Jeremy Poldark Read online

  It was Julia’s death which still hit him hardest. Demelza had grieved no less than he, but hers was a more pliant nature, responding involuntarily to stimuli that meant little to him. A celandine flowering out of season, a litter of kittens found unexpectedly in a loft, warm sunshine after a cold spell, the smell of the first swathe of hay: these were always temporary reliefs for her, and so sorrow had less power to injure her. Although he didn’t realize it, much of the cherishing this year had been on her side.

  After the storms of Christmas it had been a quiet winter; but there was no ease in the district, Ross thought, any more than there was ease in himself. Copper prices had risen only enough to bring a slight increase of profit in the mines now open, nothing to justify the starting of new ventures or the reopening of old. Life was very close to survival level.

  As he left the beach and climbed over the broken wall he saw Demelza coming down the valley, and she saw him at the same time and waved, and he waved back. They reached the house almost at the same time, and he helped her down and gave the horse to Gimlett, who had come hurrying round.

  “You’ve dressed up for your morning ride today,” he said.

  “I thought twas bad to get slovenly and be seen about as if I didn’t care for being Mrs. Poldark.”

  “There are some who might feel that way just at present.”

  She linked his arm and put pressure on it to get him to walk round the garden with her.

  “My hollyhocks are not so well this year,” she said. “Too much rain. All the crops are late too. We need a rare hot September.”

  “It would make it stuffy in the court.”

  “We shall not be in court all the month. Only one day. Then you’ll be free.”

  “Who says so? Have you been consulting your witches?”

  She paused to pick a snail from under an old primrose leaf. She held it distastefully between gloved finger and thumb. “I never know what’s best to do with ’em.”

  “Drop it on that stone.”

  She did so and turned away while he crushed it. “Poor little bull-horn. But they’re so greedy; I shouldn’t mind if they were content with a leaf or two…Talking of witches, Ross, have you ever heard of a cow illness called Tail-Shot?”

  “No.”

  “The back legs are paralysed and the cow’s teeth come loose.”

  “A cow’s teeth are always loose,” Ross said.

  “And the tail has a queer unjointed look—as if it were broken. That gives it its name. D’you think twould cure the disease to open up the tail and put in a boiled onion?”

  Ross said: “No.”

  “But it would do no harm if the cow was going to get better any how, would it?”

  “What have you been up to this morning?”

  She looked into his distinguished bony face.

  “I met Dwight on the way home. He is going to be at assize.”

  “I don’t see what need there’ll be of him. Half Sawle and Grambler will be there, it appears to me. It will make quite a Roman holiday.”

  They walked round in silence. The garden was motionless under the lowering clouds, leaf and flower taking on the warmer, firmer substance of permanent things. Ross thought, there are no permanent things, only fleeting moments of warmth and companionship, precious stationary seconds in a flicker of troubled days.

  The clouds broke in a shower and drove them in, and they stood a minute in the window of the parlour watching the big drops pattering on the leaves of the lilac tree, staining them dark. When rain came suddenly Demelza still had the instinct to go and see if Julia were sleeping outside. She thought of saying this to Ross but checked herself. The child’s name was hardly ever mentioned. Sometimes she suspected that Julia was a bar between them, that though he tried his utmost not to, the memory of her courting infection to help at Trenwith still rankled.

  She said: “Is it not time you went to see Mr. Notary Pearce again?”

  He grunted. “The man frets me. The less I see of him the better.”

  She said quietly: “It is my life, you know, as well as yours that’s at hazard.”

  He put his arm round her. “Tut, tut. If anything happens to me you will have much still to live for. This house and land will be yours. You will become principal shareholder in Wheal Leisure Mine. You will have a duty—to people and to the countryside…”

  She stopped him. “Nay, Ross, I shall have nothing. I shall be a beggar again. I shall be an unfledged miner’s wench—”

  “You’ll be a handsome young woman in your first twenties with a small estate and a load of debts. The best of your life will be ahead of you—”

  “I live only through you. You made me what I am. You think me into being handsome, you think me into being a squire’s wife—”

  “Stuff. You’d surely many again. If I were gone there’d be men humming round here from all over the county. It isn’t flattery, but the sober truth. You could take your pick of a dozen—”

  “I should never marry again. Never!”

  His hand tightened on her. “How thin you are still.”

  “I’m not. You ought to know I’m not.”

  “Well, slim then. Your waist used to have a more comfortable feel.”

  “Only after Julia was born. That was…different then.” There, the name was out now.

  “Yes,” he said.

  There was silence for a minute or two. His eyes were lidded and she could not read his expression.

  She said: “Ross.”

  “Yes?”

  “Perhaps in time it will seem different. Perhaps we shall have other children.”

  He moved away from her. “I do not think any child would be grateful for having a gallows bird for a father…I wonder if dinner is ready.”

  ***

  When Dwight parted from Demelza he rode down the steep narrow track to Sawle village, into the bubble of the stream and the clatter of the tin stamps. It was a short enough time since he had come to this district, a callow young physician with radical ideas about medicine; but it seemed a decade in his life. In that time he had earned the confidence and affection of the people he worked among, had inexcusably broken his Hippocratic oath, and since then had painfully re-established himself—entirely in the eyes of the countryside, who laid the blame on the girl, very partially in his own, which at all times were self-critical and self-exacting.

  He had learned a great deal: that humanity was infinitely variable and infinitely contradictory, so that all treatment consisted of patient experiment and trial and error; that the surgeon and the physician were often mere onlookers at battles fought under their eyes; that no outward aid was one quarter as powerful as the ordinary recuperative power of the body; and that drugs and potions were sometimes as likely to hinder as to help.

  If he had been a self-satisfied man he might have found some comfort in having come this far, for many of the surgeons and apothecaries he met had learned nothing like this in a lifetime and were never likely to. He avoided members of his own profession, for he found himself constantly at loggerheads with them. His only comfort was that they were often as much at variance among themselves, having only one element in common, an absolute and unquestioning confidence that their own method was infallible—a confidence that seemed in no way shaken when one of their patients died. If a sick man collapsed under treatment that was the fault of the sick man, not of the method.

  What Dr. Thomas Choake believed Dwight was not sure. Since their early quarrel they had seen little of each other; but as they practised over much the same territory they were bound to have occasional contacts. Choake always had an instant remedy to hand—sometimes he seemed even to have decided on a remedy before he saw the patient. But whether these remedies sprang from a fixed theory of medicine or merely from the impulses of his own brain Dwight was never able to tell.

  This n
oon Dwight had several patients to visit, the first a call on Charlie Kempthorne. Two years ago Kempthorne had had a consumption of both lungs, the top only of each affected, but enough to spell a death sentence. Now he was apparently well, and had been all this year, was free of cough, had put on weight, and was working again, not as a miner but as a sailmaker. He was at home, as Dwight had expected, and sitting at the door of his cottage busy with a coarse needle and thread. He grinned all over his lean over-brown face when he saw the physician, and got up to greet him.

  “Come inside, sur. Tis a pleasure to see you. I bin saving some eggs till you passed by.”

  “I’m not here to stay,” said Enys pleasantly. “Just a visit to see you’re following instructions. Thank you all the same.”

  “Tis no ’ardship to go on with the treatment. Here I sit in the dryth, day in day out, stitching away—and makin’ more money than I did as a sumpman!”

  “And Lottie and May?” Kempthorne had two scrawny little daughters of five and seven. He had lost his wife in a drowning accident three years ago.

  “They’m down to Mrs. Goad’s. Though what they d’learn I’m vexed to think.” Kempthorne wet the thread in his mouth and paused with it between finger and thumb to look at the other man slyly. “I suppose you d’know there’s more fever abroad. Aunt Sarah Tregeagle asked for me to tell you.”

  Dwight did not comment, having a distaste for discussing diseases in general terms with his patients.

  “The Curnows have it, and Betty Coad and the Ishbels, she asked for me to tell you. Of course, tis no more’n you’ve reason to expect in August month.”

  “A fine big sail, that.”

  Charlie grinned. “Aye, sur. For the One and All of St. Ann’s. She need all her canvas.”

  “Would you make sails for the revenue boats as well?”

  “Only if so be as I could stitch in a flaw so that they ripped when giving chase.”

  From here to the open square at the foot of the hill it was not safe to ride a horse, and Dwight walked thoughtfully down the steep rutted track of Stippy-Stappy Lane. These cottages, the better ones of the village, occupied one side of the lane; on the other, beyond the overgrown Cornish wall, the valley fell steeply into a gully where a part of the Mellingey River ran away to the sea and worked the tin stamps. Each house was about six feet below its neighbour, and at the last of them Dwight tethered his horse. As he knocked at the door a shaft of brassy sunlight fell through the clouds on the clustered cottages below, giving their roofs a wet gleam, anticipating the rain.

  Here lived Jacka Hoblyn, who had his own tin stamp, Polly his wife, their daughter Rosina, a semi-cripple, and their younger daughter Parthesia, a lively little creature of eleven, who opened the door. There were two small rooms downstairs, with lime-ash floors, in one of which Rosina carried on her work as a sempstress and patten maker. Parthesia said her mother was in bed and hopped ahead of him up the outside stone staircase to the raftered loft where they all slept. Having seen him in, she skipped off again in search of Father, who she said was sick too.

  Polly Hoblyn, who was forty and looked fifty-eight, greeted him brightly; and Dwight smiled back, taking in all the usual symptoms of an attack of the tertian ague: the muscle tremors, the pinched pale face, the dead white fingers. It was an unusually bad attack. The encouraging circumstance was that he had been called in—however tentatively and apologetically—to deal with it. Two years ago people with the ordinary complaints bought stuff, if they could afford it, from Irby, the druggist at St. Ann’s, or from one of the old women of the neighbourhood; certainly they never dared call in Dr. Choake unless they had broken a limb or were in extremis. That Dr. Enys did not mind administering to folk who could pay only in kind, or not even that way, they were slowly coming to appreciate. Of course there were those who said he experimented on the poor people; but there are always uncharitable tongues.

  He mixed the woman a dose of Peruvian bark; then, having watched it go down between the clenching teeth, he put out two fever powders to be taken later and a dose of sal polychrest and rhubarb for tonight. At this point the light in the doorway darkened as Jacka Hoblyn appeared in the doorway.

  “Good day to ee, Surgeon. Thesia, bring us a nackan from down b’low. I’m sweaten like a bull. Well, what’s amiss with Polly?”

  “The intermittent fever. She should stay in bed two days at least. And you? I think you have the same. Come over here to the light, will you.”

  As he got near, Dwight caught the strong whiff of gin. So it was one of Jacka’s times. Parthesia came dancing up with a square of red cloth, and the man mopped his heavy brow with it. His pulse was small, hard, and quick. The fever was at a later stage, and would cause an overmastering thirst.

  “I got a touch. But moving around is best for it, not loustering tween the blankets. Fasterer you move, fasterer he go.”

  “Now look, Hoblyn, I’d like you to take this now, and this powder in water before you go to bed tonight. Understand?”

  Jacka ran a hand through his upstanding hair and glowered at him. “I don’t ’old with doctor’s trade.”

  “Nevertheless, you should take this. You’ll be far better for it.”

  They stared at each other, but Dwight’s prestige was just too much for the streamer, and with some satisfaction he watched the strong dose of soluble tartar disappear. The night powder, if Hoblyn was sufficiently alert to drink it, contained ten grains of jalap, but that didn’t so much matter. Dwight felt a greater concern for the health of the three women than for the man.

  As he was leaving he saw Rosina limping up the hill with a jug of milk. She was seventeen, and her fine eyes had not yet been spoiled by endless hours of close sewing in a bad light. She smiled and curtsied as they met.

  “Your family should be improved tomorrow. See your mother takes her powder.”

  “I will surely. Thank you, sur.”

  “Your father gets—troublesome when he is in liquor?”

  She blushed. “It make him ill-tempered, sur; hard to get along with, as you might say.”

  “And violent?”

  “Oh, no, sur—or but seldom. And then he d’make it up to we afterwards.”

  Dwight slid past the little bow window of Aunt Mary Rogers’s shop and reached the huddle of broken-down cottages at the foot of the hill known as the Guernseys. Here the worst squalor began. Windows stuffed with board and rags, doors propped beside the openings they had been designed to fill, open cesspools, with rat runs from one to another, broken roofs and lean-to shacks where half-naked children crawled and played. Coming here, Dwight always felt conscious of his own decent clothes: they were phenomena from another world. He knocked at the first cottage, surprised to see both halves of the door closed, for the room within depended for its light on what came through the door. A week ago he had delivered Betty Carkeek of her first-born son when two fishwife-midwives had done their worst and failed.

  He heard the baby crying inside and after another minute Betty came to the door, opening the top half a suspicious inch.

  “Oh, tis you, sur. Do you come in.” Betty Carkeek, née Coad, was not the sort who faded away, given half a chance, but he had been relieved when the fourth and fifth days were past without any sign of childbed fever. She should do well enough now. He followed her into the stone hut—it was hardly more—stooping his head on the threshold, and saw Ted Carkeek sitting over a small fire stirring some sort of an herb brew. Ted and Betty had only been married a month, but staying home when there was work to do, and work so hard to get, seemed a poor way of showing your devotion.

  He nodded to the young man and went to look at the baby. Ted got up and moved to go out, but Betty stopped him and he grunted and went back to watching his brew. The child was snuffly with a cold and its breathing rapid; Dwight wondered what the inexperienced girl had done; one was always struggling against ignorance and neglect.
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  “Your mother not here, Betty?”

  “No, sur. Mother’s some slight.”

  Of course. Kempthorne had mentioned the Coads. “The ague?”

  “Yes, I reckon.”

  The stuff on the stove began to bubble and the fire spat as beads of moisture fell on it. Smoke curled away from the open chimney and wove itself about the blackened rafters.

  “And yourself?”

  “Proper, you. But Ted’s not so smart—”

  “Hold your clack,” said Ted from the fireplace.

  Dwight took no notice. “You’re up too soon,” he said to the girl. “If Ted is home he can look after you.”

  “Tis I been tending on he, more like.”

  Ted made another impatient movement, but she went on: “Let Surgeon see ee, Ted. There’s nought to be gained by sceedling there by the fire. He’s no telltale, we did ought to know that.”

  Ted grumpily rose and came into the light of the door. “I sprit open my shoulder, that’s all. Physic won’t do him no good.”

  Dwight pulled back the sack the boy had over his shoulder. A musket ball had glanced off the bone and come out, leaving in the first place a clean enough wound. But there was a good deal of inflammation now, not improved by the poultice of boiled yarrow leaves.

  “Have you clean water here? What’s that you’re brewing on the fire?” Dwight went about dressing the wound making no comment on the circumstances.

  And because he didn’t ask, the explanation came, though not until the dressing was done and he had bled the man and was ready to leave. Ted Carkeek was partner with four others in a cockleshell of a boat with which in quiet weather they would venture the long and hazardous voyage to France to pick up spirits and bring them back for sale.