In the early morning of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one,
three arsonists -- shadows in the night -- arrive at Lahardane, the
home of Captain Everard Gault, his wife, Heloise, and daughter,
Lucy. The sheepdogs that alarmed the Gaults of previous trespasses
had since been poisoned. On this occasion, though, it is a warning
shot fired above the silhouetted heads that sends them retreating,
saving the estate from being set ablaze. But blood speckles the
pebbles of the approach in the dawn's light, implying that the
Captain's single shot wounded one of the intruders.
Everard quickly learns the identity of the wounded -- a boy named
Horahan -- and thereafter sets to make amends. His apologies and
offers of restitution to the boy and his family are ineffective,
however, and the Gaults realize then that further defiance to
certain forthcoming attacks is senseless. "The past was the enemy
in Ireland," writes Trevor. Protestant property was the common
target in this time of insurrection and civil war, two years after
Sinn Fein declared Ireland independent, and the Gaults had obvious
British sympathies: Everard, a former British army officer;
Heloise, an English wife and mother; Lahardane, an ancestral Irish
property since the eighteenth century. It is too dangerous for them
to stay. They too must desert Ireland like so many families before
them.
Eight-year-old Lucy is never properly explained the danger of
staying at Laharadane. It is the only place she has known; a place
where the flow of streams around moss-covered stones, the bloom of
the apple orchard, the pull of the sea's tide, and the fishermen on
the shore are the very fabric of her being. So it is then, forlorn
and mournful, that Lucy decides to run away on the night before her
family's scheduled departure for England. However, when her parents
find an article of her clothing on the shore where she frequently
went swimming they fear the worst: that she has drowned.
Stricken by grief and remorse, devastated by guilt and blame,
Everard and Heloise regard the plans they have made and retreat
from Ireland. Windows are boarded, furniture is draped, and
Lahardane is left in the care of their servants, Henry and Bridget.
But almost as soon as the Gaults have left Henry finds Lucy --
alive, emaciated, her ankle broken and badly swollen -- in an
abandoned cottage in the woods. The Gaults, however, have forsaken
their intentions to relocate to England and have vanished into
Europe. The trail following them is less than cold, their
whereabouts critical yet unknown, and for thirty years this remains
as they sojourn through France, Switzerland and Italy.
Henry and Bridget resuscitate Lahardane and take up custodial care
of Lucy. As she matures, though, she also becomes more reclusive
and insular. Children in the village refuse to play with her. She
is stared at, spoken of in hushed tones and, over time, exiled. The
anguish over her parents' fate wanes as the myth of hers similarly
grows. She develops into a voracious reader and to a certain degree
lives her life vicariously through the characters that populate the
novels in her family's extensive library. It is by chance then that
at age twenty-four Lucy meets a man -- Ralph.
Ralph, a young Englishman, arrives in Ennisealea to work as a tutor
to the banker's sons for the summer. While on a drive,
familiarizing himself with the Irish countryside, he happens upon
Lahardane. Ralph and Lucy, upon meeting, are immediately enchanted
with one another and Ralph, after his departure, can't let a
thought pass through his mind that isn't of beautiful Lucy.
Properly, he is invited back to Lahardane, as those closest to Lucy
hold their breath and privately hope that Ralph will become her
future suitor. Sadly, those hopes are dashed. The end of summer
nears and so too does Ralph's tenure with the Ryalls, but not
before he pronounces his love for Lucy. Lucy's self-reproach for
the bisecting of her family weighs heavy, though. "She believed she
had no right to love until she felt forgiven," and thusly she
rejects Ralph's affection and proposal of marriage. His love
unrequited, Ralph returns to his English home and shortly
thereafter enters the war.
Guilt-laden, unbeknown to them that their daughter and home
persevere, Everard and Heloise live a life in exile on the
continent -- an exile both self-imposed and inflicted by
Mussolini's war. It's not until Heloise contracts influenza and
perishes that Everard resolves to return to Ireland and the home he
left behind three decades previous.
Arriving at Lahardane, the Captain is astonished to find the house
unsealed and tended. Yet he is more astonished to find Lucy alive;
the daughter he thought for deceased now a grown woman. But
Everard's return to a paternal relationship with Lucy is,
logically, strained. Moreover, he feels undeserved of anything
greater than the respect Henry and Bridget would extend to that of
a stranger, for it is their house now -- as it has been since he
entrusted it to their care with his exit in nineteen twenty-one --
and he is a phantasm. Still, Everard makes every effort to atone
for his absence, for an adolescence and adulthood choked by his
neglect, delinquency and taciturnity.
In the end, the forgiveness that Everard searches for is diminished
by his daughter's redemption: Lucy has forgiven the arsonist
wounded by his single shot. It was the young boy, Horahan, who
many, many years ago put the tragic sequence of events in their
lives into motion. But it is now the older man, after unrelenting
nightmares of successfully setting the Gault estate ablaze, killing
Lucy, who is driven to insanity.
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