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.
2
‘Holy Mother of God!’ Bridget whispered, her face gone pallid.
‘I’m telling you.’ Henry nodded slowly. They were down on the strand, he said. The Captain had come up through the fields and then they’d both gone back to the strand.
‘He found her clothes. The tide was going out and he walking over from Kilauran. That’s all was said.’
It couldn’t be that, Bridget whispered. It couldn’t be what he was saying. ‘Holy Mother, it couldn’t!’
‘The tide would take anything with it. Except what was caught up in the stones. He had clothing in his hand.’ Henry paused. ‘A while back I wondered was she going bathing on her own. If I’d have seen her at it I’d have said.’
‘Would she be over on the rocks? She was low in herself all this time. Would she be over where she’d get the shrimps?’
Henry didn’t say anything, and then Bridget shook her head. Why would any child take off her clothes on a strand unless it was to bathe in the sea, the last bathe she’d have in it before they left?
‘I wondered it too,’ she said. ‘Her hair a bit damp a few times.’
‘I’ll go down. I’ll bring them a light.’
When Bridget was left alone she prayed. Her hands felt cold when she pressed them together. She prayed aloud, stifling her tears. A few minutes later she followed her husband, through the yard and the apple orchard, out into the grazing field and down to the strand.
*
They stared through the dark at the empty sea. They did not speak, but stood close to one another as if fearful of being alone. Softly, the waves lapped, the sea advancing, each time a little more with the turn of the tide.
‘Oh, ma’am, ma’am!’ Bridget’s exclamation was shrill, her footsteps noisy on the stones before she reached the sand. A while ago she’d thought it, she cried, the words tumbling over one another, her features scarcely seeming to be her own in the flickers of Henry’s lamp.
At a loss, Captain Gault and his wife turned from the sea. Could there be hope, somehow, in this agitation, some grain of hope where there had been none before? In their bewilderment, for a moment, there was all that, the same for both of them.
‘I’m not saying she ever said a word, ma’am. It’s only Henry and myself thought it. We should have said it to you, sir.’
‘Said what, Bridget?’ There was a weary politeness in the Captain’s tone, and patience while he waited for an irrelevancy: already expectation had shrunk away to nothing.
‘All I’d notice was her hair was a bit wet when she’d come in.’
‘From bathing?’
‘If we’d known it for sure we’d have told.’
There was a silence, then Captain Gault said:
‘You’re not to blame, Bridget. No one will ever think that.’
‘Her forget-me-not dress she was wearing, sir.’
‘It wasn’t her dress.’
Her summer vest, Heloise said, and in silence again they walked towards where it had been found.
‘We told her lies,’ the Captain said before they reached the place.
Heloise didn’t understand. Then she remembered the reassurances and the half promises, and remembered knowing that the promises might not be kept. Disobedience had been a child’s defiance, deception the coinage they had offered her themselves.
‘She knew I’d always bathe with her,’ the Captain said.
The splinter of driftwood that had snagged what the Captain had picked up was still there, its pale, smooth surface just visible in the dark. Henry moved the lamp, looking for something else, but there was nothing.
As if somehow it had acquired a potency of its own in feeding on circumstances and events, the falsity that beguiled the Captain, and his wife and their servants, was neither questioned nor denied. The house had been searched, the sheds in the yard, the garden, the orchard. Even though nothing had suggested that so late in the evening the missing child might have been in the woods, her name had been called out there; the O’Reillys’ kitchen had been visited. The sea was what remained. It seemed no more than the mockery of wishful thinking that its claims, so insistently pressed by what facts there were, should not be accepted.
‘Will you come over to Kilauran, Henry, and we’ll take a boat out?’
‘I will, sir.’
‘Leave the lamp with them here.’
The two men went. Hours later, on the spit of rocks that broke the long expanse of sand and shingle, the women they left behind found a sandal among the shrimp pools.
*
The fishermen at Kilauran learnt of the loss when they rowed in at dawn from their fishing. They reported that all night they’d seen nothing from their boats, but the superstition that long ago had enriched their fishermen’s talk was muttered again among them. Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.
*
As the surface of the seashore rocks was pitted by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distress brought by the sea, so silence did at Lahardane.