The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  He was not a bad man, she thought, as she walked home to get Dewi’s dinner, and there had been kindness in his eyes as well as that sharpness.

  In the afternoon she went back to Old Parson with the news of Parson Gryg’s permission, and also with the worst lie of the whole day. Her father, she said, had come home unexpectedly and would be there in the morning. Instantly Old Parson was reassured. Yes, he said, he would be there at the time appointed, early though it was, and he would not bring Damaris for he realized that secrecy was the only way to protect Tomos. He was entirely happy now and delighted that it should be he who was to marry Lucy.

  At dusk she was in the castle garden waiting for Charles and the quietness brought peace. And tomorrow Charles would be her husband. She realized it suddenly and the anxious, hot, dishonest day seemed to disappear behind her like a stone dropped into a pool of water. That the pool of the past always dries up in the end, leaving one to reckon with what lies at the bottom, she knew, but she let the knowledge drop also, so that the surface of the pool mirrored nothing but quietness. In the silence she heard the hoofs of the tired mare clip clopping up the hill and it was one of the best moments of her life. But all she could find to say when he was with her was, “I have brought you more food and it’s in the kitchen. Has it gone well with the notary?”

  “He was fuddled enough to swallow every word of your story, and he accepted a gold piece with a promise of another tomorrow. And I gave another to the clerk who will have to get him here on time. There will not be much left in your purse, dear heart, by the time we are safely married.” He laughed his great laugh. “This must be the first time in English history that the heir to the throne has had his wedding paid for by his bride. I should be ashamed if it were not so comic.”

  “It is good for King Corphetua,” said Lucy. “It will teach him not to get his wallet stolen.” She broke off abruptly as a sudden thought struck her. “We have no ring! That is the most important thing of all and we have forgotten it.”

  “No,” said Charles. “I have a ring my father gave me that I always wear. When I came to find you I hung it round my neck on a cord, for I could not leave it behind. It is part of me.”

  “Can you bear to give it to me?”

  “I have given it to you already, when I gave myself in the Valley of Roses. You will see it tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” said Lucy simply. “I am going now for I have so much to do at home. I will send Dewi to wake you in the morning. It would be dreadful if you overslept.”

  “You are telling Dewi?” asked Charles, astonished.

  “In the morning. I cannot have my father so I must have a brother with me. I wish it was Justus, but I love Dewi.”

  She spoke a little sadly but he knew she was not unhappy. She was not a woman who would ever waste her time longing for the impossible perfections when the imperfections of this life could be so unbelievably lovely.

  Five

  1

  Early the next morning, while the hot day was still tempered by the seas cool breath, Lucy and Old Parson went up the hill together, and Lucy told her last lie. Her father had developed a fever and could not be with them.

  “The same fever that you had. It seems an intemperance that this hot weather brings.”

  Old Parson accepted this. He found himself very serene this morning, weak after his illness and not able to think or remember clearly, but serene. He had read the marriage service carefully in the Perrot family prayer book, he had the book with him and knew what he must say. He was wearing his black gown. His mind fumbled at what Lucy had said and arrived at a peaceful conclusion. “Then, my child, I must be to you father as well as priest.”

  “Thank you,” said Lucy, “that is just what I want. My father and I will always be grateful to you.”

  They had nearly reached the top of the hill and she looked up just as two punctual figures came out of the castle lane and turned towards the church, Charles striding quickly, tall and straight, Dewi running at his heels like a small esquire. A gush of joy broke over her and she laughed as she said to Old Parson, “Look sir! There he is. There is Tomos.”

  Old Parson blinked feebly as the couple swung round the corner and disappeared. “The young travel so fast, my dear,” he said. “One scarcely sees them. I wish the young did not travel so fast. It bewilders me.”

  They in their turn turned the corner and Lucy saw two horses tied at the lych-gate. So the notary and his clerk were there already. The church was not locked in these days since it was stripped bare and there was nothing to steal. And how bare this royal wedding was stripped! But she did not mind since she was being married at Roch, in the church where she had been baptized, and the music of birds and leaves talking together in the arching boughs above her head, as she walked through the churchyard, was all the music she wanted. “Father, Mother, Justus and Nan-Nan,” she whispered to herself as she came into the porch, and she felt a great pang. But they were here in her heart, she told herself.

  Charles was waiting just inside for her, by the old low font. He had got used to seeing her dressed as a boy and it startled him to see how tall she looked in the long sea-green gown, pearls in her ears and her hair tidier than he had yet seen it. There was no girl in the world, he thought at this moment, so fit to be a queen. He took her hand and led her up the church to the chancel steps, Old Parson and Dewi following placidly behind them. The church was full of cool emptiness and the shimmer of early sunshine. There was something about this wedding, some quality of stillness and order, that awed the notary and his clerk to unobtrusiveness, and Charles and Lucy hardly noticed them where they stood by the pulpit. Old Parson stumbled placidly through the service, prompted here and there by Lucy, the vows were spoken and the ring with its dark ruby glowed on Lucy’s finger. It caught the sunshine like fire.

  In the vestry, at the signing of the register and the marriage certificate, the notary pulled himself together and endeavoured to be facetious, but was silenced and bewildered by the extraordinary dignity of the young bridegroom, and the shining beauty of the girl. Moving in her own world she yet seemed to wish that her light should grant blessing, like Hesperus at the first hour of eve. She smiled upon the four men, and had indeed been in control of them throughout the strange little ceremony, but in her starry world there was actually only the one. Yet with grave friendliness she led the notary and his clerk out to the churchyard to show them the beauty of it, so enchanting them that it did not strike them as odd that the bridegroom should stay behind in the vestry. For the notary the whole thing had by this time taken on something of the progression of a dream; all but the gold pieces upon which his hand was clamped in his pocket. They were real enough, but so in a queer way was the dream. As he rode away he was still enclosed in it, and disturbed by it, as though some door in his own being, long closed, had been wrenched open again. But his dim eyes allowed him no vision and his confused memory, groping back to his childhood, could not find what it groped for. It took a few days of familiar routine, and much good ale, before he could shake off the vague sadness and confusion engendered in him by the beauty of that early morning wedding in a bare church.

  And for the rest of that day Old Parson was even more confused. He sat at the door of his little room and his hands trembled on his knees. It had been a dream of beauty but what had been his part in it? What had been the actual meaning of his priestly action? He tried to think but the mere physical exertion of the morning had been too much for him, and by the evening he had a fever again and the dream was lost in the mists of his imaginings.

  2

  Lucy woke first and looked straight up through the great rent in the ceiling to the sky at dawning. It had been her wish that she and Charles should spend their wedding night in her parents’ great bedchamber, though what was left of the ceiling was likely to drop on them at any moment and the floor was littered with the fallen stones of the tower. The fourposter
was more or less intact and no harder than the kitchen floor when spread with blankets. To sleep here had seemed to Lucy an act of reparation to her father, and since Nan-Nan had said that her mother and father must always be held together in her love, to her mother too. They had been excluded from her wedding day but they should have a link with her wedding night. Where they, in the early happier days of their marriage, had lain and loved, she and Charles would also lie, and in the very depths of her bliss last night she had not forgotten them.

  It was not a flaming dawn, it was pale silver, and so still that the sleepy birds in the garden seemed murmuring at her very ear. But she could not hear the sea and she knew it must be lying still as a polished shield, as still as she and Charles had been lying for the past few hours, only their breasts moving as they breathed, as the sea’s breast had moved all night.

  She lifted herself on her elbow and looked down at her husband’s dark face. He lay as she had so often seen Dewi lie, on his back with one arm behind his head on the pillow, his lashes dark on his cheeks, relaxed and defenceless in sleep, young as a fledgling. Was this a man she had married, or a child? He seemed remote from her in the mystery of his being and his sleep, and yet she was now bone of his bone and she had no existence apart from him. Down through her body to her mind and soul she had taken the stamp of this man, as though a seal had been pressed on soft wax. She had thought, when the whole of her had seemed to go out to him in the Valley of Roses, that she had given all she had. She had been wrong. She had given more last night because she had also taken. She knew now that no giving is greater than when it is mutual, since to be able to take deepens the power to give. Her eyes on his face would always bring Charles back to awareness of her. He opened his own eyes and looked up into the deep blue of hers. A slow grin spread over his face. Then something wet fell on his cheek.

  “Lucy! What are you crying for? What weepers you Welsh can be.”

  “O Dduw, y mae yr hapusrwydd yma yn ormod yw ddal. Dear God, this happiness is too great for me to bear,” Lucy murmured.

  She spoke only in Welsh and he did not understand her, but he did not just then ask her the meaning of what she said for the strange sonorous phrase seemed to express so perfectly the shock of joy that each had experienced as he returned to her from his deep sleep.

  “Did you sleep?” he asked.

  “I slept like a bee sipping honey. I would drop into the sweetness of it for a little while but I would have to come up again to the sun; to my husband warm and alive beside me.” She sank down again to her pillow and lay beside him, her hand feeling for his. “I do not think Dewi woke all night. I did not hear him.”

  She had not wanted Dewi to spend the night alone at the cottage and they had brought up her little bracken-stuffed mattress and laid it on the dais not far from their door.

  “I like Dewi,” said Charles.

  “Nan-Nan said you would.”

  “Nan-Nan! But she never knew me.”

  “She had a ‘seeing’ one day and said that Dewi would be beloved of a king.” A sudden thought struck her and she raised herself on an elbow and gazed at Charles with shining eyes. “So you will be king! Nothing dreadful will happen to you. I never thought of that before. Why did I not remember Nan-Nan’s ‘seeing’ when I felt anxious about you?”

  Charles opened his mouth to say that Nan-Nan might have been referring to another king but thought better of it because Lucy was so full of relief and joy. He said instead, gazing up at the sky, “Why has it not hung out its banners for us?”

  “The weather is on the change,” said Lucy. “I think I am glad. I would like us to stand on the cliff together when there is a gale blowing from the sea. We must do that before you go.” She paused, her voice catching. “Charles! You cannot go! You cannot!” Her few waking tears had been as nothing to the storm that broke now as she clung to him and sobbed her heart out. “Now look, Lucy,” he implored, “I did not come all this way, I did not marry you, to be drenched to the skin on the very first morning of my married life. Stop it, Lucy.”

  He was annoyed and she struggled to stop crying. The Welsh cried easily, the English did not. She was English herself now and she must not annoy her husband. She held up her hand, looking at the beautiful ring, and the tears in her eyes splintered the ruby into a five-pointed star of flame.

  “It is beautiful,” she murmured, “and so different from the first.”

  “The first?” demanded Charles sharply. “The first what?”

  “The first ring,” said Lucy. “I have been married before, you know.”

  Charles had only just emerged from sleep and was in no state to receive a profound shock. He sat up like a jack-in-the-box, leaned over and pinned her down in the bed with all his strength, his hands pressing hard upon her shoulders. She gloried in the power of his grip, though she was sure her shoulders would be bruised for weeks to come. She smiled fearlessly up at him and did not move. “I was married to a bird,” she said.

  “A bird!” he ejaculated, his fingers biting more deeply into her shoulders, his bewilderment profound. Her eyes were sparkling with teasing mischief now, yet the wet track of tears still ran back from the corners of them to lose itself in the cloud of dark hair on the pillow. She was enough to drive a man mad, he thought, with her bewildering changes of mood. But how lovely she was even with her hair in a tangle and her face tear-streaked; shed tears made her eyes more intensely blue and the tangled hair lay in a pool of darkness that turned her face into a floating flower. He must be hurting her but her smiling mouth would not acknowledge hurt. He bent over and kissed it, and the hollow at the base of her neck, and the tear-damp patches in front of her ears. “Could you tell me about this goddam bird?” he asked humbly.

  Because it had meant so much to her she was shy as she told him of the migration that the storm had halted, and the small birds dropping from the sky like autumn leaves. “It felt so strange, his claw round my finger just for the moment like that. It married me for ever to all wild things, birds and morlos and the field mice in the hedges.”

  “Do you remember when we ate blackberries together in the wood?” he asked her. “I would like to see you again with blackberry-stained lips, for they suited the gipsy in you.”

  “ I love the true wildness,” she told him. “The winged part of a man or woman beats against conformity like a bird against the bars of its cage. I think that people who do not sometimes bruise their wings are not truly alive. You will not mind if I go wild sometimes?”

  “I will never mind,” he promised. “I will always love you as you are.”

  It was to be a poignant day and the first stab of poignancy came after they had dressed, and removed the battered remains of a door that had closed their room through the night, and found themselves looking down upon Dewi lying asleep at their feet. Lucy had laid his mattress against the wall but he had pulled it across the threshold that he might guard them. He lay curled up like a puppy and beside him was a stick that he had found in the kitchen. Charles had wondered if it was safe to entrust Dewi with the knowledge of his presence at Roch, for the little boy had ridden with him at Exeter and knew who he was, but Lucy had said Dewi was as trustworthy as her brother Justus and Charles believed her now.

  “Dewi! Dewi!” whispered Lucy, and then to Charles, “He will serve you well one day.”

  Charles bent down and picked the little boy up in his arms. Carrying the child they went down into the kitchen that was home to light the fire and draw the water from the well.

  3

  The great heat was past and the day was clouded and cool. The weather was changing not with the cataclysm of a thunderstorm but with the gentle movement of a drifting leaf, and in spite of the singing joy in their hearts, that created an island of immunity all about them, Charles and Lucy were aware of a distant sadness. It was at the rim of the wheel of the world and they were safe at the heart where no harm could tou
ch them, for the wheel had lost its spokes. Yet in spite of this safety they were reluctant to leave the castle and to part from each other for even a bare half-hour seemed impossible. Yet Lucy and Dewi must go back to the cottage and see that all was in order there, for William might come back at any time. Besides, they had finished all their food at breakfast and if there were men who could live on love alone Charles was not one of them. It was already mid morning by the time he and Lucy could bring themselves to say goodbye in the castle garden, and even then Charles had to come with them up the lane and out to the road where he stood to watch them go.

  Lucy applied herself to baking and scouring while Dewi went fishing in Brandy Brook. Sea fishing was not yet for him, though he hoped to attain to it, but hanging over the bridge with a bent pin on the end of his line kept him happy for hours whether he caught any minnows or whether he didn’t. The water rippling under the bridge fascinated him and he could watch for the kingfisher. Presently Lucy joined him with a bit of bara ceich warm from the baking and while he munched she too leaned on the balustrade to watch for the kingfisher. The hollow by the stream still held the warmth of yesterday and she was so drowsy with her bliss that it was Dewi who heard the horses’ hoofs first. “Look!” he shouted to her.

  There were three horsemen riding down the hill, William and his two sons.

  “Justus!” gasped Lucy. “Richard!”

  She could not believe her eyes. She did not even know that she moved, only presently she was a little way up the hill and Justus was in her arms. And then, with surprising gladness, she was in Richard’s, and then in her father’s, laughing and crying together in a state that was half ecstasy and half nightmare. She had not yet really faced the meeting with her father, and now she had two brothers on her hands as well. It did not seem true. It could not be true and yet it was, and presently she found that the horses had been stabled at the mill and they were going down through the wood together, William and his four children. She hardly heard the happy excited talk that buzzed about her ears, but she did know that Justus had his hand through her arm, holding it against his side with a man’s strength. Yet when she looked sideways at him he was still a boy, a stocky fourteen-year-old, and just the same. It was Richard who was the man, tall and self-assured, with all his mother’s beauty. For some reason that she was too bewildered even to try to fathom she was at first afraid to look at him, yet when she did look his smile met hers with charm and friendliness.