[RECAP: Leonie hurt her ankle while trying to demonstrate a cheerleading pose, and had to be helped back to school by Father Gabriel]
It was a beautiful Autumn afternoon and Leonie had it all to herself.
Thanks to her ankle she had been excused sport for the rest of the week. While the younger students had to be in supervised study, the sixth formers were free to do as they liked.
So Leonie took the book of poetry that Father Gabriel had lent her, and wandered into the woods at the side of the school. She passed the grove of poplars at the edge, where the poetry club had been held, and went further in.
It was a beautiful wood. Not a thick, dark pine forest but an airy cathedral of beech, carpeted with bluebells in the spring. There were paintings of it in the school art room. Now the leaves were a glorious gold and bronze dome overhead, with the sunlight filtering through. It was dazzling, and the perfect place to lie down and read poems.
Which is what Leonie did. She found a mossy spot flecked with sun and wriggled down until her head was in a comfortable position on the leaves. Then she gazed upwards for a while, looking at the patterns of the leaves agains the blue sky. Finally she read some verses of The Wreck of the Deutschland, trying to memorise the ones she liked.
She had been there a short time when she heard someone come up beside her. She knew without looking who it was.
"Leonie. How is your ankle?"
Gabriel regularly walked through the woods during his free time but he had never encountered anyone in this place before. The girls tended to venture into the woods on weekends when he was busier with chapel duties.
There she lay, like a wood nymph, her hair spreading over the leaves.
He had thought of her constantly since taking her to the sick bay. English lessons had been an ordeal. Fortunately - or not fortunately, since he knew he preferred the torment of her presence to the absence of her - she hadn't been needed for the scenes they had rehearsed that week.
She didn't answer him, and he saw that she had his book clasped to her chest.
Knowing he was making a grave mistake, he sat down beside her. She remained on her back, looking upwards, and then she spoke.
I am soft sift
In an hourglass—at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift
Gabriel felt a physical ache as Leonie recited the lines. If he kept looking at her he feared he would do something foolish. So - which was probably even more foolish - he laid down with his head next to hers, but his body the other way.
He spoke the next lines. He knew them by heart
And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,
They were both silent. Leonie could hardly breathe. She couldn't believe how close to him she was. Her head was practically touching his. She had never felt this intimate with someone else and yet they weren't even having physical contact.
"Read the next verse," she asked him. Gabriel obliged.
I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
After the first five lines he stopped and they lay there together in silence once again.
Eventually Leonie spoke. "Do you think Hopkins ever fell in love?"
"He did. But it wasn't, it was..."
"It was with a man, right?" Leonie had already guessed this.
"It was. But the man Hopkins loved died very young. He drowned when he was nineteen. And he loved someone else, though Hopkins likely didn't know this."
Leonie took a while to absorb this. "And then Hopkins entered the priesthood. It's so sad." She didn't specify whether she thought Hopkins taking orders was sad, or the fact the man he loved had died.
Gabriel thought of Joanne and couldn't miss the parallels to his own life. She had loved another and left him, and he had subsequently taken orders. Was it the wrong reason? Should he have waited longer?
But how could it not be the right path? To be closer to God, to follow a life of service and sacrifice?
Even if that sacrifice meant never getting to do what he wanted to do. Which was to roll onto his side and bring his lips down upon the girl lying next to him. But he kept his head fixed and steady, looking upwards.
"How did you know he loved a man?" he asked Leonie, suddenly curious.
"I'm not sure. I guess there's nothing about women in there, except for the nuns. And they're not eroticised. Then there are a couple of poems where - you know - the imagery is kind of..."
"Homoerotic?" Gabriel suggested.
"Something like that. Only subtly, but then I haven't studied all of them as closely as you have," she said.
"The more I study them, the more I feel I don't know about him. Or rather, the more I feel there is to know," Gabriel said.
Leonie brushed off a leaf that had drifted down onto her hair. "He's easy to fall in love with though, isn't he? His poetry, I mean. Like Keats."
Gabriel laughed. "You fell in love with Keats?"
"Everyone does, don't they? You hit the emo stage and go around reciting about being love with Death and calling his soft name and so on."
It wasn't a phase Gabriel had personally been through but he took her word for it. "I hope you don't feel that way now."
"Not at all. Not now. There's too much to live for."
From the way she said it he understood there had been a time when she hadn't felt that way, but he didn't question her about it. He couldn't stop remembering Joanne. Not only was any twinge of emotion for her long gone, but he was starting to feel incredulity. He could never have imagined lying in a wood with her, taking about poets and poetry. She would have been bored after a moment, complaining about the discomfort of lying on the ground, wanting to get up and leave.
Gabriel remembered a disastrous time when they had been on a beach and Joanne had freaked out about sand getting everywhere. People did make jokes about "sand getting in the crevices" but they hadn't even been in a state of undress. Much as he had hoped to get that way at the time.
No, Joanne hadn't been much of a lover of the outdoors. But then he hadn't appreciated nature as much as he did now, past the wild days of college and quietly immersed in his work and his private study.
Leonie was just centimetres from him. If he tilted his head one way he could lean it against hers. He longed to do so. He could smell her hair, the shampoo she used, and it had made him ragingly hard.
In another life, he could have lain with her like this every night and every morning. Every day, as they were now.
Thinking about this reminded him how unwise and inappropriate it was for him to be lying there beside her. But he just couldn't bring himself to leave her just yet.
"What poets did you study in your former school?" he asked her.
"The usual ones. The Romantics. Some Shakespeare. TS Eliot. Lots of Emily Dickinson. She was from Massachusetts."
Gabriel confessed to some ignorance of Dickinson. "I'm afraid I've read very little of her work."
"She wrote nearly two thousand poems. I doubt many people have read all of them," Leonie said. She loved hearing Gabriel's voice. She couldn't see him, in this position, but he was so near to her.
She wondered if he had ever been in love, as Hopkins had. She didn't dare ask.
She rolled onto her side so she was looking at his profile, effectively upside down as he was lying the other way. He had such perfect features: he looked sculpted, like a statue. Had he chosen a different career he could easily have been a model or an actor.
Sensing her looking at him, Gabriel turned onto his side as well. Their faces were inches apart. Thank God his body wasn't facing hers as well, because that might have been temptation too much.
Their eyes were at the same level, and he looked into hers. An expression passed across her face, she looked momentarily sad. He asked her what it was.
"I was thinking of that actress who became a nun. She was so beautiful, she had that glittering career, and she gave it all up to go into a convent."
Gabriel wasn't sure what actress she was talking about. "That's not your plan, is it? Is that how you imagine your life?" The thought of Leonie shutting herself away from the world felt viscerally wrong, though a part of him could hardly bear to think of her falling in love with other men. Like the one she had confessed to being in love with.
"God no! I'm not beautiful or anything. And as for the career, who knows? But I can't imagine reaching those heights, let alone giving it up if I did."
He wanted to touch her so badly he had to curl his fingers into his palms, pressing his nails into his skin to try and distract himself. "You are beautiful, Leonie."
He spoke with such sincerity, not saying it as a platitude or joke, that she felt unable to respond. She didn't agree with him, for she wasn't vain. Normally she would have laughed it off. "Thank you, but I don't think I'll be winning Miss Universe any time soon..." But the words stuck in her throat as she saw the expression in his eyes.
Abruptly he turned from her and sat up. "I have to go, I have duties in chapel." He saw the surprise and disappointment in her eyes at his sudden change of attitude and it was more than he could bear. "I'll see you in rehearsal?"
"I'll be there," Leonie said.
Gabriel didn't have duties in chapel, except to his God and his own soul. He had to get her out of his system. This was getting dangerous.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This one was a bit longer, the next update will probably be next Friday.
Hope everyone is still enjoying it!