Emily Climbs. Lucy M. Montgomery

      EMILY CLIMBS

      By LUCY M. MONTGOMERY

      Emily Climbs

      By Lucy M. Montgomery

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7226-9

      eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7227-6

      This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

      Cover Image: a detail of the frontispiece illustration by Maria L. Kirk from the original edition, published by Frederick A. Stokes company, New York , 1925.

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      CONTENTS

       Chapter I. Writing Herself Out

       Chapter II. Salad Days

       Chapter III. In the Watches of the Night

       Chapter IV. “As Ithers See Us”

       Chapter V. Half a Loaf

       Chapter VI. Shrewsbury Beginnings

       Chapter VII. Pot-pourri

       Chapter VIII. Not Proven

       Chapter IX. A Supreme Moment

       Chapter X. The Madness of an Hour

       Chapter XI. Heights and Hollows

       Chapter XII. At the Sign of the Haystack

       Chapter XIII. Haven

       Chapter XIV. The Woman Who Spanked the King

       Chapter XV. “The Thing That Couldn’t”

       Chapter XVI. Driftwood

       Chapter XVII. If a Body Kiss a Body

       Chapter XVIII. Circumstantial Evidence

       Chapter XIX. “Airy Voices”

       Chapter XX. In the Old John House

       Chapter XXI. Thicker than Water

       Chapter XXII. “Love Me, Love My Dog”

       Chapter XXIII. An Open Door

       Chapter XXIV. A Valley of Vision

       Chapter XXV. April Love

       Biographical Afterword

      Chapter I. Writing Herself Out

      Emily Byrd Starr was alone in her room, in the old New Moon farmhouse at Blair Water, one stormy night in a February of the olden years before the world turned upside down. She was at that moment as perfectly happy as any human being is ever permitted to be. Aunt Elizabeth, in consideration of the coldness of the night, had allowed her to have a fire in her little fireplace—a rare favour. It was burning brightly and showering a red-golden light over the small, immaculate room, with its old-time furniture and deep-set, wide-silled windows, to whose frosted, blue-white panes the snowflakes clung in little wreaths. It lent depth and mystery to the mirror on the wall which reflected Emily as she sat coiled on the ottoman before the fire, writing, by the light of two tall, white candles—which were the only approved means of illumination at New Moon—in a brand-new, glossy, black “Jimmy-book” which Cousin Jimmy had given her that day. Emily had been very glad to get it, for she had filled the one he had given her the preceding autumn, and for over a week she had suffered acute pangs of suppression because she could not write in a nonexistent “diary.”

      Her diary had become a dominant factor in her young, vivid life. It had taken the place of certain “letters” she had written in her childhood to her dead father, in which she had been wont to “write out” her problems and worries—for even in the magic years when one is almost fourteen one has problems and worries, especially when one is under the strict and well-meant but not over-tender governance of an Aunt Elizabeth Murray. Sometimes Emily felt that if it were not for her diary she would have flown into little bits by reason of consuming her own smoke. The fat, black “Jimmy-book” seemed to her like a personal friend and a safe confidant for certain matters which burned for expression and yet were too combustible to be trusted to the ears of any living being. Now blank books of any sort were not easy to come by at New Moon, and if it had not been for Cousin Jimmy, Emily might never have had one. Certainly Aunt Elizabeth would not give her one—Aunt Elizabeth thought Emily wasted far too much time “over her scribbling nonsense” as it was—and Aunt Laura did not dare to go contrary to Aunt Elizabeth in this—more by token that Laura herself really thought Emily might be better employed. Aunt Laura was a jewel of a woman, but certain things were holden from her eyes.

      Now Cousin Jimmy was never in the least frightened of Aunt Elizabeth, and when the notion occurred to him that Emily probably wanted another “blank book,” that blank book materialized straightway, in defiance of Aunt Elizabeth’s scornful glances. He had gone to Shrewsbury that very day, in the teeth of the rising storm, for no other reason than to get it. So Emily was happy, in her subtle and friendly firelight, while the wind howled and shrieked through the great old trees to the north of New Moon, sent huge, spectral wreaths of snow whirling across Cousin Jimmy’s famous garden, drifted the sundial completely over, and whistled eerily through the Three Princesses—as Emily always called the three tall Lombardies in the corner of the garden.

      “I love a storm like this at night when I don’t have to go out in it,” wrote Emily. “Cousin Jimmy and I had a splendid evening planning out our garden and choosing our seeds and plants in the catalogue. Just where the biggest drift is making, behind the summer-house, we are going to have a bed of pink asters, and we are going to give the Golden Ones—who are dreaming under four feet