"Oh what a tangled
web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
Sir Walter Scott
Winter 2003
Volume I,
issue 3
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"Oh what a tangled
web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." | Winter 2003 |
Elizabeth Sites is a librarian, tutor, and writer, living in Dallas, Texas. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Literary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas, and a Master's degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Texas at Austin. Her prize-winning contemporary romances have been published worldwide. She is presently at work on a historical mystery set in Renaissance Ferrara. Direct correspondence to Elizabeth Sites at elizabeth.sites@verizon.net or to editor@lifeloom.com. |
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I'm an English tutor! I'm a librarian! I'm a romance writer, for heaven's sake! What am I doing writing a historical mystery?
It was May 11, 2001—I know the exact date because I wrote it down in my journal. The semester was almost over, and I was tutoring a clever but lazy high school senior who was catching up on overdue essays. “I’m supposed to write a psychological profile of this duke guy,” he said, “in a poem by Robert Browning called ‘My Last Duchess.’
I sighed. I'd read the poem a hundred times, a thousand times, and coaxed dozens of students through essays about it. I turned to the page in the textbook, took a deep breath—
And it hit me. I was going to write a novel about the duke's second duchess.
Why did the idea strike me at that particular time? I have no idea. Why a historical novel, when I was already a reasonably successful contemporary romance novelist? Who knows? Why a mystery? Even more mysterious. Of course it had to be a mystery—the first duchess, the subject of the portrait in the poem, is dead. “I gave commands,” the duke says, “And all smiles stopped together.” For over 150 years, readers and critics have been puzzling over what stopped the young duchess’s smiles. The traditional reading of the poem is that the duke himself murdered her, or had her murdered. But did he? And since he is negotiating to marry a second wife, what on earth would she think of the whole business?
The student finished his essay and graduated. I am sure he has long since forgotten “My Last Duchess.” I haven’t.
I started out with research on the poem itself. What, if anything, had Browning said about its historical background, and what had critics written about it since its original publication in 1842? I discovered that Browning had loosely—very loosely—based his duke on Alfonso II d’Este, the fifth Duke of Ferrara. This Alfonso—and the Estensi are riddled with Alfonsos, which makes it difficult to keep them straight—was a grandson of Lucrezia Borgia. I was thrilled. Lucrezia Borgia—perfect for a Renaissance mystery.
The duke’s first wife, it turned out, was Lucrezia de’ Medici. Both the Borgia and the Medici—better and better. Poor Lucrezia was only fourteen when she was married off to the twenty-six-year-old duke, and seventeen when she died. There was one contemporary source—gossipy and not terribly reliable—which claimed she had been poisoned. Apparently that was the germ of Browning’s original poem.
I searched out a contemporary portrait of young Lucrezia, and was utterly stunned. Letter writers of the time called her dull, illiterate, obstinate, but the portrait told a different tale. She was beautiful. Beautiful, and heartbreakingly young, with delicate freckles dusted over her nose and sensual heavy-lidded eyes.
The duke's second wife was a Hapsburg—Barbara of Austria, the daughter and sister of Holy Roman Emperors. Her portrait shows her as a tall, thin, no-nonsense sort of woman with reddish-blonde hair, brown eyes, a Hapsburg lip, and a definite presence. Not only that, but she was a granddaughter of Philip the Fair and Juana la Loca. Now I had the Borgia, the Medici, and Juana la Loca, all in one family. Who could ask for more?
Barbara, of course, would be my sleuth—she certainly had the most to gain or lose by finding out for certain if her husband was a murderer. I added a secret plot created by her brother, Maximilian II—completely fictional, but who knows what secret plots might have been afoot at the time? It dovetailed neatly with Maximilian’s known character.
With Barbara, though, I also ran up against my first obstacle: for some reason Browning referred to the putative second wife’s father as “the Count” rather than “the Emperor.” Was this just literary license on the part of the poet? Perhaps. But I was determined to keep to the real history, as far as I could, and be true to the poem as well. I worked out a way to include Browning’s reference in the story, and in the end it turned out to be an excellent means of characterization.
Once I had my setting—Ferrara, Italy, in the mid-1560s—and my three main characters in place, I had two primary problems. One was to tackle the mountain of research I needed to do, to present the city and the people and the culture of the time in an accurate and believable way. The other was to organize the dauntingly complicated task of writing a mystery in the first place. I had always loved reading mysteries, but I found out soon enough that writing one was another thing altogether.
Suspects, real clues, red herrings—how was I going to keep track of them, make sure they fell in the correct order and that no stitches were dropped as I knitted up my plot?
One of my personal idiosyncrasies is that I need to be able to see a “picture” of a book at a glance, on one page. It doesn’t really matter how big the page is, as I can stick it up on the wall with pushpins. But I need to be able to see it all at once.
I began with a spreadsheet—chapter numbers across the top, so I had a column for each chapter. Then down the side I filled in the names of all the characters and all the various threads of the mystery. I used colors so I could pick elements out at a glance: red herrings are (naturally) red, and real clues are blue. Suspects are green (with envy, perhaps) and the real killer is bright purple.
Thus, a suspect—for example, the Duke’s old nurse, an entirely fictional creation I have dubbed Maria Granmammelli—is listed in the left hand column in green. Working across the page, I filled in a brief (two or three words) note in each chapter column where she appears. That way I know where she is and what she’s doing, and I don’t forget her. Does her line peter out about chapter thirteen? I need to think of a way to bring her back into the story.
Clues are done the same way: a brief description of the clue in the first column, then notes under the chapters where it appears. I am trying to develop my clues, so that each one is mentioned two or three times—it doesn’t seem fair to mention something once in chapter two, then have it pop up like magic in chapter twenty-four as the solution to the puzzle. With the real clues in blue and the false clues in red, it’s easy to see if they’re clumping up in any particular chapter or part, and to redistribute them more evenly.
This also serves as an excellent sort of mini-outline—I can read down any given column and see exactly who and what must be in any particular chapter.
Another great help to keeping the plotline straight has been ordinary calendar software. You know, the sort of thing that pops up a month at a time and lets you type in appointments for the day. I first determined the day of the week on which Christmas fell in 1565—since my story begins on December 5, 1565, the day Barbara of Austria was married to Alfonso II d’Este—and then found the closest modern year with a corresponding day-and-date pattern. Then I started filling in the action. I also added the weather (from a website which gives current weather conditions on Ferrara over the past few years, on the assumption that the weather is relatively constant), the holy days and saints’ days (from a calendar of Renaissance saints’ days), and major historical events (the death of a Pope plays a peripheral part in the story). You cannot imagine how helpful this was, in keeping track of when the characters should be fasting, when or if Barbara might show signs of pregnancy, and all kinds of other bits and pieces.
Once I had my story more or less organized, I turned to my research. What a delight—I have always loved looking up odd facts for people, and now I could look up odd facts all day and claim to be working.
I am in awe of people who wrote any sort of fiction with a historical setting, before the advent of the Internet. I did use paper sources—my tiny local library has been incredibly helpful in tracking down odd books via Inter-Library Loan, and there are two excellent university libraries within spend-a-day-taking-notes distance. But on the Internet I can look at a live webcam trained on the Castello Estense in Ferrara, day and night, and actually see how the sun sets on the famous moat and the four towers with their white marble balustrades. I can collect literally thousands of pictures and maps of Ferrara and the surrounding countryside from tourist sites and municipal sites. I’ve found descriptions of the flora and fauna on bicyclers’ tour guides and in horticulturists’ white papers. I even found a 3D computer model which reconstructed the history of the Castello Estense.
"Genealogy of Royalty" sites have been another treasure trove, for all the members of my various families, their interrelationships, dates of birth, marriage and death, and children. Museums and antique auction houses have contributed gorgeous pictures of furniture, fabrics, hunting paraphernalia, household goods, and of course tiny jeweled flasks suitable for poisons. It was on museum sites that I found the portraits of Barbara of Hapsburg and Lucrezia de’ Medici that were so key to my characterizations.
Many of the sources I have found are in Italian. In fact, the best sources are in Italian. I use the Internet translation engines to give me a general idea of what is being said (although one has to be careful—the architect of Ercole I d’Este’s magnificent Addizione Erculea, a gentleman named Biagio Rossetti, was rendered as “Bicomfort Lipsticks”). I then read back over the original, using as much of my high-school and college Spanish and French as I can to puzzle it out, and compare it with the “translation.” I also compare the “translations” of two or three different documents on the same subject, and sometimes “translate” the same document using two or three different translation engines.
I look for sites created by members of the Society for Creative Anachronism. I would put the scholarship of most of those people on a par with most academic scholarship—they document rigorously, and tend to research exactly what a writer wants to know: just how did these people live? How did they act? What did they wear? I found a breathtaking SCA site on court dancing in Renaissance Italy, with detailed descriptions, foot-patterns just like the old Arthur Murray ads, the dance music in both modern notation and contemporary notation, and sound files of the music being played on Renaissance-style instruments.
I organize my paper notes in files, and organize my electronic bookmarks in folders, with backups of backups, of course. I have dozens of folders and probably thousands of bookmarks... everything from the forensic physiology of a smothering victim to Renaissance cryptology... from the coins minted in Ferrara to hunting to entertainments (unbelievably lavish) to marriage contracts and the canonical hours.
Little did I realize what I was getting into, when I was first led down the primrose path to historical mystery by the charming Mr. Robert Browning. It’s all his fault, after all. What commands did the Duke of Ferrara really give? How did the first Duchess’s smiles stop, there in the lush, hothouse atmosphere of a Renaissance court renowned for its art and culture? And what did a secret copy of the I Modi, an album of delightfully pornographic engravings and sonnets first published in the early 16th century, have to do with it all?
Oh, wait. Browning never mentioned the I Modi. I made that part up.
It was all part of the research, after all.
Copyright 2003 by Elizabeth Sites.
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"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." |
Copyright 2003, lifeloom.com