Falling From Grace: Student-Teacher Forbidden Romance

Chapter 25

[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: