“Gideon, what happened?” she asked. “I saw them drag you out the next day. I saw what they had done to you. We never heard from you again.”
He spoke at last, his voice harsh. “He beat me with his staff and had one of the grooms join in with fists and boots. I am lucky they didn’t kill me. I don’t recall the next morning.”
“A year later he told us you were dead. He told me, ‘You don’t have to worry about that—’” Phillip groaned. “I won’t repeat what he said. What really happened?”
“He sent me here to Tavernash Colliery as it was then with orders to send me into the pit. Daniel Kendrick managed the operation and bought it soon after. He brought me into the office and—” Gideon waved a hand as if to brush his story aside and rose. “But you have more to tell me, I suspect. If we are to continue confidences, we ought to be more comfortable.”
“But you are now Kendrick. How—” Phillip stuttered to a stop.
A rueful smile twitched to life. “I married his daughter, and he made me his heir.”
There had to be more to the story, but only one thing mattered to Maddy. “Thank God for Daniel Kendrick.”
“Indeed.” Gideon gestured to the door. “Will you come to my home for tea? It is nearby.”
*
The comforts Kendrickoffered the Morgan brothers, waiting impatiently in the outer office, were meager. It was, after all, a business office, uncarpeted, with stark white walls, a few uninteresting watercolors, and mismatched wooden furniture. Filing cabinets and the clerk’s desk dominated one side of the room. The area where they sat, thrown together for such visitors as might come to a colliery or employees who wished a word, boasted a few chairs crowded into a small space.
“Shall we step outside?” Rhys’s voice came as if from far away. Brynn sat stiff-backed in a wooden armchair, a tumbler of brandy in one hand, staring at the closed door to Gideon Kendrick’s office.What the devil are they saying? Will she tell him the truth? With the duke in the room? Maybe not yet; that would be rushing her fences. The man looked like he’d been trampled by a horse.He shook that poor metaphor away. Jessop’s—Kendrick’s—twisted body was the least of his problems. Madelyn and Glenmoor’s appearance had left him stunned, judging by his gobsmacked expression.
“I’ll take that as a no.” Rhys sighed and sat back to sip his drink.
Across the room, the woman called Alyx pretended to ignore them while she worked through a pile of papers, responded to a miner who came to collect a form and a woman who asked a question.
“You can’t burn through the door, Brynn. The landing outside is only a half dozen more feet away. If she needs you, you’ll be nearby.”
Brynn blinked and turned to his brother with a sigh. “We may be out here a while.”
Rhys gestured to the outer door with his head. “I need to stand and stretch.”
The landing outside the office door was almost as large as the office itself, with a railing on two sides and the stairway on the third. Rhys leaned an elbow on the rail, still holding his tumbler. “What do you think of this place?” he asked, gesturing across the yard, where industrious workers dumped carts of coal into wagons to haul them away under the eye of supervisors with notebooks in hand.
Brynn turned away from the door with a sigh and allowed his brother to distract him. “Busy. Productive. Better than Glynrhos.”
Rhys snorted. “That wouldn’t be hard. I hope the duke takes notes.”
“Unlikely. He has other issues at the moment.”
“Perhaps I can keep him in Wales for a while. I have more to show him. Safety lanterns, for one. God knows those poor souls at Glynrhos would benefit.”
Curiosity pricked Brynn. “What is a Davy lamp? I heard Kendrick say it.”
Rhys rose and leaned his hip on the rail, taking another sip. “Sir Humphrey Davy invented a safety lantern a couple of years ago. Godsend. We can forbid candles in the pit. Kendrick is one of the first to see the value.”
“Explain it.”
“A Davy lamp provides light below without an open flame like a candle—I don’t need to explain why that—”
Brynn raised a hand.Explosions. Please don’t go there. “I know. What kind of light? How does it work?”
“It is an oil lamp with a wick, encased in a screen—fine iron gauze. Davy figured out that firedamp can get into it, but any resulting flare-up can’t escape out into the shaft. Miners get an alert that there’s too much gas, but they can walk out without the place going up.”
A vision of Morgan One’s south shaft exploding blinded Brynn for a moment. He had to clear his throat before he could talk. “That sounds too good to be true. Where did you find it? A fairy cave?”
“Davy presented to the Royal Society. Happened to read about it. Don’t you read the London papers?” Rhys asked.
Brynn had seen nothing about it, but then, he didn’t seek out information on mining; on the contrary, he avoided it, at least he had until he’d gone to work for Rockford. He wondered if the viscount knew about Davy lamps.Probably, and he probably wants information about their use in real mines.
