The Child From the Sea

  She was at the farm when she heard the news that had been broken to Charles just before he sailed. At the beginning of May the Marquis of Montrose had been captured at Grange Castle near Dundee and taken to Edinburgh, where he was driven to the prison of the Tolbooth in the hangman’s cart. On May the twenty-first he was taken to the thirty-foot gallows by the Mercat Cross, called the Maiden, to be hanged, drawn and quartered, and it was said of him that he went to it with majesty and composure. In his last speech he said of his King, “It is spoken of me that I should blame the King. God forbid! His commandments to me were most just and I obeyed them.” And so once more a hero escaped through fiery torture from a world of men not able to endure the challenge and the reproach of greatness while it immediately confronts them; only worship it once they have done away with it.

  After Lucy had been told the news she went out on the sand-dunes with Jackie and sat there with the sleeping child across her knees, and wondered in a daze of misery how this could be. Few men were entirely evil and few were entirely senseless. Why could they not learn? Charles had felt remorse for the death of the Earl of Strafford yet he in his turn had committed the same stupid crime as his father, and for the sake of immediate advantage failed in loyalty to the best friend he had. Is that the crime, the stupidity, wondered Lucy? This greedy clutching at the immediate advantage? The saints and heroes do not do that, since their large vision takes no account of self.

  Two more sentences from Montrose’s speech came to Lucy’s mind. “God be glorified in my end. God have mercy on this afflicted land.” And then a third. “I had not any intention in my heart but what did aim at a joint and individual prosperity of the King and his people.” But no, Lucy told herself, it was the Earl of Strafford who had said that. They had been alike, their eyes set upon horizons far beyond themselves. Christ had been the same, she remembered, wanting only the salvation of men and the glory of God. Even her old friend the sin-eater had been like that, living only to carry away other men’s sins, and perhaps he too, though with dim understanding, had died his lonely death as well as he could to the glory of God.

  With her problem still unsolved she yet felt a little comforted. What consoled her, she found, were two facts; that these men came into the world at all, and that after they had left it they were revered as though they were not dead but living. The facts seemed to imply that they had come from somewhere and had gone somewhere, and the implication opened up a horizon so great that there seemed room in it for the forgiveness and perfecting of every sinner who had ever existed under a sun so tiny that it was no more than a spark in the vastness of creation.

  That summer passed for Lucy in a continued state of numbed exhaustion. At first no news came, or could come, from Charles. He had sailed away into the northern mists with his load of guilt and remorse and she could not visualize him as ever arriving anywhere. She hardly wanted him to arrive, for people said that when he rode into Edinburgh he would see the severed head of Montrose looking down upon him from the Tolbooth. And after that, what would happen?

  But gradually she grew happier. The sea and the sun and the life at the farm were good. Jackie, sitting in the high chair where she had seen him in vision before he was born, was enchanting. He was getting noisy now, beating with his wooden spoon on his chair, shouting at the top of his voice, crawling, and finally staggering, about the farmhouse. The noise did not disturb Lucy for it came upon her gradually, and like all mothers she was more aware of the glory of her son than the disturbance; others in Jackie’s vicinity were sometimes more aware of the disturbance than the glory, especially after Anne left, for she had been a better disciplinarian than Lucy. She had to leave because Lucy could no longer pay her wages, but kindly Vrouw Flinck, who was never forgotten at the British Embassy at The Hague, got her a post there and Lucy saw her when she went to the Embassy for the intercession for the King, and they promised each other that when it was possible they would be together again. The band of exiles at the weekly service were few, poor and shabby, and would have been hungry but for the Queen of Bohemia’s dinners; her doors were always flung open to them at midday and in the mêlée of disorderly servants, monkeys, dogs, noise and scuffle one could always come by a little nourishment. Lucy, well fed at the farm, did not attend these dinners and Elizabeth of Bohemia did not attend the intercession service, for like most royal persons she had a deep-rooted hatred of being stared at while she prayed. On state occasions there was no avoiding the ordeal and she strengthened her spine and folded her hands like a queen on a tomb, but praying in private she could let her spine look after itself, put her head on her arms and cry.

  But if Lucy did not see the Queen at the Embassy she did sometimes see one or other of the exiled noblemen whom Charles had not chosen to take with him to Scotland. These gentlemen, lingering for a while at the Dutch court before drifting back to Paris, felt one solitary appearance to be a duty. Sitting in her accustomed place one Thursday, her eyes fixed listlessly on her hands folded in her lap, she was conscious of a faint movement within her as though deep in her numbed spirit water stirred beneath the ice. She looked up and saw that Lord Taaffe had just come in and was gazing at her with dismay. It was only long afterwards that she remembered that look, for it vanished in a moment as he bowed to her and took his seat beside her.

  How could a man be dismayed when a girl smiled at him like that? Her joy had seemed to break from within and her tired, blanched face was at once young again. He had been shocked to see the vital Lucy looking so depleted and now and then he would look at her to see if his presence was still keeping her young, and each time she would know that he was looking and turn her head and smile at him, still young. She was thinking that here was another who loved Charles, one more link in the chain that surrounded and protected him, here beside her, praying with her. But why was he not with Charles? That was where he should have been. Tactlessly this was the first question she asked him when the service was over and they were out in the sunny street together. “Why are you not with the King, my lord?”

  His face darkened with anger. “Those goddam Covenanters limited His Majesty’s retinue,” he said shortly. “He took Wilmot. He did not take me. Wilmot gets on with Buckingham.”

  Lucy remembered how he had nearly struck Buckingham at the Queen’s levee. “And you do not,” she stated.

  “Could any man who loves the King like Buckingham? God help us, he is as arrogant a man as his father was, and as dangerous. Once let a man think he knows all and the devil has got him, and once let him persuade his King of the same thing and we are all damned.” He swallowed, failed to choke down his anger and became purple in the face. “In God’s mercy the assassin’s knife rid our late King of Buckingham’s father, and if his son follows Montrose up the ladder to the top of the Maiden it will be no more than he deserves.”

  “Will you please hold your tongue, my lord!” said Lucy, suddenly as enraged as he was. “And if you mix up the mercy of God with your terrible notions you do not deserve to receive it. And all this because you are jealous of my Lord Wilmot.”

  Lord Taaffe’s anger broke up in mirth, he flung back his head and roared with laughter. “You are quite right. Wilmot’s protective powers are not to be compared with mine and I go berserk at the thought of him in Scotland with the King.”

  “I do not wish you to have a seizure, my lord,” said Lucy, “so will you stroll down the street with me and talk quietly of horses and the providence of God? The King rides well, and a good horseman can usually escape from his enemies. And if we did not both believe that God’s providence watches over him would we have been praying together?”

  “Lucy,” said Lord Taaffe, “I can pay you no greater compliment than to say the King deserves you.”

  They walked on, deep in talk, and other worshippers, coming out into the street, stopped and regarded their retreating backs with concentrated interest. Something to gossip about was always a mercy in the boredom
of a life of exile. Anne, who had leaned out of an upstairs window in order to wave to Lucy, that being a friendly custom they had established together, was hurt that Lucy, talking to Lord Taaffe, had forgotten her. She too watched the couple as they went away, and saw how at the end of the street they did not part but stood together under a linden tree. The incident, she decided, was worth noting in the record she had promised to keep for Mr. Prodgers, who had sailed with the King to Scotland. He had asked her to write down any little happening that might be harmful to Lucy’s reputation should it be necessary later, for reasons of state, to attack it. Anne had been reluctant to give him her promise, for she and Lucy had been happy together at Breda, but the bitter jealousy of Lucy remained, her intimacy with Prodgers was now deep and he had her more in his power than she realized, and she had given it.

  Lucy and Lord Taaffe were happy under the linden tree, he asked where she was living and she told him. “You will stay there with those kind people?” he asked.

  “I hope so,” she said soberly. She could not tell him that she had hardly any money left, that she would not ask charity of the Flincks or of her aunt and she did not know what she would do. He would think Charles had been careless about her and that he must never think. “And you?” she asked. “What will you do?”

  “I am going back to Paris,” he said. “I see it this way. The King will be victorious, we hope and believe, but if it goes the other way and he has to flee again it will be to his mother in Paris that he will go. Then I shall be there, at his service in his desolation.”

  “I should be there too,” said Lucy in a low voice.

  “No, because we do not envisage defeat but victory and restoration. Stay here, Lucy, where you have friends. Do not cut yourself off from them.”

  For her sake he spoke hopefully but she knew perfectly well that in his heart he did not expect victory and restoration. His judgment was that of Sir Edward Hyde and the Queen of Bohemia, not of the younger men.

  “I will remember what you have said,” Lucy told him. Then she curtseyed and they parted. Anne, still looking out of the window, hoped that Lucy would remember her and come back down the street to wave. But Lucy did not remember. She crossed the road and turned the corner of the street.

  “I hate her now more than I like her,” said Anne to herself as she closed the window. “She does not really love me. She only pretends she does.”

  Lucy had hoped that Lord Taaffe might have come out to the farm to see her, but he did not come. What did come, to her joy, was a command from the Queen that she should bring Jackie to visit her. She dressed him in his best and hired a coach and they drove to the Wassenaer Hof. She was taken up the familiar staircase and found her hostess alone in the high-ceiling room with her dogs and monkeys. Grief for the Marquis of Montrose, for her daughter Louise in her sorrow and for Charles in his danger, had greatly aged the Queen. How much she grieved for herself Lucy could not know. Her concern for others was as deep as ever, her charm unchanged.

  For a little while they sat in the deep window, the colours of the rainbow falling upon them, and watched Jackie playing with Apollo the golden monkey, and then the Queen asked, “Lucy, did you know that my niece Mary of Orange is expecting a child in January?”

  Lucy’s heart sang with joy. Daily she had prayed for her sister-in-law, as she had promised she would, but she took no credit to herself since without doubt half Holland and all the princess’s family had been doing the same. She had thought a little more deeply about the mystery of prayer since that drive with Anne through the streets of Paris, and now she knew that to think one’s prayer had value destroyed its value, since religion seemed always a thing of paradox. The poetry of John Milton had not penetrated to Lucy yet or she might have murmured to herself,

  God doth not need

  Either man’s work or his own gifts . . .

  . . . his State is kingly.

  And then there would have been a second paradox. The King chooses to make up the ocean of his love with innumerable minute drops of human love. The ocean is all-human yet since each infinitesimal drop is his own gift of himself it is also entirely divine. Lucy’s singing joy was in the goodness of God. “I am glad,” she said to the Queen.

  They talked for a little longer about nothing, for the death of the Marquis of Montrose and Charles’s danger in Scotland were subjects that neither could bring herself to speak of, and Lucy wondered why the Queen had sent for her until Her Majesty said, “Lucy, how do you live? Are you distressed for money?”

  Lucy had woken up that morning in a state of despair, wondering what to do next, but never, unless Jackie was in want, would she take money from Charles’s family. She smiled cheerfully at the Queen. “Your Majesty, I am in no distress. Charles has been very good to me.”

  Elizabeth of Bohemia, feeding the daily hordes as she did, was herself so deeply in debt that she was relieved to hear it; yet knowing her nephew, and knowing Lucy to be possessed of a pride not unlike her own, she was not quite sure that the girl was telling the truth, and she put her hand in her pocket and brought out a small leather box. “It is a little trinket that I had as a girl. No, do not look at it now. Wear it sometimes for love of me. I am, you know, very fond of you.”

  Lucy was dismissed. She got up and curtseyed, kissed the Queen’s hand and murmured her thanks. Then she held Jackie up in her arms to kiss his great-aunt. To her surprise she felt the Queen’s arms come round herself and Jackie together and the Queen’s kiss on her cheek. Half-blinded by tears she got herself and Jackie out of the room and down the stairs. “I shall not see her again,” said a voice in her mind.

  Left alone the Queen sat down at her escritoire and took a long letter from her sister-in-law out of its wrapping of folded silk. Her favourite dog flopped down on her feet and Apollo leapt on her shoulder, for they knew she needed comfort. Her Majesty the Queen Dowager of England wrote an atrocious hand and her spelling was wild in the extreme. Her Majesty the Queen Dowager of Bohemia had never been in sympathy with her sister-in-law, was not now and never would be, and her extreme irritation with the woman was not eased by the difficulty she had in reading her letters. She had read this particular letter ten times, and had more or less mastered it, but had disliked the tone of it more violently with each reading; though she supposed that the news it brought, from a dynastic and worldly point of view, was good news.

  The marriage of Charles and Lucy was invalid. Queen Henrietta Maria’s dear Lord Jermyn (I have always loathed the man, thought Queen Elizabeth) had had his doubts and after consultation with the Chancellor and the Queen a trusted secret agent had been sent to Wales to search out the details of it. Guided by the marriage register in Roch church he had found the lawyer who had been present at the wedding and through him had discovered the priest who had performed the ceremony.

  With this old man he had made careful acquaintance, gaining his confidence with gentleness. He had been suffering from loss of memory for some years but was now having fitful returns of it, and when these fits came upon him he would remember his name, that he had lived in London as a young man and had friends there. He had talked about them to the Royalist agent. The marriage itself had never been mentioned between them and the agent had not made contact with Lucy’s father. He had however seen him at a distance and found him a boorish farmer and the castle itself a derelict ruin.

  He had returned to London and with the help of the old man’s information made various contacts there, the most valuable being with a Spanish priest who for years had been living in sanctuary at the Spanish Embassy. He was of a great age too, but his memory was good, he was excessively garrulous and had not objected to signing his name on a piece of paper containing his statement that Patrick O’Donovan, now residing in Pembrokeshire as a Catholic priest, had in fact never been one. Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter had been married in a Protestant church by a Roman Catholic layman.

  Queen Henriet
ta Maria then went on to say that dear Lord Jermyn and the Chancellor had thought it best to say nothing to Charles at present. If he died in Scotland, which God forbid, or if he won back his throne, then the truth must be disclosed at once for Jackie was a bastard and could not succeed his father. But if Charles returned to Paris defeated, and that too might God forbid, then in dear Lord Jermyn’s words, “The time to tell him is when he tires of the girl.”

  The Queen of Bohemia folded up the letter, put her face in her hands, and cried.

  4

  That evening, with Jackie asleep in his cot in Lucy’s room and the men out fishing, Vrouw Flinck and Lucy sat together just inside the open door of the farmhouse. The summer night had brought no chill with it and the flowers in the garden exhaled a breath of scent that was still warm with sunshine. There was a faint leap of flame in the hearth and it was reflected in the polished wood of the furniture. The glow shone out and then dimmed, shone and dimmed, and the rise and fall of the distant waves was steady as the ticking of a clock. Even the cool welling of the stars, as the huge arc of the sky darkened and they awakened into pulsing light, seemed rhythmic. All things were united in peace; only Lucy in her loneliness felt forsaken and cast out from the oneness of creation.

  “What ails you, love?” asked Vrouw Flinck.

  “I must leave you and this place where I have always been so happy.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “That is what I do not know.”

  “You are no longer happy with your aunt. Much love is needed if one woman is to be dependent upon another in a home that is not her own, and though a contented baby can give great pleasure in a childless house a growing boy gives less. Now here there is deep love between us and with Jackie it is as though one of my own boys was small again. If your money is spent I will share with you all that I have, and my husband would say the same.”