Clover Wetherly
Clover Wetherly
a country mouse
Characteristics/Themes: The Fool: She knows little of the world beyond the hedgerows of the farm she abandoned. Her world is painted in the simple and crude pictures painted on diviner’s cards, motley and gaudy and colourful. But watch: she’s resilient as a daisy, and not easily crushed underfoot. Yellow Jackets, Black Hearts: ‘Brand a man a thief, and he’ll never find himself a day’s worth of honest labour again.’ No hardened criminal, she, yet the farmgirl nurses in her breast a suspicion towards all those who bear arms in service of the law, from the time she saw her father dragged away and clapped in the stocks for poaching. Rural: She’s not unlike droves of other young women who come from the country to the city to seek their fortunes. She, too, has heard of the whoremongers that prey on such girls and their dreams, of the confidence men and tricksters and scoundrels. And as wholesome as the image she projects is, she’s innocent but not entirely naïve. Extrovert: The girl talks a little too much. She inserts herself into conversations, rambles from one topic to another, laughs to fend off awkward pauses. Soft of Heart: She’s careless with her kindness, and will lend her heart – and her tender regard – to any who want for gentleness and affection.
Now she no longer lives her life by the turn of the seasons and the limitless cycle of ripening and decay, but by the pulse and thrum of their footsteps, the jingling cadence of his chocobo’s tack. The seasons that define her life are reduced to two: the one that makes the road dry and raises dust to cling to them and their clothes and their hair, and one which turns the causeways into mires and bogs their boots in mud. The firelight catches the edge of something silvery, the mirror’s wooden handle jutting out from the bundle of her things under the sprawl of her bedroll. She pries it out, resting the flat of it against her knee, blinking slowly at the pale and round-faced girl blinking back at her. She tugs at the fichu around her throat, and pinches her cheeks. Her mouth hangs low and sulky. The mirror was Ja’rhem’s gift.
In the ripe fields of La Noscea, even poverty is blessed, the priests say. They know it better than the lowfolk of the country to whom the rolling golden fields are no pastoral paradise, but instead a fickle mistress that feeds them well one year, and starves them the next when the potatoes rot in the loam before they grow thumb-sized. The tithes are paid in sacks of grain, or if that fails, good livestock; the collectors care not if their bellies growl and their children watch on, hungry-eyed, as their milking cow is tethered to the official’s cart, and on Bessie treads down the dirt track, her dappled rump vanishing past the hilly horizon. They know there’ll be no milk now. For supper, it’s a feast of turnips. The turnips never fail. A child is born and they name her Clover, and like the weed that grows happily upon the field against calamity and drought, even if the rich grass dies out, she’s bright and green and indefatigable. At eleven she’s sent off to a neighbouring farm, to the small relief of her younger siblings whose share in turnips duly increase. The girl is satisfied with her lot: a little straw cot, breakfast at sunup, dinner at noon, and sometimes even a supper of soft goat’s cheese and dark bread. Her broad peasant’s face is freckled by sun and smiling as she milks cows, listens to the tales and stories shared by the labourers around the fire at dusk, bunks down happily every night in her straw cot and pulls a blanket over her and falls asleep. She dreams of places across the sea. Soon the wide pastures grow too narrow for her, as she sups nightly on storyteller’s tales, and now that the hunger in her belly is sated daily, and she wants not for bread or ale, it’s the hunger in her heart that pangs her. Her world is enclosed by the row of beeches in the north, the row of windmills in the west and the tangled hedgerows in the south. Hankering for something unknown, she stands upon the cliffs and looks east, watches through the haze a far-off sloop cutting a path through the shiny sea. The foreman barks at her; the barleycorn won’t sow itself. At seventeen, with her snub nose, her wide-set eyes and mousy hair, she’s no girl of delicate charm, but hale and robust, her young limbs shaped with vigour, and her farm-maid’s hands are rough and red at the knuckles. Her eyes are bright and brown and attentive. And she never tires.
Summer comes and she meets a man from beyond the sea. Like a figment of prophecy. His smile is beautiful and he speaks to her in poetry and in the end of her seventeenth year she boards a vessel heading east.
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