Old Bones and Fresh Bodies
Lillian Stewart Carl has written multiple novels and multiple short stories in multiple
combinations of mystery, romance, and paranormal. Her latest book is The Charm Stone, book four of the Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron series: Scotland’s finest and America’s exile on the trail of all-too-living legends.
Visit Lillian at her website, http://www.lillianstewartcarl.com/.
In my early teens (more than a few years ago), I attended a lecture by archaeologist Ivor Noel Hume about his work at Colonial Williamsburg (aka CW).
Since then I’ve read several of his books—he’s a superb writer. Martin’s Hundred recounts his excavation of a seventeenth-century settlement next to the James River that is now on the grounds of an eighteenth-century mansion named Carter’s Grove.
I asked myself what the people living at Carter’s Grove would have thought, had they known about the bodies buried in their front yard. My answer is a paranormal romance, titled Shadows in Scarlet, which begins with the discovery of a skeleton in the garden of “Melrose Hall” near Williamsburg.
Several years ago, my husband and I toured the CW archaeology labs. I was tickled to see boxes of artifacts from Martin’s Hundred still labeled with Dr. Noel Hume’s name, even though he had retired some years earlier. I was even more tickled when we happened upon a group of archaeologists, and our guide interrupted their meeting so I could ask:
“What do you do when you find human bones?”
“Well,” one of them replied after a moment’s silence, “we try to find the relatives of the body.”
Just what I wanted to hear, since that’s exactly what happens in the plot of Shadows in Scarlet.
But I can’t blame only that book on Ivor Noel Hume.
I’m also an avid reader of his articles in Colonial Williamsburg. In a postscript to one about colonial coins and currency, he tells about finding an old wooden box at an estate sale, a coin of the first Elizabeth included in its intricate carvings. (Its photograph is on the Charm Stone page of my website.)
Even though most of the stories in the five Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mysteries concern the tapestry of history, myth, fact, and belief on the bloodstained ground of Scotland, the fourth book, The Charm Stone, is set in Colonial Williamsburg.
The last governor of Colonial Virginia was a Scot, John Murray, Lord Dunmore. His wife was Charlotte Stewart. The Stewart kings were a feckless lot—see Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose story I tackle in The Secret Portrait, book one of the series. King James 1st (of England) and 6th (of Scotland) had a fear of witches, with his own cousin, Francis Stewart, accused of being one. Francis’s story may have inspired the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Some people believe scientist Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays, and a persistent rumor says that Bacon’s papers are buried in the churchyard at Williamsburg.
With all of that, it’s no surprise that The Charm Stone revolves around the activities of two conspiracy theorists. Sharon and Tim Dingwall don’t blame the currents of history on witchcraft—their Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory blames everyone from Francis Bacon to the Freemasons. And to prove their theories, the Dingwalls just might kill to get their hands on . . .
The witch box, an old wooden chest that once included a Celtic charm or healing stone in its intricate carvings.
While the bodies in The Charm Stone are a lot fresher than the skeleton discovered in Shadows in Scarlet, I am honored to attribute that plot, too, to the influence of Ivor Noel Hume.
Not that, back in my early teens, I planned to be a mystery writer rather than an archaeologist. It’s probably a good thing that hindsight is a lot clearer than foresight. Or is it? The Dingwalls would disagree . . .
March 23, 2010
Posted in: Guest Blogs
Loading ...
Leave a Reply