His eyebrows dropped a little then, dragging together as he started to speak. “My father was a miner, a coal miner, just like his father before that, and both of them died down there,” he said. “It left my mother with three daughters and a son to raise on her own.”

“How did she get by?” Elise asked, nursing her warm mug as she watched him, fascinated to hear more.

“I should have left school and started mining when I was fourteen, but my mother, well, she’s one heck of a lady. She made me stay until I was sixteen, wanted me to get an education, and she worked herself to the bone to make sure we didn’t want for anything.”

“Fourteen? That’s so young to start doing hard labor like that,” Elise mused. “Is that normal?”

“Boys I went to school with, they all started at fourteen,” he said. “Two of them were dead before the end of their first year.”

“Dead?” Elise gasped. “How? Why?”

“They send you down to collect tubs of coal with a pony all harnessed up for the job. And you just keep taking the full tubs up, and taking the old tubs down. But it’s nasty down there,” he said. “Accidents happen all the time, and not just to the boys, to the older men, too. I think my poor ma spent most of her life scrubbing her husband’s skin and his clothes clean, and then eventually she was doing the same for me.”

“She sounds like a good woman,” Elise said. “It must have been hard for her to keep food on the table.”

Harry’s eyes were shut, as if he were lost in the memory of home. “War seemed like an easy option to me. Being a soldier sounded far better than coal.”

She didn’t need to ask if he’d been right. After what he’d been through, seeing nearly everyone in his regiment killed, she bet he’d have rather faced coal-mining for the rest of his life.

“Do you have a sweetheart waiting for you back home?” she asked.

His eyes opened then, slowly. “No. Well, there was someone, but I didn’t love her enough to ask her to wait.” She went to say something but he laughed and stopped her. “Sorry, that makes me sound terribly heartless. What I meant was that I didn’t want her waiting for me, because I thought she deserved better than me, someone who loved her. We had a lot of fun, but when it came down to it, I didn’t want to ask her to marry me.”

“I understand,” she said. “Truly, I do.”

“You’ve had the same thing happen to you?”

She smiled. “No, not the same. But I never wanted to marry for marriage’s sake, if that makes sense? I would rather be alone than promised to someone I didn’t love.”