The Child From the Sea

  There was silence. Robert looked at the wine in his glass. So Old Sage had given his life, his professional life, for the wretched Patrick. Yet Patrick could not have been entirely worthless, or Old Sage would not have loved him so much. He could see Patrick in his mind’s eyes; a man of charm and delicacy but without the humility to know his own weakness. A man who would mistake euphoria for courage and rush on undertakings he could not hope to sustain.

  “What happened to him?” he asked.

  “Patrick? I told you before. He vanished. It would appear that seeing Isaiah when friends brought him home must have finally destroyed his reason. That night he locked himself in his room and by the morning he had disappeared. He took nothing with him except an old priest’s cloak that Isaiah had got to pacify him. It was rumoured that he had gone to the west and embarked on a ship bound for Ireland, that was later reported lost at sea, but nothing is entirely known. To Isaiah in his grief we stressed the likelihood of the loss at sea, and Isaiah believes that his friend has now found peace.”

  Robert lifted his glass and drank the wine. David, he believed, had been wrong to empty the cup on the floor of the cave. The life of the Guardians, poured out for other men, should be accepted with humble gratitude.

  “Was it then that Isaiah became a herb seller?” he asked.

  “Soon after. But first I took him to the house in Fish Street that had been his grandfather’s. He had been maimed in defending a man who was a Catholic and we looked after him until he had recovered his strength. The old religious house opposite was then more or less in ruins, apart from the chapel which had been turned into a warehouse. Men and women of the disreputable sort sheltered there. You could have described it as a rabbit warren of vice shunned by respectable people. I think Isaiah saw it as something of a challenge. He had lost his tongue but he still had his immense physical and spiritual strength and the place called for both. Against the persuasion of all his friends he went to live there.

  “Had he been a whole man the inhabitants would doubtless have flung him out at once, but his condition aroused their pity. Moreover, a dumb man could not preach to them upon the subject of their sins.” Father Ignatius paused and chuckled. “That must have been his greatest asset in their eyes! He cut himself off from his old friends that he might be one of them. He even covered up his tracks so that no one should find him or know how he lived. It was of course the only way to win their acceptance. What he had he shared with them and when it was gone, perhaps even the last book sold, I imagine that he more or less starved with them, for it took him some while to establish his herb business. But he so won them that they helped him clear the court and lay out the garden, and make the ruined place more habitable. As the years went on it gradually changed. There was less vice. It has now the character of an almshouse for the sick and unfortunate, and is one of the most attractive corners in London, as Isaiah is one of the most remarkable men. Yet few know of either. The yeast is hidden. Old Sage has no tongue with which to ask you and your friends to keep it so, but I am sure that his desire in this matter is as obvious to you as it is to me.”

  The old man was tired, and there was no more to say. Robert made his courteous farewell and went away.

  3

  Lucy did not see Prince Charles and Prince William as they processed through the city for on that very day her father once more left London. He and Elizabeth had failed to win their separation. Their lordships could see no adequate reason for it and Elizabeth was commanded to return to her husband. She refused, and the court washed its hands of the matter, but did not give William the custody of the children. In his fury he said that nevertheless he would take Bud home with him. Justus he could not take because of his schooling, but Bud should come. And then to his astonishment Lucy refused to go with him. They fought it out in the field by the unicorn wood, sitting in the deep grass that was now fragrant with clover, Lucy sitting upright and white-faced, afraid even to look at William in case she should cry.

  “While my mother is unhappy she is my child and I must look after her,” she said for the tenth time. “I promised Nan-Nan. I love you more than my mother, you are my firstborn, and when she is happy again I will come to you. But I cannot leave my mother while she cries in the night.”

  “It’s the crying of a spoilt child,” said William, nearly choked with his anger and disappointment. “Nan-Nan has been dead for months.”

  “Nan-Nan dying is not the only reason why my mother weeps,” said Lucy.

  “Hold your tongue, Bud!” said William angrily. He knew what she meant and he did not want her to put it into words. The man whom Elizabeth imagined she loved had grown tired of her. He had gone to his country home and taken a fancy to his wife. Somehow the whole household knew this, even the children. To William it was intolerable that the children should know. He looked at Lucy and the adult compassion in her eyes horrified him. What had he done, what had Elizabeth done, that this child was already a woman? Then self-pity overwhelmed him. Why should Bud punish him for her mother’s disappointment? It was he who deserved comforting, not Elizabeth.

  He got up, flung away from Lucy and went to find his mother-in-law; Elizabeth was spending the day with her sister and he had the run of the house. But Mrs. Gwinne upheld her granddaughter. If war came and he turned soldier, what would happen to Lucy? He must look at things from the point of view of the welfare of his daughter. Poor William tried to. “But I will be back,” he warned his mother-in-law. “I will get the custody of my children or go to hell.”

  “An unpleasant alternative,” said Mrs. Gwinne drily. “I should prefer you to have the custody of your children. When you have won it then the matter will be settled. Until then it is best for Lucy to remain here.”

  William went back to the field, took Lucy in his arms and kissed her, and went away again, the tears running down his face. It was a long time before Lucy went back to the house and she hated the smell of clover for the rest of her life. She hardly knew how to live through the next two days. Her eyes saw nothing but William’s lonely figure riding back to Roch without her, and her ears heard nothing except the queer sound, half sob and half curse, with which he had turned away from her in the field. But on the evening of the second day alleviation came. Dr. Cosin’s trial, that had started after the Earl’s execution, had gone well. He had defended himself with great skill and humour and was acquitted.

  But when they saw him again he was not the same man. His wife had died and his private grief had deepened his awareness of the tragedy gathering over them all.

  Just once more a sunburst lightened it. In August the King had gone north on another fruitless expedition into Scotland and when he returned London gave him a civic welcome. Robert Sidney took Lucy and her mother by coach to see the show, and Tom Howard came too. The King, the Queen and the three elder children were to drive from Stamford Hill to Moorgate, where the mayor would welcome them. They would watch the ceremony at Moorgate and then see the King ride into the city to the banquet at Guildhall. They had to abandon the coach before they reached Moorgate, the crowds were so great, but Robert and Tom made a way through for them and they reached the spectators’ stands in safety. They were scarcely settled when there was a burst of cheering. The Lord Mayor, attended by the aldermen, had come to the city gate to receive the King and leaning forward they could see the gilded coach approaching, with horsemen riding on either side, for the King was escorted by the Sheriff of London and a company of noblemen. The coach stopped, the coach door was flung open, the steps adjusted and the King stepped down to greet the mayor. Then the Queen was handed down, and the three children.

  Since the trial Lucy had seen the royal family only in her dreams and imaginings, and she dreaded to see the King again, afraid that she would hate him for what he had done. But she did not, for he and the Queen still seemed to belong to her, and standing they were like little people made out of china, too fragile to be expected to bear
up the burden of the world without cracking here and there. The jewels of the George flashed on the King’s dark cloak and the Queen had diamonds in her hair, and their regal bearing, still and gracious, had something luminous about it. But the light was too gentle to give much protection; it seemed only to accentuate their loneliness. It seemed to Lucy at this moment that they had not even the protection of each other. Was everyone as lonely as this?

  She returned to knowledge of her own heart to find it lurching in fear. Then she saw Charles and her whole awareness flowed out to him, at first protectively, aware of menace, then in amazement that she could have even seen the King and Queen when he was there, he was so glowing and so strong. The three children stood beside their parents, Charles and the Princess Mary holding the hand of the little one, the Prince James. The Princess, so soon to be sent away to Holland to her bridegroom, looked like Justus on the last day of the holidays, a stiff smile on her face but her eyes looking in all directions for something to happen, plague or fire or storm, that would make travel impossible. James was frankly scared by all the people and Charles towered over him like Jove, protective and confident. But his smiling face had a new maturity. They might be cheering now but he would not forget how they had treated him in the House of Lords.

  Then it all turned into a fairytale. The mayor, marvellously dressed and attended, made a speech of welcome and the King made a stammering courteous reply. Then the mayor knelt on one knee and was knighted by the King, the sunlight flashing on the sword. Two beautiful horses, gifts from the city to the King and Prince Charles, were led up and while the Queen and her younger children returned to the beautiful coach, a gift to her, they mounted them. Good horsemen as they were they both mounted gracefully, but the Prince came up into the saddle with all the joy of a boy with a new and glorious gift. Laughing, he waved his hat to the people and they cheered him and some of the ladies threw flowers to him.

  Lucy had no flowers but she took from her hanging pocket a treasure she had been holding there. Bowing first to one side and then the other, as his father was doing, he suddenly saw her. Mounted on the stand she was on a level with him. Their eyes met and for a moment he looked at her with great seriousness. She threw the purse she had made for him, her aim so accurate that he caught it easily. He laughed as he had done when he looked up at her from the barge on the river and flung her the white rose he was holding. Then he rode forward with his father and passed into the city, the coach following. Within the city the cheering rose as the cavalcade passed along to Guildhall, but without the gate silence fell for a moment or two before the people started to climb down from the stands. For Lucy the bright day was suddenly dark as though a curtain had fallen. Her childhood was over and it would be years before she would see Charles again.

  BOOK II: The Idyl

  One

  1

  The bees were humming in the warm Devonshire garden and the flowers burned in the drowsy September heat. Nicholas Chappell, Lucy’s paternal step-grandfather, was as fanatical about his garden as her maternal step-grandfather was about his library. Each flower was as dear to him as each book to Mr. Gwinne. And how dear, Lucy thought with a pang of gratitude, were step-grandfathers. She straightened herself from her weeding and looked with affection at his extraordinary figure, bent now over the bush that he was pruning. His gardening wear on a hot afternoon was a pair of patched and mud-caked old breeches topped by an exquisitely embroidered linen shirt, the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. No matter how great the heat he never wore a hat and his bald head was burned a rich brown by the sun. He was immune to any sort of weather a man can encounter in his garden, and paid no attention to such physical infirmities as rheumatism and increasing rotundity of figure. While he could stand he would garden. His annual prayer to the apothecary who attended him through the attacks of bronchial asthma that came upon him each February was always, “Give me one more spring if you please, sir. One more spring.”

  Feeling Lucy’s eyes upon him he straightened himself and smiled his charming toothless smile. “Do not get tired, my maid,” he called to her. Though equally fanatical he was a less selfish man than Mr. Gwinne. Faces that bent over his flowers were for ever dear to him, and those who sat about his hospitable board eating his apples and drinking his home-brewed wine were never forgotten. And he would sacrifice himself for them; as witness the occasion when to oblige his wife and step-son he had torn himself from his garden to sojourn for a whole mortal winter at Roch, where the salty winds were enough to break the heart of any gardener. Seeing Lucy rosy and unharmed by her efforts he nodded to her and returned to his, but knowing he would not blame her she sat down on the wooden seat beside the michaelmas daisies and took a rest.

  Michaelmas daisies had only recently arrived in England and those in the garden were Mr. Chappell’s pride and joy. They also gave joy to the butterflies. Their delicate and jewelled wings shimmered over the daisies as though they were flowers themselves; yet the wings trembled a little now and then, opening and shutting with a fanlike motion, showing them to be free of the air as birds are. Yet not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures. Lucy held out a brown hand and one drifted to her finger like the bird at Roch. Her delighted heart seemed to tremble in rhythm with the faint movement of its wings. She was an indeterminate creature herself just now, neither child nor woman, feeling adrift and lost, without either anchorage in the earth or resting place above it. A solitary tear fell and alighted on her finger beside the butterfly. It was scared half out of its wits and flew away.

  “Serve me right,” thought Lucy, feeling for her handkerchief. “Why cry? We are all alive.”

  She knew herself to be fortunate indeed that all whom she loved were still alive after two years of civil war. So many men whom she had known were not now alive, or badly wounded like Algernon Sidney, or fighting their brothers, or homeless like her own father. Roch Castle had been practically destroyed. The Earl of Carbery had garrisoned it for the King but a year later it had fallen to the Puritan Roland of Laugherne. A few months ago, when she had heard the news, Lucy had known she must go to her father. He had not yet won the custody of his children, and would not do so for another three years, but Elizabeth was happy now and he was grief-stricken and not even the thought of leaving Justus behind in London had held Lucy back, for her father was still her firstborn. By what Mrs. Gwinne had considered to be heaven’s mercy an Exeter family were returning there from London and Lucy travelled with them, dangerously but in the event safely, and now they were here together with William’s parents and Dewi. And it was peaceful here for Exeter was still in Royalist hands, as London was in the possession of Parliament. There was no fighting here and none in London and Roch Castle, though so passionately loved, was not actually a person. So why weep?

  But still there was that other family, that nimbus about the moon of which she was still deeply aware, and all was not well with them. They were scattered now, the King and Charles with the army, the younger children in a place of safety, the Queen in France. The past April, with the tide turning against her husband’s cause, she had taken leave of him at Abingdon and come, ill and discouraged, to Exeter. Her youngest child, little Princess Henrietta, had been born at Bedford House in Exeter last June and was still there in the care of Lady Dalkeith, but the Queen had fled to France. She had been heroic through two years of war but her health had been broken and her nerves shattered. When the King himself came to Exeter expecting to find her he found only the fragile little princess and his wife’s goodbye letter. “Adieu my dear heart. If I die believe that you will lose a person who had never been other than entirely yours, and who by her affection has deserved you should not forget her.” Forsaken, tormented in mind, he had become ill in Exeter. But he was not there now. He was back with the army.

  And Charles? When he was only thirteen he and James had marched with the army in the care of Dr. Harvey, Lucy?
??s friend of the Tower, and had watched the battle of Edgehill. For a short while Charles had managed to escape Dr. Harvey and get into the fight. Lucy had been told this and thought it must have been a very vile battle for a boy’s first. She remembered how he had had nightmares as a child and remembered her own nightmare of the boy with the child’s body and the man’s face. And what were they all fighting about? It had seemed clear at the beginning but was becoming more and more confused as time went on. War was like that, Grandfather Chappell had said. At the end men were hanging on to each other’s throats as dogs do out of sheer obstinacy. She found she was crying again, not for the obstinacy but for Charles. But how ridiculous. For what was he now to her? What could he ever be? Only a mixed-up memory of a bridge and a barge on the water, a white unicorn and the love of two children. Yet she still had the rose he had thrown her, pressed between the leaves of her bible. And the thread that united them still held.

  The wooden bench faced a grass path that vanished at its farther end under an archway cut in a tall hedge of clipped yew. Lucy, sundrenched and now a little sleepy, saw a fairy creature appear in the archway, a russet-clad brown thing with a feather in its cap. It danced like a March hare upon the grassy space before the archway, then bounded towards her. She held out her arms and Dewi flung himself into them.

  He was eight years old now, with rosy cheeks and eyes black and bright as a blackbird’s. He had a flaming temper when crossed but in a good mood he was a nice small boy, gay and loving. He let Lucy hug him and then struggled free with sudden arrogance, for he was an indeterminate creature too, midway between child and boy, at one moment wanting the protection of arms about him and at the next disdaining them. He picked up the fallen cap with the pheasant’s feather with one hand and with the other grabbed Lucy’s skirts, pulling her off the seat.