There they paused a while, surveying the whispering sea, staring up beach at the other figures, considering where best to cast. Sometimes you would tell by the water lying on the sand in shallow patches, or by the turn of the small waves. Presently Jud was urged into the wet sand, the rope tied round his waist so that some sudden pull shouldn’t jerk it out of his hand. Ross took off his shirt and gave it to Jud to keep, accepted the weight of the net on his shoulder and stepped naked into the sea.
The water was cold but bracing, the frothy little waves spattered him with cold showers of spray as he stepped through them, up to knee, up to thigh, up to waist, and then presently he was waterborne.
As soon as he was swimming he wondered why he had not done this before. It was not merely his absence in London; years had passed since he had come fishing in this way. It was different from the polite bathing of daytime, the walks on the beach with the children, the gallops on horseback with Demelza; this was essentially masculine, essentially earthy – if one could use that expression – essentially utilitarian and plebeian, of the common folk who tilled the soil and searched the sea and lived plain and hard. Like his father, and unlike Francis and Francis’s father, he had always had something in common with this world – it was a part of himself, just as much as his innate breeding as a Poldark was a part of himself. That he had married a miner’s daughter had confirmed the union not created it.
He had been slipping the net off his shoulder and through his fingers as he swam; now he lay on his back to get his breath and raised his head to see how far he was from the shore. Jud’s figure was like a rubbing post in the middle of a field, sentinelled and alone. Paul had moved along the beach to where Ross might be expected to come in. He was out perhaps two hundred yards. The sea was quite calm, just a gentle rise and swell as the slow waves moved towards the shore. Another hundred yards would be enough: that would about extend the net.
He went on and then turned to swim parallel to the shore and as he did so found himself in a powerful current that wanted to take him the other way. He realized he was in a vellow.
A vellow is a strong current which develops here and there along the Cornish beaches at low tide, caused by and causing shallow declivities in the sand, and is irresistible when it takes hold. To a stranger they are fatal, for he tries to swim towards the shore, exhausts himself and is carried away and drowned. To a swimmer familiar with the beaches they are not dangerous, for he allows himself to go with them and then when their force begins to wane he swims out of them and comes ashore where they allow him.
As this current caught him and tried to bear him away Ross vividly remembered a time in March when he was sixteen or seventeen. He was down on the beach with his father and a few others on a cold and gusty night, and he had carried the net about as far as he had on this occasion. An exceptionally strong vellow had caught him and, as was the custom, he had dropped the net and gone with the current. He had eventually come in more than two miles further up the beach and had had to walk back naked with the wind cutting at him and stinging his body with sand. When he at last arrived his father was standing by the tar barrel watching two men sorting fish from one of the nets, and all he said was: ‘Well, boy, you’ve been a long time.’
So the correct thing, the only thing, to do on this occasion was unhitch the rest of the net, signal to Jud – if he happened to be watching – and go with the current till he felt it releasing him. But he was very fresh, not yet at all cold, and more than a trifle irritated by the obvious concern of such as Paul Daniel that he might have grown soft, living in London. However much he might claim he was in a vellow, there might be one or two who would consider Captain Poldark had gotten a bit short of wind and decided to give up his netting while he could.
So he began to swim against the current and did not release the net. He did not make for the shore but tried to carry out his original design of bringing in the end of the net near to where Paul Daniel would be waiting.
He soon realized that he was making no headway at all. By swimming hard up the beach he was about remaining in the same place. The part of the net he still held was pulling heavily on his shoulder. The waves, in the way they did in such a case, had got up, so that he could not raise his head far enough out of the water to see the figures on the shore. The current wanted to take him out. In fact it was taking him out whether he wanted to go or not. It depended very much on the size of the vellow as to how far he might be carried before he could return; but obstinately he would not drop the net. It seemed to him that if Jud held to his end there must be a limit to the extent of the drift.
After ten minutes or so he began to feel cold. It was nothing but he realized that one felt cold quicker at thirty-eight than at eighteen. He had gradually let out more of the net, so that the weight of what he still carried was really quite small. But it was more than it should be. He was not alarmed. You don’t live so close to the sea so long and in such close contact with it that you ever envisage it as an enemy. Naturally you respect its tantrums but you know how to deal with them. Or think you do.
He lay on his back for a few minutes, admiring the half-moon. As it rose above the sandhills, so it had paled. The half-bitten coin had turned from copper to orange; now it was lemon; in another half hour there would be scarcely any colour. Little lips of waves glinted and glimmered with it. It sprinkled its light on the water, making the shadows dance. He was really rather cold. Demelza was in bed and asleep, so were his two fine children. Nampara drowsed in its comfortable fold of the valley just over the shoulder of the Long Field. Probably from here if you raised your head you would be able to see the chimneys. ‘Sir, Before I proceed to reply to the arguments adduced in support of this motion by the hon. member for Stock-bridge, I beg that the clerk may read the address of this House to his Majesty of the 6th of April, which the hon. gentleman alluded to, but declined reading . . .’ Ross Poldark, Esq., MP. How his father would have laughed. Respectability! My dear Ross! What can you be thinking of? But then his father, after a wild and wanton youth had married a girl he truly loved, and then after a brief married life Grace Poldark had been taken from him, in great grief and in great pain, and Joshua had gone back to his old ways.
But Ross had not lost his wife; and his family and to some extent his mine prospered, so perhaps for him, though respectability was not to be sought, if it came unsought it was not totally to be derided. ‘Mr Speaker, sir, the hon. member for Ilchester has implied that slavery is a condition that Christianity can condone. May I inform the hon. member . . .’
Suddenly he was in calm water. None too soon, for he was beginning to shiver. Very odd; it did not often happen this way, that one came out of a vellow while still struggling against it. Triumphantly, the end of the net still in his possession, he began to swim towards the shore. It was not far but it took him much too long. He ploughed on, the chill striking deeper, until his knee unexpectedly grated on sand. He stood up, feeling the waves breaking past him. He stumbled and almost fell, then got into shallower water and took a firm grip of himself. Must not shiver. As if nothing undue had happened, he made for the two figures waiting for him. He saw that one was Paul Daniel, the other Jim Ellery. They were in peculiar attitudes, crouched as if in great pain from an attack of colic. As he came in they tried to stand up, and Paul, his face a mask of anguish, took the rope from him.
‘Well, sur,’ he said weakly, ‘you sure done a proper job there. Got caught in a vellows, did ee? I suspected so much. But you never let go of the net! So Jud – the vellow was so strong. And he couldn’t untie himself in time . . . He – got – drawn – in! . . .’
Ross stared out at the now friendly sea. Not too far out, but far enough to have to swim, was Jud, hat firmly still on head, pipe in mouth, smoking vigorously with the effort, like some aqueous monster of the deep that breathed fire from its nostrils. Obviously he was still trying to untie the twine from round his waist.
But he was better not to try, for the current then would
bear him out.
Paul Daniel sputtered a couple of times into the moonlit dark: ‘Sur, if we pull gently on this rope, mebbe we shall not draw the fish this time; but presently, if God so will, we shall save Jud Paynter from a watery grave!’
Chapter Nine
I
That they should entertain a large party at Trenwith was George’s idea and not at all Elizabeth’s. One of the most beautiful manor houses in the county, with three or four reception rooms of the most elegant and handsome design, it suffered from an inadequacy of attractive bedrooms. The Tudors were, on the whole, like that. About fifteen bedrooms, apart from the servants’ quarters, offered themselves, but of these the best were occupied by George and Elizabeth, the second best by her parents, and the rest were all so heavily panelled and small-windowed as to be very dark, and some were small and odd-shaped and poky.
It was a house eminently designed for the afternoon party or the splendid dinner occasion, not for guests who stayed the night. Yet its isolation was such that only a small number of local friends could come and leave in a day: others had to be put up and had to make do with what was offered them. Fine for the Tudors, to whom a bed was a bed and what did the rest matter? Not so fine for late Georgians who, two hundred and fifty years after, expected a bit more.
This worried Elizabeth more than George. She was the hostess; on her depended the comfort and the pleasure of the guests; and some of these people she had not even met, being friends of George’s whom he had come to know in London. Four were actually coming from London, an enormous trip at enormous trouble and expense. (Cornish people thought little of going east, Londoners seldom if ever came west.) They were expected to stay several days before moving on elsewhere. Apart from the inadequacy of the bedrooms, there was the inadequacy of the servants.
But George would not have it otherwise or elsewhere. Their Great House in Truro was even more inadequate, and he would not invite his friends to Cardew as she suggested. George, like many men who have risen in the world and aspire to rise further, was a little embarrassed by his parents. At Trenwith the nuisance of Elizabeth’s parents had to be accepted; but they at least stood out instantly recognizable for what they were, like silver spoons against pewter, and could be borne with the better.
There was going to be a big dinner-party on the Thursday. There was to be music from the tiny cramped minstrels’ gallery but no dancing in the hall below, because when Geoffrey de Trenwith finished it in 1509 he had also had built and fixed permanently into the flags of the hall floor one of the longest and most formidable oak dining tables in the world, and, short of digging up the floor and sawing the dining table into small pieces to get it out through the door, there was no way of moving it.
On the Tuesday and the Wednesday the distant guests arrived; on the Thursday the weather was mercifully fine, so in the morning they were able to occupy themselves strolling about the grounds; at around midday the local gentry came. Old Sir John Trevaunance, now approaching his mid-sixties and still a bachelor, with Unwin Trevaunance, the MP for Bodmin who, chronically extravagant and chronically short of money, lived grudgingly off his brother’s doles which were as grudgingly granted. Sir Hugh Bodrugan – fligged up, as he called it – with his young and hard-swearing step-mother, together with their rather raggle-tail nephew Robert, who was also their heir but never sure how much, except for some land and a rotting mansion, he was likely to be heir to. Lord Devoran, Ross’s friend, with his strongly built, stocky-legged niece Betty, who immediately looked round to see if there was any promising-looking man she might sleep with. Dr Choake – very lame these days and only really comfortable on a horse – with his feather-brained lisping wife Polly, who now wore a wig to cover her greying hair and was indulging – so gossips said – in an affaire with her groom.
Sir Christopher Hawkins, cynical, quietly dignified, arrived alone. Gossip rumoured many things of him but proved nothing. John and Ruth Treneglos followed. John was having some sort of trouble with his eyes that made him screw them up and unscrew them as if they were exposed to the sun; Ruth, though still only a little over thirty, was becoming fat – perhaps as a result of the litter of children with which she had presented her husband in the last ten years. Last year, in the fullness of time, Mrs Teague had been gathered to her ancestors, but all Ruth’s four sisters had been invited – all unmarried and all likely to remain so and doomed to live on together in their mother’s house, becoming narrower of outlook and more acid as the years progressed. The Reverend and Mrs Osborne Whitworth were invited, as were Dr and Mrs Enys. Dwight had been very reluctant to accept, and, when Caroline had argued that a refusal from so close a neighbour would give unnecessary offence, had suggested that perhaps they could accept and then he could be called away by the sudden illness of a patient. Caroline said: ‘My dear, I have a husband. Everybody knows it. This is an occasion when you can observe marital attendance on me with practically no effort – except the effort of putting on a new suit of clothes. Besides . . . Unwin will be there.’ So Dwight went.
Of this group the Devorans, the Whitworths and Sir Christopher Hawkins would have to be offered accommodation for the night. The four visitors from London were Mr John Robinson, Mr and Mrs Hanton and Captain Monk Adderley.
Mr Robinson looked seventy or more, and when he arrived the last part of the journey had so upset him that he retired at once to bed and was seen no more until the party was in full swing. He, George explained, had for years been a close associate of Pitt, had helped to arrange and manage the seats at times of elections, had calculated losses and gains and had negotiated with the boroughmongers as to which seats he could be safely promised on Pitt’s behalf. He had played no such part at the last election, having pleaded age to be excused; but he was still a man of influence. What he didn’t know about the internal working of the Commons was hardly worth knowing. A phrase had originated in Westminster that he could arrange an appointment or negotiate a deal ‘before you could say Jack Robinson’. Lately the saying had become current throughout the country. His friendship and advice to a man aspiring in the world of politics was clearly inestimable.
Mr and Mrs Hanton had no connection with Parliament, and Elizabeth estimated that Mr Hanton’s genteel pedigree was about as long as George’s own. But Hanton had built up investments in the East India Company, had himself been back only two years from Bengal, had bought a considerable estate in Surrey and had had banking and industrial interests in the Midlands. Like the Warleggans, Hanton had difficulty in throwing off traces of his ancestry. His being invited to a party of this quality was a subtle piece of flattery which would engage his friendship, a friendship which could be as valuable to George – on a different level – as John Robinson’s.
The fourth guest, Captain Monk Adderley, was the most surprising of the four, for Elizabeth could not at first see advantage to George in the association. Adderley was twenty-eight, very slim and erect, his manner mild and courteous, his reputation formidable. He had served in the army for eight years, chiefly in India and China, where, it was rumoured, he had fought several duels and killed two fellow officers. He had been discharged from the army after suffering a serious head wound in another duel. The ball had carried away part of the skull, and the silver plate put in when he was trepanned was thought by some to have affected his reason – though no one could have supposed it from his perfect social demeanour. For the last few years he had represented the one rotten borough in Shropshire, Bishop’s Castle. He was known in Parliament, on the rare occasions when he paid it a visit, for his strong anti-Catholic and anti-French views.
It was a little startling, when one observed him, to discover that his father was a rich Bristol merchant of no great genteel pretension. Indeed, the only duel it was said Monk had ever refused occurred soon after his twenty-first birthday when his behaviour had so enraged his father that the old man had called him out. Monk had refused to fight on the grounds that his father was not a gentleman.
George Warl
eggan and Monk Adderley? Elizabeth, pursued with the utmost tigrish courtesy by the young man, wondered for a little. George’s value to Monk was not difficult to see, for the young MP was known to be deep in debt. The other value appeared as the days progressed. Whatever his origin, Adderley had been completely accepted by Society. He had adopted the aristocratic attitude and gone one better. He drank, he gambled, he womanized, all in the most exquisite taste. He belonged to the best clubs and was remarked as a figure everywhere. What better friend could George have if he intended to return to London?
Perhaps too there was an attraction of opposites. Adderley had the sort of glamour that George could at once admire and despise: the military bearing, the effeminate dress, the drawling voice, the careless contempt of money, the frivolous conversation, all wedded to such a ferocious reputation.
Dinner began at three and went on till six. In spite of wartime scarcities and appeals for the patriotic conservation of food, nothing had been spared today. They dined and wined at Geoffrey de Trenwith’s great table, and when the ladies retired the men sat on drinking their port and talking and arguing and laughing together. The music was playing from the gallery, but discreetly, so that it should not make conversation difficult. At eight tea was served, and many of the men retired to the winter parlour to play quadrille or whist or whatever else took their fancy. The ladies took a stroll in the gardens and admired the ornamental lake, from which the last raucous toad had long since been banished. Geoffrey Charles, in his best suit, lounged along with Dwight Enys, who had never had any taste for cards and was talking to the only person in the household in whom he took a personal interest – though put off a trifle tonight by Geoffrey Charles’s deliberately bawdy conversation.
As darkness fell the chatting groups began to move indoors. Dozens of candles were lit, and trembling light fell from the high mullioned windows across lawn and shrub and lake; the music rose and some people essayed to dance in the hall in spite of the table. Having seen her mother and father safely to bed – another responsibility – Elizabeth skimmed down the stairs, conscious that the crisis of the day was past. There was, no doubt, chaos in the kitchens, but it was all hidden away. Supper at eleven would be a light meal: cold boiled fowls, some bacon, a tongue, a cold leg of mutton roasted, mince pies and syllabubs with canary and other light wines, so that should not be a trouble. Just as everyone else was coming in she chose to go out, to have a little peace and quiet on her own.