The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  But the fracture mended quickly. William wrote to say he had found a house and it was time to leave Golden Grove. Their host and hostess planned an easy journey for them. Their own coach and servants would go back to Roch and they would travel to England with Lord and Lady Carbery, who were to visit friends near Hereford. The coach would then take them on to London, returning to pick up Lord and Lady Carbery for the return journey. The Carbery wealth spread such an aura of ease and safety over the prospect that Elizabeth looked forward to the journey without dread, her content spreading to Nan-Nan and the children.

  But Lucy was sad on the last night, for saying goodbye to their own coach and servants had seemed to break the last link with Roch. But she had the wedding ring that the little bird had set upon her finger at the time of the great migration, and she had the damask rose. Out in the garden its petals had fallen but it still glowed within her busy heart.

  She was sitting up in bed drinking her hot posset when she heard the music. “Listen, Nan-Nan,” she commanded. Nan-Nan, who was folding up Lucy’s clothes, paused, and her small face was transfigured. “It’s Geraint the Harper,” she exclaimed in delight “Come down from the mountains. Dulch! Dulch! That I should live to hear Geraint again. It’s playing down in the hall he is.”

  She and Lucy listened intently. The music was like the first shuddering of a gale in the trees, so that Lucy trembled, but so beautiful that pictures started running through her mind. Swans flying low over a grey sea, their necks outstretched and their great wings beating out the exciting rhythm of their flight. The daffodils at Roch bending all one way in the wind, the sunlight running over them. The bright-eyed twins peeping out of their carved cradles and laughing. But when she thought of the twins she began to cry.

  “Now now, cariad,” said Nan-Nan, and wrapping Lucy in a blanket she took her along the corridor to the top of the great staircase, where they could peep through the balustrade unseen by the company below. Justus, who had also been put to bed, came trotting from the boys’ room in his nightshirt, and he too was wrapped in a blanket. The three of them sat on the floor, the children cuddled close to Nan-Nan. Down below were Lord and Lady Carbery, Elizabeth and Richard seated in stately chairs, with the senior servants standing behind them. The small fry of scullions and chambermaids came and went in the doorway that led to the kitchen regions, like fish or mice looking in at human beings from the mystery of their own shadowed places. Geraint the Harper sat by the fire, his white beard flowing over his chest, his long brown fingers plucking the strings. His voice, that Nan-Nan remembered from her younger days as deep and thunderous, was not so strong now in his old age, yet still able to give a terrible power to Guto’r Glyn’s lament for Siôn ap Medog Pilstwn, that he was singing when she and the children sat down behind the balustrade.

  My tears flow like a river.

  I have wept blood on Siôn’s bed.

  And thousands weep in Maelor

  Harder than a heavy rain . . .

  For his sake many fasted.

  God paid no heed to wailing,

  And would take no gold but him.

  Right to fear, face of passion,

  A Man who will not be bribed.

  Though she understood little of the words the pictures that came to Lucy with the wild music terrified her. A blood-stained bed and faces disfigured with weeping, and vast against the night, blotting out the stars, dark and hard as iron, the dreadful face of the God who would not be bribed. What God was this? Who was he? Not the God of the cave. She forced her eyes open, to get rid of him, and turned to Nan-Nan for comfort, but Nan-Nan still had her eyes closed and her tiny face looked curtained, like the outside of a house whose owner has gone away. She seemed to have gone so far, to past or future, that Lucy feared to drag her back.

  Yesterday at home, proudly;

  And today, under the shroud . . .

  Men who are youthful and brave

  Go early up to heaven . . .

  Young he was, Owain’s kinsman,

  To be amidst oak and stone.

  Why not bear off a miser,

  God, not a bountiful man?

  There was a moment’s deep silence and the old Harper’s chin fell upon his breast. Then suddenly he looked up with a smile, his eyes going from Lord and Lady Carbery, Elizabeth and Richard, to the two children and Nan-Nan behind the balustrade, and he began to sing Guto’r Glyn’s gay song of London Town. The blood and darkness vanished and Lucy’s mind was full of wine-cups and apples, steepled churches and lovely ladies in head-dresses tall and pointed like the steeples.

  A kind, attractive city,

  Most blest in its citizens,

  Curtain-walled is the castle,

  Best of cities, far as Rome! . . .

  The London of Owain’s land,

  Wine-filled homes, lands of orchards,

  It’s a bright and blessed school,

  It’s a city of preachers;

  Men wise in verse and grammar

  Touch God in the fair temple.

  The best church, splendid chalice,

  Its organ and its bells;

  The best choir, and skilful men,

  As far as Canterbury;

  The best band, delightful men,

  The men of the white abbey;

  The best of wives, fair their hair

  And their gowns, are of Oswallt.

  In it there’s Cheap side’s trading,

  And concord, and loyalty . . .

  Grace to the town and townsmen,

  And God let this refuge last . . .

  Forever their man am I.

  The music vanished in a final sweep of the strings that was like a chime of bells, and looking round at Nan-Nan Lucy saw that she was back again, bright-eyed and merry as she looked from one to the other of her children. But unfortunately she had returned to remembrance of their bedtime and she took them away. But it did not really matter for lying in their beds with the doors open they could still hear the harp music winging through the house.

  6

  The journey to London in the warm grey November weather was serenely uneventful. The Walter coach had rattled and jolted its way over stones and ruts like a child’s toy jerked along at the end of a piece of string but the beautiful Golden Grove coach rose and fell and swayed like a ship at sea cresting the waves, and once you got used to the motion it was not so bad. Lady Carbery and Elizabeth, with Lucy between them, sat facing the way they were going, with Justus and Nan-Nan and Lady Carbery’s maid facing them with the bags and bundles. Lord Carbery rode his great black horse and Richard rode Prince. There was a train of servants with the luggage cart, so many that they need fear no sudden onslaught of thieves. They travelled at their leisure with a horseman going on ahead to prepare their noble way, so that when they came to an inn at nightfall they found blazing fires, warm beds and everyone rushing in all directions to satisfy their every need. The Princess Nest revelled in it all but the buccaneer found it a bit dull, and that strange third person of whom Lucy was occasionally aware of in herself, the one with the eyes from whom she had drawn back that the eyes might look at the damask rose, shut them and went to sleep.

  Occasionally on this journey Lord Carbery allowed Lucy or Justus to ride with him, and the days when it was her turn were to Lucy the great days, for he continued his storytelling, though with a certain caution now, confining himself to matters of factual history. He told her about the drovers’ road, down which were driven the cattle and sheep exported to England. The drovers would band together for security and King Charles’s ship money tax, collected by the Welsh high sheriffs all in silver because there was no gold in South Wales at this time, travelled to England in their care. And there was the honey road that passed through the Vale of Usk upon the other side of the heather-covered Black Mountains. Down this road the eight loads of honey exacted by the Sa
xon kings as tribute had been carried on poles, two men to a pole. Lucy thrilled at the story of the honey, and to all that she saw, the mountains and the falling streams, the forests and the castles perched upon the hilltops. One of them, the Marcher castle of Clifford, drew from Lord Carbery the story of Fair Rosamund, the Welsh girl beloved of King Henry the Second, whose home it had been. He could not forbear to tell the story of Henry’s Rose of the World, but he told it with a certain amount of misgiving. Lucy accepted it with calm pleasure and stored it away in her mind with Olwen and the Princess Nest.

  At Hereford they said goodbye to Lord and Lady Carbery. Lucy clung passionately to the Earl and Elizabeth wept in Lady Carbery’s arms. Elizabeth and Nan-Nan and the children stayed for a few days at the old coaching inn near the Cathedral, and a letter was sent post haste to William to tell him the day they hoped to arrive at High Wycombe, the last stopping place before London. Hereford was the first English town they had seen. The busy streets awed them and Nan-Nan thought that if London was noisier than this she would die of the racket, and the harshness of English voices positively hurt their ears.

  They took coach again and rolled away into the English November countryside, where the meadows were green and wet and the last sad leaves fell through the rain. As they neared High Wycombe one of the servants rode on to make ready for them through a rainy twilight that seemed to Lucy, suffering from an acute attack of homesickness, the greyest sundown she had ever seen. When they reached High Wycombe it was difficult to see it, for the coach lights shining upon wet cobbles dazzled her eyes and the slanting rain seemed as thick as standing corn. They drove into an inn yard and light streamed from an open door. A man stood there, arms akimbo, watching the coaches as they came in, his sturdy figure outlined against the light behind him.

  “Let me out!” yelled Lucy, struggling madly with the door handle. An ostler leapt to open it for her and she jumped out, in danger of breaking her leg all over again, and ran through the rain to William.

  Seven

  1

  It was May sixteen hundred and forty and Elenor Gwinne sat in the parlour of her little house in the village of St. Giles. Her armchair was by the window and she sat looking out on the garden, her hands folded in her lap. Her peaceful face was set in lines of deep gravity, a sign that she was profoundly grieved. She was a woman who had attained to a serenity that lifted her well above fuss and worry, but not above grieving; she was the least selfish of women. She grieved now for so much; the state of the country, torn by strife, for the unhappiness of her daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth and William Walter, and the effect it was having upon their children, and she grieved too that her own hard won peace was something she seemed unable to share with those she loved.

  Peace, she supposed, was contingent upon a certain disposition of the soul, a disposition to receive the gift that only detachment from self made possible. Some had the inner strength to wrestle for that detachment, others had not, and the strength too was a gift. Why to one and not the other? This was a question that had for long puzzled her. Now, growing old, she could only say that it was a part of the perpetually growing mystery of things that once she had worried at like a dog with a bone. Now she let it alone, finding some comfort in the mere growth of the mystery, as though its vast shadow thrown across human life, like the shadow of some great iron head among the stars, promised some tremendous answer. But how she wished that these bestowals were not so deeply personal.

  Her wrestling years had been the years of her first marriage. A delicate woman, difficult child-bearing had nearly broken her, but she had not died of the twelfth child. That way of escape, grasped at by so many women, she had refused. She had looked the possibility of a thirteenth steadily in the face and got well to find that her years of child-bearing were unbelievably over. After her husband’s death her eldest son had inherited Trewerne and she had escaped to Golden Grove like a bird escaped from the net of the fowler.

  Only to fall into the net of John Gwinne, the son of a family whose estates adjoined those of Lord Carbery. But this was a different matter. John Gwinne was a bibliophile who had caught sight of her peaceful face in the brief instant of shutting one book and opening another. The face had seemed consonant with his way of life and he had transported her to London that she might protect him from domestic disturbance. They had neither of them regretted their marriage and loved each other in a placid fashion that disturbed the peace of neither. John Gwinne’s peace was of a different quality from that of his wife and had been more easily come by. It was that of a man shut up in his own fortress and utterly indifferent to what went on outside it. But he was so charming in his selfishness that everyone loved him.

  Provided it made no breach in the wall of books he had built about him the state of the country did not and would not disturb John Gwinne. When, after eleven years of disastrous royal government parliament had once more assembled in pure Puritanical force and temper he had been a little alarmed to learn that his bibliophile friend Dr. Cosin, Master of Peterhouse and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, was likely to be impeached. That bibliophiles could be impeached was a slight crack in the wall. But then Dr. Cosin, the more fool he, had never built himself in with his books. His loyalties extended beyond them. He was a Royalist and high churchman who had defended his beliefs with more valor than prudence. He had introduced ornate ceremonial at Peterhouse chapel and with Archbishop Laud he had been the ruling spirit in the revision of the Book of Common Prayer, and was hated only a little less than the Archbishop and the Earl of Strafford. But after sitting for only three weeks Parliament had been dissolved, Dr. Cosin was for the moment safe and this very Sunday, being in town for Convocation, would dine with them. John Gwinne had gone back happily to his books, leaving anxiety for Dr. Cosin’s future to his wife. What would it be, she wondered? Archbishop Laud had fortified his house and Puritan mobs were parading the streets, maddened at the rumour that Strafford was bringing over an army from Ireland to be used not only against rebellious Scots but against rebellious English too. It was not wise of John Cosin to have come to town.

  She found to her surprise that she was crying, not now for John Cosin’s danger but for that of Elizabeth and Walter. Elizabeth wanted her marriage to be legally ended. She could bring a good case before the courts, she said. She could plead William’s infidelity and his cruelty; for had it not been cruel of him to force her to take care of Dewi and Betsi with her own children? And she could plead the fact that he was doing nothing for the support of his family, refusing to tie himself down to any work that would make eventual return to Roch more difficult. And he had become quite impossible to live with.

  Elenor Gwinne, pleading with her for patience, had not spared her daughter her criticism, for she was a just woman and her sympathies during the last two years had been increasingly with her son-in-law. Elizabeth, delighting in the gaieties of the town and in her charming little house in the most fashionable square in London, had been extravagant that first winter and then at the end of it had refused to go back to Wales; for a host of reasons but primarily for one not mentioned and equally intolerable to William and her mother. She had met again the man she had fallen in love with in Wales as a girl and her friendship with him was now her chief delight. She kept it on the right side of safety and decorum, for she truly desired to be a virtuous woman, but in her power to do so there was an element of cold calculation that shocked Mrs. Gwinne. Compared with her daughter’s loveless respectability she preferred her son-in-law’s heartbroken lack of it. But she had now said all she could, and knew that it had slid off her daughter’s bitterness like water off a duck’s back. All she could do now was to pay what she could towards the children’s education and keep Lucy with her as much as possible, away from the unhappy house in Covent Garden. The boys were by day at St. Paul’s School, and busy with their homework when they came home in the evening, but Lucy was taught at home and torn in pieces between conflicting loyalties. As was po
or Nan-Nan. When Lucy came to stay Mrs. Gwinne insisted that Nan-Nan should come too, for her heart ached for Nan-Nan almost more than for Lucy.

  She remembered that they were coming today to spend a few weeks with her and suddenly spring leaped through the open window. St. Giles in the Fields was one of the loveliest villages about London, lovelier even than Kensington or Paddington. The little houses gathered about the old church were charming, their gardens just now full of flowers, the meadows beyond the village golden with buttercups. The scent of the apple blossom in her own garden came to her on the south wind, and the scent of pinks. The fashionable tulips, standing very upright in their ranks of gold and scarlet, did not give their faint scent to the wind, but now and then they bowed to her slightly. She knew no more courteous or stiff-necked flowers; they often reminded her of the royal family. But not Prince Charles. There was nothing stiff-necked about that enchanting boy, who had every heart in England, even Puritan hearts, in the hollow of his hand.

  There was a sound of wheels in the lane behind the holly hedge that protected the garden, the crack of a whip exploding in the blue air like a firework, the winding of a horn, and then the clatter of horses’ hoofs slithering to a lurching standstill, and the high birdlike cries of excited children. The clamour leaped through the open window as the spring had done, and the blood pulsed in Mrs. Gwinne’s veins as though she were young again. Then it quieted with the sobering thought, “Poor Nan-Nan.”