The Child from the Sea (eBook edition)
Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC
P. O. Box 3473
Peabody, Massachusetts 01961-3473
eBook ISBN 978-1-61970-837-2
THE CHILD FROM THE SEA. Copyright © 1970 by Elizabeth Goudge.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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First eBook edition — November 2015
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Historical Note
From the Diary of Samuel Pepys
Foreword
BOOK I: The Child
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
BOOK II: The Idyl
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
BOOK III: The Woman
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Note
For
Freda Green
Acknowledgements
The extracts from Medieval Welsh Lyrics by J. P. Clancy are reproduced by permission of Macmillan and Company Limited, London; The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited; and St. Martin’s Press, Inc., Macmillan and Company Limited, New York.
Historical Note
Lucy Walter, secretly married to Charles the Second, his wife as an exile in Holland and Paris, and mother of the Duke of Monmouth—had she other attributes than beauty? Has her character been misrepresented down the years? Elizabeth Goudge, with good reason to believe so, presents her life story in a fresh and fascinating light. It begins with her childhood at Roch Castle, Pembrokeshire, and ends when Charles is restored to the throne of England.
From the Diary of Samuel Pepys
He told me what great faction there is at Court; and above all, what is whispered, that young Crofts[1] is lawful son to the King, the King being married to his mother. How true this is, God knows; but I believe the Duke of York will not be fooled in this of three crowns . . .
The Duke of Monmouth is in so great splendour at Court, and so dandled by the King, that some doubt, that, if the King should have no child by the Queene (which there is yet no appearance of), whether he would not be acknowledged for a lawful son; and that there will be difference follow between the Duke of York and him; which God prevent! . . .
This day the little Duke of Monmouth was marryed at White Hall, in the King’s chamber; and to night is a great supper and dancing at his lodging, near Charing-Cross. I observed his coate at the tail of his coach: he gives the arms of England, Scotland, and France, quartered upon some other fields, but what it is that speaks of his being a bastard I know not . . .[2]
The Queene (which I did not know,) it seems was at Windsor, at the late St. George’s feast there: and the Duke of Monmouth dancing with his hat in his hand, the King came in and kissed him, and made him put on his hat, which everybody took notice of . . .[3]
There was a French book in verse, the other day, translated and presented to the Duke of Monmouth in such a high style, that the Duke of York, he tells me, was mightily offended at it. The Duke of Monmouth’s mother’s brother hath a place at court; and being a Welchman, (I think he told me,) will talk very broad of the King’s being married to his sister . . .
Notes
* * *
[1] The Duke of Monmouth was called James Crofts when as a young boy he came to England after the Restoration.
[2] The bar sinister had been omitted from the coat of arms.
[3] Only a Prince of the blood royal might dance with the Queen with his hat on.
Foreword
This book began ten years ago with a visit to St. Davids in Pembrokeshire. Sitting on the cliffs above St. Bride’s Bay, overwhelmed by the magic of the place and above all by the Cathedral, I saw in the distance a castle appearing through the mist, high up against the sky. Perhaps the reason why it made such an impact was that it appeared as though veiled in mystery. On a clear day it would probably have made a lesser impression and I might not have become obsessed by the idea that I had to write a book about someone who had lived there. These obsessions probably only afflict romantic novelists, and are a mistake, for they are likely to land an ill-equipped writer with a task better left to a competent historian. A Welsh friend told me I had seen Roch Castle, which had belonged to the Walter family, and that Lucy Walter, the mother of the Duke of Monmouth, had probably been born there. My heart sank for the only thing I knew about Lucy was that very little is known about her, and that little not to her credit. Then I was lent a book written by Lord George Scott, one of her descendants, and the whole picture changed. Her biographer had examined all the evidence and had come to the conclusion, for reasons that he makes clear in his book, that her character has been misrepresented. Now a storyteller who is told that a historical character may have been entirely different from what we had previously supposed, is lost. A carrot of that sort has to be pursued, and so Lord George Scott’s book is the basis of my story.
One knows nothing of Lucy’s childhood except the bare fact of removal from one place to another, and so the first half of this book is largely fiction. I must apologize however for making her childhood coincide with “Vicar Pritchard’s” term of office as Chancellor of St. Davids Cathedral. He is such a delightful character that he could hardly be left out. The mystery of Lucy’s possible marriage to Charles is not likely to be cleared up now. The most likely explanation would seem to be that a marriage ceremony took place but was proved later not to have been legal. The question of its place has given rise to several legends. There is a tradition that Charles and Lucy were married in Pembrokeshire. I do not see how that could have been possible, for how did he get so far in the middle of a civil war? But I have adopted it simply because it is a Pembrokeshire tradition. According to the legend of the stolen marriage register it took place at Haverfordwest, but after spending some while in the little church at Roch, sheltering from Pembrokeshire rain, and looking at the wonderful old font where the Walter children were perhaps baptized, for me it could only have been in that church.
When the story moves to Holland and France then Lucy comes on to the stage of history. Her movements are roughly known but the truth behind the facts remains confused and mysterious. Especially is this so with regard to the extraordinary journey to London with her son, and their imprisonment in the Tower. It happened, but why is a mystery. Even her portraits are mysterious because the
y do not seem to be of the same girl. None is certainly authentic, which is a relief, since only one suggests the beauty and charm she undoubtedly possessed.
I would like to express my gratitude for a talk I heard years ago on the B.B.C. It was for Welsh schools and was given by Madean Stewart. She described how she played her flute to the seals. I have described something similar in this book, but without her talk I should not have known such a thing was possible.
BOOK I: The Child
One
1
The child awoke with the sun, as was her custom, and shot up instantly out of the nest of blankets, her brown feet reaching for the uneven floor almost before she had rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She was one of the vital, quicksilver children, born beneath a star. Even when her father roared at her, “For God’s sake child stand still!” she was tense as springy heather beneath his hand on the top of her head, and the moment he lifted it to aim a clumsy blow at her backside she was gone and his language, once more, was the cross that her gentle mother bore with such patience.
William Walter was not a very effective father but he was warm-hearted and Lucy adored him. Father! Suddenly she was afraid he might have died in the night and she ran to the curtain that shut off her turret room from her parents’ bedchamber. She lifted it and peeped round, her heart beating hard with anxiety, but behind the curtains of the great fourposter his cheerful snoring was reassuring as a humming kettle. There was no sound from her mother’s side of the bed for her mother was a very great lady, with the blood of the Plantagenets showing blue in her delicate veins, and people with blue veins do not snore. Her father too was of royal blood, for he was descended from Welsh princes, but he was always a man to hide his light under a bushel. Lucy did not worry about her mother dying in the night as much as she worried about her father. She did worry, because she loved her mother, but not as much. It grieved her that she could not love everyone equally but she had accepted that as one of the facts of life that are inescapable.
For a moment or two she lingered, her vivid triangular face floating like that of a disembodied cherub above the darkness of the velvet curtain that she had gathered beneath her chin, to hide from a possibly wakeful mother, looking through the chink where the curtains did not quite meet at the foot of the bed, the fact that she had once more taken off her nightshift and was naked. Skirts bothered her in bed just as they did by day. She wished she had been born a boy. She lingered because the sunlight lay so warmly on the carved oak of the great bed, and the scarlet rug that lay on the floor. The walls were the rough hewn stone walls of the castle tower but the sunlight brought out in them faint gleams of lilac and blue, for the rocks of Pembrokeshire of which this castle had been built were rainbow-tinted. Her eyes went from the walls to the curtain that hid the other turret room where the boys slept, Richard who was ten years old and Justus her special brother, seven years old and a year younger than herself. The two-year-old twins Dewi and Betsi slept with Nan-Nan and were kept safe by her. The older children were protected from the dangerous night world of storm and darkness, thieves and warlocks by the interposition of their parents’ bedchamber and their father’s sword standing ready to his hand beside the great bed. Nothing could get at them and they could not get out. Or so their parents thought.
Lucy dropped the curtain and began pulling on the old pair of breeches and the jerkin which had once belonged to Richard, which she wore for her more adventurous outings but wore in defiance of her mother’s orders. She did not bother with washing or with trying to comb out her thick brown hair. It was coarse rebellious hair and not even Nan-Nan could bring any sort of ladylike order to it. She ran barefoot to the narrow window, flung it open and leaned over the iron bar that had been fixed across the window to keep her, in her younger days, from falling out.
Her breath caught as the loveliness rose like a wave and broke over her. It was half past five on a May morning, cool, with a tang in the air, and though the sky was deep blue overhead the high white clouds sailing in from the sea were still bright with the gold of the dayspring. She blinked at the brightness and looked down to the sea of new green leaves below her, but that was dazzling too for the dew sparkled on every leaf. Roch Castle, in this year of grace 1638 three centuries old, was built on an outcrop of volcanic rock and upon this, the landward side, it crowned a precipice. The rocks thrust out just under Lucy’s window and the leaves of the trees in the wood below ruffled against them like water. Looking down she could see the sunbeams caught in the leaves, the birds’ nests, and even gleams of azure where the first bluebells had appeared on the floor of the wood. To her right she could see the steep lane that wound up from the valley, and upon the other side of it the tower of the church thrusting up through green leaves. A small village lay at the feet of church and castle, a thatched roof visible here and there, and beyond a stream ran under an old arched bridge. Lucy could not see it but she could hear its voice, a clear and constant rill of sound threading in and out of the singing of the birds and the bleating of lambs. Beyond the stream the trees thinned out and green hills rose towards the distant mountains.
Lucy removed the iron bar from the window. Richard, who was clever with his hands, had loosened it for her; though not for her only, because an entirely selfless action was not Richard’s métier. This window was a useful escape route for himself at times, because on his side of the tower the castle’s rock foundation thrust out at a much lower level and there was no way down. Lucy climbed backwards out of the window, lowered her feet to the rock, clung with her strong brown hands and felt with her bare toes for the familiar footholds. It was not an easy climb; if she had slipped she might have been killed and either of her parents, seeing her, would not have been the same again; but Lucy was fearless because she trusted the world. How should this glory of which she was a part do her any harm?
She reached the sea of leaves and went down through it into the branches of the old oak tree that was her friend. The wood was oak and ash and sycamore and here in the sheltered valley behind the castle the trees were not stunted like so many in this windswept land. She climbed down to the floor of the wood and stood for a few moments among the bluebells, listening to the birds whose song was rising up now from all the mysterious places in the folds of the hills where there was shade and water and the springs of being. She sang too, wordlessly, her voice running up and down that small scale of notes that is one of the ladders to heaven.
Then she ran out of the wood and up the steep lane to the place where four ways met and the castle stood foursquare to all the winds. Here the breath of the sea met her. Almost every day it met her when she ran abroad, because the wind was from the sea more often than not, yet each time it was something new and miraculous. She picked her way along the rutted lane. The soles of her feet were hardened by always running barefoot but she knew she had to avoid the sharp points of stones and hardened mud. The lane was deeply sunken in the earth, the steep banks wet and green with sparkling ferns, the flowering thorn trees bent over so far by the prevailing wind that they looked like white polled dwarfs all running as hard as they could away from the sea towards the sunrise. In the fields on either side, where ribs of rock thrust through the heather and gorse and tussocks of rough grass, her father’s sheep and black and white cows were feeding. He possessed many acres of rough grazing ground, and inland fields of oats and barley and golden mustard. His kingdom was wide and Lucy owned it.
Presently the lane took a leap and plunged headlong into a deep green gully. A stream ran down one side of it now and it was so wet that the mud squelched between Lucy’s toes. It was soft like silk and she sang for joy of the mud. The green walls on either side lifted and spread back like wings, there was sand mixed with the mud under foot and the smell of seaweed. The stream ran faster and Lucy with it. They reached the bay together and raced each other to the sea.
The small waves lapping about her ankles were very cold and she thrilled to their touch as
they gently washed away the mud from her feet. The water was green and clear and looking down she could see the bright pebbles lying on the rippled sand and her own toes among them. Her feet had a strange beauty under the water and she gazed at them entranced, for they did not seem to belong to her any more but to the sea that had bewitched them. She had a sudden longing to give herself to the water, to pull off Richard’s jerkin and breeches and run naked into the waves and swim away to the uttermost parts of the sea. It was the same sort of longing that came when she watched the larks leaping up the stairways of the sky. She wanted to leap with them and go up and up, but not to come back as they did as soon as their wings began to sizzle in the blazing sun. She would fly right on into the sun and get burnt or not, just as the sun pleased. Something or someone, some day, would pull her as moon and sun pull the tides and the larks and she would go.
She pulled her feet away from the gentle hands about her ankles, ran to the rock that was one of her special places and climbed up it. Sitting cross-legged on its flat top, she had the whole bay under her eagle eye. Except for that one deep cleft where the lane and the stream came down it was entirely surrounded by the cliffs. There were three caves hidden in the rocks and Lucy knew them as she knew the rooms of her home. One of them was above high water mark, green ferns grew inside it and there was driftwood on its floor, but the other two were washed by the high tides and the rock-pools in them were full of sea anemones and frail seaweeds like grasses, so light and airy that the slightest disturbance of a scurrying crab would send them swaying in protest, and the silver sand between the pools was strewn with shells. These caves were small, as the bay itself was small, a safe place for children, but there was another bay not far from this one that could only be reached by boat or by a climb down a sheer cliff face almost too dangerous to be attempted. In this bay there was hardly any sand, only a shelving beach of pebbles and low flat rocks, and its caves went so deep under the cliff that the sea boomed in them like thunder. This was the seals’ bay, and one of their breeding places. The caves were their nurseries and when the sun shone the gentle cows lay on the flat rocks with their ivory pups lying beside them. Lucy had seen them from above, standing on the edge of the cliff, holding her father’s hand and looking down and careful to make no sound, for the slightest noise would send them all sliding off their rocks into the sea. She often saw them from her own bay too, lying a little out to sea beyond the rocks and looking like rocks themselves. And she had heard their wild and dreadful singing and it had not frightened her as it did some people. Why should it frighten her? Seals had been human beings once and because of something they had done they had been banished to the sea, but they loved human beings even while they feared them, and through their music they tried to reach out and make contact with the life they had lost.