There were no gamekeepers about. He dismounted and knocked on the door. It was opened almost immediately by a manservant he did not know.
‘Are you the – oh . . . ’
Ross said: ‘I came to inquire about Mrs Warleggan. Is Mr Warleggan in?’
‘Mrs Warleggan . . . Well
‘My name is Poldark.’
‘Oh . . .’ The man seemed frozen.
‘What is it?’ said a voice behind. It was George.
His face was in the shadow but his voice was at its coldest.
Ross said: ‘I come in peace, George. I come simply to inquire after Elizabeth. I trust she’s better.’
There were noises inside the house but it was difficult to identify them.
George said: ‘Turn this man away.’
‘I came to ask how she was,’ Ross said. ‘That is all. I think at times of sickness one should be able to set aside old feuds – even the bitterest of feuds.’
George said: ‘Turn this man away.’
The door was shutting. Ross put his foot in it and his good shoulder against it and shoved. The manservant staggered back and collided with a table. Ross went in. There was only a single candle guttering in the great hall. It looked like a wobbling yellow eye in the iron-grey daylight.
Ross shut the door behind him. ‘For God’s sake, George! Have we to be so petty as to quarrel like mangy dogs at a time of sickness? Tell me she is better. Tell me she is about the same. Tell me what the doctors say, and I will go! And go gladly! I have no business here but that of a longstanding relationship – with this house, and those in it. I am related by marriage to Elizabeth, and wish her only well . . .’
George said: ‘God damn you, and your family, and your blood to all eternity.’ He choked and stopped as if he was ill himself.
Ross waited but no more came. The manservant had recovered himself and was re-arranging the table he had upset.
Ross said: ‘I will not go till I know how she is.’
‘Elizabeth?’ said George. ‘Oh, Elizabeth? . . . Elizabeth is dead.’
III
In the silence that followed, the manservant slid away silently and was gone from the hall.
The hall itself was like a church, echoing and cold; sickly light from the multi-paned window falling upon the great table, the empty hearth; and the one candle burning.
Ross said: ‘It . . . you can’t . . .’ He took a breath. ‘She can’t . . .’
‘Two hours ago,’ said George in a detached voice; ‘she died holding my hand. Is that any pleasure to you?’
Ross recognized now the sound he had heard earlier. It was someone crying, a woman, almost a wail, like a Celtic keening. No one would have recognized Mrs Chynoweth, whose voice for some years had been muffled and halting.
‘Elizabeth is . . . I can’t – believe . . . George, this is not some . . .’
‘Some jest?’ said George. ‘Oh, yes, I jest from time to time, but not on such a trivial subject as the loss of a wife.’
Ross stood as if his limbs were unable to make any concerted movement. He licked his lips and stared at the other man.
‘Go on, you scum!’ George shouted. ‘Go up and see her! See what we have brought her to!’
A man came out of the winter parlour. At another time Ross would have recognized him as Dr Behenna.
‘Mr Warleggan, I beg of you not to upset yourself further. No more could have been done, and there is nothing to do now—’
George turned. ‘I have Captain Poldark here. Captain Poldark, MP. He doubts my word that my wife – whom he long coveted – is dead. He thinks I am jesting. I have invited him to go up and see.’
‘Mr Warleggan, if I might suggest—’
‘Where is she?’
George looked at Ross. ‘In the pink bedroom overlooking the courtyard. You must know your way about this house, since you have always felt it belonged to you. Go up and see her for yourself. There is no one with her. No one will stay with her.’
‘Captain Poldark—’ Behenna began, but Ross was already making for the stairs.
He went up them, stumbling here and there. It was dark in the interior of the house, and another solitary candle burned at the end of the long passage. Past Verity’s old bedroom, past Francis’s bedroom, past Aunt Agatha’s bedroom. Shadows barred his way. He stumbled against an ancient tallboy. The floors creaked under his tread. Past the bedroom where he and Demelza had once slept and made love. Up five steps. Those five steps that Elizabeth had fallen down before the birth of Valentine.
He came to the door. He could not bring himself to open it. It was the room in which he had come to see Elizabeth seven years ago – a meeting from which so much mischief had sprung. Suddenly as a non-believer and non-Catholic he wanted to cross himself.
He opened the door, and the stench hit him like a wall.
The bed was there, and Elizabeth was on it, and two candles burned. The fire still flickered in the grate.
The curtains were drawn but a window was slightly open. The only movement in the room was a stirring of the pink curtain in the evening breeze. On the table by the bed were an hour-glass, a bowl, a tall painted feeding bottle, two lemons. On the dressing-table was Elizabeth’s necklace of garnets, a glass containing three leeches, a pair of scissors and a bottle of water and a spoon. Before the fire were her slippers, and a kettle hissed faintly on the hob.
He hung on to the handle of the door and retched. She did not move to greet him.
He retched again and again, and pulled a handkerchief and put it to his nose and mouth. He stared at his first love. The candles dipped in the draught of the open door.
He walked slowly to the bed. Death had removed all the lines of pain and fatigue and fever. Except that her skin was yellow. Her hair, unbrushed but curiously tidy, still framed that pale patrician face. Robbed of expression, her face in repose retained the old sweet beauty so many men had admired. You could have supposed that at any moment her eyelids would flicker open and her lips would curve into a welcoming smile. Except that her skin was yellow.
And under the sheet, and barely contained by it, lay all the horrors of corruption, mortification and decay. It was creeping up by every minute that she lay there. How far had it already reached? She had decayed while still alive, so that burial was already days overdue.
He swallowed back vomit, and took the handkerchief from his mouth and kissed her. Her lips were like soft cold stale putty.
Handkerchief back, he heaved his heart out against it and almost fell. The room swung as he caught at a chair. He turned and fled. The bang of the door behind him sounded hollow; the door of a sepulchre. A sepulchre that needed sealing off from all that was still alive.
He reeled along the passage and down the stairs without looking at George, who stood there watching him. He went out of the house and found his horse, and leaned his head against the horse’s neck, unable to mount.
IV
George said: ‘Tell me the sum I am in your debt and I will pay you.’
‘In due course. I’ll attend to it in due course.’
‘Let me know when you want your horse brought from the stables.’
‘As it is again night,’ Dr Behenna said stiffly, ‘I should prefer to sleep here. Also, I think it advisable to look at the baby once more before I go.’
‘She’s not unwell?’
‘Not at all. But I am not sure if the wet nurse is not a thought clumsy. These country girls . . .’
‘She was the best to be found at such short notice.’
‘Oh, quite. I’ve given Mrs Chynoweth a strong opiate, and she should sleep sound now. The women are upstairs now?’
‘The women are upstairs.’
‘I think the casque should be closed as quick as possible.’
‘I’m sure they will feel the same.’
Somewhere in a nearby room Valentine was arguing with his nurse. He did not yet know anything except that Mama was unwell.
George went prowli
ng round the cold shadowy silent house. This thing that had happened to him was contrary to all his previous experiences of life. In forty years he had suffered few set-backs, and they had all been man-made and capable of reversal. Most of them had been reversed in the fullness of time. One accepted a rebuff, a defeat, and then carefully gauged the size and quality of the defeat and set one’s mind to arranging future events in such a way as to overcome or circumvent it. Of course from time to time he and his parents had had minor or more than minor ailments, and one accepted that in due course one would grow old and die. But in forty years he had not lost anybody – certainly nobody important.
This total defeat was something he found difficult – impossible – to accept. From the age of twenty Elizabeth had been his goal – for long quite out of reach, beyond all possibility of attainment. But he had attained her, against all probability, against all the odds. This had been his greatest triumph. Since then, though he had allowed suspicion and jealousy to rage in him and impair his life with her, it had been rage against his own, it had been bitter anger within a circumscribed area of personal possession. So when on the rare occasions jealousy had broken into bitter quarrel, he had been prepared to back down at the last under her threat to leave him. He might be miserable with her, and fiercely intent on making her life miserable too; but there had never been any question in his mind that he was ever going to be without her.
For she was the person he had been working for – to please, to offend, to observe, to criticize, to consult, even to insult, to show off to others, to buy things for, above all to impress. There was nobody else. And now, and now when Aunt Agatha’s spleen had just lost its venom, when the poison barb had at last been withdrawn and they could live in a greater amity together, when they had a daughter to add to their son, when life could really begin anew, when – especially – he was on the point of achieving that ultimate pinnacle of distinction, a knighthood, he, George Warleggan, the blacksmith’s grandson – a knighthood – Sir George . . . Sir George and Lady Warleggan . . . coming into a reception . . . everyone would look – one of the wealthiest men in Cornwall and one of the most influential, member of Parliament, owner of a parliamentary borough, and a knight; and on his arm the fair-haired gracious aristocratic Elizabeth: Lady Warleggan . . . and at this stage she had been snatched away.
It was not bearable. He stared around him at the room he found himself in – it was a guest room and he did not know why he had come in here. It was next to Agatha’s old room, and he quickly went out and entered hers. She had cursed him, she had cursed him! – all this time her curse had lain on him, and now, when he had been about to cast it off, she had cursed him afresh, and his life was laid waste.
Most of the furniture was unchanged from when she had died – this was the bed she had died on. He kicked violently at the dressing-table, splintering one of the legs. Then he pushed it over and it fell with a crash, smashing the glass and scattering toiletries about the floor. He wrenched open the door of the wardrobe and tugged at it. Slowly it toppled and fell with a resounding thud, bringing over a chair and breaking a wooden table in its fall. The candle he had brought in lurched on its shelf and nearly fell too.
This was a cursed house, and he would willingly have burned it down – the candle to the curtain and to the corner of the bedspread – there was plenty of ancient timber which would soon ignite: a fitting pyre for Elizabeth and all the cursed and twice-damned Poldarks who had ever lived here.
But in spite of his insensate anger it was not in him, not in his nature to destroy property, especially property which more than ever now was by rights his. He stared around the room, his hands still trembling with passion, and tore off the walls two pictures which had belonged to Agatha, dashed them to the floor. He thought tomorrow night – or perhaps even tonight – he would go to Sawle Church and desecrate her grave – have two men smash the headstone, dig up the rotten powdered corpse and throw it around and throw it around for the crows to pick. Anything, anything, to revenge himself for this un-revengeable injury he had suffered.
He tremblingly took up the candle again and went out of the room, dripping tallow on his fingers and all over the floor. He stood outside, unable to contain his anger yet unable to find a subject on which to vent it. He would have gone in again to see Elizabeth, but knew it was better to wait until the two women had finished laying her out and the room had been heavily scattered with chloride of lime. He did not know whether he could bear to go in even then.
She had left him. She had left him. He couldn’t believe it.
He could not tolerate the thought of returning to the rooms downstairs where he might encounter that inept quack, or, worse, Elizabeth’s doddering, feeble-faced father. If he saw him he would cry: why are you alive? What good are you to me? Why don’t you and your miserable wife die too?
A girl had come out of a door and was staring at him. It was Polly Odgers.
‘Beg pardon, sir. I didn’t rightly know if anything was wrong . . . I mean more wrong. I heard those noises – crashes and the like. I didn’t rightly know what they were.’
‘Nothing,’ he said between his teeth. ‘It is nothing.’
‘Oh . . . Thank you, sir. Excuse me.’ She prepared to withdraw.
‘Did it wake the child?’
‘Oh, no, sir; she’s a proper little sleeper. And hungry with it! She’s grown, I believe she’s grown in just four days!’
He followed her into the room. Mrs Simons, the young wet nurse, bobbed him a curtsey as he came in.
He stared down at the child. Ursula Warleggan. But Elizabeth had left him. This was all that was left. She had left him Ursula.
He stayed motionless for a long time, and the two young women watched him, careful not to disturb his thoughts.
He had held her hand while she was dying. When Behenna said there was no more hope, he had come into the loathsome, nauseous room and sat down beside her and held her hand. One hand was badly swollen but the other as pale and slim as ever. He had thought her unconscious, but her fingers had moved in his. It was her left hand, and his ring was on it, his ring proclaiming his pride and his capture, which he had put on her finger in St Mary’s Church, Truro, less than seven years ago. With what pride and triumph. And now it had come to this.
Once towards the end she had come round and tried to smile at him, through her parched and discoloured lips. Then the smile had disappeared and a look of dread had come over her face. ‘George,’ she had whispered. ‘It’s going dark! I’m afraid of the dark.’ He had held her hand more tightly as if with his firm grip he could keep her in this world, hold her against the drag of all the horrors that drew her to the grave.
He thought of all this, standing staring down at the child which was all Elizabeth had left him. He was no philosopher and no seer, but had he been both he might have wondered at the fact that his fair-haired, frailly beautiful wife had now borne three children and that none of them would come to resemble her at all. Though Elizabeth had been constitutionally strong enough, perhaps some exhaustion in the ancient Chynoweth strain was to be the cause of this virtual obliteration of her personal appearance in any of her children, and the dominance of the three fathers. Geoffrey Charles was already like Francis. Valentine would grow ever more like the man who had just left the house. And little Ursula would become sturdy and strong and thick-necked and as determined as a blacksmith.
The child stirred in her sleep; still so tiny; still so frail. ‘Look after the children,’ Elizabeth had whispered. Very well, very well: he would do that; but what was the use of that? It was his wife he wanted: the person you did things for, the cornerstone. All his labour, all his scheming, all his organizing and amassing and negotiating and achieving . . . without her it was all in vain. He could have kicked this cot over like the furniture in Agatha’s room; turned it upside down with its frail contents, as his life had been overset, killed, made empty by a solitary stroke of malignant fate. He blamed fate, never knowing that he should
have blamed himself.
Polly Odgers leaned forward and pulled a corner of the blanket further from the child’s mouth. ‘Dear of’n,’ she said.
‘Ursula,’ George muttered. ‘The little she-bear.’
‘Please?’
‘Nothing,’ said George.
And for the first time he had to take a handkerchief to wipe his eyes.
Chapter Sixteen
I
Ross walked home beside his horse. Shock and horror had made his limbs so weak that to go home slowly step by step with Sheridan beside him was more instinct than choice.
He walked through Grambler village and past Sawle Church out on to the moorland. A wind was soughing over the land.
This was the most familiar way in the world to him; he had run from one house to the other in childhood and in boyhood; he had ridden this way and walked this way more times than he could estimate. But it was Sheridan who knew the path tonight.
One or two people passed and called good night. It was a Cornish custom, not always mere friendliness but often curiosity to identify the other in the dark. Tonight he did not reply. The horror was on him. As a soldier he had seen enough, but this was different. That she should have decayed like that while still looking so beautiful was something he would never be able to rid himself of. This was what love came to. This was what beauty came to. The worm. God in Christ!
He shuddered and spat. The sickness lay in his stomach like the gangrene she had died of.
He came up to the Meeting House beside Wheal Maiden. There was a light in it. Probably Sam. Perhaps a few faithful members of the class praying or listening to him read. Perhaps he should go in, kneel in a corner, ask for guidance and pray for humility. That was what all men lacked. Humility and perspective. But the latter was dangerous. With perspective one could always perceive the end.
Something moved. ‘Is it you, Ross?’
‘Demelza,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I thought to come this far – just to watch for you . . . Why are you walking?’