The Angry Tide

  Beth clearly expected him to open it in front of her and if possible give her some idea of the contents, for letters to people in their station of life were a rarity. So she stood there chatting, sometimes about the mine and sometimes about the victory, and occasionally her eye would stray unbidden to the letter in his hand. But he did not, could not, break the seal while she was there, and at length he took a step or two and put it down on the rough mantelpiece that Beth’s brother-in-law had once made when he had built this cottage for his faithless moonflower wife. Then he turned and smiled at Beth, his sad attractive smile, so she knew she would receive no satisfaction and was presently edged towards the door, praising him for his work today and saying it was likely Paul owed his life to him (which was not true, for Paul had been on the north lode), and so left.

  He stood at the door and saw her trudge back to her cottage at Mellin, just over the fold of the land; then he went in and picked up the letter. He felt he could not yet open it. He felt he must pray first. But pray for what? Not his own happiness; not even Emma’s. He could only pray for her soul, and that he had done every night since she left. Could he add more now, any special or different plea?

  He knelt at the foot of his bed for a few moments, saying, nothing, thinking nothing, then rose and broke the seal.

  Deer Sam, (it said)

  I am no writter as you well do knaw so I ave asked my good freind Mary to writ this for me.

  Sam deer Sam deer Sam I ave asked my good freind Mary, to say that to ee for I do meen it most truely. But Sam I be gwan to wed the secund footman. He is a kynd man ten year olderer than me but jolly an kynd an thortful of me and I blave he do truely love me. He be not a wyld man like Tom nor yet a good man like you but he have good ways an quiet ways and do wark onest and true an ard an I do like he and enjoy his company.

  Mary say I give er some awful ard wurds to spell but she arnt at the end of un yet for Sam I do want ee to knaw that if twer just so simpel as it did oughter be then you an me wud be wed an no other. But tedden so an never could be so for you be a man of God an I be no more an a jolly gurl. Sam tes worser an that. Yourm such a good man that you dont knaw the wurld so well as me. Ef I wed you an come to chappel along of you the folks wud look athurt an point an say lookee at that thur brazzen ussie who do she think she be wed to our Sam our preecher. Her what weve all seen in Sallys kiddley adrinkin wi the best an walkin arm in arm wi alf the fellers an who do knaw whats gone on in the mowhay. That we all do knaw an twas mercy she never forceput. And she wed to our Sam our preecher it edn’t fitty nor proper nor never shal be an if Sam do think different he be mazed or not so holy as he pertend.

  Sam deer Sam deer Sam I watch my good freind Mary writ it fur me an she say no more she will writ no more but I give er a shillun for writtin this so she must do some more lines wether or no. Ef ee do think defferent ef ee do say the Bible do say defferent that bad wemen be redeamed that be true of Bible days but not so naow. I’m not bad an you do knaw I be not nigh so bad a woman as many in the Bible but is reppertation that do count on your folk your prayin folk you may think they be as kynd as you but that they wud never be. They wud not tak me in as you wud tak me in an you wud be afightin them for me. Then deer Sam what ef I went an took a drink in Sallys kiddley an you did not knaw an one of your prayin folk come up an telled ee. Twould never do not in this wurld.

  So good by my deer. I be some sad talkin this letter to my good freind Mary an the tears be on my face an on my ands fur tis sad to say good by to your best love. But Ned Artnel do love me truely an I surely like im an thas the way it must be. Wed sum good woman thurs many about an forgit me. Nay never forgit me fur Ill never forgit you but thur cud be no appiness in our wedden together an one day deer eart you will knaw I do speak God’s truth.

  Your ever loving

  Emma. XXXXXXX.

  After he had finished it he read it carefully through again. Then he folded it away and put it back on the mantelshelf and went to the door and stared out over the scene. Brown mellow stubble of harvested fields folding upon each other and merging into the scrubland that led to Hendrawna Beach. And England had won a great victory. The only other houses in sight were the empty Gatehouse up on the hill and a chimney or two of Mingoose House showing above the windswept trees. The sky was clear. The sea was at peace. Smoke from a Mellin cottage chimney drifted across the sky. A cow was roaring in a dip in the valley. And England had won a great victory.

  Then the scene was no longer clear and he began to blub through his hands. He cried noisily, like a boy, hurt and in pain. For a while he could not stop, gulping and jerking, and then he fetched up some of the foul water and the tea he had drunk.

  After that he cried more quietly for a while and then took a rag from his pocket and tried to dry his eyes, his nose, his mouth. The water still kept oozing out of his eyes. He had never felt so much alone.

  He went into the cottage and poured some more water on to the tealeaves, but it was half cold.

  He said: ‘The Lord is my strength and my Redeemer. Blessed is the name of the Lord.’

  He sat down and began to say out loud many of the great passages from the Prayer Book that he had learned by heart. ‘O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom. Defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies . . .’

  It helped. Soon it would take over again. Soon. The heartbreaks of this temporal life were as nothing compared to the joys of the everlasting grave to come. Soon.

  But this was a double heartbreak for Sam. He had wanted Emma for himself to have and to hold in sickness and in health so long as they both should live. But also he had wanted her as a soul won for God – hers was the most precious soul of all to him. Had he been able to bring her to God and to wed her, then his cup would have been full. Now it was empty. And just for a while the eternal spirit of salvation ran low in him. It came to him to think that perhaps he should not have struggled and swum so hard this afternoon.

  It was blasphemy and sacrilege to think so; he knew that. Perhaps he was among the worst of sinners even to have allowed the thought to settle for a moment. Evil thoughts were like evil birds: one could not prohibit their existence, one could only prevent them from settling in one’s mind. With a cold heart he took up his Bible, drew a chair to his home-made desk and began to read. When it grew dark he lit a candle and continued. He read right through the Gospel of St John and then went on to some of the epistles.

  Thus Ena Daniel found him – Beth’s sister-in-law and one of the most faithful of his flock. Excuse her, she said, but they were all over to the Meeting House and had been waiting a fair while. They all knew he must be feeling some slight after the terrible, terrible time of this afternoon, and, though they didn’t like to start without him, Jack Scawen would be glad to try and read for him if so be as they might borrow the Bible.

  She was quite startled at the empty look Sam gave her – as if something had been washed away from him for ever in the flooded mine – but after a few moments he passed his hand across his eyes and made an effort to smile his old smile.

  ‘Why, no, Ena. I’m fine and well now. Just – a little sore, as ye might say. Just a little sore. Wait till I change my shirt and I’ll come.’

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter One

  I

  Ross did not go back to London that year. The disaster at the mine occupied him for the better part of two months. He wrote a letter to Lord Falmouth explaining.

  Demelza, always looking for the bright side, said it could have been so much worse; and, for once, Ross had to agree with her. Two lives lost – that was the tragedy; but miners were constantly in danger. Three had been killed at Wheal Kitty last year – all in trifling accidents. One or two a year had been a natural wastage when Grambler was working. The miracle here was that a major disaster had killed so few.

  There had been some miraculous escapes. Micky Green had been on his
own in the 50 level and had heard the water coming – it had sounded, he said, like the burst of a boiler. He had run to a hummock of rising ground and climbed to a crosspiece of timber and clung there for two hours with the water surging and boiling round him. Then as the worst began to subside he had lowered himself, and cautiously, still waist deep, made for the nearest shaft. One of the Carters, a boy of thirteen, had hung back behind Sam because he was unable to swim, and when they were gone he had made his way up the ladder – from which Sparrock had recently been swept to his death – and had somehow avoided the worst of the falling debris and came to the surface bruised all over and as grey as a rat.

  Chief honour for the minimal loss of life fell on Sam Carne, but he was a difficult man to thank. He did not drink. He did not favour a party at which, inevitably, everyone else would get drunk. He shrugged off, smilingly, words of appreciation and usually tried to turn the conversation to the prospects of Another Life than this. He seemed sometimes even a little sadder about it all than he had any overt reason to be, and it took Demelza a while to discover the truth. Then she said: ‘Oh, Sam . . . Oh, Sam. I’m that sorry. Oh, Sam, I feel it is part my fault.’

  ‘No, no, sister, tes far from that. You did what you b’lieved to be best. And mebbe twas for the best. The eternal Jehovah have thought fit to put this temporal burden upon me and I must thank Him for the privilege of His mercy and forgiveness. If I have sinned, then I must seek to be cleansed. If dear Emma have sinned then I do truly believe that in the goodness of time her spirit too will be cleansed and she will come to a new life in the spirit of Christ.’

  It was hard at times to feel total sympathy for a young man who embellished his personal feelings with the language of revivalism, but Demelza, who knew her brother fairly well, perceived that under his genuine, burning religious faith he was suffering just as acutely as any man who sees the girl he dearly loves lost to him for ever. And sometimes, she saw, in the dark of the night he would wake and know – the earthy carnal side of him would know – that but for his religion he could have married her last year. Even maintaining his religion at a slightly less personal and intense level, he could still have married her. Demelza thought, too, that they would have been good for each other; Sam toning down Emma’s vulgar high spirits, Emma charming and teasing Sam into a more homely approach to his faith.

  But it was not to be; and Demelza felt unhappy for her part in it. Now Sam, hero of the whole community, found himself joyless, and it was a joylessness which for a while at least would affect his attitude to God and his flock.

  Work soon began again in the 40-fathom level of Wheal Grace, and much later in the 50-fathom, but it was work of repair without ore being raised. The great flood had broken the pumping rods, and this was the first and most essential repair. Then in many places in the 50 level soft ore-bearing ground, which did not look likely to yield rich results, had been set aside in substantial piles while the better lodes were pursued; it was intended to be taken up whenever there was more time and less good work ahead. But the torrent of water had spread this around, along with whatever attle had been left, so that it had been sucked out of the caverns and blocked the tunnels. Men going down as the water was laboriously pumped out had found themselves knee-deep in mud and unable to get through to the paying lodes until the mud and the rock had been dug out and wheeled back to the kibbal buckets and hauled to the surface.

  The water had brought down falls of rock, and in places the timber supports had collapsed, making the roofs and sides dangerous. In an old book on mining Ross had read that ‘after fyre water be ye element most penetrating and destructive.’ So he found it. Since any normal method of payment was invalid while the mine was in such a state, he introduced the old Whip system, whereby the number of kibbals of mixed ore, attle, mud and stones that were brought to the surface each day were counted and a payment made per kibbal, divided equally among every person working at the mine.

  At first they had wondered whether the present fire-engine would be able to cope with the vast amount of additional water. The 40-fathom level had soon cleared, but it was almost two weeks after the pump rods had been repaired that one saw a lowering of the water further down. Then it was inch by inch, day by day, and always the fear that autumnal rains would check the gain.

  November came in wild and wet, but in the main the rain was fine stuff driven this way and that by the gales. At times the wind was so thunderous that it drowned the roar of the sea. There had not been many substantial wrecks on Hendrawna recently, but two came ashore in the middle of the month: a small schooner outward bound from Truro to Dublin, carrying serges and carpets and paper, and a larger brig, with coal out of Swansea.

  The schooner drifted in stern first and broke up below Wheal Leisure: the crew of four were saved, but the contents of the vessel vanished like magic in the wild wind and the rain. Ross, once he knew the crew was safe, discreetly kept his house; he wanted no repetition of the charges of 1790. The brig came ashore far up the beach, almost under the Dark Cliffs where no one lived at all, and seven of the nine crew were drowned. This wreck too was of value to the district, and few poor people went short of coal that winter. For the next month and more the tawny sands of Hendrawna were black-edged like a mourning card.

  Towards the end of November Jeremy caught a cold, which developed into a cough, as usual, and he ran a fever. For the offspring of such healthy stock on both sides, he had a surprisingly weak chest. There was consumption enough in the villages, not only among forty-year-old miners, whose complaint was a natural consequence of the conditions in which they worked, but among the young, and there were special families where one after another of a handsome brood would cough and sicken and die. Sometimes a whole family of five children would be wiped out in five years, leaving behind two healthy parents without issue. Sometimes five or six out of eight would go. And this would be among children who had survived the perils of childhood and were just entering their teens. It ran in families, inexplicably, with the next-door house or cottage immune.

  But Jeremy, who had been warm and cared for and never gone short in his life, was a chesty subject and therefore suspect. Demelza mentioned this to Dwight, who reassured her that he could detect no symptoms of phthisis.

  On the afternoon of the 28th she came downstairs after sitting with Jeremy for an hour, and found Ross had returned in her absence. He was reading a book, standing over it by the window where the light was best. Even now they scarcely used the new library except on special occasions. She saw the book was Mineralogia Cornubiensis, published twenty years before by a surgeon from Redruth, one William Pryce, and the pages of it were as often thumbed by Ross as the Bible’s were by Sam.

  She went to peer out at the other window. This afternoon the clouds matched the colour of the beach: sagging bags of coal moving over the valley with the swiftness of the turning world. The lilac tree beside the window bent and quivered; her garden looked derelict; the unknown plant left her by Hugh Armitage flattened its big green leaves against the library wall.

  He said: ‘Another month should see us working the 50 level again. It will have meant about three months’ loss of output – that is all – if you count it just as profit and loss.’

  ‘No one does that, Ross.’

  ‘I wonder sometimes. Listen to this: this is what Pryce says: “In some places, especially where a new adit is brought home to an old mine which has not been wrought in the memory of man, they have holed unexpectedly to the house of water before they thought themselves near to it, and have instantly perished. Great precaution must therefore be taken, and a hole should be bored with an iron rod to the distance of a fathom or two so that before breaking the ground with a pickaxe they may have timely notice of the bursting forth of the water. This advice however may not be relished by those who are impatient to be rich and value a little money more than the lives of their fellow creatures.”’

  ‘What is that saying? When the damage is done everyone is wise?’
/>
  ‘Presumably I was impatient to be rich and valued a little money more than the lives of my fellow creatures.’

  Demelza pushed her hair back impatiently. ‘You know that to be untrue, so why say it? Money was never the important thing in your mind. Not like the time when the mine fell in – then we were living from hand to mouth, and maybe a risk was something we had to take. So you could reproach yourself then. Not now.’

  Ross closed the book. ‘All the same, what Pryce says makes uncomfortable reading.’

  ‘Then don’t read it.’

  Ross half smiled: ‘The more I hear of your reasoning, the more specious it sounds.’

  ‘I don’t know what specious means,’ Demelza said, picking at a small cut in her thumb.

  ‘Well – nor I, to be exact. Plausible but devoid of inner truth – that’s as near as I can get.’

  ‘That’s near enough. Well, your specious wife thinks tis time you stopped plaguing your conscience with specious arguments as to why you are to blame for the errors of the whole precious world!’

  ‘You’ll make it sound like a swear word soon.’

  ‘That’s what it is,’ said Demelza.

  Ross laughed and picked up the book. ‘I’ll take this back where it belongs. And my uneasy conscience too.’ He peered out through the same window as Demelza. ‘God, look at those clouds.’

  She said: ‘Did you go into the Maiden workings yesterday?’

  ‘Yes. They’re dry enough, for all the water has drained into Grace. They’re dry, that is, except for the stinking mud. But the air’s so bad we could hardly venture any distance. All the mud and attle tipped down the shafts, instead of preventing water accumulating, imprisoned it; and there’s no air from the shafts at all.’