Charlie is about to extinguish the lamp, when the door opens once more and Renfrew walks in, still in his travelling clothes, carrying a tray with a steaming mug of what proves to be hot milk and honey.

“Here, Mr. Cooper, you look like you could use it. You must have lost half a stone since I saw you last.”

He sits at Charlie’s bedside and watches him drink it before carrying the tray back out. There is to his solicitude something so touchingly maternal that Charlie drifts into sleep with the image of his mother in his head, singing softly, tucking his duvet up under his chin.

CAESAR

CAESAR

The man who tips me off wants to tell me about a workers’ union the miners have set up. The gold sits heavy in his hand. He can’t take his eyes off the coin. Already he has bitten it three times. I should have shoved it up my dog’s arse before I gave it to him. See whether he’d like the taste then. I am sure he would not mind.

He is like so many of his class. Crude, greedy, and stupid. Smoke drifts out of his hairline in thin, greasy streaks; he’s hunching his shoulders, in apology, or fear.

“They be a rebellious lot,” he says for the fourth or fifth time, squinting at me. “Crim’nels in my book.”

He sounds West Country to me. An outsider here. Living his life by a handful of lies that have become true through ceaseless repetition.

“I’m a good man, I am. Salt of the earth.”

He bites the gold again, wipes snot across his beard with the heel of his palm, farts. Nervous wind, Mr. Price used to call it. He caused it in a good many people, would stand there sniffing and flash me a wink. The thought of Price lends fresh focus to my task.

Again I ask about the two boys and the girl. “Posh folk,” I say. “Gentry. One of them is badly wounded.” It is hard to explain to the man that I don’t give a toss about their dwarf insurrection. It’s not like the Spencers own the mine.

He remembers something at last. A girl has been seen, down the mine. A stranger. In the company of one Francis Mosley. A haulage woman passed them in the dark.

“Can’t have been gentry though,” he muses. “Dirty like an Arab, see. Wearing breeches. Most likely a whore. And then, a-course,” he adds after much frowning, “there was three figures on the path. Stevie Milner says he saw ’em pass. But gentry, no, that they wasn’t.” He looks at me wearily, worried he’ll lose his gold.

“Let me guess. They were dirty, too.”

“Like they was dunked in mud.”

“Take me to the place where they were seen.”