The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Two

  1

  The child gone, William was alone with Roch Castle, after Lucy and his land the great love of his life. It had not been long in the Walter family. William’s father Rowland Walter of Trewerne had bought it from the de Longueville family and William himself had been its lord only since his father’s death seven years ago. But he had been born and brought up here and loved it as deeply as though his family had owned it for generations. The mystery of love of place was something he had never considered, he only knew that away from Roch he was a lost man. And he was a farmer at heart. He loved the land itself, its very soil, as well as his sheep and cattle. To the dismay and disgust of his wife he liked to work with his men, ploughing, sowing and reaping, and shearing the sheep. Exiled from his land he became ill and miserable and his spirit withered. If only Elizabeth could have learned to love Roch he believed they might have been happy together.

  She had been born inland in a sheltered valley in the home of John Protheroe of Hawksbrook, her father, but the place that she adored was her mother’s birthplace of Golden Grove where she had visited so often in her childhood. Her uncle Lord Carbery had always been fond of her and his gracious house in the valley of the Towy, with the steep sheltering woods rising behind, and in front across the valley the great purple hill of Grongar, was her spiritual home. She fled to it whenever she could, taking the children with her, but William had been there only once, and had found himself stifled to death by the elegance and culture of that aristocratic, royalist and deeply religious family. Their voices were as gentle as the whisper of their silken garments. Nobody swore. Nobody drank too much. Such dogs as were allowed indoors smelled inexplicably of violets. But worst of all was the fact that here his Elizabeth was a different creature. The nervous tenseness and irritation went out of her and the colour bloomed in her cheeks. She was happy and no longer afraid.

  She was always afraid at Roch, though she tried to hide her fear. William was not a wealthy man and there was no protecting veneer of fine living at Roch to create an illusion of safety in a dangerous world. The castle had been altered very little through the centuries, was cold and draughty and exposed to every wind that blew. The great storms from the sea that screamed round the tower where she and William slept terrified her so much that she sometimes thought her heart would stop for fear. And the castle, she believed, was haunted. The de Longuevilles had been a tragic family with a curse upon them. Doors burst open inexplicably and things like knives and spoons and her embroidery scissors were always turning up in unexpected places, moved, she was sure, by no human agency.

  She was always fancying that she heard footsteps and the sighs of unseen presences. But the only time she had seen anything she had heard nothing. She had been sitting alone beside the fire in the hall one winter evening and feeling depressed because that afternoon one of the servants had died. Something made her turn her head and creeping up towards her through the shadows of the darkening hall she saw him, half naked and almost fleshless, a few wisps of hair clinging to a blackened skull. Death himself. Death threatening her and hers in this dreadful place. She had been too paralysed with terror even to scream and for a moment or two her sight had failed her. When she could see again he was gone. She had never spoken to anyone of what she had seen. It would have hurt her own proud image of herself to have been soothed as a child or laughed at as a hysterical woman.

  But sometimes the bursting open of a door let in very concrete terrors, news of shipwreck which would take every able-bodied man down to the shore leaving the women and children unprotected, unknown travellers demanding food and shelter, and once a band of thieves whom William had had to fight back down the hall step by step with his naked sword. And at any time the hall door might open very softly and the black figure of the queer old priest who lived at Brandy Mill would drift through lifeless as a shadow, looking for William or the children. Mercifully he was as frightened of her as she was of him and if she was alone his dazed blue eyes would fill with alarm, he would bow deeply and drift away again; but not before he had cast a blight upon her day.

  Of these terrors William was aware because he loved her, but as she did not speak of them he did not know how cruelly they shadowed her mind or how deep was her suppressed resentment against himself. She had lost her first two children, one because William’s favourite hound had jumped on her bed in the night and frightened her, causing a miscarriage, and the second because on a bitter evening he had gone into their bedchamber, where the baby was sleeping, to fetch something he wanted, and opening the window to investigate some sound outside had forgotten to close it again. The rising wind had blown the snow right on to the cradle and the baby had caught a chill and died. A careless man, he was not usually so where his children were concerned, but his friend George Wogan from Haverfordwest had been visiting him that afternoon and had brewed some Cardiganshire punch which he made to a miracle. The grief of the baby’s death had turned William from a moderate drinker to a heavy one and brought Elizabeth’s resentment one step nearer to hatred.

  And now there was this business of the twins Dewi and Betsi. Elizabeth had gone to Golden Grove, taking the children with her, and stayed too long. William had grown lonely and depressed without them and Marged, one of the maidservants, a pretty girl from the mountains, had a very sweet smile. At the time the affair had seemed to William comforting, inevitable and entirely harmless; but he had not meant it to happen and was astonished and slightly disturbed afterwards to find that it had happened. But he quickly forgot it and welcomed Elizabeth and the children home again with a face of blameless joy and innocence.

  He had not been able to understand Elizabeth’s cold misery and fury when a short time later she had to deal with the result of a momentary lapse which to his way of thinking had in no way affected his essential loyalty to her. He was very sorry and he said so, but she would not meet his sorrow with forgiveness; reconcilement between them had come only slowly and she had never allowed it to be the true reconcilement of the heart. Her attitude had angered him and for the first time in his life stiffened him into real resolution. Marged had been sent back to her mountain farm in floods of tears, that was inevitable, but he had refused to make her take the twins with her. She did not want them and they were his responsibility, he told his wife. Equally with Richard, Lucy and Justus they were his children and must have the same love and care. Elizabeth rebelled but he insisted and went on insisting, and Dewi and Betsi stayed on at the castle adored by everyone except Elizabeth. She did her best for them but their presence, as though thrust by William into the place of the two babies for whose death she held him responsible, was bitter to her.

  William, thinking of Dewi and Betsi, sighed and wondered what was to become of his children, for as things were going with him at present he would be able to make little provision for them. He had spent more than he could afford on Elizabeth, trying pathetically to buy her love with a coach, a flower garden, jewels and fine clothes; all of which she took entirely for granted because they had such things at Golden Grove as a matter of course. So now he was in debt, and efforts to improve matters by playing for high stakes at baccarat parties at Haverfordwest had been remarkably unsuccessful. He was no good at anything, he told himself wretchedly, not even at caring for what he so deeply loved, his children and his land.

  The castle, he thanked God, was strong enough to take care of itself. He looked up at the timbered roof where the sunbeams were woven in and out of the smoky shadows that hung there, like the gold threads in Elizabeth’s blue silk gown. Not all the sunshine was entangled in the roof. Pools of it lay on the oaken floor, polished and worn with age. The lower part of the walls of the hall were panelled with the same oak, and the musicians’ gallery and the ancient table and chairs on the dais were oak too, but the stone of the castle walls showed rough and strong above the panelling and formed the hood of the vast fireplace opposite William. On the hearth a few tongues of flame licked
the logs that were always burning there, resting in their own warm silver ash. A small stone figure stood in front of the hood and above the hearth, between the candle sconces. It was really the figure of a stork, the Walter family crest, but William and Lucy called it a heron, one of the herons of Brandy Brook.

  He sighed again but this time with a sense of comfort. Nothing, he thought again, could destroy this great castle. Individual men and women were tossed up on the surface of life like waves and sank away again into the deep and were forgotten, but houses such as this were like the eternal caves within the rock, where the waves surged and fretted for a while without disturbing their peace. And on the sands of time the waves left their pretty playthings of shells and coloured stones, and these too could live longer than the restless creatures who had tossed them down. It was odd, William thought. The signet ring with the heron on it that he was now twisting backwards and forwards on his finger would last longer in this world than he, and the little figure of the heron across the hall, looking so alive in the firelight, was immutable. It pleased William at this moment to think of him as the family spirit. The men and women died but the heron had the courage to live on. He was courageous as eternity itself. A queer gust of joy came unexpectedly, brought him to his feet and sent him striding down the hall with lightness and eagerness.

  He came through the screens and encountered his wife, Justus and Jano trotting behind her, coming from the kitchen. Richard had left the door into the garden open and he came lightly into brightness. Elizabeth stared at him and for an instant saw again the young man she had married, dark-eyed, alert and merry, a man with whom she could so easily have fallen in love had it not been that she had wanted another one. She had a sudden extraordinary awareness of superiority in him, a sense of herself falling, falling, that longest fall in the world that brings one to the feet of another in hearty loathing of oneself. It was as though the archangel Michael had come through the screens or, and her mind reeled, God himself. For one extraordinary moment she was nearly in his arms, that he flung out to her impulsively, but she managed to refuse them, clutching at her familiar supports, her sense of superiority and martyrdom, of injury and endurance, and the moment passed. She had, she thought, saved herself, and saw again the man she was accustomed to, his skin coarse and reddened with weather and ale, a man with a hang-dog deprecating air who looked much older than his thirty-five years. His arms dropped, he turned away and went down the steps to the garden, heavily and with a smothered oath. Elizabeth rounded on Justus.

  “Justus, what are you doing here? Go and find Richard and go to your lessons. And where is Lucy? It is time she came to me for instruction. You children! You are all just like your father. I must always be goading you to your duty. How it wearies me! Oh, how it wearies me!”

  2

  Justus trotted off obediently to find Richard and go with him to school and Elizabeth went to her bower. When William had brought her to see the castle on their betrothal day she had not been able to hide her dismay at its lack of modern comforts. He had thought it perfect himself but to please her he had built out three rooms to the east, opening off the dais, the bower, the nursery and the washing place where there was actually a bath tub. This latter innovation William viewed with suspicion. It was not out of place to have a bath in the spring, for the grime of winter did tend to linger in nooks and crannies of the skin, and of course when the body was encrusted with mud or blood, after hunting or fighting, a bath was a convenience, but at other times he did not hold with it for the hot water removed the natural oils from the body to its detriment. His father had removed his only upon necessity, and William followed his example, and much disliked seeing these invaluable lubricants being removed weekly from the bodies of his children. But Elizabeth insisted. And certainly it would have been difficult to keep Lucy looking even moderately presentable without continual washing.

  With her hand on the door of her bower Elizabeth called through the half-open nursery door, “Nan-Nan, it is time Lucy came to me for her lessons.”

  “Be patient just a minute, madam my love,” said Nan-Nan with respectful firmness. “Not yet finished with the child I am. Stand still, cariad! I have laid out your paper and standish in your bower, madam fach. Writing today to your mother you should be.”

  Elizabeth went obediently to her bower and shut the door. Nan-Nan was privileged for she had come from Golden Grove. She had been in the nursery there and Elizabeth had always loved her and upon her marriage had begged that Nan-Nan should come to her, and Lady Carbery had given leave. She and Nan-Nan understood each other and Nan-Nan thoroughly agreed with Elizabeth that this draughty castle compared very unfavourably with Golden Grove, but she refused to say so. Nor would she permit any criticism of William. After the deaths of the babies two terrible outbursts of grief and anger had been wrung from her, but afterwards she had obeyed him with the same kindly tolerance as before, and she cared for him in any physical misfortune with the same brisk tenderness that she bestowed on his children. He was the master and she did not allow either herself or Elizabeth to forget it. When a woman was married she was married, poor soul. No good crying over spilt milk and least said soonest mended. Nan-Nan was fond of clichés. She found them strengthening.

  Elizabeth’s bower matched its old-fashioned name for she had made it as a bird makes its nest, to her taste and almost to her form. If she had not actually leaned her breast against the walls to round and soften them she had hung tapestries there and she had her special treasures in this room, a couch with rose-coloured cushions, a walnut cupboard and a writing-table in the window that looked on the garden. A second window looked east to the distant mountains. It was a window of yearning for beyond the mountains was England and the city of London that she had never seen. Her mother had lived there since her second marriage and she would have lived there too had she been able to marry the man she had wanted, the Englishman she had met at Golden Grove. He was at court now, at that enchanted court of Charles the First and his French queen. He had not been unwilling, though not as much in love as she, but he had been in need of wealth and her dowry, as one of nine children and several daughters, had been microscopic. So she had been married to William and out beyond those mountains was all she still dreamed of in mad, weakening daydreams and visions of the night.

  She sat down at the table in the window and pulled her standish towards her, a lovely silver thing complete with inkpot, a perforated pot for sand and a small handbell. She shaped a quill pen and began to write to her mother but soon there was a slight movement and looking round she saw her daughter standing beside her, fresh from the hands of Nan-Nan, momentarily clean and tidy in a full ankle-length blue linen gown the colour of her eyes, her hornbook hanging demurely from her waist and her hair gathered back beneath a little white cap. She was holding out the bunch of wilting wild flowers that she had gathered on the cliff but Elizabeth did not see the flowers because her eyes were riveted on Lucy’s small brown upturned face. A pang went through her, familiar to every mother who realizes for the first time that she is going to have a beautiful daughter, a pang of mingled apprehension, fear, exultation and, sometimes, jealousy. Elizabeth was suddenly violently jealous. Those very direct blue eyes were startling in contrast to the brown skin and dark hair and lashes and even in a moment such as this one, a moment of sore buttocks and sore heart, the child’s vitality seemed to glow under the skin and to brim her eyes with light. Elizabeth had failed to get the man she wanted but Lucy would not fail because she was not empowered by her beauty only; her vitality and determination were as remarkable as her eyes.

  “For you, madam. I picked them for you.”

  Lucy was too honest to ask forgiveness for actions she intended to commit again at the first opportunity, but she could offer consolatory gifts with a sweetness that was hard to withstand. Her lips that could set so hard when she was wilful were parted now and trembled slightly in her eagerness to make amends. She had a mouth tha
t demanded kisses and her mother stooped to kiss it before she knew what she was doing. The touch banished her jealousy and in its place came a determination that Lucy should have what her mother had missed. She should not stay and eat her heart out in this storm-battered place. With her arm round Lucy she said, “London is behind those mountains. Shall we go there one day, you and I, and stay with your grandmother, and see the King and Queen and the lords and ladies going by in their coaches, and hear the bells ringing in the church towers?”

  “We have a bell in our own church tower,” said Lucy. “Have you ever been to London, madam?”

  “Not yet,” said Elizabeth. “But I am always begging your father to take us there for a winter.”

  “No, madam,” said Lucy firmly. “I would like to see lords and ladies in their coaches but not if it means leaving Roch.”

  Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders, for it was exactly the answer William would have given. “Lessons, Lucy,” she said irritably. “Pick up your hornbook.”