Title: No Cause, No Cause
Rating: K+
Wordcount: 1600
Warnings/Spoilers: Basic AoGG spoilers and speculation. Note: AU from early AoGG.
Summary: "I wouldn't give a dog I liked to that Blewett woman,"
A/N: Title taken from Shakespeare's King Lear. An AU from the beginning of Anne of Green Gables. Made up PEI geography.
(This remains unbeta-ed and barely edited. I welcome any and all feedback.)
No Cause, No Cause
"I wouldn't give a dog I liked to that Blewett woman,"
Anne of Green Gables
The dawn of fall is cold, grey, and grave in ways and portends that Marilla does not fathom. Even before she has stirred from the warm rack of her bed, her temples throb, and there grows already a massive pressure behind her eyes. It is another morning like those in a long line of mornings.
Her eyes have a hard time focusing on their work in the pre-noon light, they flicker in and out: gray, fuzzy, dim. Marilla burns her hand on the stove again. The porridge is uneven, lumpy. Matthew says nothing, and leaves the kitchen before his words will betray him. He has grown ever more silent since the spring. The morning passes like ashes into the dustbin: cold, soundless, lifeless.
Marilla Cuthbert does not think of this as punishment; but she bears it with the ache of a faithless conscience.
The girl.
There is no other, not for them. Once, when Marilla had proffered the idea, another try, a boy come fall, she thought Matthew would be silent for a month. He is, save one word.
Marilla had seen her in town, once. No, twice, her memory has misled her.
The first time, it is entering town in her buggy for the post. There is beside the steady progression of the horizon in front of her, a flash of color—that unmistakable red—bowed over many dull brown parcels wrapped in string, the crooked shoulders knotted under strain, dust on her scuffed boots, and spit-up and vomit stains on her pinafore.
Marilla had thought to call out to her: Anne Shirley. But had stopped, the words caught in her throat, the reins gently slipping through her gloves, the girl's red head bowed and unstirring; and Marilla, for the second time in her life, is caught in the cold grip of good manners, and has absolutely nothing to say. The scene passes like a dream, a memory already made, the little red Anne ragdoll trudging down the road, the buggy moving on its own, the iron shackles of fate laid down on them.
God go with you, child, Marilla prayed, her mouth too weak to say the words. Her heart feels the way an old laying hen looks on Saturday evening: there is the grasping hand, the shadow of the axe, and then—nothing.
There is a second time, Marilla remembered, her tea long gone cold and over-brewed in the pot. She shook her eyes against the ache of pain of pain, the morning light slipping in beyond the green shutters of the Gables.
The girl, Anne, walks the oldest Blewett children to school when they go. She does not go. One day, when it is bitter cold, even for the fall, and an early frost for October, Marilla had succumbed to weakness, rocking on the porch in her heaviest shawl against the morning dew. She had hoped to see the Anne-girl this morning, passing back to the Blewett holdings. Marilla saw her coming over the hill at a brisk walk. When Anne came closer, Marilla can see it is closer to a hobbling trot, with Anne's hands pressed against her side. A stitch, Marilla decided, nothing more. She mustered herself.
"Good morning, Anne Shirley," Marilla called.
"Good morning, ma'am," Anne called back, not breaking a stride in her walk.
"Will you have some tea this morning? It's bitterly cold." Marilla offered, squashing a quaver with twenty years of instinctual control.
"No ma'am, I haven't time to stop, Missus Blewett expects me."
"Anne—" Marilla said, and is that her treacherous hand uncurling towards the gate?
Anne doesn't stop, but her head turned, the violet-blue eyes are wild and frantic, seeing only the present moment. Where are her dreams, Marilla wondered, who has never had a wistful thought in her life. Her eyes shouldn't seem so dull.
"Missus Blewett," Anne repeated slowly, with a tremor in her voice and a tremble in her lip, "expects me. Ma'am, please don't keep me." There is something frayed in her look, beyond her stilted words. Marilla can only watch her run off, the thin white legs flashing under her too short skirt. Her knickers need stitching, and her skirt is too thin for a cold October. All of her needs mending.
She doesn't say anything to Matthew. What would she say? Instinctively, she knows, apologies to Matthew are inadequate. It is not as if Anne is a tart she has burned, a part of wheat field she has trampled, a favorite dog she has given away without permission.
This kind of hurt is like death.
Marilla watched the horseman appear over the horizon in a stupor. Matthew is in the lower pasture, but it is not him anyhow. She would recognize the man coming half-blind, for she sees him, oftener these days, in her dreams.
"Miss Cuthbert." Mr. John Blythe says, lifting his hat. "Is Matthew here?"
"No, Mr. Blythe, he's down in the lower pasture. I can call him for you, if you'd like." Marilla responded, with a kind of daze.
"Well, when you see him, tell him we'd like his help in town." Mr. Blythe half-turned his horse away from the gate.
"Why?"
"We're looking for a runaway—that Anne girl with the Blewetts hasn't been seen for a week."
Marilla has never been speechless, breathless in her life. She stuttered:
"N—no news?"
"We'll have to be dredging the ponds soon. But if she's gone out to sea, no one will ever find her." Blythe turned his horse toward the road, and then turned his shoulders back toward Marilla. There is no expression on his face. "Good day, Miss Cuthbert. Please give Matthew my message."
"Thank you, Mr. Blythe." Marilla found her voice is a croak. She moved from the porch mechanically, feeling her way along the wall to the door.
Anne a runaway? And a week ago? Is she dead; is this too Marilla's fault?
Marilla's hands uncurl of their own volition, and she moves as if half-drunk, dreamily through the late afternoon-sun. There is Matthew to tell. And ponds to dredge. Deep pools, and wider seas.
She remembers, then, the Blewett woman's clawlike hand clutching tight to Anne's that morning, the stiffness in the thin little shoulders, the erectness of the carriage. Anne, she recalls, did not turn back. How Marilla wished she would, how Marilla might have bent if there had been a bending in Anne first. And she had had Anne for a night, and then, and then but thrown her away.
Marilla wanders in her thoughts, in the fields. The sky is too blue for her eyes, the grass too green. It is too much with her. The afternoon fades into violet shadow.
Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord.
And Marilla sees only one thing to do but to go home to Green Gables.
She stands there a long time, shawl around her shoulders, lantern held high until her shoulder begins to ache. There she is, Anne-girl, in the straw of the third stall. Fast asleep, barn cat curled up half on her, half on the straw. An old gray horse blanket covers her, but the half of her face Marilla can see looks white against the yellow gold of the straw. Then the head shifts in sleep. There is a purple black bruise across the other eye, down onto the pale cheek.
Marilla lets out a long slow breath, and her chest feels too iron-stiff to let in more. Surely something is breaking inside of her. Again: the hand, the axe, the shadow of nothing—
What might have been loosened over months or days or weeks unfastens in an instant: the acute wound of such a thing reverberates through Marilla's bones.
"No Rachel, you cannot see her. She isn't fit to be seen.
"Whatever do you mean, Marilla?" Rachel exclaimed, half-offended to be denied the privilege.
"What I mean, Rachel, is that Blewett woman demanded everything of hers back. Right down to the last stitch."
"Mercy's sakes!" Rachel retorted, puffing up in her insult like an insulted cat.
"And I gladly gave them to her." Marilla said coolly, turning to the tea pot. "Our Anne, in this house, shall have new things."
All new things, Marilla repeated to herself. Across the wood is a brook she has never played in, a schoolhouse in which she has never sat, a beach she has not visited, a wood she has not explored.
A room of her own, a Green Gables to belong to, a Matthew and a Marilla to own.
A love to widen. And all was as it should be.
"'Yes, it's beautiful,' said Gilbert, looking steadily down into Anne's uplifted face, 'but wouldn't it have been more beautiful still, Anne, if there had been no separation or misunderstanding . . . if they had come hand in hand all the way through life, with no memories behind them but those which belonged to each other?'"
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea