Hello Dear Readers
I have edited this chapter update so that, given the glitches on the site seem to have been fixed, it is only showing the one chapter here again.
Please note that Ch 2 takes place immediately after Ch 1 (same time and location) but Ch 3 skips forward in time eight years. The rest of this story will swing back and forth in time in this manner.
With love
MrsVonTrapp x
Chapter Three
Paradise Lost
Kingsport
September 1895
Dr Gilbert Blythe took the long, circuitous route home through Kingsport's elegant park, pausing, hands deep in pockets, at the whitewashed pavilion bright in the fading golden sunlight, before striding onwards to the shore.
The light, early September breeze teased his tamed curls as he removed his hat and inhaled deep, restorative breaths after the exhaustion of yet another unending shift. The sea beckoned, but so too did whatever his housekeeper Mrs Jenkins had left warming on the stove. She was generous in her portions as if to compensate for a lack of culinary flair, but when he was usually starving of an evening, as now, it hardly mattered.
He gave into temptation and headed down the embankment, good shoes sinking into the sand, audacious enough at this hour to doff his jacket, slinging it over one broad shoulder, wishing likewise he could dispense with footwear too, feeling the grains between his toes and for the next week find them mysteriously sequestered in his socks and in the cuffs of his trousers, as he had when still a boy. Today as much as he tried to hold onto the memory of his youth he merely felt old… the years were passing quicker than he would like, except, of course, in the long, lonely night hours, when daylight and distraction couldn't come fast enough.
Perhaps he was just feeling especially nostalgic today; the fresh faces and unbridled enthusiasm of the year's new recruits about the college and the town were always a bittersweet reminder that those experiences – and that life – were no longer his. He was an established figure, now, at the hospital and the college, on his way to becoming establishment. Valued, visionary, even venerated… his career thus far had been all he could have asked for, and more besides. And yet…
Sometimes, sitting by the sea, as now, he wondered… of that other life that had called to him, briefly, as a siren's song across the water… of a snug little house in sight of the shore, and the lighthouse as lookout towards the mighty gulf, and the welfare of the locals forever in his keeping, and those simple dreams that used to sustain him… of family, a cat and a dog, the footstep of friends, a hearth-fire and… her. *
Gilbert swallowed, more painfully than he may have anticipated. It was a sweet dream that age and bitter experience had rendered impossibly naïve, and sadly short-sighted. It had been the dream of a boy, a youthful folly, sincere but misguided. As he had been.
There have been times when I thought you did care. I've deceived myself, that's all. **
Gilbert winced at the memory. Ten years, now. Ten years since the orchard, and violets, and declarations, and devastation.
I never, never can love you – in that way – Gilbert. You must never speak of this to me again. **
Well, he had been faithful to her request for the next two years. Gilbert had never uttered another word about love, or marriage, or anything much else, and eventually drifted from participant to observer in her life, marking the passage of time not by the warmth of her smile but the chill of her evident indifference.
He had thought the lilies might make a difference, though – a calling card from another time, an echo down the ages of their shared history – and it seemed at Convocation that they had. Energized, emboldened, he had asked her to dance that night, and the tiny flicker of hope still sparking within him was snuffed out.
Until…
Until…
His mind stretched back to grasp another memory, mired in the pain and disorientation of those dread days – and nights – of the worst of his fever, when typhoid had almost offered him up in sacrifice to Death, and the only thing still tethering him to the world were her cool hands and calming words… her cool words and calming hands… and he felt if he could just follow her touch and the sound of her voice, it would lead him back…
It had, but to what end?
Impatient with these intrusive thoughts, he stood quickly, brushing himself off, turning away from the sea and all it may once have represented, his gaze alighting on a lone figure further along the strip of coast, where the sand tapered off to a jagged little outcrop of rocks. He watched, unblinking, something in him curious, perhaps even uneasy. The figure's skirts swirled around her on the breeze, and when she reached to remove her hat the wind whipped her hair around her face and the bright glare of it, caught in the late sun, made him squint, his eyes watering, as if he was catching the reflection of the light on the water.
He shifted his gaze to view her more clearly, mesmerized, and then smirked as, predictably, the wind caught skirts and hat simultaneously, and in attempting to safeguard both, one of them had to be relinquished. The hat was snatched out of her hand and crested away, out of reach, landing in the water teasingly close yet too far to be retrieved, and he chuckled to himself as her aggrieved yelp seemed carried to him on the air.
Smile turned to sigh, and Gilbert turned and strode back up the sandy slope.
Over the years he had of course heard her name; just because she had disappeared from his life – from all their lives – and abandoned everything and everyone she had held dear, didn't mean she had ceased existing in the world. The occasional reference from Diana in a letter, or an overly casual note dropped into conversation from Phil, had blunted the sharp stab of pain her very mention had once evoked.
Sifting through his mail that evening, he was almost prepared for the invitation. The Welcome Dinner from Redmond, where new faculty were introduced and on show for the incumbents to examine and exclaim over. He had endured his own initiation two years ago, invited on staff as a lecturer at the medical school, his Cooper Prize still at that stage unclaimed by any other and the mantle almost as an invisible medal pinned to his heart, its enduring prestige still resonating.
For the new academic year the college's publications department had produced an impressively professional looking booklet along with their invitation, detailing all staff, the education and achievements of the new arrivals and the departmental highlights of the previous year. He was almost expected to feature as one of the leading lights in his field, doctor and scholar both, and his recent research grant was another string to an already overstuffed bow. He grimaced goodnaturedly at the photograph of him, typically outdated from when he had first joined faculty himself, and scanned their department's summary, before turning the pages, settling on the information he had really been looking for.
His long fingered hand, still browned in the recent summer sun, rested momentarily on the page, trembling briefly as it never did over the operating table. He had heard the rumours of her appointment, but this made it startlingly, irrefutably real. The photograph was professional and obviously from her publisher, doing appropriate enough justice to her features and presence. He studied it carefully, almost critically; the masses of hair, the wide eyes, the pale complexion, the hint of a smile from those almost-laughing lips; the graceful slope of her swan-neck. If something about her eyes lacked her traditional liveliness, then it was balanced by her polished poise. Her third published work - the scrappy orphan she had first written about almost three years ago, as much an autobiography as fiction - had been met with enthusiasm and acclaim, and it was announced here that the eagerly anticipated sequel was set for publication in the coming months. Meanwhile, the English faculty at Redmond College were delighted to welcome their celebrated alumnus as guest lecturer for the year, and one of the first females to do so, whilst also having the distinction of being their inaugural Writer in Residence.
Quite the Kingsport homecoming for Cinderella, who had fled the ball at midnight only eight years ago.
Gilbert sat back heavily in his chair. Her last words to him echoed in his mind as a memory rebounding. I promise, she had vowed. Damned, pathetic wretch he had been to have thought she meant it.
His dinner tasted, regrettably, as sawdust in his mouth that evening, and he wished he could have entirely blamed it on Mrs Jenkins.
Anne tramped back to her hotel in town, hatless, windblown and undoubtedly looking for all the world as eccentric as her reputation may have occasionally suggested. Certainly the concierge looking politely askance in her direction evidently believed so. She threw him a wide, unrepentant smile and ascended the stairs, her bracing shore adventure fuelling both her hunger and her creativity, and had hardly burst through the door to her room before she had deposited herself on the bed, scribbling in her notebook, occasionally darting to the window as if in attempt to catch a glimpse of the shore she had so missed, grasping at the memories that view had stirred.
She had paused almost mournfully at the pavilion on her first walk about this part of town, unseen by her and unchanged in nearly a decade, and punished herself by slowly approaching, climbing the steps as one would the scaffold, following the length of its circular seating, coming to stop at the spot where bended knee and that velvety imploring voice had eventually persuaded her, despite her own sudden and startling misgivings. She had wondered if she had just breathed… considered… even begged for some more time… how differently events – and her answer to Roy – may have unfolded.
Impossible to know, now, and hopeless conjecture all the same.
Thereafter she had made haste for the shoreline, heeding the call of the sea and the wind as it whipped the waves, bypassing the calm of the nearby dunes for the wildness further along, as the wind buffeted her slight form as she stood on the rocks, and her hat – thankfully not a favourite – had made of itself an offering to Neptune, or else Poseidon, depending on one's preferred mythology.
As the sun dipped below the horizon and the shadows outside lengthened, she called for a tray to be sent up, anxious for a new distraction and eager to avoid the contents of the large packet she had earlier collected from the college. She ate haphazardly as she unpacked, knowing that finding suitable long term accommodation a week into the start of the new academic year would be an enterprise akin to discovering buried treasure, and reconciling herself to her current surroundings for quite a while yet, though it would make a very regrettable dent in her savings.
After her second cup of tea she began to pace agitatedly, finally collecting herself with a shake of the head and a huff of exasperation, and launched herself at the packet, ripping it open quickly as one might medicine needing to be swiftly digested. Inside was the expected college prospectus, a copy of her contract as guest lecturer and a separate agreement detailing her position as Writer in Residence, a map of Redmond (as if she was some clueless Freshman needing directions to the amenities) and, surprisingly, a smaller faculty booklet and… an invitation.
She groaned. The invitation was for all the new goods on display – she knew well how those things went – and she was anxious about that as soon as she read of it. But that wasn't quite the reason for her trepidation.
The little faculty booklet helpfully detailed all staff, and she scanned the listings greedily, coming to the name that felt seared on her soul. So he did lecture at the college as well, as she had feared. Phil had been too politic to mention it and she hadn't ever felt brave enough to ask. She knew how little the departments mixed and the medical faculty was most separate of all, and yet… he would be there, and entirely too close for comfort.
She flicked the pages, and the sight of him was so unexpected she gasped. He was one of those written up particularly, amongst a hearty list of the medical faculty's many achievements, at least half of which he appeared partly – if not solely - responsible for. A strange, bewildering pride rose up in her to read it all, before she paused properly on his image, stunned to see him after so many years, marvelling that it could have been a photograph taken during his senior year at Redmond, so insultingly untouched was he by the relentless march of time.
Well, that was it. She just couldn't do it. It had all been a mad idea, this offer to return to Redmond – flattering in the extreme, but clearly mad – and she just could not spend the next year expecting Gilbert Blythe to materialize at the turn of every corner.
If she had written even half the letters to him she had composed in her head, would things have been different here, now? And further back, to the shameful refusal of a particular dance… and back even further, to another sort of refusal… what if there had been a pause, a breath, here, too?
Impossible to know, now, and hopeless conjecture all the same.
And as for everything else…her leaving Kingsport under such a mysterious cloud… the reason she had been back to the Island so infrequently… and especially the reason for not having returned to Avonlea that time as she had vowed to, in an attempt to pick up the shattered pieces of their past… he should have been told. She should have told him, after a time, when there could be no possibility of repercussions or reprisals… she knew that now. It wouldn't have changed anything, but she could have met him again on an even footing, as his friend, and not as the woman he thought had spurned him not once, not twice, but a third fatal time.
Her overwrought, self pitying tears were unwelcome but not unexpected. She gave herself over to them, weeping bitterly curled up on the bed, feeling, as Cathy had, a waif for twenty years… *** or at least, in her case, nearly ten. But she had thought to return here, to Kingsport, to Redmond, as the last place she had, for a time, properly felt like herself. Her best self.
I'm come home. I'd lost my way on the moor... ***
She'd been back to Avonlea, of course, as often as possible – it was the very reason for her negotiated week's delay – feeling a stranger in a strange land, but for the embrace of those she had loved and so rarely seen. Time stood still in Avonlea, but it galloped apace in Kingsport, and here she was offered the chance to move forward with it. Everyone else had – surely she had that right, too?
She dashed at her tears, her mind racing with the arrangements she had to make. She felt she was properly setting foot back in the world again, tethering herself to something real and tangible, after years of pinning her hopes on nothing but air and promises. Perhaps she did need that map of Redmond after all, to guide her way back. Of course, in the day, their guide had been a girl like her, paving their way and smoothing their path in those first challenging months, on the strength of her modish beauty, her open personality, her connections, and that winning, crooked smile.
Could she… would she… do that again, for her?
Anne foraged in her trunk and withdrew the printed calling cards her publisher had insisted upon after the surprise success of her book three years ago. Her first two collections of short stories – Avonlea Vignettes **** and Island Escapades - had had only a very limited print run, enjoying a positive albeit modest reception. But her life had been turned on its head by writing a thinly-veiled fictionalized version of herself, doing what Gilbert had urged her to do all along – writing what she knew – and it had somehow made that tale more potent, and indeed more popular, for a reading public, and a fair few critics as well.
Anne scribbled with alacrity across four cards, front and back, her longing and enthusiasm for her old friend unable to be contained on one, and then popped them all in an envelope to leave at reception for the hotel's errand boy in the morning, with a few extra coins for him for good measure.
Sleep, later, was elusive, however, and Anne took to pacing the floor yet again, her mind flashing to that handsome image in the booklet, and it would not let her rest.
This time she took a large sheaf of paper, for a little calling card would be absolutely inadequate for this particular purpose. She wrote well into the night, purging the pain of the past, finally settled and calm when she awoke in the morning.
Chapter Notes
Paradise Lost is an epic poem first published by John Milton in 1667 – so 'epic' indeed that the first version consisted of ten books and over 10,000 lines of verse!
* Anne of the Island Ch 41 'Love Takes Up the Glass of Time'.
** Anne of the Island Ch 20 'Gilbert Speaks.' How many of us have wished that he hadn't?!
*** Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847) Ch 3. A seminal reading experience and so many very different adaptations! One of my favourites is the 1998 telemovie, which gives due credence to the second half of the story (so few earlier adaptations do) and stars a young Matthew McFadyen as a truly lovely Hareton. Worth trying to find on Youtube!
**** Sharp-eyed (and/or obsessional viewers, like me!) will know in the Sullivan series, Anne's just-published book of short stories that she brings to Gilbert is titled Avonlea Vignettes. The sequel collection Island Escapades is entirely my doing!