It’s a good mile’s walk to the mouth of the pit. They walk by starlight, their faces tapestries of shadow. The air is so cold, each is conscious of walking through the others’ exhalations, white like frozen Smoke.

The path leads past fields, then up onto the ridge of a hill, crested by the twisted shape of an oak. Beneath them, in the darkness of a narrow gully, spreads the mining village. Livia is unprepared for its squalor, the long rows of cottages pressed in on one another like the pleats of an accordion, deflated of air. A rubbish heap rises at the end of the gully, patrolled by a pack of curs. The whole village is suffused in the stink of boiled turnips.

Mr. Mosley speaks without prompting. Perhaps he has noticed something in her face. Shock. Discomfort. A shudder at the thought of a life lived in the effluvium of yesterday’s lunch.

“Newton Village,” he says. “Six hundred souls, and nine out of every ten work down the mine. Men, women, children. Living hand to mouth; in hock to the grocer, who cheats on his scales. The wife always says we are standoffish. Too good for the village. But it’s the village that don’t like us living too close. I’m the foreman, see, same as my father was. Posh folk, we are.” Mr. Mosley pauses, snorts. “It’s true what the fishwives say. Money makes you lonely.”

It’s the longest Livia has heard him speak. But the night is too dark to make out his expression, and his voice too flat to guess at his emotion. He has not stopped while speaking, is striding on, his eyes on the path. Behind them Charlie has his hands full steadying Thomas who walks listing, white as a sheet. Jake and Francis have run ahead, to “make arrangements.” What these are, Livia does not know. On the horizon, visible against the sky, sits the dark shape of the pit tower, a latticed blackness cut into the glow of the night.

As they draw closer, other objects step out of the shadow of the plain. There are sheds, chimneys, furnaces; a shingled hut leaking yellow light; a copper engine bristling with levers, gauges, ladders; and the roofed holes of the two pit shafts. It is within sight of the latter that Mr. Mosley stops them. A pile of timber wood, man-high, provides them with shelter, hiding them from prying eyes. Here, close to the pit, a high, singing whistle, as of blades drawn across mirrors, has displaced all other night sounds. It is a sound calculated to creep into skin and teeth, estrange them from the rest of the body. If one were condemned to live in its presence, Livia thinks, one should go mad. She casts around for its source. At her back, attended by Charlie, Thomas has collapsed to the ground, head and shoulders swaddled in blankets, the mouth distended, gasping for air.