The Loving Cup by Winston Graham Read Free Book Online Page B

wish I shall cook?'
    'We've got the chicken, butter, eggs Verity gave us. Bread. Cheese. Can you?'
    'It was part of my training. But I do not know if I shall be cooking to please the English officer.'
    'Anything you do will please the English officer so long as you do it yourself, so long as we are alone.'
    ‘I t shall be our first meal ever alone.'
    '... I think there will be some wine left in the cellar; there's some plates in here - they'll need washing - knives and forks too; candles. We will dine at that great table, you at one end and I at the other! Amid all the squalor of this neglected house! What a glorious thought!'
    'So far apart ...'
    ‘ Yes, for otherwise the food you prepared would not get eaten. Afterwards, in our bedroom upstairs ...' He turned her towards him and kissed her forehead and then her lips.
    'Husband.'
    'Yes, my little,' he said, 'it shall be all that and more.'

Chapter Four
    I
     
    Jeremy found the letter waiting for him when he returned with his family from St Day Show Fair. It had been a p leasant day, which would have been more pleasant if he h ad not caught sight of Cuby Trevanion in the distance with her brother.
    As always, despite the distress in the county as a whole, these fairs drew the crowds, and although many looked ill-clad and undernourished there was money about. People were bidding for cattle, buying trinkets, patronizing the booths, eating and drinking the buns and milk. The beer and gin tents - run by the local inns - were well filled, and before the day was far advanced men were sprawled in corners insensible to anything more the fair had to offer.
    The Poldarks had taken a large surplus of piglets to sell, and baskets of soft fruits. Raspberries had been planted for the first time only four years ago, but the canes, aided by good top-dressings of rotted pig manure, were rampant in the sandy soil. The half brothers, Dick and Cal Trevail had taken the produce in two dog carts, and they brought back a variety of things Demelza needed or thought she needed or just fancied the look of. Apart from the youngest child, Henry, it had been the complete family; and nowadays,' with Ross often away or one or other or the elder children on pursuits of their own, it didn't happen too often that they all went out together. She never lost her pleasure in riding beside Ross and watching the three horses on ahead. What marvellous, beautiful, intelligent and charming children they were! She supposed most parents felt the same but it didn't deflect her from her full sense of pride. Jeremy, at twenty-two, tall and thin and attractive with his high colour and blue grey eyes: gifted in unusual ways, comical of speech, usually hiding his deepest and most complex impulses behind a curtain of flippancy, devoted to animals and painting, and apparently entirely artistic, if one did not know of his passion for machinery. Clowance, soon to be nineteen, sturdily slender, blonde as a Scandinavian, always frank, incapable it seemed of dissimulation or feminine wiles, pretty enough to cause men's eyes to follow her, a tomboy but warm and impulsive and generous. Little Isabella-Rose, now eleven, dark as her sister was fair, with the darkest of brown eyes, slender, vivacious, always thumping on the piano, always dancing as she walked, with a powerful but unmusical young voice; she was never still, seldom silent. Men would start looking at her very soon.
    They were all hers, that was what Demelza at times found so overpowering. Hers and Ross's, products of their blood, their union, their love. All seed, al l flowering differently, all adorning the family and the home. And at home a fourth - another boy, Henry - or Harry as he was already being called - little more than seven months old, gurgling cheerfully, jolly as a sprig, who with luck would grow up to complete a quartet of disparate yet related human beings carrying on the blood and the name. It was the strangest miracle.
    No one pretended that there had