The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “Do gipsies have queens?” he asked her. “I ask because if they do you are one of them.”

  She laughed but did not reply. It was a day well calculated to melt masculine minds to lazy nonsense but she must get on with the blackberry picking. She had vexed her grandmother last night and she wanted to make up for it. The blackberries fell from her fingers to her basket almost as fast as beads from a broken string and she was so absorbed in her picking, and Captain Symonds was so absorbed in her, that neither of them took any notice when they heard a horseman riding by towards the inn. But they did look up when they were suddenly hailed in the high excited voice of Ensign Haynes, aged fifteen. He was standing on tiptoe on the other side of the hedge, only visible from the chin upwards, his freckled face flushed and his eyes sparkling.

  “Come back, sir,” he commanded his superior officer. “That fellow came with a message. The Prince is to ride out on a visit of inspection. He may be here at any moment.”

  Captain Symonds was annoyed. “ ’Sdeath! Why must we be inspected? We are resting.”

  “Not now. Come on, sir.”

  “He is a lay-abed,” temporized Captain Symonds. “God-a-mercy, he will not be here for hours.”

  “If you are not ready for them, they come,” said Ensign Haynes out of his vast experience of military commanders. He looked at Lucy and grinned. “But I am not needed. I will stay and help this lady.”

  “You will not, you jackanapes,” said Captain Symonds hotly. “You will come with me and do what you are told.” He sighed and turned to Lucy. “Army life is hard on a man.”

  “All life is hard,” said Lucy. She had not ceased picking blackberries while they talked but Ensign Haynes had seen the sparkle in her eyes and it belied her grave words. He chuckled and looked at her again, but she was dismissing them both with a queenly inclination of the head and a peremptory gesture with a blackberry-stained hand. He continued to chuckle.

  “Who does the maid think she is?” he asked Captain Symonds as they went back to the inn.

  “Who knows what maids think,” said Captain Symonds disgustedly, for the dismissal had hurt his pride. “Above all that maid.”

  But left alone Lucy knew no more than they did who she was or what she thought. For a short while she felt crowned with glory, and wild fantasies circled in her mind like exploding stars, but then came hope and fear tearing her apart, and leaping between them a mocking spirit who laughed and jeered at the fantasies so that they fell down and turned into tears lying on the blackberries in the basket. Laugh at yourself, you little fool, he said to her. Fall in love with a prince? Fool! Come away into the woods with me and laugh at yourself there. But I cannot run from love, she said, for it is glory. To run away is only worldly wisdom. But I will not run to it. I will wait and be still.

  She filled her basket and carried it into the kitchen and she said no word of the Prince to her grandmother who was presiding there.

  “Wash the berries, Lucy,” said Mrs. Chappell. “We will get the jelly on the boil immediately.”

  Mrs. Gwinne had left the kitchen work to her servants and so household chores were new to Lucy, but she was anxious to learn because William hoped that one day, after he had helped his step-father with the farm for a little longer, they would go back to Wales. The castle was in ruins but they would find a home somewhere and Lucy should keep house for William and Dewi; and when the war was over for Justus too in his holidays. Until today this had been for Lucy a thing so longed for that her thoughts had been always busy with it, but now her mind was a confusion of other images; the curve of a boy’s smooth cheek, a fall of dark hair, brown hands holding the reins. She knew his face by heart, she found, and knew where the reins had hardened the palms of his hands. “I will not go to meet it,” she vowed again, and tied the strings of her cooking apron so hard that it was as though she had tied a knot upon the vow. Mrs. Chappell found her a good worker that morning though she did not always answer when she was spoken to.

  When their frugal dinner was over her grandmother was ready with another task for Lucy. “I always give a pot of my bramble jelly to Granny Miles,” she said. “And I have some pasties for her too, poor old soul. Take them now, my dear, and see that you are tidy before you set out. Change your gown and put a hat on your head.”

  Mrs. Chappell was patronizingly generous to the poor of the village and though Lucy loathed the patronage she could cooperate wholeheartedly in the generosity. But not today when she wanted to be by herself. However there was no help for it and presently she was walking up the lane with a basket on her arm. Her grandmother, glancing from a window, saw her go and sighed in despair, for her bareheaded granddaughter had not only neglected to change her gown but had forgotten to take her apron off. Yet no one would have taken her for a village maid, for she moved with grace and dignity. She rounded the corner and disappeared and the quiet autumn scene appeared for a moment or two empty and colourless.

  4

  Granny Miles lived in a small cob cottage next to the church and Lucy loved her because her tiny stature and snowy cap and apron reminded her of Nan-Nan. She was not so great a woman as Nan-Nan but she had wit and gentleness and unquenchable vitality still burned in her sunken dark eyes. Sitting and talking with her always eased Lucy’s longing for Nan-Nan, a thing that had become bearable with time but would not leave her, and today more than most days it was good to rest against the serene strength of an old woman who has weathered all the storms and not been broken by them.

  She stayed with Granny for a little while and then crossed the lane to the churchyard thinking of Nan-Nan. Was it true that the dead do not die? Because of the war the grass had grown long in the churchyard. Members of the Chappell family were buried here. One was Nicholas Chappell who had died aged seventeen. His hour of life had held his livingness as a cup holds wine, but now nothing was left of either except a few bones beneath the earth. And she stood here beside his bones with her own cup sparkling to the brim. He was not of her blood yet he seemed to be so at this moment. Had he even had time to love a girl? And what had he felt when he had come to know that the cup was cracking in his hand? Despair? Bitterness? Or that pure grief and pure bright anger that could spring like a flame from the dark web? She could not know but for a few intense moments he was so vividly real to her, and her longing to give him all that he had missed was so great, that his presence beside her brought neither astonishment nor fear, and when he slipped his hand into hers she held it closely to comfort him and was not surprised to find him warm. She thought only, yes, it is true what people say, the dead do live on.

  Then she turned towards him and it was Charles. She stood speechless, holding his hand and looking up into his face, and though he was not Nicholas she gave him her sorrow, and the gift of herself entirely. He was not Nicholas and yet he was. He might not see his eighteenth birthday. “Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust.” To one kind of dust or the other, the death of the body or the death of love. Her thoughts were not formulated, they were part of the confusion that had been in her mind all day, and they made her eyes look large and lustrous with sorrow and her mouth soft and compassionate.

  Charles flung his arms round her and hugged her. At first it was a boy’s awkward hug but it strengthened as he got the feel of this girl in his arms for the first time. They grew as they stood together. They were a year or two older when she sighed and he released her. Hand in hand they wandered under the tall trees, not knowing where they went and surprised when the cool darkness of the church porch enclosed them. But it held the promise of a greater privacy and they pushed the door open and went in and sat down on a bench. Peace held them both and presently Lucy remembered the church at Covent Garden. She had been able to go there so seldom after she went to live with Mrs. Gwinne and then at last, growing older, she had not gone there at all and had ceased to think of Old Sage. She was ashamed. How could she have forgotten him e
ven for a moment? “Touch God in the fair temple.” She had done that with him and through him and she was doing it now through the peace that held her and Charles. She had not known that glory held this peace. “All true glory, while it remains true, holds it. It is the maintaining of truth that is so hard.” The words came to her in Old Sage’s voice. Yet she had never heard his voice, for he was dumb. How could that be?

  The church clock struck over their heads and Charles got up, pulling her with him. His face that had been still as a dark carving, so that she had wondered what thoughts held him, had broken up into life and mischief and he ran her out of the church into the sunlight. “Not by the graves,” he said. “What made you stand by that grave? Come round here. It’s warm here.”

  In a sheltered corner by an old buttress, behind a yew tree, they could not be seen from the path, and a sweep of golden branches hid the graves. The sun was trapped in the warm place and a couple of butterflies sunned themselves upon the wall.

  “It was the grave of Nicholas Chappell,” Lucy said. “He was seventeen when he died.”

  “That has nothing to do with you and me.” He pulled her towards him and they leaned together against the wall beside the butterflies. She could make no answer. She could not tell Charles that if she had not turned to comfort Nicholas she would not have found herself so suddenly in his arms. She would not have run to her glory. “How do you manage to be here, sir?” she asked.

  “I have my methods of escape,” he told her. “The churchyard, I thought, was a short cut to the orchard.”

  “Ensign Haynes told you I was there this morning?”

  “He is a nice lad. He shall have promotion.”

  Their low murmuring was of nothing at all yet it seemed the wisdom of the ages. Everything about them had taken on a new depth of significance. The butterfly wings, lazily lifting on the warm stone, had a beauty so heartbreaking that it brought them near to tears. The sweep of gold was music, the song of a thousand tongues, and the warmth of the sun on their bodies was divine blessing. These things were still themselves, butterflies, leaves and sunshine, but they were also transmitters of glory from beyond themselves. Lucy found that she could no longer look at Charles and the feel of his coat sleeve against her bare arm made her breathless, so full of awe was she in the magic of his presence. Beyond this place of blessing the loneliness was vast, for no one out there had the slightest meaning now. Only Charles existed. And she only because he did. There was an old story that woman had been taken from man’s side. She could believe it.

  Charles moved, turning his hand to take hers again, and she was able to look up at him, searching his face anxiously. His eyes were bright and laughing but the grip of his hand was crushing hers to pulp. “I did not know it could happen so quickly,” he said. So for him too it had not happened before. That each was the first for the other was their especial blessing, their incredible and glorious luck.

  They turned into each other’s arms again with the easy movement of the two halves of an opened watch being pressed shut by some unseen hand. The pressure of the hand could be felt, and the Tightness of it, and the disappearance of time. They did not know how long they stood there before fear took hold of them both. Without actually seeing them Lucy became aware of two butterflies fluttering perilously over the surface of a dark sea. No, not sea. It was the dark web. How could they keep above it? How could they not fall in? Trying not to fall in she found herself struggling out of Charles’s arms, and because his fear had been a different one he pulled her roughly back, terrified to lose her.

  “I know what we will do,” he said quickly. “You know where my baby sister is lodged? You know? I am to visit her tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. Go down the lane between the walled garden and the stables, a cherry tree leans over the wall there with a door beneath it. Wait there in the lane for me.”

  “I will wait,” said Lucy, and withdrew herself gently. A gust of wind had come into the churchyard, making the gold leaves restless, and the butterflies had gone from the wall. With the intuition of a country girl she knew that the weather was about to turn around and because weather changes had often been important at Roch, demanding action of some sort, she took action now.

  “Go straight back to the inn, sir,” she commanded him. “I will stay here for a while and then go home.”

  He obeyed her. In the hidden corner she could not watch him go away but she listened intently. He walked with a long easy stride and she realized he would never allow himself to be hurried. She laid the piece of knowledge away in her mind with the few other things she had come to know about him during the last hour; the ability to be at peace, the still untarnished idealism, the determination to have what he wanted; the first few bits of the mosaic of understanding that she would build up as love increased. But could her love increase? It would change its character but it could not be more peerless than it was at this moment, untouched by the dark web.

  Presently she went home and found everyone there, even her father, like figures in a dream. Beside the reality of Charles they hardly seemed to exist.

  5

  The changing wind that had disturbed the golden leaves brought rain from the south-west by midnight, and delight to Lucy because it had swept over the cliffs of Roch before it reached the hills and valleys of Devon. The sound of it rushing in the trees brought the Roch music tumbling about her ears; all the magnificent tumult that had terrified her mother and through its mere memory would for ever fill her with joy. By morning perhaps the dogs of storm would have passed on but she thanked them for coming just now, bringing her a night of Roch on the heels of a day that had brought her Charles. All through the wakeful hours she saw him against the background of Roch. To picture him against his own background frightened her, to see him against hers brought peace.

  In the morning only the stableboy and Dewi, who helped her saddle the mare, saw her ride out of the stableyard, and though they were pledged to assure the family of her safety when she was missed they did not see which way she went. But they noted that for once in a way she had dressed with care in her dark blue riding habit, and her hat with the white feather that she never wore if she could help it, for her springy hair hated hats and always tried to push them off. And the stableboy also noted the loveliness of her glowing face. Himself appreciative of curves in a woman he had hitherto thought Miss Lucy too brown and bony for beauty, but today he changed his mind. It seemed cold in the stableyard after she had gone.

  She had to hold her hat as she rode for the wind was still high, the clouds sailed with billowing white crests lit with silver, the trees bent before the wind and the leaves streamed upon it. When Lucy and the mare reached Exeter they found the houses alive, flinging their chimney smoke up like banners, walls flickering with the patterns of dancing leaves, windows now bright with the sun, now shadowed. At the street corners the housewives going to market had their skirts blown out like balloons by the wind, and the children ran before it with cries of delight.

  But in the lane, sheltered from the wind by the high walls, there was stillness. The bright leaves on the tall cherry tree scarcely stirred. The door below under its arch of stone looked as though it had never been opened. Lucy did not dismount but sat upright upon the mare beneath the cherry tree, waiting. A robin upon the garden wall flew up into the tree and disturbed the leaves there, so that a shower of them scattered upon her dark skirt and lay there scarlet as blood, and for a moment she was frightened. Then the fear passed into the first genuinely feminine flutter of nerves that she had ever known. Was she tidy? Was she pretty? She had never enquired and no one had ever told her. She dropped the reins and put her hands up to straighten the unaccustomed hat and smooth its creamy feather. Then the robin over her head suddenly shrilled out a stave of song, sharp as a warning, and she gathered the reins again, her heart pounding. She should dismount to kiss his hand, she knew that, but even when she heard the bolt being drawn from the inside
of the door she could not move.

  And so it was as queen, not subject, that he saw her and he was startled, and halted under the archway. He had been thinking of her most of the night; the child laughing down at him from London Bridge, the motherly little girl in the woods, the gay untidy gipsy riding beside him down Fore Street, the loving and gentle girl of the churchyard. But here was someone different again. The tall motionless mare, the tall dark figure so erect in decorous clothes, the height of the scarlet cherry tree above her. His eyes had to climb a long way to find the face of this aloof and queenly creature, and then it was shadowed by the fine hat. He took three strides towards her and stood by her stirrup looking up at her. “I cannot find you,” he said in puzzlement.

  She looked down at him standing by her with his hat in his hand and she was puzzled too. He had dressed himself in the plainest clothes he had and looked sober as a brown thrush. But for his height and grace he might have been a country boy, uncertain of himself and in need of reassurance. She saw that he was not certain of himself. For some reason that she did not know he was afraid this morning and not certain of anything. She slid off the mare’s back and down into his arms so suddenly that he staggered, and holding to each other they rocked together in a sudden gale of laughter. Her fine hat fell to the ground and her hair, tangled by the wind, fell about her glowing face. They laughed and then grew suddenly serious again.

  “Now you’re the same,” he said. “What made you so different?”