Sitting together in the dining room of Tredree House, St Erth, Edward Giddy, John Withering, Thomas Beddoes loudly discussed Beddoes's recent experiment, and the ludicrousity of tuberculosis sufferers spending six months sleeping in the same room as a young bullock. Beddoes had been the one to try out Giddy's observation, and there was a marked difference in recovery rates.
Jemima Withering was sitting on the stairs, listening to it all, knowing full well she should be in bed. Davies Giddy, with whose family she and her father lodged, crept down to sit by her.
"I miss home," she told him, at length. "I miss mama." Davies touched her shoulder, then took her hand in his. A brotherly gesture made by her firm friend. Six months in Cornwall and they had become friends almost at once. Jemima was ten, Davies thirteen and already at Penzance Grammar. He delighted in teaching her what he was learning, as she read her father's books and disdained as far as she could, the pursuits that were forced on Davies's sisters, although the girls seemed to like embroidery and flower arranging.
"Father says if he gets more business, he will be able to afford for us to move, so he can have a bigger practise"
"Move?" There was a note of panic in Davies's voice.
"Not home." Jemima closed her eyes. For all her longing for Wellington, her home town, from which she had used to be allowed to go by coach to Shrewsbury for her mother, take messages, fetch items, from the haberdashery, from the grocers, there was something about Cornwall. A warmth. A familiarness. But she still missed where she grew up. She missed her mother. "Somewhere here. Cornwall. Penzance."
"Shouldn't you be in bed?"
"Yes," she agreed. But didn't move. "I just felt…with the dinner…it reminded me of how it used to be, when we used to sit up together, Gregory, Thomas and I, we used to listen to our fathers talking. The last time we did that was at Mr. Boulton's house. Birmingham." Jemima turned and smiled to Davies. "Like in there, only more people. They would eat, smoke, drink, and talk about their businesses and their researches, and share what they had found with one another."
"Like with Robert?"
A cloud crossed Jemima's sunny features, and she shrank back to the wood panelling, drawing her arms round her.
"I am sorry," Davies told her, moving to sit beside her, and was pleased when she did not move away again. He had meant to say him and Robert, but had forgotten the boy had died.
And he liked Jemima Withering, who was nothing like his sisters. She was outspoken, like boys were outspoken, she hadn't been taught to sit and sew and say pretty things. On the contrary, her father had had her beside him, teaching her himself mathematics, logic, naturalism. And when she was not learning those she was out in the countryside looking at everything that she could. It was when Davies' mother would tell him to go with her. "Miss Withering does not know Cornwall; she does not know that the ground might give way from an old mine roof!"
So Davies Giddy went with Jemima wherever she wanted to go, and she wanted to go everywhere, including the Mount, with its castle and its ever changing tides.
"We just walk over, across the sand?" Jemima had asked Davies, when the sun was high and the day was hot.
"Sometimes. You have to know when the tide is going to go back in. You can tell by the sun, look." And he had taught Jemima how to thumb the sky to estimate the hours, and the difference between neep and spring tides. He had shown her different seaweeds and shells, and the inlets and hollows where saints of ancient days had their chapels, and how some could only be reached at high tide.
Davies had shown her Charleston harbour, where the Atlantic ships came in and out, and Falmouth, where the commercial shipping had its home.
But most of all he had listened to what she had told him, about her life in Shropshire, and the mighty Severn, which brought trading ships right in through the Bristol Channel and did business up its length.
"The coal would go back on it, brought from Coalbrookdale, and from Stafford. Father was working as an engineer. He had to go down a lot."
"You went in a coal mine?" Davies had asked Jemima, on a walk back from St. Piran's."
"Oh yes, several times. The mines here are so much better for the miners than coal mines. There's gases that can kill a man, that can explode. It just takes one candle, one spark, and the firedamp takes hold. I was there when there was an explosion beyond Penkridge, when firedamp caught."
Most of the time, Jemima and he talked about Shropshire, and of Cornwall. Now, at the mention of her brother, Davies felt bad for mentioning Robert. He remembered Dr. Withering's son; he had been three or four, the same age as Davies, when Dr. Withering was last there. They had hunted in the garden for insects - Robert had taken some ants and was crushing them with the sole of his shoe, gingerly touching the gooey remains with his fingers.
They had taken them to a patch of grass and had put the remains onto it, in a discreet corner. Robert, however, with his parents, had left far earlier than the end of the experiment, under a cloud of sadness, Davies never really knew what. But the experiment had done something; the grass had died, the ants' decaying bodies producing the same result to the stricken lawn as when his father had inadvertently knocked over a glass of wine.
"Mother asks if you will be at church tomorrow."
"Your mother is kind, and asks every week. But I'll go to chapel with Father." Jemima had once told Davies how the whole family had gone to the opening of a Methodist chapel in a hamlet close to Stafford. He was getting used to her stories, when, at first, they sounded as if she must have made them up. Dr. Withering had confirmed everything, when Davies had asked, and he had decided that, firstly, the Midlands was a very different place to Cornwall, and that Jemima Withering had done some remarkable things in her short life.
Now, she got to her feet, taking Davies' hand as a door beyond them indicated adult movement, and they hurried back upstairs and into their own beds before they could be caught and punished. Tomorrow was Sunday, and neither Davies Giddy nor Jemima Withering wanted to be kept indoors when there were so many possibilities to discover beyond the Giddys' garden gate.