The Stranger From The Sea (21 page)

She had said to him: 'Well, boy,' and his life had changed.

She scrutinized him, with eyes that were a startling hazel under such coal-dark brows. Her face, round rather than oval and pale like honey, was befringed with darkest brown hair, straight and a little coarse in texture. She was wearing a purple cloak over a plain lavender frock, and the hood of the cloak was thrown back. Her expression was arrogant.

She had said: 'Well, boy;' and he had climbed quickly to his feet trying to brush some of the wet mud and sand from his clothing.

He stretched to see over the wall but could not. 'Thank you, miss; that was most kind.'

'Well, please explain yourself, or my kindness may not last.'

He smiled. 'Those men. They were after me. I did not wish them to catch me.'

She studied his smile, but did not return it. 'I trust it doesn't surprise you to know I'd already come to that conclusion. What is your name?'

Stephen had said not to give it, but this surely was different. 'Poldark. Jeremy Poldark.'

'Never heard of you,' she said.

'No, I am not from these parts.'

'Well, what were you doing
in
these parts, Jeremy Poldark? My brother would not commend me if I were to hide a miscreant - wasn't that the word Parsons used? — a miscreant who has been brandy-running and assaulting Preventive men in the discharge of their duties. And where are your five fellow miscreants? Would you point out the shrubs that conceal them?'

'Not five but one. And he's not here, miss. We parted company among those trees fifteen minutes ago. The men chose to pursue me, so I'd guess he has made his escape.'

She brushed some hair behind her ear. 'You speak like a gentleman. I guessed as much before you opened your mouth. How did I guess? Perhaps it was the
hair. Although most of the gentl
emen I know have the good manners to shave.'

'It's three days since I left home and we have been at sea most of the time since then. My friend
...
he wished to pick up this lugger in the Scillies
...'

Jeremy went on to explain. He was caught anyway if she chose to hand him over to the authorities, so she might as well know the truth. He was aware that he was not making a good job of the explanation, but the reason was every time he glanced at her his tongue stumbled, words not becoming sentences in the easy way they should.

She waited patientl
y until his voice died away and then said: 'So now you've lost the brandy
and
the lugger. It's the result of being too greedy.'

'Yes, indeed. And but for your extreme kindness I'd now be in custody.'

'And that's not pleasant, Jeremy Poldark. The Customs men are a small matter short-handed, which makes them a small matter short-tempered with those they catch. Even magistrates today are not so lenient as they used to be.'

'Which makes my obligation to you all the greater.'

'Oh, don't jump to the conclusion that you are free! You're in my custody now.'

'I'm happy,' said Jeremy, 'to be at your - your complete disposal.'

The words came out - half joking, meeting her at her own game - but when spoken they took on a serious intent. He felt himself flushing.

She looked away from him, distantly, through the gate. After what seemed a long pause she said: 'Was your lugger brown with red sails?'

He took a few steps until he could see the beach. The
Philippe
was sailing close hauled - and close in - along the beach, only just out of reach of the muskets of the two Customs officers who stood staring at it in anger and frustration.

'He must have doubled back!' Jeremy said. 'Given them the slip and got aboard! Thank Heaven the wind is dropping. But he's looking for
me’

'If you show yourself,' said Miss Trevanion curtly, 'there is nothing more I can do to save you from your just deserts.'

The lugger went about and came back along the beach. Though single-handed, Stephen was managing well. A puff and a crack announced that one of the Customs men had fired. As the lugger reached the eastern end of the beach Stephen changed course again, heading out to sea. It must have been plain to him that even if Jeremy could see him there was no way of his getting aboard without the unfriendly attention of the gaugers.

The sea crinkled like silver paper under the winter sun. The lugger receded.

Jeremy turned. 'Miss Trevanion, my home, as I explained, is on the north coast. There's no coaching road nearer to it than seven miles. But if you
could
give me my liberty, to walk the total distance from coast to coast can hardly be greater than twenty-five miles and I could do this easily in a day
...'

'Mr Poldark, my name is Cuby Trevanion. Having gone so far in frustrating the law, I feel I can deserve no worse by helping you a little more. My brother is away, so I may do this with less risk of his displeasure. In our kitchens there should be food - are you hungry? you look itl - and no doubt in the stables I can find you a nag of sorts. Would you follow me?'

'Certainly. And thank you.'

As she went ahead she added: 'My other brother is away also. We even might be able to lend you a
ra
zor’

Up rising ground by a gravel path he followed her, cutting through part of a wood which had recently been felled and the ground excavated. 'To give us a view of the sea,' she explained.

As they approached, the house took on more and more the appearance of a fairy-tale castle, with turrets and bastions and serrated parapets and rounded towers. Jeremy would have been impressed but for the fact that he had really no time for or interest in anything but the scuffing of a skirt in front of him and the appearance and disappearance of a pair of muddy yellow kid ankle boots. Totally lost, like someone hypnotized, he would have followed those boots to the end of the earth.

Between Stippy-Stappy Lane, where the cottages, if poor, were respectable, and the squalor of the Guernseys, where derelict shacks clustered around the beach and the harbour wall, was the one shop of the village of Sawle. No bigger than a cottage, it was distinguished by a small bow window and a painted front door. Aunt Mary Rogers's. Or so it was still known to many people who refused to rethink their ideas even though Aunt Mary had been in Sawle Churchyard for upwards of thirteen years. Since then it had been occupied by the Scobles.

Twenty years ago a man called Whitehead Scoble had married Jinny Carter. He was a miner working at that time at Wheal Leisure, a widower, childless, plump, pink-faced and snowy-haired though only just thirty. She was Zacky Martin's eldest daughter, twenty-three, a widow with three young children whose husband had died of blood poisoning in Launceston gaol. Scoble was much in love with Jinny, she not at all with him; but she had yielded to the advice of her elders, the need for a father for her children, and her own wish to get away from Nampara and Mellin. Scoble had his own cottage at Grambler with a ten-year lease still to run and the marriage had worked well enough until Leisure closed. Then Scoble had gone off on casual work and taken to the bottle. Ross had tried to help them but, for special reasons of her own Jinny had refused. But in
'97
when Aunt Mary Rogers had reluctantly sold her last quarter of hardbake and been carried up the hill to Sawle Church, Ross had deviously persuaded Zacky Martin to put in an offer for the shop and its
sparse contents; and Zacky with a good deal of bland-faced lying had convinced his daughter that he had made enough money out of his employment as factor to the Poldark estate to be able to finance her to take it over.

Soon after this Whitehead Scoble had returned to his wife, suitably chastened after a spell in gaol himself, and since then they had worked together amicably and made a quiet but comfortable living. The lime-ash floor had been replaced with planking, wooden shelves put up, a clean lace curtain to the window, a bell to ring when you came in, scales renewed telling the correct weight, and the shop restocked with better goods. Now sometimes people even walked over from St Ann's because their own shop was not so well supplied.

Once again Whitehead had been childless; it was something he felt strongly about and had motivated his absences and his hard drinking; but as he passed fifty he had become reconciled to his own shortcomings. And he could be father to Jinny's three children even though they would never bear his name. The elder daughter, Mary, was now married and gone. Katie, the younger, was in service at Trevaunance House. The son, Benjy Ross, or Ben as he was now called, still lived at home.

He was an eccentric. Past his twenty-fifth birthday and not yet wed. Bearded in a community which looked on beards as proper only to beggars and destitute old men. Musical but he didn't sing or play in the choir which would be the conventional way of expressing such leanings; instead he had constructed a pipe organ of his own in the back bedroom upstairs and played tunes for himself when he felt in the mood. He had also got his own one-man mine a mile inland from Grambler; here he had found a few pockets of alluvial tin, and he would pursue them underground either until they petered out or the digging filled with water. Sometimes, since the ground was sloping he could go quite deep. He made little enough out of it but
he was astute with money and saved enough on good months to tide him over barren ones.

This also enabled him to take a day off when he chose and go fishing with Jeremy Poldark. Jinny was as mystified by these aimless trips as Demelza Poldark was. Jinny was also against his spending so much time at Nampara, though her quiet discouragement made no difference.

Her opposition rose in part from the scabrous old rumour - first spoken of in her presence by Jud Paynter -that Ben was really Ross's son and that the similar sort of scar on his cheek was a judgment, a stamp of the devil, to mark their kinship. As time passed most people forgot the rumour, especially now Ben had grown a beard and the scar was not too noticeable. But there was always, she knew, some withered old crone, sitting before her cottage door who would still whisper: 'Don't ee know why he growed a
beard?
We-ell, tis plain 'nough, I tell ee.' All through the years it had made Jinny defensive in her relationship with the Nampara household, sometimes hostile in her defensiveness, so that she would not accept help from Ross which might lend new life to the evil lie.

The other reason she did not want Ben to be at Nampara too much was because she knew of his obsession for Clowance. That, she knew, was doomed. Though there was no barrier of blood relationship there was the equally insuperable barrier of class. Mrs Poldark had originally, of course, been a miner's daughter and no better than any other, but that fact would not make Mrs Poldark look any more favourably on a union between
her
daughter and a miner's son. Nor Captain Poldark neither. Besides, it was the wrong way round. If a poor girl married a gentleman she stood a good chance of being lifted to his estate. If a rich girl married a workman she descended to his. It was the way of the world.

Of course the friendship was as much of Master Jeremy Poldark's seeking as Ben's. They had an affinity which
owed nothing to shared tastes, the tall slim genteel young man reared in semi-luxury and the thin bearded hard and wiry young miner who, if he had never been short of food, had lived hard as soon as he was out of the cradle.

It was on an early March afternoon when, contrary to the reputation both of the month and the county, there was little or no wind, that Jeremy slid off his pony about half a mile from Jonas's Mill and tethered him to the stump of an old hawthorn tree. The ground ahead of him looked like a lawn that a mole has been working on, except that the lawn here was not green, being rough grassy ground with heather and a few patches of gorse. And the soil turned up by this mole was not the fine tilth of a potting shed but ugly yellow stone and the mud and mixed rubble of moorland.

Jeremy whistled a couple of times and presently Ben emerged from one of the holes, shading his eyes against the hazy sun. Together they examined the latest ground Ben had turned up with his spade. At the moment, after the rains of winter, most of the deeper diggings were waterlogged.

Jeremy said: 'There's a trace of tin, I see, but will it even pay for washing?'

'I don't need it to, for you see I'm but shodeing. You sink these here small pits around this hill and watch the way the stones lie when you come 'pon them. If you have the eye you can see what direction they d'come from. The flow of the tin stones spreads out like a turkey's tail, see, and if you trace 'em back to the root you'll come 'pon a single line which lights your way to the parent lode.'

They sat on their haunches looking up the hill. Jeremy said: 'Ben, I want you to try something else with me.'

'What's that, boy?'

'Sometime soon - today or tomorrow, maybe, I'd like to go down Wheal Leisure, look her over. Will you come? You've the miner's eye and I have not.'

Ben shook some of the rubble in his hand, testing it for weight. 'On Tr
eneglos land? Owned by the Warle
ggans?'

'The Trenegloses will raise no objection. Young Horrie is a friend of mine and his father cares nothing for it.'

'An' the Warleggans?'

'There's not a man of theirs been around in years. It's six miles from their nearest mine at St Ann's, and they sold every stick and stone there was to sell when they closed down.'

'I mind when she closed,' said Ben. 'I was a tacker at the time. We was in straits then, for Father worked there. Mr Scoble, I mean, not my real father.
1
was going to work there myself, fetching and carrying for him. I was to be paid three shullun a week. Twas all fixed, and I was real looking forward to'n - my first
real
work for
real
money. Then the news came she was all to shut down.'

He stood up, wiped the mud off the square spade, untied his loose fustian jacket. 'So what do ye seek?'

'What we all seek.'

'Twill be all derelict. Likely a full house of water.'

'Not on that cliff.'

'Tomorra, then. In the morning?'

'Ben, you know at Grace these floors of tin - they've made the Poldarks—made us rich—and the villages around have done well enough; there's been money, wages, always coming in to them. But they're on the way down; no one yet says so openly but everyone whispers it. The south floor is finished, we all know. The north has yielded for nearly eighteen years. You can't ask more than that. It is no fault of my father; for as long as I remember
£100
a month has shown on the cost books for paying men to seek other and different bearing ground. We've driven shafts deeper, we've cross cut, we've linked up with old workings - you remember what happened when we unwatered Wheal Maiden by accident and two men were drowned — we've done all possible by way of exploration. So how long shall we be in profit at Grace now? A year maybe, maybe two if the tin price bears up. Then I know my father will go on losing money for another year or two. But I think it is high time we looked altogether elsewhere.' 'Elsewhere being Leisure?'

'Well, we could start something quite new, I suppose. There's some kindly ground at the back of Reath Cottage, but the Viguses tried there and the Baragwanaths. And you've found nothing here that would justify making it a big operation, have you?'

'You can't be sure without the equipment, the money spent,' Ben said cautiously.

'Apart from that in this area,' Jeremy said, 'there's only Grambler, which would take a
fortune
to reopen, and Wheal Penrose, here beyond Jonas's, which failed in a year.'

'What do Cap'n Poldark think of Wheal Leisure?'

'Well, she was his first venture, wasn't she - before I was born. He believed in her then and for a while she paid handsomely. But when the Warleggans gained control he shut her out of his mind, concentrated on Grace, which then was as derelict as Leisure is now. I was asking him about it yesterday. D'you know Leisure never went deeper than thirty fathoms?'

'I know she never had no proper engine.'

'What sort of a yield should we ever have gained from Wheal Grace if we'd never gone deeper in her than that?'

Jeremy's pony was whinnying, so Ben went across and patted his nose. 'An' the Warleggans?' he said again.

'That we'll have to find out, but likely as not they settled up with the Trenegloses and have no further interest. It would be a strange county if every mine that was started belonged to the venturers for ever.'

'Let's hope they've gone, then. For it would be good riddance.'

While this conversation was taking place Ross was visiting Tregothnan and informing his patron that when the country next went to the polls he would not seek re
-
election. Edward, fourth Viscount Falmouth, accepted this statement without comment and bent to sniff at a magnolia that was just showing colour in the bud. When he straightened up Ross met his eye and smiled grimly.

'Your family has put up with me too long, my lord.'

'Isn't that a matter of our opinion rather than of yours?'

'There must have been many times when I furiously irritated your father and I'm sure he could have wished me to the devil.'

'Few associations are unmarred by differences of opinion. Or few associations which have any value.'

Ross had known the new viscount since he was ten years old, but since his succession two or more years ago they had not had much to do with each other. Edward Boscawen was an altogether taller, heavier built man than his father, fresh complexioned, recently married, still very young in manner. But in their brief meetings Ross had sensed a strong sense of purpose and ambition, a sense of ardent adherence to the strictest principles of Toryism which did not run with his own beliefs. He liked the boy -
the young man (he was now twenty-four) - but he did not think when it came to the point that it would be as easy to agree to differ with him as with his father. The third viscount had only been a couple of years older than Ross when he died; their relationship over the years had grown in mutual respect; this clearly would be different.

'Fifteen years as a member,' said Ross, 'is long enough. Also I'm not, as you know, a man of substance, and my constant absences from Cornwall have led me to a neglect of my own affairs.'

'In what respect?'

'Chiefly the mine on which most of my prosperity still rests. But other things too
...'

'Do you not have an efficient steward or factor?'

Ross half smiled.
'I
have tried to be my own. But it has not always worked
in absentia'

There was a pause. It seemed to him that Falmouth was waiting for him to explain further.

He said: 'The worst example was in 1802 and 1803. But there have been others.'

'Pray go on. I am interested.'

'Just after my last daughter was born I was away on and off for a long period - first with Dr Dwight Enys in France during the peace, seeking friends there - or the relatives of friends who had died - and later, when I saw that the peace - Napoleon's peace - was false, in London trying with others to persuade Pitt to return before it was too late
...
while I was away a good deal of villainy was going on at Wheal Grace. With my wife preoccupied with her baby, my son barely twelve years old, and my mine manager ill with phthisis, a group of miners concocted a scheme to rob the mine of tin as they brought it up.'