“Good evening,” Hattie said, her voice sounding high-pitched to her own ears.
A teapot whistled faintly into the silence. Outside the kitchen window, a red-haired young man swung an ax with fluid grace, followed by a dull thud.
Thankfully, Mhairi stepped forward and explained. Unlike Gaelic, which was spoken in the Highlands, the Lowland Scots had a fair semblance to English on paper, but hearing it spoken was confounding.
Rosie Fraser had a neat kitchen: tiled walls, pretty ornaments on the dresser, dried herbs hanging in bunches from a polished rack … A middle-aged woman who wore a blue handkerchief around her head detached from the group. “Welcome to my home, Mrs. Blackstone,” she said in English as she wiped her hands on her apron. “I’m Rosie Fraser.” Her cheeks were ruddy with webs of fine red spider veins; her green eyes were sharp and clear.
“How do you do, Mrs. Fraser.”
“You did a drawing of wee Anne yesterday,” Rosie Fraser said. “It’s a lovely drawing. Her mum was well pleased. Would Ma’am like some tea?”
There was a sudden explosion of activity; some women cleared a part of the table and urged her to sit, while another took the teapot off the stove and Rosie Fraser disappeared into the adjacent parlor to fetch a finer china cup.
“We can do an assembly after mass tomorrow, after the lunch,” Mrs. Fraser suggested while Hattie politely sipped the scalding brew. “We’re cooking the lunch now, you see. But what I’m thinking is, could you perhaps do some more sketches?” The women flanking her nodded.
Hattie put down the cup. “I suppose so?”
“Of my Hamish,” Mrs. Fraser said and tipped her chin at the young man who was working in the yard. Mhairi had been craning her neck in that direction for a while; now she quickly looked away.
“If you’d be so kind, Mrs. Blackstone, I’d like one of my Archie and my Dougal,” said an older woman who was clasping her tea mug to her chest with raw hands.
“Certainly?” Hattie said.
Mrs. Fraser looked at the other woman askance. “I think Mary Boyd should have one before you have one.”
The woman made a face. “Och.”
“Mary’s only got one left,” Rosie said, and the others murmured in acquiescence.
“One left?” Hattie asked.
“One son,” Rosie explained.
“Oh. I am sorry.”
A solemn nod. “Her Domnhall was hit by rocks last year.”
“I’m sorry,” Hattie stammered. The women were deliberating in hushed voices, and while some were speaking Scots, she gathered they were discussing who had suffered a loss and how long back various accidents dated, to determine who was to be prioritized for a sketch. She had a sinking feeling in her stomach by the time Rosie Fraser turned back to her and said, “So we have an assembly tomorrow, and get some sketches in return, aye?”
“It’s a deal,” she replied with forced cheer.
Her mood was subdued on the way back to the inn. “Do they not have photographs?” she asked Mhairi, who had a spring in her step and swooped to pick sprigs of heather here and there to put them into her apron pocket.
“Photographs,” the girl now said, her blue eyes surprised. “You mean of the dead?”
“Or the living.”
Mhairi laughed. “But no. They’ll keep locks of hair. Having a photographer come here, to photograph the dead, all the way from Auchtermuchty? Too expensive, ma’am. But of course”—and now she became serious—“of course a lock isn’t the same, is it? The truth is, the memories of a face fade no matter how badly you want to remember, don’t they? Then you feel bad, for forgetting.”
What a harrowing visit it turned out to be. “Are accidents in the mine commonplace?”
“I s’pose?” the girl said. “If you count the small ones, yes. Explosions, not so often these days.”
“What counts as a small accident?”
Mhairi thought about it. “I’d say, fingers getting crushed, and arms breaking. Not fatal but puts you out of work. Then there’s deadly missteps when going up or down in the heapstead, or stones falling off the ceiling. Or tubs breaking loose from a pony and going over someone who wasn’t in a safety hole fast enough.”
Before her mind’s eye, she saw the scars on Lucian’s body. Perhaps the silvery ones across his abdomen were from his harness, when he used to pull the tubs as a boy …
“But most miners don’t die from accidents,” Mhairi said. “The black lung gets them, with them breathing in coal dust all day long.”