The Florentine Quilt

32. Amelia

32

AMELIA

WALHALLA, 1902

LILALITE: Allows you to face past grief and move to the future

A n owl hoots in the Mountain Ash nearby. My head clears, and I wake, remembering where I am and what has happened. A shudder passes through me. My darling daughter is gone. First , dear Thomas was robbed of his life, perhaps a blessing given the severity of his injuries. To never return to the man he was would have meant a pitiful existence for him. But to lose my precious Alice as well. My heart is crushed and will never recover. Though damp with perspiration, I feel nothing; ice rather than blood may as well harden my veins. I am awoken to a nightmare I cannot escape. ’ Tis true. I am destined to a damned life here on Earth .

The dreams and visions that abound in my thoughts are surely sent to punish me; how dearly I have paid for the actions of my past. The chill of the evening burns through my quilt and leaves me cold. The grey mist of days blend into nights and remind me of London ; the foul city that in one breath gave me the most wondrous gift, and then took it away in the next. Closing my eyes does not stop the vivid recall, the ill-fated memories: the arduous birth, my baby’s first squawk. Mariah’s soulless eyes boring into me.

But first I write to explain the sequence of events. And though my mind is foggy, I will never forget the truth—or the way of it.

The night before Thomas left for Australia , after our lovemaking, we held each other close and whispered our dreams for a new life. There were early signs that I was with child, and I told him so. He grinned and held me tighter while we mused of a family together.

‘ We might name him after a king,’ I teased, planting a kiss on his cheek.

‘ That be too grand for us, my bird. Some simple folk we be, after all.’

‘ Perhaps not a king, then.’ I watched his face until the candle burnt low. I wanted to remember the way the shadows lit the love in his eyes and feel of the press of his kiss on my forehead.

‘ A fine woman thee be, Amelia . Some proper gift as wife. How blessed I be.’

Embarrassed by his flattery, I returned instead to my game of make-believe. ‘ I have it! We will call our little Treloar , Lancelot . A fine, strong knight’s name for a miner’s son.’

Laughing at his expression of distaste, I watched doubt pass over his face like a cloud. Realisation set in. If I were with child, he would not see it born.

‘ Do not be afeared.’ I smiled and kissed him, taking his hands in mine. ‘ If it is to be, I will not shame you with a name you cannot abide.’

‘ I trust you, my bird,’ he answered. ‘ I loathe we be parted. Mark my word, work hard I will to save pennies for thee passage, quick as you like.’

Thomas left Cornwall carrying our dream of opportunity across the seas. I was delighted to learn, shortly after, that indeed a child was forthcoming; and thus, a part of Thomas remained with me. I dreamt of his life in the colony, thousands of miles away, wishing he were settled so I could write to him of our glad tidings. Instead , I waited, knowing it may be some months, or years, until I heard word of him. My husband was no great correspondent.

I read and re-read the letter he sent when he first arrived in Hartley Vale and tried to picture his life. He said that the gold mines were finished in that region of New South Wales . Instead , he had secured work as a stonemason, in the trade of his father and grandfather before him. It was the last I heard from him.

By then, I was assailed of a raging fever, and pain suffered low in my stomach. Mother fed me broth and mopped my brow while I fell in and out of being. Nights passed with me so unwell that dreams of daylight blended into the vapour of morning, blurring the hours and days over and over into one. Mother cared for me and tended to my health, but our darling babe, little more than the size of an acorn, died inside my womb. Mother planted the seed of our love in a grave beneath an oak tree, beside a wall built of stone from many centuries past. The soul of our baby rests in peace beneath fine Cornish soil and watches over us across the sea.

Days turned into weeks and time moved on, yet I had the sense that life stood still.

‘ Do not concern yourself,’ Mother told me while nourishing me back to life with love and kindness. ‘ You and Thomas are young and strong. There will be other children.’

But how long would it be until I saw him again; until we were together? Much later I learnt that when the masonry work did not last, Thomas travelled south with fellow Cornishmen to the colony of Victoria .

I blamed myself for our baby’s death. I questioned what I had done wrong? What more I could have done to nurture its growth? I had failed Thomas as a wife; failed my child as a mother. Given how difficult it was for Thomas to travel into the unknown of a new world, how could I break his spirits so?

And so, I alone shouldered the burden, and never wrote to tell him.

I fell into a terrible dark place, my thoughts so melancholy and solemn that the summer days and bright prisms of sunlight were not enough to tempt me to lift my head from my bed and return to my garden. I hid away, begging Mother not to speak of my frailty. I retreated from the outside world.

And then one day I awoke to find the fog had lifted. I felt stronger. It was as if the sun shone brightly for the first time, and my heart was once again opened to possibility.

It was then, when I began to feel whole again, that a dark and handsome man walked into my life, and yet, through some unworldly spell or sorcery, it felt he had always been there beside me.

When I fell with child in the summer Jago came to love me, it was Mother who suggested the best course to take. Wanting to protect me from the shame of an illegitimate child, she argued with such vehemence that I wondered at her insistence. There were weeks when she could barely look me in the face, so distraught was she, bereft at my failure, at my fall from grace.

At first, I tried to hide my condition, but she knew me well. She sat me down and explained how it was to bring up a child alone. She spoke of what it meant to be shunned by the folk of your village, unable to walk the streets without spit in your path or a snigger behind a hand. Or to feel the heat of cruel words burn your back, and the wind whisper your name through the trees in shame. To be marked with a difference and stand apart from others is to be afeared and avoided.

‘ There are none who know of this, but she,’ Mother told me. ‘ You must offer the child to Mariah . There is no baby for her—if ever there was one. I doubt she will bear one of her own, for I have had cause to help her with women’s business in the past. Will be best for all. They will sail to the Americas and you will go on to Thomas when he sends for you. Once it is done, the matter will be put to rest. We must sometimes go against what we might choose for the sake of those we are bound to in this life. This is your path, Amelia .’

In the stillness of the night, with dreams of Thomas’s and Alice’s deaths held close, I endeavour to block out my missteps. But memories of those I have loved and lost rise to the surface like the flotsam and jetsam of smugglers’ plunder at Prussia Cove . I am haunted by the secrets I have kept from both men in my life. First Thomas and then Jago .

My heart beats faster when the faces of my children come to me, taunting me in their innocence. Mother may have brought Mariah to our door, but it was I who used her for my own end, and then suffered at her hand because of it. I agreed to give up my baby to Mariah , and thus because he thought her with child, ever honourable, Jago married her before he left Cornwall .

While I laboured through the birth in London , she waited in the next room, with trunks packed ready to join him in South America . The sound of fine silk scratching back and forth gnawed through my sentience while she marked her trail and paced the floorboards. Then almost faster than the child was birthed, he was swaddled by Mariah’s nurse, and whisked away; they removed him from my sight without permitting me a moment to gaze upon his face.

How she arranged the silence of the wet nurse I cannot imagine, though in truth, many a Londoner was bought for little coin in the depths of winter. I had barely mopped my brow and sipped from a cup before all three were gone with the door slammed behind them and no further care for me.

And so it was Mariah missed the birth of Alice , a half-hour later. I delivered her alone, wrapping her in my shawl of fine fleece; the same that I presented her in to Mother a few days later, when I brought her home with my head hung lower than a man meeting the hangman.

Mercifully , our home stood on the hillside at the edge of our village hamlet, far away from curious eyes. Far from mischief and trouble, or neighbours close enough to know the truth of our business. We became a reclusive pair, mostly keeping ourselves to ourselves in those last years. Mother insisted it was safest to live apart from those who would do you harm, or who knew your business too well.

On arrival in Walhalla , though not proud of another deception, I added a year to my daughter’s age to hide my first mistruth and paid a steep price for the betrayal.

To my shame, to this day Jago knows not the true parentage of either child.