The Blue Castle

Valancy Stirling woke on the morning of her twenty-ninth birthday, and for one moment, before she was fully awake, she felt almost happy.Then she heard the rain against the window, and the grey light in the room told her that it was going to be another joyless day.She lay still in her hard, narrow bed and thought about her life, which seemed to her as dull and colourless as the sky outside.

She lived in a small, ugly house on Elm Street with her mother and an older cousin named Stickles, and neither of them had ever spoken to her with real warmth.Her family was a large, proud clan of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and to them a woman still unmarried at twenty-nine was a quiet embarrassment.They said so at dinner, in front of everyone, in kind and smiling voices, and Valancy had long ago learned to say nothing.

She had never been in love, and no young man had ever waited for her at the gate.In twenty-nine years she had never once done a thing simply because she wanted to.But Valancy had two secret comforts that her family knew nothing about.

The first was her Blue Castle: an imaginary castle in Spain that she had built in her mind as a child and had lived in, in her daydreams, ever since.In the Blue Castle she was beautiful and brave and loved, and nothing there ever frightened her.The second comfort was a shelf of nature books by a writer who called himself John Foster, which she borrowed from the library and read like poetry.

Her mother said the Foster books were a foolish waste of time.That week Valancy was carrying a third secret, and this one frightened her.For months she had felt a strange pain near her heart, and she could not breathe easily when she climbed the stairs.

She had written quietly to a doctor in another town, Dr. Trent, because she could not bear for her family to find out that something might be wrong.Lying there listening to the rain on her birthday morning, she made a small, trembling decision: this year, somehow, her life was going to change.