On a sudden morning of brilliant sunshine – which presaged rain before dark – Ross walked out to where Demelza was digging in her garden. Ten years ago, inspired by her visit to Strawberry Hill and oppressed by the way the mine and its workings were encroaching on the land before the house, she had persuaded Ross to have a drystone wall built enclosing and extending the area of the garden she had then cultivated. It lay in a large oblong running up and away from the house, the house and the library comprising an L-shaped joint and part of two sides. With this shelter from the wind miracles had been wrought with daffodils, tulips and other spring and early summer flowers. By July the best was over, for the soil was too light to retain moisture. Also most winters, and often in the spring, the garden was ravaged by storm winds from which even the wall could not guard it. Often everything was broken and blackened as if by a forest fire. Yet in between times the flowers handsomely repaid Demelza and one or two casual helpers for their efforts. She had long since given up trying to grow trees. Hollyhocks were difficult enough.
This morning, as if by coincidence, she was forking round Hugh Armitage’s present of more than a decade ago, which had been planted against the wall of the library. She straightened as Ross came up, pushing her hair away from her face with a clean forearm.
He said: ‘The Falmouths’ two magnolias, which I think came from Carolina at the same time as ours, are twenty feet high, and one already in bud.’
‘This poor thing has never been happy here. And it has had a sad winter. I don’t think it is ever going to do any good. The soil is wrong.’
They stood looking at the plant. This was quite a casual discussion between them, with only the faintest shadow of Hugh Armitage left.
‘Perhaps it should go back,’ said Demelza.
‘Where? To Tregothnan?’
‘A plant that neither dies nor prospers … It is out of its element.’
‘No, keep it.’
Demelza looked up at him and smiled. The sun made her eyes glint. ‘Why?’
‘Why keep it? Well … it has become part of our lives.’ A reminder of past error, his as well as hers, but he did not say as much. It was implicit. And without rancour.
Just at that moment Isabella-Rose came screaming into the garden and went galloping over the grass. A stranger might have thought her scalded, but her parents knew this was just an evidence of high spirits, her way of saluting the joy of being alive. Gambolling along beside her was Farquahar, their English setter spaniel, and they both disappeared through the gate that led to the beach.
Demelza peered after her, but they were not visible, presumably rolling together in the sand below the level of the garden wall.
‘She’s more like you than either of the other two,’ said Ross.
‘I swear I never screamed like that!’
‘I didn’t know you when you were eight. But even at eighteen you had your crazy moments.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘And later. And later. You were twenty-one or thereabouts when you went out fishing on your own the day before Jeremy was born.’
‘There’s Jeremy now. Perhaps it was that expedition of mine which has made him so fond of sailing! … Where did he come from, Ross? He’s not like either of us.’
‘I would agree on that!’
‘There has been a change in him recently,’ Demelza said defensively. ‘He seems so high-spirited these last few weeks.’
‘Not just flippant?’
‘Not just that.’
‘Anyway,’ Ross said after a moment, ‘before he reaches us, let me tell you something about George Warleggan that I heard from Lord Falmouth last Friday…’
Jeremy, coming down from the mine and seeing his mother and father in serious conversation, steered away from them and jumped over the stile to the beach where Isabella-Rose was now throwing a stick for Farquahar to retrieve. Approaching her was a hazardous business, for she took the stick, whirled her body around and let go, so that although its objective was the sea the stick was as likely to fly off in any direction.
Demelza said: ‘It is hard to believe. I never thought George would grow to be a speculator … But if it’s true, it’s true. So what are you besting to do?’
‘I cannot think that de Dunstanville will have heard nothing at all. No doubt he will have a point of view.’
‘But you will have to express a point of view too, Ross. Won’t you?’
He rubbed his foot over a worm-cast in the grass. ‘Revenge is a sour bed-fellow. Yet it’s hard to forget the deliberate way Warleggan’s Bank broke Harris Pascoe – not merely by semi-legitimate means but by printing broadsheets and spreading lying rumours. And the number of times before that George has tried to ruin us.’
‘Not only in money ways neither.’
‘… One thinks of the power he has come to wield in Cornwall, the numbers of small men who have gone to the wall because of him. One thinks of his influence for ill. One wonders if in this case it is not so much a matter of paying off old scores as a public duty to bring him down…’
‘Could you if you tried?’
‘I doubt if it would be necessary to do anything so despicable as start a whispering campaign. A rival bank can do so much by making certain moves, and the panic begins of its own accord.’
‘So it will much depend on Lord de Dunstanville?’
‘And my fellow partners. Mr Rogers has no reason to love the Warleggans. Nor Stackhouse, I believe.’
Demelza tilted her face to the sun. ‘Caroline tells me George has been courting some titled lady, Lady Harriet Something. I wonder how this will turn out now.’
He said: ‘You don’t advise me.’
‘On what?’
‘On what I should do.’
‘It won’t be in your hands, surely.’
‘Not entirely, of course. But partly it might. Now Harris Pascoe has died, they look on me as – well, in a manner as his successor.’
‘And you ask for my advice? Is it right for me to give it?’
‘Very right. You have suffered almost as much at George’s hands as I have.’
‘But is this not a man’s decision?’
‘Don’t hedge, my dear.’
She looked at him. ‘Then I will not hedge, my dear. I should have no part in it.’
‘No part in any attempt to bring him down? No part in any pressure applied to Warleggan’s Bank?’
‘You ask me, and I think not.’
On the beach Isabella-Rose was giggling at the top of her voice. The thin high infectious sound was not quite human; it was like some bibulous nightingale bubbling away.
Ross said: ‘When I came to stand trial for my life the Warleggans did all they could to secure a conviction. Without their money, their contrivings…’
‘What George and his kinsfolk have done they have to live with. What we do we have to live with. I look back on my life, Ross; oftentimes when you are away and I have no one to talk to I look back on my life, and I do not remember many shameful things. Perhaps I forget some! But the less of such I have to remember the better it pleases. So in saying have no part in it, it is not of George I think but of ourselves.’
‘And you would say that if Mackworth Praed or Rogers or Basset himself suggests any such move I should oppose it?’
Demelza rubbed some of the damp soil off her hands. ‘I do not think you have to work for the Warleggans, Ross. But I think, being once so involved, you should stand aside and take no part.’
‘Pilate did that.’
‘I know. I’ve always felt sorry for Pilate … But not for Caiaphas … Nor Judas.’
‘Though you often call on him.’
‘Do I?’ Demelza looked up. ‘Now you’re teasing.’
‘Only because you’re my better self. And I have to keep my better self in its place.’
‘Seriously … do you not agree?’
‘I know I ought to. But I regret the temptation has ever arisen. For it is not only George we’d be sett
ling with; it is that odious uncle.’
‘He’s old,’ said Demelza. ‘He’ll soon be dead. Like so many other people and things. George is older too, Ross. People mellow, don’t they? Perhaps he has mellowed. Clowance, I think, did not find him so hateful.’
‘Clowance? When did she meet him?’
‘By accident,’ said Demelza, aware she had let it out. ‘Near Trenwith. A while ago.’
‘I didn’t know he ever came.’
‘Nor I. You were right to warn Geoffrey Charles that the house was neglected. I do wish he would come home for a while – take some leave. There’s been bad news from Portugal, hasn’t there?’
Ross refused to be side-tracked. ‘Did they speak to each other? Did George know who she was?’
‘I believe she informed him. But this was months ago, last summer, before ever you went away.’
‘And I was not told?’
‘I thought you might worry, and there was no need to worry.’
‘Another time allow me to choose.’
‘Your mind was already occupied with your coming journey to Portugal. I thought to save you a distraction.’
‘You mean you thought to save Clowance a talking-to. Judas, what a deceitful woman you are!’
‘Now you’ve stolen my word again!’
Jeremy had appeared off the beach and was coming through the gate.
Ross took his wife’s arm and gave it an admonitory squeeze. ‘All the same, it shows how tenderly my good intentions walk the tightrope. You say forgive and forget, and on the whole I agree … but, mention of him coming to Trenwith, no doubt gloating over the decay of the house, inciting the Harry brothers to new enormities, and – and talking with Clowance – this raises all my hackles over again, and I am ready to – ready to –’
‘What is raising your hackles, Father?’ Jeremy asked, coming up. ‘Who is the one to tremble now?’
Demelza said: ‘If there was a little more trembling done among my children, there would be better discipline at Nampara.’
‘Oh, pooh, Mama,’ said Jeremy. ‘You know you love your children far too much not to give them all their own way.’
‘Never rely on it,’ said Ross, doubling his fist. ‘If you –’
‘But I do!’ said Jeremy. ‘Am doing at this very moment. Seriously. Can we be serious for a little while?’
‘We were perfectly serious,’ Ross said, ‘until you turned up.’
Jeremy glanced from one to the other, uncertain whether he had made a tactical error in speaking to them both at the same time. Often in the past he had found it easier for his purpose if he approached one and let that one put his point of view to the other. They would confer, and usually the one he had approached would act as his advocate. At least, that was how he supposed it happened.
But this was probably too important to be treated that way.
‘Yesterday morning, Father,’ he said, ‘I did not go down Grace, as usual. I went the other way – for a walk along the cliffs. Fine views you get from there. Sands are very clean at the moment – no driftwood, no wreckage. But unfortunately it came on to drizzle. You remember? About ten. And I thought to myself, drot it, this is not good enough. I thought, I’m getting wet, and to no purpose; I must shelter somewhere. So I decided to shelter by going down Wheal Leisure. It just happened to be handy, there on the cliffs. So down I went.’
The brilliant morning was nearly over. Wisps of cloud, like white smoke from a fire, were drifting up from the south-west, unobtrusive as yet; they would darken and thicken by midday.
‘I thought I told you not to go down Leisure!’
‘I don’t remember that, sir. I remember you were a mite discouraging.’
There was a glint of irony in Ross’s eye. ‘And what did you find there? Gold?’
‘It is all in a poor way. Some of the shafts have fallen in, and it was necessary twice to come back and start again. The thirty fathom level is very wet; much of it is in two feet of water, running fast towards the lowest adit.’
‘It was dangerous to go on your own,’ Demelza said, memories stabbing at her.
‘I didn’t, Mama. Ben Carter went with me.’
‘Who also happened to be just strolling along the cliffs?’
‘Exactly … Well, in fact we were strolling together.’
‘I’m sure. So you went down – getting wetter than you ever could by staying out in the drizzle. What was your feeling about it all?’
‘Well, Ben is cleverer than I – ten times more experienced anyhow. He thinks it would pay to sink a couple of shafts deeper – say twenty fathoms deeper.’
‘Pay whom?’
‘We were working it out together: in this district the lodes usually run in an east–west direction – which means we could strike a continuation of the tin floors we’ve been working at Wheal Grace – or even pick up some of the old Trevorgie lodes. In any case the copper has only been exhausted so far as the present levels are concerned.’
After a moment Ross said: ‘There is no way of going deeper without installing pumping gear.’
‘In a few months if the spring is dry it should be possible to sink a shaft or two and temporarily drain them with hand pumps until we see if there are any signs of good quality working ground.’
‘And if there are?’
‘Then we could build an engine.’
‘But surely,’ Demelza said, ‘Wheal Leisure belongs to the Warleggans.’
‘After we’d been down we went to see Horrie Treneglos. Horrie’s grandfather was alive, of course, when the mine closed. Horrie asked his father about it; we thought the Warleggan interest might have fallen in altogether. But it seems it did not. The Warleggans by then had bought out most of the other venturers; so they sold off the few things that would fetch anything at all and declared the mine in abeyance, and that’s how it has stayed. So far as Mr John Treneglos knows, he owns an eighth share and the Warleggans about seven-eighths, though he thinks there was some relative of Captain Henshawe’s who refused to sell a sixty-fourth part … It’s really all worth nothing at the moment; a few stone buildings and a hole in the ground.’
Ross said: ‘Trust the Warleggans to preserve an interest in a hole in the ground.’
‘So it still isn’t feasible,’ said Demelza.
‘Well…’ Jeremy cleared his throat and looked from one to the other. ‘I suggested to Horrie that he could perhaps persuade his father to do something – such as call in at Warleggan’s Bank when he is next in Truro and say he would like to reopen Leisure with them. They’re sure to say conditions aren’t favourable – and he could then offer to buy their interest and go ahead on his own. They might very well sell to him where they’d not be willing to sell to us.’
Ross said to Demelza: ‘The boy is developing an instinct for commerce. And this deviousness is in the best traditions … Are you suggesting that John Treneglos should act as a sort of nominee?’
‘Not altogether, Father. We think – if the price isn’t too high – he might put up a third.’
‘It doesn’t sound like the John Treneglos I know.’
‘It could be profitable. His father did well out of it. And as it’s Treneglos land, he’s mineral lord and would get his dish if the mine opened; just as we have done all these years from Wheal Grace.’
‘In the old days Mr Horace Treneglos only put up oneeighth – and that reluctantly.’
‘Well … it’s like this. Since Vincent went down in his sloop Horrie says his father and mother are passing anxious to keep him home. They would, he thinks, welcome the idea of giving him a mining interest.’
‘And the other two-thirds?’
‘I thought you might take up a third, Father, and the other third we could advertise. With your name and Mr Treneglos’s heading the list I don’t think we should be hard set to find a few investors.’
Ross said after a few moments: ‘You are of a sudden very practical and enterprising. It is somewhat of a change.’
Jeremy flushed. ‘I simply thought it a good thing, with Wheal Grace nearing exhaustion…’ His voice ended in a mumble. Demelza eyed him.
Ross said: ‘Twenty years ago when Cousin Francis and I opened Wheal Grace it cost us about twelve hundred pounds. Today that would no doubt be fifteen hundred without the cost of having to buy the mine back. I know the expense would not come all at once; but the engine itself – if it came to that, as it surely would – would cost in the neighbourhood of a thousand pounds.’
The first real smudge of cloud moved across the sun. All the lights of the day were lowered; then they came on again.
Jeremy said: ‘I have been studying pumping engines. While you have been away. I believe I could design a suitable engine – with Aaron Nanfan and one of the Curnows to advise. Of course that would not reduce the cost of manufacture, but it would be a considerable saving over all.’
Ross stared at his son, then at his wife.
‘Has he?’
‘If he says he has, Ross, he has.’
Ross said at length: ‘But, Jeremy, it cannot all be learned in a few months, however much you have been studying; nor all by diagrams.’
‘It has not all been diagrams.’
‘I shall need to be convinced of that. In any case it would not reduce the cost by more than – fifteen per cent?’
‘I thought twenty, Father.’
‘Even so, it would not do to build an engine which by some perhaps small flaw in design would put the other eighty per cent at risk. However,’ he went on as Jeremy was about to speak, ‘we can consider that later. Supposing we should come to look on this reopening as a practical idea – and clearly there’d have to be a deal of consideration before we came to that point – two hurdles must be cleared first. Thoughts of an engine must wait on those. First, is the prospect of the mine as good as Ben seems to think? Though I dislike the thought of trespassing on Warleggan property, I’d want to go down myself. And if Zacky Martin be well enough I’d wish him to go with me. Second, if we are convinced of a fair prospect, will the Warleggans sell?’
The Stranger from the Sea: A Novel of Cornwall, 1810-1811 Page 22
