Claiming Her (Renegades & Outlaws) (53 page)

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Authors: Kris Kennedy

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In retrospect, it seems inevitable.

It was only a matter of time.

When Turlogh finally died (and only after much drama) in 1595, guess who took over?

Yep. Hugh accepted the outlawed Gaelic title “The O’Neill.” For this and other offenses (including supporting & then finally leading an attack against English forces) he was declared a traitor.

The story gets sad after this, for Irish culture, which had been experiencing a renaissance under great Irish lords like The O’Neill, was all but extinguished after the Flight of the Earls.

For his part, O’Neill always meant to return, and was continually seeking allies to come back to Ireland and remount a defense against England, and regain his lands. Unfortunately, he died before those ambitions could be realized, and the English Plantations in the north continued unchecked.

Which is part of why I wanted Rardove to be what it was. A place where you can imagine Irish culture
could
go on, and would go on, no matter what external forces pressed upon it. A bulwark that would stand forever, a safe haven to cultivate and protect the spirit of Ireland, throughout the trials and tribulations in the centuries to come.

I hope you can imagine Aodh and his Katy being the ones who could start a lineage that would do just that.

Sea Travel by Katarina & Aodh’s men

This is a small point, but as I was writing, I realized that although Ré and Cormac and even Bran might be experienced seamen, there was no way they were going to get a large ship across the Irish Sea with a three man crew to rescue Aodh. Additionally, they then needed to be able to cruise into a small cove, Renegades Cove.

After much research on the matter (it’s amazing the amount of research that goes into a story element that’s barely alluded to), I realized they had to have traveled in a pinnace. Here’s a great picture of one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DhowChase.jpg

Sturdy enough to undertake long open-water voyages and handy enough to use close to shore, it was used as a warship, a merchant ship and quite often as a tender, a small boat, to ferry goods and passengers to and from larger ships. It could be rowed or sailed, and could be manned by a small crew.

So, now you can picture Katy and the boys traveling over the Irish Sea to rescue Aodh!

Prisms

Elizabethans knew of prisms as novelties. Isaac Newton and his work on refraction and the essence of light was decades in the future, but I admit to a bit of rebelliousness when I’m told, “This is the way it was—the
only
way it was,” and “People did not know/use this word/say X before such-and-such a date.”

Newtown experimented, and validated, and, perhaps most importantly,
published
. But he surely wasn’t the first to
think
, or to wonder, to suspect, or even to experiment.

Especially among inquisitive and curious people, maybe even people who worked around prisms and light and water, and might depend on them for their livelihood. Like seamen and captains. Like Aodh.

Originally, in fact, I pictured Aodh giving Katarina a gift of Icelandic spar (Viking sunspot) used by seamen in the Elizabethan era (and before) to help navigate, but as the spar does not refract light in the same way as a prism, I had to leave that one behind.

Still, refraction as a concept was theorized about in the 13
^thcentury, by Englishman Roger Bacon (1220-1292), and even further back, it was studied experimentally Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (964-1014). Known as “Ahazen” in the West, he was a Muslim physicist
and philosopher in Iraq & Egypt, who studied and wrote seminal works on the nature of light and optics. It was he who first introduced the law of refraction, and he used this knowledge to make lens shapes that focused light with no geometric aberrations. Pretty cool, huh? He is reputed to have written over 90 books, including his seminal work, the
Book of Optics
.

I think a thoughtful, curious, questing person like Aodh might have done a little experimenting on his own. And then, shared it with his woman, to help light her fire, so she could burn for him.

On Katarina’s investment flop, Gilbert Humphrey

This name was a total play on the real-life, contemporary ‘adventurer’ Sir Humphrey Gilbert, solider, mariner, adventurer in Ireland and the New World, and half-brother to Sir Walter Raleigh.

Unfortunately, his ‘adventuring’ in Ireland was quite viciously done. On one campaign, he put
everyone
to the sword, even women and children, then cut off their heads and staked them along the pathway to his tent. Because the Irish were the savages, right?

Gilbert’s maritime adventures led him as far as the New World, and he died on one return journey; stubbornness did him in, as it likely had in other endeavors, too. This time, it saw to his end. He died on board his beloved ship
Squirrel
, slowly sinking, reading a book on the stern as he went down with his ship. It is believed he was reading
Utopia
by Sir Thomas More. A hard-fought, hard-won, dynamic, incredible, and sometimes deplorable, life.

References to dyes and the history of Rardove

My second book,
The Irish Warrior
, was set in 1297 at Rardove.

The story of the dyes and the madness of a 13
^thcentury baron—and the vengeful Irishman and merchant widow—are told in that story.

Anachronisms

Glacier
-From mid-1700’s in English, but derived from the French word
glacier
, which is 16
^thc, so I went with it, as Aodh knows French.

Hellcat
– Was not documented in use until 1605.

“Wildcat” was, but that felt even more anachronistic to me!

So I decided, seriously, 15 years?? I’m sure someone thought it about someone else long before another someone else wrote it down.

Mark
– as in
“You’re wasting your fight on the wrong mark, my lady.”
Someone pointed out that ‘mark’ as a victim was not in use at this time. I would counter by saying it was not
documented
, a very different thing. That said, its use here was as a ‘target’ for Katarina’s anger, and that use was very much was documented, by 1350.

I used a few other words or phrases that were not documented as being in use at the time of the story—for instance, ‘en route’ (!?!)—but I tend to err on the side of atmosphere and plausibility. Hopefully you felt immersed, even when people were
‘en route’
to places.