you're too young & eager to love

At my wife's request - some Gretchen.

I'm too lazy for a cut. Also, this started out in one place and ended in a totally different location, as is the usual whenever I write Gretchen. Also according to custom, it ends abruptly. However, for my not writing in a week or so, I'm sort of impressed with myself for the length I acquired. Woo.

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Rosemary is for remembrance. She keeps a few fragrant leaves beneath her pillow.



Gretchen thinks it should be hardest in the fall, when the air is full of dying leaves and the ash from wood fires. The fall should make her think of endings and having to say goodbye. Or it should be hardest in winter, when the trees stand stark against the sky and even a fire like a furnace can’t take the chill from a bed that should have been warm with laughter and desire. During winter, nothing grows in all the world. Or it should be hardest in the spring, when the rain falls gently and everywhere she looks the earth is coming back to life, because there is not enough rain in the skies to bring back what she wants.

But it’s hardest in the summer, when the sky is wide open and endless blue.



“I think this house needs an exorcist.” The swell of her stomach has just barely appeared; Gretchen hides it beneath soft linen and loose cotton.

Standing in the garden with the family, her feet look very white against the silver buds and greenery. She has a hand on her hip, her fingers tightening against her dress when Melinda scoffs and rolls her pretty eyes skyward. Knoxley’s mother, standing close, pats her wrist and follows the veins down until she slides her hand into Gretchen’s own, reassuring in her deep, silent strength.



Sometimes, if she’s tired enough, if she half-closes her eyes and lets her mind drift, she can convince herself that the hand on her shoulder is Colin’s.

It isn’t as if there’s much to tell between them, his hand and Knoxley’s. Colin’s hand has a minor scar just under the left thumb, on the back, where a small dog once bit him a bit too deeply; Knoxley’s hand has a tiny dent in the ring finger from an accident unrelated to his horse wounds. Their nails are the same, their knuckles, the light dusting of hair on the back. Knoxley uses too much pressure, or sometimes not enough like he’s worried she’ll be immovable one moment then shatter the next. Colin used to let his fingers walk to her neck or down her arm from the starting point of her shoulder; everywhere he touched, he seemed to claim.



Basil takes to sketching Gretchen. Besides Knoxley, she sits the stillest, able to spend hours looking out a window. At times, she’ll forget he’s there, unwinding her hair from one of her customary strict chignons and play with the ends like she’s a girl of fifteen again. Basil, normally, has to start over when this happens. He never mentions it, just turns the page of his sketchbook and keeps smoothly working the graphite in careful lines.

They talk, friendly and not quietly like she usually does with Melinda, always scared the sister might bite at her words.

“I didn’t think it was possible to run out of books in this house. But I may have read through everything.”

“In three months?” Basil teases, pausing to work at the bones in his cramping left hand.

She gives him a little glance from the corner of her eyes, not quite turning her head. The window seat on the second floor has become her newest haunt; she leans her forehead against the glass and keeps scratching the ear of her Scottish terrier who has started to fall asleep near her outstretched legs. Basil thinks she’s pretty, but it’s that glance that makes him understand why Colin ever thought her interesting enough to pursue so steadfastly (and though younger, Basil has been alive enough to know that Colin’s attention span to any one hobby is tornado quick).

Gretchen, the glance suggests, is a woman with secrets.

“Father keeps his favorites in his study. He’d be happy to lend you a few, I’m sure.” He talks, but he’s more focused on trying to capture the silence of her eyes.



By the time she has finished The Scarlet Letter, the secret bursts out of her – loud and defiant and just in time for every one to realize the weight that has pulled her stomach, once reed-straight, out.

Knoxley does not tap his fingers against the table; he is not a man predisposed to fidgeting. He stares for a little while, and Gretchen knows that this quietness is not his rejection but his acceptance.



He does not tell her that he loves her until after the child is born. Golden-haired like her mother but possessing, from the first cry, her father’s frivolity. Gretchen does not say it in return, because their relationship is a battleground of unspoken tribulations and gradual recognitions. She resents, that small core of her that abhors motherhood and the demands of a newborn and the shrillness of piercing cries, that he did not say so sooner. That Colin’s daughter is the catalyst, the thing that softens his gaze and, slowly, transforms his touch.

She does not know that only the words are ill timed, not the sentiment. That one morning he woke with the smell of her from a dream and was never able to completely remove it. That he found himself waiting for the way she would adjust the already perfect knot of his tie. That he thought her silence comforting, her easy laughter and her peculiar fears endearing. He simply woke up, some weeks ago, and started to see her.



One day, she falls from her horse. It’s the heavy wind or a sudden dizziness, but Knoxley is the one who notices the accident. The familiarity of a bucking stallion makes him grimace, an expression that tightens when he almost runs down the many stairs and out towards the stables. Running, for him, is not an easy feet – it’s more of a stumbling, shuffling gait. By the time he reaches her, she is already standing, brushing dirt from her jacket and adjusting the fall of her hair. Her shoulder and arm hurts from the landing, but she is unharmed, surprised to see Knoxley with a disheveled air about him, flushed in the face from effort.

The first thing he says is her name, loud, like a gunshot. “Gretchen.” Stern too, the type of tone her father used to use when he found her trying on her mother’s expensive Mediterranean pearls.

“Why Knoxley, do I detect a note of panic?” She, less made of ice after eighteen months, teases him. The tone she used to use with Colin but more genuine, dotted with the softness of carnations. When he only watches her, eyes dark, she worries that something horrible has happened. Her husband is too serious of a man to be stricken easily by emotion, so she thinks the worst - a heart attack, a scalding burn, a choking. The wind cools her hot neck, and she realizes it’s her. Only her that has frightened him.

“I’m … fine.” Stumbling over two words like her daughter, like in the beginning when he used to startle her with his gentlemanly touches – helping her into her coat or offering his arm for guidance down slick streets. He is still breathing a little heavy, and he runs a hand back through his hair in a gesture that Gretchen always finds surprisingly boyish. She thinks she has misjudged him, yet again, but when she attempts to take his elbow he kisses her. Hard, though he catches the corner of her mouth, and she has to turn to really meet him, and it feels like a collision, like she just fell all over again.

Afterwards, his limp worsens for a week; he leans heavily on his cane, and she has to curl beneath his shoulder, supporting his weight, to help him to bed at night. The echo of his breathing vibrates in her ribs.



Knoxley reads her poetry. Ties ribbons into her braids at her request. Plays with porcelain horses and antique tea sets. This is his daughter, Gretchen notices one morning, feeling like a stranger while watching a child she bore and a man she is starting to love. How easily he smiles with her, when their own courtship (though even that seems too gracious of a label) had been a plague of unease. She is startled to find herself jealous, bristling with envy. She waits for the guilt to twist her stomach and is more startled when it never appears.