‘Of course you have worked hard—’
‘Tried to be a good wife and a good mother.’
‘And been both in a wonderful way.’
‘But meeting Conan – my other child – like that, and seeing him so like Ossie, was like having all the injuries done again. Like having delicate bones re-broken—’
‘It was a bitter thing to happen!’
‘But these last few days – since then – I have been asking myself if it was not a sort of favour.’
‘Favour, by the Lord! Favour!’
‘Sort of. Because really, all these years, Ossie has been a nightmare, something I have run away from. Often really a nightmare, something I’ve wakened up from in terrible distress—’
‘I know, m’dear.’
‘ – thinking he was there beside me, feeling his terrible presence, breathing, grunting, pawing. Oh, the relief to wake, to discover it was not so!’
‘Why recollect it all?’
‘And not only in the night. There have been days when when everything was physically repugnant to me, when merely contact with another human being has seemed intolerable, because his flesh was there, in the contact, turning the good into the bad, the clean into the vile . . .’
‘Yes, I truly understand.’
‘This awful encounter with Conan brought it all up again, as freshly cut as a new piece of meat, the blood oozing . . .’
‘Morwenna—’
‘But since it happened, since it has happened I have tried to – to face up to it as I have never tried before. I have kept saying to myself, Ossie is dead, Ossie is dead, Ossie is dead. Over and over and over – Ossie has been dead for fourteen years. He cannot hurt me. He just cannot. Nor can his son hurt me. This is a challenge to my mind. I can only hurt myself!’
‘Yes, I suppose. But—’
‘It is to my mind that the injury has been done. Isn’t it? So in meeting Conan and in fainting and in the first horrors of coming round, and in all that followed I am really only hurting myself. Am I not? But if I hurt myself in this way I also hurt you and Loveday. Therefore, is my love for you and her stronger or weaker than this thing, this fear in my mind? If it is weaker then I am a weakling indeed. If it is stronger then I must not allow such a thing to happen ever again. I must not close my mind to memory, for that way it builds up and becomes unmanageable—’
‘Do not agitate yourself, m’love—’
‘I am not agitating myself!’ said Morwenna, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I am trying to learn to be strong. It is time, for God’s sake, that I was strong! If I meet Conan again – for that cannot be unlikely wherever we live – I shall hold tight to your hand and stare him out. And whether you are there, actually there, or not, I shall be holding tight to your hand. And after he has gone I shall go into a corner and be sick at having seen his face again. But I shall not hide from it! I shall not hide from him – or allow him to do us hurt – any more!’
She was gripping his hand so hard that her nails were digging into his skin.
‘There, there, my dear,’ he said quietly. ‘I see just what you d’mean.’
‘Do you, Drake? I wonder. But does it matter, only so long as I keep to my resolve? I think, I hope, I believe I can keep to my resolve.’
He held her for a while, neither of them speaking. A thin worm of steam began to come from the spout of the kettle. Her harsh grip relaxed, became no more than warm and confiding.
Presently in the distance they heard a whistle. It was Loveday with the milk.
Morwenna sighed and said: ‘It is not polite for a young lady to whistle. I think we shall have to mention it to her, Drake.’
‘She’s happy,’ said Drake. ‘Does anything else matter?’
Morwenna took off her glasses and hastily wiped her eyes dry. Then she put some spoonfuls of tea into the pot.
Chapter Seventeen
I
Letter from Jeremy Poldark to Dr Goldsworthy Gurney, dated 18 October, 1813.
Dear Gurney,
I am writing to tell you that I have decided not to proceed with our collaboration on the steam road carriage – at least not for the present. Let me say right away that this is not for any personal reason which involves you. I have not taken this decision because of any feeling that we could not work together, fund the building of the machine together and launch it together. On the contrary.
Unhappily, for reasons that I prefer not to explain, my life in Cornwall is no longer acceptable to me. I must explain I have been struggling with this situation for much more than a year – so it all existed long before we met – and your interest helped to revive a prepossession with steam that I had almost abandoned. But the prepossession, I have now come to realize, is not quite enough to drive out this other prepossession, and for the time being I have to go away.
So – do not laugh! – I am joining the Army. With my cousin’s, Major Geoffrey Charles Poldark’s, somewhat reluctant cooperation, I have been to Plymouth and obtained for myself a commission in the 52nd Oxfordshires; and I leave to join them next week.
It will be a new experience, at least, and I trust I shall feel less squeamish about killing a Frenchie than I generally do about a mouse!
In the meantime, of course, please make all use you care to of any of the sketches and plans I left with you. There are a few more I still have at home if you should need them. What remains of my machine at Hayle is also yours for experimentation, if you choose to use it.
As I said to you when last we met, I am not convinced by your arguments that a machine needs struts or legs to propel it first into motion; and I urge you to consider further the problems of adhesion before you launch upon the construction of the vehicle. I know some modern scientific opinion is on your side; but if a machine may start on rails without extra propulsion I cannot believe it may not be persuaded to start on the much more uneven surface of a road. I would rather consider the use of grit or gravel which could be contained in canisters and shed in front of the driving wheels when the occasion needed.
This is the last letter you will be receiving from me for some time, but if you wish to answer it, or in due course have new information to impart, pray direct your letter to me at Nampara, and my parents will see it is forwarded on.
I trust that, contrary to your fears, Dr Avery will come well and thus leave you more time to devote to your many stimulating experiments.
Ever yours most sincerely,
Jeremy Poldark.
II
The night before he left he walked up to Wheal Leisure. By a wry coincidence there had been trouble with the engine last week. For eighteen months since the engine began to run it had been almost trouble-free – a testimony to Jeremy’s design and Harvey & Co.’s manufacture. They had occasionally stopped it for ten minutes to make some adjustment or minor repair – ten minutes being about the maximum a good engine would stand without the necessity of blowing afresh – but most of the ordinary maintenance could be done while the pump was in motion. However, last week the other Curnow, Dan, had come to the house and reported that he was not happy with the engine: the stroke, he thought, was erratic, the vacuum not good, everything was a bit sluggish. Jeremy had gone with him, found Peter Curnow there too, and Ben Carter.
They waited for him, though he was by years the youngest – not because he was the boss’s son, which would have counted for little – but because he was the expert; he had designed the engine; it was his creation, his baby. He went round, peering here and there, listening, up and down the stairs, probing, questing, shutting off this valve and that, half stopping the stroke and then allowing it to go through. After half an hour he said he thought there was a leak in the condenser; the engine was not making a proper vacuum; hot water was escaping in such a way as to suggest the eduction pipe; his guess was a fault in the actual air pump.
The Curnows nodded wisely as if they had been sure of this all along, but Ben groaned. It meant shutting down the engine, possibly for as lo
ng as a week, and at a wet time of year; the lowest levels would have to be evacuated.
The separate condenser – long ago invented and patented by Watt – was in a pit in the basement of the engine house, a masonry pit full to the brim with cold water, the condenser itself being inside the pit and containing a certain amount of water which originally had been hot steam and which condensed as it came into the cylinder and so created a vacuum.
Once the engine was stopped, the first task was to pump the water out of the masonry pit with a hand pump. The pit itself was about six feet deep by eight broad, and had bracing bars across it to support and keep rigid the condenser cistern; so even when this was empty the examination of the cistern was neither easy nor comfortable, especially as it had to be done in the almost total darkness of a cold, dripping cellar. Jeremy was lowered in first, with a miner’s candle in his hat and two lanterns to help.
He was down an hour, Ben with him part of the time. Then he came up for hot tea and Dan Curnow went down. About midday, on his second turn, Jeremy found what he was looking for. The air pump was made of cast iron and there had been a small flaw in the casting. At the time, this had been filled up with scale and so had been undetectable; but over the months the scale had been dissolved by the action of impurities in the outside water – which was water brought up from the mine and not the purer rain or stream water used directly for the engine. As a result the original hair-line crack had reappeared, and at one end of it a pin-prick of a hole through which the water had been seeping in. So the engine had been sucking up a mixture of air and water instead of air only.
They had cleaned and dried off the part, filled the crack and the hole with iron cement, tested it, and the engine had been restarted only two days after it was brought to a stop.
Of course the Curnows would probably have come to the same conclusion in the end, and made the same discovery and the same repair. It simply was that Jeremy with his intimate knowledge of the construction of the engine had been that much quicker off the mark. With him gone, timely repairs would be a little less frequent; a serious breakdown, if it was a complex one as well, would require another expert to be called in.
The same with Wheal Grace – so long as it continued to run. Nampara was to lose its chief engineer.
‘When d’you leave?’ Ben asked.
‘First light.’
‘For Plymouth?’
‘No, Falmouth – to Chatham.’
‘D’you expect to sail overseas soon, then?’
‘I don’t know. I’m told there’s a contingent leaving for Holland sometime this month to bring the regiment up to strength.’
‘Holland, eh? Been fighting there, have they?’
‘So it seems. But I don’t know much except the name of the commanding officer and the depot I’m to report to in Chatham.’
‘So you’ll not be going to Spain like your cousin.’
‘Not at present, it seems.’
Ben glanced at his friend. ‘Got all your uniform, have you?’
‘Not yet. My father has given me his sword, which has saved something; but a spy glass and compass have cost me £55! The uniform and bedding and other equipment I shall get at Chatham. Also a horse. I would have taken Colley – but the cost and risk of transportation is too great.’
‘A horse in a foot regiment, like?’
‘It is usual for an officer, if he can afford it . . . You know Geoffrey Charles is to be a major?’
‘Yes. I heard tell.’
‘Well, his new rank has enabled him to give me the recommendation I needed to get a commission. That at least cost me nothing, so long as I did not mind which regiment I was appointed to. I said I did not, rather expecting every recruit would go to Spain . . . In fact it is a good regiment, one of the Light Division. I think my cousin had some hand in the choice, though he would admit nothing.’
They had climbed to the third floor of the engine house and out on to the bob plat.
Jeremy said: ‘Even though I have spent nothing for my commission it is no inexpensive thing to be an officer. I am told that even after the initial costs I shall need about £100 a year above my pay to make ends meet.’
‘What pay do you get?’
‘Five shillings and threepence a day, which after deductions will come down to about 4/-.’
‘What, 28/- a week as a lieutenant?’
‘As an ensign.’
‘You’d be better off at home, Jeremy. Looking after this mine engine like you did last week.’
‘It is not for the money I’m going, Ben – nor yet for the glory.’
They stared out over the beach which had meant so much to them both. It was an errantly windy day. Black clumsy clouds were driving up from the north-west, imposing themselves upon a sky of an unusual shamrock green. The surf reared itself and tumbled in disarray as the gusts caught it, throwing up sharp spirals of spume like the blowing of sperm whales.
Jeremy said: ‘I wish I were more like my father.’
‘What way?’
‘Well . . . for one obvious thing at the moment. My father is a natural soldier and a brave man.’
‘We-ll. I don’t know as I’d say he ever became a soldier from the real wish to be.’
‘Then should I say he appears to take to it far more than I do. He seems not to have any conscious, physical fear – I mean for himself, such as I do.’
‘Well, I don’t know ’bout that neither.’
Jeremy pushed the hair out of his eyes. ‘To tell the truth, dear Ben, I’m a rank coward. I am sickened at the sight of pain being inflicted and I am more than a small matter concerned at the thought of pain being inflicted on me. I like to tend an animal when it is ill, but if it is finally decided that the animal will not recover, someone else has to put it out of its misery. Bella is made of far sterner stuff than I am; she can superintend the slaughter of mice; I absent myself quickly. Could there ever be a more unsuitable man to lead other men into battle?’
Ben leaned back against a sudden gust of wind that threatened to push him over the edge of the unrailed platform.
‘You say harder things ’bout yourself than is the honest truth. But – well . . .’
‘No one made me go, eh? Quite true. So why should I come dwaling to you at this late stage? Perhaps because these thoughts of mine are best hid from my own family, and yet I still have the wish to express them! However, that is now done . . . Let us go down into the warmth of the house. It grows cold here.’
Ben said: ‘Your father’s in London. Your cousin is on his way back to Spain. Nampara will lack a man.’
‘True enough.’
‘Even Trenwith is bereft. That Trewinnard boy, he’s a nice ’nough kind of man but he’s got no strength, no . . . authority.’
There was a long silence.
Ben said: ‘Wonder what Miss Clowance will do if that man come round again, that Stephen Carrington. I hear tell he’s somewhere about again.’
‘He’s at sea, and likely to remain so for some months. But I don’t think you need worry about one thing, Ben. He could never prevail upon Clowance to do anything by force. He’s not as bad as that. And if he tried to be as bad as that, can you imagine Clowance being – forced to do anything she was not willing to do?’
Ben smiled uneasily. He acknowledged – or was prepared to acknowledge – Clowance’s physical strength. It was her mental strength, her moral strength against the seductive persuasions of that carnal, cunning man that he had reason to doubt. A fine thing Ross Poldark and his son would have done if one came back from his parliament and the other from the wars to find that their daughter and sister had fallen again under the wiles of Stephen Carrington and had married him. Ben knew he had little or no hopes for himself. But he could have accepted that Lord Something, who had been interested, and whom, it was said, she had refused. He could have accepted the Guildford fellow – who had been conspicuous by his absence since January. All he could not tolerate, could not live with, was the thou
ght of Stephen Carrington still succeeding in carrying her off.
Jeremy said: ‘I know you don’t like or trust Stephen, Ben – my own feelings are mixed about him. But you have to admit he has initiative. He has got these two vessels, both fast fishing vessels, one built in our yard in Looe, the other a French prize brought in at St Ives. He bought it at auction there and has been refitting it to suit his purposes. He’s persuaded my cousin, Andrew Blamey, to join him; did you know that?’
‘No . . . Is that the young officer in the Packet Service?’
‘Yes.’
‘I seen him once. Ginger haired almost, wi’ big side chucks . . . Do it please your family, him going off wi’ Carrington?’
‘Of course not. Particularly his mother and father. They naturally think he has thrown away a secure position in a respected government service for this wild venture. They’re right. Any number of things may go wrong with Stephen’s plans. But according to Clowance, to whom Andrew spoke just before he left, Andrew had got into some difficulty with his debts, and it was only because he told Stephen of these that Stephen offered him the chance of sharing in his adventure. There seems to be no question of Stephen having lured him away.’
‘What are they about?’
‘Stephen has crammed both his vessels full to the gunnels of pilchards, salted in their barrels – all of which he has bought cheap in Cornwall – and is going to run the French blockade and take them to Genoa. If all goes well you can see what he might gain. At any rate, as I have told you – even if he catches the Portuguese trades as he hopes on the way south, he will certainly not be back in England until March at the earliest. Clowance will be safe till then.’
Ben grunted. ‘He have made some money from what he put into this mine, but not near enough for what he must ’ve laid out. Where’s he gotten the rest of the money?’
There was a silence. Jeremy said: ‘He may have borrowed some of it. Also he tells people he has inherited from an uncle.’
‘A likely story.’
‘I am only telling you that he has gone away for some months, so you do not need to worry on that score.’