Her Last Letter
Last week the National Library of Scotland offered a week-long opportunity for visitors to see the last letter of Mary Queen of Scots, written only a few hours before she was executed at Fotheringay Castle. For preservation reasons, the letter is put on display only rarely.
The letter is directed to her brother-in-law Henri III, the king of France, and dated 8 February, 1587. It closes with the phrase, “Wednesday, at two in the morning.” When you look at the images you can see blurry splotches, particularly on the first page. Was Mary crying? Or are the blotches the product of the many hands through which the letter passed after her death?
The letter itself is remarkably cool and rational, the writing steady, the lines even. What was Mary thinking as she wrote it, in the middle of the night, knowing she would be taken to a scaffold and publicly beheaded when the morning arrived?
Readers and writers of historical fiction don’t always agree about how much of our art should be history and how much should be fiction. This, to me, is a good example. The letter remains; we know Mary wrote it. We have her words. We know something of what she did before and after she wrote it. But what was she truly thinking and feeling? Ah, now that is where the storytelling comes in…
‘S wonderful! ‘S marvelous!
As the Gershwin brothers would say.
Anyone interested in history to the slightest degree must check out this site. Want reviews of wonderful new historical novels? Want to know what the Romans used for toilet paper? (You will be surprised.) Want to read about nose jobs in the Renaissance? (I have to work this into a book somehow.)
Wonders and Marvels is more than just a blog. It’s a “community for curious minds who love history, its odd stories, and good reads.” My kind of place.
The Time Traveler’s Life
I’ve changed the title of my site a bit. Here’s why.
Reading and writing historical fiction is the closest we can ever come to traveling in time. From my earliest days as a reader I loved stories set in “the olden days”—I loved Little Women and Black Beauty, Gone with the Wind and Forever Amber and the Angélique books, ancient Frank Yerby and Thomas B. Costain novels lurking in dusty library bookshelves like pirate treasure, my beloved Crawford of Lymond novels by the peerless Dorothy Dunnett. To this day I gobble up historical fiction with relish. Right now I am reading the mother of all historical novels (no pun intended), Eve by Elissa Elliott. It’s a beautiful and somewhat controversial book and a fascinating piece of time travel.
My life as a writer is a time traveler’s life. When I slip inside my characters and look out through their eyes, I’m away—in a Ferrarese castello, in a garden by the sea in sixteenth-century Scotland. I return almost reluctantly to the twenty-first century. I say “almost” because, for all the delights of the sixteenth century there are still modern necessities like clean hot running water, gleaming conveniences, air conditioning, and—of course—Ghirardelli chocolate.
Falling in Love
Starting a new book is kind of like meeting an interesting new person. You make small talk. You find out about each other. Maybe you go out for coffee, then to a movie, then to dinner at a special restaurant. You like that person more and more. Then all of a sudden you turn around and KAPOW! You’re in love.
I’m in love with The Silver Casket. It has everything—a wonderful heroine, a compelling cast of good and evil and funny and sad and mysterious and bright and dark characters, fabulous and bleak and beautiful historical settings in sixteenth-century Scotland, heaps of opulent intrigue, murder and courage, and a romance that both breaks my heart and fills me with passionate delight. How will I ever get it all out of my head and onto paper?
One word at a time. One word at a time.
Viewpoint Adventures
I wrote The Second Duchess in first person—actually, in dual first-person viewpoints. I deliberately chose to write Barbara in the first person because the book started out as a historical mystery, and in mysteries the first-person sleuth is more common than not. The book, of course, went on to become as much romance and “opulent intrigue” (a phrase used to describe Duchess by one of my crit group members, which I love) and character study as it was mystery, but Barbara’s first-person voice remained. Lucrezia, the second viewpoint character, sprang to the page in first person and never looked back.
That said—I am writing The Silver Casket in third person. It’s a bigger, longer, slightly grittier, more complex story and it needs a wider view. Even so, it’s hard to feel my way out of the close, heart-and-mind intimacy of first person and into the slightly more detached third person. Even a very tight, very subjective third person still means I’m looking over my character’s shoulder and not inside her skin. It’s disconcerting. I’ve found her—my lovely farouche floromancer Rinette—and I want to be one with her.
I suspect I will write the first few chapters both ways, and perhaps some strange combination of the two, until I find the right path.
Farouche
The introduction of this Nina Ricci perfume was my introduction to the word farouche. It is from the French, and means in general wild and shy and somewhat awkward, with an element of the outdoors. Its etymology dates to Old French forasche, from Late Latin forasticus, living outside, from Latin foras outdoors.
It is the one perfect word to describe my new heroine, Marina Leslie, called Rinette by her French mother. She has grown up mostly abandoned by her courtier parents, running wild in a crumbling Scottish castle with gardens by the sea, and she is farouche down to her bones—shy, willful, deeply connected to her beloved flowers, to wild animals, to the sea, and desperately ill-at-ease in formal or social situations. How does she end up at the deathbed of Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland, the single person that gallant and beleaguered queen trusts with an enigmatic and priceless secret? And what happens next?
Farouche the perfume incorporates top notes of mandarin orange, galbanum, peach and bergamot; middle notes are honeysuckle, carnation, iris, lily, clary sage, jasmine, lily-of-the-valley, rose, geranium and cardamom; base notes are sandalwood, amber, musk, oakmoss and vetiver. I think I will have Rinette concoct her own perfume with some of these elements. Just the list sets me dreaming. It’s unfortunate Farouche has gone out of fashion and is no longer readily available. It is definitely the official perfume of my new book.
The photograph of the gorgeous Farouche bottle by Lalique is from print ads around the time of the perfume’s debut, and was taken by Leora Long.
FLAT RINETTE
The Flower Reader
Read the First Chapter of The Flower Reader
The Second Duchess
Read the First Chapter of The Second Duchess
The Second Duchess is available on iBookstore!
