No official word had reached Demelza, but she knew. As soon as dark fell she drew the curtains across the windows and lit all the candles to give the house an extra feeling of home and security. He might not come until early morning, but she had no thought of bed. Tonight was doubly important. She felt she would know as soon as their eyes met whether he had good news or bad.
She delayed supper until nine before sitting down alone at the table and pecking at the cold leg of mutton and the apple jam tartlets. After, she went into the kitchen, anxious not even to hear the telltale clop of horses’ hooves, the jangle of harness, the occasional gruff voice. Jane Gimlett was there alone, John Gimlett being out looking for a lamb which had strayed; and to give colour to her own presence, she began to re-iron the ruffs on Ross’s shirts. All of them were well worn, well darned, should long since have been cast aside.
Jane Gimlett chattered for a time; but presently, finding her mistress silent, her own talk dropped away. Upstairs Jeremy slept soundly.
Feathers, the kitten, came and rubbed its head against Demelza’s skirts. Then, finding itself unrebuffed, it wriggled under the hem of her skirt and put its forepaws round her ankle. After another minute or so it somehow got its back legs tangled up and began to wriggle and kick. Demelza bent and disentangled it and put it on the table beside her. It arched its back and opened its infant mouth in a silent snarl and then stepped sideways as if blown by the wind and almost fell off the table. She picked it up again and put it in its basket beside the ancient Tabitha Bethia, who was asleep and let out a single mew of protest.
She turned the chicken, which was cooking on a spit in case Ross should be hungry on his return, and thrust forward the potato saucepan on its iron trivet so that it stood over the hot ashes. The tide was right about midnight, and she thought he would be here by then or soon after. She took the piece of bacon out of the smoke chamber over the flue of the fire to see if it was sufficiently cured. Then she returned to the table.
On this came Gimlett, bucket in hand, out of breath, stumbling over the mat as he pushed open the door.
‘John!’ said his wife. ‘What’s amiss? Did ee find him?’
‘There’s a soldier!’ said Gimlett, clattering the bucket down. ‘By the stile at the turn of the Long Field! I nigh bumped into un! I thought ’twas one of the tub-runners.’
Demelza put her iron down. It was as if a colder iron had moved in her. ‘Are you sure, John? How are you sure?’
‘I catched a glimpse of his tunic, mistress. And he was carren a musket too! I says to him, “Fine night, my son,” and he says “Aye.” Just the word “Aye.” ’Twas no Cornishman, I knew; and then I catched sight of his musket!’
‘Did you see anything of the traders?’
‘Yes, mistress, about an hour gone. I seen two moving down to the cove.’
Oh, God, to think, to think, this might be Ross’s liberty, even his life. It was what she had feared often before, but then it had not involved Ross except as an accessory. This time of all times, when he was coming home. The room closed on her like a prison. ‘John, do you think – do you think you can get out of the house unseen, make your way down to the cove? Go out of the back again, quickly, quick, by way of the cliff. And Jane, how many candles have we? Enough to lighten all the windows d’you suppose?’
‘A score, I b’lieve, ma’am. We was to have bought more last week—’
‘John, waste no time. Do what you can even if it means—’
Demelza stopped. Gimlett said: ‘The sky’s clearing. The stars is bright as frost, but I can—’
He had looked at Demelza, and he too stopped. She was staring past him at the door. Captain McNeil was standing there, in uniform this time; and another figure could be seen in the background.
‘Good evening to ye, Mrs Poldark. I’m sorry to break in on your privacy. Your man saw one of my troopers, so I shall have to ask you all to keep within doors for the next hour or two.’
Demelza picked up one of Ross’s shirts; with trembling but controlled fingers she folded it carefully.
‘Captain McNeil … This is a surprise. I’m – at a loss …’
‘I will explain it to ye, ma’am, if you will give me a moment in privacy. Is Captain Poldark at home?’
‘… No. He’s away …’
A look passed across McNeil’s face. ‘I see. Then a word with you, if I might have it.’
‘Certainly …’
‘One moment. How many sairvants have you in the house, ma’am?’
‘Two. These two only.’
‘Then I’ll ask them to stay here in the care of my trooper. Wilkins!’
With uncertain steps, her heart choking, she led the way into the parlour.
‘Please sit down, Captain McNeil. ’Twas quite unthoughtful of you to appear sudden at my kitchen door like – like a pedlar with a tray of rings, when I thought you miles away, in London or – or in Edinburgh. You should have written.’
‘I ask your pardon, ma’am. I had no intention of disturbing anyone in this house, but your man blundered into one of our pickets. I—’
‘Pickets? It has a very military ring. Do you suppose that there is an enemy about?’
He screwed in his great moustache. ‘An enemy of a sort. We have news that smugglers have the intention to use your cove tonight. Vercoe, the Customs Officer, has repeatedly appealed for a reinforcement of his men. Tonight I and my troopers are providing it. That’s why I asked to see Captain Poldark.’
She had gone to a cupboard and taken out a decanter. He was still on his feet, and in his uniform he looked enormous and cumbersome beside her slightness.
‘You’ll take a glass of wine?’ she said.
‘Thank ye, no. Not while on duty.’
‘But why Captain Poldark? What have we to do with it?’
‘Nothing, I trust – I hope. But it is your land, ma’am. I think you can hardly be so innocent as you look. Where is Captain Poldark?’
She shook her head. ‘From home. I told you. He is in St Ives.’
‘When will he retairn?’
‘Tomorrow – I b’lieve. Please sit down, Captain McNeil. When you are standing, the room is too small for you.’
He half smiled as he obeyed her, took out his watch, replaced it. ‘Believe me, it grieves me, ma’am, to be in this position relative to yourself.’
‘So ’twas what some said, that when you were staying with the Trevaunances you were really acting as a spy.’
He said sharply: ‘No, most untrue! I came as a convalescent. Whilst down here I did nothing but pay a courtesy visit on the Customs authorities, since I had been concairned with them three years before. I ask you to believe, Mrs Poldark, that it is not in my nature to do what is – dishonourable!’
‘Then why – now?’
‘This is different, quite different. I came as a soldier, ma’am. This Trade, this organised Trade, must be stamped out. I can only obey the orr-ders I am given!’
She was surprised that the note of contempt in her voice should have pricked him so.
‘Yet you wish to lock me in my own house …’
‘For the rest of tonight. I cannot leave you or your servants free to run down and warn the smugglers.’
‘So you cannot trust me, Captain McNeil?’
‘In this I cannot.’
She looked at him through her lashes. ‘You ask me to believe in your honour but will not believe in mine.’
‘With your husband out of the house and perhaps implicated?’ He got up and stood a moment with his hands on the back of the chair. ‘Captain Poldark has been a soldier himself. It will grieve me if he is involved – I trust for his sake that he is not. I do not lightly make war on friends. But once before I warned him of the danger of flying in the face of the law. If he has done so now, he must take the consequences. Believe me, ma’am, for the favour of your good will I would pay a very high price. Indeed, almost any pairsonal price that you ask. But not one which involves a – a neglect of duty.’
A gruff voice could be heard in the kitchen. It was on her lips to tell McNeil the truth, to explain the cruel mischance of Ross’s involvement, this once alone, and to throw herself and Ross on his understanding and good will. But she stopped in time. Her meetings with McNeil had been few, but already she was coming to have an understanding of his character. In justifying his actions to her, he had revealed both his quality and his limitations. Good-natured, shrewd, susceptible to women, he yet pursued his duty with a single-mindedness which was above weakness. Mercy was as little likely to move him as money or sex.
‘What do you wish me to do?’
‘Stay in here, ma’am. I can ill spare Wilkins, but he must stay with you since it was his blunder that gave you warning. It should not be many hours.’
‘And when you have taken your traders and locked them up – then we shall be free to go to bed and – and forget you?’
He flushed and bowed. ‘That is so. And if anyone is taken connected with this house, it will be to my deep regret as well as yours. I trust this is the last time I’ll be involved in such a mission. From now on we shall have better work to do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Fighting people of a different race, ma’am. And of a different way of belief. France declared war on England yesterday. Had they done so a few weeks ago, we should have been spared this unhappy meeting.’
*
Dwight got out of the cottage and shut the door and leaned against it. Dark here, but it was the darkness of the frosty night, not that inner dark which had nearly swamped him. Bruised and shaky and in pain, but now no fear he would faint. Air revived him; as he stood there trying to think, it was a tonic – a cold breath penetrating through sweaty clothes, chilling but enlivening.
Walk to your horse, unloop the reins, struggle, pull yourself into the saddle. Already after eleven. Caroline waiting by now. Bone there, might have explained. (But he could not explain what he did not know.) In ten minutes could be there – fifteen anyhow. In half an hour away.
But that was a mere hypothesis which could not be put to the test. There was still more than half an hour to midnight. Even for Caroline …
He pulled on the reins and turned his horse. Unused to carrying up this steep and stony path, the horse stumbled, struck sparks from the loose rock. Good to get away from that cottage into the cold dark. Two children crying, staring at him, who’d been their friend; terrified hostile eyes, while Charlie lay in his own hearth. As he left he heard them move; as soon as the door closed they would come padding down, staring at their father; Lottie would damp a rag, try to revive him, in the end no doubt would succeed. But what was his future? What was their future?
At the top of the hill he spurred his horse away from Killewarren, away – for the moment – from Bath and elopement and his love and his new life. Left shoulder heavily throbbing, though no bones broken; blood from the scratches on his neck drying down the front of his shirt.
Had there been more time he might have gone back for Jacka Hoblyn. He would have been quick enough in such an emergency; they might have put out in a boat to warn the cutter. But time would have run out before anything was begun. Even now perhaps too late.
In Grambler two lights, but the same objection: by the time anyone was roused. The full responsibility was on his own shoulders.
The officer he had seen in Truro; the two horsemen who had drawn silently off the track tonight to let him and Parthesia go by. This was no ordinary ambush; he had read as much in Charlie’s eyes; the grand betrayal; perhaps Charlie had decided that after his marriage he would give up the dangerous game. Imprisonment or transportation for a dozen men, worse if there was resistance; imprisonment and ruin for Ross.
The night was dark enough to make quick movement dangerous; when he reached the ruins of Wheal Maiden, he slid off his horse, tethered it inside the broken wall. Then he went down the valley, haste and caution warring.
All the way he saw no one. A couple of lights over at the mine. The ground was dry underfoot and hard with frost; impossible to tell how many others might have passed this way before him. A light in the parlour window of Nampara. By now, no doubt, Demelza knew to expect Ross back tonight.
On the way down plans had been forming. The Nampara household could help. When every second counted …
Perhaps the silence of the valley made him suspicious, or the obvious light so late. He went to the front door and lifted a hand to rap, then lowered it and moved round the great lilac bush across the flower bed to the lighted window. Curtains were drawn, but there was a chink. He peered in. On the table a grey busby.
A stiff and curious tableau. The big soldier by the door in his red coat and gold-braided trousers, stolid, glassily staring; John and Jane Gimlett, on chair edge, strained, uncomfortable; and Demelza by the fire. Tonight, rather than the beauty in her face, you saw the strong bones underlying it. Normally they were imperceptible; it was as if she had ceased to be man or woman and become something common to both. The knuckles of her hands were white.
Dwight thought he heard a movement behind him, sharply straightened up, but it was only some stirring of the light breeze.
So what he had to do must be done himself. Round the house; a light burning in the kitchen window. He picked a way across the cobbled yard between the stone sheds. The curtains of this window not drawn; the room empty. He tried the latch and the door opened. Warmth and kitchen smells. An iron upended on the table and a cat asleep in a basket before a dying fire. A kitten, lying almost in the cinders, mewed and stretched at sight of him. The solitary candle near its end.
He saw what he wanted just inside the door, a small lantern used for carrying out of doors. As he took it down, Garrick began to bark. In haste, fumble with the shutter which had jammed. He could not leave and do it outside, for then he had no means of lighting the candle. As he pulled at the catch, he thought he heard a movement in the parlour. He stepped quickly behind the door, but there were no footsteps. Garrick stopped barking, and as silence fell the catch moved and the shutter came open. Move to the stub of candle and light the lantern from it. On a trivet on the fire a pan with some potatoes had boiled dry. The kitten was lying on its back near his boot waiting for a friendly hand to bite. He closed the shutter, slid out of the house. The latch of the door clicked.
Greater haste now across the yard, with Garrick barking again, over the stile at the back. Cloak covering the lantern, run towards the Long Field. This field occupied all that was cultivable of the headland which separated Hendrawna Beach from Nampara Cove. It reached up as far as where the outcroppings of rock and the gorse and bracken began. Over its newly ploughed surface he stumbled, climbing till he could see the sea on both sides. Only a thin surf whispered on the beach tonight; its irregular hem demarcated the sand. The inlet of Nampara could just be seen from here, a rift in the mounting cliffs towards Sawle.
He had gone a few yards more when he saw a man standing beside a boulder, silhouetted against the low stars. Dwight’s lantern could not have been entirely hidden, and only that the man was staring out to sea saved him. Back inch by inch, slowly pivoting until the boulder was between them. Exertion or tension had made him sweat again, but now it was welcome, warming his body to the night. Crouching low he skirted the sentry, going round the north side of Damsel Point until he was near the edge of the cliff. There he lowered his lantern behind a low stone wall and peered down into the darkness of the cove.
At first he saw nothing; and then, dawning on his eyes at no definite moment, he knew the ship was there. Something unnatural in the sea, low and black, unlike a rock even if a rock could be there. Straining, he could suddenly detect even the single mast and – for a second only – a glimmer of light aboard.
No light ashore. The cove, the centre of the cove, where sand and shingle met the stream, was empty. In the darker corners there might be men and beasts waiting; but so far as one could tell, nothing breathed or stirred under the frosty sky.
He lugged out his watch and peered at it like a blind man, then knelt beside the lantern to see. Ten minutes after twelve. The run had not yet begun.
In despairing haste he swung round, staring at the land about him. The other side of the wall was as good a place as any.
He wrenched out his pocket knife, opened it, and went back a few yards to the nearest gorse bush. Gorse is a nightmare of prickles but is brittle to the boot or the sharp twist. Part with knife, part with hands he tore a big piece off, dropped it over the wall. Then the next one. He could afford no time to build a stock. The thing must be fed while it was burning.
So he hacked a dozen bushes, dry stuff and highly inflammable. Together a fair pile to begin. Abandoning secrecy, he uncovered the lantern and climbed over the wall. Taking out the single candle, carefully shielding it from the air, he held it under the lowest part of the pile.
For a grievous space he thought the light would blow out; then a flame ran suddenly like quicksilver among the gorse, and in a moment the pile was blazing and crackling.