2 The Blue Castle - Read By Stephanie Poppins

Valancy Stirling is 29, unmarried, and has never been in love. Living with her overbearing mother and meddlesome aunt, she finds her only consolation in the "forbidden" books of John Foster and her daydreams of the Blue Castle. This is the place she can be who she truly wants to be.

After getting shocking news from a doctor about her state of ill health, Valancy decides to rebel against her family in true heroine style and live the life she was always meant to have.

Written by L. M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle is a classic. Tune in to my podcast to hear its stoic themes discussed.

In this episode: the cracks are beginning to show.

Transcript

Welcome to sleep stories with Steph.

It is time to relax and fully let go.

There is nothing you need to be doing now and nowhere you need to go.

Close your eyes and feel yourself sink into the support beneath you and let all the worries of the day drift away.

This is your time and your space.

Take a deep breath in through your nose and let it out with a long sigh.

There is nothing you need to be doing now and nowhere you need to go.

Happy listening.

Chapter 2 When Cousin Stickles knocked at her door,

Valancy knew it was half past seven and she must get up.

As long as she could remember,

Cousin Stickles had knocked at her door at half past seven.

Cousin Stickles and Mrs.

Frederick Sterling had been up since seven,

But Valancy was allowed to lie in bed half an hour longer because of a family tradition that she was delicate.

She got up,

Though she hated getting up more this morning than she'd ever done before.

What was there to get up for?

Another dreary day like all the days that had preceded it,

Fully meaningless little tasks,

Joyless and unimportant,

That benefited nobody.

But if she did not get up at once,

She would not be ready for breakfast at eight o'clock.

Hard and fast times for meals were the rule in Mrs.

Sterling's household.

Breakfast at eight,

Dinner at one,

Supper at six,

Year in and year out.

No excuses for being late were ever tolerated.

So up Valancy got,

Shivering.

The room was bitterly cold with the raw penetrating chill of a wet May morning.

The house would be cold all day.

It was one of Mrs.

Frederick's rules that no fires were necessary after the 24th of May.

Meals were cooked on the little oil stove in the back porch,

And though May might be icy and October frostbitten,

No fires were lighted until the 21st of October by the calendar.

On the 21st of October,

Mrs.

Frederick began cooking over the kitchen range and lighted a fire in the sitting room stove in the evenings.

It was whispered about in the connection that the late Frederick Sterling had caught the cold which resulted in his death during Valancy's first year of life because Mrs.

Frederick would not have a fire on the 20th of October.

She lighted it the next day,

But that was a day too late for Frederick Sterling.

Valancy took off and hung up in the closet her nightdress of coarse unbleached cotton with high neck and long tight sleeves.

She put on undergarments of a similar nature,

A dress of brown gingham,

Thick black stockings and rubber heeled boots.

Of late she had fallen into the habit of doing her hair with a shade of the window by the looking glass pulled down.

The lines on her face did not show so plainly then.

But this morning she jerked the shade to the very top and looked at herself in the lembrous mirror with a passionate determination to see herself as the world saw her.

The result was rather dreadful.

Even a beauty would have found that harsh,

Unsoftened sight like trying.

Valancy saw straight back hair,

Short and thin,

Always lustrous-less,

Despite the fact she gave it one hundred strokes of the brush,

Neither more nor less,

Every night of her life,

And faithfully rubbed red fern's hair-vigor into the roots,

More lustrous-less than ever in its morning roughness.

Fine,

Straight,

Black brows.

A nose she'd always felt was too small even for her small,

Three-cornered white face.

A small,

Pale mouth that always fell open a trifle over a little.

Pointed white teeth.

A figure thin and flat-breasted,

Rather below the average height.

She had somehow escaped the family high cheekbones,

And her dark brown eyes,

Too soft and shadowy to be black,

Had a slant that was almost oriental.

Apart from her eyes,

She was neither pretty nor ugly,

Just insignificant-looking,

She concluded bitterly.

How plain the lines around her eyes and mouth were in that merciless light,

And never had her narrow white face looked so narrow and so wide.

She did her hair in a pompadour.

Pompadours had long gone out of fashion,

But they had been in when Valancy first put her hair up,

And Aunt Wellington had decided she must always wear her hair so.

"'It is the only way that becomes you,

' she said.

"'Your face is so small you must add height to it by a pompadour effect.

'" Aunt Wellington always enunciated commonplaces as if uttering profound and important truths.

Valancy had hankered to do her hair pulled low on her forehead,

With puffs above the ears,

As Olive was wearing hers.

But Aunt Wellington's dictum had such an effect on her she never dared change her style of hairdressing again.

But then there were so many things Valancy never dared do.

All her life she had been afraid of something,

She thought bitterly.

From the very dawn of recollection when she'd been so horribly afraid of the big black bear that lived,

So Cousin Stickles taught her,

In the closet under the stairs.

"'And I will always be,

I know it.

I just can't help it.

"'I don't know what it would be like not to be afraid of something.

'" Afraid of her mother's sulky fits.

Afraid of offending Uncle Benjamin.

Afraid of becoming a target for Aunt Wellington's contempt.

Afraid of Aunt Isabel's biting comments.

Afraid of Uncle James's disapproval.

Afraid of offending the whole clan's opinions and prejudices.

Afraid of not keeping up appearances.

Afraid to say what she really thought of anything.

Afraid of poverty in her old age.

Fear.

She could never escape from it.

It bound her and enmeshed her like a spider's web of steel.

Only in her blue castle could she find temporary release.

And this morning Valancy could not believe she had a blue castle.

She would never be able to find it again.

Twenty-nine.

Unmarried.

Undesired.

What had she to do with the fairy-like Chatelaine of the Blue Castle?

She would cut such childish nonsense out of her life forever and face reality unflinchingly.

She turned from her unfriendly mirror and looked out.

The ugliness of the view always struck her like a blow.

The ragged fence.

The tumbledown old carriage shop in the next lot.

Plastered with crude,

Violently coloured advertisements.

The grimy railway station beyond with the awful derelicts that would always hang around it,

Even in this early hour.

In the pouring rain,

Everything looked worse than usual.

Especially the beastly advertisement.

Keep that schoolgirl complexion,

It said.

Valancy had kept her schoolgirl complexion.

And that was the trouble.

There was not a gleam of beauty anywhere.

Exactly like my life,

She thought drearily.

Her brief bitterness had passed.

She accepted facts as resignedly as she'd always accepted them.

She was one of the people whom life always passes by.

There was no altering that fact.

In this mood,

Valancy went down to breakfast.

Breakfast was always the same.

Oatmeal porridge,

Which Valancy loathed.

Toast and tea and one teaspoonful of marmalade.

Mrs Frederick thought two teaspoonfuls extravagant.

But that did not matter to Valancy,

Who hated marmalade,

Too.

The chilly,

Gloomy little dining room was chillier and gloomier than usual.

The rain streamed down outside the window.

Departed stirlings in atrocious gilt frames,

Wider than the pictures,

Glowered down from the walls.

And yet,

Cousin Stickles wished Valancy many happy returns of the day.

Sit up straight,

Doss,

Was all her mother said.

Valancy sat up straight.

She talked to her mother and cousin Stickles of the things they always talked of.

She never wondered what would happen if she tried to talk of something else.

She knew.

Therefore,

She never did.

Mrs Frederick was offended with Providence for setting a rainy day when she wanted to go to a picnic,

So she ate her breakfast in sulky silence.

Valancy was rather grateful.

But Christine Stickles whined endlessly on as usual,

Complaining about everything.

The weather,

The leak in the pantry,

The price of oatmeal and butter.

Valancy felt at once she had buttered her toast too lavishly.

The epidemic of mumps,

Indeed,

Would.

Doss will be sure to catch them,

She foreboded.

Doss must not go where she's likely to catch mumps,

Mrs Frederick shortly.

Valancy had never had mumps,

Or whooping cough,

Or chicken pox,

Or measles,

Or anything she should have had.

Nothing but horrible colds every winter.

Doss's winter colds were a sort of tradition in the family.

Nothing it seemed could prevent her from catching them.

Mrs Frederick and Cousin Stickles did their heroic best.

One winter they kept her housed up from November to May in the warm sitting room.

She was not even allowed to go to church.

And Valancy took cold after cold and ended up with bronchitis in June.

None of my family were ever like that,

Said Mrs Frederick,

Implying it must be a sterling tendency.

The sterlings seldom take colds,

Said Cousin Stickles resentfully.

She had been a sterling.

I think,

Said Mrs Frederick,

If a person makes up her mind not to have colds,

She will not have colds.

So that was the trouble.

It was all Valancy's own fault.

But on this particular morning,

Valancy's unbearable grievance was that she was called Doss.

She'd endured it for 29 years and all at once she felt she could not endure it any longer.

Her full name was Valancy Jane.

Valancy Jane was rather terrible,

But she liked Valancy with its odd outlying tang.

It was always a wonder to her the sterlings had allowed her to be so christened.

She had been told her maternal grandfather,

Amos,

Had chosen the name for her.

Her father attacked on the Jane by way of civilising it,

And the whole connection got out of the difficulty by nicknaming her Doss.

She never got Valancy from anyone but outsiders.

Mother,

She said timidly,

Would you mind calling me Valancy after this?

Doss seems so.

.

.

So.

.

.

I don't like it.

Mrs.

Frederick looked at her daughter in astonishment.

She wore glasses with enormously strong lenses that gave her eyes a peculiarly disagreeable appearance.

What is the matter with Doss?

It seems so childish,

Faltered Valancy.

Oh,

Mrs.

Frederick had been a Wandsborough and the Wandsborough smile was not an asset.

I see.

Well,

It should suit you then,

You're childish enough in all conscience,

My dear child.

I'm twenty-nine,

Said the dear child desperately.

I wouldn't proclaim it from the housetops if I were you,

Dear,

Said Mrs.

Frederick.

Twenty-nine!

I had been married nine years when I was twenty-nine.

I was married at seventeen,

Said Cousin Stickles proudly.

Valancy looked at them furtively.

Mrs.

Frederick,

Except for those terrible glasses and the hooked nose that made her look more like a parrot than a parrot itself,

Was not ill-looking.

At twenty she might have been quite pretty,

But Cousin Stickles!

And yet Christine had once been desirable in some man's eyes.

Valancy felt Cousin Stickles with her broad,

Flat,

Wrinkled face,

A mole right on the end of her dumpy nose,

Bristling hairs on her chin,

Wrinkled,

Yellow neck,

Pale,

Protruding eyes and thin,

Puckered mouth,

Had yet this advantage over her,

This right to look down on her.

And even yet Cousin Stickles was necessary to Mrs.

Frederick.

Valancy wondered pitifully what it would be like to be wanted by someone,

Needed by someone.

No one in the whole world needed her or would miss anything from life as she dropped suddenly out of it.

She was a disappointment to her mother.

No one loved her.

She had never so much as had a girlfriend.

I haven't even a gift for friendship,

She'd once admitted to herself pitifully.

Dosh,

You haven't eaten your crasts,

Said Mrs.

Frederick rebukingly.

It rained all the forenoon without cessation.

Valancy pieced a quilt.

Valancy hated piecing quilts.

And there was no need of it.

The house was full of quilts.

There were three big chests packed with quilts in the attic.

Mrs.

Frederick had begun storing away quilts when Valancy was seventeen and she kept on storing them,

Though it did not seem likely Valancy would ever need them.

But Valancy must be at work and fancy work materials were too expensive.

Idleness was a cardinal sin in the Stirling household.

When Valancy had been a child,

She'd been made to write down every night in a small,

Hated black notebook all the minutes she'd spent in idleness that day.

On Sundays,

Her mother made her tot them up and pray over them.

On this particular forenoon of this day of destiny,

Valancy spent only ten minutes in idleness.

She went to her room to get a better thimble and she opened Thistle Harvest guiltily at random.

The woods are so human,

Wrote John Foster,

That to know them one must live with them.

An occasional saunter through them,

Keeping to the well-trodden paths,

Will never admit us to their intimacy.

If we wish to be friends,

We must seek them out and win them by frequent,

Reverent visits at all hours,

By morning,

Noon and night,

And all seasons,

In spring,

In summer,

In autumn and in winter.

Otherwise we can never really know them and any pretense we may make to the contrary will never impose on them.

They have their own effective way of keeping aliens at a distance and shutting their hearts to mere casual sightseers.

It is of no use to seek the woods for any motive except sheer love of them.

They will find us out at once and hide all their sweet,

Old-world secrets from us.

But if they know we come to them because we love them,

They will be very kind to us and give us such treasures of beauty and delight as are not bought or sold in any marketplace.

For the woods,

When they give it all,

Give unstintedly and hold nothing back from their true worshippers.

We must go to them lovingly,

Humbly,

Patiently,

Watchfully,

And we shall learn what poignant loveliness lurks in the wild places and silent intervals,

Lying under starshine and sunset,

What cadences of unearthly music are harped on aged pine boughs or crooned in copses of fir,

What delicate savours exhale from mosses and ferns in sunny corners or on damp brooklands,

What dreams and myths and legends of an older time haunt them.

Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours,

And its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever,

So that no matter where we go or how widely we wander,

We shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship.

Doss called her mother from the hall below.

What are you doing all by yourself in that room?

Valancy dropped thistle harvest like a hot coal and fled downstairs to her patches,

But she felt the strange exhilaration of spirit that always came momentarily to her when she dipped into one of John Foster's books.

Valancy did not know much about woods,

Except the haunted rows of oak and pine around her blue castle.

But she had always secretly hankered after them,

And a Foster book about woods was the next best thing to the woods themselves.

At noon it stopped raining,

But the sun did not come out until three.

Then Valancy timidly said she thought she would go uptown.

What do you want to go uptown for?

Demanded her mother.

I want to get a book from the library.

You got a book from the library last week.

No,

It was four weeks.

Four weeks?

Nonsense.

Really it was,

Mother.

You are mistaken.

It cannot possibly have been more than two weeks.

I dislike contradiction,

And I do not see what you want to get a book for anyhow.

You waste too much time reading.

What value is my time?

Asked Valancy bitterly.

Doss,

Don't speak in that tone to me.

We need some tea,

Said Cousin Stickles.

She might go and get that if she wants a walk,

Though this damp weather is bad for colds.

They argued the matter for ten minutes longer,

And finally Mrs Frederick agreed rather grudgingly that Valancy might go.