From the day that Rose was abducted by the village mad-woman, everybody in Harvey River watched carefully over her, and David and Margaret insisted that she should always be accompanied by one of her siblings at all times. Whenever this job fell to Cleodine, she would respond to the admiring cries directed at Rose by saying, “She is pretty, yes, but she is not as bright as me.” Unlike Cleodine, Rose did not grow to be a brilliant or even a very competent student. She was intelligent enough, but she seemed to always prefer the company of younger children, and in classes at the village school, she was prone to long spells of daydreaming, looking out at the sky and the Dolphin Head Mountains with that sweet half-smile. And yet the teachers would never take a strap to her as they did to all the other children when she did not remember her twelve times table, or when she did not know how to spell words like supercilious and peradventure. It was as if it was understood that Rose functioned mainly as an icon, bringing joy, goodness, and light to her surroundings.

The true love of her life was a young man named John Clare, the son of a poor sugar estate worker, who had gone to school with her in the village. Intelligent and ambitious, he wanted to study to be a teacher; but his painful shyness always reduced him to silence in the presence of Rose’s luminous beauty. He never could get up the courage to confess his love to her. How could someone so radiant love a quiet, knock-softly kind of man like him? She, for her part, kept wondering how come he never flirted with her or sent her mash notes, or invited her to go in a group to dances in Lucea and Montego Bay like the other young men. Could he not see that she saved her best smiles and warmest greetings for him? She did not care if he was poor, she would have worked with him to make a life, she would have borne him beautiful children. But all he ever did was stare at her and tremble, nervously brushing his hair back from his forehead, so she concluded that he did not care.

On the day she left the village for Montreal, to join her sister Miss Jo, he just stood in the square with hot tears running down his face, one hand pressing on his windpipe, as if he were trying to force out the necessary words to make her stay. He stood like this, watching her leave his life forever, all because he did not have the words. He did not know it, but he was the namesake and descendant of a great poet, John Clare, who had enjoyed some success in England in the eighteenth century, and then, because of his struggles with ill health and poverty, spent the latter years of his life in terrible misery. He wrote a poem called “Secret Love,” and if only Aunt Rose’s silent suitor had known it, he could have asked his poet forefather to speak to her for him.

I dare not gaze upon her face

But left her memory in each place:

Where’er I saw a wild flower lie

I kissed and bade my love goodbye.

When she had gone to apply for her passport, the officer processing Rose’s papers had fallen in love with her, and tried all kinds of delaying tactics to discourage her from travelling to Montreal. He mislaid her application. He found fault with the way in which the forms were filled out, so that she missed the boat which sailed from Kingston to Montreal only every few months. It brought Canadian codfish, sardines, and wheat flour, and loaded up in Kingston with sugar, bananas, and rum. As there were not many people travelling to Canada from the West Indies at that time, berths were limited to a few on every cargo ship and Miss Jo, knowing of this, had gone to great trouble to secure her sister a place. Eventually the man did process Rose’s passport, but only after her father accompanied her to the passport office and threatened to report the man to his superior officer, making him realize that Rose was not just a beautiful, inexperienced young girl from the country who had nobody to look out for her. And so Rose took the next ship from Kingston to join her sister Albertha in Montreal, and there she found work babysitting for a French-Canadian boy named Billy Lefèvre, whose alcoholic parents would often abandon him for weeks at a time. Invariably they would not have the money to pay for her services, so she would end up feeding and caring for the boy, who called her “Tanti.” She would take him home to stay with her until his drunken parents resurfaced, and would often have to take him along with her on the other babysitting jobs she took in order to get money to feed them both. Eventually, after several such jobs turned out badly for her, she had to leave the Lefèvre boy behind with his unfortunate parents, and she found a job working in the household of a Mr. and Mrs. Lord. Mr. Lord was a newspaper magnate and Mrs. Lord was a patron of the arts. The entire family fell in love with Rose and they all became fiercely protective of her because every time she stepped outside their mansion, someone tried to take advantage of her luminous beauty.

Wherever she went in Montreal, men were drawn to her–always the wrong men. On the bus some bank clerk or a graduate student attending McGill University would sit beside her and get off at the wrong stop just to follow her home, calling out after her, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, I will die if I do not see you again.” Her doctor fell in love with her, and kept arranging for her to come and be examined for sundry suspected illnesses. As a result of this unfortunate experience, she lost faith in the medical profession and pursued alternative forms of healing. She ate healthy foods and exercised every day and grew more and more beautiful and attracted more and more unsuitable men. Men who would forget to mention their wife of twenty years and their five children. Men who would threaten to commit suicide if she did not return their love, and who would then disappear after a few months, sending her notes that read: “My Beautiful Rose. You are too good for me, you deserve someone much better.”

Perhaps the father of the son born to Rose when she was in her early forties wrote such a letter to her before he disappeared from her life. Nobody ever knew who he was, for Rose carried the secret of his identity with her to the grave. But in 1951, Rose gave birth to a beautiful, healthy boy child, whom she christened David after his grandfather. When everyone saw a photograph of the boy, they all said he looked like an angel that had been sent to make Rose happy. Here was one man who would surely love her and stay with her as long as she lived.