The Loving Cup (27 page)

In spite of the little scuffles near Merxen, this was the first time Jeremy had seen the shambles of a direct hit by cannon. Blood and bones spurted, a man held his hand to a shoulder that lacked an arm, another writhed on the ground breathing blood and vomit on the grass. But it was Love's horse that finished Jeremy. He moved a few feet away and was sick into the bushes.

'Feeling a trifle off-colour, Poldark?' Lieutenant Barton asked with a grin.

'No, no,' said Jeremy straightening up and wiping his mouth,
I
do this for pleasure.'

The bombardment having stopped on both sides, as if by mutual agreement, there followed a period of consolidation while breastworks were built and batteries were brought forward. The bombardment of the ships had been considered a failure, because the ships were relatively small and there was so much ice on which the cannon balls could bounce harmlessly away. Antwerp should now be bombarded instead, to soften it up before the troops moved in to take it.

This cannonade went on for four days, but the enemy return fire, after that one spectacular hit, was sporadic and usually harmless. The army waited for an order to advance which never came. Instead the
y were ordered to retreat - to
Odenbach, where they had been for a few days on the advance. Captain Love explained that the Germans under von Biilow had received orders to move south and to pass by Antwerp; it was part of a grand design, though whose design no one knew. Some Russian troops, some Cossacks, remained behind. A menacing lot of men, with their shaggy ponies, their sheepskin cloaks, their long lances and straggling beards. On the whole they maintained a sort of discipline, but one could imagine how quickly it would slip away in a war of conquest and pillage.

Jeremy mentioned little of all this in his second letter to his family, being full of amusing anecdotes about his fellow officers, of which there were plenty. He was interested in the way the Dutch kept pigs, what fine cattle they bred, the oddity of the Dutch cheeses ('why do they not thread a wick in them and use them for candles?'), the lovely dyed silks and silk-stuffs they made. In the meantime what was this exciting news about two new finds of copper at Wheal Leisure? Extraordinary those old Trevorgie levels, which had been mined so extensively for tin
...

In early January the
Chasse
Marie
and the
Lady
Clow
ance,
one only a day behind the other, arrived at Livorno and unloaded and sold their hogsheads of pilchards at
182/6
a hogshead. After a week ashore they reloaded with Italian white wine, tubs of liqueurs from the monasteries, silks, laces and velvets; but when about to leave they were embayed for two weeks by a vicious winter storm that sank six vessels in the port and did some damage to the
Chasse Marie,
so it was near the end of the month before the brooding mountainous landscape of Italy was out of sight.

It had been an eventless trip out, except for a few tense hours weathering Gibraltar, and except for the fact that two members of the seven crew of the
Cnasse
Marie
had been struck with a mysterious illness from which they had nearly died. Andrew
Blamey
thought sometimes that they had come through so far as much by good luck as by good management; Stephen's knowledge of navigation was cursory to say the least; even he, who had been skipping his exams lately, knew far more. One of the fishermen crew, Bert Blount, who came from St Erth, knew more than either of them.

Ross had been at Westminster almost three weeks before he saw Canning, who had been at Hinckley with his ailing son. Canning was again in a mood of despondency - not because of the state of the war but because of the state of his personal affairs.

'Naturally,' he said,
I
'm delighted that things are moving s
o well for us at present. All th
e same, I would have dearly wished to play some part in these ultimate stages, some part other than that of an uninformed back bencher, listening with anxious ears for the drops of information leaked out by the relevant ministers. Especially from Castlereagh.'

Castlereagh was the man with whom Canning had fought a duel five years ago. Reconciliations had taken place between them since then, yet their inability to work together had as much as anything contributed to Canning being left out in the cold.

if Castlereagh plays his cards right - or perhaps I should say uses our gold right
...
But I know it still all trembles in the balance. Napoleon's latest successes make one fear Marengo all over. He is trying to divide us once again.'

'Austria surely cannot make a separate peace this time,' Ross said.

'Well, one still has to consider that our allies are really only allied in their opposition to Napoleon. The Austrians have far more in common with the French than with the Russians or the Prussians, whom they consider the ultimate barbarians - and one has to admit they are not so far wrong. The Empress of France is the daughter of the Emperor of Austria.
Her
son is Napoleon's heir. If Napoleon has the good sense to accept his defeat so far as it now goes, agree to die old frontiers and begin to act like a reasonable man, the Austrians would far rather he retain his throne than that he should lose it and have Europe living under a Russian-Prussian hegemony.'

'But France will continue to exist. We have no intention of destroying it - only Napoleon.'

Canning made a sudden impatient movement. You could see he wanted the dispatch boxes of office under his hands. 'That is Castlereagh's task - to make that clear. He must use all the influence we have, especially our money, to prevent the Austrians weakening.
And
the Russians: I'm told Tsar Alexander is very depressed by the latest reverses. What we really need—what we must have - is a formal treaty between all the Allies, guaranteeing that none shall make peace without the others!'

It occurred to Ross that Canning did not appear to be badly informed about the diplomatic and military situations as they stood at that time. It was said by his enemies that he behaved as if he ran a little government of his own.

'You have heard of Sir Humphry Davy's adventures in France?'Ross asked.

in France? No.'

Ross explained. 'They are well, it seems, and in Paris, staying in a hotel, having been twice arrested on suspicion, and having had great difficulty in obtaining passports; Nevertheless he has met Ampere, Gay-Lussac, Humboldt, Laplace. And they are permitted now to roam abroad at will. They have been to the theatre, have met the Empress Josephine. The few Americans living in Paris are astonished. I wonder if a revolutionary French scientist would be given so much freedom in London.'

I
think we should not be unmatched in such civilities.'

'But should we
invite
him?'

'Ah, it is one of Napoleon's virtues and advantages not merely to be able to do a good if eccentric thing, but as an absolute monarch to have to answer to nobody for his actions. Just supposing Lord Liverpool were to invite some eminent French scientist to pay us a courtesy call, imagine the questions in the House!'

Ross said: 'There may well be rioting in Paris and civil war if the Emperor falls.'

'As he must within a month or so,' said Canning. 'Granting only that we stay together.'

I

In early March Wellington's army including the
43rd
Mon
mouthshires penetrated further into Aquitaine. Word had gone ahead of them that the men did not rape and pillage but behaved under a strict if brutally imposed discipline. It was told that Wellington even invited the mayors of the towns and villages through
which he passed to dine at his
table, something a French general, for all his ideas of equality, would never have done. What was more the British
paid
for what they took. By the time they entered St Sever, and Brinquet, they were greeted almost as a relieving army.
‘
Bunting was hung from windows, and here and there a Union Jack. The Army basked in its popularity and brief rest.

Luckier than his cousin, who was to be in the forefront of the last bloody battle for Toulouse, Jeremy's battalion was not involved in the attack on Antwerp and Bergen-op-Zoom, which was a disastrous and costly failure. The
52nd
were kept in reserve all through the
8th
March and on the
9th
they were deployed to cover the retreating troops when the attack was abandoned. Jeremy was sickened by the procession of wounded soldiers, groaning in carts, limping along the frozen tracks, leaving stains of blood behind like little signatures in the snow.

So April dawned, and in Cornwall the daffodils, the primroses, the snowdrops flowered, all late because of the bitter winter. The sun seemed like a stranger, and for a whole week persisted before its warmth could be felt through the co
ld grip of the dying frosts. In v
ery bad winters such as this Demelza felt a little anxious lest - who knew? -the miracle of spring wouldn't happen. It seemed to her that ' whoever controlled the weather was absent-minded, busy perhaps with some other world; he turned his back and forgot about it; then, at the last moment he remembered and turned round and pulled a lever like those which started the engine of a mine, and behold there was a gentler beginning to the next day, and a bird sang, and softer rain fell, and the daffodils lifted their wrapped heads looking for the warmth from the sun, and it was going to be spring after all. Henry now was sixteen months old and most like Clowance of all her children, except that his was a darkness which was likely to last:
she
had begun with some dark redness in her hair which had soon changed to blonde.

And Isabella-Rose was just twelve and becoming a handful in a way none of the other children quite had been. She was cheerfully disobedient and took any mild punishment meted out in such a vociferous but good tempered way that one did not know quite what to do about her.

And Clowance was not yet twenty: still so young for all the marriage proposals she had already received. And Jeremy - the only one of her children who had been delicate as a child - was nearly twenty-three and enduring, she was certain, agonies of discomfort in the intense cold of Holland, ifnot every moment of the day in danger of his life.

And this month, in spite of the absence of its proprietor for part of the time, Wheal Leisure showed a startling increase in profits. The quantity of good ore raised had dou
bled and with it the
money available for distribution. When he came home Ross gave a dinner for the shareholders, at which were the two Trenegloses, father and son, who were keenly delighted at the turn of events, and six of the smaller shareholders who held between them twelve of the outside shares. Nota
bly missing was Stephen Carring
ton, who stood now to benefit materially - by in fact two-fifths of the amount that Jeremy did.

On the same day in the evening Jeremy was in Mechelen, on the road to Brussels, eating broiled kidneys in a farmhouse with four other officers and speculating on the wild rumours that were flying about, that Napoleon was defeated, that he was dead, that he was on his way with a new army to attack Wellington on his flank, that the Russians were on the outskirts of Paris.

The young men drank noisily to the end of the war. Contrary to what Demelza pictured, it was a jolly, comfortable supper, during which they toasted the end of the war so often that only two out of the four remained upright, and all of them had to be helped waveringly to bed.

That night at Gunwalloe the
Lady
Clowance
and the
Chasse
Marie
discharged their cargoes of contraband, having hovered out of sight of land for a day while two men they had put ashore the previous night made contact with the people Stephen had arranged to meet there. In the weeks before sailing he had done some speculative travelling along the south coast, and at Gunwalloe he had come across a man called Nancarrow who owned a brickyard and had possibly the best distributive centre for contraband goods in West Cornwall.

It had not been a good trip home. Although they had been doing their best to close their eyes to the fact, the two men who had been so ill on the outward journey were suffering from typhus fever, and on the return journey four others had developed it and one had died.

Among the four was Stephen himself. For thirteen days he lay in his berth with terrible pains in his head and limbs and back, and skin so sensitive that he could not bear to have it touched, then becoming delirious with a fit of shivering, and a mulberry coloured rash grew round his mouth and spread across his face and chest.

All the illness was on the
Chasse
Marie;
and when it looked as if Stephen might follow the man who had just died, Andrew transferred from the
Lady
Clowance
to take charge, leaving Blount in command of the
Lady
Clowance.

The weather turned bad in the Atlantic and they became separated. Only by the sheerest luck were they able to keep to their original plan and rendezvous in the Scillies. With three men sick at one time the
Chasse
Marie
was badly undermanned and could have foundered.

By the time they reached St Mary's Stephen was past the crisis. He was like a ghost and could hardly walk, but his appetite, which had not existed for two weeks, was ravenous. They would have stayed there longer, for everyone,