Demelza Read online

  Ross glanced up again. He saw that Blewett was really worried; there were dark pouches under his eyes, and his mouth sagged. Before him—and not far away—was the debtors’ prison and starvation for his family. It was that which had made him risk the rebuff of a man who had a reputation for being unapproachable. Perhaps he had just come from a meeting with his fellow venturers and felt he must talk or suffocate.

  “I don’t think conditions can remain long as they are,” Ross said. “There is an increasing use of copper in engines of all kinds. As the towns use more the price will recover.”

  “On a long view you may be right, but unhappily we are all committed to a short-term payment of loan interest. We have to sell the ore addle cheap to exist at all. If the copper and smelting companies were honestly run we might eke out this bad period. But what chance have we today?”

  “I don’t think it can be to the interest of the smelters to keep the prices down,” Ross said.

  “Not the market price, no, sir, but the price they pay us. It’s all a ring, Captain Poldark, and we know it,” Blewett said. “What chance have we of getting fair returns where the companies do not bid one against another!”

  Ross nodded and stared at the people moving in and out of the inn. A blind man was feeling his way toward the bar.

  “There are two ways to combat the evil.”

  Blewett grasped at the implication of hope. “What do you suggest?”

  “I’d suggest what is not possible. The copper companies never hurt themselves by competitive bidding. Well, if the mines were in similar unity they could withhold supplies until the copper companies were prepared to pay more. After all, they cannot live without us; we are the producers.”

  “Yes, yes. I see what you mean. Go on.”

  At that moment a man passed the low window of the inn and turned in at the door. Ross’s thoughts were on what he had been saying, and for some moments the familiar stocky figure and slightly wide-legged walk made no mark in his mind. Then he was jerked into attention. The last time he had seen the man was years before, riding up the valley out of Nampara after his fight with Francis, while Verity stood and watched him go.

  Ross lowered his head and stared at the table.

  Between his eyes and the tabletop—as if he had been staring at the sun—was the visual image of what he had just seen. Fine blue coat, neat black cravat, lace at sleeves, stocky and rather impressive. The face was different, though—the lines deeper about the mouth, the mouth itself was tighter as if forever held in, and the eyes full of self-assertion.

  He did not look either way but went straight through into one of the parlors. A fortunate escape.

  “What we need, Captain Poldark, is a leader,” said Blewett eagerly. “A man of position who is upright and confident and can act for us all. A man, if I may say so, such as yourself.”

  “Eh?” said Ross.

  “I trust you will pardon the suggestion. But in the mining world it is everyone for himself and Devil take your neighbor. We need a leader who can bind men together and help them to fight as a body. Competition is very well when the industry is booming, but we cannot afford it at times like these. The copper companies are rapacious—there is no other word. Look at the waste allowance they demand. If we could get a leader, Captain Poldark…”

  Ross listened with fitful attention.

  “What is your other suggestion?” Blewett asked.

  “My suggestion?”

  “You said there were two ways of combating the evil of our present conditions…”

  “The other solution would be for the mines to form a copper company of their own—one that would purchase the ore, build a smelting works close at hand, and refine and sell their own products.”

  Blewett tapped his fingers nervously on the table.

  “You mean—to—to…”

  “To create a company that would bid independently and keep its profits for the men who run the mines. At present what profits there are go to South Wales or into the hands of merchants like the Warleggans, who have a finger in every pie.”

  Blewett shook his head. “It would take a large amount of capital. I wish it had been possible—”

  “Not more capital than there was, than perhaps there is, but far more unity of purpose.”

  “It would be a splendid thing to do,” said Blewett. “Captain Poldark, you have, if I may say so, the character to lead and to create unity. The companies would fight to squeeze the newcomer out, but it—it would be a hope and an encouragement for many who see nothing but ruin staring them in the face.”

  Desperation had given Harry Blewett a touch of eloquence. Ross listened half in scepticism, half seriously. His own suggestions had become more clearly defined as he made them. But he certainly did not see himself in the role of leader of the Cornish mining interests. Knowing his men, their independence, their obstinate resistance to all new ideas, he could see what a tremendous effort would be needed to get anything started at all.

  They sipped brandy over it for some time, Blewett seeming to find some comfort in the idle talk. His fears were the less for having been aired. Ross listened with an ear and an eye for Andrew Blamey.

  It was nearly time to leave, Demelza, sorely stricken, having been persuaded overnight to go on with her second party. Blewett brought another man to the table. William Aukett, manager of a mine in the Ponsanooth valley. Eagerly Blewett explained the idea to him. Aukett, a canny man with a cast in one eye, said there was no question it might save the industry—but where was the capital coming from except through the banks, which were tied up with the copper companies?

  Ross, driven a little to defend his own idea, said well, there were influential people outside the copper companies. But of course that was no seeking venture that could be floated for five or six hundred. Thirty thousand pounds might be nearer the figure before it was ended, with huge profits or a complete loss as the outcome. One had to see it on the right scale before one could begin to see it at all.

  Those comments, far from depressing Blewett, seemed to increase his eagerness, but just as he had taken out a sheet of soiled paper and was going to call for pen and ink, a crash shook the pewter on the walls of the room and stilled the murmur of voices throughout the inn.

  Out of the silence came the sound of someone scrambling on the floor in the next parlor. There was a scurry of feet and the flash of a red waistcoat as the innkeeper went quickly into the room.

  “This is no place for brawling, sir. There’s always trouble when you come in. I’ll have no more of it. I’ll…I’ll…”

  The voice gave out. Another’s took its place: Andrew Blamey’s, in anger.

  He came out, plowing his way through those who had crowded to the door. He was not drunk. Ross wondered if drink ever had been his real trouble. Blamey knew a stronger master: his own temper.

  Francis and Charles and his own early judgment had been right after all. To give the generous, softhearted Verity to such a man…

  Demelza must be told. It would put a stop to her pestering.

  “I know him,” Aukett said. “He’s master of the Caroline, a brig on the Falmouth-Lisbon packet service. He drives his men; they say too he murdered his wife and children, though in that case how it comes that he is at large I do not know.”

  “He quarreled with his wife and knocked her down when she was with child,” Ross said. “She died. His two children were not concerned in it, so far as I am informed.”

  They stared at him a moment.

  “It’s said he has quarreled with everyone in Falmouth,” Aukett observed. “For my part I avoid the man. I think he has a tormented look.”

  • • •

  Ross went to get his mare, which he had left at the Fighting Cock’s Inn. He saw nothing more of Blamey, but his way took him past the Warleggans’ town house and he was held up for a moment by the si
ght of the Warleggan carriage drawing up outside their door. It was a magnificent vehicle made of rich polished wood with green-and-white wheels and drawn by four fine gray horses. There was a postillion, a driver, and a footman, all in green-and-white livery, smarter than any owned by a Boscawen or a de Dunstanville.

  The footman leaped down to open the door. Out of the carriage stepped George’s mother, fat and middle-aged, wreathed in lace and silks but personally overshadowed by all the finery. The door of the big house came open and more footmen stood there to welcome her in. Passersby stopped to stare. The house swallowed her. The magnificent carriage drove on.

  Ross was not a man who would have gone in for display had he been able to afford it, but the contrast struck him with special irony. It was not so much that the Warleggans could afford a carriage with four horses while he could not buy a second horse for the necessary business of life, but that those merchant bankers and ironmasters, sprung from illiteracy in two generations, could maintain their full prosperity in the middle of a slump, while worthy men like Blewett and Aukett—and hundreds of others—faced ruin.

  Chapter Five

  The second christening party went off without a hitch. The miners and small holders and their wives had no mental reserves about enjoying themselves. It was Sawle Feast anyway, and if they had not been invited there most of them would have spent the afternoon in Sawle dancing or playing games or sitting in one of the kiddlywinks getting drunk.

  The first half hour at Nampara was a little constrained while the guests still remembered they were in superior company, but very soon the shyness wore off.

  It was a summer feast in the old style, with no newfangled dainties to embarrass anyone. Demelza and Verity and Prudie had been working on it from early morning. Huge beef pies had been made, repeated layers of pastry and beef laid on top of each other in great dishes with cream poured over. Four green geese and twelve fine capons had been roasted, cakes made as big as millstones. There was bee wine and home-brewed ale and cider and port. Ross had reckoned on five quarts of cider for each man and three for each woman, and he thought that would just be enough.

  After the meal, everyone went out on the lawn, where there were races for the women, a Maypole for the children and various games—drop the handkerchief, hunt the slipper, blind man’s buff—and a wrestling competition for the men. After some bouts, the final match was between the two Daniel brothers, Mark and Paul, and Mark won, as was expected of him. Demelza presented him with a bright red kerchief. Then, having worked off some of their dinner, they were all invited in again to drink tea and eat heavy cake and saffron cake and gingerbreads.

  The event of the evening was the visit of the traveling players. In Redruth the week before Ross had seen a tattered handbill nailed on a door, announcing that the Aaron Otway Players would visit the town that week to give a fine repertory of musical and sensational plays both ancient and modern.

  He had found the leader of the company in the larger of the two shabby caravans in which they traveled and had engaged him to do a play in the library at Nampara on the following Wednesday. The lumber in the library had been moved to one end, the half-derelict room brushed out, and planks put across boxes for the audience to sit on. The stage was defined by a few pieces of curtain tied together with cord and stretched across the end of the room.

  They performed Elfrida, a tragedy, and afterward a comic play called The Slaughter House. Jud Paynter stood at one side and came forward to snuff the candles when they grew too smoky.

  To the country people it had all the thrill and glamour of Drury Lane. There were seven in the company; a mixed bag of semigypsies, ham actors, and traveling singers. Aaron Otway, the leader, a fat, sharp-nosed man with a glass eye, had all the showmanship of a huckster, and spoke the prologue and the entr’acte through his nose with tremendous gusto; he also acted the crippled father and the murderer, for which he wore a black cape, an eyeshade, and a heavy black periwig. His time, like his cup later in the evening, was well filled. The heroine’s part was played by a blond woman of forty-five with a goitrous neck and large bejewelled hands, but the best actress of the company was a dark, pretty, slant-eyed girl of about nineteen who acted the daughter with an unconvincing demureness and a woman of the streets with notable success.

  Ross thought that with proper training she would go far. The chances were that neither opportunity nor training would come her way and that she would end up as a drab lurking at street corners or hang from a gibbet for stealing a gentleman’s watch.

  But other notions flickered through the head of a man sitting near. The gaunt Mark Daniel, tall and long-backed and powerful, was thirty, and never in his life had he seen anything to compare with that girl. She was so slender, so sleek, so glistening, so dainty—the way she stood on her toes, the way she bent her neck, her soft sibilant singing, the ochreous candle-reflecting glint of her dark eyes. To him there was nothing facile in her demureness. The smoky light showed up the soft young curve of her cheeks, the cheap gaudy costumes were exotic and unreal. She looked different from all other women, as if she came from a purer, finer breed. He sat there unspeaking through the play and the singing that followed, his black Celtic eyes never leaving her when she was to be seen and staring vacantly at the back cloth when she had gone behind it.

  After the play was over and drinks had gone all around, Will Nanfan got out his fiddle, Nick Vigus his flute, and Pally Rogers his serpent. The benches were pushed back to the walls and dancing begun. Those were not graceful restrained minuets but the full-blooded dances of the English countryside. They danced “Cuckolds All Awry,” “All in a Garden Green,” and “An Old Man’s a Bedful of Bones.” Then someone proposed “The Cushion Dance.” A young man began by dancing around the room with a cushion, until after a while he stopped and sang, “This dance I will not farther go,” to which the three musicians replied in chorus, “I pray ’ee, good sir, why say so?” Then the dancer sang, “Because Betty Prowse will not come to,” and the musicians shouted back, “She must come to whether she will or no.” Then the man laid his cushion before the girl, she knelt on it, and he kissed her. After that, they had to circle the room hand in hand, singing, “Prinkum, prankum, is a fine dance, an’ shall us go dance it over again.” Then it was the girl’s turn.

  All went well and fun was fast until the old people were drawn in. Then Zacky Martin, intent on mischief, called out Aunt Betsy Triggs. Aunt Betsy, known for a comic when she got going, danced around with Zacky with a great flutter of skirts as if she were sixteen, not sixty-five. When it came to her turn to go alone, she made a war dance of it, and at length she stopped at the end of the room. There was a great roar of laughter, for only one man was sitting there.

  “This dance I will not farther go,” she screeched.

  “I pray ’ee, good ma’am, why say so?” shouted everybody in reply.

  “Because Jud Paynter will not come to!” said Aunt Betsy.

  Another roar and then everybody chorused, “He must come to, whether he will or no!”

  There was a sudden scuffle and shouts of laughter as several men pounced on Jud just as he was going to sneak away. Protesting and struggling, he was brought to the cushion; he would not kneel so they sat him on it. Then Aunt Betsy flung her arms around his neck and kissed him lavishly—so lavishly that he overbalanced and they both went rolling on the floor together, boots and skirts flying. After more uproar, they got to their feet and circled the room together, Jud sheepishly joining in the rest, his bloodshot bulldog eyes half peevish, half wily. It was his choice. Even with Prudie watching it was still his choice, and she could do nothing, it being only a game.

  When he was left alone, he plodded slowly around, trying to remember what he had to sing. At last he stopped.

  “Here I stays!” he said.

  There was more laughter, so much that people could hardly answer him.

  “I pray ’ee, good sir, why
say so?”

  “Cos I wants Char Nanfan, that’s why, see?” Jud glared around as if expecting opposition, showing his two great teeth.

  Will Nanfan’s second wife was one of the comeliest women in the room, with her great fair plaits bound about her head. Everyone looked to see how she would take it, but she pulled a face and laughed and meekly went forward and knelt on the cushion. Jud viewed the prospect with pleasure for a moment, then wiped his mouth slowly along the back of his sleeve.

  He kissed her with great relish, while all the young men in the room gave out a groan.

  Jud lingered on, but there suddenly came a great shout from Prudie, who could bear it no longer.

  “Go, yer great ox! No call to make a meal of ’er!” Jud hastily straightened up amid more shouts of laughter, and it was noticed that when he fell out of the ring, he went back to his corner, which was a long way from his wife.

  After a bit, the game finished and the dancing began again. From all that, Mark Daniel had held aloof. He had always looked down on such prancing as effeminate (his was a silent, gaunt, uncompromising maleness, unimpressionable and self-sufficient), but he noticed that two or three of the actors, having finished their supper, were joining in.

  He could hold back no longer and risked an eight-handed reel, which needed no delicacy of step. Then, rubbing his chin and wishing he had shaved more carefully, he joined in a country dance. At the other end of the long line of people he saw the girl. Keren Smith they said her name was. He could not keep his eyes off her, and danced almost as if he did not see the people opposite him.

  And in some way the girl knew of his gaze. She never once looked at him, but there was something in her expression that told him she knew, a little self-conscious pursing of her young red lips, the way she pushed back her hair and tossed her head. Then he saw that for a second or two they would have to dance together. He stumbled and felt the sweat start. The moment was near. The next couple were dancing back to their places. He was off down the line, and she coming to meet him. They met, he grasped her hands, they danced around, her hair flying. She looked up once, straight into his eyes; the look was blinding, dazzling, then they separated, he back to his place, she to hers. Her hands had been cool, but the palms of his were tingling as if they had met ice, met fire, been shocked by the touch.