Лорен Уиллиг - The Deception of the Emerald Ring

"I know!" exclaimed Pammy. "I have the most adorable little yak-skin corset!"

"No yak skin," I said.

Even gratitude only goes so far.

Truth can be very convenient for fiction. The events in Ireland in 1803 make a colorful story without any additional embellishment. After a brief exile in France, Robert Emmet and other veterans of the rising of 1798 returned to Dublin to plot a new insurrection. Stockpiling weapons in various depots around the city, Emmet planned to launch an attack on key centers of power within the city, to be coordinated with risings elsewhere in Ireland, and possibly a French invasion.

At six thirty in the evening on July sixteenth, all those plans quite literally went up in smoke. An explosion at the Patrick Street depot forced the hands of the insurgents. Faced with a choice of acting quickly or abandoning the enterprise, they moved the date of the rising up to July twenty-third, far earlier than intended. As Ruбn O'Donnell sums it up, "The stark choice facing Emmet and the other commanders was to launch a Dublin-centered rebellion without delay or to hold out in the hope that the French would invade Ireland or England as expected in August/September."

Without a full muster of men, without aid from France, the rebellion was practically over before it began. As Emmet's biographer Patrick Geoghegan recounts, "As daylight faded on the evening of 23 July, Emmet waited for the rebels to arrive at the main depot…. He expected two thousand men to appear. Eighty turned up. Worse, before assembling, most of them had been to the Yellow Bottle public house…." The rebel units did manage to hold positions on Thomas Street and James Street for nearly two hours, but the planned attack on Dublin Castle never occurred and the evening ended in rout and riot. Emmet fled to the Wicklow Mountains. Along with twenty other rebel leaders, he was apprehended and executed, dying a martyr for his cause.

The historical record of the rebellion is so rich that it was a wrench not to be able to use everything. One of my favorite tid-bits was the use of hurling societies (not to be confused with curling, which is a different sort of sport entirely) as a screen for military maneuvers, with the hurling stick standing in for a musket or pike. Sadly, I couldn't think of any excuse for proper young ladies like Letty and Jane being allowed anywhere near the Donnybrook hurling club. But even with hurling out of the picture, there were plenty of details that I was able to press into service. The rebel depots, with their warren of secret rooms and hidden hordes of weapons, were a novelist's dream, and the explosion at Patrick Street simply begged for a role in the story. The rockets, designed as a variant on those used in India, were Emmet's innovation, not mine, and did indeed lead to the fatal explosion at Patrick Street.

There are several discrepancies in the various versions of the explosion at the Patrick Street depot—although nothing to suggest that the incident was anything other than an accident. By all accounts, some of the men had been experimenting with fuses for the rockets, and a moment of carelessness (and possibly inebriation) led to the resulting explosion. Once outside that basic frame, the stories start to vary. Since two of Emmet's men placed the blame on a dyer named George McDaniels, accusing him of working on the rockets while sloshed, I decided to keep him on in the role of scapegoat, placing him on the scene as the drunken watchman.

Historians also squabble over whether Emmet genuinely wished to secure aid from France or whether he preferred, as a powerful symbolic statement, to have Ireland liberated by Irishmen. For the purposes of this book, I went with the former theory, largely because it made tying in the antics of French spies that much easier. Emmet's brother, Thomas Addis, did meet several times with General Berthier, Bonaparte's minister of war, to discuss the loan of French troops, and there is some evidence to suggest that the rebel leaders anticipated a French invasion in late August or early September. For anyone interested in reading more about the rising of 1803, I recommend two excellent biographies of Emmet, both rich in detail but very different in their historiographical slants: Patrick M. Geoghegan's Robert Emmet: A Life, and Ruбn O'Donnell's Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803.

Those familiar with Dublin may notice some changes in the landscape. There would be no chance these days of anyone tripping over a body backstage in the Crow Street Theatre; it has been superseded by a warehouse and offices. The building was already, as a contemporary put it, being "pulled to pieces by installments" as early as the 1820s. For those who are curious, pictures of the theater and the principal performers can be found in T. J. Walsh's Opera in Dublin, 1798–1820: Frederick Jones and the Crow Street Theatre. St. Werburgh's survived far better than the Crow Street Theatre, but at the cost of a few appendages; it lost its steeple in 1810 and its tower in 1836. Patrick Street, home to the ill-fated rebel depot, has undergone even more of a transformation. Lauding the complete overhaul of the area, a 1905 travel guide describes its former state with unveiled distaste as "one of the most squalid, disreputable, and dilapidated in the city. It was intersected by a network of narrow streets and alleys, which were overhung by hundreds of rickety and unsanitary dwellings." It was that world, the vanished nineteenth-century landscape of narrow streets and rickety dwellings, that I strove to re-create, rather than the polished Patrick Street of today.

A year ago, as I was working on The Deception of the Emerald Ring, I came across a wonderful mystery novel by Kasey Michaels, in which an author suddenly discovers that one of her characters, a supercilious Regency gentleman, has come to life right in the middle of her living room. My first reaction was: "Oh, dear, where on earth am I going to house Lord Vaughn?"

Of all my characters, Lord Vaughn, having already hijacked the plots of two books, seemed the most likely to show up unannounced in my tiny studio apartment, raise a disdainful eyebrow, and ask what my servants had been doing to let the place get into such a disgraceful state. I had a feeling he wasn't going to be too happy sleeping on the air mattress on my living room floor, and would be even less happy with the concept of washing his own dishes. Fortunately, Lord Vaughn decided to postpone his visit (I'm convinced it was the dishwashing that put him off), but he did have a few comments (otherwise known as complaints) to make upon the publication of this third book in the Pink Carnation chronicles.

Q. My dear girl, I really must object to the premise of this absurd farce in which you appear to have embroiled me. Elopements are decidedly passй.

A. If you must blame anyone for the elopement plot, blame Georgette Heyer. During my research year in London, I used to sneak Heyer books into the British Library to read over lunch in the BL Cafeteria. The English editions were conveniently small and compact, perfect for propping up against a bowl of watery soup, and it made for a nice break from peering at crabbed seventeenth-century handwriting all day. At the time, I was midway through writing The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. Geoff—and his infatuation with the unsuitable Mary Alsworthy—had already been introduced into the plot, and I had been rather absent-mindedly wondering how I was going to extract him from that tangle.

Geoff, like so many men I knew in grad school, is entirely at home with a complicated theorem or an abstruse idea, but completely at a loss with the opposite sex. Having so little experience with women, Geoff cherishes romanticized notions of love with a capital L. Having his father and two younger siblings carried away by smallpox when he was eight, Geoff grew up in cold marble rooms, with a mother more interested in her maladies than in her sole surviving son. Like Miles, the closest Geoff came to a true family life was with the Uppingtons. But, unlike Miles, Geoff never let himself be entirely drawn into their family circle. In short, Geoff lacked any notion of what it was like to be truly close to someone, leaving him easy prey for the machinations of a Mary Alsworthy.

I'll never forget the day in the BL cafeteria when I propped open Georgette Heyer's Devil's Cub, and encountered the perfect solution to Geoff's problem. For those non-Heyer readers out there, in Devil's Cub, the sensible older sister interferes with her flighty younger sister's elopement with a bored rake, and finds herself carried off in her sister's stead. Geoff couldn't be more unlike the amoral hero of Devil's Cub (who certainly didn't have marriage on his mind), but the basic idea caught my imagination. If Geoff wouldn't seek out the right sort of woman on his own, I would fling her into his path in a way he couldn't ignore—by putting her in his carriage at midnight in her sister's place. Being an honorable sort, Geoff couldn't possibly refuse to marry her. Good-bye, Mary Alsworthy, and hello, Emerald Ring….

Q. Carrying off chits of girls in carriages is one thing, but was it necessary to export me to Ireland for your literary whims? I had an engagement to attend a house party in Norfolk when I found myself arbitrarily whisked off across the Irish Sea. One would think it could at least have waited until the Irish Season in December when there would be decent entertainment to be had.