The second courtship of George Warleggan was of a very different nature from the first. A cold young man to whom material possessions, material power and business acumen meant everything, he had coveted his beautiful first wife while she was still only affianced to Francis Poldark. He had known her to be unattainable on all accounts, not merely because of her marriage but because he knew he meant less than nothing in her eyes. Through the years he had striven to mean something to her – and had succeeded on a material level; then, less than a year after Francis’s death, he had seized a sudden opportunity to put his fortunes to the test; and with a sense of incredulity he had heard her say yes.
Of course it was not as straightforward as that, and he knew it at the time. Long before Francis’s death the Trenwith Poldarks had been poverty-stricken; but after his death everything had worsened, and Elizabeth had been left alone to try to keep a home together, with no money, little help, and four people, including her ailing parents, dependent on her. He did not pretend she had married him out of love: her love, however much she might protest to the contrary, had always been directed towards Francis’s cousin, Ross. But it was him she had married and no other: she had become Mrs George Warleggan in name and in more than name, and the birth of a son to them had given him a new happiness, a new feeling of fulfilment, and a new stirring of deeper affection for her.
It was only later that the old hag, Agatha, had poisoned his happiness by suggesting that because Valentine was an eight-month child he was not his.
For a cold man, preoccupied with gain, interested only in business affairs and in acquiring more power and more property, he had found himself suffering far more than he had believed possible.
Although a marriage undertaken on one side to acquire a beautiful and patrician property, and on the other to obtain money and protection and a comfortable life, should certainly not have succeeded beyond the terms for which it was tacitly undertaken, it had been, had become successful. There had been an element of the businesslike in Elizabeth’s nature, and a wish to get on on a material level, which had responded to his mercantile and political ambitions; and he, taken by that response and by much else that he had not expected in her, had found himself more emotionally engaged with each year that passed. That they had quarrelled so much at times was, he knew now, all his fault and had arisen over his unsleeping jealousy of Ross and his suspicions about Valentine’s parentage. But then, just when all that was cleared up, when there had seemed an end at last to bitterness and recrimination, when, because of the premature birth also of their second child, his doubts about Elizabeth and about Valentine had been finally put to rest, just then when the future was really blossoming for them both, she had died. It was a bitter blow. It was a blow from which he had never quite recovered. His knighthood, coming on top of his bereavement, instead of being the crowning point of his pride and ambition, became a sardonic and evil jest, the receiving of a garland which crumbled as he touched it.
So in the early years that followed he had become very morose. He lived mainly at Cardew with his parents, and when his father died he stayed on with his mother, visiting Truro and his Uncle Cary daily to supervise his business interests and, almost incidentally, to acquire more wealth. But his heart was not in it. Still less was it in the social side of his parliamentary career. To enter a room with Elizabeth on his arm was always a matter of pride, to go through the repetitive routine of soirées and supperparties, to perform alone a social routine he had planned for them both, was something he hadn’t the heart to face. Nor any longer quite the same ambition. Unlike his rival and enemy Ross Poldark, his entry into Parliament had never been concerned with what he could do for other people but with what he could do for himself. So now why bother?
Several times he thought of resigning his seat in the House and being content to manipulate the two members sitting for his borough of St Michael; but after the first few bad years were over he was glad he had not. His own membership brought him various commercial rewards, and he found his presence in London enabled him to keep in closer touch with the movement of events than any proxy alternative he could devise.
Both his father and mother pressed him to remarry. Elizabeth, in spite of her high breeding, had never been their choice. They had always found her personally gracious and had got on well enough with her on a day to day basis; but to them she had the disadvantage of being too highly bred without the compensating advantages of powerful connections. Anyway, it was terribly sad she had gone off so sudden that way, but it was a thing that happened to women all the time. Being a woman and a child-bearer was a chancy business at the best of times. Every churchyard was full of them, and every evening party or ball contained one or another eager young widower eyeing the young, juicy unmarried girls and considering which of them might pleasure him best or advantage him most to take to second wife.
Therefore how much more so George! Rich, esteemed in the county – or where not esteemed at least respected – or where not respected at least feared – a borough monger, a banker, a smelter, and now a knight! And only just turned forty! The catch of the county! One of the catches of the country! He could take his pick! Some of the noble families might not perhaps yet quite see it in that light, but they were few, and, as he progressed, becoming fewer. To grieve for a year was the maximum that decorum would dictate. To go on year after year, getting older and steadily more influential, and yet growing each year a little more like his Uncle Cary whose only interest in life was his ledgers and his rates of interest … It was too much. Nicholas, who had started all this from nothing, who had laid the foundations on which George had built his empire, who had seen all that he worked and planned for come to fruition and to prosper, had died the month after Pitt, and, as he lay in bed with his heart fluttering at a hundred and sixty to the minute, it had come to his mind to wonder why some sense of achievement, of satisfaction, was lacking. And he could only think that the circumstance disturbing his dying thoughts was his son’s failure to react normally to a normal hazard of married life.
When Nicholas was gone Mary Warleggan continued to prod George about it, but with growing infrequency. What elderly widowed woman can really object to having her only son living at home, or at least be too complaining about it? After all, George had two children, and even if Valentine was growing into a rather peculiar boy, this would no doubt right itself as he became an adult; and she did see a lot of her grandchildren. Valentine spent most of his holidays at home, and little Ursula, the apple of her eye, was at Cardew all the time.
The situation also suited Cary. He had always disliked Elizabeth and she had disliked him, each thinking the other an undesirable influence on George. Now she was gone uncle and nephew had come even closer. Indeed in the first year of widowerhood Cary had twice saved George from making unwise speculative investments; George’s grasp of the helm was as firm as ever, but the bereavement had temporarily deprived him of his instinct for navigation.
That time was now long past. Lately George had even recovered some of his taste for London life and for the larger scale of operations he had been beginning in 1799. He had found a friend in Lord Grenville, one-time prime minister and now the leader of the Whigs, and visited him sometimes at his house in Cornwall. In the endless manipulation of parties and loyalties and seats which had followed the death first of Pitt and then of Fox, George had gradually aligned himself with the Opposition in Parliament. Although he owed his knighthood to Pitt, he had never become a ‘Pittite’, that nucleus of admirers of the dead man notably centring round George Canning. He was convinced that the weak and fumbling Tory administration was bound to come down very soon, and his own interests would be better furthered by becoming a friend of the new men than of the old.
True, some of them had crack-brained schemes about reform and liberty, fellows like Whitbread and Sheridan and Wilberforce; but he swallowed these and was silent when they were aired, feeling sure that when the reformers came to power they would be forced to forget their high ideals in the pressures and exigencies of cabinet office. When the time came he might well be offered some junior post himself.
But George still had no thought of another marriage. Such sexual drive as remained to him seemed permanently to have sublimated itself in business and political affairs. Of course over the years he had not lacked the opportunity to taste the favours of this or that desirable lady who had set her cap at him, either with a view to marriage or because her husband was off somewhere and she wanted to add another scalp to her belt. But always he had hesitated and drawn back out of embarrassment or caution. The opportunity to sample the goods before buying never seemed to him to exist without the risk of later being pressed to purchase; and as to the second sort, he had no fancy to have some woman boasting behind her fan of having had him in her bed and perhaps cynically criticizing his prowess or his expertness.
There was one day he seldom missed visiting Trenwith, and that was on the anniversary of his marriage to Elizabeth. Though the wedding had in fact taken place on the other side of the county, he felt it suitable to spend a few hours in her old home, where he had first met her, where he had largely courted her, where they had spent most summers of their married life, and where she had died even though it was a house that had always been inimical to him, the Poldark family home which had never yielded up its identity to the intruder.
He rode over with a single groom on the morning of June 20, 1810, and was at the church before noon. It was a glittering, sunny day but a sharp draught blew off the land and made the shadows chill. Chill too and dank among the gravestones, the new grass thrusting a foot high through the tangle of last year’s weeds; a giant bramble had grown across Elizabeth’s grave, as thick as a ship’s rope. He kicked at it with his foot but could not break it. ‘Sacred to the memory of Elizabeth Warleggan, who departed this life on the 9th of December, 1799, beloved wife of Sir George Warleggan of Cardew. She died, aged 35, in giving birth to her only daughter.’
He had brought no flowers. He never did; it would have seemed to him a pandering to some theatricality, an emotional gesture out of keeping with his dignity. One could remember without employing symbols. Besides, they were a waste of money; nobody saw them, and in no time they would be withered and dead.
He had taken care that she should be buried far from any of the Poldarks, particularly from that festering bitch Agatha who had ill-wished them all. He stood for perhaps five minutes saying nothing, just staring at the tall granite cross, which was already showing signs of the weather. The letters were blurring, in a few more years would become indistinct. That would never do. They would have to be cleaned, re-cut, cut more deeply. The whole churchyard was in a disgraceful state. One would have thought the Poldarks themselves would have spent a little money on it – though certainly their own patch was not as bad as the rest. The Reverend Clarence Odgers was a doddering old man now, so absent-minded that on Sundays his wife or his son had to stand beside him to remind him where he had got to in the service.
Nankivell, the groom, was waiting with the horses at the lych-gate. George climbed the mounting stone, took the reins, and without speaking led the way to the gates of Trenwith.
The drive was nearly as overgrown as the churchyard and George resolved to berate the Harry brothers. It was a big place for two men to keep in condition, but he suspected they spent half the time drinking themselves insensible. He would have discharged them both long ago if he had not known how much they were feared and hated in the district.
Of course they were waiting for him at the house, along with the one Mrs Harry, whom rumour said they shared between them; all smiles today; this was his one expected visit of the year so they had made an effort to get the place clean and tidy. For an hour he went around with them, sometimes snapping at their explanations and complaints and apologies, but more often quite silent, walking with his memories, recollecting the old scenes. He dined alone in the summer parlour; they had prepared him a fair meal, and Lisa Harry served it. She smelt of camphor balls and mice. The whole house stank of decay.
So what did it matter? It was not his, but belonged to the thin, arrogant, inimical Geoffrey Charles Poldark now fighting with that blundering unsuccessful sepoy general somewhere in Portugal. If, of course, Geoffrey Charles stopped a bullet before the British decided to cut their losses and effect another panic evacuation like Sir John Moore’s, then of course the house would come to him; but even so did it matter what condition it was in? He had no further interest in living here. All he was sure was that he would never sell it to the other Poldarks.
When the meal was finished he dismissed the Harrys and went over the house room by room, almost every one of which had some special memory for him. Some he thought of with affection, one at least with concentrated hate. When he was done he returned to the great hall and sat before the fire Mrs Harry had prudently lighted. The sunshine had not yet soaked through the thick walls of the old Tudor house. He had not decided whether to stay the night. It was his custom to lie here and return on the morrow. But the bedroom upstairs – his bedroom, next to Elizabeth’s old bedroom – had looked uninviting, and not even the two warming-pans in the bed were likely to guarantee it against damp. The year before last he thought he had caught a chill.
He looked at his watch. There was time enough to be back in Truro, if not Cardew – hours of daylight left. But he was loath to move, to wrench at the ribbon of memories that were running through his brain. He lit a pipe – a rare thing for him for he was not a great smoker – and stabbed at the fire, which broke into a new blaze. It spat at him like Aunt Agatha. This was old fir; there was not much else on the estate except long elms and a few pines; not many trees would stand the wind. It was after all a God-forsaken place ever to have built a house. He supposed Geoffrey de Trenwith had made money out of metals even in those faroff days. Like the Godolphins, the Bassets, the Pendarves. They built near the mines that made them rich.
The first time he had seen Aunt Agatha was in this room more than thirty-five years ago. Francis had invited him from school to spend a night. Even then the old woman had been immensely old. Difficult to believe that she had survived everybody and lived long enough to poison the first years of his married life. Years later she had been sitting in that chair opposite him now – the very same chair – when he had come into this room to tell his father that Elizabeth had given birth to a son, born, prematurely, on the 14th February and so to be called Valentine. She had hissed at both of them like a snake, malevolent, resenting their presence in her family home, hating him for his satisfaction at being the father of a fine boy, trying even then with every ingenuity of her evil nature to discover a weak spot in their complacency through which she could insert some venom, some note of discord, some shabby, sour prediction. ‘Born under a black moon,’ she had said, because there had been a total eclipse at the time. ‘Born under a black moon, and so he’ll come to no good, this son of yours. They never do. I only knew two and they both came to bad ends!’
In that chair, opposite him now. Strange how a human envelope collapsed and decayed, yet an inanimate object with four legs carved and fashioned by a carpenter in James II’s day could exist unchanged, untouched by the years. The sun did not get round to the great window for another hour yet, so it was shadowy in here, and the flickering cat-spitting fire created strange illusions. When the flame died one could see Agatha there still. That wreck of an old female, malodorous, the scrawny grey hair escaping from under the ill-adjusted wig, a bead of moisture oozing from eye and mouth, the gravestone teeth, the darting glance, the hand cupped behind the ear. She might be there now. God damn her, she was more real to him at this moment than Elizabeth! But she was dead, had died at ninety-eight, he had at least prevented her from cheating the world about her birthday—
A footstep sounded, and all the nerves in his body started. Yet he contrived not to move, not to give way, not to accept …
He looked round and saw a fair tall girl standing in the room. She was wearing a white print frock caught at the waist with a scarlet sash, and she was carrying a sheaf of foxgloves. She was clearly as surprised to see him as he was to see her.
In the silence the fire spat out a burning splinter of wood, but it fell and smoked unheeded on the floor.
‘Who are you? What d’you want?’ George spoke in a harsh voice he had seldom cause to use these days; people moved at his bidding quickly enough; but this apparition, this intrusion …
The girl said: ‘I am sorry. I saw the door open and thought perhaps it had blown open.’
‘What business is it of yours?’
She had a stillness about her, a composure that was not like excessive self-confidence – rather an unawareness of anything untoward or wrong.
‘Oh, I come here sometimes,’ she said. ‘The foxgloves are handsome on the hedges just now. I’ve never seen the door open before.’
He got up. ‘D’you know that you’re trespassing?’
She came a few paces nearer and laid the flowers on the great dining table, brushed a few leaves and spattering of pollen from her frock.
‘Are you Sir George Warleggan?’ she asked.
Her accent showed she was not a village girl and a terrible suspicion grew in his mind.
‘What is your name?’
‘Mine?’ She smiled. ‘I’m Clowance Poldark.’
When Clowance returned to Nampara everyone was out. The front door was open, and, she went in and whistled three clear notes: D, Bb, A, then ran half up the stairs and whistled again. When there was no response she carried her foxgloves through the kitchen into the backyard beyond, filled a pail at the pump where twenty-six years before her mother had been swilled when brought to this house, a starveling brat from Illuggan, and thrust the flowers into the water so that they should not wilt before that same lady came in and had time to arrange them. Then she went in search.
It was a lovely afternoon and Clowance was too young to feel the chill of the wind. Spring had been late and dry, and they were haymaking in the Long Field behind the house. She saw a group standing half way up the field and recognized her mother’s dark head and dove-grey frock among them. It was refreshment-time, and Demelza had helped Jane Gimlett carry up the cloam pitcher and the mugs. The workers had downed tools and were gathered round Mistress Poldark while she tipped the pitcher and filled each mug with ale. There were eight of them altogether: Moses Vigus, Dick Trevail (Jack Cobbledick’s illegitimate son by Nancy Trevail), Cal Trevail (Nancy’s legitimate son), Matthew Martin, Ern Lobb, ‘Tiny’ Small, Sephus Billing and Nat Triggs. They were all laughing at something Demelza had said as Clowance came up. They smiled and grinned and nodded sweatily at the daughter of the house, who smiled back at them.
‘Mug of ale, Miss Clowance?’ Jane Gimlett asked. ‘There’s a spare one if you’ve the mind.’
Clowance had the mind, and they talked in a group until one after another the men turned reluctantly away to take up their scythes again. Last to move was Matthew Martin, who always lingered when Clowance was about. Then mother and daughter began to stroll back towards the house, Clowance with the mugs, Jane bringing up the rear at a discreet distance with the empty pitcher.
‘No shoes again, I see,’ said Demelza.
‘No, love. It’s summer.’
‘You’ll get things in your feet.’
‘They’ll come out. They always do.’
It was a small bone of contention. To Demelza, who had never had shoes until she was fourteen, there was some loss of social status in being barefoot. To Clowance, born into a gentleman’s home, there was a pleasurable freedom in kicking them off, even at sixteen.
‘Where is everybody?’
‘Jeremy’s out with Paul and Ben.’
‘Not back yet?’
‘I expect the fish are not biting. And if you look over your left shoulder you’ll see Mrs Kemp coming off the beach with Bella and Sophie.’
‘Ah yes. And Papa?’
‘He should be back any time.’
‘Was it a bank meeting?’
‘Yes.’
They strolled on in silence, and when they reached the gate they leaned over it together waiting for Mrs Kemp and her charges to arrive. The wind ruffled their hair and lifted their frocks.
It was a little surprising that two such dark people as Ross and his wife had bred anyone so unquestionably blonde as Clowance. But she had been so born and showed no signs of darkening with maturity. As a child she had always been fat, and it was only during the last year or so since she had left Mrs Gratton’s School for Young Ladies that she had begun to fine off and to grow into good looks. Even so, her face was still broad across the forehead. Her mouth was firm and finely shaped and feminine, her eyes grey and frank to a degree that was not totally becoming in a young lady of her time. She could grow quickly bored and as quickly interested. Twice she had run away from boarding-school – not because she particularly disliked it but because there were more engaging things to do at home. She greeted every incident as it came and treated it on its merits, without fear or hesitation. Clowance, Demelza said to Ross, had a face that reminded her of a newly opened ox-eye daisy, and she dearly hoped it would never get spotted with the rain.
As for Demelza herself, her approximate fortieth birthday had just come and gone, and she was trying, so far with some success, to keep her mind off the chimney corner. For a ‘vulgar’, as the Reverend Osborne Whitworth had called her, she had worn well, better than many of her more high-bred contemporaries. It was partly a matter of bone structure, partly a matter of temperament. There were some fine lines on her face that had not been there fifteen years ago, but as these were mainly smile lines and as her expression tended usually to the amiable they scarcely showed. Her hair wanted to go grey at the temples but, unknown to Ross, who said he detested hair dyes, she had bought a little bottle of something from Mr Irby of St Ann’s and surreptitiously touched it up once a week after she washed it.
The only time she looked and felt her age, and more than it, was when she had one of her headaches, which usually occurred monthly just before her menstrual period. During the twenty-six days of good health she steadily put on weight, and during the two days of the megrim she lost it all, so a status quo was preserved.
In the distance Bella recognized her mother and sister and waved, and they waved back.
Clowance said: ‘Mama, why do Jeremy and his friends go out fishing so much and never catch any fish?’
‘But they do, my handsome. We eat it regularly.’
‘But not enough. They go out after breakfast and come back for supper, and their haul is what you or I in a rowboat could cull in a couple of hours!’
‘They are not very diligent, any of them. Perhaps they just sit in the sun and dream the day away.’
‘Perhaps. I asked him once but he said there was a scarcity round the coast this year.’
‘And might that not be true?’
‘Only that the Sawle men don’t seem to find it so.’
They strolled on a few paces.
‘At any rate,’ said Clowance, ‘I’ve picked you some handsome foxgloves.’
‘Thank you. Did you call at the Enyses?’
‘No … But I did meet a friend of yours, Mama.’
Demelza smiled. ‘That covers a deal of ground. But d’you really mean a friend?’
‘Why?’
‘Something in the way you used the word.’
Clowance brushed a flying ant off her frock. ‘It was Sir George Warleggan.’
She carefully did not look at her mother after she had spoken, but she was aware of the stillness beside her.
Demelza said: ‘Where?’
‘At Trenwith. It was the first time ever I saw the front door open, so in I went to look in – and there he was in the big hall, sitting in front of a smoky fire with a pipe in his hand that had gone out and as sour an expression as if he had been eating rigs.’
‘Did he see you?’
‘Oh yes. We spoke! We talked! We conversed! He asked me what damned business I had there and I told him.’
‘Told him what?’
‘That he has the best foxgloves in the district, especially the pale pink ones growing on the hedge by the pond.’
Demelza flattened her hair with a hand, but the wind quickly clutched it away again. ‘And then?’
‘Then he was very rude with me. Said I was trespassing and should be prosecuted. That he would call his men and have me taken to the gates. Said this and that, in a rare temper.’
Demelza glanced at her daughter. The girl showed no signs of being upset.
‘Why did you go there, Clowance? We’ve told you not to. It is inviting trouble.’
‘Well, I didn’t expect to meet him! But it doesn’t matter. There’s no harm done. I reasoned with him.’
‘You mean you answered him back?’
‘Not angry, of course. Very dignified, I was. Very proper. I just said it all seemed a pity, him having to be rude to a neighbour – and a sort of cousin.’
‘And what did he say to that?’
‘He said I was no cousin, no cousin of his at all, that I didn’t know what I was talking about and I’d better go before he called the Harry brothers to throw me out.’
Mrs Kemp was now approaching. Bella and Sophie were making the better pace on the home stretch and were some fifty yards in front.
Demelza said: ‘Don’t tell your father you’ve been to Trenwith. You know what he said last time.’
‘Of course not. I wouldn’t worry him. But I didn’t think it would worry you.’
Demelza said: ‘It isn’t worry exactly, dear, it is – it is fishing in muddied streams that I hate. I can’t begin to explain – to tell you everything that made your father and George Warleggan enemies, nor all that happened to spread it so that the gap between us all became so great. You surely will have heard gossip…’
‘Oh yes. That Papa and Elizabeth Warleggan were in love when they were young. Is that very terrible?’
Demelza half scowled at her daughter, and then changed her mind and laughed.
‘Put that way, no … But in a sense it continued all their lives. That – did not help, you’ll understand. But—’
‘Yet I’m sure it was not like you and Papa at all. Yours is something special. I shall never be lucky enough to get a man like him; and of course I shall never be able to be like you…’
Bella Poldark, slight and dark and pretty, came dancing and prattling up with a story of something, a dead fish or something, large and white and smelly they had found near the Wheal Leisure adit. She had wanted to tug it home but Mrs Kemp would not let her. Sophie Enys, a year younger and outdistanced on the last lap, soon contributed her account. Demelza bent over talking to them, glad of the opportunity to wipe something moist out of her sight. Compliments from one’s children were always the most difficult to take unemotionally, and compliments from the ever candid Clowance were rare enough to be specially noted. When Mrs Kemp joined them they all walked back to the house, Jane Gimlett having preceded them to put on tea and cakes for the little girls.
The eager flood that had caught up with Clowance and her mother now washed past them and left them behind, in the enticing prospect of food, so the two women followed on. They were exactly of a height, and as they walked the wind, blowing from behind them, ruffled their hair like the soft tail feathers of eider ducks.
Demelza said: ‘Then you were allowed to leave Trenwith unmolested?’
‘Oh yes. We did not part so bad in the end. I left him some of my foxgloves.’
‘You – left George? You left George some foxgloves?’
‘He didn’t want to have them. He said they could wilt on the damned floor of the damned hall, for all he cared, so I found an old vase and filled it with water and put them on that table. What a great table it is! I never remember seeing it before! I believe it will be still there when the house falls down.’
‘And did he – allow you to do this?’
‘Well, he didn’t forcibly stop me. Though he snarled once or twice, like a fradgy dog. But I believe his bark may be worse than his bite.’
‘Do not rely on that,’ said Demelza,
‘So after I had arranged them – though I still cannot do it so well as you – after that I gave him a civil good afternoon.’
‘And did you get another snarl?’
‘No. He just glowered at me. Then he asked me my name again. So I told him.’