The Angry Tide (7 page)

'Pascoe, Tresize
, Annery and Spry,' Cary muttered contemptuously, and shuffled his old coat about his shoulders as if it irked him. 'That'
s his reserves. St Aubyn Tresize
has a good name, maybe, money in land, a few wharves in Hayle - but no real
weight.
Frank Annery is a notary with some connections. Spry is a Quaker, and like most Quakers is a warm man. But warm men do not fancy a cold wind.'

Outside there was the noisy tramping clatter of hooves and the shout of grooms, as a string of horses was led back to the stables of the Fighting Cocks Inn after their daily exercise.

'What is St John Peter's indebtedness to us?'

'About twelve thousand pounds.'

George said: 'What
does the fool do with his money?'

'Hunting mainly. He's Master of the Rame Hunt, and keeping up that sort of style is costly. Also he has taken up with some woman with expensive tastes in St Austell.'

Silence fell.

Ca
ry said: 'As a matter of interest Ross Poldark has a substantial balance at Pascoe's, Upwards of four thousand pounds last month. Aiming a
t one bird, we might wing anothe
r.'

Nicholas said: 'I wonder that you know all this, brother.'

Preliminary movements at the corners of Cary's mouth suggested that he might
have thought of smiling. 'Pascoe
employs a clerk called Kingsley. He is underpaid and is now able to afford a few small luxuries that he has not enjoyed before.'

'I also wonder,' said Nicholas, 'where all this is going to lead, what the value is of this continuing rancour. We
are
too big now, have too many interests to need to
waste time and money paying off
old scores. Yours is the right way, George, to wish to get back into Parliament. That is looking ahead; preparing for the future. A member has many opportunities for adv
ancing his interests. But Pascoe
's Bank? Ross Poldark? Do they merit the trouble you may have to take?'

Cary was about to reply but George spoke first.
'I
know you are the most magnanimous of us, Father, and that is an admirable thing to be. I too can be magnanimous at times, but preferably to my friends. I am a little surprised too in view of what you said just after the election, when Lord Falmouth had treated you in so cavalier a manner and had succeeded in forcing Captain Poldark into Parliament in place of your own dear son.'

Nicholas nodded and reached for his stick. 'That's so. But it was spoke in the heat of the moment. Perhaps when one has been as ill as I have been this winter one comes to have - different views, different perspectives.' He heaved himself up. 'No matter. It was but an observation. I'll go and seek your mother out. That is, if she is back from her shopping.'

Mrs Nicholas Warleggan was not yet back from her shopping, whither she had been accompanied by Mrs George Warleggan.

Elizabeth's relationship with her mother-in-law was delicate and not of the easiest, for Mary
Warleggan
had not grown into her position but had remained the simple countrywoman she had been at the time of her marriage forty years ago. At that time, being the only surviving daughter of a small but substantial miller, she had been marrying beneath her in taking the son of a blacksmith, especially old Luke Warleggan's son, however upstanding and strong he might be and whatever his aspirations. But Nicholas - who never in his life had been called Nick and fought any man or boy who so addressed him -
had soon borrowed money on the mill and on the land, and when his father-in-law died had sold it, every stick and stone of it, and had moved with his wife and small son from Idless to put up one of these new foundry places and smelting works beside Carnon Stream. There he had begun importing pig-iron from Pentyrch and Dowlais near Cardiff, and wrought iron and faggot iron from Bristol. From these were made the tools necessary to supply the mines and the cottages: screws and nails, grindstones, fire grates, wire, red-lead, pig-lead, pots and kettles and basins. Thence sprang new ventures, the building of wheels for tin stamps, the manufacture of alloys from local tin and copper, and eventually the erection of complete steam engines for the mines. Learning to find good assistants to whom you paid good wages they could not hope to get elsewhere but from whom you expected the utmost in efficiency
, Nicholas had spread his inter
ests about the county, and, as a result of the credit he extended to mines, he found himself drawn into banking. An office opened in Truro soon became the centre of his activities, and Cary, who had been managing the foundry for him, was brought in to superintend their financial operations, and thus found his true mission in life.

So had began their fortune, and Nicholas's son, inheriting the drive of his father and developing a new and sharper eye for the profitable venture, had so far increased that fortune that, in the fullness of time, Mary Lashbrook, the small miller's daughter, found herself the mistress of a great porticoed mansion seven miles from Truro with thirty bedrooms and five hundred acres of pasture and timber. More embarrassing still was the fact that her only son had chosen to marry this beautiful young impoverished widow whose family had almost the longest pedigree in Cornwall. (There had, indeed, been a terrible moment two years ago at a dinner at Trenwith, to which Nicholas and Mary Warleggan had mercifully not been invited, a dinner given for the great Sir Francis Basset - as he then was - and his lady and some others of the higher aristocracy, when in the course of conversation Basset had observed casually that his family had come over with the
Conqueror, and Jonathan Chynowe
th, the ineffectual burbling Jonathan, had at once said: 'My dear sir, that is hardly a matter for congratulation. I have records of my family for two centuries before the Conquest. We Cornish look on the Normans as usurpers.')
So it was perhaps understandable that common ground between the two Mrs Warleggans was hard to find. If Mary had ever been able to persuade herself that Elizabeth truly adored George as she did it might have made all the difference. But Elizabeth was too cool, too detached, too patrician to share in the sentiments they would then have shared. You could not discuss George's health with her, or whether he was overworking or if his moods meant that he needed a bilious powder. Valentine was the nearest meeting point, but here again Elizabeth had all the modern mother's fads and did not take too kindly to superstitions that she felt were out of date.

Not that Mary believed there was any real lack of good will on Elizabeth's part. For instance, this afternoon. Elizabeth could have made an excuse and allowed her to go to Mistress Trclask's alone. Instead they walked together in the misty clammy afternoon, over the cobbles, slipping and tripping here and there, skirts held in hand, among the common folk, some of whom recognized them and curtsied or pulled
a forelock. And at Mistress Tre
lask's Elizabeth was not only useful to Mary in helping her to choose between two paduasoys, but ordered a bonnet herself, and after it was over said:
'You've never met my cousin, have you? My cousin
Rowella
who married Mr Solway, the librarian? She is but in the next street, Shall we call on her and persuade her to give us tea?'

So up they went, Mrs Warleggan knowing well how Rowella had married far beneath her, and secretly admiring Elizabeth for not being ashamed of the fact. So they came to the door: it was one of six small houses in a terrace, poorly built, the thatches in need of repair, the window frames crooked, the brick mouldering already; and out of the door as they approached it came a thick-set, fashionably dressed, plump-faced young man whom a stranger would only just have recognized as a clergyman.

'Why, Osborne,' sa
id Elizabeth. 'Is Rowella in? We
were about to call.'

^Chapter
Six

Ross had seen Dwight and Caroline several times and had seen and admired little Sarah, who indeed was little, and pale, but intelligent and alert. Caroline said nature was compensating for so tall a mother by giving her a pygmy. Dwight said he would wager that Caroline at four months old had been no bigger, and scarcely so good-natured. Caroline replied: 'There you are wrong, Dr Enys, it is only since marriage that my nature has changed for the worse.' But, m so far as one could perceive her true feelings behind the defensive flippancy, she seemed happy in her motherhood and spent much time with the child, neglecting, as she said, 'horses and other more important matters'.

Dwight was none too well but drove himself relentlessly in his care for his patients. Sometimes it was not his health so much as his spirits that seemed down, and, on the first occasion Ross had a word alone with him, he tackled him on the subject.

Dwight said: 'Caroline taxes me too. She accuses me of being a born pessimist, which is not true; but I think it is a necessity in my profession to foresee the way in which an illness might develop, and, if possible, to try to prevent an outcome that is bad. If I know that a child with measles may develop pneumonia, as many do, and
di
e
of it, am I a pessimist to recommend that the child be treated in a way best calculated to avoid this?'

They were riding back from Truro together, having met by chance half a mile out. Dwight had been to inspect progress on
the building of the new Miners’
Hospital which was now in course of construction near the town; Ross was returning from a meal with his friend and banker, Harris Pascoe, where as usual they had tried to solve the world's problems.

'Financially,' Pascoe
had said, 'England is better off
...
or the government at least is better off, than it was a year ago. These great gifts from the nobility and the business houses towards the prosecution of the war! The Duke of Marlborough £5,000. The City of L
ondon £10,000. And three m-mercan
tile houses in Manchester - three only! - to subscribe £35,000. Voluntary subscriptions already total one and a half million. It eases Pitt's burden.'

'He looked ill when he spoke last in the House.'

'I
believe his romance has f-founde
red. He hoped to marry Miss Eden but the matter has gone awry. Some say he was so short of money that he lacked
the
courage to put the question. Well.
..
sometimes integrity can exact too high a price. A man who has been first minister of this country for so many years
.’

'Ireland is a terrible trouble,' Ross said. 'What a story! Persecution, insurrection, conspiracy, betrayal. There's no end to it,'

'And in the meantime I wonder where General Buonaparte has gone."

'To the East probably.'

'But where cast? Egypt?'

'It is possible. He must have his eyes on India.'

'Ross, are you sorry you have chosen to represent Truro?'

Ross frowned. 'Not sorry. Not yet. But - restive,'

'Have you ever been anything else?'

'Well
...
the needs of mankind are so great, the process of satisfying them so slow. I mean, of course, the fundamental needs - even while we are fighting a war for our very existence. The days are ending, I think, Harris, when nation fought nation without involving the mass of the people. Now, especially since Carnot, war is a word which involves everyone. England, all of us,
are
fighting France, all of diem, so it is more than ever important that the poor and the dispossessed should feel they are no longer forgotten and unregarded. They are just as much a part of England as the noblemen and the mercantile houses.'

Harris looked at the colour of the wine in his glass, 'Produce of France,' he said. 'Once we saw them as a nation of benighted papists. Now we
see
them as revolutionary atheists. I wonder at heart how far they are different from us. Were you able to obtain any silver change in Truro this morning?'

'None. None at all.'

'People have started hoarding it. One cannot keep pace. Have you seen these - Spanish dollars, taken as prizes, reissued at the Mint with our own King's head stamped over the other?'

'They
offered me such but I refused.’

'No need. They are
legal te
nder. At four shillings and nine
pence each. But I suspect they will disappear tike all the rest. Do you suppose your mine will dry up in its riches as quickly as it began?'

Ross smiled. 'I see you keep well informed. We shall be rich for a year or two yet, and maybe much longer. The north is a keenly lode and hardly yet explored. I've also ordered a resumption of work in
the direction of Wheal Maiden.’

'You have a 1-large balance with us at the moment, Ross: close on £4,000. Have you thought of putting some away in Consols? They were back to 71 last week.'

'It's an agreeable feeling to have it all readily available in your bank, I'm looking for something else in which I
can take an interest, like Blewett's shipyard at Looe
; like the Daniell furnaces. The more
I
spread my interests, the more insulated
I
am against the vagaries of Wheal Grace.'

'Now that you
are
a member of Parlia
ment your name will carry weigh
t. Oh, don't pull a face, it's true whether you like it or not. There will be men looking to add your name to theirs in many enterprises.'

Ross said:
'I
shall be like a rich heiress - suspecting the intentions of my suitors
...
Seriously, Harris, is all well with my cousin?'

'Who? St John Peter?' Pascoe shrugged. 'He leads my daughter a dance.'

'The young fool. I'd like to knock his head in. What can one do with such people?'

'Wait perhaps until they grow into old fools. Joan says very little, but one hears reports.' 'Docs he still bank with the Warleggans?'

'Yes. But he has hardly touched Joan's money. He must have some personal arrangement with them.
I
don't know of its nature.'

Ross grunted in some discomfort. 'I wish
I
had influence with him. But sweet reason has never been his strong point.
I
wonder about his father, whether
I
might have a word with him.'

'I
don't think it would have any good outcome. St John always speaks of his father in the most disrespectful terms.'

Ross grunted again, and silence fell. 'Talking of the Warleggans...'

'Were we?'

'In a fashion. Happily I have seen nothing of George as yet,
I
suppose he is in Truro?'

'Oh, yes. They all
are
. George,
I
believe, i
s in the process of buying hims
elf back into Parliament.'

'The devil
...
With Basset's help?’

'No, no. George has been buying burgage property in St Michael from Sir Christopher Hawkins.
I
have no details, but
I
gather a substantial number of properties
are
likely to change hands.'

'That may give him an interest in a borough, but surely there are sitting members?'

'Yes; a man called Wilbraham, and a Captain Howell. Warleggan hopes no doubt to persuade one or the other of them to resign. It's not i
mpossible if the money is right’

Ross stretched his legs. ‘I
must go, Harris, Why will you never come to see us? It is the same distance cither way.'

‘I
have to be here most days,' said Pascoc. 'None of my partners is active, and I had hoped, as you know, that Joan's husband might have come in in an active capacity, but, as you also know, he looks on banking as usury and will have no part of it.'

They went downstairs. The bank was busy with market-day customers. Pascoe opened the side door.

'George,' said Ross, bending his head to go through. 'Could he not find less expensive ways of gaining a seat?'

'Oh, yes. But what he hopes no doubt in the end is to control both scats at St Michael. Then, who knows, he might spread his fingers further. With scats to put at the government's disposal, he would be in a strong position to ask for favours in return. While Pitt is so scrupulous in his personal life, he has no hesitation in buying support for his policies.'

'Say no more,' Ross commented, 'I have a queasy stomach.
’