I am so excited to welcome Anna Belfrage to the blog today. She is the author of "Serpents in the Garden" which is the fifth book in the Graham Saga (one of my new favorite series!).
First of all, may I extend a warm thank you
(and a virtual hug – I am a hugging person) to Denise for being generous enough
to host me today. It is people like you,
Denise, who make up the life-support system all authors need to thrive and go
on writing.
Anyway; today’s post is about love. I have
a thing about love – in all its forms and guises. Not that I believe myself to
be unique in this; most people I know have a thing about love.
Love
hurts, they say. I guess most of us would agree, having at some point or other
experienced just how much it can hurt. Like when gorgeous Scott in 9th
grade stared through you the Monday after the party, and yet he’d been anything
but distant when you danced to “Stairway to Heaven” – or when pretty Amanda
tossed her hair and told Marc it was over, she was with Steven now, and
besides, she’d only been with Marc because she wanted to make Steven jealous –
no one in their right mind really wanted to be with Marc! (Young people can be
very cruel)
To be discarded like a faulty toy is painful – and even more
so when there is an element of betrayal in it. In general, relationships where
one of the parties cheat are already over long before the cuckolded party
realises it. Once again, I imagine most of us have experienced just how
difficult it is to be the one who no longer loves when the other is still
burning for you – whether it be puppy love or the more mature version. How does
one let someone down gently?
Quick answer nr 1: You can’t.
Quick answer nr 2: But you have to try, because otherwise you’re compounding
the damage.
In Serpents in the Garden, one of my
protagonists, Ian Graham, discovers his wife is sleeping with Patrick, the
field hand. Humiliated and hurt, he is also beset by vivid images in which his
adulterous wife is laughing at him while enjoying her lover’s caresses.
He sent wood chips flying; he chopped and
chopped, venting anger and humiliation on the length of timber at his feet. He
choked on his rage, a hard knot working itself up and down his gullet. God, how
gullible she must have found him! He drove the axe head into the wood, and
worked until his shirt stuck to his back.
It helped to gouge his way through the log. With
each stroke, the red anger inside of him receded, the heat that threatened to
boil over cooled, until he was left with a controlled, icy rage that lay like a
lid across the angry whipping thing in his guts.
Ian and
Jenny live in 17th century Maryland. Adultery could potentially lead
to death (although it rarely did) and definitely to public humiliation. Not a
sufficient deterrent for Jenny - she burns for the other man. Does she still
love Ian? Yes, Jenny would have answered – at least initially. (This is before
Ian has found out)
When Ian
returned late, Jenny was waiting for him, newly bathed and in her best
embroidered shift; nothing else.
“Malcolm?” he asked when she wound her arms round
his neck.
“Asleep, and tomorrow is Sunday.”
“So it is,” he nodded, and the shift was already
on the floor. He carried her over to their bed and made love to her until the
candles guttered one by one.
In the dark, Jenny lay awake beside his sleeping
shape and held on very hard to his hand. She loved this man, the way his hazel
eyes shifted with his moods, the way his hands were warm and soft on her skin –
of course she loved him. So, why was it Patrick she saw while they were making
love? Why was it Patrick she wanted to hold her, take her?
She rolled over to face Ian and traced his
sleeping profile. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “Oh God, Ian, I am that
sorry.” And she knew that she wouldn’t put a stop to it – at least not yet.
Falling
out of love is a much more gradual process than the tumultuous experience of
falling in love. Bit by bit, love is downgraded to affection, to indifference,
and where once life without the other was impossible to even consider, one day
one wakes and thinks life without the other would be quite okay – quite nice
actually.
I don’t think Jenny in Serpents
in the Garden ever reaches the indifference level. Instead, she is swimming
in guilt, further burdened by the heavy-handed morality of the times. A woman
who strayed was per definition a fallen woman, a sinful creature risking
censure and ostracism. (A man who strayed was merely displaying normal male
behaviour – unapproved of, but forgivable) As Jenny discovers, the adulterous
woman in the 17th century had no rights – especially when it came to
her children. So why does Jenny risk everything? Anyone who has been in love
knows the answer; she can’t help herself.
Wounds to the heart can take a long time to heal, and in Serpents in the Garden several of my
characters suffer devastating blows, the kind that bring you to your knees
while you promise yourself that never, ever again will you gamble the well-fare
of your heart on another human being. Fortunately, the heart is a resilient
organ. Despite being badly bruised, at times even broken, it heals. The more
daring among us will therefore set our heart at risk over and over again –
hoping that one day we’ll find the love of our life. And many of us do. So yes;
love hurts. But it also carries us through the darkest of days, it gives us
wings to fly with, just when we need it the most. That, I believe, is one of
the central messages in all my books: love rules, people. Without it, we would
be but husks.
Anna
Belfrage is the author of The Graham Saga – so far five of the total eight
books have been published. Set in seventeenth century Scotland and
Virginia/Maryland, The Graham Saga tell the story of Matthew and Alex, two
people who should never have met – not when she was born three hundred years
after him.
Other
than on her website, www.annabelfrage.com, Anna can mostly be found on her blog, http://annabelfrage.wordpress.com – unless, of course, she is submerged in
writing her next novel.
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