hyel (hyel) wrote in multi_fiction, @ 2009-01-17 12:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | anne green gables, au, gen, rated: general, weekly promotion challenge |
Wishes Are No Horses, part 9 (Anne of Green Gables)
Title: Wishes Are No Horses, part 9
Author's Name: Hyel
Disclaimer: Anne of Green Gables (c) L.M. Montgomery.
Warnings: AU.
Ratings: general
Summary: Dr Barry meets a bosom friend.
Note: I meant to make 10x300 word stories, but ended up making 9, and this last one 1000 words long.
Diana looked over the little sickroom, hardly the size of the sitting room at home, filled with beds, and at the end, the medicine cabinet with its heavy lock and the shelves arranged with bandages and books. It was the only hospital in the city that would hire a woman doctor fresh out of college, and it wasn't much – but it was hers. She felt a thrill of satisfaction, mixed, as always, with trepidation, and grief for the other future she'd lost.
She shook hands with the nurses, practicing that sense of inviting authority she'd watched in her professors, and the steel she'd had to forge in her character. Two or three had eyed her oddly when she'd been introduced as Dr Barry, and she'd have many months' work breaking them out of their prejudice.
Afterwards, she took tea with her new partner, Dr Halliday – luckily for her virtue a man so clearly immune to ladies' charms as to put her perfectly at ease from their first meeting. They discussed their regulars, the neighbourhood, and her future training under his tutelage.
'My dear,' said Dr Halliday, 'you need a female companion, a friend to live with. You would do much better in the country, and let us pray for that eventuality, but while you are in the city, there's nothing like a chum to make those beasts' – he meant men in general – 'keep their paws to themselves, or, if your friend Halliday is lucky, reserve them for him.'
Diana was a Doctor of Medicine and would not blush, but she may have giggled. 'And how do you suggest I go about securing one, Doctor? All my Avonlea friends have married or moved, or are teaching school, and I can't very well keep a wife on this pay.'
Dr Halliday laughed, approving. 'Take our new trainee nurse – she has no residence at the moment. Take Anne.'
'I don't think I met an Anne just now.'
'No – she was making a house call this morning.' Dr Halliday gave her a long look. 'Something tells me you two need each other.'
--
Diana met Anne – tall, thin, red-haired - the next morning, but had no time for even half a word as a Mrs Turner came in in the throes of a difficult childbirth. Her contractions were regular and coming in close together, but she was barely half-way dilated.
The birth took another five hours, and there was much blood lost – almost too much. Diana took other patients, adviced, treated, bandaged, diagnosed, and returned every time to the young mother's side, until with great relief she could finally say, push. Anne swabbed Mrs Turner's forehead – wide, pale, so young – and held her hand. The boy was out in another ten minutes, red and healthy and screaming.
'Is he all right?' Anne cried. Diana gave him to Anne with a relieved affirmation, and Anne's eyes sparkled like stars as she went to wash the child. The exhausted mother, after seeing her child, fell into grateful sleep.
Later, as Anne was washing her hands for the last time that day, Diana went up sand asked her to a late tea that evening. Anne complied, and by the look in her eye Diana guessed Dr Halliday had been talking to her about the scheme, too.
Anne insisted on pouring, and bustled about making herself useful. Anne was not handsome, nor the opposite – too thin, a little more worn-out than she should be at their age, and her dress was cheap and drab, but she wore her hair with a sense of style, her carriage was tall and queenly, and there was a stubborn spark in her eye no life of hardship had yet wiped out.
Diana had already made up her mind.
She took Anne's hand as Anne put down their cups, and almost laughed because she felt like going down on one knee. 'Anne,' she said. 'Have you ever had a bosom friend?'
--
'She loves children so much,' said Ruby Blythe quietly to Diana, 'it's a shame she hasn't any herself.'
Diana agreed, and gave her Anne a fond look. Anne was reading from a book of fairy tales to Ruby's two youngest, Jim and Cordelia, who sat spellbound by her voice and the passion she put into the king's speech.
'She had an offer, actually,' said Diana, 'and for a moment I was sure I would lose her. It would have been a good match, like one out of a fairy story, but she changed her mind at the last moment. She said she didn't want to be in a fairy story after all.'
'Roy Gardner, I'm assuming?'
Diana nodded. 'I have to say I'm glad,' she said. 'Roy was never very interesting – and anyway his undying passion is now directed elsewhere, and I get to keep Anne.'
'And yourself?' said Ruby softly, giving her a look somewhere between pity and curiousity.
Diana laughed. It was hard to say when exactly the loss of Fred had stopped stinging, or the imminence of becoming an old maid had ceased to give her pain, but there it was. She regretted nothing – not even the children she never had. She had her work, and Anne, and their little house, and her practice, and every morning, all around her, all the beauty of the Island. This is where she belonged, and so did Anne.
Diana had cried for an hour when Anne had confessed she'd almost been adopted into Avonlea when they were children, and even more when Anne had told her what she'd endured instead, in the orphanage, and later in the city. It was too late to save her childhood, but Anne assured her she had been saved now, in all the ways a woman could be saved.
After tea, they took a carriage to the road to their house, and walked the rest of the way under the stars, arm in arm, talking quietly. It was as perfect a happiness as anyone could wish.