The Story of Lucy Gault

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.