Ross Poldark (30 page)

A tenacious prime minister, at twenty-seven, was holding his uneasy position in the face of all the coalitions to upset him; but the coalitions had hopes. Money had to be found, even for peace and reform; taxes had gone up 20 percent in five years and the new ones were dangerously unpopular. Land tax, house tax, servants’ tax, window tax. Horses and hats, bricks and tiles, linen and calicoes. Another impost on candles hit directly at the poor. Last winter the fishermen of Fowey had saved their families from starvation by feeding them on limpets.

It would take fifty years, some people said, before things righted themselves.

Even in America, Ross had been told, disillusion was no less. The United States had so far been united only in a dislike for overlordship, and with that gone and all the afterwar problems in train, they seemed on the point of breaking up into local self-governing republics quarrelling endlessly among themselves like the cities of medieval Italy. Frederick of Prussia, tapping away with gouty fingers on his piano in the Sans Souci Palace at Potsdam, had been heard to say that the country was so unwieldy that now they had got rid of George the Third the only solution was to set up a king of their own. The remark even found its way into the fastnesses of Cornish society.

Other things too the Cornish knew, or sensed, with their constant illicit traffic between the French ports and their own. England might be down in the mouth, but things were even worse in Europe. Strange whiffs of a volcanic unrest came to them from time to time from across the Channel. Dislike for an old enemy as much as idealism for a new friend had tempted France to pour out her gold and men to help American freedom. Now she found herself with an extra war debt
of fourteen hundred million livres and a knowledge of the theory and practice of revolution bred in the minds and blood of her thinkers and soldiers. The crust of the European despotisms was being weakened at its weakest spot.

In two years Ross had seen little of his own family and class. What he had overheard in the library on the day of Geoffrey Charles's christening had filled him with con tempt for them, and though he would not have admitted to being influenced one way or the other by Polly Choake's gossip, an awareness of their clacking tongues made him dislike the idea of going among them. Monthly, out of common courtesy, he went to enquire after the invalid Charles, who refused either to die or get better, but when he found company there, his conversation didn’t touch on the popular subjects. He was not as concerned as they about the return of Maria Fitzherbert from the Continent or the scandal of the Queen of France's neck lace. There were families in the district without enough bread and potatoes to keep them alive, and he wanted these families to be given gifts in kind, so that the epidemics of December and January should not have such easy prey.

His listeners felt uncomfortable when he was speaking, and resentful when he had finished. Many of them were hard hit themselves by the slump in mining and the increased taxation. Many were helping those hard cases with which they came in contact, and if that barely touched the fringe of the distress they did not see that Ross was doing any more. What they were not prepared to accept was that they had any sort of liability for the hardships of the day, or that laws could be framed to offer some less soul-destroying form of relief than the poorhouse and the parish cart. Even Francis could not see it. Ross felt like another Jack Tripp preaching reform from an empty tub.

He topped the crest of the hill on the way home and saw Demelza coming to meet him. Garrick was trotting at her heels like a small Shetland pony.

She hopped from time to time as she came up.

“Jud d’ tell me,” she said, “that the mine is to open at last!”

“Just as soon as we can hire the men and buy the tackle.”

“Hooray! Garrick, go down. I’m real pleased ’bout that. We was all disappointed last year when we thought twas all set, sur. Garrick, be quiet. Will it be as big as Grambler?”

“Not yet.” He was amused at her excitement. “Quite a little mine to begin.”

“I’m sure twill soon be a big un wi’ great chimney stacks and things.”

They walked down the hill together. Normally he took her very much for granted, but the interest of the others today made him steal a sidelong glance at
her now. A well-grown and developing girl, barely recognizable as the scrawny half-starved urchin he had swilled under the pump.

More changes had come about during the last year. Demelza was now a sort of general housekeeper. Prudie was far too indolent to wish to manage anything if there was a way out of it. Her leg had given trouble two or three times more, and when she came downstairs again, it was easier to potter about the kitchen brewing tea for herself and doing a little light work than contriving the meals and cooking them, which Demelza so much seemed to enjoy. The burden was off her shoulders; Demelza never dictated, and was quite willing to continue doing her own work as well, so what was there to object to in that?

Apart from one violent quarrel, life in the kitchen was more peaceful than when Jud and Prudie shared it alone; a rough camaraderie had grown up between the three, and the Paynters did not seem to resent Ross's friendship with the girl. There were plenty of times when he was lonely and glad of companionship. Verity no longer had the heart to come over, and Demelza took her place.

Sometimes she even sat with him in the evening. It had begun with her going to ask him for orders about the farm, by her staying to talk; and then somehow she was sitting in the parlour with him two or three evenings a week.

She was, of course, the most amenable of companions, being content to talk if he wanted to talk, or to persevere with her reading if he wanted to read, or willing to slip out at once if her presence was unwelcome. He still drank heavily.

She was not quite a perfect housekeeper. Though she came near enough to it for normal needs, there were times when her temperament played a part. The “moods” of which Prudie had spoken still took her. Then she could outswear Jud, and once had nearly outfought him. Her sense of personal danger was at all times nonexistent; but at such times even her industry was misdirected.

One dark rainy morning of last October she had chosen to clean out part of the cattle shed, and began pushing the oxen around when they got in the way. Presently one resented this and she came out boiling with indignation and wounded in a manner that made sitting down impossible for a week. Another time she chose to move all the kitchen furniture while Jud and Prudie were out. But one cupboard was too much even for her energy, and she pulled it over on herself. Prudie came back to find her pinned underneath, while Garrick barked his appreciation at the door.

The affair of the quarrel with Jud had a more serious side and was now discreetly forgotten by all. Demelza had tasted the bottle of spirits in the old iron box in the library, and, liking the taste, had finished the bottle. Then she went
prancing in to Jud, who by mischance had also been having a private sup. She so tormented him that he fell upon her with some indistinct notion of slaying her. But she fought back like a wildcat, and when Prudie came in, she found them struggling on the floor. Prudie had jumped instantly to the wrong conclusion and had attacked Jud with the hearth shovel. Ross's arrival was only just in time to prevent most of his staff from being laid up with serious injuries.

A frozen equanimity had fallen on the kitchen for weeks after that. For the first time Demelza had felt the acid sting of Ross's tongue and had curled up and wanted to die.

But that was twelve months ago. It was a grisly spectre buried in the past.

Without further speech they passed through the apple trees and walked towards the house, through the garden on which Demelza had put in so many extra hours last summer. All the weeds had been cleared, leaving much bare earth and a few straggling remnants of the plants Ross's mother had grown.

There were three lavender bushes, tall and ungainly from the press of weeds; there was a bush of rosemary, freed from its tangle and promising flower. She had also unearthed a damask rose with its bright splashed flowers of pink and white, and a moss rose and two monthly roses; and in her quest about the countryside she had begun to bring home seeds and roots from the hedgerows. These were no easy things to rear: They had all the waywardness of wild things, ready to luxuriate in desolate places of their own choosing but apt to pine and die when confined within the luxury of a garden. But last year she had had fine spurs of viper's bugloss, a patch of sea pinks, and a row of crimson foxgloves.

They stopped now, Demelza explaining what she pro posed to do here and here, suggesting that she might take cuttings from the lavender bush and try to root them to make a hedge. Ross looked about him with a tolerant eye. He was not greatly interested in flowers, but he admired the neatness and the colour; and herbs which could be cooked or infused were useful.

Recently he had given her a little money for her own use, and with this she had bought a bright kerchief to wrap around her head, a pen to learn to write, two copy books, a pair of shoes with paste buckles, a big cloam mug to hold flowers, a sunbonnet for Prudie and a snuffbox for Jud. Twice he had let her mount Ramoth and ride with him into Truro, once when he had promised to visit the cockpit and watch Royal Duke fight for a fifty-guinea purse. This entertainment, to his surprise and amusement, quite disgusted her.

“Why,” she said, “tis no better than Fathur do do.” She had expected something more refined of a cockfight patronized by the nobility and gentry.

On the way home she had been unusually silent. “Don’t you think animals d’ feel hurt like we?” she got out eventually.

Ross considered his answer. He had been led once or twice before into pitfalls by making unthinking replies to her questions.

“I don’t know,” he said briefly.

“Then why do veers squeal like they do when you put rings through their noses?”

“Cockerels aren’t pigs. God made it their nature to fight.”

She did not speak for a time. “Yes, but God didn’ give ’em steel spurs to fight with.”

“You should have been a lawyer, Demelza,” he commented, and at that she had been silent again.

He thought of these things while they talked in the garden. He wondered if she knew what Nat Pearce and the others had been thinking when they stared at her in the parlour a couple of hours ago, and whether she agreed with him that no idea could be more ridiculous. When he wanted that sort of pleasure he would call for Margaret in Truro, or one of her kind.

It seemed to him sometimes that if pleasure lay in the unsubtle sport that a harlot afforded, then he had not quite the normal appetites of a normal man. Well, there was an odd satisfaction in asceticism, a cumulative self-knowledge and self-reliance.

He thought very little about it these days. He had other interests and other concerns.

B
EFORE SHE LEFT HIM DEMELZA SAID SHE HAD SEEN JINNY CARTER EARLY THAT day, and Jim was sick with a pleurisy. But Jim with his uncertain health was often laid up for a few days, and Ross did not take account of it. All the next fortnight he was busy with matters concerning the opening of the mine, and he put off seeing Jim until he could offer him certain cut-and-dried duties. He did not want this to seem a made-up job.

The library at Nampara was to serve as a mining office, and the domestic life of the house was disrupted while part of this was cleared and repaired. News that a mine was to open instead of close spread quickly, and they were besieged with miners from up to eighteen miles distant, anxious to take the work at any price. Ross and Henshawe tried to strike bargains fair to both sides. They engaged forty men, including a “grass” captain and an underground captain, who would be responsible to Henshawe.

At the end of the fortnight Ross met Zacky Martin and enquired about Jim. Jim was up, Zacky said, though not yet back at the mine, being troubled with his cough.

Ross thought over the arrangements so far as they had gone. Next Monday eight men would begin the adit from the face of the cliff, and another twenty would be at work on the first shaft. It was time for the assistant purser to be brought in.

“Tell him to come round and see me tomorrow morning, will you?” Ross said.

“Yes,” said Zacky. “I’ll see Jinny tonight. I’ll tell her to tell him. She won’t forget.”

Jim Carter was not asleep and heard the faint tapping on the door almost as soon as it began.

Very cautiously, so as not to wake Jinny or the babies, he slid out of bed and began to gather up his clothes. Once he trod on a loose floor board, and he stood still for some seconds suppressing a cough, until the girl's regular breathing reassured him. Then he pulled on his breeches and shirt and picked up his boots and coat.

The hinge of the trap door usually groaned when it was moved, but he had put grease on it earlier in the day and it opened now with no noise. He was halfway through when a voice said:

“Jim.”

He bit his lip in annoyance but did not reply; she might yet be only speaking in her sleep. There was silence. Then she went on: