Alex Grecian - The Yard

“Hello?” Hammersmith said.

He raised his voice and hollered again, louder this time.

“Hello? Is anybody home? Police.”

Silence answered him. The brownstone had the feel of a long-abandoned place. No homeowner was within earshot.

Behind him, Hammersmith heard Blackleg drop to the floor. He turned and Blackleg nodded at him. The two men walked to the fireplace, and Hammersmith knelt on the hearth. He reached out toward the shoe that dangled from the chimney and prodded it with his nightstick. There was clearly a foot in it. A body was stuck up inside the chimney.

Hammersmith paused and glanced back again at Blackleg. The other man’s expression mirrored his own. The shoe hanging down below the top edge of the fireplace’s mouth was small enough to fit in the palm of Hammersmith’s hand. They were looking at the foot of a chavy: a dead child.

Hammersmith grabbed the child’s ankle in both hands and pulled. Nothing happened. The body was wedged in tight. He braced himself and pulled again. He felt something shift above him.

“Come here and help.”

Blackleg squatted on the marble slab next to Hammersmith and the two men pulled together. The child’s trouser leg ripped and the shoe thumped into the ashes below. Both men fell backward on their rumps and coughed as a cloud of ash and dust billowed out at them. A rasping sound echoed through the room, and a moment later the entire body dropped from the chimney and tumbled out onto the hearth.

Hammersmith pulled his shirt over his mouth and nose, shielding himself from the swirling ash, and scrambled forward until he was leaning over the body. He wiped soot away from the blackened face and stared heavily down at the face of a boy who could not have been a day over five years old.

COLLIER, WALES, EIGHTEEN YEARS EARLIER.

Nevil Hammersmith was the smallest boy in the village of Collier. With a piece of coal, he had marked his height on the doorpost of the room he shared with his three sisters, and each morning he stood against it. He held his palm flat against the top of his head and moved carefully away to see whether his hand had risen higher than the black smudge on the wood behind him. Each morning his hand was even with the mark. He was almost five years old and he had not grown since his fourth birthday.

His morning ritual of measurement was a hasty thing. His father shook him quietly awake before dawn, six days a week, and Nevil was expected to stumble into his clothes (generally left in a heap on the floor the previous night) and sneak out of the room without waking his sisters. They had housework and chores to tend to on the small farm, but he let them sleep.

Nevil and his father left by the front door. The back door was for the girls. The pigs were corralled behind the main house, and it was bad luck to see a pig before the day began. Nevil’s father hung an arm over his shoulder as they walked and Nevil felt proud, grown-up. He pushed away thoughts of the day ahead and focused, instead, on the moment, basking in his father’s easy camaraderie.

At the mine, they lit candle stubs and entered the huge main chamber. The overman wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and Nevil was glad for that. The last time he’d seen the overman, it was for a whipping with the yard wand.

Nevil’s father checked in for them both and then left the chamber without looking back, headed for the tunnel he’d been working the day before. When he had gone out of sight, Nevil turned and scampered into his own tunnel.

The tunnel was hard-packed dirt, shored up on both sides by thick wooden beams hammered into the walls at regular intervals. Side tunnels branched out every few yards, and ponies trotted past Nevil pulling coal carts from deep in the mountain. As Nevil hurried forward, the ceiling of the shaft ahead of him grew lower and the walls gradually pushed inward until there was no room left for a pony to travel. He blew out his short candle. There was always the danger of gas pockets down here, and the candle wouldn’t last long, anyway. He moved forward in the dark, feeling for trapdoors ahead of him, closing them behind him before crawling on to each new door. Soon the ceiling was too low for a grown man to stand upright and, as Nevil neared his post, even he had to crouch and then crawl forward. The walls narrowed until there was barely room for a coal cart in the tunnel.

Nevil hated the dark and hated the cramped tunnels, but he felt pride knowing that his job was important and that nobody else could do it. No adult in the village could fit in these tunnels when a cart rolled through. And, as the smallest four-year-old (almost five) in Collier, Nevil could squeeze into the smallest spaces of anybody. There wasn’t much value in being small. This would have to do.

He reached his post behind a trapdoor and whispered, “Hello?”

“Is it you, Nevil?”

“It’s me.”

“The night’s done, then?”

“It’s nearly dawn.”

“Did you hear?”

“About the South Drift?”

“Yes. I thought maybe you hadn’t heard yet.”

“I heard.”

Nevil’s father had broken the news carefully over supper. Three children from the village, barely older than Nevil, had died in a shaft collapse the day before. Nevil hadn’t known them well, and death was not yet a concept he completely understood, but he had gone to bed shaken and the trio of ashen children had haunted his dreams.

“Have a good day then, Nevil,” Alice said.

He scrunched against the wall as she passed him. Alice was six and would soon be moving to a bigger tunnel. When she was gone, he searched for the warm spot where she had been sitting, but the floor was cold everywhere in the small chamber, and so he found a spot of his own and settled in.

It took a few moments for his body heat to warm the damp wall enough that he didn’t notice the cold anymore. He could feel, rather than hear, the rumble of carts rolling through distant shafts, and he listened for one of the carts to move toward his own tunnel. If a cart came through this tunnel, Nevil would have to quickly open and shut the trap so that the tunnel would remain properly ventilated. That was the entirety of the job: twelve hours of opening and closing this trapdoor, six days a week, for two cents a day. As he grew, he knew he would move on to larger tunnels. By the time he hit puberty, he would be on his hands and knees pushing coal through these same tunnels every day, and smaller children would have taken his place behind the doors, listening for his cart.

But he knew that he would never take his father’s place in the newer shafts, pounding out the black nuggets and loading them into empty carts to be rolled away down the tunnels by someone else’s children. Nevil had no idea how he would escape the mine, but he had no intention of spending his entire life there the way that his grandfather had and the way that his father would. Nevil could see the cycle of life and death that took place down in the dark behind the village, and he was determined to break it. It could be done. His uncle George had run off to London and joined the navy when he was sixteen. Nevil had never met him, but George had become a family legend, a whisper passed around among the children. Someday Nevil would go to the city himself, and he would find a job he could be good at, and he would never return to Collier.

And when he had children of his own, they would spend their days in the sun.

He listened to the dark. Water dripped from the ceiling, plonking onto the dirt beside him. Rats scurried somewhere to his left, coming closer, then scuttling away whenever he moved his legs. He closed his eyes (there was no point in keeping them open), but he was careful not to fall asleep. If the mine’s deputy caught him sleeping, it would mean ten lashes from the overman’s yard wand again.