Ross Poldark (2 page)

“Well, what of it?” said Charles.

“I was asking if you’d seen her. Ross always mentions her. A pretty little thing. He's counting on her being here when he comes back, and I think it a suitable arrangement. An early marriage will steady him down, and she couldn’t find a decenter man, though I say it as shouldn’t, being his sire. Two good old families. If I’d been on my feet I should have gone over to see Jonathan at Christmas to fix it up. We did talk of it before, but he said wait till Ross came back.”

“Time I was going,” said Charles, creaking to his feet. “I hope the boy will settle down when he returns, whether he marries or no. He was keeping bad company that he should never have got into.”

“D’you see the Chynoweths now?” Joshua refused to be side-tracked by references to his own shortcomings. “I’m cut off from the world here, and Prudie has no ear for anything but scandal in Sawle.”

“Oh, we catch sight of ’em from time to time. Verity and Francis saw them at a party in Truro this summer—” Charles peered though the window. “Rot me if it isn’t Choake. Well, now you’ll have more company, and I thought you said no one ever came to see you. I must be on my way.”

“He's only come quizzing to see how much faster his pills are finishing me off. That or his politics. As if I care whether Fox is in his earth or hunting Tory chickens.”

“Have it as you please.” For one of his bulk Charles moved quickly, picking up hat and gauntlet gloves and making ready to be gone. At the last he stood awkwardly by the bed, wondering how best to take his leave, while the clip-clop of a horse's hoofs went past the window.

“Tell him I don’t want to see him,” said Joshua irritably. “Tell him to give his potions to his silly wife.”

“Calm yourself,” said Charles. “Aunt Agatha sent her love, mustn's forget that; and she said you was to take hot beer and sugar and eggs. She says that will cure you.”

Joshua's irritation lifted.

“Aunt Agatha's a wise old turnip. Tell her I’ll do as she says. And—and tell her I’ll save her a place beside me.” He began to cough.

“God b’ w’ ye,” said Charles hurriedly, and sidled out of the room.

Joshua was left alone.

He had spent many hours alone since Ross went, but they had not seemed to matter until he took to his bed a month ago. Now they were beginning to depress him and fill his mind with fancies. An out-of-doors man to whom impulse all his days had meant action, this painful, gloomy, bedridden life was no life at all. He had nothing to do with his time except think over the past, and the past was not always the most elegant subject matter.

He kept thinking of Grace, his long-dead wife. She had been his mascot. While she lived all had gone well. The mine he opened and called after her brought rich results; this house, begun in pride and hope, had been built; two strong sons. His own indiscretions behind him, he had settled down, promising to rival Charles in more ways than one; he had built this house with the idea that his own branch of the family of Poldark should become rooted no less securely than the main Trenwith tree.

With Grace had gone all his luck. The house half built, the mine had petered out, and with Grace's death, his incentive to expend money and labour on either. The building had been finished off anyhow, though much remained unrealized. Then Wheal Vanity had closed down also and little Claude Anthony had died.

…He could hear Dr. Choake and his brother talking at the front door: his brother's dusky thickened tenor. Choake's voice, deep and slow and pompous. Anger and impotence welled up in Joshua. What the devil did they mean droning away on his doorstep, no doubt discussing him and nodding their heads together and saying, well, after all, what else could one expect. He tugged at the bell beside his bed and waited, fuming, for the flip-flop of Prudie's slippers.

She came at last, ungainly and indistinct in the door way. Joshua peered at her shortsightedly in the fading light.

“Bring candles, woman. D’you want me to die in the dark? And tell those two old men to be gone.”

Prudie hunched herself like a bird of ill omen. “Dr. Choake and Mister Charles, you’re meaning, an?”

“Who else?”

She went out, and Joshua fumed again, while there was the sound of a muttered conversation not far from his door. He looked around for his stick, determined to make one more effort to get up and walk out to them. But then the voices were raised again in farewells, and a horse could be heard moving away across the cobbles and towards the stream.

That was Charles. Now for Choake…

There was a loud rap of a riding crop on his door and the surgeon came in.

Thomas Choake was a Bodmin man who had practised in London, had married a brewer's daughter, and returned to his native county to buy a small estate near Sawle. He was a tall clumsy man with a booming voice, thatch-grey eyebrows, and an impatient mouth. Among the smaller gentry his London experience stood him in good stead; they felt he was abreast of up-to-date physical ideas. He was surgeon to several of the mines in the district, and with the knife had the same neck-or-nothing approach that he had on the hunting field.

Joshua thought him a humbug and had several times considered calling in Dr. Pryce from Redruth. Only the fact that he had no more faith in Dr. Pryce prevented him.

“Well, well,” said Dr. Choake. “So we’ve been having visitors, eh? We’ll feel better, no doubt, for our brother's visit.”

“I’ve got some business off my hands,” said Joshua. “That was the purpose of inviting him.”

Dr. Choake felt for the invalid's pulse with heavy fingers. “Cough,” he said.

Joshua grudgingly obeyed.

“Our condition is much the same,” said the surgeon. “The distemper has not increased. Have we been taking the pills?”

“Charles is twice my size. Why don’t you doctor him?”

“You are ill, Mr. Poldark. Your brother is not. I do not prescribe unless called upon to do so.” Choake lifted back the bedclothes and began to prod his patient's swollen leg.

“Great mountain of a fellow,” grumbled Joshua.
“He’ll
never see his feet again.”

“Oh, come; your brother is not out of the common. I well remember when I was in London—”

“Uff!”

“Did that hurt?”

“No,” said Joshua.

Choake prodded again to make sure. “There is a distinct abatement in the condition of our left leg. There is still too much water in both. If we could get the heart to pump it away. I well remember when I was in London being called in to the victim of a tavern brawl in Westminster. He had quarrelled with an Italian Jew, who drew a dagger and thrust it up to the hilt into my patient's belly. But so thick was the protective fat that I found the knife point had not even pierced the bowel. A sizeable fellow. Let me see, did I bleed you when I was last here?”

“You did.”

“I think we might leave it this time. Our heart is inclined to be excitable. Control the choler, Mr. Poldark. An even temper helps the body to secrete the proper juices.”

“Tell me,” said Joshua. “Do you see anything of the Chynoweths? The Chynoweths of Cusgarne, y’know. I asked my brother, but he returned an evasive answer.”

“The Chynoweths? I see them from time to time. I think they are in health. I am not, of course, their physician and we do not call on each other socially.”

No, thought Joshua. Mrs. Chynoweth will have a care for that. “I smell something shifty in Charles,” he said shrewdly. “Do you see Elizabeth?”

“The daughter? She is about.”

“There was an understanding as to her between myself and her father.”

“Indeed. I had not heard of it.”

Joshua pushed himself up the pillows. His conscience had begun to prick him. It was late in the day for the growth of this long-dormant faculty, but he was fond of Ross, and in the long hours of his illness he had begun to wonder whether he should not have done more to keep his son's interests warm.

“I think maybe I’ll send Jud over tomorrow,” he muttered. “I’ll ask Jonathan to come and see me.”

“I doubt if Mr. Chynoweth will be free; it's the Quarter Sessions this week. Ah, that's a welcome sight!”

Prudie Paynter came lumbering in with two candles. The yellow light showed up her sweaty red face with its draping of black hair.

“Ad your physic, ’ave you?” she asked in a throaty whisper.

Joshua turned irritably on the doctor. “I’ve told you before, Choake; pills I’ll swallow, God help me, but draughts and potions I’ll not face.”

“I well remember,” Choake said ponderously, “when I was practising in Bodmin as a young man, one of my patients, an elderly gentleman who suffered much from strangury and stone—”

“Don’t stand there, Prudie,” snapped Joshua to his servant. “Get out.”

Prudie stopped scratching and reluctantly left the room.

“So you think I’m on the mend, eh?” Joshua said before the physician could go on. “How long before I’m up and about?”

“Hm, hm. A slight abatement, I said. Great care yet awhile. We’ll have you on your feet before Ross returns. Take my prescriptions regular and you will find they will set you up—”

“How's your wife?” Joshua asked maliciously.

Again interrupted, Choake frowned. “Well enough, thank you.” The fact that the fluffy lisping Polly, though only half his age, had added no family to the dowry she brought was a standing grievance against her. So long as she was unfruitful he had no influence to dissuade women from buying motherwort and other less respectable brews from travelling gypsies.

The doctor had gone and Joshua was once more alone—alone this time until morning. He might, by pulling persistently on the bell cord, call a reluctant Jud or Prudie until such time as they went to bed, but after that there was no one, and before that they were showing signs of deafness as his illness became more clear. He knew they spent most of each evening drinking, and once they reached a certain stage, nothing at all would move them. But he hadn’t the energy to round on them as in the old days.

It would have been different if Ross had been here. For once Charles was right but only partly right. It was he, Joshua, who had encouraged Ross to go away. He had no belief in keeping boys at home as additional lackeys. Let them find their own stirrups. Besides, it would have been undignified to have his son brought up in court for being party to an assault upon excise men, with its associated charges of brandy running and the rest. Not that Cornish magistrates would have convicted, but the question of gaming debts might have been raised.

No, it was Grace who should have been here, Grace who had been snatched from him thirteen years back.

Well, now he was alone and would soon be joining his wife. It did not occur to him to feel surprise that the other women in his life scarcely touched his
thoughts. They had been creatures of a pleasant exciting game, the more mettlesome the better, but no sooner broken in than forgotten.

The candles were guttering in the draught from under the door. The wind was rising. Jud had said there was a ground swell this morning; after a quiet cold spell they were returning to rain and storm.

He felt he would like one more look at the sea, which even now was licking at the rocks behind the house. He had no sentimental notions about the sea; he had no regard for its dangers or its beauties; to him it was a close acquaintance whose every virtue and failing, every smile and tantrum he had come to understand.

The land too. Was the Long Field ploughed? Whether Ross married or not there would be little enough to live on without the land.

With a decent wife to manage things… Elizabeth was an only child; a rare virtue worth bearing in mind. The Chynoweths were a bit poverty-stricken, but there would be something. Must go and see Jonathan and fix things up. “Look here, Jonathan,” he would say. “Ross won’t have much money, but there's the land, and that always counts in the long run—”

Joshua dozed. He thought he was out walking round the edge of the Long Field with the sea on his right and a strong wind pressing against his shoulder. A bright sun warmed his back and the air tasted like wine from a cold cellar. The tide was out on Hendrawna Beach, and the sun drew streaky reflections in the wet sand. The Long Field had not only been ploughed but was already sown and sprouting.

He skirted the field until he reached the furthest tip of Damsel Point where the low cliff climbed in ledges and boulders down to the sea. The water surged and eddied, changing colour on the shelves of dripping rocks.

With some special purpose in mind he climbed down the rocks until the cold sea suddenly surged about his knees, sending pain through his legs unpleasantly like the pain he had felt from the swelling these last few months. But it did not stop him, and he let himself slip into the water until it was up to his neck. Then he struck out from the shore. He was full of joy at being in the sea again after a lapse of two years. He breathed out his pleasure in long, cool gasps, allowed the water to lap close against his eyes. Lethargy crept up his limbs. With the sound of the waves in his ears and heart he allowed himself to drift and sink into cool, feathery darkness.

Joshua slept. Outside, the last trailing patterns of day light moved quietly out of the sky and left the house and the trees and the stream and the cliffs in darkness. The wind freshened, blowing steadily and strongly from the west, searching
among the ruined mine sheds on the hill, rustling the tops of the sheltered apple trees, lifting a corner of loose thatch on one of the barns, blowing a spatter of cold rain in through a broken shutter of the library where two rats nosed with cautious jerky scraping movements among the lumber and the dust. The stream hissed and bubbled in the darkness, and above it a long-unmended gate swung whee-tap on its hangings. In the kitchen, Jud Paynter unstoppered a second jar of gin and Prudie threw a fresh log on the fire.

“Wind's rising, blast it,” said Jud. “Always there's wind. Always when you don’t want it there's wind.”

“We’ll need more wood ’fore morning,” said Prudie.

“Use this stool,” said Jud. “The wood's ’ard, twill smoulder.”

“Give me a drink, you black worm,” said Prudie.