He shifted on his seat to accommodate the sudden weight of discomfort in his stomach.
“I don’t know what a toff’s excuse is to be mean to his woman,” he said, “and I’m not making excuses for it; there’s never an excuse for such a thing. I tried to explain something I’ve seen growing up: a boy in Drummuir learns that a good man provides for his wife and keeps his family safe. When he becomes a man, he’s usually proud of his work, proud of being a miner. But he also realizes that he’ll never offer his sweetheart more than the damp hut and a lifetime of backbreaking work, and no jolly song, no camaraderie, can change that truth. Money might be tight all the time. He needs her to work to make ends meet. Makes some men angry, that. And the wife, she knows every fellow with a tall hat and a cravat can grind her husband into the dust with his posh heel if he wants, yet here she’s to submit to her husband’s authority. It’s never said, but you know, deep down. It can cause bad blood.”
Harriet wrinkled her nose, as though it were causing her brain some physical effort to accommodate his perspective. “I suppose injustice in one place is usually linked to injustice elsewhere,” she finally said. “A ghastly web. One more reason for men and women to be coequals in a marriage—there, no bad blood over failed duties and expectations.”
“Logical,” he conceded, which made her look half-satisfied.
“Who’s more hard done by, then,” he said, “a poor man, or a rich woman?”
“The rich woman,” she said easily, “for her oppression before the law and in the home always depends on her being a woman, regardless of her circumstances or position in society.”
Logical again.
“I suppose,” he said. “But there’s oppression in never having a day without worries about tomorrow’s bills. Where the next hot meal and warm coat comes from. In having to run up and down the heapstead over and over like a rat in a drainpipe just to feed your family, until you finally turn up your toes.”
“Indeed,” she said, looking vexed. “But working on improving one ill doesn’t preclude paying attention to another, I’m certain of that.”
He liked having a companion for debate in his wife, he realized, even if to date, he had never cared much for debating. A ghastly web, she had called it. She had words for things he usually only felt intuitively.
Harriet was contemplating him curiously now. “What would your mother say?” she asked, blindsiding him.
“What?” He sat frozen in his seat.
Her smile was a little uncertain. “Your mother. Would she have wanted equal pay?”
He kept his eyes on the green pastures rolling toward the horizon while he collected his thoughts. “I don’t know,” he said. He focused on his breathing; his chest felt tight.
He didn’t want to speculate about what his mother would’ve thought or said; he never did, for it sufficed that whatever memories he had of her kept spurring him on to reach his goal. Any thinking beyond that, and anger began crawling through his gut. Or he remembered how young she had been when she had died. Seven-and-twenty. Too young to die, too young to have an eleven-year-old son. This realization had struck when he had gone to the graveyard to find his grandmother. He had visited his mother, too, and when seeing her birth date on her stone, he realized that she would have been fifteen or sixteen when she had returned from the manor to the colliery. From all he’d heard, his father had been ill-tempered and older. Money made a man look good, often enough, but he was still hardly the type a proud young miner lass would fancy. So he couldn’t know. He couldn’t know with certainty whether he had been forced into existence through an act of violence. The thought had brushed his soul cold like a wintry breeze while he had stood by the grave, doing the math, and he had avoided thinking of it since. Something inside him shut down fast and brutal like an iron portcullis at the thought of Harriet knowing. She had only just begun to look at him with a blush on her cheeks instead of an angry, wary, or contemptuous glitter in her eyes, and he’d do more than lie to keep it that way.
“I don’t know what she’d want,” he repeated.
“What was she like?”
His hand moved to his chest. His brow felt damp. “I remember that she loved the sun. It was probably what she loved best in the world. Sunlight.”
“That’s a lovely memory,” Harriet said, and the warm, interested expression on her face kept him talking.
“When it was bright in the morning or after the shift ended, she was at her happiest, I could feel it,” he said. “I remember thinking … I remember thinking that she belonged in the light, not underground. Her hair was the color of ripe wheat, you see. It always made me think of summer.”