Читать книгу Rumours that Ruined a Lady - Marguerite Kaye - Страница 5

AUTHOR NOTE

Almost all of my books have their genesis in the characters of the hero and heroine. This one was different, and began life as a whole lot of disjointed concepts and ideas, something I’ve learned the painful way was a big mistake!

While writing THE BEAUTY WITHIN, my previous book about the Armstrong sisters, I decided that Caro’s story was going to be very dark, and as such did some minor setting-up, hinting that there were goings-on in her life without knowing myself what they were. I wanted Caro—on the surface the most compliant and dutiful of sisters—to have a deep, dark secret, and I wanted that secret to be revealed in layers, so I decided that I would begin her story at some tragic pivotal point and then reveal how she got to there. I wanted to write a love story that extended over a long period of time and, just to complicate matters, I decided I wanted there to be a strong gothic element in it too—without actually having defined what I meant by gothic.

I made Caro a murderer. I invented a twin brother for Sebastian. I made his father physically vicious as well as emotionally cruel. I decided that being a murderer wasn’t dark enough for Caro, and turned her into a long-term opium user. And I invented a mother for Sebastian based on the character of Jane Digby, whose biography I was reading. She was a beautiful and outrageous society beauty, with a string of husbands and lovers, who ended up living as a Bedouin and married to a sheikh. (If you want to know more about Lady Jane, then I can highly recommend Mary S. Lovell’s book, A Scandalous Life.)

As you’ll see when you read Caro and Sebastian’s story, very little of this made it into the final version. There’s no twin brother, no murder, only a little opium and the only link to Lady Jane’s life in Damascus is the mention of an Arabian horse! The problem was, I think, that concepts don’t make a romance. People and characters do. I did get my lovers with a history, though, and I have structured the story in a non-linear way. Writing this book has been a long and sometimes very painful process, though ultimately it’s produced a story I’m extremely pleased with. I hope you’ll agree.

I’d like to thank my editor Flo for her enthusiasm and support, without which I think I might just have given up on Sebastian and Caro. I’d also like to thank Alison L for suggesting Lady Jane’s biography to me, and for coming up with Hamilton Palace as the model for Crag Hall. And finally I’d like to thank all my Facebook friends, for all your suggestions and encouragement during the writing of this book. You helped get me there in the end!