The First Blast of the Trumpet by Marie Macpherson

When people look incredulous and ask, ‘What on earth possessed you to write about John Knox?’ I usually answer, ‘He did.’ For the founding father of the Scottish Reformation is not the most obvious choice for a hero, nor was he foremost in my mind when I started writing my novel. For me, growing up in Scotland Knox was a pulpit-thumping tyrant, a cartoon Calvinist who hated women and banned not only Christmas but playing football on Sundays. Besides, the tragic, romantic figure of Mary Queen of Scots had always held far more fascination for me than the dour Scottish reformer. But it was a series of coincidences that led to the ghost of Knox hijacking my original project.

I’d been doing some research into the Treaty of Haddington, signed in 1548 betrothing Mary to the dauphin of France, when I came across a surprising story. In the local archives I read an article about Elisabeth Hepburn, prioress of St Mary’s Abbey at the time of the treaty who had been forced into becoming a nun to protect the Hepburn family interests at this wealthy convent. Clearly she did not buckle down to a life of quiet contemplation for she was later accused of a certain misdemeanour. This made me eager to find out more about this feisty, free-spirited woman.

It just so happened that I had studied 16^th century Scottish literature at university and was blown away by the works of these early writers, especially the playwright David Lindsay who wrote a scathing attack on the Roman Catholic Church, A Satire of the Three Estates. In his play he denounces a prioress for her immoral behaviour and I wondered if by any chance Elisabeth had inspired this character who cursed her friends for ‘compelling her to be a nun and would not let her marry’?

At the time Lindsay had been exiled to Garleton Castle just a few miles away from Haddington and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that they had met. In fact, the novel, originally entitled The Abbess of Unreason, was going to focus on the intriguing relationship between these two characters.

I was then thrilled to find that Lindsay had urged Knox to preach his first sermon – to sound his first blast of the trumpet – against the Church of Rome at St Andrews shortly before he was arrested and sent to the galleys. Did Lindsay have more influence on Knox than many historians give him credit for? The radical ideas expressed in his play must have affected Knox. Perhaps he learned his preaching skills from the playwright and director, Lindsay. That, to me, suggested a close relationship and I was curious to know how and when it began.

Knox himself was notoriously tight-lipped about the first thirty years of his life. As far as he was concerned, he was born again when the Reformist preacher, George Wishart, pulled him from the ‘puddle of papistry’. What is known about his early life is that this poor orphan lad, born in Haddington in 1513 or 1514, was educated at the local grammar school and St Andrews University and that puzzled me. How could a man of base estate and condition’ have afforded an expensive education? Also unexplained was his relationship with the powerful Hepburn family, the earls of Bothwell. Unearthing these bare bones inspired me to flesh out a story with a dark secret at its centre.

It just so happens that in 2013 (or 2014 as some maintain) Knox will celebrate his 500^th birthday and perhaps Knox thought it merited some kind of fanfare. He was certainly instrumental in changing the title which I borrowed from his polemical pamphlet The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. But unlike his misogynistic rant against female monarchs, my First Blast, the first of a trilogy of novels, does not rail against women but is an attempt to unveil the man behind the myth.

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Inceptio by Alison Morton

The world of INCEPTIO glimmered into life several decades ago. My father, a numismatist, had introduced me to history, especially the Roman world. So much so, that it seemed perfectly normal to clamber over Roman aqueducts, walk on mosaic pavements, follow the German limes, pretend I was a Roman playactor in classic theatres all over Europe from Spain to then Yugoslavia, from Hadrian’s Wall to Pompeii.

We were in north-east Spain one holiday. I was eleven and fascinated by the mosaics in the Roman part of Ampurias (a huge Graeco-Roman site). There were so many of them.  I wanted to know who had made them, whose houses they were in, who had walked on them. 

After my father had told me about traders, senators, power and families, I tilted my head to one side and asked him, “What would it be like if Roman women were in charge, instead of the men?” Maybe it was the fierce sun boiling my brain, maybe early feminism surfacing or maybe it was just a precocious kid asking a smartarse question. But clever man and senior ‘Roman nut’, my father replied, “What do you think it would be like?”

Real life intervened (school, university, career, military, marriage, parenthood, business ownership, move to France), but the idea bubbled away in my mind and the INCEPTIO story slowly took shape.

Although I specialised in languages, I was never free of the tug of history. As well as reading academic books and watching series of documentaries, I grabbed every historical fiction book that came my way from Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth via Jean Plaidy and Phillipa Gregory to C J Sansom’s Heartstone.

My mind was morphing the setting of ancient Rome into a new type of Rome, a state that survived the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire into the 21^st century, but retained its Roman identity. And one where the social structure changed; women were going to be leading society. In my daydream haze, my heroine, Carina, was having all kinds of adventures, saving the world as well as herself. Of course, she’d be high-spirited, not stupid, but a bit rash and she’d make mistakes. Some of her conflicts would be personal and romantic - of course, there would be hero(es) -  some against the establishment of which she was a part. 

As I became an adult, I added in a lover for her, a blood–and-bone Roman; damaged, thus self-protective, even arrogant. And Carina would have been brought up elsewhere, just to introduce more conflict. A pleasant fantasy, she and Roma Nova were at this time firmly caged in my head while real life clunked along.

But one day, about three years ago, they flew out. What had opened the door?

Every Wednesday, I would go to the multiplex cinema with my husband on a 2-for-1 offer from our then mobile phone provider with a warm feeling that we were getting something back from the fortune they were making from our monthly contract.

 None of the films looked anything special, but we eventually chose one. Thirty minutes into the film, we agreed it was really, really bad. The cinematography was good, but the plot dire and narration jerky.

 ‘I could do better than that,’ I whispered in the darkened cinema.

 ‘So why don’t you?’ came my husband’s reply.

  Ninety days later, I’d written 96,000 words, the first draft of INCEPTIO.

Alison Morton
www.alison-morton.com

@alison_morton

www.facebook.com/AlisonMortonAuthor

Book trailer: http://youtu.be/NJXrIn7QkiM

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A Murder at Rosamund's Gate by Susanna Calkins

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?

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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The Owl of the Durotriges by Yassmin Sanders

I started writing The Owl of the Durotriges after completing a degree in Archaeology and Classical History at Canterbury in 2008.  I undertook the part-time degree for curiosity and interest rather than a career choice.  My specialist area was deposition in boundaries but the more I read about the late Iron Age, the more fascinated I became with the era in general.  Archaeology tells us about social history rather than the history of kings and queens and I was able to imagine how the people lived at that time.  At the end of the degree I realised that I would lose this knowledge unless I put it to good use and kept up the reasearch and so I began writing.

I was fascinated by the fact that there was a roaring trade between Hengistbury Head and Brittany well before the Romans arrived and I wanted to challenge the classically-biased  belief that we were a bunch of barbarians before Caeser or Claudius.  I set the main action in Hengistbury Head and as soon as I began to write, the characters seemed to announce themselves on the page.  Chela, our heroine, is a healer.  I once trained as an aromatherapist and had to learn all about the medicinal uses of plants and herbs - this seemed an opportunity to make use of this knowledge too.  I also included druids but I wanted them to be politically active rather than simply a benign priesthood.  The story changed and had very many edits and re-edits until I was happy with it.  My main aim, however, was to tell a good story rather than use the book as a platform to promote the Iron Age. I hope I have succeeded, but that, of course, is up to the reader to say.

You can see more on my website:  www.yassminsanders.com  

To the Fair Land by Lucienne Boyce

I sometimes wonder how I managed to combine all the elements of To The Fair Land – Grub Street, Captain Cook’s voyages, murder, fantasy, elopement, the search for the Great Southern Continent... It’s always hard to trace the beginning of something but I would say that the initial spark that eventually brought together these apparently disconnected themes came from Frances Burney, who is one of my literary heroines.

That initial glimmer was my fascination with the secrecy surrounding the publication of Frances Burney’s first novel, Evelina. The book was published anonymously to preserve the author’s modesty. Although there were many fine women novelists in the eighteenth century, attitudes towards them were often hostile and misogynistic. Women who wrote attracted criticism and notoriety which had more to do with their gender than their work, and no respectable woman would seek such attention.

It has also been suggested that the reason for Frances’s secrecy was that the Burneys wished to avoid attracting undue attention to themselves because of certain shocking family secrets. Two of Frances’s step-sisters eloped, and her brother Charles was sent down from Cambridge University for theft. Later, scandal surrounded her elder brother James and half-sister, Sarah, who was also a novelist. I’m not convinced by this argument: these dreadful family secrets were no barrier to her father continuing to write and publish his work – with the unpaid help of Frances as his secretary.

Be that as it may, it was the secrecy about the authorship of Evelina which intrigued me. I began to wonder what would happen if a book was published with more at stake than a reputation. I started to imagine the possibility of a publication that meant real danger to people connected with it. But what could be so important? Again, I found the clues in Frances Burney’s novels and diaries. Her brother James served in the Resolution on Captain Cook’s second voyage; Frances herself met the Tahitian Omai who was brought back to England by the explorers.

Then there was the lure of the Great Southern Continent. I’ve always been fascinated by mythical lands – the island of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Richard Brome’s The Antipodes, Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s Herland, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, William Morris’s Wondrous Isles, C S Lewis’s Narnia, El Dorado, Camelot...all the dystopias and utopias and lands of fabulous wealth that mankind has dreamed of for centuries. (Now we put them on other planets!)

Since the time of Pythagoras, people had believed in the existence of the Great Southern Continent – or Great South Land – which they thought lay in the southern hemisphere. Many navigators went in search of it: Marco Polo, Amerigo Vespucci and Magellan; Dampier and Wallis of England; Bougainville of France. In 1765 Admiral Byron thought he glimpsed this “continent of great extent never yet explored”.

What could be more exciting? The quest for new lands – perilous voyages – scandalous secrets – it was all there! At stake are lives, fortunes, even the fate of a nation…so Ben Dearlove, the hero of To The Fair Land, faces violence, murder and imprisonment because of his obsession with a book about a voyage to the Great Southern Continent. The heroine, Sarah Edgcumbe, is a homeless wanderer who has to conceal the truth about her past. She’s also named, by the way, after Sarah Burney and like her namesake is a writer.

The last great navigator to set sail in search of the Great Southern Continent was Captain James Cook. On both his first and second voyages he was instructed by the Admiralty to search for it, and it was he who demonstrated, once and for all, that it did not exist. But in 1772 his second voyage had only just begun and it was still possible to believe that the Continent existed. So it was at this point in history that I set the events at the heart of To The Fair Land.

To The Fair Land is available in paperback and also as an ebook for Kindle and non Kindle users.

Read an extract at http://www.lucienneboyce.com/fiction.html

The Wild Heart by Gina Rossi

Southern Africa encompasses a vast and beautiful series of interchanging landscapes, a wealth of culture and a million secrets. It is the cradle of civilization and a cultural melting pot. It's a darkly glamorous, wild, romantic world. 

I've always wanted to write an historical novel and have read, literally, hundreds. I adore the regency romances, the Edwardian historicals and the fabulous tales of royalty through the ages, but I wanted to do something different. I lived in South Africa for many years and understand (and have witnessed) some of the struggles of that continent. However, those valiant struggles aside, I wanted a feelgood story to come out of Africa. It's time for that. 

So, from the golden age of Dutch and French influence on the 18th Century Cape of Good Hope, comes the story of Georgina Blake, a refined young woman from Wiltshire who commits a social and moral blunder and finds herself cast adrift, alone, in the savage African landscape.

Gina Rossi was born in South Africa. She grew up in Johannesburg and lived in Cape Town before moving to England to live near Oxford, in the Cotswolds. 

Now settled in the sunny south of France, Gina is able to write full time. Her debut historical romance 'The Wild Heart' was listed for the 2012 Joan Hessayon award. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association (RNA) in the UK, and the Romance Writers Organization of South Africa (ROSA)

Follow Gina on twitter: @Ginagina7 

Pinterest http://pinterest.com/ginarossiwriter/# 

Coachman by Sue Millard

In 1994 a neighbour of ours asked me to transcribe a letter written by her great-grandfather William James Chaplin. A bookseller had bought it at auction and brought to show her. Neither of them could read his writing. I could… and that long, rambling letter with its air of ‘one-too-many-ports-after-dinner’ gave me the idea for the novel.

William Chaplin was a huge force in the London coaching business in the 1820s and 30s, yet the few stories about him that are recorded in books by his contemporaries all show him in an affectionate light. He was largely responsible for the abolition of heavy brutal driving whips in London’s coaching trade, and his vision was so clear that when the railways began to challenge his trade he was immediately stepped back, sold all his coaches and rebuilt his business on new lines. A thoroughly solid, sound, clever fellow.

When I realised how damn boring that story would be – Dallas with only the nice bits on display – I knew I had to invent someone humbler, so I could show what might have happened to the drivers, stablemen and horses when railways took the heart out of their daily life. Many of the drivers I mention in Coachman were real people in the Golden Age of Coaching, and some, such as Cross, wrote autobiographies during their twilight years for the benefit of Coaching Revivalists in later Victorian times. Their anecdotes were rich sources for this novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed the research that has been necessary, from the theatre productions of London to the beginnings of the railways and the changing business plans of the Royal Mail. The task was made much easier by the digitizing of old and expensive books by the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, while the British Postal Museum and Archive were helpful in providing photocopies of such material as the instructions and route for the last-ever Procession of Mail Coaches on 17^th May 1838. The icing on the cake was the drawing of the Procession by John Sturgess in my copy of The Coaching Age in 1885. It’s not a truly contemporary image but it captures the flavour of the scene beautifully and it made a perfect cover.

The setting among horses and coaches was easy to write about because I have been a carriage driver myself since 1985. Horses still work and misbehave in the same ways today as they did then, so speeds and difficulties were not hard to imagine. To get the full flavour of riding on a coach behind a four in hand I took part in a coaching run between Newcastle and Carlisle in 2011, with the Bowman family from Penrith. They are leading lights in the North West Driving Club and known internationally in competitive driving, and I have shamelessly stolen one or two of the comments that they have let slip over the years.

I have given George Davenport some rather forward-looking attitudes, such as his reluctance to be cruel to horses to get the work out of them that his timetable demanded. Such kindness was probably not typical of most men of his time, but I needed it to make him a warmer character, because his dedication to driving was obviously going to be a rich source of conflict with the women in his life. I gave him the name of my own great-grandfather, because he was a coachman in domestic service, though he didn’t work a commercial route, and he lived 50 years after Chaplin’s time. Although his wife, my great-grandmother, really was called Lucy Hennessy, she didn’t live in Carlisle and my relatives will no doubt be relieved to hear that I have completely invented her unpleasant mother and their unsavoury history.

As for the rest of the cast, I am grateful to Jennie Hill for permission to write the novel and for giving me a copy of Chaplin’s family tree. He had 16 children, of whom Sarah was the only one of his children who died unmarried (Rosa died aged 8 and Horace died in infancy). Nothing else is known about Sarah, so I could safely invent whatever reasons I liked to account for her spinster status. A former coachman remarked that Chaplin’s business was founded on “systematic application ... in which the female members of the family were called to assist,” so I decided to make her obsessed with business and power, determined not to lose them by marriage and yet tormented by physical desires that – due to the strict notions of propriety at that time – she had little hope of satisfying. The temptation to move the newly-married George to London, to hold Lucy back with illness and leave him within reach of such a woman as Sarah was quite irresistible.

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