Trevor, William: The Story of Lucy Gault

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.’