‘I am sure my mother would be quite delighted with the match if she thought Mr Whitworth and I loved each other. Did you tell her that we loved each other?’
‘I do not think I used those words, Morwenna, for that is something you must tell her yourself. I told her that an engagement between you and Mr Whitworth would be announced shortly; I told her of Mr Warleggan’s great generosity towards you, and I told her of Mr Whitworth’s birth, youth and good looks, and of his really excellent prospects in the church. No doubt you will be writing to her soon yourself. You do write weekly, don’t you?’
‘And if I tell her – if when I write I tell her that I don’t know Mr Whitworth, that I certainly don’t love him and scarcely even like him; what will she say then? Will she still be delighted, Elizabeth? Will she still wish me to marry him?’
Elizabeth played two or three thoughtful notes on the harpsichord. It needed tuning. No one ever played it. It had been bought by Mr Nicholas Warleggan to furnish the house, but no one had ever played it.
‘My dear, pray think this over before you say anything more, certainly before you write to your mother. I think she would be greatly upset if, having learned from me of your splendid match, she then heard from you that you were not contented in it. She will wish you to be happy, as we all do; but she would be grievously disappointed if she thought you were finding fault with such a match because of a false and romantic idea of what a marriage ought to be.’
‘Is it false to have a romantic idea of marriage, Elizabeth? Is it wrong to feel that there should be love in marriage? Tell me, Elizabeth, tell me about your first marriage? How old were you then – eighteen, nineteen? Did you not love Mr Poldark? Did you not know him well and exchange loving confidences before ever the match was made? Or was it all arranged, as this has been arranged, without your consultation?’
Elizabeth waited until Morwenna had blown her nose and wiped her eyes. ‘Perhaps it is unfair to you, my dear, that we should try to put an old head on young shoulders. It is natural to expect romance. But it is not something on which a successful marriage can be based. In this you must accept the guidance of—’
‘Did you? Did you not marry for love?’
Elizabeth raised a hand. ‘Very well. I will tell you, since you demand to know. I married for what I thought was love, and it did not last for a twelvemonth. Nay, not for one whole year. After that we tolerated each other. Perhaps it was no better and no worse than most other marriages. But the fact that we thought ourselves in love with each other did not contribute one way or the other to the outcome. Now I have married Mr Warleggan, and although this was somewhat more matter-of-fact in origin, it is proving altogether more successful . . . Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘It is not what I wanted to hear,’ said Morwenna.
Elizabeth got up and put a hand on her young cousin’s shoulder. ‘The French have a saying – is it the French? I don’t know, I believe so – there is a saying that you do not put a boiling kettle upon the fire. You put cold water in the kettle and allow it to warm. So with marriage. In marriage you and Osborne Whitworth may come to love each other far more than if you had loved each other at the start. One expects less, one discovers more. Instead of demanding perfection we demand nothing and so often receive much.’
Morwenna wiped her eyes again and then the backs of her hands. ‘I do not know what to say, Elizabeth. It has – come as a great shock, a very great shock. Of course I am not unappreciative of your thought. I know you and Mr Warleggan mean it only in kindness. But I – I cannot see myself . . . I cannot feel that this is my . . . Indeed, the more I think of it—’
Elizabeth kissed her forehead, which was cold and clammy with shock. ‘Say nothing more now. Sleep on it. It will all look different in the morning. Indeed you may find yourself quite excited at the prospects that are now open to you. I’m sure your mother will be. Such a match for you is more than in ordinary circumstances she can have hoped for.’
She left the girl sitting alone with a single candle flickering in the small draughty music room. She had tried all along to keep her own voice detached, the conversation on a cool unemotional level. She felt she had succeeded, but it was not without cost to herself. She would have liked to have talked to the girl on her own terms, asked her what her feelings really were about her future husband, tried to console her and encourage her in quite a different way, not as an older relative but as another woman and a friend. But all along Elizabeth knew herself to be George’s wife. She had had a task to carry out, and she had dutifully performed it. It would have been disloyal to George to have talked to the girl in any way that might have encouraged her to thoughts of disobedience.
Besides, if confidences had once begun, she knew she might sooner or later have found herself ranged against him.
The early snow of March melted and was succeeded by a cold thaw. Gales and sleet followed, with floods such as had not been equalled in the memory of man. The Severn burst its banks at Shrewsbury and carried away bridges, the Lee overflowed the Essex Flat, all the Fens were under water and many of the inland banks swept away, the Thames rushed through London and submerged so much of it that inhabitants at Stratford and Bow lived in their upper rooms and used rowing boats in the streets. Vessels were wrecked all round the coasts, but this time unfortunately none cast itself upon the hospitable shores of Grambler and Sawle.
In Holland the French were triumphant, and the British government sent transports to the Weser to evacuate the remnants of their army, an army which, let down by its allies, its commissariat, its medical supplies and its own officers, had lost 6,000 dead in a week, mainly from typhus and the cold. Frederick William of Prussia had already made peace with his adversaries, and there would be barely time to get the remnants of the Expeditionary Force home. The remaining countries of northern and central Europe were preparing to make the best peace they could with the new dynamic that the French brought. Virtually the war was over. But Pitt said: ‘It matters little whether the disasters which have arisen are to be ascribed to the weakness of Generals, the intrigues of camps or the jealousies of Cabinets; the fact is that they exist, and that we must anew commence the salvation of Europe.’
One person who was happy amid these disasters, who came back from London by stages, the coach slithering and sliding and lurching among the thaws of early March, was Caroline. A first prisoner-of-war list had been received by the Admiralty on which the name of Surgeon-Lieutenant Dwight Enys was officially recorded. What, however, was more to the point was a three-page letter in the same mail bag from Dwight himself. Demelza was in her garden on the 11th of March, staring with particular pleasure at a crocus which had decided to rear its canary yellow head before the last frost was out of the ground, when Caroline arrived, and she knew at once by the look of her that she brought good news. Ross happened to be near by, and they went in out of the wind and read the letter together in the parlour.
1st February, 1794/5
‘Caroline, My Love,
‘I am writing this altogether unsure whether it will reach you and confident only that, now I have paper and pen, I must do so in the hope and prayer that our gaolers will be as good as their Word and let this letter pass.
‘Where am I to begin? All these months I have so often composed letters to you in my heart, but, now the opportunity comes at last, I am tongue-tied. Let me say then first, that I am safe and not unwell, though our treatment has been far from what one would have expected from a civilized Nation. I do not even know how long you had to wait before you were appraised of the fact that I was a prisoner. If you have written to me, I have received nothing. All communication with the central government has broken down, and internment camps and prisons, it seems to me, are administered locally according to the whims of the Commandant.
‘Well, that is, I suppose, one of the fortunes of war – or of this war. At least we have been kept alive, after a fashion. It seems like ten times ten months since our battle with the French all t
hrough the afternoon and on all through that night with a great gale blowing and the sea roaring. You will, I am sure, have heard Enough of this Engagement; and my part in it you will be able to picture without the Necessity of lurid description. For more than three quarters of the time I was working in a cleared space between decks with my apprentice, Jackland, and by the light of a sharply swinging lantern. Such help as I could give to the wounded was so rough and ready as to be a nightmare of slapdash surgery. Oftentimes I was thrown upon the patient or he upon me, so that the dripping knife I used as much endangered one as the other. But by two in the morning the water had rendered my makeshift hospital untenable, and all came on deck to await the end.
‘Yet it was another two hours before we struck. I do not remember if I told you that of our total complement of near 320 less than 50 were volunteers. About a half of the total were Pressed men, some with no previous sea experience at all; there were another 50 who were Debtors and minor Felons who had been given the choice between a prison sentence and serving at sea; about 25 foreigners, Dutch, Spanish, Scandinavian, who had been swept up by the gangs of Plymouth; and the same number of boys: urchins, orphans and the like. This crew for ten hours had fought a continuous battle with an enemy and with mountainous seas, and you would have thought that the prospect of Ship-wreck would have turned them into a panic-stricken rabble. Yet after we had struck the utmost calm and discipline reigned among the men. For nearly four more hours they worked at the construction of Rafts and life lines, and only six attempted to desert and were drowned. In those four hours, under the confident and firm hand of Lieutenant Williams, they ferried ashore first the wounded, then in gradual order and by a strict rotation all the crew, and so at last the officers. I was fortunate to be sent first with the wounded, of whom two died on the beach, but of the entire crew only three, aside from the six deserters, were lost to the sea.
‘Very soon we were surrounded and escorted inland by French armed Police and lodged in a school before being marched to our present Prison the following evening, so I saw little of the plight of the Héros; but she had thirty English prisoners on board whom I have since met and treated, and they tell me that she struck in a less favourable situation than we did, that complete panic thereupon reigned Aboard, and that it was four days before the last was brought ashore, leaving many dead aboard from their privations and the sea around littered with corpses. Near four hundred perished from this Vessel alone.
‘Well, we have been in this Prison ever since, and I at least have been fortunate in that I have never had cause to be idle. With three surgeons only among many thousand, and the usual outcrop of bilious fevers and scrofulous conditions resulting from bad food and close confinement, we have none of us lacked for Occupation. So far there seems to have been no talk of parole or repatriation or Exchange. None of the senior officers has been freed or ransomed or exchanged; and there are in the prison English ladies, one at least titled, the like of whom you would consider the French would have no purpose in retaining, but here they still remain.
‘My own Caroline, this is no love-letter, as you will by now have seen. If this reaches you it will at least give an Account of what has happened through this long Year. I can only say that amid all the trials of this present time you are never absent from my thought, that the locket you gave me is always warm against my Heart, and that, however long this separation continues, it cannot alter my love for you and my devotion.
‘Good night, Caroline, my love.
‘Your devoted,
Dwight’
‘I have left word with the Admiralty,’ said Caroline, ‘regarding a ransom. But at present they do not advise it;’ she lifted an ironical eyebrow at Ross, ‘as foreseen by you. They are trying to arrange exchanges, but up to now they have not been successful with prisoners held in Brittany.’
‘Now that the French are so victorious against other countries,’ Ross said, ‘it may be that they will be able to turn their attention to controlling their own.’
Nevertheless he did not privately rejoice as much as Caroline and Demelza were doing. The Admiralty list and the letter only confirmed what he had discovered from Clisson six months ago. In the meantime, and quite recently, he had received reports from Brittany of the conditions of the prisoner-of-war camps at Quiberon and elsewhere along the coast. Even if one allowed for a measure of exaggeration, the accounts were horrifying. So, while he showed a pleased face to the two women and joined with them in speculating on Dwight’s release, he felt that the chances of their seeing the young surgeon home alive and well were not more than even, and that the urgency to arrange an exchange or a ransom was greater than either of them realized.
Chapter Five
Ross continued his weekly visits to Agatha until early April. Then one day when he called on her she said:
‘They be back.’
‘Who? George?’ Ross said, startled in spite of himself, for the boldest of us likes to be prepared within himself for trouble.
‘Nay. The Chynoweths – the old folk. And Geoffrey Charles and his governess.’
Ross found time to admire her reference to the old folk.
‘And George and Elizabeth?’
‘Next week or the week after, they say. But they said they’d be home for Easter, and now that’s by.’
Ross put his head near to the whiskery old face and shouted: ‘You know that when he returns my visits to you must necessarily cease.’
‘Aye. Shame on him. Cess to him. Shite take him.’ Agatha stroked her black cat while uttering these curses. Ross thought that an earlier generation would have greatly feared her. ‘Ross, boy, I’ve a thing to say afore ye go. Mind you the tenth of August?’
‘The tenth? I do not recall it. Oh . . . but it is your birthday . . .’
Agatha’s mouth quivered above her purple gums. ‘My hundredth. That’s what I been living for. No Poldark hasn’t ever reached it afore. Nor none beyond ninety, so far as I know. There was Rebecca, Charles Vivian’s sister, but she died of a bursten and rupture well afore her ninety-first. And she were the eldest by long strides. Till me. And now Agatha Poldark’s going on for a hundred! Four months more, that’s all I got to stay. Think on that!’
Ross made appropriate noises. The old woman’s mouth was working with excitement as if she were going to have a fit.
‘So . . . my son. On the tenth August I be going to have a party. Eh? Eh? What’s that you say? A party! Twill cost no money to that tight-fisted gale that Elizabeth’s wed. I’ve got money. Not much, mind, but more’n enough for that . . . My father left me a little nest egg in three per cents an’ it’s been adding on ever since. I give some to Francis last week but there’s still some left.’ She gasped and rested a minute, trying to get her generations right and resting and gathering her strength for the next effort. Her whiskers seemed to bristle. ‘George can’t stop me. Twould get all about the county that he’d stopped me. I’ll have all my friends – them I’ve not seen for years and years. And I’ll have the neighbours, all the neighbours, and – and a big cake. You and your little bud’ll be invited. And that tall long lean thin red-haired sprig of a gel you brought here Christmas. And your childer – I want to see your childer afore I die. So mind that. Mind August tenth!’
Ross patted her head. It was the longest speech he remembered from Aunt Agatha. ‘I’ll remember. We shall come. Now rest or you will tire yourself. See, the weather’s relenting at last, and in another week or so it will be warm enough for you to get out in the garden.’
On his way downstairs he met a girl he had not seen before.
‘Miss Chynoweth?’
Morwenna had a rather unusual short-stepped tripping walk, which probably came from being unable to see very far ahead of her. She peered up at him.
‘Mr Pol-Captain Poldark, is it?’
‘You are just from Truro, I believe?’
‘We came on Tuesday. Just after the holiday.’
So this was the girl Drake had a taking for. N
ot pretty. But demure. And fine eyes. But they were a little swollen.
‘You are all well in Truro?’
‘Some have had influenza. And baby Valentine has been dangerously ill in rickets but is better. Thank you.’
Had she been fretting for Drake? ‘I have just been visiting Miss Agatha Poldark. She keeps in fair fettle, considering her age.’
‘Yes. I thought she looked better than when we left. She has stood the weather uncommon well.’
‘While you have all been away,’ Ross said, ‘I have visited her weekly. The servants were becoming idle and neglectful. Such a visit was necessary as there was no one of her family left behind.’
Morwenna nodded but did not speak.
‘Now you are back I must discontinue these calls. As you will know, Mr Warleggan does not welcome me here. So this will be my last visit. Can I rely on you to see that Miss Poldark is well cared for until Mr and Mrs Warleggan return?’
She flushed very easily. ‘Of course, sir. And Mr Chynoweth is about. We shall make sure that she is not neglected.’
‘Or left entirely alone.’
‘Or left entirely alone.’
‘Thank you.’ He took her hand. It was cool and clammy. She was not at all like Elizabeth. No poise. None of that delicate patrician beauty.
‘Good-bye, Miss Chynoweth.’
She answered him very quietly and watched him go.
It had been a desperate two weeks. Her first refusal to accept the arranged marriage had taken place with Elizabeth only on the morning following the evening when she was first told of it. Dry-eyed now, she had argued as rationally as she knew how. Deeply appreciative of their thoughts for her future . . . great opportunity, she knew . . . position in society . . . but marriage was something she was not yet prepared for. In one year, two years perhaps, even if then so favourable a match was not forthcoming. She was happy with them; indeed she might never marry; she had thought often of going into a convent. At present she wished more than anything to stay with Geoffrey Charles. It seemed vitally important to her that she should finish her task with him before even thinking of anything else.
The Black Moon Page 24