It takes Livia a while to connect the sound to the pit shafts, then to follow it up, along the path of two slender wires, to the whirling of two metal wheels, each crowning the giant scaffold of a pit tower that squats over its hole like a spider made of wood and steel. The wires run taut over these wheels and from there back down, towards two lean-tos at ten yards remove. Inside, great drums can be seen to spin like giant cloth spools, winding, unwinding wire at speeds that cancel out all sense of motion. Thus, for all the drums’ frenzy, there is an eerie stillness to the scene, the wires standing in the black pools of their shafts like fakirs’ ropes whose invisible movement carves slivers of sound out of the fabric of the night.

They wait. Mutely, Charlie walks over to stand next to Livia; eases her tension with a quick, shy smile. Side by side they peer into the dark. At long last, a figure steps out of the hut ahead, its door a rectangle of gaslight. It is by the man’s movements that she recognises him as Jake. He crosses the thirty or forty yards separating them with long, efficient strides, never breaking into a run but moving just as fast. Already Mr. Mosley has pulled them out of the shelter of the timber pile and is marching them towards the pit mouths. The night darkens as they step into the shadow of the bigger of the giant scaffolds. Between its splayed feet, framed by a kind of wooden porch, the pit mouth gapes, a lipless hole, red-bricked and smooth, emitting belly smells like a dyspeptic beast.

Once more the big wheel spins around its axis; once more sounds the eerie song of the wire. Then a cage is spat out of the shaft, hangs flimsy from its thread above the blackness of the pit.

“Quick now, get in.”

Jake swings open the door and one by one they step over the lip of the pit, onto the rough floor of the cage. The contraption quivers under their step, feels insubstantial; its iron frame covered by protective netting, a tin roof above, along with the rusted hook that connects it to the wire. How many men might the cage hold? It feels full enough with just the five of them, Thomas sprawled across the floor, but a picture comes to her, unbidden, of twenty, thirty men, women, and children, squeezed shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, their faces pressed against the netting, like bait used to lure whatever lives down in the deep. A sickness rises in Livia. To fight it down, she concentrates on Mr. Mosley. The miner has donned a leather cap and hung an oddly shaped lamp from his buttonhole. It isn’t lit.

“The operator won’t tell anyone?”