The Angry Tide Read Free Page A

a year' s time. It had been through Deme lza that Emma had got her new position. It would be anything but fair, therefore, to try to fit Sam up with another wife before even the year was out.
    That left Drake, the younger brother. Drake was in a much worse state, having fallen in love with Elizabeth Warleggan's cousin, Morwenna, and then seen her married off to the Reverend Osborne Whitworth, vicar of St Margaret's, Truro, by whom she now had a two-year-old son. Drake was in a worse state, but because it was hopeless, he might be a more suitable subject for speculation. Morwenna was out of his reach for ever. The marriage bond, once undertaken, was indissoluble, and, however unhappy Morwenna might be as the vicar's wife, one could never see her running away from him and setting up house with Drake in defiance of all the laws and conventions of the land.
    So Drake's case was hopeless, and for nearly three years he had known it to be, and for nearly three years he had lived in a state of utter depression and had never looked at another woman. And two years ago Ross had bought him a small property and a blacksmith's shop a mile this side of St Ann's, so now he was a respectable tradesman and one of the catches of the neighbourhood. But he never looked at a girl. At least he never looked at one in the way young men were accustomed to look. He was emotionally frozen, physically frozen, doomed to sterile bache lordom, his memory totally dominating his present thoughts so that they remained fixed on a girl long since lost. What was more, one couldn't be absolutely convinced that it would have been a good match even had it eve r been able to take place. Morwenna was a reserved, shy genteell y educated girl, a dean's daughter, far more 'above' Drake than Rosina was above the average miner. Could one have seen her as a blacksmith's wife, cooking the meals, washing the clothes, scouring the floor? Surely it would all have gone stale very soon.
    Of course Drake was still only twenty-two; three years was nothing in a man's life at that age. But Demelza distrusted a vacuum; there seemed to be a risk in it; and she thought Drake might get set in his melancholy. He was always very pleasant but she terribly missed his gaiety. In the old days it had bubbled from him in an irrepressible way. Of all her brothers he was the most like her, seeking and finding pleasure in all the small things.
    So. It was perhaps risky to try to play the matchmaker. It was also probably useless. The spark came from nowhere, and no one could supply the spark. But there was a long word that Deme lza had heard used recently and, when she discovered what it meant, one she specially like the sound of, It was propinquity. You didn't actually do anything. Or nothing obvious, that was. Nothing that anybody could possibly object to. You just arranged things so that propinquity took place. Then you waited and watched to see if there was any result.
    And she alone probably of all people in the district was in a position to contrive such propinquity. She must bend her mind on how best to achieve it,
    A gentle breeze blew out of the west as she got up to go. A solitary horseman was coming across the moorland. She turned and began to walk home, her mind comforted by the thought of what she might arrange. Once before, long years ago, she had brought all sorts of trouble on herself by trying to arrange meetings between Ross's cousin Verity and a Falmouth sea captain with a bad reputation. She really should know better than to meddle in other people's lives. Yet hadn't there been justification finally, after all the trouble, at the very end? Wasn't Verity now married to lice sea captain, and happily married? Wasn't that the best result of all?
    She stopped to lift her skirt and look at the back of her knee where something was tickling. Sure enough, it was an ant who had wandered off his stone wall and was exploring impermissible regions. She flipped him off with her finger and let