The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  It was not possible to withstand his determination and Lucy was too weak to try. She was not only physically exhausted with hunger and weeping but also with the misery of forsakenness. Charles had not written to her lately; he seemed lost in the darkness and snows of the north and reach out as she might in her prayers, and her midnight thoughts of him, she could feel no sense of union, only sorrow and confusion. It had been a relief to turn to thoughts of her father working with his beasts and his land, content before the kitchen fire at night within the shell of the beloved castle. She had thought that they were still upon the same green star together and had dreamed that one happy day she would go home to Wales and take his grandson to visit him. Now her father too was gone. His body was laid in the churchyard at Roch but where was he himself? Where was her father?

  “Where is he?” she whispered to Lord Taaffe, and with the gruel not quite finished she pushed away the bowl. He put it down and took her in his arms again, but silently, for like her he found it impossible to visualize such a man as he believed her father to have been in the kind of conventional heaven of which they had been taught as children. Nor could he picture himself there. Nor her. “He is one with all he loves,” were the words given to him. “And with whom he loves also. Love lives on, you know, and when the soul is not imprisoned in the body it is free as a bird to be where it will.”

  They were the right words for Lucy. They took her to Roch and for a moment she seemed to see a bird flying over the beloved fields, floating around the castle tower and sailing out to sea on the wind. Only a symbolic picture but it seemed to hold a truth to which she would presently cling. But for the moment it was Lord Taaffe to whom she clung. “Do not go yet,” she implored him. “Not yet.” He held her until suddenly like a child she fell asleep, then put her back on her pillows. For a moment she half waked and realized that he was leaving her. “Come back soon,” she whispered.

  “I will,” he said, and stood by her until she was asleep again. Then with reluctance heavy as lead he left her.

  Outside in the street going home he wondered where the words had come from that had seemed to comfort her. Before he had met the old man he would not have known what to say. His poor Lucy, he thought, she was so loving that she had great power of grief. “Love and grief are not di­visible,” the old man said. He must be back again to comfort her as quickly as he could manage it.

  But he did not manage it for more than a week for even his strong constitution could not hold out for ever against the combination of not enough food, no cloak and bitter weather. He caught a chill and for a few days was shivering with fever under the blanket in his attic. Then, too soon, he went back to the horses and had no spare time because the old ostler in turn became ill.

  But at last he was free to set off in the cold winter dusk to the house that was now home to him. He had kept himself going through the days of illness thinking of that house; the warm smell of the bakery that was his first greeting as he opened the door, the busy shop on the first floor full of colour and laughter and the frivolous pretty things that made women contented, and above that Lucy’s room where he could sit and talk with her and play with her son and know blessed ease to his spirit.

  Whatever the difficulties deep below them he had this ease with her, the ease of home. As he turned the corner of each new street he mentally set up the tall house at the end of it, light shining from the windows, and so held himself upon his feet. “There it is, only a few more yards,” he kept repeating. He had employed this ruse as a boy in Ireland, when he had ridden too far and got caught in a storm and could hardly get home. He would set up the old castle with light in the windows always just ahead of him and think of the fire in the hall, the dogs lying before it, and his mother’s welcome.

  But the way was longer than he had remembered, the wind was rising and it was beginning to snow, the first snow of the year. He had had the sense to borrow a tattered horse rug from the stables and wore it over his shoulders. He would leave it in the bakery and Lucy would not see it. This, he thought with confusion, had been a bright idea and he was proud of it. But where was the castle? He pulled himself up, and taking a grip upon his scattered wits leaned back against the wall of the house beside him. The cobbled lane was almost empty and seen through the whirl of snowflakes it looked unfamiliar. “You fool, you’ve taken a wrong turn,” he said to himself.

  He staggered away from the wall and turned to go back the way he had come, but now he met the full blast of the wind and realized to his dismay that he was facing a blizzard. The snow was driving in his face so that he could not see if home was at the end of the lane, but a beam of light shone through it and he remembered that the castle had always reminded him of a lighthouse. He put his head down and began to struggle towards it, dragging his feet through the snow, repeating to himself, “The lighthouse.”

  And now he thought he was fighting his way out into the sea to save people from a wreck of some kind. The white spray of the waves was breaking over his head and the water was cold as ice. Some boyhood memory was with him and he muttered, “Very cold for a summer’s night.” He fought his way through a couple more waves, head down against them, and then some sense of an approaching presence made him jerk his head up again and he saw one of the ship’s survivors coming towards him, borne along by the greatest wave of all. He could see the figure quite clearly because for some peculiar reason a ship’s lantern was swinging beside him, a little above his head, and it looked a frail figure. He lurched forward to the rescue and a great wave carried her straight into his outstretched arms.

  “I have got you,” he gasped in a voice that was rough and hoarse from his recent chill, and he gripped her with all his strength, holding her above the waves. “Got you,” he reiterated, his triumph so gruff and great that it sounded savage. “Got you.”

  For a moment Lucy was so terrified that she could not even scream. Then her courage returned, and she cried out, wrenched her right arm free and struck out blindly at the faint blur of a face that she thought she could see above her. The Paris streets were not safe for women and she had been told that when a man attacks you the right thing to do is immediately to place your thumbs on his eyeballs and press hard, but she could not get her left hand free and neither could she see the man’s eyes. But her right fist, more by luck than skill, landed full upon his forehead and he lurched back against the wall. A sensible girl would now have picked up her skirts and run for home but Lucy was immediately seized with anxiety and remorse. Had she hurt the poor man? The swinging lantern shone upon his face and she peered up anxiously. “Theo!” she gasped in horror.

  He peered down at her. The blow had lacked the force that Lucy could have used had she not been numbed with fright and cold, but even so it took him a moment or two to get her face in focus, and a few more moments to return from Ireland to Paris.

  Then a sudden rush of joy, coming up from the depths of the spirit, seized both of them at the same moment, bringing with it a strength and clarity that although not physical yet transformed both body and mind. For a few illumined moments they were well and whole. It was a moment of recognition and they clung together as though they had been parted for a hundred years. Time seemed to sweep back upon itself, carrying them to where forgotten memories waited beyond time, then with a gust of wind and snow they were swept forward again, the memories uncaptured, and they knew where they were. All the more they clung together because it was not where they wanted to be.

  But it was where they had to be and the man demanded, “What are you doing out here alone in this storm? It is not safe.”

  “I only ran round to the apothecary to get some cough mixture for Jackie. He has a little cold. Theo, where are you going?”

  “To find you. To comfort you.”

  “But you were going the wrong way.”

  With strength and clearness dying away Lord Taaffe’s mind was now given over to the obstinacy of the sick. “N
o, I was not going the wrong way. I saw the castle at the end of the street. Do not dawdle, Lucy, we must make haste.” And he tried to pull her round to face the storm.

  She locked her arm in his and said firmly, “Home is with the wind behind us. The wind will take us there.” Then as he resisted her she said sharply, “Theo, you are to come with me. Do as I tell you.”

  He capitulated and was aware of little except the relief of doing so. Resistance and struggle were all very well up to a point but beyond that point abandonment could seem the final good. He longed to sink down into the whiteness of the snow but was aware of Lucy and her determination that he should not do so. Lucy. She was a very determined girl. Abandonment to Lucy. It was she who was the final good. To be lost in her was what he wanted.

  Lucy was intent upon getting him home, putting him to bed and looking after him. The light of the swinging lantern had been fitful but it had shown her two horrifying facts; a ragged horse blanket instead of a cloak and the haggard face of a sick man. And he had told her he had money and she had been fool enough to believe him. She thought with a sort of rage he was a typical exile and that many of Charles’s friends were in much the same state. And she was Charles’s wife. For most of them she could do nothing but for this man she would do all that she could. She reached the door and pushed it open. “Betje!” she called. “Betje! Come at once.”

  Eleven

  1

  For the Royalist exiles that New Year was one of alternate sorrow and hope. The first sorrow was the death of William of Orange ten days before Princess Mary gave birth to a son. Lucy was not the only one to weep for her, sad that the arrival of the longed-for baby should be overshadowed by such grief. Yet she had a boy, Lucy said to herself, and babies are the supreme joy of the world. She should know who had a son. Spring ran them very close, and so did God, but then spring was the birth of joy and God had once been a baby, so the three could hardly be divided.

  And then came another joy, the news that at the beginning of January Charles had been crowned King of Scotland at the ancient Palace of Scone. The fact that the coronation had been a humiliating farce, imposed upon a king who was virtually a prisoner and had already been tormented past endurance, did not penetrate to the minds of his friends in France. He was a crowned king now, and all Europe realized the fact, and waited for news of the triumphant invasion of England that would surely follow. But the spring months went by and no news came.

  Lucy was now receiving occasional short letters from Charles; before his coronation, he said, he had been too busy to write. They were light and amusing letters, giving descriptions of the hours-long sermons he must sit through. “All the Stuarts,” he told her, “have reduced sleeping through sermons to a fine art.” Yet if the letters kept upon the surface of his life his love for her and Jackie shone through very clearly in the little sentences that kept breaking in out of context. “Dear heart, I dreamed of you last night . . . Just at sunset I wondered if you were putting Jackie to bed . . . My love, do not forget me.”

  Parts of these letters she read aloud to Lord Taaffe, when he came to see her, but these little sentences she could not share with him and though she read without hesitation he always knew when she missed them out and shared her heartbreak. Indeed he more than shared it since of the two of them it was he who suffered most.

  Their contemporaries at the courts of France and Holland would have been consumed with amusement had they known that the tough Irishman and the King’s mistress, of all people, were in anguish because for one night only they had been lovers. What of it? Were homeless exiles not to seek the comfort of a little loving to alleviate their lot? Anyone who thought otherwise was a fool. They would not have understood, if they could have seen it made visible, the quality of the integrity that despite their failures gave such distinction to Lucy and her lover. Both had the gift of a dedicated loyalty. They were not faithful when it suited them, they were faithful to the core.

  “All true glory, while it remains true, holds it. It is the maintaining of truth that is so hard.” In her girlhood Lucy had accepted what Old Sage had said of peace in the narrow sense, love being merely the love of man and woman and truth the troth they plighted to each other when they were married. Now she saw this troth as a symbol. The glory was a much greater thing than the love of man and woman, the troth something that must be maintained with love itself. In this realization she knew that she might one day find comfort, though she could not find it now, for the breaking of the symbolic troth seemed to have broken her heart, too.

  Lord Taaffe, less reflective than Lucy, was in a worse case. All he knew was that he had never felt more wretched.

  Neither could understand how it had come about. Lord Taaffe had prided himself upon his control in every department of life; even when it came to his drink he knew when to stop, he thought. Lucy, though she had told herself in Paris that one day Charles might have much to forgive her, would never have dreamed that it would be for disloyalty to him.

  After the exhaustion and cold of the snowstorm Lord Taaffe had been for a few days extremely ill, but Lucy’s and Betje’s nursing and his own strong constitution had quickly put him on his feet again with no apparent signs of weakness. Lucy had her grief for her father in control and allowed no signs of it to appear to sadden other people. Both had actually been tremulous with the blows that had struck them and abnormally sensitive to every gust of emotion.

  On the day that Lord Taaffe had said he was going back to his attic the next morning their tempers had flared. Lucy had said he was not fit to go. He had said he was. They had argued hotly and made it up again, Lord Taaffe winning, and to take away the sting of battle Betje had served them a delicious supper in Lucy’s sitting room. Later, entirely reconciled, they had stood before the fire to say goodnight and suddenly tomorrow’s parting had seemed impossible. They had shared so much, the journey from Holland, Lucy’s grief for her father, the strange encounter in the snowstorm, Lord Taaffe’s illness, and hard things shared unite those whose response to them is made of the same sort of courage. Yet the unity did not seem new. It was old. And suddenly the deeps had opened again, as in the storm, and they had been helpless.

  He left the next day, as he had said he would, but he had come to visit her in the old way and patiently they had tried to understand their dilemma. They did not reproach each other and they did not argue, since sorrow had carried them down to the ancient roots where they were one. When Charles came home should they tell him? Both in their honesty wanted to tell him but put his happiness before their own comfort. Why should his faith in Lucy be taken from him simply to make them feel more comfortable? They considered that they did not deserve to be comfortable, but the thought of discomfort made Lucy put into words Lord Taaffe’s worst fear. “I may have a child,” she said calmly, “and in that case he cannot help knowing.”

  “If the child were born before he comes home it could perhaps be adopted and he need not know,” he said.

  There was a silence and it tingled. “Do you suppose,” enquired Lucy in a voice like silk, “that I would allow any child of yours and mine to be adopted?”

  He looked round quickly and saw the danger sparks in her eyes and the angry colour in her cheeks and for the first time in weeks his old grin flashed into his face. “No,” he said and flung back his head and once more roared with laughter. And Lucy laughed too, with sudden delight, and he remembered the storm at sea when they had been on deck together and a wave had come over the side and broken over their heads. She had been more like a man than a girl and he realized that she was now, and had been all through this time of trouble. And he realized too that he had not the slightest desire to make love to her again. At the roots their love went deeper than love-making.

  But there was nothing masculine about Lucy when she realized that the child was coming. She was instantly all mother, her first reaction one of joy. But afterwards came sadness as she wondered what
Nan-Nan would have said. She had promised Nan-Nan that she would never bring a little bastard into the world and now she had broken faith with Nan-Nan as well as with Charles. Nevertheless there was to be a baby; a new spring. And no child of hers should ever suffer as the little Betsi who had been taken away from Nan-Nan and had died. No child of hers should ever be taken from her, not even by its own father, since fathers who must be about in the world cannot take proper care of small children. Neither Jackie nor the child who was coming should ever be taken from her. Never.

  Her resolve passed through her being as though it were one of those strong stakes that gardeners strike into the ground to give backbone to some fragile flowering thing. She would cling and twine about it now as though it were salvation. She was not a weak woman but her broken promise had destroyed her confidence in herself. She took Jackie into her arms and spoke her vow aloud to him. “I will not let anyone part us, Jackie.” He submitted to her clinging arms for a moment or two, since he was a loving child, then wriggled free, for breakfast was on the table. “Gum,” he said.

  The delight that had sprung up between Lucy and Lord Taaffe at the thought of a child was something they nourished carefully now that the child was a fact. His anxiety and remorse he hid from her. The fact that the carrying of this child was not so easy as it had been with Jackie was, she hoped, her own secret. Betje, who took things as they came, clucked her tongue at the frailty of human nature but was secretly delighted that a baby was to be born under her roof; she had a strange passion for delivering babies and much talent for it. The thought of Betje’s talent was a marvellous comfort to Lucy as she sat by the open window of her sitting room making clothes for her baby, for as time went on her exhaustion became greater and she was sometimes frightened. She had vowed she would never let her children be taken from her but what if she were to be taken from her children? “I will not die of this baby,” she resolved. “I will not.”