But perhaps it went further than this. Gilbert Hunt could not have helped noticing, as the years passed, how Matthew’s links with his own father grew thinner, how his visits with Elizabeth to Launceston grew more infrequent and how John Pearce, even with the incentive of becoming a three-fold, four-fold grandfather, seemed to shy away from the close-knit atmosphere of Burlford. The Rector perhaps put this down to some wary residue of Methodism. Later, he would have revised his opinion. Later too, Elizabeth would have perhaps confided in him that there had been some difference of feeling between Matthew and his father: something to do with Matthew’s not advancing himself further in the world. So, Burlford parish was not far enough in the world for the former apprentice of Launceston, and all Matthew’s attainments failed to sate the clockmaker’s pride? Matthew was not doing badly. He had advanced far enough in the world for a God-fearing man — and advancement, in the world or in the Church, was a ticklish thing.…
In any case, before this point was reached, it would have seemed to the Rector that Matthew had transferred onto him from his own father a paternal status that it was difficult not to accommodate. And, remembering that sanguine young man he had first encountered in John Pearce’s premises, he could not have imagined the almost prostrate state in which Matthew would come to him, ten years later, yes, in the Rectory study, after little Felix had died, and demand an explanation, a reason. Nothing less.
He uttered the usual formulae. He spoke of God’s will. What else could he have done? God knows, his own heart was afflicted cruelly enough by his little grandson’s death and he grieved for both parents, though it was Elizabeth who seemed better able to bear this loss of one quarter of her issue. God knows, he found it hard enough, in this thick glut of family tears, to keep his own eyes dry and remember his priorities as a clergyman. And yet (could he ever be forgiven?) he could not deny that thrill of pure joy when (God’s will not seeming to suffice) he had put his arms round Matthew in a silent, receptive embrace, while a voice inside him uttered the equation: he has lost a son, I have found one.
And that was when the trouble really began. If that scene ever really took place (I imagine, I invent), then how deluded the older man was. He could not have guessed how this son-in-law, who had so far failed to be his friendly sparring partner, would one day become his earnest antagonist, on terms beyond any he could have predicted.
I see Elizabeth turn from the dressing-table, put down her hairbrush. I don’t believe that these Victorians were really, when it came to it, so Victorian. So demure and strait-laced. I don’t believe they were a different species, who propagated their kind by some method less intimate and passionate than ours. John, Christopher, Felix, Lucy. The atmosphere at Leigh House in those early days was surely ripe with love; as sticky, as fertile, as any pullulating little patch of ground that Matthew would have stooped over with his magnifying glass and collecting bottle, ready to trace yet more evidence of nature’s astonishing irrepressibility.
For that was how the villagers of Burlford must now and then have come across him, on Jacob’s Hill or in Loxley Wood, though not yet with the haunted and furtive looks he would later display when discovered in this way. Far from it. Like as not, he would wave to you and give you the time of day and tell you something savouring rather of one of Rector Hunt’s harvest-tide sermons, about how all creatures were exquisitely adapted to their purpose in creation. Which was obliging of him.
To be sure, he had his scientifical fancies, did the Rector’s new son-in-law — beetle-hunting and the like. But he was a good sort, for all his being a Cornishman larded over with Oxford learning. He made a fine picture with his young wife at church on a Sunday and said his Amen as loud as anyone, and any man who could marry the Rector’s favourite daughter with the Rector’s own blessing was good enough for Burlford and should hold himself, what’s more, a privileged mortal. He didn’t put on airs or hide the twang in his voice. All in all, he seemed to have his head set square on his shoulders and his feet square on the ground, and everything as it should be in between, judging by results. More to the point, when he stopped jawing about bugs and caterpillars, he could lean against a gate with you and tell you all that was worth knowing about the field in front of you, just by looking. Which showed he had a care for those who lived by the land and wasn’t just a lackey to the folk in Tavistock who got rich quick (and poor again just as quick, no doubt) by burrowing about underneath it.…
Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought. And Matthew did not lack for work. I see him, as his neighbours saw him, riding off over the hill to a world that was changing even more rapidly than his father-in-law’s misgivings could encompass.
Who has heard of the copper rush of southwest Devon (you see, Potter, I have done my homework), which came and went over a century ago? Forget your Klondikes and your Californias. Who has heard of Josiah Hitchens of Tavistock, “King of Copper,” who in 1844, the same year that Matthew Pearce encountered an ichthyosaur and also happened upon Elizabeth Hunt, discovered in a wood in the Tamar valley a copper lode so rich that it would form the basis for almost two decades of the biggest copper mine in Europe and within two years return its shareholders eight hundred per cent. The “mine”—that is, a chain, a family of mines (Hitchens must have regarded them as his children), which multiplied themselves along the course of the lode: Wheal Maria, Wheal Fanny, Wheal Anna-Maria, Wheal Josiah (naturally), Wheal Emma … Collectively known as Devon Great Consols.
Then there were all the lesser, hopeful ventures spawned by Hitchens’ discovery — including the Wheal Talbot mine, in which a certain James Neale would have a dominant interest. Then all the attendant enterprises (all work for Matthew): quays on the lower Tamar (ore out; coal in), canals, pumping systems, even the Consols’ own railway.
Under the guidance of his moribund senior partner, Matthew would have acquired the sought-after skills of a mining surveyor and watched the sinking of shaft after shaft. Beneath the day-to-day bustle of it all, the uncanny irony must surely have struck him. That he should be plunged, so literally, so nakedly, into the realms of Geology. That he should be lowered — for sometimes it must have been required of him — into those subterranean zones from which no one returns without having their view of life on the surface modified. When he rode back over the hill to Burlford and took in the timeless cluster of rooftops and church tower, the rookeried beeches behind the Rectory, how did it seem? Like a welcome refuge? (After all, he and Elizabeth might have chosen to live in Tavistock itself.) Or, more and more, like some piece of brittle, nostalgic scenery?
24th June 1856:
I perceive the Rector apprehends the literal undermining of his parochial security. Tavistock marches outwards — underground! Says: “My dear Matthew, I fear there will soon be nothing left of our familiar surroundings but a precarious crust. When you ride into Tavistock, do you not expect at every moment your swift descent into the lower world?” Answer, to the point: “I assure you, sir, we surface dwellers are in no such danger.” Do not say: “But the picture we cherish of our familiar world may be a thin crust for all that.”