‘No, I didn’t wish to interfere. Why – are you worrying about him? Did you have some private letter from him yesterday?’
‘Nothing! I’ve heard nothing from him! It was just an idle question.’
‘Well, I believe he has a fancy to arrange his own life. Jeremy, you know, however much we love him, is rather the dark horse. Not long ago we were talking: you said so yourself.’
‘Yes . . . I know I did.’
Jane Gimlett came in. ‘If you please, sur, Ben Carter is outside.’
‘Tell him I will see him in a moment.’ Ross got up. ‘Are you sure you don’t need me here today?’
‘Quite sure.’
He hesitated a moment more. ‘I suppose it could have been nothing I had done to cause you to behave as you did yesterday?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Yet you are stiff towards me.’
Demelza said: ‘Only because I am stiff towards myself.’
III
After Ross had gone Demelza spent a quiet morning, nursing her headache and her queasiness, and making preparations for the afternoon. Although not at her best today, some things could not be allowed to wait.
Even getting away seemed a major task, for she had to surround it with so many excuses. She knew this was one of her weaknesses: she never seemed able to make a majestic pronouncement simply that she was ‘going out’. (She remembered an occasion when Jeremy was eight and she had put on her cloak and Jeremy had said, ‘Where are you going, Mama?’ To which she had replied, ‘Nowhere.’ Instantly he had said, ‘Can I come?’)
Eventually this afternoon Bella was dispatched and Henry ‘seen to’, and some cider-pressing that she had agreed to superintend postponed until the following day. She went upstairs and, the weather still being warm, she put on a cool linen blouse with short sleeves, and a linen skirt which wrapped around and was secured by five big bone buttons. Under the skirt she pulled on Clowance’s shabby blue barragan trousers which Clowance had been too ashamed to take with her into her married life. These could be rolled up to the knee and prevented from unrolling by means of pieces of ribbon elastic. She put on thin lisle stockings and a well-worn pair of leather-laced boots which would not slip easily.
Then she took up a small bag, put in it two candles, a tinder box, a pair of scissors, a twenty-foot length of rope. She had no certain use for the rope, but she thought it appropriate to carry it, just in case.
Even now she had to shake off one member of the family, and the one most difficult to reason with: Farquhar.
Farquhar was the family’s dog, and most particularly Isabella-Rose’s; but like most animals he had a habit of attaching himself to Demelza. So he did today, and was constantly ordered to go home, only to be observed a few minutes later following at a distance crawling on his belly. Demelza was painfully reminded of that other day and that other dog which had been so much a part of her life and was now long gone. There had been an occasion when she had walked this way one Christmas long ago and Harry Harry, the Warleggan gamekeeper, had shot Garrick in the ear . . .
This of course was not so long a walk. Kellow’s Ladder came even before Sawle Cove.
She had passed it many times but never investigated it. The Ladder was something she knew the boys had used – and Charlie Kellow also had used before he became so fat and boozy – and she had, without personal examination, assumed it to be about as safe and as unsafe as any other cliff climb in the neighbourhood. If you bred young children and lived in the neighbourhood of fearsome cliffs and a treacherous sea you just had to close your mind to the dangers and accept the fact that young people grew accustomed to their environment – otherwise you would never have a peaceful hour.
To get to the ladder you climbed or slid down a narrow path running diagonally across the face of the cliff, which here was not sheer but inclined inwards and upwards towards the land. This cliff face was tufted with grass and thrift and heather and the occasional stunted gorse bush, and was populated and punctuated by rabbits and rabbit holes. Then you picked your way further downwards among an outcrop of granite boulders. By this time you had dropped about 150 feet, and here you came on a platform slanting at about thirty degrees towards the sea, largely grass covered, but part of it stone-walled with the ruins of a mine-working. From here it was about another fifty feet, slithering among boulders until you saw a V-cleft in the precipice face and at the bottom of the V was the hole and the ladder. Demelza reached it, lonely and breathless, and peered down the hole at the sand sixty feet below.
As she looked the sand was covered by the sea, and then uncovered again. The tide was later today.
It was not nearly so good a day as when Ben had come. There had been an uncertain, watery sun all morning, and streaky clouds had gathered to make a birch-broom sky. It looked as if autumn was on its way. But you could not be certain: in this peninsula of land thrust out into the Atlantic you could never be sure even of the bad weather.
The hole – or shaft – was about eight feet across. She had hoped it might be sloping but it was not. The ladder, which at first she could hardly see, was nailed to the side with large-headed iron nails, and to her dismay was not quite continuous; that is to say it ended at one place and began a few inches lower to the right and then six more rungs down it moved to the left again. She guessed it was because the people who put it there – had it been the Kellows? – had found in places that the nails would simply not go into the rock and had had to adjust their ladder accordingly.
She knelt for a minute or two staring down: she could see only one rung actually missing – otherwise they looked sound. Anyway they had borne Ben’s weight.
She wondered at her own breathlessness and dizziness. Was it just vertigo and loneliness? How much had she drunk last night? Certainly far more than Ross guessed. Her head still throbbed. But she had to be alone on this mission, however iron-bound and looming the landscape. The gulls of course had soon seen her and were crying overhead. Otherwise nothing stirred.
She unbuttoned her skirt and unwrapped it and laid it beside the hole. She put a heavy stone on it so that it should not blow away. She tied the cloth bag round her shoulder in such a way that it would not flap or fall forward at an inconvenient moment. She edged her way to the rim of the hole and got her foot far enough down to rest on the first rung. It seemed willing to take her weight. Slowly she manoeuvred herself round, clutching at tufts of grass for support until she was facing the wall of the adit. She transferred her hands to the ladder sides, took a second step down and then a third.
The rock wall was greasy with Saturday’s rain; this hole must serve as drainage for a large area of sloping land. The rungs too were slippery. Should she have taken off her boots and come down in bare feet?
She reached the broken rung. She tested it with her toe and a piece of the rotten wood broke off and fell down and landed in the wet sand with a plop. As she would, if she fell. It was not too long a stretch to the next rung; thank Heaven they were only about a foot apart. She stretched down and found it. As she transferred her weight to it it gave an ominous crack. Gripping hard to the sides of the ladder, she moved quickly to the one below. It held her without complaint.
How far had Ben said was the side tunnel? Had he said at all? Awkward if she missed it.
Step followed step until she was half way. The circle of daylight at the top was by now scarcely larger than a full moon; that at the bottom was growing ever greater. The sea covered the sand again; bubbles and froth, swirling, bottle-green vomit veined with white. Something fell on her hair, wriggled down her shoulder and was gone.
She saw the tunnel. Another thing Ben had not mentioned was that it was not immediately adjacent to the ladder: you had to make a three-foot stride. Not much for a man. Not much for an agile woman. But an agile woman suffering from the effects of drink, with more than a trace of natural vertigo, and entirely on her own, tends to become more nervous at each step. Her foot slipped on the edge as she fell gasping into the
mouth of the tunnel.
Her hands were shaking so much that she could not light the tinder. She sat back against the edge of the tunnel taking breaths to steady herself. Water was dripping here, as if the land were bleeding. Wherever there was water and a sufficiency of light some sort of vegetation grew, whether it was moss or grass or tiny ferns. You could not stop life, could you?
Except by death.
There were splendid colours in the rock here: mottled browns and veins of green and russet streaks and speckled greys, with dashes of ochre and yellow; no wonder they had opened this tunnel.
She began to feel sick. It was all imagination, she told herself. What was she doing with imagination, let alone a queasy stomach, who had been a starving brat not above picking up and eating a half-chewed and rancid bone off the rubbish heap where someone who could afford to be more particular had thrown it? Thirty years ago. Thirty years of genteel living had so weakened her digestive juices, thirty years of happiness and sorrow and love and childbearing and work and play and breathing the genteel air of Nampara had so developed her sensibilities and her imagination, that because of one mere night drinking port she was about to be sick, and because of loneliness and vertigo she was trembling scared of attempting to climb the ladder again.
What if she did find herself incapable of returning up the slippery crumbling ladder? Would anybody ever find her? It would be dark when Ross got home. No one would have any idea of where she had gone. Perhaps tomorrow they would scour the cliffs, see the skirt . . .
She was sick, and after a few minutes wiped her mouth distastefully on her sleeve and began to feel better. Shutting her mind to her situation she tried the flint again. This time the tinder lighted, and from it the two candles caught. The cave grew around her, dripping here and there, flickering yellow.
It was easy to see the sacks, with a sheet of tarpaulin beside them which presumably had been used to protect them from the damp. The first sack was marked ‘S’ and was empty. So was the one marked ‘J’. The third one, ‘P’ or ‘B’, had the documents in.
She took them out, read what was on them. Then she took a candle back to the opening of the cave and one by one set fire to the documents, holding them by a corner until they were properly alight and allowing them to burn on the edge before brushing the ashes over into the sea. These all burned, she took up a sack and lit that. It caused a lot more smoke, and the channel of the breeze blew much of it back into the tunnel and made her cough. She went on with the second sack. This was damper and took a long time to lose its identity and its ink initial. Eventually she was satisfied that nothing recognizable remained and she thrust it over the edge like its fellow. And presently the third sack followed in the same way.
The few coins that Ben had mentioned were scattered on the floor. Among the pennies were two twopenny pieces, which were already becoming rare. She hesitated over these but presently threw them down the shaft.
All that remained was the piece of tarpaulin. Plain black, dirty and cobwebbed, it was unidentifiable, unrecognizable in any way; but it might as well go the way of the rest. As she pulled it forward something clinked and she saw a piece of silver, part fallen down a shallow cleft. She picked it up.
It was a silver cup, very small, but nicely fashioned, with two handles. Not more than two and a half inches high. Like a toy. But prettily made. She rubbed the tarnished side of it and could see some inscription but could not make it out. Perhaps a foreign language. She dragged the tarpaulin to the edge and tipped it over. At first it caught in some errant draught, but after flapping for a few seconds it collapsed and slowly descended to the waiting sea.
The cup was in her hand. Dangerous to keep? Perhaps. But hard just to jettison. She hesitated and then put it into the bag she had brought. It could be looked at again.
A further circuit of the cave showed nothing more. She snuffed out one candle, then the other, waited until the tallow had cooled before she put them away. She strapped the bag back upon her shoulder. Then she looked out at the ladder. It was a long way away.
The first step was the worst: three feet to get your foot on the rung. It was much easier coming down because you could hold firmly to the ladder side while you groped for the tunnel entrance. But in reverse, what did you hold on to? There wasn’t a convenient outspur of the rock that you could clutch. All the rock was smooth and straight and hard and damp.
She sat down for a minute or two to try to stop her knees shaking and to work this out. She thought, if I think of falling I shall never face it. I shall be here, still crouched here, a trembling, half-frozen, half-starved, pitiable wretch when (if) they find the skirt tomorrow, or the next day. Or perhaps even the next. She could find moisture in the cave but no food. Could you eat fern?
She remembered Cousin Francis going out that rainy September afternoon so many years ago, and never coming back. He had gone down Wheal Grace on his own and slipped and fallen. Only fallen a little way compared to what she would fall here. But he had fallen into water – and he could not swim. She could swim, after a fashion, but the water at the bottom of this shaft was not deep enough to break her fall. The distance was probably less than thirty feet. Well, it would be soon over. She would likely break her back and that would be the end of it.
She again began to take breaths to steady herself. She had decided she must not think of falling and since then had thought of nothing else! Well, what were the choices? If she tried to climb and failed she was certainly dead. If she tried to climb and succeeded she returned to Nampara as if nothing had happened; no one would ever know she had been down here. That was the whole object of the mission. If she stayed where she was, the chances were that she would be found alive, eventually, though one knew not when. Also, she would then be asked to explain what in Heaven’s name had got into her, going down an old adit with treacherous steps, on her own and unaided. If she refused to give the true explanation – as she must – then she would, rightly, be regarded by Ross as a mental case.
Illogically it was the dislike of this that stirred her to make a move. She unhitched her bag again and took out the rope. There was no use for it. There was no way in which she could attach it to the ladder. The rungs were too close to the wall of the adit, and if by any remote piece of luck she was able to sling the rope through a rung and retrieve the other end, an improbable feat in itself, she would be more likely to find it an encumbrance round her waist. She could see herself slowly but helplessly sliding down the rope into the sea.
Did that matter? Could she not, when in the sea at the bottom, or somewhere on the way down, grasp the rungs and begin a normal climb?
She thought: This is not an adit over the sea. This is not a cave from which I have to step to death or safety. This is a step in our back yard, where the calves are fed. Three feet? Dear life, I could jump four. Why should I miss the rungs? Why should I fail to grasp the ladder sides? In any case I don’t have to jump – I only have to stretch. And balance at the same time. It’s really only standing on the edge and letting yourself gradually fall. If your foot misses, your hand should hold. If your hand misses there’s another hand close behind. Judas God, what are you made of? Are you one of those elegant, simpering, pampered maidens at Bowood, who have never known the sort of exercise you take every day, who have never ridden a horse astride or fought with the waves on Hendrawna Beach or scrubbed a floor or fed pigs or milked cows or brewed ale? Come, come, my dear, take a grip on yourself.
So she carefully re-wound the rope around her forearm and re-packed it, carefully re-fixed her bag, carefully stepped to the very edge of the adit, below which the sea, bottle-green and vomit-stained with white, swirled backwards and forwards, covering and uncovering the sand like a magician at a fair; and she took a breath, the deepest breath of all, and looked at the ladder only three feet away, and stretched out her leg and could not reach and could not reach until she began to fall, and then put out her foot an extra six inches, and clawed with her hands against the slippery rock
face, and her foot jarred and held and almost slipped, and her hands, like helpless prisoners in some failed prison escape, slid and clutched and slid and clutched, and then one hand felt something more secure than the rock face, and held on to it. And then she swung, toe only just holding, hand only just holding, while the thirty-foot drop became three thousand feet and the earth swung and the adit swung, toppling her further and further into the gaping, sucking hole. And then her other hand clutched, just in time as her foot slipped off the rung. And she held, kicking desperately for twenty seconds, bruising her knees and her toes; a panic-stricken groping until her foot found a rung again, and her other foot found the rung above it; and, with an immense effort of will, she unloosed her hands from the ladder side and, panting, trembling, shuddering with every breath, she went up, rung by rung; to the break in the ladder and the missing step, and changed her grip, and blindly dizzily, reached the top. And crawled out and lay on the rubble near the hole gasping like a newly landed fish but knowing she was safe after all.
Chapter Four
I
Ross left for London late in October, and, the sea routes being no longer hazardous, he sailed from Falmouth in a tin ship. But as usual, it seemed to him, when he was aboard the trip was a foul one, and they did not drop anchor in the Pool of London until the 11th of November. There was much to be said for Jeremy’s steam carriages, he thought.
He found London returning to normal after the famous junketings he had shunned, and Parliament, whose opening he had now missed, preoccupied with matters which, while certainly of moment, did not in his view embrace some of the more pressing issues of the day. The Houses had expressed their deep regret at the continuing ‘indisposition’ of His Majesty King George the Third; there had been discussion on the disbanding of the militia; a vote of credit had been passed necessary for the services of the year 1814; provision made for the household of Princess Charlotte; long speeches on the thorny matter of the Prince Regent’s debts; complaints had even been aired that Parliament had been recalled too early.
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