"To Love and to Cherish", "To Have and to Hold"

[fiefoe]

Patricia Gaffney 的田园三部曲之一二。

First time around, a most fevered read, 几乎肯定是看了个通宵。Wyckerley 田园得很阳光诗意。Christy 是光明天使来的，恭谦体贴，西曼中罕见的牧师职业； Anne 是到处流浪的画家的女儿，丈夫Geofry 以为她是heiress而诱婚，酗酒冷暴力加梅毒，她只有自己的日志为伴。夫妻俩在他父亲去世后回乡继承爵位，Geofry 很快从军隐身，Anne 得有机会在penny reading，harvest home 等乡村风俗中渐渐治愈。Christy 和Anne在Anne 守寡后公开爱意，但为了Christy 的清白大冬天坚持户外约会，是全文最让人上头（heady）的一段。但Geofry 再次现身，漫天乌云，我就赶快快进到HE了。

• If only he could stop thinking of himself, stop worrying about what kind of job he was doing, stop feeling fear in the face of another’s death, instead of love and true compassion for the ill and the dying—in other words, he thought wearily, if only he could be more like his father.
• As for Geoffrey’s wife, Christy wanted to stare at her until she made sense to him, fit into some category of womanhood he could check off and set aside, a mystery solved. She was lovely—but that was obvious; a quality much more arresting than beauty simmered under her apparently unlimited composure. It drew him in spite of the faint mockery in her eyes—he was sure now that it was mockery—whenever she intercepted his curious glance.
• The Archangel (Reverend Morrell; Geoffrey’s nickname for his friend has stuck with me, because the man truly does resemble Michael or Gabriel in a Renaissance painting, or even more, one of Blake’s copper etchings)
• The furnishings are fairly atrocious, with such things as stuffed animals in glass globes in the hall, a case of stuffed hummingbirds in the library—so cheery—and gilt-framed engravings
• Could it be this tolerant fondness I’ve acquired for Lynton Hall, the sort of charitable, forgiving affection one feels for an eccentric relative?
• Morning birds, rude sunshine, everything full and unexperienced
• The mind was like a pendulum: a forceful sermon might move it from its habitual position, but sooner or later it always swung back into place.
• Bees buzzed among the columbine and blue forget-me-nots in the carefully tended garden, and the mild air was sweet with the odor of wallflowers. Violets and primroses tumbled from window boxes and clay pots set back from the path. The old thatch on the gables and jutting eaves of the cottage roof sprouted reeds and emerald-green mosses, and draped the upstairs dormer windows in graceful curves, like a woman’s bonnet.
• when someone spoke to her—alertly, directly, without affectation or excessive demureness. The clothes she wore were respectable but a trifle odd, a little off, not quite what Christy imagined was the fashion in London nowadays, and she wore them with a careless panache that fit with his—perhaps naive—image of impoverished bohemianism on the Continent.
• “Tragic” was too strong a word to describe the fine, elusive essence of her—he hoped; yet beneath her limitless composure he sensed the soul-sick desperation of a life gone out of control.
• “Faith is living with an emotional acceptance of those things to which we give intellectual assent—by acting as we believe. As we believe, so we become.
• The distance between the horses didn’t begin to narrow until Christy spied the tall stacks of Guelder’s steam engines rising high above the trees, belching puffy clouds into the lead-colored sky.
• I’m smothering in politeness. Faith in God isn’t a debate I have to win, it’s a way we can understand each other.”
• Crimea, where Geoffrey expects the real fighting to occur. I read the newspapers to keep up. Quiet old England turns out to be a shade bloodthirsty: everyone is dying for a good old-fashioned war again, which they haven’t had since Waterloo. The enemy seems to have been picked almost at random, as far as I can tell. The residents of Wyckerley are puzzled but proud of their new viscount for going off to keep Turkey safe from Russian encroachment (a murky and remote motive to me,
• He could rarely fathom her moods. Her smiles were either brittle or soft and inexpressibly sad, and they almost never reached her eyes. She said bitter things with the soft smile and vulnerable things with the brittle one, keeping him off balance and anxious for her.
• “Plough Sunday? Don’t tell me you bless a plough!” “I do. The farmers carry it inside and set it down in the chancel, where it sits in muddy state all during the service.”
• “How? Have you spoken to groups before?” “I don’t have to.” “I take it that means no.” He sighed. “It gets easier,” he said gloomily. “A little. Not much,” he amended in a flash of candor.
• He took her arm so she wouldn’t stumble in the stony alley behind the house. For some reason touching her, even in this meaningless way, seemed too intimate a thing to do in silence,
• “This is glebe land—meaning the ecclesiastical parish owns it.
• He took the opportunity to stare at her—something he was always trying not to do. It was folly to tell himself that all she’d brought into his quiet life was friendship and frank conversation. He thought about her too much for that to be true. The days when they didn’t meet seemed flat and routine to him, incomplete. He caught himself saving up stories or bits of conversation to share when he saw her. He kept her in the back of his mind, seeing the world through her eyes, thinking, Anne would laugh at that; this would surprise her; that would put her hack up.
• The humor and friendliness in her face warmed him to his bones. He lifted his hand—and dropped it abruptly, realizing he’d been going to touch her. “I believe you’ve been softening me up gradually, Reverend Morrell, since the day we met,” she said, quite softly.
• Who would have thought it—of my entire acquaintance, Reverend Christian Morrell has become the person with whom I can most be my godless self. Astonishing.
• I was toasted time and again for my generosity, my beauty, my cleverness, my kindness—everything but my grandmother’s rheumatism. Despite all my cajoling, Christy wouldn’t
• She had to close her eyes. A slow, gentle warmth filled her, soft and soothing, like healing water. I care for you. Excitement and trepidation came next, and she took turns thinking, It can’t be true, and I knew it all the time! But it was too big, too much—she couldn’t think about it now.
• pathetic, and she still had a little pride left. Christy looked miserable. He was weighing his unhappiness against hers, and she knew with a giddy, guilt-ridden surge of hope that, in such an equation, she would always be the winner.
• But—he cares for me. That stays in my heart. I take that hope out and hold it, look at it, stroke it, and whisper to it, like a child with a pet she’s found in the wild and isn’t allowed to keep. I must hide it out of sight and look at it only in the coldest times, the heartless hours.
• His set of friends was ‘bohemian,’ which meant, as far as I could tell, that they slept with each other’s wives and made a virtue out of professional failure.”
• He’d given up trying not to think of her. There were ways in which he was a strong man, but that kind of willpower was beyond him.
• And then she touched the tip of her tongue to her top lip and whispered, “Christy, would it be a sin if you kissed me?” He didn’t laugh. Nor did he say what he was thinking—that for him it would be a sacrament.
• The reprieve would be brief, though: he and forty village children and their parents were coming to her house in two hours for the annual Christmas revel.
• they took turns saying, interspersed with exclamations of “How lovely to be together and warm.”
• She could feel her heart stealing away, deserting her side and going over to his. Uncatchable
• He couldn’t understand how it had happened. One minute he had her half-naked in his bed, and she wouldn’t marry him; the next, he was telling her about the Weedies, and she would. It made no sense—but he supposed miracles never did.
• But, of course, now I’ll never know if he meant to pass the Song of Solomon off as his own work indefinitely. Probably not. More likely, he thought to wait for me to praise his poem and then spring it on me—“Aha!
• I feel the deprivation acutely. Journal, are you ready? He’s giving me up for Lent.
• The game was up as soon as he touched her. Kissing Christy was serious business these days; she couldn’t afford to waste a second through frivolous talk or lack of concentration.

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更加罕见的setup： Sebastian, in his capacity of local magistrate, took released convict Rachel into his custody & employment for twisted reasons. 最大的转机是他的伦敦libertine 朋友们来访欺负Rachel，让他护犊心爆发，完全改过自新，从此用香水浴，小狗，书籍，海边度假治愈Rachel。阴谋是 Rachel收到的parole信是伪造的，她眼看又要身入囹圄，Sebastian在危机里再次开眼，Christie 拿出证明Rachel清白的证据。两人第一场情戏就是看作者走钢丝，Rachel受过性虐待，Sebastian这阶段又完全没有她同意，但最后还堪堪能算成‘ravishment’，不恶心住读者，针眼非常小冰非常薄。上一本Love/Cherish其实不吝啬暗黑，相比这本简直阳光暖煦。

• Two happy accidents of nature lifted Wyckerley out of the ordinary, though, and made it genuinely charming. One was its aspect: it sat on a lush green hill overlooking not only Lynton Great Hall a half mile to the east, but the south Devon coast and the dark, brooding wastes of Dartmoor to the north. The second natural gift, even more delightful, was the Wyck, a cunning little river that ran right through the town, side by side with the High Street, spanned at convenient intervals by stone slabs or humpbacked bridges built by the Romans fifteen centuries ago. In April, violets and marsh marigolds covered the river’s steep-sided banks, and strawberries and watercresses and wild daffodils.
• Nobody had a lawyer, which made self-defense all but impossible; under English jurisprudence, the accused wasn’t allowed to speak on his own behalf.
• All her movements and gestures were scaled down, designed to attract the least amount of attention. It was self-deprecation refined to an art form. He thought of nuns again. Silent as a cool draft, Mrs. Wade glided rather than walked, the movement of her legs barely discernible. As if the goal were to go from point A to point B without disturbing the air.
• The little thrill in her chest at this elementary but powerful act—controlling light and darkness in her own room—would probably fade soon, like her awareness that the bed was too soft. How quickly one could adjust to the unspeakable luxuries of freedom.
• In some ways, what he saw in Rachel Wade was what he couldn’t see in himself anymore. She was like some raw, naked thing, stripped down to the basics, without illusions or hope, without vanity. The fire she’d been through had burned her clean to the bone. She knew something now; she’d learned a secret maybe the secret—and he had some idea that if he could possess her, the essence of what he lacked and she had would be his. He would appropriate it.
• “Good morning, my lord,” she greeted him levelly. And then, in an unwonted fit of extravagance, she added, “It’s a beautiful morning.”
• Except that it had left her feeling helpless. Nothing new in that: he must lie awake at night thinking of ways to make her do things she didn’t want to do.
• Devonshire lay in the green lap of May, and every bird, every wildflower, every fresh scent on the breeze was an unimaginable delight.
• “Could you cheat? Whisper something to a neighbor as you passed?” “Some did, yes. The art of ventriloquism flourishes in a prison yard, as you can imagine.
• never knew where he came from. I petted him.” The bold, wistful way she said this last made him imagine her hoarding the thought of the yellow dog for months, even years, using the memories of soft fur and wet tongue to comfort herself in the long hours of her imprisonment.
• realized they were together, and said, “Oh,” in a long, rising-and-falling intonation of delicate horror. It might have been amusing if it hadn’t ruined the mood of tentative gaiety that, against all odds, had prevailed in the shop before her arrival.
• She didn’t mean only this. She meant her whole life. Her fatalism had the usual effect of making him want to take her, and making him want to set her free.
• Randolph’s cruelties were hopelessly mixed up in her memory with the things this man had done to her. Need and revulsion, pleasure and pain, desire and disgust—neither her mind nor her body could be relied on tonight to sort them out accurately.
• Self-doubt, guilt’s unsavory neighbor.
• “My God.” He was quietly, odiously delighted. “My dear lady,” he breathed. “You murdered my uncle.”
• Something happened then. He wasn’t on the piano bench with Kitty on his lap. He was halfway across the room. He heard a snap in his head, exactly like a bone breaking, and at once the eerie fugue state evaporated. His past and his future had broken cleanly in two. This, now, was the present, a violent limbo he had to smash his way out of to survive.
• “Only from books.” He looked skeptical. She had no wish to convince him, no wish to be Sebastian’s nurse. But for some reason—pride?—she added, “Burton’s Pathology; Fever Nursing by Campion.”
• “It’s in your pocket,” she snapped. Of all the emotions she could have felt at this moment, aggravation because he wouldn’t let her take care of him was surely the maddest.
• “Then do it. Please. I don’t want anyone but you to touch me.” Immediately she flushed. Her throat hurt; the most foolish desire to weep welled up in her without warning. She wanted to whisper, Why? but she held her tongue. She would not regard what he said, she would not regard the way he was treating her. It was an anomaly. It meant nothing.
• In truth, he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t bear solitude right now. She needed the comfort of another human being, and although it was the height of irony, the only person to whom she could turn was the very one who had put her in need of comfort. Ah, well. It wasn’t an uncommon phenomenon; she’d seen it in Dartmoor often enough—the prisoner so desperate for sympathy and companionship that she grew dependent on, even attached to, her gaoler. Was it twisted? A corruption of reality? In the end it didn’t matter, because the deadliest enemy was still loneliness. It put all the others to shame.
• They looked at each other through nothing but the air, no veils of deception between them, no pride, no determined cruelty, no trumped-up impassivity.
• After that first year, I came to understand that the anger and fury, the terrible sense of injustice I felt—they were eating me alive, and keeping me in a prison every bit as vicious and confining as Exeter. But I could free myself at least from that prison if I could let all the rage and hurt go, just—let it go. And so I did.” “How?” “I stopped caring.”
• Why didn’t I do this sooner? the dreaming woman had wondered. Touching the man had been the key, the beginning. “What do you hope for?” he’d asked her once, and he understood her answer perfectly now: “I hope to be able to bear it.”
• When she was seated in the tub with water up to her rib cage, he brought her the basket of soaps and oils. “Which do you like?” He handed her the soaps, one by one, and uncorked all the little glass vials for her to sniff—oil of roses, oil of orange peels, sweet almond, lavender, lily of the valley.
• “I’m thinking there should be a medal for the kind of willpower it’s taking for me to keep my hands off you. Except for your feet.” “The Order of the Bath?”
• The moon in any phase was still a private, special joy, because she’d gone for so long without seeing it.
• He suggested a fernery as well, but I thought that was a bit much. I mean, where does it end, where does one draw the line? A rosary, a gladiolary, a petuniary. But of course if you want a fernery, that would be an entirely different thing. I suppose it might be all right, damp and close, aquatic, somewhat fetal, really, but—”
• “I’ll miss you,” she told him, turning in his arms. “I wish . . .” But she didn’t finish the thought. It wasn’t in her yet to wish for things.
• She thought of the day she’d told him of her prison daydream—that her cell was a greenhouse filled with flowers and damp, sweet-smelling earth. Her heart ached, and she knew that what she felt for him was love, not gratitude. A complicated love, born out of need and helplessness at first, but moving away from them as time went by, moving into a cleaner, clearer place as she grew stronger, less dependent on him for survival. Where would it end? To see the sky and the ocean like this, great gulps of the wide world in vistas that stretched literally for miles—it was almost too much. It was another of Sebastian’s gifts, this clandestine three-day escape from Lynton
• “When did you buy it? How did you know I wanted it?” “You told—” “Did you know I saw Traviata performed in Venice in fifty-three? And again in Covent Garden just last spring?”
• “I think its to use the few talents I’ve been given to try to do something good in my small corner of the cosmos. And to be happy without hurting any more people than absolutely necessary.”
• He thought he understood now what had drawn him to her in the first place. He’d seen her as the opposite of himself, and he’d wanted her to save him. Simple as that. She’d stood in his mind for survival, because she’d been through hellfire and come out strong and whole, indestructible. What had he ever suffered? Except for a drunken duel or two