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.
The dance was over. He walked solidly back to his corner. Other people about him were talking and laughing and did not notice any change. He sat down, wiped the sweat off his forehead and calloused hands, which were twice the size of hers and could have crushed them to pulp. He watched her covertly, hoping for another glance but not getting it. But women, he knew, could look without looking.
He joined in nearly all the rest, hoping that he might come near her again, but it did not happen. Nanfan’s son, Joe Nanfan, who ought to have known better, had somehow gotten to talking to her, and he and a wizened little man from the troop took her attention.
Then the party began to break up. Before any grown-ups left, Zacky Martin, “scholar” of the neighborhood and father of Jinny, got up and said a little piece about what a brave time they had had, one and all, and how they’d all eaten enough to last ’em a week and drunk enough to last ’em a fortnight and danced enough to last ’em a month. And how ’twas only fitty there and then to say thank you kindly for a handsome day and all the generosity, to Captain Poldark and Mistress Poldark, and Miss Verity Poldark, and to wish long life and prosperity to them and theirs, not forgetting Miss Julia, and might she grow up a pride to her father and mother as he was sure she would, and that was all he had to say except thank you kindly again and good night.
Ross had them all served with a stiff glass of brandy and treacle. When they had drunk it, he said, “Your good wishes are of great value to me. I want Julia to grow up in this countryside as a daughter of mine and as a friend of yours. I want the land to be a part of her inheritance and friendship her earning from it. I give you our good wishes for the health and happiness of all your children, and may we all see a prosperous county and better times together.”
There was a rapturous cheer.
The Martins stayed behind—Mrs. Zacky to help her daughter with the clearing up—so the Daniels went home alone.
Leading the way, Grannie Daniel and Mrs. Paul supported Mark’s elder brother between them. Then just behind, like frigates behind ships of the line, came Paul’s three young children. A little to the left, heads close together in whispered talk, were Mark’s two sisters, Mary and Ena; at the rear Old Man Daniel hobbled and grunted, and the long silent figure of Mark made up the convoy.
It was a pleasant July night with the western sky still luminous, as from the reflection of a lighted window. Now and then a cockchafer would drone past their ears and a bat lift fluttering wings in the dusk.
Once they had left the stream behind, the only babble was that of Grannie Daniel, a hearty, fierce old woman in her late seventies.
The convoy, shadowy, uneven figures in the shadowy half dark, breasted the rise of the hill, bobbed and stumbled on the skyline for a few seconds, and then plunged down toward the cluster of cottages at Mellin. The valley swallowed them up and left only the quiet stars and the night glow of summer over the sea.
• • •
In his bed Mark Daniel lay very quiet listening. Their cottage, set between the Martins and the Viguses, had only two bedrooms. The smaller of those was used by Old Man Daniel and his mother and the eldest of Paul’s three children. The other one Paul and his wife Beth and their two younger children took, while Mary and Ena slept in a lean-to at the back of the cottage. Mark slept on a straw mattress in the kitchen.
Everyone was a long time settling off, but at last, when the house was quiet, he stood up and drew on his breeches and coat again. He did not put on his boots until he was safe outside.
The silence of the night was full of tiny noises after the enclosed silence of the cottage. He set off in the direction of Nampara.
He did not know what he was going to do, but he could not lie and sleep with that thing inside him.
That time there was no silhouette on the skyline, but for a moment the trunk of a tree thickened and then a shadow moved beside the ruined engine house of Wheal Grace.
Nampara was not yet in darkness. Candles gleamed behind the curtains of Captain Poldark’s bedroom and there was a light flickering about downstairs. But it was not for those that he looked. Some way up the valley beside the stream were the two caravans that housed the strolling players. He went toward them.
He saw as he drew nearer that there were lights there too, though they had been screened by the hawthorn and wild nut trees. For a man of his size he moved quietly, and he came close to the larger caravan without raising an alarm.
No one was asleep there or thought of it. Candles burned and the players were sitting about a long table. There was much talk and laughter and the chink of money. Mark crept near, keeping open a wary eye for a possible dog.
The windows of the caravan were some distance from the ground, but with his great height he could see in. They were all there: the fat man with the glass eye, the blowsy leading woman, a thin fair man who had played the hero, the shriveled little comedian…and the girl. They were playing some card game, with thick greasy cards. The girl was just dealing, and as she laid a card each time opposite the thin fair man she said something that made them all laugh. She was wearing a kind of Chinese smock and her black hair was ruffled as if she had been running her hands through it; she sat holding her cards, one bare elbow on the table and a frown of impatience growing.
But there is a stage when even the slightly imperfect is an added lure; somehow Mark was grateful for that falling short from divinity. He stood there looking in, one great hand holding back a prickly hawthorn bough, the uncertain light from the window setting shadows and mock expressions on his face.
There was a sudden roar of laughter, and in a moment the comedian was gathering in all the pennies on the board. The girl was angry, for she flung away her cards and stood up. The fair man leered at her and asked a question. She shrugged and tossed her head, then her mood changed, and with incredibly swift grace, she slid, pliant as a sapling, around the table to bend and kiss the comedian’s bald head, at the same time drawing two pennies away from under his lifted fingers.
Too late, he saw through it and snatched at her hand, but she danced away, showing her fine teeth in glee, and took shelter behind the fair man, who fended off the angry comedian. Almost before Mark could realize it, she was out of the caravan, banging the door and giggling with triumph. Too occupied to notice him in the dark, she ran toward her own caravan fifty yards up the valley.
Mark sank back into the shadows as the comedian came to the door and shouted and swore after her. But he did not follow, for the blowsy woman squeezed past.
“Let her go,” she said. “You ought to know she’s still a child, Tupper. She can’t bear to lose at a game of cards.”
“Child or not, she stole the price of a glass of gin! I’ve seen folk ducked and whipped for less! Who do she think she is, Queen o’ Sheba with her airs? Dang and rot all women! I’ll have her in the morning. D’you ’ear, Kerenhappuch! I’ll ’ave you in the morning, you sneavy little dumdolly!”
The answer was the slamming of a door. The leader of the troop elbowed his way past the woman.
“Stop this noise! Don’t forget we’re still on Poldark land, friends, an’ though he’s treated us good, you wouldn’t get soft smoothing if you found yourself on the wrong side of him! Leave the little neap alone, Tupper.”
The others, grumbling and talking, went in, the woman walking across to the other caravan.
Mark stayed where he was, crouching in the bushes. There was nothing more he could do or see, but he would wait until all was quiet. He would not sleep if he went home, and he was due at Grambler Mine at six.
There was a light in the other caravan. He straightened up and moved in a semicircle toward it. As he did so the door of the caravan opened and someone came out. There was the clatter of a bucket, and he saw a figure coming toward him. He ducked down into the bushes.
It was Keren.
She passed close to him and went on her way, whistling some song softly between her teeth. The clank, clank of the wooden bucket went with her, blatant among the softer noises of the copse.
He followed her. She was making for the stream.
He came up with her as she knelt to scoop up a bucketful. They were some distance from the caravan, and he watched a moment and heard her swear impatiently, for the stream was shallow and she never had the bucket more than a third full.
He stepped out of the bushes.
“You rightly need a pot or a pan to—”
She turned and half screamed.
“Leave me alone you…” Then she saw it was not the comedian and screamed louder.
“I mean no ’arm,” said Mark, his voice quiet and sounding firm. “Hush, or you’ll rouse the valley.”
She stopped as quickly as she had begun and stared up at him.
“Oh…it’s you…”
Half pleased to be known, half doubtful, he looked down at the delicate oval of her face.
“Yes.” It was lighter away from the overhanging trees. He could see the moist gleam of her bottom lip.
“What d’you want?”
“I thought to aid you,” he said.
He picked up the bucket and went out into the middle of the stream where there was a narrow channel. He was able to fill the bucket and brought it to her side.
“What’re you doin’ sneakin’ around here so late at night?” she asked sharply.
He said, “I reckon I liked that, what you did tonight. I liked that play.”
“Do you live…at the house?”
“No. Over there.”
“Where?”
“Down in Mellin Hollow.”
“What d’you do?”
“Me? I’m a miner.”
She moved her shoulders distastefully. “That’s not a pretty job, is it?”
“I…liked the play acting,” he said.
She looked at him obliquely, taking in the size of him, the set of his shoulders. She could see no expression on the shadowy face turned to her.
“Was it you that won the wrestling?”
He nodded, not showing his pleasure. “But you wasn’t—”
“Oh, I wasn’t there. But I heard.”
“That play,” he began.
“Oho, that.” She pouted her lips, turning her profile against the lighter sky. “Did you like me in it?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you did,” she said calmly. “I’m pretty, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” he answered, forcing out the word.
“You’d best be going now,” she advised.
He hesitated, fumbling with his hands. “Won’t you stay and talk for a while?”
She laughed softly. “What for? I got better ways of passing my time. Besides, I’m surprised at you. It’s very late.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“You’d best be off before they come lookin’ for me.”
“Shall you be at Grambler tomorrow night?”
“Oh, yes. I expect.”
“I’ll be there,” he said.
She turned and picked up the bucket.
“I’ll carry that,” he said.
“What? Back to the camp? No, indeed.”
“I’ll look for ’ee tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll look for you too,” she answered back over her shoulder, carelessly.
“You will?”
“Yes…maybe.” The words floated to him, for she had gone, the clank of the bucket dulled and sibilant as it receded.
He stood a moment. “All right, then!” he called.
He turned and walked home under the quiet stars, his long, powerful stride longer than ever and his slow, steady, careful mind moving in uncharted seas.