Interview with Patricia Bracewell, author of THE STEEL BENEATH THE SILK

For all those who read and loved the first two books in the Emma of Normandy Trilogy—Shadow on the Crown and The Price of Blood by Patricia Bracewell, go and snap up the third volume, The Steel Beneath the Silk—available at last! And of course, listen to my conversation with Patricia about how she discovered Emma, what inspired her to write her trilogy, and her long and frustrating journey to getting this final volume published.

Transcript

Susanne 0:28

I'm so thrilled that my guest today is Patricia Bracewell, historical novelist author of the Emma of Normandy trilogy, which was shadow on the crown, the price of blood and the steel beneath the silk. Her most recent book is the steel beneath silk. And this is what we're going to talk about today. Pat. So glad you're here.

Pat 0:51

Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Susanne 0:53

as you know, I like to talk about lots of, crafty things with books, but I'm going to start slightly differently because I would love you to recount your journey to getting this third volume published.

Pat 1:05

that was a long journey that very few people know about. As you know, I was published in hardcover by penguin for the first two books and random house came in and suddenly my editor was gone and her boss was gone and her boss was gone. And the whole culture at a penguin changed. And when we submitted the draft of. the steel beneath the silk, they took a look at it and said, we're sorry. We think early medieval is not selling very well these days. And it's been so long. It's been five years since your last book came out. So we're going to pass on this one, even though it's a very nice book. You did a good job. So what do you do when you've got the third book of a trilogy and the publisher, the first two doesn't want it, it puts you in a really bad position. My my agent switched companies she's went to another company and I think she probably realized we weren't going to get any major deals. I was without a publisher and without an agent. And I had met Linda Cardillo of Bella story oppress in 2019 at the historical novel society conference. And we had spoken and I called her up or actually emailed her and said, I'd like to send you this. Manuscript, would you take a look at it? And she took a look at it and her staff took a look at it and they said, we'd love to publish this book. And of course they were familiar with it because they'd read the first two. And so out at came, finally, it took us, better part of a year to do it. But. we got it done. And I just kept asking myself all the way through. Of course I was devastated when it was when penguin rejected it. And I just kept saying to myself, what would Ima do? What would it, so that was that was what I thought Emma would do. She would just keep pushing until she could get the book out. And so that's the story and why it took so long.

Susanne 3:08

Yeah. And it's so funny because of course I read the first two and you get to the end of the second one and you're like on the edge of your seat waiting for what's going to happen next. I was like, I was so happy when this all worked out and you were able to get the steel beneath, so published, Tell me about the actual craft challenges of having to having such a big gap between the two and how did you make sure that somebody who just picked up the steel beneath the silk might be able to get where they were if they hadn't read the first two volumes? Right.

Pat 3:42

when we, you know, the first draft, one of the I thought it was the final draft, but it wasn't the novel it leaned a lot on the first two books. And when I had an editor look at it and my agent looked at it she said, you have to make this a standard loan. It has to not. Be dependent on the first two books. Even if it's, you're looking at it as the third book of the trilogy, it still has to, you want, and I realized then, yeah, I want people to buy this book, even if they haven't read the first two books. And so the editor took a look at it and she helped me look at the areas where we might need a little backstory. And just a sentence or two, her comment was, if they've read the first two books, it's been a long time, they're going to love getting reminded of some of this, but I didn't want to go into a lot of. A lot of detail. I didn't want to distract from the story going forward. So what I tried to do was when I was telling some backstory, I would try to tell it from a different viewpoint. Then what we saw in. The earlier one of whatever scene was taking place in the earlier book. And so now you're getting not just a bit of a reminder of what happened, but you're getting a reminder from someone else who was there, whose head we were not in when that original. Episode took place. So you're adding to the reader's knowledge of the characters, plus you're moving a story forward. So that's what I tried to do. And in fact, the prologue of the original prologue was three pages long. It was very short. I knew I had to talk about the scene that happened in all Hallows church. You probably remember that at the end of the price of blood. I hadn't resolved. What had happened afterwards at the end of the book and I needed to resolve it at the beginning of this one. So I retold that whole scene from an omniscient point of view, added stuff at the beginning, added stuff at the end that, that wasn't in the first. first time we'd seen it in the previous book. And so it became 12 pages long instead of three. And I think it really added to the book because it allowed me to introduce some things about Edward that we hadn't seen before. And Thorkil and even Emma's connection with, Thorkil make that a little bit stronger than when I'd left it.

Susanne 6:09

Well, whatever you did, it worked really well. I loved all of these books from beginning to end and they're so just so exciting, talk about high stakes, Start, tell us what, what drew you to this time period into this story in particular?

Pat 6:26

it was Emma. I bumped into a reference to her online at some point back in, in the last century. and I'd never heard of her. And I thought she's the wife of two Kings of England and the mother of two Kings of England. And the great end of. William, the conqueror, why have I not heard of this woman? And so I started to do some research on her and the more research I did, the more convinced I was that that she needed a book. And I realized it was going to be, have to be more than one book. And. an, a number of readers have complained that I've only covered a little part of Emma's life in this trilogy. And what I set out to do was to write the story that Emma didn't tell, because Emma commissioned a book towards the end of her life called the encomium Emma Regina, and it starts with spins invasion of England and 10 13, and then goes forward from there. Ethel read King of England is not mentioned at all. And

Susanne 7:27

good blamer.

Pat 7:28

we don't really know. We don't know why he's not. we do know we have some ideas about why he wasn't mentioned, but I came up with my own idea of why he wasn't. And so what I wanted to tell was the story of that first marriage of her going to England and what she experienced in the first book in the second book, her growing comfort with. Hoop that people were and her connections that she made. And then the third book, when all hell breaks loose and and that second marriage comes about. And even today, historians don't know actually what happened because we have five or six stories from that time about how that came about.

Susanne 8:08

whichever one you land on, it's still fascinating, Yeah. I have a question I've been dying to ask you my little limited English history that I studied. I don't even remember maybe in high school or something. I never really studied English history was, is the Ethel read in the book? Was he known as F read the unready? Yes. Oh, okay. Good.

Pat 8:29

Yeah. So let me tell you about that name. Ethel red means Ethel means Novo red means council in old English. So his name meant Nobel council and somewhere along the way, some wag and Anglo sex in England called him ethelred unread, which means no council or bad council. So it was a play on words. It was a disk of the King's name. Ethelred unread. Noble council, lousy council. and it got corrupted somewhere along the way and all those centuries to become unready. So he wasn't really unready a little. That's what stuck even today. Historians call him ethelred the unready.

Susanne 9:12

Oh well, I'm so relieved to know that I've been wanting to ask. Cause as I say, my, my sort of British medieval history is very thin on the ground, but that was one thing that stuck in my head. Yeah. And King Knute, but spelled C a N U T rather than. Yeah. Because of course spelling is very all over the map. yeah. yeah. So the other thing I wanted to ask you was. You, you use bits of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which I think are great ways to start chapters and things. how much information does that actually give you the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Pat 9:51

Chronicle? it tells you about battles. It doesn't tell you when they happened or where it's just vague. it tells you about the, which Bishop died and was replaced. it will tell you about the passing of Kings. It says very little about the women. Emma is mentioned a few times in the Chronicle. She's one of the very few women who are mentioned in the Chronicle during this period. So there are just these enormous gaps. So it will say something like Edmond, Knute army went to the isle of Sheppey and Edmond accepted Edrick back and. That's it that's and it was the worst thing he'd ever done. And it doesn't tell you why Edmond didn't follow connote into Sheppey. It doesn't tell you exactly when this happened. It doesn't tell you they're just all these terrible gaps that are wonderful for historical novelists to be able to fill in. But sometimes I would just. Stare at the at my copy of the Chronicle and say then what happened? Why did he do that? Yeah.

Susanne 11:01

what was the actual purpose of the Chronicle?

Pat 11:04

It was started by Alfred the great, and it was meant to Chronicle the events that took place in Anglo-Saxon England. And there are actually six Chronicles that we have. And what Alfred, the great did was he started one and he sent several copies of it out to the various major. Abby's all over England. So one went to York, one went to Christ, church, Cambridge Christ church in Canterbury, one stayed at at Winchester and I forget where the others were. But so then that brought everything up from. The creation, it started with the creation and came all the way up to Alfred's time. And then it was up to the various monasteries to keep note of what happened in any given year. And sometimes in a year you'll have maybe three sentences and in another year you'll have two or three pages. And it just depends on where the. Particular copy is where it's being kept. So we get a little different look from York than we do from Canterbury or from Winchester. And what I was using was someone's compiled all of them together and you can look at what you're seeing is what's what they all viewed as happening in that year.

Susanne 12:25

Do you read old English or were you working from a translation?

Pat 12:28

I was working from translations all the time. I know a few words here and there, and I tried to sprinkle old English a little bit in the books, but not too much. I didn't want to really frighten people.

Susanne 12:40

No, I get it. Totally. aside from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, were there any other sources you were able to consult for this?

Pat 12:47

of course, Ms. Emma's book the encomium Emma, Regina because she covers, she starts with then West of England. I was able to use some of that. Now there are chroniclers that we're writing in the 12th century. So writing in the 11 hundreds, and these are Norman chroniclers. They're writing in Norman times, but they're in England. So this is after the conquest and they use. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other, I don't know, word of mouth, other different Chronicles that have been lost. So we have William of mom's breeze, Chronicle. We have John of Wurster is Chronicle, and I use those too. I've used there was a book about Emma. Written by Pauline Stafford. And she's a a historian and she's basically Emma's biographer. And so that was very useful because she quotes other chroniclers in Germany. and we look at some of the sagas there's information in some of the sagas that touch on what happened at this time with my Thorkil is in the sagas and Knute. and of course that comes much later because that's coming out of Iceland in the 14th century. William of Jimmy age in Normandy, what's writing about and hit again, he's in the 12th century, his writing later, but he covers a little bit. Of what happens. So those are some of the the resources that I use all in translation.

Susanne 14:10

Yeah. So did you set out to be a historical novelist or did this story, did you stumble on it and say, I just have to tell this particular story, how did that come about? I had

Pat 14:23

written two romance novels. and they never went anywhere and they're still in manuscript form up on a shelf in my closet, which is where they belong. But I spend a lot of years as a member of the romance writers of America. And I went to a lot of workshops through them. And in writing those novels, I learned a lot about a know point of view and how to, how to create a scene how to put a book. To a novel together that, that w I, those were my training novels, essentially, but after I'd finished the second one, I thought, you know, I want to write something that has a little bit more grit to it. And I've read historical novels all my life ever since I was in high school. And so I started looking around my antenna were up and that's when I bumped into Emma and decided to write her story. I thought, this is it. This is the story I want to tell.

Susanne 15:15

Yeah. it's, it is obviously her story, but going back to this whole point of view thing, you have a lot of point of view characters I do. and of those point of view characters, I know, I think you say in the beginning, and I can't remember, I'm sorry. I had them on Kindle, which is always hard to go back and flip back to wherever and audio book for the first one. Of those point of view characters were any completely invented or were there, or were they all historical characters that you knew more or less? There were

Pat 15:46

very few invented characters and they were all minor characters. So in the first two books, Emma ethelred Athelstan, who's the King's eldest son and Where the four viewpoint characters and they were all real people and they were the viewpoint characters in the second book as well. And then in the third book, I added Edmund Ironside who would become King of England and Knute because I wanted to get inside their heads before we'd seen them only through someone else's eyes I needed to get inside their heads for the third book. So they are They are viewpoint characters and they're all historical figures. How,

Susanne 16:29

how was it the difference between being something I always think of being inside a woman's head, as opposed to a man's head. What sort of psychic adjustments do you make for

Pat 16:42

that? I try to become my sons. I have two strapping sons. and so I, I get my head back into their way of looking at the world or trying to and I think the hardest was ethelred because he is so. Dour uh, character and gruff and harsh. and I remember I would go down into the kitchen after I'd been writing about ethelred and saying to my husband, don't talk to me. I'm in ethelred brain right now. I don't even say anything because I would just get in a bad mood whenever I had to be at the lead. And I loved riding L diver. she's my bad girl. And she was such

Susanne 17:23

a good, bad girl. She was a good, bad girl. Absolutely. But and then what I love though, is that you, even though FL red was just not a, here's a piece of work. He, his. his visions are his haunting, the ghost that haunted him. Where did that come from? And how did you decide to incorporate that?

Pat 17:45

one of the things that William of mom's Barry writes in his Chronicle is that ethelred was haunted by the shade of his brother demanding terribly the price of blood. Yeah.

Susanne 18:02

So I, you

Pat 18:03

know, I immediately, I really thought, okay, this gives me license to have a ghost and the ghost. For me, I thought, I had him very lightly and the very first iteration of the first manuscript of shadow on the crown and my agent came back and said, we want more ghost please. And so I added more, I thought people are going to get sick of this ghost. But, and I had to make his appearance different every single time, over three books. So different things happen. You don't want to repeat yourself, although there's always this sense of coldness that comes over him. And in my own mind, there was something physically wrong with ethelred when the ghost, whenever the ghost appeared and, someone said to me is there really a ghost or is it guilt? And my answer to that was in my mind, it's both. The ghost is there because of the guilt of ethelred because he took his brother's throne after his brother was murdered. so I, I got pretty comfortable with the ghost, although he appears much less in the third book than he does in the first two.

Susanne 19:09

you get the sense in the third book that Ethel read is really declining in ability and health and all that kind of stuff, and Stepping back from being very active and raining. And so somehow that was logical to me, but this whole ghost thing would also separate from him a little bit. So interesting. You say that about him being there? Possibly something physically wrong with him in your mind, but possibly almost, even in his, I was been doing some research for a nonfiction. Why a book that I'm pitching at the moment about women composers and I was looking into starting with Hildegard of Bingen and she is known for having had visions ever since she was three years old. And there's a modern Modern scholars believe that possibly she, what she had was migraines and that the migraines, because of the way she describes the effects, the visual effects, or very much the way migraines can manifest. So I thought that was fascinating, So I wonder how many mystics or how many people who saw things like ghosts were actually going through some physiological. Manifestation of of a change in their bodies. So that's interesting, the book

Pat 20:30

that I read and I'd have to run over to grab the grab it, to see the the author called hallucinations and it's written by a doctor and he talks about hallucinations and the physical interaction between having hallucinations and what's going on. And and so that's where I got the idea of. Of him being sick bathroom, having something wrong with him that's why this was happening.

Susanne 20:54

yeah. absolutely. let's talk a little bit about Al Givat, who I also really loved and I think w. What I was really impressed with is you do a good job of making her kind of despicable, but likable at the same time. how did you think about her as a character and how did you use her? I mean, she's just such a nice little thread running through all three books.

Pat 21:19

we know very little about El Godiva. We know that and actually her, or she would have been known as L G view of North Hampton. that's her old English moniker and I changed the towel guy, but which is a more modern Rendition of and I chose that name because it sounds like Godiva and I would always tell people it's like Godiva and the idea being that there would be this. mental equation with lady Godiva, with Godiva chocolates and El Guiver. So you have these different that, that I wanted to have subliminally happening in the reader's mind, whether it does or not. I don't know, but it certainly happened in mind. Anyway. we don't know much about her. We know that connote married her at some point and that they had two sons. And they may have had a daughter and that's it. And she comes into the story historically much, much, much later back in the, in, in 10 30, 10 35. So knowing this, knowing that and. At 10 35, she's promoting her son for King after Knute dies. And Emma is promoting her son for King after Knute dies. And so they were in conflict in 10 35. I wanted them to be in conflict in my story right at the beginning. So I brought L guy, but in, right at the start that she is in shadow on the crown, that she is a seductress. And that she has having a thing with Ethel red at the same time that he's just married. Emma. And so that gave me sort of, you know, at one point I have think of Al GABA is a coin that you flip and always ends up right side down and dark side up. And in, in a way I thought of Emma and AlgaVia as two sides of the same coin, they were both powerful women. They were both determined. they were both ambitious for their children. and one was dark and one was light. And so I used her in that way all the way through, but I knew that her relationship with connote was going to have to go to heck. So I, and I wanted that to be her, I didn't want them to actually be in love. I wanted them to be yeah, connected sexually and. As part of an Alliance, but I didn't want that to be the message. A lot of connotes life. I wanted it to be Emma. Yeah. I threw another guy in there that Al Gaia is having a relationship with. So that was happening mostly in the the second book. No,

Susanne 24:01

it's so satisfying in the third book when they then Emma and Knute finally get together, even though of course it's kind of forced on Emma really isn't it's, which is, and there was a lot of that, of course women were pawns in the power struggles as they were all through European history. The other thing though, is the awful things people did and the violence and everything. How was it, how did you manage writing about that? About the battles and the murders and things like that?

Pat 24:36

the battles were tough because I'm not a. I don't have a background in that. and I just tried to be logical about it, what would they do? What they feel, what might this happen? and, you know, I'm reading a book now that's set in a much later time and it's battle, battle, battle, battle, and it's much more visually. gruesome than anything that I write. In fact, one of the things I think about my books is that if you compare them to what probably actually happened, they're pretty tame. I think it was probably a lot worse. I have a pathologist neighbor and I would talk to him about wombs and about illnesses that might've happened in that time. Of course, doing some research. into that because a lot of people have studied that the impact of an arrow on going through armor and into a body chain, mail, and into a body. so it's just a matter of bearing down and saying this has to happen. So how am I going to make it happen?

Susanne 25:32

Yeah. And I understand that because of course in my 12th century thing with the crusades and the people being burned at the stake, you just go there because you have to, and then I remember somebody reading a scene that wasn't even that bad, that I didn't think it was even that bad and responding and saying, Oh, that was really hard to read. I could, you know, but it was. And yeah, I think there is this slight disconnect we have to be a little bit outside of of the violence and everything, and just get on with it.

Pat 26:04

and I didn't want to focus on that because my story is the women's story. I really wanted to focus on what was happening to the women, which no one writes about in that, in the histories. Oh yeah.

Susanne 26:15

They're left out. Isn't that the truth. Isn't that how, yeah. And that is, I think one of the big things that has spurred so much historical fiction is trying to resurrect characters or call attention to people who were probably a very important part of history, but not recorded, not taught in the schools as it were. so did you, were you a historian yourself? What is your background? My

Pat 26:44

background is who was an English major? I have a master's degree in English and I was a high school English teacher, but I liked English history. I took a class in English history when I was in college. And even as a teacher, I, there were certain times when we would be reading Shakespeare or something, and I would go through the history. probably bore my students to death, still trying to get them to understand all the different Kings in the relationships between one King, another and why this guy was doing that. and then when I was when I was working on the book, I took a class at, this was wonderful. I went to Cambridge university in England and did a two week course on titled King X, Queens, and biking's, which was. From the time of Alfred, the great to Edward, the confessor, which is exactly what I needed. And that was really a dream come true for me to do. That was it was fascinating.

Susanne 27:37

Yeah, I would love to be able to just go and take a bunch of courses on all sorts of different things. But so is there anything I haven't asked you about your trilogy about this book that you want to bring up or discuss?

Pat 27:51

I can't think of anything. You've been pretty. Yeah. You've covered everything pretty well, especially it's important that that readers understand that they can jump into this book and not feel that I have to read the first two. Once

Susanne 28:06

they've read this book, they'll want to go back and read the first.

Pat 28:10

Yeah. So that's about it.

Susanne 28:12

Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you and I will put in all this sort of links and things like that. So people can go rush off and buy the book. Oh, there's a, is there an audio book? Is there going to be one

Pat 28:26

it's out there already? There's an available and Rachel Atkins who recorded it in England, did a wonderful job. Wonderful job. She's really good.

Susanne 28:38

Excellent. Excellent. I've read the book, but I also sometimes get books on audio just to listen to them when they're good performances. Yeah. So I do that too. Yeah. So just last thing is something else coming along? Are you writing another book? Are you going to,

Pat 28:55

I haven't made any decisions about that yet. I've been trying, you know, I've been trying to decide if I want to write another book about Emma, because I keep getting. People saying what about the questions next? Yeah. What about the rest of the story? And there's not a lot of conflict in the rest of the story. I don't think until we get to the end of her second marriage. So I have to think about that and how I want to do that. But I do have ideas about a lot of what went on in those years following her second marriage. So we'll see, I don't know.

Susanne 29:27

Well, if you do, I'm sure I will grab it and read it. It is, I can take another six years. We'll say, Oh and then I think that's something people do. You don't understand, people who write romance, genre fiction or whatever they can, if they're setting it in a place where they either, it's a place, they go back to a lot. So they know the setting and whatever, or it's in the present. It doesn't carry the weight of the research you have to do. It's hard to write a good historical novel, even in a year. There are people who do it, it's hard. so yeah, so we just have to be patient.

Pat 30:05

Exactly.

Susanne 30:08

All right. Well, thank you so much. And I will let you know when this is live and we can all share it all over the place.

Pat 30:17

Thank you so much, Suzanne. It's just been really great talking to you.

Susanne 30:22

Thank you.