The Story of Lucy Gault

3

Bridget polished the furniture before she covered it with old bed sheets that had never been thrown away. She cleaned the windows before the boards were nailed in place. She scrubbed the steps of the uncarpeted back stairs and the dog-passage flagstones. She packed away eiderdowns and blankets.

In the darkened house on the morning when there was nothing left to do except in the kitchen and the sculleries, where daylight still prevailed, Henry walked about the upstairs rooms with a lamp. The air there was already stale. That evening they would lock up.

The two were melancholy. On each of the few days that had passed since the Gaults’ departure there had been the expectation that one of the fishermen would arrive with news that something had caught in their nets or on an oar. But no one had come. Would the Gaults want to know if anyone had? Bridget wondered, and Henry had shaken his head, unable to answer that.

In the hall he lifted the globe from the lamp and quenched the wick. In the dairy he washed out the churns he had earlier brought back from the creamery. I’ve a wall to see to,’ he called out to Bridget when she appeared at the back door of the house, and he saw her nod across the distance that separated them. He wondered what it would feel like, sitting down for the last time at the kitchen table when he returned. A bit of bacon she was cooking.

The sheepdogs hurried in the yard when Henry whistled, and Bridget watched them pushing at one another behind him when he set off. ‘It’ll keep fine,’ she raised her voice to comment.

‘I’d say it would all right,’ he said.

Bridget did not feel that her prayers had let her down. It was enough to have prayed, God’s will that He had not heard her. They would settle into the way things were to be; they would accept it, since that was how it had to be. Old Hannah would come to the gate-lodge the odd time and one day even Kitty Teresa might, although she was a fair enough distance away. More likely, though, Kitty Teresa wouldn’t want to come visiting. After the carry-on there’d been with her when she had to leave, that would maybe be too much for her.

Most of all you’d miss this big old kitchen, Bridget thought when she entered it again. She would still come down to the yard to feed the hens for as long as hens were there; she’d find new tasks outside. When first she had come to the kitchen with her mother she used to play in the yard, and when it was raining she’d sit by the fire in the meal shed, blowing at the turf with the wheel-bellows, watching the sparks.

At the sink she scrubbed the surface of a pan, its enamel chipped in a way that had been familiar to her for years. She rinsed it and dried it, returning it to its place, wondering if the day would come when she’d use it again, and in a sudden wave of optimism believing that she would, that with time’s healing they’d come back. She brought the piece of bacon to the boil on the range.

*

Henry didn’t remember the black coat when he saw it. He had often seen it worn, years ago, but he didn’t recognize it now. It hadn’t been there before was what he thought. The last time he came up here after stones for a gap in O’Reilly’s sheep wall there had only been high weeds in that corner. He stood looking at the coat, not moving further in to the ruins, telling the sheepdogs to stand back. Slowly he lit a cigarette.

The stones he was after were there, as they’d been before, fallen out of the walls, lying among the nettles. He remembered Paddy Lindon sitting at the table of which only the legs and a single board were left. The nettles around it were beaten down, a path made to the corner where the coat was. Two straw fish-baskets were lying there, and he could see flies on brown apple-cores.

He tried to make sense of it, and when a kind of sense came he didn’t want to go closer. One of the sheepdogs whined and he told it to shut up. He didn’t want to lift the coat to look, but in the end he did.

*

In the yard one of the dogs gave a single bark, and Bridget knew that Henry had returned. That dog always barked once when it came back to the yard, a habit Henry was trying to break it of. At the range she pushed the saucepan of potatoes on to the heat and poured boiling water over the cabbage she had cut up. She laid out knives and forks on the table and then heard Henry’s footsteps in the passage. When she looked round from the range he was standing in the doorway. He had a bundle in his arms.

‘What’s that?’ she said, and he didn’t make any kind of reply, only came on into the kitchen.

*

All the way down through the woods he had hurried, anxious to relinquish the effort of understanding, on his own, what still didn’t make sense enough. Surely the stillness in what he carried was the stillness of the dead? Again and again he laid it down to see, and even reached out to close the eyes that stared at him, for how in that dank place after so long could there still be life?

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.

‘What we’ll have is a bath,’ she said when she had made the bed as best she could without disturbing the limp form that lay there. But the bath would have to wait until the doctor had been, and she ran hot water into a basin in the bathroom and carried it back. She could hear a clattering outside and guessed that Henry had put a ladder up and was removing the window boards from Lucy’s bedroom before he went for Dr Carney. You’d think he’d know better than to waste time over that. Her crossness came as a relief.

‘Would I boil you an egg when we have you washed? Egg in a cup, Lucy?’

Again Lucy shook her head. The ankle could have a bone broken the way it looked, black more than blue, swollen up like a big ball. The whole leg had gone useless, trailing like something dead.

‘Wait till I take your temperature,’ Bridget said. There was a thermometer somewhere, but she couldn’t think where and wondered if, anyway, it had gone from the house. They’d have to leave it to Dr Carney. ‘We’ll get you nice and clean for him.’

The child was dirty all over, her feet, her hands, her hair tangled, scratches on her arms and face. Her ribs stood out, the flesh of her stomach loose beneath them. A boiled egg mashed up with toast in a cup was what she always loved. ‘Maybe the appetite’ll come back when Dr Carney’s been.’

The water in the basin went grey at once. Bridget poured it away in the bathroom and filled the basin again. What had he meant, sugar sandwiches? That cottage had fallen down. Had the child been in it ever since? Was it some childish thing, wanting to stay there for ever because she didn’t want to go away? Was it only that that had caused this terrible commotion, and grief like you wouldn’t witness in a lifetime? She should have told him to send a wire to the address they’d left. Then again he’d have to call in at the gate-lodge for the bit of paper and she hoped he wouldn’t think of it himself, because of the delay.

‘Mama and Papa have gone away,’ Bridget said. ‘But they’ll come back now.’

She put one jar halfway down to warm the cold sheets, the other at the bottom. She undid the window catch and pulled the top window down a little. Henry had wrenched off several of the boards, but some remained.

‘Dr Carney won’t be long,’ she said, not knowing what else to say.

*

‘Sure, it’s all there.’ In the hall Henry gestured with his head, vaguely indicating the bedroom he had taken the window boards from. ‘There’s nothing else only what she’ll tell you.’

‘Nothing else? And she after walking back from the dead!’

She couldn’t have walked an inch, Henry said. She’d have walked too much as it was, getting to where he found her. He wouldn’t have found her at all if he hadn’t been thinking to fix the place where the sheep were getting in again.

‘What’s that about sugar sandwiches?’

There were pats of butter in a bit of newspaper, and grains of sugar left. There were apples she’d have taken off the trees, not ripe yet but she’d eaten them, because the cores were thrown down. She’d managed rightly, Henry said.

‘Is the child away in the head, Henry?’

‘Arrah, not at all.’

‘Did she know what she was doing when she went off?’

‘She did of course.’

‘We need get word to Mr Sullivan. And word sent to England.’

‘I was thinking that.’

The doctor diagnosed a broken bone that would have to be investigated further, and damage to the surrounding ligaments, internal bleeding, fever, a high temperature, lack of nourishment. He advocated beef-tea or hot milk, no more than a slice of thin toast to begin with. Henry returned with him to Kilauran, to send the necessary telegram. In the kitchen Bridget toasted a single slice of bread at the bars of the range.

They’d have to sleep in the house tonight. Henry reached that conclusion on the way back to Lahardane; it occurred to Bridget while she carried the tray upstairs. They couldn’t leave the child on her own, not the way things were, never mind another attempt to set the place on fire. Until whatever arrangements could be made, until the Captain and Mrs Gault returned, they’d have to be there.

‘What did you say in the wire?’ Bridget enquired when Henry returned.

Lucy found alive in the woods, the message had gone to England.