The Black Moon

by Winston Graham

  ‘Oh, Morwenna, there is something I had intended to have mentioned to you. It is true, is it, that you have been riding on Hendrawna Beach?’

  The girl put down the needlework she was doing. She needed no glasses for this close work. ‘Yes. Did Geoffrey Charles tell you?’

  ‘He did not volunteer the information. I found sand in his pocket and asked him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Morwenna. ‘We have been several times. Was that wrong?’

  ‘Not wrong. But straying further afield than I have the fancy for you doing.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It is in fact less far than we ride the other way. But if you do not wish us to, we need not go there again.’

  ‘How do you get on? Do you go through Nampara land?’

  ‘No. I thought from what you said you’d not like us to do that, so we go round by Marasanvose and through the sandhills which I believe belong to Mr Treneglos.’

  ‘Keigwin goes with you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Though sometimes Geoffrey Charles has a fancy to walk and then we walk on alone.’

  ‘He is a strong-willed boy. You must not let him get the upper hand of you.’

  Morwenna smiled. ‘I do not think he does, Elizabeth. But he is not so much strong-willed as – persuasive.’

  Elizabeth smiled too and put a hand to turn the handle of her old spinning-wheel. She had not used it for over a year.

  Morwenna said: ‘There is a holy well among the low cliffs about a half way along the beach. If you have not seen it . . .’

  ‘I have not seen it.’

  ‘Geoffrey Charles would greatly wish to take you there, I know. And beyond that are some caves which are quite fantastical. It is like going into a great abbey. But all dripping water. Very eerie and strange. Why do you not ride with us one day, Elizabeth?’

  Morwenna’s eyes had an unusual brilliance, Elizabeth thought. Perhaps it was some trick of the candlelight.

  She said: ‘Some day, perhaps. Next summer. But now the days are drawing in and there is the risk of strong tides I would feel better pleased if you did not go on another beach this year.’

  ‘We are very careful.’

  ‘I would prefer you not to have to take that sort of care.’

  ‘Very well, Elizabeth. Geoffrey Charles will be greatly disappointed, but whatever you say, of course, we will do.’

  There was something vaguely combative in the words which contrasted with Morwenna’s normal quietness of tone. Elizabeth’s sharp perception picked it up, but she did not feel there was anything she could really query. Geoffrey Charles, she thought, had also been secretive. If necessary she would get the secret out of him.

  Morwenna turned again to her needlework. Very eerie and fantastical: that was what the day had been. A meeting with Drake at ten – he had somehow got off work – a brilliant morning with clouds building up for afternoon rain; a mile walk along the shining ochre sand – soft today from some freak of the tide so that their footsteps were left in a deep track behind them; Geoffrey Charles running to and from the edge of the water laughing with delight at its lick on his bare feet; the two young adults walking more gravely and talking together, laughing together sometimes at Geoffrey Charles as if seeking excuse and common ground for expressing their pleasure at being alive and in each other’s company; their approach to the great caves, not so long since vacated by the sea and still a-drip with water; the wide pool at the mouth of them, and Geoffrey Charles pulling up his trousers as far as he could and splashing through it; of Drake’s offering to carry her and her refusal, instead going behind a rock and taking off boots and stockings, then walking skirt-held through graspingly cold water over the knees and safely to the other side; the scraping of tinder to make a light, the smoking tallow candles on old miners’ hats Drake had brought for them, the exploration through slithering seaweed and among driftwood and the flotsam of the tide ever further and deeper into the echoing reaches of the caves. She was always afraid of enclosed places, and this was no exception; and she was afraid of the great white surf roaring not so far away lest the tide might turn treacherously and cut them off. But the fear added to the excitement and was bearable because it could be shared among them, and particularly with him. It was not a situation, her attraction for this rough young carpenter, that she could accept or be content with in rational moments; but nothing, no prohibition of class or creed, could have prevented her absorbed enjoyment of the morning.

  Elizabeth had said something.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was dreaming. Excuse me.’

  ‘As the autumn comes on, I would advise you not go far afield, even with Keigwin as your escort. The village folk are law-abiding, and in any case know you and respect you; but the harvest has failed and that must lead to more poverty and distress. And the further you stray the more likely it would be that some harm would befall you. Indeed, as the bad weather comes it would be safer not to take Geoffrey Charles out of the grounds at all. Remember, this is his first year of comparative freedom, and we should not overdo it.’

  They had not overdone it, surely, that morning, though the morning had not ended with the exploration of the caves. After they had come out into the air again the sun had been a hot eye burning them, the sky a meridian blue, with a ridge of cloud creeping up from the north as black as a black sheep’s fleece; and Drake had stripped to his trousers and gone jumping into the heavy waves that rumbled on the sand. Not to be outdone, Geoffrey Charles, ignoring Morwenna’s protests, had stripped himself of everything and gone in naked. Morwenna had followed to the edge and had stood there watching them while the bubbling froth swirled and ebbed about her legs. Afterwards they had lain drying behind a rock in the hot sun, Geoffrey Charles for decency’s sake covered by his undershirt. Had they overdone it? Was such exquisite pleasure forbidden and wrong?

  ‘Morwenna!’ said Elizabeth sharply.

  ‘I am indeed sorry, Elizabeth; I was thinking. Forgive me again.’

  ‘I was saying that I hope while I am away that you will keep him closely to his studies. In a year or so Mr Warleggan is determined to send him away to school, perhaps to Bristol, or even as far as London. It is essential therefore that he keeps attentive to his work, particularly to his Latin.’

  ‘I will do my best to keep him at his studies,’ said Morwenna.

  Will Nanfan was a big man with fair hair greying and thinning, who kept some sheep on his smallholding and eked out a living by this and other means. He was an uncle of Jinny Carter and the husband of the tall blonde Char, whom Jud Paynter had once lusted after. He called to see Ross one evening with news of a contact he had made in Roscoff, one Jacques Clisson, a merchant who travelled the peninsula buying up lace and silk gloves to bring to the port for sale to the English traders. He knew as much about affairs, said Nanfan, as anyone you could find who would be prepared to open his mouth for money. According to Clisson there were six or seven hundred English in prison in Brest, and a few at Pontivy and La Force, but by far the largest number were at a place called Camp-air – though in the queer French lingo it was spelt Q-u-i-m-p-e-r. There there were three or four thousand English, of all sorts and conditions, women and children, merchant seamen, matelots, officers, the sick and the well, in one enormous convent, which had been turned into a prison. According to Trencrom’s map, which Nanfan had brought along, Quimper was only a few miles from the Bay of Audierne where the Travail had foundered, so the chances were that if there were any survivors they would have been taken there.

  Nanfan had asked Clisson what information he could get about names of ships, prisoners, and officers in particular, and had offered fifty guineas for a full list of the names of officers saved from the Travail – if any. Clisson had said he would do what he could, but that it was dangerous work and might take time.

  Ross straightened up from the map. ‘Did this man give any idea of how the prisoners were being treated?’

  ‘Not well. Bad, i’ fact. Jacques says tedn the ordinary folk, tes the rabble that’s got the up
per hand. Among that sort there’s little decency left.’

  ‘How do you meet Clisson if you have no date fixed for your next run?’

  ‘He belong to be in Roscoff every mid-week. Thursday to Monday he’s on his travels. Comes home Monday night wi’ ’is horse and his pack’orse and the stuff he’s bought for England.’

  ‘Does he speak English?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Else I wouldn’t understand’n.’

  ‘I picked up a smattering of French when I was a boy, Will, going over with my father; but I would hardly think I know a word now. Do you remember my father?’

  Nanfan smiled. ‘Oh, yes, sur, I mind him well. I mind seeing your mother once too, though that were long ago, when I was no more’n a tacker. She were riding a horse alongside of your father. She were tall. And thin, like – or thin then – wi’ long dark hair.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ross. ‘Yes. She had long dark hair . . .’ For a moment he was a child of nine again and a part of her sickness and her pain. It was terrible the darkness then, and the crying woman, and the unguents and the balm and the scurrying feet. Illness and sad smells and an old nurse and the parchment colour of his father’s face. Smoke casting a shadow, and the shadow was disease and death. He blinked and shook the image away. Now it was twenty-five years later and his wife and child bloomed and the corroding worm had gone from the house.

  He said: ‘In those early days when I went across with my father as a boy, ours as you know was not organized as a business: we sailed to Guernsey only to stock up our own cellars with brandy and rum and tea . . . Even then the British government was trying to put a stop to the trade at Guernsey. Roscoff is much the same run, I suppose?’

  ‘No different. But Roscoff is rare and prosperous. Two new hostelries they’re building; and there is English, Dutch, French merchants there, all doing a fine trade.’

  ‘Not interfered with even by the Revolutionaries?’

  ‘Not even by the Revolutionaries. Ye can stroll around in the town wi’out let or hindrance; but I reckon if ye was to stray far beyond its boundaries, then you’d be picked up soon ’nough.’

  Will began to roll up the map. It made a crackling sound in the silent room. ‘Mind, tis a bit edgy in Roscoff. Everyone be there for the trade, but everyone d’watch everyone else It is spy on spy, as ye might say. Men d’look over their shoulder at other men. Even women is on the squitch. We will need to go careful wi’ Clisson, for if someone let it be known as he was having truck wi’ the English gentry twould be simple to denounce him – that’s what they call it – denounce him, and he’d be took to Brest and axed.’

  Ross nodded. ‘So if I went over it would be better if I had some good plain business there, trading or the like, and then meet Clisson by accident?’

  ‘It would be well advised. And clothed like one of us. Ye’d not be amiss then if you’ve the mind to come.’

  ‘I’ll see Mr Trencrom,’ Ross said.

  Chapter Ten

  In 1760 when the meeting house at Grambler had been projected, after one of the great Wesleyan revival meetings near, Charles Poldark, then a stout, active, cautiously prosperous man of forty-one, had been approached to give a piece of land on which the little house could be built. Although disliking Methodism as he disliked any deviation from the norm, and distrusting it as in a sense a rival to the authority of the squire, he was prevailed upon by his new wife, then only just twenty and already the mother of his two children, to allow them a corner of land abutting on the straggling village of Sawle. Young Mrs Charles, although never admitting it to her husband, had as a girl heard Wesley preach, and had come near conversion herself.

  Charles, always cautious, would not give the land but leased it on a three lives basis. However, on the bottom of the lease he wrote that ‘A new lease on a further three lives shall be granted free at the discretion of my successors’.

  By the time the last of the three men died on whom the original lease had been based, it was 1790, and Methodism in Grambler had fallen as low as Bodmin church spire; but Will Nanfan’s father, then still alive and one of the original founder-members of the Society, had remembered enough to take two other elders and call on Francis and ask for a renewal of the lease. Francis, preoccupied and unbusinesslike, had simply waved a hand at them and said: ‘Forget it: the property is yours.’ After due thanks, old Nanfan had mumbled something about a deed and Francis had said, ‘Of course. I’ll see to it.’ He never had, but as he was so young there had seemed no need to press it.

  Tankard, George Warleggan’s solicitor, had been out from Truro weekly since he took up residence, establishing just where the boundaries of the Poldark property began and ended, looking through old mining leases and generally tidying up the neglect of years. When any questions of rights came up, George had instructed that wherever there was doubt this should be firmly resolved but that Tankard was to err on the side of generosity. George had no desire to establish himself in the neighbourhood as a severe landlord, and indeed no need. He always paid his servants and his employees well; much above the average for the day: it cost so little extra, and for it he demanded and received good service with no nonsense and no sentiment involved. But he did dislike vague agreements, loose ends, untidy clauses, things understood rather than written down. He had a formidable, tidy and efficient mind and it did not appreciate inefficiency in others.

  Often the cases were simple enough to decide without reference back, but one afternoon before he left to return to Truro Tankard said: ‘That Meeting House, Mr Warleggan, just on the edge of the village. Last week I saw they was repairing the roof, so I looked up the documents that you have here and I found they was operating on an expired lease. This forenoon I called round to see them. There was the three of them there and I pointed out the situation anent the lease, whereupon the eldest of them, a man called Nanfan, said that when the lease expired four years ago the land had been gifted to them by Mr Francis Poldark. I asked them for the relevant deed, but Nanfan said this had been a verbal gift. Mr Francis Poldark had simply said: “You may have the land,” and left it at that. Of the three men present on that occasion, two of them, including this Nanfan’s father, have since died, so there be only one witness to the event. I said as I would refer the matter back to you.’

  George looked at the map on the wall of his study which showed the boundaries and details of the estate. ‘That it? Yes. They even call it Meeting House Lane, I see. Well, it has been sanctified by time, I suppose. Draw up a formal deed of gift. Find someone responsible on the other side to sign it. Let it be done properly.’

  ‘Very good. I’ll attend to that next week.’

  ‘But a moment . . . These are the dissenters who have been annoying us in church, aren’t they? Odgers, this grub of a parson we have here, has been doing battle with them. He has forbidden them the church, and now he says they attend service at Marasanvose and hold meetings in Grambler while the church service is on. Our church was three parts empty last Sunday.’

  Tankard waited obediently halfway to the door.

  George tapped the map. ‘Leave it. Let it lie in abeyance until next week. In the meantime I will see Odgers and get his views.’

  Two weeks later George went to Truro, partly on business, partly to see that their town house would be in all ways ready to receive them. Elizabeth stayed behind, attending to all the minor businesses which require thought when one is moving for several months. In the evening about six a deputation of three men called to see her.

  It was not a convenient time: she had been busy all day and had had words with her mother, who was at her most tiresome. The elderly gentlefolk who had been engaged to look after the Chynoweths had left in July, and had not been replaced. So exacting was Mrs Chynoweth that only the most needy would stay in such a situation and so far she had turned down three new pairs of applicants. It meant more work for the ordinary servants and more responsibility for Elizabeth. Also today little Valentine had been sickly and fretful and she hoped he was not
sickening for something Yet she had lived in the district ten years, knew everyone in the village, and could not bring herself to turn them away without seeing her.

  In fact, only two came into the parlour; Tom Harry, who escorted them, thought three was a crowd, so the youngest member of the party, Drake Carne, had been told to wait in the kitchen. Of the two who came Elizabeth knew only one, the big middle-aged, highly respected Will Nanfan, whose smallholding ran beside a corner of the estate; the other was a younger man, tall, tow-headed with a thin lined face that belied his youth.

  They stood awkwardly before her – it was difficult dealing with a woman but it seemed their only chance – they did not know what to do with their feet or their hands until Elizabeth, smiling, told them to sit down. Then with some hand-twisting and throat-clearing they told her their tale. When it was done and she had all the information they could give her, she said:

  ‘You must appreciate that it is very difficult for me to interfere. I leave all the management of the property to my husband, Mr Warleggan, whom you should have seen instead. It would have been far better, because he could have given you a considered answer.’

  ‘We did ask for him last week, but Mr Tankard d’say he is too busy to see us.’

  ‘Well, he is a busy man. I’ll tell him you’ve called; but if this is his decision and not just the lawyer’s then I cannot promise to alter it.’

  ‘We thought,’ said Nanfan, ‘as Mr Francis had give the land to us. Perhaps you could put it to Mr Warleggan that – well, it’s fair and proper for we to keep it. If Mr Francis Poldark hadn’t said as we could have it—’

  ‘Are you sure he said that? Could there have been some misunderstanding?’

  ‘Oh, no, ma’am, my father were quite sartin. And old Jope Ishbel d’say the same. Besides, in the first lease Mr Joshua Poldark say it is to be renewed.’

  ‘At the discretion of his heirs – is that it?’

  ‘. . . Well, yes, ma’am.’