The Painter’s Vow in Ashbourne Vale

Not with psalms or scripture, but with pigments mixed in sighs,
A palette forged from twilight and the ache of cloudless skies.
His name, a withered murmur, clings to cobblestones unswept,
For Ashbourne’s folk keep distance where the outcast soul has crept.

They call him *Ether’s Madman*—a jester to the real—
Who stains his hands with starlight and trades bread for ideal.
His studio, a carcass of some saintly, crumbled nave,
Holds canvases that shiver with the ghosts he could not save:

A mother’s face, half-painted, drowned beneath a storm of blue,
A spaniel’s loyal visage, bleached by sunbeams it outgrew.
But in the western alcove, veiled by tattered damask shrouds,
Lurks one unfinished portrait, born of whispers through the clouds—

*Her* eyes, two fractured embers; *her* brow, a moonlit slope;
The miller’s daughter, Clara, who had mastered how to hope.
Each dawn, she brought him lilacs plucked from shadows of the mill,
Their petals bruising softly as she climbed his splintered sill.

“Why paint the world as it *is*?” she asked, her voice a fledgling’s wing,
“When shadows kneel to beauty, and the dirt learns how to sing?”
He’d dip his brush in silence, tracing contours of her wrist,
As if to cage the pulse there, where her blood sang like a mist.

Their pact was spun in autumn, when the oaths taste lightly sweet:
“When this portrait finds its finish, we shall drink the wind as meat.
No vows penned by the clergy, no gold band’s hollow glare—
Our sanctuary, this pigments’ hymn, this pact of breath and air.”

But winter came with velvet boots and frost’s meticulous knife,
To carve the village tighter, bending alleys with its strife.
The miller found her kneeling where the artist’s shadows bled,
Her fingers stained with umber, and her future bound in thread.

“You’ll wed the blacksmith’s nephew,” spoke the father, voice of stone,
“For artists starve on stardust, and we bleed for bread alone.”
She clutched the lilac’s skeleton, its fragrance long since dead,
While in the chapel’s belly, a lone candle trembled red.

Three nights she slipped through darkness, past the gnarled and jealous yew,
To find his hands still trembling, his resolve worn thin as dew.
“Unravel me from father’s loom,” she pled, her cheeks undone,
“Or paint us into legend, where the meek outrace the sun!”

He stroked her hair with brushes still damp from failed designs,
And murmured of a phoenix plumed with dusk and tangled vines.
“Before the cocks crow judgment, I shall barter with the dawn—
The portrait *will* be perfect, and the chains of *should* withdrawn.”

Yet fate, that sly composer, tuned its scales with venom’s care:
The artist’s right hand faltered, seized by palsy of despair.
A quake no herb could gentle, no prayer’s breath adjourn,
Turned Clara’s gaze to fragments—one eye glass, one eye urn.

He hurled his oils westward, heard them shatter on the stream,
While Clara wove her tresses into ropes of silent scream.
Her wedding day approached, a crow with feathers dipped in tar,
As villagers stitched rumors of the painter’s fallen star.

At midnight’s brittle hour, when the stars don masks of gray,
She stormed his ruined cloister with the wrath of scorned dismay:
“You promised me a kingdom where the brush’s edge prevails!
Yet here I stand, half-finished—am I naught but destined *fail*?”

The wind gnawed through the rafters; moths performed their jittered waltz.
He grasped her fading contours, felt the future’s looming vault.
“The portrait *is* our epilogue,” he wept, “though none may see—
For some loves bloom too vibrant for the prison of to-be.”

She fled with scorn’s sharp cadence, left her lilacs to decay,
While he unearthed a vial of gold—his youth’s discarded ray.
A gilder’s final sacrament, consumed in one swift draft,
To mend his traitor fingers with the alchemist’s doomed craft.

Dawn found him fevered, painting with a radiance unearned,
As golden veins devoured the flesh that prudence spurned.
Each stroke became a requiem, each hue a scalding tear,
Until her face, resplendent, held the sun itself in fear.

But as the final flourish trembled toward her lips’ faint curve,
The poison reached his heartstrings, snapped the breath he did not deserve.
The villagers discovered, come to jeer or plead or stare,
Two bodies clasped in pigment: one of ash, one of air.

The portrait, now completed, glowed with life’s forbidden thread—
Her smile, a captured tempest; his hand, eternally spread
As if to touch the future that their present could not hold.
The canvas, though transcendent, crumbled swift as love foretold.

Now Ashbourne tells the caution in a hush of lowered brows,
Of how ambition’s wingspan clips the dove that dare avow
To love beyond the ledger, past the clock’s relentless chime—
A dirge hummed through the lilacs, which still bloom, but scentless, climb.