They went to Aunt Agatha’s old room and found it in even poorer shape than the rest of the house. Two pictures on the walls had their glass smashed, and one frame sagged. A part of the dressing table was broken and the thing stood bent-legged, like a soldier on a crutch. The wardrobe door swung open on one hinge. An empty bird cage hung by the window, its bars glinting in the sun, and inside a tiny frail-boned skeleton lay aslant gathering dust.
There was a tomb-like smell to the whole house.
‘Let us go on,’ said Geoffrey Charles sharply, his arm about Amadora. ‘I do not think this is a happy room.’
Nor was his mother’s, for again part of the curtain and carpet was gnawed away, and mice droppings were everywhere; moths had holed the pretty pink bedspread; beside the bed were an hourglass, a bottle containing furry liquid, a spoon . . .
His step-father’s room was cleaner, looked better cared for, but Geoffrey Charles would not stop there. He led the way to the room which most recently had been used by his grandparents, Jonathan and Joan Chynoweth, for it was perhaps the sunniest, with blue damask curtains over lace, a flowery wallpaper above the half panels, pink and yellow silk curtains decorating the fourposter bed. That the bed needed drying out, that the moths here again were in the curtains, that there were sinister rustlings in the wainscot, were matters to be taken in one’s stride.
‘Let’s go down,’ he said, after he had thumped open two windows. ‘We’ll sleep here. I’ll light a fire here after I’ve lit the one in the kitchen. Then I shall go and find those two knaves who pretend to look after this property. They can come and stable our horses and rub them down, but I don’t want them putting their ugly faces in this house – our house – tonight. If they saw unexplained lights it might disturb their drunken stupor, and cause them to come stumbling up here at the wrong time.’
‘Wrong time?’ said Amadora.
‘Wrong time.’ They went down the dark stairs arm in arm, jogging slightly to keep in step. He led the way through to the kitchen.
Three steps led down to a flagged floor become uneven with time and now silk-threaded with snail-trails. The fireplace was black and cold and rusty. A great kettle was still suspended above it on a hook. By the back door was a wooden pump with a bucket under it. The bucket had split. Cobwebs festooned the shelves and there was a smell of decayed food. The place was dark from its single dirty window, and Geoffrey Charles went across and flung open the half door. Light flooded in.
‘That’s better. We cannot hope to clear much tonight, but a fire will make a big difference. And some fresh air . . .’
Amadora glanced at him sidelong. ‘Do you wish I shall cook?’
‘We’ve got the chicken, butter, eggs Verity gave us. Bread. Cheese. Can you?’
‘It was part of my training. But I do not know if I shall be cooking to please the English officer.’
‘Anything you do will please the English officer so long as you do it yourself, so long as we are alone.’
‘It shall be our first meal ever alone.’
‘. . . I think there will be some wine left in the cellar; there’s some plates in here – they’ll need washing – knives and forks too; candles. We will dine at that great table, you at one end and I at the other! Amid all the squalor of this neglected house! What a glorious thought!’
‘So far apart . . .’
‘Yes, for otherwise the food you prepared would not get eaten. Afterwards, in our bedroom upstairs . . .’ He turned her towards him and kissed her forehead and then her lips.
‘Husband.’
‘Yes, my little,’ he said, ‘it shall be all that and more.’
Chapter Four
I
Jeremy found the letter waiting for him when he returned with his family from St Day Show Fair. It had been a pleasant day, which would have been more pleasant if he had not caught sight of Cuby Trevanion in the distance with her brother.
As always, despite the distress in the county as a whole, these fairs drew the crowds, and although many looked ill-clad and undernourished there was money about. People were bidding for cattle, buying trinkets, patronizing the booths, eating and drinking the buns and milk. The beer and gin tents – run by the local inns – were well filled, and before the day was far advanced men were sprawled in corners insensible to anything more the fair had to offer.
The Poldarks had taken a large surplus of piglets to sell, and baskets of soft fruits. Raspberries had been planted for the first time only four years ago, but the canes, aided by good top-dressings of rotted pig manure, were rampant in the sandy soil. The half brothers, Dick and Cal Trevail, had taken the produce in two dog carts, and they brought back a variety of things Demelza needed or thought she needed or just fancied the look of. Apart from the youngest child, Henry, it had been the complete family; and nowadays, with Ross often away or one or other of the elder children on pursuits of their own, it didn’t happen too often that they all went out together. She never lost her pleasure in riding beside Ross and watching the three horses on ahead. What marvellous, beautiful, intelligent and charming children they were! She supposed most parents felt the same but it didn’t deflect her from her full sense of pride. Jeremy, at twenty-two, tall and thin and attractive with his high colour and blue grey eyes: gifted in unusual ways, comical of speech, usually hiding his deepest and most complex impulses behind a curtain of flippancy, devoted to animals and painting, and apparently entirely artistic, if one did not know of his passion for machinery. Clowance, soon to be nineteen, sturdily slender, blonde as a Scandinavian, always frank, incapable it seemed of dissimulation or feminine wiles, pretty enough to cause men’s eyes to follow her, a tomboy but warm and impulsive and generous. Little Isabella-Rose, now eleven, dark as her sister was fair, with the darkest of brown eyes, slender, vivacious, always thumping on the piano, always dancing as she walked, with a powerful but unmusical young voice; she was never still, seldom silent. Men would start looking at her very soon.
They were all hers, that was what Demelza at times found so overpowering. Hers and Ross’s, products of their blood, their union, their love. All seed, all flowering differently, all adorning the family and the home. And at home a fourth – another boy, Henry – or Harry as he was already being called – little more than seven months old, gurgling cheerfully, jolly as a sprig, who with luck would grow up to complete a quartet of disparate yet related human beings carrying on the blood and the name. It was the strangest miracle.
No one pretended that there had not been problems already with the two eldest, no one denied the likelihood of many more with all of them: that was part of the challenge and the stress and the stimulus of life.
When Jeremy got upstairs he impatiently broke the seal of his letter and frowned at the handwriting. It was new to him. He carried it to the window and read it in the fading light.
Dear Sir,
Over the last few months I have heard from my friends that you are developing or attempting to develop a steam carriage for use on our common roads. This is a subject which has fascinated me all my life, and I would be greatly obligated to you to be told something of the progress of your experiments. I have met Mr Trevithick on two occasions and am fascinated by his mechanical and scientific genius.
I am a doctor by profession, being junior partner to Dr Avery of Wadebridge – from which town I write, and alas admit it to be in an area remote from the centres of experiment. However, I have an uncle who is Vicar of St Erth, and several times I have been able to visit him, and also have been privileged to meet Mr Davies Giddy and Mr Henry Andrew Vivian of Camborne, who first told me about you.
I should be especially interested to learn in what way you intend to combat wheel spin, also whether you have ever considered the proposition that the bursting of boilers is not always occasioned by the pressure of steam but can come about through the decomposition of the waters? Is it not possible that hydrogen combined with nitrogen and oxygen may form an explosive compound?
These a
nd many other matters I would welcome your views on, and if your machine is sufficiently advanced that it may be seen I should esteem it an honour to be shewn it.
If you should be so willing, and consider a preliminary meeting appropriate, I could come to Truro any Wednesday, preferably in the forenoon, and we could talk over the matter. Although Mr Trevithick now says not, I believe there are enormous commercial possibilities in this development – and not so far ahead. Steam carriages are the national conveyances of the future.
I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant,
G. Garner
Jeremy turned the letter over, and if he had known how to smile sardonically he would have done so. Mr Garner, whoever he was – Doctor Garner – was a little out of date. Jeremy’s attempt to build a new steam carriage had ended more than a year ago when Trevithick had come upon him unexpectedly in Harvey’s Foundry, had examined the carriage that was being built, and had pronounced it unworkable: far too heavy, with a boiler of obsolete dimensions. Of course Trevithick had tried to soften the blow, but, remembering his remarks later, one could see that he really thought the machine was a young man’s folly, with no prospect of success whatsoever.
Sometimes the thought of constructing a horseless carriage, the ambition to try again, still disturbed Jeremy in the night, the argument being, as Stephen had once put it, that Mr Trevithick’s disapproval need not mean the automatic end of the idea; or as Cuby had said at their one happy meeting of last year, that it was not the way of a true inventor to give up after a first set-back.
All the same, Dr Garner was too late: the events in January of this year still stood abrasively across Jeremy’s mind. There were a number of things he could still do with his life, but the patient, slow-evolving world of engineering and invention did not seem to be one of them.
So a brief reply to Dr Garner politely choking him off.
In the chest under the window were all the papers Jeremy had accumulated during the years when his passion for steam had had to be purely theoretical: the newspapers, the magazines of his boyhood, the sketches and drawings of the later period, together with calculations and estimates he had jotted down when first visiting Hayle and discovering the boiler for himself. After his meeting with Trevithick last spring he had thrust his later sketches on top of the rest and shut the lid. Except for taking out occasional things he needed from day to day, he had not used the chest. Now he lifted the lid again and fumbled about among the fish hooks, the crayons, the half-finished sketches, the old newspapers, and came out with a cutting from the Sherborne Mercury of early 1803. It was the first cutting he had clipped out to keep for himself.
In addition to the many attempts that have been made to construct carriages to run without horses, a method has lately been tried at the hamlet of Camborne in Cornwall which seems to promise success. A carriage has been constructed by a Mr Trevithick, containing a small steam engine, the force of which was found sufficient, upon trial, to impel the carriage, containing several persons amounting to a total weight of 30 cwt, against a hill of considerable steepness, at the rate of four miles an hour; and upon a level road at eight or nine miles an hour.
Just that. Just that; nothing more; no attempt to speculate or to elaborate; an item of news, of no greater importance, it seemed, than the one following, which reported a tithe feast in Probus.
Jeremy smoothed out the newspaper, which was already yellowed with age, put it on the dressing table, fished in the chest again. A half dozen cuttings were in his hand. One was a flippant announcement from the London Observer of 17 July, 1808.
The most astonishing machine ever invented is a steam engine with four wheels so constructed that she will with ease and without other aid, gallop from 15 to 20 miles an hour in any circle. She weighs 8 tons and is matched at the next Newmarket meeting against three horses to run 24 hours, starting at the same time. She is now in training on Lady Southampton’s estate adjoining the New Road near Bedford Nursery, St Pancras. We understand she will be exposed for public inspection from Tuesday next.
And on to the end of it Jeremy had pinned one of the highly coloured admission cards they had all bought – he and his father and his mother – admission cards to go into the compound on that early autumn day of the same year. Printed in pink, it showed a drawing of the engine, called Catch Me Who Can, and was headed ‘TREVITHICK’s Portable Steam Engine. Mechanical Power Subduing Animal Speed.’
It had not lasted, that wonderful experiment. The engine had performed well but the rails had frequently given way. The number of people willing to pay a shilling admission, with the opportunity of a ride if they felt like risking it, had not been enough to defray expenses. The exhibition had closed. The moving steam engine, whether on rails or on road, was a freak, a sideshow without practical applications. It had best be forgot. Trevithick, from that day on, had decided to forget it.
So who was this man writing from Wadebridge? Some amiable crank. Someone who had convinced himself that if you refined and heated tin long enough it would turn to gold, or thought that if you fixed bamboo-framed wings to your back you could fly. Cornwall was full of dotty inventors.
Jeremy read the letter again. ‘Combat wheel-spin?’ It was perhaps not an irrational question, for many believed that insufficient traction could be obtained by wheels being forced round by pistons. The horse was the obvious example. Wheels were too smooth. But how out of date was this man? Did he not read the technical papers? Was it even necessary to reply, or did one just ignore the letter?
He was saved the decision by the sound of footsteps on the stairs. A tap on the door. Unusual.
‘Come in.’
His father entered, stooping in the doorway. Ross’s gaunt face had an inscrutable but pleasant expression. He didn’t often come up here.
‘Did you not hear the commotion?’
‘No. Bella? But she always makes a noise.’
‘It seems we are waiting for you.’
‘Supper? Good.’
‘No, not supper . . . Don’t you need a light?’
‘I was just going to make one.’
Ross said: ‘This damned door is too low. Do you not often scrape your head?’
‘Not often now, Father. I’ve grown used to it.’
‘When we put you up here you were hardly five feet tall. An extra foot or so makes a difference. Something should be done. Perhaps we could raise it. Cut a piece of the wood out.’
There were shouts from downstairs.
‘And what,’ Jeremy asked, ‘have you come to tell me?’
‘Geoffrey Charles is back.’
‘What! Here? When did he—’
‘At Trenwith. They arrived last evening, it seems.’
‘They?’
‘Yes, he’s brought his young Spanish bride.’
‘Good God! After all this time! Wonderful! And what—’
‘We left too early this morning to hear of it. Jane has just told us. She heard it from Ern Lobb, who heard it from someone else, I forget who. They’ve gone into the house and are living there, it seems, all on their own, except for the tender care of Liza Harry.’
‘They haven’t been over here today while we were out?’
‘No. I imagine it is a pretty mess at Trenwith and they want a day or two to sort things out.’
‘But that’s where we can help them!’
‘Of course.’
‘Papa, Papa,’ came the husky young contralto of Isabella-Rose. ‘Are you coming?’
Ross looked at Jeremy and smiled. ‘You see?’
‘You mean – you’re going over tonight?’
‘Against my better judgement. I put it to your mother and to Clowance that for four people to come beating at your door at half an hour after nine o’clock at night, clamouring to be let in, is the sort of welcome that Geoffrey Charles no doubt could survive. But if his wife is of a nervous disposition it could well prejudice her against the family for ever. No use. They didn’t heed me.’
‘What did Mama say?’
‘Never mind. The question is, do you wish to eat supper on your own, which would give pleasure to Jane, who will feel hurt if everything she has prepared has to stand and go cold for hours? Or do you feel that, having waited so long for Geoffrey Charles, even one day lost will make a difference?’
‘I’m coming with you,’ said Jeremy. ‘But chiefly to see his Spanish girl.’
II
After Ross had left the room to precede him down the stairs Jeremy paused and picked up a silver stock-pin which had arrived by messenger a couple of days ago. Though it did not really suit his present attire he fancied it and thrust it into the lapel of his jacket.
Music Thomas had brought it. Inside the parcel was a small printed card which read: From Mrs Clement Pope, Place House, Trevaunance, Cornwall.
Chapter Five
I
The following week Ross and Demelza were supping with Dwight and Caroline Enys at Killewarren.
Ross said: ‘You haven’t seen them yet?’
‘No,’ said Dwight. ‘Caroline was for calling, but I thought they were better to have a few days on their own to settle down.’
‘Settle down!’ Demelza said. ‘The house is in a rare jakes! We have been over every day – Jeremy and Clowance and I – doing our most. And Geoffrey Charles has hired three women from the village. And there are five men trying to mend the chimneys and repair the leaks in the roof. And the Harrys have been given a month’s notice to leave. I thought poor Amadora would be overwhelmed.’
‘A pretty name,’ said Caroline. ‘A pretty creature?’
‘You must ask Ross,’ said Demelza; ‘he was much taken with her.’
‘I have always liked little dark girls,’ Ross said. ‘You must know that.’
‘I’m not little,’ said Demelza.
‘Well, you were when I first saw you.’
‘Sorry if I have overgrown my strength.’
The Loving Cup Page 5