The Angry Tide (53 page)

Ross was in Truro all day Friday, the 13th, attending his second meeting at the Cornish Bank as a partner and guarantor. The duel was not mentioned, though everyone must have known about it for the simple reason that no one remarked on the stiffness of his right hand. Movement was returning, but he still had difficulty in signing his name.

For the most part the talk was double Dutch to him, though he maintained a polite attention. On matters of broad policy he found he was of some ge
neral use, and, although Lord de
Dunstanville must have had many other cars to the ground in London, Ross was the only member of Parliament present and could contribute here and there.

After it was over he supped and
slept with Harris Pascoe in Cale
nick, where for the moment he was continuing to live with his sister. The old premises
of Pascoe
's Bank would be sold or pulled down, and Harris was looking for a smaller house in Truro, near the centre, whence he could walk daily to the new bank. He had fitted well into his reorganized life, and although he lacked the prestige of being entirely his own man, he was saved much of the anxiety, and, as he said to Ross in his usual deprecating way, this was no bad thing for someone of his age and disposition.

Ross left on the Saturday morning and was home by midday. It was the darkest day of the year, of the whole winter, for although no rain fell the world was sunk in cloud, and dawn and dusk were nominal terms to indicate grudging changes in visibility.

As soon as he got home Demelza told him she had heard Elizabeth was still gravely ill. They had heard yesterday through Caroline, and
Demelza
had been to Kille
warren this morning to inquire.

'It was the neare
st I could go,' she said. 'If we
were neighbours in any proper sense . . .'

'Did she say there was any change
at
all?'

'Not for the better. D
wight was at Tre
nwith then.'

'Is the child alive?
’

'Oh, yes, and well, I believe. Premature but well.'

They met each other's eyes but said no more.

Dinner was usually taken with the children, and, now that Mrs Kemp was becoming something of a permanent resident, with her too; so there was no lack of talk. Clowance, from being a silent child, was now vying with Jeremy in
an
ability to keep
up
a non-stop conversation whether anyone was listening or not.

Ross did not e
at much, and half way through the meal he said in an undertone to
Demelza
: 'I think I must go.'

Demelza nodded. 'I think you should. Only I'm afraid for you.'

'I can look to myself.'

'If you were to meet Tom Harry in the grounds - and you with your weak arm.'

'He could not stop me on a horse. And at a time like this George must surely admit me.'

'I
...
wouldn't rely on it, Ross.'

'No.' Ross bethought
himself of their last meeting. ‘I
can only try.' 'Should I come?'

'No
...
If there have to be insults I can swallow them, on such
an
occasion as this. But if you were insulted I could not.' 'Take Gimlett with you.'

'I don't think he would terrify a mouse. Tholly Tregirls is the man, but I can hardly draw him out of his kiddley just to accompany me on a social call.'

'A sick visit,' said
Demelza
.

'Whichever you say
...
I think I'll go now, while the daylight lasts - such as it is.'
Demelza
said: 'I'll light the candles.'

To the accompaniment of a dozen questions Ross got up and went for his cloak and hat. As he left he kissed
Demelza
, which was unusual for him in mid-afternoon.

She said: 'Don't stay too long, or I shall worry. For your safety, I mean.'

He smiled. 'For my safety.'

Outside he cast a glance at the sea, which had now lost all its wildness. It was coming in like an oilcloth that was being lifted by a draught, only the edges frayed with dirty white. Seagulls were celebrating the darkness of the day.

When he turned in
at
the gates of Trenwith a number of lights already flickered in the building. Few houses, he thought, responded more quickly to mood than Trenwith. When he had been here on that summer evening eighteen months ago it had been pulsating and gay; now it looked still and cold, as cold as the Christmas when he had visited Aunt Agatha.

There were no gamekeepers about. He dismounted and knocked at the door. It was opened almost immediately by a manservant he did not know.

'Are you the - oh
...'

Ross said: ‘I
came to inquire about Mrs
Warleggan
. Is Mr Warleggan in?'

'Mrs Warleggan
...
Well
...'

'My name is Poldark.'

'Oh
...'
The man seemed frozen.

'What is it?' said a voice behind. It was George.

His face was in the shadow but his voice was at its coldest,

Ross said: 'I come in peace, George. I come simply to inquire after Elizabeth. I trust she's better.'

There were noises inside the house but it was difficult to identify them.

George said: 'Turn this man away.'

'I came to ask how she was,' Ross said. 'That is all. I think at times of sickness one should be able to set aside old feuds - even the bitterest of feuds.'

George said: 'Turn this man away.'

The door was shutting. Ross put his foot in it and his good shoulder against it and shoved. The manservant staggered back and collided with a table. Ross went in. There was only a single candle guttering in the great hall. It looked like a wobbling yellow eye in the iron-grey daylight.

Ross shut the door behind him. 'For
God's
sake, George! Have we to be so petty as to quarrel like mangy dogs at a time of
sickness?
Tell me she is better. Tell me she is about the same. Tell me what the doctors say, and I will
go!
And go gladly! I have no business here but that of a long-standing relationship - with this house, and those in it. I am related by marriage to Elizabeth, and wish her only well
...'

George said: 'God damn you, and your family, and your blood to all eternity.' He choked and stopped as if he was ill himself.

Ross waited, but no more came. The manservant had recovered himself and was rearranging the table he had upset.

Ross said: 'I will not go till I know how she is.'

'Elizabeth
?' said George. 'Oh, Elizabeth?
...
Elizabeth is dead.'

In the silence that followed,
the manservant slid away silentl
y and was gone from the hall.

The hall itself was like a church, echoing and cold; sickly light from the multi-paned window falling upon the great table, the empty hearth; and one candle burning.

Ross said: 'It
...
you can't
...'
He took a breath
. 'She can't
...'

'Two hours ago,' said George in a detached voice; 'she died, holding my hand. Is that any pleasure to you?'

Ross recognized now the sound he had heard earlier. It was someone crying, a woman, almost a wail, like a Celtic keening. No one w
ould have recognized Mrs Chynowe
th, whose voice for some years had been muffled and halting.

'Elizabeth is
...
I can't - believe
...
George, this is not some
...'

'Some jest?' said George. 'Oh, yes, I jest from time to time, but not on such trivial subjects as the loss of a wife.'

Ross stood as if his limbs were unable to make any con
certed movement. He licked his li
ps and stared at the other man.

'Go on, you scum!' George shouted. 'Go up and
see
her! See what we
have brought her to!'

A man came out of the winter parlour. At another time Ross would have recognized him as Dr
Behenna
.

'Mr
Warleggan
, I beg of you not to upset yourself further. No more could have been done, and there is nothing to do now -'

George turned. 'I have Captain Poldark here. Captain Poldark, MP. He doubts my word that my wife - whom he long coveted - is dead. He thinks I am jesting. I have invited him to go up and see.'

'Mr
Warleggan
, if I might suggest -' 'Where is she?'

George looked at Ross. 'In the pink bedroom overlooking the courtyard. You must know your way about this house, since you have always felt it belonged to you. Go up and
see
her fo
r yourself. There is no one with
her. No one will stay with her.'

'Captain Poldark -' Behenna began, but Ross was already making for the stairs.

He went
up
them, stumbling here and there. It was dark in the interior of the house, and another solitary candle burned
at
the end of the long passage. Past Verity's old bedroom, past Francis's bedroom, past Aunt Agatha's bedroom. Shadows barred his way. He stumbled against an ancient tallboy. The floorboards creaked under his tread. Past the bedroom where he and
Demelza
had once slept and made love. Up five steps. Those five steps that Elizabeth had fallen down before the birth of Valentine.

He came to the door. He could not bring himself to open it. It was the room in which he had come to
see
Elizabeth seven years ago - a meeting from which so much mischief had sprung. Suddenly as a non-believer and a non-Catholic he wanted to cross himself.

He opened the door, and the stench hit him like a wall.

The bed was there, and Elizabeth was on it, and two candles burned. The fire still flickered in the grate.

The curtains were drawn but a window was slightly open. The only movement in the room was a stirring of the pink curtain in the evening breeze. On the table by the bed were an hour-glass, a b
owl, a tall painted feeding bottl
e, two lemons. On the dressing-table was Elizabeth's necklace of garnets, a glass containing three leeche
s, a pair of scissors and a bottl
e of water and a spoon. Before the fi
re were her slippers, and a kettle hissed faintl
y on the hob.

He hung on to the handle of the door and retched. She did not move to greet him.

He retched again and again, and pulled a handkerchief and put it to his nose and mouth. He stared at his first love. The candles dipped in the draught of the open door.

He walked slowly to the bed. Death had removed all the lines of pain and fatigue and fever. Except that her skin was yellow. Her hair, u
nbrushed, but curiously tidy, sti
ll framed that pale patrician face. Robbed of expression, her face in repose retained the old sweet beauty so many men had admired. You could have supposed that at any moment her eyelids would flicker open and her lips would curve into a welcoming smile. Except that her skin was yellow.

And under the sheet, and barely contained by it, lay all the horrors of corruption, mortification and decay. It was creeping
up
by e
very minute that she lay th
ere. How far had it already reached? She had decayed while still alive, so that burial was already days overdue.

He swallowed back vomit, and took the handkerchief from his mouth and kissed her. Her lips were like soft cold stale putty.

Handkerchief back, he heaved his heart out against it and almost fell. The room swung as he caught at a chair. He turned and fled. The bang of the door behind him sounded hollow; the door of a sepulchre. A sepulchre that needed scaling off from all that was still alive.

He reeled along
the
passage and down the stairs without looking at George, who stood there watching him. He went out of the house and found his horse, and leaned his head against the horse's neck, unable to mount.

George said: 'Tell me the sum I am in your debt and I will pay you.'

'In due course. I'll attend to it in due course.'

'Let mc know when you want your horse brought from the stables.'

'As it is again night,' Dr
Behenna
said stiffly, 'I should prefer to sleep here. Also, I think it advisable to look at the baby once more before I go.'

'She's not unwell?
’

'Not at all. But I am not sure if the wet nurse is not a thought clumsy. These country girls
...'

'She was the best to be found at such short notice.'

'Oh, quite. I've give
n Mrs Chynowe
th a strong opiate, and she should sleep sound now. The women are upstairs now?'

'The women
are
upstairs.'

'I think the casque should be closed as quick as possible.' 'I'm sure they will feel the same.'

Somewhere in a nearby room Valentine was arguing with his nurse. He did not yet know anything except that Mama was unwell.

George went prowling round the cold shadowy silent house. This thing that had happened to him was contrary to all his previous experiences of life. In forty years he had suffered few set-backs, and they had all been man-made and capable of reversal. Most of them
had
been reversed in the fullness of time. One accepted a rebuff, a defeat, and then carefully gauged the size and quality of the defeat and set one's mind to arranging future events in such a way as to overcome or circumvent it. Of course from time to time he and his parents had had minor or more than minor ailments, and one accepted that in due course one would grow old and
the
. But in forty years he had not
lost
an
ybody - certainl
y nobody important.

This total defeat was something he found difficult - impossible -to accept. From the age of twenty Elizabeth had been his goal - for long quite out of reach, beyond all possibility of attainment. But he had attained her, against all probability, against all the odds. This had been his greatest triumph. Since then, though he had allowed suspicion and jealousy to rage in him and impair his life with her, it had been rage against his
own,
it had been bitter anger within a circumscribed area of personal possession. So when on the rare occasions jealousy had broken into bitter quarrel, he had been prepared to back down at the last under her threat to leave him. He might be miserable
with
her, and fiercely intent on making her life miserable too; but there had never been any question in his mind that he was ever going to be
without
her.

For she was the person he had been working for - to please, to offend, to observe, to criticize, to consult, even to insult, to show off to others, to buy things for, above all to
impress. There was nobody else.
And now, and now when Aunt Agatha's spleen had just lost its venom, when the poison barb had at last been withdrawn and they could live in a greater amity together, when they had a
daughter
to add to their son, when life could really begin anew, when -
especially -
he was on the point of achieving that ultimate pi
nnacle of distinction, a knighth
ood - he, George Warleggan,
the
blacksmith's grandson - a knighthood - Sir George
...
Sir George and Lady Warleggan
...
coming into a reception
...
everyone would look - one of the wealthiest men in Cornwall and one of the most influential, member of Parliament, owner of a parliamentary borough, and a
knight;
and on his arm the fairhaircd gracious aristocratic Elizabeth: Lady Warleggan
...
and at this stage she had been
snatched away.

It was not
bearable.
He stared around him at the room he found himself in - it was a guest room and he did not know why he had come in here. It was next to Agatha's old room, and he quickly went out and entered hers. She had cursed him, she had
cursed
him! - all this time her curse had lain on him, and now, when he had been about to cast it off, she had cursed him afresh, and his life was laid waste.

Most of the furniture was unchanged from when she had died -this was the bed sh
e had died on. He kicked violentl
y at the dressing-table, splintering one of the legs. Then he pushed it over and it fell with a crash, smashing the glass and scattering toiletries about the floor. He wrenched open the door of the wardrobe and tugged at it. Slowly it toppled and fell with a resounding thud, bringing over a chair and breaking a wooden tabic in its fall. The candle he had brought in lurched on its shelf and nearly fell too.

This was a cursed house, and he would willingly have burned it down - the candle to the curtain and to the corner of the bedspread -there was plenty of ancient timber which would soon ignite: a fitting pyre for Elizabeth and all the cursed and twice-damned Poldarks who had ever lived here.

But in spite of his insensate anger it was not in him, not in his nature to destroy property, especially property which more than ever now was by rights his. He stared around the room, his hands still trembling with passion, and tore off the walls two pictures which had belonged to Agatha, dashed them to the floor. He thought tomorrow night - or perhaps even tonight - he would go to Sawle Church and desecrate her grave - have two men smash the headstone, dig up the rotten powdered corpse and
throw
it around and
throw
it around for the crows to pick. Anything, anything, t
o revenge himself for this un-re
vengeablc injury he had suffered.

He tremblingly took up the candle again and went out of the room, dripping tallow on his fingers and all over the floor. He stood outside, unable to contain his anger yet unable to find a subject on which to vent it. He would have gone in again to see Elizabeth, but knew it was better to wait until the two women had finished laying her out and the room had been heavily scattered with chloride of lime. He did not know whether he could bear to go in even then.

She had left him. She had
left
him. He couldn't
believe
it.

He could not tolerate the thought of returning to the rooms downstairs where he might encounter that inept quack, or, worse, Elizabeth's doddering, feeble-faced father. If he saw him he would cry: why are
you
alive? What good are
you
to mc? Why don't you and your miserable wife
the
too?

A girl had come out of a door and was staring at him. It was Polly Odgers.

'Beg pardon, sir. I didn't rightly know if anything was wrong
...
I
mean
more
wrong. I heard those noises - crashes and the like. I didn't know what they were.'

'Nothing,'
he said between his teeth. 'It is nothing.'

'Oh
...
Thank you, sir. Excuse me.' She prepared to withdraw.

'Did it wake the child?'

'Oh, no, sir; she's a proper little sleeper. And hungry with it! She's grown, I believe she's grown in just four days!'

He followed her into the room. Mrs Simons, the young wet nurse, bobbed him a curtsey as he came in.

He stared down at the child. Ursula Warleggan. But Elizabeth had left him. This was all that was left. She had left him Ursula.

He stayed motionless for a long time, and the two young women watched him, careful not to disturb his thoughts.

He had held her hand while she was dying. When Behenna said there was no more hope, he had come into the loathsome, nauseous room and sat down beside her and held her hand. One hand was badly swollen but the other as pale and slim as ever. He had thought her unconscious, but her fingers had moved in his. It was her left hand, and his ring was on it, his ring proclaiming his pride and his capture, which he had put on her finger in the dilapidated old church of Mylor by the river Fal less than seven years ago. With what pride and triumph. And now it had come to this.

Once towards the end she had come round and tried to smile at him through her parched and discoloured lips. Then the smile had disappeared and a look of dread had come over her face. 'George,' she had whispered. 'It's going dark! I'm afraid of the dark.'
He had held her hand more tightl
y as if with his firm grip he could keep her in this world, hold her against the drag of all
the
horrors that drew her to the grave.

He thought of all th
is, standing staring down
at
the child which was all Elizabeth had left him. He was no philosopher and no seer, but had he been both he might have wondered at the fact that his fairhaired, frailly beautiful wife had now borne three children and that none of them would come to resemble her at all. Though Elizabeth had been constitutionally strong enough, perhaps some exhaustion in the ancient Chynoweth strain was to be the cause of this virtual obliteration of her personal appearance in any of her children, and the dominance of the three fathers. Geoffrey Charles was already like Francis. Valentine would grow ever more like the man who had just left the house. And little Ursula would become sturdy and strong and thick-necked and as determined as a blacksmith.

The child stirred in her sleep; still so tiny; still so frail. 'Look after the children,' Elizabeth had whispered. Very well, very well: he would do that; but what was the use of
hate
It was his
wife
he wanted: the person you did things
for,
the cornerstone. All his labour, all his scheming, all his organizing and amassing and negotiating and achieving
...
without her it was all in
vain.
He could have kicked this cot over like the furniture in Agatha's room; turned it upside down with its frail contents, as his life had been overset, killed, made empty by a solitary stroke of malignant fate. He blamed fate, never knowing that he should have blamed himself.

Polly Odgers leaned forward and pulled a corner of the blanket further from the child's mouth. 'Dear of'n,' she said.

'Ursula,' George muttered. 'The little she-bear.'

'Please?'

'Nothing,' said George.

And for
the
first lime he had to take a handkerchief to wipe his eyes.