‘It’s time he was home,’ she said. ‘I wish he’d take leave. He could stay with us and visit Trenwith at his leisure. It needs him.’
‘We have told him all that.’
‘Read it to me, Ross. I’ve forgot the half of it.’
He frowned at the letter, aware that only vanity prevented him from buying spectacles for close work.
‘Sabugal, the third of November, 1811,’ he read.
My dear Uncle Ross and Aunt Demelza.
I have been tardy in answering your letter of the 12th August, but things of varying interest and moment have been occurring in these parts. Now we are back in our Winter Quarters, as they may be glowingly described, and time will be on our hands until the open season for shooting Frenchies begins again in the New Year.
You ask me to apply for Leave and visit you at Nampara. When I return to England and Cornwall no house shall see me before Yours, and if you are still generous enough to be of the same mind I shall stay with you as long as your Patience lasts. Thank you for that invitation; for Trenwith, I feel, will be draughty with ghosts. I would love to see you all, and have so much to talk of; for it is more than a year now since that happy Meeting before Bussaco. In military ways for me it has been a wonderful year, a year in which after all the retreats and disappointments – even the retreat after Bussaco! – a change has taken place at last and we have been constantly, gradually advancing with great tactical skill. No one in the history of war, I believe, has so brilliantly demonstrated the virtues of reculer pour mieux sauter as Wellington. I am reminded of the tide advancing on Hendrawna Beach, as Morwenna and I used to watch it; by little forward and by little back, yet ever irresistible.
I could obtain leave now and spend Easter with you – a splendid idea – yet will not; for such camaraderie and kinship has built up here among those officers and men who have survived, that I should feel ill at ease with my Conscience to leave them now, even if only for six or eight weeks. You would not believe how we Esteem each other – even though little is said!
But do not suppose, after the spartan life of this last summer’s campaign – and that was spartan indeed! – that we now shall lack all creature Comforts and Entertainment over the winter time. We have in prospect at this moment a series of dances, of festivities, of the new sport of steeple-chasing and the old sport of fox-hunting, of boxing contests and donkey races, and hunting for wolf and wild boar, of amateur concerts and ‘professional’ suppers which may lack the elegance of the London that I once knew but need fear no comparison in the Zest with which they are performed and enjoyed.
Also, my dears, the ladies here are very sweet and warm and welcoming. There is a fine line drawn betwixt those whose warmth is restrained by considerations of chaste behaviour and those not. But all are equally gracious – even the nuns! Before I came to the Peninsula I used to expect the Portuguese ladies to be less attractive than the Spanish, but upon my soul, I believe there is little to choose. Perhaps when next you hear from me I shall be wed to one or another of them! I wish they did not have this Popish religion.
Before we retired here for the winter, we had one last splendid brush with Marshal Marmont at a place called El Bodon. I have no doubt that long before you receive this letter your News Sheets will have brought this village and plateau to your attention. But I can only say that, although we were ourselves a little late in the field, through no fault of our own, this was one of the most satisfactory Encounters ever to have been engaged in. It was the usual bloody affair, of course, but an Object Lesson in the way to fight battles when apparently outnumbered. I do believe in future manuals of war El Bodon will have an honoured place.
I have been keeping singularly well, and in a whole year of fighting have not so much as suffered a bellyache or earned a scratch. More of my good friends have gone, but, as I say, a sufficiency remain to continue to sustain me in comradeship and accord.
Again my love to you all.
Ever most sincerely
Geoffrey Charles.
PS. Any news of stepfather George? When we last met, you mentioned that he might be thinking of remarrying, but I have heard Nothing of it. My only correspondent, short of Yourselves, is Valentine, who sometimes sends a note. I received one from him last month, in which he was full of a flirtation he was conducting with someone else’s pretty young wife, but he said nothing of acquiring a Step Mother. So I assume George’s suit was unsuccessful, or is it still on the Boil?
PPS. Odds heart, I tell an untruth! A Letter from Drake in June. They are happy. That is such a splendid thing. Him and Morwenna I must see when I come home.
Demelza took the letter from Ross and held it crackling in her fingers. Then she got up and put it back in the drawer.
‘Perhaps if George remarried, Geoffrey Charles would be more willing to come home, make his home among us again.’
‘I doubt if that would make so much difference. Not, that is, while the war lasts.’
‘Well, at least thank God Jeremy has not gone.’
‘No . . .’
Demelza came back, noticing his tone. ‘You do not surely wish him to go? . . . Do you?’
Ross scowled his discomfort at the question. ‘Of course not! Not my only son. But mixed feelings, as you must realize. This is not a colonial war – not a war such as I fought in, which was a mistake from the beginning. This is a war for survival – our survival; and as such must be . . . fought out. If I were younger – as you know . . .’
‘Yes, I know. But Jeremy’s not a fighter – at least not in that way.’
‘No, not in that way.’
‘But he is working, is he not, for the mine?’
‘Oh, indeed! I cannot fault him. He takes more than his fair share of any work that is going. I must admire him greatly for all of it.’
‘Must?’ Demelza said gently.
Ross shifted. ‘We have been well enough together these last months. Since he discovered to me his passion for the properties of strong steam – since we had it out together as to why he had concealed it so long, and all the foolish subterfuge of his going fishing – since then we have been in good accord. Really, my love, I mean it.’
‘I’m glad. I still think sometimes he feels . . .’
‘That he cannot escape from being the owner’s son? That I understand. Perhaps if I went away again . . .’
‘No.’
Ross put his hand over hers. ‘At first, of course, I was so angry with him for putting me in a false position . . . And yet, after a time, I felt that more than half the fault was mine. If there is not the communication there should be between a father and a son, surely it is the father who mostly lacks the insight and the understanding.’
‘Not always,’ said Demelza. ‘I have seen you make the effort. But anyway let it be. Forget it – if it is over.’
‘It is over. But should not be forgotten, as an object lesson for us both. I mean for him and me.’
Demelza said: ‘Even Mr Harvey was telling me what a talented son we have.’
‘It is good to know he is so regarded.’ Ross added: ‘Thank God he seems to have grown out of his disappointment over Cuby Trevanion.’
She turned. ‘He hasn’t, Ross. I’m certain sure of that. More’s the pity. If Clowance is in two minds, Jeremy is not. It’s something I know. He grieves for that girl all the time.’
Chapter Two
I
Friday was lowering, with nothing to illumine either sky or sea until late in the afternoon when a red grin appeared in the west where the sun was about to set. At the same time drifting rain moved over the land and a few partial and indistinct rainbows slid across the moorland to semaphore the end of the day.
Trenwith House, that property belonging to Geoffrey Charles Poldark, inherited from his father, long ago dead in a mining accident, looked at its coldest and most neglected as dusk began to fall. Built of enduring Tudor stone and designed with the natural elegance which seemed to come to those forgotten men who genera
lly worked without benefit of architect, it had survived the endless ranting of storm and tempest for three centuries, and structurally it was still sound. A pane or two of glass was cracked, a gutter had rotted here and there and a chimney stack had split. But the roof of giant Delabole slates – put there, one would suppose, by a race of weight-lifters – had cared nothing for wind and weather, and all the granite mouldings, lintels and architraves were as sound as when they had been constructed in the year Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon.
Throughout this time the house had received the intermittent consideration and neglect of varying generations of Trenwiths and Poldarks who, according to their temperaments or fortunes, had used their home with greater or lesser loving care; but the gardens for the larger part of the three hundred years had received the minimum of attention. This was partly because on a poor, sandy and windswept soil gardening was an ill-rewarded occupation, partly because none of the Trenwiths or Poldarks had been notably interested in flowers or shrubs and could find other uses for their usually limited funds. Only, paradoxically, when the house for the first time moved out of the direct care of the family was money and time and attention spent. This was when Geoffrey Charles’s young and beautiful widowed mother had married George Warleggan, the blacksmith’s grandson and a new power in the mercantile world of the county. With Geoffrey Charles still a little boy, George had foreseen Trenwith as his own and his wife’s country home for at least the next fifteen years, and not only had restored and refurbished the house with extravagance and excellent taste (chiefly his wife’s) but had had the old stagnant pond cleared and made into an ornamental lake, and the gardens laid out and tended like a park.
For a few years Trenwith had glowed under this unexpected attention, and the gardens, though ravaged by winds, had surprisingly repaid the care and time spent on them with flushes of brilliance and vigorous growth in the hot sun. But high noon had lasted too short a time: in five years Elizabeth was dead in childbirth and George, just become a knight bachelor, could no longer bear the sight of the house; it was occupied by Elizabeth’s parents until they died, then the best of the new furniture was moved to George’s other home at Cardew, and Trenwith left to the untender mercies of the Harry brothers and their one slatternly wife, who lived in the lodge house and intimidated the neighbourhood with their brutish ways. Geoffrey Charles Poldark, the rightful owner, was now twenty-seven, but a captain in the Monmouthshires, the 43rd, of the crack Light Division, fighting in Spain, and had not been to Cornwall for five years.
So the house for that length of time, which was since old Mr Chynoweth had died, had lain entirely empty, visited perhaps once a quarter by Sir George just to keep the Harrys up to scratch.
But visiting it occasionally – at first quite openly – Clowance Poldark came. She loved the house and admired her cousin, what little she had seen of him, and being a girl without reservations or second thoughts she saw no reason at all why she shouldn’t visit the house just whenever she chose – with or without the knowledge of the odious Harrys. Once indeed by the purest accident she had encountered Sir George himself. He had snarled at her – as being the interfering daughter of his worst enemy – but she had refused to be dragooned or intimidated into leaving – and there was not much physical force that even George could sanction for use on a pretty girl of sixteen with bare feet and fine skin and a luscious bosom; so she had stayed to leave him some flowers and departed in her own time.
But since Stephen Carrington came out of the sea to lure her with his strong arms and compulsive maleness, her visits had become clandestine, secretive, and therefore to her – however necessary – shameful, for she had an instinctive distaste for the least subterfuge. Worse still, it was at her instigation that the secrecy was maintained. He cared nothing for gossip and would have been happy to be seen with her anywhere in the world.
They met upstairs, in Geoffrey Charles’s old bedroom, the one he had occupied as a little boy, the turret room, up the three steps and overlooking the courtyard. Some of Geoffrey Charles’s old paintings and drawings still hung on the walls, curling and spotted with damp. The bed and chairs were draped in dust sheets, the faded curtains hung askew in the ebbing light. The house was tomb-cold and still. She was there a few moments before him, and when she heard his footsteps very quietly on the stairs her mouth went dry, something swelled in her body and her knees went weak as if she had already swallowed a love-potion prepared by a witch.
His hand came cautiously round the door; he frowned at its sprained squeaking when he pushed it open; then his face lit up when he saw her standing there near the window in her muslin dress and heavy cloak.
‘Clowance! Dear love! There’s a good girl! I was afeared . . .’
‘What, that I would break my promise?’
‘No, but someone might have crossed your will to be here. I know it is not easy for you . . .’
He came towards her, but cautiously, not as he would have wanted to do, hungrily, encompassing her in his arms. Experience of her made him calculating. She was like a bird, for all her sturdiness, easily put off, turned to flight. He put his hands experimentally on her shoulders, kissed each cheek and then her mouth, letting his lips linger but not insist. He withdrew before she did. He drew her to sit beside him on the bed, put his arm around her.
‘Are you cold, me love?’
‘Did anyone see you come?’
‘I’ve been waiting for this all week, counting the hours.’
She said: ‘It’s good to be here.’
They talked, while he stroked her face and hands, kissing her gently, smoothing her body under its heavy cloak like someone who had to be reassured and pacified.
She said again: ‘Did anyone see you come?’
‘Not a soul . . . But I had just to get away from Jeremy. He wanted to talk. I had to hurry back to the Nanfans to take a wash and change me shirt before I came to see me dear love.’
‘It’s always dangerous,’ she said. ‘Villages have eyes everywhere.’
‘Let ’em see what they want to see.’
‘Stephen, I don’t wish what we feel for each other soiled by ugly gossip.’
‘Then come into the open.’
She was silent, and for a moment he pressed no more, sitting quietly beside her.
He said: ‘What’s amiss with Jeremy? He’s crossed over some girl, isn’t he, too? He’ll say nothing, but I know it’s that way.’
‘Cuby Trevanion is her name,’ said Clowance.
‘Is she pretty?’
‘I’ve never seen her. He met her that time when he went with you to the Scillies and brought your boat in near Mevagissey. When you went away for four or five months.’
‘I know all that.’
‘Well, he was given shelter by the Trevanions and met this girl then. She helped him out of some difficulty. He won’t say what.’
‘Maybe I can guess,’ said Stephen sardonically.
‘Yes, well. He fell in love with her. I don’t know if she loves him in return . . .’
‘Does she live at that great house? That castle place?’
‘Yes. Caerhays, it’s called.’
‘So twould be a good thing for Jeremy, eh? A fine match, eh? What’s the let?’
‘Her brother – who’s head of the family – does not think Jeremy is good enough.’
‘Holy Mary, so that’s how the land lies! But I don’t follow you! The Poldarks are gentry too! What’s he looking for, a duke?’
‘It is not so much a question of breeding as of money. For all their possessions, they are desperate hard up. They have overspent on the house and now need Miss Trevanion to marry a rich man.’
Stephen kissed her, moving his lips about the corner of her mouth, lifting her lip with his own. ‘Well, dear God, I’m sorry for him! But does not Miss Trevanion have some say in the matter?’
‘So far as I can make out she conceives it her duty to do as her brother wishes.’
‘Then if she has n
o more will of her own than that I’d say Jeremy is well out of it!’
‘A feeling of family duty takes people various ways.’
It was a significant comment. After a moment he said: ‘Maybe him and me are in the same boat.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Well, both deep in love with a girl whose family don’t think we’re good enough for them.’
‘My family don’t yet know.’
‘They must have a fair inkling.’
‘Yes,’ Clowance agreed. ‘They have a fair inkling.’
‘That’s why they took you away twice – first to London, then to this rich Lord’s house in Wiltshire.’
‘They didn’t take me away. I went of my own accord.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because I wanted to – distance myself from you – try to be more sure.’
‘And are you?’
‘I think so. Though . . . I still hear things.’
‘Things!’ he said scornfully. ‘What do gossip matter? They link me name with every mopsy I so much as look at, let alone exchange a word with over a glass of ale!’
For a change she kissed him. ‘I know, Stephen. It is the punishment for being such a good-looking man.’
Slowly now, even under the shelter of her cloak there began the gentle but urgent exchange of love-play. She was as hungry for Stephen as he was for her, and she doubted her strength in the face of his importunities to continue to refuse him. Presently she half stood up, half broke away from him, her clothes untied and unbuttoned, her stockings fallen about her ankles, stood taking deep breaths, half swaying against him.
He said: ‘Come here next week, same time. I’ll light a fire, make the room comfortable, cosy. This window faces the courtyard. Who could see?’
He thought she moved her head in a negative.
He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, trying to steady himself too. ‘I’m no saint, Clowance, but I’m lost with you like no other ever and I want to be wed to you, and I can’t say more. It is me dearest wish. But it can’t go on like this. If it goes on like this, one of these days . . .’
The Miller's Dance Page 3