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She would know his stride at any hour, from almost any distance — an upright, restrained yet capering limp, a prosodized form of that skirmishing irony his family lives in such disdain and dread of — and so while Dean is still a long ways off up the New Moon lane Emily has already leapt from her seat at the lookout window, raised her mirrored hairbrush for a fortifying consultation with Emily-in-the-Glass, skimbled her way downstairs — skimble-skamble ought to be one of those words you can fold into a paragraph by halves, like butter — rushed out-of-doors into Cousin Jimmy’s garden and come to stand between the eventide shadows cast by its central black spruce.
She has lived these past three days in a torment of anticipation, pricked by scrupulous moments wherein she has misguessed certain recollected phrases or descriptions, turns of plot or interchanges of dialogue within the manuscript she has handed, irretrievably, to Dean Priest: a man who has read everything from Aristotle to Aquinas, Machiavelli to Kant, Cervantes to Tolstoy to Hugo to Goethe to Dickens and Eliot, although upon finishing The Mill on the Floss Emily had pitched it through the barn's hayloft door in anguished rage and only beseeched the book later for its pardon. Dean is a man who has been everywhere, knows everything, purportedly believes in nothing, or else believes that whatever is done has been done before already like a chasing after the wind. He has dismissed her short fictions by his satiric praise as hobbyist cobwebs, which Emily supposes is what they become when passed beneath those eyes that frequently seem to be partaking of a private, slightly cruel cosmic jest.
And what would eyes such as those make of a rainbowed thrice-denied novel like A Seller of Dreams ? What has she been expecting him to make of it? Vanity of vanities! Emily swats distractedly at herself, noting how her skirts are still knotted above the knees from climbing into the cellar with some apple marmalade she has put up for the winter. She hastens to set herself in better niminy-piminy order. Ought she to have worn one of her crêpe or dimity dresses, instead? Her ashes-of-roses gown? What color did Dean favor best? She hasn’t even taken off the old flour-sack apron she wears for pickling turnips! But why should considerations like those enter into her thinking? Aunt Elizabeth will doubtless be looking out shortly to find Emily fallen down in a swoon like that stupid heroine from Children of the Abbey and conclude the girl has knocked herself insensible by running full-chisel into something: possibly a stone wall, having mistaken it for a cardboard one.
“Daffy,” confides Emily, to the cat who comes skambling out after her, “maybe Mr. Carpenter was right about getting a spoon and learning to cook. A turkey pot pie wouldn’t torture me like this.”
Yet in Dean, Emily allows, there is also the man who can spy fantastical shapes within the clouds, and who knows all the tales of triumph and tragedy that lend the constellations their shapes; who years ago had read her childhood poems with such solemn attention, pausing only to ask where in all the infernal circles a frozen-chosen Murray of New Moon fetched up a term like "Papal dispensation"; who told her a story about seeing Venice eternal and ethereal in the summer moonshine that nevertheless concluded in a jolly, deprecating joke about getting eaten alive by the mosquitos; whose penetrative, compassionate, mocking, winsome, scornful, dignified, longing, uncanny eyes are such a suitably pale, magician-green color, and never reveal the same cards twice. He is the man who once stepped to the edge of a bank above the rocks at Malvern Bay to get a closer look at a spray of farewell-summer, blooming there in its requiem purple, and maybe he wondered as he walked why the earth felt so loose under his feet.
But I’d hate to have you dream of being an Austen or a Brontë, he has said to her, and wake to find you’d wasted your youth on a dream.
And Emily has asked him for the truth! The stark, unclothed truth! A recklessly dreadful petition: as reckless as a prayer for the utmost desire of one’s heart and nearly as dreadful, nearly, as hearing the voice of God call one’s name and answering back, here I am.
If you condemn it, I’ll burn it, she has sworn to him. Had that been the truth as well? Oh, the rebuke she’d like to give that second publisher and his scribbling-women condescensions about pepping up her story, changing its ending! Something in the style of Ilse’s objurgations might've fixed him: you plucked-bald chicken — you featherless biped — you man — no, that was a redundancy, and an italicized redundancy at that.
Then Emily wishes in a homesick way for Ilse’s old friendship, for an undoing of the time that has removed them forever from the days when they could argue about whether their playhouse built from twigs should have a parlor, but this is just as hopeless as the wish that she could undo these last three days and save her first-born manuscript from whatever merciless judgement it is about to receive, however fair the judgement may prove to be when she is twenty years older, a hundred years wiser. She nearly glances up into the darkling sky but looks away before she can pick out Vega of the Lyre.
Whose lyre, though? Yes. She remembers. It belonged to Orpheus, thwarted mournful Orpheus. Yet even in death Eurydice he sung, Eurydice still trembled on his tongue, Eurydice the woods and floods and rocks and hollow mountains rung — but Emily had handed Dean back his tattdermalion copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology declaring that her favorite was the story about Cupid and Psyche.
“Is it? I’d have thought Proserpine and Pluto would've appealed more to your tastes as a romantic,” Dean had said, dryly.
“Psyche had more interesting adventures. She was brave,” Emily answered, fifteen and wondering if Dean could divine by her ladylike posture that she was wearing a new coutil corset: dove-gray, boned with watchspring, fringed by a flummery of lace. “And loyal.”
By the time Dean’s limping step brings him up to the garden gate, Emily is sure the tumult in her heart will shake her body into flinders: though in Murray-pride style, it must be acknowledged, she commands herself to stand pale and immovable beside the stone bench. She turns. The enameling autumn dusk lends everything a blue clarity that is sharpened further by the immixing of what Dean Priest means to her and all the mutinous suspicions Emily has been dismissing as devilish nonsense, again and again, concerning what she may mean to him.
“Well,” she says.
Dean stops. He is holding her book and its beloved book-people in his hands. He looks askance at her from a place far behind those too-knowing eyes with what is, rather unmistakably, a transfixed or fearful kind of guilt.
Cold dread cascades through her. She clenches her fists — she is a Starr, a Murray, a Shipley, a Byrd, even a bit of a Burnley, forty-two degrees of cousinship removed — yet when Dean opens his mouth Emily hears herself speaking, first.
“I used the word ‘incarnadine’ twice.” Her voice is a tremor. “I only just realized it today — in Chapters Two and Seven. That must be a kind of a mortal sin — a literary gluttony. It’s such a sumptuous word! Even Shakespeare only ever set it once into all the plays and sonnets he ever wrote.” She braces her knees, as she had braced them against her school-desk while waiting for Mr. Carpenter to read her poems. “I know I told you I’d burn it if you didn’t think it was any good. That was a wicked thing to say. But — ‘dear to us are even the wounds inflicted by a faithful friend’ — ” Emily is unsure if this is a precise quotation from the twenty-seventh verse of Proverbs but hopes her paraphrase is not in violation of the advisement from Fifth Matthew about adding any jot or tittle to the law; water brims into her eyes “— and you’ve always been my friend, Dean. Thank you for being my friend — I've asked you for the truth and you could never be any less of a friend to me for telling it.” Her hands come to rest flatly over her heart after a swipe at both her cheeks. She manages a final small, steadying smile to give him courage, if he happens to need it. “Yes. Go on.”
Then she waits, longer, and returning to this moment afterwards Emily will not be able to decide whether what silences her is the fact that she has run out of things to say or if it is the half-suppressed look of effortful, almost sick distress that has come gradually into Dean’s face, with its elusive and allusive features she has never found handsome but has always considered interesting. Which may be preferable, from an authorly perspective: a handsome face becomes invisible after two or three descriptions but an interesting face yields new significances with each subsequent encounter, like an exegesis. She has thought recently of how Dean has seemed to go backwards in time, as she herself advances forward, changing in her perception from an old man to a merely middle-aged man who may even, one day, be young, but something in his expression now opens the whole pathless if brief lifetime of difference in their ages between them.
“So — ” perhaps she needs to help him deliver the killing stroke; how unnatural it is to see Dean Priest seized by a loss for words “— it's no good.”
They are almost equal in height, Emily being a trifle taller, so that when Dean lowers his head she can see there are several strands of gray shot through his lion-brown hair.
“— It’s very good, Star.”
The aforementioned Emily Starr is so absorbed in wondering whether his walk through the chill dusk accounts for the hoarseness in his voice — the crook in Dean’s back causes his rib-cage to buckle outwards, allotting less space for his right lung than his left; it makes him prone to coughs — that she nearly mishears him. The shimmer in her eyes spills over but she does not lift her hands to dry it this time.
“Oh,” she says.
He raises his head. The tendons in his slender throat move when he swallows.
“You’ve asked me not to blandish you with false praises, so I’ll say it has its faults — a bit emotional, a bit overstrained — it needs a final pruning — but there’s a true charm and wit in it. It is a work out of the ordinary in both its conception and development. Your characters are natural, delightful and alive — they’re nearly as filled with the sheer joy of existence as you are.” He lays her book on the bench. “I did say once that I perceived you are an artist in words. I trust you won’t begrudge me the venial pride of knowing I spoke rightly.”
“And —” the faintness in Emily’s voice disconcerts her “— there aren’t too many italics? They’re such an Early Victorian obsession.”
“The first italics in Western typography were improvised by Aldus Manitius in 1500 to replicate the appearance of calligraphy. If they’re an obsession, they’re Renaissance humanist one,” Dean brushes at his vest as if drying his palms, “and that suits you nearly as well as fairytales do.”
Emily’s hands remain clasped against her tempest-tossing heart. She must wait longer before she can trust her voice.
“I see.” She glances at her book on the tide-smoothed bench, then at Dean who has dropped his emptied hands to his sides. The air and sky have taken on a preemptive radiance of remembrance for her, although the thing is still happening and seems as if it will go on happening for a long time. “Thank you. I’m much obliged to you for your honesty.” Her head bursts full of a whirligig light. “I’m going to sit down, if you don’t mind.”
She sags onto the bench in a billow of workaday twill skirts. Dean settles at her left, tucking the black ends of his coat against himself. Emily hides her face behind her hands as tears slip between her fingers.
“I’m — happy you like it.” A few miscreant strands of hair stick to her face. Emily hopes they will not straggle their way into her mouth. “You’ll laugh at how afraid I’ve been. Wasn’t that cowardly of me? Just now I was sure, really sure you were coming here to tell me the book was — another pretty, flimsy cobweb. How could somebody who's lived as little as I have ever write a story? And lately it’s seemed as if all my work must be very worthless and childishly unimportant to you.” Her face grows fever-hot. Emily presses the backs of her numb and trembling hands against it. “I’m sorry. What an unjust thing to say. Only, it’s made me feel — downcast, and lost — to think I couldn’t create anything you admired. Mr. Carpenter said I shouldn’t try to please anyone other than myself, but — you're so clever, Dean. Nobody else I’ve ever met cares about books like you do, the way you can understand and truly know them, as if they’re living people who might keep somebody company when he's lonely — oh, Dean, please forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive, Star,” he says, in that strange fraught voice.
“Thank you. And I'm — not respecting Murray traditions with this comportment, am I?” Her face is too dripping-wet for her hands to make a difference. She uses her sleeves. “I’ve been trying to decide for these past three days how I’d survive it if you told me the book was no good. Even if it was only pretty cobwebs, I —”
“Would that have been so — absolutely fatal, if I’d said it?” The question seems to stick in his throat. “The Lady of Shalott’s charmed web-weaving has withstood the test of time.”
“Tennyson.” She sniffs. “He’s nice enough, but he’s always seemed a bit overdone to me. That poem’s five stanzas too long. Besides, the Lady of Shalott was cursed, and imprisoned. She could never turn around to stare the world fully in its face, until she did it anyway and perished for it.” Emily rubs her nose, which will begin to drip in about a minute. “Unless that's a useful comparison — burning the book would’ve felt like casting my whole heart into the fire.”
“You wouldn’t have burned it,” Dean says. Emily also wonders if she should bring him a dipperful of water from the outdoor pump, since he sounds parched as well as tired. “I know you didn’t mean that. Tell me you didn’t.”
Emily does not look at him. She must, must compose herself, but this exhausted ecstasy and relief fills her so utterly that for several moments even her generational pride cannot enfold it. She remembers the heart-ravished victory of writing the final page to A Seller of Dreams and pondering, dazedly, if this was anything like what a woman felt when she had a baby.
“I can’t decide. I can’t say it. But I’ve — ” Emily lowers her hands “— you sent me a poem, once. You’d cut it from ‘The Fringed Gentian’ and wrote that it reminded you of me. I’ve kept that clipping, all this while. It’s in the portfolio you brought me from Paris. I’m sure you’ve forgotten it, but the final verse has always stayed with me — ‘Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep, how I may upward climb the Alpine Path, so hard, so steep, that leads to heights sublime’ — ”
“— ‘How I may reach that far-off goal of true and honored fame,’” he rounds the verse off without effort, “‘and write upon its shining scroll a woman’s humble name.’”
A soft, overwhelmed sob rises out of her before she can stifle it; there is an almost imperceptible fit of motion through Dean’s right hand that makes Emily think for one blank, vertical second that he is going to reach towards her, to touch her arm or her shoulder, and what will she do if that happens? But he only clenches his own hand into a fist, as if around a passing reflexive impulse, then he opens it again. Emily brushes more tears off the wicks of her mouth.
“When I — knew I wanted to be a writer, I vowed — that’s the way I’ll do it. I'll climb the Alpine Path and put my name on that shining scroll — you wouldn’t lie to me, though, Dean. You understand everything so well. You’ve always made my life — richer, and dearer, by your being in it.” She dries a hand against her skirts before reaching to touch the manuscript and sees there are several dog-earned corners where Dean has marked off its pages. “If you’d said this was no good — you — then I don’t know what I would’ve done. I might’ve — given up, or wanted to. And that — ” at her next breath the autumn briefly takes on a sweeter, watery softness like spring. Another opal-hued evening comes back to her along with the permanent immediacy of its grief “ — Dean, it would’ve been like learning all over again that my father was going to die. I hoped I’d die, too, so we could stay together.”
The tears are blotching her aproned lap and the frontage of her shirtwaist. It occurs to her that in the six years she has known Dean Priest she has never, not once, not even over the grand novels or poems they have read together, wept in front of him; as for Dean himself, Emily has often concluded that he must have left off such idealist human trifles as weeping years ago, as well as doubting and the forsaken, wakeful agonies of three o’clock.
But there is another lacuna of silence, and when Dean speaks Emily reconsiders all those sides to his empty life she knows nothing whatsoever about.
“Your father, Star,” he says, “had a habit of looking at everything as though it mattered. We proofed each other’s essays in school and I told him he might as well go off to be a circuit preacher instead of a journalist, since he seemed intent on composing a whole eulogy or an epithalamium to every single one of life’s mundane details. But that was my usual mean-spirited humor — in fact, it’s what made him good company. I’m sure it was the sole reason he ever took the trouble of becoming my friend.” Dean lowers his attention to her hand atop the manuscript. “It’s been strange to hear snatches of Douglas Starr’s voice again, after all these years, but if your whole heart’s in there then I shouldn’t wonder.”
This reaches something else, something deeper, within her, and Emily starts to cry anew, appalled at herself. Hysterics! What would that Murray tribunal of portraits in the parlor say? Yet there must have been an artist or two among them who could sympathize, surely. Nobody but an artist would hang a front door with red glass panes in it such as they have at New Moon, since making that particular shade of pentecostal scarlet requires gold-dust be added at the glass's molten phase.
Finally Emily wads up her apron and buries her face against it, completing the preposterous spectacle she is making of herself and her clan. Dean turns out his pockets in quest of a handkerchief but finds them empty — Emily is glad of this; Dean’s pocket handkerchief tends to retain the bay-rum scent of his shaving soap — and he looks away towards the garden’s northwest corner where its sundial stands.
“Remember those tomorrows you’ve told me about.” His voice recovers its more typic wryness. “There’s a great deal of life ahead of you yet and you’ll learn not to hazard so much by placing it entirely into the hands of your critics.” He angles his head, though his twisted shoulder lends it a mild and perpetually speculative tilt anyway. “Especially not the despoiling old cynics like your friend Jarback Priest.”
His tone restores Emily to herself as well, partially. She gives her apron a bannering snap. “You are not old, Dean. If Byron had died at forty-two instead of thirty-six everybody would’ve still lamented how he was too young for the world to be parted so soon from him.”
“Considering the special grudge you harbored for that woebegone painting of him at Ruth Dutton’s house, I can’t say the comparison is a credit to me.”
“An abstract comparison. Byron’s hair was darker and I’ve never been able to take his mouth seriously. Yours suggests a better-developed sense of humor.” She finishes drying her face. “But my book — the story wasn’t too quiet? The ending’s right? The second publisher I sent it to told me it needed — peppering.”
Dean keeps his face turned away. “Evidently the bore mistook your submission as a recipe intended for the home-life section in MacLean’s and therefore I can’t advise you. My sisters haven’t let me within shooting distance of a kitchen since I carved ‘To the Fairest’ into one of their Victoria Day picnic toffee apples. Granted, I was about twenty-seven at the time and might’ve behaved myself better.”
“How very Priest-y of you.” She baffs at him using her apron, but without touching him. “Did Aunt Nancy emerge as the winner in your ensuing family contest?”
“Inevitably, given that favorite-nephew Leslie offered to play the role of Paris. Dear, venerable Aunt Nancy,” says Dean, “though she’s always struck me more as a Hera than an Aphrodite.” He pauses. He has always possessed a knavish sense of comic timing. “Possibly even an Eris.”
Emily smiles against her apron before dropping it to pin back her disordered locks of hair. “I could never understand why Athena and the other goddesses wanted that garish prize so badly in the first place. A solid gold apple has lost all the loveliest things that make an apple an apple, hasn’t it? The shaded, flaming colors, the wisps and freckles on its skin, the tiny dark seeds like gemstones — no, thank you. I’d have chucked it back into the fray and asked to exchange it for one of Lofty John’s big green sweets.”
“Why, yes, I believe you would’ve. Then Homer would’ve needed to find alternative fodder for his epics — and if you could similarly unmake the events that precipitated the first book of Xenophon’s Anabasis, my stalwart patroness, you will have wholly delivered a marginally more fortunate iteration of myself from the miseries of his college entrance examinations on Greek grammar.”
The sprightly fun of this remark nearly startles Emily as much as the sobriety it replaces. It has felt like such an impossible age since she last heard that self-forgetful, boyish slyness in Dean’s voice, over the course of this year that has been changing everyone she knows into strangers in strange lands while also changing Emily into a stranger unto herself. The triumph thrilling through her veins — it is good; he has admitted her book is good — commingles now with the more familiar quickening, parrying satisfaction of knowing she has made Dean Priest laugh, although when matching her convictions against his own it has heretofore always seemed as if she is facing an expert swordsman indulgent enough to keep one hand behind his back.
“But good prose and poetry do have a sort of festal quality to them, don’t they? Assuming you don't overload the pepper,” she says, gaily, the tears still sparkling on her lashes. The raw redness of her nose and eyelids have a more sublunary effect. “The first time I ever read a verse from Donne I wished I could eat it like a spoonful of the meringue glacé I tasted once at a Charlottetown social. Tart, yet so lavish.”
“H'm. The Palace Hotel in San Francisco was serving a respectable meringue glacé the last time I visited,” Dean says, “or as respectable as such an impertinent confection can be. I can’t speak for it now, what with the fire they had back in April.” He holds his lean jaw, considering. “That hellrake Marlowe could probably provide a heavier main dish for your feast, but there would need to be a stronger flavoring of human unkindness in it. Veal grenadin with a fresh mushroom sauce?”
“Never.” Emily’s hands thump back over her heart. “That’s too brutal, even from the man who gave The Tragical Historie of Doctor Faustus its horrid ending. I helped Cousin Jimmy pull a calf last spring and haven’t been able to eat veal again since. The heifer had been in labor so long, we worried she’d die — it was the sort of thing that makes one appreciate why the Spartans honored a woman’s death in child-bed as equal to a man’s death in battle.” A different sort of heat diffuses through her elfin ears. It is an indelicate remark, especially in a man’s presence, but then Dean is not a common man and he has never once told Emily that anything she has said was indelicate, or incomprehensible, even if the jeering quirk of his mouth has occasionally suggested she has said something ridiculous; she does, however, hope he has never heard the story about how Emily Byrd Starr plans to have ten children and has already picked out their names. “No. I’ll only agree to serve it if it’s mutton or beef.”
“As your ladyship wishes,” Dean concedes, evidently unaffected. “Would your overdone friend Tennyson bring the potatoes au gratin?”
“Potatoes in that state are still too lumpy and jokesome for the likes of Tennyson. The man never let himself get carried away by anything! But he’d serve a wonderfully-flavored and civilized bowl of crème vichyssoise.” She gestures as if arranging the spread of a table. Her hot face cools. “It could follow an appetizer of Keats’s caviar canape. I can never tolerate his richness in larger portions.”
“Nor would you be the first reader for whom ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ has been a cause of indigestion, though I’ll note that the caviars in Moscow or Brescia are nothing like what you find at a Charlottetown social.” Dean’s hands come to rest on his knees. The slim, lathed lines of his wrists give Emily cause to recollect all the letters he has ever written to her, while away for his winter travels, those tantalizing accounts of a country’s art and landscapes, food and music, the people and their histories filled with pain, bloodshed, shame and heartache. “What have you got for other entrees and cheeses? Where are your authors and desserts?”
“Austen could contribute something like a chicken saute with artichokes, I think. I'd love to grow artichokes, but it's too cold here, and Aunt Elizabeth says they strike her as perfidious vegetables. What have they got to hide, she says, all closed up like that? But a nicely-baked one begins with the mild, sophisticated taste, and you only work your way down to the acerbity of it after you’ve chewed it twice. That's what reading Austen was like for me, then re-reading her later — Charlotte Brontë could provide something equally delicate and ornate, in an utterly different way. Her prose stimulates but never oppresses the palate. 'A muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close-serried, along the horizon,'” quotes Emily. “I'll ask her to bring filet of freshwater herring poached in vermouth.”
“Caught from some misty gray loch at daybreak? Yes. Better poach it with some lemon, too. There’s more than a dash of that in Villette.” Dean taps a thumb. “What might either or both of Miss Charlotte’s sisters bring for you?”
Emily purses and bites her lips. “What was the name of that cheese you tried once while you were in Lozère? Roquefort? That might suit Anne, to balance things, even if it’s a French cheese and she was so properly English. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has such a smoothly distinctive tang to it.”
“Indeed. And I’d attribute the same understated texture to Agnes Grey.” He swallows again. “And your fellow Emily? Whatever was in her that allowed her to give the world Wuthering Heights, I fear your other attendees may express some trepidation about sampling it.”
“Oh, no they won’t.” Daring, a little, the triumph still humming vividly through her, Emily leans an ell or two closer towards him. She drops her voice to a pig’s-whisper. “I’ll teach her Aunt Laura’s chocolate cake recipe. I’ve learned how to make it, you know.”
Dean leans no closer but drops his voice to the same tête-à-tête volume. “Isn't that recipe an oath-kept Murray secret? Everybody in Blair Water has been after it for nigh on thirty years.”
“Miss Emily Brontë ought to always be treated as an exception, whatever the rules. Anyway, the cake’s real name is,” she leans in, farther, sitting tightly on her hands so her sleeve will not brush against his, “‘Devil’s Food,’ but that's an excessively improper name.”
“Excessively improper.” He repeats it warmly. “And a bit impious of you to share it, I should add. Do you draw me into your confidence on this most sacrosanct of family traditions because I’m an infidel?”
“I told you, you're my friend. And you’re no more an infidel than you are an old man, Dean — you believe in God but you don’t believe He cares.”
“‘And Man in portions can foresee his own funereal destiny.’”
Emily is near enough to him now that she notes there are several more gray hairs at his temple, just behind the vulnerable square of skin where a pulse could be felt, if pressed: the temporal artery, according to one of Doctor Burnley’s medical textbooks. She sits back.
“Byron! I forgot about Byron. He’ll feel hideously slighted if I don’t reserve a seat for him. What dish should I ask him to prepare?”
Dean pushes two knuckles absently against his breastbone as if palpating a twinge of soreness while he thinks.
“You can ask Byron and his ridiculous mouth to victual the Camembert cheese,” he says. “It’s a bit more earthy and pungent compared to the Roquefort.” His hand drops into his lap. The few paper-fine creases around his eyes are deepened by one of his inflected smiles. “Unless you’d rather he supplied the tablecloth? Purple and gold, like the cohorts of the Assyrian?"
Emily nods, paying him a sidelong smile in return. Once when Dean came to visit her on a showery May morning, Emily had been doing Aunt Laura’s weaving up in the garret — he had climbed the stairs as he always did, two feet on each tread — and she press-ganged him into helping her wind the warps for a whig-rose-patterned coverlet. He had observed that the beat of her floor loom’s treadles was an anapestic tetrameter and they took alternate turns reciting lines from The Destruction of Sennacherib to one another, until Aunt Elizabeth called up to ask them what, for peace’s sake, they were raving about. In the twilight beneath the spruce tree Dean turns away from the sundial and towards the garden’s big lilac bush.
“— Ah. Wait,” he says. “You have no wine.”
And there, suddenly, as before, is that same fatigue in his voice, ordinarily so coy or mordant or full of eloquent, communing silences. Emily nearly leans forward to look him in the face but saves herself by giving her thighs a pat that reminds her of Ellen Greene.
“That’s right. We’ll need good wine, red and white. How careless of me! Could I entrust a Transcendentalist with such an important task?”
“I’m sure Emerson could provision you with a magnificent bottle of white — clear and frosted like a midwinter’s eve in the northern woods — and Thoreau might bring you an equally fine contribution, if you could snag him by his coat-tails long enough to even give him a dinner invitation — as effervescent and eerily gleeful as the tremolo cry of a loon.” Then Dean turns his unhandsome face towards her; it wears a bemused expression yet there is a presence beneath it, behind it, that troubles her wellspring-depths in the subtle way Dean’s expressions frequently do. “But you’re this banquet's guest of honor, my Star. I suggest you choose who brings the red.”
And Emily ought to think, wishes to think, wants to think of Teddy, the sweet mysticism of their shared glance in the Old John House, yet what comes to her — red wine, after all, is the drink of soldiers and poets, kings and servants alike — are thoughts of Aunt Laura, holding her head while she was sick from that hideous dose of mustard-water during the poisoned-apple kerfuffle; Cousin Jimmy, placing a new blank book on her desk, having ridden almost fifteen miles against the fangs of a rising storm to buy it at Shrewsbury; Aunt Ruth, sailing out the door in her finest bonnet like a stout little ironclad warship, its turret gun primed for a fight wherein it would dance circles around any bigger opponent that dared to cross it; Father, dearest of fathers, asking Emily to sit on his knee because he no longer had the strength to lift her, wrapping her into the wings of his faded robe in a way that made all the brokenhearted fears withdraw from her; Ilse dancing with her across the moonlit sands, Perry saying he would walk the whole distance to Charlottetown so he could give whichever editor had rejected her poem a good sockdolager on the nose, Daffy in her arms and purring so deeply she could feel it through his fur; she remembers Aunt Elizabeth standing above her as she spoke, in a quaking voice, Emily, I had no right to read your letters, I was wrong, will you forgive me?
“For the red wine,” says Emily, “I think I'll ask that nice young shepherd-boy David and his harp.”
Dean pauses to weigh the proposition. He examines his composed hands rested on his knees.
“Yes. You’re right, of course. Nothing inferior will do,” he says, and then says something else. “The Psalms were about the only poetry my mother ever read or liked, but she knew them all by heart — those and the Song of Songs.”
“Oh! Did she? That’s wonderful. I couldn’t recite any of them from memory, except the twenty-third. I — don’t know if I’ve heard you mention your mother before, Dean.” A dishonest pronouncement: Emily knows it for a settled fact that Dean has not, even if Old Kelly has tried more than once to ward her off the blighted Priest clan with a piece of Blair Water gossip about how Jarback’s father used to throw the dinner dishes when he was in a temper. “My favorite Psalm has always been the one hundred and fourth. Which did she like best?”
“I never knew. She died when I was ten years old and that isn’t a question a child usually asks his mother.” One edge of Dean’s mouth twitches. “Not the sort of selfish child I was, anyway.”
“We’re all a bit selfish when we’re young.”
“And a blessed few of us eventually recover from the double affliction.” He inclines his head again, this time like a sort of genuflection. “There’s several lines in your book I believe she would’ve enjoyed especially.”
“Then your mother was a — ” Emily waits to receive the right word; across the fields and hills that encircle the Blair Water valley a lantern kindles in a distant farmhouse window “— daydreamer sort of a woman?”
“She was a sad woman. Or marrying my father and becoming my mother turned her into one.”
A night-breeze carries the briary scent of woodsmoke from various chimneys. For an instant Emily’s heart seems to bleed out through uncounted different channels at once into the life of whoever has lighted that far-off lantern and into all the other hundreds of lives playing out their dramas around her, at whose mysterious sorrows and glories alike she will only ever be able to guess as if seeing them reflected within a glass darkly: at least, thinks Emily, until we’re all in heaven together, at the end of age, hopefully a more exciting heaven than Mr. Dare preached about as well as a place where my cats can be, and then we will see each other face to face.
Is Dean’s mother there already, a shining witness, or is she waiting for him along the road, like Father promised he and Mother would wait for me?
“I decided when I was thirteen that I want to be a writer who uses her pen to heal instead of hurt,” Emily says. “I hope those lines from my book your mother might’ve enjoyed are ones that could have helped her, too.”
And for a second time in the same evening, Dean Priest does not appear to know how he should answer. The posture he is sitting in allows Emily to study his mute back; working up a description of him in her Jimmy-book as a girl she had written, but he isn’t really hunched or crooked, is he? His shape is much more like a curve in scrollwork, I think. When I see it I imagine the twining stem of a wild grape, or the ornamentation they set into the margins of an illuminated manuscript, and because this line had shone as her candle-flame favorite in an otherwise dim, shoddy paragraph, Emily snuffed it out entirely. Murder your darlings! Such hard advice. Her pen nearly bit through the paper.
She tries to give her thoughts the same corrective thumping she previously gave her skirts. She points to the manuscript.
“And what place at the table could this have, would you say?”
“That?” Dean shrugs his shoulders, the way he does when he is laughing at himself. “That’s the bread — as all fairytales have been for mankind, from the beginning of the world to date.”
Daffy has come to them on fog-light feet to brush against their legs. Emily runs a hand along his back whereas Dean does not; the informal, cajoling manner of greeting he is most accustomed to, as a man who has kept dogs all his life, runs too great a risk of offering the cat an insult it will require three successive feline lives to receive absolution for. Dean had stopped to rest once on their rambles at Wyther Grange — the strain of that uneven stride makes his body ache, as does damp weather, things Emily has gradually deduced rather than anything Dean has ever admitted to — and Tweed lay down beside him amidst the seaside goldenrod, setting his tawny head atop Dean’s chest until they both closed their eyes. This idle scene was permitted to continue until Emily in her ribboned braids picked some pink joe-pye-weed to scatter atop them, like a bespellment, and when Dean sat aright to shake the petals off his hair he had made a mischievous game of pretending she was a wood-sprite whose riddles he needed to answer. What is greener than the grass? What is deeper than the sea? Two years ago when one of her chickens laid a splendid milk-blue egg Emily had made pinholes at both the egg’s ends with her quilting needle, to blow out the plump yolk, then used a thimbleful of glossy carriage-paint to eek the middle stanza from “Hope" is the thing with feathers onto its shell — ah, there was another Emily who had crested the Alpine Path! “It's all I have to bring today” would send any aspirant into despair — so she could give the egg to Dean as a gift, wrapped in a matchbox. His birthday was about a month after hers on the 13th of June.
“My choice of verse isn’t too — pedestrian, is it?” Emily said, twirling a pinch of her muslin skirts. Dean’s pale, clean fingers had seemed deftly delicate as he turned the egg to read what was painted on it, and it made her blood skittish. “I’ve been thinking a Yeats poem might’ve been a better match for that shade of blue.”
Dean had looked at her, unsmiling. “Yeats? What has Yeats to do with me, or I with him? Leave him his salley-gardens and celestial frippery.” He set the egg back in the matchbox. “No embroidered cloth of heaven could be worth more to me than this, Star.”
Nobody bestows compliments the way Dean can, after all: like emerald diadems, like wildflower garlands. Going out for a walk one June morning Emily had put on an old straw sunhat lined with new cherry-red linen and greeting her Dean had remarked how the color made her face glow like a sunrise cloud, just as Emily had hoped, had known he would. Skimming cream in the New Moon dairy one July forenoon Emily was singing Wild Mountain Thyme to herself — I will build my love a bower by yon pure and living fountain, and around it I will lay all the flowers of the mountain — when Dean stooped through the low, narrow door at the top of the dairy’s steps, joining his lyric baritone with her half-trained spinetti soprano for the final chorus; then he said, lo, siren, most cunning and beauteous of catastrophes, what ill-fated man wouldst thou happen to be summoning towards his demise with thy song? Thrashing out the philosophies of Hobbes and Rousseau one balmy August evening in the garden Emily had said, exasperatedly, that some men needed their ears boxed more frequently as children, and Dean laughed, declaring how one day he would bring her to the Boston Athenaeum, or a Paris salon, and set her up like Saint Catherine of Alexandria, contesting her wisdom against the Emperor Maxentius’s scholars. You’d give everybody a drubbing they wouldn't soon forget, he said. And if anyone proposed to cut off your head like they did at first to Saint Catherine you could simply turn them to stone with one of your Murray looks.
Yet he never accepts compliments with much good grace in kind, to tell the bare bones of it. One day he had found Emily picking greengages in the sun-dappled old orchard and drew off his coat to serve as a bundle when her withy-basket grew full. Plucking down another of the glaucous, lucid little green plums, Emily had held it up to Dean’s tricksterish face and exclaimed, with the smitten joy of a flash — such a flash —
“Why, Dean! I never noticed! They’re almost the same color as your eyes.”
At which Emily thought he would smile, reply with a frolicsome comment or quote a terse, luscious line from one of those Japanese poems he knew; what had fanned through his fair complexion instead was a dark, humiliated flush, stinging-red as though she had just struck him with the back of her hand, so that for a transposed second she could almost envision the ungainly and unloving, unloved boy her father met at Queen’s Academy.
Dean, grown older, but perhaps with that same friendless boy reliquaried down inside some deep, narrow cleft driven into his heart, had cocked his head at one of its more misanthropic slants.
“I wouldn’t have guessed it was New Moon manners to make fun at a guest’s expense,” and his voice was bitter, “however much resemblance the guest in question bears to a bunch-backed toad.”
Emily had whitened, saying nothing. They carried her greengages into the cook-house without speaking and before Dean went away he handed her, wordlessly, the translation of Verdi’s Rigoletto he had originally come to lend her. After three days Emily returned it inside a parcel also containing a tiny quarter-pint jar of greengage jam, as well as a letter stating that while she thought the opera was exquisite, as expected from the maestro, the punishment its third act wrought upon Rigoletto was too severe, even if it was in retribution for those many injuries inflicted by the jester’s keen, pitiless tongue. In five more days only a clean and empty jam jar came back to her.
And how often over the past six years has Emily read a new poem, a play, a novel, a newspaper article, a fanatical advertisement for Dr. Hammond’s Pulmonary Curative and Tar Expectorant — WILT THOU BE MADE WHOLE? — and batted it around in her head like a yarn-ball until she could tease out some sportive, casual observation meant especially for Dean? When she has discovered the season’s first silvery-velvet catkin buds blooming on the willow trees, down in the pasture fields, or realized her new shoat-pig has higgley-wiggled its way between the palings of the sty so that she must charge after it through the slinging mud, has she not wondered — now, what just-perfect words will I choose when I tell Dean about this? Will it make him smile?
While she was in her final year at Shrewsbury she wrote him an absolute screed of a letter lampooning the particular translation of Cyrano de Bergerac chosen for her literature course: heresy! An insipid desecration! What daft person would entrust Cyrano’s duel or his exchanges with Roxane on the balcony to a dullard with no sense of humor? I'd sooner spend an evening with the R.H.Y.M! Then a fat envelope was returned to her, three weeks later, postmarked from the Hotel Arcadia in Los Angeles, the contents of which proved to be Dean’s handwritten translations of the Rostand dialogues — with a footnote: mayhap this will appease you, offended Polyhymnia — that retained all the drama’s piquancy and pain without any sloppy added sentimentalism. On three or four occasions Dean’s sister Mrs. Fred Evans had, potentially by riveting him to the buckboard, compelled her brother to come along to the summer gatherings held in the basement of Saint John’s Presbyterian Church; between sets Emily would go winging over to chatter at him where Dean posted himself in a corner, as stoic as a gargoyle — Mr. Potter says they’re playing Foreignlander next; such a sad, pretty song; a slow song, too, easy to follow with your feet — although she never turned her head quickly enough to see the looks Dean and his spectral eyes hexed at the various ruddy-cheeked but white-livered youths Emily Byrd Starr flitted about with during the faster reels. She keeps the Lady Giovanna’s portrait in a place of honor on her bedroom wall but it has been a long time since she put on her Egyptian-princess necklace, however much she likes it, because it has come to her in pleasurable but not entirely pleasant darts of apprehensive insight that there is almost nothing Dean Priest would refuse to give her, if she asked for it, and almost nothing he would not do or attempt to do for her if she bade him to, almost.
And there, at the bottom of things, is a thought that visited her recently, during a treacherous three-o’ clock eight days after the Mira Lee sailed:
Would Dean have greeted me with that same impersonal, accomplished courtesy, after so long a separation? Would he have gone away from me with that hearty lifeless handshake and never, never a single backwards glance?
Emily sleeks her palm once more along Daffy’s neck before he dashes off: devilish nonsense, she thinks. Devilish, heinously disagreeable nonsense. Why would a worldly and world-weary man of middle age such as Dean Priest commit the young man's folly of being in love with her? Emily Byrd Starr, you fickle superficial chit! How very close and real every illusory problem appears to a person while she stands at the frightful threshold age of eighteen!
“When that second publisher asked me to change my ending,” Emily says, sedately enough, “I think he was implying that fairytales have gone out of the fashion.”
“Then he was a myopic blaggard as well as a bore.” Dean is looking off now into the spinney of yellow maples and birches she once saved by invoking the authority of Saint Peter’s keys. “The Americans seem to still be enjoying their Frank L. Baum thoroughly enough. I believe there’s also a well-acclaimed play running here and in England about a far-off never-neverland and a boy there who doesn’t grow up. Are you familiar with it?"
“Yes! J.M. Barrie’s play! Ilse mentioned she’s sorry she’s too tall for the leading role. They’ve got to swing you around on wires, which she says sounds like terrific fun. I’m not certain that’s the word I'd use for it.” Emily adjusts another hairpin. “I’ve been trying to find The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for years but the bookshop at Shrewsbury never wants to order me a copy.”
“I’ll harrow one up for you the next time I’m in Montreal — but this is looking to be a brave new world of a century, either way. I see the signs. Verily, I say unto you, we may be about to witness a return of tales filled with elves and dwarves and wizardry and a true-believer faith in fairies — and in happy endings, which places the greater demand upon your common jaded reader’s credulity. Who knows? This may be a century where the faith becomes a necessity.” His eyes, those eyes, turn upon Emily once more, and nobody can look at people or into them quite like Dean does. “You’ll find a publisher who's worthy of both it and you, eventually. There is a place prepared for you at life’s banquet of success.”
“I’ll — try,” Emily says. “I’ll keep climbing — I’ve already been waiting years and years to write this. I’m sure a little more waiting won’t hurt me.” She attempts a laugh but cannot draw a deep enough breath for it. “These past three days have felt so much longer anyway.”
“That’s hardly a surprise. I’ve heard rumors that certain highly consequential matters have been fitted neatly into the course of a mere three days.”
He picks up her manuscript with an inscrutable face, after correcting one of its dogeared creases, and gives it gently to her: A Seller of Dreams, by E. Byrd Starr, New Moon Farm, Blair Water Township, Prince Edward Island, Canada, each capital letter topped off by her pen where Perry’s third-rate machine hopscotched over it. A new typewriter from the mail-order catalog would cost her upwards of thirty dollars, weigh more than forty pounds and likely need to be shipped from Chicago, creating a boondoggle when it arrived at the post office, but clasping the manuscript against her bosom Emily decides she may risk the expense.
And so long as I’m raising a ruckus, she determines, I’ll send for one of those ten-dollar Ladies’ Edgemere bicycles, with the pneumatic tires and nickel-plated finish plus some split gabardine skirts to wear while I ride it. Mrs. Ann Cyrilla will decry it as more of Dean’s bad influence. Let her! I’ll soar down to Shrewsbury on my dastardly bicycle and persuade Mr. Towers to let me serialize a monthly story in the Times, maybe. Plenty of novels came onto the world’s stage first as serials, didn’t they? Yes, unless you’ve got enough sand to argue that the likes of The Brothers Karamazov or The Count of Monte Cristo aren’t proper novels! Which Jimmy-book plot should I spin out for it? A story true to life, this time — though fairytales are truer than life, so it’s no degradation to say such a thing. Unless I’d rather try my hand at a ghost story? A mystery? An adventure? A romance full of colorful love-talk, flavorsome and bantering in just the same way that — well, I'll choose carefully. And if Mr. Towers won’t accept the serial idea, I’ll go farther afield — my bicycle will have a saddlebag — and I’ll speak with the editor of the Charlottetown Argus. I can offer to do odd jobs for extra income in the meanwhile, the way Miss Royal wanted me to. I’ll set type, I’ll copy-edit, I’ll learn shorthand and stenography, I’ll find my way into the company of other poets or novelists who may not call it the flash but who can likewise see and hear and feel the same sacramental world that sings, that blazes just behind the veil of this present one. I couldn’t possibly be worse at typesetting than the wretch who substituted orchids for sardines, and I — oh, why does Dean look so sad?
Because now Dean has paused, gravely, watching her. Slowly, more gravely, he reaches inside his coat to extract a folded packet of letterpapers, held together by a brass fastener; he offers these to her with the tips of his fingers, as one might handle a scalpel or the stem of a thorned and heavy-blossomed flower.
“I’m certain you’ll put me back into my trammels if you find anything there too disagreeable. I did mean it when I advised you not to let anybody make you into something other than yourself.”
Emily takes the papers from him. They are slightly warm.
She examines the topmost page, thereby discovering that Dean has given her fifteen or twenty supplemental pages’ worth of annotative notes to accompany A Seller of Dreams. They are organized by chapter: questions, questions and more questions, transcribed lines or passages, gleaned words alongside their dictionary definitions — intervale, ruckle, coppice, spall, selvage, integument, alchaest, catawampus, noting also her duplicate use of incarnadine — and long, compact paragraphs of commentary, all of it written in the lively cursive hand Emily by now knows as well as her own.
She rises to her feet.
“I feel rather as if you’ve saved my life, Mr. Dean Priest,” she says. The tremor threatens a return to her voice. “Again.”
Then Dean gives her another of his smiles, his more-than-smiles upon that mouth for which Emily is sure there is a random, perfect word she has never yet listened close enough to hear. His voice is very kind. “Are you still so entirely glad that you like me, Star of the Morning?”
And here, there is an instant, only an instant, but like all instances it can never be taken back once it has passed, where into Emily’s shivering, swelling, confounded heart there suddenly intrudes a piercing, spear-point pang of tenderness for him; she recalls her heel coming down to crush the purple asters — a word taken directly from the Greek astēr, “star” — and her thought is, I’ve never told him.
I’ve never told Dean how as I lay there on that ledge of rock with the earth slipping away beneath me into the waters below I prayed to God, my father’s God, the God who is Love itself in the verbal sense and has promised fear not, I go before you always, I will rejoice over you with singing, this is my body which is broken for you — I prayed for that mighty jealous beautiful pain-bearing servant-God to please work a miracle, to spare my life, and this may have been a likewise dangerous petition, since I cannot decide what it meant or means that this is the man whom God called as my answer: this maybe old, maybe young, lame and crooked, soul-wounded man they call Jarback Priest, this man who has always seemed to satiate some intricate yet inborn hunger within me that no other taste is fully able to, like salt. I have never wondered what was in Dean’s mind or on his face at the moment when the ledge fell away and the rope I was clinging to sprang taut between his hands.
“Yes,” says Emily, “just so long as you’ll still swear to the fact that my soul is my own.”
“Your own,” Dean answers, “and fire-new.”
Then he stands, looking diminished in the brilliant blue-gold shadows of the nighttime garden, as if he has come to the end of some great, terrible contention of powers that has beggared him of his strength. She recalls dreaming last year about the Lost Diamond that shot up to become a star, knowing she could not go fast while she pursued it through the western sky though it sank, and sank further, because Dean had been beside her with his halting step and how could she run ahead if the cost was leaving him behind?
Emily turns with the Murray trick of holding her neck in a just-so way.
“Well, our soul-fires won’t keep us warm out here for much longer. Will you come inside the house a while? I haven't got any bottles of winter moonshine or loon-songs, but I can probably froth the milk for some hot cider syllabub."
Dean shakes his head, as Emily guessed he would.
“Stars such as yourself have no trouble charting their course through the darkness, but those of us trapped in these cumbersome mortal coils must get about with a great deal more stumbling.” As he turns to leave, another trick of his phantasmal eyes transfigures both his smile and the stillness that lays wide between the farm’s surrounding dells and meadows, like the toll of a sanctus bell. “‘May there always be one last happy dream in your pocket.’”
Emily draws a slow breath, savoring the fragrant spices of this offering, because for the first time, the very first time, a person has quoted a line from her own novel back to her. It requires a pause to set the moment within her memory, then another to ready an answer she had scratched out from an earlier draft.
“I’ve got several, in fact, if you need one for yourself. Very reasonably priced,” she says. “What do you lack, my fellow pilgrim on the road?”
“Oh, no. I’m afraid I’ve lost the coinage with which I might’ve once paid you — and my own dreams wouldn’t be worth anything to you as a barter.” He puts a hand to his thin chest, a gesture that should be merely one more of his histrionic, gallant my-lady affectations, but she knows it is something else. “Keep them, Emily.”
Then Emily watches him pass through the garden gate and she remains there, standing between the moon-black spruces, until Dean Priest halts in the lane and turns for a final backwards glance at her. She goes quickly into the house.