Author's Note:

Hello lovely Anne-girls

On Monday 10th September I celebrate a year on the site. I have written very many words and two stories yet to end. I did not anticipate the journey to completion would be quite this long!

Thinking of appropriate homage to all the wonderful writers here and as thanks to all you fabulous readers and reviewers, do I give you an overdue chapter of either ongoing story? Of course not (though they are on their way). Instead, I cannot shake my image of canon Anne and her night-vigil; that Book of Revelation she opens and cannot put back down. This was to be a one-shot but has expanded to five or six short chapters (and I say short in the face of your disbelieving bemusement) and I intend to publish all in this coming fortnight (see aforementioned disbelief, etc).

This idea is not new; it is the oft-tramped path in the time between the last chapters of Anne of the Island, encompassing 'A Book of Revelation' and 'Love Takes Up the Glass of Time' and the world (and summer) inbetween. I intend to fly close to canon but there will be obvious deviations and gap-filling which I hope will still feel authentic. I have not read any accounts of this general timeframe barring Catiegirl's wonderful and wrenching 'The Path Not Taken', and apologise if I have inadvertently stepped on any toes from other stories before.

As ever, with grateful thanks to Lucy Maud Montgomery, who brought me here, and to this community of kindred spirits; your encouragement and friendship sustain me more than you can know.

With love,

MrsVonTrapp x

'Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd'

Chapter One

Drowning

Anne

Anne Shirley was rather used to making unequal bargains with God, but in the wind-lashed night of her bitterest revelation, she begged of Him things unholy and untold but to her secret self. Dear Lord… I ask of nothing but that you save Gilbert, and if you cannot save him, that you take me alongside him. For I will not… cannot… remain on this earth without him.

God had evidently been displeased with her audacity, or else did not much care for the offer of her own soul, for the rain beat down over the shivering fields in unimpressed answer. The Haunted Wood, once hallowed haven, was now full of the groans of mighty trees wrung in the tempest, and the air throbbed with the thunderous crash of billows on the distant shore.* Anne paced, stockinged feet freezing against the floorboards, thinking of a lone, rogue apple tree beyond the marsh, and whether having survived all else it would survive this. Would God take the tree but not Gilbert? Or was the explorer forever bound to his discovery?

She murmured this as she murmured other things she would barely remember; an unending incantation of pleas for the present interspersed with agonised apologies for the past, and all too late. Too late to forgive him his long-ago schoolboy taunt and his trespass, even if the iron had entered into (her) soul. ** Too late to thank him properly for fishing her out of the pond; an unlikely Lancelot. Too late to accept a dance with him, though she wore his lilies at her waist and had begun the evening with his pink heart by her breast. And much, much too late to take back words so painful and untrue… I never, never can love you - in that way - Gilbert. You must never speak of this to me again. ***

I love you I love you I love you… she whispered now, dropping to her knees before the candle in the window, the steady flame of which became her constant; the light of her life, as Gilbert was. She repeated the vow until she was hoarse, fervently wishing her words would reach him in his fever. If she called out his name as Rochester had Jane, would he hear her? Beyond the reach of time and space and even sense, she repeated his name now; a mournful mantra to her missed hopes. Gilbert… all began and ended with him; her very own Genesis. In the new-despair that plunged to depths she had never dared reckon on, frightening and fathomless, she clasped his name to her and clasped her hands to her heart and prayed he would not go away from this life thinking that she did not care. *

The storm raged all night, but when the dawn came it was spent, * as was she. Anne saw a fairy fringe of light on the skirts of darkness. Soon the eastern hilltops had a fire-shot ruby rim. * She didn't know if she dared greet the new day and the news it might bring with it. Here, in this little east gable room, she could safeguard herself against the black years of emptiness * with the cold comfort of denial and delay. The clouds rolled themselves away into great, soft, white masses on the horizon; the sky gleamed blue and silvery. * She stared out in disbelief that the world could be washed new full of such beauty and promise; such an unexpected gift, fearing for what – or whom – had been taken instead in the exchange.

Anne rose from her knees, welcoming the sharp protest of aching joints, relaced her boots with unfeeling fingers and crept downstairs. The freshness of the rain-wind blew against her white face as she went out into the yard, and cooled her dry, burning eyes. * Later she would remember there had been a brief conversation; a merry rollicking whistle and a desperate question, and an assurance from an unlikely source that seized her heart in its grip, and felt the sharp, jagged joy pierce her. Though she would properly recall little except those two words; He's better. *

She knew she stood under the willows; she knew she saw new-blown roses; she knew she heard birds trilling. She might have even realised that she set off, through the woods and beyond the marsh, and in the circle of early morning sunlight there stood an apple tree, stripped bare of any lingering blossoms, but still existing; proud and strong and safe.

As was he.

Anne found herself at Blythe farm, and at a door she had dared not darken of late with her unappreciated presence. Mr Blythe had always greeted her in the village with a soft smile and a kind word, even past the point where she might have deserved them, but Mrs Blythe had these two years regarded her with the reproachful eyes and thin lips of the mother whose beloved boy had been wronged, and whose heart would always carry the anguish and accusation of his betrayal.

It mattered not. He was alive, and God had upheld his end of the bargain, and it was her turn to repay with relief and remorse and recompense.

Mrs Blythe opened the door; her attractive face pale and drawn, her hair straggling from her haphazard bun in unnoticed escape, and only her eyes lit with a new hope that fought the deep shadows etched beneath them.

The two women stared at one another, the haunted, dishevelled appearance of each an ironic echo; in mirthless mimic of the night's shared purgatory.

"Anne Shirley?" Mrs Blythe croaked.

"M…Mrs Blythe…" the name trembled on her lips, and Anne felt herself swaying in turn. "Is… is he…?"

Dark brows drew upwards in their own question, and then lowered in grim understanding.

"He's been spared, praise God."

Anne felt the sway drift into shake, to shudder, to sag… to be told, beyond any doubt, that it was true.

"I'm sorry…" she breathed raggedly. "I… d… didn't know…"

Whether she meant to explain I didn't know that he was sick… or I didn't know that I loved him… she could not say, and they were interchangeable understandings anyway. From this moment forth there would be no distinction for her between them, and she would wear her wretchedness willingly, as penitence for her pride and her purposeful willingness to overlook what the bond was that had held her to Gilbert - to think that the flattered fancy she had felt for Roy Gardner had been love. And now she must pay for her folly as for a crime. *

Behind the resolute figure of his wife came Mr Blythe, tiredness and worry still stooping his shoulders, but eyes lighting with the curiosity she had so often noted in his son's.

"Why Anne…" he greeted, and if puzzled by her unscheduled, inappropriate early hour call he was too polite – and still too weary – to note it. "Did you come for news of Gil?"

Her courage and her composure began to fail her, and she could do nothing but offer the cutting she had taken, breaking off the deep-green summer foliage as carefully as any medical student undertaking their first incision.

"It… it's from… his apple tree," she rasped, not daring to think, let alone substitute, the use of pronoun… his for ours.

"Gilbert is only just out of danger. He is a long way off receiving any visitors," Mrs Blythe made indignant reply, her exhaustion sidelined to her righteous anger, though it wavered as her eyes followed her husband's broad hand as it reached out and accepted her gift, her talisman, her apology… and perhaps her goodbye.

"Thank you," John Blythe added apologetically. "We'll put it by his bedside. It will be sure to cheer him when he wakes."

Anne nodded, beyond further words, and turned for the long trek back to Green Gables, where an increasingly frantic Marilla helped her inside and upstairs, holding her as the sobs convulsed her slight frame, till she allowed herself to be cajoled into bed, cradled in her work-worn arms and crooned into dreamless sleep.

Chapter Notes

My story title is from Tennyson's 'In Memoriam: AHH' (1849)written of course for his great friend from Cambridge days, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of cerebral haemorrhage in 1833.

And we remember, always, this is the cruel, swift stroke that took Jonathan Crombie from us in 2015.

*Anne of the Island (Ch 40)

**Anne of Green Gables (Ch 15)

***Anne of the Island (Ch 20)