‘I don’t think I can face another funeral,’ Kerensa confided to Alice Trenchard on Alice’s next monthly visit to the rambling Tudor manor house. They were chatting in the comfort of the summer house, a few days after the dead miners had been buried in one communal grave.

‘Aye, it’s been a grim year so far, and I know what it’s like, having lived and worked on a mine face all my life before I came here to work. Beatrice was talking to Rosie and she believes the same as me, that the mine disaster was caused by a scoffer not leaving behind a didjan for the knockers.’

‘Could have been. Even if you don’t believe in the little people, it doesn’t do to offend them. But it’s a heavy price for the tinners to pay for not leaving behind a piece of pasty or hevva cake.’

‘Well, I hope there won’t be the need for another funeral for a very long time,’ Alice said. ‘As it is, Ben Rosevidney will soon find himself digging new graves over the old ones on the south side of the church. Thank the Lord he won’t be digging one for Philip and David now they’ve got over the measles. They were so poorly and I was so afraid Jessica was going to catch it. I was grateful to the Sampsons on Polcudden Farm offering to take her but I missed her so much. If anything happened to her…’ Alice shuddered. She dearly loved her eight-year-old twins, tall, strong, blond and robust like Clem. But Jessica, the daughter she had longed for, had replaced Clem as the one she most desired to return her love.

Alice had long accepted that Clem would always love and mourn his loss of Kerensa, but now she had Jessica it didn’t matter so much. And nothing could detract from the close friendship she had formed with Kerensa from the days she had lived at the manor as Kerensa’s maid. Alice was content with life as a farmer’s wife and since the deaths of Clem’s mother and grandmother she had presided over the Trenchard household with a firm but fair maternal hand.

‘I would love to have had Jessica over here with us, but of course Clem wouldn’t have approved,’ Kerensa said, knowing Clem would not allow any of his children under the Pengarron roof.

‘No, I s’pose not and it’s a shame, but it would have meant risking your children getting the measles. There’s no children now on Polcudden Farm.’

‘Well, that’s true, of course. So Jessica hasn’t developed any spots then?’ Kerensa asked, watching her own daughter at play with her dolls and Bob a few feet away.

‘No. You don’t think she could still get them, do you?’ Alice anxiously dropped her knitting in her lap.