Demelza by Winston Graham Page B

for you an' Ross to make out. But I promise you you shall not be moved.'
    The man at the door was silent while two more candles were lit from the first. She heard him stir and shuffle one foot.
    'I can't thank you right, mistress,' he said suddenly, 'but if there's service to be done for you or yours leave me know.
    She lifted her head, and smiled across at him. 'I know that, Mark,' she said.
    Then he was gone and she was left alone with the candles lifting their heads in the lightening room.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    SOME GROUND HAZE gathered with the dark, and that night the moon came up like a bald old redskin peering over a hill. In the hollow of Mellin and the barren declivity of Reath beyond, it looked down upon a string of black figures, active and as seeming aimless as ants in the sudden light of a lantern, moving backwards and forwards over the hummock of moorland beyond Joe Trigg's cottage and down towards a path of rubble-scarred ground sloping indeterminately east.
    The building was on.
    There were nine to help him at the start: Paul, his brother and Ena Daniel, Zacky Martin and his two eldest boys, Ned Bottrell, who was a cousin from Sawle, Jack Cobbledick and Will Nanfan.
    First there was the site to be marked; and this must be level enough to support the four walls. They found a patch and cleared it of stones, about a hundred yards from Reath Ditch. Then they roughly marked it into a rectangle and began. The walls were to be made of clay, beaten hard and mixed with straw and small stones. When Ross killed a bullock at the time of the christening Zacky had helped him and had been given a bag of bullock hair off the hide. This was used now, being stirred in with the clay and the stones and the straw to make a binding mixture. Four great boulders were used for the corners of the house, and from one to another of these a rough trough was built of wood about two feet wide and two deep. Into this the clay and stones and all the rest were shovelled and stamped down and left to set while more was mixed.
    At eleven the three youngsters, being on the early core, were sent home to sleep, and at midnight Cobbledick turned his long high stepping stride towards bed. Zacky Martin and Will Nanfan stayed until three, Paul Daniel until five, when he had just time to get home and have a plate of barley bread and potatoes before going on to the mine. Ned Bottrell, who ran his own little tin stamp, left at eight. Mark went steadily on until Beth Daniel came over with a bowl of watery soup and a pilchard on a chunk of bread. Having worked without a break for nearly fourteen hours, he sat down to have his food and stared at the result. The foundations were in and the walls just begun. The area of the cottage was slightly larger than intended, but that would be all to the good; there would be time for partitioning off when She was in it. To get her in it: that was his obsession.
    This morning early the little children had been round before they went off to the fields; then later three or four of their mothers, staying an hour to help and talk or looking in on their way to work. Everyone had taken his cause to heart and no one had any doubt that he would have his house before Sunday. They might have been critical of the marriage since no one wanted a stranger, but Mark Daniel being who he was and popular, people were willing to swallow their prejudices.
    At seven that evening Zacky Martin, Will Nanfan and Paul Daniel, having had a few hours' sleep, arrived back, and later they were joined by Ned Bottrell and Jack Cobbledick. At ten another figure came out of the cloud-shadowed moonlight behind them, and Mark saw by his height that it was Ross. He stepped down the ladder and went to meet him. As they neared each other likeness might have been remarked between these men. They were of an age, ran to bone rather than flesh, were dark and long-legged and indocile. But at close quarters difference was more noticeable than sameness. Daniel,