A Time for Courage by Margaret Graham

she wondered, but was too tired to care. The camphor made her eyes sting. She closed them. It was nice to have Mrs Arness here, to have an arm around her shoulders, to have someone touching her. It was good, so good to be in a household where rules were not hard and unyielding, where warmth was everywhere.
    Now she was pulling up the sheet and natives were dancing round her father’s white body. How many fish had he and Harry caught? She turned as Mrs Arness moved from the bed, the oil lamp in her hand lighting her face.
    ‘Why did Aunt Eliza send me here?’ she queried, but the words were too quiet for anyone to hear.

4
    Sam met Hannah and Harry as they drove the trap into the mine yard which was pitted with deep ruts still water-logged from the rain.
    ‘Drive on further, Harry,’ he instructed, pointing to a curved track which ran up to the front of the brick-built office standing to the left of the workings. Behind the low building which ran into sheds and store-rooms were the chimneys which cast long shadows. Around them the moor seemed undisturbed by this man-made intrusion, and set against the pale blue sky and distant white clouds the seagulls wheeled and called while below them kites silently hovered over their prey.
    Sam had never allowed Hannah down into the mine but now as he helped her from the trap she asked him again. He shook his head, his hand tipped far back and his ginger hair, clean and free from oil, fell down on to his forehead.
    ‘Your father would not approve,’ he repeated, ‘and besides, it’s bad luck for women to go down amongst the darkness. The men would object.’
    So it would just be Harry and he was pleased because they were already one day late. Serve her right to stand there with a face down to her boots, he thought. Damn the girl. Caught some sort of chill, his father had said when the message had arrived during a late dinner after that appalling storm. ‘So you’ll have to delay your trip, though why you want to go and delve in that filthy mess I cannot imagine. Hardly a gentlemanly activity.’
    Harry had not attempted to explain but merely finished his port and wondered whether Sam took exception to his father’s attitude. It was hard to tell as he sat across the table sipping his port from the crystal glass. Samuel Polgus was a man whose face showed little.
    Now Harry stood with his hands in his pockets looking over the buildings, drinking in the smell of the place, seeing the gorse which grew out of thin earth wherever it could find a footing.
    As Hannah kicked at the dried dirt of the track which dusted her skirt with grey, he looked at Sam giving orders to two men waiting outside the mine office. Sam was stocky in his brown suit and stood solidly on his feet. In fact everything looked solid about the man, as though he could block a punch from the boxing teacher at school with just a movement of his hand.
    His marriage to Eliza had been a late one, Harry thought, and one that had not brought approval from his father, for Sam was the manager of the mine and that made him very little better than ‘trade’. A downward move for Eliza and utter nonsense in his father’s eyes since she had, to his certain knowledge, rejected far more suitable offers. It was a situation which would not be permissible in his family, he had said to his wife specifically for the ears of his son and daughter who were riding in the same carriage back to the wedding breakfast.
    Harry remembered that when his mother had demurred and talked of love, his father had snorted that love had nothing to do with marriage. Marriage was the consolidation of property, and Harry thought then, and again now, that in that case Eliza had probably married well, since she no longer had to pay out a salary to Sam. It would be all in the family from now on. He looked around with satisfaction at the site. They were here at last and the rain had cleared, though the ride over had been slow because there was so much mud on