Author Maths, by Y S Lee

The US/Canadian cover (Candlewick Press)

One of the things I find consistently surprising in historical fiction is how very long it takes to get from one place to another. My Mary Quinn Mysteries (called the Agency series, in North America) are set in London between 1858 and 1860. They’re too urban to make use of the railways that criss-crossed the country and a shade too early for the first intra-city underground trains (the Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863). Most of the travel in my novels takes place either on foot or by horse-power: carriages, cabs, and of course, simply riding on horseback. By 1858, there were also horse-drawn omnibuses that, like our present-day buses, plied regular routes through the city. 

The UK/Australian cover (Walker Books)

The climax of Rivals in the City features a fair amount of running around between locations in central London. One of the first things I did when plotting it was create a chart showing the different sites, the distances between them, and how long it would take to move from one point to another. In order not to spoil the plot (Rivals will be published next week in the U. S. and Canada; it’s already available in the UK), I’ve renamed the locations after four of my favourite North American cities. This, of course, is a fiction upon a fiction; the real locations are London landmarks. Otherwise, here’s what my chart looks like:



Timing the final action

Locations	Distance in miles	Walking (in mins)	Running (in mins)	Horseback (in mins)
Vancouver to Toronto	2.7	54	27	22
Toronto to New York	3.2	64	32	25
New York to Montreal	1.9	41	19	16
Montreal to Vancouver	1.9	40	19	16
New York to Vancouver	1	20	10	8

I assumed an average running speed of about 6 miles/10 km per hour - a pretty fast clip for a woman burdened with heavy clothes on slick, inconsistently paved, and poorly lit urban streets (it’s after dark). But I’m talking about the women of the Agency, an elite detective firm. Not only are they are in excellent physical form, they are responding to an emergency.

I assumed a horse trot of 7-8 mph, since poor road quality and night-time visibility again make it impossible to canter. With horseback, I also needed to allow tie-up time and the need to rest or change horses. Riding turned out to be not much faster than running, but riding made it possible for a character to arrive at an important location looking respectable.

As it worked out, the time elapsed for a series of important messages to be relayed was:

- 57 minutes: for a character to run from Vancouver to Toronto and back again

- 41 minutes, plus delays while tying-up a horse: for a character to ride from Toronto to New York, and then from New York to Montreal

- 30 to 35 minutes, plus time for marshalling and instructions: for a large group to walk quickly from Montreal to Vancouver

This left me with a space of 2 ¼ hours, the minimum period during which my heroine, Mary Quinn, would be alone in “Vancouver” after sounding the alarm. It turned out to be the perfect window of time to allow her to take action, imperil herself, yet receive help at just the right moment.

I love this kind of concrete plotting, and wonder if any of you do the same. How do you work out timelines, near-misses, and rescues?
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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press), a quartet of novels featuring a girl detective in Victorian London. Rivals in the City, the last in the series, is published in the US and Canada on March 10.

Killing your darlings (then resurrecting one) by Imogen Robertson

Marie Bashkirtseff - In the Studio

The Paris Winter is out in paperback this week, so while I’m copy-editing my next book, part of me is also wandering the boulevards, peering in at the shop-windows and watching the young women climbing the stairs to their studio to continue their training as artists. It is one of the great pleasures of writing for a living that you get to swoop mentally across a city, checking the waters rising, being a ghost at Maxim's or Bal Taberin or examining diamonds in the jeweller’s shops on rue Royale. You start watching your characters and as they and the plot develop you start noticing something like a novel taking shape. It can be very exciting. There are also moments though, when rather than wafting around the world you’ve created, you find yourself slamming into a brick wall.

Writing a novel involves any number of highs and lows, and normally at least twice in the process I feel like throwing the laptop out of the window and finding something more sensible to do for a living. Then I remember I’m not trained for anything else, and being self-employed for this long has turned me too feral for office work so I have to sit back down and get on with it. There were some real highs writing Paris Winter, there were some brick wall moments too.

The helpful cat

When I first delivered the manuscript to Headline, and to my editor there, Flora Rees, it had a modern narrative running through it. There were bits of it I was very pleased with, but after getting my notes back from my Flora (and getting married - though I’m not sure that had anything to so with it), and re-reading the manuscript I had to admit that it just wasn’t working. I was on my extended honeymoon in Portugal at the time and I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach as I skyped Flora, my mother-in-law’s cat curled up next to the keyboard, to say I thought it all needed to come out. Flora had, I think, come to the same conclusion some time ago and was gently hinting me in that direction, so I suspect she wasn’t surprised. I also remember she seemed a lot less worried than I was about throwing away a third of the book. The next few days involved a real slaughter of the darlings, as scenes and characters melted away and left no trace behind them in the manuscript. Once that painful decision was made though, the novel blossomed. Suddenly there was room for the story to breathe and I’m afraid I began to forget all about my modern characters and their stories. Playing with the cat helped. Also having an understanding husband and a shop down the road that sold a decent white wine for one euro a bottle turned out to be very important. 

The understanding husband

I entirely rewrote the book in a month and it was incredibly satisfying. In the general slaughter though, I also killed one of Flora’s darlings. It was a scene towards the end of the novel, a key one, and I entirely rewrote it so it was seen from a different character’s perspective, and took place in a different part of the city. Flora, while of course understanding my reasoning, was sorry to see it go. Which brings me back to the paperback. As well as having a lovely quote on it from Manda Scott and a banner announcing it was short-listed for the CWA Historical Dagger, it also has a bonus track. We have put in that missing scene as an extra at the end of the novel. Has anyone else every done anything like that? And if you had the chance to resurrect a lost scene like this, adding to the end of the novel as an sort of ‘alternative reality’ for your readers, would you? And as readers, would you be interested is discovering bits of what might have been? 

The Paris Winter (with bonus track) is available from Thursday.

Packing Shed Island - a Landscape with Oysters, by Penny Dolan

Writers tend to steal landscapes, laying places down in the mind until they are ready for revisiting in fiction.  I’m huddled over another idea right now, but the landscapes keep arriving, ready for whenever they might be needed for some fiiction in the future. 

There’s time, and there’s place. 

The afternoon was the last of a golden August, and we were at a good friend’s birthday celebration. There was a lot of waiting around, so I started to think – as one does – about the passing of time, not only birthday musings but also about the place under my feet: an island off the Essex coast, known as Mersea.

Earlier that week, looking for somewhere to stay near Mersea, I’d studied maps of the Essex coast, a ragged region of land and water.  The oozy rivers and the flat, marshy tongues of mud stretch far out into the sea. Small harbours and villages that look close neighbours by boat can be hours away by road, especially in the past.   

Any map of the coast itself, with its many inlets, mudbanks and tides, suggests how easily people and goods could travel in or out of the area, as long as you had a trustworthy or well-paid local guide or pilot.   

With no disrespect, the wildness of the coast suggests a place for unseen arrivals and departures, for plots and plans. There are no cliff-top coastguard paths looking down on the waterways here. 

West Mersea, the island’s harbour, was a mix of well-worn boats, a few hulks and gleaming craft whose masts rattled in the brisk breeze. Our friends live in the old harbour, in the handful of original cottages set beyond the sea wall. 

As we were ferried towards the party, the outlines of the newer Mersea showed in the clustered architecture of the thirties, forties and fifties. The community that had lived from the sea made a living from now-mobile holidaymakers and caravanners.

We arrived, on a low tide, at Packing Shed Island, the raised, dry mud bank in the middle of the tidal waterway.  There you stepped into water and mud and history. Under your shoes were crunched shells of all sorts, left over from past oyster boat hauls. 

Ahead, raised on its legs, was the wooden Packing Shed, crowning the ridge.  When the original shed was built, in 1890, oysters were a flourishing trade and sixty men and boys worked on the island.

Over on the far side were the remains of the square oyster “tanks”, where the oystermen rested their catches. Some lay partially filled with water, some looked ready to disappear under an unusually high tide. 

The oysters were left in their shells in the tanks, so the tides could wash in and out, believing the seawater cleansed the shellfish of all impurities. Now, a local explained, all oysters are “washed” by UV light to kill all the bacteria.  I still didn’t feel hungry. 

I admit to shivering slightly as I write this, because only last night I read about Execution Dock where the bodies of seafaring malefactors were left until three tides had washed over them. 

The Mersea men packed the oysters in barrels for shipping by Thames barge to Billingsgate and Europe. It was a hard life: fierce storms often swept in Mersea to damage the shed, the boats and the people. A portion of the Tollesbury and Mersea Native Oyster Fishing Company’s profits was set aside for widows and orphans.

The Packing Shed, however, hasn’t been used for oysters for years.  The trade disappeared, taken away by rail, road and refrigeration. The Shed was left alone until, after the big storm of1990, local people realised that part of their history was danger of disappearing completely into the sea. A Trust was formed, funds were raised and local lads on community service were drafted in as the hard labour.  

Would current health, safety and claims rules scupper such a hands-on scheme now. Would there be a tick-box for risk of death by drowning? Would this make good story . . .?

Quick, back to party time. By now, a single-seater plane was flying in joyful acrobatics across the blue sky. I can’t have been the only one to whom, even among the admiration and happiness, those billowing smoke-trails brought thoughts of all the planes and pilots who’d dropped into the water off the Essex coast, unable to reach their bases?

  
Just how many centuries of history were there in that one small place and moment?

Across the water, just visible on the mainland, lay St Peters Chapel on the Wall, a tiny church founded in 653 AD by the Celtic missionary St Cedd,  sent all the way from Lindisfarne. 

The "Wall" that the chapel was built against was the remains of a Roman fort.

Once upon a time, I was told, St Peter's Chapel at Bradwell had been two miles inland. Now a breakwater of vast concrete blocks lay off-shore, protecting the holy place for a while longer.  

 I’d like to visit that little chapel sometime soon.

Meanwhile, not far from the chapel’s stone tower was a far larger building of grey brutalist concrete: Bradwell Nuclear Power Station, built in 1962 and decommissioned in 2006, It sits there, as most such power stations do, on the sea’s ever shifting edge. 

 Dystopia, anyone?

Hoping, once again, that energy planners and politicians did think about the long tides of history, I turned back, rather thankfully, to the party.

Penny Dolan

The Memory Castle

by Teresa Flavin

I am currently spending many hours a day in an imaginary sixteenth-century castle, Blackhope Tower, sending my young characters up its turnpike staircase to an eerie and magical room that houses an infamous painting, a tiled floor labyrinth and a ceiling decorated with mermaids and sea monsters. Blackhope Tower is a sort of memory castle, a construct inspired by features of places I've seen in my travels around Scotland, most notably the Borders and Aberdeenshire. But memories can fade and get a bit vague around the edges. When that happens, nothing beats a visit to the source of one's inspirations.

Crathes Castle

This is why I was so delighted to do events recently for the Aboyne and Deeside Festival at atmospheric Crathes Castle, one of the Aberdeenshire tower houses that inspired features of Blackhope Tower. On this visit the National Trust for Scotland kindly permitted me to take some photos to share here, for which I am very grateful. 

Crathes Castle gardens

Crathes Castle has, in addition to its beautiful gardens and grounds (including the rather special topiary features), some of the finest Scottish Renaissance painted ceilings in the Stair Chamber, the Nine Nobles Room, the Green Lady's Room and the Muses Room. They were painted in the late 16th century but were hidden by lathe and plaster ceilings until 1877 (the Stair Chamber was not uncovered until 1960). The decorations on the boards and oak support beams were probably made by a local Scottish artist and done with water-based glue tempera paint. The boards and beams were covered in a white base, the text and decorations were done in black and filled in with colour pigments. Artists apparently adapted images and emblems based upon European engravings and pattern books.

Judas Maccabeus detail, Nine Nobles Room

The Stair Chamber's ceiling contains text from the Geneva Bible while the Green Lady's is a collection of sayings about life, marriage, good and evil. While all four ceilings are impressive, the Muses Room and the Nine Nobles Room are spectacular. The former features descriptions and elaborate illustrations of each Muse, while the latter celebrates characters of the ancient world and the Old Testament, including Julius Caesar, Hector of Troy and King David. It's likely that the ceiling images were used not only as inspirations but as memory aids. The paintings are a feast for the eyes, graphically strong and expressive, and intensely mysterious in places.

Muses Room ceiling

After spending time in Crathes Castle, taking in its colour and atmosphere, I felt as if my imaginary castle had been cleaned, painted and given a good airing out. I returned to writing with renewed vigour and immense gratitude that I live in a country so endowed with historical riches. These days my characters are positively running up the turnpike stairs, their senses heightened because mine have been. 

I've enjoyed sharing my thoughts and sketches with you over the past year and am sad to say that this is my last post as a History Girl. I am handing the torch to the excellent novelist Karen Maitland, whose books I have read with relish. She will make a fantastic addition to the History Girls and I look forward to reading her posts from next month. My thanks to all the History Girls and to you, our readers, who have helped to make this a splendid blog.

Teresa Flavin is the author and illustrator of The Blackhope Enigma and The Crimson Shard, historical fantasy novels for young readers, published by Templar Publishing in the UK and Candlewick Press in the USA. She is currently at work on the final novel in the trilogy.