The track separated them. The mid-afternoon was frowning towards evening, and it would be dark before they reached home.
When they came together again Dwight said: ‘You will have heard that Music Thomas is to marry Katie Carter tomorrow.’
‘Yes.’
‘I hope it may turn out well. I think it might. For Katie to marry Music willingly makes an altogether better prospect of it.’
‘Ben does not feel so.’
‘It was about that that I wanted to speak to you, Ross. I know you’ve long had an interest in the Carter family, as indeed I have. We both remember our visit to Launceston gaol.’
‘I often think’, said Ross, ‘it is due to your ministrations that Zacky is still alive.’
‘Zacky is alive because he has a constitution which will not give way; my medicaments are no more than a useful prop. But I think Katie will be grieved if no one of her family – except her mother, and she reluctantly – comes to the church . . . I suppose Ben is unrelenting . . . and I doubt if Zacky could walk that distance. But Mrs Zacky is a devout Wesleyan and goes regularly to church. Do you have any leverage you could exercise?’
‘Only persuasion. Which I will exercise since it is you that asks. Betsy Maria is in Penryn with Clowance, but there are a half-dozen uncles and aunts – some of them younger than Katie – who might be willing to go. And of course there are the Nanfans. I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t recall having seen Music for a couple of years, and then he was still very much the village fool.’
‘I’ve no doubt that if you were to call to see him now, he would be so overcome with embarrassment that you’d think him no better. And I rather fear that the excitement of the wedding may tip his balance tomorrow. But not only has he improved, he is still improving. Rather than being mentally retarded, as we all thought, I am convinced he is just a very slow developer, whose development has been much held back by the part he learned to play and what the village expected of him. I think with Katie’s understanding and companionship he may become at least as normal and intelligent as most of those who taunt him.’
By the time they separated the night’s cloak had been drawn over the sky with just a scarf of daylight reaching into the sea. Ross made a short detour to Mellin and knocked at the Martin cottage. So he had come one morning thirty years ago in search of cheap labour to work his neglected fields, and so had met Jinny for the first time and become involved in the fortunes of the whole Martin family.
All those years ago Zacky Martin had been a small, tough, wrinkled man – wrinkled far before his time; now with real age and the long struggle against miners’ tissick he had become tiny: a cashew nut instead of a brazil. Somehow Dwight kept him alive, mixing hot vapours for him to inhale at bad times, or potions of nux vomica and strychnine as a tonic for good ones.
This was a good one, and Ross, stooping into the small living room, greeted them both and sat down. Mrs Zacky, who had delivered Demelza of Julia and helped at the births of Jeremy and Clowance, and who had had eight children of her own, had not shrivelled with the years: she was a stout, white-haired, bespectacled, flat-faced, rubicund, vigorous seventy-one. In the room, as it happened, were Gabby and Thomas, now both married and living at Marasanvose. They had been collecting driftwood (which Ross had stumbled over in the dark outside). The wrecks around the coast were breaking up and distributing their flotsam. Fortunately – from their point of view – old Vercoe, the Customs Officer at St Ann’s, was known to be laid up with an ulcer on his leg.
Mrs Zacky said: ‘Well, I ’ad thought to go, an’ then I thought not. Katie be very wilful; always ’ave been, will not be told. She’ve never even brought ’im round to see us. I mind ’im in church, o’ course but he never come to no prayer meetings.’
‘She’m shamed of ’im,’ said Thomas. ‘That be the truth and no two ways o’ looking ’pon it.’
‘I aren’t so sartin he’s so dead’n alive,’ said Gabby. ‘He’s a treat wi’ horses. An’ I seen him quick ’nough ’pon times.’
Zacky said: ‘Katie be wilful but she have her head screwed on. Maybe ’twill turn for the best.’
There had been many improvements in the cottage since those early days: a good smooth planchen laid over the earth floor, and rugs on that; three comfortable upholstered chairs, a dark oak table, a mirror, a new fireplace; the ovens moved into the scullery. Zacky had prospered with his master. Ross had pressed him to move into a place less cramped for size, but as their family had grown and gone and his own active life became restricted Zacky had been less and less inclined to move.
Gabby relit his pipe. ‘I ’ear tell there’s like to be trouble.’
‘Trouble?’
‘’Twas only a whisper I picked up but they d’say them lads that was always baiting Music, they d’plan to upset the wedden.’
‘Upset it? How?’
‘Dunno. There’s three or four lads, half a dozen girls, mischief bent, ye might say.’
‘What time is the wedding?’
‘Nine o’clock,’ said Zacky. ‘After it they go back to work at Place House.’
Mrs Zacky clicked her knitting needles. ‘Reckon I’ll maybe go up to the church, if ’tis your wish, Cap’n Ross.’
‘Maybe I’ll come along wi’ ee, mam,’ said Gabby. ‘’Tis slack time an’ I can steal a hour.’
‘We’d best not be late leaving this eve,’ said Thomas. ‘There’s a couple loads wood outside. If we can have the lend of your handcart, Father?’
‘Anything of value come in?’ Ross asked.
‘Two spars o’ good timber, sur, looks like black spruce or some such. Naught else you’d say of value.’
‘Think you they’ve come from the Kinseale?’
‘They’re small pieces, ten foot long, but there may be better on the morning tide.’
‘What time is high water? Ten or a little after? Well, it’s worth keeping an eye open.’
His mission accomplished, Ross led his horse home. He found Demelza seated before the fire reading to Henry; Bella and Cuby heads together over a piece of needlework; their latest cat, Hebe, licking a delicate back leg at Demelza’s feet and Farquhar, nose in paws, drowsing in the steady candlelight.
When he came in all was commotion, movement, talk. Demelza went off immediately to see that supper should soon be served. She still hadn’t learned the ability to delegate.
Against the probabilities, her relationship with Cuby had ripened into an easy friendship. There had been some moment of crisis, Ross sensed, soon after Cuby arrived, but that had passed. This peculiarly fraught, uneasy situation could so easily have failed because of the special tensions that operated within both women; and it was a testimony to Cuby, he thought, as well as to Demelza, that they spoke understandingly and affectionately to each other, considerate but not over-polite; they even sometimes differed on things, even shared a joke.
Next Monday Demelza was to go to Penryn to spend a few days with Clowance, and he knew she would try to persuade her to spend Christmas with them. Ross’s instinct was against it, but he did not utter a word. The second loss, coming so hard on the heels of the first, had left a raw edge that couldn’t yet begin to heal. It was twisting the sword in the wound to attempt to keep up Christmas in any way whatever. If Clowance came she might find it hard to reconcile herself to the prospect of a new baby in the house and a sister-in-law about whom she still had resentful reservations. Dwight said he thought Cuby’s child would be likely to be born in mid-January. As soon as possible then Cuby would want to show the baby to her mother. That would be the time to press Clowance to come to Nampara. The longer the girls were kept apart while the first wounds healed, the better chance there was of their finding harmony and understanding.
V
Day came up about seven, with angry clouds which seemed to be a residue of some quarrel of the night. Ross took his spyglass to the window of his bedroom but the sea and beach were calm
and unencumbered.
They breakfasted at 7.30, when Bella was full of some rhyme or jingle she had learned, supposing it to be the sounds a nightingale made when in full song. At eight Ross strolled out of the house as if going to Wheal Leisure, but instead walked up the Long Field and its promontory of rocks at Damsel Point which divided Hendrawna Beach from Nampara Cove. The unbroken sand of Hendrawna Beach was a creamy white as the sun broke through, the placid sea, so wild a few days ago, turning gently over at its edge, playful wavelets bearing no visible cargo. The two Martin men had got the best last night.
He wondered how Katie’s wedding would go. He hoped the village lads, who could be spiteful enough, would not interrupt the ceremony, or turn the evening into some sort of a noisy riot. He turned to go back to the house and then stopped to stare into Nampara Cove. By the freak of the tides practically all wreckage was washed up along the great beach, the cove scarcely ever gathered anything of note. Today the position was reversed. The cove was choked with wood.
He clambered down the side of the gorse-grown cliff and came out on the small beach, part sand, part pebbles, bisected by the Mellingey Stream. It took no time to recognize the wood as being good quality timber, more black spruce, red and yellow pine, oak and probably beech. There were also tar barrels and bales of rope and oakum floating around.
He touched nothing but began to limp quickly up the narrow green valley to the house. There were a half-dozen able-bodied men about the farm. They would be mainly in the fields by now. And Sephus Billing. Sephus Billing was this morning repairing the fowl house. He was a fair carpenter but his intellectual attainments would not have put Music to shame. And he was a member of the Billing clan who pullulated in one of the larger cottages of Grambler village.
‘Sephus!’ Ross called as he came into the yard.
‘Ais, sur?’
‘There’s a lot of good timber washing in in Nampara Cove. Go and tell the other men, I want them to stop work and go down to see what they can salvage.’
A gleam lit up Sephus’s dull eyes. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Ais, sur, that I’ll do.’ He put down his hammer. You never had to tell a Cornishman twice to down tools if there was booty to be had.
‘And Sephus!’ as he made for the gate.
‘Sur?’
‘When you have told the men you may go on to Grambler and tell your family of it. There should be a little bounty for all.’
Ross walked to the gate and shut it after the fleeing man. With an ironical gaze he saw Sephus running in the direction of Cal Trevail, who was pulling carrots in the field beyond Demelza’s garden. Soon there would be plenty of willing helpers. All Sephus had to do then was alert the village of Grambler.
VI
Music and Katie went to church through a deserted village. No young men or girls waited by the wayside to douse them in liquid manure. They were married in an almost empty church, the only people present being Parson Odgers – and Mrs Odgers to remind him not to read the burial service in error – Jinny and Whitehead Scoble, Dr Enys, Mrs Zacky Martin, Char Nanfan, and a half-dozen old women who were too infirm to rush down for the pickings in Nampara Cove.
In the cove itself a fair element of chaos reigned, for the haul was bigger than it first seemed. A freak of tide had carried the cargo of the wrecked Kinseale out of Basset’s Cove and deposited it several miles north. The way was narrow and people were trooping down and back, some with mules, some with wheelbarrows, some with boxes and sacks – anything that would carry or contain more than a pair of hands. Often they plunged into the water to grab some item of flotsam, often there were arguments, sometimes fights. Everybody came peaceable, but not everybody could contain their greed.
After appropriating for himself two or three nice lengths of wood, Ross left the villagers and his farm labourers to it. Let them have their fun while the going was good. It was doubtful if Vercoe would have hastened to put in an appearance if he had been well; as he was not, there was no risk at all. Cuby went with Demelza and Isabella-Rose to the edge of Damsel Point to watch. Just for half an hour there was the risk of the crowd getting out of control, but Ross said: ‘Let them be. There’s no liquor. They’ll have cleared everything as clean as a whistle by nightfall.’ And they had. Demelza wrinkled her nose at what she expected she would find trampled down in the muddy track of her special cove when she went to look in the morning.
Meantime Music and Katie had returned to their cottage, changed out of their Sunday clothes and walked to Place House to resume their duties. Katie was normally a living-in maid, but as master and mistress were away had been given permission to sleep out for a few nights. So in due course, which was late in the afternoon, they returned to the cottage together, tramping unspeaking through the windy dark. An hour before they returned, unknown to them, the lads and girls, tired out with a day of collecting timber and pieces of panelling and rope ends and paint brushes and a roll of calico and a man’s jacket and other odds and ends, had bethought themselves of their old malice and decided – coming giggling out of a kiddley – that, well, they might just so well dump the pig shit as waste it, and they would be passing the cottage anyway on their way home. But they were thwarted by the startling and unexpected presence of Constable Vage, who happened to be taking a stroll in Grambler village at that time. It was the first time he had been in Grambler for a month. Ross, not being a magistrate, had no authority to call him out, but a discreet guinea sent over by Matthew Mark Martin had been enough, and he had whiled away the time talking and drinking with the Paynters until the drunken laughter of the lads alerted him afresh to Ross’s request.
So the happy couple slept undisturbed, Katie in the upstairs room once occupied by the three brothers, Music stretched out below in front of the dying fire.
He was perfectly, perfectly happy. She was his wife. She was upstairs in his house, along of him.
If it never came to no more than that, he would be content. If it someday came to the as-yet-unthinkable he would be enraptured. But for the time being he was perfectly, blissfully satisfied with the simple fact that they were wed. Beyond that his patience stretched away into the illimitable distance.
Chapter Two
Lady Harriet Warleggan was brought to bed on the evening of Wednesday, the 12th December, and her labour continued into the morning of the 13th.
Things had not been easy between Harriet and George. Harriet was tetchy all the time, plagued by thoughts of the accident and made more angry by George’s reactions to it. He seemed to take it as a breach of convention, even an insult to himself, that his wife and this upstart he disliked so much and whom Harriet well knew he disliked so much, who had been guilty of highway robbery against him – that they should have been defiantly and openly riding together; and that she had put their son at risk for the sake of some stupid and high-spirited gallop across hunting country . . . It never quite emerged whether Harriet had challenged Stephen or Stephen Harriet, but there had been some sort of competitiveness involved, of that George was sure. And he was not at all certain that there had not been some sexual undertones.
Indeed he had nurtured a number of suspicions ever since Harriet had virtually blackmailed him into withdrawing his bankruptcy notice. Her overt reason, because Clowance had rescued her dog, had never convinced George. Being a man who disliked dogs and only tolerated hounds because they contributed to a national sport, he was unable to fathom the feelings of a woman who felt as Harriet did. Stephen was a personable man – if you liked the braggart type – and he had made a fuss of Harriet. She clearly had a soft spot for him, and had blown up her obligation to Clowance to hide her real feelings. The fact that they had gone riding – galloping! – together was proof enough that something had been afoot.
Well, serve them both right if he’d broken his damned back. It was a miracle that she hadn’t fallen too and taken with her his hopes of an heir.
George had mixed feelings about Stephen’s death. It was good riddance, of cou
rse, and it wiped the slate clean. All the same it would have been better if he could have somehow been arrested for the crime he had committed and ended his life dangling from a noose. Now he had escaped. And with him had gone any hope there might have been of tracking down his two accomplices. The chapter was over and done with. Only Clowance was left on whom he might vent his spleen.
But that George had no intention of doing. Ross Poldark was winged by the loss of his eldest son. His eldest daughter – yes, there was another one; that one with the raucous voice – seemed bent on continuing to live in Penryn for the time being; and George thought he might well make some gesture to befriend her. Although she was a Poldark with her share of Poldark arrogance, he had always been attracted by her, ever since they had first met at Trenwith when she had wandered barefoot into the great hall, blatantly trespassing. Indeed it might be said that it was his encounter with the fresh young Clowance, carrying her bouquet of stolen foxgloves, which had first aroused him to recover his appreciation of women in general, a process which had led to his courtship of Lady Harriet Carter and their eventual marriage.
Of course, apart from a salacious look or two, George had not the least serious sexual intent towards the young widow; but if he did find a way of befriending her it would, he thought, make his old rival irritable and suspicious and might even raise a tremor of annoyance and jealousy in his own wife.
During the period of waiting that dark December night George paced the wide drawing-room of Cardew and nursed his hopes and his grievances and listened for noises from upstairs. His latest grievance was but an hour old. When Dr Charteris had arrived to join Dr Behenna, who was already in attendance, George had gone into the bedroom with them for a moment or two. There had been sweat on his wife’s brow, and the midwife was holding her hand. Looking up and seeing him, Harriet had said between her teeth: ‘Get out of my sight!’