When her mother died, there had been no one else to take care of Maud. Her mother’s brother, Uncle John Franklin Macneill (Lu’s father), had his family; and Clara’s sister, Maud’s Aunt Annie Campbell, had hers; so the responsibility fell to Maud’s sixteen-year-old aunt, Emily. Maud wondered if that was why Emily now had such a sour disposition; she certainly had picked up her talent for insults from Grandfather. But when Maud was younger, Emily had been kind to her, willing to answer questions about heaven and if Mother was happy where she was.
Standing there with the wind and the low moan of the sea, Maud allowed herself to dwell in memory. No one believed Maud when she told them that she remembered Mother’s funeral. It was all Maud had of her mother.
Maud had been just twenty-one months old when it happened, but she could remember every detail. Father crying beside the casket, his dark hair combed neatly, beard trim, his eyes sad and dull. Her mother looked beautiful, pale, like a queen sleeping. Maud had used that exact description in her piece of verse about a queen who had been poisoned by an evil villain. She was calling it “The Queen’s Betrayal.” It was very dramatic.
The warm wind whistled, and she looked up to see it wasn’t the wind at all. Nate Spurr strode toward her from the Haunted Woods—appearing almost as if by magic. Maud felt that flutter again and turned her face to the shore so he couldn’t tell she was excited to see him. Being the Baptist minister’s stepson, he would have attended the Baptist Church, on the other side of the woods. It must have let out a few minutes ago.
They hadn’t spoken since she left last winter, and Maud had wondered if he was still angry with her because she’d refused to tell him why she had to leave. She had given him a message through Mollie in a letter when she was away, telling him where she was, and she’d hoped he would write. They were friends, after all. She never did get a letter back, but the note he’d sent through Mollie showed he had forgiven her. Hands shaking, Maud quickly opened her Bible to read the note before he reached her:
Dear Polly,
A quick message to welcome you back to school. Things were certainly not as interesting with you gone. Now we can get into all sorts of trouble.
Snip
Maud didn’t quite know what he meant by “trouble,” but the last thing she needed was her grandparents finding another reason to send her away again.
“Polly.”
Nate was the smartest boy in school. He’d grown since Maud had last seen him. His ears still stuck out a bit, but his short brown hair curled around them in an appealing way. He had intense gray eyes and a square jaw with a dimple in his chin. He was thin but strong, and looked at you as if he knew your whole story. This always made her nervous.
Maud dropped her gaze and, trying to keep things light, reverted back to an old joke of theirs. “Hello, Snip. Is that Pollie with a y or ie?” Part of the nickname game Maud, Mollie, Jack, and Nate had played involved Nate insisting that her nickname be spelled with a y instead of an ie, as Maud preferred.
“Why, a y, of course!” Nate grinned. “It is the only dignified way of spelling it.”
“It is not,” she responded on cue. “You know that ie is the only way.”
Nate cleared his throat. “I see you got my note,” he said.
“Yes, but only just.” She slipped the letter back into the Bible. “I haven’t had time to respond.” Maud noticed how Nate hugged a book under his arm. He was dressed in his Sunday best—a fine dark waistcoat—but his brown cap, worn backwards the way she liked it, made him appear more like himself.
“Will I receive an answer tomorrow?” he said.
“Perhaps,” Maud said. “If you tell me what you’re holding in your hand…”
He pulled out the hardcover book he had been carrying and showed it to her. “I must confess, Mollie told Jack you might be here, so I thought I would give it a chance.”
“Really,” Maud said, getting the courage to look him in the eye.
“Yes. I read this book over the summer and thought you would enjoy it.”
“How would you know what I enjoy?”
Nate chuckled. “I know you, Lucy Maud Montgomery.” He paused. “More than you know.”
Maud’s whole body ached to take it, but she only read the title: Undine by Fouqué. The title was familiar. It took her a moment to place it. “This is the book Jo is reading at the beginning of Little Women!”
He grinned. “I remember last spring you had mentioned being curious about it, so I bought a copy when I went with my stepfather to Charlottetown in early summer. While Little Women is a silly girl’s book—”
“It is not a silly girl book—” Maud said, ready to defend her favorite novel, but then stopped when she realized he was teasing her—as usual.
He held it out to her. The book was made of rich navy blue cloth. On the cover was an elegantly robed mermaid with flowing hair, cradled in seaweed.
Nate Spurr had thought of her.
“Take it,” he said, stretching the book out to her. “I look forward to hearing your opinion.”
She fiddled with her ring. “I don’t know.”
“I left you some of my thoughts inside.” He flipped open the front cover to show his notations. Maud did the same thing to her books, as though she was having a personal conversation with the author.
“You’ve read it,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. She twisted her ring.
“I don’t think it is proper for me to receive a gift from you.”
Nate stepped forward. “Would it help if it was only a loan?” The book lay innocently on the palms of his hands.
A loan. No one—not even Grandma—could say anything about someone lending her a book. Even if it was from the Baptist minister’s stepson.
“All right,” she said, taking it from him, their fingers lightly brushing over the spine’s curved edges. “If it is only a loan.”
“Of course,” he said. “There’s really nothing like starting a new story, is there, Maud?”
CHAPTER THREE
Maud read over the letter she had just finished writing to Nate and gazed out at her grandfather’s apple orchard. It was the morning of the first day of school and she wanted everything to be perfect.
After she and Nate had parted, Maud returned home just in time for Sunday dinner and didn’t pay much attention to her cousins, irritating Lu, who finally said in a burst of impatience, “Your head’s in the clouds again, Maud.” To which her Uncle John Franklin responded, “That’s what comes from all of that reading.”
But Maud was thinking about what her response would be. She did a lot of thinking about writing before she actually put pencil to paper. Paper was scarce, and Grandma thought it wasteful if Maud wrote something only to throw it away. So, Maud would walk or think, imagining what she might write, and then take some of the letter bills left in the post office to write on. But the letter to Nate was going to be on stationery or writing paper, so she couldn’t make any mistakes.