Jess Wainwright represented that one last bit of serenity that still escaped him.
He had a duty to his family and his countrymen to invest all his energy and acumen in ways that moved the needle of industrial progress forward. Because he’d seen firsthand why the burdens such industry placed on the poor should be abolished. He was determined to do his part. He’d fought alongside his fellow miners for better wages and better working hours. For an end to child labor. Plenty of his bones had been broken for his convictions.
When he was seven years old, Cadoc followed his older brother Griffin into the pit. Griffin had just turned seventeen, and it wasCadoc’s responsibility to carry his tools and fill the drams with the coal his brother cut and blasted.
The pit was a hopeless, miserable, scary place and his first day surrounded by inky darkness he never thought he’d see sunshine again. The damp made him sneeze and Griffin told him there were big, hairy spiders hiding in every corner that preyed on toes. Whenever he climbed the ladder at the end of the day, even though it was usually by moonlight, he wanted to kiss the grass beneath his feet.
He dreamt of fishing and running through the meadows chasing after his sisters, and he always thought those things would be his again soon. Until he looked down at the grime on his skin and clothes that no amount of lye could scrub away. Until he looked down and saw the black crescents beneath his nails and squinted into the bright sun he’d begun to believe was forever lost to him.
When he turned ten, he became a drammer. He was outfitted with a leather girth and a chain to haul the full sleds of coal from the head of the shaft to the main road. It was a distance of sixty yards and he trudged home every night with crushed fingers and an aching back. The pickers were ruthless and reveled in tormenting the children who served as drammers. It was a constant fight for dominance and submission, and he learned to defend himself against their blows. He didn’t complain, because the work was keeping his younger sisters fed. He still carried the scars on his back from one of the pickers who’d thrashed him, and three fingers on his left hand had been crushed so many times they’d never completely straighten.
Cadoc was fourteen when Griffin and his mother were killed in a methane explosion. He’d been aboveground, working on the machinery instead of down in the tunnels with them. He was left to raise his five younger sisters, and that’s when he knew he needed to make sure no one else died that way - so that thosehe loved, who had no choice but to work in the mines, lived. He started begging for scraps of metal from the men who ran the equipment, and when he showed the foreman the carbide lamp he’d designed, Rhys Jones took him under his wing. He taught Cadoc how to read blueprints, how to calculate dimensions and rudimentary chemistry.
That’s when Cadoc started organizing.
Because he didn’t want his sisters to become pit lasses, and he wanted his family’s deaths to lead to something better for all of them, he absorbed knowledge like a sponge. He used it to create a better world for everyone who took the lift into the darkness so they could earn a decent living. When their mother died, Gwyn had just turned eleven and was old enough to care for their little sisters, Peggy, Ellen, Caris and Mary, while he became the one who put bread on the table for all of them. For ten years, he put in the long hours to become a foreman and invent things that would make mining easier and safer. He was at the front of every march, and when he started making money hand over fist from his industrial improvements, he became the voice of Griffin and his mother in places they wouldn’t have been able to reach.
By the time he turned twenty-seven, he’d invented four lamps to help curtail the methane explosions, a trammel system with rails so children like the one he’d been wouldn’t be crushed beneath the wheels of the coal wagons, and devised a way to safely install lighting down in the tunnels.
His inventions had brought a stable, robust income that he’d invested wisely in manufactories and railroads. He and his family would never again have to wonder where the next loaf of bread was coming from. They would never again have to drop down into the darkness and dream about fishing and running through meadows instead.
When Gwyn married a man from Cumbria, that was where he decided to settle. And when Gwyn followed her husband to thegoldfields of California, he agreed to become the guardian of his niece and nephew until they were sent for.
Marcella and Davy had been rambling about his manor house with him and his middle sister Caris for five years. Gwyn had borne three more children and she and Simon had moved further north, chasing fortune. Gwyn dashed off a letter every month, but she’d yet to ask Cadoc to send her two eldest children. And the letters themselves had become more and more slapdash and perfunctory. She never asked real questions about the children she’d left behind and Cadoc had no idea if she’d received any replies updating her on their progress. She never referred to his side of the correspondence.
Marcella had just turned seven and Davy was nearly twelve. They’d stopped asking when they were going to America. They’d both become rather avid amateur naturalists, no doubt due to the influence of the beautiful bluestocking they reported to every morning.
In what little spare time he had, he thought about the prim, beguiling school teacher who instructed his niece and nephew.
Jessamine Wainwright was forthright and self-assured and she shared his fascination for science and mechanics. He enjoyed thwarting her so he could watch the color flush her cheeks and throat and spent an inordinate amount of time devising ways to arouse her irritation, so she’d snap and crackle like a fireworks display. There was nothing he wanted more than to glide his hands over her supple curves, and untether the waterfall of dark hair she kept ruthlessly pinned up. Her hazel eyes would flare as she succumbed to his touch and taste.
Just the thought of her surrender made his cock harder than a pike and sent his thoughts into a jumble that destroyed his ability to concentrate on anything else. He needed to send out monthly invoices, but couldn’t stop thinking about the way her eyes had sparkled in fury at his offer to ruin her.
A light knock at the door interrupted his preoccupation. “Come in,” he called.
His sister Caris walked in, a sealed envelope clutched against her chest. “We’ve gotten a letter from Gwyn.”
He rocked back on the legs of his chair and gestured toward the divan across from him. “Shall we read it together?”
Caris handed the letter over and took a seat, her hands clasped on her knees. “Every time we get one I wonder if it’ll be that letter. The one that takes them away from us.”
Cadoc snorted. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. It’s been five years and I think they would kick and scream bloody murder if we tried to send them to America now.”
Her lips thinned in acknowledgment and she let out a sharp breath. “But she’s their mother. I’m not. Even though I’ve had the raising of them the last five years, she could send for them at any time.”
“We’ve had the raising of them together. And as I said, I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
Cadoc unfolded the letter and scanned the contents before he raised his head in disbelief. “She’s not asking for them.”
Caris wrung her hands in her lap. “She wants us to bring them? Or she’s coming home to retrieve them?”
He shook his head. “Neither.” He broke into a smile. “She’s relinquishing them to our care. Permanently.”
His sister’s mouth flew open in astonishment. “Truly?” She asked as she leapt up and twirled around. The news clearly made her giddy.
“Truly,” he said as he extended the letter in her direction.
She took it and read it even faster than he had. “Gwyn writes that they are headed for the Yukon Territory, and she doesn’t know when they’ll be in a position to take them. What’s in the Yukon Territory?”
