When Jake does not answer at once, she walks over to the wall where a small wire cage has been screwed into the wall. It houses a group of limp canaries that press their beaks against the mesh. Beneath it stands a box, neatly stacked with a score of wooden clubs, each handle wrapped with rope for a better grip. A newspaper article comes to Livia’s mind, something she has read in the county circular, written by an Oxford don, worried for the body politic.

“This is a meeting hall. You are organising the malcontents, is that it? A ‘workers’ union,’ that’s what you call it. A gang of thieves.”

A look at Jake’s face tells her she is right. There is anger there, at the ease with which she has guessed his secret as much as at her tone. He walks over to her, holds up a hand, spreads out his fingers in front of her face like he wants to smother her. But the hand remains where it is, a five-spoked fan spread out thickly in the gloom.

“By itself, each of these can be broken by a child.” He wriggles his fingers, then crumples the hand into a fist, the knuckles standing out white in the half-light. “Try breaking this, Miss Naylor!”

A fist the size of a ham hock. Black, casting a shadow over her face. But Livia feels outrage rather than fear.

“It’s illegal, that’s what it is. It’ll land you in jail.” The newspaper’s warnings come back to her, well-wrought phrases, warnings for the custodians of land and Crown. “What does it want, your union? Riots in the street, I suppose. Burnt manor houses, looted granaries, and free gin for every man, woman, and child. Anarchy! There’ll be famine before you know it.”

Jake drops his fist.

“We are fighting for proper insurance,” he answers with an odd sort of dignity. “When there’s an accident. Last month a man got cut by a snapped cable. Lost both hands. Manager wouldn’t give him a penny.”

He lifts up the lamp, opens it, blows out the flame.

“You must keep it off. There is shale gas in the area. Besides, the next shift will start soon. Light travels a long way down here, and colliers’ eyes are sharp.”

The darkness is so total the words are disconnected from their speaker. Jake no longer exists. Her own body has disappeared. All of a sudden, Livia is to herself just the breath of her lungs, the taste of her tongue between her teeth.

“No light?” she asks, her voice spilling out of her then evaporating in the dark. “How will we live?”

Jake’s answer has the simplicity of truth.

“You’ll get used to it.”

ф

Very soon she is alone.

It isn’t true, of course, but it feels like it. Abandonment. As though she has been left here to rot.