I mention him attending service. He references the Bible. He thinks various thoughts that are moral on a philosophical, if not religious level, and he’s all too aware of hypocrisy in others when it comes about.
At one point when Mark is very troubled about how he feels about Jessica, he goes on a walk. In the first draft of this book, I actually explicitly mentioned that he prayed. It had nothing to do with whether I think that people should or shouldn’t pray; it was simply that I felt that Mark as a character would. My editor thought this would put some people off, and frankly, I had already felt uneasy about it. I changed the section so that Mark recited to himself lines from a prayer in the 1830s Book of Common Prayer.
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Mark’s Name
Q. So what exactly is Mark’s full Bible-verse name?
A. It isn’t spelled out in the book, because it is, in fact, a very gruesome verse! Mark does refer to it by chapter and verse. It is Mark 9:47.
And that reads: “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.” Nice, right? (I use the King James Version because that’s what his mother would have used.)
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Mark’s Ring
Q. On the original cover for Unclaimed, Mark and Jessica are wearing matching rings, ones that are like the ring Mark is wearing in the book. How did you get the art department to do that?
A. Sadly, it didn’t happen that way. The first draft of Unclaimed had no ring in it. I sent it to my editor. I was working on revisions when she sent me the cover art.
I think my response was something close to, “Wait, why are they wearing big honking matching rings? Can we Photoshop those out?” The answer was no.
So I gave Mark a ring in the book. It actually was a good solution to a problem with that first draft—that Jessica needed some proof that she’d seduced Mark, and taking his underwear would be (a) gross and (b) not very good proof.
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Smite and Mark’s relationship
Q. Why does Mark go to Smite instead of Ash?
A. Because when it comes down to it, Smite knows Mark better than Ash does. And because Mark has a puppy for Smite.
I don’t approve of the random gift of a dog—dogs are a lot of work, and giving someone a puppy is kind of like giving them a sinkhole of need and attention—but Mark definitely knows Smite well enough to know that what he needs is a puppy.
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Touching on sensitive topics
Q. Jessica’s story touches on some extremely sensitive topics—not least, the forced abortion that Weston inflicted on her. Did you ever balk at addressing these things?
A. I have wanted to write about a courtesan heroine who had an abortion forced on her—the idea that someone would feel that he owned her so much that he could do that to her, and what she’d have to do to get out from under him and reclaim herself…that just really worked for me. So, no, I didn’t balk at it.
I was worried I would have difficulties getting that past my editor, but she didn’t even blink at that.
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On Lancelot, Guinevere, and knights
Q. What’s the deal with all this Lancelot/Guinevere stuff?
A. This book has repeated references to the Lancelot/Guinevere legend. In the enhanced edition of Unveiled, I mentioned that the story was intended to pay homage to Arthurian legend. Actually, the entire series is. In some versions of Arthurian legend, Lancelot was a virgin…up until he and Guinevere fell in disastrous love. Obviously, this is not a retelling of Lancelot/Guinevere, because it is a romance, and that story does not have a particularly happy ending. Or a particularly great middle. The beginning isn’t awesome, either. But still, this was the general gist of it.
But as always, I wanted to muck it up a bit. Mark is a literal knight, but Jessica is the one who is an extraordinary marksman. And it’s not a physical danger that Mark rescues Jessica from, but the emotional danger of depression.
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The Duel
Q. Be honest. How long had you wanted to end a story with the heroine dueling for the hero’s honor?
A. Oh, I wish I could lie and say that I always intended it. But I pulled up the synopsis that I put together for this book before I had written it, and this is what I said was going to happen:
Together, along with John, Mark and Jessica hunt down Dinah and Edmund Dalrymple in the inn where they’ve taken a room for the night. Dinah is confused and scared. She thinks she has no choice but to do as Edmund says. After a scuffle, in which Jessica shoots Edmund, Tolliver agrees to marry Dinah and her reputation is saved.
In other words, I hadn’t planned this ending at all.
Er. You’ll notice from that snippet from the synopsis that in the original version of the story, the antagonist was going to be Edmund Dalrymple. (See all that antagonism set up between Mark and Edmund in Unveiled? It was there for a reason! A reason that I abandoned because the book just did not work as well with Edmund as the villain. Too much unnecessary involvement of Ash and Margaret.) And that Edmund was going to run off with Dinah—Dinah, by the way, is the rector’s daughter—and Tolliver was going to come along and save them, and Jessica was going to shoot Edmund, and is that complicated enough for you? You should be very glad I changed it, and now you see why.
Re-centering the backend of the plot around the romance meant that the confrontation with the newly renamed villain—Weston—had to be about Mark and Jessica. Not about someone else.
I wasn’t even trying for it. It’s just that once I got to that point in the rejiggered setup, it seemed natural. Why would Mark fight a duel for Jessica? Mark’s a terrible shot.
I know people might not believe me, but I don’t always set out to try and flip tropes. It’s just that sometimes I stub my toe against one and realize that it just looks better flipped the other way around.
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Unraveled Enhanced Content
The Floating Harbor
The Floating Harbor: © David Jenkins
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Temple Church
Temple Church: © David Jenkins
The gate leading to Temple Church: © David Jenkins
When Miranda speculates that the spire of Temple Church was falling, I based that on a note from a guidebook. “This tower is now about four feet from the perpendicular,” George Pryce wrote in A Popular History of Bristol in 1861, “having increased three inches in about seventy years. Its leaning position and oscillatory motion has been noticed, in general terms, by many writers. ‘When the bells that are in it sound, it is so moved this and that way, that at length by the too great and frequent shaking it has separated from the body of the church, and has made a chink from the very top of the roof to the foundation.’”
It hasn’t fallen yet, but Miranda’s idle speculation was shared by many—especially since the ringing of the bells would set the tower swaying.
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What is Hope’s full name?
Q. Mrs. Turner gave all her children Bible verses for names. What was Hope’s full name?
A. This one was actually originally in Unraveled but then got cut because it had nothing to do with the story.
Hope’s full name is First Corinthians 13:13: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
(Note that all the Bible verses use the King James Version of the Bible because that is what they would have used at the time.)
She’s called Hope (rather than Faith or Charity) because at one point, when she was very young and misbehaving (Hope often misbehaved), her mother told her that she had no faith in her, and was not in charity with her behavior. All that remained was hope that there was a chance for improvement. So hope is what stuck.
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The Bristol Bridge
The S.S. Great Britain: © David Jenkins
This is a place reference that is (at best) ambiguous to modern readers. Today, people sometimes use the word “Bristol Bridge” to refer to the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which was actually under construction at the time this book took place, but was not open for business. At the time, the “Bristol Bridge” referred to the bridge that crossed the Floating Harbour at Victoria Street.
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A note on Richard Dalrymple
Q. Richard Dalrymple turns out to be a pretty decent guy, but he spends a lot of time doing some really, really jerky things. Was it all just for the dukedom?
A. Think about this from Richard’s perspective. Smite used to be his best friend. And back when they were friends, Richard told Smite his two big secrets—namely, that his parents’ marriage was bigamous, and that he’s gay. In Unveiled, Richard believes that Smite told Ash about the first one. And if he tattled on the first, why not the second?
Richard spends Unveiled in a tearing panic. If he becomes the duke, he can’t be charged with a felony in ordinary court, and the House of Lords is probably not going to charge him with his proclivities so long as he is discreet. But that’s no longer a possibility. In Unveiled, he earnestly believes that Ash’s choice to challenge and void his parents’ marriage was the first skirmish in a battle—one that ends with Ash taking the title and charging Richard with criminal sodomy.
From his perspective, he’s fighting for his life.
I couldn’t get into any of this in Unveiled because Richard doesn’t trust anyone enough to tell the story. The only other person who knows the details is Smite, and Smite is singularly closemouthed. So this is something that just got reserved for future books.
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A note on Smite and Ash
Q. Why does Smite refuse to go on a walk with Ash in Unveiled? Is he just being a jerk?
A. Ash asks Smite to walk along the banks of the river. Water makes Smite feel sick. Ash interprets Smite’s dismay as reluctance to spend time with him, and Ash backs off.
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The Last Arthurian Legend
Q. So if Ash/Margaret is the tale of Arthur, and Mark/Jessica is the tale of Lancelot, who is Smite?
A. Smite is King Pellinore: Hopeless quest, beast he must continue to pursue even though no he’ll never catch it. Has a nice dog. There’s a line in this book where Smite says that he wishes the quest had not come to him; at some point in edits I realized that this was very reminiscent of Frodo in the Lord of the Rings.
I thought about deleting it. Then I decided against it.
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More about Richard
Q. What ultimately becomes of Richard Dalrymple? Would you ever consider writing about it?
A. I actually tried to write Richard’s story at some point, and didn’t get very far with it. I’m not sure why—probably because I was trying to write the wrong story, and also possibly because, for whatever reason, I tend to tell stories about women. It’s harder for me to write a story where a woman wasn’t a protagonist.
I always imagined that Richard eventually got to the point where he was comfortable in his own skin and that he found someone who could appreciate him and challenge him in the ways that he most needed.
When I attempted to write his story, I tried to pair him with Miranda’s friend, Jeremy, from Unraveled. Yes, Jeremy was smitten with George in Unraveled, but I really suspect that their relationship wouldn’t survive much past the end of the story. “Yes, I let you suffer in captivity for close to a month, but come on, my mom was holding you, what else was I supposed to do?” does not make for a good relationship, no matter how earnest you are.
That didn’t work. There was just not a good story there between the two of them.
But if you want, you can imagine them running into each other and Richard being all huffy and stuck on how important he is and Jeremy not taking him seriously until Richard finally learned to laugh at himself.
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The S.S. Great Britain
The S.S. Great Britain: © David Jenkins
The S.S. Great Britain, after a lifetime of service, was returned to Bristol’s Floating Harbour, where it has been revitalized and serves as a tourist attraction today. I’ve actually used the silhouette of the S.S. Great Britain in the Floating Harbour as the backdrop for the cover for the stand-alone version of Unraveled.
At the time the S.S. Great Britain was built, it was the largest steamship of her time, and it was massive—so massive that it couldn’t fit out of the locks of the Floating Harbour.
What this meant was that an early photography enthusiast took a picture of it in 1844—believed to be not only the first picture of the S.S. Great Britain—but the first photograph of a ship, period.
The S.S. Great Britain in 1844: photograph by Talbot.
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The relationship between the brothers
Q. Throughout the entire series, the brothers’ relationships with each other go through some ups and downs as they deal with their past, before being brought to a resolution in the final book. Did that overarching plotline affect your process at all when writing the series?
A. I always knew I wanted to write a book about brothers. And I didn’t want them to be brothers who hated each other, because hatred for siblings is not something I think I could write well. But I also didn’t want to write a book about brothers who loved each other and never had issues, because I don’t think that’s the way things work, either.
If you really love someone, you end up comfortable enough with them to get mad at them. No matter how you slice it, there are jealousies, anxieties, things that never went right. So I wanted to write a book about brothers who loved each other—who would do anything for each other—and who weren’t okay with each other.
I wanted them to make fun of each other. I wanted them to hurt each other. And I wanted to make sure the reader knew how much they loved each other.
The way that it ended up falling out wasn’t exactly how I planned, but I’m really happy with the result, and hope you are, too.
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Author’s Notes
For Unclaimed: SHEPTON MALLET IS A REAL TOWN, but the people I describe in it are entirely the product of my imagination.
In order to write a story with actual conflict and obstacles to overcome, I had to create some town residents who were less than perfect. My apologies in particular to the rectors of Shepton Mallet, who have absolutely nothing in common with the fictional Mr. Lewis.
Luckily for me, the reality of Shepton Mallet was much, much friendlier. From the Shepton Mallet Tourist Information and Heritage Centre, to the workers at Dungeon Farm who helped me find my way, the people I met were universally kind and helpful. (The only exception to the “kind and friendly” label was a herd of cows who apparently hadn’t been informed that they were supposed to be herbivores and attempted to eat me. Bad cows.)
Even though the bones of this story are fiction, it’s woven around bits of historical fact. For instance, there was no MCB (as if you couldn’t guess that part), but Queen Victoria really did get the silk for her wedding dress from Shepton Mallet. Mark’s father never really exploited anyone, but the workers in Shepton Mallet burned factories years in advance of the Luddite movement. The Shambles are, in fact, called Shambles, and the ones that were in the market square in 1841 dated from medieval times. The market is still held around the Market Cross on Friday, and the cheese is delicious. I confess that I exaggerated the potency of the apple brandy, although it was fun to try it in the name of research.
I’ve done my best to try to capture a little bit of the feel of Shepton Mallet in this book, but there’s no substitute for the real thing. Visit, if you have the chance. I highly recommend it.
If you’re from Shepton Mallet and you’re wondering why I’ve renamed the River S
heppey, I haven’t—it didn’t get its current name until the Ordinance Survey conducted in the late nineteenth century.
Finally, I did my best to capture the countryside, but the truth is that Shepton Mallet and Somerset today are very different than they were in early Victorian times. This is because modern machinery has obviated the need to use waterpower, and so the millraces and leats that would have been widespread back then have fallen into disuse. Modern agriculture has also drained most of the bogs, the marshes and the wet places; in 1841, drainage techniques were being applied for the first time. I’ve done my best to reconstruct what the countryside would have looked like, but the historical accounts I’ve found are incomplete. I had to use my imagination.
For Unraveled: THREE YEARS AGO, I wanted to write a series about an insane mother who had a powerful effect on all three of her children—but a different effect on each one. I got the first hint of where Smite had come from when I read Asylum Denied by David Ngaruri Kenney. In that book, Kenney describes some of his experiences in his home country of Kenya. A particularly vivid image was his description of standing in solitary confinement in water. When I read that, I set the book down and said aloud, “That’s Smite.”
The rest of the Turner series formed itself around that moment. I had known that I wanted Smite to be a magistrate in Bristol; he must therefore have grown up in Somerset. I found Shepton Mallet by searching for floods in Somerset, and Mark’s book was born from that. Ash became the brother who escaped the worst of the torment and who felt the weight of survivor’s guilt.
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