Blood Ties
Authors: C.C. Humphreys
Blood Ties
‘With
The French Executioner
Humphreys established himself as a quality purveyor of historical detail and vigorous action … This unusual storyline is dispatched with consummate skill, and the conflict between father and son has an intelligence and sophistication that transcends the narrative’
‘C.C. Humphreys excels as ever in the throat-in-mouth action and knows instinctively how to keep a reader pasted to the page … This novel shows a writer reaching ever upwards and I can’t wait for Humphreys’ next novel. If you like Bernard Cornwell’s
Grail Quest
series, you’ll love
The French Executioner
and
Blood Ties
. To my mind, Cornwell is good, but Humphreys is better’
Historical Novels Review
The French Executioner
‘Falling somewhere between the novels of Bernard Cornwell and Wilbur Smith, C.C. Humphreys has fashioned a rollicking good yarn that keeps the pages turning from start to finish’
Irish Examiner
‘… how he fulfills his mission is told with enormous zest in this splendid, rip-roaring story … a fine addition to the tradition of swashbuckling costume romance of which Robert Louis Stevenson is the incomparable master’
Hamilton Examiner
‘Don’t miss this wonderful saga of magic and heroism … if you can find a first impression, hoard it and wait till it rises in value like a first edition of
Lord of the Rings
. This is as good. For sheer pleasure I’ve read nothing to match it all year’
Crime Time magazine
For my parents, Peter and Ingegerd, and the stories they told me
C.C. HUMPHREYS
ContentsTwelve: Into The Belly of the Beast
Seventeen: The Grey Wolf and the Bear
Whereas the genesis of my first novel,
The French Executioner
, came in a blinding flash – the swordsman, Jean Rombaud, taking Anne Boleyn’s six-fingered hand as well as her head – the idea for this second arrived more stealthily. I knew I wanted to spend more time with the characters I’d already created yet the book had to stand alone. I enjoy writing action-filled adventures, but felt that this story should be more intimate, and explore further my characters’ inner conflicts. The idea of a war within the family came then – father versus son, brother against sister, mother against daughter. But I still needed some historical ‘pegs’ to hang my fictional story upon.
When I began writing historical fiction, I thought research was about getting the details right, and indeed there is huge satisfaction in accurately describing the past. But what research
really
does is act as a stimulus. I rediscovered the old truth that fact is stranger than fiction time and again. One fact unearthed is the very seedbed of creation. And so often that fact, that date, that place, can seem an almost miraculous thing.
Some examples – I knew I wanted to involve the new as well as the old generation from the previous novel. Since I’d left my characters in the epilogue, happy and content near Siena in 1546, I wondered what was happening there, say, in 1555, when the children would be grown yet their parents not too old to have adventures. I discovered that war had once more ravaged the land and that Siena endured a terrible siege … that ended on 17 April 1555.
I then had the idea of transferring the threat against Anne Boleyn to her daughter. Schoolboy history told me that Elizabeth was in great danger throughout the reign of her sister – Bloody Mary. Further research told me that Elizabeth was summoned to Hampton Court, still under arrest … on 21 April 1555.
Across a continent, four days apart! My characters, fictional and real, in crisis. With such symmetry of dates, I felt blessed. The rest was almost easy.
Almost. There was one other aspect I felt compelled to include. Though raised in London, I was born in Canada, have often been drawn back to its stunning forests, mountains and rivers. How could I honour these two halves of myself, the Englishman and the North American? What was going on in Canada at the time that could link it to these events in Europe? I researched. I discovered, again, more amazing things than I could ever invent. Especially that in 1536, the year that Anne Boleyn was executed, a Breton explorer, Jacques Cartier made the first of three voyages to the St Lawrence. He took hostages back to France. Applying the ‘what if?’ of the fiction writer I wondered if a baby hostage could have survived. If so that young man would have been eighteen in 1555. The same age as Jean Rombaud’s daughter, Anne.
I had my link from the Old World to the New. Hence the second half of this book. My research then disgorged facts of the native cultures of the time that almost dictated my story thereafter. Not least that the tribe Cartier encountered who, later, were dubbed ‘Huron’ by the Europeans, were driven away by their blood enemies, one tribe of the nations later known as the Iroquois …
…
sometime in the 1550s
.
I had my overall story and more facts gave me wonderful set pieces and characters. Several books stimulated.
The Huron: Farmers of the North
by Bruce G. Trigger, was a source of riches, as was
The League of the Iroquois
by Lewis Henry Morgan. (Written in 1851, I found a second-hand copy under strange circumstances one day while walking down the Finchley Road. It was in the window of a tatty shop that seemed to have mainly soft porn videos, with a very odd owner who tried to convince me that the Ark of the Covenant was a giant crystal CD player. Both owner and shop had disappeared when I looked a week later. Spooky!) I’ve taken as my Native models the Tahontaenrat, the Huron tribe that
could
have been the one driven out of the St Lawrence in 1555. I based their conquerors on their old enemies, the Seneca, an Iroquois nation who
could
have expelled them. My study of their customs and language – both tribes spoke versions of Iroquoian –are mainly drawn from written sources begun some hundred years later. But these societies, by all accounts, hadn’t changed much in the previous centuries. They had their clan groupings, their councils, their ways of hunting and war, even their lacrosse. They had evolved advanced social structures and had no need to change. Until the Europeans came.
The siege of Siena is brilliantly analysed in Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams’s
Firearms and Fortifications – Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-Century Siena
. The Tower of London website was a great help as was a book my brother sent me that we’d had in the family for ages:
The Tower of London
by W. H. Ainsworth. This was given to my brother by Great Aunt Ethel whose ancestor, and therefore mine, Sir Henry Bedingfield, was Princess Elizabeth’s gaoler at Woodstock. (I desperately tried to get this relative into the novel as some heroic swashbuckler but he just wouldn’t fit!) A retired Jesuit, Fr. Richard Foley, helped me with my Latin.
I spent a wonderful day with John Moses, a Native History Researcher at the fantastic Canadian Museum of Civilisation in Hull, Quebec. Part Iroquois himself, he talked brilliantly and had photocopied many articles that proved invaluable. Best of all, he gave me white gloves, then led me into the stacks of artefacts that the public never see. Here I hefted genuine Iroquois war clubs; one, from the early seventeenth century, especially captured me, becoming the basis for the duel fought in Part Two. I will never forget the feeling as I swung it through the air. That sort of research is beyond price – especially to a fight choreographer.
The main difficulty of writing about native affairs is the fear of stereotyping peoples every bit as complex as one’s own without the innate understanding one has from growing up in their culture. There is also a great deal of controversy about certain points – for example, scalping and who actually began it. After much pondering I decided to include it as part of their way of life, while being fully prepared to admit that they may well have been taught it by early Europeans. What I was determined to avoid was the Hollywood trap of depicting all natives as ‘Noble Savages’.
There is so much to admire in the proto-Huron and Iroquois societies. The richness of their myths and the sophistication of their psychology, the respect they accorded each individual. The way Huron children were treated as just other, smaller, humans and never struck, which the Jesuits could hardly believe. The honour given to women and their opinions, particularly amongst the Iroquois. Their, in my opinion, healthy attitude to sexual relations. The sharing of all things, especially food in times of hardship together with their desire to acquire status and respect rather than wealth. Their lack of a death penalty – except in rare cases of witchcraft and treason. Their command of rhetoric and their consensus politics, the elevation of leaders on merit. Friedrich Engels, for very good reasons, labelled the Iroquois a proto-Communist society, an example of one that had worked.
But … but … but … the native peoples of the St Lawrence in 1555
could
be ‘savage’. War, viciously conducted, was what men did. Prisoners
could
be horribly tortured before death. Their hearts
could
be eaten. In these things they were no different from those ‘savages’ across the Atlantic with their inquisitions, their racks, their heretic burnings, their racial slaughter. All humans have a capacity for cruelty, whatever their ethnic background; we have only to look around our world today to see that. I hope I have struck a balance, seen the good as well as the bad in all and portrayed their humanity, the dark as well as the light. For my purposes, the Huron are the good guys, the Iroquois somewhat nastier. In someone else’s story, it could be the other way around.
As for the way they talk, like my sixteenth-century Europeans, I have tried to make them natural to our modern ear without being anachronistic. While working on the second draft of this novel in a cottage in Shropshire I read a wonderful novel by Rosemary Sutcliffe,
Warrior Scarlet
. Set in the Bronze Age in England, it had everyday speech referenced only by what the people would have seen around them. It was natural to them. An enviable pattern I’ve tried to imitate.
Some acknowledgements. As in the first book, my wife, Aletha, was a model of patience and good advice. I completed the final edit as a fellow of Hawthornden Castle so thanks to all there. Once more, I am indebted to the team at Orion. Jane Wood, Publishing Director, who wasn’t sure about the word ‘sequel’ and then got thoroughly behind it. Jon Wood, Editorial Director, who ‘inherited’ me but whose love of a good swashbuckle has made him a big supporter with an excellent eye for an edit – and a fine taste in red wine. Rachel Leyshon, who edited my first novel and I hope will edit my last, and whose observations are always shrewd while she reins in my tendency to disembody (‘he threw his eyes across the table’ etc). My agent, Anthea Morton-Saner, whose great advice, in career and writing, I always value. My Canadian Publisher, Kim McArthur, whose enthusiasm envelopes and whose business smarts market my books in my birthplace superbly. And Alma Lee, Artistic Director of my first Writer’s Festival in Vancouver – a new friend.