George said: ‘Last year, because of a stupid and contrived agreement between two of our so-called nobility, I lost my seat in Parliament. This you well know, my dear Father, since you fought with me to the end, allowed our friend Poldark to take my seat. Well . . . that is done. Unless we arrange to shoot him on the highway we cannot unseat him. But I see no reason to be deprived of a place in Parliament for any length of time. I enjoyed the experience. Seats are for sale. I am buying one.’
‘Not a seat,’ said Cary. ‘A borough. You can get a seat for two or three thousand pounds. Trying to buy a borough will cost you five or ten times that before you’re finished.’
‘Agreed,’ said George. ‘But who has a seat for sale just after an election? Life is short: I don’t wish to wait. With a borough – if I get it – I have control. I can also dispense patronage: a parsonage for one, a customs appointment for another, a profitable contract for a third. One comes to possess influence and power of a new kind.’
‘St Michael is scot and lot, isn’t it?’ Nicholas remarked. ‘From what I know of them they’re very difficult boroughs to control – and expensive. The costs do not finish when you buy the property, George, they go on and on. People – the voters such as they are – tend to form themselves into groups and sell themselves to the highest bidder.’
‘I’m a rich man,’ said George. ‘I can afford to indulge myself. This fellow Barwell, who made a fortune in India; he too is prepared to pay for his indulgences. My fortune came from nowhere but the county in which I was born; and I intend to represent that county. There is no more to be said, dear Father, there is no more to be said.’
‘Nor is there,’ said Nicholas, frowning at the accounts. ‘I do not for a moment deny your right to spend this money as you please. Indeed I’m in favour of your attempt to get back into Parliament. So long as you know the pitfalls. . .’
‘I think so. Sir Christopher Hawkins has made them clear.’
‘He’s selling the properties to you?’
‘In part. In other cases he’s negotiating the sale.’
Cary said: ‘D’you know that lampoon about Hawkins and his home? It was going the rounds a year or so ago.
“A large park without any deer,
A large cellar without any beer,
A large house without any cheer,
Sir Christopher Hawkins lives here.”’
Cary sniggered.
‘Nevertheless we’d do well to keep him as our friend,’ said Nicholas. ‘Having quarrelled with the Boscawens -irrevocably, I fear – and being on less amiable terms than hitherto with Basset, Hawkins is a necessary ally in high places.’
‘I’m bearing that very much in mind,’ said George.
Further conversation was prevented for a time by a fit of coughing that attacked Nicholas. Cary watched his brother with an eye like a cockerel.
‘Have you tried snail tea?’ he asked. ‘When I had the influenza some bad last winter a year gone and my chest was raw as a brush, it had a soothing effect. That and camphor behind the ears.’
George fetched his father a glass of wine, which he sipped. ‘Upon my soul,’ Nicholas said, ‘I never was troubled in all my life with any affection of the bronchia until the time I came to Trenwith, George, when Valentine was born. I caught a chill in that draughty bedroom you gave me, and I truly believe that old witch of a woman, Agatha Poldark, cast some spell upon me there that will not disperse.’
‘Agatha cast an evil spell on us all,’ said George sourly. ‘Even Valentine. If another child is ever born to us I shall make certain the confinement takes place either here or at Cardew.’
Nicholas wiped his eyes with a red bandana handkerchief. ‘Is there something of it in the wind?’
‘That was not what I said.’
‘All the same, boy, one child is scarce enough to make sure of the inheritance. Twould be better—’
‘I was enough,’ George said shortly.
‘Talking of inheritance,’ said Cary, playing with the feather of his pen. ‘You both know, I reckon, that Nat Pearce’s illness has developed a putrid tendency and the surgeon gives him no more’n a few weeks to live?’
Nicholas shook his head and sighed. ‘Old Nat. Is that so? Why he’s barely three years older than I am. I’ve known him since I was twenty or so. His father was a lawyer before him but died young and Nat inherited the practice almost so soon as he had gone into the business.’ He dabbed his mouth and coughed again. ‘Of course in those days he was far too superior for the likes of me. It is all a long way back – before ever we had anything of this – and yet tis not forty years.’
‘Things’ve altered in more ways than one,’ said Cary. ‘Nowadays I own him, Mr Nathaniel Pearce.’
‘Much change you’ll get,’ said George. ‘He’s in debt all round.’
Cary picked his nose and carefully assayed the mining samples he had dug up. ‘Nephew, if you can spend your money one way, buying ramshackle property at big prices in order to put two letters after your name, I too can be extravagant in my own way. I conceit I know more about this town and the doings of its inhabitants than any other man alive; and Mr Pearce’s business I have reason to know particular well. And I can tell you that when Mr Pearce dies certain persons in this town will be in something of a taking when the details of all his affairs comes out.’
George narrowed his eyes. ‘You didn’t tell me this. D’you mean he has been using for his own ends some of the monies entrusted to him?’
‘That is what I do mean.’
‘How do you know? Did he tell you? Are the Boscawens involved?’
‘Unfortunately I suspicion not. Or to very small extent. Mr Curgenven, their steward, keeps too close a watch on all transactions, legal and mercantile. But there are others.’
‘Can you name them?’
There is the Aukett trust. When Mrs Jacqueline Aukett died she left three grandchildren, who were minors, and Mr Pearce was chosen to administer the trust. Then there’s the Trevanion family trust. And there’s another bound up with Noakes Peto and the mills he left . . .’
Silence fell. Nicholas’s breathing sounded like a kettle just beginning to sing on the hob.
George said: ‘Uncle Cary, are you being selective? Is it just chance that all the people you mention banked at Pascoe’s?’
‘Not chance,’ said Cary. ‘Not chance. For in these cases Pascoe’s Bank, or Pascoe himself, have been a party to the trusts.’
Nicholas closed the ledger and drummed on the top of it with his broad fingers.
‘You’re not supposing, Cary, surely, that there could be any risk in this to Pascoe’s Bank itself?’
‘I’m not supposing and I’m not not supposing. It would depend on what other pressures could be exercised at the appropriate time. Don’t forget I have Pascoe’s son-in-law in my pocket.’
George said: ‘I know that he still banks with us, but am unaware of the details.’
‘Soon after he married Pascoe’s daughter he told me he had a thought to change banks – first having discharged his debts to us out of his wife’s marriage portion. But I talked him out of this. I persuaded him to remain, by playing upon his vanity and his cupidity.’
‘That may not have been difficult,’ said George. ‘But tell us how nevertheless.’
‘St John Peter does not really like to be beholden to his father-in-law, whom he tends to despise, as a mere banker, so I suggested to him that I should renew his accommodation bills with us at a very low rate of interest. I told him we were anxious for reasons of prestige to retain his name among our customers. Some fools are vain enough to believe anything. I pointed out to him that the money we could offer him would bear 2% less interest than his new money – his wife’s money – would be earning for him in Pascoe’s. He would therefore gain by continuing to deal with us and at the same time neither his wife nor his father-in-law would know the extent of his then debts.’
‘And he accepted that?’
‘Being t
he man he is, why should he not? And since then, living as he does, the bills have increased in size and number.’
‘You think long, Cary,’ George said. ‘This must have been in your mind for years.’
Nicholas Warleggan was still ruminating on his last remark. ‘Pearce isn’t big enough – his affairs aren’t big enough – to shake Pascoe’s Bank. Pascoe survived the crisis of ’96, when we all felt the wind blow. He might have been vulnerable a few years ago; but now he must have big reserves.’
‘Nobody in banking has big reserves, Father,’ George said. ‘Not even us if the cards were called. But it depends what pretty surprises Cary has up his sleeve.’
‘Pascoe, Tresize, Annery and Spry,’ Cary muttered contemptuously, and shuffled his old coat about his shoulders as if it irked him. ‘That’s his reserves. St Aubyn Tresize has a good name, maybe, money in land, a few wharves in Hayle – but no real weight. Frank Annery is a notary with some connections. Spry is a Quaker, and like most Quakers is a warm man. But warm men do not fancy a cold wind.’
Outside there was the noisy tramping clatter of hooves and the shout of grooms, as a string of horses was led back to the stables of the Fighting Cocks Inn after their daily exercise.
‘What is St John Peter’s indebtedness to us?’
‘About twelve thousand pounds.’
George said: ‘What does the fool do with his money?’
‘Hunting mainly. He’s Master of the Rame Hunt, and keeping up that sort of style is costly. Also he has taken up with some woman with expensive tastes in St Austell.’
Silence fell.
Cary said: ‘As a matter of interest Ross Poldark has a substantial balance at Pascoe’s. Upward of four thousand pounds last month. Aiming at one bird, we might wing another.’
Nicholas said: ‘I wonder that you know all this, brother.’
Preliminary movements at the corners of Cary’s mouth suggested that he might have thought of smiling. ‘Pascoe employs a clerk called Kingsley. He is underpaid and is now able to afford a few small luxuries that he has not enjoyed before.’
‘I also wonder,’ said Nicholas, ‘where all this is going to lead, what the value is of this continuing rancour. We are too big now, have too many interests to need to waste time and money paying off old scores. Yours is the right way, George, to wish to get back into Parliament. That is looking ahead; preparing for the future. A member has many opportunities for advancing his interests. But Pascoe’s Bank? Ross Poldark? Do they merit the trouble you may have to take?’
Cary was about to reply but George spoke first. ‘I know you are the most magnanimous of us, Father, and that is an admirable thing to be. I too can be magnanimous at times, but preferably to my friends. I am a little surprised too in view of what you said just after the election, when Lord Falmouth had treated you in so cavalier a manner and had succeeded in forcing Captain Poldark into Parliament in place of your own dear son.’
Nicholas nodded and reached for his stick. That’s so. But it was spoke in the heat of the moment. Perhaps when one has been as ill as I have been this winter one comes to have – different views, different perspectives.’ He heaved himself up. ‘No matter. It was but an observation. I’ll go and seek your mother out. That is, if she is back from her shopping.’
II
Mrs Nicholas Warleggan was not yet back from her shopping, whither she had been accompanied by Mrs George Warleggan.
Elizabeth’s relationship with her mother-in-law was delicate and not of the easiest, for Mary Warleggan had not grown into her position but had remained the simple countrywoman she had been at the time of her marriage forty years ago. At that time, being the only surviving daughter of a small but substantial miller, she had been marrying beneath her in taking the son of a blacksmith, especially old Luke Warleggan’s son, however upstanding and strong he might be and whatever his aspirations. But Nicholas – who never in his life had been called Nick and fought any man or boy who so addressed him – had soon borrowed money on the mill and on the land, and when his father-in-law died had sold it, every stick and stone of it, and had moved with his wife and small son from Idless to put up one of these new foundry places and smelting works beside Carnon Stream. There he had begun importing pig-iron from Pentyrch and Dowlais near Cardiff, and wrought iron and faggot iron from Bristol. From these were made the tools necessary to supply the mines and the cottages: screws and nails, grindstones, fire grates, wire, red-lead, pig-lead, pots and kettles and basins. Thence sprang new ventures, the building of wheels for tin stamps, the manufacture of alloys from local tin and copper, and eventually the erection of complete steam engines for the mines. Learning to find good assistants to whom you paid good wages they could not hope to get elsewhere but from whom you expected the utmost in efficiency, Nicholas had spread his interests about the county, and, as a result of the credit he extended to mines, he found himself drawn into banking. An office opened in Truro soon became the centre of his activities, and Cary, who had been managing the foundry for him, was brought in to superintend their financial operations, and thus found his true mission in life.
So had begun their fortune, and Nicholas’s son, inheriting the drive of his father and developing a new and sharper eye for the profitable venture, had so far increased that fortune that, in the fullness of time, Mary Lashbrook, the small miller’s daughter, found herself the mistress of a great porticoed mansion seven miles from Truro with thirty bedrooms and five hundred acres of pasture and timber. More embarrassing still was the fact that her only son had chosen to marry this beautiful young impoverished widow whose family had almost the longest pedigree in Cornwall. (There had, indeed, been a terrible moment two years ago at a dinner at Trenwith, to which Nicholas and Mary Warleggan had mercifully not been invited, a dinner given for the great Sir Francis Basset – as he then was – and his lady and some others of the highest aristocracy, when in the course of conversation Basset had observed casually that his family had come over with the Conqueror, and Jonathan Chynoweth, the ineffectual burbling Jonathan, had at once said: ‘My dear sir, that is hardly a matter for congratulation. I have records of my family for two centuries before the Conquest. We Cornish look on the Normans as usurpers.’)
So it was perhaps understandable that common ground between the two Mrs Warleggans was hard to find. If Mary had ever been able to persuade herself that Elizabeth truly adored George as she did it might have made all the difference. But Elizabeth was too cool, too detached, too patrician to share in the sentiments they would then have shared. You could not discuss George’s health with her, or whether he was overworking or if his moods meant that he needed a bilious powder. Valentine was the nearest meeting point, but here again Elizabeth had all the modern mother’s fads and did not take too kindly to superstitions that she felt were out of date.
Not that Mary believed there was any real lack of good will on Elizabeth’s part. For instance, this afternoon. Elizabeth could have made an excuse and allowed her to go to Mistress Trelask’s alone. Instead they walked together in the misty clammy afternoon, over the cobbles, slipping and tripping here and there, skirts held in hand, among the common folk, some of whom recognized them and curtsied or pulled a forelock. And at Mistress Trelask’s Elizabeth was not only useful to Mary in helping her to choose between two paduasoys, but ordered a bonnet herself, and after it was over said:
‘You’ve never met my cousin, have you? My cousin Rowella who married Mr Solway, the librarian? She is but in the next street. Shall we call on her and persuade her to give us tea?’
So up they went, Mrs Warleggan knowing well how Rowella had married far beneath her, and secretly admiring Elizabeth for not being ashamed of the fact. So they came to the door: it was one of six small houses in a terrace, poorly built, the thatches in need of repair, the window frames crooked, the brick mouldering already; and out of the door as they approached it came a thick-set, fashionably dressed, plump-faced young man whom a stranger would only just have recognized as a cle
rgyman.
‘Why, Osborne,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Is Rowella in? We were about to call.’
Chapter Six
I
Ross had seen Dwight and Caroline several times and had seen and admired little Sarah, who indeed was little, and pale, but intelligent and alert. Caroline said nature was compensating for so tall a mother by giving her a pygmy. Dwight said he would wager that Caroline at four months old had been no bigger, and scarcely so good-natured. Caroline replied: ‘There you are wrong, Dr Enys, it is only since marriage that my nature has changed for the worse.’ But, in so far as one could perceive her true feelings behind the defensive flippancy, she seemed happy in her motherhood and spent much time with the child, neglecting, as she said, ‘horses and other more important matters’.
Dwight was none too well but drove himself relentlessly in his care for his patients. Sometimes it was not his health so much as his spirits that seemed down, and, on the first occasion Ross had a word alone with him, he tackled him on the subject.
Dwight said: ‘Caroline taxes me too. She accuses me of being a born pessimist, which is not true; but I think it is a necessity in my profession to foresee the way in which an illness might develop, and, if possible, to try to prevent an outcome that is bad. If I know that a child with measles may develop pneumonia, as many do, and die of it, am I a pessimist to recommend that the child be treated in a way best calculated to avoid this?’
They were riding back from Truro together, having met by chance half a mile out. Dwight had been to inspect progress on the building of the new Miners’ Hospital which was now in course of construction near the town; Ross was returning from a meal with his friend and banker, Harris Pascoe, where as usual they had tried to solve the world’s problems.
‘Financially,’ Pascoe had said, ‘England is better off . . . or the government at least is better off, than it was a year ago. These great gifts from the nobility and the business houses towards the prosecution of the war! The Duke of Marlborough £5,000. The City of London £10,000. And three m-mercantile houses in Manchester – three only! – to subscribe £35,000. Voluntary subscriptions already total one and a half million. It eases Pitt’s burden.’
The Angry Tide Page 7