Woman with scales and skull on full back

The winter the water came up in the low workings, a boy named Tomas Greaves went down with the second shift and did not come back up. His mother came to the scales with a shawl over her head and asked what her son's tub had weighed. Hester looked in her ledger and said nothing for a long while. Then she took the brass weights from their box, one by one, and set them on the pan opposite the boy's name, until the beam hung level and the lamplight caught the roses somebody had painted on the housing years before.

The magpie that lived in the headframe came down onto the beam and shook out a black feather, which settled on the copper pan like a thumb pressing down. Hester let it stay. She said the dead weigh less than the living by exactly that much, and that the company had never once been asked to account for the difference. The mother went home with the wage packet. Hester kept the feather, and she kept the scale true.

Nobody in Pennick ever asked her to weigh a man again. But on certain nights, when the wind comes off the spoil heaps, you can hear the brass weights chiming in their box, one note for every name she wrote down, and then one more, which nobody has ever been able to explain.