Marilla of Green Gables

by Sarah McCoy

  Finally, the driver gave a “Ho!” to the horses, and they slowed to a stop before a brick townhouse; though similar to the orphanage, it was narrow where the orphanage was wide.

  “This be the place,” said the driver.

  On the front stoop, Mrs. Spencer’s cousin Lydia Jane greeted them from beneath her woolen shawl.

  “Come, come! It’s freezing out. Butler Cline will fetch your bags.”

  Marilla and Rachel made a dash for the door, with the wind snatching their skirts helter-skelter as they went.

  “These winter storms are wretched!” Lydia Jane said in welcome. “Hang your coats on the hooks. Go in by the fire. Tea is waiting.”

  Mrs. Lydia Jane was twice widowed with nine children: three died young, four were married off, one was a missionary in India, and another was a shipping clerk in America. She’d lived in a country house with rooms aplenty but moved to the city when the last of her children were grown.

  “She’s as thorny as a bramble,” Mrs. Barry had warned. “Raised her children by the righteous Word and the rod. Do as she says and you’ll stay on her good side.”

  Mrs. White preferred a strict chaperone to an indulgent one. But Rachel had never been one to appreciate any disciplinarian outside of herself. Marilla suspected that was partly why Rachel never returned to Mr. Murdock’s tutelage at Avonlea School. Bending to someone else was not a gift of the White spirit.

  “Drink your teacup empty. I don’t want my porcelain stained with a ring,” Lydia Jane instructed.

  Marilla obediently gulped back every drop while Rachel drank slowly, swirling the contents every so often with a casual “Mmm.”

  When Lydia Jane determined that teatime was complete, she called for Cookie the cook to collect the tray, with Rachel’s ringed cup and all.

  “You’ll be sharing my spare room.”

  She marched them up the stairs to a room smelling of dead roses and musty carpets.

  “The bed is plenty big enough for two. My cousin says your meeting with the Sisters of Charity is tomorrow, so Cookie will have breakfast on the table at nine o’clock. I apologize in advance for my absence. My daughter-in-law had her fourth child last week. She’s come down with milk fever. I promised to watch over the older children while the doctor pays a call. But I trust that you will go straight out to your business and come straight home. The only single young women who dillydally in the streets are those of ill repute. I know you will uphold my respectability by not appearing as such.”

  With that, she nodded good-night and closed the door with a resolute click.

  “Lawful heart, if she isn’t the most cantankerous!” Rachel threw herself down on the bed. A fine dust rose up like slate chalk. She waved a hand through the air to clear it. “Even more so than Mrs. Barry, which I didn’t think possible.” She rolled onto her elbow. “She’s determined not to let us have any fun, but I’m more determined to out-determine her.”

  Marilla opened her vanity case to brush out her hair before bed. “We were warned! Let’s do as she says, Rachel.”

  Despite Marilla’s newfound confidence, she harbored apprehension that she couldn’t rationally explain. She knew every nook and cranny of Avonlea. It belonged to her as much as she belonged to it. Here she was an outsider, unfamiliar with the people and the city. All she wanted to do was complete the task and get back home.

  “We can have a little fun. If we take the long or short way to the orphanage, it doesn’t change anything as it pertains to Mrs. Lydia Jane. Our destination points remain the same.”

  Marilla was exhausted and simply wanted to sleep. No more talking or moving or thinking toward tomorrow. It would come in due time. After ensuring that the Ladies’ Aid Society check issued from the Abbey Bank was tucked securely in her purse, and her purse tucked under the winter petticoats in her traveling case, she climbed into bed beside Rachel.

  It was the first time she’d slept with anyone besides her mother. Rachel smelled differently in the night. Her gown was scented with chamomile and dried sweetgrass. Warmth emanated from the opposite side of the bed where Marilla was used to cool sheets. It reminded her of when she was young and the Gables had yet to be built. All four Cuthberts slept together on a pallet pulled out before the hearth at night and pushed back against the wall during the day. Clara and Hugh slept side by side in the middle with Marilla fitting into Clara’s side and Matthew into Hugh’s like soupspoons. Marilla had been afraid of the shadows in the windowsills then. The only way to keep the monsters from nibbling her toes had been to wrap her feet between her mother’s. She’d nearly forgotten—both her fear and the magic to chase it away.

  “Do you think we’ll see the orphans from the last time?” Rachel yawned. Her buttermilk breath puffed warm.

  “Hopefully not,” said Marilla. “It would mean they’ve gone on to join families.”

  Marilla’s and Rachel’s feet met in the middle.

  “Your toes are like ice!” Rachel rubbed her feet against Marilla’s under the covers. “You would think Lydia Jane would give us bed warmers if there’s no fireplace in the room. I checked under the bed, in the wardrobe, everywhere—not even a hot brick to be found!”

  True, it was odd. Even at Green Gables, every bed had a warming pan underneath.

  “Maybe she hasn’t any to spare.”

  Rachel harrumphed. “Well, we’ll catch the grippe for sure if we sleep another night without.”

  They were staying two nights with Lydia Jane.

  Rachel twitched in the darkness. “It’s settled then,” she said at last. “After breakfast, we’ll have to go by the general store. It’s on the way to the orphanage. Father has an account. We can pick up a bed warmer there.”

  Marilla sighed. Trust Rachel to find a justification to do as she wished. “Rachel . . .”

  “What?” she replied guilelessly. “If Mother were here, she’d do the same.” Then she flopped onto her stomach and brought the pillow over her head. “Good night, Marilla,” she mumbled.

  * * *

  Fried potatoes and sausages were on the table the next morning. Marilla was glad for the hot meal. Their night had been far from restful. Every time she came close to sleep, a draft would sweep up from her toes and make her nose run. She’d tried to put the pillow over her head like Rachel, but she couldn’t breathe through the down.

  She nearly drank her weight in hot tea before she’d rid herself of the shivers.

  “Has Mrs. Lydia Jane gone to her daughter-in-law already?” Rachel asked Cookie, slicing her sausage and dipping it in mustard.

  “She has, miss, and she asked me to put her collection of Quebec City Gazettes—English and French—in the parlor for you two young ladies to enjoy before your meeting.”

  From their breakfast table, they could see the yellow and molding stack of periodicals from weeks, months, even years gone by. Marilla found the extreme accumulation of any one item to be gluttonous and indicative of a small mind. She’d never understood the popular compulsion to hoard a hundred silver spoons, a hundred porcelain trinket boxes, a hundred stamps, and certainly not a hundred copies of back news. What good did it do a person? When they were dead and gone, it was all fodder for the trash fires.

  “How generous of Mrs. Lydia Jane to share, but we must run an errand on our way to the orphanage.” Rachel bit the end of her sausage and chewed.

  Cookie was of the old French servant ways and didn’t say a word in opposition. She merely raised her eyebrows high and gave a low hum under her breath while cleaning away their empty dishes.

  The windstorm had passed and the sun was out, making the day warmer than the one before. They were halfway down the front stoop before Cookie shouted out, “Be wary of Spring Garden Road! Trouble there today—a hanging!”

  Marilla looked to Rachel.

  Rachel grinned.

  Marilla frowned.

  Together they pushed down the city sidewalk. The bells and whinnies of the fly carriages whirled left and right. Kitchen mai
ds rushed by with baskets full of root vegetables, new bread, and fish in paper wrappings. Newsboys shouted, “Half price!” on the morning edition. The Majesty Inn, where they’d stayed on their last visit, was busy as an anthill. Madame Stéphanie’s Hat Boutique was equally so. Patrons hurried from shop door to shop door, keeping out of the cold. Marilla and Rachel were the only ones to pause at the window, ogling the winter bonnets of fur and wool.

  “I wish Father had an account with Madame,” said Rachel. “Then I could buy another lace hat. I barely got to wear mine for an hour.”

  “Pining for a thing won’t grant you it. Come on.”

  Rachel might’ve concocted this bed-warmer mission, but Marilla was determined not to be caught in a lie of circumstance. They would go to the general store and on to the orphanage, then directly back to Mrs. Lydia Jane’s. Not knowing the layout of Hopetown, Marilla feared they’d come upon the gallows at any minute. She’d looked into the face of death already. There was nothing about it that she wished to revisit. Unlike Marilla, however, Rachel had never seen so much as a dead hog, and her macabre curiosity was getting the better of her. She dragged her heels and paused at every intersection to look east and west. She even stopped a chimney sweep to ask, “This isn’t Spring Garden Road, is it?”

  “No, miss, it’s—”

  Marilla yanked Rachel forward without hearing the rest. The general store was two blocks up, but the closer they got to the city center the thicker the crowds became. A maelstrom of motion swept them up so that they had to link arms to keep from being separated. So many people in the current. They couldn’t see one yard ahead. By the anxious tone of the mob, Marilla knew this was not the usual traffic. She didn’t dare ask a stranger. So she clung to Rachel and Rachel to her. Then, all at once, they came to a standstill and the murmurs quieted. Her fears were realized.

  On a high platform behind the courthouse was the gallows. Marilla pushed to find a way out of the throng, but all eyes were up to the scaffold and all feet planted in the frozen dirt.

  “We’re walled in.”

  Rachel nodded. “Look!”

  The soldiers escorted a handful of disheveled men from a wagon. The crowd burst into commotion. Jeers and cries mingled to a roar that made Marilla’s knees buckle. The vibration sent tremors through her. She covered her ears. When the prisoners reached the top platform, nooses were placed round their necks.

  “Silence!” called the magistrate. He wore a grand regent hat and elysian beaver coat.

  The crowd obeyed. The light breeze carried the sound of a distant harbor gull and the rumble of icy waves, making Marilla wish she were back on her island, far from this place.

  “These are the criminal leaders. They have been tried by the God-ordained court of Her Royal Majesty and found guilty of rebellion and treason. Look well, citizens. This is what befalls insurrection.”

  The mass erupted.

  “Death to treasoners!”

  “Tories for the Crown!”

  “Hang the rebels!”

  “The prisoners will have their last words,” said the magistrate.

  All hushed. The gull bleated cah-ha-ha-ha out of sight.

  “Please speak, Chevalier de Lorimier!” A sympathizer dared to shout.

  Marilla remembered the name from the newspapers. Lorimier and his comrades were part of the Patriote Movement’s paramilitary. They had participated in the uprising for an independent Canada. A seditious act. The sentence was death.

  Lorimier lifted his face. The flaxen rope was tight at his neck, but he spoke boldly, as if it weren’t there at all.

  “I leave behind my children, whose only heritage is the memory of my misfortune. Poor orphans, it is you who are to be pitied, you whom the bloody and arbitrary hand of the law strikes through my death . . . I am not afraid. Vive la liberté!”

  And then the trapdoors were unbolted and the men fell like weighted jigs.

  Rachel cried into Marilla’s shoulder, but Marilla stared on, unable to blink.

  “May God be with their souls,” she whispered, then saw a child, still in pantalets and swathed in a knitted cap and scarf, atop its father’s shoulders. Watching. Laughing. Cheering on death. And Marilla was suddenly aware of children everywhere. Some with their parents and many alone in scruffy groups of threes and fours. All laughed and mocked the dead. Justice was a game and had nothing to do with right versus wrong. They were too young to understand that life is ephemeral while death is permanent. These weren’t her children or children of Avonlea, and yet they pained her. Like a tendon tethered to splintered bone.

  A hole in the crowd gave them pass and Marilla took Rachel’s hand.

  “Come on!”

  Together they ran, the steel toes of their boots clicking on the cobblestones, until Marilla saw the doors of the orphanage. There she pulled the bell and banged the knocker over and over for what felt like an eternity before the bolt slid open and they spilled inside, shaking and sweating despite the frost on their coats.

  XXIV.

  Safe Havens and Letters

  “I would’ve insisted you come another day had I known of the executions,” apologized the Reverend Mother.

  She had hot tea brought into her office, but neither Marilla nor Rachel could drink a drop.

  “We bolted the doors for fear of rioters, but the Royal Guard seems to have everything under control.” She cleared her throat and stared out the window to the inner courtyard, empty of children in the winter months.

  Rachel cried off and on. Marilla sat stony, wishing they’d never gone down that street, never set out on such a folly. They should’ve obeyed Mrs. Lydia Jane and gone straight to the orphanage.

  “Is it over?” asked Marilla.

  The Reverend Mother continued her gaze outside. “I fear it’s only beginning. The unrest is more expansive than Hopetown. The United States is also in conflict. Our Sisters of Charity there speak of the great divide between North and South. Just as we here are Tory against Reformer. Human hearts are full of strife. It’s a fallen world, my dears. We can only do our best to establish safe havens where we can.”

  It seemed a battle already lost.

  The Reverend Mother turned then and picked up the donation check that Marilla had brought. “Thank you for this. Mighty good will come from it.”

  “But how can we help more?”

  “Justice is mine, sayeth the Lord. Let the men of politics rage against each other, spill blood, and live in enmity. It’s our duty to love the poor, the orphaned, the weary and burdened. Matthew 11:28. Love can be its own kind of war.”

  Rachel broke into sobs. “I want my mother . . .”

  The Reverend Mother rang a bell on her desk, and the door opened. “Sister Catherine, would you please take Miss White to the kitchen. The poor lamb has had quite a shock. Perhaps a sugar biscuit would help settle her nerves.”

  Sister Catherine put an arm around Rachel and led her out. The Reverend Mother closed the door to her office before facing Marilla.

  “The moment I met you, I saw strength. May I share something in confidence?”

  Marilla couldn’t imagine what the Reverend Mother might need to share in confidence with a Presbyterian farm girl from Prince Edward Island.

  “Of course.” She gulped and quickly prayed:

  Forgive me for not obeying Mrs. Lydia Jane. Forgive me for being tolerant of Rachel’s deceptive schemes. Forgive me for not being with my mother in the hour of her need. Forgive me for the woods and the brook . . . and John. She wanted to be as absolved as possible to receive whatever the Reverend Mother wished to bestow.

  “Do you remember the young orphan you met last year—Juniper?”

  Marilla could never forget. “Is she still here?”

  “No.” The Reverend Mother adjusted the sleeve of her tunic. “Thankfully not. She was adopted by a family in Newfoundland.”

  The image conjured by that news was soothing: the girl in her red bonnet ambling down some pastoral road with her new p
arents.

  “I’m glad,” said Marilla. “I can’t imagine it’s easy . . .” She struggled for the right words. “For a person of her description . . . an older orphan and—”

  “An African slave?”

  Marilla looked down at her fingers. “Mrs. White is having her sewing circle and Sunday school knit caps. She’s determined to have enough for every orphan by next winter.”

  “That’s very kind of her. We have too many cases of head cold in the winters.”

  Yes, but Marilla hoped the Reverend Mother had heard what she was really saying.

  “And I should think,” Marilla continued, “that a quality hat might be a simple but vastly important thing to an orphan in need of concealment.”

  The Reverend Mother smiled and took a seat beside Marilla.

  “So you do understand.”

  Marilla nodded. “I believe so.”

  “To speak candidly, we are receiving more and more children born into slavery and orphaned by their parents’ deaths or life’s circumstances. It makes no difference to God. They are alone and in need of grace. There are very few safe houses between the southern states of America and our door. They arrive half starved, wounded, sick, and terrified from the journey. We do what we can—everything we can. But with so few sanctuaries, it’s impossible for the many to take refuge in those few. Our dormitories are overwhelmed. It’s increasingly difficult to protect them from slave-catchers who wish to return them to bondage. Despite Canadian law, there are many in power who sympathize with the wealthy slaveholders. To them, these orphans are property, not people. The courts have their hands full with the rebellions. They turn a blind eye to the runaway slaves and the slave owners who come to collect them. It’s a broken system for which neither Tory nor Reformer has a solution. So we look to the Word: ‘for you are not under the law but under grace.’ Romans 6. We obey that and pray it protects. His grace be sufficient.” She crossed herself. “Amen.”

  One land’s law outlawed slavery. Another’s enshrined it. Both thought they were just. Marilla saw the need for action and the great peril the slaves faced if discovered.