The Story of Lucy Gault

9

The visits of Mr Sullivan continued, as he had promised they would. And Canon Crosbie came out from Enniseala, to satisfy himself that Lucy was being brought up in the Protestant faith. On Sundays when they went to Mass, Bridget and Henry took her with them to Kilauran, where she waited for half an hour for the service to begin in the green-painted corrugated-iron hut where the small Church of Ireland congregation worshipped. Although he knew she attended the Sunday services in Kilauran, since they were conducted by his curate, Canon Crosbie felt he should see how things were at Lahardane for himself.

‘And you always say your prayers, Lucy?’ As genial in old age as his innocent smile and pure white hair suggested, Canon Crosbie twinkled at her over the tea things Bridget had set out for them on the dining-room table. ‘Can you say Our Lord’s Prayer for me, Lucy?’

‘Our Father, which art in heaven,’ Lucy began, and went on until the end.

‘Well, that’s grand.’ Before he left, Canon Crosbie gave her a book called The Girls of St Monica’s, reflecting privately that had things been different she would by now have been sent away to a boarding-school herself. There was no doubt in the clergyman’s mind that that would have been the intention of the family, but when later he raised the subject with Aloysius Sullivan it was pointed out to him that, as things were, the funds for anything of the kind were lacking. Until her parents’ eventual return, Lucy Gault would continue to receive her education in Mr Aylward’s small schoolroom.

By now, the lull that had followed insurrection in Ireland had given way to civil war. The new Irish Free State was bloodily torn apart by it, as towns and villages and families were. The terrible beauty of a destiny fulfilled trailed a terrible bitterness, which haunted memories long after the conflict ended in May 1923. Towards the end of that same month, Mr Sullivan received a letter from Miss Chambré to the effect that Heloise Gault’s aunt – informed, when her health was a little improved, of her niece’s departure from Ireland – had been affected by a desire for reconciliation. Learning then that Heloise’s present whereabouts were not known, she had confidently instructed Miss Chambré to place an advertisement in several English newspapers. That this had elicited no response was the cause of considerable disappointment. I myself did not expect otherwise, Miss Chambré wrote, but for the sake of an old lady’s peace of mind I feel it to be my duty to request you to inform me when you receive news of Heloise Gault. Naturally the conduct of her child is still concealed from my employer.

Mr Sullivan sighed over that. He might have pointed out, but did not do so, that Lucy Gault’s conduct had spawned its own punishment, a fact confirmed in his conversations with Bridget and in his own continuing observation. It was apparent to him also that bewilderment possessed the household at Lahardane as unproductively as did the agitation that disturbed his thoughts when he dwelt for too long on what had come about. The solicitor, who lived alone but for a housekeeper, for the most part kept the depth of his concern private, occasionally and to no avail touching upon it in the presence of his clerk.

Waking often in the night to find herself similarly affected, Bridget would lie sleepless, waiting to greet Henry when he opened his eyes with a plea to tell her all over again about the moment of discovering the bundle among the weeds and fallen stones. The dog that had been befriended had run off one day and hadn’t been seen again: to Bridget, and to Henry, that seemed of a piece with all that had happened otherwise, but in time this was dismissed by both of them as fancy.

While at Lahardane there was the rawness of disorder, the story of what had brought it so dramatically to a country house came to find a place among the stories of the Troubles that were told in the neighbourhood – in Kilauran and Clashmore and Ringville, on the streets of Enniseala. The tragedy called down upon herself by a child, and what had since become her life, made a talking point, and seemed to strangers to be the material of legend. Visitors to the beaches of this quiet coast listened and were astonished. Commercial men who took orders for their wares across the counters of shops related the story in distant towns. Conversation in back bars, at tea tables and card tables, was enlivened by reports of what had occurred.

As often with such travellers’ tales, exaggeration improved the telling. Borrowed facts, sewn in where there was a dearth, gathered authority with repetition. Stirred by what was told of the events at Lahardane, memories strayed into other houses, through other family archives: to have suffered so harsh a misfortune, the Gaults had surely once betrayed a servant to the gallows, had failed to stand by common justice, or too haughtily had taken for granted privileges that were theirs. In talk inspired by what was told, the subtleties that clogged the tidiness of narration were smudged away. The spare reality of what had happened was coloured and enriched, and altogether made better. The journey the stricken parents had set out upon became a pilgrimage, absolution sought for sins that varied in the telling.

*

‘The Grand Old Duke of York,’ sang the children at the Christmas party in Mr Aylward’s schoolroom, ‘he had ten thousand men

Balloons decorated the spelling charts and the blackboard, holly cheered the maps and Mr Aylward’s own portraits of kings and queens. There was tea for the children, all fifteen of them on benches around the four tables pushed together – sandwiches and barm brack, and cakes speckled with hundreds and thousands. The room was darkened. Borrowed curtains hung over the two windows and Mr Aylward made shadows with his fingers on a white sheet – a rabbit, a bird, an old man’s craggy profile.

Afterwards Lucy walked home along the strand, alone in the gathering darkness, the fierce winter sea unruly beside her. She kept hoping, as she always did on the strand, that the dog might have come back, that he’d rush stumbling down the cliffs, barking the way he used to. But nothing moved except what was driven by the wind, and the only sound was the wind’s ceaseless whine and the crash of the waves. ‘Don’t come near me,’ Edie Hosford had said again, not wanting to be touched by her when they were playing Oranges and Lemons.