Author's Note: Heart's Blood

Warning: contains SPOILERS. Read these notes after you have read the novel!

Beauty and the Beast has always been one of my favourite fairy tales, and readers will recognise the bones of it in Heart’s Blood: a mysterious house with an alienated, disfigured master, a priceless plant growing in a forbidden garden, magic mirrors and unusual household retainers. The story of my novel has the same general shape as that of Beauty and the Beast.

However, this is far from a fairy tale retelling. It’s not even a close reinterpretation of the traditional tale. Heart’s Blood is a love story, a ghost story, a family saga, a story about people overcoming their difficulties, and a little slice of Irish history, as well as a homage to a favourite fairy tale. There were elements of Beauty and the Beast that I really wanted to include – the bittersweet central relationship, the mysterious setting – and aspects that I knew I didn’t want. I like a female protagonist who follows her own path and fights her own battles. I did not want Caitrin to be as passive as Beauty, who is so much at the mercy of her family’s poor decisions. I took out the character of Beauty’s father, making Caitrin an orphan. Rather than being sent to the Beast’s house because her father stole a rose for her, Caitrin joins Anluan’s household of her own free will. However, she brings with her a heavy load of past troubles, and has her own emotional journey to make. The cliché selfish sisters of the fairy tale are replaced by Caitrin’s grasping kinsfolk, and her reluctant journey home, later in the book, is part of the personal quest she must undertake in order to defeat her demons. In addition, I made Caitrin not simply someone’s daughter, but a skilled craftswoman seeking to earn her own living in a time and culture where independence for women was rare.

Central to Heart’s Blood is the story of Anluan’s family – four generations blighted by a disastrous attempt at occult magic. I wanted the layers of family history to emerge gradually, through Caitrin’s examination of the documents stored in the library at Whistling Tor. At the first stage of planning for the novel, I decided Caitrin would be a scribe. Her craft gives her a reason to stay in Anluan’s house all summer and to be drawn into his circle of odd retainers. It allows her to discover the family secrets for herself, with the reader learning the truth as she does, a little at a time. Within the family history lie the keys to Anluan’s apparently insurmountable problems – not only his ancestor’s dark legacy but also the childhood illness that has marked him, body and mind.

I considered a number of ways in which I could make my hero a ‘beast’, and discarded many of them – it was unrealistic, for instance, to make him so severely depressed or so violent in nature that we could not believe in his rehabilitation. I wanted him to have a physical disability that would limit his capacity for action, but not be so crippling that he could not in time become a leader.

I decided to have Anluan suffer a stroke (‘a palsy’) in his early teens. This would account for his physical weakness on one side and the unevenness of his features. Certain activities, such as wielding a sword, would be forever beyond him. However, he would discover in time that his partial paralysis was not as limiting as he had believed. Hope and determination go a long way to overcoming such a handicap. In the twelfth century, community perceptions of disability would be different. The ordinary people of Whistling Tor would find it all too easy to link Anluan’s odd appearance, his physical restrictions and his antisocial behaviour with the uncanny host that inhabited the hill, and to view him as accursed, deformed and useless. I saw Anluan as fighting depression for most of his young life, which would reinforce his view of himself as weak and incapable. While I have not specified the event that made him decide he was impotent as well, this can be deduced by reading between the lines.

Heart’s Blood has a real historical context. The story is set in Connacht (Connaught) in the west of Ireland, in the twelfth century. In 1167, Anglo-Norman lords crossed the Irish Sea and began taking territory from local kings and chieftains. At that time Ireland was a realm of small kingdoms and shifting alliances, with several dominant dynasties, notably the Uí Neill in the north and the Uí Conchobhair in the west.

An influential Irish chieftain was exiled by high king Ruaridh Uí Conchobhair and fled to France, where he allied himself by marriage with a powerful Norman lord. King Henry II of England, fearing these two might set up a Norman state in Ireland, visited that country in 1171 to establish his authority (on the pretext of reforming the Irish church.) The Pope later ratified the grant of Irish lands to the English crown. The Treaty of Windsor (1175) formalised the arrangement. Under this treaty, the territory already taken by Norman barons in the east of Ireland, along with certain major towns under Henry’s direct control, would be subject to the feudal system that applied in England. Ruaridh Uí Conchobhair would remain king of Connacht and have control of the territories not taken by the Normans.

Ruaridh was losing his grip as high king, and he proved ineffectual in his control over the Norman lords, who continued to help themselves to territory and establish their own mini-kingdoms. In some places, Irish leaders hired bands of gallóglaigh (referred to in English as gallowglass) to fight for them. Magnus, in Heart’s Blood, is one such warrior.

The gallóglaigh were mercenaries from the north and west of Scotland. They were of combined Norse, Scots and Pictish descent. Gallóglaigh could be hired in numbers, constituting a small army, or in ones and twos – Anluan’s father, Irial, could only afford one, but what a versatile one he chose! A gallowglass usually had two boys who travelled about with him to carry his spear and his other equipment. He fought with axe and broadsword, and was widely feared and respected for his skills.

Ruaridh Uí Conchobhair was deposed as king by his son Conchobar in 1183. Conchobar mounted a spirited resistance to the encroaching Normans, and when he died his brother Cathal did the same. Under this more vigorous leadership, the Irish in Connacht held their ground for many years. Heart’s Blood takes place while Ruaridh is still high king. At an inn on the way to Stony Ford, Brendan and the locals discuss the possibility of Ruaridh’s sons succeeding him and express a cautious hope of better times.

Lord Stephen de Courcy is not a historical character, but an invented one, representative of the Norman barons who sought land and influence in the west of Ireland. I had him allied by marriage to Ruaridh Uí Conchobhair, since that was a common means of securing a treaty with a potential enemy.

Heart’s Blood contains elements of the supernatural: the changeable fortress of Whistling Tor, Anluan’s unusual retainers and the uncanny host. The ‘fantasy’ element in all my other books to date has been based on the mythology or folklore of the setting. In this novel I tried something different. All the characters in Heart’s Blood, with the exception of Olcan and Fianchu, are human, and for all its fairy tale origins and its fantastic elements the story is chiefly an examination of human strengths and frailties. Caitrin’s quest is, not to save a kingdom or defeat a dragon, but to rescue a man from despair. She succeeds because of her innate ability to accept difference. Her capacity to see the good in everyone works its own kind of magic at Whistling Tor. However, this is not a straightforward story of ‘strong woman saves damaged man’. When Caitrin comes to the Tor, she brings her personal demons with her; she has had her own brush with mental illness. While she deals courageously with the oddities that face her in Anluan’s household, she cannot summon the nerve to confront the cruelty and injustice she has left behind her in Market Cross. It requires Anluan, changed forever by her presence in his house, to goad her into action. In finding the courage to step beyond their self-imposed boundaries, our Beauty and Beast rescue each other.

© Juliet Marillier August 2009