The Iron and the Flame

In 1787, a young Quaker arrives in Philadelphia with sixty pounds and a letter of introduction to an iron merchant. He is supposed to learn the ledger, learn the prices, and come home before the frost. He does not come home before the frost. Benjamin Jones - fifth generation of a Welsh Quaker family that crossed the Atlantic with nothing but faith and a gold ring - begins as a merchant's apprentice on Chestnut Street and ends as the ironmaster of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. What starts as a season's education in the price of iron becomes the work of a lifetime: a marriage into Philadelphia's powerful Howell family, the death of a young wife, a furnace on the Rancocas Creek, cannon cast for the War of 1812, a road built through a frozen forest, a financial ruin survived, and an empire of iron forged from dark water and charcoal and will. But an empire built by one man cannot be inherited by another. When Benjamin brings his eldest son to the furnace and sees the fear in the boy's face - and refuses to name it - he sets in motion a reckoning that will shadow the family for generations. The Iron and the Flame is the second book in The Line of the Black Water, a multigenerational family saga tracing a Welsh Quaker family across three centuries in America. Grounded in archival historical fiction and set against the ironworks and pine forests of early America, it is a novel about ambition, inheritance, and the distance between what a man builds and what he keeps. Book Two of six in The Line of the Black Water series.