The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,77

with its bunches of variously colored ribbons, the straw hat tied under the chin—it was what the other girls wore for Sunday best, but on her it seemed uniquely fetching.

They took the path that led across the big field, where Michael had fought with Walker. It was a fine afternoon; others were walking there, they exchanged greetings as they passed. Ahead of them, to the north, the sky was divided by a broad, straight-edged band of cloud that seemed precisely ruled across from verge to verge. Above this band there was still the blue of day, deep and luminous; below it the delicate and reticent shades of evening were gathering, bronze, silver, slate gray, palest apricot.

Michael slowed his step. “Shall we gan through the Dene?” he said.

There was a pause before the reply came, but it was of the briefest. “If tha likes.”

She would have thought it improper in Michael to suggest this at any earlier stage. Like holding hands, it was a necessary and time-honored step in the progress of courtship, the first experience of enclosure, of being screened off and out of view. Generations of couples had traversed these paths above the beck; many were the children that had been conceived here.

Talk was more personal and intimate with them now, and as they crossed the pasture fields and began to descend toward the deep cut which marked the beginning of the Dene, Michael told her of the attempts he had made to get the overman to shift David from being Walker’s marrow to being his. “Walker an’ me are both puttin’ the coal, just the same,” he said. “Why not keep it in the family? Walker can find someone else—he can have the lad that works with me, if he wants.”

“Well, but,” she said, “tha wouldna be doin’ him nay favor. Walker would just start knockin’ him about. What a mean, he’ll keep his hands off yor David, now that tha’s had it out with him.”

“Well, that’s one way of lookin’ at it,” Michael said. It was an aspect that had not occurred to him, or to his father either.

Elsie turned to smile at him as they walked. “ ’Tis sometimes better to let things be,” she said. Michael was like the men of her own family, set on having his own way and keeping close to his own idea of things. But he would listen to her, and she liked him for this—it was one of the things she liked most about him. “My uncle would be alive to this day if they had only let things be,” she said. She had been fond of this uncle, her mother’s brother, who had died in an accident at the pit some two years before, killed by a haphazard fall of stone from the mouth of the shaft. “They changed the work hours,” she said. “The men went off without puttin’ the timbers across where the stone was loose, an’ the basketman had just come on an’ he didn’t know it. Usual game, tryin’ to get more work out of the men for the same money.”

Anger had come with the words into her voice and into her face. Michael made no answer, allowing silence to mark his agreement and sympathy. He knew the circumstances of Thomas Fenby’s death; pit deaths and injuries formed part of the collective knowledge of the colliery. But Elsie’s quickness of feeling was still strange to him. She had gone from a smile to a flare of anger in two shakes of a duck’s tail. “Look,” he said, with a certain relief at finding a change of subject. He pointed down at the path as it began to descend through the wooded slopes of the Dene. There were the trot marks of a fox in the dried clay.

There had been high winds in the previous days, and they could see a tangle of damage higher up on the slope, where the trees were more exposed. Branches had been torn from some of the elms there; they lay in a jagged debris of timber, the pale yellow of the breaks deepening to reddish in the core of the wood. In places the bark had been stripped off in the fall, leaving raw-looking, ocherous patches. Chaffinches fluttered among the tangle of boughs, repeating a single sharp note.

They fell silent as they went farther in. Both were aware of the momentousness of the occasion. Elsie was nearly eighteen. She had come here often as a child, with other