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By Root 1718 0

excesses at Réquillart, the two children had been holding each other tight to keep warm. The wind whistled through the props of oak and chestnut, and they snuggled together as though they were in some abandoned woodman’s hut. Lydie no more dared to talk openly about all she had suffered as the child version of a battered wife than Bébert could find the courage to complain of the slaps in the face he got from their leader and which made his cheeks swell up. But really, Jeanlin had gone too far, making them risk their necks in all these mad escapades and then refusing to share the spoils; their hearts rebelled, and eventually they kissed, despite his having forbidden it and despite the risk of getting a clip round the ear from out of the blue, as he had threatened. The clip round the ear did not materialize, and they continued to exchange soft kisses, having no thought to any other form of contact and putting into their embrace all the pent-up passion of their forbidden feelings, every moment of affection and painful martyrdom they had ever known. They had kept each other warm like this the whole night through, so happy in their remote hideaway that they could not remember ever having felt happier, even on St Barbe’s Day when everyone had fritters and wine.

A sudden bugle-call made Catherine jump. She craned her neck and saw the guards at Le Voreux taking up their weapons. Étienne was running towards her, Bébert and Lydie had leaped out of their hiding-place. And in the distance, in the growing daylight, a band of men and women could be seen coming down from the village, angrily waving their arms.

V

All the entrances to Le Voreux had just been closed; and the sixty soldiers of the guard, with their rifles at their sides, were barring the way to the only door still left open, the one that led up to the pit-head via a narrow flight of steps and past the doors to the deputies’ office and the changing-room. The captain had lined the men up in two ranks with their backs to the brick wall so that they could not be attacked from behind.

At first the band of miners from the village kept its distance. There were thirty of them at most, and they were busy arguing loudly about the best course of action to take.

La Maheude had been the first to reach the pit, with her dishevelled hair bundled hastily under a black scarf and carrying a sleeping Estelle on her arm; and she kept repeating with feverish urgency:

‘No one goes in and no one comes out! We’re going to corner the lot of them!’

Maheu was nodding in agreement when old Mouque arrived from Réquillart. They tried to stop him getting through. But he would have none of it; his horses, he said, still had to have their oats and they didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about any revolution. Besides, one of the horses was dead, and they were waiting for him to arrive before bringing it out. Étienne cleared a path for the old stableman, and the soldiers let him climb the steps into the mine. A quarter of an hour later, as the swelling band of strikers was becoming more threatening, a large door opened at ground level and some men appeared, hauling the dead animal, a sorry bundle still wrapped in its rope net, which they then abandoned among the puddles of melted snow. Everybody was so shocked that no one tried to prevent them going back inside and barricading the door again after them. They had all recognized the horse by its head, which was bent back stiffly against its side. People whispered to each other:

‘That’s Trumpet, isn’t it? I’m sure it is.’

And indeed it was. He had never been able to accustom himself to life underground. He had always looked miserable and never wanted to work, as though tormented by longing for the daylight he had lost. Battle, the doyen of the pit horses, had tried in vain to pass on some of his ten years’ accumulated compliance by rubbing up against him in a friendly way and nibbling at his neck. Such caresses had only made Trumpet more miserable, and his coat would quiver as he received these confidences from his elderly comrade who had grown old in the