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did it to humiliate you, Siân.”
    â€œWell,” she said quietly, “he will not succeed in doing that. Many other women do the same job. There is no reason why I should not be one of them. I am not afraid of hard work.”
    â€œYou should not be working at all,” her grandfather said gruffly. “I take it as a shame that any woman of my family is forced to work outside the home. Especially in the mine. Emrys and I earn enough to keep your gran and you in the house.”
    â€œBut, Grandad—” she began.
    â€œBut Siân has her pride,” Emrys said, cutting her off. “When she came to live with us after my sister died, she was too proud to make it seem that she was asking for charity. And again after Gwyn died.”
    â€œOh, there is wicked,” Gwynneth said indignantly as she sat at the kitchen table, a pile of darning on the table before her. “As if our own granddaughter would be accepting charity by coming to live with her own gran and grandad. Don’t talk nonsense, Emrys.”
    And yet it would have seemed like charity, Siân thought, looking into the last embers of the fire and setting her head back against the chair. Emrys understood that. She had grown up alone with hermother, who had been driven out first from the chapel and then from the community of Cwmbran when her womb had begun to swell. She had been housed close to Penybont farther up the valley by the man who had disgraced her—Sir John Fowler, owner of the Penybont works. Siân had never been invited to call him Dada or even Papa. She could not quite think of him as her father, though he had sent her to an expensive girls’ school in England when she was old enough to go. And he had tried to provide for her at the age of seventeen when her mother died by offering her in marriage to Josiah Barnes. It would be an excellent match, he had told her. Barnes was an important and powerful man.
    But Siân had refused to marry him. Lonely and caught between two worlds, she had wanted to join the one to which perhaps she could belong. She could never belong in Sir John Fowler’s world. No one there, including Josiah Barnes, would ever let her forget her origins or her illegitimacy. And so she left her mother’s cottage, where she had no wish to live any longer. But she had been refused a job in any capacity at her father’s works.
    She had come to her grandparents’ house in Cwmbran. She had come begging. But not to live on their charity. Two days after they had taken her in Josiah Barnes gave her a job—grinning at her as he offered it and undressing her with his eyes. It was the lowliest, hardest, and dirtiest job for women. She had accepted and worked in the mine for three years, until she married Gwyn Jones, a miner, and moved into the small miners’ house he shared with his parents and brothers. Such had been her determination to fit in.
    After Gwyn’s death from a cave-in underground that had killed two other men too, Siân had gone back to work though she was pregnant. Gwyn’s family was large and it had been a time of low wages. But after her son had been stillborn a month early, she had moved back to her grandparents’ and returned to the mine though her grandfather had tried to use his influence to get her a better job in the ironworks.
    Siân started suddenly as there was a knock on the door and the latch lifted after her grandfather’s call.
    â€œGood evening, Mrs. Rhys, Hywel, Emrys, Siân,” Owen Parry said, cap in hand. “Lovely day it has been, hasn’t it, now?”
    The only time Owen ever looked uncomfortable or sheepish, Siân thought, was when he came calling on her, though he had been coming several evenings a week for months. He was courting her.
    â€œGood evening, Owen,” Gwynneth said. “Yes, a lovely day indeed. All my washing dried in no time at all.”
    â€œHello, Owen,” Siân