Christmas greetings, Anne-girls!
This story is a response to my guest on 'Betwixt the Stars' who challenged me (and a few others here!) to write a Christmas-themed Anne and Gilbert story.
Goodness, Guest, you discovered my weakness – like Marty McFly being called 'chicken', I just can't resist a challenge from our community!
This will likely be a small arc of a few chapters that I will try my best to close out by Christmas but that might take me up until New Year to complete, or as I am able to write it. I hope you all enjoy.
The narrative picks up in December of the final year at Redmond, and references a certain, famed pink enamel heart that we only hear about Anne receiving retrospectively in Chapter 37 of 'Anne of the Island'. It is always fun to imagine what led up to it!
And as we are talking pink enamel hearts, this is therefore dedicated to DrinkThemIn x
Merry Christmas!
MrsVonTrapp x
ALL GOOD THINGS
Chapter One
Tokens, Tidings and Tidbits
'Sometimes good things fall apart so better things could fall together.'
-Marilyn Monroe
Gilbert stared for long moments at the sight through the shop window, even as the wind gusted around him and the cold sliced his lean cheeks and rang painfully in his ears.
He had only ducked out for stamps, hatless and heedless, large hands thrust into his pockets and broad shoulders hunched as he quickly traversed the thronging streets, frowning at the crowds clustering outside the tea rooms and squinting at the lights reflected in the late afternoon's dusting of snow.
Everyone's excitement and seasonal joy seemed a personal affront this year, and he had never felt less invested with the Christmas spirit. All around the merry festive whirl caught his classmates as if ensnared in an enchanted spell, one of laughter and parties and frivolous times with friends. He himself couldn't remember the last time he had properly laughed, or enjoyed an evening out that hadn't involved escorting Christine, both an old promise and new obligation, the violet-eyed girl a surprising anchor in a cold, churning Anne-less sea.
Anne.
He never revisited that day in the orchard, with a flint-edged determination and an iron-clad will, so instead he usually dwelt on that evening in Avonlea, a briefest summer interlude, walking home from Fred and Diana's wedding with her, the darkness enveloping them as a soft embrace. That night had been something of a rapprochement, or at the very least a truce. Gilbert listened and observed as Anne had trodden as lightly as her words, musing on the impossibility of her former pupils being so very grown up, and she feeling so very old, when instead she was as much dryad as she ever was, with the moonlight transforming her eyes to liquid silver and her hair to a burnished amber gold, half wood sprite and half dream. And he, all agony, hand straining to take hers, throat burning with the effort to swallow down any foolhardy, betraying sentiments, smile tight as he farewelled her, step heavy and defeated on the solitary trek home.
And now, suddenly, he bounced on the soles of his shoes; whether struck with sudden inspiration or merely in effort to encourage his circulation in the cold. The token seemed to call to him, an echo of an earlier time, and he had the choice to listen or to ignore it. He looked away down the street towards the post office, and back again to the window. He glanced at his watch. The afternoon was tipping its' hat to dusk; there was not enough time to do both.
He was rarely one for split-second decisions; they had not served him well. Long fingers plucking a red braid… big mouth uttering an immortal, ill-advised nickname… and then that other time, when he should never have said anything at all. This was right up there with those other impetuous undertakings, but at least here, now, there could be no unfortunate consequences.
And if he lost his nerve, he could always gift it to his mother.
Gilbert pushed open the door, surrendering to the sudden warmth, and surrendering a goodly amount of his precious savings into the bargain, and certainly his remaining common sense.
The pink enamel heart strung on a fine chain of gold, prettily wrapped and preening, seemed to pulse in his pocket, alive and strumming as his own beleaguered heart, which pounded in time to his steps all the way back to his boarding house.
Anne struggled through the doorway of Patty's Place the next afternoon, laden with books and circulars and Roy's gift and his flowers and all the other paraphernalia she had collected en route from the college. The festive joy was perhaps seen in the becoming flush to her cheeks and in her overbright eyes, though her auburn brows frowned above them, marring the smoothness of her otherwise pale, pretty complexion, and her pink lips were not curved in their usual smile.
"Good Lord, are you doing the rounds for Father Christmas this year?" Stella grinned from her perch by the fireplace, teasing an unimpressed Sarah-cat with tidbits.
"Then that remark alone puts you on my naughty list, Miss Maynard," Anne joked, a little sharply.
Stella arched a black brow but did not say more, though Pris and Phil, come from the kitchen where the former was instructing the latter on the intricacies of baking Christmas shortbread, exclaimed enough over the blood-red roses and the hastily rewrapped stole to restore some of Anne's equilibrium.
"Gosh, they're lovely!" Pris enthused, bending over the bouquet and inhaling deeply. "Roy really does have excellent taste, Anne!"
"Yes… he does…" Anne agreed, flushing.
"This is definitely not out of Eaton's," Phil flashed her winning, crooked smile, pausing to stroke Anne's stole more reverently than any of the resident felines.
"Yes, well…" Anne, turning crimson now, tried to wrestle back her gifts, if only to deposit them in the depths of the nearest armchair, as if attempting to bury them out of sight. "Roy is very generous."
"You're so lucky, Anne!" Pris sighed. "All I got from my date last week was a Happy Christmas!"
Anne felt around for her smile, forcing it into being.
"And you deserve the happiest of happy Christmases, darling Pris!" she clutched her hand, squeezing tightly. As do we all!"
There were fond smiles all round and a sharing of glad tidings, which quietened into a newly awkward silence as Anne collapsed into the sofa opposite Stella, studiously avoiding the gift-laden armchair and begging of the girls any news emanating from their last day of classes before Christmas break.
Pris looked to Phil, and Phil looked to Stella, and then all darted eyes back to Anne.
"What is it?"
Pris took the spot next to Stella, which caused an offended Sarah-cat to finally vacate her post, whilst Phil, after some silent urging from the others, positioned herself next to Anne, clearing her throat as if scheduled to give an important announcement.
"Honey, there was some news today, as such, after Roy had met you to take you… oh, wherever it was this afternoon…"
"To a late lunch…" Anne clarified carefully, "in town."
"Yes, that was it. Well, the rest of us met for lunch on campus, and there we were, counting off our To Do lists and bemoaning how many calls we would be forced to make when we arrive back home, and lo and behold, along comes Christine Stuart, strolling about looking like the cat who ate the cream. With her fiancé."
"Fiancé?" Anne repeated quietly, her face freezing as if on the word. "Wh-what do you mean, fiancé?"
"Well, yes – you could have knocked us down with a feather too, I can tell you!"
"They're engaged?" Anne's face had turned perfectly milk white, and unnervingly still.
"Anne – it's not what you're thinking!" Stella interjected quickly in rescue from across the room, giving Philippa a frustrated look. "Christine's fiancé isn't… Gilbert."
"I… I don't understand…" Anne murmured miserably, grey eyes wide and staring, darkening as if a sudden storm had swept across them.
"Oh Queen Anne, darling, goodness no!" Phil put a hand on her friend's arm to instantly reassure. "I'm going about this all the wrong way!"
"Then please… tell me the right way!"
"Honey, when we met Christine earlier today, she wasn't even with Gilbert. She was with some man called Dawson. From her hometown. He had come across to accompany her back for the holidays. Apparently she has been engaged to this Dawson character since the moment she set foot in Kingsport, and hardly deigning to tell a soul about it, either. Her family had been most against it, so to keep the peace she had waited until she turned twenty one. But there she was, parading him about, flashing an outrageous diamond and telling their news to anyone who would listen, now that it's all official. So what do you think about that little tidbit?"
"Gracious…" Anne swallowed, noisily.
"Exactly what we said!"
"No one's sure if Gilbert even knows," Pris conjectured, blue eyes sparking with the intrigue of it all. "Can you imagine how devastated he would be if she's just been stringing him along?"
Anne didn't need to imagine. She had seen Gilbert's devastation, up close and all-too personally. She had carried the memory of it with her as a painful penance that flared periodically, like heartburn.
"He did happen to leave quite hurriedly this morning…" Phil now worried her bottom lip at this new thought. "Right after our last Mathematics lecture. But I'm sure it's nothing. He said he wanted to avoid the full carriages tomorrow when most will be heading off. But he left this for you, honey…" Phil walked across to the table and retrieved a cream envelope, turning to offer it to Anne. "Something about him wanting to get it to you in time and not having enough stamps."
The girls now leaned forward, perhaps thinking some explanation for today's unlikely news was contained within Gilbert's missive. Anne hoped no one else observed how the card trembled in her hand, and she took several moments to compose herself, giving Phil a wan smile of thanks and trying to ignore all eyes upon her. What could Gilbert possibly want to be contacting her about, after these many long months? Had he had some great falling out with Christine over her engagement?
She paused at her name in the firm, upright style she would have recognized anywhere. Anne seized the envelope and ripped it open. A Christmas scene as with so many other Christmas scenes, and his strong hand sharing his message for her, though she had done very little to deserve it.
Dear Anne
Wishing you all good things for Christmas
and the coming year.
From Gilbert
Well, there it was. No secret, no sharing. Just his tidings for the season. And yet her cheeks heated again all the same, and she was grateful that, their extraordinary news delivered, her housemates could resume their prior activities. Phil and Pris returned to the kitchen, whilst Stella idly picked up her book, scarcely perusing it before noting Anne move quickly from the sofa to collect her bounty from the armchair. She saw how her redheaded comrade grasped the beautiful stole tentatively, almost afraid to touch it, before contemplating the extravagant arrangement of blooms awkwardly cradled in her arms with a troubled expression.
"The gifts embarrass you," Anne heard the voice, friendly but firm, announce behind her.
Anne whirled around. "Stella, love, what a notion!"
Stella noted how Anne did not deny it, instead laughing off the suggestion with two blazing pink-spotted cheeks.
"You hated showing them to us just now, and you couldn't wait to move away from discussion of them."
Anne opened her mouth as if to refute this, before promptly closing it again.
"I just… I just don't want to feel as if I'm showing off, that's all."
"None of us feel as if you are, and you are always generous in sharing any gifts anyway. So I don't think that's it."
Anne pursed her lips, collapsing into the armchair now with an ungainly thump. She was well used to Stella's directness, but never had it been applied to herself so uncompromisingly.
"The stole is so beautiful…" she answered rather plaintively, "and yet I know I'll never wear it. Even to the symphony, if Roy takes me again. I'd feel as if I… as if I was just playing a role, playing dress ups, trying to fit in with his set. Even the roses are… well, they're stunning. But they're overwhelming. I'd have much preferred a small posy, or even a single stem. That would be something I could have taken back home to Avonlea. It would have been something I could have lived with. I can't live with all this."
The sorry tears pricked her grey eyes, and Stella gave her a sympathetic smile.
"You make it sound as if you're finding Roy someone you couldn't live with."
Anne's head snapped up, colliding with the stark thought for the very first time, and she rubbed her arm reflexively, as if seeking comfort from an unexpected attack.
"I'm sure I'm just tired and making too much of things… and Roy is perfectly… he's perfectly…"
"Perfect?" Stella baited, mercilessly.
"Do I need to write you up on next year's naughty list, too?"
Stella rolled her eyes, though their joke had taken the sting out of her earlier assumptions. Galvanizing herself, Anne noted she had better put the roses in water or they would be as wilted as her updo.
Sweeping out of the living room, she was suddenly called back.
"Don't forget Gilbert!"
"Pardon?" Anne squeaked.
"His Christmas card," Stella nodded to it teetering, almost forgotten, on the edge of the sofa.
In the calming hush of her beloved blue room, Anne surveyed her packed trunk, sans stole, which had been carefully repackaged and sequestered in her bottom bureau drawer. Half of that glorious, intimidating profusion of roses was sitting in a vase by the window sill, in conversation with the pines, whilst the remaining blooms added glamour to the kitchen table downstairs. At least Aunt Jimsie and the cats would have joy of them, she sighed, stopping herself from imagining Rusty lording over the entire neighborhood with his new bed of fur stole, softer than a cloud.
Roy's Christmas card, overflowing with romantic sentiments, had been added to the other cards she and the girls had strung up as festive garlands all about the living room, but Gilbert's now rested on her bedside table, looking at her reproachfully. For a dread moment, with the truth of Christine's circumstances out in the open, she had thought that maybe he had written to revisit his offer, and was still attempting to ascertain if she was relieved or unfathomably disappointed.
Anne had revisited that day in the orchard too many times to be healthy or even reasonable, as well as every other meeting since, most of them, except their evening post-wedding stroll in Avonlea, colored by the presence of that beautiful violet-eyed creature hanging on his arm, treating him in a bafflingly familiar and territorial way that had always rankled. It most definitely rankled now. Mostly because, in her secret putaway heart, she knew that she must have once done the same.
And that tiny, telling exchange with Phil long ago – the very day of her twentieth birthday to be precise…
"I must marry a rich man, Aunt Jamesina," Miss Gordon had stated with typical audaciousness. "That—and good looks—is an indispensable qualification. I'd marry Gilbert Blythe if he were rich."
"Oh, would you?" said Anne, rather viciously.
"We don't like that idea a little bit, although we don't want Gilbert ourselves, oh, no," mocked Phil. *
No. She hadn't wanted Gilbert herself. Of course she hadn't. She had made that terribly, irrefutably clear. She certainly hadn't wanted Christine to win him. But really, it was she who had lost, for his friendship, his support, she had belatedly understood, was vital to her, and she had not realized how lonely… how bereft… she would be without it. It was not something, for all their beauty and obvious expense, that a fur stole and flowers could replace.
That night, Anne stared at Gilbert's card for long moments before finally falling asleep, the words swirling around her brain and creeping into her consciousness.
In the morning, she plucked a single rose to travel with her, and after an agonized hesitation, took Gilbert's card as well, tucking it safely into her pocketbook.
Chapter Notes
*Anne of the Island Chapter 19 'An Interlude'