The Story of Lucy Gault

2

With more time than ever on her hands when she’d left Mr Aylward’s school, Lucy began to read the books in the drawingroom bookcases. All of them were old, their spines familiar for as long as she could remember. But when she opened them she was drawn into a world of novelty, into other centuries and other places, into romance and complicated relationships, into the lives of people as different as Rosa Dartle and Giles Winterborne, into bleak London fog and the sun of Madagascar. And when she had read almost all there was to read in the drawing-room she turned to the bookcases on the first-floor landing and those of the unused breakfast-room.

In the house the window boards that had briefly been in place were hardly remembered now; the sheets that had been lifted from the furniture had long ago been put to other use. When school had been finished with, Henry and Bridget were still Lucy’s daily companions, offering the same friendship they had when she was a child. If Mr O’Reilly happened to be working nearby when she walked through the pasture fields he waved at her, as he always had.

Nor did the interest Mr Sullivan and Canon Crosbie had taken in a solitary child’s welfare wane when childhood passed. There were still their visits, still the birthday presents and the Christmas presents they had always brought to her. And in return there was their choice of the Christmas turkeys Henry reared.

‘It’s only that I wonder,’ Canon Crosbie confessed, ‘if it’s right for a young girl to find herself so much alone, so many miles from anywhere?’

Each time the clergyman wondered, he elicited the same response: this was how things were, Bridget pointed out.

‘Does she ever mention making something of her life?’ Canon Crosbie persisted. ‘Does she ever show a preference?’

‘A preference, Canon?’

‘For one vocation or another? To – well, I suppose, to go out into the world?’

‘This is what she knows, sir. There isn’t a shell on the strand she doesn’t have affection for. It is how she is, Canon. Always was.’

‘But that’s not the thing at all! A girl should not lavish affection on shells. It is not right that shells should be her companions.’

‘There is Henry. There is myself.’

‘Oh, indeed. Indeed, of course. A blessing, Bridget, that doesn’t go unremarked. You’re very good.’

‘I’m not saying it’s short of unusual, sir, the way things are. All I’m saying is, Henry and myself do our best.’

‘Of course you do. Of course, of course. You’ve done wonders. There’s no one saying you haven’t done wonders.’ Canon Crosbie was emphatic, then paused a moment. ‘And tell me, Bridget, does she continue to believe in their return?’

‘She has never stopped believing that. It’s what she waits for.’

‘I knew her father when he was her age,’ the old clergyman continued after a pause. The vagueness in his voice sounded like defeat now, as if no matter how long they talked the conversation wouldn’t advance. ‘“Everard Gault has married a beauty,” Mrs Crosbie said, having seen Mrs Gault before I did myself. “Well, that makes up for it,” Mrs Crosbie said – because Everard Gault’s family had been taken from him, we all knew that. She has had a soft spot since for Heloise Gault. Well, for both of them, you have to say. And so have I, of course.’

‘Henry and myself-’

‘I know, Bridget, I know. It’s just that sometimes in the evenings when we sit there in the rectory we think of a young girl on her own – or, not quite, of course, but still a little on her own. And we hope, Bridget, we hope.’

‘She has taken on the bees.’

‘Bees?’

The Captain used have beehives in the orchard. We didn’t bother with the honey the time he left. Henry can’t be doing with bees, but she’s started up the hives again.’

Canon Crosbie nodded. Well, that was something, he said. Bees were better than nothing.

*

That something had befallen Captain Gault and his wife came to be believed: that they had found themselves unexpectedly destitute, a particular plight of this time; that they had been the victims of disaster. This newspaper tragedy or that easily became another fragment of their story, which increasingly gathered interest the more often it was told. Absence made truth of conjecture, Mr Sullivan often reflected, and yet had conjectured himself, for it was impossible not to. ‘It is our tragedy in Ireland,’ he was heard to remark more than once, ‘that for one reason or another we are repeatedly obliged to flee from what we hold dear. Our defeated patriots have gone, our great earls, our Famine emigrants, and now the poor to search for work. Exile is part of us.’

He did not himself believe that further misfortune, natural or otherwise, had befallen Captain Gault and his wife. Exiles settled in their exiled state, often acquiring a stature they had not possessed before. He had observed this often in those who came back to Enniseala only to find themselves restless in a town that was too small, feeling they belonged nowhere now, yet seeming wiser than they had been. And who could blame Everard Gault and his wife, lowered by their sadness, for wishing to begin again, where everything was different? He regretted, with the benefit of retrospect, that he had engaged an incompetent private detective to conduct a search of a Swiss city, especially when he considered that the tally of the man’s expenses could not now be put to better use. It annoyed him, too, that the woman Chambré had chosen English newspapers in which to place advertisements when he had assured her that England had been specifically rejected as a country to settle in by the couple who were sought. His own professional tidiness resented the muddle he had contributed to himself by withholding his convictions: Lahardane as it was today was less awkward to live with than the memory of his saying that everything would be all right.

*

For her part, Lucy did not wonder much about the nature of exile, accepting, with time, what had come about, as she did her lameness and the features that were reflected in her looking-glass. Had Canon Crosbie raised with her the question of going out into the world, she would have replied that the nature and the tenets of her life had already been laid down for her. She waited, she would have said, and in doing so kept faith. Each room was dusted clean; each chair, each table, each ornament was as they were remembered. Her full summer vases, her bees, her footsteps on the stairs and on the landings, and crossing rooms and in the cobbled yard and on the gravel, were what she offered. She was not lonely; sometimes she could hardly remember loneliness. ‘Oh, but I’m happy,’ she would have reassured the clergyman had he asked her. ‘Happy enough, you know.’

Presents from him, from his wife, from Mr Sullivan, came again on her twenty-first birthday. Afterwards, in warm evening sunshine, she lay reading in the apple orchard another of the novels left behind by other generations. Enough of the world it was for Lucy Gault, at twenty-one, to visit Netherfield.