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Since the loss of Julia and the opening of the prosecution against him, he had forced himself to make this walk daily. Or if the mood took him and the weather was favorable he would go out in the new dinghy and sail as far as St. Ann’s. Such activity didn’t lift the cloud from his mind, but it helped to set it in proportion for the rest of the day’s tasks. His daughter was dead, his cousin had betrayed him, his much-labored-over smelting scheme was in ashes, he faced charges in the criminal court for which he might well be sentenced to death or life transportation, and if by some chance he survived that, it would be only a matter of months before bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt followed. But, in the meantime, fields had to be sown and reaped, copper had to be raised and marketed, Demelza had to be clothed and fed and cherished—so far as it was in his scope to cherish anyone at this stage. It was Julia’s death that still hit him hardest. Demelza had grieved no less than he, but hers was a more pliant nature, responding involuntarily to stimuli that meant little to him. A celandine flowering out of season, a litter of kittens found unexpectedly in a loft, warm sunshine after a cold spell, the smell of the first swathe of hay: these were always temporary reliefs for her, and so sorrow had less power to injure her. Although he didn’t realize it, much of the cherishing this year had been on her side.
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