The Story of Lucy Gault

1

Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one. Aiming above the trespassers’ heads in the darkness, he fired the single shot from an upstairs window and then watched the three figures scuttling off, the wounded one assisted by his companions.

They had come to fire the house, their visit expected because they had been before. On that occasion they had come later, in the early morning, just after one. The sheepdogs had seen them off, but within a week the dogs lay poisoned in the yard and Captain Gault knew that the intruders would be back. ‘We’re stretched at the barracks, sir,’ Sergeant Talty had said when he came out from Enniseala. ‘Oh, stretched shocking, Captain.’ Lahardane wasn’t the only house under threat; every week somewhere went up, no matter how the constabulary were spread. ‘Please God, there’ll be an end to it,’ Sergeant Talty said, and went away. Martial law prevailed, since the country was in a state of unrest, one that amounted to war. No action was taken about the poisoning of the dogs.

When daylight came on the morning after the shooting, blood could be seen on the sea pebbles of the turn-around in front of the house. Two petrol tins were found behind a tree. The pebbles were raked, a couple of bucketfuls that had been discoloured in the accident taken away.

Captain Gault thought it would be all right then: a lesson had been learnt. He wrote to Father Morrissey in Enniseala, asking him to pass on his sympathy and his regret if the priest happened to hear who it was who’d been wounded. He had not sought to inflict an injury, only to make it known that a watch was being kept. Father Morrissey wrote back. He was always the wild one in thatfamily, he concluded his comments on the event, but there was an awkwardness about his letter, about the choice of phrases and of words, as if he found it difficult to comment on what had occurred, as if he didn’t understand that neither death nor injury had been intended. He had passed the message on, he wrote, but no acknowledgement had come back from the family he referred to.

Captain Gault had been wounded himself. For six years, since he had come back an invalid from the trenches, he had carried fragments of shrapnel in his body, and they would always be there now. His injury at that time had brought his military career to an end: he would remain for ever a captain, which was intensely a disappointment, since he had always imagined achieving much higher rank. But he was not, in other ways, a disappointed man. There was the great solace of his happy marriage, of the child his wife, Heloise, had borne him, of his house. There was no other place he might more happily have lived than beneath the slated roof of its three grey storeys, the stone softened by the white woodwork of the windows and the delicate fanlight above a white hall door. Flanking it on its right was the wide high archway of a cobbled yard, with cobbled passageways leading to an apple orchard and a garden. One half of the circle on to which the front rooms looked out was the gravel sweep; the other was a raised lawn that was separated from steeply rising woods by a curve of blue hydrangeas. The upstairs rooms at the back had a view of the sea as far as the sea’s horizon.

The origins of the Gaults in Ireland had centuries ago misted over. Previously of Norfolk – so it was believed within the family, although without much certainty – they had settled first of all in the far western reaches of County Cork. A soldier of fortune had established their modest dynasty, lying low there for reasons that were not known. Some time in the early eighteenth century the family had moved east, respectable and well-to-do by then, one son or another of each generation continuing the family’s army connection. The land at Lahardane was purchased; the building of the house began. The long, straight avenue was made, lines of chestnut trees planted along it on either side, the woodlands of the glen laid out. Later generations planted the orchard, with stock from County Armagh; the garden, kept small, was created bit by bit. In 1769 Lord Townshend, the Lord Lieutenant, stayed at Lahardane; in 1809 Daniel O’Connell did when there wasn’t a bedroom unoccupied at the Stuarts’ Dromana. History touched the place in that way; but as well-remembered, as often talked about, were births and marriages and deaths, domestic incidents, changes and additions to this room or that, occasions of anger or reconciliation. Suffering a stroke, a Gault in 1847 lay afflicted for three years yet not insensible. There was a disastrous six months of card-playing in 1872 during which field after field was lost to the neighbouring O’Reillys. There was the diphtheria outbreak that spread so rapidly and so tragically in 1901, sparing only the present Everard Gault and his brother in a family of five. Above the writing-desk in the drawing-room there was a portrait of a distant ancestor whose identity had been unknown for as long as anyone of the present could remember: a spare, solemn countenance where it was not whiskered, blue unemphatic eyes. It was the only portrait in the house, although since photography had begun there were albums that included the images of relatives and friends as well as those of the Gaults of Lahardane.

All this – the house and the remnants of the pasture land, the seashore below the pale clay cliffs, the walk along it to the fishing village of Kilauran, the avenue over which the high branches of the chestnut trees now met – was as much part of Everard Gault as the features of his face were, the family traits that quite resembled a few of those in the drawing-room portrait, the smooth dark hair. Tall and straight-backed, a man who hid nothing of himself, slight in his ambitions now, he had long ago accepted that his destiny was to keep in good heart what had been his inheritance, to attract bees to his hives, to root up his failing apple trees and replace them. He swept the chimneys of his house himself, could repoint its mortar and replace its window glass. Creeping about on its roof, he repaired in the lead the small perforations that occurred from time to time, the Seccotine he squeezed into them effective for a while.

In many of these tasks he was assisted by Henry, a slow-moving, heavily made man who rarely, in daytime, removed the hat from his head. Years ago Henry had married into the gate-lodge, of which he and Bridget were now the sole occupants, since no children had been born to them and Bridget’s parents were no longer alive. Her father, with two men under him, had looked after the horses and seen to all that Henry on his own now saw to in the yard and the fields. Her mother had worked in the house, her grandmother before that. Bridget was as thickset as her husband, with strong wide shoulders and a capable manner: the kitchen was wholly in her charge. The bedroom maid, Kitty Teresa, assisted Heloise Gault in what had once been the duties of several indoor servants; old Hannah walked over from Kilauran once a week to wash the clothes and sheets and tablecloths, and to scrub the tiles of the hall and the stone floors at the back. The style of the past was no longer possible at Lahardane. The long avenue passed through the land that had become the O’Reillys’ at the card table, when the Gaults of that time had been left with pasture enough only to support a modest herd of Friesians.

Three days after the shooting in the night Heloise Gault read the letter that had come from Father Morrissey, then turned it over and read it again. She was a slender, slightly built woman in her late thirties, her long fair hair arranged in a style that complemented her features, imbuing a demure beauty with a hint of severity that was constantly contradicted by her smile. But her smile had not been much in evidence since the night she had been woken by a shot.

Even though in the ordinary run of things she was not pusillanimous, Heloise Gault felt frightened. She, too, came of an army family and had taken it in her stride when, a few years before her marriage, she was left almost alone in the world on the death of her mother, who had been widowed during the war with the Boers. Courage came naturally to her in times of upheaval or grief, but was not as generously there as she imagined it would be when she reflected upon the attempt to burn down the house she and her child and her maid had been asleep in. There’d been, as well, the poisoning of the dogs and the unanswered message to the young man’s family, the blood on the pebbles. ‘I’m frightened, Everard,’ she confessed at last, no longer keeping her feelings private.

They knew each other well, the Captain and his wife. They had in common a certain way of life, an order of priorities and concerns. Their shared experience of death when they were young had drawn them close and in their marriage had made precious for them the sense of family that the birth of a child allowed. Heloise had once assumed that other children would be born to her, and still had not abandoned hope that one more at least might be. But in the meanwhile she was so convincingly persuaded by her husband that the lack of a son to inherit Lahardane was not a failure on her part that she experienced – and more and more as her only child grew up – gratitude for the solitary birth and for a trinity sustained by affection.

‘It’s not like you to be frightened, Heloise.’

‘All this has happened because I’m here. Because I am an English wife at Lahardane.’

She it was, Heloise insisted, who drew attention to the house, but her husband doubted it. He reminded her that what had been attempted at Lahardane was part of a pattern that was repeated all over Ireland. The nature of the house, the possession of land even though it had dwindled, the family’s army connection, would have been enough to bring that trouble in the night. And he had to admit that the urge to cause destruction, whatever its origin, could not be assumed to have been stifled by the stand he’d taken. For some time afterwards Everard Gault slept in the afternoon and watched by night; and although no one disturbed his vigil, this concern with protection, and his wife’s apprehension, created in the household further depths of disquiet, a nerviness that affected everyone, including in the end the household’s child.

*

Still eight but almost nine, Lucy had made friends that summer with the O’Reillys’ dog. A big, frolicsome animal – half setter, half retriever – it had crept into the O’Reillys’ yard a month or so ago, having wandered from a deserted house – so Henry’s guess was -and been accepted after some hostility by the O’Reillys’ working dogs. Henry said it was a useless creature, Lucy’s papa that it was a nuisance, particularly the way it scrambled down the cliffs to offer its company to whoever might be on the strand. The O’Reillys had given the dog no name and would hardly have noticed – so Henry said – if it had wandered off again. When Lucy and her papa had their early-morning swim, her papa always sent it back when he saw it bounding over the shingle. Lucy thought that hard, but did not say so; nor did she reveal that when she bathed by herself -which was forbidden – the nameless dog blustered excitedly about at the edge of the sea, which it did not ever enter, and sometimes ran about with one of her sandals in its mouth. It was an old dog, Henry said, but in Lucy’s company on the strand it became almost a puppy again, eventually lying down exhausted, its long pink tongue lolling from its jaws. Once she couldn’t find the sandal it had been playing with, although she spent all morning searching. She had to root out an old pair from the bottom of her clothes-press and hope no one would notice, which no one did.

When the Lahardane sheepdogs were poisoned Lucy suggested that this dog should be a replacement for one of them, since it had never really become the O’Reillys’; but the suggestion met with no enthusiasm and within a week Henry began to train two sheepdog pups that a farmer near Kilauran had let him have at a bargain price. Although devoted to both her parents – to her father for his usually easygoing ways, to her mother for her gentleness and her beauty – Lucy was cross with them that summer because they didn’t share her affection for the O’Reillys’ dog, and cross with Henry because he didn’t either: all that, in retrospect, was what that summer should have left behind, and would have if there hadn’t been the trouble in the night.

Lucy wasn’t told about it. Failing to rouse her from sleep, her father’s single shot became, in a dream, the crack of a branch giving way to the wind; and Henry had said that the sheepdogs must have gone on to poisoned land. But as the weeks went on, the summer began to feel different, and eavesdropping became the source of her information.

‘It’ll quieten,’ her papa said. ‘There’s talk of a truce even now.’

‘The trouble will go on, truce or not. You can tell it will. You can feel it. We can’t be protected, Everard.’

Listening in the hall, Lucy heard her mama suggest that maybe they should go, that maybe they had no choice. She didn’t understand what was meant by that, or what it was that would quieten. She moved closer to the slightly open door because the voices were lower than they had been.

‘We have to think of her, Everard.’

‘I know.’

And in the kitchen Bridget said:

‘The Morells have gone from Clashmore.’

‘I heard.’ Henry’s slow enunciation reached Lucy in the dog passage, which was what the passage that led from the kitchen to the back door was called. ‘I heard that all right.’

‘Past seventy they are now.’

Henry said nothing for a moment, then remarked that at times like these the worst was always assumed, the benefit of any doubt going the wrong way in any misfortune there’d be. The Gouvernets had gone from Aglish, he said, the Priors from Ringville, the Swifts, the Boyces. Everywhere, what you heard about was the going.

Lucy understood then. She understood the ‘deserted house’ the nameless dog had wandered from. She imagined furniture and belongings left behind, for that had been spoken of too. Understanding, she ran from the passage, not minding that her footsteps were heard, not minding that the door to the yard banged loudly, that hearing it they would know she’d been listening. She ran into the woods, down to the stream, where only a few days ago she had helped her papa to put in place a line of crossing stones. They were going to leave Lahardane – the glen and the woods and the seashore, the flat rocks where the shrimp pools were, the room she woke up in, the chatter of the hens in the yard, the gobbling of the turkeys, her footsteps the first marks on the sand when she walked to Kilauran to school, the seaweed hung up to tell the weather. She would have to find a box for the shells laid out on the window table in her bedroom, for her fir-cones and her stick shaped like a dagger, her flint pebbles. Nothing could be left behind.

She wondered where they would go, and could not bear the thought of somewhere that was impossible to imagine. She cried to herself among the ferns that grew in clumps a few yards from the stream. ‘It’ll be the end of us,’ Henry had said when she had listened, and Bridget had said it would be. The past was the enemy in Ireland, her papa said another time.

All that day Lucy remained in her secret places in the woods of the glen. She drank from the spring her papa had found when he was a child himself. She lay down on the grass in the place where the sun came into the woods. She looked for Paddy Lindon’s tumbled-down cottage, which she had never managed to find. Paddy Lindon used to come out of the woods like a wild man, his eyes bloodshot, hair that had never known a comb. It was Paddy Lindon who’d found her the stick shaped like a dagger, who’d shown her how to get a spark out of a flint pebble. Some of the roof of the cottage had fallen in, he’d told her, but some of it was all right. ‘Amn’t I destroyed by the rain?’ he used to say. ‘The way it would drip through the old sods of the roof, wouldn’t it have me in the grave before I’m fit for it?’ The rain taunted and tormented him, like a devil sent up, he said. And one day her papa said, ‘Poor Paddy died,’ and she cried then, too.

She gave up looking for where he’d lived, as so often she had before. Becoming hungry, she made her way down through the woods again, to the stream and then out on to the track that led back to Lahardane. On the track the only sound was her footsteps or when she kicked a fir-cone. She liked it on the track almost better than anywhere, even though it was all uphill, going back to the house.

‘Will you look at the cut of you!’ Bridget shrilly reprimanded her in the kitchen. ‘Child, child, haven’t we trouble enough!’

‘I’m not going away from Lahardane.’

‘Oh now, now.’

‘I’m never going.’

‘You go upstairs this minute and wash your knees, Lucy. You wash yourself before they’ll see you. There’s nothing arranged yet.’

Upstairs, Kitty Teresa said it would surely be all right: she had a way of looking on the bright side. She found it in the romances Lucy’s mother bought for her for a few pence in Enniseala and she often passed on to Lucy tales of disaster or thwarted love that turned out happily in the end. Cinderellas arrived at the ball, sword fights were won by the more handsome contender, modesty was rewarded with riches. But on this occasion the bright side let Kitty Teresa down. As make-believe fell apart, she could only repeat that it would surely be all right.

*

‘I belong nowhere else,’ Everard Gault said, and Heloise said that by now she belonged nowhere else either. She had been happier at Lahardane than anywhere, but there would be revenge for the shooting, how could there not be?

‘Even if they wait until the fighting’s over, that night won’t be forgotten.’

‘I’ll write to the boy’s family. Father Morrissey said to try that.’

‘We can live on what I have, you know.’

‘Let me write to the family.’

She did not protest. Nor later, when the weeks that went by drew no response to the letter; nor later still when her husband took the pony and trap into Enniseala and found the family he had offended. They offered him tea, which he accepted, thinking this to be a sign of reconciliation: he was ready to pay whatever was asked of him in settlement of the affair. They listened to this suggestion, barefoot children coming and going in the kitchen, one of them occasionally turning the wheel of the bellows, sparks rising from the turf. But no response came, apart from the immediate civilities. The son who had been wounded sat at the table, disdainful of the visit, not speaking either, his arm in a sling. In the end, Captain Gault said – and was embarrassed and felt awkward saying it – that Daniel O’Connell in his day had stayed at Lahardane. The name was legendary, the man the beloved champion of the oppressed; but time, in this small dwelling at least, had robbed the past of magic. Those three lads had been out snaring rabbits and had lost their way. They shouldn’t have been trespassing; no doubt about that, it was admitted. Captain Gault didn’t mention the petrol tins. He returned to Lahardane, to another night-time vigil.

‘You’re right,’ he admitted to his wife a few days later. ‘You have always had a way of being right, Heloise.’

‘This time I hate being right.’

Everard Gault had been missing in 1915; and waiting, not knowing, had been the loneliest time of Heloise’s life, her two-year-old baby her greatest comfort. Then a telegram had come, and soon afterwards she had closed her eyes in selfish relief when there was the news that her husband had been invalided out of the army. As long as they lived, she vowed to herself, she would never again be parted from him, her resolve an expression of her gratitude for this kind misfortune.

‘All the time I was there I could feel them thinking I had intended to kill their son. Not a word I said was believed.’

‘Everard, we have one another and we have Lucy. We can begin again, somewhere else. Anywhere we choose.’

His wife had always brought Everard Gault strength, her comforting a balm that took away the weary pain of small defeats. Now, in this greater plight, they would manage. They would live, as she had said, on what she had herself inherited; they were not poor, though they would never be as well-to-do as the Gaults had been before the land was lost. Somewhere other than Lahardane, their circumstances would not be much different from their circumstances now. The truce that had come at last in the war was hardly noticed, so little was it trusted.

In the drawing-room and in the kitchen the conversations continued, the same subject touched upon from two different points of interest. Rendered disconsolate by all she heard, the upstairs maid asked questions and was told. Lahardane was Kitty Teresa’s home too, had been for more than twenty years.

‘Oh, ma’am!’ she whispered, red in the face, her fingers twisting the hem of her apron. ‘Oh, ma’am!’

But if it was the end of things for Kitty Teresa, it was not, as they had imagined it would be, entirely so for Henry and Bridget. When plans were made, it was put to them that they might continue their occupancy of the gate-lodge as caretakers of the larger house, that for the time being at least the herd would be made over to them to give them a continuing livelihood.

‘You’ll do better with the creamery cheque,’ Heloise estimated, ‘than with what wages we could afford. We think that fair.’ Only passing time, the Captain added, could settle all this confusion.

They would be going to England, Heloise said at last to her child, after she’d promised Kitty Teresa to look out for another position for her and had given old Hannah notice.

‘For long, is it?’ Lucy asked, knowing the answer.

‘Yes, for a long time.’

‘For ever?’

‘We don’t want it to be.’

But Lucy knew it would be. It was for ever for the Morells and the Gouvernets. The Boyces had gone up to the North, Henry said, the house was under auction. She guessed what that meant from his voice, but he told her anyway.

‘I’m sorry,’ her papa said. ‘I’m sorry, Lucy.’

It was her mother’s fault, but it was his fault too. They shared the blame for old Hannah’s miserable silence and Kitty Teresa’s eyes gone red and her apron soaking with the tears that streamed on her cheeks and her neck, causing Bridget twenty times a day to tell her to give over. Henry slouched glumly about the yard.

‘Oh, who’s a fashion plate!’ her papa exclaimed, pretending in the dining-room when one morning she wore her red dress.

At the sideboard her mama poured out tea and carried the cups and saucers to the table. ‘Cheer up, darling,’ her mama said, her head on one side. ‘Cheer up,’ she begged again.

Henry passed by the windows with the milk churns on the cart and, not cheering up in the least, Lucy listened to the clomp of the horse’s hooves fading on the avenue. Two minutes that took: once at breakfast her papa had timed it with his pocket watch.

‘Think of a poor little tinker child,’ her mama said. ‘Never a roof over her head.’

‘You’ll always have a roof, Lucy,’ her papa promised. ‘We all have to get used to something new. We have to, lady.’

She loved it when he called her lady, but this morning she didn’t. She didn’t see why you had to get used to something new. She said she wasn’t hungry when they asked her, even though she was.

Afterwards on the strand the tide was coming in, washing over the sand the seagulls had marked, over the little piles the sand-worms made. She threw stems of seaweed for the O’Reillys’ dog, wondering how many days were left. No one had said; she hadn’t asked.

‘You go on home now,’ she ordered the dog, pointing at the cliffs, putting on her papa’s voice when she wasn’t obeyed.

She walked on alone, past the spit of rocks that stuck out like a finger into the sea, crossing the stream where the stepping stones were. When she had climbed a little way up through the woods of the glen she could no longer hear the sea or the sudden, curt shriek of the gulls. Slivers of bright light slipped through the dark of the trees. ‘I’ve never seen the half of the old glen,’ Paddy Lindon used to say. Every year, he’d once told her, he cultivated potatoes on the clearing he’d made beside his cottage, but this morning she didn’t have the heart to go looking for it again.

‘Who’s coming to Enniseala with me?’ her papa invited that afternoon, and of course she said yes. Her papa leaned back in the trap, hugged into its curve, the reins loose in his fingers. The first time he was in Enniseala, he said, was when he was five, brought in to have the fraenulum of his tongue cut.

‘What’s fraenulum?’

‘A little snag underneath your tongue. If it’s too tight you’re tongue-tied.’

‘What’s tongue-tied?’

‘It’s when you can’t speak clearly.’

‘And couldn’t you?’

‘They said I couldn’t. It didn’t hurt much. They gave me a set of marbles afterwards.’

‘I think it would hurt.’

‘You don’t need anything like that.’

The marbles were in a flat wooden box with a lid that slid on and off. It was still there, beside the bagatelle in the drawing-room. She had to stand on a footstool when they played bagatelle, but she knew these were the marbles he’d been given then because once he’d told her. He’d forgotten that. Sometimes he forgot things.

‘There’s a fisherman in Kilauran can’t speak at all,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘He does it on his fingers.’

‘Yes, he does.’

‘You see him doing it. The other fishermen understand him.’

‘Well, there’s a thing! Would you like to hold the reins now?’

In Enniseala her papa bought new suitcases in Domville’s because they didn’t have enough. One of the shopmen came out from the office and said he was sorry. He wouldn’t have believed it, he said. He’d never have thought he’d live to see the day. ‘Please God, you’ll be back, Captain.’

Her papa kept nodding, not saying anything until he held his hand out and called the shopman Mr Bothwell. The new suitcases hardly fitted into the trap, but they did in the end. ‘Now,’ her papa said, not getting into the trap himself but taking her hand in a way that made her guess where they were going.

He could move the door of Allen’s without the bell ringing. He opened it a little and reached up for the catch at the top, then pushed the door so that they could walk in. He reached over the counter and lifted the glass jar down from the shelf and tipped the sweets into the scoop of the scales. He slipped them into a white paper bag and put the bag back on the scales again and put the glass stopper back on the jar. Liquorice toffee and nougat were what he liked and so did she. Lemon’s Pure Sweets it said on the silver-coloured wrappers of the liquorice toffees.

While he was weighing them she wanted to giggle, as she always did, but she didn’t because it would have spoilt everything. He pulled the door in and the bell rang. ‘Four pence ha’penny,’ he said when the girl with the plaits came out from the back. ‘You’re a holy terror!’ the girl said.

He always held the reins himself when they were on a street. He held them tight, sitting straight up, jerking one and then the other, now and again releasing one of his hands in order to wave at someone. ‘What’s it mean “and County”?’ she asked when they had passed all the shops.

‘And County?’

‘Driscoll and County, Broderick and County.’

‘The Co. is not for County, it’s for Company. “And Company Limited.” The Ltd means Limited.’

‘It’s for County at school. County Cork, County Waterford.’

‘It’s just the same abbreviation. Shortening a word so there won’t be too much written on a map or above a shop.’

‘Funny they’re the same.’

‘You like to have the reins now?’

There was a smell of leather in the trap, but it was stronger when the new suitcases were opened in the house. The trunks were half full already, their lids held upright by straps that folded away when they were closed. Henry measured the windows for boarding.

‘Who’s never been on a train before?’ her papa said, the way he did, as if she were still only three or four. He used to go away by train himself, away to school three times a year. He still had his trunk and his box, his initials painted on them in black. She asked him to tell her about the school and he said he would later, on the train. Everyone was busy now, he said.

‘I don’t want to go,’ she said, finding her mama in their bedroom.

‘Papa and I don’t want to go either.’

‘Why are we then?’

‘Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to.’

‘Papa wasn’t trying to kill those men.’

‘Did Henry tell you that?’

‘Henry didn’t. And Bridget didn’t.’

‘You’re not nice when you’re cross, Lucy.’

‘I don’t want to be nice. I don’t want to go with you.’

‘Lucy-’

‘I won’t go.’

She ran from the room and ran down to her crossing stones. They came to find her, calling out in the woods, but everything she said to them on the way back they didn’t hear. They didn’t want to hear, they didn’t want to listen.

‘Will you come to the creamery with me?’ Henry said the next day, and she shook her head dolefully. ‘Shall we have tea outside?’ her mama said, smiling at her. And her papa said the cat had her tongue when the tablecloth was spread on the grass and there was lemon cake, her favourite. She wished she hadn’t gone to Enniseala with him, she wished she hadn’t asked him about his fraenulum and what was written over the shops. All the time they were pretending.

‘Look,’ her papa said. ‘The hawk.’

And she looked up although she hadn’t meant to. The hawk wasn’t more than a dot against the sky, circling round and round. She watched it and her papa said don’t cry.

*

The weeping of Kitty Teresa was no longer heard in the bedrooms because Kitty Teresa had gone already, gone home to Dungarvan when another position couldn’t be found for her. She would come back the day they came back themselves, she promised before she left. No matter where she was she’d come back.

‘They’ve rented a place,’ Bridget said in the kitchen, and Henry took from the shelf above the range the piece of paper with the address on it. He didn’t say anything at first and then he said so that’s that. ‘Only till they’re fixed permanent,’ Bridget said. ‘They’ll buy a place, I’d say.’

In the yard Henry sawed the wood for boarding the windows. Lucy watched him, sitting on the ledge beneath the pear tree that was spread out against the yard’s long east wall. It was on her way back from school that she’d begun to bathe on her own, weighing her clothes down with her satchel and running quickly into the sea and out again, drying herself any old how. Henry knew; she didn’t know how but he did. When she slouched off now he probably guessed where she was going. She didn’t care. She didn’t care if he went away to tell on her. It wasn’t like him to do that, but the way things were he might.

In the field above the cliffs she heard the chiming of the Angelus bell in Kilauran. Sometimes you heard it, sometimes you didn’t. The sound still carried to her while she was pulling off her clothes on the strand. It was lost when she ran into the sea and waded out. This was always the best part – walking slowly through the waves, the coldness rising, invigorating on her skin, the pull of the undertow at her feet. She spread out her arms to swim beyond her depth, then floated with the tide.

The strand had been empty in both directions when she’d left it. Without being able to see clearly as she swam back to it, she knew that what seemed to be moving there now was the O’Reillys’ dog chasing its own shadow on the sand. It often did that; while she watched, it stood still for a moment, gazing out to where she was, before beginning its play again.

She turned on her back to float. If she ran away she’d take the short cut Paddy Lindon used to talk about. ‘Take to the high woods the steep side,’ he used to say. ‘Go long enough on and there’s the road for you.’

She swam towards the shore again and when the water became shallow she walked through the last of the waves. The dog was nosing about on the shingle and she knew that her clothes had been pilfered, that whatever had been taken would already be buried in the shingle or the seaweed. When she began to dress she found that her summer vest had gone but when she looked in the ragged line of seaweed and in the shingle she couldn’t find it.

Helpless in its disgrace, scolded all the way up the cliff, the nameless dog cringed piteously, until there had been punishment enough. The matted, untidy head was pressed against Lucy’s legs then, to be stroked and patted and embraced. ‘Home now,’ she ordered and, fierce again, watched while disobedience was considered and thought better of.

In her room, she replaced from among the clothes that had been packed already the vest that had been lost. He never went any other way, Paddy Lindon used to say, when he’d be heading for the processions in Dungarvan or for the Sunday hurling. When his luck was in, a cart would go by on the road and he’d hail it.

*

‘This is specially yours,’ her papa said.

He had gone back to Domville’s to get it. It was blue, not like the other suitcases, and smaller because she was small herself. Leather, even though it was blue, he said, and showed her the keys that fitted its lock. ‘We mustn’t lose the keys,’ he said. ‘Shall I keep one?’

She couldn’t smile, she didn’t want to cry. All her things, he said, all her precious things would fit in it, the flintstones, the dagger stick.

‘One day we’ll have L.G. put on the lid.’

‘Thank you, Papa,’ she said.

‘You go and put your things in it.’

But in her room the blue suitcase remained empty on the window seat, its lid closed, one of the keys that opened its lock still tied to its handle.

*

‘I understand,’ Bridget said when it was explained to her that it might be a little time before some at least of the possessions left behind were sent for. The instruction was given that Henry and she should walk through the rooms occasionally, since things sometimes went wrong in an empty house. Lucy heard all that.

The sheets for draping the furniture were ready in the hall. Upstairs on the first landing there was a pile for the jumble sale, the clothes they didn’t want to take with them. Some of Lucy’s were there too, as if everything now was being taken for granted.

‘Oh now, you mustn’t, darling.’ Her mama was in the doorway of her bedroom but Lucy didn’t look up, her face pressed hard into her pillow. Then her mama came in and put her arms around her. She wiped away the tears and there was the same scent on her handkerchief, always the same it was. It would be all right, her mama said. She promised it would be.

‘We have to say good-bye to Mr Aylward,’ her papa said later, finding her in the apple orchard.

She shook her head, but then he took her hand and they walked through the fields and along the strand to Kilauran. The O’Reillys’ dog watched them from the top of the cliffs, knowing better than to follow them, because her papa was there.

‘Couldn’t I stay with Henry and Bridget?’ she asked.

‘Ah no, no,’ her papa said.

The fishermen were spreading out their nets. They saluted, and her papa saluted them back. He said something about the weather and one of them said it was grand altogether these days. Lucy looked about for the fisherman who talked with his fingers, but he wasn’t there. She asked her papa and he said that man was maybe still out with his boat.

‘I’d be all right with Henry and Bridget,’ she said.

‘Ah no, darling, no.’

She reached up for his hand, turning her head away so that he wouldn’t know she was trying not to cry. When they came to the schoolroom he lifted her up to see in at the window. Everything was tidy because it was the holidays, everything left as Mr Aylward said it must be, the four empty tables, the benches pulled in to them, the charts hanging up. Bayonets were first made in Bayonne.Cider is the juice of apples. The blackboard was clear, the duster folded by the chalk box. The shiny maps – rivers and mountains, the counties of England and Ireland – were rolled up on the shelf.

‘We need a bit of time,’ her papa said in Mr Aylward’s house, his head inclined in her direction, and she knew he didn’t mean all three of them when he said we.

‘Ah, well, of course,’ Mr Aylward said. ‘Of course.’

‘It breaks my heart,’ her papa said. ‘To tell you the truth.’

Yet what else could he have done, he asked Mr Aylward, when he’d looked down at the shadows standing there, knowing there would be petrol somewhere as well, knowing that whoever was there had poisoned the dogs? He’d been nervous, firing in the dark, he said. No wonder he’d never made a soldier.

‘There isn’t any man in a family wouldn’t have done the same,’ Mr Aylward said.

A sheepdog from Lahardane had gone on to poisoned land before, Henry had said; not that that dog had died, but even so. Henry wanted everything to be all right, pretending too.

‘You keep the poetry up, girl,’ Mr Aylward said. ‘She’s right good at learning her poetry, Captain.’

‘She’s a good little girl.’

Mr Aylward kissed her, saying good-bye. Her papa finished what was in the glass he’d been given. He shook hands with Mr Aylward, and Mr Aylward said that it should come to this. Then they went away.

‘Why’d they bring petrol with them?’ she asked.

‘One day I’ll tell you about all that.’

They passed the fishermen, who were now repairing the nets they’d laid out. It was the place where the women had stood, gazing out at the sea when the Mary Nell had not returned. The women had been there when she passed on her way to school, and again on her way back, their black shawls pulled tight, nearly hiding their faces. The storm that had wrecked the Mary Nell was over then, the sun was even shining. ‘Bestow thy blessing,’ they had prayed with Mr Aylward, ‘that they may be kept safe in every peril of the deep.’ But that same day there was the sound of the women’s keening. No fisherman came back, none was rescued, because the Ballycotton lifeboat had been beaten back by the gales. No drowned body was washed up with the smashed planks and ragged strips of canvas, with the splinters of mast and boom. ‘A man’s not given back from that sea,’ Henry said. ‘In living memory and before.’ From miles out, the sharks hurried in when there were wrecks.

As she passed by the fishermen with her father, the sound of the keening, the mournful wail that carried over the half doors of the cottages, seemed to Lucy to be there again, a forlorn echo of a terrible time returning in a time that was terrible also. The cheerfulness that came now and again to Lahardane wasn’t real and only lasted for as long as they remembered to pretend.

‘I don’t want to leave Lahardane,’ she said on the strand.

‘None of us wants to, lady.’

He bent down and lifted her up, the way he used to when she was little. He held her in his arms and made her look out over the calm sea, looking for the man who spoke with his fingers, but she couldn’t see a fishing boat, nor could he. He put her down again and wrote with a pebble on the sand. Lucy Gault, he wrote. ‘Now, that’s a lovely name.’

They climbed the cliff at the place where it was easy, up to the field next to the O’Reillys’ turnip field, where there’d been barley last year. When Mr O’Reilly was weeding whatever crop was there he’d wave to her.

‘Why must we go?’ she cried.

‘Because they don’t want us here,’ her papa said.

*

Heloise wrote to her bank, in England, to explain what was about to happen and to seek advice about her holdings, all of which were in different areas of enterprise within the Rio Verde Railway Company. For generations there had been a family connection with the renowned railway, but in the present circumstances – since for a time at least her inheritance would play a greater part in her life and that of her husband and their child – her tentative query did not seem out of place and the bank’s response confirmed its wisdom. Steadfast and prosperous for almost eighty years, the Rio Verde Railway was at last beginning to display signs of what might possibly be the onset of commercial fatigue: Heloise was recommended to consider disposing of all, or the greater part, of an investment that for so long had served her family well.

In Enniseala the Captain sought confirmation or otherwise of this advice from his solicitor and friend of many years, Aloysius Sullivan, who was as knowledgeable about financial matters as he was about the law. He shared the bank’s opinion: with plenty of trading acumen left, and its accumulated funds to draw on, the Rio Verde Railway would certainly not collapse overnight, but even so a more diversified portfolio was his suggestion also.

‘No need to think about it before we leave,’ Captain Gault reported when he returned to Lahardane. Echoing again the view of the bank, the solicitor had confirmed as well that this wasn’t something to decide about in a hurry.

They talked about being in England then, of the many other practicalities they would have to see to when they were less distracted by emotion. How different their lives would be! each thought but neither said.

*

The straw fish-baskets hung in a row in the long scullery beside the cold room. They were flat and they didn’t hold much so Lucy took two, one at a time, on different days. She took bread from the bin in the pantry, a heel of white the first time, then heels of brown or soda, whatever would not be noticed. She wrapped them in the shop paper that was kept in the drawers of the kitchen dresser. She filled one basket and then the other with the packages, with apples and scallions and food she took from her plate in the dining-room when no one was noticing. She kept the baskets in a shed in the yard which no one went into, hidden behind a wheelbarrow that had fallen apart.

She rooted among the jumble on the landing for a skirt and jumper. She made a bundle of them in an old black coat of her mother’s: at night it would be cold. On the landing there was no sound except the rustling she made herself, and when she took the clothes to her hiding place she met no one on the back stairs, no one in the dog passage.

*

On the afternoon of the day before the day of the departure Captain Gault went through his papers, feeling that it was something he should do. But the occupation was tedious and, abandoning it, he dismantled instead the rifle he had fired in the night. He cleaned its parts purposefully, as if anticipating their use in the future, although he did not intend to take the rifle with him.

‘Oh, all this will fall into place,’ he murmured more than once, confident in his reassurance to himself. Leaving, arriving, the furniture one day settled around them again: time and circumstance would arrange their lives, as in exile so many other lives had been arranged.

He returned to leafing through his papers, conscientiously doing his best with them.

*

Heloise secured the leather straps on the trunks that were ready to go, then attached the labels she had written. Wondering if she would ever see again all that had to be left behind, she distributed camphor balls in drawers and wardrobes, in sleeves and pockets.

This was the empty time of day. No matter what excitements there might earlier have been, or in what way the day so far had been different from other days, the house was quiet now. No rattle of pans disturbed the hours before evening came, no music on the gramophone in the drawing-room, no chatter of voices. Betraying nothing of the chagrin the task induced, Henry carried downstairs the trunks and suitcases that had been packed. On the kitchen table Bridget spread out on her ironing blanket the shirt collars the Captain would require on his travels. In the depths of the range the heaters for her iron had just begun to glow.

*

When Lucy passed the open door of the kitchen, Bridget did not look up. Henry was not in the yard. Only the orchard was noisy, the rooks scattering from among the apple branches when her presence disturbed them.

She went the steep way, as Paddy Lindon had advised, avoiding the easier track through the glen in case Henry was out on it. She didn’t know how long her journey to Dungarvan would take; Paddy Lindon had never been precise about that. She wouldn’t know where to look for Kitty Teresa’s house when she got there, but whoever gave her a lift would. Kitty Teresa would say she’d have to take her back, but it wouldn’t matter because everything would be different by then: all the time she’d thought about running away Lucy had known it would be. As soon as they discovered she wasn’t there, as soon as they realized what had happened, it would be different. ‘It breaks my heart, too,’ her mama had said. ‘And papa’s. Papa’s most of all.’ When Kitty Teresa brought her back they’d say they’d always known they couldn’t leave.

She passed a moss-encrusted rock that she remembered from some other time when she was here, then a fallen tree that wasn’t familiar at all, with spikes where it had cracked off that could catch you if it was dark. It wasn’t dark now, no more than gloomy, like it always was in the high woods. But darkness would come in an hour or so and she’d have to get to the road before it did, although there wouldn’t be any chance of a cart going by until the morning. She hurried and almost at once she stumbled, thrown forward, her foot caught in a hole. Pain spread from her ankle when she tried to move it. She couldn’t stand up.

*

‘Lucy!’ Captain Gault called out in the yard. ‘Lucy!’

There was no answer and in the milking parlour he shouted down the length of it to Henry.

‘Tell Lucy if you see her I’ve gone to say good-bye to the fisherman we missed the last time.’ By the avenue and the road, he said, back by the strand. ‘Say I could do with a bit of company.’

He called her name again at the front of the house before he set off on his own.

*

‘She was here earlier,’ Bridget said. ‘I saw her about.’

It wasn’t unusual; Lucy often wasn’t there. Meeting Bridget on the stairs, Heloise had made her enquiry without anxiety. It could be, Bridget supposed, that there was the dog over at the O’Reillys’ to say good-bye to.

‘You’ve been a strength to me, Bridget.’ In that quiet, untroubled moment Heloise paused before returning to the suitcases in her bedroom. ‘All these years you’ve been a strength to me.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t be going, ma’am. I wish it was different.’

‘I know. I know.’

*

On the avenue Captain Gault wondered in what circumstances he would again move through its shadows, beneath the long arch of branches that stole most of the light. On either side of him the grass, deprived, was a modest summer growth, yellow here and there with dandelions, foxgloves withering where they had thrived in the shade. He paused for a moment when he came to the gate-lodge, where life would continue when the house was abandoned. Now that an end had come, he doubted this evening that he would ever bring his family back to live at Lahardane. The prediction came from nowhere, an unwelcome repetition of what, these last few days, he had privately denied.

On the pale clay road beyond the gates he turned to the left, the berried honeysuckle scentless now, September fuchsia in the hedges. They would not for long have to rely on Heloise’s legacy. Vaguely, he saw himself in a shipping office, even though he hardly knew what the work undertaken in such places involved. It didn’t much matter; any decent occupation would do. Now and again they would return, a visit to see how everything was, to keep a connection going. ‘It isn’t for ever,’ Heloise had said last night, and had spoken of the windows opened again, the dust sheets lifted, fires lit, flowerbeds weeded. And he’d said no, of course not.

In Kilauran he conversed with the deaf and dumb fisherman, as he had learnt to in his childhood: gestures made, words mouthed. They said good-bye. ‘Not for too long,’ he left his silent promise behind, and felt a falsehood compounded here too. He stood for a while on the rocks where sea-pinks grew in clumps. The surface of the sea was a dappled sheen, streaked with the last faint afterglow of sunset. Its waves came softly, hardly touched with foam. There was no other movement on it anywhere.

Had he been right not to reveal to Heloise, or to his child, the finality he had begun to sense in this departure? Should he have gone back to that family in Enniseala to plead a little longer? Should he have offered more than he had, whatever was felt might settle the misdemeanour he had committed, accepting that the outrage of that night was his and not the trespassers’ who had come? Climbing down the rocks on to the shingle, shuffling over it to the sand, he didn’t know. He didn’t know when he walked on, lingering now and again to gaze out at the empty sea. He might have said to himself on this last night that he had too carelessly betrayed the past and then betrayed, with easy comforting, a daughter and a wife. He was the one who was closest to place and people, whose love of leftover land, of house and orchard and garden, of sea and seashore, fostered instinct and premonition. Yet when he searched his feelings there was nothing there to guide him, only confusion and contradiction.

He turned towards the cliffs, crunching over the shingle again. Lost for a while in the trees, his house re-appeared, a light coming on in an upstairs window. His foot caught on something among the stones and he bent to pick it up.

*

‘Lucy!’ Heloise called and Henry said she might have gone after her father. He hadn’t seen her to pass on the Captain’s message but, contrary as she was these times, she’d maybe been hiding about in the yard somewhere and had heard it for herself. She hadn’t spoken a word to him for three days, nor to Bridget either. The way things were, it wasn’t surprising she hadn’t come in for her tea.

Heloise heard him shouting Lucy’s name in the yard sheds. ‘Lucy!’ she shouted herself in the apple orchard and in the field where the cattle were, which was the way back from the O’Reillys’. She passed through the gate in the white railing that separated the fields from the turn-around in front of the house. She crossed the gravel to the hydrangea lawn.

It was she who had first called it that, just as it was she who had discovered that the Lahardane fields had once been known as Long Meadow and Cloverhill and John Joe’s and the river field. She’d always wanted to hear those names used again, but nobody had bothered when she suggested it. The hydrangeas were heavily in bloom, their blue still distinctive in the darkening twilight, bunching out around the semi-circle they formed along a grey stone wall. They were the loveliest of all Lahardane’s features, she had always thought.

‘Lucy!’ she called through the trees. She stood still, listening in the silence. She went further into the woods, coming out twenty minutes later on the track that ran down to the stream and the crossing stones. ‘Lucy!’ she shouted. ‘Lucy!’

She called out her child’s name in the house when she returned to it, opening the doors of rooms that weren’t used, climbing up to attics. She went downstairs again. She stood by the open hall door, and in a moment heard her husband returning. She knew he was alone because there were no voices. She heard the gate she had passed through earlier creaking as he opened it and closed it, the latch falling into place.

‘Is Lucy with you?’ she raised her voice again to ask.

His footsteps on the gravel halted. He was hardly more than a shadow.

‘Lucy?’ she said.

‘Isn’t Lucy here?’

He still stood where he had stopped. There was something white in his hand, a shaft of lamplight from the open hall door spilling over it.