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Allen’s heart sank. This Mr. Blewett… He looked a little like Mr. Thomas. Mr. Hammond had looked softer, but only at first. He’d also looked scrappier and messier. Mr. Blewett was clean and stiff and terrifying. He measured Allen up with his hard eyes, then he clapped his hard hands together, making Allen flinch.
“Get on over here, boy,” he commanded in a hard tone, waving him over. Everything about this man was hard.
Mr. Cuthbert was watching it all, but he didn’t say anything. Allen caught his gaze for just a moment. He tried silently pleading with him, but he still looked so resolute and firm in his decision to give him up because he wasn’t a girl. Mr. Cuthbert didn’t need any help, he’d said firmly back at Green Gables. The mail-order orphan was for Miss Cuthbert alone, and Miss Cuthbert had no use for a boy in her kitchen and house and garden. Miss Cuthbert—who’d told Allen to call her ‘Mary’ because she said that’s what everybody called her—had told Mr. Cuthbert that she could hire a girl to help her with the house, and that Allen could be company for him, but Mr. Cuthbert had just bristled at the suggestion that he needed something so sentimental as company.
“He’s no good to us,” Mr. Cuthbert had pronounced the night before, when he’d thought Allen was asleep, not crouched near the top of the stairs, his pale and freckled face pressed against the railing. “He’s got to go straight back to the asylum where he came from.”
“Well, we might be of some good to him, Marillion,” Mary Cuthbert had returned quietly, before she’d softly slipped out of the kitchen and into her bedroom, the only sign of her coming or going the barely-audible rustling of her dress.
Allen shuffled his way across the room dutifully, shaking the whole time. He trembled more the closer he got to Mr. Blewett, who shifted in his seat and brushed at his trousers before standing. He grabbed Allen’s face when he got close enough. His grip hurt, but Allen didn’t whimper or make any kind of sound. He was thinking of Mr. Thomas, and how similar the two men were, and how much Mr. Thomas had hated when Allen cried during a beating. This wasn’t nearly as bad, but somehow it hurt worse, happening in front of Mr. Cuthbert who the child had thought would be his new father. He thought he heard Mr. Cuthbert’s chair creak, as though he’d moved a bit when Mr. Blewett grabbed Allen, but nobody said a word. Mr. Blewett turned his face from side to side, examining him. When he was “satisfied,” he released Allen’s face with a small push. Allen only staggered a little.
“How old are you, boy?”
“El-Eleven.” Allen had to clear his throat to make his voice clear, but even then he could tell that his shakiness annoyed Mr. Blewett.
“Straighten up, boy,” Mr. Blewett barked. “Gotta see if you’re as scrawny as you look all hunched over like that.”
Allen’s face flushed, tinging the paleness with a sickly pink, but he did as he was ordered. He still couldn’t really look Mr. Blewett in the face for long though.
“Hmmm… Well, you’re a skinny, ugly little thing, ain’t you?” Allen felt tears welling again at Mr. Blewett’s mean assessment, but he blinked them away. He tried to find the resilience he’d worn his entire life, but one night at Green Gables and all that anticipation beforehand, when he’d thought he’d have a real family that wanted him and loved him and chose him for who he was, not for what he could do for them, had ripped all that learned and cultivated hardness away. Plus, he’d always been sensitive about his looks. “But the wiry, homely ones’ll always work the hardest, eh, Spencer?”
Mr. Samuel Spencer laughed a little nervously. He wouldn’t really look at Allen. He just kept glancing back and forth between Mr. Cuthbert and Mr. Blewett, all discomfort as he surveyed the scene unfolding in his study.
“Well, alright. I’ll take him, ‘long as he acts smart and respectful.” He pointed a bony, hard finger in Allen’s face. Allen was feeling heavy hands and seeing purple bruises and bleeding lips in his memories, and he flinched back and barely kept himself from whimpering again. “Understand that, boy?”
Allen forced a quick nod, already terrified of Mr. Blewett’s consequences should be displease the man.
“Good. I been strugglin’ awful hard with the farm this summer, what with the hired boys bein’ so expensive this season, and I’m terrible worn-out and got no time for coddlin’ stupid whelps.” Mr. Blewett went to grab his hat, and Allen watched it all as if in a horrible dream. The dream he’d dreamed over and over again, where everything was the same, and no one ever wanted him, and all he was good for was pushing a plow or cleaning a barn: the dream that was his horrible, unforgiving reality. “I’m much obliged to you for makin’ this so simple on me and the missus, Spencer. You too, Cuthbert.”
Mr. Blewett crossed to shake Mr. Cuthbert’s hand, but Mr. Cuthbert didn’t move.
“Well, I don’t know,” Mr. Cuthbert said slowly.
Allen’s heart leapt into his throat. Wide gray eyes darted to Mr. Cuthbert’s face. Mr. Cuthbert’s serious gaze was fixed on Mr. Blewett though.
“I might have been too hasty making such a decision without well and truly consulting Mary. Besides, I didn’t say we were set on not keepin’ the boy, just that we were thinkin’ it over.” Mr. Cuthbert stood from his seat, breezing past the astonished Mr. Blewett. “I’ll take the boy on back with me, and I’ll let you know what Mary and I decide real soon, Samuel. Come along, Allen.”
Mr. Spencer stood and mumbled, “Al-Alright, Marillion.”
Mr. Blewett clenched his jaw and his fists, and Allen was gladder than ever that he wasn’t going home with him right now. He’d kept his bag and hat with him, and he hadn’t taken off the shabby gray coat when he walked into Mr. Spencer’s study, so he just silently followed Mr. Cuthbert out into the blessed, baking sunlight. The blossoms and sea breeze smelled sweeter than before, as though Allen were smelling them for the first time.
“M… M-Mr. Cuthbert?” Allen stuttered breathlessly once they’d climbed into the buggy and begun rolling down the red roads away from Mr. Spencer’s house. “Mr. C-Cuthbert…”
“Spit it out, boy,” Mr. Cuthbert admonished sternly. He didn’t look away from the roads and the sturdy brown horse.
“Mr. Cuthbert…” Allen turned on the seat, facing the serious gentleman. “Mr. Cuthbert, did you really say you might keep me, or was I only imagining it?”
“I did not say I might keep you,” Mr. Cuthbert said shortly. “I said I would discuss it with Mary. Don’t let your imagination give you any kind of silly hope about this. I’m just not real sure ‘bout the idea of handing you over to Peter Blewett.” He shook his head, his lips pursed tightly. His knuckles were white around the reins. “I’d have a tough time givin’ a dog I liked to that man…”
“I’m glad you didn’t give me to him, Mr. Cuthbert,” Allen admitted, relief seeping into his quiet voice. He sank back into the wooden seat, feeling as though he’d narrowly escaped an execution of the worst death imaginable.
When Marillion looked over at the boy briefly, he couldn’t help thinking how sad it was that a child should feel so genuinely relieved to be away from a man he’d just met. But this waif was no ordinary child. He got the feeling that Allen Shirley could sense things better than most people, even adults. He’d read that boy’s face in Samuel Spencer’s parlor, and he’d seen the perception regarding Peter Blewett. He’d been pale with fear, shaking and tearful and trying—failing—to hide it. But that desperate look he’d shot towards Marillion had stabbed something in the old man’s chest. Then Blewett had grabbed Allen’s small, thin face, and Marillion had to grip the sides of his chair to keep from jerking the trembling boy away from the harsh Blewett fellow.
He’d heard stories of Peter Blewett. His neighbor and friend, Reuben Lynde, had told Marillion that he’d heard horrible tales about the Blewett place from one of his hired boys: “Francis Lewis used to work for Peter Blewett, you know,” Reuben had said, blue eyes sharp. He might complain about the hired boy’s unreliability at times, but he cared about Francis, in his gruff, often-offensive and judgmental way. “That boy couldn’t have been more than eleven, and Blewett horse-whipped him for oversleeping one day. Can you believe that, Marillion? I wouldn’t have believed it of an Avonlea man myself had Francis not showed me the scars.” Reuben had shaken his head, thick arms crossing tightly over his substantial chest. “What kind of man would do that sort of thing to a child?”
“Allen…” Marillion’s voice was softer, and his stomach sank with the questions he had to ask but didn’t want to hear answers for. “The people you lived with before, those Thomas and Hammond men you mentioned earlier... Were they… Did they treat you alright?”
“Oh…” Allen’s downcast eyes and flushed cheeks and jittery hands said enough, even if he hadn’t continued speaking, and Marillion was already seized with unholy fury imagining men like Peter Blewett charged with this sensitive, small creature. “Oh, I’m sure… they meant to be good to me, Mr. Cuthbert. But… they were all in such trying circumstances when they took me in. Mrs. Thomas had just left Mr. Thomas when Mrs. Reed handed me over to him, and Mrs. Hammond was in consumption already when I went to live with her and Mr. Hammond. I know those sorts of trials were very hard on Mr. Thomas and Mr. Hammond… Mrs. Hammond, too, of course.” The small, forced smile was too heartbreaking for words. “But I’m sure they meant to be good to me. I’m… sure of it.”
After a long pause, Marillion cleared his thick throat and said, “You go on and call me ‘Marillion.’” He snapped the reins, urging the horse towards Green Gables faster. “Everybody calls me that. You just go on and do it, too, while you’re with us.”
He didn’t say so to Allen, but he’d made up his mind right then that, even if he did have to keep the child and raise him himself, though Lord only knew what an old bachelor like him would know about raising a boy, he would not be giving Allen Shirley to Peter Blewett.
Wouldn’t Mary be pleased at this turn of events.