She kept telling herself that she would do it the next week and then the next. She did the shopping for Daisy, taking the train into Alnwick, and it was there one Friday morning in the local butcher’s that she heard the familiar sounds of a Deerness Law accent, that soft, broad and to her somehow warm sound, and it made her feel homesick. Suddenly Esther Margaret stopped thinking about the sounds and began to listen to what was being said, and as she listened she grew cold, as though she had been standing outside on the beach in a bitter wind. ‘Poor soul,’ the woman was saying, ‘poor Mary Cameron. Six days it took to get them out of the pit and then the younger lad dead. I remember her when everything went wrong. There wasn’t a nicer woman in Deerness and she’s never been the same since.’ Esther Margaret went out and bought a newspaper, and there it was — the two brothers had been trapped by a pitfall and the younger one had died. She read the article several times before she took it in, and then she had to do the shopping.
