“You feel well, dearie?” queried Vrouw Flinck.
“Yes, madam,” said Lucy, quite unconsciously using the title she gave her own mother and grandmother. “It is just that my husband and I have no child and what I want most in the world is a son.”
Vrouw Flinck put her hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “Many babes have been conceived and born in this house,” she said. “And many children have sat laughing in that chair. So keep your heart up, my love. Is it tonight your man comes?”
“Tonight or tomorrow night,” said Lucy. “I do not know. He is a sailor with the English ships. His name is Tomos Barlow.”
“How strange are these English names!” murmured Vrouw Flinck.
“It is a Welsh name,” Lucy corrected her with severity. “Tomos and I are Welsh, not English.”
“I ask your pardon,” said Vrouw Flinck humbly. “And now come through this door and I will show you the cow-house.”
It was a large apartment, spotlessly clean, the walls lined with coloured tiles. The beams overhead held the overplus from Vrouw Flinck’s china cupboard, Delft plates, glazed brown bowls and pots and pans. And from the beams hung bunches of peacocks’ feathers. “This lovely place for the cows!” gasped Lucy.
“Our cows are our greatest treasures,” explained Vrouw Flinck. “Are they not treasures in Wales?”
“Yes,” said Lucy, “but we do not give them parlours to live in.”
“I have heard that the English regard their dogs and horses as members of their families but not their cows,” said Vrouw Flinck, “the Welsh are perhaps the same. If the dogs and horses why not the cows? What should we do without our butter and milk and cheese? The poorer people have but one cow but we have four. When the weather is cold they are brought in here to their own house and kept warm with blankets.”
Lucy was gazing at the peacocks’ feathers. “Do you think as we do that they are magic things?” she asked. “We have an old song in Wales which tells how a girl made a garland of peacocks’ feathers for her lover.”
“They bring good fortune,” said Vrouw Flinck. “The peacock is to be revered, you know, like the stork, the heron and the swan. We do not know from whence they come on their great wings. They are to be revered.”
“I revere all birds,” said Lucy gravely. “Even the little ones with claws so tiny they can fit round your finger like a ring.”
The dairy upon the other side of the living room was spotless as the cow-house and tiled with the same gay tiles. Lucy looked with admiration at the churns, the cheese press and the bowls of milk. There had been a dairy at Roch but as a child it had always been to the stables that her feet had carried her. “You have horses?” she asked.
“We have Nico who pulls the fish cart to market. We need horses in a fishing village for the boats are drawn up on the sand for safety by horses and pulled by them to the wharves for repair. And now I will show you your bedchamber. My two sons sleep there as a rule but they have moved to the loft while you and your Tomos are with us.”
The little room was simply furnished with a chest for clothes and two carved oak chairs that must have been brought from the living room. The bed was a cupboard in the wall. There was a pot of flowers on the windowsill and the smell of the sea was in the room. Tears came into Lucy’s eyes, “You have taken so much trouble for two strangers,” she murmured.
“My daughter Betje loves you,” explained Vrouw Flinck simply. “There is your saddlebag upon the floor. My husband brought it in for you. I will leave you now. Make this room your home.”
Lucy unpacked her bag and changed her riding habit for an apple green gown. She dressed in the style of a Dutch huisvrouw now with a white cap over her hair and a little white apron. There were hooks in the wall and on one of them she hung the little mirror that her father had given her when she first grew old enough to need such a thing, and on the other his miniature. She flung her mother’s cloak over one of the chairs, crocus-coloured lining outwards. The shell Justus had given her she put on the windowsill beside the pot of flowers. And she slipped Charles’s ring on her finger.
Presently Vrouw Flinck called her to the kitchen for the midday meal of black rye bread, cheese and buttermilk, and then she went back to her room and sat with her sewing at the window to watch for Charles. She was making a shirt for him out of fine linen embroidered with scarlet thread hardly coarser than gossamer. She still did not exactly love her needle but she had mastered it and the pains she took were so infinite that the result was almost perfection.
She was so happy that she was not impatient and it was almost with surprise that she looked up at the click of the gate and saw a tall young man walking up the path in the dazzle of the late afternoon. He wore the rough clothes of a common sailor; a kerchief was bound about his head and he had a bundle hung over his shoulder on a short stick. He wore sabots and walked with a seaman’s rolling gait, and it was not until he lifted his head that she knew who he was and flew out of the house and into his arms. In full view of the little world of Scheveningen but oblivious of it they clung together in fits of laughter, the tension and pain that had been between them in the palace garden entirely gone. This was Tomos again, delighting in the fun of masquerade, and there would never be tension when Charles was Tomos.
“How did you get here?” asked Lucy.
“I rode as far as the woods with Sidney and then changed into these clothes he got for me. It was easy to get away. My sister thinks I have ridden back to Helvoetsluys. There can be only this one night, dear heart, for there are great doings of trouble and hope in my world just now.”
“Forget your world for this one night,” pleaded Lucy.
“I have forgotten it,” he said. “I will not even speak of it.”
But later, sitting on the sand-dunes watching the strong colours of the dazzling day fading slowly to exquisite echoes of themselves, like flowers reflected in pools of pale water, he did speak of it and she was glad, for she wanted to share as many of his anxieties as she could; his father in prison and Princess Elizabeth, the most sensitive of all the children, and little Prince Henry still in the hands of their enemies. “But if this invasion succeeds it will be the turning of the tide,” said Charles. “And by God it must or what will become of my father? Buckingham says I have only got to land and the country will rise for me. He has just come from England where he led a rising himself. It failed but he says had I been with him it would have succeeded. Do you remember Buckingham? One of those two fair boys in the unicorn wood? Francis, the other, was killed in the rising.”
“I am sorry,” said Lucy steadily but she felt shaken. So soon now Charles would be fighting again and she would be back once more with the nightmares and the fear. “You sail soon?” she asked.
“Quite soon,” said Charles cheerfully. “I will be on board the Satisfaction. I will have Rupert with me, and Buckingham and my brother James. I will be glad to be fighting again, whether by sea or land. Inaction drives me mad.”
“We were together before you went to that last retreat in the west and I thank God we are together again before this new fighting.”
He took her hand and they sat silently watching the extraordinary peace of the scene around them. The dunes cast long shadows of heliotrope over the sand and coarse grass, and the calm sea was pale blue silk streaked with silver. From the red-roofed cottages of the village the peat smoke from cooking suppers curled up in wreaths of blue. They watched for the first few stars to come out and then saw the fishing boats pushing out one by one from the shore, going off for a night’s fishing. There was no wind inshore to fill the coloured sails and they could very faintly hear the sound of the oars in the rowlocks and the men singing.
“At night the watchman on horseback keeps a look-out for the boats,” said Lucy. “He sounds a trumpet when they come in, for there is no harbour and men go down with the horses that pull the boats in. On stormy nights, Vro
uw Flinck told me, the women are so anxious that they are all down waiting on the sands. The seas here can be very wild.”
“It is difficult to believe it tonight,” said Charles. “When life is full of peace it always seems impossible that it can vanish. One can realize that beauty will pass and knowledge decay but not peace. Why is it?”
“I do not know. Perhaps peace is the air of eternity, its very breath, without which no other thing could exist at all.”
Presently, still hand in hand, they walked slowly back to the farm and found the family just sitting to supper. They were all there for the two fishermen were not going out that night. Mijnheer Flinck had a face that seemed made of dark folded leather, and far-seeing eyes. A thatch of white hair fell round his face, contrasting vividly with his bright red jersey. His sons were not much older than Charles but the spring of youth had gone already from their slow and heavy movements. They stood up and greeted their guests with simple dignity, and with a special delight in Charles as another seaman. But when they were settled again Lucy saw the old man looking at his guest’s smooth hands, and then the far-seeing eyes rested with wonder upon his face. But the wonder did not pass into curiosity, which is not becoming in a host; and this family practised still the ancient hospitality that takes a guest on trust from God, to be fed, warmed, defended with one’s life if need be, but never questioned, doubted or criticized.
Nevertheless Lucy thought it was as well that Charles’s Dutch vocabulary was at present limited for she doubted if his knowledge of fish was extensive. But the few words he had learned, though he did not always know what they meant, his charm and laughter delighted his hosts. The simple meal in the long room, now full of shadows, the windows opened to the darkening sea and the candles burning on the table, was for Lucy and Charles no interruption of their joy but a part of it. This did not surprise them for they were both aware of the ancient hospitality. They felt it as a prolongation of the peace they had known on the dunes in the sunset.
“You have made it look like home,” said Charles when they stood together in their room. The moon was up now and they hardly needed the candle he carried. He put it down on the chest and looked about him. “What have you done?”
“It is my mother’s cloak over that chair and my father’s picture and my little mirror on the wall, and the flowers and the sound of the waves at Roch.” And she picked up the shell and held it to his ear. “Do you hear? That was the sound that was in our ears on many of our great days at Roch. Do you remember?”
“I do not forget Roch,” he said with his arm round her.
“Do you speak French as well as you speak Dutch?” she teased him.
“I have a French mother and I speak it perfectly,” he said, and then began to laugh. “But not at the French court. There I do not know a word of the language. I stammer and stutter, fall over my feet, tread on the hems of the ladies’ dresses. They think I am a feeble-minded oaf.”
“Why do you behave so?”
“To delay my wooing of La Grande Mademoiselle. You have heard of her? She is large and rich. You will be surprised how difficult it is to make love to a woman when you cannot speak her language.” His arms tightened about her. “Though if you knew no English there would be no difficulty at all.” Her joy was so great that she did not know if she was laughing or crying. “But I do know one Welsh phrase,” he went on. “You spoke it in the great bed at Roch and I memorized it. What does it mean?”
“It means, dear God this happiness is too great for me to bear,” said Lucy.
“Is it as great now as it was at Roch?” he asked.
“It is greater,” said Lucy. “It will never grow less.” And she believed that, so great was the peace.
Five
1
The month of May had seen the people of London rejoicing in the streets over the birth of their Prince, and Lucy opening her eyes for the first time in the great bedchamber at Roch Castle, but April was the month when their son also became aware of the fact of light. It showed him sparkling water, and a sailing ship passing somewhere just beyond his ken. He stretched out his hand and made a grab for it, as later in life he was to stretch out his hand for so much, and brought the hand back empty. He placed it over his button nose, minute fingers spread wide, and gazed up at the reflection of light upon the ceiling. His eyes were blue and the feathery down on top of his head was pale gold. He was a perky baby, very forward considering he had been in the world for three weeks only, knowing what he wanted and screaming for it in fury, but a vision of angelic peace the moment he was satisfied. He was satisfied now for he had just been fed to capacity, his digestion was excellent and for the first time he had become possessed of light. The fingers that had been questing in extraordinary astonishment over his nose contracted sleepily into a fist not much bigger than a large walnut. This he placed in its habitual resting-place beneath his chin, withdrew his gaze from the ceiling and fixed it upon his mother’s face.
She gazed back, searching for family likenesses, the constant preoccupation of all convalescent mothers, and once again, as so often when she looked at him, she thought of the little prince whom she had seen holding the hand of his older brother on that day of the Guildhall banquet, and she hoped that Charles would agree that he should be called James. At present he was called Jackie because Peter Gosfright, confronted with him for the first time, had ejaculated, “The jackanapes!” Of another likeness there was no doubt. In the breadth of the tiny face across the cheekbones she saw Charles, and when the fingers uncurled they were abnormally long, like his father’s.
She placed the tip of her own finger against the fist and the tendrils uncurled, and curled themselves again about her finger reminding her as always of the claws of the little bird at Roch. He smiled at her. They told her that babies did not smile until four months old and that the appealing quiver of his mouth was only wind. But he had already brought up his wind very satisfactorily when she had held him against her shoulder after his feed. This, she maintained, was his smile, kept for her alone. She returned the smile and kissed the top of his head. He turned his cheek inward to her breast and slept.
Suddenly she felt dreadfully tired and lay back against the pillows of her bed with her sleeping baby in her arms. To feel tired and at times to be in black depression was usual after childbirth, they told her, and strong though she was she had had a hard time giving birth to this baby. “Too much riding,” Aunt Margaret said. “For a woman to ride with a baby on the way is asking for trouble, and so I told you at the time but you paid no attention, headstrong girl that you are.” But Lucy no longer minded Aunt Margaret’s sharp tongue; she was too thankful to her for her gift of family loyalty. And the tiredness and sorrow that accompanied her joy in Jackie had another and deeper origin than giving birth to a baby. She lived still under the shadow of all that had happened to Charles, and to her through him, between the conception and birth of their child, and it was a deep shadow.
2
The invasion upon which Charles had built such high hopes had been a failure. The landing on the coast had been abortive, and an attempt to bring the Parliamentary fleet to battle had failed also. In sight of each other, and ready to fight, the two fleets had been separated by a great storm. There had been nothing for it but retreat to Holland for refitting, but the half-starved crews were demoralized and could not be rallied again. A magnificent reception at The Hague and the offer of generous financial support for one week only had been for Charles only final humiliations. That at sea he had proved himself as a man of courage, and a commander able to rally to himself the support even of starving men, had made it all the harder to come back to the life of political intrigue he hated. If he was to save his father and his own future he must learn the arts of beguilement and deception but how could a prince live on borrowed money and keep his dignity? How could he learn the ways of cunning and keep his integrity?
He had asked Lucy these que
stions one night of despair at Scheveningen, and it was then that she told him they were to have a child. “Between us,” she said, “between ourselves in our hidden life, there need be no deceptions. Together in our marriage, and with our child, we can always have truth.”
“What did you say?” he demanded. “A child? Lucy? Did you say a child?”
In the moonlight she saw his illumined face. She had been afraid he would be dismayed but instead he was transfigured with delight. A son! He had no doubt it would be a son. Of course it would be a son. All remembrance of failure vanished in the realization that he had fathered a son. There was no dismay because taken by surprise he had forgotten who he was, and also forgotten that there had ever been other fathers. In the stillness of the night he and the girl and the unborn child were alone in the world.
But after Lucy was asleep dismay came. He remembered his failure again and the cupboard bed that had been a refuge for the simplicity of human love became a sort of trap. He drifted into a sleep and the trap became a sticky mesh like a fishing net. Entangled in it he was aware of some black obscene crouching shape at the edge of it. Striving to escape, sweating with terror in the manner of his childhood nightmares, he awakened both himself and Lucy.
“It was just a dream,” he gasped out to her.
“It has passed,” she said, soothing him. “And do not struggle so. You will hurt the baby.” And she drifted again into her peaceful sleep.
The next day they went back to The Hague, he to the palace and she to the Vingboons, and a few days later Robert Sidney came to her there to tell her Charles was very ill with smallpox.
The Child From the Sea Page 47