The Four Swans

  ‘I expect he forgot, Ross. I expect he’s too big a man to ask for things like that.’

  ‘Not, I would imagine, if they were of any advantage to himself.’

  ‘How do you suppose Ossie has got it, then?’

  ‘He may have influence with the Dean and Chapter – his mother was a Godolphin. And of course George, occupying the largest house in the parish and being a Member of Parliament . . .’

  ‘Well, I suppose Elizabeth will be pleased, since it will be preferment for her cousin’s husband.’

  ‘Odgers will not be pleased. It was his one hope of a comfortable genteel life. Now he knows he must slave and scrape for the rest of his days.’

  ‘Would you be able to have more influence, Ross, if you were a Member of Parliament?’

  ‘Who knows? God knows. I am not and shall never be.’

  ‘Never is a long time.’

  ‘Anyway, you consider me unsuited to hold such an office.’

  ‘Twas you refused, Ross, not me. I know you asked me before you said no, and we talked of it; but you’d really decided to say no before ever you spoke to me, hadn’t you? I thought – what it was in me to think – and I said to you that you had chosen right if you go on all the time being judge and jury to condemn yourself.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I remember; the coat of armour. Well, my dear, perhaps one of these days I shall grow one and become a borough monger and conspire with the best. Perhaps I shall be able to regulate, order and arrange my prickly conscience if I contrive benefits only for my friends and not for myself, and refuse any payment for them. That way my nobility of soul will shine through.’

  ‘It is not so much that I care vastly for Mr Odgers,’ Demelza said. He’s a teasey little man. But Mrs Odgers is so hard worked, and the children so down-at-heel. And also Ossie Whitworth thinks so highly of himself already that it seem a pity he will have reason to be still more satisfied.’

  II

  Ossie was indeed satisfied. As soon as he was summoned to Exeter to be collated he wrote assiduous letters of thanks to Conan Godolphin, George Warleggan, and all others who had assisted him in the struggle; for he was nothing if not punctilious about his own affairs, and one never knew when one might need one’s friends again. It was a very pleasant weekend, the last in January, that he spent at Trenwith, and with his two women and a groom beside him he knew it made a distinguished cavalcade.

  It was Morwenna’s first long trip since her illness but she stood the ride well. Her health had improved steadily from the time of Dwight’s ministrations. True in September there had been a relapse that had lasted two weeks; she had retired to bed and had refused to speak to anyone in the house – not even Rowella, certainly not Ossie. Dr Behenna had declared it a light paludal fever caught from the river, and had given her purges and Peruvian bark. This treatment had had a good effect and had restored the family’s faith in their medical man.

  And from then on, although quiet and sad, she had gained strength, and this visit to Trenwith showed her to be in perfect good health again. The return to this house was a test of another sort; every room had some memory in it of the tragedy of her young love. Knowing of Drake’s nearness, she almost yielded to the temptation to rise very early on the Sunday morning and walk to see him, but at the last her nerve failed. Ossie might wake before she returned and then there would be great trouble. And, in any event, what could it profit either Drake or herself to rub their wounds raw again? She knew of his enduring love; he knew of hers; it must be enough.

  It was a full church, with the Reverend Clarence Odgers fussing about his new vicar and assisting in the service. Ossie preached 1 Tim. 6 (UCP). ‘Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, suppose that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself. But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.’ He thought it went well. It was a timely sermon at this period of unrest. (There had been another food riot at St Just last week.) He had thought of collecting perhaps fifty of his sermons and having them published. There was a handy little printer he had met in Exeter who would keep the costs down, and it did a man’s name good to have some published work on sale. He fancied he had made a good impression on the new Archdeaeon and had invited him to stay with them at St Margaret’s when he came round on his next visitation.

  After church he met the rest of the Odgers family, and they all trooped back to Trenwith for dinner. Elizabeth had sent written instructions to the servants to prepare a meal for twenty, but, the Chynoweths being incapable of overseeing anything, it was all badly arranged. Ossie determined to have a word with George about it when next they met.

  They went home on the Monday morning, Ossie having left a list of matters which Odgers was at once to see to: overgrown churchyard, ill-fitting door, cracked window, mice in vestry, fabric over altar, holes in curate’s cassock, inattention of choir during sermon, omitting words from service and use of erroneous doctrine. There were other things Ossie had noticed but he thought that would do to begin.

  As soon as they reached home Morwenna ran upstairs to see how John Conan had fared in her absence, and Ossie, who had been unable to keep his eyes off Rowella’s thin back all the way home, beckoned her into his study.

  She came demurely, stood just inside the door, eyes glinting out at the trees and the river.

  ‘Shut the door,’ he said with a hint of impatience.

  ‘Yes, Vicar.’

  He said: ‘It may be late tonight. It is becoming more and more difficult . . .’

  ‘Whenever you say.’

  ‘It is not whenever I say, as you well know. Else it would be now!’

  ‘Yes, it would be nice now,’ she said.

  His look was half lust and half anger. ‘Do not . . . you must not . . .’

  ‘What, Vicar?’

  He brushed some dust from his coat, put his hands in their favourite position behind his back and stared at her.

  ‘Go, now. Go and help your sister. It is improper that we should be much alone. But I thought I must tell you about tonight. It must be tonight, you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘Tonight.’

  And it was that night, after he had had his way with her, that she told him she was going to have a baby.

  III

  She wept in his arms, while he wished he had the strength to throw her in the river.

  It seemed sometimes to him that God was trying him too highly. True his call had not been great – his mother, finding him unable to pass the sort of examinations that the law entailed, had chosen the ministry as a suitable alternative for the son of a judge – but, once so chosen, he had pursued a highly successful career in it; he had read a good deal of ecclesiastical law and, among the natural frivolities of a moderately well-to-do young gentleman, he had sought and obtained preferment which did not at all seem undeserved.

  But nature had endowed him with powerful appetites, and marriage had been a necessity if he were to obey the relevant doctrines of the church. The death of his first wife had been followed by marriage to a second who, after the birth of their child, had been forbidden him on the strictest medical advice. Then and there present, occupying a seat at his dining table, and presently coming wholly to occupy his thoughts, was this thin rake of a girl with the most astonishing figure and appetites of her own, who had lured him with her mock-modest wiles, enticed him upstairs with learned talk of Greek heroes and had then unclothed herself and thrown herself at him as if, instead of being a dean’s daughter, she had been the vilest wanton off the streets.

  So he had become wrapped in her toils, bound hand and foot by her lures and his own deprivations. So he had allowed himself to become seduced by a wanton child. So he had broken the seventh commandment and offended against all the laws of the society of which he conceived himself to be a leader.

  This far it had happened, but this
far it had happened in secret. Now, now, this Medusa weeping on his shoulder would shortly begin to bear within her body, in such a way as could not be disguised, the evidence of her shame. And the evidence of his guilt. His guilt. For all to see. His very special guilt in having contracted a liaison with a woman, scarcely more than a child, who was his own wife’s sister. It was intolerable, impossible. The church, the Archdeacon, the churchwardens . . . What would happen to his preferment, even to his position in the church at all?

  ‘Come, come,’ he said, ‘I do not believe it can be so.’

  ‘Oh, it is so,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, it is so! Last month I have missed what I should have had, and this week should have been the second. And I have been quite venomous sick as if I had been given a poison! All these last weeks I have hoped and prayed that it should not be so!’

  They lay there for a long time saying nothing. Although she continued to weep, he felt that he could not be absolutely sure that her tears were not exaggerated to exact from him the maximum of pity. For a time his mind was drugged, as if unable to bestir itself from the morass into which her words had plunged it; but gradually it began to work. All the choices were nasty. If she were to commit suicide . . . If she could be persuaded to visit one of the old women of the town . . . If she could be sent away somewhere to stay with some crone who would ‘adopt’ the child after it was born . . . If she could be sent home to her mother in disgrace . . . If some other man could be blamed . . .

  Of course he would deny any responsibility. It was only her word against his, and who would not take the word of a respected clergyman against that of a hysterical half-demented girl? Send her home in disgrace, let her mother make what she could of it. Scarcely anyone in the parish need ever know. Morwenna, perhaps, but it would be in her own interest to keep it secret, whatever her private thoughts.

  Rowella moved away from him and tried to dry her eyes on the sheet. A worm of doubt moved in Ossie. In spite of her extreme youth Rowella was not to be trifled with. If she chose to keep quiet about him, she would keep quiet; but if she chose not to, her accusations would not, he suspected, be barely audible between heart-rendering sobs. She would make her points, whether overshadowed by age and position or not. It was a horrible situation and one about which he ventured to feel a grievance against God.

  ‘We will have to think gravely about this,’ he said, as if he had not already been thinking gravely.

  ‘Yes, Ossie.’

  ‘I must go now. We will consider it again tomorrow in the light of day.’

  ‘Do not tell Morwenna.’

  ‘No, no. I shall not do that!’

  ‘It is a terrible thing to have happened.’

  ‘Yes, Rowella, it is.’

  ‘I do not know what anyone will think of me.’

  ‘Perhaps they will not know.’

  ‘It will be very hard to hide.’

  ‘Yes, that too I know,’ he said in intense irritation.

  ‘Perhaps you will think of something, Vicar.’

  ‘There, there. We shall have to think and pray.’

  ‘I could kill myself for this.’

  ‘Yes, yes, my dear.’ Was there hope?

  ‘But will not,’ said Rowella, wiping her eyes.

  Chapter Five

  I

  In early February the de Dunstanvilles dined with the Poldarks at Nampara. It was something Demelza had set her face against ever since Ross first mentioned the possibility. Dining out with the nobility was one thing, entertaining them in this small house, and with untrained servants, was another. And of all the nobility, these were the two she feared most. She would rather have welcomed three Lord Falmouths and a couple of Valletorts thrown in; the simple reason being that she could not detach the Bassets from memories of her childhood – or indeed from the knowledge that three of her brothers and a stepmother and stepsister still lived in a wretched cottage half a mile from the gates of Tehidy. Since she married Ross she had never found much difficulty in dealing with the lesser fry of the social scene: the Bodrugans, the Trevaunances, the Trenegloses and so on, and even with Lord Falmouth she had established a very slight rapport (in that on the rare occasions when he had spoken to her she thought she detected a gleam of approval in his eye), but the new Baron and his lady, though always gracious to her, suffered her, she thought, entirely on account of Ross.

  Also poverty, until the last two years, had virtually cut off any formal entertaining at all; so she had had no practice. It was totally and impossibly unfair to begin by entertaining the two richest and most sophisticated people in Cornwall, who anyway must by now know exactly who she was and where she came from.

  For a while Ross allowed himself to be put off by these objections; but eventually, as he told her, it became impossibly ill-mannered not to invite them, since Basset had several times expressed a wish to see the work that his recommended plasterer had done for them.

  ‘I have said this too often to you already,’ Ross added; ‘in England we are not near so rigid in our class structures as you still appear to suppose. Thomas Coutts, the banker, married a maid in his brother’s employ, and she now entertains princes. Besides, in all countries, England as elsewhere, a woman at marriage takes her husband’s position and rank. Why do you think Frances Hippesley-Cox became first Lady Basset and then Lady de Dunstanville? Because of her marriage to Francis Basset.’

  ‘Ah, but you can tell, she was gentlefolk to begin.’

  ‘No matter. Just as she is now Lady de Dunstanville, you are Mrs Ross Poldark, and if any person ever treated you different from that I would turn him out of the house, even if it were the King himself. After all these years you must understand that.’

  ‘Yes, Ross.’

  He did not like her in one of her meek moods. They usually boded no good.

  ‘Oh, I appreciate all about the Bassets and Tehidy and the rest. Try to forget it. You only have to be your natural self. Pretend nothing, for you have nothing to hide. Rather you have everything to be proud of.’

  ‘And who shall do the cooking, Ross?’

  ‘Jane knows many of the dishes you serve. Perhaps you will have to oversee it in its early stages . . .’

  ‘And in its late stages too. If Jane knows we have the Baron de Dunstanville at our table she’ll tremble so much she’ll drop the goose in the fire and pour mustard sauce on the apple tarts.’

  ‘Mrs Zacky would come in, I’m sure. If she can deliver a baby she should be able to put the dishes into and out of an oven.’

  ‘And who will wait at table in white gloves? Jack Cobbledick?’

  ‘Nobody will wear white gloves. Ena can wait very well now and Betsy Maria can help . . . It has to be, love. I’m sorry, but there is no way out short of a discourtesy I cannot possibly show. If they do not like our country cooking they can go back to their palace and rot.’

  ‘I believe they’re much more likely to go back to their palace and laugh.’

  ‘There you do them an injustice. If they hadn’t wanted to come he would not have almost reached the point of suggesting it. And gentlefolk never laugh at simplicity; they only laugh at pretence.’

  ‘And where can I show her upstairs? Downstairs may be lovely – if we keep the pigs out and Garrick in the scullery – but we have no new furniture for our bedroom and still only an outside closet.’

  ‘Much healthier. For the rest, show her into Jeremy’s room. It is simple, but all new and fresh, and there’s a good mirror.’

  Demelza considered the gloomy prospect ahead. Ross put his arm round her shoulders. ‘I rely on you.’

  ‘Perhaps you should not always.’

  ‘Whether I should or should not, I always will.’

  ‘Well, if I have to I have to, but on one condition: we must invite Dwight and Caroline too to water them down.’

  ‘I was going to suggest it.’

  So the dinner came off on a fine Tuesday in mid-February. Demelza had given great thought to the menu for she knew, whatever Ross might
think, that she would have to oversee the meal until the last second. She did pease soup, which could be got ready beforehand, then a boiled tongue, similarly easy, followed by a fat little turkey hen roasted, with chopped bacon, then her special raspberry jam puffs, and ended with a syllabub and mince pies. The day before, Ross had been over to Mr Trencrom and cajoled him into selling him a half dozen bottles of his finest claret, which Mr Trencrom always had run over specially from France. With Geneva, brandy, and Demelza’s favourite port, there was plenty to drink, and good drink at that. Basset, in spite of his wealth, was no toper, and everyone ended the meal pleasantly full, pleasantly relaxed and pleasantly talkative.

  There was much to talk about: Mantua had fallen and resistance in Italy was at an end; the last Italian ports were being closed to English shipping; and Austria, the only bastion remaining, was tottering to a fall. The last attempt to invade Ireland had been foiled by the weather, but any day another might begin, especially as the Spanish and Dutch fleets were now available to combine with the French. As troops were freed from their other conquests in Europe they were being drafted to the Channel coast. Next time it might not be Ireland that was attempted. More volunteers were being recruited throughout the land, and at every tiny port men were being pressed for the navy. Miners were exempt from impressment but here and there were forming patriotic groups for resistance against the French.

  They later moved into the new library, whose plaster-work was much admired, and then, the day being so fine, it was suggested they should all go for a walk as far as Damsel Point, and Demelza, to her horror, found herself partnered by Lord de Dunstanville. The way lay along the narrow path skirting the Long Field, so there was no hope of breaking this order until they reached the rocks. Ross led the way with Lady de Dunstanville, and Dwight and Caroline had meanly contrived to stick together and bring up the rear.

  Conversation between the lady of the house and her guest centred chiefly on crops. This was easy enough, and a polite question now and then kept him going. Demelza had long since realized that most men liked the sound of their own voices, and the new baron was no exception. Not that what he said was boring or in any way dull; he was incisive, to the point, and full of ideas that were new to her. After a while she began to relax, reasoning that the more he dominated the conversation the less time he was likely to have to think about her social deficiencies.