Bella Poldark (49 page)

'Mama,' said Henry, 'are you and Papa not in love any more?'

Demelza stared down at her child. 'What doyou mean?'

At this response he stumbled. 'I only - only thought Demelza said: 'Your Papa is very sad about your cousin Valentine's death.'

'Yes ... I 'spect you are too?'

'Of course. We all are.'

'I only thought,' Henry began again, and stopped again.

'That Papa is more so. He and Valentine saw much of each other. After dear Jeremy's death Valentine was more the same age, and your father used to call on him, and Valentine, as you know, came here. Valentine was sometimes quite a difficult young man to deal with--'

'What's difficult?'

'Headstrong. And then Valentine's wife ran away with Baby George and Valentine was left on his own. Because we are sort of cousins and because we are almost neighbours your father felt he should try to help him, and so he became very fond of him. It has been very upsetting for us all.'

'Headstrong,' said Henry. 'That's what you call me sometimes.'

'So you are. But not in the same way. Fortunately.'

'I'm not as bad as Valentine?' 'Oh no. Oh no.'

Henry rubbed one shoe against the other. 'You would not let me keep anything like Butto?'

'I should hope you wouldn't want to.'

'At the - at the inq . . . what do you call it?'

'Inquest.'

'At the inquest Lieutenant Lake said that if he had not gone back in to try to save Butto Valentine would not have lost his life.'

'How do you know? You were not there.'

'Ellen Porter told me.'

'She had no business to.'

'And she said . . .' Henry was suddenly breathless. 'She said, if Papa had not gone back in to try to save Valentine, Papa would not have been hurt.'

'That is true.'

'Ellen says they were both brave men risking their lives for a dumb animal.'

'Perhaps so. But it did no good. One human life wasted, and another grievously near being killed also.'

'Is Papa . . . Will Papa be well enough to go to London next Friday?'

'It has not yet been decided.'

Physically Ross made a remarkable recovery. All the burns were light: three places bandaged and four others to be dabbed with a zinc ointment three times a day. Concussion and suffocation had been the real dangers, and once the smoke had cleared itself from his lungs he was able to breathe normally. The concussion had left him with occasional dizzy spells, but he had been careful not to tell Dwight about them. His chief sensation was of deep-rooted grief, which mingled with chagrin at Valentine's totally unnecessary death. It was not like losing Jeremy - he was not gut-frozen with despair and loss - he felt more as if he had received a poisonous wound. Ross wondered whether it was just Valentine's frustration and natural recklessness which had goaded him into going back to look for Butto. Maybe everyone had underestimated the tie between the young man and the ape. Affection in Valentine had been rare to show itself, but, just as his attachment for his son had become evident over the last year, perhaps his fatherly instincts had extended to cover the ape-waif he had picked up in Falmouth and come to care for. Valentine's death had shaken open a whole raft of memories in Ross, memories of Valentine as a child, memories of Elizabeth, conversations they had had, such as their encounter in the churchyard when his frustrated love for her had welled up afresh. All those years ago. Back to thinking of the letter she had written him -- kept for years but then destroyed -- in which she told him she was going to marry George Warleggan. And her final, still partly unexplained, death in childbirth. He wondered whether Demelza sensed some of the turmoil he was going through: thoughts, feelings, memories overlaid, suddenly turned over, stirred, no longer entombed. Although Demelza had been half afraid to trust Valentine, his death had shocked her in a new way, and she had drawn away from Ross as if temporarily estranged. The other great mystery to Ross was his own hallucination - for that was all it could be. When he had fallen in the blazing smoke-filled debris of the hall he had seen Valentine beside him, and Valentine had said, 'I came out the other way. I found Butto. He is dead.' And twice he had called him 'Father'. Twice. In actual fact Valentine by then was apparently already dead, clutching to Butto's hand, as he had been found by Sam and the others when the fire died down. Some sort of thought transference in the moment of death? A communication, mind to mind? If he, Ross, had not been dragged out by David Lake and others it would have been his last living thought. 'Father.' 'Father.' In his memory he could not recollect Valentine ever having called him that. It was a claim. A greeting. An assertion. Now he could claim no more. The funeral was tomorrow. Since the fire he had ridden three times to see Selina, and once had seen George. Place House was a ruin. Part of a roof still stood, precariously, waiting for the first gale. Skeletal walls. Recognizable but mainly unusable furniture. Volcanoes of black ash, still smoking. The stables untouched, and a conservatory and some outbuildings. There had been looters picking over the ruins several nights, but little remained to steal except some food and drink. David Lake had taken charge and came over every day from the Crown at St Ann's. The mine had restarted. As he climbed awkwardly from his horse, Demelza was coming up from Nampara Cove. She said gently: 'You are riding too much.'

'I think it is over now. I may perhaps need to go to Truro on Wednesday.'

'Have you used your ointment?'

'Not since this morning. It is only this foot that's a mite troublesome.'

'Let me do it for you now.'

'If you have time.'

'Of course I have time!'

They went upstairs to their bedroom, and she helped him draw off the boot and stocking.

'It's swollen,' she said.

'A little, yes.'

'Has Dwight seen it?'

'Not since Sunday. I don't think I need to take too much heed of what he says. Medical men always err on the side of caution.'

She dabbed the swollen foot, and carefully he did not react.

'Lucky it is not your damaged ankle.'

He gazed at her bent head, thick hair curling, now slightly tinted at his request.

'Come to think of it, I might get Barrington Burdett to come over here instead on Wednesday morning. I saw the Cornish Bank today, so it should be only a few documents to sign.'

'I thought you had been to see Selina again.'

'I have. But I rode on into Truro after.'

'Has she changed her mind at all?'

'D'you know, I think -- of course we are all shocked, saddened by Valentine's useless death, but in the end the one who will sorrow most - and for longest - will be Selina.'

'D'you think--'

'I suspect her bitterness towards Valentine was almost a surface bitterness. Oh, she felt it truly, no doubt of that, but it was a resentment she wanted him to feel, not for him to be lost to her for ever.'

Demelza said: 'Some of those that love most can hate most.'

The ointment was put on. 'There. Leave the pad be for a few minutes.'

'It is very cooling.' She stood up. 'You need to rest for a few days. You are we are not so young as we used to be. You would be wiser not to go to London.'

'Oh, I shall go to London if it--'

'If it kills you.'

He smiled wryly. 'It will not. I want to see her on the stage again.'

'You have had a bad shock, Ross. A physical shock. And one of bereavement. You have made a quick recovery, but--'

'To tell the truth I would have welcomed a rest these last days, but I was driven on. And you, my dear? You have had a horrible time too.'

'Oh . . . yes. Oh, yes.'

Later that night, when Harry was abed, she said: "You said this afternoon you was driven on. Why?'

'Why? But I have told you why.'

'Tell me again.'

Ross lit his pipe, his mind listless, unconcentrated. 'Valentine taught the ape to smoke. David Lake says he thinks the fire was started that way. When Butto's body was removed he was clutching a cigar in his hand.'

She stared at his pipe. 'I shall always hate the smell of cigars after - after Paul Kellow.'

Ross drew on the pipe, tossed the spill into the fire. 'I cannot explain more why I have been driven on without touching on painful subjects.'

'Painful who to?'

'To you. The - the parentage of Valentine has been gone into far too often. This tragedy - it has, at least in a sour way - produced a resolution, even though it has all been a sorry, criminally cruel mess. The one remaining source of conflict will be the future of Georgie. Obviously I was as totally opposed as Valentine to his being brought up a Warleggan. So I was prepared to do anything I could to heal the breach between Valentine and Selina. And, if that failed, to support Valentine in his claim to the custody of the boy. When he wrote asking me to go to Place House last Tuesday, you advised me not to go. I could not tell you my extra reason for not taking that advice was because I had promised Philip Prideaux to tell no one that almost any day Valentine might be arrested on a near capital charge. At Philip's suggestion I was going to warn him. Thanks to the ape I never had the chance.'

Demelza stared at the great bruise on her husband's forehead.

'And that is why you have been abroad all these last three days, when you should have been resting?'

'It seemed to me that Valentine's death had completely destroyed my hope of rescuing Georgie from being brought up under George's domination.'

'And you have seen Selina?'

'Three times. David Lake told me of Selina's hysterical grief and that gave me a small hope that something else might be arranged.'

"You went on Friday?'

'Yes. She was back at Rayle Farm by then. Her cousin was with her and little Georgie. She was still badly shocked, hardly able to string two words together.'

Demelza said nothing.

'After dinner she began to calm down, to talk more rationally. You know, she has come to me for advice before.'

'I do. Usually when I was away.'

'One of Selina's stepdaughters has recently married, married well, to an Indian or a half-Indian. Her husband is the son of a rich cotton broker who comes, I think she said, from Bombay. They were married in August, and Selina nearly bankrupted herself to pay for a splendid wedding. In the New Year the married couple are going to Bombay to live for probably two years, so Letitia has offered her stepmother their London house to live in rent-free until they return. Selina has been unable to make up her mind about anything, even before the tragedy of the fire. Both she and her cousin hate the property George has rented for them, and it could be that now she has little Georgie back they might all return to Lisson Grove, where the house is, and settle in there.'

Demelza said: 'I can imagine Selina unable to decide anything, with her son being stolen from her. I can see all that.'

'What can you not see, then?'

'I think you are trying to explain to me, aren't you?'

'Unfortunately there is in all this a financial dimension, and that is what I have been attempting to sort out. Selina is not penniless, but she is hard pushed to live in the style she has been accustomed to. When she appealed to George for help she said she had got into the hands of moneylenders to pay for the expensive wedding. George, I gather, paid off the moneylenders on condition she should come back to Cornwall to live -- with other stipulations you know. This Selina would have to pay back to George if she broke her agreement, but she can do this, Mrs Osworth says, with the proceeds of the house they have just sold in Finchley or wherever. With a rent-free house in London she could therefore be out of debt and have the rest of the proceeds to invest or to live on.'

'Will it be enough?'

'No.'

Ross's pipe had gone out while he was talking, but he made no move to relight it. You may think I have been too precipitate in trying to come to a set of arrangements before we leave for London; but I was much concerned to build on Selina's suddenly sharp distaste for the house she was living in and to help to work on that and to put in front of her a course of action which George would not be able to discourage her from.'

'Tis all a small matter complicated, but. . . Your concern is all for Georgie and not at all for Selina?'

'Oh God, of course it is! I care nothing for her. You you must understand how I feel about Georgie?'

'Yes. Yes, I do. And what will Valentine have left? It surely cannot all be debts.'

'I asked Selina, and she says that while Mr Pope was alive he paid an insurance against fire at Place House, but she doubts if Valentine bothered to renew the policy. The mine -this new mine -- Wheal Elizabeth is the promising source. You know, of course, that when this new company was formed to take over the mine in order to save Valentine from prosecution, Warleggan & Willyams took forty-nine per cent, the Cornish Bank took twenty-six per cent and twenty-five per cent was left in the possession of Valentine. This rescue operation was undertaken as a speculation which might have involved us in a heavy loss. It now seems more likely to promise a substantial profit. In the exceptional circumstances we are in, I have offered to cede to Selina twenty per cent out of the twenty-six per cent the Cornish Bank now owns, if she will return to London and not accept any money from George. This will mean that she will own forty-five per cent of the venture shares, and if the mine yields as there is hope it will, she should be able to live comfortably on that and maintain her independence.'

Demelza said: 'Surely your partners will not be willing to - to cede - to give those extra shares to Selina?'

'No, well, I have to tell you now that they were not too willing to take them up in the first place, so--'

'So--?'

'I took them all myself.'

'You put all... you put all your own money in the mine?'

He looked down. 'Yes.'

'And you might have lost - what - two, three thousand pounds of your own money.'

'But I shall not now.'

'A very long time ago, d'you remember, when Julia was a tiny baby, you almost went bankrupt and might have been put in jail for debt, for the lack of three thousand pounds.'