Author's Note: The coal mine in this chapter is ludicrously fictitious.
The important Scottish coalfields are way further south, and certainly not in the Highlands, where Clan Cameron's ancestral holdings exist. I didn't know that when I started this story, and so in a brilliant flourish of intellectual dishonesty I'm completely making up a coal mine. The "Skull of Gulvain" mine (or "School of Gulvain", as the child workers sarcastically call it) is derived from the phrase "Sgàile Gaor Bheinn", which can be clumsily translated as "Shadow of the Mountain Gaor". Gaor Bheinn itself— a real-life mountain— was bastardized (as with so many Gaelic place names) into "Gulvain" in the Lowland Scots tongue. It's actually a granite mountain and most certainly does not have a coal mine anywhere in its vicinity (look it up; it's actually very pretty :)
Incidentally, this kind of thing is exactly how many real places in Scotland ended up getting their Anglicized names, such as the so-called "Lake of Menteith" (Loch Innis Mo Cholmaig) or "Kyle of Lochalsh" (Caol Loch Aillse).
Also incidentally, the name Gaor Bheinn translates to "dirty mountain" in real life, so that means our fictitious coal mine's name can mean either "Shadow of the Dirty Mountain" (original Gaelic) or "Skull of the Dirty Mountain" (bastardized). Either way, it's one of those "names to run away from really fast".
Mines of this era were ridiculously unsafe and unregulated. Women, girls and small boys would work them, too. Coincidentally this chapter takes place one year before a disaster at the Huskar Colliery in Yorkshire led to the drowning deaths of 26 children, aged 7 to 17. This would shock the conscience of the Victorian public and lead to an inquiry at the behest of Queen Victoria, which spawned a reform act, passed in 1842, forbidding women and girls from working the mines.
Penance wouldn't have lost his time card, though; boys 10 and up were still good to go. The Victorians' conscience could only be 'shocked' to a certain point, after all.
Naturally it might be a little libelous to unfairly associate Clan Cameron with running dangerous mining operations when they didn't; if I were being historically accurate I'd instead criticize them for their participation in the brutal Highland Clearance of peasant farmers in the early-to-mid 1800s. But coal mining is a more dramatic profession than growing turnips, so...
None of this really has any impact on the story, by the by. I just wanted to mention that I occasionally put a lot of thought into things like this, even when I'm completely making stuff up.
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"Prayer of the Trapper Boys"
Ten Miles Northwest of Fort William, Scotland – 1837
The harness squeaked on metal cinches. Those rusty bits cried desperately for a dab of oil.
He was nearly ready to do the same for a draught of water.
Nearly.
As he drew another long breath that stale scent filled his nostrils; it was chalky and stagnant, like the cold embers of a dead fire.
Emphasis on 'cold'.
The mine was particularly frigid this midmorning; outside the loving rays of the sun scoured the Highland glens, burning off evening's frost and morning's mist, alike. Down here, though, in the dank bowels of the earth, not a ray of sunlight could find a frigid, shivering cheek.
He didn't mind the cold, at least. His muscles strained with effort as he took each inch of ground, crawling on all fours, hefting that ungainly cart of coal behind him. Steam burned off his body as if he were an overworked boiler, misting up the air in the narrow shaft, dancing around the flames of those pathetic little candles set into the rockwork like eddies in a pond.
The yawning emptiness of eternity stretched before him, black and mysterious. 'Hurrying' could be a lonely job, sometimes, with only that dark void to keep you company as you crawled like a baby through the blackness.
He didn't really mind the loneliness, either, nor the darkness.
For the moment, at least, he rather fancied the idea of burying himself down in the grip of the cold, bleak earth. It was monotonous, here, and it was foul.
But it was better than London, at present.
For a moment, just a moment, that rhythmic scuffling of his shoes took on an odd timbre in his head, something like the clunky, wooden tick of a pendulum clock.
Penance willed that noise from his head.
In point of fact the boy wasn't even alone, today; he was allowed to work with a 'thruster' this morning— another set of small hands pushing that lumbering cart on his six— and it was Gavin he chose for the job. Gavin was decent at keeping hold of that massive cart, and he steered it reasonably well.
But, more than any of that, Gavin had something else about him: a job qualification that no other boy in the Sgàile Gaor Bheinn mine could boast, and it made him the most desirable work-mate, as far as Penance was concerned:
The kid had a hell of a singing voice.
"And when my fever'd lips were parched
On Afrie's burnin' sands
She whispered hopes of happiness
And tales of distant lands.
My life has been a wilderness
Unbiest by fortune's gale
Had faith not linked my lot to hers—"
Penance moved in time with the echoing melody, thrusting his legs forward and clawing at the earth precisely with the meter, like a strutting pony. He focused nearly all his attention on the other boy's dulcet voice.
Which explains why he neglected to notice the closed wood slats in front of him, barring their way. The darkness of the shaft disappeared under a blast of bright white light, scouring his vision like the surface of the sun. He fell back on his rear and gripped his forehead, rubbing at it with filthy fingers as he cursed.
"What's that, mate?" Gavin peeked his head around the massive cart; his freckled face was barely visible in the gloom, and the sickly candles cast shadows that bobbed and weaved across it, making it look more like a clay death-mask than an 11-year-old's youthful face.
"I said I think Hew might be getting some winks, again." Penance massaged his forehead as he got back to his knees. He looked up at the closed wood slats. "Hey, there, Hew. You there? Hey, Hew?"
Gavin crawled up to Penance's side and rapped his fists on the slats, his crooked teeth bared like a honey badger's.
"Hew!" He barked, his voice instantly more appropriate for a dockside bar than a church choir loft. "Get your ruddy arse up and stand to, you sniveling li'l pile!"
What followed was nearly thirty seconds of elegant, flowing, uninterrupted curses of the foulest nature straight from Gavin's mouth, no insult repeated twice and no breaths taken between them. By the end of it Penance was nearly on his side from laughter, and only his 'professional acumen' kept him together.
"Steady on!" A mousey little voice eventually sounded on the other side of the slats. Predictably it was groggy with sleep. Small hands fumbled at the levers on the opposite side and then, with uncoordinated gracelessness, the slats inched back and the passage opened.
"How many times I gotta say it, Hew?" Gavin growled into the darkness. "No sleepin' when 'school's' in session, you sod!"
"Nothin' for it! You try sitting around for hours on end in the pitch black, nothin' to do—"
"Nothing? You trappers have got one job: open the bloody door when the tubs come along. That overly complex for you, you li'l tosser?"
Hew rolled out from his tiny alcove in the shaft and scrambled up to the open door. The wiry 8-year-old blinked in the candlelight as he crawled, shaking rock dust out of his wild red hair as he moved.
"'Tosser'? I'll toss you right on your lily arse—"
The boy skidded to a halt, alerting like a deer before a wolf. He ignored Gavin completely, but instead stared at Penance with bugged eyes.
"P— Penwyn! I... uh, listen: sorry about all that, mate..."
Penance gave the boy a gentle smile, nodding.
"It's alright, Hew. But you can't be sleeping on the job; if you don't work that door then we're stuck down here. Worse, the air might back up in the shaft and not flow, fouling up the deeps—"
"An' I happen to have a love of air in my lungs!" Gavin said.
"You're windy enough as it is," Hew grumbled.
"Hew." Penance got to his knees, crossing his arms like a curt schoolmaster.
The younger boy looked to one side, sheepishly brushing more dust out of his unkempt hair.
"Sorry, Penwyn. But it's just so boring! I've told 'em all that I've got the muscles for a thruster, if only they'd give me the chance."
Gavin chuckled.
"You're no more'n three stone. And wet, at that! You really think you can push coal?"
"Can you?" Hew shot back. He motioned to Penance with his chin. "Or are you only good for riding Pen's coattails?"
Gavin's black eyes bugged; his muscles tensed as he prepared to crawl over to the smaller boy and lay an unholy beating on him.
Penance put a quick stop to the boys' back-and-forth bravado before things could turn to blows. While he had no desire to see the suicidally overconfident Hew beaten to a stain on the rocks his diplomacy wasn't entirely selfless. Penance's 'unusual' strength at pulling the coal carts was something of an open secret amongst their little community of hurries and thrusters, and many of the girls and boys working the mine coveted a position as Penance's thruster since it was literally a load off their shoulders. 'Steering the feather' is what the other kids had started calling thrusting detail behind Penance. He tolerated their adoration, but he'd rather not have it spread too far beyond their little circle. The last thing he needed was unwanted attention.
Such as, say, two kids loudly slugging it out over who gets to work with the supernaturally-powerful boy.
He ordered Gavin back to his place behind the cart and then sent Hew back into his tiny alcove, sulking. As Penance moved past him, straining in his harness, he looked over at the smaller boy.
"You know, Hew: sometimes 'boring' can be a good thing. Better than 'exciting', at least..."
Hew looked to one side, unconvinced, and he grumbled to himself.
As Penance got into his rhythm, clawing his way up the shaft, Gavin gave off a very self-satisfied grunt from his position behind him.
"Just as well you saved that li'l tosser from himself, Penwyn. Hew's got a right massive mouth for bein' such a scrawny louse—"
Penance glared at the craggy rocks beneath him, gritting his teeth.
"Lose your place in the song, Gavin?"
The other boy's voice quickly cut out.
"Uh, no. Of course not," he muttered.
Gavin cleared his throat, and then he launched back into the melody:
"Where'er I wandered— east or west—
Tho'faith began to lour
A solace still she was to me..."
X
X
X
By the afternoon break he barely had enough strength to crawl out of the yawning maw of the mine. He made it beyond the barren entrance of Sgàile Gaor Bheinn, which loomed over the land like some prehistoric giant's jaw bearing broken teeth. It was a jaw with one hell of an overbite, too; the mine opened up to land well before one was clear of the stalactite-festooned ceiling. A bit of 'orthodontic work' kept the jaw soundly cracked open: wooden buttresses spanned the sides of the cavern at several intervals. Still, at times Penance felt a certain sense of dread when passing through the place, as if the prehistoric jaw might suddenly snap closed, sealing everyone under its rocky teeth.
But, again, being buried under the earth might not be the worst thing in the world.
It was still far better than London.
He shuffled out of the mountain's shadow and over to the tree-line, where the workers took their meager meals. Penance collapsed on the scrub, limbs splayed out. He made a 'dust angel', wiping the black soot from his body and leaving it clinging to the grass beneath him.
An old timer chuckled at Penance's display, working his laughter around a tough bit of jerky. He gummed at it with his dozen or so remaining teeth. The man sat against one of the trees, shaded from the sun. He was a 'getter'— one of the men who worked the coal seams with their pickaxes— but you wouldn't know it from looking at him. He was pushing 60, at least, and his wiry body was badly wrinkled with age. His hairy skin hung from his bones like droopy cowhide blankets, and the reedy blue of his veins showed all along his ghostly arms.
"Is there e'en a proper lad under all that grime?" He teased.
Penance smiled, stretching his limbs out and letting the sun burn against his ashy skin.
"Now that's a good question," Penance mumbled.
Hew and some of the other small trapper children tromped by in a pack, all of them scratching dust out of their hair and brushing it out of their raggedy clothing. They left a cloud in their wake, training from their bodies like a vapor trail. The kids groused amongst themselves, and the centerpiece of the conversation was their usual complaint: the boredom of trapper work. Hew proudly assured the group that he was soon to graduate to thrusting work. Anything was better than being a trapper, after all. Anything was more 'exciting'.
Anything was better than 'boredom'.
The old getter and Penance watched the small children march by. When they were gone the getter shook his head, breaking off another chunk of jerky.
"In the moneyed cities, proper, the wee lads 'n lasses put out their prayers for sweets 'n toys. At the 'Skull of Gulvain', though?" He shook his head, sunken eyes stern. "Only a respite from the tedium, and a sorry 'respite' at that: a chance to wear down the crowns of their heads by pushing their faces up against the corf." He looked down at his own calloused hands, turning them over with a rueful smile. "And then a chance to wear their very bodies down to raw sinew 'n bone." He looked over at Penance. "A child should have more of a prayer than that, shouldn't they?"
Penance stared up at the sky, hands folded behind his head. Somewhere in the back of his mind he could hear the quiet, metered clunking of a pendulum.
"There are worse things than tedium," he mumbled.
The getter scoffed, motioning to the bleak chasm of the mine across from them.
"Our boss men— they who'd run a thing as this, that turns a wee one's very prayers sour— there's a reckoning well in store, I'd imagine. Bosses such as they crush as much coal as they do spirits, lad. Such a thing's worse than a hanging offense, says I! You know it for sure: the day of the rope will come for the lot of 'em, eventually."
Penance didn't move his eyes from the cloud-studded sky.
"It usually doesn't," he said.
The getter glared at the boy, his shriveled face contorting like a crumpled sheet of paper.
"What makes you say that, laddie?"
Penance shrugged.
"Experience..."
His answer didn't satisfy the old man, who only glared at the boy a while longer before breaking off another piece of jerky. This one he tossed onto Penance's chest. The boy sat up, taking the jerky in hand, and he looked over at the getter.
"You're a weird lad, are you no?" The old man observed.
"Thanks—"
"You've a strange tune to your pipes, haven't you? From where d'ya hail?"
"I'm a highlander." Penance stuffed the jerky in his mouth and began gnawing at it, savoring the flavor as his saliva brought the meat back to life.
The getter chuckled, shaking his head.
"I think not, laddie. If you're going to fib, try to fib well, at least."
Penance smirked, again laying back down on the grass.
"I'm from a few different places," he admitted. "I lived in London, of late..."
"Eh, London!" The getter scoffed. "Had to be a sight nicer place than a coal mine in the arse end o' Scotland. What the devil drove you here, lad?"
The sound came to him again— distant, cold and dreamy: the oaken clunk of a pendulum on its swing. It picked away at his brain like an axe through a coal seam.
He could still see that pendulum swinging.
"It's... kinda rough there," Penance explained. "The cholera's grown strong, again, you see..."
The getter grunted with a knowing nod.
"Mmm. Foul odors of the big city are a potent danger, they are; the miasma feeds on malodorous city stuffs—the rot of garbage, the stink of animals— 'specially at night, so's they say."
"They do say that," Penance agreed. "I was staying with a family, there— not so very wealthy or fancy, mind you— watching after the children in exchange for bread and board. The man worked as a mixer at a chemist's shop, but he took to experiments in the sciences as a hobby."
"Oh, la-dee-dah!" The getter chuckled derisively.
Penance ignored the man.
"He was an animated type. Excitable guy. He built his own pendulum clock, you know. It kept time well-enough but by God it was the ugliest looking thing you could imagine."
"'Scientists' are seldom accused of suffering an excess of 'artistic drive'," the getter said.
Penance chuckled softly.
"'Scientist' is a bit much. Like I said, he was quite excitable, and he had more enthusiasm for it than talent, I think. Of late he got obsessed over this idea of the cholera: he ran all these strange experiments with different waters he collected around the town, going on about how that was the key to the whole problem, if the waters could only be 'cleansed'..."
The getter's sunken eyes squinted, and then he scoffed.
"Clean the waters to clear the miasma from the air? Ha! That's like patting down a smoldering rug when your whole house is aflame! I mean, waters can release a foulness, sure, but the stench isn't nearly so strong as that o' rot 'n the stink of dead animals. Don't take a 'scientist' to divine that fact. 'Clean waters'! Might as well blame the illness on invisible little demons swimming about in the rivers."
"Kelpies in a cup," Penance reflexively smiled.
"So, a bit touched in head, that one is."
The boy again looked up at the sky, his reflexive smile dropping.
"He was, I guess..."
He'd taken a real fascination with his work, near the end. You couldn't take five steps in the house without tripping over one of his beakers or flasks, and he'd jaw on about his work for hours, if you let him.
Those were exciting times, then.
The children came down with it, first. At the start it was simple vomiting, but then the passing of these terrible, watery stools. After a time there wasn't enough water in their bodies to do even that, and their skin blued and shriveled.
By the time they were gone their parents were well on their way to joining them.
Those were frantic days, then, spent constantly changing linens, cleaning vomit and worse, shuttling glasses of water from bed to bed to bed to bed in a fruitless effort to keep bodies hydrated...
Yeah, those were very 'exciting' times, then.
It didn't last long, and it all ended with Penance sitting in a silent hall, perched in a chair before that ugly clock. He watched the pendulum swing, and he listened to that clunky wooden click as it echoed through the stillborn quiet of an empty house.
He wound it before he left.
He figured that was proper, at least.
And now he was quite rightly soured on London, for the moment. A good century or more might go by before he even thought of another visit. For now he wanted nothing to do with the bright lights of the big city.
Right now he honestly felt more at home in the cold, dark heart of the earth.
In too short a time the bell sounded from the mine entrance. The adult getters got to their feet, massaging aching backs and kneading out the cramps in their legs. A clump of trapper children had to be roused from their spot by an older boy via a gentle boot tap to one of their backsides.
"C'mon, sun-baskin' pups," the older boy said. "The 'School of Gulvain's' back in session."
Penance lazily staggered to his feet, yawning and cracking his spine. He ambled back over to the mine entrance with the old getter, and when they got there he noticed a curious sight: one of the foremen was speaking with someone off to the side of the overhang, and it was someone quite out of place in a coal mine.
The woman was perhaps in her late-40s, with a stern but handsome set of laugh lines woven about her cheeks, like delicate cracks of marble in a Greek statue. Her striking dark green eyes seemed a mismatch to her graying brunette hair, but neither feature was unattractive in and of itself. She stood tall, wearing a fine silk shawl with flowers embroidered upon the purple fabric, and underneath a dress of sheen fabrics, slightly lighter in color than her shawl.
Penance had plenty of experience working as a tailor's apprentice, but he didn't need a detailed knowledge of clothing to know that any one article of that woman's ensemble was worth more than a year of a getter's wage.
"That's something you don't see in the 'Skull' on a regular basis, isn't it?" The getter grumbled.
Penance, transfixed by the woman's ludicrous presence, nodded.
"Not a man, a woman, a boy or girl," he muttered.
When the getter looked down at Penance, face scrunched quizzically, Penance looked up and explained himself.
"A lady," he said.
The getter scoffed, waving a dismissive hand.
"That'd be none other than the 'mistress' herself: the Lady Cameron, over from her grand estate out in Achnacarry."
"'Cameron' as in the clan? This area is their land, isn't it?"
"Aye," the getter crossed his arms, glaring at the finely-dressed woman. "An' this hole in the ground be theirs, as well..."
Penance then noticed a boy standing off to the lady's side. He was a few years older than Penance (physically) and his fine clothing and a sporty, neat haircut put him in obvious league with the woman. As the foreman spoke to the woman— the Lady Cameron— the boy's eyes took to disinterested wandering. Several times the lady had to grip his shoulder or tap at his ear to regain a brief moment of his attention.
"Eh, that wee dandy sprout at her side would be the Lochiel, e'er since the sir passed on, these two years back."
"'Lochiel'?"
"Aye," the getter nodded. "Chief 'o the clan, lad. Though of course in all things practical it's the lady that runs the affairs. Must be why she's draggin' that sorry sapling out our way, innit? She's already teachin' the li'l 'master' to look down on us dregs!" He spat on the earth. "Eh, on the day of the rope— when it finds all these bastards' sorry necks— may it find the lady's, doubly quick!"
The getter wandered off to retrieve his equipment and shuffle his way back into the deepest recesses of the mines. Penance, meanwhile, lingered at the mine entrance, waiting for Gavin to make his way back from the break. Several children passed him by, all of them asking if he was 'unattached' for the afternoon shift, but he turned each kid's offer down.
Maybe if they had better singing voices, he thought. He supposed the foremen would disapprove of Penance holding a singing audition amongst all the children at the mine's entrance.
He chuckled. At least it would be a good show for the Lady Cameron and her little 'Lochiel'.
By this time the lady had given up on keeping the boy's attention, and the smartly-dressed youth instead wandered around under the overhang of the mine entrance, absently kicking at rocks. At one point he lost his balance on the rough ground and stumbled, careening right into Hew, who was wandering back into the mine. The boys both fell and ended up in a pile; the Lochiel instantly fought his way to his feet, kicking and elbowing at Hew to get away from him.
"Augh!" He growled, wiping at the dust on his clothes as if it he'd just been bathed in a leper's spit. "You clumsy little rat!"
Hew tried making an apology, but the older boy was hearing none of it. He gave Hew a kick square in the ribs, forcing the boy to ball himself up on the ground. Another kick found the crown of the boy's head.
A third kick was interrupted by a rather curt shove.
The Lochiel stumbled to one side, a stunned expression on his face, as if an ant had just jumped up and socked him in the jaw. When he righted himself he was faced with Penance, body squared and hands at his side, balled into tight fists.
Hew took the opportunity to roll to his feet and dart back into the mine, cradling his bruised midsection, leaving only Penance and the older boy to glare at each other with bared teeth.
"You'll want to be moving along, mate," Penance told the Lochel.
The older boy's mouth went agape, as if a dog had just given him marching orders.
Who knows, from his point of view that might've been exactly what had just happened.
"I... you..." the boy struggled to speak. Blood flooded into his cheeks until the skin of his face looked like a coal burning in a furnace. He snarled.
"You damned beast! You'd dare—"
"Yeah, I 'dare'," Penance drawled.
The Lochiel swung his fist, hitting Penance clean on the cheek. When Penance's face didn't even turn with the punch the older boy's eyes went wider. He swung at Penance's gut, and again the boy offered no reaction.
Well, he did offer one.
Penance started slowly walking forward, approaching the Lochiel like a stalking tiger.
"I said: 'you'll want to be moving along'," Penance growled. "Now do it!"
The older boy's lips went aquiver. He looked left, then right, then behind him, all while walking back from Penance's predatory approach.
"Y— you god-damned cur!" He bleated.
When his back touched the side of the mine he again looked behind him.
That was when he found the beam in the wall.
And that's when it happened.
"I'll fix you, you mangy beast!"
The boy grabbed the beam and pulled at it, managing to yank it out from the mess of beams it was connected to.
It was strange. Penance felt it in his gut before he could feel it in in his feet: that slow and heavy rumble. Maybe it was the dread of knowing what was about to happen, and it hit his stomach before the rest of him could even process it.
But then 'it' happened: the cavern quaked and the rocks came tumbling down. Penance had only a split second to think, which was better than the Locheil, who only stood there, dumbfounded, as the earth conspired to swallow them both, whole.
Penance dove on top of the older boy and they both landed on the cavern floor, him on top shielding the other boy's body. He thought that was fairly noble, all things considered.
The rocks, however, didn't seem to care one bit. And 'nobility' doesn't count for much when a boulder hits your back, squishes your insides into jelly and lays the bulk of your body as flat as a shilling.
The last thought Penance had— just as his heart exploded in what was left of his chest, and his bones and muscles flattened into a mushy pulp— was a rather amusing observation: hadn't he fancied the idea of being 'buried' in the cold, bleak earth?
Indeed, he had.
Well, at the very least this was all very 'exciting', wasn't it?
He might have laughed, if he had a working jaw.
As it was he merely lay there, gurgling frothy blood and his own liquidized lungs from his lips, until the darkness took him.
