The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  She did not hear footsteps and when she turned and saw the tall cloaked figure of her dream standing beside her she was startled and even frightened when the heavy head turned towards her. A lantern faintly illumined the long melancholy face. She could not see the eyes in the pits of darkness but she sensed that they were not softened by the sight of her. The wig increased the ponderous weight of the head that seemed now to be hanging over her like some portent of doom. The grim mouth opened like a dark cavern and let out a gusty sigh. “Mrs. Barlow,” said Lord Glamorgan in tones of deep despair. “Your servant, madam.”

  Lucy was abruptly set free from the whole gamut of emotions that until now had made her feel like a quivering harp plucked by more hands than she could well endure upon her spirit. Her natural laughter came back. Poor Lord Glamorgan! He had looked forward to the peacefulness of an all-male journey and now a giddy girl was to be his travelling companion.

  “My lord,” she said gently, “I will not incommode you. Even if we encounter storm and are long at sea I shall give no trouble. I am strong and healthy and I know when to hold my tongue.”

  Something faintly resembling a smile creased Lord Glamorgan’s gloomy face. “That, madam,” he said, “is a priceless gift in a female. Are you returning to your cabin? I wish you a very good night.”

  She was still laughing inside herself when she lay down again on her bed. Then came a tremor of fear. So that dream had not been a summons from her husband but merely that queer thing, dreaming forward. The rest of the night she could not sleep.

  Four

  1

  Lucy was leaning on the parapet of one of the bridges of The Hague, lulled to tranquillity by the stillness and peace of the July morning. The sun had only just risen and when a short while ago she had ridden through the sleeping city she had felt as though she alone were alive.

  It was something new to feel tranquil for the two months she had spent in Holland had brought her no nearer to a meeting with Charles, and into close companionship with Aunt Margaret in the Gosfright house at Rotterdam. That her aunt, ailing and irritable, had not driven her distracted she had put down to the extraordinary fact that she had fallen in love with Holland. That she, who so loved mountains and wildness, could so delight in a flat, tidy landscape surprised her. It was the nearness to the sea, she thought, and the rivers that brought the shipping so far inland, and the quantities of seabirds that pleased her. At Rotterdam the deep canals came right through the town and sea-going ships sailed past the doors of the houses. The Sea-Horse, after sailing up the River Maas to Rotterdam in the dawn of a May day, had glided close to the windows of Uncle Gosfright’s house before she docked, and those windows had been for the next two months Lucy’s comfort.

  But Aunt Margaret was better now and for her convalescence they were staying at The Hague with her husband’s sister Wilhelmientje Vingboon. Ardent gossips as they both were Margaret and her sister-in-law got on well, and when they were settled with their needlework Lucy was able to escape, ostensibly to her chamber to write to her mother but often out through the back door to the streets and canals of The Hague. But to this bridge on the outskirts of the city she could only escape in the early morning, with the collusion of Wilhelmientje’s husband Herman, who had shown her where to find the key of the stable and had put one of his horses at her disposal.

  This bridge was another of her special places. Here she could look out over the fields and marvel at the windmills. She liked it best when the vast sky was full of hurrying clouds and the wings of the mills turned swiftly, but when the day was still and blue like this one the extraordinary clarity of the light made her think of Pembrokeshire. The fields were intersected by canals. The big ones were the roads of Holland where the barges and sailing ships passed and repassed in dream-like silence, the small ones, made for drainage and division of the fields, were carpeted with waterlilies, their banks gold with kingcups in the spring. The herons loved these fields and canals as the storks loved the town, building their nests on the chimneystacks. Lucy would never forget her arrival at The Hague for almost the first thing she had seen had been her family crest, the stork, surmounting the church towers and public buildings, and Herman Vingboon had told her that every ounce of plate wrought by the famous silversmiths of The Hague bore the emblem of the stork.

  There was no sound, no human figure in all the vast landscape. She had always liked to be alone but now that Charles had made her a part of himself she liked it less, for the loneliness passed so quickly into longing. Her husband was still so far away. She knew something of his movement for since he was the brother of their princess there was often talk about him at The Hague, and especially at the Vingboon house, for Herman was in charge of the horses at the royal stables and he heard the latest gossip. The Prince was in Paris with his mother, Lucy had been told, and it had been rumoured that he was to marry Mademoiselle de Montpensier, a great heiress and the French king’s cousin. Her heart had beaten to suffocation when she heard this but when she learned that Mademoiselle was much older than Charles, a large lady with a large nose, it had quietened.

  Then had come the tidings she had been longing for; Charles was coming to The Hague. For a few days she had been wild with hope, and then Herman had come from the palace with the startling news that the greater part of the English fleet had mutinied and sailed for France and the Prince of Wales, and Charles had left Paris for Calais. After that, no news, and she had been so restless and anxious that this early morning peace seemed very strange. Unless he was nearer to her than she knew? She looked round involuntarily, but there was no one there and nothing to feel but the ache of longing.

  Suddenly the air was trembling with distant music. It was six o’clock on a July morning and all the bells of The Hague were ringing out the news. The bells of the city of London had been a delight to hear, borne on the wind to the garden at St. Giles, but the bells of The Hague rang carillons, clear as the air of the great skies swept by the sea winds. Away from The Hague Lucy would always remember it as a city of bells and birds, surrounded by a necklace of trees, and beyond the trees the flat green meadows and the canals with their floating carpets of lilies.

  The city would be stirring now and she must go back. She had tethered the chestnut cob to the parapet of the bridge. She mounted him and rode back to the city and along the cobbled lane that led to the Vingboon home. The canal was on one side of her and on the other towered the tall red-roofed houses. Many of the older houses were crooked because of the subsidence of the soil, and they seemed like aged people holding each other up. This watery country was much afflicted by rheumatism and it was not difficult to think that the oldest houses had it too. She rode slowly because maidservants in white caps and wooden sabots were going backwards and forwards to the canal fetching water, and storks were stepping daintily and arrogantly here and there, entirely at home and unafraid. No one would ever harm a stork for they were regarded with almost superstitious reverence. They were lucky birds and to have storks build a nest on your roof was to be protected and safe. The wings of the gulls flashed overhead and when Lucy opened the door in the wall beside the house and went into the courtyard the doves rose in a cloud to greet her. They again were birds that brought luck and there were few families who did not own at least a pair of turtle-doves as a charm against the rheumatism.

  Lucy led the cob through the courtyard to the stable and then went into the house to get ready for yet another decorous day. The stableboy and the indoor servants greeted her with broad smiles, for they knew all the ways by which she escaped from decorum and like Herman kept her secret.

  One of the servants, Betje Flinck, who especially attended upon the ladies of the household, was a good friend to Lucy. She was an intelligent girl, soon to be married to one of the French chefs at the palace, a man called Louis Fragonard. She had picked up a little English from her mother, who in her youth had been a maidservant at the house of the English ambassador at T
he Hague, and Lucy, equally intelligent, could now speak some Dutch. They liked each other. Betje was older than Lucy and mothered her. Her home was at Scheveningen, a village by the sea a few miles away. Her mother and father, she had told Lucy, lived in a farmhouse there. Her father and elder brother were fishermen and had a stall in The Hague fishmarket. Their business was a prosperous one and they provided the palace with fish. The younger brother helped his mother with the cows and dairy. If at any time Lucy wanted a breath of sea air, Betje had said, she would be welcome at the farmhouse. Lucy had told Wilhelmientje and Aunt Margaret of this invitation and Wilhelmientje had said that the Flincks were highly respectable people and Lucy would be safe with them. Aunt Margaret had said frigidly that they would consider the question if the invitation was repeated.

  But this day was not destined to be one of the dull ones for at the midday meal the three ladies were joined by Herman Vingboon in a state of great excitement. He was a jolly man, tall and handsome, with a small pointed black beard and twirled ends sharp as needles to his waxed moustaches. Lucy liked him because he was a horseman. There was nothing he did not know about horses and all the love of which he was capable was bestowed on them alone. Though perhaps capable of cruelty in other directions she knew he would never harm a horse. Between large mouthfuls of roast beef and great draughts of beer he communicated his excitement to the ladies.

  “The English fleet that ratted to the Prince of Wales is at Helvoetsluys,” he told them. “The Prince and his brother the Duke of York are with them, and Prince Rupert. The Duke, they tell me, has just escaped from England in women’s clothes. There’s a plucky young fellow for you. Only fifteen years old.”

  “When did you hear this, Herman?” asked Margaret.

  “Early this morning at the stables,” said Herman. “The horses had to be groomed and got ready early to take their highnesses to meet the Prince. A busy time I have had of it this morning I can tell you.” He reached for more beer. “And I will have a busier few hours this evening when they all come back and I have the Englishmen’s horses to see to as well as my own.”

  “But how can Prince Charles come back to The Hague with Prince William and Princess Mary?” asked Lucy, who was sitting bolt upright with a flaming red spot on each cheek. “He must set sail at once for England. If he does that, with the temper in England what it was when I left, the whole country will rise to him and the King will be set free.”

  “Ships have to be refitted, my dear,” explained Herman patiently. “You cannot start a campaign without making plans for it. You must have food and water, men and arms. You must also have money to pay for these things. Where’s that to come from?”

  “I do not see why Holland should finance an English war,” said Wilhelmientje.

  “Our Princess Mary is your Princess of Orange,” said Lucy hotly. “Families should help each other.”

  “It is the duty of France to help our cause,” said Aunt Margaret, pouring oil on troubled waters. “Queen Henrietta Maria is a French princess. Better still, Prince Charles should marry his heiress with no further dilly-dallying. Then as regards finance there would be no further difficulty.”

  Lucy had not yet told Aunt Margaret about her marriage and so no one knew that she sat there with her blood turning to ice. Present with her at the table now were two of the three demons that would torment her for the rest of her life; wrangles about money and the fear that Charles would commit bigamy.

  Herman broke into a roar of laughter. “The Prince is a lad with an eye for a pretty woman,” he told his ladies. “He will hardly take La Grande Mademoiselle to his bed while the Duchesse de Chatillon continues to smile on him. There’s beauty for you! They say that—”

  “That will do, Herman,” interrupted his wife severely. “The gossip of the stables is not a suitable subject for our table.”

  Lucy’s third demon entered and stood with the other two behind her chair, the demon of malicious gossip. With her head high she spoke out instantly, reiterating to herself her faith in Charles. “The Prince has always borne an unsullied reputation,” she said coldly. “At what time will they be returning to the palace?”

  “I could not tell you,” said Herman. “In time for the banquet this evening. Five o’clock perhaps. Six o’clock.”

  “You cannot be out in the streets to watch them ride by, Lucy,” said Aunt Margaret firmly. “You might have to wait for hours and Wilhelmientje cannot spare a servant to attend you for so long.”

  The meal was finished now and Herman pushed back his chair, his eyes twinkling. “Lucy can ride back to the palace with me,” he said. “We shall be told when they are on the way and I will take her to a good vantage point for seeing the procession. Make haste, Lucy. Put your habit on.”

  No one could object and Lucy ran upstairs to put on her riding habit for the second time that day. The three demons had vanished and she was madly happy. She would see Charles again and that at the moment was all that mattered. Her habit was the colour of the swallow’s wings and a bird could hardly have flown down the stairs into freedom more quickly than she did.

  Their way took them past the Wassenaer Hof, the residence of the widowed Queen of Bohemia, Charles’s aunt and Prince Rupert’s mother, and she turned her head to look with interest at the gateway in the courtyard wall, with rising beyond it the tall red brick building with its towers and gables. Charles’s family was still for her an enlargement of her own, the nimbus about the moon, and for no member of it did she feel a more lively affection than for the Queen of Bohemia, who was never so happy as when she was on horseback.

  She was a woman of courage and character; so much of the latter that she had become “a character,” horrifying the careful Dutch ladies by the extravagance and eccentricity of her housekeeping and the troops of monkeys and dogs who accompanied her wherever she went. And even now, after bearing many children, she was still so beautiful that men called her the Queen of Hearts. At other times she was called the Winter Queen, for her brief and tragic reign had lasted for only one winter.

  The gossip about this extraordinary woman was never-ending and Lucy had heard some of it when she listened to the talk of Aunt Margaret and Wilhelmientje, and had boiled with anger. The jealousy that could do its best to harm the reputation of a woman of spirit and beauty, merely because she had a power to charm and delight that others did not have, seemed to Lucy a vile thing. Sometimes she had a strange sense of kinship with the Winter Queen; almost as though they were sisters in adversity. But that was nonsense, and audacious nonsense too. Yet she answered Herman absently as they rode past the Wassenaer Hof, and he was piqued by her lack of attention.

  “The Queen will have ridden out to Helvoetsluys with the rest,” he told Lucy. “Any excuse to ride abroad, and I must say that she has a good seat on a horse. They call her a beauty but she is too gaunt for my taste. I like a bit of flesh on women and horses.” He eyed Lucy. “You could do with a good bran mash, yourself, my girl.”

  Lucy withered him with a glance yet in a moment she had relented and was laughing with him for he was being very kind to her today. Was he not helping her to a sight of her own husband?

  2

  Herman obtained permission for his niece to sit in the palace gardens with the proviso that she must be out of them before the royal family returned, and he left her on a seat beside a small lake where swans were elegantly floating, their whiteness mirrored in the blue water between the lilies. Not far from the lake was the newly completed Mauritzhuis, built by the Prince of Orange to house his splendid collection of pictures. She glanced towards the palace and it looked to her very splendid, and the garden was so large and it awed her. What wealth these people had! And what power. They could crush you or make you just as they pleased. She felt scared beneath her joy and taking her ring from round her neck she put it on her finger, and the fear was gone. She got up and wandered about the garden, finding hidden grottos, fountai
ns and marble statues, but she kept returning to the swans’ lake lest Herman should waste time looking for her when the message arrived.

  It came earlier than they had expected, about five o’clock. Herman fetched her in a hurry and disregarding the command that she must leave the garden took her to where a flight of steps led up to a little Greek temple built against the wall, beneath the spreading branches of a tall yew tree. Here it was easy for him to lift her to the top of the wall where she could sit hidden by the sweeping shadow of the tree. He laughed as he turned to leave her. “There will be the devil and all to pay if you are found there but in that habit you look like a dark bird hidden in its nest. But mind, Lucy, do not you dare come down till I fetch you. I will not forget you. Stay where you are.”

  She gave him her promise, for he might be in trouble if she were found, and settled herself within the friendliness of the tree, feeling as though she drew its shadows about her like a cloak. She had a growing sense of silence and of sanctuary; yet she was looking down a broad tree-lined avenue where a laughing crowd of people was gathering to line the way beneath the linden trees. The silence came not from about her but from within, from her past. She was remembering the yew tree beside the portico of the church at Covent Garden, and Old Sage. “The maintaining of faith is so hard.” She had forgotten him again, but it seemed he did not forget her. For the flash of a moment she knew that the maintaining of faith was what supremely mattered to her. It was for her the hidden life.