Bella Poldark

by Winston Graham

  Demelza stared at it and swallowed.

  ‘So far, Paul, you have told me of the things you hate. Tell me of the things you love.’

  ‘The things I love? Ah, you want to be knowing, don’t you. Don’t you. Well, you’ll know soon enough. One of the things I love is to make a woman scream, and then to stop her screaming. I assure you it is fascinating. There will be such a change in your face when I do what I intend to do to you. At first your face will be contorted with pain, but as you open your mouth for your second scream your lungs will collapse, and soon your face will go all grey and drawn like an old woman and your hair will drag. And as I open you up the greatest moment will be over.’

  ‘Paul—’

  ‘Hush.’ He glanced at the clock. ‘What time is Jeremy’s father coming back?’

  ‘Eight o’clock.’

  ‘You said eight-thirty before. I suppose you are trying to keep me talking.’ He frowned, smoothed back his sleek black hair. ‘Well, I don’t mind. I did not specially want to kill Jeremy’s father, but he will be so surprised to see what I have done to Jeremy’s mother that it will be a way to catch him unawares . . .’

  The fireworks were at their peak. Having first refused to take any part in it, Ben was now enjoying the evening. Essie was at his side when he set off a rocket, and she jumped and gasped when it whooshed out of its bottle. Ross came across to them with a box of Roman candles.

  ‘All well, Essie?’

  ‘Lovely, thank ee, sur.’

  Ross said: ‘Could I leave you to set these off, Ben? It’s time I went to pick up my wife, else she’ll miss it all.’

  ‘Is she not well?’ Essie asked.

  ‘Only a headache.’ He handed the box to Ben, and turned to go. Then he saw a newcomer, someone who had just arrived within the periphery of the lights. Valentine. He was alone. Ross decided to speak with him, and changed his tack. Then he saw Betsy Maria Martin. ‘Betsy.’

  ‘Sur?’

  ‘Could you walk down and fetch your mistress. She should be ready by now.’

  ‘Er – yes, sur.’ The maid turned to go.

  Then Ross saw the disappointment in her face. This was a firework display such as she had never seen before and probably never would again. She couldn’t bear to miss it.

  ‘Betsy.’

  ‘Ais, sur?’

  ‘Don’t bother. I’ll fetch Lady Poldark myself.’ A word with Valentine, and then he’d go.

  Demelza’s migraine had just returned.

  Paul said: ‘You want to keep me talking. Well, that is what I came for, to talk to you.’

  ‘I . . . I asked what there was in your life that you – really liked.’

  ‘Liked? Liked? LIKED? How can I like anything when I cannot feel anything! Everything that happens around me I see through a screen. If I used this knife to strip the clothes off you, if I stripped you naked – Jeremy’s mother naked! – I should not feel anything – no lust, no embarrassment, no excitement. But when I cut your throat and see your blood spurting onto the carpet, then I shall have all the sensation there is in the world! You’ve no idea, Demelza. It is an engrossing excitement. Do you know what an orgasm is? Well, I shall have an orgasm.’

  He smiled at her. ‘This – it is like an addiction. It is such a dominance. The first time it happened – the time with the scissors – I was quite shocked, shaken. Rather afraid, very surprised – and it only happened because she tried to rob me while I was asleep. That was in a house in Plymouth Dock. But later I came to look back on it and think of it with the sort of pleasure life has never held for me before. And I began to think that all women are whores. After all, if the occasion arose, I might do it again. I asked myself – might I? Then I did. And I did. And I did.’

  ‘I am your friend and neighbour,’ Demelza said.

  ‘No, you’re Jeremy’s mother. But still pretty enough to kill. To destroy. All women are built to be whores, are they not? Their naked shapes are full of disease. My sisters, my wife, my mother. If one cannot remove some of them from the earth, what is the purpose of having been born?’

  It was a quarter after eight.

  Demelza said: ‘Paul why are you telling me this? You could not escape from a murder like you propose . . . Why do you not just go away and forget all you have told me? If I were to tell anyone, you could deny that you had said anything. There is no other person here to have heard it and to confirm what you say . . . But if you will go away I can promise to say naught of what you have told me . . . In fact I can’t believe what you have told me. It is too – too unreal. And don’t forget you told me it was Philip Prideaux.’

  She had said the wrong thing. ‘Oh, but it is true. Everything I have told you is true. As you will be discovering for yourself in a few minutes now—’

  ‘But why tell me—’

  ‘Because life is so dull if one’s achievements are kept secret. I want people to know about me. I am tired of pretending it is someone else—’

  ‘But you tried – at the beginning you tried to put the blame on Philip Prideaux . . . Why should you do that if you want it for yourself—?’

  ‘I was trying the idea out on you. I could see you didn’t believe it. I could see that I couldn’t escape. So it is giving me real pleasure in explaining to the victim what is going to happen to her and why I am taking pleasure in inflicting pain. Pain is the one reality. Everything else is unreal and tiresome and not worth enduring. You may say I am inflicting the pain, not suffering it. But that is just as good. It is all part of the one experience that I can believe in and relish—’

  He stopped, listened. A light scratching.

  ‘That cat?’

  ‘He is not outside the front door now. He is . . . is outside the door of this room. Did you leave the front door open?’

  Paul picked up the knife. ‘If you scream I’ll soon stop it.’

  He went to the door and lifted the latch. Moses shot in. Paul stabbed at him, but the cat, with a feline sense of self-preservation, swerved his body at the last moment and howled as he reached the fire.

  Outside the hall was dark. The only light in the parlour was from the fire and the one candle Demelza had been holding and had put unsteadily back on the table.

  Knife poised, Paul kicked the door wide and peered out. The front door was ajar. A cloaked figure stood by the stairs. The knife glinted as Paul took a step into the hall. Then the other figure rushed at him.

  Demelza clutched the table for support, her back straight. She was on the point of fainting. The noise in the black hall was tremendous. Furniture falling, hatstand clattering, curtains ripping, two men shouting at each other between grunts and gasps and the conflict of heavy bodies. She felt she must do something, if no more than take up the candle and carry it to the door. But she had not the strength, and if that fell or was pushed from her hands the darkness would be complete.

  Yet someone was fighting Paul. Someone was risking his life. If Paul killed him then he would return to kill her. But it had not looked like Ross or anyone she knew.

  But suppose it was Ross. She had to see. She moved an inch from the table and swayed. She clutched back at it for stability.

  The fighting had stopped. A man stood at the door looking in. It was not Paul Kellow. It was Philip Prideaux. He was breathing heavily and one arm hung useless at his side. He had lost his cloak and there was thick blood on his shirt.

  He said: ‘Are you . . . ?’

  Demelza said: ‘Where is – where is Paul?’

  ‘Just here. On the floor. I do not think he will – will trouble us for a while. I found a club. In the – the hatstand. I think – I think he has – has injured me.’

  There was a cut on his face as well, but it looked more like a scratch than a knife wound.

  He came a couple of steps into the room, stopped, peered behind him, then, satisfied, took another step.

  He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and took out his spectacles. They were splintered across and across. He threw them
on the floor, where they slithered over to where the cat crouched. Moses spat at them.

  ‘I’ll not – need those again,’ Philip said.

  Then his knees gave way and he quietly, slowly, collapsed at Demelza’s feet.

  Chapter Four

  The splendid fireworks display ended in panic. Ross had delayed only a further five minutes to speak to Valentine, but he was barely halfway home when he was met by Mrs Zacky Martin (who had left the display early to see for Zacky), in a complete lather of horror, to tell him that Lady Poldark was in deep trouble. Mrs Zacky had heard her crying out from the window. Mrs Zacky was sent hurrying back to the fireworks to fetch Dr Enys.

  Ross rushed to the house and found it a shambles: Paul Kellow senseless in the hall, Philip Prideaux senseless in the parlour, Demelza clinging to the front door trying to steady herself and weeping like a hurt child.

  Into his waiting arms she poured out an incoherent account of protest that barely bore belief. Ross picked her up and carried her into the library, where there was a settee, laid her on it; then, having assured himself that she was not physically injured, and urged violently by her, left her there, went back into the slippery main house and tried to succour Philip and to staunch the flow of blood from his arm.

  On this came Dwight, followed shortly by his medical bag brought by Bone, who had run to Killewarren for it. The hall of Nampara was like a charnel house. Eventually, after having eleven stitches in his arm, Philip was half-carried upstairs to Jeremy’s old room and was given brandy and hot milk and told to rest. Paul was only just stirring, and Dwight thought his skull might be fractured. He could not at once be taken away and locked up, but Constable Purdy had been found and waited by the side of the young man.

  Philip gasped out an explanation to Ross. For some time he had suspected Paul, and had tried to follow him when he had the opportunity. Staying with Geoffrey Charles, he had come with him to the bonfire, and there had seen Paul and had noticed his built-up shoes. When Paul left the fire he had followed him, but had missed him in the dark and thought he had gone home to Fernmore. Only when he reached Fernmore and had not been able to find him had he then gone on to Nampara ‘just to check’.

  ‘In time,’ said Demelza, ‘to save my life.’

  Ross ground his teeth. ‘God! I was halfway home when I met Mrs Zacky!’

  ‘Tis my own fault if anyone’s. I had partly guessed about Paul.’

  ‘Did you? Why did you not tell me!!!’

  ‘I had so little to go on. Only a few tiny things . . . and – and my instinct, which – which—’

  ‘Which so often can be relied on.’

  ‘I didn’t want to suspect Paul!’

  Demelza’s wrists and ankles were aching. It was ‘a sickness of the bone’. It could not be got rid of by vomiting. Paul. Jeremy’s friend. She had never truly liked him. But not this. Not this. Not this. She had tried to disbelieve her own suspicions. Not this. Not this. Only a little while ago he had looked at her with his expressionless face and intrusive eyes, and she had been in the direst danger. A sharp knife on her throat, and instead of lying on this settee – and later in her own bed, unharmed, with Ross beside her – she would instead be a corpse, her blood mingling with that of Captain Prideaux in the hall.

  Many people came to see her in the library. All expressed shock; all, even Bella and Henry, were gently ushered out. Geoffrey Charles had taken general charge. Ben Carter and two others tried to put the damaged furniture to rights and to mop up the blood. But it was impossible to hide all the horrors.

  The knife of a madman.

  Later, hours later, Demelza said: ‘Ross.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why are you shivering?’

  ‘What? I’m not!’

  ‘Yes, you are. Or you were in your sleep.’

  ‘I haven’t been to sleep. But, well, yes, in the halfway between waking and sleeping—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It came to my mind to see exactly what you had gone through. The scene came up in front of me as if in an engraving, you on one side of the table and he on the other – talking to each other, he pouring out the poison of his twisted mind and – and me at that firework display. Why couldn’t I sense there was danger?’

  ‘Because,’ Demelza said, ‘we have lived together here all these years, and there never has been any danger like this before.’

  He was silent for a while. ‘When I first reached you, when I first gathered you up, you screamed at me.’

  ‘Did I? Yes, I suppose. I was hysterical.’

  ‘Of course. Now in reflection . . . you screamed at me that I should have come to you instead of talking to Valentine.’

  ‘I tell you. I was hysterical. You muttered something about Valentine. I did not know what I was saying.’

  ‘So I want to explain more clearly now. As I was about to leave, Geoffrey Charles told me that Valentine had just stolen his small son, Georgie, back from his mother. I went to ask him what his scatterbrained plan was. I swear I was not with him three minutes!’

  ‘Well, in the end the milk was not spilt.’

  ‘But I have to cry over it. D’you know, when I walked over to speak to him I told Betsy Martin to go down to tell you I was coming. Then . . . then I looked at the – at the sheer enjoyment on her face and realized I was asking her to miss the best of the spectacle, something she might never see again, so I stopped her, told her not to bother. Not to bother! Great God, I might have been condemning you to death!’

  ‘I said before – how could you have known?’

  Ross put his hand on hers. ‘You asked me what I was shuddering about. That was what I was shuddering about!’

  ‘You know,’ Demelza said, ‘he had a twisted mind, Paul did. It was terrifying! Is there something that can go wrong with a compass on a ship? Is it a magnetic field or something? Dwight was trying to explain to me once. Well, twas as if Paul’s compass has gone wrong. He drives his ship with a compass that’s so far off true that he can kill people and yet behave soon after as if nothing unnatural has happened. None of his family suspected anything.’

  ‘Mrs Kellow did, I believe. From what Constable Purdy told me of his interview when he told them at Fernmore. Mrs Kellow confessed that she had known Agneta Treneglos was sheltering in the outhouse the night before she died. And Mr Kellow was, he says, terrified by him.’

  ‘And Daisy?’

  ‘Ah, Daisy, no. She refuses to believe it even now. She says it is all made-up falsehoods. She became hysterical.’

  Demelza gave a shiver of discomfort that almost got out of hand. ‘It may be I shall have to stand up in a court of law?’

  ‘It depends what other evidence there is. And also how he behaves when they question him. He may decide to make a full confession. In a lot of murderers’ minds there is a mountain of pride and conceit. They like others to hear of their misdeeds. He was very open with you.’

  ‘Yes, Ross, but then he did not expect my evidence to go very far!’

  ‘Nor you! God’s my life, I am trying not to believe it—!’

  After a minute Demelza said: ‘Well, this clears Valentine.’ She sighed, and tried not to let it become a sob. ‘He will be relieved. At least, I think so. Unless he sort of enjoyed being suspected. At times he too seems to be steering by a false compass.’

  For a few moments it had helped them both to think of something else, at least obliquely away from the intense horror of Paul Kellow. It was now well after two a.m., and in the pitch darkness of the early winter morning they needed each other’s presence as if there was something new-found in it. A woman’s hand and a man’s hand were clasped, a warm breath occasionally moved between them like a communion of two people whose lives might well have been ended six hours ago by the intrusion of a friend who had turned into a monster. Their lives over the last thirty years had not infrequently been in danger, but it had in most cases been a perceived danger, an expected danger, a danger that had been partly anticipated,
planned for. This had come so unawares. Demelza had stood on the edge of a cliff and, by the merciful intervention of a relative stranger, she had been pulled back.

  But there was no sleep in either of them. Demelza wanted to tell Ross in more detail of her conversation with Paul, in which he seemed to be trying to explain to her his reasons – or unreasons – for killing these women. Self-justification was at the root of it all – and a sort of exploding egoism, as if there were an overwhelming need to do these evil things – to prove something, to himself and to the world at large. But she knew if she once began to talk about it to Ross there in the dark she would never be able to stop until she dissolved into a weeping creature shaking from head to foot in a paroxysm she would later come to despise.

  They both dozed round about four, and an hour later they were wakened by the cocks crowing. So well attuned were they to this sound that normally it would not have disturbed them.

  Bella and Harry were late for breakfast: it turned out last night that Harry had singed a side of his hair on an untrustworthy firework, and before breakfast Bella had taken him into the scullery and clipped away the hair from around his right ear to match what the firework had done to shorten his hair on the left.

  Henry explained: ‘Bella says I have to match.’

  ‘You were in luck not to burn your ear,’ said Demelza, clutching gratefully, unbelievingly, at normality. ‘What was it, a cracker?’

  ‘No, a Roman candle. I was poking at it to see why it didn’t go off.’

  ‘But it did.’

  Harry beamed brightly and nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And where was Ellen while this was going on?’ Ellen Proctor was paid to keep Henry out of mischief.

  Henry waved a hand. ‘Oh, talking to Saul Grieves or Fred Smith or Marcus Daniel.’

  Demelza glanced at Ross, who smiled and shrugged. ‘I said she was too good-looking for a nursemaid.’

  So conversation was pleasantly evasive until Harry touched on the tragedy of last night. He was chiefly admiring of the viciousness of the fight.

  ‘A club against a knife! My dear life, I wish I’d seen it. Jag – whoom. Jag – whoom! Whee – whoo – whee – whoo. I used to take that on the beach when I was a tacker and throw it for Frobisher. Captain Prideaux must have caught Paul bonk on his napper. Where is Captain Prideaux now? I thought he was in Jeremy’s room.’