The Florentine Quilt

7. Amelia

7

AMELIA

CORNWALL, 1896

BERYL: Overcoming obstacles and distractions

’ T

is easy, looking back to see the fateful path I took.

Folk know little of me or my ways, and the gift of sight sets me apart. I chose not to tarry and gossip with the Janes and Marys of the village; those who shunned the ancient wisdoms and beliefs. I was marked and excluded for my differences. Yet the same maids sought me out soon enough: for a potion here, a tincture there, when need outweighed their fear.

She arrived at my door without warning, her hair loose and wild about her shoulders, and eyes all-knowing. Mother had encountered the young maid at the market, seeking cure for an affliction too intimate to share with the village doctor. It seemed word of my healing skills and tonics perfected to some success had spread aways beyond our hamlet.

Though close in age to me, she had me feeling like an old woman before my time. Mariah was lithesome and graceful, with hair that shone like midnight sky and smooth unblemished skin. Fortunate to be spared the work of a bal maiden, like many young maids of our kind, instead of hands roughened by calluses from spalling ore into pieces for picking, Mariah’s were smooth and lily-white. She wound balls of twine and cut lengths of fabric, or totalled columns in the ledger at her father’s store in the village. The hardest Mariah laboured in a day was to stack jars of jam or tidy fripperies on a shelf.

After that first meeting, she oft arrived unannounced on the pretext of a convivial visit. She asked about my healing potions and questioned the ingredients in my salves. Her interest in my affairs puzzled me, but vainglorious and ever grateful, I drank in her attention like honeyed cider and eagerly imparted my knowledge. I’m ashamed to admit that, at the time, I allowed false pride to fill my head with more than a little conceit. Mariah Allen sought my favour, my friendship, with flattery and smiles that swept into my days with the ease of an ocean breeze trailing a midsummer storm.

Alas , I admit, my affections were ripe for the picking. Yet like an ache in a thumb after a thorn is removed, she vexed me all the same.

One afternoon, she waited until Jago had untethered Jupiter and led him down the path before she knocked at my door. She made a show of huffing and puffing, and bent double from the supposed exertions of her lengthy walk from the village. A performance feigned to obscure all signs of her charade.

She set her cap for Jago from the moment she saw him. It was in the flare of her char-brown eyes and the single arched eyebrow lifted in question. When he rode away, she followed his trail with the hungry stare of a prowling fox. I should have read the pathway she intended then, when she tossed it over in her mind.

Of course, I was impulsive and lovestruck, and for shame, did not pay heed to the signs, nor the warnings, until I braved her wrath much later. When it was far too late for us all. What a fool I was, to ignore the touch of the other world taunting me and fall for the maid’s mistrustful—nay devious—ways.

Mariah questioned me in the giggly ways of a maid eager to know all manner of a man who gains her notice. I explained Jago’s injuries, and insisted he was nothing more than a regular customer purchasing a salve to ease his scars. What more could I say? Then she, the cat, while I played the mouse, was ever watchful as she puzzled and prodded to garner the true nature of our relationship.

Perhaps she saw our easy manner in each other’s company for certainly, it was difficult to hide. By that time we were well united in body and soul. Love surged between us with the force of Zeus’s lightning bolt striking from the heavens. I sincerely regret how our happiness blinded us, when our connection must have been plainly obvious. But never will I regret our love.

To my delight, Jago’s departure had been delayed while his employer raised capital. One day, he expressed his thoughts when we spoke of matters of the heart. ‘ Our dear Miss Allen was slighted by a childhood sweetheart and rejected out of hand. For shame.’ His eyes brimmed with concern. ‘ She is too kind a soul to have been treated so poorly and with such contempt.’

His face grew dark with contemplative sadness and indignation, and my heart grew tender, for I loved his sensitive nature. An unusual trait in a man, especially one who appeared to have the strength of a lion and carapace of a tortoise shell.

Shortly after, gossip arose that shone Mariah in quite a different light. Some said she had become far too hoity-toity and was fit for a fall.

Soon , word filtered through my customers of her attentiveness to a certain gentleman. Sightings of her chance meetings suggested his generous disposition served to encourage her further. It were commented how she oft made a habit of dropping her handkerchief in the street, and that he happened by on an occasion when her horse went lame. Once , she hobbled home with a broken heel on her shoe, only to be swept onto his horse and rescued for all the village to see.

But the bal maidens were not deceived by her fluttering eyelashes and honeyed smiles and laughed at her pretences.

‘ Set her sights on mine manager from wheal Tregonning , she has,’ one chatted with another while they waited for me to bottle their tonics, ‘strutting the High Street after him, like some show pony on market day.’

‘ Not for first Mariah aimed higher than her station,’ the other retorted. ‘ Remember Penrose from bank? That maid some too big for her boots.’

‘ He be proper ansum,’ another giggled. ‘ I see why he be to her liking.’

The heat rose in my face like a boiling pot on the hob while I furiously worked the mortar and pestle.

‘ Set for a fall, she be. Heard rumour he has a woman hid away in secret.’

Their words struck like a poison dagger thrust sharp into my chest. I saw then that Mariah knew too much and had read clearly the nature of our relationship.

The spread of cards had foretold of a woman—a friend, yet one who would cause me pain. How trusting I had been, not to see it was she. My innocence in the ways of maids was sorely tested in the manner of Mariah’s wooing. I had never before known the lightness of heart found in a friend.

And while true she provided me with help of a kind when the need arose, it was to her own end that she endured and cultivated the association. I was deeply saddened by her duplicity. Her betrayal. Yet who was I to complain of such undertakings after what I had done? Many would say I received my rightful comeuppance.

When I cast my thoughts back, every step Mariah took was one to get closer to him, to find a way to snare Jago on the end of her hook. And yet, by the time her net was cast, the inner machinations of her thoughts were clearly visible; and I was as much in need of her help, as she was in seeking mine.

Alas , it was the only way forwards for both of us.

Later she revealed how she had observed Jago and me that first day and followed our return from the shoreline when we made our way along the narrow pathway somewhat secreted from view of the road. Hidden by a hedgerow of blackberries, the scratch of their thorns did nothing to keep her nose from our business. Neither Jago nor I could help ourselves by that time, the yearning between us was so intense. The path was one we took regularly. With desperation for the little time we had left before his pending departure, all we wanted was to be together.

It was there in the cards. Sacrifice and loss. In bowing to her scheme, I gave up my claim on Jago , though I had no right to call him mine by law. She told me her plan when it was too late to deny, and I had no option but to seek her help. I was damned by then, whichever path I chose.

Shock turned to disbelief in that second month, when I found I was carrying Jago’s child. I expected to pay for my sins—for there are consequences for the wrongs that happened between us. Yet I was ripe with the glow of happiness shining within me, knowing the seed of our love would live on beyond us, proof that our relationship had existed at all. But the deceit of dear Thomas —the pain it would cause—made me ill to my stomach for all we had brought upon his good name.

It was Mother who made me see sense.

And so it was I turned away from Jago’s kisses though it was torture to do so. I kept my secret from him, shamed by the kind of woman I had become. When he wearied of my cruelty, when I turned prim and cold and he could not discern the reason for my conduct, the path to Mariah’s door was left ajar.

At first, Jago saw nothing in my manner to deter his affections. But in the moments following our lovemaking, when he spoke of love, I made a show of being teasy. Indifferent . He tried for a time to win me over with surprise visits, catching me at work in the fields or intercepting my path from the cliffs to my door. He was charming in his attempts to steal kisses, taunting me in a way he knew I liked, running his fine-tapered hands over my body in places he ought not.

But when I told him I no longer held him in high regard, when like a pellar, I tricked him into believing I had tired of him, he turned angrier than the sea’s tempest under the dawning of a red sky. I read the hurt in his eyes when I brushed him away like a hoverfly—when I chided him, reminding him I was a married woman and he could never have me, truly. I sought to drive the nettle in, to make him feel my pain.

I am no better than Mariah with her lies.

But trouble brewed. Folk spoke of the change in Jago’s countenance, and that he had turned surly and stubborn in his work. Then the veins dried up in the rock and before long the wheal was forced to let men go. They blamed him as mine manager—believing Jago had offended the spriggans. The miners insisted the ugly little devils that spat and hissed and cursed the gold had hidden the treasure from him. Next came the accidents—thankfully none too serious—but still a cause for concern. Jago was accused of being difficult; men who once held him in high regard grumbled they could not wait to see the back of him.

When people see what they cannot explain, they find a way to despise it, to make sense of it in their own way. And so, the villagers turned to the knockers, the spirits of the old miners, to improve their luck. Each offered up the end of his pasty and encouraged them to knock in places where the rich lodes were found.

It pains me to recall the ache in my heart when I read confusion in the handsome face of the man I loved. But he must never know. Jago Carrick is not a man to leave behind a part of him like a discarded stone from a leather boot. A man of his ilk would fight like the force of the wind across the cliffs for his child. I knew his character well enough when I lay with him, and yet I took fate into my hands.

On what came to be our last evening together, we walked towards the ridge to watch the sea mist settle on the horizon. I purposefully stood under the boughs of an elder tree. I had to make him understand our time together had come to an end. The elder holds the power of life and death within its branches, the seeds of birth and renewal inside the buds. Jago followed like a lamb. He did not understand my intentions, nor the influence of the moon that rose that evening, nor the spell cast upon him.

The pain in his eyes was hard to bear.

‘ You turned from me, as though you cared nothing for my love! My heart. You were lost to me. I regret I found solace in her comfort and kindness. But now… Good Lord , Amelia , what have I done?’

His face was ravaged with guilt. I knew then they had lain together; that it was done.

Early in our association, Mariah had come to me all innocent and eager to learn, and I had made her a love potion. At the time, she had the wild abandon of a woman juggling many flirtations. It never occurred to me to ask for whom it was intended.

When I learned it was Jago who had unwittingly taken the draught, the wind blew out of my sails. Mariah became more attractive to him, her persuasion of his affections assisted by methods of my own hand. I had in one small measure both foreseen Jago’s enchantment and enabled it. Trapped like a fly in a spider’s web. I had pushed him away.

Mariah was wily beyond my imaginings. When she taunted me with news of her feminine triumph, my thoughts raged like a storm. I’m ashamed to say I wished her ill.

Jago was distraught. ‘ You were cold to me,’ he continued, ‘even when with me in body, it appeared I had angered you. You were in some other place. I was at my wit’s end. I sought comfort in her friendship because she knew you best. She encouraged talk of you and to speak of you with one who knew you—one who knew our secret—was my only salvation.

‘ When she insisted you told her I was a mere dalliance, and you loved your husband beyond compare— it was then I forgot myself. She said you sent her to console me and had given your blessing. My thoughts were in turmoil: what happened made little sense. It was as though my mind was shrouded in sea fog. The next I recall, she arrived at my door to tell me she was with child.’

What a clever girl Mariah was, catching him at his lowest ebb to be all the woman to him I could no longer be.

I bit my tongue until it bled. Mariah Allen never was and never shall be a friend of mine.

‘ Dearest , can we not find a way? Sail with me to South America , and we will begin a new life together.’

‘ I can never be yours, Jago . We know it.’ The words scratched and strained and stuck in my throat. ‘ We must do what is right by everyone.’

My heart was filled with sadness and regret, but what could I do but let him go? I had seen my destiny turned in the cards, yet tried to elude it, like the lovesick charlatan I was.

‘ Mariah is with child. And I have wronged my husband. I will go to Thomas when he sends for me. I never promised you anything more.’

As I answered, a lacy white blossom dropped from the elder tree onto my face. The sweet creamy scent overpowered my senses. I brushed it away and watched it fall to the soil.

‘ That is true.’ He looked down at me, and a tear dropped to my cheek. ‘ Yet , no matter what you say you feel for me, I will love you, Amelia . In this lifetime and the next.’

I took a deep breath and crossed my fingers in my palms. ‘ For shame, Jago , for I do not love you.’ The lie twisted in my chest. ‘ Mariah spoke the truth. ’ Tis Thomas I have always loved.’

I could not bear to witness his pain. My heart broke open then, torn to shreds like the spoils of overripe fruit. For I pledge my heart to him in eternal love.

He was trapped by a woman who played the game of chance and won. Their hasty marriage was arranged, and Jago set sail for South America . I am not certain if the swift exile from the Cornish coast was at his insistence, or the fortuitous timing of his employer. Mariah followed later, once the baby was born.

And so it was that Jago Carrick , my heart, my soul, was lost to me forever.