Posted on: 2010-02-28
It's true that I've owed Frederick Wentworth more than my share of favors. In a seaman's life, one learns the easy acceptance of another man's risks on your behalf – his limbs, his life, his soul.
Perhaps it was not worth the sacrifice on my part. Perhaps I should have been more selfish, but it was in my nature to go forth unquestioningly on behalf of my fellow sailor and friend. And at the time, I thought little of what I was giving up. Had I not already lost that which was most precious to me?
Oh Phoebe, Phoebe. Phoebe by firelight, Phoebe by sunrise. Phoebe with your brown sugar hair and your petulant mouth, and your smile like a hurricane and the northern lights all in one.
Phoebe with your freckles in the most unexpected places – behind your left ear, on the skin of your little wrist. Once upon a time, I was going to find and lay a kiss on every single freckle.
Funny, is it not? A sailor expects to meet the bulk of his sorrows on the sea, because of the sea. The sea is what we're most wary of. But I find myself tied by grief to land instead, and in my black moods, I find it possible to hate the ground I walk on.
And in this haze of sad words and sad songs, of hushed worried voices, came a girl with something of your spark. You would have been great friends in another life, my Phoebe, you and Anne Elliot.
What a quiet, steely little thing she was. Unprepossessing, genteel. If you were a wild pearl, smooth and shot through with more color than venetian glass, then she is that pearl passed through a jeweler's hands: refined, subdued, and made elegant for the world of men. For truly, she was made to be handled by others, to be tossed about by those who love her, and by those who don't, and in the case of my idiot friend, by those who wish they did not.
She is learning, though. She is learning to be her own creature, to value her independence, to cultivate a subtle fierceness that suits her even better than the salty sea air. And as she comes into her own, brandishing her warmth and bringing me back to the surface, I can't help but be reminded strongly of you. You who I still love with my wordless, ceaseless love. You who I need – never had I felt the full, aching depth of that word till I loved you.
Wentworth needs her in that same, wretched way. For her part, she wants him. Feels bound to him. Loves him, I would even venture to say, but needs? Anne Elliot has taught herself to be above need, and I fear for her. To be above need is to be removed from love, and Anne is a creature that deserves to know love. She has suffered, but she nurses her suffering. It has been her closest companion for many years, and as independent as she has become, I do not think she is ready to say farewell.
I think I made my decision even before Louisa's fall. Convenient though her accident was, my mind had already been made up watching Frederick and his Anne, or perhaps I should say, Anne and her Frederick. Sullen glances, the hesitance, the beautiful, terrible clumsiness of a strained love. The furnace they were putting themselves through was the making of Anne – it set her free in a way her years of self-denial could not. But Frederick isn't made of such stern stuff. A sailor's first lesson is to never underestimate the sea, and he is paying the price now for not recognizing Anne Elliot for the force of nature that she is. I watched him battered, I watched him breaking, and like any good crewmate, I stepped in.
I read love sonnets to a girl who loved the idea of poetry. I offered devotion to one who would not be able to discern its quality. I gave her both affection and regard, and she mistook their quietness for depth.
I will be kind to her, Phoebe. And we shall be happy, in our way. She will laugh, and I will smile. I will indulge her in her happy whims and exuberance, she will never make demands on my heart. And I shall see Wentworth whole and hale and happy, free of Louisa and restored to Anne, and the joy of their joy will be mine, as well.
I will admit this to you, my darling Phoebe; Anne Elliot was too much like you. I think I could have loved her, but then I would have had to reclaim my heart and soul from their rightful place at the feet of your memory. And that, I could not bear.