The Story of Lucy Gault

In the town of Montemarmoreo, in via Cittadella, they had taken rooms above the premises of a shoemaker. ‘What shall we do today?’ the Captain would ask, always knowing what the response would be. Well, walk a little, Heloise would suggest, and they would walk in the hills where sour black cherries grew near marble quarries now exhausted. In fits and starts the conversation would drift about – never to Lahardane or to Ireland, but back to Heloise’s childhood, to memories of her father, and of her mother before she became a widow, to places and people of that safe time. The Captain encouraged with patient questions and patient listening; Heloise was talkative, for such recollections dispelled the nag of melancholy. Her beauty and Everard Gault’s straight back, his soldier’s stride, picked them out in Montemarmoreo, a couple who were mysterious at first and then not so at all.

Another child, so long denied them, might one day be born in Italy: for his wife’s sake that was Captain Gault’s hope; for his sake, it was hers. But they were wary of expectation, drew back from it as they did from what must not be spoken of. Expert now at altering sentences already begun, or allowing them to wither or smiling them away, they gave themselves to the unfamiliarity of the place they had arrived in as invalids of distress, to its rocky hills and narrow streets, to a language they learnt as children do, to the simplicities of where they dwelt. In the ways they had devised they used the hours up, of one day and of another and another, until the moment came to open the first bottle of Amarone. They were a nuisance to no one in Montemarmoreo.

7

I respond regretfully,

Aloysius Sullivan was informed from the southernmost part of Bengal,

being greatly affected by what you report. Everard and I have corresponded but infrequently over the years. I last visited Lahardane a year or so after the birth of his daughter, when my brother had written to inform me of that fact. Ireland, in my own poor view, has always been the distressful country of its renown. That my brother and others have been obliged to leave it, as once the Wild Geese did, is the saddest news I have heard for many a long day. Should I hear from Everard, I will most certainly inform him of what has come about. But I believe it more likely that you, or those remaining at Lahardane, will hear sooner than I.

The firm of Goodbody and Tallis, solicitors of Warminster, Wiltshire, requested Mr Sullivan to clarify his letter of the fourteenth inst. addressed to their client, now an invalid, the aunt of the aforesaid Heloise Gault referred to. Replying, Mr Sullivan revealed the circumstances in which two servants and a child found themselves, and explained how these circumstances had come about. The reply he received – from a Miss Chambré, companion to the lady who was an invalid – expressed horror, and distaste for what had occurred. There had been no recent communication from Heloise Gault, Miss Chambré stated, nor could any of what was presently communicated be retailed to her employer, whose delicate heart might easily not sustain the strain of learning of such appalling thoughtlessness in a child.

Since my employer has never been offered the courtesy of acquaintanceship with this child,

Miss Chambré continued,

and has herself been long neglected by her niece – for many years receiving no more than a card at

Christmas –

I

believe the withholding of this most shocking news from an invalid is doubly justified. I would suggest the child be placed in a home of correction until such time as the parents return from their travels. Not that they themselves, from what you have imparted, are without blame in this unfortunate matter.

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