The crime at the heart of A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate came to me
when I was a graduate student in history.
I'd been pouring through ballads and broadsides—the penny press that
served as both a source of exaggerated news and a cheap entertainment in seventeenth-century
England—and I was struck by the same story that appeared again and again.
These “true accounts” would
speak of a woman who’d been found stabbed in a secluded glen or a deserted
field. In her pocket, the investigating authorities often found a letter,
purportedly from the killer. In this letter, he would usually tell his victim
to meet him at ‘such-and-such deserted location.’ Then he would sign the letter, with either
his given name or his initials.
The
case seemed open and shut.
Yet, every time I read one of
these accounts, I had to wonder: Why
didn’t the killer search his victim for incriminating evidence before he fled
the scene? Didn’t it ever occur to him that she might bring the letter—you know,
the one with his initials—with her to their rendezvous? I also would wonder:
Why did the victims agree to meet these killers? Or perhaps, most simply of
all, was some other chap being framed for the crime?
No matter what, the story was
not just sad, but incomplete.
In some ways, A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate became the answer to the questions that never got asked--Who was this woman? Why had she agreed to meet her killer? Did she know him, or had she been tricked?
In some ways, A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate became the answer to the questions that never got asked--Who was this woman? Why had she agreed to meet her killer? Did she know him, or had she been tricked?
And perhaps most important of
all—Would she get the justice she deserved?
I decided to focus my story
around Lucy Campion, a
seventeenth-century English chambermaid serving in the household of the local
magistrate. Lucy’s life is an endless
repetition of polishing pewter, emptying chamber pots, and dealing with other
household chores until a fellow servant is ruthlessly killed, and someone she
loves is wrongly arrested for the crime. In a time where the accused are
presumed guilty until proven innocent, lawyers aren’t permitted to defend their
clients, and—if the plague doesn't kill them first—public executions draw a
large crowd of spectators, Lucy knows she may never see her brother alive
again. Unless, that is, she can identify the true murderer…before that murderer
turns on her.
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