The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  The ice was broken between them and they sat on the windowseat together and presently Mary was talking eagerly of the coming journey. She was going, she said, because she did not like The Hague. It disagreed with her and a holiday might make her feel stronger and then perhaps she might bear a child.

  “Of course it is easier to travel to France by sea,” she said, “but Charles is taking the land journey so that he can show himself as King in the Spanish Netherlands. That will be good for his cause.”

  The door opened and there was sudden movement among the rainbows, dogs and monkeys chattering and barking, laughter and voices and a sea-sound of silken skirts in motion. Four princesses had entered the room with some precipitation, unannounced and uninvited by their mother. The Queen drew herself up, a little angry, but seeing that the invasion was led by the little Princess Henrietta who loved babies, and that her eldest daughter Elizabeth, coming last and closing the door carefully, sent her a glance of dignified apology, she relented. They all did what Henrietta wished though she was the youngest but one. Smiling, the Queen presented her daughters and Lucy had a quick impression of the four. Elizabeth tall and dark, her face grave with a scholars gravity, Louise the artist, betrothed to the Marquis of Montrose, her face full of humour and intelligence, the adorable Henrietta, blue-eyed, fair-haired and fragile, and the dark pretty Sophie whom the Queen had hoped would marry Charles.

  Mary had handed Jackie back to his mother and Lucy stood holding him proudly, the feel of him in her arms giving her courage in the centre of this rustling, exclaiming, perfumed and inquisitive group of female royalty. But for him she would have been afraid for Charles had deserted her and was on the other side of the room. Even he could have too much of women, especially when they were related to him.

  The Queen too stood a little aloof, her face as still as though carved out of stone. Statuesque too were the long folds of her white dress. Though she was so much stronger now waves of tiredness and depression could still quite suddenly break over Lucy, the shock of them making her sensitive to the realities of the lives whose outward appearance was a weaving of colour and light before her eyes. Through the mist of sunshine and rainbows she saw two stark figures of dark and light. Her young husband in his deep purple mourning, his black hair tumbled about his dark face, was playing with the greyhounds and the monkeys in the oriel window. With the sun shining upon them they seemed fabulous creatures of silver and gold and they leaped and fawned upon him, and his face was full of tenderness for them, for like all his family he loved animals. The scene was primeval; man moving through the sun and rainbows of the garden when he was alone, at home with the creatures and adored by them, his mind without knowledge of human love or hate, his memory a calm peaceful pool to mirror only the stars and sunshine and the bright eyes of the trusting beasts. He was alone but not conscious of loneliness for his garment was made of the purple shadows of evening, when he walked beneath the trees and was companioned by the stillness and quietness of God.

  It was the Winter Queen’s figure of grief that was a dazzle of whiteness like frozen snow. If the woman had brought human love to Adam she had brought grief too; tears and partings and forsakenness. Perhaps he had been better off without her; playing with the creatures or alone with that quietness under the trees.

  The two tall figures seemed to tower suddenly to the carved roof above, then receded from Lucy, leaving her conscious only of the laughing girls who had formed themselves into a circle about her. She could not know that of them all only the plump Sophie would live long and cheerfully and be a mother of kings. Of the others two would die young and two would escape to convents from a world they could no longer endure. Just for a moment it seemed that they were pressing her in and in to some central point of grief, yet when she reached the centre grief broke into miraculous joy, for Jackie was in her arms. At this central point of creation there was joy. She laughed and was back upon the surfaces of life, with the Queen pressing them to dine with her and Charles remembering an important engagement.

  Driving back to Scheveningen Lucy felt herself still held in that rainbow light. Her husband’s family had been kind to her. The nimbus about the moon had indeed been a circle of comfort and she dared to ask Charles, “Am I coming to Paris too?”

  He smiled at her. “Why yes, dear heart. I promised you Paris. I do not break promises.”

  Lucy smiled back. “It will be wonderful to be with you. And wonderful to travel with the Queen.”

  “But you cannot do that! You cannot take part in a royal progress. You must follow me a little later. Wilmot will bring you. He will take care of you on the journey and in Paris. You had better go by sea from Brill. By land the journey is long and troublesome and I take it only for reasons of State. You must have some woman to attend you. Get yourself a reliable maid. You should have done that long ago.”

  Lucy was ashamed that this news of a separate journey should upset her so much, for what else could she expect? The King of England would not go on a royal progress visibly accompanied by his mistress and her baby. But how could she bear to be parted from Charles now that they had Jackie? They were an indissoluble trinity. She swallowed her tears and asked equably, “Where am I to live in Paris?”

  “Wilmot will find you a lodging somewhere,” said Charles airily. To her horror she heard an edge of anger in her voice as she said, “I will lodge with my dear Betje and her husband. Then when you want me to ride with you she can look after Jackie. I would not trust Jackie with some strange landlady found by Lord Wilmot who knows nothing whatever about babies.”

  “Marry come up, you cannot bring Jackie!” ejaculated Charles. “You must leave him at Rotterdam with your aunt.”

  As they drove under the green shade of the trees it seemed as though darkness had fallen. Lucy did not think she could have heard right. Leave Jackie behind? But it was impossible. Charles must be mad. Then she remembered that a parting between her and Jackie was indeed impossible.

  “I am feeding Jackie,” she reminded her husband.

  “Get him a wet-nurse.”

  “Indeed I will not. I do not want my son suckled by a Dutch-woman. Babies absorb characteristics with their milk. Yes they do. My grand-mother said so. Do you want a dull, solid Dutch baby? Do not laugh, Charles. Please do not laugh. I have told you that my grandmother said so.”

  Charles blew his nose to hide his laughter. “Would you consider Scottish milk?” he asked from behind the folds of his handkerchief. “There are all those Scottish weavers at Rotterdam. Your uncle must employ a number of them. The Scottish are loyal on the whole and an honest and brave people. I have no doubt their milk is the best in the world.”

  “Welsh milk is the best in the world,” said Lucy, “and my son shall have no other.” She was not amused by the conversation and she was hurt that Charles was amused. “Charles, Charles!” she burst out. “How can you bear to go away and leave Jackie behind you?”

  He sobered instantly. “Because my son is too dear to me and too important a personage to be exposed to the dangers of travel at so tender an age. And Paris behind her fine façade is a stinking hell where fevers breed from filth. And the barricades have only just come down after the war of the Fronde and who knows when they will go up again? So if you do not want to part from Jackie, Lucy, you had better not come with me.”

  He was angry now and in spite of his love for Jackie vaguely jealous. Whom did she love best, himself or the boy?

  “If I feed Jackie he will catch no fever,” said Lucy obstinately. “And if the barricades go up again he and I will be safe with Betje and her husband.”

  “I have made my wishes known to you,” said Charles. The fingers of one hand were drumming on his knee and when she glanced at him his bearing was that of His Most Sacred Majesty.

  “I will leave Jackie at Rotterdam and I will follow you to Paris,” she said.

  Instantly he turned back to her,
a boy again, his set face breaking up into charm and laughter. He took her and her baby into his arms together and unity was once more restored. Jackie, squeezed too tight and very hungry, burst into roars of fury and his parents into laughter. Nevertheless this first quarrel over their child had left its mark.

  Seven

  1

  Lucy sat at the high western window of her lodging, and watched the stormy sunset light streaming over the towers and roofs of Paris. It had been a day of stifling summer heat with a thunderstorm in the late afternoon, but now the thunder was no more than an angry mutter in the distance and behind the towers of Notre-Dame the sun had torn the clouds apart and made of them savage banners of red and purple.

  She was not at ease in Paris. The surface of her life was gay, and her heart beat high with hope because in this new reunion Charles seemed more in love with her than ever, but this unease, united with the longing for Jackie, left behind at Rotterdam, and the fact that she did not quite trust Anne Hill, the girl who had come with her from Holland as her maid, kept a shadow of anxiety always at the back of her mind. And hidden below her surface vivacity there was always her tiredness.

  She looked out again over the city and wondered why it made her afraid. It was beautiful now, its steep roofs washed to a silver cleanliness by the storm, and she tried to think that a faint flower scent came to her, carried on a wandering air from some great man’s garden, perhaps from the garden where Cardinal Mazarin’s strange monkeys and tropical birds chattered and fluted. She could see it in her mind’s eye as Betje’s husband had described it to her, with its roses and lilies and tinkling fountains; and looking down on it from the window of the room where he spun his webs of power she saw for a moment the olive-skinned enigmatic face of the man who was the virtual ruler of France. The King and his brother were still children and he held their mother in the hollow of his hand.

  How men hated him! That was what was the matter with Paris, Lucy thought suddenly. Hate. In the stinking alleys and filthy tumble-down hovels lived human beings so degraded by poverty that even she, who had so loved the sin-eater, turned her head aside when she saw them gaping at her from their shadows as she jolted over the cobbles in Lord Wilmot’s coach. Between these travesties of human creatures and the silken beings who danced at the Louvre there were contrasts so great that only hate could be begotten of them; and from hate fear was born. It was the poor who hated and the rich who were afraid, and when trouble broke out the Cardinal, the archetypal figure of power, was somehow always the enemy.

  The sun sank behind the fiery clouds and Lucy got up and lit the candles, for Charles was coming tonight and supper was laid on the table. With her back turned upon the window, and its view of a city that made her afraid, she looked at the room that was now another of her homes. Stone-walled and strong-beamed, it looked safe, and suddenly she was happy as she rustled round the room, and into her adjoining bedchamber and out again, making all ready for Charles, and letting her fancy rove through the little kingdom of the old house beneath her.

  It was tall and narrow. On the floor below Betje and her husband lived and Anne had her room. The millinery shop was below again, and on the ground floor was a bakery. The smell of fresh bread, bringing memories of Roch, was one of the joys of this home. A narrow staircase wound about its newel-post from top to bottom of the house and when Charles came to see her the first Lucy knew of his arrival was the creak of every third stair as he strode upwards.

  He always came to see her as Tomos, wearing a big shabby hat, riding perhaps from his mother’s apartments at the Louvre, or from Saint-Germain, the country palace where she also had a suite of rooms and where she often stayed with Minette. At other times he came from the house of the English ambassador or the lodgings of one of his friends, for he had no settled home except these attic rooms. She had hardly trimmed the candles when she heard his step and a moment later she was clinging to him as though they had met after an absence of years instead of days; for their life was full of uncertainty and the tense atmosphere of Paris heightened it.

  As they ate their supper and drank their wine Charles laughed often, telling Lucy of his mock courtship of Mademoiselle, which he had begun again to keep his mother quiet, and the eccentricities of Sir Edward Hyde his chancellor, and the comic feud that existed between him and the Dowager Queen. Lucy laughed too and then cajoled him gently to speak of more serious things. To her delight, because she knew it would please the Queen of Bohemia, he was turning now less to the Covenanters for support and more to the Marquis of Montrose in Scotland and the Marquis of Ormonde, who was rallying the wild Irish to the Royalist cause.

  “You write often to the Marquis of Montrose?” she asked.

  “Often. He is a great man. I tell him in every letter I write that he has my loyalty and support. But it is to Ireland I hope to go soon. If we can win Ireland the tougher nut of Scotland will be easier to crack.”

  “Very soon?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  She sighed but she made no comment. Then she asked him to describe these three men to her; the Chancellor, Montrose and Ormonde, and she said their names over to herself. These were the King’s greatest servants. These he should trust and these only. Shyly she told him so and he laughed and pulled her curls.

  “There is a fourth,” he said. “A man whom my mother detests almost as much as she does old Hyde. Dr. Cosin. He was once Dean of Peterborough and now he is our Protestant chaplain at Paris, with rooms at the Louvre and at the English embassy, where he preaches to us all on Sunday. Wilmot should take you to hear him one day. He is a fierce, difficult man but he has great loyalty. My mother will capture the souls of her Protestant children only over his dead body and I believe he would die for the Church of England and for me should his duty demand the sacrifice. What is the matter, Lucy?”

  She was white. Dr. Cosin who had given her the silver piece, Dr. Cosin her grandmother’s friend, and she must presently appear before him as the King’s mistress. “It is nothing,” she said. “It is the weather. It was hot till the storm came.”

  Anne Hill had come into the room once or twice, bringing a dish of strawberries for them and a fresh bottle of wine, but they had hardly noticed when she came and went for she had the silence of a cat in movement. She was slender with regular features and smooth corn-coloured hair under her cap, and she would have been beautiful had not a bad burn ravaged one side of her face. Her father had been one of the Rotterdam Scottish weavers and she was well-mannered and discreet. Aunt Margaret, who had chosen her, had been pleased with her choice. Anne’s calmness, she had hoped, would check Lucy’s impetuosity and her tidiness not be without effect upon Lucy’s hair and wardrobe. And the two girls were so different that they should surely get on well together.

  Up to a point they did. But Lucy, unable to be happy unless she had the affection of those about her, was aware that she had not won Anne’s, and in the girl’s demureness she felt a hint of mockery. Well, what could she expect? Anne would probably not have entered the service of the King’s mistress had she not been well paid. That her father had died in her childhood, and that she and her mother had lived in great poverty until her mother had died too, Lucy knew not from Anne herself but from Aunt Margaret. Anne did not confide in her. She confided in Anne sometimes, hoping to win confidence in return, but she did not. That was partly why she was faintly afraid, for it is dangerous to tell too much to someone who does not return your trust. There was another reason. Sometimes there seemed to come from Anne a queer breath of evil. And yet once or twice she had seen in Anne’s face a gleam of light that softened her disfigurement like the reflection of light on water, gone in a moment but mysterious and lovely. Could a person both be evil and yet reflect light? She did not know but though she feared her maid she could not dislike her.

  The door closed finally behind Anne and Charles, who had been appreciative of her graceful exit, said, “It is a pity about
her face for that girl of yours has the smallest waist I ever saw. Though yours was nearly as small, dear heart, before you had Jackie. Not that having a baby spoilt your beauty for you are lovelier than you ever were and it is time my mother saw you. I have arranged it. Wilmot will bring you to Saint-Germain tomorrow.”

  “Charles!” gasped Lucy in terror. “Go to Saint-Germain to see your mother! I cannot do it. I cannot!”

  “Why are you afraid?” asked Charles. “You have confronted my aunt of Bohemia and her livestock, daughters and monkeys and all. And since we have been here you have ridden in the forest with me or Wilmot, and come for picnics on the river and faced Buckingham and the rest and queened it over them, and now you quail at thought of meeting one poor old widow woman.”

  “She is your mother.”

  “Yours too. And she knows it. She has seen my copy of our marriage certificate. And you will see old friends, Lady Dalkeith whom you met in Exeter, who is now Lady Morton, and Minette. She is five years old now and a fairy child.”

  “Then I will come,” said Lucy with sudden courage. “But I hope it is only your family and not one of your mother’s levees.”

  “It is one of her levees, but Wilmot shall get you there in good time that you may have a little while with my mother alone. Now do not be afraid. Keep your head up and be bold. Shall we play chess before we go to bed?”

  2

  It was Betje who helped Lucy dress for the levee, for Anne was having her day off, and Lucy was thankful for it, for Betje with her broad homely Dutch face, her goodness and honesty, was like firm ground beneath her feet. “Those who bring forth fruit out of an honest and good heart,” she quoted. “That is you, Betje. You make me think of golden corn ripening under the sun, the good bread that feeds the world.”