Chapter Text
The train shuddered to a slow, sighing halt, and the doors opened like a mouth releasing a long-held secret onto the platform. Anne pressed her face to the cool glass, her breath fogging a small, eager circle. To her, this was no ordinary station of wood and iron laced with coal smoke. It was the seam between two worlds the gray, echoing orphanage they had left behind and the living story she had been writing in her head for years. Avonlea spilled out before her in colors stolen from the margins of daydreams: meadows burnished late-summer gold, hedgerows trembling with birdsong, a sky so pure it felt like fragile glass ready to be shaped into crowns and castles. Every foot of the road beyond promised hidden doorways lanes leading to secret gardens, orchards dripping with possibility, theatres stitched from living green.
She clutched Bethann’s hand until the other girl’s fingers cramped, anchoring herself against the pull of old memories. *Not back there,* Anne thought fiercely. *Never again.* For her, this was the portal to fairy-tale living at last. For Bethann, quieter beside her, it was something steadier: a map of possibility she traced with careful, hopeful eyes.
Bethann did not speak the way Anne did. Her visions lived tucked behind dark, watchful eyes empresses with iron crowns ruling distant, merciless courts; whole nights spent wandering marble halls no one else could see. Anne’s wonder spilled out like an unstoppable fountain. Bethann’s imagination smoldered like embers both bright, only different fuels for the same small fire they had kept alive together since the orphanage days.
Matthew stood by the fence when they stepped down, cap in hand, shoulders stooped in quiet uncertainty. He had expected one boy, someone broad-shouldered enough to ease the farm’s heavy winters. Instead, two slender girls in plain dresses descended with their small bundles. Anne leapt forward like a small planet flinging itself toward a new sun, words tumbling in breathless exuberance as she named the world around them in grand, invented titles. Bethann lingered a step behind, studying the man with quick, measuring eyes that judged nothing yet missed nothing.
Matthew was a man of few words, but when he saw how the two children clung to one another how one voice braided into the other’s silence—a soft, startled movement crossed his mouth. “Come along, then,” he said. His hand on the buggy reins carried an odd tenderness, the sense of a careful life surprised into a gentler shape.
The road to Green Gables stretched like a ribbon of promise. Anne declared every hedgerow the White Way of Delight, every hill a hidden castle. Bethann let the words settle deeper inside her, translating them into her own quiet language: hedges became battlements, lanes turned to caravan routes, faint smoke on the skyline became the chimneys of palaces she had only ever read about. When the white house with its sharp green gables rose from the fields like something torn from an illustration, Anne gasped and clutched Bethann’s sleeve so hard the bones beneath ached. In that shining moment, both girls were utterly, fiercely certain belonging had finally found them.
Inside, they stepped into the sternly measured air of Marilla’s world, where words were trimmed like wicks and dust had been banished for years. The bright bubble of Anne’s envisioning met cold reality at once.
Marilla looked them over as if checking a length of cloth for defects. Her lips tightened. The meal she set before them was plain and efficient. At last her fork came down with a decisive sound. “There’s been a mistake,” she said. “We asked for a boy.”
The words fell like a stone into still water. Anne’s mouth dropped open, then a river of speech rushed forth pleading, bargaining, promising she could work as well as any boy, milk and mend and chop and carry. Bethann sat perfectly still at first, fingers folded so tightly white ridges showed at her knuckles. Silence had always been her survival. But the thought of being torn from Anne, ferried off to another hard place with no softness at all, pressed like a hot coal against her throat. Her voice, when it finally came, was small and direct, stripped of theatrics. “Please don’t send us away. I’ll rise early. I’ll scrub. I’ll carry water. I’ll do whatever is asked.”
That Bethann should beg startled Matthew. That the usually even-tempered girl should break made Marilla’s eyes linger a beat longer than intended.
For the moment, Marilla decided the right thing was to take them back. The next morning the buggy was hitched with brisk economy. Anne wept openly into her handkerchief while Bethann sat like a quiet stone, clutching Anne’s fingers until their skin blanched white. As Green Gables receded into the morning blue, the girls held their private conversation in whispers imagining roads, schools, and whether cherry trees in dreams could be counted on to bloom again.
At Mrs. Spencer’s the threat of Mrs. Blewett’s strict hand loomed. But something in Marilla had already begun to shift. Watching Anne fill a room like sunlight and Bethann hold a quiet reservoir of strength, the thought of scattering them sat bitterly in her chest. With a swiftness that surprised even herself, Marilla cut through the talk of arrangements and declared they would bring the girls home. Not on a whim, but because she had glimpsed the unkind next step of fate and refused it. Matthew let out a breath that was almost a smile.
Back at Green Gables, Marilla insisted it was still only a trial, but a new softness lived beneath the hard line of her mouth. That night felt different less mercy, more like an unspoken covenant with providence.
In the stable that evening, lamplight flickering over hay and leather, Jerry worked quietly. Anne burst in bright and loud as a small theatre troupe. Bethann followed almost silently, eyes watchful. When Jerry muttered something in French, a scrap from Bethann’s brief past placement rose unbidden. “Vraiment?” she answered, halting but careful. Jerry’s face softened in astonishment. Patchwork sentences passed between them, and for a moment the barn itself seemed to grow a new door.
The next morning dawned bright and honest. In the kitchen Anne turned every chore into grand adventure. Bethann discovered a small, private delight in cooking—the quiet conjuring of turning simple ingredients into warm, sustaining loaves. “It’s like magic,” she told Anne, flour dusting her sleeves and a smudge of dough at the corner of her lip. Anne’s eyes shone; even Marilla allowed the corner of her mouth to lift.
Mr. Barry’s visit brought the word *daughters* into the air like a small, honest sun. The invitation to tea at the Barry home followed. And then Rachel Lynde arrived.
Her sharp eyes took them in. “Carrots,” she sniffed at Anne. To Bethann, whose quiet gravity still filled the doorway, she declared the house “practically turned into a zoo.” Bethann swallowed the old taste of humiliation and retreated upstairs, tears threatening.
Anne exploded like a comet. “How dare you! You have no imagination—no kindness! If I called you ugly, clumsy, fat how would you like it? You’ve hurt me and you’ve hurt my sister, and I will not bear it!” Her foot stamped. She fled upstairs in a tempest. Bethann waited above, letting Anne’s anger be her shield. When Anne returned they folded together like two pieces of the same odd puzzle.
Marilla felt a strange loosening inside. The neat plans of her life had been interrupted by two small, insistent hearts. “We’ll see,” she said at last. She would call it a trial, but she had already yielded. The girls would stay. Green Gables now held Anne’s chatter and color, and the deep, patient well that was Bethann.
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The following morning they walked to the Barry home. Marilla strode ahead, steps firm. Anne and Bethann followed close, hands brushing. For Anne it was the brink of another adventure. For Bethann it felt like standing before the gates of a palace, where the smallest moment might shape their futures forever.
The tea unfolded much as Anne’s vivid stories promised Diana’s warm curiosity, Anne’s tumbling words, Bethann listening and weaving the conversation into her private tapestry of empires. When they left, a picnic invitation danced in the air, and Anne declared it the most glorious event yet. Bethann smiled quietly, warmed not by the picnic itself but by the sun in Anne’s eyes.
Then came the first day of school.
The schoolhouse smelled of ink and pine and chalk dust. Anne darted toward Diana with cathedral-like awe. Bethann followed more slowly, noting every detail as if the room were the first page of a new, important book. She sat composed, her small book in her lap, while Anne spun dreams of Prince Mysteria.
Bethann’s own visions stayed locked inside empresses with iron crowns, marble thrones, stone lions that woke at night. *Safer there,* she thought as Billy Andrews and the boys sneered from the back. *Where no one can laugh them away.*
But when Mr. Phillips singled her out with the word *phthisis*, Bethann rose. Her voice was soft yet steady. “Phthisis.” The room hushed. Gilbert Blythe glanced over, intrigued. The boys’ disappointment was a small victory she held quietly.
At lunch, Billy and his friends cornered her again. Gilbert stepped in, calm but firm. Later, walking home, he tried once more. Bethann answered briefly, then quickened her pace, her wall still firmly in place though a tiny crack of curiosity had appeared.
On the long road home her imagination unfurled: the dirt path became a crimson carpet to a great hall, trees turned to armored sentinels. By the time Green Gables appeared, her heart had steadied.
Inside, Matthew cleared his throat. “Bethann… we’ve been thinking. You ought to have a room of your own.”
She blinked, startled. The small space they offered a narrow bed, dresser, washstand was to her a kingdom, a sanctuary. Closing the door, she pressed her palm to the wood and breathed in the truth: for now, she belonged.