The Twisted Sword: A Novel of Cornwall 1815

by Winston Graham

  With only two days to go before the axe Stephen was not the best company, but in Jason’s presence he always put on a show; pride in his son’s admiration for him impelled him to make the effort. He had not told Jason of the impending crash, but during the evening the young man got a fair idea that trouble of some sort was impending.

  ‘What’s amiss, Fa-Uncle?’ he said in an undertone after Captain Buller had left. ‘Why ask him?’

  ‘Because the Queen Charlotte’s being refitted for taking on the New York run – now the war’s over. He’ll be signing up crew early next month, and there’ll be plenty applying. He’s got a good reputation and the money’s good.’

  ‘I don’t want to join the Packet Service,’ said Jason. ‘I don’t want to work for anyone but you. I know I wasn’t needed on the Chasse – or Blamey did not want for me to be mate – but I’m willing enough to sail as an ordinary seaman on the Adolphus.’

  ‘Aye, lad,’ said Stephen. ‘I’ve no doubt ye are.’

  ‘There’s something serious wrong, isn’t there. Adolphus has been ready a week an’ she’s not yet victualled.’

  ‘Nothing to be gained by taking on stores while we’re all wind bound. Look at the masters in this room. Everyone’s held up.’

  ‘Yes, but if the wind came off at dawn tomorrow they’d all be away by the first tide. We could not be.’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ said Stephen, and gulped at his ale. But his voice was not sharp.

  They listened together to two captains talking at the next table.

  ‘… the breeze died away and we was befogged and becalmed for nigh on ten days. Man, ye wouldna’ believe it but ye could hear sailors talking in other vessels and never see sight o’ them. Then when the fog lifted we might ha’ been part of an armada. Fourteen of ’em we counted gathered there like a flock of sheep by the calm…’

  Jason said: ‘I heard you were thinking o’ selling Chasse Marée.’

  ‘Who told ye that?’

  ‘It was a word just dropped. Are we doing badly, Father?’

  ‘It is not our fault. I need time, Jason, and I can’t buy time.’

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘No matter. You will find out soon enough.’

  ‘A hundred and fifty-eight barrels of tar,’ a voice said near to them. ‘Fifty-nine hogsheads of tobacco. Five hundred and fifty mats. Eighty wainscot logs. Clapboards. Laden to the gunnels, we were, and who should come up but this French privateer?’

  The Carringtons listened in silence to the story.

  Jason said: ‘So we’re at war with France again.’

  ‘Not yet. I don’t know. We may be. But Harrison’s talking about the winter before last. I’ve heard this story before.’

  Jason said: ‘But it said in the paper last week. It said Parliament said there was a state of war. And it said in another part of the paper that no ships are to go to Ostend except in convoy because o’ the French privateers.’

  ‘The lad’s right,’ said a beery old man, leaning over from the next table. ‘They’ll be issuing Letters of Marque from this side of the Channel before you know. Wish I was younger. I’d go after some pickings.’

  Jason looked at his father who, never down for too long, laughed and slapped the boy on the back.

  ‘Wish we could too. Maybe after the next few weeks, after the dust has settled, we’ll go adventuring on our own.’

  ‘What is wrong with Adolphus?’ persisted Jason.

  ‘Ah … There’s the rub, boy, there’s the rub. Drink up, we must be going.’

  Another conversation drifted to them from a large hairy, good-tempered man who might have German or Scandinavian blood.

  ‘I picked up with the Neptune in December just before we got the Trade Winds, and for twenty-two days we never lost sight of each other, so even balanced was our rate of sailing. I was just ahead all the time; we were carrying topmast studding sails, but alas on the twenty-first day King Wind said we could carry them no longer and carried them off. Ha! ha! ha! No captain likes to be outdone, me least of all. So the next night we had supper together, McGennis and me. A Liverpool man but no worse for that. Ha! ha! ha! He told me he was homeward bound after a successful trip … Thank you, Tonkin. Here’s to your health … A successful trip. Best part of it, he said, was when he was looking for wood and produce in the Gaboon River. Traders came aboard and offered him thirteen slaves. He took ’em. Carried them across and sold ’em to the Portuguese slave traders. Made more, he said, by this than all his commissions and adventures besides…’

  There was what passed for a brief silence in the noisy coffee room.

  ‘’Tis a felony now, carr’ing slaves,’ said a strongly Cornish voice. ‘The law were brought in a few year ago, my dear. ’Tis profitable, I agree, but not if you get ten years’ transportation for et.’

  ‘If you get caught, true enough,’ said the big man. ‘But McGennis was not caught.’

  ‘In Bristol,’ said Stephen, ‘I’m told they have a device of selling their ships to the Portuguese. Not really selling but a device, ye understand. Then they change their names and sail under the Portuguese flag. ’Tis dangerous, but the profits are huge.’

  ‘I’d have no hand in it,’ said a man called Fox. ‘It would be moral blood money. A man who still trades in slaves is no better than a pirate.’

  Jason said in an undertone: ‘I wouldn’t care. If we don’t do it, someone else will. Tell you what, Father. One day we’ll sail off in the Adolphus together, you as captain, me as mate, see what we can find. That would be real good. Come home wi’ gold. If you’re in trouble, Father, money trouble, that’s the way out of it.’

  Stephen looked at the stocky young man beside him. A chip off the old block.

  In spite of the vagrant life he had led and the ill luck that had come his way in his earlier years, Stephen had always had a pride in himself, an arrogant belief in his own ability not merely to survive but to become a success. He was confident in his own maleness, in his physical strength, in his good looks, in his ready tongue. There was a unique person called Stephen Carrington and there was no one quite like him. His mind was quick and adaptable, his body was something to be proud of, he walked with the hint of a swagger. And this boy was very like him. This boy, his blood, looked up to him with pride and admiration. And in a few days’ time he would learn that his father had lost everything, was to be bankrupted at the whim of George Warleggan.

  Well, there was no way out. Of course he was still alive, could somehow begin over again. Scrape together a few hundred pounds from among his friends, lease a small cutter or a schooner, start smuggling crude tin stuff to France, make a bit, add a bit, build up again a step at a time. (Though with the enmity of a Warleggan to face it would be an uphill struggle in this county.) Perhaps go back to Bristol, take Clowance and the boy. (Though he had quite a few enemies there.)

  So all his abilities and adaptabilities really counted for nothing. The trap had been set and he had fallen into it. He had been riding high, and the higher the rise the bigger the fall.

  Some folk would derive a sour satisfaction from it. Not excluding his father-in-law, he suspected, having no doubt from the beginning disapproved an association with the Warleggans. In spite of Clowance’s trenchant rejection of the idea, the old feud seemed the most likely cause of his new ruin. (There was nothing else he had ever done to offend the Warleggans, except to steal money from their bank, a matter on which they could not have the inkling of suspicion.)

  The two men left the hotel together. The south-easter met them, whistling round the corner. It was one of those relentless winds that do not take off even at night.

  Stephen put his hand on Jason’s shoulder, a feeling of warmth and comradeship coming over him. ‘I’ve a difficult time coming, lad. That’s why I was wanting you to sign up with Captain Buller. But no matter; I expect we’ll get along somehow. Carringtons usually do.’

  Chapter Seven

  I

  Jeremy had
been away five days on manoeuvres and returned on the Friday afternoon to kiss Cuby repeatedly and to tell her he had planned a picnic for the Saturday.

  ‘Have I spoken of Captain Mercer? I forget. He has invited us to a picnic in Strytem, where he is stationed. It’s about twelve miles from Brussels. I have hired a carriage and if we leave at nine we shall be able to spend most of the day with them. Do you mind?’

  ‘I’d greatly like it. Is he in your regiment?’

  ‘No, the Horse Artillery under Sir Augustus Fraser. I met him at the Forties Club.’

  ‘Ah yes. I see.’

  There was a brief silence. Jeremy’s membership of the Forties Club was virtually the only bone of contention between them. It was a gaming club open only to officers under the age of forty. They played faro, whist and lansquenet, for low stakes or high according to the whim of the players. The principle of the club was that money never changed hands: it was all done by IOU. Once a month there was a dinner and a reckoning. On one occasion Jeremy had shocked her by saying he was two hundred and fifty guineas in debt. Two weeks later, just before the dinner, he had reduced it to forty guineas, but that was not to say he could have been sure of any such outcome.

  Cuby’s father had died when she was three months old and thereafter her life had been ruled by her brother – who was nine years the elder and who – well set up to begin – had nearly bankrupted himself building a magnificent Nash-designed crenellated mansion overlooking Porthluney Beach, and then compounded his error by trying to recoup his losses on the race course. His plan to marry Cuby into the rich Warleggan family had come to nothing, and it was very doubtful now whether he would be able to survive as a Cornish landowner. When, rarely, a sleepless night came to Cuby she would lie quiet beside Jeremy, hands behind her head, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what would happen to her family now.

  So, reacting to the sort of life in which she had lived all her youth, when outgoings were always greater than incomings, where essential building or repairs were stopped because no one could pay the bricklayers’ wages, where the footmen in the house looked down at heel for lack of a shoe repair or wore a coat splitting at the seams because it had been made for someone else, where the marvellous horse that was going to win the Derby came in fourth or the run of amazing good luck at faro unfortunately changed to an amazing run of ill luck before the winnings could be pocketed, Cuby had, for the first and only time in their married life, exploded at Jeremy.

  Afterwards there had been a wildly rewarding reconciliation, when they had kissed and made up, when he had brushed her damp lids with his own and stroked her breasts and kissed her eyelids, and had promised fervently that his gambling and his extravagances should be strictly curtailed.

  ‘Do you mind, my sweetheart?’ he asked, mistaking, or choosing to mistake, her hesitation. ‘It will not be too much for you?’

  ‘Of course it will not be too much for me, boy,’ she said, using as she sometimes did out of deep affection the name she had first given him. ‘Except for this nasty sickness, which your mother assures me will go away soon, I am very well. I must not be treated as if made of porcelain! For months and months and months yet it will make no difference to my activities. It is natural for a woman to have a baby. There is nothing peculiar about it. It is not an illness, a complaint, a disease. It is just a natural outcome of – of loving.’

  ‘I am delighted’, said Jeremy, ‘that it will make no difference to your activities,’ kissing her in the small of the neck and then on her hair and then blowing gently into her ear. His fingers stroked her face. ‘The natural outcome of loving. What a good expression. Do you not think we should break our five-day fast?’

  ‘Gladly, but it is still daylight.’

  ‘I have no objection to the daylight.’

  ‘And you have not eaten.’

  ‘There are other hungers I would rather satisfy.’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘Oh, curse!’ said Jeremy, rising from beside her. ‘Do not stir. Do not flicker an eyelid, my sweetheart, until I come back. I will send this savage intruder away.’

  But when he opened the door a young man in civilian clothes stood there, in the company of a tall young woman. The young man was sturdily built, full lipped, dark haired and browed.

  ‘Goldsworthy!’

  ‘My dear Jeremy! What a pleasure! I trust that we don’t call on you at an inappropriate moment? We have but an hour since arrived in Brussels. You have never met my wife, Bess? Bess, this is Jeremy Poldark; how happy I am that we have run you to earth!’

  II

  The Gurneys were in Brussels just for a week and had taken rooms in the rue du Musée. They had brought their young baby and a nurse and two servants. Brussels at the moment was the social capital of Europe, with Wellington giving repeated balls and much of the British aristocracy there to frequent them and to give soirées and luncheon parties and suppers themselves. Jeremy, used to regarding Goldsworthy as a juvenile and eccentric innovator and surgeon before his time – he was only twenty-two – was surprised that he had come to savour this hectic scene. Probably his new wife, Elizabeth, who was ten years his senior, was the instigator of the trip; though Gurney was no blushing violet. He was, he announced, thinking of moving to London, where all the important men of science congregated.

  ‘Cornwall is a backwater,’ he said, ‘for what I want to do. Trevithick is there still, but there’s talk of him going to South America. Woolf is active and there are a few other good men about, but I believe if you want to make the impact you have to go to London. I can practise as a surgeon there just as well as in Padstow. Not,’ he added, ‘that I shall lose touch with Cornwall. Once you have lived there, nowhere else is quite the same … And you, Jeremy, how long will you stay in the army? How long before we can go into partnership, constructing the next horseless carriage?’

  They stayed to supper, with Cuby and Jeremy occasionally exchanging sweetly lustful glances when the others were not looking. Jeremy invited them for the picnic the following day, and they accepted.

  At nine the following morning they set off in an open landau and rumbled over the cobbles and out of the city onto the country lane leading to Ninove. Swallows flew high as they passed through rich farmland, patched with woods in which the leaves were brilliantly bursting, a luxurious countryside, unscarred by war.

  But a countryside preparing for war. Villages were full of cavalry or horse artillery or men marching behind gun carriages. ‘Ninove is Lord Uxbridge’s headquarters,’ said Jeremy. ‘He’s the commander of Wellington’s cavalry. It’s only three or four miles from here.’

  All the same, undeterred by thoughts of battle, undistracted by – or uninterested in – the sights of a rich and fertile land, Goldsworthy Gurney spent the trip talking to Jeremy of his plans for a horseless carriage. He was still concerned about adhesion wheel grip on the roads. From his earlier ideas of levers or propellers which acted on the ground like horses’ feet to get the carriage moving, he had turned to the introduction of revolving chains fitted with projections which by moving round, as in launching a dinghy, would help the carriage on its way. He had also been experimenting with a new piano which would, he hoped, harmonize with the organ he had built, and which many people said had a specially fine tone. Eventually they could be played together by a single performer.

  The two ladies got on as best they might, which on the whole was pretty well. Mrs Gurney had been a Miss Symons of Launcells, and was suitably impressed that Mrs Poldark had been a Miss Trevanion. Cuby was relieved that her new friend knew of John Trevanion only as an ex-Sheriff of Cornwall and not as someone hopelessly in debt.

  The carriage turned off the more acceptable road and jolted and lurched among the muddy ruts of a Flemish country lane. Three perilous streams were crossed by bridges on which the plankings were loose. The horses did not like it at all and had to be led.

  When they reached Strytem, which was no more than a hamlet buried in tall elms, the m
oustached Captain Mercer was there to greet them. Two extra made no difference, and he led the way into a large ruined château where his troop was billeted. Inside it was handsome but dark, and soon the party set off followed by a cart containing the food and wine, and tablecloths were laid on the green sward by the banks of a slow-flowing river. There were fourteen of them, including four ladies, and they sat in the sun and laughed and talked and ate and drank in the greatest accord.

  Ghent, said Captain Mercer, was crowded with Bourbons, from servants and hangers-on to princes of the blood. It was also a mustering point for British regiments arriving from England and then passing on to new camps and billets. No one, he said, had any idea what was happening as far as a strategy of war was concerned, but all the Belgians, and most of the French royalist officers attending on the King, were convinced that these splendid troops passing through to fight Bonaparte would, if it came to a battle, be thrown back into the sea.

  Jeremy, in fact, knew a little more than Mercer, having been out all week on manoeuvres and having seen the Duke at close quarters. This had been just east of the village of Waterloo, and at Halle where the roads from Ath and Mons united.

  ‘I do not suppose for a moment’, he said, ‘that the Duke will fight unless he has to. At present we are such a miscellaneous crew! There’s maybe twenty-five thousand British troops in Belgium but less than a quarter are veterans. Most of ’em are less qualified than I! We’re desperately short of cannon and cannot match the French cavalry. Of course we’ve got the Hanoverians, and the Brunswickers, who are good; but who can rely on the Belgians, most of whom are Bonapartists at heart?’

  They left at seven after a day spent in the green heart of spring, making their way back across the bridges until they reached the main road. Here they had twice to draw in to the side while a troop of cavalry clattered past. Then they went through a village in which the Life Guards were taking their ease. Their tall lanky figures in brilliant scarlet tight-fitting jackets contrasted with the brown smock-frocks of the peasants moving among them in the evening light.