The Stranger From The Sea (32 page)

Midsummer Eve - or St John's Eve - the saint being John the Baptist - is a magical night. The height of the summer solstice, when the sun, having reached the tropical points, is at its furthest from the equator and appears to stand still. The time of human sacrifice, of sun worship, of the gathering of serpents, of the breaking of branches, of the foreseeing of death.

Among the Celts of Cornwall it had been a special, a supernatural night back into pre-history; but first Puritanism and then Methodism had frowned on the commemoration of pagan practices, so that gradually it had become a simpler feast, a night for bonfires and courting couples and a few brief ceremonies into which there entered more fun than belief.

All the same, under the jollity, the giggling, the dancing, something spoke to people that was older than the Christian faith, older than atheism, older than unbelief. When the night was fine, as it seemed so often to be, there would be odd silences, whisperings, a starting at shadows, a peering about in the flickering firelight and an occasional glance behind into the looming parti-coloured darkness.

On such nights, of course, it was never quite dark, not all through the night, for the sun was not far enough below the horizon and the sea sent up moon-blue reflections into the sky. Which encouraged people to sit up all night watching for the souls of their friends.

Demelza neither believed nor disbelieved in pagan rights and superstitious practices. She thought there was room for a lot of things in the world and there was no
virtue in being dogmatic. If she spilt salt it took but a second to throw a pinch over her left shoulder, and who was the
worse
for it? She never carried may blossom into the house or sat thirteen at table. Also some of the remedies old Meggy Dawes had told her as a child worked remarkably well. One just had to keep an open mind and take things as they came.

But in arranging a special party on this Midsummer Eve and reintroducing some of the old customs, she was only building on a general wish in the district to resume a festival that was almost lost. For years, apart from 1802, Napoleon and his threat of invasion had put a stop to the fires. As when the Armadas of Spain threatened two hundred years before, the lighting of the beacons was to be the alarm signal.

It still was; but since Nelson's great victory the danger had been less. Nursemaids still threatened naughty children with Boney and his terrors; the French Emperor was as invincible as ever; but he had subjugated Europe, not the sea or the navy that commanded it. And this year, especially, there had been
another
victory to celebrate - and on
land.
The first on land in
Europe
almost anyone could re
member. There had been bonfires
to celebrate it, only seven or eight weeks ago. If one bonfire, why not others?

It could not be quite like the old days with the first fire being lighted at Garrack Zans near Sennen at the Land's End, to be followed by Trencrom and Chapel Cam Brea until fires were blazing on all the hilltops creating a link of light right across Cornwall. But there could be nothing wrong with one or two here and there. The highest point near Nampara was just south of the gaunt buildings of Wheal Maiden, near the new chapel and beyond the cluster of windswept pines, and it was Ben Carter calling to ask if they might build a bonfire there that put it into her head to develop the evening into an outdoor party and feast.

It seemed quite rare that almost everyone she cared about should be at home and available at one and the same time.

But it was not purely for herself or Ross or for the village folk that she had taken up the villagers' idea. Both her elder children needed livening up, needed 'taking out of themselves'. The Easter party had come to nothing; and various suggestions she had made later had fallen flat. When Jeremy had come home in the dusk of that evening in late May he had found his mother still in the garden and after talking casually for a minute or so had suddenly burst into tears and she had held his head on her shoulder as if he were a little boy again. It was soon over and he snivelled and wiped his nose on her handkerchief, and neither of them had ever or would ever refer to the incident again. She had been glad - proud to be there, but it had shown her the depths of his distress.

In the four weeks since then he had behaved pretty much as usual, but he had been absent from the house a great deal - sometimes up at Wheal Leisure mine and forgetting his mealtimes, but often away on Colley, no one quite knew where, except that it was to do with the mine and the engine he hoped to design and build. He was withdrawn into himself, occupying himself to forget. Quite suddenly grown up, but not in the right way. She almost wished he would resume his interest in Violet or Daisy Kellow - or even begin to see something in the narrow-eyed eccentric Agneta Treneglos.

As for Clowance, nothing in her life had run quite right since Stephen Carrington left. The second letter from Lord Edward had crossed post with her belated reply to his first, and, a few days later, the expected invitation from Lady Isabel Petty-Fitzmaurice. The invitation had been commented on when it was received, but nothing had passed between any of them about it since. A reply could not long be delayed.

With the old mine being explored, it brought Ben Carter more often into the house, and he was the only one of

Clowance's immediate suitors to have the advantage of being on the spot. But one pondered how much advantage this really was. It was not in Clowance's nature to be rude to anyone, but she treated him very casually, like a brother - like a fellow miner, for she had been down Wheal Leisure four times herself.

At least, Demelza said to Ross wryly, you got the social gamut with Clowance. The younger brother of one of the richest peers in the land; a thirty-year-old sailor-adventurer with dashing good looks and a shady past, and a penniless bearded miner who happened to be their godson.

'It will all blow over,' Ross said. 'You worry too much. Suddenly in the middle of it all Clowance will rise up and marry someone entirely different.'

'I don't exactly
worry’
said Demelza. 'Sort of speculate.'

'I suspect - and hope - that with Clowance it will be a long-term occupation. I have faith in her judgment.'

'I wish I had.'

'Don't you?’

'In her common sense, yes, yes. But sometimes women are swayed more strongly by other feelings.' 'And men, for God's sake.' 'Meaning Jeremy.'

'At this moment, yes, for he thinks he has chosen. Of course he'll get over it. But I could kick that man's pretentious backside. Odious little frog. Telling Jeremy there had been a Trevanion there since 1
3
1
3!'

'Five hundred years is a long time. When did the first Poldark come over from France?'

'1572. It's nothing, Demelza.
Nothing.
I've said this to you before. People who brag of their ancestors are like root vegetables. AH their importance is underground.'

·Yes, well -'

'But what does it all matter? Who is to say that
your
ancestor was not here before mine? It is only what you are
yourself that counts. Consider it: who has a longer descent than anyone else? Are we not all from Adam?'

'That is not the way the world sees it.'

'Then the world sees it wrong! They attach importance to a
name.
But we all have names! Because Poldark has owned property and Boscawen has owned property and de Dunstanville and Trevanion and the rest.
..
Came and Smith and Carter and Martin and Nanfan . . . and even Paynter; we all come from the same stock in the beginning. That some have had the good fortune, or the cunning, or the skill to climb higher than the others and to continue to ride the wave through the centuries makes them no more deserving of awe, praise or reverence.'

'
You're right - of course. Tis al
l true. Yet
...
I am proud of being a Poldark, if only by marriage. You're proud of it too, Ross; else you would not feel so strongly about the Trevanions' slight of our son.'

'I'd feel strongly about anybody's slight of our son.' Ross said.

Jeremy would have been surprised at this sentiment. He was not sure that his father was proud of him at all.

Midsummer Eve dawned cloudy, and for a while light rain fell. But it was never in earnest, and even pessimists such as Jud, sitting like an extinct volcano emitting a wisp of smoke before his cottage door, agreed that the evening was likely to be fine. And it was. The sun set into a sea of blue milk, and the crowd around the bonfire at Wheal Maiden gathered in pleasant anticipation. The only one who disapproved was Demelza's brother, Sam, who could not see it as part of the Christian festival, but he had been bribed - if such a word could possibly be applied to him -by the promise that he would be invited to say a prayer before the bonfire was lighted.

Paul Kellow had brought his sister Daisy, but Violet was confined to her room. The Pope sisters had come, in charge of a groom, but the pretty young blonde wayward-eyed Mrs Pope was staying in with her husband. Horrie

Treneglos and Agneta and the other two boys, and the Enyses with their two daughters, made up the gentry of the occasion. There were about thirty elderly villagers from Mellin, Sawle and Grambler already assembled round the bonfire; the young and the more able-bodied would make up the procession, which was to start from old Grambler mine.

Trestl
e tables had been set up, on which were piled buns and saffron cakes and shortcakes and ginger biscuits, and seedy cakes, also two huge buttermilk cakes as big as the wheels of a cart. And three casks of ale. And a mound of potatoes to roast when the fire had died down. Behind these tables, when the time came, the dowagers of the village - Mrs Zacky Martin, Mrs Char Nanfan, Mrs Beth Daniel — would stand on sentry-go making sure everyone got a fair share and waited his turn.

'Else they'd be like to overturn the tables,' said Demelza, 'grabbing at everything and the strongest to the fore.'

'It would be no worse than I once saw at a Lord Mayor's banquet,' Ross said. "Those at the top table behaved with some dignity but as for the rest, it became a scramble and within five minutes of the guests taking up their stations all the dishes were cleared, ten folk pulling all ways at a goose or a rib of beef and tearing it to pieces. Once the liquor was served, bottles and glasses were flying from side to side without intermission. The heat and the noise were worse than a battle.'

Demelza laughed. 'Well, here at least we shall have fresh air.'

The torch procession began at ten. A wild young man called Sephus Billing led the way, accompanied by Music Thomas, singing at the top of his alto voice. Following them came three fiddlers, two borrowed from the church choir, and then a group of young women all singing. These were surrounded by more young men jumping about and waving their torches in circles. Some said the circles were supposed to represent the path of the sun, but mostly it was just a way of making the torches look more effective. Behind the torch-bearers followed about fifty stragglers, talking and laughing and trying to join in the songs.

Three tin barrels were at the heart of the bonfire, and a tent-shaped frame had been made of wood from used pit-props, spars, broken masts and old planks washed up by the tide. It was wasteful; in four or five months every family would be glad of this firewood, but that was how it went. None of them would have said thank you for the distribution now. Since in the nature of the festivity the bonfire must look superficially green, youths had been a few miles inland to collect fir branches and hawthorn and sycamore and elm. These clothed the framework, so that the whole thing looked like a woodland pyramid.

As the torch procession could be seen — and heard - in the distance against the dying light, Daisy Kellow, who had her arm linked with Clowance, said to Jeremy: 'When it is over, why do we not go to the churchyard?'

'Why?' said Jeremy.

'Tis the old belief, isn't it. If we stand by the church door we shall see all the people who are going to die in the next twelve months. Their shades will come up and knock on the church door one by one, and they shall enter in the order in which they shall die.'

'If we saw them, would it profit us?'

'No, but twould give us a perfect
frisson.'

Ben Carter, who was next to Clowance, but not daring to link, said: 'There is another belief, that the souls of everyone will leave their bodies and wander off to where they be going to die, whether twill be by land or sea.'

'It all seems a thought morbid to me,' said Clowance. 'Should we not concern ourselves with the living?'

'But these
are
the living,' said Daisy. 'That is what makes it so exciting. I believe if I saw myself going in at the church door I should faint right a way I'

Her brother said: 'She would faint right away if she saw herself going in at the church door with the wrong man!'

'Paul! I didn't know you were by! How horrid to come creeping up and eavesdropping! This was a
serious
discussion!'

'When Jud was gravedigger,' said Jeremy, 'he was always complaining of scooping up the casual kneecap or skull. When my time comes I shall hope at least to have room to turn over whenever someone says something bad of me.'