esther was dipping a blanket into the drainage ditch, and now she quickly wrapped it around Mack. Shivering, he lay down in the trench, still holding the end of the string. Annie knelt beside him and, somewhat to his surprise, kissed him full on the lips. Then she covered the trench with a heavy board, closing him in.

There was a sloshing sound as they poured more water on the board, in a further attempt to protect him from the flames he was about to ignite. Then one of them tapped three times, the sign that they were leaving.

He counted to one hundred, to give them time to get out of the tunnel.

Then, with his heart full of dread, he started to pull on the string, drawing the blazing torch into the mine, toward where he lay, in a tunnel half full of explosive gas.

Jay carried Lizzie to the top of the stairs and set her down on the icy mud at the pithead.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“I’m so glad to be above ground again,” she said gratefully. “I can’t thank you enough for carrying me. You must be exhausted.”

“You weigh a good deal less than a corf full of coal,” he said with a smile.

He talked as if her weight were nothing, but he looked a little unsteady on his legs as they walked away from the shaft. However, he had never faltered on the way up.

Daybreak was still hours away, and it had started to snow, not in gently drifting flakes but in driving icy pellets that blew into Lizzie’s eyes. As the last of the miners and bearers came out of the shaft, Lizzie noticed the young woman whose child had been christened on Sunday—Jen, her name was. Although her child was only a week or so old, the poor woman was carrying a full corf. Surely she should have taken a rest after giving birth? She emptied the basket on the dump and handed the tallyman a wooden marker: Lizzie guessed the markers were used to calculate the wages at the end of the week. Perhaps Jen was too much in need of money to have time off.

Lizzie continued to watch because Jen looked distressed. With her candle raised above her head she darted among the crowd of seventy or eighty mine workers, peering through the falling snow, calling: “Wullie! Wullie!” It seemed she was searching for a child. She found her husband and had a rapid, frightened conversation with him. Then she screamed “No!” She ran to the pithead and started back down the stairs.

The husband went to the edge of the shaft then came back and looked around the crowd again, visibly distressed and bewildered. Lizzie said to him: “What’s the matter?”

He replied in a shaky voice. “We can’t find our laddie, and she thinks he’s still down the pit.”

“Oh, no!” Lizzie looked over the edge. She could see some kind of torch blazing at the bottom of the shaft. But as she looked it moved and disappeared into the tunnel.

Mack had done this on three previous occasions, but this time it was much more frightening. Formerly the concentration of firedamp had been much lower, a slow seep rather than a sudden buildup. His father had dealt with major gas leaks, of course—and his father’s body, as he washed himself in front of the fire on Saturday nights, had been covered with the marks of old burns.

Mack shivered in his blanket sodden with icy water. As he steadily wound in the string, pulling the blazing torch closer to himself and to the gas, he tried to calm his fear by thinking about Annie. They had grown up together and had always been fond of one another. Annie had a wild soul and a muscular body. She had never kissed him in public before, but she had often done it secretly. They had explored one another’s bodies and taught each other how to give pleasure. They had tried all sorts of things together, only stopping short of what Annie called “making bairns.” And they had almost done that.…

It was no use: he still felt terrified. To calm himself he tried to think in a detached way about how the gas moved and gathered. His trench was at a low point in the tunnel, so the concentration here should be less; but there was no accurate way of estimating it until it ignited. He was afraid of pain, and he knew that burns were torment. He was not really afraid to die. He did not think about religion much but he believed God must be merciful. However, he did not want to die now: he had done nothing, seen nothing, been nowhere. He had spent all his life so far as a slave, If I survive this night, he vowed, I will leave the glen today. I’ll kiss Annie, and say good-bye to Esther, and defy the Jamissons, and walk away from here, so help me God.