8 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.

In this episode, Valancy spends a restless night.

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 Eight Balancy did not sleep that night.

She lay awake all through the long dark hours thinking.

She made a discovery that had surprised her.

She who had been afraid of almost everything in life was not afraid of death.

And it did not seem in the least terrible to her that she did not now seem to be afraid of anything else.

Why had she been afraid of things?

Because of life.

Afraid of Uncle Benjamin because of the menace of poverty in old age.

But now she would never be old,

Neglected or tolerated.

Afraid of being an old maid all her life she was but now she would not be an old maid very long.

Afraid of offending her mother she was and her clan because she had to live with and among them and couldn't live peaceably if she didn't give in.

But now she hadn't any of these worries and Valancy felt a curious freedom.

But she was still horribly afraid of one thing,

The fuss the whole of them would make when she told them.

Valancy shuddered at the thought of it.

She just couldn't endure it.

She knew so well how it would go.

First there would be indignation.

Yes she had gone to the doctor without consulting Uncle James.

Yes her mother thought her so sly and deceitful.

And indignation on the part of the whole clan because she had not gone to Dr.

Marsh.

Then would come the solicitude.

She would be taken to Dr.

Marsh and when he confirmed the diagnosis she would be taken to specialists in Toronto and Montreal.

Uncle Benjamin would foot the bill with a splendid gesture of magnificence in thus assisting the widow and orphan and then he would talk forever of the shocking fees specialists charged and saying that they couldn't do anything.

And when the specialist could do nothing for her,

Uncle James would insist on her taking purple pills.

I've known them to effect a cure when all the doctors have given them up,

He would say.

Then her mother would insist on red ferns blood bitters and Cousin Stickles would insist on rubbing her over the heart every night with red ferns liniment.

Dr.

Stalling would come to her and say solemnly,

You are very ill,

Are you prepared for what may be before you?

Almost as if he were going to shake his forefinger at her,

That forefinger that had not grown any shorter or less knobbly with age.

And all the while she would be watched and checked like a baby,

Never let to do anything or go anywhere alone.

Perhaps Valancy would not even be allowed to sleep alone lest she die in her sleep.

Cousin Stickles or her mother would insist on sharing her room and bed,

Yes undoubtedly they would.

It was this last thought that really decided Valancy.

She could not put up with it and she would not put up with it.

As the clock in the hall below struck twelve,

She suddenly indefinitely made up her mind she would not put up with it.

She had always been told ever since she could remember she must hide her feelings.

It is not ladylike to have feelings,

Cousin Stickles had once told her disapprovingly.

Well,

She would hide them with a vengeance this time.

But though she was not afraid of death,

She was not indifferent to it.

She found she resented it.

It was not fair she should have to die when she had never lived.

At that moment rebellion flamed up in her soul.

The dark hours were passing by.

It wasn't because she had no future,

But because she had no past.

I'm poor,

I'm ugly,

I'm a failure and I'm near death,

She thought.

She could just see her own obituary now in the Deerwood Weekly Times.

A deep gloom was cast over Deerwood,

Etc,

Etc.

Leaves a large circle of friends to mourn,

Etc,

Etc.

Lies,

All lies,

Gloom forsooth.

Nobody would miss Valancy Stirling.

Her death would not matter a straw.

Not even her mother loved her.

Her mother who had always been so disappointed she was not a boy,

Or at least a pretty girl.

Valancy reviewed her whole life between midnight and the early spring dawn.

It was a very drab existence,

But here and there an incident loomed out with a significance out of all proportion to its real importance.

These incidents were all pleasant in one way or another.

Nothing really pleasant had ever happened to Valancy.

I've never had one wholly happy hour in my life,

She thought.

I've just been a colourless non-entity.

I remember reading somewhere once there's an hour in which a woman might be happy all her life if she could find it.

I've never found my hour,

And I never will now.

If I could only have that hour,

I'd be willing to die.

Those significant incidents kept bobbing up in her mind like unbidden ghosts without any sequence of time or place.

For instance,

That time when at sixteen she blewed a tub full of clothes too deeply.

The time when at eight she'd stolen some raspberry jam from Aunt Wellington's pantry.

Valancy never heard the last of those two misdemeanours.

At almost every clan gathering they were raked up against her as jokes.

Uncle Benjamin hardly ever missed retelling the raspberry jam incident.

He'd been the one to catch her.

Her face all stained and streaked.

I've really done so few bad things.

They have to keep harping on about the old ones,

Thought Valancy.

I've never even had a quarrel with anyone.

I haven't had an enemy.

What a spineless thing I must be not to even have one enemy.

There was that incident of the dust pile at school when she was seven.

Valancy always recalled it when Dr Stalling referred to the text.

To him that hath shall be given,

And from him that hath shall not be taken,

Even that which he hath.

Other people might puzzle over that text,

But it never puzzled Valancy.

The whole relationship between herself and Olive,

Dating from the day of the dust pile,

Was a commentary on it.

She had been going to school a year,

But Olive,

Who was a year younger,

Had just begun and had about her all the glamour of a new girl,

And an exceedingly pretty girl at that.

It was at recess and all the girls,

Big and little,

Were out on the road in front of the school making dust piles.

The aim of each girl was to have the biggest pile.

Valancy was good at making dust piles.

There was an art in it,

And she had secret hopes of winning.

But Olive,

Working off by herself,

Was suddenly discovered to have a larger dust pile than anyone.

Valancy felt no jealousy.

Her dust pile was quite big enough to please her.

Then one of the older girls had an inspiration.

Let's put all our dust on Olive's pile and make a tremendous one.

A frenzy seemed to seize the girls.

They swooped down on the dust piles with pails and shovels,

And in a few seconds,

Olive's pile was a veritable pyramid.

In vain,

Valancy,

With scrawny,

Outstretched little arms,

Tried to protect hers.

She was ruthlessly swept aside,

Though her dust pile scooped up and poured on Olive's.

Valancy turned away resolutely and began building another one.

Again a bigger girl pounced upon it.

I want my own little dust pile,

She said piteously.

Her plea went unheeded.

While she argued with one girl,

Another scraped up her dust pile.

And then Valancy turned away,

Her heart swelling,

Her eyes full of tears.

You were very selfish,

Said her mother coldly when Valancy told her about it that night.

That was the first and last time Valancy had ever taken any of her troubles to her mother.

She was neither jealous nor selfish.

It was only that she wanted a dust pile of her own,

Small or big,

It mattered not.

When a team of horses came down the street,

Olive's dust pile was scattered over the roadway.

Then the bell rang,

The girls trooped into school and forgot the whole affair.

But Valancy never forgot it.

To this day she resented it in her secret soul.

I've never even been able to have my own dust pile,

She thought.

The enormous red moon she'd seen rising at the end of the street one autumn evening of her sixth year,

When she'd been sick and cold with the awful uncanny horror of it.

It was so neat to her,

So big,

She thought.

She'd run in trembling to her mother and her mother had laughed.

She'd gone to bed and hidden her face under the clothes in terror that she might look out of the window and see the horrible moon glaring in at her through it.

Then there was the boy who tried to kiss her at a party when she was fifteen.

She had not let him,

She'd evaded him and run.

He was the only boy who had ever tried to kiss her.

Now,

Fourteen years later,

Valancy found herself wishing that she had let him.

I've had nothing but a second-hand existence,

She decided.

All the great emotions of life have passed me by.

I've never even had a grief and I've never really loved anyone,

Have I?

Do I really love Mother?

No,

I don't.

That's the truth.

Whether it's disgraceful or not,

I don't love her and I've never loved her.

What's worse,

I don't even like her.

I don't really know anything about any kind of love.

My life has been empty.

Nothing is worse than emptiness.

Nothing!

Valancy ejaculated the last nothing aloud.

Then she moaned and stopped thinking about anything for a while.

One of her attacks of pain had come on.

When it was over,

Something happened to her.

Perhaps this was the culmination of the process that had been going on in her mind ever since she'd read Dr.

Trent's letter.

It was three o'clock in the morning,

The wisest and most accursed hour of the clock.

But sometimes that sets us free.

I've been trying to please other people all my life and I've failed,

She said.

After this day,

I shall please myself.

I shall never pretend anything again.

I've breathed an atmosphere of fibs and pretenses and evasions all my life.

What a luxury it will be to tell the truth.

I may not be able to do much that I want to,

But I won't do another thing I don't want to.

Mother can pout for weeks and I shan't worry over it.

Despair is a free man,

Hope is a slave.

Valancy then got up and dressed with a deepening of that curious sense of freedom.

And when she finished with her hair,

She opened the window and hurled the jar of potpourri over it into the next lot.

It smashed gloriously against the schoolgirl complexion on the old carriage shop.

I'm sick of the fragrance of dead things,

Said Valancy.

My future starts here.