Two hours later Oliver rode up with Jack by lantern light. Leaving Jack to tie up the horses, Oliver weaved his way through the waiting groups of hushed, shocked mining folk huddled round a fierce bonfire. He stopped to give words of comfort and asked if the two doctors had arrived and where he could find Matthias Renfree. He was told there had been no sign or word of the mine doctor but Dr Crebo had arrived half an hour ago and was treating the casualties in the shack with Matthias’s aid.

As Oliver lowered his head to enter the shack, his features hardened at seeing Clem there. A quick glance around the poorly lit shack told him there were eight men and three boys lying injured. A corpse covered with the shawl of a weeping woman was about to be removed.

Oliver ignored Clem, who’d given him a curt nod before turning his head away. Neither man liked the other being there; two things they shared, a mutual love for Kerensa and a mutual loathing of each other.

Oliver spoke to Charles Crebo. ‘How are things, Doctor?’

‘Not so bad as I feared, Sir Oliver, but tragic all the same,’ the surgeon-physician said in a heavy voice, without looking up from a patient on whom he was expertly stitching a badly gashed head wound. He waited for the miner’s groans and oaths to die away before going on in precise short sentences. ‘Sixteen dead. Twenty-three injured, some severely, some not. Many are missing. Four amputations, two legs on the same patient, he’ll probably die; two arms, each on a different patient. Two men comatose, one will certainly die. This patient will recover.’

‘There’s very, little hope of getting any others out alive, sir,’ Matthias added. ‘Several feet of tunnelling has given way out under the sea. There’s tons of rubble to get through and far too little good air for further rescue work. It’s badly ventilated at the best of times.’

‘Nearly as bad as the accident at the Trewhelah Mine at Porthtowan last year,’ Oliver said gravely. ‘That, it is said, will shut the mine down about two years early. Let’s hope that won’t be the case here. Have Sir Martin Beswetherick and the other owners been informed?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Matthias. ‘I saw to it straightaway.’