Another of the Hallets’ neighbours, an Acadian refugee known as “French John,” has echoes in my character Pierre Boudreau.
Big-Headed Tom—whose last name was Stephenson—was a real-life character I stumbled across by chance while reading old issues of The Caledonian Mercury newspaper, which on January 13, 1762, published a lengthy extract of a letter from an officer on board the Pembroke (a ship captained at the time, coincidentally, by John Wheelock, younger brother of Captain Anthony Wheelock) relating “the character and adventures of a very strange fellow . . . commonly known by the name of Big-headed Tom,” with details of Tom’s piracy and hatred of the Spanish.
Captain del Rio will not be a complete stranger to my readers, as his equally fictional father played a prominent role in my earlier novel, A Desperate Fortune. And his first mate, Juan Ramírez, although fictional as well, is nonetheless inspired by all the Spanish mariners caught up in the disgraceful so-called Slave Conspiracy and trials that took so many lives so needlessly in New York City in 1741.
Every now and then, while reading for research, I come across voices of good people—quiet ones, usually—swept to the corners of history, forgotten and overlooked, when they deserve to be heard and remembered. Before I had finished the first of his letters, I knew Captain Anthony Wheelock had one of those voices.
Born and raised in the parish of Westminster, London, England, he seems to have inherited his “strong passion for doing what seems to me right” from his father, Bryan Wheelock, a Clerk of the Board of Trade in London, who was once briefly dismissed from that position in retaliation for testifying honestly when questioned by the House of Lords about some secret letters he had seen. Bryan Wheelock, thanks to family connections, had also travelled with Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a highly respected and influential philosopher who believed that all men had an inner moral sense of right and wrong, that “the love of doing good” was “of itself, a good and right inclination,” and that “Prejudice is a mist, which in our journey through the world often dims the brightest and obscures the best of all the good and glorious objects that meet us on our way.”
Bryan spent the last year of the earl’s life with him in Naples, Italy, and was with him when he died there. It’s my belief that Bryan chose to name his firstborn son in memory of the earl, since in my research of the Wheelock family up to then, I’d found no other “Anthony.”
Anthony Wheelock, born on the 31st of December, 1716, followed a different path from his father. In the 1740s the records show him as a Captain of Marines on board various ships, eventually in command of his own Company, but by the summer of 1759 he was in America, a self-described “late Captain of the 27th Inniskilling Regiment of Foot,” being sent by General Amherst to New York to be in charge of the French prisoners.
His letters to Amherst reveal him as a man of great compassion and integrity, speaking up often in defence of others’ rights. When Amherst failed to pay the mandated provision money to the colonists housing and feeding the prisoners, Wheelock objected to the hardships it would cause. Amherst relented, and paid. Wheelock also argued on behalf of the Canadian prisoners who, in his view, should have been allowed to return to their homes and families after the war, instead of being forced to go to France. It clearly bothered him.
In the early 1770s he served as the crown agent for the British colony of East Florida, and eventually returned home to London, where he died in 1781, leaving everything to his son Jeffrey, and his “dear wife Jane”—the former Jane, or Jeanne, de Joncourt, whom he’d met and lost his heart to while he had been working in New York.
They married in 1761, a year after the events of this novel, and finding the entry of that marriage in the registers of the French Church of Saint-Esprit at New York was, for me, a happy discovery.
Jane’s late father, Peter de Joncourt, a merchant and tavern-keeper, had served for years as an “Interpreter of the French language” by commission from the Lieutenant Governor of New York, so I passed this duty on to Jane, particularly since Wheelock in his letters often wrote of needing somebody to help him write in French.
And since the de Joncourts had also taken care of the captured French commander Baron Dieskau a few years earlier, when he’d been brought to New York gravely wounded, I decided they would be good hosts for my own wounded sergeant in this novel.
The sergeant is a composite of two real-life men, one whose name I’ve not yet learned. The unnamed soldier who was robbed and beaten on the road to Hempstead was the subject of a letter Captain Wheelock wrote to General Amherst. Wheelock was dismayed the man had not received the justice he felt such a crime deserved. In spite of my searches, I’ve since found no further references to this man, just as I could find no information on another man I came across—a sergeant of the Troupes de la Marine whose death was noted in the registers of the French Church of Saint-Esprit at New York City as: Jacques le Roy, dit La Réjouie, prisoner of war.
So I decided to combine them.
A word about La Réjouie: in French North America, men joining the army were given nicknames, or “dit” names (pronounced “dee” for the French word that, in this sense, means “called.”) These “dit” names could refer to anything from the place a person came from, as with Depoitiers (of Poitiers) and Lavallee (the valley), to a physical descriptor like Le Grand (the large) or La Jeunesse (the young), or to an aspect of their character, like Belhumeur (good-natured) or La Pensée, (the thoughtful one).
Captain Louis de Preissac de Bonneau was very real, with a dashing personality that leaps easily out of his letters and seems to have made him a favourite of the ladies. When he was taken prisoner the first time, in 1758, one officer in Quebec wrote to his commander, “My wife will weep for her friend Bonneau.” He was well known in New York, and I’ve kept his movements and activities there as true and accurate as possible.
When Fort Niagara fell to the British in August, 1759, several French soldiers and officers remained unaccounted for. One of these, according to the records, was named “La Noye.” And Wheelock, writing to Amherst about the Canadian officers, noted, “La Noue a Lieutenant has a settlement in Canada . . .”
That was all my imagination needed to create my fictional character of Jean-Philippe de Sabran de la Noye, whose career was pieced together from the histories of several real-life Canadian officers in the Troupes de la Marine. I gave him an imagined seigneurie on the bank of the St. Charles River, not far from the very real General Hospital, which still stands, and where a poignant monument commemorates those who died there in the Seven Years’ War, watched over by the tomb of Montcalm.
There is no town of Millbank on the north shore of Long Island, but after you’ve read this book, the real village of Roslyn may have a familiar feel. The Wilde farm occupies land not dissimilar to Garvies Point Museum and Preserve, although I’ve taken the liberty of placing a fictional house there that has a lot in common with the Raynham Hall Museum, found in Oyster Bay. And there’s a strong resemblance between the real-life Mosquito Cove, near Sea Cliff, and this book’s Snug Cove—a name I borrowed from the cove of the same name on Campobello Island, where another of my ancestors, Colonel Christopher Hatch, owned two houses and a wharf.
That same ancestor—a United Empire Loyalist who left New York for Canada in the wake of the Revolutionary War—brought with him at least one slave: Violet Tucker.
I have no record of her being granted freedom. While the British abolished the slave trade in 1807, slavery itself continued until the Slavery Abolition Act came into effect in 1834 for the greater part of the Empire, and for the whole of it in 1843.
Violet married Rueben Alexander in 1792, when she was thirty-seven, and together they raised a family of several children, and when the 1851 census was taken she was still alive, at the age of ninety-six.
But a Pictorial History of St. Andrews, drawn and written by Frances Wren in 1937, claimed that Violet “could remember as a little girl in Africa when the slave shi
p came and took her away.”
That always stayed with me.
The character of Violet in this book is in her memory.
Phyllis is also based on a woman who actually lived. Sometimes, in my research, I find people I just feel are reaching out to me. They take hold of my heart, somehow, and I just can’t forget them.
In my reading for this book, I came across this entry in the Minutes of the Coroner’s Proceedings for New York:
Sunday, October 22d, 1758:
Having received information that one Louder a taylor in this city had starved his wench so that she died I made enquiry about the same but could make nothing more of it than what is contained in the following deposition—viz:
Susanna Roome wife of Cornelius Roome of the said city feltmaker being sworn according to law deposeth & saith that about five weeks past a Negro wench named Phillis was committed to the gaol of this city on suspicion of poisoning her master one Lowder a taylor who lives in the house with the deponent that James Mills the gaolor and undersherif came & desired the said Lowder to take her away she being taken sick and discharged from thence, that her said master Lowder then confined her in a small room in the garret having a chain round one of her arms made fast to the partition of the aforesaid room that he gave her suppon [a sort of cornmeal mush] to eat that the deponent was informed by the girl the meal was full of worms and the wench could not eat it that the deponent then gave her tea and other things to nourish her at two severall times that when her master discovered it he was very angry that he then made the room close so that the deponent could not farther help her that she called for drink from ten a clock one morning till three a clock in the afternoon, that she was confined in the aforesaid room almost all the time from her coming out of gaol till ffryday Saturday and Sunday last that she believes the said wench had suppon enough to suffice nature.
Sworn the 22d of October 1758 before me
John Burnet Coroner
That entry brought tears to my eyes and made me angry. It still does. And while I agree with the wonderful historical novelist Beverly Jenkins that there can be no happy endings in slavery, I wanted to honour and recognize Phyllis the best way I knew how to, in this novel.
Angélique, while entirely fictional, represents the many people, both black and Indigenous, who were held as slaves in French and English Canada, and about whom I was never taught at school.
In the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, entered into the public domain in 2015, the commissioners state:
The reconciliation process is not easy. It asks those who have been harmed to revisit painful memories and those who have harmed others—either directly or indirectly—to be accountable for past wrongs.
It’s an ongoing process, for all of us. But as a writer, I also feel strongly that, as the commissioners promise, “The arts help to restore human dignity and identity in the face of injustice.”
And that’s what I’ve tried to do.
A Note of Thanks
I owe a debt of gratitude to Harriet Gerard Clark, Executive Director of Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay, New York, for allowing me to tag along with her to bring me up to speed on what had changed (and what had stayed the same) since I worked as a curator.
I could not have written Juan, Phyllis, or Violet without the expert guidance of Beverly Jenkins, just as I could not have written Sam without the generous help of John Moses. I’m beyond grateful to them both, and to Jesse Thistle and Shiloh Walker for casting a critical eye over Sam’s scenes. If any mistakes remain, after their efforts, it’s entirely my own fault.
Thanks to Sarah Callejo for correcting my Spanish and refining the voices of Captain del Rio and Juan, and to Jean Alix and Danièle Coulombe of Le Château Frontenac in Québec City, for going above and beyond to assist me in researching scenes that, although they didn’t, in the end, make it into this book, may well find their way into a future one.
Thanks also to Rob Hutchinson, honorary contractor in charge of my fictional Wilde House restoration project, and to Bobby Watt—whom I first met nearly thirty years ago when I was a young museum assistant and he was the mason in charge of our building’s restoration—for taking time, as he did then, to answer all my questions. My stonemason character, Willie McKinney, is named for Bobby’s father.
To my mother, who from the very first has been my most demanding editor, and to Laurie Grassi and Nita Pronovost of Simon & Schuster Canada, and Deb Werksman of Sourcebooks, my thanks for their hard work in drawing the best from both me and the story.
Thank you to Marty Karlow, for being an exceptional copy editor.
To those who gave me help whose names I didn’t think to ask, and those who helped but whom I have forgotten to acknowledge here, please know I’m in your debt.
This book took longer to write than intended, and I’d like to say a special thank you to my publishers—Simon & Schuster in Canada, and Sourcebooks in the United States—and to everyone who works there, from Kevin Hanson and Dominique Raccah on down the line, through all the many people and departments without whom my books would never see the light of day, for giving me their understanding and support and, above all, the gift of time, to write the book the way it wanted to be written.
To my wonderful agents, Felicity Blunt and Shawna McCarthy, my thanks for their loyalty, love, and belief, and for carrying me through a difficult time.
And to all the librarians, booksellers, bloggers, and readers who give my books life—thank you so much for waiting. I’m glad I can finally share Bellewether with you. I hope you enjoy it.
About the Author
© JACQUES DU TOIT
A former museum curator, SUSANNA KEARSLEY brings her own passion for research and travel to her novels, weaving modern-day suspense with historical adventure. Her award-winning books have been published in translation in more than twenty countries. She lives east of Toronto.
www.susannakearsley.com
@SusannaKearsley
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ALSO BY SUSANNA KEARSLEY
A Desperate Fortune
The Firebird
The Rose Garden
The Winter Sea
Every Secret Thing
Season of Storms
Named of the Dragon
The Shadowy Horses
The Splendour Falls
Mariana
Simon & Schuster Canada
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Susanna Kearsley
Epigraph by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Household Poems (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 66-67.
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This Simon & Schuster Canada edition April 2018
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[email protected] Interior design by Lewelin Polanco
Cover Image: Mark Owen / Arcangel
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kearsley, Susanna, author
Bellewether / Susanna Kearsley.
Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-5011-1654-4 (softcover).—
ISBN 978-1-5011-1656-8 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8571.E37B45 2018
C813'.54 C2017-906688-9 C2017-907232-3
ISBN 978-1-5011-1654-4
ISBN 978-1-5011-1656-8 (ebook)
Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether
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