A/N: The chapters (I am planning) are following each of the episodes, as a parallel story to what is happening with the main events. This one will be following S1 E3.
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"You're not Davies Giddy."
A young boy, dressed in a coat and hat, stood, booted footed, on the bottom of the gate that swung with a squeak outside Tredree, the Giddy's house.
It had been an intense morning. Her father had finished the mine survey over beyond Camborne, Wheal Leisure, and it would be opening in a day or two. Its owner, Poldark, had heeded most of Dr. Withering's suggestions, which had delighted Jemima, not because of them being her father's suggestions, but because it meant she had had time to go to the mine herself, and explore, promising to always go down with one of the Martin boys.
So Jemima was happy, and was in a happy mood, waiting as she was to meet Davies, and spying the visitor, clearly waiting for him too.
"Well observed young sir," Jemima said kindly. "He will be along shortly; the coach from Truro-way drops off after noon, and he will walk this way."
"Then I'll wait," the boy told Jemima. She stood the other side of the gate, waiting too in the warm, pleasant sun. After a time, the boy turned his head to look ar her.
"Do you want to see something?" Jemima looked down to a keen and enquiring face, but before she could answer the boy had something in his hand, the familiar hexagonal-crystalled form of tin ore.
As Jemima saw cassiterite most days, it wasn't a revelation, but she smiled, pleased that another person was interested in what she was. Davies was not. Passionate as he was about the countryside, the fierce waves in the harbour at Penzance, how the land went out to meet the water, the sky to the sea, he had little interest in mines and ores as she did; Davies had seemed to have grown out of his will to explore crevices and cracks in rocks with her. He was much more serious about the law, pleasing his parents who desired him to be a lawyer.
"How old are you?" the boy asked, folding his hand around the metal ore before stowing it in his waistcoat pocket.
"Do you always ask such questions of people you have just met?" He didn't answer, but his face lit up as he realised something.
"You're a girl; you're Doctor WIthering's daughter!"
"Pleased to meet you," Jemima replied, with a smile. "And you are?"
"Davy, Humphry Davy." He bowed. "My guardian, Robert Dunkin, has arranged for your father to apprentice me, in his spare time."
"Aren't you a little young to be apprenticed?"
"I'm nine," he told Jemima. "But I've been dissecting patients since I was three." She turned to him, horrified.
"Patients?" she echoed. But Humphry just looked thoughtful.
"Rabbits, mainly, sometimes hares. I caught a weasel once, and kept him as a pet; I was going to dissect him too, but he got out and went back to the wild. My guardian thinks my apprenticeship will not be too long; I go to Penzance Grammar when I am 13."
"Then I may see you, Humphry," Jemima told him, "For I am to be at Penzance Grammar after the Fair!"
It had been Mrs. Giddy's idea. Jemima had been beside her father even back in Shropshire when her mother had died, and had learned all manner of things medical, particularly injuries sustained in battle. Here, to please Mrs. Giddy, she had learned sewing and baking, had read the books Davies's sisters had read, and more besides, for Reverend Giddy had allowed her to read from his private library. Jemima's favourite books had been those of Cornwall, one in particular with a large map across two pages, illustrated very finely with what looked like expensive ink.
Neither would forget their first meeting, as they watched Davies appear at the hill and trail down the road, not knowing for a few minutes he was about to meet someone who was to be his lifelong friend.
Instead, he and Jemima would join Humphry in their favourite summer pursuit of tramping the country, attending the Quaker meetings that Robert Dunkin would hold at his house, and listen to Humphry as he lectured on topic after topic that entertained his mind.
The fateful day he had asked if they wanted to see an experiment he was conducting in Dunkin's garret room and had nearly blown the windows out would not be Humphry's last, and Jemima felt gladdened that she had someone she could talk to about copper and tin and minerals from the Midlands, Davies' interest seeming to have come back to those topics once more as they explored a disused mine one day towards Zennor on a trip their parents had planned to the west coast.
Davies's anger flared whenever he thought Jemima was paying too much attention to things with Humphry, especially when he began at the school earlier than he had said.
"I can make metal come out of these rocks," she had told them both, when they had visited with Dr. Withering a house just to the west of Camborne where John Withering was, with a boosted medical practise had made enough money to buy a house of their own. He had told Jemima she could have the outhouse for her own similar experiments and had, a day after leaving Tredree and arriving three miles away at their new home, taken her father at his word.
"With this." Some sort of device that turned and caused bits of dust to clump together, that bit the hand if touched. Davies looked on, keenly whereas Humphry had experimented further, and the metal had been spongy and had fizzed when water was added.
"What is it? We can still be friends, as we have always been," Jemima had told Davies as Humphry had played with malachite and ground up coal over a small coke fire that had once been the house's laundry copper. Humphry had gone in to work with her father and she and Davies sat on an old log that had been left over from a winter storm many years ago and had shaped itself to many sitters over the years.
"You have Humphry for your friend now," he told her. And it was true - a new Sunday pastime now included "whatever Humphry wanted to experiment on", the boy's favourite being heating up small tin ingots and bending it and listening to the crackles come from within. The "cry" of the tin" it was called, but it was more a bubbling, creaking sound to Jemina's ears. She shook her head.
"He has himself; but it's because of him I get to go to school; father has taken him on as an apprentice doctor and through that association I am allowed to stay. I learn mathematics, logic, Latin, Greek…lots of things that I surely would never have been taught with a governess." She sighed. "You have taught me a great deal too - if I want to…if I will - "
"You wish to mine, own a mine, run a mine, be a captain." Davies took her hand and Jemima did not protest. He was bigger now, and had his own interests that were different to hers, politics, society, the law. But he knew her as he had always done.
"I will, one day. And the only way I will be able to do that is to learn about metals and minerals, and about Cornwall. I will go home one day and I will buy land with coal beneath it."
"I know you will," Davies told her, his eyes light with the realisation that a certain path lay open to the future. He took his hand up, contained in it her own as it was, and kissed the back of it. "And, with that mine your father has surveyed, that will be your beginning."
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Davies was right; Leisure was to be her beginning, but her future was just that, future. None of them could predict just what an impact that mine, Wheal Grace, Grambler and Wild's Ding Dong mine was just going to bear on her life. It was to start there, on a bright, summer morning, with a ribbon of men and women, late of Wheal Reath, and some too from Grambler, arriving to work for the owner.
"What do you think?" she had asked him, pleased that at least one of her friends had come, to what Jemima was beginning to think of as her mine, the mine captain Henshawe, trusting her on the nearer levels, after her impeccable behaviour when she went down with her father, had allowed her to go deeper, and had shown her different features which both excited her and inspired her to thoughts of metal work and machinery that could be fashioned to save time and money in extracting the haematite, behind which, they hoped, hid malachite.
"I don't know what to think, but I would like to make things better for Cornish folk."
"Because then you will go home and make it better for the Midland folk."
There was no bitterness to this, between them. Davies would himself be going shortly to an apprenticeship in Truro. They had promised to always remain friends no matter what.
As Jemima had been reminded of home, however, she enthused on the topic, finishing with, "I wish I could take you home to meet them, you would have enjoyed discussing with them; Gregory, Mr. Watt's sons attended often. We'd listen on the stairs; Thomas would always wake up, so we would sit together to listen, he should fall asleep in my lap."
The bell rang just then, and Davies took her hand - it was his cue that he was to leave; his parents had given him permission to go with Jemima and her father as long as he called in to see Mr. Howe, with his letter of recommendation from school. From there, he would begin his apprenticeship in law. Jemima patted her friend on the shoulder and glanced to him after a moment, to see him striding south, to the Truro road.
People were gathering. A lot of people. Jemima had been at Camborne with her father only a few months, and, unlike at Penzance where after nearly three years living there had come to know many people, the people surrounding her were people she had never seen before.
Many seemed noble, gentlemen, with their wives. There would be some investors, of course: Poldark had had several people give money to have this mine open. Her father stood beside Poldark and then, as her eye caught two people on horses on the high ridge of land behind the mine's engine housing, it lit on William Henshawe, who had seemingly spent his time permanently at Leisure, for he was always there when Jemima had come with her father. Their eyes met, and he gave her a welcoming smile, which she returned.
Poldark was speaking now, and his speech, which was declaring the mine open, praising his investors and workers, and thanking Providence for meeting so many people with whom he could forward his venture, was being well received by those before him. Jemima had been a little impressed with the man, for he had pitched in with his miners to clear fallen rock, replace wooden railings and ring steps with metal, to dig line and lay track on which wagons could be placed and sent downhill, saving human and horse muscle.
Fare was then offered to those who had come, and Jemima was crossing over to her father when she heard Poldark tell his wife, a tall, slim woman with fire-red hair, that while it all seemed to be going swimmingly, his neck was on the line if it failed.
He looked beyond his wife, and saw Jemima, and smiled a little, and nodded. Jemima nodded back, and his wife turned, almost dropping the tray of food she was carrying. She bobbed in a curtsey. Jemima bowed.
"Excuse me," Jemima ventured, not because she was hungry, but because what Mrs. Poldark was carrying on her tray was the strangest of things. "What is that?"
"Well, it is a pie," she told Jemima, holding the tray closer to her, her voice a little uncertain as if Jemima was trying to catch her out. "It's called "Star Gazy pie."
Which was a good name for it, because half a dozen fish heads were poking out of the top of the pastry crust, as if frozen in the act of leaping out of it. Jemima ate most things, but didn't really like fish, not how the Cornish ate it, nearly whole, bones, fins, heads.
The cradle rhyme ran through her head, but Jemima's brain changed it to, "Half a dozen herrings bakes in a pie."
"We would have fagots, at home," she told the woman, who did not seem much older than herself.
"Fagots?" Demelza rested the tray on one of the ore boxes, and picked up a handful of sticks. Jemima shook her head.
"No, they're made of…all of the bits inside the pig, all together, cooked."
"The guts…?"
"My father calls it viscera, yes, and grey peas and…Dully cake. Is there Dully cake in Cornwall?"
"What be it?" asked Demelza, who had the tray again, and had offered it to the Martins, Jago, who had been down the mine so many times with Jemima taking the largest slice. Jemima didn't blame him; there had been many "short" days, as her father had told her, where a day might go by and people would have literally nothing to put into their stomachs.
"It's…Jemima thought, and bit her lip, "Flour…sugar…butter…"
"'Tis for any cake!" exclaimed Mrs. Poldark, with a laugh.
"But the fruit is soaked and spices are added, it bakes through. And, we have...oatcakes." Jemima could cook oatcakes. Mrs Wedgwood's cook had taught her, but it needed a hot, flat stone. Sometimes, she would put them in the crockery kiln with the master's pieces. Jemima thought these tastes best of all.
"Perhaps a while," suggested Mrs. Poldark, "You would call to my master's house and I would show you Star Gazy pie, and you can show me…Dully cake and oatcakes?" Jemima smiled, though her mind dulled: she could cook, it was true, but she didn't fancy spending her life in a hall kitchen teaching anyone when she could be out here, exploring.
But, the woman seemed nice, and genuinely seemed interested in Shropshire, in Staffordshire food. Not that the Midlands had much; much of what came to that part of the country came from other places by road or, now, by canal. The Dully cake spices came from, Jemima knew, the north west, a place with high mountains and vast lakes - Josiah Wedgwood's friend and fellow Quaker John Dalton would bring it sometimes when he visited the industrialists and attended Soho House dinners with Watt and Boulton, with Darwin and Priestly and her father.
"I will ask my father if I can," Jemima told her, her heart softening a little. Where would be the harm in teaching this lady how to cook the things she liked to eat? She rather fancied a little fish pie, but had not taken any because she wanted to eat just the flesh, not the skin or heads or anything else and knew it would be a waste to leave what she didn't want when so many around her were in want of food.
"I will ask my father," Jemima decided. "Where do you live?"
"Over west, north. About three miles away beside the sea. it's called Nam - "
But before Mrs. Poldark could finish, the crashing of the mine bell drowned out all around them. A rumbling came, the unmistakable sound of gunpowder being used in an enclosed, vacuous granite space. Probably the north west level, for many miners would be being sent north east to clear the haematite ore, but north west, towards the dormant Wheal Grace had never been exploited. It was from the north west that Jemima had carried out a fist-sized piece of rock whence the soft, reactive metal had come as she had moved the generator handle and attached wires to its granular surface.
"Jemima! Oh, do excuse me!" The rumble ebbed away, and Jemima saw the mine captains Zacky Martin and William Henshawe come over to her. "Miss Withering, I mean!" Henshawe added, striding over to her. He glanced to Poldark, who, from his post prandial position beside his wife, had watched Henshawe cross to her, "I thought, with your permission - " this aside was to Poldark, "That you might wish to go to the north west? From where you got your dark rock?"
Because, apart from Humphry and Davies, she had also shown her experiment to her father, who had told Poldark and several people from the mine, all of whom were both mystified and intrigued at the small sample of strange metal that Jemima had showed them, that had yielded from the application of the motion engine.
"There would need to be more explosives to clear it properly," Poldark told them, "But yes. As always, Miss Withering, do take care. You will not be with Jago, or any of the others, for they are needed to clear the blasted ironstone.
"Blasted it is," Mrs Poldark commented, as she collected up the tin plates that the miners had stacked for her, which made a few of them chuckle. But Jemima turned to Poldark, with the thought that had been late in her mind.
"I believe you should send the haematite for smelting as well. Many people would buy the iron."
"Maybe," Poldark replied, his face betraying no hint of the intrigue that he felt when this young person made suggestions to him - interesting and logical and economic suggestions at that.
"I know the copper and tin smelting works would not take it - could it not be shipped up to…" she thought of the maps she had seen, of the places she knew, "...Bristol, no…Gloucester," Jemima emphasised, "...and up the Severn? Coalbrookdale has the furnaces, the Darby furnaces could take your ironstone, and you could sell it through an agent."
"It is…definitely an idea." He smiled at her, as an adult to a child who wants to end the conversation he deems boring. Jemima felt a little affronted at that - it was a good idea! "It is copper I need, as green as the sea, not ironstone. Though often the ironstone heralds the copper." He strode away, and Mrs Poldark continued with the post victual collection of plates.
Her father was in deep conversation with Zacky Martin, but Henshawe, the grass captain - that was, the person in charge of everything that happened on the land above the mine, was smiling at her.
"Where there's ironstone often copper," he told Jemima, a well-repeated saying.
"Not at home," Jemima told him. She liked Henshawe, who had taken her into the mines several times, and had explained the geography underground.
"And where be home to you, little Miss?" His intonation was still formal, unlike their easy interactions about minerals and metals and mining that they had when they were below ground. Jemima took the social hint. "You say Coalbrookdale?"
"Shropshire, the Black Country. Where there's iron there's coal," she added, loud enough for Poldark to hear, her mind resting on the face of her brother for a moment. The man did not turn his head, but turned a little, betraying that he had heard her, and Jemima came back to the present.
"And there's subsidence, which you don't get with granite." William Henshawe laughed, his bright brown eyes crinkling at the corners. It was something, in the not so distant future, that would Jemima's memory of the man, and she would have to fight days of depression and misery because of -
That would be then. Now, Jemima was thirteen and Henshawe was Poldark's captain. She was a scholar, concerned with her favourite subject, mathematics, and he was her father's friend. Henshawe was now smiling, and was offering a wide armed gesture that would usher her towards the mine engine housing.
"How very perceptive if you, young Miss," and added, his head dropping near her ear, "If it were up to me, I would send the ironstone north." Jemima glanced at the heap that had grown since June. In two months the accumulation of orange-red rock had grown. What a wasted opportunity.
"It'll still be here," he told her, "And when the wind changes and with it his thoughts."
"Could you show me the 20 level?" Jemima asked, as they got to the pit head. Already, a lot of miners' stiff, leather hats were gone - work had begun already. "I went down with my father…though I am sure you won't remember."
"I remember," Henshawe told her, as she took off her outer skirt. Underneath, a pair of hard wearing linen trousers, with another softer pair of cotton underneath. John Withering had approved of the garments for the purposes of climbing through mines, and so, approved, Jemima hung her skirt on the peg from which she had taken a mining hat. Henshawe struck the flint and lit her candle, taking his own and lighting from hers.
"How deep does it go?" she asked, when they had descended ten feet and were still in the main ante-corridor that branched off to other, lesser mining work faces.
"More wide than deep," he told her, gesturing on, "and if it were to carry on, we would be on the north face of the cliff."
It marvelled Jemima the three dimensional geography from under a mine. Dust, there was plenty, but far better than in the coal mines, no mine gases to explode or poison in a copper mine.
The familiar "dink dink dink" as if someone very far away came to her ears and Jemima stopped in her crouching progress along the north west passage.
"The little people," Henshawe laughed. It was a joke between them that they both said to one another when they heard it. People would say there were pixies living here - kobolds, or knocker men. But it is the ore, creaking, he had explained.
A black wall inset with paler grey minerals finished their traverse, and Henshawe lit another candle and held it up to the wall. Not that they would be looking for metal ores in a coal mine, Jemima thought, but the man would be lucky to get away with a naked flame at home. Firedamp was one of the worst hazards in a coal mine, the change in the air, the tightness of chest. The gas would light even before it got to the poor, unfortunate soul who had been foolish enough to bare a candle before him, if firedamp was near.
"More blackstone," she said, "Ironstone too, lots of it."
"At least it can be cleared, and your mysterious ore can be brought up too."
He led her back the way she came, catching her arm once when she wobbled on unexpected ground. Jemima's mind filled with possibilities. She was climbing the steps when she saw Poldark at the pithead hut entrance, and he reached to her linen skirt and handed it to her, ushering Henshawe into the sunlight. They were talking, as carts were being assembled on the grass around the mine. As she passed by, she thanked him and Poldark for letting her in, and held out another fist-sized rock, as black as the first one she had found.
"You keep it," Poldark told her, warmly, and she turned to find her father, to show him her treasure. "Let me know if you find anything interesting when you assay it!" he called after her, her hair, as black as the rock, streaming out behind her. Then he turned to Henshawe and put a hand to his shoulder, turning him to face the brick building that was, even now, being set up with block and tackle to haul up the ore.
"Do I need to tell her not to come back? I have to make this work, we all put fifty good pounds in, I, they, you, Will!" Poldark pressed his point as Henshawe gave him a look of astonishment.
"The child…,?" Henshawe looked over his shoulder, at Jemima, facing her father, showing her the stone she had been given, happily talking to him, and gesticulating, telling him of where she had been.
"Yes, the child!" Poldark returned, sharply. "How fares Mary?" Henshawe looked back to his friend and business partner, his face dropping the smile he had had.
"Fine, well, as can be expected, given the circumstances."
"Well then," Poldark told him, his tone brighter, quashing his instinct. "We must have a care; children grow, especially female children." Henshawe gave him a look of shock.
"I would - I cannot believe you would think I would allow anything to - !"
"I know you will be mindful, Will, "But men will be men, and she will not remain a child much longer." Discomfort settled between them for a moment.
"She is to go to Camborne soon, though I have not seen a young person as consumed with mining as she is. She will grow, and may not have an interest in it for much longer. Now, what are your thoughts about the blackstone you have discovered? Believe you to be something worthwhile in it?"
As he had predicted, Will thought to himself, his mind still on Miss Withering. Mercurial, changeable as the wind, where he would not entertain the lucrative suggestion to extract the iron, a more uncertain yield from the new blackstone and the man was hooked.
Jemima still came, and no-one's behaviour could ever be called into question. She explored, because she wanted to, she was accepted because she always had been. And during that time, miners brought up ironstone and rock that may have contained tin, and Jim Carter was caught poaching, tried and imprisoned.
"I know something that will cheer you," John Withering told his friend, when he and Jemima had travelled back to Tredree for dinner with the Giddys. He encouraged Jemima to lay the ore on the table.
"Who found it?" Davies asked, his eyes betraying his suspicions, smiling as they were on Jemima.
"My daughter," Dr. Withering said, proudly, as the blue-green rock was passed first to Giddy, then to Beddoes and then to Mr. Dunkin, Humphry's guardian.
"Well, bless me!" Edward Giddy exclaimed, smiling, too, at Jemima.
"Providence for our poor land, and no mistake," Robert Dunkin told John Withering, giving Jemima a brief, approving nod. From that man, it was high praise indeed - Jemima thought he was a stern man, a demeanour only reinforced with his forthright and blunt interactions with Humphry and with those who attended his home to hear Bible readings as the Society of Friends, to which Jemima had attended many times, the growling disapproval of the man keenly in her memory.
"I could not be more pleased with her than if she were my - " Withering broke off, then turned, guiltily, to Jemima. " - than if it were my son. Robert," he clarified, owning the indelicate thoughts that he had spoken, that he had thought.
And that had caused more good than harm; words were spoken for Robert Withering, lost so young in the pursuit of natural philosophy, willing to go abroad to find the best for it to be used with the good of the people through whose hands workplaces could be made possible.
There was a shift, an acceptance. Davies had given her a nod, more as an equal than a younger sibling. Jemima could have asked for little more that night, and she made herself a promise - not to leave Cornwall for the Black Country until she had all the skills she needed to be a success.
For that, she would have to convince Poldark to give her miners to dig out the blackstone to get to the copper.
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"Get the Bible, child. Elizabeth," Agatha Poldark added, when Francis's wife had not moved.
"Oh, Aunt, I am sorry.". She looked down to Geoffrey Charles in her lap, guilty at the indulgence she had permitted herself to cuddle him to sleep and daydream. At once, Elizabeth got to her feet and moved him gently to his crib. No spoiling of the boy, that would lead him to be spoiled as an adult.
"The Bible, Elizabeth," Agatha persisted, her throat dry as the memory of a family ritual stirred in her venerable mind. "The Poldark family bible!"
"Yes, yes," Elizabeth gathered herself. "Aunt, do you know where it will be?"
"Charles should have it," she told her granddaughter-in-law. "I last wrote in it…fifteen…twenty…" She gave a hawkish look to Elizabeth, "How old is Francis?"
"Twenty four, Aunt," Elizabeth told her.
"Well then, and we had it then in the cabinet in the study…Charles will know, Charles will know…!". She waved her hand impatiently towards the door.
Genteelly, Elizabeth stood, leaving the youngest and oldest Poldark together while she went on the search.
It didn't take long - just as Agatha had said, it was just inside the cabinet, old leather cracking across the front. Elizabeth opened the cover to a small eruption of dust. Inside, a spider's web of calligraphy filled the flyleaf. All noble families, noble and ancient, from the time of the Restoration, had their families recorded. It had been a habit from the time just before, when Cromwell had ransacked the land: when the Restoration came, people had to know to whom the nobility had been restored. No doubt the Chynoweth family, no doubt her mother had one similar.
Elizabeth took it into the afternoon room, placing it carefully onto the table before the old lady, who craned from her chair to look at the book.
"Yes, yes, open it up child.". Elizabeth glanced a few times to the old lady and then opened it up to the inside cover. Without looking up, Agatha Poldark held up a magnifying glass, tracing the branches of her tree.
"You do it, child," she told Elizabeth, "The men will never bother. But we women know the value of history, and tradition."
Elizabeth looked, down the line from Agatha's father, to her brother, Claude and his wife Matilda.
Three children, Maria, Charles and Joshua had come from their union, and Elizabeth found Verity and Francis, and her own name, beside that of her husband. Or, where it should be.
"Put it in, child, yer own name. That's right, that's it," Agatha encouraged, pushing the quill and ink towards Elizabeth. Clearly the old woman had been thinking about updating the Bible in order for the means to do so to be so close to hand.
Trying her best to imitate the flourishing hand that had recorded her husband's family's predecessors, she inscribed "Elizabeth Poldark" beside that of Francis. Then, she drew a line down and continued, "Geoffrey Charles Poldark" and "1784".
"There, there," Agatha declared, proudly, "Another sprig of the family tree." She looked across to the crib. "Close it, girl and come and look at what yer did, yer bonny boy, all resting peaceful."
But Elizabeth did not look; instead, another branch had caught her eye. Claude she knew about, Ross's younger brother, taken by a fever when he was six. She put her finger beside the entry.
"Shame, such a shame," sighed Agatha, as Elizabeth looked at her, and then back to the words, "Baby girl." She overcame her stunned silence and looked back to Agatha again.
"Ross had a sister?" she managed. It was the first anyone had ever told her of this.
"Ah yes," Agatha recounted, "Oh yes, weak little thing she was, we buried them together at Sawle, Grace and the poor little mite."
"And Ross knows?"
"Mebbe." Aunt Agatha shrugged and leaned back in her chair. "What do it matter now, poor little mite. It's yer little babby you should be thinking on." And with that, she closed the Bible's cover with a snap, and settled back into her chair.