By all accounts, Ellen Terry’s Lady Macbeth was one of the finest in history. John Singer Sargent’s monumental 1890 painting of her in her blue beetle-wing costume is one of the treasures of the Tate Britain. The original gown is housed in Terry’s cottage of Smallhythe Place, in Kent, now run by the National Trust. She was a friend and colleague of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, but her letter to Monsieur Superbe Homme is my forgery.
Beerbohm Tree’s 1916 film of Macbeth is one of the great lost productions both of Shakespeare and of silent-era Hollywood. A few still photographs survive; it is from these that I took the descriptions of set and costume.
This book owes more than usual to the heroic ministrations of Brian Tart, my editor and publisher at Dutton; his assistant Jessica Horvath; and my agent Noah Lukeman. Together, they nursed and prodded it—and me—through a writer’s block of cursed proportion; all that is good about this book owes its existence to them. Thanks, too, to David Shelley, Thalia Proctor, and Sphere for their patience and speed.
I had the great good fortune to have advice and help from numerous experts while researching places, people, and practices for this book. I would like to give special thanks to Wiccan priestesses Ashleen O’Gaea and Carol Garr, along with their covens, for their openness and generosity.
In Scotland, Helen Bradburn, Cailleach of the 2008 Samhuinn fire festival in Edinburgh, gave me invaluable insight into the workings of that spectacular celebration. Colin Campbell, a photographer with a fine eye for the Scottish landscape, along with his wife, Linda, and dog Cal, got me out to Loch Bruiach on a silent, snowy November afternoon. Jamie and Karen Sinclair gave me the great gift of a family paper on the history of the real King Macbeth, as well as the loan of their collection of books on Dunsinnan and its environs while I was in the area, traipsing up and down the hill. Inspector Paddy Buckley-Jones of the Tayside Police kindly enlightened me on some details of police procedure; any irregularities in police behavior in this book are my fault, not his.
In London, Chris Green, house manager; Paul Rotchell, assistant manager; and John Fitzsimmons, theater manager, all ensured that I learned what I needed to know about Her Majesty’s Theatre; Chris gave me a much-appreciated tour of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s dome room. Jamie de Courcey served as my eyes and ears at the British Museum at times when I could not drop in myself; Dr. Silke Ackermann, curator of the British Museum’s European Department, helped with the workings of the museum and its collections, John Dee’s mirror in particular. Christina Oakley Harrington and her staff at Treadwell’s Bookshop identified useful books on various occult subjects.
In New York, Sister Carol Finegan, director of institutional research at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, gave me a long and detailed tour of fonthill Castle in riverdale.
On the academic front, Professor Dan Donoghue of Harvard university’s English department undertook to translate some Shakespeare into Anglo-Saxon poetry and then transliterate it into runes. Chris Tabraham, principal historian for Historic Scotland, helped me with details of Edinburgh Castle and its environs as they would have been in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Stuart Ivinson, library assistant at the royal Armouries in Leeds, provided much-needed research on Anglo-Saxon and Norse knives and swords, and John Oliver, curator (fiction) of the BFI National Archive at the British film Institute enlightened me on material aspects of silent-era films.
Others who helped with various angles of research are: Ilana Addis, Martin Brueckner, Brian Schuyler, Bill Fetzer, John Alexander, Eric Baker, Bill Kapfer, René Andersen, Liz Stein, Lauren Galit, David Ira Goldstein, Nick Saunders, Louise Park, Bill Carrell, Laura Fulginiti, Phil Varney, Sandy and Brian Stearns, Jill Jorden Spitz, Stephanie Innes, Pamela Treadwell-Rubin, and Assistant Chief Kathleen Robinson and Crime Laboratory Superintendent Susan M. Shankles, both of the Tucson Police Department.
Charlotte Lowe and Ellen Grounds both read parts of the manuscript and gave encouraging feedback. Dave Grounds has a special and much-appreciated talent for listening to me wander through tangled thickets of plot and then cutting straight through the chaos with sensible suggestions. My mother, Melinda Carrell, and Kristen Poole remain two of my most trusted readers.
Without my husband, John Helenbolt, this book would never have seen the light of day. He and our son, Will, give me day-today proof that the world is indeed full of strange and wonderful magic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Lee Carrell holds her Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard university, as well as other degrees in English literature from Oxford and Stanford universities. She taught at Harvard university and directed Shakespeare for the Hyperion Theatre Company. Jennifer’s first thriller, Interred with Their Bones, is an international bestseller, translated into twenty-eight languages. She is also the author of The Speckled Monster, a work of historical nonfiction about battling smallpox at the beginning of the eighteenth century. She has written a number of articles for Smithsonian magazine.
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