Demelza

by Winston Graham

  As he came back to the bed Demelza wiped her eyes.

  “I think, I believe I like you with a beard, Ross.”

  He put his hand up. “Well, I do not like myself. It will come off sometime today.”

  “Is it going to be a fine day, do you think?”

  “Fine enough.”

  “I wish I could see the sun. That is the drawback to this room: there is no sun until afternoon.”

  “Well, so soon as you are well you shall go upstairs again.”

  “Ross, I should like to see our room again. Take me up, just for a few minutes, please. I believe I could walk up if I tried.”

  On an emotional impulse he said, “Very well. If you wish it.”

  He lifted her out of the bed, wrapped a blanket around her legs, two around her shoulders, and picked her up. She had lost a lot of weight, but somehow the feel of her arm about his neck, the living companionable substance of her, was like a balm. Still quiet to avoid rousing Jane, he slipped out of the room, mounted the creaking stair. He carried her into their bedroom, set her down on the bed. Then he went to the window and opened one to clean a circle in the salt of the other. He shut the window and went back to the bed. Tears were streaming down her face.

  “What is wrong?”

  “The cot,” she said. “I had forgotten the cot.”

  He put his arm about her and they sat quiet for a minute or two. Then he picked her up again and took her to the window and sat her in a chair.

  She stared out on the scene, and with his cheek pressed against hers he stared with her. She took up a corner of the blanket and tried to stop the tears.

  She said, “How pretty the cliffs look with all those streamers on ’em.”

  “Yes.”

  “Redruth Fair,” she said. “The beach puts me in mind of that, the day after it is over.”

  “It will take some clearing, but the sea is a good scavenger.”

  “Ross,” she said, “I should like you to make it up with Francis sometime. It would be better all around.”

  “Sometime.”

  “Sometime soon.”

  “Sometime soon.” He had no heart to argue with her.

  The sun shone full upon her face, showing the thin cheeks and the pallid skin.

  “When something happens,” she said, “like what has just happened to us, it makes all our quarrels seem small and mean, as if we were quarreling when we hadn’t the right. Didn’t we ought to find all the friendship we can?”

  “If friendship is to be found!”

  “Yes. But didn’t we ought to seek it? Can’t all our quarrels be buried and forgotten, so that Verity can come to visit us and we go to Trenwith and we can live in friendship and not hatred while there’s time.”

  Ross was silent. “I believe yours is the only wisdom, Demelza,” he said at length.

  They watched the scene on the beach.

  “I shan’t have to finish that frock for Julia now,” she said. “It was that dainty too.”

  “Come,” he said. “You will be catching cold!”

  “No. I am quite warm, Ross. Let me stay a little longer in the sun.”

  Order Winston Graham’s next book

  in the Poldark series

  Jeremy Poldark

  On sale August 2015

  Reading Group Guide

  1. Demelza occasionally worries about Ross’s feelings for Elizabeth, his former fiancée. Do you think Demelza’s concern is justified, or is she making too much of something unimportant?

  2. Ross and Demelza hold two christening parties—one for upper-class guests and one for poorer guests. As could be expected, Demelza feels uncomfortable and out of place during the first party but fine during the second. How does Ross manage to fit in and be perfectly comfortable in both settings?

  3. When Tom Carne and John Treneglos argue at the party, Ross intervenes to apologize for Carne’s behavior. Ross says to Treneglos, “Modes and manners vary with the breed…those with the same code can speak the same language” (p. 42). Do you think it would have been possible for Carne and Treneglos to communicate effectively with each other? What kinds of differences have you run into with other people that make communication especially difficult?

  4. As Ross reacts to Jim Carter’s death, Verity suggests that the Poldarks are all sentimentalists at heart and that it is a more dangerous trait than cynicism. Which do you believe is more dangerous, cynicism or sentimentality?

  5. Demelza and Keren both marry into a class and lifestyle that differs greatly from those in which they were born and raised. What similarities and differences do you notice in the ways Demelza and Keren adapt to their new lifestyles?

  6. Do you support Demelza secretly meeting with Andrew Blamey and organizing his rendezvous with Verity? Do you think Francis and Ross react fairly or unfairly when Demelza eventually confesses her actions to them?

  7. When Ross thinks about marriage, he is struck by the fact that though he and Demelza are attached to each other as closely as possible, “they were yet separate beings irrevocably personal and apart, and must remain so for all efforts to bridge the gulf” (p. 99). To what extent do you think Ross and Demelza genuinely attempt to bridge this gulf? Do they communicate with each other as well as they can or should?

  8. Several characters express concern about their reputations and are secretive about their actions, whether they are immoral or perfectly harmless. Why do you think rumors and suspicions spread so quickly throughout the various towns and homes?

  9. Keren complains that the common folk are dull, narrow, and no more than half alive. Dwight, on the other hand, enjoys the locals and suggests that a closer look reveals an admirable depth to their personalities and attitudes. Given that both Keren and Dwight are outsiders to the community, why do you think their perspectives differ so greatly? With whom do you agree?

  10. Ross criticizes the upper class at Warleggan’s party and blames Jim Carter’s death on their selfishness and sloth. Demelza vehemently counters that he is stereotyping both the upper and lower classes. This seems like a reversal of their earlier relationships to different classes during the christening parties. What do you think prompts Demelza to make this argument at the ball?

  11. The initial description of Andrew Blamey supplied by Ross and Francis does not seem to match his actions later in the novel. What do you think accounts for this difference?

  12. Do you agree with the general public’s assessment of who is at fault and to what degree for the conflict between Dwight, Keren, and Mark? How is Ross’s reaction different? How much blame do you place on each character?

  13. Ross insists that he will not borrow money from friends during tough financial times. Do you commend his attitude, or do you think he is being foolishly stubborn?

  14. After Julia’s death, Ross bleakly reexamines his life and considers it a “frenzied futile struggle ending in failure and near bankruptcy” (p. 387). He feels as though a phase or epoch of his life has come to an end. How would you respond to his self-assessment? Do you think a specific phase has come to an end for Ross? If so, what is that phase, and what lies ahead for him?

  15. To what extent do you condone the behavior of the locals during the shipwrecks at the end of the novel? Why do you think Ross invites the crew to stay at his house overnight? Does this gesture successfully make up for the locals’ behavior?

  JEREMY POLDARK

  A Novel of Cornwall,

  1790–1791

  Read on for an excerpt from Jeremy Poldark,

  book three in the Poldark series.

  Available August 2015 from Sourcebooks Landmark.

  Chapter One

  In August 1790 three men rode along the mule track past Grambler Mine and made toward the straggling cottages at the end of the village. It was evening and the sun had just set; clouds had been driven up the
sky by a westerly breeze and were beginning to flush with the afterglow. Even the mine chimneys, from which no smoke had issued for the best part of two years, took on a matured mellow color in the evening light. In a hole in the taller of the two, pigeons were nesting, and their flapping wings beat against the wider silence as the men passed. A half dozen ragged children were playing with a homemade swing suspended between two of the sheds, and some women standing at the doors of cottages, hands on elbows, watched the horsemen ride by.

  They were soberly dressed, respectable riders in a clerkish black, and they sat on their horses with an air of importance; not many such were seen those days in the half-derelict, half-deserted village that had come into being and had existed solely to serve the mine and that, with the mine dead, was itself perishing of a slower decay. It seemed that the men were going to pass right through—as might have been expected—but at last one nodded his head and they reined in their horses at a more dejected-looking shack than anything they had yet seen. It was a one-story cob hut with an old iron pipe for a chimney and a roof patched and repatched with sacking and driftwood, and at its open door on an upturned box sat a bowlegged man sharpening a piece of wood. He was under the average height, strongly built, but getting up in years. He wore old riding boots bound with string, yellow pigskin breeches, a dirty gray flannel shirt that had lost one sleeve at the elbow, and a stiff black leather waistcoat whose pockets bulged with worthless odds and ends. He was whistling almost soundlessly, but when the men got down from their horses, he unpursed his lips and looked at them with wary bloodshot eyes; his knife hung over the stick while he sized them up.

  The leader, a tall emaciated man with eyes so close together as to suggest a cast, said, “Good day. Is your name Paynter?”

  The knife slowly lowered itself. The bowlegged man put up a dirty thumbnail and scratched the shiniest spot on his bald head.

  “Mebbe.”

  The other made a gesture of impatience. “Come, man. You’re either Paynter or you’re not. It’s not a subject on which there can be two opinions.”

  “Well, I aren’t so sure ’bout that. Folk is too free with other folk’s names. Mebbe there can be two opinions. Mebbe there can be three. It all depend what you d’want me for.”

  “It is Paynter,” said one of the men behind. “Where’s your wife, Paynter?”

  “Gone Marasanvose. Now if you be wanting she…”

  “My name is Tankard,” said the first man sharply. “I’m an attorney acting for the Crown in the coming case of Rex versus Poldark. We want to ask you a few questions, Paynter. This is Blencowe, my clerk, and Garth, an interested party. Will you lead the way inside?”

  Jud Paynter’s wrinkled teak-colored face took on a look of injured innocence, but under the conventional defense there was a glint of genuine alarm.

  “What are ’ee coming troubling me for? I said all I had to say afore magistrates, an’ that were nothing. ’Ere I am, living a Christian life like St. Peter himself, sitting before his own front door interfering with no one. Leave me be.”

  “The law must take its course,” Tankard said and waited for Jud to get up.

  After a minute, glancing suspiciously from one face to the other, Jud led the way inside. They seated themselves in the shadowy hut, Tankard staring distastefully about and lifting his coattails to avoid the litter as he sat down. None of the visitors had delicate noses, but Blencowe, a pasty, stooping little man, looked back wistfully at the sweet evening outside.

  Jud said, “I don’t know nothing about’n. You’re barking up the wrong door.”

  “We have reason to believe,” said Tankard, “that your deposition before the examining justice was false in every particular. If—”

  “You’ll pardon me,” said Garth in an undertone. “Perhaps you’d be letting me speak to Paynter for a minute or two, Mr. Tankard. You remember I said, afore we came in, that there’s more ways…”

  Tankard folded his thin arms. “Oh, very well.”

  Jud turned his bulldog eyes upon his new adversary. He thought he had seen Garth before, riding through the village or some such. Snooping perhaps.

  Garth said in a conversational, friendly tone, “I understand you were Captain Poldark’s servant at one time, you and your wife, for a great many years and for his father afore him?”

  “Mebbe.”

  “And after working faithful for him all those years you were suddenly put off, turned from the house without a word of warning.”

  “Ais. ’Tweren’t right or proper, I’ll say that.”

  “It is said, mind you, this is but hearsay, y’understand, that he treated you shameful afore you left—for some fancied misdeed—used his horsewhip and near drowned you under the pump. Would that be so?”

  Jud spat on the floor and showed his two great teeth.

  “That’s against the law,” interposed Tankard, squinting down his long thin nose. “Offenses against the person: common assault and battery. You could have proceeded, Paynter.”

  “And it can’t have been the first time, I’ll wager,” said Garth.

  “No, nor it wasn’t either,” Jud said after a minute, sucking at his teeth.

  “People who ill-treat faithful servants don’t deserve them these days,” said Garth. “There’s a new spirit abroad. Every man is as good as his neighbor. Look what be happening in France.”

  “Ais, I d’know all about that,” Jud said and then stopped. It wouldn’t do to let those prying busybodies into the secret of his visits to Roscoff. All the time that Poldark stuff might be a blind to trap him into other admissions.

  “Blencowe,” said Tankard. “Have you the brandy? We could all do with a tot, and no doubt Paynter will join us.”

  The afterglow faded, and the shadows in the littered hut grew darker.

  “Take it from me,” said Garth. “The aristocracy is finished. Their day is over. Common men will be coming into their rights. And one of their rights is not to be treated worse than dogs, not to be used as slaves. D’you understand the law, Mr. Paynter?”

  “The Englishman’s house is his castle,” said Jud. “And habeas corpse, and thou shalt not move thy neighbor’s landmark.”

  “When there’s trouble at law,” said Garth, “like what there was here in January, it’s often hard for the law to act like it should. So it acts as best it may. And when there’s riot and wrecking and robbery and suchlike, it says nothing about those who follow if so be as it can lay hold on those who lead is plain to be seen.”

  “Mebbe.”

  “No mebbe about it. But reliable evidence is hard to come by. Evidence of responsible men like yourself… And, mind you, if the law sees it cannot prove a case against the ringleader, then it will look further and smoke out the lesser men. That’s the truth of it, Mr. Paynter, as sure as I’m sitting here. So it’s best for all that the right man should stand in the assizes.”

  Jud picked up his glass and set it down again, it being empty; Blencowe hastily proffered the brandy bottle. There was a comfortable bobbling sound as Jud upended it.

  “I don’t see why for you d’come to me, when I wasn’t there at all,” he said, caution still uppermost. “A man can’t see farther’n he can blaw.”

  “Listen, Paynter,” said Tankard, ignoring Garth’s warning sign. “We know a great deal more than you think. These inquiries have been in train for near on seven months. It would be better for you if you made a clean breast of it all.”

  “Clean breast, indeed—”

  “We know that you actively cooperated with Poldark on the morning of the wreck. We know you were on the beach all through the rioting of that day and the following night. We know you played a leading part in resisting the officers of the Crown when one was seriously injured, and in many ways you are as culpable as your master.”

  “I never ’eard sich loitch in all me life! Me? I was never neare
r the wreck nor what I am now—”

  “But as Garth explained, we’re willing to overlook this if you will turn King’s evidence. We’ve a weight of testimony against this man Poldark, but wish to make it stronger. It’s plain you owe him no loyalty. Why, on your own showing he’s treated you shamefully! Come, man, it’s common sense to tell us the truth, as well as your common duty.”

  With some dignity Jud got to his feet.

  “Also,” said Garth, “we’d make it worth your while.”

  Jud pivoted thoughtfully on his heel and slowly sat down again. “Eh?”

  “Not official, of course. It wouldn’t do to come official. But there’s other ways.”

  Jud stretched his head to peer out through the door. There was no sign of Prudie. It was always the same when she went to see her cousin. He looked sidelong at each of the men in the hut, as if he might weigh up their intentions unnoticed.

  “What other ways?”

  Garth took out his pouch and rattled it. “The Crown’s out for a conviction. The Crown’s to pay for the right information, like. Strictly on the quiet, of course. Strictly between friends. Like offering a reward for an arrest, as you might say. Isn’t it, Mr. Tankard? Nothing different from that.”

  Tankard did not speak. Jud got his glass and sucked up the rest of the brandy.

  Almost under his breath he said, “First threatenings an’ now bribery. Bribery as I’m alive! Money for Judas, I reckon they’m thinking. Stand up in a court o’ law agin an old friend. Worse’n Judas, for he did it on the quiet like. An’ for what? Thirty bits o’ silver. An’ I’m reckoning they wouldn’t offer me that much. They’d want for me to do un for twenty or ten. Tedn reasonable, tedn proper, tedn Christian, tedn right.”

  There was a short pause.

  “Ten guineas down and ten guineas after the trial,” said Garth.

  “Ha!” said Jud. “Just what I thought.”