The Story of Lucy Gault

Captain Gault no longer spent his nights at an upstairs window but stood alone on the cliffs, staring out at the dark, calm sea, cursing himself, cursing the ancestors who in their prosperity had built a house in this place. Sometimes the O’Reillys’ nameless dog plucked up courage and came to stand beside him, its head hunched down as if it sensed a melancholy and offered a sympathy of its own. The Captain did not turn it away.

Here and in the house, all memory was regret, all thought empty of consolation. There hadn’t been time to have the initials inscribed on the blue suitcase, yet how could there not have been time since time so endlessly stretched now, since the days that came, with their long, slow nights, carried with them a century’s weight?

‘Oh, my darling!’ Captain Gault murmured, watching yet another dawn. ‘Oh, my darling, forgive me.’

*

For Heloise, the torment had a variation. Clawed out of the past, spread rawly through her suffering, the happy years of her marriage felt like selfishness. In all the rooms of the house she had come to as a bride there were memories of what had been so greedily hers – of gramophone music danced to with Everard’s arms lightly about her, and the sluggish tick of the drawing-room clock while they read by the fire, the high-backed sofa drawn up, the crackle of logs in the grate. Disappointed but safe at least, he had come back from war. The child who had been born was growing up; Lahardane offered a living as well as a way of life. Yet if Everard had married differently, the unforgiving end of this chain of circumstances would not have come about; there was always that.

‘No, no,’ he protested now, attributing blame elsewhere. ‘If ever they come back I’ll shoot them dead.’

Again, for both of them, the sheepdogs lay poisoned in the yard, their bodies cold on the cobbles. Again Henry raked the sea-gravel where blood stained the pebbles.

‘We could not explain more,’ Heloise whispered, but her guilt did not lessen: to their child she had not explained enough.

*

‘I wonder, though, will they go now?’ Bridget speculated when the preparations for leaving did not begin again. ‘I doubt they care what happens to them.’

‘Isn’t it fixed, all the same?’

‘What was fixed is different now.’

‘You’d say Kitty Teresa’ll be fetched back? And Hannah with her?’

‘I’m not saying what I don’t know. Only that I wouldn’t be surprised how things would be.’

Bridget’s belief had always been that affection for the place would bring Captain Gault and his wife back when the country was quiet again and some settlement could be reached about the wounding. In hopeful speculation, she had found particular significance in the fact that the herd was not to be sold.

‘I’d say they’d go,’ Henry said. ‘I’d say they’d want to go now.’

*

The relevant formalities were completed as fully as possible, all that the circumstances allowed. Captain Gault’s declaration was starkly empty of sentiment, but the Registrar’s clerk who came to Lahardane to transcribe it was moved and sympathetic.

‘Why should we wait longer now?’ Heloise asked when the man had gone. ‘If the Kilauran fishermen are right in what they believe, there’s nothing more. If they are wrong, there is, for me, a horror I do not want to know. If I am different from all the mothers in the world, if they would creep about the shingle and the pools for ever seeking a thread of ribbon they may remember, then I am different. If I am unnatural, and weak and full of a fear I do not understand, then I am unnatural. But I can only say that in my merciless regret I could not bear to look down and see my child’s fleshless bones and know too much.’

Their sorrowing was their common ground, yet separated them. One spoke, the other hardly heard. Each turned away from useless pity. No premonition helped them now, no voice in a dream, no sudden instinct. Heloise packed the last of their luggage.

During the bleak time that had passed she had requested, in a telegram to her bank, that the Rio Verde share certificates should be forwarded to her husband’s bank in Enniseala. She revealed this to him as he was setting out to make what new last arrangements were necessary with Aloysius Sullivan.

‘But why on earth should they be sent to us now?’ He stared at her in bewilderment. ‘All the way to us over here when we’re about to leave?’

Heloise didn’t answer. She wrote a note instead, empowering him to receive the certificates on her behalf.

‘It’s how I want it,’ she said then.