Save My Soul Alive, a blue castle fanfic

Save My Soul Alive

By Laura Schiller

Based on: The Blue Castle

(Dialogue quoted from pages 162-163, Bantam edition)

"She is a rare artist, this old Mother Nature, who works 'for the joy of working' and not in any spirit of vain show. Today the fir woods are a symphony of greens and greys, so subtle that you cannot tell where one shade begins to be the other. Grey trunk, green bough, grey-green moss above the white, grey-shadowed floor.

"Yet the old gypsy doesn't like unrelieved monotones. She must have a dash of colour. See it. A broken dead fir bough, of a beautiful red-brown, swinging among the beards of moss."

Barney watched and listened as Valancy stood still in her snowshoes, reciting John Foster. Her breath misted from her lips in white clouds of steam; her face, once so pale, was flushed like a rose in the cold of a Muskoka winter. Her amber eyes shone with rapt admiration – for him, Barney, for his words, though she didn't know it. She spoke them softly, tasting every word, her sweet, throaty, summery voice turning every sentence into poetry.

Barney's reaction, as usual, was profound embarrassment in the guise of disgust. He knew at least five places where he could have improved that paragraph, but hadn't bothered because his editor was pushing him to get the thing published already. He didn't feel it quite deserved the compliment of being committed to memory and spoken aloud in a voice like that.

"Good Lord," he muttered, striding ahead so she couldn't see him blush, "Do you learn all that fellow's books by heart?"

"John Foster's books were all that saved my soul alive these past five years," said Valancy.

At this point they were both distracted by the pattern of the snow on an elm-tree, but Valancy's words stuck in Barney's mind like burrs throughout their walk. He turned them over and over in his head, her words, and the way she looked when she said them – as if John Foster were her own personal God.

Saved my soul. Incredible. It was one thing to dream of touching the heart of some faraway, anonymous reader, but quite another to be confronted with the living, breathing, starry-eyed evidence in the shape of his wife. Could she really mean that? She must – Valancy never said things she didn't mean, at least not to her husband. They had promised.

For a moment, he longed to tell her. No more secrets, no more pretense. To watch the joy and astonishment light her face as she learned that the husband she loved and the writer she idolized were one and the same. Except...he set his jaw grimly and stopped, glancing behind him at Valancy struggling to keep up on her snowshoes.

No. He couldn't tell her. He had got out of the habit of trusting people long ago, when first his friend, then his fiancée, had broken his heart. He knew that if he told her how rich and famous he was, the doubts would creep up in spite of himself – he would be haunted by the question of whether she still loved him, not his money or fame.

He had to keep believing in her...this wood-elf, this child, this woman...the best and dearest friend he'd ever had.

Once she had caught up with him, out of breath, tear-streaks dewing her face in the chilly wind, he took her mittened hand in his and matched her pace.

"Tired, Moonlight?" he asked.

A colder wind than the one in the woods blew across his heart. There it was again, the reminder of her terrible fragility, the hint of theshadow they had promised not to name.

"Just a little," said Valancy, with a shrug.

"All right, then. Let's go home."

The idea of my books, of all things, saving her! thought Barney, the bitterness that had become a habit with him twisting his face into a scowl. But goddamn it, if only they could!