A few hours later the new face had been established and the deputy had made his inspection before signing the shift off. Adam and his brothers, along with the rest of the men, made their way towards the main roadway where at last they could straighten up and ease their aching backs. All of the men walked along joking and laughing and swearing at each other, but although one or two glanced Adam’s way they knew better than to try and talk to him. When he had suddenly upped and married one sister after being engaged to the other for a couple of years, there had been plenty of speculation, especially because – as one miner put it – the sister he’d been landed with had a face as rough as a badger’s backside.

When they reached the cage that would transport them above ground there was the usual pushing and shoving and banter, but again Adam stood aloof from it all, merely making sure he didn’t ride up in the same group of men as Walt. Because he had hung back he was in the last few of the shift to go up, and as the cage rattled its way towards the light he experienced none of the relief he’d once felt at the thought of seeing the sun and the sky again after hours in the bowels of the earth.

He knew he had changed, he told himself grimly as they reached the surface and he exited the cage and gave his lamp and token in. He hadn’t needed Walt to tell him that. It had begun on the day he knew Ruby had left Sunderland and had washed her hands of him for good, and it had gathered pace since. He didn’t recognize himself any more, that was the truth of it. The lad Ruby had fallen in love with didn’t exist. And he knew just how absolute the change now was by the fact that this didn’t bother him as it had done at first.

It had been some months into his marriage before he had acknowledged how angry he was with Ruby. Before that he had imagined it was just Olive he was furious with, but his anger against Ruby had been different. Olive he would always loathe for the way she had set out to trick him, but Ruby should have seen that in a way he was as innocent as her in it all. If she had loved him like he loved her, she would have understood; she would have agreed to leave Sunderland with him and go down south where they could have got married and put the past behind them. Instead she had assumed the moral high ground and cleared off leaving him in hell, a hell of fierce anger and pain and longing, a hell in which his corroding hate had gradually eaten away the core of him.