Demelza (49 page)

He looked at her a moment. He was not a petty man, and the things that came to his lips were the things he could not say.

And, though at first he struggled to deny it, he could not in the end fail to acknowledge that the feeling moving in her had moved him no differently in the matter of Jim Carter. Could he blame her for the sort of impulse on which he had acted himself? He could not subdue his thoughts, but honesty and the finer bonds of his affection kept him mute.

So the meal went on in silence.

At length she said: 'I couldn't do any other, Ross.'

'No,' he said, 'it was a kind and generous act. Perhaps in a fortnight I shall be in a mood to appreciate it.

They both knew what he meant but neither of them put it more clearly into words.

A SOUTH-WESTERLY gale broke during the night and blew for twenty hours. There was a brief quiet spell and then the wind got up again from the north, bitterly cold, and whipping rain and sleet and snow flurries before it. New Year's Day 1790, which was a Friday, dawned at the height of the gale.

They had gone to bed early as Demelza was tired. She had had a broken night the night before, Julia being fretful with teeth.

All night the wind thundered and screamed - with that thin, cold whistling scream which was a sure sign of the 'norther.' All night rain and hail thrashed on the windows facing the sea, and there were cloths laid along the window bottoms to catch the rain that was beaten in. It was cold even in bed with the curtains drawn, and Ross had made up a great fire in the parlour below to give a little extra heat. It was useless to light a fire in the bedroom grate, for all the smoke blew down the chimney.

Ross woke to the sound of Julia's crying. It reached very thinly to him for the wind was rampant, and he decided, as Demelza had not heard, to slip out himself and see if he could quiet the child. He sat up slowly; and then knew that Demelza was not beside him.

He parted the curtains, and the cold draught of the wind wafted upon his face. Demelza was sitting by the cot. A candle dripped and guttered on the table near. He made a little hissing sound to attract her attention, and she turned her head.

'What is it?' he asked.

'I don't rightly know, Ross. The teeth, I b'lieve.'

'You will catch a consumption sitting there. Put on your gown.'

'No, I am not cold.'

'She is cold. Bring her into this bed.'

Her answer was drowned by a sudden storm of hail on the window. It stopped all talk. He got out of bed, struggled into his gown and took up hers. He went over to her and put it about her shoulders. They peered down at the child.

Julia was awake but her plump little face was flushed, and when she cried her whimper seemed to end in a sudden dry cough.

'She has a fever,' Ross shouted.

'I think it is a teething fever. I think…'

The hail stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the scream of the wind seemed like silence after it.

'It will be as well to have her with us tonight,' Demelza said.

She bent forward, it seemed rather clumsily to him, and picked up the child. Her dressing gown slipped off and lay on the floor.

He followed her back to the bed and they put Julia in it.

'I will just get a drink of water,' she said.

He watched her go over to the jug and pour some out. She drank a little slowly, and took some more. Her shadow lurched and eddied on the wall. Suddenly he was up beside her.

'What is the matter?'

She looked at him. 'I think I have caught a cold.'

He put a hand on hers. Although the icy breeze was in the room her hand was hot and sweaty.

'How long have you been like this?'

'All night. I felt it coming last evening.'

He stared at her. In the shadowed light he could see her face. He caught at the high frilly collar of her nightdress and pulled it back.

'Your neck is swollen,' he said.

She stepped back from him and buried her face in her hands. 'My head,' she whispered, 'is that bad.'

He had roused the Gimletts. He had carried the child and Demelza down into the parlour and wrapped them in blankets before the drowsy fire. Gimlett he had sent for Dwight. Mrs Gimlett was making up the bed in Joshua's old room. There there was a fire grate which would not smoke, and the only window faced south; a more habitable sick-room in such a gale.

He found time to be grateful for having changed the Paynters for the Gimletts. No grudging grumbling service, no self-pitying lamentation on their own ill luck.

While he sat there talking in the parlour, talking softly to Demelza and telling her that Julia was a sturdy child and would come through quick enough, his mind was full of bitter thoughts. They flooded over him in waves, threatening to drown common sense and cool reason. He could have torn at himself in his distress. Demelza had run her head recklessly into the noose. The obligations of relationship...

No, not that. Although he could not see through to the source of her generous impulses, he knew it was much more than that. All these things were tied together in her heart: her share in Verity's flight, his quarrel with Francis, his quarrel with her, the failure of the copper company, her visit to the sick house of Trenwith. They could not be seen separately, and in a queer way the responsibility for her illness now seemed not only hers but his.

But he had not shown his anxiety or resentment three days ago; he could not possibly show it now. Instead he wiped her forehead and joked with her and watched over Julia, who slept now after a bout of crying.

Presently he went out to help Jane Gimlett. A fire was burning already in the downstairs bedroom, and he saw that Jane had stripped the bed upstairs to make up this one so that there should be no risk of damp. While he was helping Demelza to bed the whole house echoed and drummed, carpets flapped and pictures rattled. Then the front door was shut again and Dwight Enys was taking off his wet cloak in the hall.

He came through and Ross held a candle while he examined Demelza's throat; he timed her heart with his pulse watch, asked one or two questions, turned to the child. Demelza lay quiet in the great box bed and watched him. After a few minutes he went out into the hall for his bag, and Ross followed him.

'Well?' said Ross.

'They both have it.'

'You mean the malignant sore throat?'

'The symptoms are unmistakable. Your wife's are further advanced than the baby's. Even to the pink finger ends.'

Dwight would have avoided his eyes and gone back into the room but Ross stopped him.

'How bad is this going to be?'

'I don't know, Ross. Some get past the acute stage quick, but recovery is always a long job, three to six weeks.'

'Oh, the length of recovery is nothing,' Ross said.

Dwight patted his arm. 'I know that. I know.'

'The treatment?'

'There is little we can do: so much hangs on the patient. I have had some success with milk - boiled, always boiled, and allowed to cool until it is tepid. It sustains the patient. No solids. Keep them very flat, and no exertion or excitement. The heart should have the least possible work. Perhaps some spirits of sea salt painted on the throat. I do not believe in bloodletting.'

'Does the crisis come soon?'

'No, no. A day or two. In the meantime be patient and have a good heart. They stand so much better a chance than the cottage people, who are half starved and usually without fire and light.'

'Yes,' said Ross, remembering Dwight's words two mornings before. 'The results are always unpredictable,' he had said. 'Sometimes the strong will go and the weak survive.'

THE NORTHERLY GALE blew for three days more.

In the late part of New Year's Day snow began to blow in flurries before the wind, and by next morning there were drifts of it against all the hedges and walls, though the gale-swept ground was free. The pump in the yard was hung with tattered icicles like a beggar woman, and the water in the pail was frozen. The clouds were livid and low.

In the middle of the day the hail began again. It seemed hardly to fall at all but to blow flatly across the land. One felt that no glass would withstand it. Then it would rap, rap, rap a dozen times and suddenly stop and one could hear the wind like a roaring mighty beast rolling away in the distance.

To Demelza all the noise and fury was a true part of her nightmare. For two days her fever was high, and something in being in old Joshua's big box bed threw her errant mind back to the first night she had ever spent at Nampara. The years slipped off and she was a child of thirteen again, ragged, ill fed, ignorant, half cheeky, half terrified. She had been stripped and swilled under the pump and draped in a lavender-smelling shirt and put to sleep in this great bed. The weals of her father's latest thrashing were still sore on her back, her ribs ached from the kicks of the urchins of Redruth Fair. The candle smoked and guttered on the bedside table and the painted statuette of the Virgin nodded down at her from the mantelpiece. To make things worse she could not swallow, for someone had tied a cord about her throat; and there was Someone waiting behind the library door until she fell asleep and the candle went out, when they would creep in in the dark and tighten the knot.

So she must stay awake, at all costs she must stay awake. Very soon Garrick would come scratching at the window, and then she must go to open it and let him in. He would be a comfort and a protection through the night.

Sometimes people moved about the room, and often she saw Ross and Jane Gimlett and young Dr Enys. They were there, but they were not real. Not even the child in the cot, her child, was real. They were the imagination, the dream, something to do with an impossible future, something she hoped for but had never had. They now lay in the guttering candle and the nodding statuette and the aching ribs and the cord round her throat and the Someone waiting behind the library door.

'Ye've slocked my dattur!' shouted Tom Carne, while she trembled in the cupboard. 'What right ha' you to be seein' her back! I'll have the law on you!'

'That statuette seems to be worrying her,' Ross said. 'I wonder if it would be wise to move it.'

She looked over the edge of the bed, out of the cupboard, down, down, to two tiny figures fighting on the floor far below her. Ross had thrown her father into the fireplace but he was getting up again. He was going to put something round her throat.

'Are ye saved?' he whispered. 'Are ye saved? Sin an' fornication an' drunkenness. The Lord hath brought me out of a horrible pit of mire an' clay an' set my feet 'pon a rock. There's no more drinkings an' living in sin.'

'Saved?' said Francis. 'Saved from what?' And everyone tittered. They weren't laughing at Francis but at her, for trying to put on airs and pretending to be one of them when she was really only a kitchen wench dragged up in a lice-ridden cottage. Kitchen wench. Kitchen wench...

'Oh,' she said with a great sigh, and threw her life and her memories away, out over the edge of the bed into the sea. They fell, twirling, twisting away, growing ever smaller, smaller. Let them drown. Let them perish and die, if she could but have peace.

'Let him drown in the mud,' Ross said. 'Cheating at cards - let him drown.'

'No, Ross, no, Ross, no!' She grasped his arm. 'Save him. Else they'll say tis murder. What does it matter so long as we've got back what we lost. So long as we haven't lost Wheal Leisure. We'll be together again. That is all that counts.'

She shrank from the touch of something cool on her forehead.

'It's unusual for the fever to persist so long,' said Dwight. 'I confess I am at a loss to know what to do.'

Of course Mark had killed Keren this way. The men had not told her, but word had gone round. Against the window somehow, and then he had choked the life out of her. They were trying to do that now to her. She had been dozing and Someone had come in from the library and was just tightening the cord.

'Garrick!' she whispered. 'Garrick! Here, boy! Help me now!'

'Drink this, my darling.' Ross's voice came from a long way away, from the other room, from the room that was not hers, echoing out of her dreams.

'It is useless,' said Dwight. 'She can't swallow anything at present. In a few hours perhaps, if…'

Garrick was already scratching, eagerly scratching.

'Open the window!' she urged. 'Open quick, afore tis… too… late.'

Something large and black and shaggy bounded across the room to her, and with a gasp of joy she knew that they had done as she said. Her face and hands were licked by his rough tongue. She wept for sheer relief. But suddenly to her horror she found that the dog had somehow made a horrible mistake. Instead of knowing it was his mistress he thought she was an enemy and fastened his teeth in her throat. She struggled and fought to explain, but her voice and her breath were gone, were gone...

The candle had blown out and it was cold. She shivered in the dark. Julia was crying with her teeth again, and she must get up and give her a drink of water. If only the wind was not so cold. Where was Ross? Had he not come back? He takes things so much to heart, Verity said, he takes things to heart. Well, then, I must not disappoint him this time. Deceived him once. Deceived him. I must not let him down. Clear, clear, but how might it happen? If you don't know you can't be sure.

Something with Julia and herself. But of course, Julia was sick. She had been watching by her bed all night. Francis was sick too, and Elizabeth was sick if she would only admit it. There was a horrible taste of copper in her mouth. It was those herbs they were burning. Aunt Sarah Tregeagle had come straight from carol singing to tend on them all. But where was…

'Ross!' she called. 'Ross!'

'He's gone to sleep in his chair in the parlour, ma'am,' said a woman's voice. It was not Prudie. 'Do you want for me to call him? He's been without sleep these three nights.'

It would not do for any of them to be asleep if her father came. He would bring all the Illuggan miners and they would set fire to the house. But he had reformed. He was a new man altogether. He had married Aunt Mary Chegwidden. How would he come this time, then? Perhaps with a choir of Methodists and they would sing outside the window. It seemed funny, and she tried to laugh but choked. And then she knew it was not funny, for there they were outside the window, there as she looked down on them, a great sea of faces. And she knew that they were hungry and wanted bread.