The Mists of Pencarrack Moor

by Terri Nixon

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

1931, Cornwall. Lynette Nicholls lost her brother exactly a year ago in a tragic air training accident. When she visits the coastal town where it happened, she begins to doubt everything she's been told about the incident and becomes determined to uncover the truth.

Her investigation takes her deep into the community, where she meets Geordie Sargent, the leader of the miner's dispute. When sparks fly between them, and Lynette is drawn into his fight, she risks losing everything.

Lynette knows she must choose between her love for Geordie and justice for her brother's death. But, as her life becomes further entangled in the dangerous secrets of Pencarrack Moor, she starts to wonder if she still has the luxury of making that choice . . .

Praise for Terri Nixon:

'A brilliant read' RoNA award-winning, bestselling novelist Tania Crosse

'Love, loss and old rivalries are skilfully woven against an atmospheric coastal backdrop holding a promise of new beginnings. A five star page turner from the start' Kay Brellend, author of A Workhouse Christmas

'I guarantee their story will stay with you long after you have finished reading this beautifully written book' Lynne Francis, author of A Maid's Ruin

'A moving story of tragedy, deception and one woman's determination to protect her family. I couldn't put it down!' Charlotte Betts, author of The Light Within Us

Release date: March 21, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 90000

Sample

Dartmoor, Devon

1929

The morning that saw the mine closed down forever, and the village nearly destroyed, had started in the same, unremarkable way as countless others. A grey day in March; one of those bland days where there was no comment to make, except, perhaps, that it was a little overcast. Colin Damerel’s son had left for work at the local garage hours ago, his daughter had gone to school, and his wife was already elbow-deep in laundry in the outhouse. Damerel himself had embraced the peace and quiet and taken a second, leisurely cup of strong black coffee, before donning his coat and trudging down the hill to see if, by a miracle, his day would turn out to be as dull as the weather. He doubted it.

The highly lucrative copper industry in the district had, by necessity, given way to the mining of arsenic, and after that it had been a slow but inevitable decline into decay, but Damerel had used that time shrewdly. With his knowledge and his experience, and with some smoothtalking to raise the loans he needed, he had become the proud owner of his own – admittedly small – tin mine near Peter Tavy, just north of Tavistock; Wheal Peter was proof, were it needed, that he’d been destined for better things from the beginning, and it had never failed to give Damerel a thrill of achievement to see his name painted on the sign at the front of the yard. Especially after the closure of the Devon Great Consols mine, to which he’d given his blood and his sweat, if not his tears.

But there was an ominous tension in the air, that had become increasingly hard to ignore over the past months, and today the cold faces that turned his way were devoid of the polite acknowledgements that usually greeted the arrival of any manager or mine captain, let alone the owner. Damerel shouldered his way through the throng of workers clustered outside the office, ignoring demands to stop and talk, and thanking the heavens that even those work-roughened men had more sense than to physically bar his way.

Safely in his office, with the door firmly shut between himself and the raised voices, he drew a shaking hand through his thinning hair and donned his helmet; it never hurt to remind the dissenters that he’d been one of them once, that he knew their troubles, understood their concerns, and was aware that changes needed to be made. But he also needed to remind them that those changes would cost money, and that the money would have to come from somewhere. It was fair to admit that he’d drawn on early mine profits to build his own impressive house, but if he didn’t show a prosperous face to the world, who would believe Wheal Peter was worth investing in? That writer, Wodehouse, had once had a story in one of the American magazines his wife enjoyed so much, and she’d read out a line to him: if you don’t speculate, you can’t accumulate. Words to live by.

Damerel was mentally working this into yet another speech to appeal to the labourers outside, when the door opened a few inches and John Doidge, his mine captain, squeezed into the office. Doidge ran the bolt behind him the moment the gap was closed, as if he expected the irate miners to thrust their way in by force, though they hadn’t reached that stage yet. Thankfully. But the whole thing was tasting sourly of the same unrest Damerel had witnessed at countless other pits just before they closed, and he knew it was only a matter of time.

‘Haven’t they grasped it by now?’ he grumbled. ‘You’re in amongst them, haven’t you made our position clear?’

Doidge, who was probably only fifty but had lately begun to look a lot older, shook his head. ‘They won’t do it. You’ll have to get other labour in, and you know what that’d mean.’

Damerel sighed, bone-weary of going over the same old ground. ‘If they’d just go down there long enough to get us a good, clear sample, we could get the loan we need to pay for the repairs. Then I wouldn’t have to dock their wages.’

‘They’re sayin’ it’s a matter of safety, and they’re not goin’ back down until the cage is fixed.’

‘Then tell them to use the ladders.’

Doidge looked at him with guarded amusement, then his half-smile faded when he realised Damerel was being serious. ‘They’re wood, sir, and old! You wouldn’t spend out for iron—’

‘It wasn’t a case of not spending out,’ Damerel said, growing angry. ‘I got the cage installed instead.’

‘Maybe so, but them ladders … You’ll never get the whole shift down safe – Sir,’ Doidge added the honorific after a pause, but still looked uncomfortable at the order he was expected to convey. Damerel saw it and scowled.

‘The ladders were replaced just last winter, anyway.’

‘Were they?’ Doidge frowned. ‘I don’t recall that.’

‘I got them done when we shut down for two weeks because of the floods.’ Damerel opened his ledger for the first time that day, trying not to look at the balances column, and turned back several pages until he found what he was looking for. ‘Here, look. February seventeenth. Not iron, no, but they’ll be fine.’ He sighed. ‘Just get one team down there, all right? Geordie Sargent says the lode his team found at the forty fathom level looks set to extend a good mile north-east. That alone should be enough to squeeze something out of the banks, or even attract other investors.’

‘We need to pump out before forty’s safe,’ Doidge pointed out, not for the first time. ‘The adit’s not cut through to the vertical shaft yet; there’s nowhere for the water to go if they hit.’

‘There’s no water down there.’ Damerel tapped a greasy-looking plan that lay half-buried on his desk. On it, a roughly sketched, but as-yet incomplete, drainage tunnel led off the main shaft; insurance against disaster should they blast through to an underground lake or river. ‘We’ve checked and double-checked.’

‘It’s askin’ for trouble,’ Doidge insisted.

‘It’s necessary! We can only pay for the repairs to the cage once we’ve got proof of a strong lode. And we can’t get that ’til we get Sargent and his team back down there, and then get his samples to the assayer.’

‘Well, we can only hope it’s all Geordie says it is,’ Doidge grunted. ‘We’ve only got his word, an’ it don’t seem worth the risk, to me.’

‘Lucky it’s not your risk then.’ Damerel ensured his tone conveyed that the conversation was over. ‘It’s mine.’

‘And Geordie’s,’ Doidge said, stubbornly.

Damerel shrugged. ‘Sargent’s a menace, but he’s got a sensible head on his shoulders. Get out there and make sure his team’s ready to go down.’ He waited for Doidge to move, and when he hesitated, he rapped the desk with his knuckles. ‘Go on, then! Time’s wasting.’

After the captain had left, and the babble of raised voices outside had died down again, Damerel turned the pages in the ledger back to the most recent. His reluctant gaze went at last to the profit and loss columns, which didn’t make for pleasant reading; he’d borrowed widely from the start, adding to what he’d managed to skim from Devon Great Consols as they’d gradually faded into history, setting himself visibly high, in order to attract investment.

To begin with, it seemed it had been more than worth it, but interest rates were rising, and too many of what had seemed promising lodes had trickled away to nothing, leaving miners who were on piecework out of pocket. Those few on a fixed wage were clamouring for more, as the economy struggled with the after-effects of the war, and they were being plagued by cheap imports of tin and copper now too, which left the English mining industry out in the cold. The forty-fathom lode was Damerel’s last hope of avoiding going the way of Devon Great Consols, and by the end of the day he would know one way or the other.

He felt quite queasy at the thought of going home to Mary with news that it was all over, but all he could do now was wait, half-convinced John Doidge would appear at any moment with news that the tunnel had flooded after all, and washed Sargent and his team to their deaths.

But it wasn’t a flood that ended everything for Wheal Peter; the team never even made it as far as the tunnel.

Doidge didn’t knock; he just stood in the open doorway, slack-faced with shock as he told Damerel what had happened.

Sargent had, understandably, baulked at the order to use the wooden ladders to descend such a distance, but after some argument, and some pleading by Doidge, who had counted on Sargent’s respect for him, he had evidently accepted that this was the only way the mine might be saved. As shift captain, he had checked the ladders carefully, and gone down first, but with two-hundred-and-forty feet to climb, it would be a painfully slow descent, so Doidge had urged the other four to follow without delay. They did so, watched by the other miners with a mixture of anger, fear and envy, which had turned to horror when the fifth and youngest member of the team, seventeen-year-old Jack Clitherow, had let out a sudden, startled warning shout, and crashed down onto his brother, eight feet below him. Within moments, four of the team were lost to the darkness, and their impact-blunted cries as they collided repeatedly with the uneven walls of the shaft, haunted many dreams from that day on. Few more so than John Doidge.

Further down the shaft, Geordie Sargent had had a split second longer than the rest of his team to realise what was happening, and in which to flatten himself against the ladder. He said later, just before he’d passed out himself from shock and pain, that he’d just tucked his head down and grimly clung on, as bodies, boots and tool bags smashed into him on their tangled, flailing way past. He’d muttered bleakly that the silence that followed had been even worse than the fearful certainty that he would perish alongside his team.

‘The rope we used to pull the lad out didn’t do him no favours,’ Doidge told Damerel, still sounding distant and numbed. ‘He already had a couple of broken ribs from being crushed against the ladder, and we was none too gentle gettin’ him up, trying to rush things, like. But he’s bein’ took care of now.’

Damerel found an ugly thought surfacing: it would have been better for Sargent to have followed his team to their deaths, than to have him talking of the accident, and what had led to it. He’d always been a bit of a firebrand, that one; caught people’s attention with charm and an easy smile, and kept it with smart words and an infuriating talent for agitating his fellow miners. Damerel buried the thought, ashamed of it, but still he privately wished that, if anyone had had to survive, it had been the far more malleable youngest Clitherow boy.

In the end it didn’t matter anyway. Before mid-morning, word had already begun to spread beyond the village where most of the miners – and newly bereaved families – lived. From there it would ripple across the moor, and then on to Tavistock, and, even before Damerel had had time to absorb the news, and try to limit the damage, he knew the mine wouldn’t survive. He called Doidge back in.

‘Assemble everyone outside the office at two o’clock sharp.’

‘A lot of the lads have already gone,’ Doidge said, his expression grim. ‘There’s goin’ to be a rush to get whatever jobs are out there.’

It made sense, of course. The miners were clearly willing to risk losing whatever meagre handout might be on offer, in order to secure work. And meagre it was.

With the office door bolted once more, against intrusion, Damerel pawed through the cash in the safe, his mind racing through mental arithmetic that left him cold. Then he sat back on his heels and forced himself to think straight. No man would attempt another descent until iron ladders had replaced the wood, or until the cage had been fixed, but no bank would advance a loan to repair the cage, or to provide a man-engine instead. Likewise, no company would consider entering into a partnership with Wheal Peter, when it was abundantly clear its management was at fault; even if the forty-fathom level proved good after all, it was just one lode. Who, in their right mind, would invest in a business connected with such an avoidable tragedy, on such a flimsy basis? It was a vicious circle.

Damerel counted the money again, then drew off a wad of notes and slipped them into his leather purse. He replaced what was left, pushing the box all the way to the back of the safe, and pulling old account books and cloth wages bags in front of it. He returned to his desk and studied the page in the current accounts ledger for a moment, then pasted a blank piece of paper very carefully over the wages column. He spent some time rubbing the edge of his fist carefully up and down the page, transferring some of the grime and sweat from his skin to the pristine white, and waited as long as he could get away with past two o’clock, while the noise outside grew. The paste seemed to take forever to dry, but once Damerel had re-drawn the lines separating all the columns there was no discernible difference between them. Nothing that would be noted by an emotional, angry or bemused miner, in any case.

He closed the ledger and opened the door again. ‘Doidge! In here!’

The captain pushed his way through the increasingly impatient throng, and came in, his face set, his eyes still haunted. Damerel understood that look; accidents happened in mines all the time, and each one was a keenly felt tragedy, but this was a small company, and even Damerel – a lifelong miner, and to some degree inured to the effect of such events – could appreciate the disbelief that hung over the place. Four dead from one village, two of them from one family, and from what Doidge had said, Sargent was in a bad way too; his wife probably had no idea yet just how close she’d come to being a widow. There’d be no money coming into that household for a good while, and, now that he came to think of it, Damerel remembered the two Clitherow boys were some relation to Marion Sargent, too. But there wasn’t time to dwell on that; Damerel knew he must play a role now, and play it well. He rubbed his hands over his face, as if he’d done nothing but sit in stunned contemplation since the accident, and looked helplessly at Doidge.

‘We need to pay them,’ Doidge began, before he could speak. ‘We can’t just—’

‘I know.’ Damerel held up a hand, and affected a resigned look as he opened the ledger. He gestured to the safe. ‘Best get the money out then, such as it is. We’ll divide it equally among those who’re left. I won’t take a penny for my cut; we’ll share it out among the families of Sargent’s team.’

Doidge’s expression eased slightly, telling him he’d said exactly the right thing, and he opened the safe and lifted out the box of cash, pulling a face as he looked inside. ‘This in’t going to go far.’

‘I’ve just had to pay out for new fuses,’ Damerel said, trusting Doidge had better things to think about than to question that. ‘Doubt they’ll take them back, now, either.’

Doidge admitted the workers, one by one, and Damerel solemnly handed over their share, along with his sorrowful condolences on the loss of their friends. Doidge counted out the money in front of each of them and Damerel entered the amounts into the blank column; to his relief, the men signed beside their names without demur.

When Doidge himself claimed his wage, along with Geordie Sargent’s, Damerel was certain that, of all the men, he would be the one to notice the tiny join in the paper laid over the payments column; he had prepared some vague explanation about spilled ink, which might or might not have worked. But Doidge was too dazed and grief-stricken to do more than scribble his signature next to both names and pocket the cash. Damerel shook his hand in the doorway and asked him to convey his regrets and condolences to Mrs Sargent, along with her husband’s wage. Doidge nodded, his expression set into one of grim resolve, and left the site for the last time.

Damerel locked the door again and carefully peeled away the paper pasted over the wages column. He set to work scraping away every remnant of paste before adding considerably higher figures into the column alongside the signatures. With the numbers adding up neatly to a total loss, and no hope or expectation of repaying his debts, Damerel was finally able to apply himself to what he might do next. He was finished here on Dartmoor, and he could no longer pretend otherwise.

But, as he walked home after the longest day of his life, he gradually became aware of a strange lightness settling over him. He fought it at first, still too relieved to have found he was capable of feeling genuine shock and sadness for the lives lost today, and for the ruin of young Sargent and his family. He embraced the guilt, too, now that the self-preservation impulse had faded, and the remorse; he should have spent the money on the cage sooner, instead of holding back and waiting for the engineers to offer cheaper labour. It was too late for such regrets now though; those lads were gone.

As he stepped into the cool familiarity of his home, he realised something else was gone too: the seemingly endless struggle to keep the mine turning a profit, juggling the debts, and sharing the decreasing rewards between his creditors and his workers. And gone too, was that cold, snaking fear that had so often pursued him into his dreams at night: that someone would find out how he’d used those early profits. All that was in the past now, and the unpaid loans would be written off. Wheal Peter was no more, but the community would rally and eventually thrive again, without his help or his interference. Damerel had a small sum of investment money – he patted the purse in his pocket to reassure himself – and a damned fine house to sell, which would raise considerably more. While no one would invest in him, and understandably so, they would still welcome his money with wide open wallets.

He opened his back door and stepped into his garden, where he could see Dartmoor spread out beneath and all around him. Crumbling engine houses and too many disused chimneys rose here and there, and there was a new silence that stretched between him and the horizon. There was none of the rhythmic stamping he’d been so accustomed to all his life; no clanking sounds of working horses and machinery; no shouts, whistles or blasting sirens … It was quite eerie, now he stopped to really listen. But even as he bade farewell to the life he’d known, Damerel opened himself to the wider possibilities. Copper, tin and arsenic might be on the wane, but there was another mining industry that was still flourishing, still exporting huge amounts, and still making its owners and investors vast profits. He turned his face to where the sun was finally dipping to signal the end of this long, long day. To the west. Towards Cornwall. It was time to start again.

Brighton

11 February 1931

Lynette Nicholls sat at her writing desk, but her attention was not on the paper in front of her. Nor was it on how much time had ticked by since she had sat down after breakfast to put pen to paper. Instead, it was drawn to the photograph of her older brother, caught with a broad grin but otherwise carefully and quite properly posed; it was on the memories of exuberance and devilry, courage and determination. It was on the knowledge that today marked one whole year since he had died.

Xander had been madly excited about joining the flying school that had recently re-opened in Cornwall, hoping to move on to military training as his second step, and perhaps ultimately to join the Royal Air Force. He’d done well, too, passing the tests with ease, and moving steadily towards the day he would be allowed to take control of the plane himself. But a year ago today, on that first eagerly anticipated training flight, some unknown engine malfunction had sent the plane spiralling out of the sky and into the indifferent and unforgiving Cornish sea, from which neither Xander nor his instructor had ever emerged.

Every day since it had happened, Lynette had struggled to put one foot in front of the other; she had battled to hold her grief in check in front of family and friends, and to function in the way expected of her, as the daughter of a successful and locally prominent family. Every evening she had retired early, unable to bear the silent, still-raw grief in her parents’ eyes as they moved around each other, each lost in their own unspoken hell. Everyone’s beloved Xander, who’d fallen flat on his face socially more often than Lynette cared to remember, but who had charmed absolutely everyone in the process, was gone.

Bertie Fox, one of hers and Xander’s closest friends, had come to Bristol for the funeral; she had been pale and quiet, still in deep shock, and she had reached out to Lynette in her grief. Lynette had wanted desperately to take the comfort and return the gesture, but knowing Bertie was still intent on following Xander’s dangerous, and possibly fatal, path into the skies, she had been unable to; the thought of losing someone else in the same way was too awful to contemplate. It was easier to break all ties there and then, so Bertie had returned to Cornwall confused and upset, and Lynette had hated herself for it. Probably more than Bertie would ever know.

She reached out now to touch the smiling face in the picture, and realised, with a jolt of guilt, that a tiny smile had found its way onto her own face in response. She banished it immediately, feeling disloyal and even a little chilled, but, as her gaze was drawn back to her brother’s picture, she could hear his voice, as clearly as if he were sitting behind her on the bed.

Come off it, sis. You can’t go on like this forever, even you know that.

‘I can if I want to.’ Her own voice startled her, in the heavy quiet of her room, but surprisingly it comforted her as well, and she shifted her eyes from the picture to the bed; for a split second she could almost see him too, lounging back against the headboard, his hands folded behind his head, his blond hair flopping over his forehead, and his face lit with affectionate amusement. But for the first time, the fleeting image didn’t bring a shaft of pain, even when it vanished, and his voice remained strong in her mind.

Don’t just write to her, go and see her.

She looked down at the expensive, creamy writing paper, and at the pen in her hand, and then again at the words she had already written:

Dear Bertie

I can’t believe we have reached a year since the loss of our impossible boy. My brother, your friend—

That was when she had run out of words and had lifted her eyes from the paper to the picture, hoping to find something that would comfort them both. But instead Xander himself had stepped in, and he was right; she had seen Bertie only once since the funeral, and although their fractured friendship had been mended, it remained stiff through lack of exercise. She took a deep breath, sent Xander a quick, grateful smile, and continued writing.

I am considering the possibility of renting a room near you for a short while. Please do let me know of anywhere you think might be suitable.

She tapped her pen thoughtfully against her lips for a minute, suddenly uncertain. Was this really the right thing to do? Visiting Bertie at home had been one thing; the Foxes’ hotel in Trethkellis was miles away from the site of the flying school. But now Bertie lived and trained in the very place from which Xander had taken his first and final flight, and Lynette would be able to stand on the cliff and look out over the sea at the exact spot, should she find the courage to ask to see it.

You should see it. His voice was soft now, but no less present for all that, and she knew he was right about that, too. She needed to say goodbye, and then to step forward into whatever life might prove to be without him. She bent once more to her letter.

There had been no branch line into Pencarrack the last time Lynette had visited. It seemed such a long time ago, but it had only been a little over a year since she had last been here. It had been Christmas, immediately before Xander had begun training here; a day of immense fun, she remembered now, as the train rolled to a stop by the tiny platform. Xander, herself and Bertie, along with Bertie’s sister and her friend, had bowled down the country lanes in Xander’s prized Bentley, chattering and singing all the way, before poking around the little shops in the town and then lunching at the Cliffside Fort Hotel. Where, of course, Xander had characteristically opened his mouth and put his enormous foot in it with the head chef.

She smiled at the memory, and realised she was doing that more easily since she’d made the decision almost two weeks ago. She had reassured her parents that she would be better for her trip down here, though it had been difficult so soon after the first painful anniversary, and she’d almost changed her mind more than once. But here she was, with a single case containing a few changes of clothes, and Xander’s letters to show Bertie. She stepped onto a sparsely lit platform that hadn’t even been here a year ago, and looked around for the friend she hadn’t seen in almost as long. How would their reunion go?

Another moment of uncertainty threatened to send her straight to the office for a ticket back to Brighton, but she sat on it firmly. Yes, it had been a long time since she’d seen Bertie Fox, but their friendship had been built on unusually emotional foundations, after Bertie had lost her leg in a motorcycle accident. They’d met only a few hours before that, but had hit it off so well that Lynette had spent as much as possible of her remaining time in Cornwall at Bertie’s hospital bedside.

‘Lynette!’

She turned towards the voice, and all her doubts melted away. Bertie peered through the dim light and waved her walking stick in the air, earning herself a glare from the lady who stood next to her at the gate. Lynette picked up her case and hurried over, to find herself drawn into a huge, warm hug, almost drowning in the rough thickness of Bertie’s coat until she pulled back, laughing.

Bertie was exactly as Lynette remembered her, although her glossy dark bobbed hair was almost hidden tonight, by a red woollen hat that kept out the worst of the February wind blowing off the sea. She was the same girl who’d raced her motorbike at Bude, for the first time, but with the determination and ferocity that had brought her in second in a field of experienced riders. Now she applied that same ambition to flying planes, and it seemed she was proving equally successful at that.

‘You’re doing the advanced classes now, then?’ Lynette prompted, as they made their way out into the cold night. Bertie had been strangely reticent about giving up this information, but Lynette was delighted for her.

‘As of two months ago.’ Bertie slipped her hand under Lynette’s arm, still clearly reluctant to discuss it. ‘Come on, I have a taxi waiting to drive us down to the flats. I’m going to stay over tonight, and we can chat to our hearts’ content over a nice hot toddy. You can tell me everything you want to do while you’re here.’ She gave Lynette a concerned look. ‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right staying … well, staying—’

‘Near the base where Xander lived?’ Lynette nodded. ‘Don’t worry about that. Or me. I’m getting better.’

Bertie smiled. ‘I’m glad. Come on then.’ She tugged Lynette onwards. ‘It’s almost eleven, and this wind is freezing my hat to my head.’

Lynette helped Bertie out of the taxi a short while later, and they went into what had once been a grand hotel, but had now been converted into stark, but efficient, holiday flats. Bertie pulled a face as she put the key in the lock of the room she’d booked for Lynette.

‘I’d forgotten how dull this place can be, off-season. How long are you planning to stay, anyway?’

‘A week or two. If I do decide to stay longer, I might look into renting a cottage or something, a bit closer to the base. In the village, maybe.’

‘Good idea.’ Bertie looked at the clock. ‘Shall we have a nightcap? I remember what the trip from Brighton is like; you must be exhausted.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Lynette shrugged off her coat and hung it on the back of the door. ‘Actually, I feel too wide awake to even think about sleep. It’s a pity it’s so late, and so foul out; I could have done with a walk.’

She went over to the window but there was nothing to see of the town from here; they were facing the open moorland, and it was nothing more than vast blackness with the occasional pocket of lighter grey where the cloud drifted. She gave a little shiver and came back to sit on one of the twin beds.

‘What are the others up to now?’ she asked, as Bertie took a brandy bottle from her pocket and poured a generous slosh into two cups. ‘I know Tory and the new girl have their riding school almost ready to open, but what about your other friend, Gwenna?’

‘She’s passed her course,’ Bertie said, ‘but we don’t really see her much now. She’s a bit withdrawn. It was a difficult time for her, and I think she wants to be left alone for a while. She’s gone home to help her mother in the shop while her dad’s still in prison.’ She added hot water from a flask to the brandy, and swilled it to mix it. ‘She’ll think about her career wh