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art, and then—the reason she’d come—local history. The aisle in question was a well-stocked unit with many tomes on display. She began at the beginning—the letter A —and slowly worked her way through the offerings.
    After reaching Z , she’d extracted two books that might suit her purposes, one a comprehensive guide to Whitby and its surrounding areas, and the other a history of mining in the northeast of England. She took both to a table nearby and sat in a chair to peruse them.
    The first, an unambiguously titled tome called Whitby , contained several chapters on a range of local issues, including religion, shipping, fishing, cultural life and folklore. Meg scanned the index for reference to Sandsend and found just three entries, two of which proved negligible, and the third only marginally less so. A section was dedicated to various materials acquired from the tiny village, including jet, alum, roman cement, ironstone and building stone. There was little about the human aspects of this mining activity, however—the main reason Meg was interested in the issue—and so she quickly moved on to the second book.
    This one moved closer to her chosen subject matter, but was similarly sparse and frustrating. She’d wanted to know what it had been like for miners in those bygone days, where they’d lived and what their jobs had involved. But the best the book could offer was a handful of evocative quotations from noted commentators of the day.
    In 1858, someone called Walter White had written about the Sandsend alum works in the following way:
    …a low, darksome shed, where from one end to the other you see nothing but leaden evaporating pans and cisterns, some steaming, and all containing liquor in different states of preparation…In going about the works it was impossible not to be struck by the contrast between the sooty aspect of the roofs, beams and gangways, and the whiteness of the crystal fringes in the pans and the snowy patches here and there where the vapor had condensed.
    This was certainly interesting, but got her no closer to the people who’d worked in the mines for such pitiable wage packets. She read on, hoping the narrative would become a little less reliant on dry facts. And that was when she chanced upon a section that brought life to all the people who’d once grafted in conditions hardly conducive to physical or mental well-being.
    Someone called Sir George Head had described the work of jet miners in 1835 thus:
    A man very often not only works alone all day in such a gloomy state of confinement, but reaches his solitary dungeon without assistance, merely by the perilous expedient of a rope rove round a stake fixed on the summit of the cliff: by the rope he lets himself down, and at the end of the day’s work pulls himself up again.
    Compared to this experience, the health and safety regulations that hampered and enhanced modern institutions seemed laughable fey. Meg even laughed briefly, drawing a few disapproving glances from people around her, including several elderly people who might be familiar with working conditions before welfare campaigners had set their merciful hands upon them. But then she returned her attention to the book.
    She paged through several more chapters, but found little to excite her. In the Sandsend area, unmarried men working in the mines had occupied communal hostels situated on the site, while guys with family had walked from their homes in nearby villages. All were paid by the day or by piecework, while more skilled staff would be contracted on an annual basis and paid every six months, in June and December.
    That was as much as she’d been able to discover about the people she was interested in. Perhaps she’d have better luck with the local newspaper’s archives, which, she’d been led to believe, dated back to the 1850s and might present a more human side to all the dramas enacted in the region.
    She got up to return the books to the shelves, and was