The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  The copse grew chill as the shadows lengthened and she remembered her grandmother and Nan-Nan, and that they loved her and perhaps were anxious. She left the copse and went across the field, through the garden and so home. She went straight to the parlour and her grandmother was sitting there alone, doing nothing, and Lucy thought that she looked very much older now that her daughters had come to live with her. Perhaps daughters were a mistake.

  “Lucy,” said Mrs. Gwinne, holding out her hand, “where have you been? They have all been looking for you.” Lucy came to her grandmother and stood silently beside her, and Mrs. Gwinne cried out, “But where is Jacob? What have you done with Jacob?”

  “I have not got Jacob any more,” said Lucy.

  “But did you not hear me say that you should not be separated from Jacob?”

  “I did not hear what you said in all that hubbub of aunts,” said Lucy, “and I know that you do not like Jacob.”

  “It is true that I do not like monkeys, but I would not have let anyone take him from you. He was a comfort to you. Where is he, my dear?”

  “I met Tom Howard in the fields with some other boys and I gave Jacob to one of them.”

  “And you cannot get him back?”

  “Jacob was a gift,” said Lucy with a touch of pride.

  “Who was this boy?”

  “A friend of Tom’s,” said Lucy, and would say no more, for what she felt about Charles was something too strange and private to be spoken of.

  Mrs. Gwinne kissed her gravely. “I love you very much, Grand­daughter,” she said. “I love you more than any other living person. So does Nan-Nan, whom you will find upstairs. It is past your supper time. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, madam,” said Lucy. Her grandmother was curiously undemonstrative for a Welsh woman but Lucy understood her undemonstrativeness and respected it. She choked back the tears that Mrs. Gwinne’s words had brought near to the surface, curtseyed gravely and went upstairs comforted.

  Ten

  1

  Lucy’s letter was despatched by Tom and soon brought forth an apologetic reply from Robert Sidney. He had not forgotten her but he had been much away from London and the city had been so disturbed this autumn that he doubted if her grandmother would have approved an excursion to the Tower. But when the times were better they would have their outing. Lucy thought this an unsatisfactory letter and showed it to her grandmother. But Mrs. Gwinne upheld Robert Sidney. The Tower was a prison as well as a zoo, and notable political prisoners had been in captivity there since the last Parliament, among them the Puritan leaders John Pym and John Hampden who were so beloved by the people of London. There had been noisy demonstrations not only in the streets but among the Thames boatmen. Lucy must wait.

  “It is foolish to keep prisoners and lions in the same place,” said Lucy. “For it is in times of disturbance that unhappy people need the comfort of lions.”

  Mrs. Gwinne looked at her granddaughter and saw that she spoke not flippantly but in sincerity and from inner grief. She was anxious about her father. She missed the animals at Roch and she missed Jacob even more. The lions would have brought true comfort. “Mr. Sidney will take you as soon as he considers it safe for you, Lucy,” she said gently.

  “I do not wish to be safe,” said Lucy. “I wish to see the lions.”

  November came with skies veiled with thin silver and the trees with thinner gold, a fragile and hushed world imploring peace; and for a while it seemed that the city was in a quiet mood. The Puritan leaders in the Tower had been released. The King’s Scottish war had ended for the time being in defeat and armistice, and he had returned to London to call another Parliament. A letter came from Robert Sidney to Mrs. Gwinne asking if he might now take Lucy to the Tower. It was shown to Elizabeth, who said it should have been written to her, and another family storm ensued. But Lucy this time rode it peacefully. She was going to see golden lions in silver weather, and with that sense of occasion that had come with her Welsh blood she said she would wear for the first time the winter cloak and hood which her grandmother had made for her and trimmed with beaver fur.

  Sitting beside her in the coach, driving through the fields towards London on the great day, Robert Sidney found her changed. At their first meeting she had seemed an impetuous gipsy, though royal withal, but this small maiden seemed a pensive child who answered his kindly questioning without shyness but sadly. He could not know that his masculinity, so close to her, had overwhelmed her with longing for her father. Depressed by this autumnal mood he pulled her hood back from her face with a suddenness that startled her, and out came the gipsy like a jack-in-the-box, rosy and sparkling with mixed anger and delight, uncertain whether to laugh or spit like a kitten and dissolving instead into a sudden burst of tears.

  “Whatever is the matter, Lucy?” he demanded, his arm round her and her head against his shoulder.

  “My father does not like me to wear a hood,” she sobbed.

  “It is a pity, with hair like yours,” he agreed, pushing his fingers through it. “It is like heather, or a dog’s coat. And if you think that sounds ungallant I did not mean it so. I like heather and dogs. You must miss your father now he’s away, but he’s alive and with you on this star, this special green star.” He went on talking at random and she was soon comforted. He told her that his own father had gone to Paris to be Ambassador there and his mother had gone with him, and his sister Dorothy, whom he loved very much. There were brothers and sisters left at Penshurst but Dorothy was the dearest of them all.

  Lucy was interested in Dorothy and wanted to know how old she was, and Robert said she was nineteen and had a husband and baby, and Lucy was discouraged by such importance and maturity. She had thought Dorothy might be her own age. Then Robert said Dorothy was so pretty that the poet Mr. Lovelace had written songs about her, and that put her instantly into the company of Nest, Olwen, and Fair Rosamund, and the thought of all these lovely ladies brought added brightness to the air, and in no time at all they had reached London.

  “We must go by boat to the Tower,” he told her, “even though it is on the same side of the river. No one must go to the Tower for the first time other than by water.”

  They left the coach in the Strand and to Lucy’s delight went down the alley way that led to her special place. She looked up at the mulberry tree leaning its arms upon the wall. The leaves were now thin gold, and there were few of them left. They floated slowly down towards the river and when they were standing on the landing-stage Lucy found them rustling about her feet.

  “They are mine,” she said to Robert, and when this surprised him she told him that the mulberry tree was one of her two special places. “Where is the other?” he asked, and she told him it was at Covent Garden and she would take him there on their way home. Then the boat that Robert’s shout had summoned came alongside and she forgot the gold leaves and abandoned herself to the joy of the occasion.

  In the care of a stout and jovial boatman they moved down the river with the ebb tide at a splendid and exciting pace. Even on such a windless day there was a cool breeze on the water and the sea birds screamed and dipped around them. They might have been at Roch, only neither the trees of the south bank nor the procession of great houses and autumnal gardens that edged the north bank were like the coast of Wales.

  “Look, Lucy!” cried Robert. “Look back at Whitehall.” She looked back and saw the famous array of tall buildings rising superbly from the water, crowned by steep irregular roofs, towers and spires, the home and state apartments of the King of England. This royal habitation took the curve of the river in a graceful sweep and was reflected in the water. Past its gateways the white swans floated day by day, and the gulls dipped and rose about the walls. And this was Charles’s true home, as Roch was hers. “Is the Prince there now?” she asked Robert.

  “I expect he is, now that the King is home and the new Parliament sitting
. Look, Lucy, at the barge coming up-stream. There’s a fine barge for you!” Then as it came nearer he exclaimed in astonishment, “That can’t be my Lord of Strafford’s barge. He is at home in Yorkshire. My God it is! And he is in it. S’death, what a fool!”

  The boatman stopped rowing and turned to look. “Black Tom Tyrant, the devil take him!” he growled, and spat in the water. “All the trouble in England is along o’ him and the Archbishop. All those goddam taxes. Grinding the faces of the poor. Bringing the Pope over to burn us poor Protestants to death all over again. Hanging, drawing and quartering’s too good for them two.”

  “Hold your vile tongue!” said Robert in sudden fury. “We have a child with us.”

  Lucy had been aware of their conversation with only one ear, for the other was attuned to the music that came over the water as the barge was rowed powerfully up-stream. A young page was sitting in the prow thrumming a guitar and singing. The music had a noble eloquence that accorded well with the striking figure who stood in the barge, looking at London as though he saw it from the water for the first, or the last, time. He was unusually tall, a lion of a man. Beside him stood a huge Irish wolf-hound. About the man and dog there was a mutual grave affection that was very clear to Lucy.

  “Is that my Lord of Strafford, in the crimson cloak?” she demanded.

  “Yes,” said Robert. “The greatest man in England.”

  An explosion of disagreement from the boatman was checked by the wash from the barge, which struck them while his mind was elsewhere, and their boat swung into another whose occupants, a couple of city merchants and their wives and boatman, had also been gazing at the barge. An oar was lost, the boatmen swore loudly and blasphemously, the boats rocked madly and the water splashed the ladies’ cloaks. They were frightened and screamed, while their husbands shouted and reached for the lost oar, banging their heads together and nearly capsizing the boat. It was a typical Thames fracas. The gulls screamed with the ladies and Lucy, though she laughed, could now understand her mother’s reluctance to travel by water. She herself was not frightened but Robert was afraid she might be and rising up, tall and enraged, he roared at the boatmen, beating down the plebeian noise with his aristocratic thunder. Then he turned the Sidney charm on the ladies and soon they were happy and pacified, and with mutual apologies and compliments the two boats continued their journeys.

  “I did not know you could shout like that,” said Lucy with admiration.

  “I can when the situation demands it,” said Robert with modest pride.

  London Bridge loomed over them and Lucy found it thrilling to look up and see the shops and houses right up above her in the sky. Then their boat shot into the shadows below, where the silver water became suddenly dark and menacing about them, sucking and slapping at the piers of the bridge as the waves at Roch sucked round the rocks when the tide was coming in. There was a booming overhead like the booming of storm and looking down at her Robert saw that she was his little gipsy again, excited by the experience and enjoying it to the full. He was rejoicing in her when suddenly her face crumpled and she was once more in tears. When they came out the other side into the light again it seemed that there had never been a more miserable little girl.

  “Lucy, is this just Welsh emotion or is something really the matter?”

  “We were just underneath!” she sobbed.

  “Underneath what?”

  “The shop where you bought him for me.”

  “The marmoset?”

  “Yes. Jacob. I haven’t got him any more.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “No. I gave him away.”

  He was surprised but not hurt. He had an intuitive understanding of her and knew there was some good reason for the parting. “Could you tell me about it?” he asked.

  Until now she had found it impossible to speak to anyone of Charles, but it was Robert’s right to know about Jacob and she must tell him. Controlling her tears with adult resolution and murmuring low as a bee humming in his ear, so that the boatman should not hear, she told him about the meeting in the fairy wood. “I had nothing else to give him,” she explained. “Only Jacob.”

  Robert rubbed his ear, which was tickling with the bee-humming. “I should have done the same,” he assured her. “There is nothing that I could myself refuse to Prince Charles. And Jacob will have a good home.”

  “You forgive me?” she asked.

  “Of course I do. True gifts are not given with conditions. They are given for the recipient’s pleasure, whatever that pleasure may be. Now look. We are coming along to the Tower.”

  The great fortress rose menacing in the grey day. Arsenal, zoo, mint and state prison, it was in its last capacity that it awed Lucy. As they drew in to the landing-stage, and she saw above her a flight of steps and a dark arched doorway through which she must pass, fear came over her. It was not physical fear, a thing of which she knew nothing, but a darkness of the spirit. The silver day was unchangeably soft and gentle about her, Robert’s hand helping her from the boat was kind and strong, and the face of the man who was coming down the steps to greet them wore a welcoming smile. But these things, dissolving in the chill of the fear, had no reality. Nothing was real but this very terrible spiritual thing that had come to meet her and broken over her like a wave. But like a wave it passed on. She was aware again of her cold hand clinging to Robert’s, of stone steps beneath her feet. But the living warmth of Robert, the firmness of the steps, were things that it was necessary for her to test with her own senses, as a man bites on a coin, testing their validity with hers. To have the contact ring true brought the greatest relief she had ever known.

  “Is the little maid scared?” asked a kindly voice.

  Lucy looked up into the relaxed yet still slightly stern face of the man on the steps and was presented to Mr. Cottington, the Lieutenant of the Tower. Such was the Sidney prestige and his own charm that Robert was able to command even the personal welcome of the Lieutenant when he brought a little girl to see the lions.

  “She is cold after the journey on the river,” explained Robert.

  Mr. Cottington smiled at Lucy, and took her hand. “I have a fire in my library,” he said, and led the way through the archway and along a dark passage to a room where the window looked on a green garden that might have been in the heart of the country, had it not been for the grimness of the walls that enclosed it The library was like that of any country gentleman, booklined and comfortable, with a log fire burning and a collation of cold meats laid out upon the table.

  Lucy, with her capacity for enjoyment of the present moment, forgot her fear as her eyes flashed appreciatively from the collation to the two other gentlemen present, or rather one gentleman and one boy, presented to her as Dr. William Harvey and his nephew Smuts. The famous doctor, a Welshman who came sometimes to visit Mr. and Mrs. Gwinne, Lucy knew already but Smuts she did not know. He was on a visit to his uncle and had also been brought to see the lions. He had bright eyes and a sprinkling of freckles over his nose and cheekbones to which he owed his nickname, so he told her later. She knew at once, as she had known with Tom Howard and Robert, that friendship with him was like the end of a long ribbon put into her hand, something she would hold and follow into the future.

  Chairs were pulled to the heavy oak table and the cold game pie and roast beef, washed down with ale and London wine, enjoyed to the full. Then the gentlemen sat by the log fire with their pipes but the boy and girl were detained by ginger suckets and rosy apples. Their elders smoked and watched them with amusement.

  “There are no children living in the Tower just now,” said Mr. Cottington sadly. “There have been so many in the past. Young Watt was here with Sir Walter Raleigh at one time, and Algernon was here with his father the wizard.”

  Lucy heard and looked round at Robert. “Algernon?”

  “Not my brother,” Robert told her. “My uncle.”
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  “Was your grandfather really a wizard?” gasped Lucy.

  “He carried out scientific experiments; he was a chemist and alchemist. He was looking for a way to turn baser metals into gold.”

  “Was that why he was put in prison?”

  Robert was smiling with private amusement. “No,” he said. “My maternal grandfather, the Earl of Northumberland, was mysteriously involved in the gunpowder plot. It was not a serious mystery but it was awkward, and unexplainable, as when one of his chemical experiments went wrong and blew a hole in the ceiling of his laboratory. The final result in both cases was a rather nasty stink.” He brushed aside a smoke ring with his elegant hand. “The Gunpowder Plot smell still clings a little.”

  “I do not think it is right that poor little boys should be imprisoned with their fathers,” said Lucy indignantly. “I would not like to be imprisoned in the Tower.” For a moment the fear touched her again, but it passed and she added slowly, “Yes, I would, if I was here with my father.”

  “My uncle enjoyed the experience,” said Robert. “He visited the lions daily.”

  At the mention of lions Smuts, who had been intent on his food, swallowed a sucket whole and got up from his seat. “Lucy has finished now,” he announced, and Lucy loyally transferred half an apple to her pocket in order to bear out his statement. Mr. Cottington arose to lead the way.

  Lucy held Robert’s hand rather tightly as they were led along a labyrinth of narrow passages with stone staircases leading up from them. It was all very dark and airless and there was a curious smell everywhere, a stale unhappy smell that she did not like at all. Robert hummed a gay tune as they went and behind them Dr. Harvey laughed with Smuts, and Lucy realized they did it on purpose, and knew that a place where people laughed and hummed on purpose was not a good place. Her heart swelled against the knowledge and gave her a physical pain in her chest.