Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man's world in the Welsh mining pits. Gus Dewar finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson's White House. Brothers Grigori and Lev Peshkov embark on radically different paths when their plan to immigrate to America falls afoul. Billy's sister Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London.