“Once in a generation they come,” he said. “One of the Tylwyth Teg, born to an ’ooman.”
“Silly old man,” said Gwladys good-humouredly, but she remained disturbed. “It was as though she bade us farewell,” she added.
“There’s change coming,” said John Shepherd.
“What sort of change?” asked Gwladys sharply, for John Shepherd was known to have the two sights.
But he hedged and said less than he knew. “A storm there’ll be by morning,” he said.
“Not a cloud in the sky,” said Gwladys, looking out of the window. “So still it is out there you can hear the fish in the sea jumping.”
“It’s coming down the birds are,” said John Shepherd.
“Coming down?” said Gwladys gravely. As a countrywoman she knew the meaning of this. The migrating birds, reaching the coast, knew it was not safe to go on over the sea.
The hall door was still open and Lucy ran down the steps and through the garden, across the road and through the hedge. She was still crying as she ran barefoot through the tuffety grass and heather, and was unaware that birds were dropping silently about her, but by the time she reached the edge of the cliff the sadness that pressed upon her had become too heavy for tears. It came partly from the new sorrow of the sin-eater, that had opened the door within her to the sorrow of the world, but also from something that she knew without knowing what it was that she knew. John Shepherd must know it too, she had felt it in him when she put her arms round his neck.
She stood knee-deep in tawny bracken and the vast sky above her was the dim gold of very old beaten metal, thunder gold. Yet there was no haze or oppression of thunder. The only hint of storm was the deep eerie boom of the tide in the caves below the cliff. The sea was calm gold, yet below the surface Lucy knew it must be stirring around the tree trunks of Cantre’r Gwaelod, the lost land under the waves. The orange sun was low over the sea, the path of its reflection trembling a little on the surface of the gold, but Lucy tonight would not see the green flash as it disappeared into the sea, for above the horizon was a bank of cloud the colour of the fading heather. The sun reached it and sank slowly, and then all the cloud bank was edged with fire. It grew colder and the land darkened and it seemed to Lucy that the sky reflected the darkness. Then from somewhere far down below her, from some hidden cave, came a great and tragic cry, like some heartbroken prophet crying out in despair at what he had seen. Coming at such a moment the seal’s cry seemed dreadful to Lucy and she turned and fled inland.
It was then she became aware of the birds. They were coming down from the sky like drifting autumn leaves, martins, chaffinches, goldfinches and linnets, finding their way to the bracken-sheltered hollows and the warm dry hedges and the safe crannies of the rocks. Lucy had watched the bird migrations before but she had never seen one halted like this, halted as the warning sounded along the shore. She stood still, scarcely breathing, her arms out and her face turned up to the darkening sky, and they had no fear of her. A wing brushed her cheek and just for a moment some tired little being alighted on her hand, putting on one finger for ever the memory of a tiny claw that clung like a wedding ring. It was for her a moment of ecstasy, of marriage with all living creatures, of unity with life itself, and she whispered in Welsh, “Dear God, this happiness is too great for me!” Then she began to cry again and she no longer saw the birds, only heard them and felt them, drifting and rustling, their colours muted in the twilight, glad to drift upon the tides of the air, to fall and sleep.
The sheep and the cows were standing bunched together when she at last came to herself and ran across the fields.
2
The sea was loud all night though the wind came at first only in sudden flurries that brought no rain, only the mutter of thunder and the flicker of lightning against the darkness of the clouds that came up out of the west, putting out the stars one by one. There was no stopping them. There was nothing one could do. The coming storm was like blood welling from a deep wound. It was raining by morning, the thunder heat had vanished and the wind was fresher. By the early afternoon it was half a gale, the cloud mass had broken up and the clouds were racing across the sky like hounds let loose. They were the Cwn Annwn, Lucy told Justus, as they knelt in the windowseat of the oriel window in the hall, their faces pressed against the streaming pane, the dogs of storm that hunt lost souls across the sky.
They played games for the rest of the afternoon but with diminishing enthusiasm, for the gale increased with a steadiness that was alarming even to children who had grown up to take the storms beyond the window as much for granted as town children take the traffic rumbling by. They were disturbed too by their mother’s white face and their father’s restlessness. Even Nan-Nan did not appear quite herself. She told them stories as she put them to bed, and she sang the fretful twins to sleep, but her voice had weariness in it. Lucy did not sleep much that night. She remembered how she had heard the seal crying. Storms like this could dash seals to their death upon the rocks.
By the next morning both land and sea were drowned in rain and the waves crashed along the coast, mile after mile of continuous thunder. There was no question now of the children going down to the shore, they could not have stood against the wind, but William went out continually, his men with him, even John Shepherd, who always refused to be counted among the women when any danger threatened men or beasts. The women went about their tasks hardly knowing what they were doing, their faces taut with the strain of listening.
In the afternoon the rain stopped and an hour before sunset, when the tide turned, the wind gradually slackened. Great gusts still flung themselves at the castle with the booming of cannon, but between whiles came islands of peace when there was no sound of wind or rain, only the continual roar of the waves. It was in one of these moments of respite that they heard the gun they had been listening for, and knew that a ship was on the rocks. Richard, kept within doors until now only by the command of his father, was suddenly away like the wind before anyone could stop him. Elizabeth, who had been sitting embroidering by the fire, suddenly cried out and dropped her work in the ashes and Lucy ran to her. But she was not ill, it seemed, only suddenly brought to the end of her tether by Richard’s danger. She allowed Lucy and Nan-Nan to put her to bed, give her a hot brick at her feet and pull the curtains round her, and took refuge within them from all that the night might bring.
Richard, soaked to the skin with spray, soon came dashing back, sent by William, to report that the wreck was just outside their own bay on their own rocks, and was gone again at once leaving the women in the castle in a flurry of preparation in case there should be survivors to be cared for. The flurry made it easy for Lucy and Justus to follow Richard.
He had not waited for them and they had not expected that he would. Lucy was hindered by her skirt, Justus by his weight and tender years, but even so they made good speed down the lane. For a moment, as she ran, Lucy remembered that the hedges were hiding a host of little birds sheltering warm and snug.
When they reached the bay it seemed already full of people, fishermen from hamlets along the coast, William and his men and a few women with shawls over their heads; they were wailing and the men shouting, for the drama was at its height and Welsh emotion at fever pitch. The wind had dropped now but sea and sky were still as dramatic as the men and women in the bay. The clouds were lit with the sunset and the waves came in like charge after charge of cavalry, their spume flung to a great height. In all the movement and turmoil the eye could find only two centres of calm on which to rest, the wrecked ship itself, wedged between two rocks, sometimes seen for a moment then hidden again as the waves leaped at it, and all along the horizon, where two nights ago there had been that ominous bank of cloud, a long streak of tranquil lemon-coloured sky. It would lift and lift all night, Lucy knew, until it had imposed its tranquillity over the land and sea, and then all the little birds hidden in the hedges would fly away.<
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Then she forgot the birds in the knowledge that men were on that motionless ship and that they too were quiet; unable to do anything more to help themselves. It was the people on shore who were in a turmoil, for they did not know what to do. It seemed impossible to launch small boats in this sea and though the tide was going out it had nearly reached its limit and would not bring the ship much nearer to them. But someone had brought ropes and a brawny fisherman climbed to the top of Lucy’s special rock holding one of them, gathering his strength for the throw. William followed with another rope and Lucy scrambled up to be with her father. He exclaimed angrily, but let her stay. The moments of waiting were tense with the expectation that at any moment the battered ship might go to pieces. Then, with a shout from the bay, the rope was flung. It fell short but was flung again, and again, and now there was no more tumult, only shouts of command, and finally a yell of triumph when the rope was caught and secured and the first man was seen coming down it to the sea. A second rope was flung and men from the shore went out along it to meet the exhausted men from the wreck. They went out with the waves over their heads and seemed to disappear, so that the women cried out. William leapt down from the rock with Lucy, whom he then pulled from him and flung away like a burr, and went out through the waves. And so did John Shepherd.
They passed through the wall of water and Lucy did not see them any more. It was as though a door had slammed in her face, and was her first experience of terror. She stood still, her mouth vacantly open, her hands twisted up in the stuff of her dress. Men shouted at her to get out of the way and the water washed round her ankles but she did not move. She did not see anything but the wall of water where the door was that might not open again. They had gone. From the rock beside her father she had seen the men on the wreck and her mind had known that they were in danger of death, but death then had seemed distant, something she did not know about, dreadful perhaps but exciting and mysterious like all unknown things. But it was not like that now. It was very simple. It meant that at one moment the person you love best in the world was alive and warm beside you and the next there was no one there. She was stunned by the terror of this reversal. The fight to get the men in was going on all about her but she was too deeply shocked to know about it. She simply watched the wall of water that fell, and rose again immediately, but did not return her father and John Shepherd to her.
Justus pulling at her skirts brought her back, for she loved Justus best after Nan-Nan and William. “Our father said to go home at once,” said Justus.
She swung round and at the same moment a beam of sunset light shone through a breaking cloud like a long finger of brightness and touched William. She saw him kneeling with his back to her, bending over a man who lay on his back on the sand, and suddenly the dreadful reversal was the other way round, from death to life. She flew to him, hitting out with her clenched fists at men in her path, and flung her arms round his neck. She could not speak but the stranglehold of her arms was the last straw for William at that moment. “S’truth! Lucy, get away,” he swore at her. “Take Justus and go home, for God’s sake.” The face he turned up to her was a mask of exhaustion and anger but she did not mind being sworn at if he was alive. Then looking over his shoulder she saw the man who lay on the sand with his eyes shut. It was John Shepherd, but John so different that he no longer looked like himself. The shock came back. “John Shepherd is dead,” she said.
“Not yet, the old fool!” said William, and pulling her arms from his neck he pushed her away from him. “Take her home, Justus,” he said. “And where’s Richard? Richard!”
His voice had risen to a roar, so like the roar of a wild beast in grief and rage that it brought Richard running to him. “Take these children home. What the devil were you doing letting them come here at all? Take them home.”
Richard marched them along in fury, driving them before him like a herd of cattle. The ignominy of being rent from the excitement on the beach to take the young ones home stuck in his gizzard, but not sufficiently to impede speech. His opinion of them buzzed and spat about their ears so nastily that half way home Lucy swung round, twisted her hands in his wet hair, braced herself with her knee in his stomach and pulled. He stamped on her feet and she hit him on the nose and made it bleed. Justus sat down on the wet bank to wait. He was tired and very miserable because of John Shepherd. He cried softly.
The affair ended as quickly as it had begun because Lucy heard his weeping. She pulled him up out of the hedge and they stumbled on together.
3
Of the evening of confusion that followed Lucy afterwards recalled very little, though she remembered that Nan-Nan put them to bed and that she got up again, crept past their mother’s fourposter to the dais and looked down on the scene in the hall, dark now and lit by candles and firelight. The shipwrecked men were being cared for there, the servants were going backwards and forwards and Parson Peregrine and her father were helping to look after them. The scene was wild and strange for the candles flickered in the draught, the flames of the hearth leaped and died and shadows rose and fell like waves, revealing the men’s faces then drowning them again in darkness. It was as though the storm still broke over them all, but silently. The noise of it was gone but the suffering ebbed slowly. And she could not see John Shepherd.
She was caught by Nan-Nan and taken back to bed again. “Where is John Shepherd?” she asked.
“In the kitchen,” said Nan-Nan cheerfully. “It’s warm there by the fire. Better for him than in his own cottage with none to care for him. He’s tired and cold but not injured at all. Don’t fret now, cariad. Tell me, am I to lock you into the nursery or will you stay in your bed near your mother?”
“I will stay,” promised Lucy, for being locked in made her want to swear. Indeed in her younger days she had done so, beating her fists black and blue on the locked nursery door, and she felt she would have done the same thing tonight, as she lay in the darkness thinking about the storm and John Shepherd. She did not sleep well and with the first light she got up and dressed and went barefoot across the bedchamber and down through the hall.
The rescued sailors, wrapped in blankets, were lying about the fire asleep, safe and warm. It made her heart glow to think that Roch had saved them and now sheltered them. She went through the screens and down the stone steps to the kitchen. There was no one there except John Shepherd lying on a truckle bed by the fire, but someone must have been there on and off through the night, she thought, because the fire had not died down to ash but was burning well. She knelt by the old man and looked at him. His face was grey and his closed eyes seemed to have fallen back inside his head, and his cheeks had fallen in too. His mouth was open and his breath came in shallow gasps. The sour smell of old age came from him and the smell of death. But Lucy was not shocked or frightened, only furiously angry. Why should this happen to John Shepherd? He was a good old man and he had been trying to help save life down in the bay. Why should this happen? Why was not someone doing something? Why was he alone like this? She fumbled among the blankets and found his hand and held it, but he did not seem to know. She talked to him, telling him how much she loved him, but he did not seem to hear what she said. Then she began to cry and her tears dripped down on his hand, but he did not move. Then Gwladys came in, looking very puffy about the eyes as though it was she who had been up all night with John Shepherd, and told Lucy to go back to bed. “There’s nothing you can do, cariad,” she said. “The doctor came last night, and the parson, and could do nothing. John Shepherd is an old man, with his heart not strong at all, and he had no business to go down to the bay. Silly old fool!” And then she began to cry too. “He will not speak again,” she sobbed.
And then John Shepherd suddenly surprised her, for he opened his eyes and spoke. “With all my sins upon me,” he whispered in despair, and then he closed his eyes and his head upon the pillow began slowly turning from side to side. Lucy took his hand again and nothing t
hat Gwladys could say to her would make her let go. Gwladys in despair fetched Nan-Nan, and then William, but she would not go. “Let her alone,” said William at last. “We cannot have her screaming. Poor Bud, she has got to know one day.”
John Shepherd lived until nearly midday. Screens were placed round the chimney corner where he lay, and though the work and traffic in the kitchen were heavy that morning men and women came and went silently, and Lucy scarcely heard them. But she knew just when John Shepherd died. A flame leaped in the fire and she turned her head towards the sudden explosion of light. When she looked back again John Shepherd had ceased to breathe. She could not believe it at first and she knelt on, still holding his hand. Then she knew. John Shepherd had gone through the door and this time he would not come back. She would never talk to him again. Some disasters could be righted but not this one. Yesterday she had feared without knowledge, as men fear pain who have never felt it burn into their own flesh, but now knowledge struck into her soul, not like burning but like the frost of winter. She no longer cried but shivered from head to foot. If this could happen at any moment to those one loved then all peace of mind was gone for ever, as John Shepherd was gone for ever. There was no foothold anywhere and she was appalled. Yet still she knelt on holding his hand. To do so was a sort of loyalty. She would not forsake the dead.
The Child From the Sea Page 10