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“Guilty.”
Demelza’s breath is stolen from her. She almost swoons, but Verity’s arm is around her shoulders, holding her up. She can’t hear anything for a few moments, and when she can hear, the words make no sense to her.
“…taken to a place of execution…”
“No!” she cries. “Ross –,”
“Demelza –,”
She tries to reach him, to touch him – just to touch him, just to brush her outstretched hand against his – but somebody holds her back. Verity is speaking, but Demelza can’t hear her. She hears Ross, hears him saying her name again, and then there’s a commotion, a raising of voices, angry shouts – but Ross is beside her, Ross is there, his hands grasping her elbows, his eyes dark and fixed on hers.
“I love you,” he says. “I love you.” Somebody is trying to pull them apart, soldiers tugging him away from her. The judge is calling for order, but Ross surges forward once more and kisses her. Demelza tries to hold on to him, but she’s pulled back. “Forgive me,” Ross says. “Francis, look after her. Demelza –,” And then he’s shoved away from her, soldiers marching him out, and Demelza’s vision blurs with tears.
The last thing she ever hears him say is her name.
She cannot ever remember how she left the courtroom. She will never remember that Francis had carried her, insensible, out into the open air, nor that Verity and Dwight were beside him. She will remember nothing of the pretty young lady who offers the use of her carriage to take Demelza back to Nampara, rather than using the public coach. She will remember none of that. She will not remember Dwight forcing a draught down her throat, nor Verity wrapping a shawl around her shoulders. When she is able to look back, many weeks and months later, she will not be able to remember any of it.
The first thing she is aware of, after hearing Ross speak her name, is a rising nausea that she can do nothing to combat. She is in a carriage, and the carriage is jolting along the cobbles of a Bodmin street, and Verity is holding her hand.
“I shall be sick,” Demelza whispers. Somebody raps on the carriage roof, and they lurch to a stop. Demelza is helped out, and it’s Francis who stands beside her and shields her from onlookers as she empties the contents of her stomach into the gutter. She has no handkerchief to wipe her mouth, but Francis gives her one, silent and without judgement. She takes several deep breaths and clutches at his sleeve. “I must bring him home,” she says to him. “Will they let me bring him home?”
“After – afterwards,” Francis says, with some difficulty, “they will let you take the…the body. Dwight is staying in Bodmin to see it…to see he is taken care of.”
“I don’t want him buried in Bodmin,” Demelza says. It’s all she can say before another wave of sickness hits her. There is nothing in her stomach; she vomits bile, and her throat hurts.
They go with her in the carriage – Francis, Verity and Elizabeth. Demelza does not speak, during that long journey across the moors, until she hears them say that they will take her to Trenwith, not to Nampara. Then she rouses herself to tell them she will not go to Trenwith, and perhaps she looks a little fierce when she says it, because they argue with her but none of them argue with great force. Verity will stay with her; Demelza agrees to that much. So the carriage goes to Nampara – or as close as it can come, for the road to Nampara rarely carries anything more than a wagon – and Demelza goes back into the empty house. All is dark, and all is quiet, and when Garrick comes to press his wet nose into her hand, she looks at him without recognition.
She sits in the library and stares around at it all. Ross’s papers, Ross’s books. Ross’s presence, all around her, but he will never be there again. Never again will she hear his footstep in the hall, never again will he surprise her at the spinet. Never again will he say her name, or kiss her neck, or laugh with her.
It is all gone. All the light has gone from her world. There is nothing left. The very air tastes of ashes in her mouth.
She does not sleep that night. Verity tries to make her go to bed, but Demelza cannot face it. She cannot face that bed, their bed, nor the empty cot on the floor, nor the wardrobe full of his clothes. She cannot do it. Not so soon. So she sits up in the kitchen, beside the fire, and Verity sleeps a little in a rocking chair. Demelza’s thoughts are muddled, almost fevered. She thinks of everything and of nothing, hypnotised by the flames in the hearth. She thinks that she has never seen a man hanged. She worries about the harvest. She wonders if Dwight will bring Ross home soon. She does not cry. Her eyes are dry. Tears will come, but for now she is unnaturally calm. The storm has not yet hit.
At dawn, there is a knock at the kitchen door. Demelza rises, stiff, to answer it. Jud and Prudie are waiting outside; neither of them speaks, and Jud cannot meet her eyes. But he’d tried to help, in the end. In the end he’d turned his back on George’s bribery and stuck with Ross. So Demelza steps aside and lets them in. They are familiar to her, and they were Ross’s servants. They do not offer her words of sympathy. Jud mutters something about hitching up the oxen to start work. Prudie stokes up the fire and puts the kettle on. Verity wakes, startled, and Demelza tells her she should go upstairs and rest.
“So must you, my dear,” Verity tells her, voice sleep-roughened. “Did you sleep at all?”
“I could not sleep,” Demelza says. She knows she must sleep, that she cannot go on and on without setting foot in the bedroom, but not yet. Not yet.
Francis comes not long after the Paynters arrive, looking pale and unkempt. He has not slept either. He takes Demelza’s hand and tells her that whatever she needs of him, he will do. He is close to tears as he promises his help and support, but still Demelza does not cry. She looks at the ring on her finger and listens as Francis tells her that he is completely at her service.
“I wish,” she says, when at last he is silent, “that I had a black dress.” And Francis says nothing, but brushes moisture from his eyes with a rough hand.
Dwight reaches Nampara a little after lunch, in a wagon driven by an unfamiliar man. In the back of the wagon is a coffin, but Dwight will not let her open it.
“He is gone,” he says, and it would be harshly spoken but for the catch in his voice, “and you should not see him like this.”
Verity agrees, and Demelza is sent away while Dwight and Verity care for her husband’s body. She goes to her garden first, but nothing there gives her any joy. She wanders away, down the hill, heedless of where she is going. It is a beautiful summer day, the sky a cloudless blue, the sea dazzling with the sun’s reflection, but Demelza feels cold, a deep, gnawing cold that is in her heart, not her body. She walks the paths that she and Ross had trodden together, and she thinks that if it were not for the child in her belly, she might fling herself from a cliff.
But there is the child. His child. All that’s left of Ross in the world, and she will do whatever she must to bring it into life and keep it safe from harm. She must stay alive for the child’s sake.
She finds herself at Wheal Leisure, without knowing quite how or why. Ross’s mine. The chimney is smoking, the bal maidens are working. Mr Henshawe is talking to Zacky Martin, the pair of them at the engine house door, but they fall silent when they see her. Everybody falls silent. The men take off their caps and hats, and the women bob low curtseys. Demelza sees grief and sympathy written across every face, and her mouth is dry and there is a lump in her throat, because they all know. They know Ross is gone.
“Ma’am,” says Mr Henshawe. “Ma’am, I…” He cannot seem to find the right words. Demelza thinks that she understands how he feels. “A grave injustice,” he says at last, and she nods. It was an injustice. Ross should be here now, rejoicing in his freedom, planning where next to try for a new lode of copper, laughing with Zacky. But he isn’t here. He will never be here again.
“Ma’am, you didn’t ought to be here,” Zacky says gently. “Not today. Can I see you home?”
“I can’t go back,” Demelza says. Her voice sounds dull in her ears. She lifts her face into the breeze, smells salt and brine and coal smoke. “They’re tending to him,” she adds. “I’ll go back, by and by.”
It’s all over when at last she consents to let Zacky walk her back to Nampara. The coffin is closed again, and sat on a trestle table in the library. Demelza does not go in; she stands in the doorway for a moment, staring at the plain wood that houses her husband’s remains, and then she closes the library door, locks it, and gives the key into Prudie’s keeping. She does not explain why, but Prudie asks no questions. Prudie isn’t a kind woman, by nature, but she is fond of Demelza, and Demelza trusts her. She trusts that Prudie knows why Demelza cannot keep the key.
Later, she will find a little packet of Ross’s hair, tucked behind a vase on the parlour mantel. A few of his dark curls, carefully trimmed and folded into a paper. Verity’s work. But that comes later. At present, Demelza sees very little, because the world has gone so dark.
Francis makes the arrangements for the funeral. Ross will be committed to the ground beside Julia, their beloved daughter, as Demelza requests. His closest friends come to carry his coffin to Sawle. Zacky Martin, Paul Daniel, Dwight Enys, and Francis as a fourth. Demelza walks behind them. She wears a black dress borrowed from Elizabeth, the bodice hastily altered for her by Verity. It fits well enough for now, but Demelza will have to send to Truro for some cloth for her own mourning clothes. She feels she must wear black, because her world is black now, and even the coming child cannot change that. She walks behind the coffin and wonders if there will ever again be any light in the world.
The churchyard is full of people, when they reach it. All of Mellin, Sawle and Grambler, it seems – save those who had taken George’s coin and spoken against Ross. There is scarcely room to walk, a crush of bodies all waiting silently for the funeral procession, but they all draw back to create a path. Demelza cannot put names to faces, not now, but afterwards she will remember every one of them. The church itself is full, too. Ross’s own class, here. Horace Treneglos, Hugh Bodrugan, Mr Trencrom. Tonkin and Blewett and Tressidder, all part of the failed Carnmore Copper Company. Their names are branded in her memory, their fates a burden on her soul. Harris Pascoe, Philip Henshawe. She recognises Captain Andrew Blamey, standing beside Verity, and Demelza has a wild, desperate fear that a brawl will happen now, at Ross’s funeral, for she knows Francis’s views.
Elizabeth is not in the Trenwith pew – too distraught, Francis tells her later, with an ironical twist to his mouth – but Aunt Agatha is there, drawn out of the house for the first time in years. She pats the bench beside her, suggesting Demelza should sit there, but Demelza shakes her head and sits in the Nampara pew. So rarely occupied, this pew. Ross had never been one for religion.
She sits alone, except for the tiny soul beginning to grow in her womb, and hears nothing of the service, for her own heartbeat is a pounding in her ears. Then it is over, and they are back in the churchyard for the burial. Dwight and Francis flank her, steadying her, and when she sees the open grave, the hole in the ground into which they are lowering the coffin, they grip her arms tightly and stop her from starting forwards towards it. It’s wrong, she wants to say. Ross should not be put in the earth like this. But she can’t speak, and they don’t let her try to stop it from happening. She ought to be grateful, but her heart is too broken for gratitude.
Afterwards, Francis urges her to go back to Trenwith with him, and Verity and Dwight agree, but Demelza is determined. She wants to go home. So they come with her, Francis and Dwight, Verity and Blamey, Mr Henshawe and Harris Pascoe. She has nothing to offer them, when they reach Nampara. Prudie manages to find wine and brandy. Demelza drinks a glass of port, and then another. Pascoe and Francis talk to each other in the hall, and Francis utters a loud exclamation. Demelza doesn’t care what it’s about. She tries to pour herself another glassful of port, but Dwight stops her.
“Mr Pascoe has the will,” he says. “And…and you won’t find solace in drink, Demelza.”
“There is no solace anywhere,” she says, but she lets him take the bottle, and she takes the cup of tea that Prudie brings her. Dwight is right; there’s no good to be gained by becoming drunk, though it might make her forget for a while. Francis comes and sits beside her, looking shaken, his face ashen, his hand trembling a little. She wonders what Pascoe has said to him. Soon enough she finds out, when Pascoe comes into the parlour and they all assemble to hear the will.
Debt.
Debt beyond anything she had imagined.
There are the shares in Wheal Leisure; those are hers now. The stock, the household goods. Wheal Grace, the destitute mine. There is a mortgage on the house. She had known about that. But a thousand pounds of debt, and at an interest rate that will beggar her within a year…
Demelza rises, and Pascoe falls silent. She goes out of the parlour, through the kitchen, but does not make it to the earth closet before she vomits again. Prudie is beside her, holding her hair back, and Dwight too, touching her forehead and feeling for her pulse at her wrist.
“I’m with child,” she tells them. “I’m with child.”
“Dear God,” says Dwight blankly. “Dear God. Did Ross –,”
“No,” Demelza says, shaking her head. “No. He didn’t know. I couldn’t – I couldn’t – oh Dwight, how could I have told him?”
She rinses her mouth and lets Dwight help her back into the parlour. Words have been exchanged in her absence, she can see, but she refuses to acknowledge any quarrel between Francis and Blamey. She will not do it. She has lost too much to lose what few friends she has left. She leans on Dwight’s arm and tells them the news – news that should have been happy, and now provokes only sorrow among Ross’s friends and family, gathered here in his home. Francis is devastated. Verity weeps a little, and clings to her husband. Demelza watches them all, Ross’s friends and her own, and she cannot offer any comfort to any of them. She has none to give.
It is Mr Henshawe who draws them all together. He rises from his chair and asks how they can help her, what she would like to do. Demelza can scarcely think of the future, but she must, for her child – Ross’s child – deserves all that she can give it. She must keep the house, and the land. Nampara land; Poldark land. Wheal Grace has nothing to offer. Wheal Leisure must be kept, for though the farm provides enough for her to live on, she needs a greater income to pay the debts.
“George will no doubt try to buy up any shares he can get his hands on,” Francis says, bitterly. “And I dare say he’ll be calling on you soon to make you a generous offer.”
“George Warleggan can offer what he likes,” Demelza snaps. “He took Ross from me, he’ll not take Wheal Leisure, too.” She is bitter too, and resentful, and angry. She is beyond angry with George Warleggan; she is enraged, she is furious. She is not fool enough to lay all the blame for the trial at his feet, but he had done his best to see Ross hanged. He had made it happen, with bullying and bribery. George will not take one thing more from her, not if she can possibly help it. She cannot hope to meet the debt without the shares, at any rate, and she will not lose this house and land. Her child deserves them. She will not fail Ross in this.
The mortgage, Pascoe tells her, she must not think of, for his bank holds the mortgage and he will hold it indefinitely, without interest. The mine is still profitable, for now. The thousand pounds of debt, though…he does not hold that, and he cannot control what happens to it. One man, Notary Pearce, holds it now; he may choose to sell on the debt to anyone he likes. The name ‘Warleggan’ hangs unspoken in the air. Demelza cannot think anything except Ross, Ross, Ross, over and over his name in her head, a silent cry for his support. But Ross is not here. He is gone, and she is alone.
“I have some savings,” says Andrew Blamey. “Mr Pascoe, perhaps you can see who might be willing to sell me their shares in Wheal Leisure.” He and Francis look at each other, and Demelza waits for an argument, but there is none. Francis merely nods, and clears his throat, and says that they will all do what they must to keep the Warleggans from gaining further ground at the mine. The threat of a fight passes. Demelza closes her eyes and leans back in her chair. The conversation goes on, but she hears little of it. She is so very tired, so very heartbroken.
At length they leave, singly or in pairs. Pascoe leaves her with a letter, addressed to her in Ross’s hand, but she cannot bear to look at it, and he sets it on the mantel for another day. Henshawe promises to bring her a report from the mine soon, in a week or so, and then he departs. Even Verity must go, though she promises to return within a few days for a longer stay. Demelza neither encourages nor discourages her from the idea; she does not care who is here at Nampara with her and who is not, for nobody can be who she wants. Ross is gone, and so nobody else matters. Nobody else feels quite real to Demelza, in these first days after Ross’s death. Nothing feels real.
The house is silent when they have all gone. She drifts through the rooms of Nampara, untouched by the dust or the dead flowers that would normally distress her. All she can see is the absence of her husband. In bed that night, she hugs Ross’s pillow in place of him. The smell will wear off eventually, but for now she clings to it. Several times she rises in the night and buries her face against his coat, hanging in the wardrobe, and tries to pretend that his arms are around her. It never works.
Dwight comes to see her every day, and Francis too. They are worried for her, but Demelza cannot reassure them. She eats a little, sleeps a little – barely enough to keep herself and the baby healthy – but beyond that she cannot do more. Dwight prescribes a draught to help her sleep, and tells her she must go about in the fresh air more, that she ought to take long rides or walks, but Demelza has too much to do. She spends most of her time in the library, fumbling her way through Ross’s household accounts books and the mine accounts, trying to understand the entries and the numbers. And even were she not so preoccupied, the furthest she cares to go now is to the fields, to decide when to begin the harvest. Even that she only does because Francis reminds her that she needs all the income she can get.
Other people visit her as well – people from the villages, coming in a slow trickle, one or two a day, and though they never stay long, they all bring her something. A faggot of sticks for her fire. A basket of fresh-laid eggs. A pail of goat’s milk. She tells Mrs Zacky they must stop, that they have too little to give to her, but Mrs Zacky lifts her chin and tells her they take care of their own, hereabouts.
“’Tis little enough, after what Cap’n Poldark done for us all,” she says, and Demelza’s protests are silenced.
The flow of visitors will last for weeks, and even when everyone has come, when everyone has curtseyed or taken off their caps and told her how sorry they are – even then, the gifts will keep coming. Demelza will find handfuls of strawberries on the front door step, or a bunch of flowers on the mounting step in the yard. It will choke her throat with unshed tears. It will go on for weeks, these small tokens – for months. Small acts of kindness that slowly make Demelza remember there are other people in the world, too, once she can lift her head from her suffering. But in these first, early days, she feels nothing but pain and darkness.
A week after the funeral, Mr Henshawe comes to tell her that a decision must be made about striking out in search of a lode of copper at Wheal Leisure. Zacky Martin is with him, and Francis too, and they tell her they have a plan, if she will agree to it. Demelza’s head is aching from squinting over Ross’s books, and her heart is aching from spending so much time among his things and reading his familiar hand, but she listens to them as they explain their idea. They propose Francis to take over as mine purser, Ross’s job, for which he will accept no pay. Zacky and Mr Henshawe will advise and teach him, for Francis openly admits he knows less about mining than he ought, and, aided by them, Francis will act as her agent at the shareholder meetings and copper auctions.
“I know you have no reason to trust me in this,” Francis says, when they have finished speaking and still Demelza can find nothing to say. “But I promised Ross that I would take care of you, Demelza, and I mean to keep my promise.”
Demelza shakes her head. “I trust you, Francis,” she tells him. “Thank you. Thank you, all. I am happy to accept, though…” She looks down at her wedding ring, at her thin hands. “Though I should like to be involved as much as possible,” she says at last. It is a distraction. This past week, it has been all that has kept her going – sitting here, in Ross’s library, surrounding herself with all that is left of him. The thought of keeping Wheal Leisure alive, of finding some way to clear the debt and keep Nampara for her child, for Ross’s child…it has been the only thing to get her out of bed in the morning.
“Of course, ma’am,” Zacky says. His gaze is too compassionate when he looks at her, and Demelza cannot meet it for long.
She has another visitor that week. Ross is barely cold in the ground when George Warleggan comes to call. He rides up to the house as if he owns the land himself, as if it is his house. Demelza is in the garden when he comes, not working but sitting in a chair that Prudie has put beneath the shade of the lilac tree. He looks like a puffed up cockerel, chin high, glancing about himself as if assessing the value of what he sees. Demelza sits in her chair and looks at him, and thinks she has never hated anyone as she hates him. Garrick, resting at her feet, lifts his head and growls.
“Mourning suits you,” George says maliciously. “How are you enjoying being a gentleman’s widow?”
“You’re not welcome here,” Demelza tells him. “Please leave.” Garrick growls again. She puts her hand on his neck, to keep him in place.
“You haven’t heard why I’m here,” he says, though he glances at Garrick and she sees a flicker of apprehension in his expression before he conceals it. “I assure you, it will be worth your time.”
“The only thing I want,” says Demelza, “is the one thing you can’t give me. Your money couldn’t buy Ross, George, and it can’t buy me.”
“Everybody has a price, Demelza,” George says, politely enough, but Demelza sees the way he looks at her, as though he is trying to determine what her price might be. He looks at her like she’s a cheap whore, to be bought for a shilling. Demelza despises him. Perhaps he’s right, perhaps everyone has a price. But Ross went to the gallows rather than pay it, and Demelza’s loyalties run deep and firm. George Warleggan will not get the shares in Wheal Leisure. She will not let him take that from her. From Ross.
“My price is my husband,” she says, taking her hand off Garrick’s neck. “Can you restore him to me, George?” She rises then, and goes inside, and tells Jud to make sure George leaves Nampara land without delay. She and Verity stand at the parlour window, watching as George mounts his horse and rides away, followed by Jud, who obeys her orders now without even a complaint, driven to loyalty and hard work by his guilt and by Prudie.
George has lost the first fight, but Demelza knows the war is far from over.
Lacking mine work to keep her busy in the library, she finally lets Dwight bully her into taking long walks or rides in the fresh air. She rides Darkie, Ross’s horse, who is too gentle and reliable to ever throw her. She goes across Hendrawna beach, along the cliffs, wandering along old tracks and well-trodden pathways. Or she walks with Garrick, sometimes to Wheal Leisure, sometimes to old Wheal Grace where she sits on abandoned stones and tries to remember why she must keep breathing, keep living. Verity comes with her sometimes, but Demelza prefers to be alone. At times she finds that she cannot bear to look at Verity, whose dark hair and eyes and wide mouth are so like Ross’s.. Francis is easier to look at, for Francis is so unlike Ross, except perhaps in the curl of his hair, now that it’s a little longer. But Verity is more sister to Ross than cousin, and sometimes Demelza wishes it was not so.
But she does not need Verity to remind her of Ross. Demelza sees him everywhere, hears him everywhere. She walks along the cliff path and feels his hand in hers, his laughter in her ears. She seems to catch sight of him from out of the corner of her eye, but when she turns, he is gone. She hears him calling her name in the screech of the gulls, hears him whisper it in the wash of the tide on the sand. She goes into the farm yard and expects to see Ross coming out from the barn or the stable. Always she looks for him, and her heart breaks anew when he is not there.
Her heart is shattered into a thousand pieces, and there is no mending it. She has lost her daughter Julia, and she has lost her husband Ross. There is no light left in the world, no joy. The first loss had been bearable because it had been shared, because Ross had been there to grieve with her and because she had seen, so clearly, how much Ross had needed her to be strong. But now she is alone, and the weight of it beats down on her. She feels barely half alive. She is adrift in a sea of despair, and Francis and Verity do not feel enough to anchor her. She is not even sure that the child will be enough.
She still has not wept. Her heart is too sore for tears.
Ross has been dead for twelve days when Demelza meets Caroline Penvenen again. She is returning from another long walk when Caroline rides up behind her and calls out a greeting. Demelza does not recognise her at first, for all that time in Bodmin is a clouded time in her memory, but then Caroline dismounts and Demelza remembers her.
“I come on an errand for my uncle,” Caroline tells her. She is glancing Demelza over, and Demelza wonders what she sees. She is thinner now than she was in Bodmin, and she wears black, but from the way Caroline looks at her, Demelza thinks there must be some other mark on her, some sign of her grief written into her face. She does not know how pale she has become, nor that her eyes are underscored by blue-black marks of fatigue. She has not looked at herself in a mirror since the morning of the trial. “He’s sent you some fruit, from the hothouse,” Caroline says. “He would have come himself, but I told him I would bring it in his stead.”
“That’s kind,” Demelza murmurs. “’Tis a kind thought.” She has no appetite. She does not want fruit. She wants Ross, and she can never have him back. Caroline stands looking at her, and Demelza stares back, blank, until she recollects herself. “Oh,” she says. “You must come in for some refreshment.”
“No,” Caroline says slowly. “No, I thank you, Mistress Poldark, but I won’t intrude on you today. Perhaps another time.” Demelza nods, relieved, and takes the basket that Caroline gives to her. There are cherries, and peaches, and even some oranges. It’s a generous gift, a kind thought, but food tastes of ash in her mouth and even the lush colours of the fruit cannot make her smile.
“Your husband,” Caroline says, quite suddenly, just as she is about to mount her horse again, “your husband seems to have been well-regarded hereabouts.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Demelza manages. “Yes, I believe so. Among some.”
“He did not do those things, did he?” Caroline asks. “He was innocent.” Demelza cannot speak; her throat is clogged with tears that still refuse to be shed. She nods her head. He was innocent. Caroline looks away from her, fiddles with her glove, and then she reaches out and touches Demelza’s hand, just briefly. “He is entirely self-serving, that man,” she says. George’s name remains unspoken. Demelza wonders what George has been saying, what foulness he has been spreading. She wonders if he is gloating publicly as well as privately. Caroline Penvenen had been outspoken, the night they had met in Bodmin, but this seems different. “Should you object to my calling again, ma’am?” Caroline asks then, and Demelza’s manners do not allow her to say no.
She stands in the lane for long minutes, watching Caroline ride away, the basket of fruit clutched in her hand. Thoughts swirl in her mind, too fleeting and too insubstantial to be grasped. She does not know what to make of this woman, Caroline Penvenen, who had gone to Ross’s trial and who now seems to know what George had done. She does not want to be visited by anyone, let alone a fine lady like that. But Demelza cannot have what she wants, and beyond that one thing, beyond the desperate aching loss and the iron determination that George shall not win all, all other things pale into insignificance. Caroline will come if she wishes to, and Demelza will endure it as she endures everything else now.
The first good news she hears since Ross’s death comes after a shareholders’ meeting, nineteen days after the trial. Francis goes as Demelza’s representative. Mr Henshawe and Zacky Martin go as grass captain and underground captain, to lend their weight to Francis’s suggestion of striking out in a new direction at Wheal Leisure. Demelza waits at Nampara, her stomach a tight knot of anxiety, for this is the first meeting without Ross and she knows the other shareholders will be nervous. She knows that George has been approaching them to buy them out. She wanders through the house, watched by Verity and Prudie both, and she only settles when, at last, the three men return from Truro.
“Good news, ma’am,” Mr Henshawe says, smiling down at her. “Captain Blamey snatched Mrs Aukett’s shares afore George Warleggan could get to see her.”
“And,” Francis adds, “Horace Treneglos and Ray Penvenen between them have bought Renfrew’s shares. At a pretty penny, too – they beat George’s offer.” He grins at her, seeming happy for the first time since before the trial. “They won’t sell,” he says. “They’re standing firm with us.”
Demelza sags with relief, worn out from anxiety. She sinks down into a chair and covers her face with her hands. That’s four shareholders on her side, with Mr Henshawe, and though there are another four, none of those hold a great number of shares. She still has the majority, and with allies, there is no chance that George can close the mine, as he had closed Wheal Reath and Grambler and so many others. Wheal Leisure is as safe as any mine – for now. They must find another lode of copper, but Mr Henshawe is confident, and Zacky agrees.
“There’s promise in two or three places,” he says. “We’ll pull men off the south lode, start out east. We’ll keep her going, ma’am.”
Francis stays, once the other two have gone. He takes her hands and tells her that, with this good news, she must try to take better care of herself. He tells her that Dwight thinks she ought to have a change, and once again Francis urges her to go with him to Trenwith, at least for a few days – especially since Verity must leave soon, to return to her own home. But Demelza shakes her head and refuses. She will not go to Trenwith; she belongs here. And besides, Elizabeth is at Trenwith, and Elizabeth has not come to see her. Not once in all these long days, nearly three weeks, has Elizabeth come. Demelza will not be the first to bridge that gap, not when she knows how Elizabeth felt for Ross, how Ross felt for her. There is a kernel of bitterness in her heart, and until she can let it go, Demelza will not force a meeting with Elizabeth. She will not risk giving this bitterness a chance to thrive, not when she knows how Ross would feel about it, and so she cannot go to Trenwith. She will not go. She will remain here, at Nampara, where she belongs.
She says none of this to Francis, but she thinks he guesses a little, for his eyes grow bleak and his mouth is a firm line as he accepts her answer.
“I wish you would reconsider, my dear,” Verity says to her, three weeks after the trial as she prepares to leave. “You should not be alone.”
“I prefer it,” says Demelza. “Besides, I have Prudie and Jud.” She touches her stomach, still flat beneath her stays, and thinks about her child. She is never truly alone, with the child growing inside her. Ross’s child. Sometimes it feels almost like a poison within her, this unborn baby. She is sick every day, far more than she had been with Julia. She eats because she must, but after every meal she goes out to the earth closet and vomits, so violently that her stomach aches and her throat is raw. Dwight has prescribed a tea brewed from ginger, and she drinks it with every meal, but it seems to make little difference. She wonders sometimes if the baby wants to go with Ross, to be with him and with Julia, for it makes her so ill, this child.
She wonders, sometimes, how she could possibly keep living if she lost this, too. This last piece of Ross left to her.
Verity goes back to her own home, and that afternoon Demelza walks in Nampara Cove, the sand hot beneath her bare feet. She remembers another day when she had walked bare-footed here. A lifetime ago. She had come down to the cove sure that she had lost Ross, sure that she must leave him even though he’d taken her into his arms and his bed, the night before. She had ached with loss, but it was nothing compared to how she feels now.
Garrick is with her now as he was then. He is the only companion she can bear for long, for he cannot ask her questions. He knows Ross is gone, he understands the absence, but as long as he is fed and warm and given freedom to chase rabbits, he is not unhappy. He does not ask her whether she has eaten, or slept, or try to coax her to do some activity or other. Garrick is happy enough to sit quietly with her, and though there’s no comfort in it – there’s no comfort in anything for Demelza, at present – at least he does not constantly remind her of her loss.
And another day here, too, when the pilchards came, just a few weeks after their wedding. Another August day, like this one, though earlier in the month. That evening had been the first time that Ross had kissed her with tenderness and affection, not just with passion. Demelza presses her fingers to her mouth. She cannot replicate the feeling of his lips against hers, of course, and her heart aches and her throat aches and she wishes she was dead.
The water is cold, lapping at her feet. Demelza walks down into the sea, until her skirts are soaked to the knee and she can rest her palms on the surface of the water. The choughs on the cliffs shriek and argue and she can hear Ross’s voice in it, thundering with fury. She closes her eyes and imagines he’s beside her, imagines his breath on her neck and his hand on her waist. She pictures that smile he gave her, the one that was her own. Her heart is aching so much, a physical pain in her chest that makes her wonder if it’s possible to die of a broken heart. She’s heard stories of such things, but never given it much credence. Ross would have laughed at it, she knows. He survived a broken heart. Ross would have said that she had mended his heart, if she’d caught him in a sentimental mood.
Demelza takes another step into the sea. The waves reach her thighs. Another step, up to her waist.
And then she hears Prudie calling for her, so she turns and pulls herself from the water, her skirts sodden and heavy, slapping against her legs as she walks. Demelza endures Prudie’s scolding and her fussing, and lets Prudie take off her soaked clothes and help her into another dress. Prudie treats her like a child, with a care and gentleness that Demelza has rarely seen from her. She thinks that perhaps Prudie, above all others, knows how deep this wound is. Prudie has always known how devoted Demelza was to Ross; she watched Demelza fall in love with him. There is nobody else who knows how pivotal Ross is to Demelza’s whole existence.
A man visits her, twenty-three days after the trial. When Jud sees him coming, he makes himself scarce, which is how Demelza knows that this supercilious man in black is acting for the Warleggans. She lets Mr Tankard speak his piece, dully curious about what price George is willing to pay, but when he’s finished, and is looking at her as though he expects no other answer but yes, Demelza rises and rings the bell to call for Prudie.
“Prudie will see you out,” she says to Tankard.
“But – I assure you, ma’am,” he blusters, “you’ll get no higher price.”
“George knows my price,” Demelza says. She sees him register the idea that she knows who has sent him, and there is an odd kind of satisfaction in seeing him realise that she is not an ignorant, illiterate slut – as no doubt George has told him – and that she will not be an easy target for them. Prudie comes in, and Demelza tells her to escort the gentleman to his horse. When Prudie comes back afterwards, huffing and puffing about Warleggan spies, Demelza shrugs her shoulders. “I didn’t expect him to give up,” she says. “George spent enough money to kill Ross, he won’t let money stop him getting Wheal Leisure.”
Demelza has the majority of the shares, and she has allies, so George cannot win through that route, but the thousand pounds of debt is a crushing weight on her shoulders. She cannot think how she can meet even the interest on it, and George seems willing to spend a fortune to gain a final victory over his enemy.
So many visitors come to Nampara these days, so many more than when Ross was alive. There is the steady stream of villagers, though at least many of those come early or late now, leaving things on her doorstep rather than wanting to see her. Dwight comes every day, sometimes briefly and sometimes for longer. Francis always comes to Nampara at dinner, after a morning’s work in Wheal Leisure or in his own fields at Trenwith, and because he is with her for dinner, and watching how much she eats, Demelza tries to eat a little more then. Every few days Mr Henshawe comes with Francis, and they sit at the parlour table and give her updates from the mine. She likes those meals, when the focus is not on her, when she can evade questions about her wellbeing and concentrate instead on copper and ironstone and how much blasting powder they ought to purchase.
“Are you not missed at Trenwith?” she asks Francis once. “Elizabeth must be feeling that sore, does she not want you with her?”
“Elizabeth has no right to feel –,” Francis begins, but cuts himself off, anger seeming to choke him. He lifts a clenched fist to his mouth, then turns away from her. Demelza stares at him, shaken by his anger. She has only seen him angry like this once before. “Elizabeth is mourning a thing that had not existed in years,” Francis says at last, more calmly. “And she is doing you a grave injustice by it.”
So Francis comes daily, and if it causes him problems with his own family, he never tells Demelza and she never asks again. Elizabeth has still not come to Nampara. Demelza hopes that she is clinging to her son and to her husband and recognising how lucky she is. A living child, a living husband, to love and be loved by. Demelza has lost that, and Elizabeth has it. She envies Elizabeth for different reasons, now.
Caroline Penvenen comes to call again, twenty-seven days after Ross’s death, and this time Demelza is at home to receive her properly. Prudie serves tea, and the saffron buns she’d made to try to tempt Demelza’s appetite, and they sit together in the parlour. One grand lady, a wealthy heiress, and one debt-ridden miner’s daughter. Demelza wonders if Caroline knows, and then remembers that George Warleggan supported Unwin Trevaunance; of course Caroline knows.
Caroline brings flowers from the hothouse, this time. “I thought you might not care for more fruit,” she says idly. “My uncle has more flowers than he knows what to do with. The gardener has – what do they call it? A green thumb.”
“It’s very kind of you,” Demelza says, looking at the vibrant colours of the bouquet. She remembers asking Ross, once, if he minded her bringing flowers into the house. That was before their marriage, when she had been growing more confident in her place and taking over more duties from Prudie. Ross had told her to do what she liked, as if it hadn’t mattered to him, but a week later he had come back from Truro with two new pewter vases for the parlour. He’d said nothing about it, but Demelza had smiled for days.
There are no flowers in the house, now. Prudie has cleared away all the withered blossoms, but she has never had a knack for choosing flowers, or for arranging them in a vase or a jug, and Demelza has had no heart for it. Not even for Julia’s bed, where before she laid fresh flowers every day. She looks at flowers in her garden, or in the meadows and hedgerows of Nampara land, and she has no desire to pick them, to bring colour into the house. It seems pointless now. There is no Ross to share her grief for Julia. There is no Ross.
They drink tea and Caroline carries the conversation, commenting on the society in Cornwall, on Unwin Trevaunance, telling Demelza about her dog Horace. Demelza listens and nods and murmurs ‘yes’ or ‘no’ appropriately, and looks at this lady in her bright, fashionable clothes and wonders why Caroline has come back, why she seems interested in pursuing an acquaintance. They exist in two different worlds, and though Ross had bridged those worlds, and helped her do the same, Ross is gone. Doors that were open to her as a gentleman’s wife will be shut to her as a gentleman’s widow, as George spreads his poison and reminds everyone where she came from.
Caroline doesn’t seem to mind Demelza’s lack of conversation. She drinks her tea and comments on the fine views from the parlour window, and then she rises to go.
“You must return the visit now,” she says, in a teasing kind of way, as if she is already Demelza’s friend. “You know the way to Killewarren, of course.”
Demelza falters. “I fear I am not good company at present,” she murmurs. “You will excuse me, Miss Penvenen, I’m sure…”
“Perhaps it’s too far for you to come, for now,” says Caroline, pulling on her gloves. “Do you ride, Demelza? I may call you Demelza, mayn’t I?”
“I ride…a little,” Demelza says. The force of Caroline’s will is almost enough to take her breath away. “Dwight wants me to be out of doors more, but I…”
“Ah, the redoubtable Dr Enys,” Caroline laughs. “Then I shall come again, Demelza, and you must show me your favourite rides hereabouts.”
Demelza has no words with which to reply, but Caroline seems not to care. She flicks a speck of dust from her riding habit and takes her leave, and Demelza is left stunned, bewildered. Resentful, too – not just of Caroline, but of Verity and Francis and Dwight, of Zacky and Mr Henshawe and Mr Pascoe. All these people who seem determined that she must keep living, that she must do more than merely exist, more than simply draw breath. They do not know, these people, that every moment of her life now is agony, a constant rubbing of salt into a gaping, open wound. They mean well, she knows they mean well, but it is often too much to bear. She will keep going, of course she will, for her child’s sake, but they cannot ask for more from her.
It’s September now, and the weather turns windy. Demelza’s hair is pulled into knots by the wind, when she goes walking, but she doesn’t care enough to even attempt to tame it. Ross had loved her wild hair. He had liked to bury his hands in it, to push it over her shoulder so he could kiss her neck, and sometimes he had brushed it for her. Unruly, he’d called her hair, but he’d always smiled when he’d said it.
She comes home from her walks and Prudie says she looks like birds have nested in her hair. Demelza tidies herself then, because Prudie seems to have a way of scolding and chiding that shows no sympathy, no pity. Prudie’s manner is rough but her hands are gentle when she brushes Demelza’s hair and ties it with a ribbon. Sometimes Demelza thinks this is what a mother must be like. She does not remember her mother; any memories of that time are lost beneath the later drudgery and hunger and suffering. She remembers her father, drunk, beating her with his belt. She remembers her brothers, all six of them, the youngest barely more than a toddling infant on the fateful day when she’d borrowed her brother’s clothes and gone to Truro market with Garrick. But her mother is lost to her, saving only their shared name.
She can’t remember, now, why she’d gone to Truro that day. But she remembers how Ross had picked her out of the dirt, bought her food and drink, and then put her on his horse in front of him. She had lost her heart to him the very next day, when he’d fought her father for her. And now her heart is broken; Ross has taken part of it into his grave.
“She don’t eat enough to keep a cat alive,” Prudie tells Francis, one day when they think she is out of earshot. “An’ what she do eat comes back up again. Can’t be right for the child, Mister Francis.”
“Is there nothing that tempts her?” Francis asks. Demelza cannot hear Prudie’s answer. “We must find something,” Francis says, “or she might…” He doesn’t finish, but Demelza knows what he’s thinking. Or she might lose the child. She knows she has grown thinner when she should have grown fatter. The new clothes she bought a few weeks ago, her mourning clothes, are already too loose in places. She’d done that with Julia, too – lost weight before gaining it – but she knows it was different, then. Her sickness then had not been fed by grief. It had not been so intense.
George visits again thirty-two days after the trial, and Tankard is with him this time. Demelza does not let them into the house; she goes out to meet them at the garden gate, and stands firm when, for a moment, George looks as though he would like to push her aside.
“I believe I told you my price, George,” she says coolly to him. “And I know I told you you’re not welcome on my land.” My land, she says, not this land, not Nampara land, not Ross’s land. Her land. It is the first time she has laid claim to it, beyond calling it her home. This is her land, her farm, her house. The mine is not hers, not precisely, but the majority shares are hers. It is all hers, because Ross is dead. He’s dead because this man in front of her, George Warleggan, put him in the grave.
George smiles. It’s a self-satisfied smile, as if he knows what she’s thinking and is congratulating himself on it. A surge of anger makes Demelza feel more alive than she has in a month. It is a physical thing, rising up within her, stiffening her spine and lifting her chin. It makes her feel as though she could commit violence. For Ross’s sake, and for the sake of this unborn child in her belly, she could scratch away George’s smug expression, bite and kick and act every bit the miner’s daughter she is. She was raised in violence, with blows and beatings and the gnawing ache of hunger. George was raised a gentleman, for all he’s a blacksmith’s grandson. She knows him to be determined and ambitious, but he shies away from direct confrontation, from a fight. Not like Demelza.
Her grip on the gate tightens. George’s smile falters, just for a moment, as he looks at her. She hopes he is a little afraid of her. She wants him to be afraid of her.
“How long do you imagine you can hold out?” George questions, with a kind of mock civility that makes Demelza grit her teeth. “A few months? Perhaps as long as a year? But I assure you, the good will of men such as Penvenen and Treneglos is not infinite.” Demelza says nothing. She would rather count on decent men like Ray Penvenen and Horace Treneglos than on George Warleggan. She will count on Francis and Mr Henshawe and Zacky Martin and trust that they will help her keep Wheal Leisure from being a Warleggan mine.
“Few men are willing to be part of a venture where a woman is principle shareholder, I think,” says Tankard, as if it’s an idle thought.
“Particularly when she is represented by an inveterate gambler, a near-drunkard,” George remarks. Tankard nods his agreement. “You know, of course, how deeply indebted Francis is to the Warleggan bank? Even after taking his thirty pieces of silver.” He means to divide her from Francis by saying that, but Demelza knows what Francis did, and she knows her own small part in it, and above all she knows how desperately, deeply sorry Francis is. George will not divide them, not now.
“D’you imagine you frighten me?” she asks.
“You would be foolish not to be frightened,” says George. “I am a powerful man, Demelza. And you are not in a position to be foolish.”
Demelza considers him carefully. He cannot force her to sell her shares – she is too determined to keep them, and she has many friends guarding her against the need for it – but there are other things he can do. There is the debt, that awful thousand pounds of debt at forty percent interest. George doesn’t hold the debt, and there is no reason why he should suspect it exists, but if he should ever hear of it, he’ll buy it, she knows, and he’ll ruin her. The debt will ruin her without his help, but he’ll do it with glee. And yet she is not frightened of him. She has lost Ross; she has nothing left to fear from George Warleggan.
“I believe the word is trespass,” she says. George blinks, and Demelza offers him a brittle, false smile. “What you’re doing. I believe it’s called trespassing.”
“No constable or magistrate in the county would believe the word of a scullery maid over the word of Mr Warleggan,” says Tankard.
“I’m a gentleman’s widow,” Demelza says, using George’s own words against him. “And,” she adds, “the mother of a gentleman’s child.” She touches her flat stomach, and feels a grim satisfaction at the way George looks at her now. She is carrying Ross’s child; George cannot win, now. He can never win. If Demelza comes through the pregnancy and the birth, and brings forth a healthy child…if she can survive this sickness, this despair, this unending darkness and raise Ross’s child, perhaps Ross’s son…
No matter what George does to her now, he can never win. There is no triumph for him with Ross Poldark’s child still living in the world. The knowledge is bittersweet to Demelza, both uplifting and depressing. Because George cannot win, but neither can she. Not without Ross. But Demelza keeps that thought tucked inside and does not let George see it. Instead she calls for young Mark Martin, one of Zacky’s brood, who is helping with the farm work. He’s a stout lad of nine years, and he nods seriously when she tells him to make sure Mr Warleggan and Mr Tankard don’t lose their way off Nampara land and back to the Truro road.
They leave, George and his lawyer, though not willingly. Demelza watches them go, watches Mark Martin wandering after them, and wonders how long it will be before George tries again. Weeks, perhaps. But try again he will, and he does not care that she says he’s unwelcome, that he’s trespassing. The boundaries of her land are largely unmarked; Ross had always had it so, and his father before him. Demelza has no wish to erect fences or stone walls, but she wants some way to keep George out, some certain sign that she can point to and say he must not cross beyond that point. She mentions it to Francis, hoping he might have some solution for her, but he shakes his head and looks angry – though not with her.
“You’ve every right to keep him off your land, Demelza,” he says, “but I’m not sure there’s anything you can do to stop him. Money talks, these days. And we all know George isn’t afraid to use it to get his own way.”
So Demelza has to accept that George will come back, and there is nothing she can do about it save repeating that he isn’t welcome.
She walks more within Nampara land than beyond it, during these early September days. The winter wheat is being planted, by Jud and a couple of young Martin children, and in another field beans and carrots are being harvested, by temporary field hands drawn from Mellin and Sawle. The workers nod at her as she goes, touching their caps. Demelza nods back, but never stops to speak to anyone. She wanders the paths between the fields and tries not to think of how many times she had walked these paths with Ross. She’d followed him as his servant and walked beside him as his wife, content just to be with him.
Now she walks alone, and she watches the harvesting not with pride, but with anxiety. She knows how much she will need it all, every sack of carrots, every basket of apples from the orchard. She has to find four hundred pounds by Christmas, and she has no idea how she can possibly manage it. But somehow it seems too abstract, too insubstantial a threat to be grasped. The debt is a weight on her back, but so is Ross’s absence, and nothing compares to that. It gnaws at her heart and soul every moment of every day. She wakes in the night feeling empty because he is not there beside her. She drifts aimlessly through the daylight hours. She eats and sleeps and breathes and talks, but Demelza is numb and cold and lost.
Only her child, Ross’s child, and the grim determination that George will not win all, keep her alive at all. But the child seems determined to make her ill; Demelza must be closer to three months along than two, and still she is sick every day, still she loses weight. Dwight tells her that some women suffer so with pregnancy, and that it should pass in time, but she sees the way he looks at her, as though he is afraid. He is afraid she will lose this child, and he is afraid of what that loss might do to her. Demelza cannot soothe his fear, because it is the only thing that she is afraid of, now. She does not fear poverty, or hunger, or pain, but she fears losing Ross’s child.
Verity writes and asks how she is. Demelza doesn’t know how to answer that, so she writes about the harvest, and the number of potatoes she expects, and that Francis is being attentive. It isn’t what Verity will want to hear, but it’s all Demelza can write. Small things, impersonal things. She has never been a good letter-writer, in any case, and she has lost the will to improve herself. The letter from Ross, the letter that Pascoe had given her after the funeral, is still unopened on the mantelpiece.
Caroline visits again, thirty-seven days after the trial, and somehow she cajoles and persuades Demelza into going for a ride with her.
“I shan’t take no for an answer,” she proclaims. “Come, Demelza, you promised to ride with me. It’s a fine day, and I particularly wish to be away from Killewarren this afternoon.”
Before Ross’s death, Demelza had never ridden for pleasure. Since then she has ridden because Dwight tells her to be in the fresh air, but it still feels strange, to go riding for no particular purpose. If Caroline realises this, she keeps it to herself and makes no comment. She talks about other things: how much she is looking forward to a hunt, the way her little dog Horace had sneezed onto Unwin Trevaunance’s face, a new gown she has ordered for a party her uncle is taking her to in Falmouth next week. They ride across Hendrawna beach and up onto the cliffs, and Demelza hardly has to say a word, for Caroline fills the silence with seemingly little effort.
“We dined with the Warleggans, yesterday,” Caroline says at length, just as Demelza is about to suggest that they turn back. “George seems to be under the impression you’re with child.”
“That’s so,” Demelza agrees, glancing at Caroline, who gives nothing away in her expression. She is smiling, but she is often smiling. She seems to find the world an entertaining place, and all the people in it seem divided into two categories, dull or amusing. Demelza supposes that Caroline’s life lends itself to such a view. She is handsome, and a wealthy heiress. Demelza knows, from Francis, that Caroline will have money of her own when she’s of age, as well as the fortune she stands to inherit from her uncle. She is a young woman with the world at her feet. No wonder she finds so much amusement in life.
She is, perhaps, only a year or two younger than Demelza, who was twenty on her last birthday. But Demelza feels much older than that, these days. Julia had been not quite two years old when she died.
“You don’t look it,” Caroline says bluntly. “You’re thin as a rake.” Demelza shrugs a shoulder and says nothing. She thinks Caroline means to be a friend to her, but Caroline is not one of her own kind. She belongs to that other world that Ross had briefly drawn Demelza into. She dines with all the local gentry and even the nobility, the sirs and lords of Cornwall. She dines with the Warleggans, too, and that makes Demelza cautious. “Did he know?” Caroline asks. “Your husband.”
Demelza turns her face into the wind. “No, ma’am, he did not,” she says.
“I believe I would have liked him,” says Caroline. “Or perhaps he’s been exaggerated to me. People do like to speak well of the dead. Or is it ill?” Demelza can’t answer. She has no words to speak of Ross, even to those who knew him. Her memories of him are hoarded up in her mind and heart, treasures too precious to be shared. One day they will spill out, one day she will tell her child about its father, but for now there is nothing she can say. “By the by,” Caroline goes on, “you must call me Caroline. I have so few female friends, you know, and it would be quite ridiculous for us to remain on formal terms for much longer.”
“If you like,” says Demelza. Caroline smiles at her, a genuine smile quite different from her usual amused expression, and Demelza feels it almost like a warmth, like something unfurls a little in her chest. “Are we friends, then?” she has to ask.
“I feel sure we shall be great friends,” says Caroline. Then she suggests they return to the house, for she says Demelza looks tired, and Demelza, worn out by Caroline’s exuberant conversation, makes no objection.
They go back to Nampara, where Caroline gives Demelza into Prudie’s care and then takes her leave. It’s late afternoon, and in former days, Demelza would have been hard at work at this hour, tending to her chickens, or taking in dry washing from the clothes line, or preparing a meal. But now she does none of these things. She cannot bring herself to care whether the clothes are folded neatly, nor whether supper will be ready on time. She lets Prudie settle her into a chair in the kitchen, close to the fire, and when Prudie gives her a bowl of potatoes to peel, she works obediently, mechanically, as if she was still the kitchen maid and Prudie her superior. But she knows Prudie doesn’t mean it that way. Prudie means to keep her busy, to keep her active, to stop her from drifting away too much. It’s a kind gesture. When the potatoes are done, Prudie replaces it with a bowl of peas to be shelled.
At sundown Jud comes shuffling into the kitchen. He can barely say a word to her, these days. He nods and grunts and obeys her orders, but he cannot look at her, and he cannot speak to her. It’s not grief that drives him so, but guilt. Demelza had never imagined Jud could feel things so deeply. He has become the kind of servant that Ross had always wished him to be, but she thinks that Ross would dislike this change, despite always wanting it. She thinks Ross would stare at Jud, if he could see him now, and ask if he had struck his head, or if some bolt of lightning had crashed into him to produce such a miraculous transformation.
Her hands fall idle. Prudie takes the bowl of shelled peas. The smell of cooking onions make Demelza feel sick, but she tries to breathe through it, and drinks the ginger tea that Prudie makes for her. She knows she must eat more; she must keep more food in her stomach. Demelza cannot bear the thought that she might lose her child. She forces down her supper, when Prudie gives it to her, and for fully an hour afterwards she has hope that she will keep it down. Then nausea rises, and Demelza hurries to the earth closet. Prudie comes with her, and holds her hair back, and afterwards she insists on putting Demelza to bed with a hot brick at her feet.
“Never so bad with the first one,” she mutters, tucking the blankets around Demelza. “What Mister Ross’d say if he could see you now…skin an’ bones, worse than when you first come here.”
“But he’s not here, is he?” Demelza says, sharper than she intends. If Ross was here, all sorts of things would be different. But he’s gone, and it’s no good Prudie asking what he’d think of Demelza’s thinness. He’s not here to see it. He’s not here to say anything. And besides, Demelza knows what he would say. She knows how he would look at her, all concern and frustration and love. She can picture it so clearly, his expression. It makes her want to weep, but Demelza has not cried since the trial. The tears are thick in her throat, but some force keeps them from being shed. It’s as if she feels too much for tears, the pain too vast, too inexpressible.
It is unending, this grief, and Demelza cannot cry about it. She cannot cry for Ross as she cried for Julia.
On the fortieth day after the trial, the fortieth day since Ross last kissed Demelza and told her he loved her, Elizabeth comes to Nampara.
She comes in the morning, when Demelza is reading a letter from Pascoe, and trying to understand it. The news from Pascoe – that somebody has bought the debt, and lowered the interest rate to nothing – is too extraordinary, too unbelievable to take in. When Prudie announces Elizabeth, Demelza is so preoccupied that she scarcely hears it. It’s only when Elizabeth comes in that Demelza looks up and comprehends that she is really here. She drops the letter onto the parlour table and rises, lifting a hand to her untidy hair. She has hardly cared for her appearance since coming home from Bodmin, and though she knows she’s neat enough, she feels the difference between herself and Elizabeth more acutely than ever. She feels like a ragged crow next to some fine, exotic bird – especially when Elizabeth can’t conceal her shock, at the sight of Demelza.
“Oh, Demelza,” she says, quite faintly. “My dear cousin. Francis said, but I never dreamed…”
Demelza tells Prudie to bring tea, and offers Elizabeth a seat beside the fireplace. It’s a cool day, nearly October, but there’s no fire lit in the parlour. The four hundred pounds has weighed heavily, and Demelza is making economies where she can. Shawls and thick petticoats will keep her warm enough, in this room, for a while yet. The only fire in the house at present is in the kitchen, and Demelza is loathe to invite Elizabeth to sit there. They sit silently together, an awkward silence, stretching out until Demelza’s ears seem to ache from it.
Then Prudie comes clattering back in with a tray of tea things, and a plate of ginger biscuits. Dwight has suggested it to help Demelza’s nausea, and so Prudie has baked them, for she seems determined to make Demelza eat. Demelza takes one to please her, but she does not eat it. She crumbles it between her fingers and stares at the tips of her shoes, where they peek out from beneath her black skirt.
“Francis says that you have been…that you are quite unwell,” Elizabeth says.
“I have some sickness,” Demelza agrees. It doesn’t describe the overwhelming nausea, but Demelza hesitates from complaining to Elizabeth. She is honest with Prudie, and with Dwight, and even with Francis – but not Elizabeth. Not the woman who had so often been a ghost in her marriage. “Dwight prescribes ginger, but I…I have no appetite, these days.”
“I can imagine,” murmurs Elizabeth. Demelza thinks that Elizabeth cannot even begin to imagine it, for this pain was unimaginable to Demelza until it happened, until it came, like a great tidal wave crashing over her head and submerging her in an icy numbness that never recedes. It’s a knife jabbing into her heart, and rats gnawing at her stomach. It’s hearing Ross’s voice, constantly, and turning to find him, and remembering all over again that he is dead, that he has been taken from her. It’s losing the scent of him from the bed, and from his coat, and it’s being terrified that she will forget the way his eyes lit up when he laughed. The grief, the pain, the loss, is beyond anything Demelza could ever have imagined, even in the depths of her anguish over Julia.
If Elizabeth can imagine this pain, Demelza is sorry for her. But she does not think that Elizabeth has such an imagination.
“I owe you an apology,” Elizabeth says after a moment. “I should have come before now.”
“No, no,” Demelza says quickly, shaking her head. She can’t look at Elizabeth; she looks down at her shoes, and at the hem of her skirt, and the whiteness of her petticoat peeking out between the two. “No, I do know how you must have been feeling.”
“…No,” says Elizabeth. “No, I don’t believe you do.” Her voice is shaking, and that makes Demelza look up. Elizabeth is pale and there is a glimmer of wetness in her eyes, but she is resolute, too. Demelza doesn’t want to hear what she has to say – she wants no part of any confession Elizabeth might want to make, has no interest in trying to comfort her cousin by marriage. She could easily despise Elizabeth, if Elizabeth has only come now to parade her own grief. She doesn’t blame Elizabeth for her sorrow, not when Demelza has always known the attachment between Elizabeth and Ross, but she cannot bear to hear about it now.
Demelza feels ill; not the nausea of pregnancy that she has become so used to, but a faintness and a dizziness that threatens to engulf her. She rises, puts her plate of crumbs back onto the tea tray, paces away from Elizabeth and goes to stare out of the parlour window. She cannot bear this. She had felt a seed of bitterness towards Elizabeth before, but now it threatens to grow, threatens to sprout into hatred. Demelza doesn’t want that, but she cannot bear to hear Elizabeth speak of her feelings for Ross – not those of love nor those of grief.
“I don’t want –,” she begins, but Elizabeth interrupts her.
“Demelza, how I feel, or how Francis feels – or any of us – it can be nothing, nothing compared to your feelings,” she says. “He was your husband.”
Demelza’s hands are shaking. She clasps them firmly together and stares out, blindly, at the lilac tree in the garden. This is not what she expected Elizabeth to say. She never expected Elizabeth to speak of her feelings as nothing. She knows how Ross and Elizabeth had been tied together, a bond that Demelza had never broken, even in the heady early days of having Ross’s love for herself.
“And you…you were the love of his life,” Elizabeth says.
Demelza turns back abruptly. “What?” she demands, sure she has not heard right, sure Elizabeth cannot be saying that. Her throat is choked, but whether with brittle laughter or with tears, she cannot tell. Elizabeth looks at her oddly, and then she nods.
“He told me so,” she says, quite gently. “When you were ill with the putrid throat…after Julia…he said you were the love of his life.” She keeps looking at Demelza, straight at her, no wavering or hesitation. No sign of what this must be costing her to say. “You were the love of his life,” she says again. “You made him so very happy, Demelza.”
Demelza stares at Elizabeth for long moments. “He said that?” she asks, and Elizabeth nods in answer. “He said that,” Demelza murmurs. “He said I was…”
And then suddenly Demelza cannot see clearly. Suddenly there is a hotness in her eyes, a stinging of salt. The numbness breaks, the ice shatters. She hears a keening sound, and it’s coming from her own throat, her own mouth. Tears are spilling down her cheeks. She doubles over from the force of it, the storm finally hitting her. It is a tempest, it is a riptide, grasping hold of her at last. At last she is crying, and forty days’ worth of tears is too much be confined to gentle weeping. She cannot stand; her knees give way and she drops to the floor. The keening grows into a wail, a desperate howl of anguish that she has no power to stop.
Demelza does not become insensible now, as she had after hearing the verdict at the trial – after Ross’s last desperate embrace of her, that last, fleeting kiss. She is aware, peripherally, that Elizabeth comes to kneel beside her and takes her hands. She can hear Elizabeth speaking, but the words are muffled, indistinct. Her own crying is louder in her ears, wrenched from her heart and soul, a wordless expression of the grief that has gripped her so tightly for so many days. And then Elizabeth is replaced by Prudie – solid, comfortable Prudie, who puts her arms around Demelza and hugs her tight. Prudie speaks too, but Demelza can’t hear, can hardly feel Prudie’s embrace. The storm has crashed down upon her and she is swept up in it.
A glass is pushed into her hand, and somebody helps Demelza to bring it to her mouth. She swallows automatically when liquid fills her mouth, and almost chokes from the sting of the brandy in her throat.
“Good girl,” Prudie is murmuring to her. “There’s a good maid. You cry it out, now. There, now.” She’s rocking Demelza in her arms, the both of them down on the parlour floor; awareness of this creeps upon Demelza gradually, piecemeal. The cold of the flagstones beneath her, the way she’s half-resting in Prudie’s lap, her head on Prudie’s shoulder. It’s Elizabeth who has helped Demelza drink the brandy, her hands covering Demelza’s to keep the glass steady. Demelza is shaking, almost convulsing with sobs, but Elizabeth brings the glass to her lips again and makes Demelza drink again. The brandy spreads a warmth through her body, and slowly, slowly, she stops shaking. Slowly her sobs begin to ebb, until the fierceness of it is gone and all that’s left is gentle, silent tears, leaking from her eyes and trickling down her cheeks. Now that the tears have started, Demelza feels as though she will cry forever.
“How can I go on without him?” she asks, her voice barely more than a hoarse whisper. “I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it!”
“’Course ee can,” Prudie says. “’Course ee can. Don’t reckon there’s a thing you can’t do, once you set your mind to it. Never know’d such a one for tha’.”
“She’s right, Demelza,” says Elizabeth. “You’re stronger than you know.”
“And you ain’t alone, child,” Prudie says. She’s still rocking Demelza gently, back and forth, comforting her like she’s a child in need of a mother’s tender care. “You ain’t alone. You got me, an’ you got Mister Francis, an’ Missus Elizabeth, an’ the doctor.” Demelza shakes her head wearily and thinks that none of them are Ross, none of them are enough. Francis has been so good to her, these past weeks, and Dwight has been so attentive, but they aren’t Ross, and they cannot make the loss any easier to bear.
“Your child, Demelza,” Elizabeth reminds her. “You have the child to live for.” She takes away the glass of brandy and clasps Demelza’s hands firmly with her own. “Don’t follow Ross into the grave,” she says. “He would never have wanted that for you.”
Demelza is still weeping, tears rolling down her face, slipping into the creases of her mouth so she tastes salt. Her head is aching, a dull pounding at her temples. She feels cold suddenly, so very cold, and she does not object when Elizabeth and Prudie help her up, and take her through to the kitchen where the fire is glowing hot. Elizabeth sits beside her as Prudie hustles about making more tea, and Demelza stares at the fire and blinks again and again to stop her tears from stinging her eyes. Prudie gives her a ginger biscuit, and Demelza eats it mindlessly – and then realises that there is a gnawing feeling in her stomach that is not sickness, and is not grief.
“Prudie,” she says, “would you cut me some bread and butter?”
“Be you hungry?” Prudie asks sharply. Demelza nods. “Praise the Lord,” Prudie says, throwing up her hands. Demelza sees Elizabeth smiling, sees her lift a hand to her mouth to hide it, and suddenly Demelza is smiling too. A real smile, a proper smile – the kind she has not managed in so very long.
It is not the end of Demelza’s grief. Still she wakes every morning and reaches for Ross; still she hears him calling her name. Every day she misses him in a hundred different ways, and every day is an ordeal to be faced, somehow, without him. But the storm has hit, and Demelza can cry now. She cries every day, it sometimes seems. She weeps in the morning in an empty bed and she soaks her pillow at night. She often still takes Ross’s coat from the wardrobe and wraps it around herself, trying to pretend it’s him.
It is not the end of her grief. But now that the wave has crashed, now that she has broken through the ice, Demelza can begin to try to live again – to truly live, to take pleasure in the small things that have always pleased her, and to feel as though she is touched by the world, that she is still a part of the world. She will, eventually, feel that she is alive again. It is distant from her now, farther in the future than she can think of yet. But it will come. Eventually, it will come.
* * *
Demelza’s child is born in March. It is a long, hard labour – far longer than Julia’s birth – and for long hours Demelza is lost in a cycle of pain and exertion. Afterwards she will hear that the child was positioned badly, and that Dwight had feared for them both, but for now, all Demelza knows is that at last the baby is born, and at last she hears its first cries.
“A boy,” Dwight tells her.
“Let me see,” she begs him. “Give him to me, Dwight.” Prudie is cleaning and swaddling the baby, but Dwight nods at her, and in a moment Demelza is holding her child, her son. “Oh,” she says softly. “Oh, he’s so perfect.” He’s so small, this baby – smaller than Julia had been. Perhaps it was Demelza’s nausea that made it so, or perhaps it’s simply nature. Demelza doesn’t care. He has all his fingers and toes, and he has a wisp of dark hair on his head. Her heart swells with emotion, and she kisses her son’s forehead. “Hello, my lover,” she murmurs. “Oh, I’m so glad of you. You’ve no idea how glad I am.” Then, because contractions are starting again for the afterbirth, Demelza surrenders the baby to Prudie again.
“What will you call him?” Dwight asks later, when the birth is wholly over and Demelza has been washed and put into a clean nightgown. She is too weak to sit up properly, cannot hold her son again so soon, but Prudie has made up the crib right beside the bed, so that Demelza can look her fill.
“Jeremy,” Demelza says. “Jeremy Poldark.”
“Not for Ross?” asks Francis, who has finally been admitted to the room. He and Elizabeth had been sent for as soon as Demelza had begun her labour, and now they are both peering into the crib and admiring the newborn.
“No,” says Demelza. “No, there’s only one Ross for me.” She reaches out her hand and strokes Jeremy’s brow. “He deserves a name of his own,” she murmurs. “Ross wouldn’t want it, anyway. But he’d be so pleased, wouldn’t he? Our son.”
And Jeremy Poldark opens his eyes and opens his mouth, reminds the world that he is alive, and announces that he is hungry.