Of Somewhere
I'm very happy you've found your way here and feel honoured to present to you my latest writing endeavour – if, admittedly, a little later than originally planned. It is, I think, not the kind of story that LMM would have set in her sometimes too sweet Anne world, which never quite dealt properly with the nitty-gritty parts of life that it touched upon, but for all that, she was a woman very aware of all the nuances life can present and she wrote about them all the same – if, alas, not by way of Anne. I'm taking it upon myself, then, to try my hand at infusing some of those more difficult nuances into this particular literary world, though certainly without claiming to be comparable to The Great Creator, as she has been called elsewhere to admirable effect.
We are returning to a historical setting with this story, specifically the years of the Great War. All Anne books up to and including RV shall be regarded as canon and the same is mainly true for the first year or so of RoI, though I have to switch up some things from early RoI as well to make my plot work as envisioned. After that, we diverge from the story as written by LMM herself to create a new timeline and see where it takes us.
The premise for this story has been knocking around in my head for years now, perhaps for as long as a decade, but I never quite figured out a way to put enough meat to the idea to make it worth either my while or yours. Last autumn, things finally came together in my head in a way that I hope will result in a story worth reading.
I will try my best to keep my weekly posting schedule, but there's a chance I might have to switch to biweekly at some point due to time constraints. For the same reason, there won't be any lyrics-inspired chapter titles for the time being, though I might go back later and add them. Those small caveats aside, I hope you enjoy the story! As always, I value all your thoughts and comments and am ever curious to hear what you think!
Prologue
Susan is the first to notice.
Perhaps it might come as a surprise that Susan Baker, self-declared old maid, is the first to read the signs, but it should not be forgotten that Susan saw many a child join the Ingleside fray over the years. She knows, therefore, which signs to look for, even if they show themselves in unexpected places.
It's not that Rilla doesn't try her best to hide it anyway, of course.
She isn't quite sure what she's hiding, exactly, or why she feels the need to hide it. As the last child to have been born to Ingleside more than sixteen years ago, she's never experienced the advent of a new addition to the world and thus, doesn't know much about which signs to look for. For all that, she isn't entirely clueless either though, having heard rumours among the older girls and whispers shared between the good housewives of Glen when they didn't think she was listening.
She knows enough, from those stolen snatches of conversation and the raised eyebrows accompanying them, to know that something is greatly amiss and that no-one must know, even if she isn't quite sure about the details of what is happening. It's more of a feeling, an ominous sense of impending doom, that makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up and keeps her quiet in face of the unfathomable.
At first, it isn't too difficult either.
At first, admittedly, she barely has any idea herself that she's hiding anything. It's an unconscious turn, a collection of small, barely discernible decisions that amount to an act of subterfuge before she has any idea of what is happening at all.
The slight dizziness overcoming her at unforeseen moments of the day is easy enough to write off as a result of stress. There's a war going on, after all, of the kind the world has never seen before, and two of her brothers have been irrevocably swallowed up by it, not to mention all those other young men she knows. Who then, will raise their eyebrows at the occasional dizziness, or even mention it at all when the world is burning?
The same excuse has to do when the thought of food starts making her squeamish and the smell even more so. She tries begging off during mealtimes to avoid having to eat whenever the spells of nausea hit, but of course, that's not something Susan could ever possibly miss. She, undisputed ruler of the Ingleside kitchen, always made sure that all her charges ate well and now that Rilla is the only charge still left in her care, there is no possibility she could miss said charge avoiding mealtimes.
Thus, when she confronts Rilla, her head inclined to one side and her eyes narrowed in concern, there's no use denying the accusation, for an accusation it truly is. Naturally, there never is any use in denying anything Susan accuses any of them of, so Rilla doesn't even try. Instead, she just shrugs and mumbles something about the war and being worried and not having much of an appetite. Susan appears to believe it, too, for she pats her cheek in sympathy, though not without chiding her for mumbling at the very same time.
Having satisfied Susan with this explanation, Rilla is prepared to use it on her parents as well, but it turns out she doesn't even have to. If it takes Susan less than a week to notice her avoidance of mealtimes, her parents never realise it at all, which means she never has to give them an explanation for it either.
Not, obviously, that she can blame them. Her father is busier than he's ever been with his work, having taken on a sizable number of clients from younger colleagues who signed on with the Army Medical Corps, which in turn resulted in him often leaving home at dawn and not returning until after nightfall. Her mother, meanwhile, is busy with the Lady's Aid and all the other village organisation that she's expected to take part in as the wife of a prominent member of society. In her free-time, she can often be found writing letters, to her sons in France and her daughters in Kingsport as well as her friends all over the country.
Busy as they are, who can blame them for missing their daughter avoiding meals in turbulent times such as these? Rilla, certainly, is far too relieved to place any blame, because she realises instinctively that it will be easier to hide her secret if fewer people notice anything out of the ordinary about her behaviour.
It is, incidentally, around this time that she faces up to having a secret at all.
Having partly convinced herself that stress was indeed to blame for both dizziness and nausea and having otherwise resolved to think about it as little as possible, she's shaken out of her state of half-denial when Susan, for the second month in a row, asks for her special cloth rags to launder. Having never had to make use of them with perfect regularity, there was no difficulty to explaining away the lack of them in the first month, but when Susan asks again four weeks later, even Rilla can no longer deny that something is out of order – and that something needs to be done.
She still doesn't allow herself to admit what it could be, however, not even to herself. When she makes a small cut on her thigh to draw blood, she is very careful not to think too hard about why she's doing it, and neither does she dwell on her actions when she uses her clothing rags to absorb the blood, only to later make sure that Susan sees her launder them. It's just something that she does, a necessary thing that needs doing for reasons not quite within her grasp, and she firmly resolves to think about it as little as she thinks about peeling potatoes or any of the other mundanities filling her life.
In this way, she makes it past Christmas and if Nan makes an off-hand comment about her figure rounding out, they all appear to attribute that to her growing up, more woman than child now. Under that guise, Rilla also works up the courage to ask Di to help her let out her corsets just a bit, and her sister does so cheerfully and unthinkingly before returning to Redmond and happy ignorance as the new year strikes.
With 1915 thus behind her, there's a naïve, stupid, foolish part within Rilla that dares to hope that maybe, it will all blow over, if only she can succeed in keeping her secret until – well, until. It's not something she allows herself to dwell on at all, this 'until', and if, in dark and sleepless nights, the realisation creeps up on her that her particular problem isn't one that will miraculously disappear one day, she does her very best not to dwell on that either. After all, tomorrow is another day, and nothing ever looks so bleak in sunlight.
That is, at least, until one morning she gets up from bed, walks past the small mirror hanging above her desk – and realises with a sickening jolt that sunlight is no longer her friend. In fact, sunlight, even the wan and wintery kind, appears poised to make all her efforts null and void, to ridicule her attempts at denial and to expose her secret to anyone who has eyes to see.
She doesn't give up yet, of course.
If anything, she tries more fervently, because even if she inherited few of the family virtues, she sure got many of their vices, and stubbornness has always been chief of them. It is that same stubbornness, given to her by both parents in kind, that makes her lace those corsets ever tighter, painfully so, to force her treacherous body back into its normal form, the one not related to whispers and raised eyebrows and a vague sense of most terrifying doom.
It works, too – until it doesn't.
Until the morning when, try as she might, the corset just won't close, no matter how long she holds her breath. She's frantic, increasingly so, because she knows she's late to go down, far too late, and it won't be long before someone comes looking for her. The knock on the door, when it comes, therefore, isn't so much unexpected as dreaded, but when she tries to call out No!, the word gets stuck in her throat nevertheless.
The door swings open, revealing Susan and whatever she meant to say, it clearly gets stuck in her throat, too.
For a moment that might as well be eternal, they stand there, silently, and with sudden clarity, Rilla knows that Susan sees, that Susan understands, that Susan knows. Because Susan Baker, self-declared old maid, has seen many a child join the Ingleside fray – and it appears that this child is no different.
