The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “Where is Dewi?” she suddenly asked Justus.

  “Asleep in the cottage. We did not wake him up to bring him. We thought he would howl if he had to say goodbye to—to—Charles, to the Prince.”

  He stammered a little in speaking of Charles and he did not look at Lucy, for he was sure he was nothing to her now. He had been looking forward to Dewi, thinking that the little boy might perhaps be fond of him, but Dewi had given his devotion to Charles. Neither fact surprised him and he was overwhelmed to find himself suddenly gripped in one of the bearlike hugs to which Lucy had so often subjected him in their childhood.

  “There is no one like you, Justus,” she was saying. “And now we are going to be alone at the cottage with Dewi for three or four days. I will look after you both. We had better go and get Dewi’s breakfast.”

  She began to run and he ran with her, but presently she could no longer run because she was sobbing. They walked slowly to the cottage, Justus with his arm round her. Her hard sobs scared him a little but he was glad she should be with him and not alone in the castle.

  BOOK III: The Woman

  One

  1

  I am here again, thought Lucy, and it is autumn as it was before, but last time I was here with Nan-Nan and now I am alone, a woman and not a child.

  She was standing at the window of her bedchamber at Golden Grove and she was feeling tired and discouraged, for her arrival had been a lonely one. She had travelled with friends but they had left her at the gate and she had ridden through the park by herself, to find only servants to greet her in the great hall, for she had arrived earlier than she had expected and Lord and Lady Carbery had not yet returned from an afternoon’s visit. She had been shown her bedchamber and the maidservant had brought her warm water in a silver ewer, and told her the hour at which the family dined, and smiled and left her.

  The window was closed and the leaded panes seemed like bars between her and the outdoor world she loved. A little desperately she wrestled with the latch and pushed the window open, and the golden warmth of St. Martin’s summer flowed in and took possession of her almost as though Golden Grove took her in its arms. She pulled a stately chair to the window and sat with sunshine lying on her tired eyelids, the warmth soaking into her aching body and taking her back over the years to the day when she had looked into the heart of the rose that grew on the terrace. “I’m glad I have come,” she told Nan-Nan. “I’m glad, after all, that I have come.”

  2

  When a month ago Lord Carbery had asked her to come she had not known whether to say yes or no. He had arrived at Roch unexpectedly one day, having ridden from St. Davids, and had found her and her father and Dewi sitting in front of their door gutting fish. Serene upon their own ground Lucy and Dewi had been unabashed, and William very nearly so. Seating their distinguished relative upon an upturned bucket in the sun they had finished the gutting, washed themselves, cooked the fish and then entertained him to dinner.

  It was Lord Carbery himself who had been abashed. With the war in Wales apparently ended he had returned to Golden Grove, with no intention of getting mixed up in any fresh flare-up of fighting, should it occur, and so comfortable that he had been a little slow in enquiring into the welfare of less fortunate relatives. The sight of the ruined castle, which he himself had garrisoned for the King, had appalled him and when he had arrived in the middle of the fish gutting, a process which he had not hitherto beheld, he had been more than appalled, he had been ashamed. His own relatives had for months been existing in a condition of smelly squalor and he had done nothing whatever to help them.

  But William was proud and had wanted no help. An offer to provide himself and his children with a home at Golden Grove, the charm of it slightly overstressed because the Earl’s lower nature could be coupled with his higher one only with a good strong haul upon the harness, had been courteously refused because the manoeuvre was apparent to William. A tactful offer of financial assistance, in which there was no division of personality because the Earl was still so wealthy that he could be generous without suffering any change in his habits, was also refused; less courteously. Lord Carbery, noting that the child who had twisted him round her little finger had grown into a charming young woman, had wondered if Lucy would like to pay them a visit? This offer William had referred to Lucy.

  But he had encouraged her to accept it. He and Dewi would flourish, he had said, if she did not stay too long. Damaris would look after them. A little change would do her good. But Lucy had jumped at the offer. She would like to think it over, she had said, and had left them and gone down to sit on the rocks; and had sat there so long that William had been hard put to it entertaining the Earl while she made her mind up. But at last she had come back and accepted the offer with gentle gratitude.

  Sitting now in the open window at Golden Grove her thoughts went back to Roch. Life with William, after Charles had gone away, had been difficult for them both. She was no longer single-minded, for Charles possessed her and not for one moment could her thoughts leave him. She would talk and laugh with those she loved, and her hands would serve them, but afterwards she would not remember what she had said or done, for at the back of her mind Charles lived and moved and spoke, and her true colloquy was with him alone. She had had two letters from him and then no more. In the isolation of Roch little definite news reached them. They knew only that the defeated army of the west had fought its way back to Cornwall, until finally the Royal Standard floated from the last outpost of Tintagel Castle. On a dark March night, Charles had escaped to sea and sailed to the Channel Islands. Two months later his father had yielded himself a prisoner to the Scots.

  The news that Charles was safe had at first brought relief to Lucy, and the cessation of the nightmares of wounds and death that had haunted her, but something in the last of his two letters had frightened her. He had asked her never to speak of Tomos Barlow beyond the circle of her family, and never to wear her ring. She had obeyed him to the point of taking it from her finger and wearing it round her neck beneath her dress on a gold chain, but though the feel of it between her breasts sometimes comforted her it brought too the fear that Charles might try to hide her away out of memory in the same way as he had told her to hide her ring. She had grown thin and pale and William had been greatly troubled, but they could make no real contact with each other now, for she knew her father’s terrible hopes and fears. He took a gloomy view of her prospects and wanted her marriage terminated; and before the escape to the Channel Islands his secret thoughts had not stopped short of the death of Charles in the last battle. Above all he had hoped she would not bear a child as passionately as she had hoped she would. And he had had his wish for there was no child. “You are full young yet,” Damaris had said, trying to comfort young Mrs. Tomos Barlow. “When you are older you will bear as many babes as your granny Mrs. Gwinne.” But William’s relief had cancelled out Damaris’s comfort and it had sometimes seemed to Lucy, in the sleepless hours before cockcrow, that her father’s unspoken thoughts had denied life to her child and might deny it to Charles. Had thoughts such terrible power? The song of John Donne’s that Charles had taught her had suggested that they had, and she had grown afraid of her father and estranged from him.

  Sitting on the rocks she had thought, it will do us both good to be parted for a while. And she had also thought, at Golden Grove they will know all that has happened in the world. They will tell me about Charles.

  3

  In the passage outside her room a board creaked under a light step and a silk skirt rustled and suddenly Charles, and news of him, were so near that her heart beat to suffocation. Hardly knowing that she had moved she had opened the door, curtseyed to Lady Carbery and was in her arms.

  They were of the same height now and Lucy found herself looking into the tired eyes of the older woman with a new sense of recognition. On her previous visit Lady Carbery had been to her no more than a background of pe
rvasive kindness against which the Earl had stood out a little larger than life, but now, here was another woman who felt as weary as she did herself; not with physical labour, for Lady Carbery’s shapely hands had never made contact with a saucepan, but with the perpetual guidance of a great household, the unending drain upon the compassion that had made Golden Grove the refuge that it was. She lives her real life hiddenly, thought Lucy, looking into her hostess’s face, like I wear my ring. Do all women do that? Must I?

  She looked searchingly at Lady Carbery, slightly discomposing her hostess by what Mrs. Gwinne had called “that dreadful blue stare.” The poor lady detached her own gaze with difficulty and pulled a second chair to the window.

  “I must tell you, my dear,” she said when they were seated, “that our household is now larger than it was. We have a resident chaplain now. He lives here with his wife and young children. I will present you to Doctor Jeremy Taylor and his lady at dinner. He has lately been released from prison and it is a source of thankfulness to the Earl and myself that our home can now be a refuge for him and his family.”

  “Prison?” asked Lucy with interest. “What did he do?”

  “He was a prisoner of war,” said Lady Carbery hastily, for the sharp turn of Lucy’s head had suggested a reprehensible interest in crime. “An imprisonment of honour in Cardigan Castle.”

  “Ought priests to fight?” wondered Lucy. “Parson Peregrine shot at a Puritan’s hat, but then he is a hot-tempered man and he was goaded to it.”

  “Doctor Taylor served with the army in a priestly capacity, as a chaplain,” explained Lady Carbery. “He was with the army in Wales at the time of our sad defeat. I must tell you, Lucy, that he is a very distinguished scholar and Christian. He was a friend and protégé of our beloved martyr Archbishop Laud. He is a Fellow of All Souls and was with the King at Oxford.”

  With the King at Oxford? thought Lucy. Charles was with the King at Oxford. If I am very careful I can speak to him of Charles. Aloud she said to Lady Carbery, “I shall be honoured to meet him.”

  “There will be two other guests present,” murmured Lady Carbery. “Mr. Wyatt and Mr. Nicholson. Mr. Wyatt is our rector at Llanfihangel Aberlythch. They have a private school for young gentlemen at the Rectory.”

  “I shall be honoured to meet him, madam.”

  Lady Carbery’s eyes were resting on the skirt of the shabby blue riding habit that Lucy was still wearing. She had grown considerably since it had been made and the hem had been let down and adorned in two places with patches of a lighter shade of blue, one having the shape of a star and the other of a crescent moon. There was a light-heartedness about Lucy’s repairs that would have delighted the Earl but Lady Carbery had little sense of humour and was saddened. “You have a gown for evening, my love?” she asked tenderly. “Anything I have is yours, you know.”

  “Thank you, madam,” said Lucy, “but my grandmother gave me a sea-green silk gown and pearl earrings. I think you will not need to be ashamed of me.”

  She spoke with gratitude but there was a sparkle in her eyes that might have been due to a touch of anger. Lady Carbery could see that she had been something less than tactful. When one spoke to her first the girl had her mother’s gentleness but Lady Carbery feared that she might also have something of her father’s wilful spirit.

  She did more than fear when Lucy entered the parlour. It was not by intention that she had kept the distinguished company waiting, for her unpunctuality was congenital, but the proud carriage of her head made it appear so. And she should have accepted the loan of a dress; the sea-green gown had seen better days. But the girl had arranged her unruly hair as carefully as she could and the curtsey into which she sank before Lord Carbery was graceful, and when he raised her and kissed her Lady Carbery perceived that though she was smiling she was also trembling. Poor child! If she must face misfortune with defiant pride, well, that was her way, but it could be a dangerous way and Lady Carbery’s heart ached as she presented Dr. and Mrs. Taylor, and Mr. Wyatt and Mr. Nicholson. Three strange men black as crows, thought Lucy, very reverend and very learned, and a woman with a kind smile, a little startled by her, and Lady Carbery not approving of her. But Lord Carbery was just the same and seated her by him at the dining-table, his amused eyes telling her that he and she were the black sheep in this grave company and must be a comfort to each other. The hurtful defiance left her, she was herself again and presently very much aware of Dr. Taylor.

  He was one of the redeemers, she realized, and was suddenly happy as well as relaxed. They were good company; like the sun of which she had drawn pictures as a child, rays shining out from a courteous face, and a small blessing hand at the end of each ray. She did not know she was looking at a man who in his youth had been described as “no less than the son of Apollo, the god of wisdom and eloquence,” but she would have accepted that as an apt description. His wife looked worn though content, as the wives of such men so often do. The strength of his power to cheer and carry others had its corresponding reaction of fatigue in the home circle, and her own supporting role was arduous; yet that she adored him Lucy realized instantly. And she was also aware, now that she herself was a wife, of how greatly Lady Carbery loved her husband, even though he was not really as serious-minded as she could have wished or as he for her sake endeavoured to appear. To fall in love had seemed the glory of the world, but she saw all over again that there was no true glory unless the maintaining of faith worked upon the sparkle and moulded it to the durable diamond. These two women possessed that. Charles, she thought. Charles! Charles!

  Dr. Taylor was sitting opposite her and instantly, with boldness, for her conversation should have been directed to Mr. Wyatt at her side, she asked him, “You were with the King and the Prince at Oxford I believe, sir. What do you think of the Prince?”

  There was a second of stunned silence and Lady Carbery actually blushed for her young relative, but Dr. Taylor’s laugh came to the rescue. “Every young lady asks me that,” he said. “And not young ladies only, since all our hope hangs upon him.”

  “Could we get him back to England and on the throne, a young man of humour and tolerance, our troubles would be over,” declared Lord Carbery.

  “And what of our divinely appointed and most gracious King?” asked Lady Carbery gently. It saddened her that this heretical notion of the Puritans, this diabolically-inspired suggestion that kings were not necessarily the vice-regents of God, was now spreading even to good Royalists. That, she thought, was the dreadful thing about wrong notions. They had a power of insidious growth that seemed denied to good and proper ways of thought. She must talk to her husband about this in bed tonight. She never corrected him in public.

  “Graciousness does not rule out fanaticism,” said the Earl firmly, “and if our sovereign is king by divine appointment then here is yet another case where I fail to see eye to eye with my Maker. I think the King should abdicate and join his sick wife. The Scots would gladly give him up to connubial duties in foreign parts.”

  “Your suggestions are exactly those that were put before the Prince in the Channel Islands,” said Dr. Taylor, “and he would have none of them. In his own way he is as obstinate as his father, and loyalty to his father is one of the notions he is most obstinate about, and may God bless him for it.”

  “So there’s now little hope of his return to England,” said Mr. Wyatt.

  “None,” said Dr. Taylor. “Were he to return now, thinking as he does, we should merely have him in custody with the rest of the royal children. There is nothing for him to do now but go to France.”

  “The outlook for us is that of a ship at sea in a thick mist,” said Mr. Nicholson gloomily. “We do not know to what we are drifting and until the wind changes we are helpless.”

  Lady Carbery resolutely changed the conversation. “You have still not told my young cousin your opinion of the Prince, Doctor Taylor,” she said. “Is his count
enance pleasing? Are his manners charming?”

  Dr. Taylor laughed. “I am no judge of a man’s looks,” he said, “but I believe it is said that the Prince’s manners redeem his face. But talking to him you are too enamoured of the boy himself to think of his looks. One even forgets his youth. Can one give a young man or woman higher praise than that? Youth is itself so radiant a garment that a personality that can outshine it must be captivating indeed.”