Bella Poldark (20 page)

The elderly Paynters continued to live on in the last cottage of Grambler village. They were now both so decrepit that they were incapable of looking after themselves. Indeed they could not possibly have managed but for the kindness of Music and Katie Thomas, who lived in the cottage next to theirs. The Thomases both worked at Place House, Trevaunance, but slept out, and Katie always found time to brush out their hut, wash their ragged clothes, bring them a stew to put to simmer on their Cornish stove until they were ready to eat it. Music brought in coal and kindling wood and fetched water and shopped for them, this last being usually to bring a pint jar of gin from Sally Chill Off s. The Paynters accepted their assistance more as a right than as a privilege, grunting and complaining noisily when being so helped. It seemed sometimes that Demelza was more grateful for the help than were the Paynters. She felt a sort of obligation to Jud and Prudie: had they not been servants at Nampara when Ross first brought her home as a starving waif from Redruth fair? If the Thomases had not been to hand the only refuge for the Paynters was the Poor House, and that was hard to contemplate. Demelza might have paid for some woman to go in to live with them and look after them, but even in the poverty of the villages around it was hard to pick on someone to care for such a contentious and dirty couple, especially one who was not as old and dirty herself. At Christmas she always bore them a number of presents, and the day after the Trenwith party she conscripted Clowance while she was still at home to go with her on this very difficult and overpoweringly smelly visit of mercy and good will. Clowance felt rather the same instinctive obligation towards the ageing couple, but Bella, being so much younger, had escaped from this sentimental weakness and generously allowed the other two to go on their own. Henry had a snivelly cold, and this was a good enough excuse to leave him behind. It was another dark, still, dry day and the land had a brooding quiet about it that was old and comforting: the year was nearing its end and all passions were spent. Even the gulls sounded tired and lonely. Because Cuby and Clemency and Noelle were late leaving, it was well on towards evening before the two women set out on their charitable mission. It was already full dark, but the path to Grambler was so well trodden that it did not occur to either of them to bother with a lantern. On the way there they talked about the party. Clowance said: 'Papa was a mite frivolous last night, was he not?'

'A very large mite,' said Demelza. 'And it was not because of the drink he took. Spirits seem to have but little effect on him.'

'He made the greatest of a fuss of Lady Harriet. And I do not think it displeased her.'

'Nor should it,' said Demelza enigmatically.

'On the south coast, Mama, she has become my best friend. As you know, I think - d'you know, I think it all stems from the day when Music and I saved one of her great boar hounds from a mantrap. She was very kind to Stephen too. But she has gone out of her way again and again to help me since he died. She has even tried matchmaking by introducing Philip Prideaux to me.'

'I'm sure Philip is grateful. Are you?'

'Ha! How well you turn the subject! I was going to say that I hope you did not scold Papa too severely for his misdemeanours.'

"Who said they were misdemeanours?' Demelza asked pleasantly.

Clowance laughed. 'Some wives might have thought so. I am glad if you did not.'

Demelza raised her head and sniffed. 'D'you think it is going to rain? This bonnet does not like getting wet; it tends to crinkle at the edges like a pie crust.'

'Mama, do you think I could be odious and sneak away from the Paynters after, say, ten minutes? They are almost insufferable. And everything stinks so! Would you very much mind?'

'You were never brought up to the smells of poverty, as I was. What shall you do?'

'It isn't poverty that smells so bad, it is dirty unwashed things. Well, I thought if you did not mind, I'd call in at Fernmore to say goodbye. I think Paul and Mary are still there; and I hardly had a good chance to talk to Daisy last night.'

'She's got a horrid cough. Have a care.'

'I will.'

'Clowance, I do not greatly enjoy seeing your father flirting with some handsome woman, any more than he would take too kindly if I flirted outrageously with some handsome man, as has happened now and then in the past. But we have been together for a very long time, him and me, and except for one dire event on his side, and one dire event on mine - of which you already know much and need have no expectation of hearing more from me now - we have been a veritable Darby and Joan to each other.'

'Who were Darby and Joan?'

'Oh, folk in some old ballad. But mark you, we still feel as much for each other, your father and me, as we have always felt. In our lives, and I'm serious now, we have had so much loving, so very much loving. It has not staled. It varies from year to year, but it keeps always to a constant pitch of - of being deeply and truly involved. And desirous. Against this - if you put this against your father having a frolic on the dance floor with the beautiful second wife of his oldest enemy - this frolic is as important as a ball of fluff.'

'It's lovely to know,' Clowance said, embarrassed now that she had brought up the subject. 'Of course, I have always known. The whole family knows it. I was - sort of joking.'

'I think,' said Demelza judiciously, 'in fact I have come to the knowledge gradual through the years, that your father passes through periods of rebellion, of ambition, of a need for adventure. He is going through such a time now. He would - though he protests he would not - he would dearly like to be entrusted with some mission: like when he went to join the escort of the Queen of Portugal; like being sent to the British Embassy in Paris to report on the Bonaparte feeling in France; like being asked to support or oppose some Bill in Parliament. These moods pass, often they come to naught, but since - since Jeremy died he has been very much at home. Looking after me, he tells folk:

but sometimes it's me who's looking after him. Last night he was in the best of spirits ever I have seen him in since since Waterloo. He said to me last night he felt like kicking over a trace. If a simple noisy flirtation releases something bottled up in him, I shall certainly not complain.'

They were nearly at the Paynters. Clowance squeezed her mother's arm. 'You are a wise woman.'

'No,' said Demelza. Just a woman.'

The Paynters accepted their Christmas presents with a fair grace. Clowance had helped to carry them and then, having served her ten minutes, excused herself and set off for Fernmore. Demelza gave Prudie a censored account of the great party. Jud was not deaf, except with the inattentive deafness of old age, and while not interested in what his visitor said, he pursued his own line of thought amid the clouds of smoke he created with his clay pipe. Eventually, when the parcels were all opened and the vision of last night's party fairly well explored, he tapped his pipe on the edge of the fire grate and said: 'Your maid left some soon. Reckon she soon had enough of we.'

'As you saw,' Demelza said, 'she was bearing presents for the Kellows, and she wanted to see them tonight before she went home.'

Jud sucked his pipe, making a noise like a choked drain.

'Reckon your young don't take no account of we. Why, that Bella-Rose 'asn't been nigh us, not once since she come home wi' her flipperty dandical young man. Reckon she'll be off t'London 'gain afore ye know it.'

'She's staying until the New Year.'

'Reckon she'll come to no good up in that there town. She'd do betterer for herself if she done her scholaring in Truro. I've allus said that, 'aven' I, Prudie?'

'Hold thy clack,' said Prudie. 'Tesn't no business of yourn what the Cap'n and the mistress d' do wi their childer--' 'And that there Clarence,' said Jud. Having wilfully misheard the name at her christening twenty-five years ago, he had ever after been impervious to correction. 'That there Clarence. She don't show 'er age, do 'er? She be mopping wi' some other man now, eh?' He screwed up his eyes and examined Demelza's expression for evidence of guilt or conspiracy.

'Miss Clowance is doing very well on her own,' said Demelza. 'She has been a widow only four years. She is in no haste to marry again. When she wishes to do so no doubt she will tell us.'

So the time wore on, and eventually she decided she had done her duty and could leave. Prudie, the only moderately mobile of the two, waddled out in Demelza's wake and gratefully pocketed the guinea she usually received privately on these occasions. So to walk home. Demelza calculated she had been at the Paynters' about an hour, so it would now be around seven of the clock. She wondered whether to make the detour and call in for Clowance, but decided she would rather go straight home to see if Henry had settled after his fretful day. It was pitch black now and even the most familiar path had the odd loose stone. Better to have brought a lantern after all. Although there is usually some light in a Cornish night sky, it can at times be ineffably dark. 'Black as a bloody sack,' as Jud was fond of saying. Demelza began to think about Harry. With Jeremy taken from them, he was their only son, to whom the inheritance of the baronetcy would eventually pass. One daughter dead, two daughters alive, one son. Much the youngest and probably the last of the Poldarks - unless Amadora's second child should be a son. It was fortunate, Demelza thought, that Henry was such a robust little boy. One had to be careful not to spoil him, and if he had been like Jeremy, an excitable child with endless minor ailments, the pressure would have been great. Even disciplining Harry, in the small ways one has to do with any child, took on a greater significance. Like the heir to the throne. Except that all Harry would inherit was a part-converted farmhouse, a hundred acres of shallow, windswept fanning land, a couple of mines, a few external assets which Ross had, almost against his better nature, allowed to aggregate around him, and on one side of the farmhouse a part sandy, part shingly cove and on the other side an unmatched vista of one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Henry, she suspected, had somehow come to comprehend that his family looked on him as someone special. He knew when to take liberties, how far he could go with his parents, when to test his will against theirs. Or am I imagining this? she asked herself. Am I imagining it and has it had no influence on him at all? Was he just one of those people who knew as soon as they saw the light that they were special, and expected, with the greatest charm, to be so regarded? Thinking of light, she found that as her eyes grew accustomed to the intense darkness after the ochre yellow candle flame in the Paynters' cottage, she could just pick out the familiar delineations of the track. She reached the church. There was nothing living round here, only the dead. The vicarage was hidden by fir trees. So it was not the best place to hear footsteps. She still had the animal faculties of her youth, otherwise she would not have detected the faint crunch or separated it from the normal noises of the night. Even then she thought she might be mistaken. The sound came from behind her, and she went on for about twenty paces more before her ears caught it again. Without interrupting her pace she turned her head and peered behind into the night. The spire of the old church was an extra pyramid of darkness against ink-blue plumes of cloud, but nothing was visible at ground level. Having turned her attention from her walking, she tripped and caught the sole of one shoe more heavily on the ground. She went on. This was just moorland, interspersed with a few old diggings and some wind-stunted bushes as the path climbed towards the higher ground where Wheal Maiden had once been. Built out of the fallen stones of the mine was Sam's Meeting House. Until she got to the top she would not be able to see if there was a light in the window. It was a matter of two hundred yards. A little way beyond that was Wheal Grace - not yet entirely closed. Then down to the house. In all not much more than half a mile. No distance. She could do it comfortably in ten minutes. So why hurry? This was probably one of the miners walking to Wheal Grace to take up his evening core. (Except that Grace had very few miners left and the time for changing cores was eight o'clock.) As a country person accustomed to walking about from place to place in the dark, she would hardly have given two thoughts to there being any danger in being followed. The obvious thing was to stop and let this unknown person catch up with her, and they could go on together. So it would have been with her if a month or two ago Agneta Treneglos had not had her throat cut nearby. And had there not been others, other women attacked? Rubbish. These things didn't happen on Nampara land, even on the darkest night. She stopped. She listened and narrowed her eyes to stare behind her. There was no sound now. No untoward sound or movement. Even the light wind had dropped. She waited. Then she went on. It was a minute or so before she heard the footsteps following.

She stopped again. 'Who's there?'

She detected, or fancied she detected, a man's tall figure. Her heart was thumping now. Perhaps those things did happen, could happen, on Nampara land.

'What do you want?'

There was no answer. Her throat tightened.

'Tell me what you want? Who are you? Say something or you'll spend a night in jail!'

The only answer was a puff of gentle breeze wafting against her cheek. This brought a whiff, a hint of cigar smoke.

She turned and walked on, her pace quickening at every step. When she reached the top of the hill she was breathless, but not from exertion. There was no light in Sam's chapel. Sam had told her that he never locked the door. In fifty paces she could reach it. But if she went inside, there was only the one door. Supposing the person behind her followed her in? She broke into a run. Having come up to the chapel she fled straight past it. On her right the buildings of Wheal Grace loomed up. The footsteps were running behind her, catching her up. He was making a sort of noise as he almost came up with her. It was a chuckling noise, or a gobbling. She burst into the engine room of Wheal Grace. The younger of the two elderly Curnows was there; he worked at Leisure but was gossiping with the Grace engineer, a man called Watford. They stared at her arrival, then looked alarmed at her white face and laboured breathing.