The Wedding Night (17 page)

Be safe, Jack.

* * *

Six hours remaining and at least a dozen feet to go. Jack changed out his crew, bringing on fresh brawn, but he stayed himself until he was forced to meet the train from his
Strathfield
works.

He wanted to see Mairey—just see her, because he couldn't afford more time than that. She'd been sharp tempered and accusing, as though his recklessness had caused the accident.

She'd have to get used to the dangers inherent in mining. He would take the silver from the
Willowmoon
site in the same way: an open pit as long as it was profitable, and then following the individual veins with a shafts-and-tunnel system.

The streets were nearly deserted, almost peaceful. The night wind had picked up a laughing melody in its dance through Glad Heath, and not at all to his surprise, he found Mairey at the end of it.

The lamps in the schoolhouse were turned low and sleepy, and all the chairs and tables were pushed to the perimeter. The floor was littered with blankets and children, some soundly asleep in their mothers' arms, most looking up at Mairey as she spun one of her stories.

"
Gwynella
and the Enchanter." Oddly, the Enchanter had a different name now:
Balforge
. And he seemed to be a dragon.

They had come miles since he'd first seen her surrounded by so many captivated children. She'd been the irascible Miss Faelyn then; he'd been boorish. Three weeks, and everything had changed:

Mairey had become the reason that he rose in the morning, the reason he came home.

He was about to join her when
Gadrick
caught his elbow. "Sir, the train from
Strathfield
will be here in a moment."

It was for the best. He had
work
to do.

A half hour later he was supervising the addition of more coal tubs onto the lift chain at the shaft, and soon coal was coming out of the
Shalecross
at an exhausting rate, bringing hope along with it.

But his place was in the rescue passage. So with the better part of four hours remaining, he grabbed up his pick when his shift came and slammed his vengeance into the solid rock, letting the shock of it echo up through his arms, feeling the sting of the blisters breaking on his hands and building again.

He knew the pulse of Glad Heath as he knew the sound of his own heartbeat. He'd been born in a cottage down the lane, had lived there until the night his father died.

That grisly night had come on the heels of a cave-in—one tragedy following another. Cahill had sent his strikebreakers to make war against Jack's father and the other miners, and his life had changed forever. He might have failed his sisters and his mother completely; he had surely betrayed the promise he'd made to his father to keep them safe; but he'd at least avenged the family's memory.

Glad Heath was his now. It had been idle for ten years before Jack had acquired it from that bastard Cahill's estate. The man's profane practices, his cruel disregard for his workers, had assured that his mine would eventually fail. And it had, while Jack was in exile in
Canada
, making his own fortune.

The irony had been vastly satisfying when he'd returned with his wealth to
Britain
and found Glad Heath on the auction block. No one wanted a derelict mine—no one but Jack. He bought it for a song, and then invested a fortune in bringing the colliery up to his standards of safety and efficiency. He'd doubled the shoring-timbers, engineered innovative ventilation chambering to keep the air fresh, and had installed closed-gear winching and sumps to keep the passages dry. Flame was dangerous, but he found a way to lessen the threat, bringing light and air to the darkness.

He would risk no man's life in the pursuit of profit, so he judged every tunnel and fissure himself. He employed full-time engineers and the best mechanics, who had been instructed—at the peril of their jobs—to shut down production at the first sign of problems.

He'd learned from his father and from his own bleak years at Glad Heath that respect was the key to a man's success, so he sacrificed profits for shorter hours in the tunnels and a living wage for the miners. Even more, he took a wild-hearted pride in sharing his profits with the men who worked for him, and he valued those elected to his advisory committees. His expenses were far greater than any other mining company, but so too were his revenues. His safety record was unparalleled, and he had made enemies of the other owners by hiring any miner who came to him.

And come they did. So many more each year that Jack had opened whole other tunnels, opened new sites for those who wanted to work honestly and with a mind toward the community.
Mairey's
Willowmoon
silver would be one of those new mines. He hoped she would approve.

Twelve hours gone, plus the five before he'd arrived on the scene. He'd never lost a man yet in his tunnels, but time was against them. He prayed as he lifted his pick, prayed as he sweated and strained and drove its steel point ferociously against the bedrock time and again, laboring through his shift and the next. Finally, the force of his own pick broke through to the blackness to the other side.

"We're through!" he shouted, his heart ready to burst with joy and fear and exhaustion. Three men crowded around the shilling-sized hole. "Moving air, sir! Feel it?"

The air was moving, but it was rife with coal gas.

"We'll find 'em alive, sir. I'm sure of it."

But Jack wasn't sure at all.
Richmond
should have heard the sounds of digging long before this; should have been digging from his side to meet them. He hefted the pick again, and took out his fear and fury on the rock until the hole was large enough to crawl through.

"The risk is mine from here on; I'll go in myself," he told his men. "You've all done more than enough."

Jack crawled into the blackness, reached back for a lantern, and then started up the narrow incline toward the cave-in.

Please, God, let them be alive.

Chapter 12

«
^
»

J
ust before
noon
the colliery whistle began to blow, high and singing. The schoolhouse emptied in an instant, and Mairey hurried along with the women and children, up the sinuous, neatly tended streets toward the pit and its towering tangle of wheels and gears and steel-tackled webbing.

Had they found the men, or was this another horrible cave-in? Rumors had spread all through the night like a field fire, fanned and flaring and dying, then rising again, until
Mairey's
fear for Jack had become nearly unbearable.

Her heart pounded as she waited with everyone on the pit brow, watched the giant wheel turning and turning. Anything could have happened down there in all that blackness. How many times had she read of rescuers being killed in the tunnel along with the original victims?

Not Jack Please God, not Jack
. Everyone around her must be wishing the same thing for the people they loved.

Loved? Mairey scrubbed that impossible word from her thoughts. She couldn't love the man—wouldn't.

Everyone grew still as the top of the lift appeared, the cage groaning its way up through the center of the iron frame until it jerked to a stop. There was a shocked silence and then a riotous joy swept the crowd.

The men were safe and stumbling out of the cage! Jack had done it—had rescued them just as he'd promised.

Mairey still searched the grimy faces, her heart frantic as wives and mothers swarmed around the rescued men and pulled them away from the danger and into their arms.

How she envied them all their joy even as she shared it. But Jack wasn't among them, and she'd never been so frightened in all her life. Tears swam in her eyes as the cage descended into the shaft, making seeing difficult.

She pushed closer, found a familiar face—
Richmond
—the engineer! She recognized him from Jack's office, though he was altogether inky. She caught his arm, happy to see him safe, but terrified for Jack.

"Have you seen Jack? Is he coming up?"

"Ah, Miss Faelyn, isn't it?"
Richmond
enveloped her hand and shook it with all the glad vigor of a man recently resurrected, grinning with stark white teeth. "We met at
Drakestone
."

"Yes, yes. But did you see Jack down there? Is he all right?"

Richmond
smiled even wider, pointing over her shoulder to the cage rising up again out of the terrible pit. "Looks well enough to me."

Jack!
Oh, how she wanted to shout his name and run to him! The lout was safe! And oily black, from the top of his head to his
oncecrisp
white shirttails that now hung out of his stained leather trousers.

Mairey's
anger burned as brightly as her relief as Jack made his way toward her. They were shoved together in the tempest of glad-handing and
reveling,
and he held her tightly, length to length.
and
grinning

"We saved them all, Mairey," he whispered, his eyes shot with red. "Thank you."

Thank you?
For covering for him, for telling his lies, for praying for him, for his people, all through the hellish night?

"'Glad Heath,' Jack? Is that what this valley was before you destroyed it with your coal pits?
A misty
, heather-scented moorland?"

He frowned down at her,
then
slid his hand along his cheek as though she had slapped him there. "It was a heath to be sure, Mairey. But long, long before it came to my hands."

"It's ugly here, Jack."

Something unfamiliar and humbling flickered in the clear
midnight
of his eyes. He set her from him, a distance that seemed lonelier than winter.

"Glad Heath is a colliery, if you haven't noticed. It's not a spit-clean university. It lacks the clipped hedges and the oak-paneled eating halls. It's grimy, stark, and dreary. The work abrades the skin and blackens the lungs—"

"And it crushes people, Jack." Her panic and anger made her reach for him and hold tightly, made his thick, sinewy arms seem all too vulnerable against the force of a mountain bearing down on him. "Can't you see the danger? Couldn't you feel it while you were down there?"

"I know the risk."

She hated that part of him—the cool mining baron. "I'm sure you do. But the risk is theirs, Lord Rushford, not yours. Their sons and husbands, their fathers."

"And my father."

"Oh, and a great risk he must have taken every day. Sitting in his fine office in
London
, worried about his profits, his investment—"

"His
life
." He frowned. "My father had no office in
London
. I don't know where you get that notion. He labored all his days here at Glad Heath. He died here."

She wasn't sure she had heard him right; she was tired to the marrow and confused by all the celebrating. "Your father died here? How?"

"In a riot during a labor dispute."

"A mining baron, dying at his own mine in a labor dispute? Now there's a switch."

"Mining baron?" He laughed then, throwing his head back to the brightness of the sky, a touch of madness in his laughter. "Bloody hell, madam—my father was a pitman."

"A what?"

"A
coal miner
."

"No." He was lying, trying to make some kind of point.

He cocked his head at her, raising a brow that was hardly distinguishable from his coal-begrimed skin. "No?"

"He couldn't have been a coal miner. Then how did you—"

"How did I—the son of a poor man—end up with Glad Heath?" He snorted and took the cup of water that a buxom, dazzle-eyed young woman offered to him. He drank it down in a single quaff. "My thanks, Molly."

"And my greatest pleasure, my lord." The brazen woman drew a smile out of him as she sped away with her skirts caught up to her shapely calves.

Mairey's
face flushed as a wave of blatant, green-tinted jealousy swamped her. A wholly unworthy and out-of-proportion emotion.

"How
did
you end up with Glad Heath, Jack?" He glared down at her, swabbing his neck with a red kerchief. It came away black and dripping with sweat. "I bought it from the estate of the man who killed my father."

Another woman came to Jack, the matronly Mistress Boyd, handing him a chunk of bread and a wet rag, leaving him with a motherly kiss and a pat on his backside. His eyes followed the woman fondly before he turned back to Mairey. He seemed righteously proud of himself and so much at home here. "My father worked this mine from the time he was eight years old. He formed a union and led a strike against the unsafe conditions in the pits, shutting down the mine for a month."

"He was killed for leading a strike? Jack, that's horrible. How could that happen?" Feeling roundly possessive, Mairey took the rag out of his hand as he stuffed the bread into his mouth, and she began to scrub the coal off his nose.

"Cahill sent his private army on horseback from the train station, rode them up the hill to the pit, and let them loose against a handful of unarmed men and boys."

"How could he?" Horrified, Mairey scrubbed more thoroughly, streaking the black off his cheeks and forehead, while Jack submitted blissfully.

"Cahill was a bastard who trafficked in human lives. My father was killed right over there." Jack opened an eye and sighted down his inky finger to a lamppost. Its flame burned hotly, even in the blaze of the sun. "He died in my arms."

Her tears blurred his face into a watery gray blotch. "Then you know how dangerous the mines are, Jack. Everything about them, inside and out. How can you in good conscience send people down there to be killed? They depend upon you, Jack. They trust you."

"And by the grace of God I have earned that trust." He took a step backward and frowned at her. "I've turned a death camp into a safe, profitable colliery. Now if you'll excuse me, Mairey, I have a mine to run."

"
Ballocks
!"

He had turned away, but now he swung back again, the devil in his eyes.

"What?"

"How can you say that your mines are safe, when you've just suffered a cave-in and put all those people in danger?"

"Mairey, some accidents can't be prevented. I would never, ever send anyone down a shaft or into a tunnel that wasn't safe enough for my own father, nor for anyone
I loved
."

"
Ballocks
again!"

"I've had enough, woman." He came at her like a bull, head down and charging, and in the next instant he'd thrown her over his shoulder, her backside to the sky, his hand clamped there like a sizzling hasp of iron.

"Put me down, Jack!"

"You've a lesson to learn, Mairey Faelyn." He stomped through the celebrating toward the mine shaft, with its whirling, whining gears and shuddering cables.

"Do you plan to throw me down your
mine.
Jack Rushford?"

"Tempting, but you'd only gum up the works, woman, and I've just got them working again."

Mairey squirmed just to spite him, knowing that it was useless, that he would only tighten his scorching hold around her legs.

As they approached the shaft, its steel cage rose up again from the bottomless hole into the towering head-frame,
then
came to a squealing stop.

"Jack Rushford, where the devil are you taking me?"

He stepped into the swinging basket "To hell, madam."

Mairey's
courage fled as he finally released her, sliding her down the length of him as though he enjoyed the contact. "I don't want to go with you."

"We're partners in a silver mine, my dear. It's time you looked at one close up."

Partners—he kept saying that, as though she shared his despicable dreams of silver. They were adversaries.

The lift started down with a shudder. Mairey grabbed his leather coat and hung on for dear life as the cage jiggled down into the darkness.

"Is it supposed to do that?" She was quaking herself, a miserably frightened ninny.

"Do what?"

"That jiggling."

He laughed gently and turned her away from him, so that the layers of rock flew past her nose. "Physics," he said into her ear. "You'll be all right."

Mairey grabbed handfuls of his sleeve where he'd wrapped his arm around her waist. He was warm and breathing steadily, her rock. Her heart was racing with kinetic danger, her pulse thrumming against his fingers where his large hand had claimed her shoulder and the rise of her neck.

"It's windy," she said as a cool breeze blew her hair upwards, a flying, freeing sensation.

"It's supposed to be." He gathered the swirling of her hair into a bundle and held it in his fist. "I've spent a lot of time and money to keep the air circulating through the ventilation shafts."

She had expected stifling heat and the stink of
sulphur
. But the air was clean, if coal-smelling, and cool.

They stepped out of the lift into a bright chamber, framed like an
old
Saxon cathedral in tall timbers and crossbeams. A forest on a winter's eve. It had an eerie, underworld beauty. Dark, shiny-faced elves scurried into a second tunnel with their buckets, feeding an ever-rising chain of tubs that carried coal up to the surface.

"That's the last of the cleanup from the cave-in." He put one of the metal caps on her head, a mate to his own, took her hand, and started into one of the tunnels. "I'll show you where we rescued the men."

If she lived, if she ever saw the light of day again, she'd at least have a better understanding of her enemy and his lair. The tunnel twisted and rose, then dipped and straightened. She'd expected seeping walls and crumbling terror. But Jack's mine was clean-lined and stout, and as bright as
noon
.

"Shoring up the passageways is the key to safety." He stopped at an intersection and slapped his palm against a fat, foot-square timber. "The more bracing, the safer. A great expense, but necessary. I'll take the same care in the
Willowmoon
tunnels."

You won't get the chance, Lord Rushford.

"We'll use these same double-screened Davy lamps, an added safety feature developed by my engineers. Explosive gasses aren't the problem with silver mines that they are with coal. But light is fundamental to a man's spirit, and I'll bring daylight into the darkness of the
Willowmoon
Mineworks
just as I have here."

Then light a candle for me while you're there, Jackson Rushford. Because I'll be dead before I let you riddle my glade with your worm holes.

"Come." He took her hand again and led her deeper into the mine, past a small culvert and a dark pool, under the great air shafts that dropped sunlight-scented air onto them.