(The Boar King’s Honor Trilogy, Book 2)
By Nancy Northcott
THE BOAR KING’S HONOR TRILOGY
A wizard’s misplaced trust
A king wrongly blamed for murder
A bloodline cursed until they clear the king’s name
BOOK 2: THE STEEL ROSE
Amelia Mainwaring, a magically Gifted seer, is desperate to rescue the souls of her dead father and brother, who are trapped in a shadowy, wraith-filled land between life and death as the latest victims of their family curse. Lifting the curse requires clearing the name of King Richard III, who was wrongly accused of his nephews’ murder because of a mistake made by Amelia’s ancestor.
In London to seek help from a wizard scholar, Julian Winfield, Amelia has disturbing visions that warn of Napoleon Bonaparte’s escape from Elba and renewed war in Europe. A magical artifact fuels growing French support for Bonaparte. Can Amelia and Julian recover the artifact and deprive him of its power in time to avert the coming battles?
Their quest takes them from the crowded ballrooms of the London Season to the bloody field of Waterloo, demanding all of their courage, guile, and magical skill. Can they recover the artifact and stop Bonaparte? Or will all their hopes, along with Amanda’s father and brother, be doomed as a battle-weary Europe is once again engulfed in the flames of war?
The Steel Rose is the second book in the time-traveling, history-spanning fantasy series The Boar King’s Honor, from Nancy Northcott (Outcast Station, The Herald of Day).
How One Idea Became a Trilogy
by Nancy Northcott
Hi, Beatrice, and thanks for having me!
You asked about the inspiration behind The Steel Rose. It’s the second book of three, so some aspects of the story were dictated by the first book, The Herald of Day. It sets up the problem that runs through the trilogy, the efforts of the magically Gifted Mainwaring family to lift the blood curse an ancestor placed on their line.
In 1483, early in the reign of Richard III, Edmund Mainwaring used his Gifts to help agents of his liege lord, the Duke of Buckingham, sneak into and out of the Tower of London unobserved. Edmund didn’t know those agents’ mission was to kill the sons of the last king, Edward IV, who’ve become known as the Princes in the Tower. After Edward died, evidence came to light proving his marriage to his queen, Elizabeth Woodville, was bigamous. Their sons were thus ineligible to inherit. They posed no danger to the next legitimate male heir, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who was recognized by Parliament as Richard III.
Buckingham was also in the line of descent but with a lesser claim. If he wanted to seize the throne, eliminating anyone who might be considered to have a superior claim would be wise. The boys had been proclaimed bastards, but their father had been extremely popular. Why take the chance that his followers would prefer them, illegitimate or not, to Buckingham? He already planned a rebellion to remove Richard III and his superior claim.
I inserted the magic and my conjecture as to Buckingham’s possible motives. The rest is historical fact, though the proof of that earlier marriage to Lady Eleanor Butler has since disappeared. History also says the boys were last seen in the Tower in the autumn of 1483, shortly before Buckingham rebelled.
Whether or not Buckingham (or anyone else) murdered the boys is only conjecture. I find historian Matthew Lewis’s arguments in The Survival of the Princes in the Tower persuasive, and logic dictates that people would’ve noticed if the boys simply vanished one night. The Tower was a secure prison, yes, but it was also a royal residence with comfortable royal apartments. Edward’s sons had a household, people who could’ve attested to their sudden disappearance. Trotting those people out to point fingers at Richard III would’ve been in Henry VII’s best interests, especially when Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck made their own claims to the throne, saying they were the sons of Edward IV.
Henry VII implicitly blamed Richard III for the boys’ disappearance (“shedding innocent blood,” I believe the phrase was) and painted a successful propaganda portrait of him as a heinous monster. Yet no such public display of witnesses condemning him as a murderer was ever made.
The absence of established fact leaves room for fiction. So I decided, years ago, to write a book blaming Buckingham for the murders. I set it in the reign of Charles II, not long after bones thought to be those of the missing boys were discovered under a staircase in the Tower. That claim is problematic, but that’s not what this post is about.
This is the Tower of London, where the Mainwarings’ problems started:
Playing the What If… game, I wondered how someone could be murdered in a royal fortress that’s locked up at night and busy during the day. Possibly with magic? And what would happen if the person wielding that magic had no idea what they were abetting? And then couldn’t tell the truth under the Tudors without being executed as a traitor?
My fictional answer was that the wizard in question, Edmund Mainwaring, threw himself on the mercy of King Richard III, who told him the political situation made revealing the truth risky and ordered him to keep quiet until given leave to speak. A little less than two years later, the king died at Bosworth Field without ever telling Edmund he could reveal the truth. So Edmund wrote a confession and hid it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t trust his son to honor or pass on the duty to clear a dead king’s name. Desperate to atone for the wrong he’d unknowingly committed, Edmund cursed the male heirs of his line to not rest in life or death until the king’s name was cleared. After they die, their souls are trapped in a wraith-infested shadowland between the worlds of the living and the dead so long as the stain on the king’s honor remains. (Just by the way, the title The Boar King’s Honor is inspired by Richard III’s use of a white boar as his symbol.)
When I wrote The Herald of Day, I intended for it to be a one-off. The Mainwarings would solve their problem in that book. Until a friend said, “You know, you have room for a trilogy with this story.” I looked at it and realized she was right. So the hero and heroine of Herald do not save the day after all.
A trilogy, of course, meant plots for two more books. I knew where I wanted to focus the next part of the Mainwaring quest. The woman Edward IV first married secretly, Lady Eleanor Butler, was consigned to the dustbin of history. He never admitted to marrying her, but, as the late Dr. John Ashdown-Hill points out in his biography of her, Eleanor The Secret Queen, she behaved ever after as though she were married but separated from her husband. Eleanor had been deeply wronged, but what recourse did she have against a king? Instead of pursuing that, she got on with her life while honoring her marriage vow in the only ways open to her.
Unfortunately, Eleanor didn’t live to see the truth of her marriage revealed. She was vindicated but posthumously. And then the Tudors set to work destroying all proof of the prior marriage. Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth was Henry VII’s queen. Henry needed her to be legitimate and Richard’s claim to be dishonored in order to prop up his shaky blood claim to the throne. Only as modern historians took another look at the situation and at Henry VII’s tendency to burn any document hostile to his claim (like the copies of Titulus Regius, the act of Parliament recognizing Edward’s marriage to Eleanor and Richard III’s claim as heir), has this been reconsidered.
So I wanted to pay tribute to Eleanor in the next book, The Steel Rose. That part of the plot was settled, but the rest of the book had to be a fitting follow-up to all aspects of The Herald of Day, not only to the Ricardian plot. In Herald, the villain has altered England’s history to set up a dictatorship of the magically Gifted. The hero and heroine are in a race to counter that and save the true timeline. So the next book needed equally big stakes.
The Regency, the period I ultimately chose for The Steel Rose, finally saw an end to twenty years of war and the threat of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Battle of Waterloo ended his dreams of empire forever. But no one knew who would win that huge battle. Afterward, Wellington described it as “the nearest run thing you ever saw” (per King’s College London website: rb.gy/x0sshp). The threat of Bonaparte plunging Europe back into war after a year of peace following his first abdication and exile to Elba seemed big enough. I love reading Regency novels but had never tried to write one. I didn’t feel I had anything unique to bring to the period. With a Ricardian quest, though maybe I did.
Bearing all that in mind, I set The Steel Rose mostly during the Hundred Days, the period between Bonaparte’s escape from Elba and the Battle of Waterloo. Then I read about that period to create the plot. Bonaparte’s wars had bankrupted the country. So why did Frenchmen flock to his banner? My hero and heroine believe a magical artifact inspires the nation’s loyalty. They set out to steal it in hopes of undercutting his support and helping the allied nations defeat him.
This artwork in the Hyde Park Corner subway (passage under the street, for my fellow Americans) at Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington’s London residence, commemorates the battle.
The heroine, Amelia Mainwaring, is a seer. She wants to save the souls of her late father and brother, who’re trapped in the shadowland between life and death. In London seeking information that can help her lift the curse, she begins having visions that presage Bonaparte’s escape. She seeks help with the family curse and with interpreting these disturbing visions from Julian Winfield, a close friend of her late brother. Julian, who is also Gifted, is the realm’s foremost authority on magic. He’s also the head of a secret organization called the Merlin Club. It masquerades as an ordinary gentlemen’s club in the exclusive St. James area of London.
The rules governing England’s Gifted, also known as wizards, forbid the use of their magic in conflicts against other nations. This rule is absolute. The Merlin Club was founded by wizards who deemed that rule not only unreasonable but foolish, especially when Gifted of other nations entered the fray to support their homelands. So the club members use their abilities in defense of Britain, most often—but not always—when Gifted are active on the other side. During the war, Julian worked overtly for the Home Office and covertly as a spy with the Merlin Club.
The book builds toward a confrontation with Bonaparte, but I wanted a more immediate problem for Julian and Amelia. I came up with Silas de Vere, the Earl of Wyndon. He is also Gifted, and like his ancestor who caused so many problems in The Herald of Day, he believes the Gifted should rule England. He has a plan to make that happen, and the Bonapartist cause has given him his opportunity.
I also wanted Julian and Amelia to be different from Richard and Miranda in The Herald of Day. Neither Miranda nor Richard had been married, and Miranda was untrained in the use of her seer Gift. Amelia, on the other hand, is accomplished as a seer. She and Julian have both lost spouses. Amelia mourns her husband, but Julian is grateful to be rid of his unfaithful, deceitful wife. For her, freeing her father’s and brother’s souls is paramount. She’ll worry about rebuilding the rest of her life after that job’s done. Julian wants time to rest from the ugliness he saw in the years before Bonaparte’s first abdication in 1814. He’ll help Amelia with her quest to save his friend’s soul, dive back into his books, and train his horses. Of course matters don’t go as either of them planned, and therein lies the story.
Thanks again for having me today, Beatrice!
Nancy Northcott’s childhood ambition was to grow up and become Wonder Woman. Around fourth grade, she realized it was too late to acquire Amazon genes, but she still loved comic books, science fiction, fantasy, history, and romance. She combines the emotion and high stakes, and sometimes the magic, she loves in the books she writes.
She has written freelance articles and taught at the college level. Her most popular course was on science fiction, fantasy, and society. She has also given presentations on the Wars of the Roses and Richard III to university classes studying Shakespeare’s play about Richard III. Reviewers have described her books as melding fantasy, romance, and suspense. Library Journal gave her debut novel, Renegade, a starred review, calling it “genre fiction at its best.”
In addition to the historical fantasy Boar King’s Honor trilogy, Nancy writes the Light Mage Wars paranormal romances, the Arachnid Files romantic suspense novellas, and the Lethal Webs romantic spy adventures. With Jeanne Adams, she cowrites the Outcast Station science fiction mysteries.
Married since 1987, Nancy and her husband have one son, a bossy dog, and a house full of books.
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