Bonds of Earth, The

by Thompson, E. V.

  Taking pity on him, Annie Pyne said, ‘From all the girls told me, they were very lucky it was you who found them and not that gamekeeper. Poor Jennifer had a nightmare about that poor dog of his last night and woke us all up with her screaming. She was very upset. The man must be some kind of monster, what with that and poor Albert Bolitho.’

  ‘It’s actually Mr Bolitho and his family I’ve come up here to find. Agnes Roach, the farmer I work for, has sent a couple of things for them.’

  ‘That’s very kind of her, very kind indeed. I sent the girls up to them earlier today with a couple of things I’d baked, but they can do with anything they can get hold of to eat. Unfortunately, Albert is one of those foolishly proud men who feels that accepting things from others is almost as bad as workhouse charity.’

  ‘Thanks for warning me, but I think I can get over that problem. I mentioned Jenken to Agnes and she’s said she’ll take him on to help me with the haymaking. I’ll tell Mr Bolitho we’re so desperate for help that she’s sent me with this basket as a sort of bribe.’

  Annie Pyne nodded her approval, ‘That should work, and having Jenken bringing money into the home will be a godsend for them all. Your employer must be a very kind woman.’

  It was Goran’s turn to smile now. ‘She wouldn’t thank you for saying that. She tries to convince everyone she’s a hard-headed, no-nonsense farmer, and in some ways she is, but she is a kindly woman and let me leave work early today to bring these things up here … but that reminds me, the reason I’ve called on you is that no one at the mine could tell me where Mr Bolitho and his family live. They said you might know.’

  ‘I’ve been there only once and doubt if I would be able to find it again, but Nessa will, she’s in the house doing some school work. You’d never be able to find it on your own. Wait here while I take this washing in and I’ll send her out to you.’

  Inside the cottage Nessa was seated at a table, utilizing the light streaming through a south-facing window by which to copy words from a large, leather-bound dictionary.

  ‘There’s someone outside wanting directions to where the Bolithos live. I said you would show him.’

  ‘Oh, Ma! I’m trying to finish this before the light goes.’

  ‘Of course, I forgot you were doing something important. I’ll go out and tell him you’re busy when I’ve put this washing down.’ Then, in an off-hand manner, Annie Pyne added, ‘It’s that young man you met when you, Morwenna and Jennifer were trespassing on the Spurre estate.’

  ‘It’s Goran?’ Nessa’s sudden change of attitude was startling, even though her mother had been expecting her to become more interested when she knew who was outside.

  The heavy book was closed hurriedly and Nessa rose to her feet so swiftly that her mother’s eyebrows were raised in unfeigned surprise as, all interest in her bookwork forgotten, Nessa demanded, ‘Where is he…?’

  Without waiting for a reply, she darted to the door saying, ‘I won’t be long, Ma. I’ll just show him to the Bolithos’ house.’

  Behind her, Annie Pyne was left with a great deal to think about.

  Outside the cottage Nessa had a moment of panic when there was no immediate sign of Goran, then she remembered her mother had been outside taking washing off the line behind the cottage.

  She had recovered much of her composure by the time she found him waiting by the back door, back towards her, holding the basket.

  ‘Hello, what are you doing here?’

  It was not as casual as she would have liked it to appear but, turning, Goran returned her smile and lifted the basket. ‘Agnes Roach has sent this for the Bolitho family but I don’t know where they live. I just spoke to your mother and she said you would know.’

  ‘I do, but it’s out on the moor and you’ll never find it on your own. I’ll take you there.’

  ‘Thanks, but I also want to speak to your pa, Agnes says she wants him to call on her at the farm. I’ve been to the mine but they said he was below ground with some of the miners.’

  ‘He should be home by the time we get back from the Bolithos’. You can tell me what it’s about on the way and why she’s sent things for Albert and his family … they’ll certainly be welcome. The family are desperately poor.’

  Chapter 6

  WALKING AWAY FROM the cottage, Nessa struck out across the open moor with Goran by her side heading in the general direction of a ragged ridge of fractured granite that rose in impressive dominance above the surrounding moorland.

  ‘I love it up here,’ Nessa said, happily. ‘It’s so different from where we lived down west. There it was impossible to escape from the noise and clatter of the mines all around us, but here it’s so quiet sometimes you can imagine you’re the only person in the world.’

  ‘I know what you mean, but you can hear the noise from the mines around Caradon when the wind’s in the wrong direction – and Wheal Hope will be closer than any of them.’

  Looking at him questioningly, Nessa asked, ‘Don’t you like mines, or mining?’

  ‘I don’t know enough about them to say whether I really like them or not,’ Goran replied honestly, ‘but my pa was killed working on a mine when I was small and Ma has always been very bitter about it, so I suppose that’s bound to have had some effect on how I think about them.’

  ‘Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

  He shrugged, ‘How could you? Neither of us knows very much about the other. We’ve only met a couple of times….’

  Even as he was speaking Goran was thinking of their first meeting, when he saw more of the Pyne sisters than most men viewed of any woman, even those to whom they were married. He wondered whether Nessa was remembering it too! Dismissing the thought immediately, he hastily changed the subject.

  ‘Your ma said you were in the house doing school work when I arrived.’

  ‘That’s right, I was learning new words and writing them down, with their meanings. One of Ma’s brothers teaches in his own school in London and he sends books and sets work for me. It’s something I want to do when I’m older.’

  She thought of asking Goran how well he could read or write, but changed her mind. If he could do neither well it might cause him embarrassment and she had no wish to do that.

  However, Goran himself pursued the matter. ‘I can read and write a bit. One of my pa’s sisters teaches school too and she was teaching me until Pa died and we moved away. She’d sometimes come visiting and leave me books and things to work on, but not long afterwards she went to America and there are so many words in the books I don’t understand that I got fed up trying to read them. But I’m not bad at sums. I work mornings for Elworthy Coumbe, Agnes’s brother, who has the farm next to hers and because he can’t read or write I keep a tally of what money’s spent and what comes in. Agnes checks everything because she has a good mind for money but she says I’m pretty good too and it’s not often she finds anything wrong.’

  ‘Don’t you have a dictionary?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A dictionary, a book that tells you what every word means. It’s what I was using when you came to the house. It’s fun, you find all sorts of words there you’ve never heard of.’ Having a sudden idea, she added, ‘My uncle sent a couple of dictionaries, one for me and another for Morwenna, but she’s never bothered to learn to read and doesn’t use it. When we go back home I’ll ask Ma if you can borrow it. You’ll enjoy using it and be surprised how useful it is. If you only learn two new words a day, by the end of a year you’ll know more than seven hundred new words – as well as all those you’ll have learned from the books you’ve been able to read.’

  Her enthusiasm was such that Goran said, ‘You obviously really do enjoy learning, you’ll be a good teacher one day. I’m surprised Morwenna doesn’t feel the same way.’

  With a hint of remorse, Nessa explained, ‘I don’t think our uncle helped very much when he used to come to see us. He would keep on about how clever I was and never say anything kind about Morwenna
at all. I think she was so upset she decided that if she couldn’t be better than me at learning she wasn’t even going to try. It’s a pity because she’s quite clever, really, but I suppose it doesn’t matter too much, all she wants to do is get married and have a home and family of her own.’

  ‘And that’s not something you want?’

  ‘I want to get married and have a family too … eventually. But before even thinking about that I want to do something. Teaching, if I can.’

  Goran was impressed. He had met few girls in his young life and certainly none with Nessa’s learning or ambition. The few he had come across thought as did Morwenna, looking forward to marriage and a family as their ultimate aim in life.

  ‘Where’s Morwenna now, back at the cottage?’

  Nessa looked at him sharply. ‘No, she’s taken Jennifer for a walk to North Hill village. It seems there’s a shop there and Ma wanted to know what they sell as it’s probably our nearest. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No particular reason. She won’t find very much in the shop although they can usually get anything you ask for … but they do sell sweets, so they might help Jennifer forget the nightmare your ma said she had last night.’

  ‘Yes, it was about that gamekeeper shooting that nice young hound,’ she explained, ‘It was a horrid thing to do. I’m surprised they keep such a man on at the big estate.’

  ‘Marcus Grimble can do no wrong in Sir John Spurre’s eyes. He served as his personal orderly in the Napoleonic wars and Sir John will not hear anything said against him.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like this Sir John Spurre, although I doubt whether I’ll ever meet him so what I think won’t matter to either of us … but we’re almost at the place where Albert Bolitho lives: it’s over there, in among those large rocks.’

  The Bolitho ‘home’ was no more than a piece of ground about the size of the living-room in Goran’s cottage and was surrounded on three sides by man-high granite boulders. Tree branches had been laid across the top of the space, on which there rested an untidy ‘thatch’ of gorse, coarse grass and turf.

  The open front of the primitive shelter was hung with a frayed and holed tarpaulin sheet which failed to quite reach the ground. A corner had been folded back to reveal a number of flat stones which had apparently been manhandled inside to serve as makeshift seats.

  Almost half the floor area was covered by a thick layer of fern on which was strewn three or four frayed blankets. Two scantily clad young boys, scarcely more than babies, were sharing this improvised bed with their injured father while another two, not much older and with only a little more ragged clothing, were outside in the company of a skin-and-bone woman who, a defeated expression on her pinched face, squatted, snapping twigs with which to feed a low-burning fire.

  Beside the lack-lustre fire was a smoke-blackened pot containing what Goran thought was probably the remains of a stew made from the rabbits obtained at such a great cost by the head of the Bolitho family.

  The state of the hovel and its occupants came as a shock to Goran. He and his mother were by no means well off and he had seen many farm labourers with even less than they possessed, but he had never before witnessed such abject poverty as this.

  The woman eagerly seized the basket of food he brought but she had hardly begun to thank him for it when her husband’s tremulous voice called from inside the improvised home.

  ‘Who is it? Who’s out there?’

  The miner’s wife looked at Goran questioningly and he called, ‘It’s Goran Trebartha – I’m the one who found you yesterday.’

  There was a pause as Albert Bolitho digested this information before calling, ‘What are you doing here? Come inside where I can see you.’

  Stooping in order to pass through the triangular opening, Goran entered the primitive dwelling. Albert Bolitho did not appear to have strength enough to rise up from his fern bed but he raised an arm towards Goran, ‘I’d like to shake your hand, son. The doctor says I owe my life to you – and my freedom too. I won’t ever forget it. But what are you doing here … and who’s that with you? Has someone found out what I was doing?’

  He asked the question when he heard his wife say something to Nessa and there was fear in his voice as the possibility occurred to him.

  ‘No, and no one will. Your wife is talking to Nessa Pyne, she brought me here. I’m here because I mentioned Jenken to Agnes Roach, the farmer I work for, and told her he seemed a sturdy lad. We’ve got haymaking coming up on the farm very soon and are desperate for someone to help us out. Agnes wants to take him on to work with me getting the hay cut and dried. She asked me to come here and speak to him and has sent a couple of things for the family. You’d be doing us a great favour by allowing him to come and work with me.’

  ‘He’ll do it, of course. To be honest, it would be a lifeline for the family, me being laid up the way I am. Have you spoken to him yet?’

  ‘No, your wife says he’s gone off to the doctor at Rilla Mill to get something that’s being made up to put on your leg … how is it feeling now?’

  ‘The only feeling right now is pain, but the doctor reckons I’m lucky to have that. He believes if I’d been ten minutes later getting to him I’d have lost my leg and should have been grateful had that been all. He says he’s seen men die from far less.’

  ‘Well, you’re still here and going to get better. Hopefully by the time you are fit again there will be work for you at the Wheal Hope, they seem to be getting on well with things there.’

  ‘Captain Pyne has some good men working for him and once I’m well again I’ll be more than happy to take any work he can offer me, but I won’t forget who I have to thank for being able to do it. God bless you, boy. I’m not much good to man or beast at the moment but when I’m up and about again you’ll never need to ask twice for my help in anything, it’ll be there for you.’

  Chapter 7

  WALKING BACK WITH Nessa from the Bolithos’ hovel, Goran was still haunted by the poverty of the injured miner and his family but when he voiced his thoughts to Nessa, her response was philosophical.

  ‘It’s possibly the worst conditions I’ve seen a family in but it’s something a great many miners accept as part of their way of life. There are always far more miners in Cornwall than there is work for them and when news of a rich find goes around they flock to the area in the hope of being taken on. Sometimes they’re lucky and enough mines start up to give them all work, but not all mines succeed. When they close there can be hundreds of miners, thousands even, desperately searching for work and they make their homes where they can, with whatever is at hand.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like that sort of life.’ The mere thought of living in the same conditions as the Bolithos caused Goran to shudder.

  ‘I doubt very much whether they do, but they say that once you’re a miner, you’re always a miner and if that’s what it takes….’ The gesture that ended her statement indicated an acceptance of the facts but, changing the subject abruptly, she asked, ‘Where exactly is it you live?’

  ‘In a cottage on Elworthy Coumbe’s farm, close to the farmhouse. If you aren’t in too much of a hurry to get back to the mine I’ll show you. We won’t need to go far out of your way; you’ll be able to see it from the edge of the moor.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  There was a natural ease in their new-found relationship that they both recognized, even though neither had experienced it before with anyone other than family. Goran was an only child, brought up for many years on a fairly isolated farm and although Nessa had been brought up in a family environment in the midst of a bustling mining community, she had always lived in the shadow of her older and more outgoing sister.

  ‘That’s the farm down there.’ They had reached the edge of the moor and Goran pointed to where a cluster of farm buildings huddled in a shallow hollow surrounded by fields that extended down the slope of the moor’s edge to the River Lynher which formed a natural eastern boundary of the farm. ‘O
ur cottage is the building with smoke coming from the chimney, just to the right of the farmhouse.’

  Shifting his gaze further to the left, he said, ‘That hedge over there, running up to the wall of the field where the sheep are, is the boundary between Elworthy’s farm and that of his sister, Agnes Roach. I work on his farm from dawn to noon, and hers from one o’clock until dusk.’

  Nessa gave him a sympathetic look, ‘Don’t you ever have time off to do things you want to do?’

  ‘Not very often. Agnes isn’t the healthiest of women – and although Elworthy is capable of working as hard as any two men, he doesn’t always think about things and needs to be watched in case he does something stupid. But it isn’t as bad as it sounds. Whenever I take animals to market, or things to sell on fair days in Launceston and Liskeard, I often have time to wander around and see things, although if Elworthy is with me I need to look after him. He’s as good a farmer as anyone when he’s doing what’s familiar but he gets confused when he’s away from the farm, especially if there are a lot of people around him.’

  ‘Is that Elworthy down there by the river, talking to a man with a horse?’

  Nessa pointed to where two men were talking by a narrow bridge which spanned the river in the far corner of the farm. One of the men was wearing a smock, an article of clothing adopted by many of those who worked the land, but it was sight of the other man which caused Goran to start in surprise. Holding the reins of a thoroughbred horse as he talked to his companion, he was dressed in the manner of a gentleman … and Goran recognized him immediately.

  ‘Yes, that’s Elworthy, but what’s Sir John Spurre doing down there talking to him? As far as I’m aware it’s the first time he’s ever come to either of the two farms.’

  As they watched, Elworthy began pointing in various directions and Goran pulled a startled Nessa behind a clump of gorse before the two talking men looked in their direction.