“Cavalry,” he said. “Down in Exeter. Quick.”
Horses were his life just now, especially the glorious horses of the King’s army, but when His Majesty had ridden in from Exeter three months ago he had been confined to his chamber with contagious spots, and though he had bitten the hands that fed him, and hit out with his fists at the kind faces about his bed, he had not been allowed out. Now he was not to be defrauded of his pleasure, and nor was Lucy of hers; though with her it was something more than pleasure that set her heart beating madly against the detested corsets into which she had been thrust on her fourteenth birthday. But she was all child as she raced with Dewi to the stable. Mr. Chappell saw them go but did not enquire where they were going, for as a mere step-grandfather he refused to be associated with disciplinary measures. He was pleased to have William, Lucy and Dewi under his roof, and not unwilling to pay for the education of Richard and Justus, but he declined responsibility for the children’s misdemeanours; it was not he who had begotten their father.
Sitting side-saddle on her grandfather’s chestnut mare, with Dewi beside her on his rough little Dartmoor pony, riding towards Exeter, Lucy found herself lifted on a sudden wave of pleasure and relief. She had delighted in London but here in the country she had captured once more the peace she had known at Roch. And she was her father’s daughter. The smell of Mr. Chappell’s farmyard was as good to her as the smell of cowslips, and no golden chair in the world was as fine to sit on as a horse’s back. This countryside was not Wales but it was near enough. She loved the round green hills of Devon, the deep lanes where the white violets grew in spring, Exeter Cathedral and the river that wound its way under the bridges of the old town to the meadows where the sheep were feeding, and on to the sea.
“There’s Exeter,” she cried to Dewi as they reached the turn in the lane from which they could see the city.
“Of course it’s there,” said the practical Dewi, and he cantered on, afraid to miss the cavalry. But Lucy stopped to look at the city, for if Roch Castle could be practically destroyed, with the tower fallen and the great roof of the hall burnt to cinders, so could the houses with the tall chimneys from which the smoke crept up so peacefully and lazily. It was not men alone who died in war. There was a mist over the river and the sun had combined smoke and mist into a golden haze from which the towers of the cathedral soared clear. With a feeling of reassurance Lucy rode after Dewi. The mare’s long graceful stride soon overtook the bustling hurry of the little pony, to Dewi’s annoyance.
“You were told not to take the mare without permission,” he reminded his sister.
“I never ask for what will be refused,” retorted Lucy proudly.
When they reached the city they found the narrow streets crowded and the noise and confusion stupendous. Officers in plumed hats, with the royal ribbon across their breastplates, were riding hither and thither trying to find billets for men and horses, and the tired troops were making for the alehouses or for flights of steps where they could sit and rest, while the citizens who were not in the streets were leaning out of the windows demanding to know where the Prince was lodging.
“The inn, Fore Street,” a soldier answered them and the tide of rejoicing humanity flowed instantly towards Fore Street, carrying Lucy and Dewi with them. In the Royalist west the King was admired but it was the Prince who was still the chief darling of the people.
The Cavalier Inn, a timber-framed house with mullioned windows, was one of the loveliest in Devon and today confronted Fore Street with pride, the sun sparkling on the newly washed windowpanes. A group of officers lounged about the doorway and the space in front of it was being kept clear by the pikes of an armed guard. Grooms were holding horses in readiness to the right of the door, and expectancy rippled through the crowd for it had been rumoured that the Prince might be coming out at any moment. “We will stay here till he does,” Lucy said to Dewi. They had manoeuvred the mare and pony to a position exactly behind the guard and discontented persons called out to them, some of them not too politely, that they should take their mounts round to the stableyard, but Lucy and Dewi had expended much charm and force getting themselves where they were and they refused to budge. “I wish to honour the Prince of Wales,” Lucy called back. “I am myself a Welshwoman and I will not be dissuaded.” Some of the remarks had angered her, her colour was up and her head held high. She was aware that she had no hat and that her gardening clothes, an old shabby kingfisher blue skirt and a faded orange bodice, were not suitable for riding, but what did that matter? She was a gentlewoman however she was dressed, with the blood of princes in her veins, and Dewi with the feather in his cap was the finest little boy in the world; they were here and here they would stay, for the glory of Wales and the honour of its Prince.
They waited for a while and then there was a burst of cheering and heads were tipped back, for a window above had been flung open. Lucy looked up too and saw Charles there leaning out and waving to the crowd. She had often wondered what would be in her mind if she saw him again and strangely it was a fall of music, the chiming of familiar words.
The white upturned wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him,
When he bestrides the lazy pacing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.
And indeed for a few moments he looked like a young god leaning from the window, his dark eyes alight with laughter, for he could look handsome when he laughed and his vitality and grace had a startling charm. He was royally dressed in a scarlet doublet, the lace of his cravat falling on a cuirass so brilliantly polished that it shone like silver. The boy who had come up the river in the Royal barge had acknowledged the cheers of the crowd with anxious carefulness, but this much older boy responded with the ease of a cat rearing its head to the stroking hand. He had grown to like acclamation and just now it was a needed balm. He saw Lucy and stopped laughing, and in his sudden gravity she knew his need. Serious and puzzled he was no longer a young god, scarcely any longer a boy, for his face had a look of strained fatigue that had nothing to do with youth. To make him laugh again she smiled up at him herself, and he responded, but uncertainly, groping for a lost memory. She knew what it was. London Bridge. Only it was the other way about now. It was he who leaned from above and she who looked up from below.
He drew back from the window and a moment later he appeared at the door, his plumed hat in his hand. He was now in his fifteenth year. So tall and strong that he looked much older. His black horse was led up and he mounted quickly and gracefully. He was facing Lucy, looking at her over the heads of the guards, and now he noticed Dewi in his feathered cap and grinned at him, for already he loved children. “Will you ride with me?” he asked them both, and then turning to his gentlemen he said, “I am acquainted with this lady. She and her brother shall ride with me.” There was no more to be said but Lucy as she wheeled her horse to ride out into Fore Street beside the Prince was aware of profound disapproval rising up about her thick as fog. Charles felt it too, for trained in discretion as he had been, and not impetuous by nature, this was the first time he had been guilty of such an unsuitable and erratic action. But it was too late to turn back now, the girl was beside him, the small boy following, and he forgot his anxiety in sudden joy.
Out in the street it appeared that he had pleased the crowd if not his gentlemen. They were delighted to see a West Country girl riding beside the Prince and roared their approval. And indeed the boy and girl in their bright clothes, sitting their horses with very straight backs, the little boy riding behind like a small esquire, were a sight for sore eyes, so clear-eyed and innocent as to appear untarnishable, so young it seemed they could never be old. The moment was lifted up out of time, not to be forgotten by those who watched and cheered, or by the three fairytale figures who rode through the sunshine as though it were a sea of light flowing in from another country. Beyond the cheering they could hear the cathedral bells.
As well as laughing and waving to the people they found they could talk a little. “I said I knew you,” said Charles. “But do I? You are familiar but I don’t know why.” And in his heart he wondered if that was what every man thought when for the first time a woman came up over the horizon like the sun and struck him between the eyes.
“Sir, I gave you a monkey,” said Lucy. “His name was Jacob.”
Charles’s eyes lit up. “Jacob. So you did. And a little purse. I have it still.” Actually he had lost it but he had a beautiful voice, already deep and caressing, and he made it sound as though the purse were against his heart at the moment of speaking.
“And once, sir, I waved to you from London Bridge.” She wanted him to remember how he had looked up at her as she just now had been looking up at him, but he replied to her only with a smile and she knew he had forgotten. How could he possibly remember? Yet all the same she felt a slight chill at her heart and was aware again of the disapproval of the gentlemen riding behind them, and knew that her immortal moment was slipping from her.
“You are riding to the Guildhall, I believe,” she said. “I will leave you, sir, at the next turning. It will be more suitable.”
“What is your name and where do you live?” he asked her hastily.
“My name is Lucy Walter. I live with my grandparents at the house of Brock Hill in the village of Broad Clyst.”
“Is it far?”
“Only a couple of miles. Goodbye, sir.”
She had seen the lane leading off Fore Street between two houses. She bowed to him and turned her horse and the people let her and Dewi through. She rode some way down the deserted lane before she stopped and looked back. Above the heads of the people, framed by the leaning houses, she saw the plumed horsemen going by as though they were far away, she herself a lonely onlooker, and felt a pang of unexplainable desolation, as though she had been cast out.
“Are we going home now?”
She had forgotten Dewi. She smiled down into his brown mischievous face, “As quick as we can. It may be they will not know I have taken the mare.”
2
That however was too much to be hoped for and at supper that night Lucy sat with her back very straight and her cheeks very rosy, for not only her grandmother but her father too was seriously displeased. Indeed William was at the moment a very worried man. The landlord of the village inn had been in Exeter that afternoon and had seen Lucy riding with the Prince, and his daughter was now being talked about in every house in the village. And not for the first time either, for Bud’s escapades followed each other in rather close succession. Harmless in themselves they were always spectacular, as when she had plunged fully dressed into the river to rescue a drowning puppy, or sat all day beside a village lad who had been put in the stocks, feeding him with her grandfather’s strawberries, or worst of all when she had seen a felon marched by to his hanging and had tried to walk beside him; she would have gone with him to the gallows, William believed, had she not been forcibly removed. And now riding brazenly beside the Prince who had been going neither to the stocks, nor the gallows, nor the block. Not at the moment. The ghost of a smile softened William’s eyes as he looked at his daughter. If it had been the block to which Charles had been riding she would not have left him. Lucy saw the smile and knew herself once more forgiven. Her father, whatever she did, would always forgive her.
“What’s that?” asked Mrs. Chappell suddenly. The clatter of horses’ hoofs in the lane beyond the house was so loud that it reached even to the quiet dining parlour, and she turned her eyes accusingly upon Lucy. What had her scapegrace granddaughter brought upon her this time? She was a different type of grandmother from Mrs. Gwinne, a wiry little woman, bustling and kindly and a notable housewife, anxious to do her duty but seeing it more in terms of food and shelter than of love and understanding. She had affection for her legal grandchildren but there was no love lost between her and Dewi, and for this latter reason there was not very much love between her and Lucy.
“If a detachment of cavalry is to be billeted upon you, madam, it is none of my doing,” she said to her grandmother and held her chin in the air rather naughtily.
“Bud, Bud,” chided her father under his breath, for she was wearing a gown of sea-green that her grandmother had given her, and the little pearl drops in her ears had come from Mrs. Chappell’s treasure chest, and the small holes in the lobes of the ears from her expert surgery with needle and cork. Lucy flushed with shame, for Grandfather and Grandmother Chappell had been very kind to them all. Where would they have been without them?
“The men pass by,” said Mr. Chappell. “They are going to the inn.” But his optimism was too quick for the silence that succeeded the dying away of the clatter was presently shattered by a vigorous attack upon the knocker of the front door. A Captain Symonds was ushered in, a smiling young man with a couple of front teeth knocked out. The homeliness of his appearance, his Devonshire speech and the slight difficulty he was having with it in consequence of the accident, made his request for stabling a few horses, the accommodation at the inn being insufficient, less of an affliction than it might have been. Supper awaited him at the inn but he sat down and had a glass of wine with them, and talked a little of the war. He talked hopefully yet his broad good face was now unsmiling. It was Lucy’s first real intimation of a tide going out and she longed for reassurance; so much so that when Captain Symonds rose to take his leave she got up too and said she would show him the way to the garden door, that was nearer to the inn than the front entrance.
“The hussy!” murmured her grandmother as the two left the room.
“Bud is not a hussy,” said William, breathing hard. He was not able to tell his mother what he knew so well about his daughter, for the necessary words would not come to his mind, but Grandfather Chappell the gardener was able to do his explaining for him.
“The maid has long tap roots,” he said, “and finds her nourishment far below the usual vanities of maidenhood. Therefore she is not self-conscious and not, I think, as much aware of the difference between men and women as maidens mostly are.”
“No?” asked his wife drily.
“All innocent maidens make instinctive use of their natural charm,” Grandfather Chappell conceded. “Men also in a different manner. But down below the surface where the tap roots are humanity is of one stuff of love and sorrow.”
He spoke so sadly that his wife’s face softened and William, the remembrance of his shattered home and his broken marriage bitter within him, poured himself another glass of wine. Of one stuff. Deio! Deio! If men could only know that before it was too late.
At the door in the garden wall the man and girl stood talking. The door opened on a narrow lane leading to the inn. A small stream rippled down the farther side of it, its voice interwoven with the song of the thrush in the garden. Beyond the stream a ferny bank rose to a drystone wall and beyond it was the Chappells’ orchard, reached by stepping stones across the stream and an ancient stone stile in the wall. The dew was falling and the smell of wet moss and ferns was cool and fresh. “No smell in the world like the West Country smell,” said Captain Symonds. “I have been on the march since Naseby. I wondered if I would ever smell Devon again.”
“Wales smells better,” said Lucy.
He laughed. “Wales is the West Country too. We are compatriots.”
She could not have disagreed with him more profoundly but politeness forbade her to say so, and she had not brought him to the garden door to discuss moss. “Are they far away?” she asked abruptly. “I felt when you were talking just now that they were not far behind him.” Then seeing his puzzled look she added with grave dignity, “I speak of the Prince.”
He had been told of the bold girl who had ridden with the Prince. Was this the maid? He looked round at her with mischievous enquiry, his eyes twinkling, but he was instantly sobered. She seemed to have
aged since he had last looked at her and her face was a woman’s in its controlled anxiety. He had seen so many women look like that during the past two years; longing to cry out for reassurance but too proud to do so.
“We will never permit them to capture the Prince,” he told her. “Wars always sway backwards and forwards and if the tide is against us now it will turn again, we hope and believe. If not, and we are forced back into Cornwall, remember that there is the sea and France.”
She was comforted and grateful and a girl again as she picked a sprig of rosemary from the bush by the door and put it in his coat. “Goodnight,” she said, and was gone as soundlessly as a moth. He was out in the lane, he found, with the door shut between them, and he laughed ruefully for he had not wished to leave her. They would have six days’ rest here, he had been told. It was a pleasant thought. He would look for her in the garden tomorrow.
3
It was not in the garden that he found her but in the orchard picking blackberries for bramble jelly. A hedge separated the orchard from the Exeter Road, and here the brambles grew so thick and tall that it was only possible to see passers-by if they were on horseback. It was a place both enchanted and enclosed, the windless warmth giving to all it pervaded a dreamlike eternal quality. All things had reached their fruition and were contented with it. The voices of the sheep in the fields, and the humming of the bees in the wild flowers that grew along the hedges, seemed not so much sound as the gentle breathing in and out of this contentment. Pressed into blackberry picking slightly against his will the man soon found himself lazily happy with it, since it was what the girl wanted him to do. In her shabby clothes, her fingers stained with blackberry juice, he found her even more desirable than she had been last night in the silk dress, sitting a little stiffly in the formal parlour.
The Child From the Sea Page 29
