The Four Swans

by Winston Graham

  ‘For the time pray accept my guidance,’ Dwight said coldly. ‘If in a month my treatment has brought no improvement you may dispense with my services and look elsewhere.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Although it had not been put into words between them it had been understood that Elizabeth should not go to Trenwith until George returned. But the week after George left Geoffrey Charles came home from Harrow, returning two weeks before the prescribed end of term because of an epidemic of scarlet fever at the school. All his puppy fat had gone, he was desperately pale, and he had grown three inches. She thought him ill but the weighing machine contradicted it. As she had feared, he was half a stranger to her, as tall as she though not yet twelve; and there was some darkness in his eyes that suggested he had been through the mill. His delightful spontaneity had disappeared, yet when he smiled he had a new and more adult charm. She thought he looked fifteen.

  He did not want to stay in Truro. Truro was tedious. He had no friends here and no freedom. After a couple of visits to Morwenna and a day or two on the river he said he wanted go to the coast. He could ride there more easily, swim there, take off his stiff collar and enjoy the summer. That week Elizabeth received a letter from her father saying that her mother was acting queerly, that the staff generally were misbehaving, that he was none too capital himself, and that he’d be glad to see her to discuss the inadequacies of Lucy Pipe who, since Aunt Agatha’s death, had been looking after them.

  Mr Chynoweth wrote monthly and always on a note of illness and complaint, but this together with Geoffrey Charles’s demands, and her own annoyance at finding all her movements in Truro tracked by one or other of George’s personal servants, was enough. She left on the Saturday morning after Geoffrey Charles had returned, taking with her only her two sons, Valentine’s nurse Polly Odgers, and the coachman. Harry Harry and his fellows were instructed to stay behind.

  It was a teeth-rattling journey over tracks gone suddenly hard and rutted after ten days of fine weather. They reached the old Poldark home in glistening sunshine and a heat rare so near the coast. Bees hummed in and out of nodding Canterbury bells, Tom Harry’s terrier barked excitedly, the leather trappings creaked as the coach came to a standstill, and startled servants peered out of windows at the unexpected arrival.

  Once she was here she was glad she had come. Although the house had mixed memories for her, this was much less a Warleggan property than the house in Truro and the mansion of Cardew. The servants, once they realized no severe reprimands were coming, were genuinely pleased to see her. Even her parents seemed less tiresome after the separation. And she was free of surveillance.

  She had a moment of doubt when the first morning Geoffrey Charles took a pony and rode off to see Drake Carne. It was what she had feared; you could not break affection by decree; yet Geoffrey Charles came back to dinner looking happier than he had done since he returned from school, and this pattern continued for several days. After all now that Morwenna was wed, the only bar to a friendship between the young man and the boy was that Drake was too low in class and that he was Ross Poldark’s brother-in-law. But now that he was living on the other side of Trenwith he seemed less likely to involve them with Nampara, and his trade and his new little property gave him a small enhancement of status. She, Elizabeth, had a number of cottager friends in Grambler and Sawle whom she was accustomed to call on and chat to, and most of these were ex-servants who remembered Francis and his father or village women connected with the church. It wasn’t very different.

  One of the families for which she had always taken some responsibility – from the days when she had been newly wed and prosperous, through the long years of indigence and again in the much greater prosperity of her new marriage – was that of the Reverend Clarence Odgers and his wife and brood. Polly, Valentine’s nurse, was the eldest child; but by now most of the others were grown-up enough to work. Three of the children had died in recent years but there were still seven to be accounted for. So, after sending for Mr Odgers on the first afternoon and exchanging greetings and news with him, she invited them to supper on the Tuesday and when they were leaving, the evening being warm and splendid, she said she would walk back with them to their tiny overburdened cottage that passed for a vicarage. As they reached it Mr Odgers went off into a dead faint.

  There was nothing wrong with him except that, after a spring of malnutrition, he had eaten altogether too much at Trenwith, his trousers had become very tight and he was ashamed to unbutton them in front of his hostess, so that the constriction round his middle together with four glasses of canary wine brought his feeble body to a state where it opted out of the struggle.

  His eldest son, who acted as verger and did most of the kitchen garden work for his father these days, and a sturdy child of about twelve carried their father up to bed, where he recovered consciousness and was all eagerness to hurry downstairs again to apologize to Elizabeth for the embarrassment he had caused her.

  She waited twenty minutes to be sure that all was well, and then had to wait another twenty while a sudden rain shower pattered upon the leaves and the uneven stones outside. In a brilliant lambent sky with the setting sun orange-tinting the moorland, a few bags of cloud had gathered and were dropping their load. A vivid rainbow faded as the rain stopped and the sun sank.

  ‘Paul will come with you, Mrs Warleggan,’ said Maria Odgers. ‘Paul will just walk with you so far as the gates. Paul—’

  ‘Let him see to his father,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’s ten minutes and I shall enjoy the cool of the evening.’

  ‘It might be better if Paul were to go with you, Mrs Warleggan. Mr Odgers would never forgive me if—’

  ‘No, no, thank you. Good night. I’ll send over in the morning to enquire.’ Elizabeth slipped out, not anxious to have an escort.

  As she went off, a few spots of rain, reluctant to cease altogether, fell on her hair, so she put on the white bonnet she carried. On the way from Trenwith Mr Odgers had talked anxiously with her about the vacant living of Sawle-with-Grambler. He would dearly have liked the living for himself; after all he had administered the parish and conducted the services for eighteen years, and such a plum, quadrupling his income at a stroke, would make him virtually a rich man for the rest of his life. This son could be apprenticed here, that son, who showed rare promise in the ancient languages, sent to the Grammar School, this daughter, who was ailing, provided with special food, that daughter, who had all the looks of the family, given an opportunity of spending a year with their cousins in Cambridge. His wife Maria would be saved the endless anxious scraping to make ends nearly meet, and, as for himself, well one hardly needed to look at him to see what such preferment would do for him.

  But he had no friends in high planes, so he had really little hope of the living coming to him. But now that Mr Warleggan had become a Member of Parliament, was there perhaps just a chance that he would speak for him to the Dean and Chapter, or even write a letter, or otherwise intercede for him among his influential friends?

  Elizabeth had heard him out and had promised to do what she could.

  As she reached the church the rain became heavier again so she ducked into the porch and took off her bonnet and shook it and peered up at the sky. She had been so impatient to be on the move that she had not properly observed the manoeuvres overhead. The rain fell in slanting rods which were splintered into brilliance by the afterglow. It could not last long. The church was locked, so she had no choice but to stand in the porch and wait.

  ‘The parson knows enough who knows a duke.’ Who had said that? She would mention Mr Odgers’s hopes to George if when he returned he was in an approachable mood. A word to Francis Basset? She might attempt that herself. Too far to ride on such a small matter, but she might write a letter. Would Mr Odgers make a suitable incumbent? The poor little man was so anxious, so downtrodden, with his horse-hair wig and his dirty nails. He seemed doomed to be subservient to others. Yet how better would the parish be served by h
aving another absentee vicar? She could not even remember the name of the man who had just died. Odgers had given his life to the parish in his own unkempt unscholarly way. Indeed, she had noticed recently he sometimes put SCL after his name. Student of Civil Law, a non-existent degree that non-graduates sometimes used in an attempt to improve their status.

  By the time the rain stopped the light was fading and she stepped into the churchyard, trying to avoid the puddles with her white buckram shoes. The quickest way from here was diagonally across the churchyard by a path among the gravestones to a stile at the corner. She took it, knowing it would lead her past Aunt Agatha’s grave.

  Many families as important to a church as the Poldarks had been to Sawle would have had a family vault; but, except for an old Trenwith vault at the other side of the yard, long since full and crumbling with neglect, all the Poldarks were buried in this area of the graveyard, individually or at the most in pairs. A few were commemorated by plaques inside the church. This was the only part of the graveyard not grossly over-full. In many parts, as Jud Paynter complained, it was hardly possible to thrust in a spade without jarring it on a bone. Jud, of course, complained at anything, but it had been the same story from the sexton before him. She must try to persuade George to give a new piece of land. The scars of mining came like a tide right up to the churchyard wall.

  Just near Aunt Agatha’s grave, as Elizabeth had noticed at the time of the funeral, were three stunted hawthorn trees, so bent and slanted by the wind that they might have been clipped into their distorted shape by giant shears. Coming on them now, silhouetted against a sky gone sallow with the fall of evening, they produced a replica of Aunt Agatha herself, etched and magnified in black against the chalky light. Bending forward, cloak drooping, nose and chin thrust out, cap on head. A long-handled shovel someone had leaned against the trees provided the stick.

  Elizabeth hesitated and stared, smiled to herself; then the smile turned to a shiver and she stepped past. As she did so a part of one of the trees moved and came to life and became a figure, and she stopped.

  She turned to walk back quickly the way she had come, and a voice said: ‘Elizabeth!’

  She stopped again. It was Ross’s voice, and sooner than meet him she would have been more willing to have confronted some long-dead corpse dragging the rotted remnants of its winding sheet.

  He moved a few steps away from the trees, and she could see rain glistening in his hair.

  ‘I had come to look at Agatha’s grave and was sheltering from the shower. Were you in the church?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He had changed little over the years, she thought, the same restless, bony face, the same heavy-lidded unquiet eyes.

  ‘You were going – returning to Trenwith?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’d be safer with an escort. I’ll walk with you that far.’

  ‘Thank you, I’d prefer to walk alone.’

  She went past him to the stile but he followed, and followed her over.

  When he spoke his voice was again without expression: ‘I’ve been considering the size of stone to put up for Agatha. I gather from George that he has no plans for doing this, so I thought to do it instead.’

  After a bit of rough ground they rejoined the path and so could walk side by side. Short of returning to the Odgers, there was no way of preventing his accompanying her.

  ‘I thought a granite surround and cross in the style of her brother’s but smaller. Nothing but granite will stand the weather here.’

  Choking anger welled up in her against this man who had done her such a monstrous, an unforgivable wrong. Anger especially that he should be walking beside her and talking in this apparently casual tone, as if they were two uninvolved cousins-by-marriage discussing a simple matter of the headstone of a deceased great-aunt. Had her anger not been so fierce she might have realized that his calm was a surface calm hiding the emotions that her appearance had stirred in him. But it was too great. He seemed at that moment the cause, the fount, the initiator of all her present and past miseries.

  He had been speaking again but she sharply interrupted him. ‘When did you see George? When did he tell you that we did not intend to erect a headstone?’

  These were the first words she had really directed at him, and he could hear the anger trembling in her voice.

  ‘When? Oh, last Tuesday sennight it would be. I was in Truro, and Francis Basset called me in to discuss a charity hospital.’

  She had stopped. ‘So that was it.’

  ‘What? What is wrong, Elizabeth?’

  ‘What do you – you suppose is wrong?’

  ‘Well, I know all that has been amiss between us all these years, but what new is there?’

  ‘New?’ she laughed. ‘Nothing, of course! How could there be?’

  He was startled by the harshness of her laugh. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s nothing. A mere nothing. Except that every time George meets you it transforms him from a reasonable man into an unreasonable one, from a kind husband to a bitter one, from – from . . .’

  Ross digested this in silence for a while.

  ‘I’m sorry. Our antagonism has not softened over the years. I confess it seems even to have sharpened again of late. I spoke a few words with him that afternoon and as usual we rubbed each other the wrong way, but I was not conscious of special enormity. Still less, since you married him and threw in your lot with him, would I wish to say anything or do anything to make your life a more dislikeable one or to spoil the happiness you should be enjoying.’

  Against his intentions a bite had come into the last sentence.

  She stood there in her white frock in the deepening twilight. He thought exactly what she had thought, what little change the years had made. He might have been back in Trenwith thirteen years ago, looking at the girl who had then meant everything in life to him and on whose word his whole future hung.

  This was practically the first time they had spoken directly to each other since May ’93. He was only too aware of the indefensibility of his actions then and the probably greater indefensibility of his non-action of the month following. He knew it was something for which Elizabeth would never be willing to forgive him: she had made this clear in their brief meetings since in the company of George. Ross did not altogether blame her; if their positions could possibly have been transposed he thought he might have felt the same himself. So he expected coldness. But he did not expect this trembling anger. It startled him and shook him. As he grew older his own tendencies were to try to repair the breaches that past enmities had made.

  ‘Why should my meeting George turn his disposition against you? I say nothing about you. I never mention your name . . . Though, stay, on that occasion I did suggest I might discuss Agatha’s stone with you. But it was a simple suggestion that he brusquely turned down. Is he still jealous of our one-time attachment?’

  ‘Yes, he is! Because he now appears to suspect the nature of that attachment!’

  ‘But . . . how can he? What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you think I mean?’

  They stared at each other.

  ‘I don’t know. But whatever is past is long past.’

  ‘Not if he suspects that Valentine is not his child!’

  It was something she could not have said to any other person. It was something that for a long time she had not even said to herself.

  ‘Oh God,’ Ross said. ‘God in Heaven!’

  ‘If you think God has been concerned in this!’

  Over the land it was almost night now but, seawards, sea and sky lent a luminous light to the dark.

  Ross said. ‘And is he?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is he George’s child?’

  ‘I cannot say.’

  ‘You mean you will not say.’

  ‘I will not say.’

  ‘Elizabeth . . .’

  ‘Now I’ll go.’

  She turned to thrust past him. He cau
ght her arm and she wrenched it away. She said: ‘Ross, I wish you would die . . .’

  He stared after her stupidly while she walked rapidly away. Then he ran after her, caught her arm again. She pulled with real violence but this time his grip held.

  ‘Elizabeth!’

  ‘Let me go! Or are you still so much the brute and the bully?’

  He released her arm. ‘Hear me out!’

  ‘What have you to say?’

  ‘Much! But some of it cannot be said.’

  ‘Why? Are you the coward as well?’

  He had never seen her like this, or remotely like it. She had always been so composed – except on that one occasion when he had broken her composure. But this was different, this corroding hysteria and hatred. Hatred of him.

  ‘Yes, the coward, my dear. It’s impossible to dredge up all the memories of fifteen years. It would hurt you the more and I’m sure do my cause with you no good. Three years ago, mine, no doubt, was the crowning injury, the insult you can never forgive and forget. I only ask you when you’re of quieter mind to think over the events that led to my visit that night. Injury until then was not all on one side.’

  ‘Do you mean—’

  ‘Yes, I do mean. Not to excuse myself, but to tell you to think over the ten years before. Wasn’t it the tragedy of a woman, a beautiful woman, who couldn’t make up her mind, and so ruined the lives of all of us? . . .’

  She appeared about to speak again but did not. Her hair and frock gleamed, but there was not enough light now to show her face. She turned slowly and walked on. They were near the gates of Trenwith.

  He said: ‘But that’s past. Even my offence is three years past. It’s the present that shocks me.’ He hesitated, groping for words. ‘How could he ever know?’

  ‘I thought perhaps you had hinted . . .’

  ‘Great God, you must have thought me a monster!’

  ‘Having done the rest, why should you not do that?’

  ‘For the very good reason that I loved you. You were – the love of my life. Love can’t turn to that much hate.’