Ross Poldark (32 page)

Ross took the wine offered him and explained his mission to the baronet. A poacher had been taken on Bodrugan land last night. A boy known personally to himself. Sir Hugh, being a magistrate, would no doubt have something to do with the hearing of the case. It was the boy's first offence and there was strong reason to believe that he had been led away by an older and more hardened rogue. Ross would consider himself under an obligation to make good any loss if the boy could be dismissed with a severe warning. Moreover, he would be personally responsible…

At this stage Sir Hugh burst into a roar of laughter. Ross stopped.

“Blast me, but you come too late, sir. Too late by half. I had him up before me at eight o’clock this morning. He's on his way to Truro now. I’ve committed him for trial at the next quarter sessions.”

Ross sipped his wine.

“You were in haste, Sir Hugh.”

“Well, I didn’t want to be delayed dealing with the fellow when it was the day of the meet. I knew by nine o’clock the house would be in a pandemonium.”

“The poacher,” said Lady Bodrugan, struck with the idea as she released the dog. “I suspicion it was he who dropped the glass. I’d have him flogged at the cart wheel, by God! The laws are too easy on the varmints.”

“Well, he’ll not be troubling my pheasants for a week or two,” said Sir Hugh, laughing heartily. “Not for a week or two. You must agree, Captain Poldark, it's a standing disgrace the amount of good game that's lost in a year.”

“I’m sorry to have intruded on your hunting time.”

“Sorry your mission ain’t a happier one. I’ve a nag to lend you if you’ve a mind to join the hunt.”

Ross thanked him but refused. After a moment he made his excuses and left. There was no more he could do here. As he moved away from them he heard Lady Bodrugan say:

“You don’t mean you’d have let me varmint go free, Hughie?”

He couldn’t hear her stepson's reply, but there was a ripple of laughter among those who did.

The attitude of the Bodrugans to his idea of letting a poacher off with a warning was, he knew, the attitude all society would adopt, though they might dress it in politer phrases. Even Cornish society, which looked with such tolerance on the smuggler. The smuggler was a clever fellow who knew how to cheat the government of its revenues and bring them brandy at half price. The poacher not only trespassed literally upon someone's land, he trespassed metaphorically upon all the inalienable rights of personal property. He was an outlaw and a felon. Hanging was barely good enough.

Ross came up against the same attitude a few days later when he spoke to Dr. Choake. Jim was not likely to be brought up for trial before the last week in May. He knew that Choake, in his capacity of mine surgeon, had treated Jim as recently as February and he asked him his opinion of the boy.

Choake said, well, what could you expect with phthisis in the family? By auscultation he had detected a certain morbid condition in one lung, but how far it had developed it was not possible to say. Of course the complaint had various forms; mortification of the lung might set in early or late; he might even live to be forty, which was a fair age for a miner. One couldn’t tell.

Ross suggested that the information would be of use at the quarter sessions. Evidence of serious ill health, together with a plea from himself, might possibly get the charge dismissed. If Choake would give evidence at the trial…

Choake knit his brows in a perplexed stare. Did he mean…

Ross did mean. Choake shook his head incredulously.

“My dear sir, we’d do much for a friend, but don’t ask us to testify on behalf of a young vagrant who's been caught poaching. We couldn’t do it. ’Twould come unnatural to us, like mothering a Frenchie.”

Ross pressed, but Choake would not budge.

“To tell the truth, I haven’t a deal of sympathy for your aims,” he said at length. “No good will come of being sentimental about such folk. But I’ll set you out a note of what I’ve said about the boy. Signed with my own hand and sealed like a writ. That will be just as good as going there and standing in the box like a felon. We couldn’t do that.”

Ross grudgingly accepted.

The following day Wheal Leisure had its first official visit from Mr. Treneglos. He stumped over from Mingoose with a volume of Livy under his arm and a dusty three-cornered hat stuck on top of his wig. There was mining blood in the Treneglos family.

He saw what there was to be seen. Three shafts were being sunk, but it was hard going. They had struck ironstone almost at once. This in places meant working with steel borers and then blowing with gunpowder. The layer ran east to west and seemed to be of some size, so the next few weeks were likely to be tedious for all.

Mr. Treneglos said, well, that would mean more expense, but the circumstance was not discouraging. Rich lodes of copper were often found in ironstone. “Nature's safe,” he said. “She keeps her treasures under lock and key.”

They went to the edge of the cliff and stared over the edge to the flimsy wooden platform halfway down, from which eight men in twelve-hour cores of four had begun driving an adit into the cliff. They had long since gone from view; all that could be seen from the cliff top was a boy of twelve who appeared from time to time with a barrow whose contents, the refuse of the four tunnelling beetles, he emptied onto the sand below. They too, Ross said, had met ironstone and were trying to find a way round it.

Mr. Treneglos grunted and said he hoped those two old women Choake and Pearce wouldn’t start whinnying about the expense at the next meeting. How long had they reckoned on it taking them to bring home that adit to the mine, eh?

“Three months,” Ross said.

“It will take all of six,” said Mr. Treneglos to himself. “It will take all of six,” he assured Ross. “By the by, have you heard the news?”

“What news?”

“My son John and Ruth Teague. They’ve made it up together. They are going to be wed, y’ know.”

Ross didn’t know. Mrs. Teague would be in transports.

“She's done well for herself,” the old man said, as if for once he spoke Ross's thoughts instead of his own. “She's done well for herself getting John, even though he is a small matter boisterous in his cups. I could have wished for some maid with money to her name, for we’re none too easy set for our position. Still, she takes a fence well and she's suitable enough other ways. I heard of a fellow the other day who was carrying on with his kitchen wench. I can’t remember who twas. Serious, I mean, not for a lark. It all depends how you treat a thing like that. I well remember John put one of our serving girls in the straw before ever he was seventeen.”

“I hope they’ll be happy.”

“Eh? Oh yes. Well, I shall be glad to see him settled. I shan’t last forever, and there hasn’t been a bachelor master of Mingoose for eighty years.”

“You’re a magistrate,” Ross said. “What is the sentence for poaching?”

“Eh? Eh?” Mr. Treneglos clutched at his old hat just in time to save it from the wind. “For poaching? It all depends, dear boy. All depends. If a man is caught with a whippet and snare in his keeping, then if tis a first conviction he may be given three or six months. If he's been convicted before or has been caught in the act, as the saying is, then no doubt he’ll be sent for transportation. You have to be strong on the rogues, else we’d have no game at all. How's your uncle, boy?”

“I haven’t seen him this month.”

“I doubt if
he
will go magistrating again. I s’pose he takes it easy? Perhaps he pays too much heed to the physical profession. I mistrust ’em myself. Rhubarb's my cure. As for the doctors:
timeo Danaos et dona ferentes;
that's my motto. That's my motto,” he added to himself. “Should be Charles's.”

The trial took place on the thirtieth of May.

It had been a cold and unsettled spring with strong winds and days of chilly rain, but in the middle of the month the weather began to clear and the last week was quiet and suddenly very warm. Spring and midsummer were telescoped into one week. In six days of blazing sunshine the entire countryside grew and set into its richest green. The delayed spring blossoms came out overnight, bloomed as in a hothouse, and were gone.

The day of the trial was very warm, and Ross rode into Truro early with the songs of the birds all the way. The courtroom would have been gloomy
and decrepit at the best of times. Today the tunnels of sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows fell on the gnarled old benches and showed up the big cobwebs in the corners of the room and hanging from the rafters. It picked out the emaciated clerk of the court bending over his papers with a pendulous drop glinting from his nose, and fell in patches on the ill-kempt spectators crowded together whispering and coughing at the back.

There were five magistrates, and Ross was pleased to find that he had some acquaintance with two of them. One, the chairman, was Mr. Nicholas Warleggan, George's father. The other was the Revd. Dr. Edmund Halse, whom Ross had last met in the coach. A third he knew by sight: a fat elderly man called Hick, one of the gentry of the town, who was drinking himself to death. During most of the morning Dr. Halse kept his fine cambric handkerchief before his sharp thin nose. No doubt it was well soaked with extract of bergamot and rosemary, a not unwise precaution with so much fever about.

Two or three cases were got through quickly enough in the heavy airless atmosphere, and then James Carter was brought into the box. In the well of the court Jinny Carter, who had walked the nine miles with her father, tried to smile as her husband glanced towards her. During the period of his remand his skin had lost its tan and thick smudges below his dark eyes showed up.

As the case began the usher glanced up at the big clock on the wall, and Ross could see him deciding there would be just time for this case before the midday break.

The magistrates were of the same opinion. Sir Hugh Bodrugan's gamekeeper had a tendency to wander in his evidence, and twice Mr. Warleggan sharply instructed him to keep to the point. This gave the witness stagefright, and he mumbled through to the end in a hurry. The other gamekeeper bore out the story, and that completed the evidence. Mr. Warleggan looked up.

“Is there any defence in this case?”

Jim Carter did not speak.

The clerk got up, pushing away a dew drop with his hand. “There's no defence, Your Worship. There's been no previous conviction. I have a letter ’ere from Sir Hugh Bodrugan complaining of how much game ’e's lost this year and saying as how this is the first poacher they has been able to catch since January.”

The magistrates put their heads together. Ross cursed Sir Hugh.

Mr. Warleggan looked at Carter. “Have you anything to say before sentence of this court is passed?”

Jim moistened his lips. “No, sir.”

“Very well, then—”

Ross got up. “If I might ask the indulgence of the court—”

There was a stir and a mutter, and everyone turned to see who was disturbing the magisterial dust.

Mr. Warleggan peered through the shafts of sunlight and Ross nodded slightly by way of recognition.

“You have some evidence you wish to give in this man's defence?”

“I wish to give evidence of his good character,” Ross said. “He has been my servant.”

Warleggan turned and held a whispered conference with Dr. Halse. They had both recognized him now. Ross continued to stand up, while people shifted their positions and peered over each other's shoulders to get a view of him. Among those just to his left he saw a face he recognized, one it was impossible to mistake: the moist, prominent mouth and slant eyes of Eli Clemmow. He had perhaps come to gloat over Carter's downfall.

“Will you take the witness stand, sir,” Warleggan said in his deep careful voice. “Then you may say what you have to say.”

Ross left his seat and walked across the court to the witness box. He took the oath and made a pretence of kissing the greasy old Bible. Then he put his hands over the edge of the box and looked at the five magistrates. Hick was blowing as if asleep; Dr. Halse was dabbing lightly with his handkerchief, no trace of recognition in his eyes; Mr. Warleggan was looking through some papers.

“No doubt, gentlemen, on the evidence you have heard, you will see no reason to look for anything exceptional in this case. In your long experience there must be many cases, especially at a time of distress such as this, when there are circumstances—of hunger, of poverty, of sickness which extenuate the offence in some degree. But naturally the laws must be administered, and I should be the last to ask of you that the ordinary poacher, who is a trouble and expense to all of us, should be allowed to go unpunished. I have, however, a close knowledge of the circumstances of this case which I should like to put before you.” Ross gave them a summary of Jim's vicissitudes, with particular stress on his ill health and the brutal assault made upon his wife and child by Reuben Clemmow. “Living as he does in poverty, I have reason to believe that the prisoner fell into bad company and was persuaded away from certain promises he had made direct to me. I personally am sure of this boy's honesty. It is not he who should be in court but the man who led him astray.”

He paused and felt that he had the interest of his listeners. He was about to go on when someone sniggered loudly in the well of the court. Several of the magistrates looked across, and Dr. Halse frowned severely. Ross had no doubt who it was.

“The man who led him astray,” he repeated, trying to regain the wandering attention of his listeners. “I repeat that Carter has been led astray by a man much older than himself who has so far escaped punishment. It's he who should bear the blame. As for the prisoner's present health, you have only to look at him to see what it is today. In confirmation of that I have here a statement from Dr. Thomas Choake of Sawle, the distinguished mine surgeon, that he has examined James Carter and finds him to be suffering from a chronic and putrid inflammation of the lung which is likely to prove fatal. Now I am prepared to re-engage him in my employment and to stand surety for his good behaviour in the future. I ask for the consideration of these facts by the court, and that they should be taken into careful account before any sentence be passed.”