The Story of Lucy Gault

In the kitchen the smell of bacon boiling crept through his confusion, as reality settles the fragments of a dream. The clock ticked brightly on the dresser, steam rattled a saucepan lid.

‘Mother of God!’ Bridget cried. ‘Oh, Mother of God!’

*

The child’s lips were stained with blackberry juice. There was a sick look about her, her cheeks fallen in, dark hollows beneath her eyes, her hair as ragged as a tinker’s. In Henry’s arms she was covered with an old coat of her mother’s. Filthy it was.

Henry spoke at last. He said he’d gone for the stones to Paddy Lindon’s cottage. As often it was, his face was empty of expression even while he spoke. ‘More happens in a ham,’ Bridget’s father had once said about Henry’s face.

‘Sweet Mother!’ Bridget whispered, crossing herself. ‘Sweet Lady of Mercy!’

Henry slowly made his way to a chair. The child was starved, so weak you’d say she couldn’t live: unspoken, these comments tumbled about in Bridget’s thoughts, as earlier they had in Henry’s, bringing with them the same confusion. How could she have come in from the sea? How could she be here at all? Bridget sat down, to steady the weakness in her knees. She tried to count the days, but they kept slipping about. Ages it felt like since the night on the strand, ages before the Gaults had gone.

‘There’s food she took from the house,’ Henry said. ‘Sugar sandwiches she maybe lived on. And thank God for it, there’s water in that place.’

‘She was never in the woods, Henry?’

Every morning Bridget carried her rosary from the gate-lodge to the kitchen and placed it on the shelf above the range. She pushed herself up from the table to find it now, gathering it between her fingers, not telling the beads but finding solace in their touch.

‘She ran off,’ Henry said.

‘Oh, child, child …’

‘She’s frightened by what she done.’

‘Why d’you do a thing like that, Lucy?’

Her own voice sounded foolish, Bridget thought, and hearing it she experienced the guilt of foolishness. Wasn’t she to blame for not mentioning the bathing? Wasn’t the child forever playing her games in the glen and above it in the woods – why wouldn’t she have reminded them of that? Why wouldn’t she have said it was all fancy, what the fishermen believed?

‘What possessed you, Lucy?’

One of her ankles was in a bad way, Henry said. When they came into the yard she’d wanted to be on her feet but he hadn’t let her down. You wouldn’t know when it was the ankle got like it was. It was maybe smashed up, you couldn’t tell. He said he’d go over for Dr Carney.

‘Will I carry her above first?’

He wouldn’t say more, Bridget said to herself, until the bedraggled child was upstairs. Nothing would be passed on before that and then he’d say how he happened on her, what she’d said to him if she’d said anything at all. The child was so silent now she might never open her mouth again.

‘Wait till I fill a couple of jars for the bed.’

Bridget returned her rosary to the mantel-shelf and pulled the kettle that had boiled back on to the heat of the range. The water steamed and spluttered almost at once. The Captain, the mistress, Henry going up and down the strand, poking at the shingle: the Devil’s fools, as she’d been herself, making everything worse. In a glare of light, Bridget saw them now, absurdly there.

‘Are you hungry, Lucy? Are you starved?’

Lucy shook her head. Henry had sat down too, his brown hat cocked forward a bit, as if it had been knocked on the way through the woods and he hadn’t remembered to set it right when he put his burden down on the chair.

‘The dear help her,’ Bridget whispered, and felt tears warm on her cheeks before she knew she was crying, before she knew that foolishness was neither here nor there. ‘Thanks be to God,’ she whispered, her arms suddenly around Lucy’s thin shoulders. ‘Thanks be to God.’

‘You’re all right now, Lucy,’ Henry said.

Bridget filled two hot-water jars. There was a kind of exhaustion in the child’s eyes. An agony it seemed like, dully there.

‘Are you sick, Lucy? Is there pain in your leg?’

The eyes registered for an instant what might have been a denial, but still there was no response, nothing said, no movement. Henry got to his feet, to take the unresisting body into his arms again. Upstairs, while Bridget held the two lamps she’d lit, he laid it down on the bed from which the sheets and blankets had been taken away a week ago.

‘Wait there till you’ll see Dr Carney himself,’ Bridget instructed. ‘Get him back here quickly. Take the trap, don’t walk. I’ll manage now.’

She rummaged through the bedclothes she had folded away in the landing hot-press and found a nightdress.