Summary:
Valancy Stirling is a shy, obedient, 29 year old woman who is convinced that she is not pretty and is oppressed by her mother and most of her family who keep her in a position of meekness beneath them. Her only escapes are in her daydreams of a Blue Castle, where she is in control, and in books about nature (written by her favorite author: John Foster).
One day she received a letter from a Dr. Trent, a heart specialist who she secretly consulted about a recurring heart spasm that concerned her, and is told that she has a fatal heart condition which is destined to kill her within the year.
Determined to actually "live" her last year on earth, Valancy moves out of her home to nurse the dying Cissy Gay (the daughter of the notorious Roaring Abel, the town drunk and odd jobs man) and keep house for them, much to her family's horror. She also takes up an association with Barney Snaith (a mysterious middle aged man who is rumored to be a murderer, a fugitive from justice and the father of Cissy Gay's deceased illegitimate child> who she falls in love with despite his reputation.
Within this year Valancy discovers her Blue Castle, where true beauty lies, what it is to love someone, what it is to be loved and learns to love herself for who she is.
"Tall mulleins stood up along the road in stiff, orderly ranks like companies of soldiers. The thistles looked like drunken fairies or tipsy elves as their car lights passed over them."(p. 109)
`"There's our island," he said gloatingly.
Valancy looked - and looked - and looked again. There was a diaphanous lilac mist on the lake, shrouding the island. Through it the two enormous pine trees that clasped hands over Barney's shack loomed out like dark turrets. Behind them was a sky still rose-hues in the afterlight, and a pale young moon.
Valancy shivered like a tree the wind stirs suddenly. Something seemed to sweep over her soul.
"My Blue Castle!" she said. "Oh, my Blue Castle!"
They got into the canoe and paddled out to it. They left behind the realm of everyday and things known and landed on a realm of mystery and enchantment where anything might happen - anything might be true.'(p. 134)
`"Have you missed me, Moonlight?" Barney was whispering.
"It seems a hundred years since you went away," said Valancy.
"I won't leave you again."
"You must," protested Valancy, "if you want to. I'd be miserable if I thought you wanted to go and didn't, because of me. I want you to feel perfectly free."
Barney laughed - a little cynically.
"There is no such thing as freedom on earth," he said. "Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. You think you are free now because you've escaped from a peculiarly unbearable kind of bondage. But are you? You love me - that's as bondage."
"Who said or wrote that `the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is'?" asked Valancy dreamily, clinging to his arm as they climbed up the rock steps.
"Ah, now you have it," said Barney. "That's all the freedom we can hope for - the freedom to choose our prison. But, Moonlight" - he stopped at the door of the Blue Castle and looked about him - at the glorious lake, the great, shadowy woods, the bonfires, the twinkling lights - "Moonlight, I'm glad to be home again. When I came down through the woods and saw my home lights - mine - gleaming out under the old pines - something I'd never seen before - oh, girl, I was glad - glad!"(p. 153-154)
"I've had a caller," said Barney the next afternoon, when Valancy had returned from another flower quest.
"Who?" Valancy was surprised but indifferent. She began filling a basket with arbutus.
"Allan Tierney. He wants to paint you, Moonlight."
"Me!" Valancy dropped her basket and her arbutus. "You're laughing at me, Barney."
"I'm not. That's what Tierney came for. To ask my permission to paint my wife - as the Spirit of Muskoka, or something like that."
"But - but -" stammered Valancy, "Allan Tierney never paints any but - any but -"
"Beautiful women," finished Barney. "Conceded. Q.E.D., Mistress Barney Snaith is a beautiful woman."
"Nonsense," said Valancy, stooping to retrieve her arbutus. "You know that's nonsense, Barney. I know I'm a heap better-looking than I was a year ago, but I'm not beautiful."
"Allan Tierney never makes a mistake," said Barney. "You forget, Moonlight, that there are different kinds of beauty. Your imagination is obsessed by the very obvious type of your cousin Olive. Oh, I've seen her - she's a stunner - but you'd never catch Allan Tierney wanting to paint her. In the horrible but expressive slang phrase, she keeps all her goods in the shop-window. But in your subconscious mind you have a conviction that nobody can be beautiful who doesn't look like Olive. Also, you remember your face as it was in the days when your soul was not allowed to shine through it. Tierney said something about the curve of your cheek as you looked back over your shoulder. You know I've often told you it was distracting. And he's quite batty about your eyes. If I wasn't absolutely sure it was solely professional - he's really a crabbed old bachelor, you know - I'd be jealous."
"Well, I don't want to be painted," said Valancy. "I hope you told him that."
"I couldn't tell him that. I didn't know what you wanted. But I told him I didn't want my wife painted - hung up in a salon for the mob to stare at. Belonging to another man. For of course I couldn't buy the picture. So even if you had wanted to be painted, Moonlight, your tyrannous husband would not have permitted it...."'(p. 172-173)
COPYRIGHT 1988 BY RUTH MACDONALD & JOHN GORDON MCCLELLAND - PUBLISHED BY BANTAM BOOKS/APRIL 1989