The Miller's Dance (32 page)

'Thank you, that's enough. No doubt she will be sick tonight.'

'Have you ever known her to be sick ?'

'No. Not except when she had the whooping cough.'

Ross sat on the edge of the bed and yawned. Demelza said: 'Did you buy a horse for yourself?'

'No.' He told her why, then went on to give a brief description of the day. He mentioned his meeting with Lord Falmouth.

Demelza said: 'So it is still open for you.'

'Not exactly.'

'Why not? How did you part?'

I
said if I reconsidered my position I would write within the week.'

'Well, then
...
You say there'll be no contest?' 'Not
at
Truro. Lord Falmouth's nominees will be returned unopposed.' 'But you are still hesitating?' There was a long silence.

Then he said: 'You really
want me to take it, my dear?' ‘
Do
I?'

'Haven't you said as much these last weeks?'

'Not exactly. I want you to do what you most want to do.'

'But your advice
...'

I
want you to do what you most want to do.'

'And you think I want to take it?'

She hesitated,
I
think. Yes.'

I
wonder why you think that?'

She looked at him, her eyes reflecting the candlelight, which blurred their expression. 'Because you are as you were born — restless, wanting adventure
...
or if not adventure, some sort of action. If this meant more travel abroad I would be at a dead
set against it. But to go on unti
l the end of the war, it seems to me that is what in your heart you would most prefer to do. After all, as you have told me so often, a member of parliament
need
not leave his home for long periods. If you go up thrice yearly it should be enough. You certainly need not - must not - be absent from home for more than three months in twelve. In that way, you can feel you are still helping a
little
more towards the war and yet be able to be home with your family for three-quarters of the rime. Did I not say once that you wear a hair shirt? You live with a sort of, a kind of self-criticism which never allows you any complacency. Is this not the best way of easing it, of keeping a check on it, of not allowing it to fret you too much?'

'So,'
said Ross thoughtfully.

'So,' said Demelza.

Downstairs there was a sudden shouting. Isabella-Rose had returned from the stables. Mrs Kemp's voice could also be heard in open rebuke.

'Time someone took a belt to her,' said Ross.

I
know. Will you do it?'

‘I
t is the mother's duty,' said Ross.

'What? In my condition?'

'Then it will have to wait,' said Ross. 'The most I have ever managed with her is a slap.'

'Which brought her galloping to me demanding that I should hit you back.'

'Did she now? Did she now? Well, well.
’

They listened while the noise slowly subsided.

Ross said: 'Jeremy was with a girl today. I think it was that one. I saw them walking together.'

‘
I
trust it is a good sign. Though if her brother is so determined against it, one cannot see much hope.'

'There's always hope if they are really in love with each other.
’

'Jeremy is,'said Demelza.

When Ross had gone down to supper Demelza stretched her legs in bed to gain a more comfortable position. She had
not
felt well today. It had been a light fever but it was passing. She had been in bed since seven.

Having lived so long together, Ross and Demelza found it hard to deceive one another. Their ears were attuned to tiny nuances, and a hint of insincerity or mental reservation was usually detectable. But tonight she had brought it off in two respects. First she had deceived him about the unimportant matter of her indisposition. Not so unimportant from
the
point of view of her own morality was her deception about his retaining his seat in Parliament. What she had said to him was not literally untrue: she believed him a man who needed the stimulus, even the goad, the frustration, of such a position. But in so urging she had not been thinking of him, nor even of herself, but of Jeremy.

With a sympathetic but observant eye she was aware of how hard he was finding it to get Cuby Trevanion out of his blood. She also knew that as instigator of the reopening of Wheal Leisure he felt keenly the present failure or the mine to pay its way. Further, from conversation with him before he met Mr Trevithick, she understood what hopes he had been building on the development of his steam carriage.

Now all was bitterness and disappointment and failure; and she remembered the conversation they had had over the supper table in May. To drop all his failures behind him and to go and fight was a clear-cut solution. As a patriotic man Ross would not dissuade him. And how could she?

So in a delicate balance Demelza reasoned that she would rather lose Ross for periods of the year because she could lose him more safely. With Ross at home there was no real need for Jeremy to be on hand at Wheal Leisure; with Ross away an extra responsibility devolved on his son. Happily they got on well together now after the frayed relationship of a year or so ago; but Ross at Westminister left Jeremy the only male in the house.

This might not tip the scales, but it just could. Where preservation of her son from the hazards of war came in. Demelza was prepared to use any strategem that offered itself.

I

News was filtering in of bitter disasters to the Russian armies at a place called Borodino, with the French triumphant everywhere. General Kutusov, it was said, had evacuated Moscow and the French had already entered it.

Even in Spain things were not now so favourable. Following the triumphant entry into Madrid, with the populace welcoming the liberating armies in an ecstasy of joy, Wellington had been loaded with honours; but after the heady celebrations came the grim reality. Commanding 80,000 troops of four nationalities grouped in two armies divided by 150 miles of difficult terrain, Wellington still faced four French armies which outnumbered his own by three to one. And if Napoleon returned the victor from his war with Russia
...
'

What had to be done must be done quickly, and Wellington had left Madrid as soon as he could and had marched with four of his divisions a distance of a hundred and sixty miles to invest Burgos. Since then little had been heard. It could be that any day a fast frigate would bring news of the fall of the fortress city and another great victory. But Burgos, people said, was a little like Badajoz, and Wellington was still without his siege trains.

Looking at his maps, with Jeremy and Dwight, and sometimes Stephen, Ross expressed his concern. Not only was Madrid, it seemed to him, in danger of being retaken-which militarily did not matter so much - but Wellington's army was in some danger of being caught between Clausel to the north of him and Soult to the south.

The harvest in England was the best for years, and as the time of the election came on a comfortable glow lay over the farmlands of which England was still largely composed.

Not that prosperity or discontent made much difference to the election, for the days the
West
Briton
dreamed of were not yet come. Lord Liverpool was likely to be supported in Parliament by a much more comfortable majority. There were several bitter contests in Cornwall, notably those at Penryn and Grampound, where the election in each case took three days. In Truro, where it occurred as forecast on Friday
the
9th
,
it was all over in half an hour. The Burgesses assembled and elected Lord Falmouth's candidates
nemin
e contradicente,
as Mr Henry Prynne Andrew put it. They were Colonel Charles Lemon and Captain Ross Poldark.

George Canning had been persuaded out of his safe seat to contest Liverpool, one of the open boroughs with a more or less popular franchise; out of its 100,000 odd inhabitants about 3000 had the vote, though the voting was not secret
The contest, Canning wrote to Ross later, took eight days and brought him to the very edge of exhaustion, for each day
the
rival candidates had to attend the polling station and shake the hand of, and speak a few words to, every single voter as he turned up. Two men were killed in rioting between rival factions and a couple of hundred injured, but this was a quiet election for Liverpool.

When the seat was at last won he was carried through the streets for three hours,
I
am,' he wrote, 'off to Manchester soon where I am to make a big speech, though it will not be to advocate the enfranchisement of that great city, much though they may expect it As you know, my feeling is that it is better to risk a few injustices such as this than to consider a reform of the whole system, which could do irreparable harm to the balance of our constitution.'

Though neither could see into the future, Canning's becoming a member of the Liverpool constituency was to bring his friendship with Ross to breaking-point because of his advocacy of Liverpool
m
etal interests. But that was far ahead.

'It gives me a feeling of distinction to represent so fine a city as Liverpool,' he ended his letter, 'and there has been a heady stimulus in this close contact with a living - and very lively! - electorate. I had many doubts at the beginning as to the wisdom of attempting it, but now I feel war-weary and triumphant. I could, indeed, have saved myself the tremendous wear and tear because I find I have also been elected both for Petersfield and for Sligo.

'But what good news that my old friend has not altogether cast us off and is returning to the battlefield! From the way you spoke and the way you wrote I had felt you an altogether lost cause. We are in for a strenuous session and I believe you will not regret this change of mind. We shall at least be together shoulder to shoulder in encouraging the firm prosecution of the War!'

II

October
9
was a day that came to be remembered by the Nampara household in ways other than for the re-election of its head to a seat at Westminster.

At eight Ben Carter and Jeremy had their usual half-hour discussion about the mine. The £10 a share call would take them to the end of the year. There was certainly no justification yet for the reopening of the mine, certainly nothing to
cov
er the initial oud
l
ay of the
engine. B
ut what was being
brought up and sold was lengthening the time it could run.

Similarly there was no justification for building a whim eng
ine, so the old Trevithick boil
er continued to languish on its trestles in Harvey's Foundry, together with the other bits and pieces assembled there in more hopeful days. What Jeremy
had
obtained from the other venturers when they met last month was sanction to try to improve the water supply. Jeremy's catchment was clearly not going to be a great success in such a dry summer as this had been. What water fell tended to evaporate under the sun; so the supply of pure water almost since the mine was opened had had to be supplemented by mules carrying barrels from the Mellingey. It was wasteful and time-consuming.

In a survey of the land, Jeremy had come to the conclusion that mere was a point at which the much utilized and ill-treated Mellingey stream was twenty or thirty feet higher than the rain catchment he had built beside the mine. This point was not far from Wheal Maiden before the stream began its plunge down towards Nampara. The distance from Wheal Leisure was about a mile as the crow flew but nearly two by any feasible route. It was hard to be sure of the degree of fall, but even ten feet would be enough, and he was fairly certain there was that So it was technically not impossible to construct a leat, which in places would have to become an aqueduct, which would convey a portion of the water from the stream in a wide semi-circle to the mine. This morning Jeremy was going with Zacky Martin to work out the practical difficulties and the cost.

At eight-thirty, having seen Jeremy off, Ben made his usual tour of the mine, talking to the workers where he came on them, seeing that nothing untoward was occurring. In the last sue months of extensive exploration the mine had been tunnelled and re-tunnelled so that it was now quite possible to lose one's way in it, if a few basic principles were not known and observed.

Having been over it all, Ben climbed back to the east workings of the 30-fathom level where much of the most productive work was still going on. There were twelve miners working here and they glanced up at him as he passed, wondering why he had returned. He could not have told them himself. It was not a suspicion that anything had been missed or that anything new could be found. The miners of twenty years ago had taken the best of the copper ore and left the less good, so it still paid to clear
up
this residue, still paid sometimes to pick at an unproductive-looking heap of deads or to climb up the long-since-abandoned rubble of an overhand stope to see what might yet be found there. But most of this had now been done.

It was back thirty yards or more from where most of the miners were now working that Ben observed a little fall of rock. It was new and, ever mindful of safety, he upturned a box and stood on it, trying to see whether the timber of the roof - which was necessarily an old roof - was sound. It looked like beech and alder, which meant it had, like so much of the rest of the timber, been imported, probably from Dorset or Devon. This roof was known as a st
ull because it supported the attl
e from a stope - or series of deep steps cut overhead into
the
lode. As the miners climbed, the non-paying ground was piled up for them to use as a
p
latform to work their way upwards. The ground being
l
oose above this roof meant that the timber had a great weight to support. But it all looked sound.

He went back another ten yards and mounted the stope, climbing to the top. This was one of the first pieces of work to be examined and one of the first to be discarded, for the lode had been thoroughly worked and there was nothing more worth considering.

All the same he did examine the rock roof at the top, pulling at a piece of fairly solid-looking ground and finding rock and stones crumbling and rattling on his helmet. He lit another candle from his helmet candle and found a place for it on a slaty ledge. He took out the small pick he always carried in his belt and considered the matter. By rights there should have been another man with him; but he decided to chance it and gave a few sharp blows at the ground above him. He was at once engulfed in a cascade of falling stones which nearly knocked him over. He then perceived what looked like another tunnel or winze running above.

At first he thought
he had climbed as far as the 20
-fathom shaft, but then realized he could not have done. Cautiously but without great excitement he slithered down the rubble to the 30 shaft, found a short l
adder, carried it up and again
mounted. Presently he found himself in a considerable cavern about ten feet high and some thirty long. It was not really above the shaft he
had climbed from, but seemed to be pointing north.

The air was very stale but breathable; his candle bobbed and dripped, lurching its insecure light into one hollow after another; grey walls, unmetalliferous; a broken spade, heaps of rubble, a drip or two of water from a greenish point in the roof. He picked at the wall here and there: rather slatier ground than usual, a few gleams of iron pyrites and copper pyrites. Ben coughed to clear his chest and moved towards
the
tunnel showing at the farther end. A
little
extra stirring - of interest as he saw tha
t this went deeply on and slightl
y down. Clearly this was a part of some old workings which had not been opened in recent years. Had there been an earlier mine? From memory he could not recall whether Captain Poldark had first started this mine in 1787 or restarted it.

Safety again suggested he should fetch one of the men up from below to go with him - it was the common precaution against a sudden fall or foul air. Since he made it a rule for the men to obey, he could hardly flou
t it himself. He turned back to th
e ladder to go for either Stevens or Kempthorne, and as he did so he pi
cked up the handle of the spade
to see if it would give him a clue as to its origin and age. As soon as he touched it, it crumbled into dust.

III

Florence Trelask, Mistress Trelask's daughter, now a thin bloodless spinster of
39,
had called in
the
morning for a fitting of the wedding dress. Earlier Clowance had chosen the material and the design: it was to be a gown and petticoat of fine blue satin sprigged all over with white, and with white Ghent lace at the collar and cuffs. She and her mother and Miss Trelask had been closeted upstairs for an hour this morning. It almost fitted, it would almost do, but Miss Trelask, a perfectionist like her mother, had packed it all up again, wrapped it in innumerable folds of tissue paper and borne it away in a large white box which she tied to the saddle of her pony. It would be returned fully completed by the end of next week.

After she left, Demelza rode to Killewarren to take dinner with Caroline, accompanied much against her will by Jane Gimlett to see that she was safe and did not tire herself. Demelza thought all this coddling nonsense. It was true that she felt unwell from time to time, and this was a complete change from previous pregnancies when, after the first three months, she had always felt most exceptionally healthy. But the symptoms were slight - a swelling of the hands, giddiness, a tendency to light fever - and might not even be connected with her condition at all. She hadn't told Dwight and had no intention of doing so unless it became worse. And certainly it was no malaise that the presence or absence of Jane Gimlett was likely to influence.

Clowance stayed behind to do some sewing, which was clearly the proper occupation for a young lady within two weeks of her wedding day. But although a much better sempstress than her mother, she had really little more taste for it, and would have preferred to be out riding or walking or picking wild flowers.

In fact the day had a melancholy and autumnal look. There were precious few trees in this district to change colour or to drop their leaves, but the sea can look autumnul in its own right. Low clouds drifted across a fitful sun, and groups of sea-birds - gulls, kittiwakes and terns-were mirrored like mourners in the damp sands, all facing the breeze.