Ross Poldark by Winston Graham

Author:Winston Graham [Graham, Winston]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: General, Romance, Sagas, Historical, Fiction, Media Tie-In
ISBN: 9781447207252
Google: 2P2IAkNd-lwC
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2011-08-18T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1

IN THE GROWTH OF DEMELZA'S INTELLIGENCE ONE ROOM AT NAMPARA PLAYED a distinctive part. That room was the library.

It had taken her a long time to overcome her distrust of the gaunt and dusty lumber room, a distrust which derived from the one night she had spent in, or beside, the great box bed. She had found afterwards that the second door in that bedroom led through into the library, and some of the fear of that first hour stuck to the room beyond the second door.

But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction, and once inside the room she was never tired of returning to it. Since his return Ross had shunned the place because every article in it brought back memories of his childhood and of his mother and father and their voices and thoughts and forgotten hopes. For Demelza there were no memories, only discoveries.

Half the articles she had never seen before. For some of them even her ingenious brain could not invent a use, and so long as she could not read, the piled yellow papers and the little signs and labels scrawled and tied on certain articles were no help.

There was the figurehead of the Mary Buckingham, which had come ashore, Jud told her, in 1760, three days after Ross was born. She liked tracing the carving of this with her finger. There was the engraved sea chest from the little fore-and-aft schooner which had broken its back on Damsel Point, drifted upon Hendrawna Beach and darkened the sands and sand hills with coal dust for weeks afterwards. There were samples of tin and copper ore, many of them lacking labels and all useless anyhow. There were spare strips of canvas for patching sails, and four ironbound chests at whose contents she could only guess. There was a grandfather's clock with some of its inside missing—she spent hours over this with the weights and wheels, trying to discover how it could have worked.

There was a coat of mail armour, terribly rusty and antique, two rag dolls and a homemade rocking horse, six or seven useless muskets, a spinet which had once belonged to Grace, two French snuffboxes and a music box, a roll of moth-eaten tapestry from some other ship, a miner's pick and shovel, a storm lantern, a half keg of blasting powder, a sketch map pinned on the wall of the extent of Grambler workings in 1765.

Of all the discoveries, the most exciting to her were the spinet and the music box. One day, after an hour's tinkering, she persuaded the music box to work, and it played two thin trembling minuets. In excitement and triumph she danced all round the instrument on one leg, and Garrick, thinking this a new game, jumped round too and bit a piece out of her skirt. Then when the music was over she hurriedly went and hid in a corner lest someone should have heard it and come and find them there.

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