Character Showcase - Jacobella

In my upcoming release, The Crollalanzas, Jacobella is the heroine’s mother. Born in Venice—'La Serenissma’— Jacobella has happily lived there all her life. In childhood, due to an outbreak of plague, she was briefly forced to leave the city, but since then she has sworn never to go away again. This is the place she knows and loves. It has been good to her.


Jacobella has led a colourful life, raising three daughters alone, tending to sick, injured and pregnant women of the district (often fighting their battles with debt collectors too), and chasing the ill-tempered, hypocritical parish priest away from her door with a sauce ladle. The finery in which she dresses herself and her daughters on market day, raises more than a few eyebrows and brazenly flouts the sumptuary laws, but Jacobella has defied the rules for so long that nobody seems capable of reining her in. Or perhaps she has a supporter in high places. After all, in the bloom of her youth, before she was required to clean her own kitchen table, and back when she kept her hands soft as lily petals, men sang that Jacobella held the light of Venice in her striking gaze— the same verdigris and gold radiance that twinkled off the canal at sunset.


Now beyond those years, the passage of life having broadened her waist and rumpled her edges, she remains, for her daughters, that very light itself and the center of all existence.

Her refusal to be commanded or controlled by anybody, has provided plenty of speculative gossip for her neighbors. According to local rumor-mongers, the pride, confidence and independence that she has likewise instilled in her daughters, will do those young girls no favours. It has given them a high and mightiness far above their place in life and will lead to their disappointment, unless they come back down to earth. They are strange girls already and Jacobella’s lack of discipline— her childlike enjoyment of games, and her dreamy, carefree attitude to motherhood— will only encourage mischief.

And who really was their father? He’s been gone from the scene since before the youngest was born. Jacobella claims he was an Englishman and a poet, whose name translated in Italian to Crollalanza— hence the name she gave to her three daughters. But the only proof she has now is a little book of bad poetry and a tattered map of London.


But so loyal, self-sufficient and thriving is their little famiglia, that her daughters cannot imagine where a man would fit within it.


Jacobella grows the ingredients for her medicines and salves in pots around her crumbling house, and on a balcony over the water. The sheer abundance of lemons on her little tree and the lush flora on her balcony astonishes everybody and causes some to accuse her of witchcraft, especially when they compare her plants to their own sad specimens.


When she is not causing a scandal with her neighbors, fighting the parish priest or insulting the local apothecary (who considers her a dangerous competitor), Jacobella enjoys figs, biscuits, wine and story-telling. She also likes to sing, one song in particular— but only a part, as if she never knew the entire song, or has forgotten it. Long after she is gone from their lives, this snippet of an unidentified tune will always remind her daughters of their happy childhood and of the mother who gave them everything.


If only they could figure out who “Eileen” is and why she is perennially summoned to no avail.



The Crollalanzas  -- Coming April 3rd!

(Image: Two Women at a Window by Bartolome Esteban Murillo 1617-1682)