The Child From the Sea Read online

  There were no seals in sight today but there were gulls everywhere, wheeling over the cliffs and the sea, and on the sandbank opposite her the busy oystercatchers were gossiping and strutting around and getting ready for the day. She got down from her throne and ran down to the sea again to make a sea posy for Nan-Nan. She gathered seaweeds, and samphire from the rocks, and tied them together with a bit of seaweed bright as a crimson ribbon. Nan-Nan liked sea posies. Elizabeth Walter thought them messy but she liked posies of wild flowers and Lucy never took anything home to Nan-Nan without taking something for her mother too. This was because she felt so guilty in loving Nan-Nan more than her mother. Elizabeth had reproached her for this once, saying bitterly, “You love everyone more than your mother.” And Lucy had flung herself on her in a passion of tears and cried out, “Oh, madam mother, I love you! But I love Nan-Nan terribly much.” And with tears rolling down crimson cheeks she had clutched at the bodice of her dress until she tore it. What, Elizabeth had wondered, could be done with such a tempestuous child? And from whom did she inherit these passions? Not from her mother, most certainly. And not from her father, who though uninhibited was placidly so. Was it, Elizabeth often wondered, anything to do with having been born upon volcanic rock?

  With the posy in her hand Lucy ran up the lane till she was nearly at the top, scrambled up the bank to her left, forced her way through the thorn trees, ripping a triangular piece out of the seat of Richard’s breeches, and came out upon the cliff top among the sheep. She ran to where the wild flowers grew, deep blue squills and pink and white campion, thrift and cowslips making a ribbon of clear colour along the cliff edge, with little isolated gardens down below wherever the crumbling cliff gave foothold. The sun was fully up now, light poured from the sky and land and sea reflected it back in singing colour. It seemed unkind to pick the flowers because indoors their bells were silent, and Lucy told them she was sorry but that she wanted them for her mother.

  “Sun up, little madam, and the castle’s stirring.”

  It was John Shepherd trudging slowly along with buckets of mash for the lambs. He was greybearded, mild and weatherworn, and advanced as though with each step he dragged up a load of mud from the earth, but Lucy did not know if he was old or not. She never thought of age in connection with the men who cared for her father’s beasts and tilled his land. With their faces roughened like the barks of trees, their sweaty country smell and heavy deliberate movements they seemed as ageless as the land itself, and as trustworthy and inevitable, and she loved them as she loved the cliffs and the blue squills and the wild birds singing. And they in their turn kept a place in their hearts for the strange little creature who raced about barefoot in her boy’s garments, wild and furious at times but openhanded as the spring.

  “John Shepherd, John Shepherd,” she cried, and ran to him, impetuously pulling her mother’s posy apart so that she might make up a little one for him. He knew better than to say no for to refuse one of her offerings was to invite a passion of disappointed tears. He patiently put down the buckets and allowed her to tuck the posy into the buttonhole of his old coat. The squills were no bluer than her eyes. All that she was now in her vital springtime joy, all her woman’s promise, shone in her eyes. Whether she was pretty or not it was hard to say, for she was never still or clean long enough for anyone to form a considered opinion, but her eyes were unforgettable.

  “Duwch, duwch! There’s kind you are,” said John Shepherd, dragging his words up to the surface with the same patient effort with which he pulled his feet from the soil. “Cariad,” he whispered half to himself, for he adored her.

  John Shepherd, like Lucy, was bi-lingual, for this was the Little England beyond Wales where English adventurers had settled in William Rufus’s days. Later the Flemish immigrants had come, dumped on the coast by Henry the Second who had not known what to do with them, and protected by a chain of castles South Pembrokeshire had become a replica of an English community. But its people had to talk Welsh as well as English for they had only to cross the brook and Newgale bridge, between Roch and St. Davids, to find themselves in the ‘Welshery’ of Pembrokeshire, where English was an alien tongue.

  “It’s running home you should be,” John Shepherd continued, a little anxiously because he always wanted to protect Lucy from the results of her impetuous actions. “Yes, yes. The castle’s stirring.”

  In her joy Lucy had been oblivious of the passing of time but now she cast a glance of panic at the sky, observed the sun’s position with alarm, subjected John Shepherd to a passionate embrace and fled. He watched her running like a hare, leaping over the stones and tussocks of heather in her path, and his face creaked slowly into a toothless smile. Then the smile faded. She must have made her exit from the castle long before the doors were open and she’d get into trouble. Shaking his head with foreboding he plodded slowly on to his sheep.

  2

  Lucy, running, decided that she would not sneak in by any back entrances. She had been playing truant for a long while and had a feeling that it was about time she was brought to justice. She had a deep sense of justice and sometimes this made her feel as uncomfortable in her spirit if she deserved a whipping and did not get it as she felt in her body if she did get it, and of the two she preferred to suffer in body. Also with her love of drama she was not averse to occupying the centre of the stage.

  “I shall go round to the front door and knock,” she said to herself. “And I shall say I am a princess. Shall I be Olwen or Nest?”

  The Princess Nest, daughter of Rhys ap Tudor the great prince of South Wales, had been a lady of surpassing beauty and her loveliness was still spoken of with bated breath though she had died six centuries ago. Not Helen of Troy, or Deirdre or Fair Rosamund had been more beautiful than Nest. Perhaps not even Olwen of the Mabinogion, “Olwen of slender eyebrow, pure of heart,” another great Welsh princess of whom the bards had delighted to sing. And Lucy was descended from Nest; at least so her father said though he seemed not able quite to prove it, as he was able to prove his descent from Rhys ap Thomas, an even greater man than Rhys ap Tudor, his forefinger tracing the lines down the parchment of the family tree. Nevertheless the Walter family, in company with all the great families of south Pembrokeshire, had no doubt at all that Nest was in their blood and the knowledge enormously increased their pride.

  Lucy loved being Nest. She liked being her in the great hall, pacing up and down with the end of a dirty towel fastened to the belt of her dress and trailing on the floor like Nest’s train of crimson velvet. And she liked being Olwen, waiting in the castle of the nine porters and the nine watchdogs for the glorious Prince Kilhwch to come and fetch her. She was never tired of hearing the story of Prince Kilhwch. He would come for her one day, she was quite sure, and lift her up in front of him on his horse of dappled grey, and they would go away together to fairyland.

  “I think I’ll be Kilhwch,” she decided as she ran. “I’ll be Kilhwch knocking at the castle door, come for Olwen. My father shall be Olwen’s father, who propped his eyebrows up with forks, and madam my mother shall be Olwen.”

  At this point she tripped and fell flat in a patch of cow dung but it was dry and she was immediately up and running on again.

  The length of the castle faced west towards the sea, battered by the great gales but indestructible. The entrance was to the north and Lucy ran diagonally across the field, scrambled up a bank and through another hedge of thorn trees and was on the rough road that ran northward along the battlemented walls of the inner bailey. To the west the outer bailey had disappeared now, in these comparatively peaceful days, though fallen stones in the fields showed where it had been, but to the east on the landward side it still stood in places, surrounding the farm buildings, granaries and workshops. Lucy ran across the road and along a grass-bordered lane that had the wall of the castle courtyard on the right and the stables on the left. She pushed open the stout oak door in the wall and was in t
he courtyard, which at great expenditure of gold and labour William Walter had transformed into a flower garden for his wife. Here within the shelter of the high walls she did not feel the winds she hated and could grow the roses and lilies she loved, with fruit trees against the walls. She had a knot garden of herbs here, a sundial and an arbour where the family could sit and make music on Sunday afternoons. Lucy ran up the path to the stone steps that led to the door of the great hall. Beside them there grew a very old rosemary tree, planted here years ago for the protection of the family, for rosemary is a holy herb. The living rooms were all on the first floor. Below there was a great kitchen, with the servants’ quarters over it, and a maze of cellars and store rooms where in days past the men-at-arms of the castle had slept on a floor composed simply of lumpy and volcanic rock. Lucy banged on the door with her brown fists and cried, “Open in the name of Prince Kilhwch, cousin of King Arthur.”

  3

  The door was opened by Richard. “If you think you are being funny,” he said coldly, “you will not think so long.”

  At ten years he was old for his age, and the young heir. If he had not been her brother Lucy doubted if she would have liked him, and even though he was her brother her affection was not as deep as she would have wished. But she liked looking at him for he had his mother’s smooth fair hair, falling gracefully to his shoulders, her cool grey eyes and perfect oval face. Lucy swept past him, acknowledging with a princely inclination of the head the low bow which he had not given her, and slipped through the screens that divided the main part of the hall from the space under the musicians’ gallery, out of which opened the front door and the door to the kitchen. “I am Prince Kilhwch, come to fetch the Lady Olwen,” she cried aloud as she strode up the hall. But her parents, who had just finished their morning meal of ale and barley bread and honey at the long table on the dais, did not seem to see a prince. Their faces, turned towards her, showed them not sensible of the honour done them and the prince fell away from Lucy, leaving her with a desolate numbness striking at her loving heart. But she marched on without hesitation, facing the issue.

  A rough brown object, rising just clear of the table between William and Elizabeth Walter, and looking like that beloved dormouse in Alice in Wonderland of which children at that date were so cruelly deprived, shot up and revealed itself as the head of a small boy. Justus dived beneath the table and ran down the steps of the dais towards Lucy. He had been breeched but his hair was still cut short and stood straight up on end, his cheeks were round and red as apples and his velvet-brown eyes loyal and affectionate as those of the dogs who followed at his heels, Elizabeth’s black and white spaniel Jano and William’s favourite hounds Shôn and Twm. Justus flung himself into Lucy’s arms in welcome and the dogs leaped and barked about her. Richard strolled slowly behind, hands in breeches pockets, disassociating himself from the whole affair.

  “Come here, Justus,” roared William. “Shôn. Twm. To heel, Jano!”

  They came, but at their own time, and accompanying Lucy. William was obeyed by his dogs and children in reverse ratio to the noise he made, for his family knew about his noise; behind it he sheltered from the necessity for action, his overmastering desire in life being to be left in peace. Lucy climbed the steps to the dais and stood before her parents. She curtseyed, the little bob comically at variance with her boy’s clothes, and then stood with her hands behind her back while William roared. When he had finished she turned her eyes to her mother and awaited her sentence. Standing just behind her Justus and the dogs shared her trouble with the loyalty of their kind.

  Elizabeth was looking very beautiful in her rose-pink morning gown, her hair gathered under her mob cap. At thirty she thought of herself as already middle-aged, but there were no lines on her lovely face and her figure was slender and straight as when she had been a girl. But some of her grace had been lost now in too stiff a backbone and the stillness of her face was not that of peace. Now and then she betrayed herself by a nervous twitching of the eyebrows and often her hands were restless. She had been married to William Walter at the age of sixteen when he had been twenty-one, an arranged marriage between two great Pembrokeshire families.

  “Lucy,” she said quietly, “you have many times been forbidden to wear boy’s attire.”

  “Yes, madam,” said Lucy.

  “Then why are you wearing it?”

  “Madam, it is difficult to climb in skirts.”

  “Where have you been climbing?”

  “Among the rocks in the bay, madam.”

  “Lucy, when your father and I awoke this morning you were not in your bed. And when we came to the hall we could not find you. Did you bribe one of the servants to let you out?”

  “No, madam.”

  “Then how did you get out?”

  “I got out of my window, madam.”

  “You what?” gasped Elizabeth, her control momentarily slipping as she visualized those rocks and the tree branches below. “But that is dangerous! You are never to do that again. Nor you, Richard. Do you hear, Richard?” White-faced she looked round at her elder son, but apparently he had not heard for he was sitting on the windowseat in the oriel window with his head bent studiously over a book. She turned her eyes back to her daughter. “I do not like you to be whipped, Lucy, but what else can be done? It seems that you will not learn any other way.” She turned towards her husband, sitting with his legs thrust out before him and his chin sunk on his chest. He mumbled into his beard, something to the effect that Bud, his name for Lucy, had better sit down and have something to eat. He could not thrash a child on an empty stomach.

  “I do not want to eat, sir,” said Lucy. “If you please, sir, I would prefer to be whipped at once.”

  Elizabeth rose. “It is time I went to the kitchen,” she said. “Come with me, Justus. Richard, take Shôn and Twm into the garden and groom them. If your father insists on bringing the hounds into the house at least someone should see that they are not coated in mud.”

  She went down the steps of the dais and down the hall towards the kitchen, her keys jangling at her waist, for she was a notable housewife. She looked like a tall pink tulip as she swayed down the hall and her husband watched her with a hungry wretchedness in his eyes. In his fashion he loved her. He knew that in comparison with her he was no more than a worm at her feet but he thought sometimes that if she had not known it too they might have been happier. She bore with him patiently at all times, and when he made love to her she bore it with exemplary wifely endurance, but held herself always at a distance. They seldom argued, her aristocratic training disliking the vulgarity of it, but he thought sometimes that a good flaming row might have done them a world of good. She disappeared through the screens, Justus and Jano trotting behind her. Richard followed with the hounds.

  Silence fell in the great old hall that during three centuries had held so many miseries and witnessed so many cruelties. They were all present again as William rose heavily and held out his hand to Lucy. She took it and they walked together to the oriel window. They were as close together at this moment as two human beings can be. It is said that some mystical bond is formed between the tortured and the torturer and with them it was strengthened by the knowledge that the whipping of disobedient children is a religious duty, by the love they had for each other and by the fact that in their case the torturer always suffered more than the victim.

  A little cane was kept in an oak chest near the oriel window. William stooped for it, then sat down on the windowseat. Lucy carefully laid down the two wilting posies she had picked for her mother and Nan-Nan and placed herself face downwards across his knees. The few swift cuts were light ones but heard in the attentive silence of the hall.

  It was so quickly over, this thing that hurt them so much because it was so strange that it should have to be between them, yet it had seemed to take an eternity and a sob broke in William’s throat. Lucy scrambled up on his knee
and put her arms tightly round his neck. His beard was scratchy against her cheek and he smelt of ale and his farmyard, to both of which he was much attached, but she was none too clean herself and her love was not fastidious. She murmured soft endearments, and the nameless dreadful things that had brooded like bats up above them in the shadows of the vaulted roof vanished and in their place came all the joys of love and triumph that this hall had seen, and they gleamed and fluttered there like doves with the sun upon their wings.

  “Damn it!” muttered William. “Why can I so seldom whip Richard? I do not mind whipping Richard.”

  “Better for people to whip those they love than those they do not love,” said Lucy.

  “Run off to Nan-Nan, Bud,” he said, “and get her to salve the sore places.”

  She picked up the wilting posies and did as he bade her and he noticed what care she took to hold herself straight and run up the steps to the dais and away to the rooms beyond as though she had no soreness at all. She had guts, he thought, wisdom too, for that had been a sensible thing she had said about whipping. How cruel men could be without love to restrain them. From whom did she get her wisdom? Not from him. Not from her mother. Elizabeth had judgment but not wisdom, which must have its roots in love. His little daughter had reached far back in time for her qualities, he believed, back almost to the fresh beginnings of time, so vital was she in these days when the world was growing old and weary because, men said, the end of all things was at hand. He was not able to look forward for her as he did for his other children, for she seemed to go out into the light of legend and to vanish there, going down with the sun over the edge of the sea.