Finding the Story Within the Walls of a House

Most historical novelists go looking for their stories. Mine came looking for me—through the walls of my own home. My husband Scott and I live in Selma, an early 19th-century historic manor in Leesburg, Virginia, that we pulled back from the edge of ruin. When we began, I had no idea the house would hand me my first novel. But that is exactly what it did.

(The Stories Inside Your Setting.)

Selma was built by General Armistead Mason, a United States senator who, in 1819, was shot dead in a duel by his hot-tempered young cousin. I went looking for the man who built my home and found a story I couldn’t ignore—two kinsmen, a quarrel that spiraled past the point of return, and a code of honor that demanded blood. That duel was the catalyst that inspired my writing career.

The deeper we dug into Selma’s walls, the more personal the past became. Restoring an old house is its own kind of research. Thieves had pried antique tiles from a dining-room fireplace, and beneath them we found initials etched into mortar more than a century before. Stripping a ruined ceiling, we uncovered the carved initials of the carpenters who had raised the beams—one of them an ancestor of mine. Following that thread through the genealogy, I learned that my great-great-great-great-grandfather had served as a captain under Armistead Mason in the War of 1812. The man who built my house had once commanded a man whose blood I carry. History, I was learning, circles back on itself in ways no outline could invent.

Houses keep their residents the way memory keeps the dead. Selma led me to a hot-tempered young lawyer named Jack McCarty, whose refusal to ever back down anchors my Fields of Honor series, beginning with my first book Masque of Honor and the series second installment Bargains of Fate. Powell Harrison—the soft-spoken Leesburg attorney at the heart of Veil of Doubt, drawn against his better judgment into defending a widow accused of poisoning her own children—is bound to Selma, too. His daughter lived within these walls from 1902 until she died here in 1945, in the room where I now sleep.

You cannot share a house with someone’s history and not grow curious about the life she lived, the father she loved, and the cases that made his name. That curiosity sent me into the court records, and the records led me to Jane Gray Wharton and General William Scott Ketchum, the twice-widowed soldier I fell for in the trial transcripts of The Grays of Truth. None of these people are household names. Each of them endured more than any ledger bothered to record. The history kept their names; I went looking for their humanity.

People assume historical fiction starts with history. In my experience, it starts with a person—usually one the world has all but forgotten: the young widow lost in grief, the farm boy conscripted into a war he never chose, the attorney who took the case no one else would. I have never written a novel because an event was important; history is crowded with important events that often make for terrible stories. What pulls me in is the figure standing at the edge of the frame, the one no monument remembers, who left behind little more than a name in a ledger and a few lines in a yellowed newspaper. My work is to find that person and write the story that the record stripped away.

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Once I begin to see a person instead of a name in the archives, the research changes. I stop collecting facts and start hunting for the wounds that shaped them. When were they born, and who raised them—or didn’t? How many siblings, spouses, and children did they bury before history thought to notice them? A man orphaned at age 10 sees the world differently than one who never was; a woman who has lost three children carries that grief into every room she enters. And no one is shaped by a single wound. The losses gather and layer—grief hardening into caution, want sharpening into ambition, an early betrayal teaching a child never to trust again—until they settle into a temperament. When I imagine the people I write about, I see the sum of those scars: how they learned to love, what they could never forgive, the lines they would die before crossing. That is where their true character lives.

Genealogy databases and old newspapers carry me the rest of the way, though not for the reasons people expect. I’m there less for the facts than for the atmosphere—the advertisements that reveal what a person could afford, the weather on the morning of a trial, the editorials that betray a town’s fears, the very words people used against one another. What I’m really after is the texture of a vanished day. I want a reader to stand where these people stood: to smell the tallow smoke and the river damp, to hear a carriage laboring over a muddy road or the scratch of a pen signing something that can never be unsigned, to taste the copper edge of fear in the seconds before a choice is made. Because nearly everyone I write about faced the same quiet, terrible reckoning—the thing that was right set against the thing that was easy, with everyone they loved hanging in the balance. They didn’t always choose well. And if we are honest, neither do we.

I think of facts as the bones of a story: They give it structure, but never a pulse. Giving a story a pulse has never meant reproducing the past exactly as it happened—that is the work of nonfiction. What I am after is harder to pin down: the spirit of the thing, the flesh and heartbeat and soul. The people I write about are never just characters to me. They were human beings, with dreams that came to nothing and fears no one wrote down, who made choices for reasons I will never fully understand. My job is to find the spirit of their stories and write them into novels you can’t put down.

That’s the truth waiting inside the dates and the dusty annals—and inside the walls of an old house. These were not simpler people living simpler lives; they loved and feared and faltered exactly as we do. History hands us their names. Story shows us their hearts—and, if I have done my work well—something of our own. I don’t write to learn what happened. I write to stand, for a few hundred pages, in the rooms these people once filled—and to discover how little distance there really is between their world and ours.

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