Page 1 of A Tenuous Betrothal
Chapter One
Cresselly, Wales, January 1815
Rhianna Davies was banished fromher home. Her uncle’s parting words stung with each remembered repetition.“You don’t need to be coming back, ever again.”
Her uncle had also banned her from all meetings with the mining community after one of her famed outbursts demanding he maintain the workers’ rights. But the dear people of Carmarthenshire were still her people. Coal mining had been the townsfolks’ life and sustenance in Cresselly, her small town, for generations. As owners in the industry, her father and his father before him had cared for their workers for as long as their families could remember. Her father had been the great benefactor of their incomes that provided the very food on their tables. Unlike many mine owners in their valley, the Davieses had treated the families in the mines like true tenants. Gifts at Christmas, raises in wages, and better working conditions had all been part of the Davies tradition.
But not anymore.
Rhianna crept along in the darkness of her home—her former home—in the stillest hours of night. She’d not run into a single servant yet, but she knew their patterns. She could likely enter and leave with no one the wiser, at least not until morning, when Uncle noticed he was missing the rugs by the fire.
Stealing. So now she was a thief. But she was freezing. The hunting cabin where Uncle had sent her to live had very little wood, and the rugs that had formerly been in her father’s sitting room would be warm, comforting covers on her cold floor. In this one act, she’d stooped lower than she could have ever predicted. She was a common criminal. But the rugs were made by her mother, weren’t they? And she wanted them back. In her mind, Uncle had stolen them first.
The floor creaked, and she froze. The house was silent, but she waited. The one real risk was not a servant. She only hoped to avoid them so as to prevent awkward situations for them were Uncle to ask questions. She knew Uncle wouldn’t awaken from his half-drunken stupor at this time of night, so he wasn’t a real risk either.
A low growl made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
“Good girl,” Rhi whispered.
She’d hoped to avoid her uncle’s two dogs—they were the real problem—but the growling grew louder.
“Here’s a morsel for you.” She reached into her pocket to pull out a piece of a biscuit she’d saved for just such an emergency. “Nice doggy.”
Another growl joined the first and grew closer.
“No, please.” She braced herself. Things were going to be perilous. The servants had left word that Cook had prepared a basket of food and left it outside the kitchen door. Dogs or no dogs, she was not leaving without the food from Cook.
The dogs drew closer. She could see their eyes reflecting candlelight from the corridor’s wall sconces.
“Why are you the most wretched pets in all of Wales?” She huffed, then threw the bit of biscuit at them, turned, and ran, glancing over her shoulder.
Without even a sniff at the biscuit, the dogs barked in large and deep-sounding bellows, surely waking all in the house, their large padded paws chasing her down the corridor. She’d known running into the dogs was a risk she took in coming. But hearing their snarling, desperate approach, she acknowledged that the reality was far worse than she’d predicted.
She took the long way to the back door, the roundabout way that led past the kitchen. With the dogs yapping at her heels, scratching at the floors as they rounded corners, she snatched up the basket at a full run, tore out the servants’ door, and closed it behind her. The dogs’ barking and scratching behind the door made her keep running, not knowing if they were capable of opening it.
With rugs tucked under one arm and a basket in her other hand, she tore across the lawn. A light in her uncle’s room had been lit, but she gave it no attention.
An hour later, she was back at the cabin, sitting on one of her newly acquired rugs in front of a celebratory fire, eating a meat pie from Cook. But no grand feelings of victory rewarded her efforts.
“What am I doing?” She sighed and pulled her mother’s quilt tight around her body.
She studied the quilt, an older blanket her mother had embroidered. The yellows and blues, the deep reds, all reminded her of Mother’s cheerful smiles. In every corner, her mother had designed a rising sun. Rhi traced a finger over each one, almost absentmindedly. The last letter she’d received from her father had been covered in little drawings of rising suns. She reviewed his words in her mind for the hundredth time. He’d been concerned for the miners while she’d been traveling with her mother, and he’d expressed his hope that all would be well.Hope is always on the horizon, Rhianna. Remember that.She smiled. One phrase in particular from the same letter lingered.Your goodness stands untested. Be kind to those in your care, even when you have reason not to be.She’d been confused at his meaning at first read and even now wondered what more he could have meant. But undoubtedly the people in the mines were now in her care. She pulled the quilt up to her face, breathing in the smells of home. Her cheek rubbed against the nearest sun. Where was her hope now? Certain it was on the horizon, she refused to give in to the loneliness that threatened in her banishment.
Banishment. To this hunting cabin on the very edge of her land, torn from everything that was hers except for what she could sneak out of her home. Not much for a fire, not much to eat, and only a well for water. She would make do.The sun always rises, she reminded herself.Hope is on the horizon.
The symbol was something Rhi and her parents had shared together in love. All notes, all letters—every correspondence—and even sometimes their handkerchiefs included the sun, embroidered in the corner. It always reassured.
But now the rising suns in the blanket were the only ones Rhi would ever receive from her parents again.
On one of the last days they’d shared together with her mother still alive but late into her illness, Father had asked the servants to set up a conveyance. They’d carried Rhi’s mother up the hill behind their estate. The wind whipped the air all around them in a fury and strength that was oddly comforting to Rhi. The servants set her mother down, and Father had wrapped her tightly in the very quilt Rhi now held. She’d sat beside her parents as the sun peeked up over the horizon. She well remembered her father’s words:“There is always hope. And someday, even if your mother must smile down on us through those rays, we will hope. Hope for deliverance. Hope to reunite. Hope.”His arm had reached out around her back to embrace them both. In the great sorrow of mourning what was yet to come, she had felt the strength of their unity. And she had hope. Even now, as an orphan, having lost them both to illness, the fiery power of hope lit her life and emboldened her actions.
Early in the morning two weeks later, when food was starting to run thin, a knock at the door to her primitive, run-down home—the smallest two-room cottage in Cresselly—seemed to shake the walls.
Rhi rushed to open it.
Mrs. Powell bustled in with an old weathered basket. The smells of food warmed the cottage. “Oh, my dear, I don’t want you suffering over here, not after all your father’s done for us.” The older woman lifted out a meat pie and a tin of biscuits. “We gathered what we could, the lot of us. It’s not much, mind you, but it will sustain you.” She was slightly stooped in age but still lively and full of that kind sparkle Rhi loved to see in others. “And how often did your mother do the same for me time and again?”
Rhi smiled, thinking of her angel mother delivering baskets, nursing the Powell children back to health, caring for the other miner families. “You are as good as they come, Mrs. Powell. Now, don’t be exerting yourself overly so. I’m perfectly happy in my little cabin.”
