Nobody asks them any questions until after dinner. The men, it seems, don’t like to speak. All Livia has learned from them is their names. The father is Bill Mosley. The eldest son, dark-haired, with thick, drooping moustaches, is called Jake. His brother, Francis, is lighter haired and finer featured. He appears to be entirely mute. The farmer herself is called Janet and will not stand for Mrs. Mosley, as she thrice repeats. She alone is chatting away, working at the cooker.

“My men,” she explains in passing, “are miners, all three of them.”

The moment she says it Livia sees the black crescents that mark the fingertips at the edge of their nails; the black dust that has grown into their skin at the knuckles and dyed them blue. Other than that they are scrubbed scrupulously clean.

Dinner is a hearty affair of potato and cabbage soup, some rashers of bacon, and a tin-loaf of coarse brown bread. They have shifted Thomas from the table to a bed at the back of the cottage. Charlie gets up every few minutes to check on his friend.

“He’s awake. I’ll try to feed him some soup.”

Mrs. Mosley goes with him. It leaves Livia alone with the three men.

She watches them eat. The father is already done and sits fingering his pipe. The quiet one spoons his soup with an abstracted air, turned inward, smiling to himself. His brother is busy buttering his bread with a haste bordering on anger, as though the loaf is his personal enemy and needs to be cowed. All the while he is looking at Livia. It is not a friendly look.

“Preacher came to the mine today, Mum,” he suddenly starts declaiming, slowly and emphatically, still looking at Livia though it is his mother, behind him, he purports to be addressing. “Caught us while we were washing. No chance of escape. Always the same song. ‘Smoking is sin. Don’t think because you can’t see it, down the mine, that it is less so. God’s eyes. .’ And so on and so on.” He snorts, chews, swallows. “Smoking ain’t sin. It’s a weapon. Toffs use it to keep us down. Proves everything’s just as it should be, with them on top, smug like a bunch of dung beetles rolling their lunch.”

It is his father who answers him, calmly, in his slow thoughtful manner, laying the pipe down next to his plate.

“I don’t know, Jake, it ain’t as simple as that. Wish that it was. But it ain’t. Think of all them regular Smokers over in the village, the ones whose Smoke is full of hate. Collins, for one. Hazard. Lawrence. Old Jimmy Becket. Each of them a right little bugger. Liars, drunks, cheats. Might as well call it sin.”

The son bristles at this, but respects his father too much to contradict him outright.