Dwight got up too. ‘Don’t worry. Try not to be upset. It will be a nine-day wonder in the village and in no time at all everyone will forget it.’
‘My dear life!’ Katie stopped as if she had been bitten.
‘What is it?’
‘Music!’ said Katie, and slapped her thigh. ‘I shan’t have to wed Music!’
There was a moment’s pause before Dwight spoke. ‘No. You don’t have to wed Music.’
‘My dear soul! Well, now, there’s a relief for ee! Jer-us-alem! I don’t have to wed no one ’tall!’
They went to the door.
‘Music will be much upset.’
‘Ais, I s’pose. Do you think he ’ave ordinary feelings like a real man?’
‘Emphatically so. Did you not realize that?’
‘Ais, I s’pose. Ais, I d’know he be very fond of me. I like him too. There’s no ’arm in him. Never a bad thought. ’E’s gentle and kind. But I don’t wish to wed ’im.’
‘Well,’ said Dwight dryly, ‘it is your own choice. It always has been.’
There were more heavy clouds blowing up like angry fists clenched in the sky, but as she was let out of the side door, Katie squinted into a shaft of the expiring sun.
‘I can’t wed ’im now. ’Twas a convenience. ’Tis too bad for him maybe. I’m sorry for him, I really am. But there ’tis. He knew how ’twas. He’ll ’ave to put up with un.’
IV
After leaving Dwight Ross took out the letter Cuby had written.
Dear Lady Poldark,
I am writing this from Caerhays where I have now been three weeks with my family. Perhaps I should first have written to you, but in truth it is hard to know what to say to the mother of the man I loved so dearly and who I know held him at least as dear. When we met last you were much concerned for the safety of Jeremy’s father – and thank God he has come safe home – yet I remember it personally as a happy time when we first came to know each other and Jeremy was there to make our friendship complete. Now all is lost, and I propose to come to you carrying his child and carrying the grief of a bereavement we both equally share. Sir Ross told me I would be welcome at Nampara, to stay until after the birth of my child, and I feel sure that you would echo that welcome. But my constant presence in your household may come to be a too constant and irksome reminder of Jeremy’s death, a lodestone dragging you ever back to your feeling of sorrow and loss.
So with your permission, dear Lady Poldark, I would like to come for perhaps two weeks, to begin, then perhaps to return to Caerhays for a little while. Let it be how it seems best and most seemly to you.
If it were convenient I would come next Monday, the 17th. I would like to bring my sister Clemency for company, who would stay the night and return with the groom on the following day. But pray make some other suggestion should this not be convenient. I am, as you well understand, entirely a free agent.
Believe me, dear Lady Poldark, I am so much looking forward to seeing you again.
Your loving daughter-in-law,
Cuby
Demelza had sent a note back saying she would be most welcome.
This was just before the young sailor had arrived to tell them of Stephen’s accident.
V
In the afternoon Ross walked up to Wheal Grace, changed into mining things and went over it with Ben Carter. There was not much fresh to see, and what there was was depressing. For years the mine had yielded riches from several floors of tin and now was played out. The south floor had been closed for two years. The north, after appearing to be bottomed out more than once, had raised hopes by revealing smaller pockets and platforms from time to time, but none had more than postponed the evil day when the mine had to close.
While in captivity Ross had had plenty of time on his hands to make calculations, and he had come to the decision that if or when he got home the mine should be immediately shut down. By now there were only forty men working in it; all the others who had left had been absorbed into Wheal Leisure as that mine expanded. They could probably now take on another ten.
But Jeremy’s death had knocked his calculations – like many other things – out of joint. He told Ben that for the time being the old mine should continue to operate but that the sixty-fathom level – the lowest there was – should be abandoned and such work as there was could be concentrated on the forty-fathom and above. The bottom pumps – installed by Jeremy – were to be disconnected and brought up – and anything else of value before the old floors were submerged. Beth, the engine built by Bull & Trevithick twenty-five years ago, and modernized by Jeremy in 1811, could continue to function on a reduced scale and under reduced stress. Labour force could be pared down to about thirty. It was more than maintenance, but not a lot. It would cut his profits on Wheal Leisure by about twenty per cent.
Ben asked if he would go over Leisure with him tomorrow, but Ross said it would have to be one day next week. There was no reason for this – he was not busy except that Leisure in the last five years had become so much Jeremy’s mine (the whole decision to reopen it, the design of the engine, the leats to bring the fresh water, the development of the rediscovered Trevorgie workings) that he just did not wish to face it again. He had made a perfunctory tour when he first came home, but then the wound had still been so raw that it couldn’t be made worse.
It was only about four and a half years ago, just after he had returned from Spain – and they had been down Wheal Grace and were walking back to the house together – that Jeremy had made the suggestion that they might consider reopening Wheal Leisure. He had interlaced his remarks with seemingly innocent queries about the Trevanions – apparently he had just then met the girl for the first time and was besotted with her. Ross knew nothing of this then – Cuby and Jeremy had first met when Jeremy was returning from some adventure he had undertaken with Stephen Carrington and they had come ashore near Caerhays. An ill-fated affair if ever there was one; yet it seemed to have contained within it a short vivid few months of brilliant happiness. Perhaps that was better than nothing at all. And Cuby, although in some ways wilful and perverse, had been a girl worthy of his love.
The other thing Ross had not known that chilly morning in February 1811 was Jeremy’s intense preoccupation with the development of steam – and the gift that he had for harnessing the latest ideas. Ross never failed to blame himself for this lack of knowledge, this lack of perception in regard to his son. Yet, as Demelza had said, Jeremy had preserved such secrecy about it that there was no way of knowing. It had, as so often happened between father and son, been a breakdown in communication rather than a breakdown in sympathy.
And then, before he died, so very young, he had even begun to distinguish himself in a military career, picked out by Wellington himself for promotion. Another Captain Poldark. Somehow the art of war was the last thing one would have ever expected him to excel at, the tall, thin, gangling, artistic young man with the slight stoop, the joking, flippant manner, the distaste for bloodshed.
God, Ross thought, what a waste! what a loss! – for Demelza, for Cuby, for Isabella-Rose, above all for Jeremy himself . . .
He was about to leave the shelter of the mine when his temporarily blurred sight picked out the figure of another young man approaching. As tall as Jeremy, younger by three years, long-nosed and narrow-eyed and thin-shanked, dark of hair and skin, a lock showing over his brow from under his hat. His cloak and features were glistening from the latest shower.
‘Well, Cousin Ross or I’ll be damned! What nasty weather! Were you in the mine? Good fortune for you. I wasn’t, as you observe. These clouds just dip the water out of the sea and empty it like a child with a bucket!’
His glinting, easy, charming smile. But just the wrong moment for Ross, remembering Jeremy.
‘I thought you were back in Oxford.’
‘Cambridge. No, we leave at the weekend. Ghastly journey, but Selina will not go by sea. A pertinent disadvantage to making one’s home in Cornwall is the mo
nstrous distance it is from everywhere else!’ He got off his horse, glancing at Ross’s gaunt, grim face. ‘We wrote, of course, as soon as we heard.’
‘Of course,’ said Ross. ‘Thank you. I’m sure Demelza replied.’
‘I believe Clowance did. It is a sad loss for us all.’
‘Thank you.’
Valentine had dismounted. Ross noticed the slightly bent leg.
‘Are you walking back?’
‘Yes. But I have to warn you, Demelza is from home. She is staying with Clowance for a few days.’
‘It was about Clowance that I was come to ask. Or if not Clowance, then Stephen. I have heard he has had an accident.’
‘Bad news travels fast.’ As they began to walk downhill Ross told the young man what he knew.
Valentine said: ‘That is cursed luck. I have come to know Stephen over the last couple of years and find him an energetic, versatile feller. He will not take kindly to a long spell of invalidism.’
‘Dr Enys is going tomorrow, so perhaps we shall have more information then.’
The small angry clouds marching in from the north-west had separated, like a military procession before an obstacle, and between them the sky above Nampara had become sea-green and shot through with sunshine. Valentine took off his hat and flapped it against his cloak, knocking away the moisture. He asked about the progress of Wheal Leisure and Wheal Grace, and spoke of his own new venture, Wheal Elizabeth, which by the beginning of next year was likely to need an engine.
‘I had been going to seek Jeremy’s advice on this. Alas . . .’
‘When shall you get your degree?’
‘Next spring. We hope to be permanently in residence at Place House from then on. May I ask you one or two questions?’
A change of tone.
‘Questions? Of course. If I can answer them. Will you come in?’
‘Let us walk down to the beach. Maybe the open air will be better for any confidences which may pass.’
They skirted Demelza’s garden and came out on the rough ground leading to Nampara Beach, where the mallows and the thistles and the rough grass grew. The tide was out, and the expanse of sand stretched to the Dark Cliffs, smooth, pale brown, uninterrupted by rock or shelf or gully. The sand nearby was well pitted with footprints, but beyond a few hundred yards even they disappeared. In the distance a solitary figure moved along the high-water mark.
‘Paul Daniel,’ said Ross.
‘What?’
‘Paul Daniel. He shares this part of the beach with three others who go up and down the high-water mark seeing what’s come in. When he finds something on the way out he does not pick it up but makes a double cross beside it in the sand. Woe betide anyone who makes off with it.’
Valentine laughed. ‘We are both Cornish to the bone, you and I, Cousin Ross; yet I suspect you understand the villagers far better than I ever shall.’
‘My early life was more earthy. Certainly until I left to go overseas in my early twenties I had never been further than Plymouth.’
‘. . . I have been away so much.’
They leaned on the gate.
‘What did you wish to ask me?’
The breeze was not interrupted for some time.
‘You mentioned Dwight Enys just now. He attended my mother when my sister was born.’
‘I believe so.’
‘Did he attend her when I was born?’
‘No, he was at sea – in the navy.’
‘You know I was an eight-month child?’
‘I have heard so.’
‘Premature in all things. But you say you have heard so. Did you not know so, as you lived so near by?’
‘My relationship with the Warleggan family has never been friendly. At that time it was at its worst.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why was it so bad just then?’
‘Is this an examination I have to face?’
‘If you please.’
Valentine was tapping on the gate with his long fingers. This young man had been a figure in Ross’s thoughts, frequently forgotten and then painfully, poignantly central again, for more than twenty years. Yet in all that time they had never had a personal, intimate discussion. Their contact had been superficial. It seemed peculiarly maladroit that Elizabeth’s son should tackle him in this way so soon after Jeremy’s death. He had always tended to dislike the young man: his sardonic humour; his mischievous jokes; his great charm; his automatic assumption that all women would succumb to it. He had been particularly disagreeable at Geoffrey Charles’s party, had brought Conan Whitworth uninvited and greatly upset Morwenna, had half-drunkenly smiled and sneered through the tense encounter following, when Ross and George had almost come to blows again. Rumour had it that he had married Selina Pope for her money and was already being openly unfaithful to her.
‘What are you looking at?’ Valentine asked.
‘At you, Valentine, since you ask. At the time you were born, the natural antagonism between me and your father was at its height because I had not wished your mother to marry him. He must have known this.’
‘You were in love with my mother, were you not?’
‘At one time.’
‘At that time?’
‘I held her in high esteem.’
Ross watched a parade of crows which were waddling in judicial procession towards the cliffs of Wheal Leisure as if about to open the assizes.
Valentine said: ‘Did you know – I suspect you did – that I was a constant bone of contention between my mother and father?’
‘Later, yes.’
‘So you must have known why.’ When Ross did not answer Valentine said: ‘Because he suspected I was not his son.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Yes, indeed. All my childhood I lived under this cloud, though of course I did not know what it then was. After my mother died it lifted a lot. It was as if Ursula’s birth – at seven months – had allayed his suspicions. After that he made an effort in his own dry dusty way to become an agreeable father. But by then the damage – so far as I was concerned – was done. I feared him and hated him. There was little he could do by then to change himself in my eyes. I . . . I have always felt he was in some way responsible for my mother’s death.’
‘I do not think that could be. Your – George – was very attached to your mother; no doubt, as you say, in his own dry dusty way; but I believe it to have been genuine. Do not forget that it was twelve years before he remarried.’
Paul Daniel had moved out of sight. Ross felt a surge of fruitless anger at the tangle of love and hate and jealousy which had surrounded this young man’s birth and distorted his childhood. Whose fault was it? His as much as anyone’s. Elizabeth’s too. And George’s. The one blameless person was surely Valentine. Through the years, and always at a distance, Ross had watched the boy’s progress to manhood. Yes, what he had seen and heard had been unfavourable.
But too seldom had he faced the facts of his own responsibility, psychological or actual, for the situation as it had come about.
This unsought meeting stung him emotionally, made him feel as if the central fact of his whole existence, the hub from which all the spokes of his later experience led away, lay in the few minutes of anger and lust and overpowering frustration from which Valentine could have been born.
He put his hand on Valentine’s arm, briefly. It was an uncharacteristic gesture.
‘Why have you come to see me today?’
‘I felt that before I left again I had to meet you, try to straighten out certain events in my own mind.’
‘I do not think I can help.’
‘That was what Dwight Enys said when I spoke to him a few days ago.’
‘On this subject?’
‘Related to this subject . . . Do you think my mother was unfaithful to George Warleggan after they were married?’
‘Good God, no! You demean her memory.’
‘I cannot help but speculate
. It would explain his extraordinary changes of mood.’
‘I’m sure that is not the explanation.’
‘Do you then feel equally certain that my mother went with no man between the time her first husband died and the day of her remarriage?’
Ross had seen this question coming. ‘Your mother was an upright and honourable woman. I saw little of her, but I should think it highly unlikely.’
Valentine coughed dryly. ‘Well, may I ask a final question, then. It is the one I came to ask, difficult as it may be to ask it. Is it possible that you could be my father?’
Ross found he was gripping the top of the gate too tightly. He slackened the grip and then flexed his fingers, looking at them. He knew how much might depend on his reply. And how necessary it was instantly to lie, without the least hesitation. Instantly. And yet how impossible it was to lie whatever the consequences.
‘I have no intention of answering your question, Valentine.’
‘You mean you can’t or won’t?’
‘Both.’
Wheal Leisure was coaling. Black smoke rose and merged with the cloud drifting above it and began its journey of dispersal inland.
Valentine said: ‘Then it is a possibility?’
‘God damn you, boy!’ Ross stopped and swallowed, trying to contain his anger, aware that it was as much directed at himself as at his questioner. There was silence for a few moments. ‘Damn you! . . . Yes, it is a possibility.’ As Valentine was about to speak Ross went savagely on: ‘But only a possibility. No one will ever know for certain. I do not think your mother ever knew for certain. It is a question that I cannot answer for I do not know the answer. Does that satisfy you?’
Valentine said thoughtfully: ‘Yes, thank you. I think it does.’
It seemed as if, because of what had happened that moment, the world was moving in a different way, as if a few words uttered into the wind, spoken by a single voice, heard by one person alone, would prevent its ever being the same place again.
Ross said: ‘But let me warn you. Let me warn you of this, Valentine. If at any time you speak of this – in public or in private, claiming something or denying something on the strength of what I have said, there will be two men wanting to kill you. That is George Warleggan and myself. And I swear to you one of us will.’