The Story of Lucy Gault

It couldn’t be that, Bridget whispered. It couldn’t be what he was saying. ‘Holy Mother, it couldn’t!’

‘The tide would take anything with it. Except what was caught up in the stones. He had clothing in his hand.’ Henry paused. ‘A while back I wondered was she going bathing on her own. If I’d have seen her at it I’d have said.’

‘Would she be over on the rocks? She was low in herself all this time. Would she be over where she’d get the shrimps?’

Henry didn’t say anything, and then Bridget shook her head. Why would any child take off her clothes on a strand unless it was to bathe in the sea, the last bathe she’d have in it before they left?

‘I wondered it too,’ she said. ‘Her hair a bit damp a few times.’

‘I’ll go down. I’ll bring them a light.’

When Bridget was left alone she prayed. Her hands felt cold when she pressed them together. She prayed aloud, stifling her tears. A few minutes later she followed her husband, through the yard and the apple orchard, out into the grazing field and down to the strand.

*

They stared through the dark at the empty sea. They did not speak, but stood close to one another as if fearful of being alone. Softly, the waves lapped, the sea advancing, each time a little more with the turn of the tide.

‘Oh, ma’am, ma’am!’ Bridget’s exclamation was shrill, her footsteps noisy on the stones before she reached the sand. A while ago she’d thought it, she cried, the words tumbling over one another, her features scarcely seeming to be her own in the flickers of Henry’s lamp.

At a loss, Captain Gault and his wife turned from the sea. Could there be hope, somehow, in this agitation, some grain of hope where there had been none before? In their bewilderment, for a moment, there was all that, the same for both of them.

‘I’m not saying she ever said a word, ma’am. It’s only Henry and myself thought it. We should have said it to you, sir.’

‘Said what, Bridget?’ There was a weary politeness in the Captain’s tone, and patience while he waited for an irrelevancy: already expectation had shrunk away to nothing.

‘All I’d notice was her hair was a bit wet when she’d come in.’

‘From bathing?’

‘If we’d known it for sure we’d have told.’

There was a silence, then Captain Gault said:

‘You’re not to blame, Bridget. No one will ever think that.’

‘Her forget-me-not dress she was wearing, sir.’

‘It wasn’t her dress.’

Her summer vest, Heloise said, and in silence again they walked towards where it had been found.

‘We told her lies,’ the Captain said before they reached the place.

Heloise didn’t understand. Then she remembered the reassurances and the half promises, and remembered knowing that the promises might not be kept. Disobedience had been a child’s defiance, deception the coinage they had offered her themselves.

‘She knew I’d always bathe with her,’ the Captain said.

The splinter of driftwood that had snagged what the Captain had picked up was still there, its pale, smooth surface just visible in the dark. Henry moved the lamp, looking for something else, but there was nothing.

As if somehow it had acquired a potency of its own in feeding on circumstances and events, the falsity that beguiled the Captain, and his wife and their servants, was neither questioned nor denied. The house had been searched, the sheds in the yard, the garden, the orchard. Even though nothing had suggested that so late in the evening the missing child might have been in the woods, her name had been called out there; the O’Reillys’ kitchen had been visited. The sea was what remained. It seemed no more than the mockery of wishful thinking that its claims, so insistently pressed by what facts there were, should not be accepted.

‘Will you come over to Kilauran, Henry, and we’ll take a boat out?’

‘I will, sir.’

‘Leave the lamp with them here.’

The two men went. Hours later, on the spit of rocks that broke the long expanse of sand and shingle, the women they left behind found a sandal among the shrimp pools.

*

The fishermen at Kilauran learnt of the loss when they rowed in at dawn from their fishing. They reported that all night they’d seen nothing from their boats, but the superstition that long ago had enriched their fishermen’s talk was muttered again among them. Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.

*

As the surface of the seashore rocks was pitted by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distress brought by the sea, so silence did at Lahardane.