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By Root 1306 0

Denhall, rented from the mine authorities. A low-built house, connected to two others, it was one of hundreds of similar workers' cottages in the area. Sandstone steps skittered up to the low door. Now it is a pretty cottage and the subsidence gives it a picturesque appeal, but then it was a rackety, dirty, cramped place to live. At twenty-one, Mary was a drudge in a dirty hovel, her day consumed by domestic chores, in a village populated by people who were, in the 1850s, according to visitors, "as primitive as their village was secluded."1 At four, she awoke to fetch water, light the fire, and prepare Henry's breakfast. After he left at five, she began her daily battle against the dirt that silted up the windows and covered every surface with a grimy film. Outside her window lay a treeless expanse of scrub scarred by heaps of coal waste, and cheap stone cottages blackened by sooty rain. She knew that soon after she gave birth, she would be expected to work in the mine with the other women. There was little to look forward to and not much to enjoy. Henry returned in the late afternoon, exhausted by a day of laboring in hot and dangerous conditions, and like most men in Ness, he drank and probably beat his wife.

Helped only by neighbors, women drank gin to dull the pain of birth or pulled on a knotted rag. Mary called the child Amy, her sister's name and a Kidd family favorite. Perhaps Henry was not particularly interested in his daughter's name. Many communities held a form of party for new mothers twenty-eight days after the birth, a version of the older "churching" ceremony, which was an attempt to combat postnatal depression and to celebrate the mother's survival, but it appears that Mary had no such party. No relations came to assist her, and because there were so few women in the village, she had little companionship. Lonely and overwhelmed, the young Mrs. Lyon struggled not to vent her frustration on the child. She might have had a closer immediate bond to a son, but Amy was a burden and a seemingly inescapable tie to Ness. Mary's life stretched out drearily before her, a monotony of children, domestic labor, and poverty.

Emma was baptized on May 12. On the register, her name looks like "Emy," but Emma herself always claimed it was Amy, a common name in the Kidd family. It is likely that the registrar simply misspelled it: parents were at the mercy of the registrar's choice of orthography, particularly if, like Henry and Mary, they could not read. One in three children like Emma died within infancy, but she was born in the best season for survival: disease was more virulent from June to September, and babies died of cold from November to February. There was hard work ahead for the infants who lived. Denhall employed most children over nine or ten as cheap labor. All the girls born in Ness were, by the age often, pulling baskets to the surface every day, covered in dirt and regularly harassed by the men. At the end of the day, they returned home to cook and clean for their family or, as was nearly as likely, since many women died in childbirth, stepmother.

The grim cycle of Emma's life seemed preordained. But two months after her baptism, Henry died suddenly. By June 21, 1765, he was buried. Mary and Emma were free.

Emma never discussed her father, and her mother did not disclose any details. Research into death in the eighteenth century gives us some clues about the cause of Henry's demise and his daughter's refusal to discuss him: Emma and her mother might have been covering a scandal.

Men who worked in or near a mine had a short life expectancy, but their deaths from respiratory diseases were lengthy and agonizingly protracted. If Henry had been tubercular, he would no longer have been working. He would have been visibly sick, and Mary would have been unlikely to marry him. There are no records of any pit disasters or smallpox epidemics in the summer of 1765. No cause of death is recorded, and in the yard of Great Neston church, there is no marker for his grave. Mary did not receive a pension or payout from