Demelza Read online

  “I’ll be well enough,” said Demelza. “Leave me be. I’ll sleep on my face tonight.”

  “Well, that’s as you please. I came to tell ’ee that Mark Daniel’s outside by the kitchen door, besting whether to come in and see you or no.”

  Demelza sat up and winced. “Mark Daniel? What does he want with me?”

  “Nothin’ by right. He come first at noon. They’re from home, I says, an’ll not be back, she afore supper, I says, an’ he afore cockshut tomorrow, I says. Oh, he says, an’ goes off an’ comes back and says what time did ye say Mistress Poldark would be back, he says, an’ I says supper tonight, I says, an’ off he go wi’ his long legs stalking.”

  “Has he asked for me tonight?”

  “Aye, and I telled him you was suppin’ an’ not to be disturbed by the likes of he. Gracious knows, there’s enough fuss one way and the next with all the bal men in district callin’ around to pass the time o’ day.”

  “He must want more than that,” Demelza said and yawned. She straightened her frock and patted her hair. “You’d best show him in.”

  She felt lonely and important. The last time Ross had ridden to Bodmin she had had Verity to stay.

  Mark came in twisting his cap. In the parlor he looked enormous.

  “Oh, Mark,” she said, “did you want to see Ross? He’s from home and is lying tonight at Bodmin. Was it important or shall you wait until tomorrow?”

  He looked younger too in the evening light and without his cap, his head bent for fear of the ceiling beams.

  “I wish ’twas easier to explain, Mistress Poldark. I did ought to have called in to Cap’n Ross yesterday, but ’twasn’t quite decided then, an’ I didn’t fancy to tell my chickens afore they was bealed. An’ now—an’ now there’s the need to hurry, because…”

  Demelza rose, careful to avoid grimaces, and went to the window. It would not be dark yet for an hour, but the sun was winking out behind the western rim of the valley and shadows were deepening among the trees. She knew that Mark was a special friend of Ross’s, second only to Zacky Martin in his confidences, and she was flustered at his call.

  He was waiting for her to speak and watching her.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Mark, an’ tell me what it is that’s troubling you?”

  Presently she looked around and saw that he was still standing.

  “Well, what is it?”

  His long dark face twitched once. “Mistress Poldark, I have the thought to be married.”

  She gave a relieved smile.

  “Well, I’m glad, Mark. But why should that be worrying you?” As he did not speak, she went on, “Who have you the mind for?”

  “Keren Smith,” he said.

  “Keren Smith?”

  “The maid that came wi’ the traveling players, mistress. The dark one wi’ the—wi’ the long hair and the smooth skin.”

  Demelza’s mind went back. “Oh,” she said. “I know.” She did not like to sound unpleasant. “But what do she say to it? Are they still hereabouts?”

  They were still hereabouts. Standing by the door, grim and quiet, Mark told his story. And much that he did not say could be guessed. Almost every night since their first meeting, he had followed the players around, watching Keren, meeting her afterward, trying to persuade her of his sincerity and his love. At first she had laughed at him, but something in his great size and the money he pressed on her at last won her interest. Almost as a joke she had accepted his advances and then suddenly found that what he had to offer was no light thing after all. She had never had a home and had never had a suitor like that.

  Mark had seen Keren the previous night at Ladock. By Sunday of that week they would be at St. Dennis on the edge of the moor. She had promised to marry him, promised faithfully on one condition. He must find somewhere for them to live; she would not share his father’s house, crowded already, for a single day. Let him only find somewhere just for her alone before Sunday and she would run away with him. But if the company once traveled beyond St. Dennis she would not, she said, have the heart to come back. From there they would begin the long trek to Bodmin and not even if Mark took a pit pony for her would she face the moors a second time. It was a flight from St. Dennis or nothing. And it was up to him.

  “And what do you think to do, Mark?” Demelza asked.

  The Cobbledicks had moved into Clemmow’s old cottage; so there was no place empty at all. What Mark had in mind was to build himself a cottage before Sunday. His friends were ready to help. They had picked a possible spot, a piece of rough wasteland looking over onto Treneglos property though still on Poldark land. But with Captain Ross away…

  It was strange to think of the feelings of love stirring in that tough, short-spoken, gaunt man; stranger still to think of the wayward pretty May-fly who had wakened them.

  “What d’you want for me to do?” she asked.

  He told her. He needed leave to build. He thought he might rent the land. But if he waited until the next day, it meant missing a whole day.

  “Isn’t it too late already?” she asked. “You can’t ever build a cottage by Sunday.”

  “I reckon we can just do un,” he said. “There’s clay to hand and, private like, thinkin’ it might come, I been gathering stuff of nights. Ned Bottrell over to Sawle has got thatchin’ straw. We can make do, if only ’tis a four walls and roof to ’er head.”

  Words were on Demelza’s tongue to say that any woman who made such conditions ought to be left where she belonged, but she saw from Mark’s look that it wouldn’t do.

  “What land is it you want, Mark?”

  “Over the brow beyond Mellin. There’s a piece of old scrub an’ furse, an’ some attle from an old mine ditch. By the bed o’ the leat as dried up years ago.”

  “I know it…” Her mind went over the issue. “Well, it is not really in my hand to give it to you. What you must do is think to yourself: I’m an old friend. Wouldn’t Captain Ross let me have this bit o’ scrubland to build my cottage?”

  Mark Daniel looked at her a moment, then slowly shook his head.

  “’Tis not for me to decide, Mrs. Poldark. Friends in a manner of saying we been all our lives; grown up head by head. We’ve sailed together, running rum and gin, we’ve fished together on Hendrawna Beach, we’ve wrastled together when we was tackers. But when all’s done he belong up here and I belong down there, and—and I’d no more think to take what was his wi’out a by-your-leave than he’d think to take mine.”

  All the garden was in shadow. The bright sky seemed to have no link with the gathering dusk of the valley; the land had fallen away into the abyss of evening while the day still blazed overhead. A thrush had caught a snail and the only sound outside was the tap-tap-tap as he swung it against a stone.

  “If ’tis not in your power to do it,” said Mark, “then I must see for a piece o’ land elsewhere.”

  Demelza knew what chance he had of that. She found when she turned from staring at the sky that she could only see his eyes and the firm parenthesis of his cheekbones. She went across and picked up flint and steel. Presently her hands were lit up, her face, her hair, as the first candle sputtered and glowed.

  “Take an acre measuring from the bed o’ the dry stream, Mark,” she said. “I can’t say more’n that. How you shall hire it I’ve no notion, for I’m not learned in figures an’ things. That’s for you an’ Ross to make out. But I promise you you shall not be moved.”

  The man at the door was silent while two more candles were lit from the first. She heard him stir and shuffle one foot.

  “I can’t thank you right, mistress,” he said suddenly, “but if there’s service to be done for you or yours let me know.”

  She lifted her head and smiled across at him.

  “I know that, Mark,” she said.

  Then he was gone and she was left alone
with the candles lifting their heads in the lightening room.

  Chapter Eight

  Some ground haze gathered with the dark, and that night the moon came up like a bald old redskin peering over a hill. In the hollow of Mellin and the barren declivity of Reath beyond, it looked down upon a string of black figures, active and as seemingly aimless as ants in the sudden light of a lantern, moving backward and forward over the hummock of moorland beyond Joe Triggs’s cottage and down toward a path of rubble-scarred ground sloping indeterminately east.

  The building was on.

  There were nine to help him at the start: Paul, his brother, and Ena Daniel, Zacky Martin and his two eldest boys, Ned Bottrell, who was a cousin from Sawle, Jack Cobbledick, and Will Nanfan.

  First there was the site to be marked, and that must be level enough to support the four walls. They found a patch and cleared it of stones, about a hundred yards from Reath Ditch. Then they roughly marked it into a rectangle and began. The walls were to be made of clay, beaten hard and mixed with straw and small stones. When Ross killed a bullock at the time of the christening, Zacky had helped him and had been given a bag of bullock hair off the hide. He used it then, stirring it in with the clay and the stones and the straw to make a building mixture. Four great boulders were used for the corners of the house, and from one to another of those a rough trough was built of wood about two feet wide and two deep. Into that, the clay and stones and all the rest were shoveled and stamped down and left to set while more was mixed.

  At eleven the three youngsters, being on the early core, were sent home to sleep, and at midnight Cobbledick turned his long high-stepping stride toward bed. Zacky Martin and Will Nanfan stayed until three, Paul Daniel until five, when he had just time to get home and have a plate of barley bread and potatoes before going on to the mine. Ned Bottrell, who ran his own little tin stamp, left at eight. Mark went steadily on until Beth Daniel came over with a bowl of watery soup and a pilchard on a chunk of bread. Having worked without a break for nearly fourteen hours, he sat down to have his food and stared at the result. The foundations were in and the walls just begun. The area of the cottage was slightly larger than intended, but that would be all to the good; there would be time for partitioning off when She was in it. To get her in it: that was his obsession.

  Early that morning, the little children had been around before they went off to the fields, then later three or four of their mothers, staying an hour to help and talk or looking in on their way to work. Everyone had taken his cause to heart and no one had any doubt that he would have his house before Sunday. They might have been critical of the marriage since no one wanted a stranger, but Mark Daniel being who he was and popular, people were willing to swallow their prejudices.

  At seven that evening Zacky Martin, Will Nanfan, and Paul Daniel, having had a few hours’ sleep, arrived back, and later they were joined by Ned Bottrell and Jack Cobbledick. At ten another figure came out of the cloud-shadowed moonlight behind them and Mark saw by his height that it was Ross. He stepped down the ladder, and went to meet him.

  As they neared each other, likeness might have been remarked between those men. They were of an age, ran to bone rather than flesh, were dark and long-legged and indocile. But at close quarters difference was more noticeable than sameness. Daniel, darker-skinned but sallow from underground work, had a stiffness that the other lacked, was broader in the jaw and narrower at the temples, his hair straight and close-cropped and black without the copper. They might have been distant relatives branching far from a common line.

  “Well, Mark,” said Ross as he came up. “So this is your house?”

  “Yes, Cap’n.” Mark turned and stared at the four walls nearly roof high, at the gaping sockets where the windows should go. “So far as it is made.”

  “What have you for floor joists?”

  “There’s wreck timber enough, I reckon. And these pit props. The planchin’ will have to wait till later.”

  “For an upper room?”

  “Ais. I thought it could be builded in that thatch; ’twill save the wall-building, for I’ve no more straw to spare—nor time.”

  “You’ve time for nothing. What of the windows and door?”

  “Father will loan us his door till I can make another. An’ he’s hammering up some shutters for us over home. ’Tis all he can do with his rheumatics. They’ll pass for the time.”

  “I suppose,” Ross said, “you’re making no error, Mark. In choosing this girl, I mean. D’you think she will settle down here after roaming the countryside?”

  “She’s never had no home, not since she can mind anything. That is the more reason why she should want one now.”

  “When are you to be married?”

  “Monday first thing ef all goes well.”

  “But can you?”

  “Yes, I reckon. A fortnight gone she promised she’d wed me and I asked parson to call the banns. Then she changed her mind. This Sunday will be the third time. I’ll take her over to Parson Odgers Monday as soon as we’re back.”

  Behind his words lay the shadow of a fortnight’s struggle. The prize had one minute looked close within his hand and the next as remote as ever.

  “Mistress Poldark’ll ’ave told you,” Mark went on.

  “She told me.”

  “Did I do right in askin’ her?”

  “Of course. Take more of this bottom if you wish to reclaim it, Mark.”

  Mark inclined his head. “Thankye, sir.”

  “I’ll have the deed drawn up tomorrow.” Ross stared at the shapeless yellow mound. “It is possible I can find you a door.”

  • • •

  They were not acting at St. Dennis but were resting before the long trek to Bodmin the next day. That week they had gradually left the civilized west of Cornwall behind and had moved off toward the northern wilderness. For Keren each day had been worse than the last; the weather was too hot or too wet, the barns they played in impossible to manage, leaky and rat-infested or too small to move in. They had made barely enough to keep hunger away, and Aaron Otway, who had been consoling himself as he always did when times were bad, was sometimes almost too drunk to stand.

  As if to set her decision on firm lines, the previous night at St. Michael was the worst fiasco of all. The persistent rain had kept away all but seven adults and two children, and the players had had to act on wet and smelly straw, with constant drippings on their heads. Tupper had found a fever and had lost the ability (or desire) to make people laugh, and the audience just sat and gaped through it all.

  They were to have spent the end of Sunday cleaning up the two caravans ready for a triumphal entry into Bodmin, Otway’s idea for attracting an audience on Monday night, but he had been drunk all day and the others were too out of sorts or listless to make any move, once they had found a field and turned their animals out to grass. If a wheel fell off or an axle broke for lack of grease, well, let it.

  She had her things packed in a basket, and at what she thought to be midnight she carefully slipped out of her bunk and made for the door. Outside it was fine, and with a shawl about her head she crouched by the wheel of the wagon waiting for Mark.

  It was slow waiting, and she was not a patient girl, but that night she was so set on leaving her present company that she stayed on and on, cursing the summer chill of night and wishing he’d make haste. Minutes passed that seemed like days, and hours that might have been months. Crouching there with her head against the hub of the wheel, she fell asleep.

  When she woke, she was stiff and chilled through, and behind the church on the hill was a lightening of the sky, the dawn.

  She came to her feet. So he’d let her down! All that time he’d been playing with her, making promises he had no intention to keep. Tears of fury and disappointment started into her eyes. Careless of noise she turned to go in, and as she touched the handle she saw a tall
figure hurrying across the field.

  He came at a shambling half run. She did not move at all until he came up with her and stood seeking his breath and leaning against the caravan.

  “Keren…”

  “Where’ve you been?” she said wildly. “All night! All this night I’ve been waiting! Where’ve you been?”

  He looked up at the window of the caravan. “You got your clo’es? Come.”

  His tone was so strange, short of its usual respect, that she began to move with him across the field without arguing. He walked straight enough but stiffly, as if he could not bend. They reached the lane.

  At the church she said angrily, “Where’ve you been, Mark? I’m chilled to the marrow! Waiting all the night through.”

  He turned to her. “Eh?”

  She said it again. “What’s amiss with you? What’s kept you?”

  “I was late startin’, Keren. Late. ’Twas no easy job building a house… At the last…there was last things to do… Didn’t start till ten. Thought I should make up by running all the way… But I mistook the road, Keren. I ran wrong…kept on the main coach road instead o’ turning for St. Dennis… I went miles… That’s why I came on ’ee from be’ind… Lord save us, I never thought to find ye in time!”

  He spoke so slow that at last she realized he was dead tired, almost out on his feet. Surprise and disappointment made her snap at him, for she had always been pleased at his strength. It was a letdown. Surely that great moment of his life should have been enough to liven him up all over again.

  They walked on quietly until full day, when a fresh breeze blowing in from the sea seemed to give him a new lease, and from then on he steadily came around. She had put aside some dough cakes from the previous night’s supper, and those they shared at the side of the road. Before they made St. Michael he was the stronger of the two.