‘Steam,’ said Amadora, pushing her hair back. ‘That is new word. How shall I steam?’
‘Esteem,’ said Geoffrey Charles. ‘Love, care for, venerate, cherish, admire – that’s as far as I can go! But as to the future, who can see it? If the war ends, then we shall return, with perhaps enough money to put Trenwith to rights and to set us up as landed gentry of a very small but comfortable type.’
‘It may not be so long,’ said Captain Blamey. ‘Napoleon is reeling.’
‘Well . . . There is this truce he has agreed to on the eastern front. Of course it has come about because of his defeats in Russia and in Poland – but also because of Wellington’s successes. He has sent Soult, I gather, to try to repair the defeats in the Pyrenees. He must not be underestimated. There are decisive battles still to come.’
Amadora put her hand on her husband’s arm. ‘Talk not of battles now.’
He put his other hand over hers. ‘It is a new thing for me. Always before I had nothing but myself to lose. Now I have all the world to lose. Pray the Lord such good fortune does not turn me into a coward.’
‘Coward?’ said Amadora. ‘Who is this coward? But we shall talk nothing of battles now. What is fated will happen.’
Chapter Two
I
Jeremy Poldark had been to St Ann’s on business and cut across the cliffs on the way home. Skirting the workings at Wheal Spinster, which was a Warleggan mine, and observing the now silent engine house of Wheal Plenty – also a Warleggan mine but closed by them last year – he circled Trevaunance Cove and took the cliff path for Trenwith. It was not uncommon for him to walk these days. Journeys on foot took longer and gave him more time for thought. The more tired he was at night, the more prospect there was of sleep.
A young man to whom life had offered few complexities until he met Cuby Trevanion, nothing had ever seemed quite simple since. He had struggled with protest, impulses in his own blood that he could not rationalize, followed by actions that he could hardly condone yet saw with an instinctive fatalism as part of a pattern of revolt that he could not alter. Even now he had not yet come to live with it.
As he climbed one of the stiles he saw a handsome grey horse cropping the grass near a hedge which separated one field from the next. The horse was saddled and the reins hung loosely about his neck as he quietly tore at the grass. It was a side saddle. Jeremy jumped down and walked towards him. The horse gave no sign of knowing that he was being approached.
‘Hey-ho,’ Jeremy said soothingly. ‘Come, come, what is this? I don’t know you, my beauty. Have you been straying a little and lost your way?’
The horse shook his head, making the bridle rattle, and showed a white eyeball. Jeremy, who knew a good deal about animals, saw how taut the muscles were.
Bees were humming in the hedge. No other sound.
‘Where’s your mistress, eh? Has she gone to pick flowers? Should you not be tethered, my beauty? Tck, tck – Tck, tck . . .’
He put a gentle hand forward to stroke the horse’s neck and instantly there was a galvanic movement: everything shook and jerked and rattled and after a few moments the horse resumed his cropping twenty yards away. A flying hoof had just missed Jeremy’s face.
‘Like that, is it? Well, well, old boy. What a fuss to make! A little show of temper? Too much corn I suspicion.’ Jeremy looked round. The sun was two hands’ breadth from the sea. Crows were circling the high sky.
‘Hello, there, is anyone about?’
A group of cows raised their heads and watched him with bovine disinterest from the other side of the field. Probably, since there was no one at Trenwith, the horse had come from Place House. Jeremy thought now he had seen him before, but not recently.
A distant cry. He scrambled over a hedge, which was tall and riotous with foxgloves. At the other side of the next field a young woman was half-sitting, half-lying on the grass. She was in grey, with a grey tricorn hat nearby. As he trotted towards her he saw it was Mrs Selina Pope.
She also recognized him as he came up and gave him a painful smile.
‘Jeremy . . .’
‘Mrs Pope. You’ve come a cropper?’
‘’Fraid so. It’s my ankle. I fell awkwardly.’
Her blonde hair, dressed in a chignon, had partly fallen loose, and two locks hung across her shoulder.
He knelt beside her. ‘This one?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you been lying here long?’
‘Twenty minutes. Perhaps half an hour. I don’t know.’
‘It was lucky I was passing. Otherwise you might have been here a long time.’
‘Yes. Yes, I might. Until some alarm was raised.’
‘Are you hurt otherwise, do you suppose?’
‘My shoulder.’ She felt it.
‘Bad?’
‘No, I think not.’
‘I think we should take this boot off.’
‘Could you not get help from Place House?’
‘Of course. But it would be better to relieve the ankle before it swells.’
She pulled her skirt up a few inches. ‘I believe it is already swollen.’
A calf-length boot of fine grey kid with six buttons down the side. He began slowly to undo these, taking care not to put any strain on the leg inside.
After Sir John Trevaunance died in 1808, his heir and brother Unwin had sold Place House to a Mr Clement Pope, reputedly a rich merchant who had come from America bringing with him a very pretty blonde second wife, called Selina, and two daughters in their late teens by his first wife. Mr Pope, an unamiable character of sixty with a long thin neck, had a fastidious manner and a voice like an unoiled hinge. His ambition had been to launch himself and his family into Cornish society, particularly to obtain good marriages for his daughters, but this attempt had not been successful. It was largely his own fault, for he had an unequalled blend of austerity and unction which offended those he most wished to impress and which made old Sir Hugh Bodrugan say he was ‘like a damned draper’.
The Poldarks had met the family on a number of occasions and were on moderately friendly terms, chiefly with the daughters, Letitia and Maud, because they were of an age with Clowance. Horrie Treneglos had for a while flirted outrageously with Letitia, who was a plain girl; but was now more seriously pursuing Angela Nankivell of Lambourne. Jeremy quite liked the pretty Maud, but had cheerfully avoided any commitment. As for the stepmother . . .
As for the step-mother, she looked about twenty-six . . .
‘I tried to catch your horse, Mrs Pope. He was having no truck with me at all. Generally I can manage horses. He seemed a thought wild.’
‘Amboy is my husband’s horse. But Mr Pope has not been well enough to take him out, so I thought to exercise him.’
‘You would have been wiser to have left it to a groom.’
‘Oh, I have been on him often before,’ she said stiffly.
‘How is Mr Pope?’
‘Not at all himself. It seems that exercise or undue excitement brings on these gouty pains.’
‘Dr Enys is your doctor, I suppose.’
‘Yes. Of late.’
‘I’m sure you could find no better.’
‘So I have been told.’ She was still a little on her dignity.
The last button undone, Jeremy saw that the ankle was indeed swollen. He took the heel of the boot and applied slight pressure. She winced.
‘I can’t stand that.’
‘I should cut it off for you. That is if you do not mind the damage to the boot.’
‘No. Oh, no. But . . .’
He looked at her. She had always been ‘Mrs Pope’ to him, he ‘Jeremy’ to her. It marked the difference in their status, in the relationship of a young man towards a married woman who acted in loco parentis towards two girls he was supposed to admire. It need not mean that their relationship had to remain on that level, though it had never occurred to him before that it should ever be otherwise.
She said: ‘Can you
not go and fetch help?’
‘That of course I’ll do. But your foot would be more comfortable if I cut the boot away first.’ He fished in his pocket and took out his folding knife. The blade, he knew, was sharp for he had honed it yesterday.
He unfolded the knife and slid it between her leg and the material of the boot. She watched him with interest.
The knife cut through the kid without even tearing her stocking. When he had eased off the boot she said: ‘Thank you, Jeremy.’
‘A pleasure.’
She lowered her eyes. ‘Yes, my foot is swollen.’
‘If you will take your stocking off, I’ll bind it with a cold cloth. I passed a ditch with water in it on the other side of this field.’
‘Where is the cloth to come from?’
‘My kerchief will do.’
‘Can you not catch Amboy?’
‘I don’t think there is the least chance. He’s out to enjoy himself. In any case you could not ride him home.’
‘Well . . .’
‘Why did you call him Amboy?’
‘Why not?’
‘It is an unusual name.’
‘It was where we lived in America. Just south of New York.’
Jeremy squatted a moment longer beside her. The sun was setting into summer mists. A shoal of gnats glinted as they hovered among the foxgloves.
‘I never thought to ask. Are you American, then?’
‘My mother was. But no. Not really. It happened that I was born in Essex.’
He got up. ‘I’ll go and soak this kerchief. If you could take your stocking off while I’m away.’
He walked across to the ditch which contained just enough drainage water from yesterday’s rain. He tore the kerchief down the middle and soaked half of it. When he went back he found she had obeyed him. He grinned at her in a friendly, youthful fashion to take the charge out of the situation and bound the linen round her naked foot and ankle. As it happened he had never seen a woman with painted toe-nails before. At first he had thought it was blood. The look of them fascinated him.
She said: ‘It was fortunate you were passing.’
‘So shines a good deed in a naughty world.’
‘What is that?’
‘That? I don’t know. I believe I learned it at school.’
‘Were you coming back from St Ann’s?’
‘Yes. I had been consulting with the captain of Wheal Kitty.’
‘You are very clever, I’m told – passing brilliant in designing engines.’
‘I am not an inventor, Mrs Pope. I work on other people’s ideas and sometimes I hope to improve on them a little.’
‘That is all any inventor does, Jeremy. Each one takes a little step forward building upon the last.’
He smiled. ‘That’s a kind way to regard it.’
‘And right.’
‘Partly right. But the true inventors are those who make the big steps, where no one has quite thought to step before . . . Do you have a pin?’
She hesitated, then took out a short pin with a silver head from the lapel of her jacket.
‘Thank you.’ He slid it through the end of the bandage to hold it in place.
Amboy was still peacefully tearing at the grass quite nearby.
‘Do you think you can catch him?’
‘No. Not without help. Or not till he’s cold and tired.’
‘Well, perhaps you would be good enough to fetch help.’
He straightened up. ‘It is not quite how a surgeon would have done it, but it should hold. I’ll carry you home.’
She looked up at him, sandy lashes narrowed over wisteria blue eyes. ‘It is more than a mile,’ she said coldly. ‘Pray don’t consider it. Let them know at Place House.’
‘Which will take best part of forty minutes there and back. And the sun is going down. I don’t think Mr Pope would approve of my leaving you here alone.’
He picked up her stocking, rolled it and slipped it in his pocket. Then he picked up her hat and her boot.
‘We’d better save this,’ he said. ‘No doubt it can be stitched up. If you could hold it for me.’
A few wisps of cloud overhead were aflame like fragments of burnt paper blown up from a fire. A cow, deprived of its calf, was roaring in the fields sloping down to Trenwith.
‘I am not light,’ she said.
‘You must be,’ he replied, and bent to take her round the waist and under the knees.
At the last moment she put her arm round his neck and straightened her uninjured leg so that he did not have too much difficulty in lifting her. He gave a slight grunt and she was up.
‘Damn it,’ he said, ‘I had forgot your crop. Wait, I think I can bend—’
‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘It can be recovered later.’
The procession began. After making the proposal he had thought of the hedges between there and Trevaunance Cove and speculated how he might negotiate them; but as it turned out all the hedges, in the way she directed him, had openings to give access from one field to the next, and there was only one stile and one gate. The latter he was able to open without setting her down; the former he lifted her over and she perched on one leg until he was able to follow.
Although she was in fact a bit heavier than he expected, Jeremy did not find it an unpleasant journey. They talked little on the way, but she did say stiffly: ‘Pray rest if you are tired.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘You must be very strong.’
‘Not really.’
‘Well, not at all the effete young gentleman.’
‘I work about the farm. And of course at the mine. And other ways . . .’ He frowned, eyes briefly shadowed.
‘Other ways?’
‘My parents have always taught their children it is proper to soil their hands.’
‘Very good advice. Perhaps it should have been given me.’
‘Oh, that’s different.’
‘With a woman? Maybe. But I do not suppose Clowance bothers, does she?’
‘Bothers?’
‘About soiling her hands.’
‘No. I don’t believe she does.’
‘What has happened to that very good-looking sailor with whom she was so friendly?’
‘Stephen Carrington? He went away.’
She noticed the change in his tone. ‘For ever?’
‘It would be better.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t think they were suited.’
‘That I can well understand. It would be such a poor match.’
‘It was not what I meant. Unless you use the word match in a wider sense.’
She smiled. ‘You are very wise for one so young, Jeremy.’
‘Is twenty-two young?’
‘It seems so.’ She was going to add ‘to me’, but did not.
He took another grip of her. Every now and then he had to do this, for she tended to slip.
The sun had been gone down well before they came within sight of Place House. Swallows were wheeling. A long twilight was yawning up the sky.
‘This will do,’ she said. ‘I am most grateful to you. See, the bank here will do for me to sit while you go for help.’
‘What help is necessary now?’
‘If my husband is looking out, as he may well be, he might become unduly alarmed, think I am serious hurt.’
‘We shall soon be able to reassure him.’
‘And jealous,’ she said lightly. ‘My husband, because I am so much younger than he, is jealous of all men.’
‘Oh,’ said Jeremy, ‘that I can understand.’
‘Thank you.’
He set her down on a piece of greensward between two rocky outcrops.
‘Thank you,’ she said again.
‘And what would you like me to do now, Mrs Pope?’
‘If my husband does not see you, then the best way will be to go round to the stables. Music Thomas will still be there. Ask him to come. I believe I can lean on his arm.’
/> ‘Why not have two men and sit in a chair?’
‘We have no other men about the house, Jeremy. Mr Pope will not have them.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Tell one of the maids. If possible tell my personal maid, Katie Carter. Ask her to inform Mr Pope, but on no account to alarm him. He must not be subjected to shocks.’
He took the stocking out of his pocket and put it beside the boot. ‘I shall be back in three or four minutes.’ He turned to go.
‘Jeremy.’
‘Yes?’
She stared at him with eyes like a cat’s, more open with the coming of dark.
‘Believe me, you have been most obliging.’
II
Music Thomas was the youngest of the three brothers Thomas who lived next door to Jud and Prudie Paynter; he sang alto in the choir, walked on his toes, and was not the brightest of men. He worked at Place House as a stable-boy, and in the light of the startling information Mrs Pope had just given Jeremy, it occurred to Jeremy to suppose it was Music’s apparent disabilities which made him employable by Mr Pope.
That the strange, now sickly, Robespierre-like figure of Mr Clement Pope should insist on presiding over an entirely female household, like some sultan jealous of his harem, gave Jeremy a disagreeable frisson. It lifted a curtain on life. There had been rumours from the first that Mr Pope kept a cane for his daughters, which was not used on their hands, and that even now when one was twenty years of age and the other twenty-one, the sanction at least still existed. What of Selina, his wife? It had been said that she came of a poor family, her father an army surgeon who had died young. She had married for money, and so far as one could tell had kept her part of the bargain. That Mr Pope doted on her was plain to see whenever they appeared in company together. Was she subject to the same discipline? It seemed unlikely, since any pretty woman with an old husband has ways of making her pleasure or displeasure felt. But it was clear that Mr Pope was insanely jealous. A friendly neighbour, nine or ten years her junior, must not be seen carrying her into the house after a mishap on a horse. And the only man employable, within permissible touching distance of her, must be one whose manhood was in considerable doubt – and even he did not sleep in.
The Loving Cup Page 2