Demelza (45 page)

They came in, a sheepish, blinking, uncertain lot, headed by Uncle Ben Tregeagle; ill-clad and undernourished every one, and only eight in all, for two of the choir were ill with the ulcerous sore throat and three were sick with influenza and Sue Baker had her fits. So Uncle Ben said, looking sly and foreign with his hooked nose and his long greasy black hair curling in little ringlets on his shoulders.

Demelza nervously gave them all a drink and took one herself; she would almost sooner have entertained Sir Hugh Bodrugan than these humble choristers; at least she knew where she was with him. She pressed cakes on them and refilled their glasses and when they rose to go she gave them a handful of silver - about nine shillings in all - and they crowded out into the misty moonlit night, flushed and merry and opulent. There they gathered round the lantern and gave her one more carol for luck before filing off up the valley towards Grambler.

Laughing now at her own absurdity and her success in spite of it, she went back into the parlour and began to pick out on the spinet the simple tune of 'In Dulce Jubilo.' Then she sat down and filled in with the other hand. She was getting good at this, though Mrs Kemp frowned on it and said it wasn't music at all.

While she was so playing she heard Ross return. She met him at the door and at once saw how everything was.

'I've saved some pie for you,' she said. 'Or there's cold chicken if you want. And some nice fresh cakes and tarts.'

He sat down in his chair and she helped him off with his boots.

'I had supper with Tonkin. Not a feast but enough to satisfy. A glass of rum will do and a bite or two of your cake. Have we had visitors?'

Demelza explained. 'There's a letter here from Verity. It came this morning.'

Ross read it slowly, puckering his eyes as if they too were tired. She put her hand on his shoulder, reading it again with him, and he put his fingers over hers.

The quarrel between them on that July evening had long been ignored but never forgotten. It had been ignored, and for that reason was still felt more by her than by him, it being her temperament to dislike anything not clear and downright. Also he had been fighting other things all these months and away more than at home. That he suspected Francis of betrayal had come to her gradually, and with it all the rest of his reasoning; so that she sometimes felt not only responsible for his quarrel with his cousin but also for the mounting difficulties of the copper company. It was not a pleasant thought and had lain heavy on her, far heavier than he knew. It was the first real shadow on their relationship and it had spoiled her happiness all this autumn. But outwardly there was no change.

'So your experiment prospers more than mine,' he said. 'Perhaps your instinct was the surer.'

'Is there no better news for you?'

'Johnson and Tonkin and I have gone through the books item by item. Sir John has come to the view, which I think will be general among those who are left, that it is better to cut our losses than to refuse to admit defeat. There will be a final meeting after the ticketing on Monday. If the decision goes against us I will spend Tuesday helping to wind up our affairs.'

'Who are for going on, do you know?'

'Tonkin of course, and Blewett and Johnson. All men of good will and no financial standing. Lord Devoran is for going on so long as he is asked for no more money. Penvenen is already considering converting his mill to other uses.'

Demelza sat down beside him. 'You'll have till Monday free?'

'Yes - to make merry over Christmas.'

'Ross, don't get bitter. You see what Verity says.'

He sighed, and the sigh turned to a yawn.

'She says you feel everything too deep and that is the trouble, I b'lieve. What difference will it make to our money, Ross?'

'I may have to sell some of the Wheal Leisure shares.'

'Oh, no!'

'Perhaps only half - those I bought from Choake.'

'But they are paying a - a dividend, d'you call it - it would be such a shame! Is Harris Pascoe not a friend of yours?'

'He's a banker, my dear. His first obligation is to his depositors.'

'But he must have a pile of money heaped up in the vaults. It would be no use to him! He knows he will be safe with your promise to pay. Why, you will be able to pay him in a few years out of the div-what I said-if he will only give you…'

Ross smiled. 'Well, that will all be thrashed out. I shall have to be in Truro for two days, and Pascoe has invited me to stay with him. It will be difficult for him to be too hard on a guest.'

Demelza sat in gloomy silence, nursing her knees. 'I don't like it,' she said at length. 'It isn't fair, Ross! It is wicked an' inhuman. Have bankers got no Christian bowels? Don't they ever think, "How should I feel if I was in debt?"'

'Come, my dear; don't you too get despondent or we shall be a pretty pair to wish each other a happy Christmas.'

'Ross, could we not raise a mortgage on this house?'

'It's already raised.'

'Or sell the horses and the oxen. I don't mind walking about my business or going short of some foodstuffs - it is only what I was always used to. Then there is my best silver frock and my ruby brooch. You said that was worth a hundred pounds.'

He shook his head. 'All told these things wouldn't discharge the debt, nor half of it. We must accept the position if it has to be.'

'Is there a chance of going on?'

'Something will depend on the ticketing on Monday. And there is a movement on to drop the smelting but prevent the failure by becoming merchants pure and simple. I dislike face-saving.'

Demelza looked at him. She wondered if she was very selfish to feel glad that in the coming year there might be fewer calls on his time. If the failure of the company meant a return to old ways then there was some recompense even in failure.

Christmas passed quietly inside Nampara and out - the calm before the storm. He had had scarcely so much leisure since the project took shape. They had worked shorthanded on the farm all through the summer to cut down expense. He had scraped to put everything into Carnmore, and now it seemed he might just as well have thrown it over the cliff. A bitter reflection but one that had to be faced. Ever since that meeting of the company in July, Ross and his fellow shareholders had been fighting a losing battle. St Aubyn Tresize, Aukett and Fox had all as good as resigned that day, and since then almost every week had seen a fresh casualty. Those the Warleggans could not touch directly they worked round to affect indirectly. Miners found their credit suddenly withdrawn or their coal supplies held up. Sir John was still fighting his case in Swansea. Alfred Barbary's title to some of the wharves he used in Truro and Falmouth was called in question, and litigation was pending here until he contracted out of the Carnmore. Even Ray Penvenen was not immune.

Of course it was not all the Warleggans, but it was the result of forces put in motion by them. If their grip had been complete the company could not have survived a month, but there were gaps in all their schemes. Only one third of the other copper companies were directly controlled by them, the rest were in friendly cooperation with the same ends in view.

On Boxing Day, the only windy day of the week, Ross and Demelza rode over to Werry House to visit Sir Hugh Bodrugan. Ross disliked the man but he knew Demelza had been secretly hankering to go ever since her first invitation nine months ago and he felt it right to humour her. They found Sir Hugh bottling gin, but he gave up with a good grace and ushered them into the great parlour, where Constance, Lady Bodrugan, was busy among her puppies.

She was not so rude as Ross remembered her, and received them without blasphemy. She had got used to the strange idea of her elderly stepson's having this liking for Ross Poldark's underbred wife. They took tea at a respectful distance from the greatest log fire Demelza had ever seen, and surrounded by spaniels, boarhound puppies and other breeds, whom Constance fed with cakes from the table and who made polite conversation a tenuous affair punctuated by the snaps and snarls of the disputing feeders. Every now and then a great gust of smoke would billow out from the fireplace, but the room was so high that the fog made a canopy over them and drifted away through the cracks in the ceiling. In this peculiar atmosphere Demelza sipped strong tea and tried to hear what Constance was saying about her treatment for dog's distemper; Ross, looking very tall and rather out of place on a chair too small for him, nodded his lean intelligent head and threw the ball of conversation back at Sir Hugh, who was just then leaning back scratching his ruffles and wondering what sort of a bedfellow Demelza would really make.

After tea Sir Hugh insisted on showing them the house and the stables, although by then darkness was near. They walked down draughty passages, led and followed by a groom with a horn lantern, up staircases to a great room on the first floor once elaborately decorated but now damp and mildewed, with creaking boards and cracked windows. Here the Dowager Lady kept her yellow rabbits in great boxes along one wall and bred her puppies in boxes opposite. The smell was overpowering. In the next room was a family of owls, some dormice, a sick monkey and a pair of racoons. Downstairs they went again, to a passage full of cages with thrushes, goldfinches, canary birds and Virginia nightingales. Sir Hugh squeezed her arm so often that Demelza began to wonder if this show was all a pretext for being with her in dark and draughty places. In one room, where the wind was so high that they might have been out of doors, the rear lantern went out and Sir Hugh put his short thick arm round her waist. But she slipped away with a faint rustle of silk and moved quickly up to Ross.

The stables were the best-kept part of the house, with many fine hunters and a pack of hounds, but inspection was abandoned halfway, Lady Bodrugan not being concerned for the comfort of her guests but thinking the horses would be needlessly disturbed.

So back they went to the great parlour, in which the fog had thickened since they left. Demelza had not yet learned to play whist, so they had a hand of quadrille for an hour, at which she won five shillings. Then Ross got up and said they must go before the wind grew worse. Sir Hugh, perhaps with vague hopes of further intimacies, suggested they should stay the night, but they thanked him and refused.

On the way home Demelza was rather silent, more silent than the gusty night dictated. When they got into the shelter of their own combe she said: 'It isn't always the people with the biggest house who are the most comfortable, is it, Ross?'

'Nor the best-bred who are the cleanest.'

She laughed. 'I did not fancy staying there the night. The wind was everywhere. And I should have dreamed of finding that old sick monkey in my bed.'

'Oh, I don't think Sir Hugh is sick.'

Her laughter bubbled up again, overflowed and ran with the wind. 'Serious, though,' she said breathlessly, 'what is the use of a big house if you cannot keep it nice? Are they short of money?'

'Not desperate. But old Sir Bob squandered most of what was not entailed.'

'It must be strange to have a stepson old enough to be your father.' Little eddies of laughter still bubbled inside her. 'Serious, though, Ross, would he have money to loan you to tide you over just for the present?'

'Thank you, I would rather the company was put away decently.'

'Is there no one else? Would old Mr Treneglos help? He has done well out of the mine you started for him. How much do you need to carry on a while longer?'

'A minimum of three thousand pounds.'

She pursed her lips together as if to whistle. Then she said: 'But for yourself, Ross, so as not to have to sell the Wheal Leisure shares. That's what I care about most of all.'

'I shall be more sure when I've talked of it with Pascoe,' Ross said evasively. 'In any event I would not be willing to borrow from friends.'

HE WOULD NOT be willing to borrow from friends.

He said that to himself as he left for Truro on the Monday morning. At heart he would have agreed with Demelza, that his own happiness lay with her and little Julia and having leisure to labour on his own land and to see it grow. That was what he had thought at the beginning and nothing could alter it. He might even look back on this year as a nightmare well over and best forgotten. Yet nothing would remove the stigma of the failure, nothing would remove the sting of the Warleggan triumph.

And nothing would solve the bitter disappointment of having to part with the whole of his holdings in Wheal Leisure, which he knew was coming, though he had hidden it from Demelza. To lose that was the worst blow of all.

At the clump of firs Zacky Martin was waiting.

The pony and the horse fell naturally into step, having now made many journeys together. Ross tried to forget the business on hand and asked after Zacky's family. The Martins were a tenacious stock. Mrs Zacky made them all drink pilchard oil during the winter and although it was foul and stank it seemed to be to their good. Jinny's three were brave, thanking you, Zacky said; and Jinny herself more better in spirits. There was a miner at Leisure called Scoble, a widow man in the thirties, lived beyond Marasanvose, no doubt Captain Poldark knew him.

'You mean Whitehead?'

'That's of him. They call him that on account of his hair. Well, he's taking an interest in Jinny, and she won't have nothing to do with him. Tisn't as she dislike him, she say, but that no one could do for Jim's place. That's well enough and as it should be, her mother say, but you've three young children to think of, and he's a nice steady feller with a little cottage, still some years to run and no children of his own. Mebbe in a year or so, Jinny say, I could consider it, but not yet for a while, twouldn't be possible. That's well enough, her mother say, but he's lonely and you're lonely, and men don't always wait and wait, for there's other girls'd be glad of the chance and they single and no family.'

Ross said: 'There is a lot in what Mrs Zacky says. And no need to fear appearances. I know a clergyman in Truro called Halse who married his second wife within two months of losing his first. It is nothing unusual in the upper classes.'