The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “You did right, Lucy,” said Dr. Cosin, and sneezed, thereafter blowing his large nose with the blast of a trumpet. Jackie was fascinated but Lucy was not. “You have no fire,” she said, “and it is cold as the grave in here and there is a dreadful smell of mice. Why have you no fire?”

  “I have no fuel,” said Dr. Cosin.

  Lucy jumped up and put Jackie on his lap. She took a little box of comfits from her pocket and laid it on top of the large bible on the table. “Give him one if he yells,” she said and was gone before Dr. Cosin could stop her.

  Jackie found himself deserted. His fat cheeks crimsoned, he screwed his eyes shut, opened his mouth and roared. Dr. Cosin reached for a comfit and there was instant silence as Jackie sucked. A few last tears still clung to his long eyelashes but an expression of bliss came over his face as he moved the comfit from here to there in his mouth, to wherever he had a tooth. He had few teeth as yet but he knew how to use those he had. Presently he opened his eyes and was fascinated by Dr. Cosin’s long beard. He pulled it but it did not come off. Dr. Cosin rescued his beard, placed it inside his gown for safety and contemplated this child upon his knee who might one day be King of England. Why not? He had been born in lawful wedlock, the true son of the present King’s true wife.

  He was a fine child, only eighteen months old but big and strong. He was a Stuart but he had a beauty denied to the Stuarts, his mother’s beauty. It was in his smile as he played with the buttons on Dr. Cosin’s gown, and in the lovely curve of his cheeks, and when he repeated for Dr. Cosin’s benefit a few strange words that he could now say, Mam, Shir Da, Pisherbouten, Ollypol and Gome, his voice had the true Welsh lilt. “Your Royal Highness is a dangerous young man,” Dr. Cosin told him. “You have too much charm.”

  “Ollypol,” said Jackie and pointed his forefinger at the bag of comfits. “Lollipop,” Dr. Cosin corrected him, for as a scholar he was a stickler for correct language, and was giving him just one more when Lucy returned with a rustle of tulip skirts and another whiff of that perfume (surely the Dutch Betje would not have given her perfume?) and followed by a handsome young serving man dressed in the royal livery of France and carrying a big basket of sea-coal. With a smile and a bow to Dr. Cosin he knelt before the fire.

  Dr. Cosin was not pleased with Lucy. “Madam, I ordered no fire,” he thundered.

  “No, sir, but I did,” said Lucy politely. “I went down to the kitchen, following my nose, and this very kind young man understood my wishes perfectly although I do not as yet speak very good French.”

  The young man hid his amusement as he lit the fire. Her French was indeed atrocious, but very voluble, and he was her servant for ever. “Madam has but to command,” he told her before he left the room. “My name is Pierre Latour.”

  “I will remember,” Lucy assured him.

  “You are making yourself very much at home, Lucy,” Dr. Cosin told her with a touch of sarcasm. Sitting now before the fire with Jackie on her lap again Lucy considered this. “Yes,” she said. “I know how to make homes. If Jackie and I can come to live here I shall hang my father’s miniature on the wall and then it will be home.”

  “You love your father?”

  “He is my firstborn,” she said, quite forgetting that the phrase had originally been given her by Dr. Cosin himself. “By that I mean that he was the first person I truly loved. He came even before Nan-Nan and my brother Justus.”

  “You write to your family?”

  “I do not write letters easily, and after I have written to my husband, though it is a joy to write to him, I do not wish to see a pen again. But I do write occasionally to my family, my father and mother, my grandmother and my brother Justus. My father writes to me and for him to have to get his pen to paper is a worse agony even than it is for me. He tells me only of the weather and the crops but at least I know he lives.”

  She smiled, and Dr. Cosin realized that for her to know that her father was still with her in the world meant more than perhaps she knew herself. He was slightly ashamed of his questioning but in spite of the evident well-being of herself and Jackie he was aware of unexplainable anxiety for them. He wanted to know that Lucy was not separated from her family. “The King writes to you?” he went on.

  Lucy’s smile became radiant. “Yes, His Majesty writes to me. He is easy with his pen. You should see him at it! The quill flies over the paper as though it was still on the wing of a bird.” The radiance died. “He tells me that he loves me and Jackie but he does not tell me how it goes with him in Scotland, and I do not think it goes well.”

  Dr. Cosin was no longer listening. He had heard some sound outside the room. Lucy listened and heard the running of very light feet on the stairs. Only a fearless child, running from authority with wickedness and joy, would pelt downstairs in that headlong manner. She tucked Jackie under her arm, seized his lollipops from the table and hid them quickly in the empty cupboard. He opened his mouth to roar but the sudden astonishing entry of a little girl silenced him. Taking no notice of Lucy and Jackie, Minette ran across the room to Dr. Cosin. She would be all her life very faithful in friendship and she had not forgotten him.

  “My governess is out,” she said. “She has a ruby ring and she has gone to sell it because my brother James needs a new shirt. I am with Mam but while she talked to my Lord Jermyn I ran. Is there anything in the cupboard?”

  “Princess, there will always be something in my cupboard for you,” said Dr. Cosin rashly, and she ran to find it, but it was only when Jackie recovered from his astonishment and gave utterance to his outraged feelings (for were they not his lollipops?) that she realized there was another child in the room. “A little boy!” she ejaculated and held one out to him. He grabbed it and they sat together in front of the fire with the box between them. Lucy looked at Dr. Cosin in dismay. “The Princess’s dress is patched and she needs new shoes.”

  “She will not get them from the Queen Regent of France,” said Dr. Cosin. “When the tide is going out poor relations are best forgotten. When the last jewels are gone I do not know what our royal family will either eat or wear.”

  “I will make a new frock for the Princess,” said Lucy instantly, and Minette looked up and smiled. “I know you,” she said to Lucy.

  “Princess, I was with you and the King in the little dell by the fountain at Saint-Germain. You kissed me then. Will you kiss me now?”

  Minette came and kissed her gladly, and she had not forgotten because she had already the royal gift of a good memory. “My governess told me that your name is Mrs. Barlow,” she said, and then, searching round in her mind for the right thing for a princess to say next she enquired politely, “Is Mr. Barlow well?”

  “He is well and in Scotland with the King,” said Lucy.

  Jackie knew who the King was and Lucy had been trying to teach him to say, Sir, my father. “Shir Da,” he said, and then glancing round and finding nothing more to eat he looked at his mother and suggested hopefully, “Gome?”

  “Jackie, we do not go home until we have prayed for the King on Thursday,” said Lucy decidedly. “We came to do that and we will do it.”

  Dr. Cosin got up slowly, for the rheumatism in his knees was agonizing, and they kneeled down together. Jackie knew how to kneel and was proud of the accomplishment. Presently he fell over but after lying on his back for a few moments he then took up the cross-legged yogi position. On the whole he found it the most comfortable for prayer. Dr. Cosin was repeating the petitions for the King when he realized that there was another guest on the stairs. The descent was that of an ailing woman who must come slowly with one hand on the wall. He knew who it was but he did not pause in his prayer, or look round when his guest entered, and following his example neither did Lucy. Nor did Minette for she hoped to remain unseen behind Lucy’s skirts.

  And nor did Jackie for he was listening intently for that word he liked. Sound was at present his favour
ite mystery. Words, his mother singing, birds chirping, people playing harps and lutes, china clinking, dogs barking and coach wheels rattling on cobbles made up for him a marvellous symphony of joy of which he lacked words to tell. Though he loved to roar and scream he liked also to listen and look. What came in through the holes at the sides of his head and the windows each side of his nose was astonishing at times, and so he listened now to the sound booming over his head. It was one of the big sounds, like thunder or wind, but it was saying the same things that his mother said in her voice like a lute. “Defend his person from all danger, both by sea and land,” boomed the wind. “Bless his counsels. Prosper his enterprises. And command thy angels so to pitch their tents about him . . .”

  There it was, that glorious word like a flower bell turned upside down. “Pisherbouten!” he shouted, so loudly that the prayers came to an abrupt stop. “Pisherbouten!” And once again, even from the steady yogi position, he overbalanced and his cheek came against Dr. Cosin’s hard shoe. He did not roar this time but he sobbed. It had been a long day and suddenly he was tired. Lucy picked him up, set him on his feet and commanded and threatened her Maker with silent intensity. “Make him go to his grandmother. God, you can do everything, so make him run to his grandmother. If you do not take him to his grandmother I shall never pray again.”

  In a brief glance Lucy had seen his grandmother in her shabby black gown, ill and embittered, every trace of her beauty gone. She was no figure to attract a child but Lucy had taken the kingdom of heaven by storm and Jackie staggered towards her with his arms stretched out; actually to preserve the equilibrium but with every appearance of affection. The Queen’s face changed. She smiled and the charm that was never quite lost all her life long lightened her ravaged face. She bent down and held out her arms to the baby. He lurched into them, leaned against her in his great tiredness and was comforted. The poor Queen too was comforted and loved Jackie and never ceased to love him while she lived.

  She had come in anger to reprimand Minette and to tell Dr. Cosin once for all exactly what she thought of him, but what could she do now but let Lucy help her to her feet and sit her by the fire with her grandson on her lap, while she searched his face for likenesses and found him a true Stuart and kept what she had to say to Minette until later. She even, to her own subsequent horror and astonishment, found herself incapable of protest when Dr. Cosin boomed forth into one of his heretical speeches.

  “Your Majesty will excuse us if we now bring to a conclusion the Protestant prayers for his King’s majesty which the honour of your entry has momentarily interrupted . . . That he may be preserved from the hands of all that seek his hurt, and may be speedily established in the just rights of his throne, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’ ”

  From this prayer he passed to the litany for the King, and then he gave the congregation his blessing and the Thursday intercession service for His Majesty was at an end.

  Charles, shivering with cold and fatigue, had just hidden himself in a hayloft in the Highlands. Only Prodgers was with him, for it had been against the advice of Buckingham and Wilmot that he had escaped from Argyll and the Covenanters and ridden to join a promised rising of Royalist Highlanders. But the clans had failed him. Now he lay in the hay hoping the pursuit would pass him by yet knowing in his heart that it would not do so. Strangely, for no apparent reason, a little warmth came to him, as though from the glow of a fire. He thought of Lucy, and of his comic son, and of Minette, the three whom he loved best in the world, and he even smiled a little. He constantly thought of them. Children are not treacherous, and Lucy, he knew with absolute certainty, would be loyal to him to the day of her death and beyond. He hid his head in his arms and tried to conjure up the picture of her glowing face.

  3

  Lucy and Jackie were happy living with Betje. For one thing Lucy was leading a useful and orderly life. Betje needed her help and she gave it with a will, serving in the shop and stitching in the evenings under Betje’s tuition at all the pretty things they sold to the ladies of Paris. Lucy loved Betje more and more, and she liked Betje’s husband, and he liked her and was grateful for the help she gave his wife. Betje and her husband were still childless but they had not given up hope of a child of their own; Jackie awoke no jealousy in them and their nerves were strong.

  On Thursdays Lucy went to the intercession service and there she met other exiles. Since Dr. Cosin accepted the King’s mistress as part of his little congregation so did they, and when she brought Jackie with her they were enraptured over the King’s lovely son. But Lucy could not always take Jackie because he was too heavy to carry and to hire a coach was expensive. But what she did take always, heavy though it was to carry, was a basket of food that she and Betje had cooked. It was scrupulously divided among the hungry; though Dr. Cosin resolutely refused to take his share. Occasionally, to punish him, Lucy did what he did not approve of and visited him at the Louvre, with Jackie on one arm and a basket on the other. Then a servant was sent to tell Her Majesty the Queen Dowager of England that her grandson was at the Palace and a lady-in-waiting came down to Dr. Cosin’s study to fetch Jackie, and he was borne away to visit his doting grandmother. Dr. Cosin noticed that, herself excluded, Lucy showed no jealousy and spoke of the Queen Dowager always with compassion. He was proud of her.

  Lord Taaffe, having paid his respects once to the Queen, did not visit the Louvre again and never came to the intercession service, but he did keep his promise to visit Lucy and Jackie, though it grieved Lucy that he came so seldom and stayed so briefly. The first time he came he brought her some expensive perfume. His money was running short and he had to go short of food to buy it, but the longing to give her just one gift was overwhelming. Why he had to choose something so apparently useless and frivolous as perfume he did not know; unless it was that it has a strange power of giving confidence. Why, who can say? The hope of the eternal spring? He lacked confidence in Lucy’s happiness and he had not the right or power to fight for it himself.

  With his own happiness he was not concerned. What did it matter? It was the King who mattered, and Lucy. He was an extrovert and did not examine his own feelings very closely; if he had it might have surprised him to find that the King meant more to him than any other human being, more even than Lucy. It was torture not to be with him in Scotland. There was little warmth and no comfort in his cheap lodging and sometimes he would go out at night and tramp the streets of Paris, cold with November mists, wrestling with his jealousy of Buckingham and Wilmot who had been preferred before him, and with his passion for Lucy. Both were destroying things, corrosive things, eating into the mind and soul as hunger eats into the body.

  He was nearly at the end of his resources now and was too proud to ask anyone for help. Semi-starvation bred strange fancies and sometimes it seemed to him that there was some evil presence with him in the streets, an adversary with a dark net creeping up behind him, ready to throw its folds over him to strangle him. And not him only. All round him were those who had already been destroyed. He saw wrecks of bodies huddled under archways, dreadful faces peering from doorways, remnants of human beings who had once been capable of beauty and goodness. But the adversary had come and now the stars looked down upon the mess with glittering indifference, an indifference almost as terrible as that of the men and women who passed by in their painted coaches on their way to some banquet in a palace warm and scented as a flower.

  He felt strangely lost as he watched them go by. By birth he was one of them but by misfortune he was linked to the lurkers under doorways. So where did he belong? Where was his home? Where is any man’s home? In his young and pious days in Ireland Lord Taaffe would have said it was the heart of God, but he could not now equate that heart either with the indifference of the stars or with the wreckage of human life about him, and so it was not in his power to answer his own question.

  Yet it was the asking of it, he thought later, and he had asked with a compell
ing desperation, that in some unexplainable way precipitated one of the strangest happenings of his life. One night an old man with a stick bumped into him. Whether he had lurched, or the old man had lurched, he did not know, for they were both suffering from hunger and fatigue. He steadied the old fellow but for a moment neither looked at the face of the other, each fearing what dreadful thing he might see. Then just at the same moment each took courage and under the flaming light of a tavern they looked and were astonished, for each looked into the face of a friend and each at the same moment asked the same question, “Are you in need?”

  The old man replied first and his reply was startling. “I have a great hunger. For food perhaps, for warmth a little, but my true hunger is for God alone.”

  He spoke the most exquisite French in a high comical voice and his eyes under the domed forehead were bright with intelligence. It was impossible to tell how his small face, puckered and wrinkled with age where it was not thickly bearded, could express so luminously the greatness of his compassion. Yet it did so. His next remark was as startling as his first. “My lord,” he said, “I will come home with you.”

  The “my lord” startled Lord Taaffe. “Do you know me?” he asked.

  “Whether you are a lord in the worldly sense I do not know. I honoured in you, and greeted in you, that divinity which reigns in the hearts of all men.” He paused and the penetration of his bright eyes as he looked at Lord Taaffe’s was extraordinary. “Have you a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread at home?” he asked.

  “Sir, I have not,” said Lord Taaffe. “I eat only every other day and this is my hungry day. And I have no home, only a lodging so vile that I trust it is temporary.”

  “Kindness such as I see in your face would make a home out of any odd corner where you might choose to entertain a guest,” said the old man, and fumbling under his threadbare coat he brought out a gold ring that hung round his neck by a piece of string. He untied the knot and handed the ring to Lord Taaffe. “Go into the tavern behind you and purchase a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread,” he commanded.