Bella Poldark (21 page)

'Mistress Poldark!' said Curnow. 'What's amiss?'

'I ... er. . .' Demelza blinked in the lantern light and took a deep breath, and swallowed. 'It is nothing. But -- are you free, Tom?'

'Free, ma'am? Yes, ma'am. I just called 'ere on me way

'ome. What be amiss?'

'I - thought someone was following me. I -- I'd like you to walk with me just down so far as Nampara.'

'Gladly, ma'am. Now, ma'am? Yes, gladly.'

'And Watford.'

'Yes, ma'am?'

'Have you a spare workman, someone you could spare for an hour?'

'Ais, I reckon.'

'Would you ask him to go over at once to the Kellows and ask him to wait there until he can escort Miss Clowance home. Tell them you are acting on my instructions.'

Lieutenant Christopher Havergal took coach for London on the second of January 1820. Before he left he asked Demelza if she could persuade Ross to let him marry Isabella-Rose at Easter. By then Bella would be eighteen. Christopher said that, apart from their love for each other, there were other reasons why their association would be easier if they were married. As Mrs Pelham's goddaughter - which was the 'relationship'

they had agreed on - Bella was in a favoured position, but he, Christopher, lacked any status; and Bella was frequently attracting attentions from young men who presumed too much. Demelza said: 'I do not think Bella would encourage another young man. She is completely committed to you.'

'Your daughter is a very striking young lady. She does not need to show an interest in some young man for him to show an interest in her.'

Something made Demelza ask: 'Is there one or another particularly?'

He stroked his moustache. 'Five or six, I suspect. But one, yes, one is a slightly greater danger than the rest. You will remember the young Frenchman who visited Mrs Pelham's house when you were in London. Maurice Valery.'

'Oh? Oh, yes.'

'He has recently, been appointed as conductor to the Academie Orchestre de Rouen, and this I think has gone greatly to his head. But there is no doubt he is an accomplished musician, and that attracts Bella.'

Demelza was thoughtful. 'Yes. I know - we all know that you have been very patient.'

'Mrs Pelham's generosity towards Bella is boundless. Though she clearly is enjoying all she does for us, this does not make it less worthy; but in some ways - soon now - we shall be better on our own. By Easter I shall be able to afford a nice new house for us to live in. Bella's progress as a singer is startling, and it may be good sometime for us to go to Hamburg or Paris, and this we can only do comfortably if we are man and wife.'

Demelza had not told Ross about her scare in the dark, but had had to explain to Clowance why she had sent a miner from Grace to accompany her home. Clowance was indignant that she must not tell her father lest it should

'worry him', but reluctantly promised. While the murderer of Agneta was still at large any follower in the dark had to be taken seriously, whether in fact he was sinister or innocent.

The following day, in the rush of Clowance's departure, with Philip Prideaux to escort her, Demelza began to wonder if she might have dreamed or imagined the whole thing. (She knew of course she had not, but wondered how she would have behaved if Agneta had not just been murdered. Would she not have stopped and confronted her follower, and might it not have been Music Thomas with some request to make or a drunken miner on his way home and not wanting to be recognized?) But did such men smoke cigars? Was it a cigar? Might it not have been something that Jud smoked, some cheap scented tobacco out of a clay pipe? Pigtail? Or Thick Twist? She had never smoked. She knew well the smell of Ross's tobacco. Could she be sure of any other? At this, still the darkest time of the year, it was an uncomfortable feeling to have in the back of one's mind, the idea that some evil person might just be lurking. For Heaven's sake, this was a peaceable district where everyone knew everyone else, and the biggest crime in a year might amount to the theft of a dozen eggs. Perhaps it was as well that Clowance had an escort home. Perhaps Bella might be safer in London after all! On the fifth of January there were signs of a change in the weather: a strong wind blew the heavy cloud away and brought a new shifting canopy of its own, which threatened blistering rain. The sea, which had been talking in its sleep for a day and a half, suddenly woke and frothed at the mouth.

One afternoon Demelza spent an hour in her garden. At this time of year there was little that a storm could hurt, but one or two of the roses had sent up tall shoots which might crack at the root if they swayed about too much. A stick in support would be a good thing. Also that foreign tree from the Carolinas, which Hugh Armitage had brought and they had planted against the protection of the house wall, still clung obstinately to life though making little progress in this unsuitable soil. Its evergreen leaves were like spaniel's ears that flopped about in the wind. The hour was almost up, and for a while the wind had paused for breath as darkness pended. The last distorted rim of the sun, pale and cold, looked like a great luminous iceberg sinking into the sea. She wrapped the thick string into a ball and moved to go in. As she did so she saw a tall man in black peering at her over the wall. She dropped the string.

'Lady Poldark, excuse me.'

'Who on - oh, Captain Prideaux! I did not expect - to see you again so soon.'

'I trust I did not startle you.'

'I did not, was not quite expecting someone to come on me from the beach side.'

'Is this gate open? May I come in?'

He came in, tall and gaunt, not at present wearing his eye glasses. That perhaps was why she had not instantly recognized him. He picked up the ball of string, gave it to her. She thanked him. He said: 'I left my horse on the rough ground by the fence. Excuse this unorthodox arrival. I saw someone in the garden, and thought at first it was just a member of the household.'

'So it was,' she said. 'Will you come in? The wind will soon be picking up again.'

'Thank you. But may I ask if Sir Ross is indoors?'

'Did you want to see him? I believe he is at the mine. If--'

'No, Lady Poldark, I wanted to see you.'

'Oh.' They went in. She noticed he was almost as tall as Ross, had to bend his head in the same places. In the old parlour he waited for her to sit down, then put his hat on a chair and his cloak over it.

'You must forgive me, Lady Poldark, for a slight subterfuge. I promised Clowance.'

Oh dear, Demelza thought, another suitor.

'What did you promise Clowance?'

'She told me that a man, an unknown man, had followed you home last Sunday evening and that you felt at some risk because of the unfortunate death of Agneta Treneglos. You told Clowance but made her promise not to tell her father because you thought this would worry him unduly. Am I right?'

'You are perfectly right.' So he had not come to declare his love. It made a change.

'But she told me. On the ride home. She said she felt she must tell someone. And she asked me not to give anything away to your husband.'

'Did she ask you to come and see me?'

He found his glasses in a pocket, fiddled with them nervously, put them on. 'Oh, no. Not at all. I wondered if you could kindly tell me exactly how it happened. Where you first noticed that you were being followed, whether you have any idea how this man was dressed, whether anything like it has ever happened to you before.'

Demelza was not quite at ease with Captain Prideaux. She wondered why he was so concerned, why he was personally pursuing the matter. He heard her story out in silence. 'You believe this man was dressed all in black?'

'I think so. Rather as you are now, Captain Prideaux.'

He smiled coldly. 'But you did not see his face?'

'No. Oh, no.'

'Was he tall or short?'

'Tall. He may have had something across his face.'

'What makes you say that?'

'There was a chink of light coming through the door of the engine house. I could see no face.' She shivered. 'A very distressing experience,' he said, in that stiff voice he sometimes used. 'But why, if I may ask, did you not tell Sir Ross?'

'What could he do? Except worry for me. What can you do, Captain Prideaux?'

'Would you do me the honour of calling me Philip.'

'It's kind of you to take this interest, Philip. Do you think you can help?'

'Last year, when I had just returned to Cornwall -- oh dear, it will be the year before last - a parlourmaid at Cardew was murdered one night on her way home. It was while I was staying at Cardew that it happened, and out of idle curiosity I went to see the dead woman. She had been stabbed and her throat cut in exactly the same way as Agneta Treneglos.'

Demelza moistened her lips. 'And was there not some other girl killed more recent? Somewhere betwixt Indian Queens and Padstow.'

'Yes, but she was strangled.' Philip glanced up quickly and took off his glasses. 'I remember reading that.'

'And do you feel there may be a connection?'

'Someone has asked me to find out. I tell you this in confidence.'

Demelza took a spill, lighted it at the fire and went to the candlesticks on the sideboard. 'Is it someone round here who has asked you to do this?'

'I'm not at liberty to tell you, Lady Poldark. But I can tell you that this morning I did actually make some progress.'

The third candle was guttering and the flame stayed small.

He said: 'As you know, ma'am, Agneta ran away from home, and no one seemed to have the least idea where she had spent the time. It was four days before the body was found, and Dr Enys said she had probably been dead for about two days. That left two nights unaccounted for, as well as two days. No one had seen her. Isn't that so?'

'I believe tis so.'

'Which suggests to me that she hid for most of the time - or was hidden. Well, I know now where she was.'

Demelza turned. 'You do?'

'She was at Fernmore.'

'Fernmore?' She dropped some candle grease on the mantelshelf. 'The Kellows? How could that be?'

'I called to see Miss Daisy Kellow and asked her questions. She told me in the end that she thought Miss Treneglos had been there both nights. You will of course remember -- though I did not know -- that Fernmore was originally occupied by a Dr Choake. It seems that Dr Choake utilized a large shed at the rear of the house for his surgery. Since he left, this shed has been neglected and used only as a lumber room. It should have been kept locked, but was not. From what she found in the shed Miss Kellow could tell that someone had occupied it.'

'But it could have been some tramp.'

'No, there was a comb that Miss Kellow recognized. And other things.'

'Then why did she not tell the coroner at the inquest?'

'She thought it would not make any difference to what had happened.'

Demelza scraped the cooling wax off the mantelshelf.

'And does it?'

'It raises many questions. Did Miss Kellow know of the other girl being there while she was there? I asked her, and she said she had no idea. I asked her if she was a special friend of Agneta, and she replied that she was not.' 'Did you see Daisy's mother and father?'

'No. She said her father was in Redruth and that her mother was not well enough to receive visitors.'

'Her brother and sister-in-law were at the party with her.'

'They have gone home. But I will see Mr Paul Kellow later on. I have met him several times and this will give me an excuse to call.'

There was a pause.

'I think that is Ross now. But he has gone through to the kitchens.'

Philip got up. 'Then I will leave you. This has been a courtesy call, Lady Poldark. Pray give your husband my warm respects.'

Demelza said: "I wish you well in your quest, Captain er, Philip. We shall all breathe easier if this mystery is solved ... It still puzzles me a small matter that you are personally going to so much trouble.'

Philip Prideaux smiled more warmly. 'I do it willingly. Like you, with a number of women probably at risk, I shall breathe easier if the murderer is caught.'

It was not until after he had left that she wondered why she had not mentioned the smell of the cigar.

Ben walked Essie home from his cottage to the gates of Trenwith. The wind was bringing up broken masses of cloud, with the moon behind them in the high January sky. So fast were the clouds moving that the moon might just have been thrown across the sky. Where there were clumps of trees they looked like cloud shadows on the moor. They had skirted Grambler beside the gorse bushes, prickly and stark, stunted hawthorn trees and waving brambles among the skeletal old mine buildings long fallen to waste. Few used this desolate way, and it was a narrow track with only just room to walk abreast without touching. Never quite touching. They had both been brought up in a rough country world where life, under a thin veneer of Wesleyanism, was plain, hard and crude. Sex was as often as not a hearty rough and tumble in the dark, a subject for tittered innuendoes and loud guffaws. Hardly anyone had time or patience for that pretty word romance or for anything that amounted to courtship. Yet Ben Carter at thirty-one and Esther Carne at nineteen had remained separate from the crowd. Ben because of his long enduring preoccupation with Clowance. Esther, perhaps because she was a little like Rosina Hoblyn had once been, born with an awareness that she was a little too good for the village lads and not good enough for any man with minor claims to gentility. He had met her at the gates at three; they had walked along the cliffs behind Trenwith while the light lasted and then gone back to his cottage and taken tea with his mother, who had been commanded by Ben to be present. Later he had taken Esther into the back room and explained how his new-built organ worked, and then played pieces of church music and dance music for about half an hour. Jinny had stayed until they left. Little of anything which might be called flirtatious conversation had passed between them - because of Jinny's presence and because Essie could hardly take the lead. Ben just did not know how; but they had exchanged glances, looks, occasional smiles. Jinny by this time was stout and grey and in her sixties, still fresh-complexioned and comely, but with a tight set to her mouth which reflected a life of struggle and prideful resistance to misfortune. She had in fact, with an occasional and never-sought gift from Ross, prospered more than most: her little shop, which sold everything from candles to sweets, from cotton to paraffin, had kept the family above water when Whitehead lost his job and while Ben prospected vainly for tin in little sub-surface workings of his own. The great tragedy of Jinny's life, which she had suffered when barely twenty, had been the death of Jim Carter, her first husband. She had never loved any man before or since, her later marriage to Scoble being one simply of liking and convenience. She had become a staunch Wesleyan before Sam turned up, and of later years, with Sam's encouragement, she had played an active part in his church and his Witnessing to the Truth. She had no objection to the thought of her eldest son marrying, indeed it was high time - long past time, some thought - the only tiny fly in the ointment being that this thin blonde girl was chief nurse to the Poldark baby, and almost acting as a companion to the Papist Major Geoffrey Charles had married. To many people in the county Catholicism was a serious menace, something still to be fought and feared like a dread complaint. And even though by some strange mischance the British had for long been fighting on behalf of the Spaniards in Spain, the less one had to do with such folk the better. In their eyes the Pope was close to the Devil, the Scarlet Woman, long allied to Napoleon; and before him to King Philip of Spain. Many brave men - including Jeremy Poldark - had laid down their lives to save their country from the Papists. It was therefore very unsuitable and dangerous for one of them to have married a Poldark and be living in their midst. If only if -- Ben were to marry this Came girl, he would be well to do it quickly and withdraw her from the evil influence which at present threatened her. Ben, his mother knew, though a nominal Wesleyan, was not as committed as he should be, and might not feel as strongly as Jinny. It was clearly a sign of his intentions, a sign of his recognition of the proprieties, that he should have invited her to be at his cottage for Esther's first visit. The girl, like all decent girls of her age, was as yet unformed, seemed a little lacking in character -- it was quite hard to imagine what her middle-aged son saw in her - but that would all change with maturity. Jinny's chief - only real - concern was that she should be encouraged to join the Community and to develop without improper or impure thoughts of incense, of confession, of black-robed priests. (It had been rumoured that such a priest had called at Trenwith and been admitted to the house.) Before they separated Ben, as if conscious of the importance of this first meeting, said: 'How d'ye like my mother?'