Chapter 1
What was so important as to require the privacy of the study? Stifling her impatience, Caroline Broadhurst folded her hands in her lap and waited for her husband’s pronouncement. They’d spent a great deal of time together at the mill and then shared dinner, but after telling her he wished to speak to her about a certain matter, he had turned taciturn. Whatever he had to say, he hadn’t wanted either the clerks or the servants to overhear.
The setting sun cast an orange glow over his solemn features. Everything Mr. Broadhurst did was slow these days. His spotted hands shook as the whiskey decanter clinked against his glass. He poured out a generous dollop then shuffled to sit gingerly behind his desk. Taking a hearty swig, he gulped, loudly shattering the silence. Moisture pooled at the edges of his mouth.
Did he feel the need for liquid fortification?
He set the tumbler down, frowned, then shifted ledgers and papers to the side of his blotter as if he could not go on until everything was in order.
He picked up the tumbler and drank. He didn’t offer her a glass, but then ladies didn’t drink whiskey. He’d married her because she had the kind of breeding and connections to society that even his money could not buy. He could buy entrée, but welcome was beyond his reach. Yet with her by his side, he was tolerated in polite circles.
“I want a child,” said Mr. Broadhurst, startling her. “A son.”
A jagged pang ripped through her, tearing open a hard truth she’d thought she had accepted. Her prayers for a child had fallen on deaf ears. Caroline choked then coughed.
After enduring her husband’s twice a week visits to her bedroom for fifteen years of marriage, she no longer believed she would be blessed with children. No matter how she longed to count little fingers and toes, to cradle a child to her breast, to worry if a baby was too hot or too cold like mothers do, those joys would never be hers.
Shifting, she murmured an apology. She couldn’t have said if it was for her coughing or her failure to conceive.
What did he expect her to do at this point? She fought to lock the yearning for a child into a dark corner of her mind, where it wouldn’t drag her into melancholy. Nothing could be done about her desire for a child or his. Or was his case less hopeless? Her thoughts chased their tails in circles. If he meant to take a new wife . . .
“What is your meaning?” she squeaked out.
His gaze slid away from hers, and he twisted the glass in a slow circle on the letter blotter. “I want a son to leave the mill to.” His words were even and measured, as if he were discussing a load of cotton or ordering new machinery.
This couldn’t be happening. Her chest squeezed and she wanted to push his glass back to his lips before the next words spilled out of his mouth. If he divorced her, she’d be an outcast. Being married to a man in trade was bad enough, but to be put aside by a man whose only recommendation was his wealth would make her a pariah. No one would ever take her seriously in the business world, let alone in society.
Caroline clenched her skirt of brown worsted. Would he even be able to perform with another woman? The last few times Mr. Broadhurst had come to her bedroom, he’d suffered embarrassing failures. She had tried to reassure him, he was just tired or working too much. Celebrating the end of that part of her marriage was wrong, but after so long, the hope of pregnancy was only a crushing burden that was cruelly dashed each month. At least without his attentions, she knew to expect her courses.
Perhaps he would buy himself a beautiful young wife. Perhaps he could find a wife who did not find congress between a man and a woman so distasteful. Perhaps he could perform with a younger, prettier, more passionate woman.
Mr. Broadhurst stood and shuffled over to the credenza to pour another drink.
“Should you have another?” she asked before she could censor the concern he would take as an attack on his health or his age.
“I do not think it will kill me just yet.” Mr. Broadhurst raised his glass in a mock toast. “This is not a criticism of you, my dear wife.”
His words were only marginally reassuring. Caroline looked down and forced her hands to relax. A lady did not fidget so. “Sir?”
“I have always been grateful that you have not behaved as your sisters have.” He studied her. “But, regrettably, it has put us in a fix.”
Her face heated. Even though her sisters, with the help of Mr. Broadhurst’s money, had married in their own class, none of their marriages were any more of a love match than hers. Funny, at one time she’d envied them their philandering husbands and gaiety in London society.
Mr. Broadhurst cleared his throat. “I am not getting any younger.”
“None of us are, sir,” said Caroline. But while she approached thirty, he was well over seventy now.
He sat again in his chair, his glass thumping on the heavy oak desktop. He fiddled with the drink for long seconds, sloshing the amber liquid back and forth. He raised the whiskey, took a sip, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Containing her wince, Caroline knew he had a handkerchief. Every morning before they left for the mill office she made certain he was properly pressed and dressed like a gentleman, with a fresh handkerchief tucked in his pocket.
“I need to make arrangements for the mill before I die.”
Caroline started to protest that day was surely far distant, but she knew it wasn’t. Her husband had outlived most of his contemporaries.
“I could run the mill well enough,” she said. Her husband did not have any relatives to leave his massive wealth, and he’d insisted she learn the operations years ago. She expected to run the mill. Why had he been training her, if not to take over?
Years ago he had caught her hiding a novel under the ledgers she was supposed to study. He’d sat her down and told her that she needed to learn the business so she could watch over it while their children grew old enough to take it over. He was not a young man. Feeling guilty for her rebellious attitude, Caroline had applied herself to learning.
“You are a woman,” he said. “And too softhearted to run a business for long.”
Caroline leaned forward on her chair. Not that she had any doubt of her abilities, but to placate her husband’s fears, she said, “I would hire a man to oversee the running of the mill, and I would just—”
Mr. Broadhurst held up his hand, stopping her. “That would be enough if you were holding it for a son. But what good is building the Broadhurst name if there is no one to carry on?”
She knew the operation inside and out, but the children hadn’t come. If she was not to run the mill, what was she to do—spend all her days idly reading or sewing or, God forbid, collecting birds and cats as if they could substitute for the children she should have produced? Her hands curled and she had to concentrate to stretch out her fingers.
No, the mill was to be hers. She hadn’t spent all these years docilely standing by him to be relegated to a cipher.
“I do not know what to say. I always wanted children. I would have given you a son if I could.” She clasped her hands tightly together to keep from twisting them. She would have been thrilled to give him a dozen children, boys, girls. Even one child to kiss good-night, to teach how to be a good and compassionate steward to the mill and its workers, and to give all the love she held in her heart, would have been a heaven sent miracle, but she had proved barren.
“I hope you mean that.” He looked at her so intently she felt bound to offer a solution.
“If you would like to adopt a boy, little Danny Carter is an orphan and he is very good at ciphering. I think his grandmother would be relieved to . . .
Mr. Broadhurst’s lowered brows over glaring eyes stopped her.
“We could raise him to take over the mill,” explained Caroline. Certainly it was not an ideal situation, but it was done. Flutters in her chest suggested a fairy bearing hope had spread excitement with a tiny wand. A child would give her a reason to want to get out of bed each morning.
“You are not suggesting naming a mill child as my son.” Mr. Broadhurst’s tone was derisive. “He would suffer the same exclusions from society that I do.”
With his innate intelligence and unflappable confidence, she thought he would have found acceptance if he had tried harder, but he had come to rely on her for smoothing the way with people—which was almost laughable, as she was the least sociable creature in the world.
“What does that matter?” The hope flitted away. She’d never understood why her husband so desperately desired the acceptance of society. He found little pleasure in their frivolous pursuits and had a bourgeois distaste for the lack of morality among the elite. They’d seemed ideally suited for each other in that respect.
“I married you to be sure that my children would be accepted everywhere. That my name would be welcomed in the highest of circles.”
Caroline lowered her head and gazed at her lap. The back of her throat grew dry. She swallowed several times, to no avail. She always knew her bloodline had been a commodity exchanged for money. Only she had failed to deliver her side of the bargain.
Her husband stood and shuffled over to the window. Her eyes narrowed, but she fought to find the numb place that allowed her to get through each day. To allow the disappointment to rule her only left a bitter taste in her mouth. Nothing could change her barrenness.
“You are my third wife without issue, and your sisters have all produced children. The fault does not lie with you.”
Her ears rang as if they had been clapped soundly. As long as a man could do his part, the failure to conceive was always blamed on the woman. Her mouth worked, but she couldn’t force out the demurral she should voice.
He swallowed a shaky gulp. “I consulted with a London physician some time ago, and he told me I am sterile.”
Caroline gasped. “How could he know?”
Mr. Broadhurst’s shoulders stooped forward and his head bowed. He cleared his throat several times and coughed into his sleeve. “He looked at my fluid under a microscope. He said I had no seed.”
She didn’t want to know that much detail. Her face burned, yet her hands felt like they’d been submerged in the coldest of well water. It wasn’t her fault? She’d been shouldering the blame for years—believing that the failure to conceive was some infirmity of hers or her inability to happily tolerate the necessary union. But the fault was all along her husband’s?
How long had he known? Tightness boiled in her chest. How long had she suffered the indignity of his nighttime visits after he learned he could not father a child? Hoping the twilight masked the heady emotions tumbling through her, she looked away.
“I have written to your brother and he has agreed to bring a few of his friends for a hunting party.”
“What?” Caroline half rose from her seat. Her husband had never cared for her brother, and to invite him and his cronies to invade their quiet home was unnerving. She could guess what he wanted, but it didn’t comport with their weekly hours in church, with the moral man she thought her husband was.
“Any child born of your loins would by law be mine and would carry my name. I would claim a son as a miracle God has granted in my last years.”
Her heart thumped erratically as her legs turned to pudding. She sank back down onto her seat. No, this couldn’t be happening.
He was sanctioning an affair, but she recoiled, with every fiber tightening in protest. Duty required that she submit to her husband, but never to any other man.
“I have already told the housekeeper to stock extra provisions. The men will arrive a week hence.”
“No,” whispered Caroline, her throat too tight to allow out more than the faintest breath.
“If there is any particular friend of your brother’s you want invited, send word.”
Unbidden, the faces of the men her brother comported himself with flashed in her mind’s eye, and quickly she rejected each one. Between his portly political friends or his sporting cronies, not a single man was the least bit interesting to her, let alone one she would consider in that manner. “I do not wish for them to come.”
Stars above, what had Mr. Broadhurst told her brother?
“They will be robust young men, men of your ilk. All you must do is lie with one of them and conceive a child. I know that my age has been disagreeable to you.”
A memory of a millworker with too-long dark hair her fingers always itched to brush off his forehead flashed in her mind. She shook her head, willing the completely unsuitable image away. Dear God, what was wrong with her? The whole idea was preposterous, crass and utterly unthinkable.
“No!” Caroline popped out of her chair, no longer able to sit. The act of conception was disgusting. To endure it when it was not an obligation of marriage—well, it was a gross indignity.
“Mrs. Broadhurst, please.”
Mr. Broadhurst never asked, never used the word please. He was always in command of his business, his household, and even her. Staring at him as if he were a foreign creature, she shook her head while backing toward the door. Her heart tried to pound out of her chest and she couldn’t catch her breath. She needed to lie down or loosen her stays before she swooned.
“Mrs. Broadhur—Caroline, I’m begging you.” Mr. Broadhurst took a step toward her.
Caroline felt for the doorknob behind her back. “It would be a sin.”
He thrust out his chin and glared at her. “You did not come to me with so much religion. I only ask you to behave as your sisters have. Have I ever asked anything else of you?”
She had been a perfect wife, caring, modest, and always a lady in every way, and this was how she was repaid? No gentleman would ask this of her, but then Mr. Broadhurst was not a gentleman other than by money. Perhaps he didn’t understand the magnitude of what he was asking. Her sisters with their faithless marriages must have given him a distorted view of what was acceptable in aristocratic circles.
“Sir, no one could think this a reasonable demand.” Her whole body shook. Her fingers closed around the doorknob, and for a second she feared she was locked in with the madman who had replaced her husband. Finally, she twisted the knob and opened the door.
“Caroline, you will do this. I will brook no disobedience.” Mr. Broadhurst’s tone had turned stentorian. For a moment he resembled the hard man who had come from a crofter’s hut and built an empire.
She had never dared to defy him so openly before. A lady didn’t argue with her husband, raise her voice to him, or refuse him. “No, I shall not.”
Shaking her head, Caroline backed out the door. She’d taken great pride in always behaving as a lady ought, but this was too much.
Her legs barely held her as she stood quivering in the hall. The always silent hall. The house always echoed with too much silence. Once, she’d believed the rooms would resound with the laughter and playful shouts of her children. Instead the silence mocked her.
Gulping a couple of breaths that did nothing to calm her, Caroline fled to her bedroom. She could not believe what her husband had asked of her. She would not lie with another man.
Ever.
Jack Applegate backed against the loft ladder as the chaos of the morning exploded around him. After a week away, the household seemed frenetic, loud, and pressing him down. This had been his home for twenty-eight years, but choosing to leave permanently was the right decision.
As usual, his brothers and sisters pushed and shoved to get a turn at the pitcher and basin. The baby howled, while the two-year-old banged a spoon on the table. His fourteen-year-old sister stood at the stove stirring a pot of gruel so thin it looked blue.
His stepmother, Martha, set the kettle back and pushed at escaping strands of her fading hair, then tried to still the banging spoon. She closed her eyes. Likely the babe in her belly was giving her fits this morning.
One of the boys bumped against the ladder, while trying to pull on boots without sitting. Jack steadied his brother. The main room barely contained the lot of them, and didn’t offer enough places for everyone to sit at one time. In a few minutes all but the youngest would leave for work.
Jack’s father shuffled out of the bedroom, stooped and crooked and leaning heavily on his cane. Lines of permanent pain had carved deep grooves in his face, and Jack hated that he was about to add to them.
One of the girls popped out of their father’s chair at the table and pulled it out for him.
“Weather’s changing,” he grunted as he gingerly sat.
“You hear your father. Mind you take sweaters.” Martha stood at the stove, filling bowls. “Jack, would you—”
“Mine has holes,” complained a middle child before Martha could finish, but the caterwauling from the cradle drowned out anything else.
Jack picked up the baby and lifted him high in the air until the cries turned to gurgles of laughter.
“I was going to ask you to fetch milk,” said Martha.
If he walked to the dairy to get milk, he’d have to pay for it. This last month alone he’d already bought new boots for Beth—the hand-me-downs no longer mendable—stove blacking for the stove Martha claimed was past repair, and a new doorknob to replace the one the middle boys had managed to break. The family always had needs. He could spend all his money and it wouldn’t make a dent. “I have to talk to Da this morning.”
Jack stopped swinging the baby and cradled the tot against his chest. But the cries quickly returned and the boy gnawed at Jack’s collar.
Martha shouldered past him and plunked bowls of steaming gruel on the bare wood planks of the table. “I would think someone who could afford to take a train trip could manage to buy a bit of milk to help out the family.”
“I’ll fetch milk at the dinner break,” conceded Jack.
He’d have to buy a chunk of cheese if he expected anything to eat for his noonday meal, because payday was too long ago and little food was left to go in the lunch pails. The haunch of beef and the bakery bread hadn’t gone as far as Martha hoped when she bought them after getting paid last month. Too many mouths to feed, and he was the only one in the house earning a man’s wages.
Martha should have bought flour for bread, but she kept saying the stove wouldn’t bake right. Jack suspected this pregnancy so close on the last one was draining her and she was too tired when she got home from the mill to cook.
He nudged a sibling off the table bench and took the seat closest to his father.
His father turned jaundiced eyes on him. “What is it? You planning another trip?”
Perhaps this would be easy. “For good. I’m moving to London.” Jack adjusted the baby on his knee, put a bit of gruel on the end of his spoon and took it to the little lips. The baby attacked the spoon, his head shaking left and right, getting gruel more on his face than in his mouth.
Only as Jack was trying to scrape the food back onto the spoon did he realize that the room had gone silent, as silent as the middle of the night—assuming none of the little ones were fussing.
He looked up. Martha pressed her hand against her chest.
His father’s watery eyes fastened on him. “Now is not a good time, son.”
“It’s never a good time.” Jack’s spine tightened, but he strove to sound calm.
Twice before he’d been ready to leave. When he was twenty he hadn’t had a real plan, but when his mother died giving birth to one of the middle boys, he decided to wait. Later, after his father remarried and all seemed well, Jack renewed plans to leave. Then his father injured his back and Jack postponed leaving again. This time he had thought out the smallest of details. His plans were solid, he’d saved enough money, and he was going no matter what.
“I talked to a man about my equipment designs. I’ve an appointment to see the company owner about a job in a fortnight.” Jack had done more than talk. He’d bought a secondhand suit so he didn’t look like a hayseed. He’d paid a university student to label his drawings with fine penmanship. He’d found the company that made the machinery the Broadhurst mill used and approached the shop manager all in the space of his four actual days in the city.
If he wanted success in life, he had to act now. He’d been worried no one in London would listen to him, take him seriously, or—as the stories went—would rob him blind. But as he found his way about the vibrant bustling city, nothing in his life had ever felt so right or so liberating.
Ever since he returned late the night before, the walls had felt close, as if they were squeezing him. He’d woken to find three of the little ones curled on his mattress in the corner of the attic he curtained off to make his own room. He loved his family, but they would suck him dry if he didn’t venture out and make his mark in the world.
“You need to hold my mechanic’s position until I get back to work,” said Jack’s father. “Too many men let go from Granger’s mills are looking for work to let a good job go vacant.”
“I need a new stove,” muttered Martha.
Jack ignored her and swallowed hard against the tug of duty and obligation. “I have been holding your job for nigh on four years. If you aren’t able to take it back now, you never will be.”
Frankly, he didn’t know if his father would ever be able to work again.
Jack’s father put a hand on his arm. “Son, this restlessness will go away if you just take a wife. You can move her in here. This house will be yours one day.”
Jack stopped himself from making a sour face. He was older than most to remain a bachelor, but it was his choice. Most men his age had their own homes, their own wives, and their own children, but he’d stayed at his father’s house long past the time when he should have left.
Besides, there was only one woman who interested him—and she was far out of reach. He might have caught her eye a few times, but she always looked away. For all he liked to watch the graceful way she moved, or catch sight of her pale arched neck under the heavy knot of gleaming dark hair, she always looked a little startled and unnerved by his interest. Of course, he had no business thinking that way about the mill owner’s wife. She was a lady and he was a laborer.
But if he could make his way in the world and have success, maybe a woman like her would be possible in the future.
Martha pressed her lips together, while two of his sisters nudged each other and mouthed the name of the girl he was stepping out with. But she was not the woman he envisioned as a future wife, and he’d told her he wouldn’t be marrying her—more than once. “I’m not ready for a wife and family.”
“You’re long past due. We can build you a proper room on the back.”
And lose the last of the garden space. And by “we” his father no doubt meant Jack and his brothers who could be trusted with a hammer.
“Or bump out a dormer upstairs,” said Martha.
And who would pay for the lumber and nails? Jack took his time feeding the baby another bite and carefully scraping the spoon around his lips. As the oldest son, he would inherit one day, but along with the rickety house and mortgage would be the responsibility of his siblings, which appeared year after year without fail. One day he hoped to support his own children, but not like this. Not with scrimping and scraping by, spending every shilling on bare necessities. “I don’t want this house, Da.”
“You think you can do better?” sneered Martha.
“He wants the Broadhurst house. He’s always staring at it,” said his brother David.
How could he not look at the mansion when it was visible from every corner of the village? Although nearby, the towering pompous reminder of the Broadhurst wealth was far enough removed from the laborer’s houses so as to not sully its white stone facade.
Sighing, Jack fed the baby another bite. He didn’t want the Broadhurst house specifically, but one like it with a woman like Mrs. Broadhurst to welcome him home.
“You’ll never have a house half that big,” said Martha.
“We’ll see,” said Jack. Hell, if he had a house half that big, Martha and his father would be first in line to move in with him.
“This is a fine house,” objected his father. “David, bring me the bottle. My back is killing me.”
David brought over the gin bottle, and his father took a healthy swig. Jack fought the boil of anger. No milk for the babies, but there was gin for his father’s back pain. Jack rubbed his forehead. He no longer knew if the pain was an excuse for the gin or the gin was an excuse for the pain. What he did know was that if his father couldn’t put his family’s needs above his own, then he shouldn’t have to either.
“What is wrong with you, Jack? Can’t you see we need you around here?” demanded Martha.
Jack knew the strain of a rough pregnancy, and the fear that everything would fall apart made her lash out. After having walked over fifteen miles yesterday to make it home, he too was tired and irritable, and he couldn’t miss another day of work to rest.
Holding the baby around his waist, Jack stood. “I’m not your husband. He is.” He pointed to his father. “And you two should give having baby after baby a rest.”
He wanted to call the words back as soon as they left his mouth.
“What makes you think you’re any better than the rest of us?” hissed Martha.
“I’m not better than you. I just want a better life.” And he’d put it off for far too long, but now was determined to get the hell out of this mill town before he was trapped here forever.