Bits of History Now

My 2020 in some ways just began, but with all that’s going on, that’s easy to understand. Focusing on writing is saving me during this pandemic.

I’ve just finished writing the Prequel, Inheritance Spurned, to my Highland-Cape-Fear-Conspiracy Thriller Series–and Stone of Her Destiny, Book I, many of you have bought from Amazon or Kobo.

I have one disclaimer and one forewarning.

You may have sensed a literary divide between contemporary and historical. So have I. But I don’t understand why.

My feet are firmly planted in both camps, lol. I love current time zones, but I love historical stories. I’ve grown up around history where every house, every framed picture, every path prompts a story, and people are still around to tell them. My cousin is a real historian.

BUT, I will drive the tedious historian mad. That’s because I love alternate history. I write some within my novels which are all contemporary or not so long ago. I also play with history. Not revisionist history to “right” a movement we now consider wrong. I’m totally at odds with rewriting classics to purge controversial copy. I’d rather know the foibles of a people and era. But history shaping now, or history still alive, I love. I’m not as enamored of costume and speech pedantry…unless it’s a fragment of an old costume found.

Take the year-old article on Sotheby’s. For £3,000, a 1.4 cm piece of stone was on the auction block–a chip off the old Stone of Destiny–subject of my latest book, Stone of Her Destiny. The fact that the history of this stone can be traced back a millennium has piles to do with its high price–as does the provenance, since it was used in the coronation of monarchs.

When you think that the 1.4 cm piece was kept by Stonemason Robert Gray, who repaired the Stone of Destiny, broken after it was stolen from Westminster Abbey by Scottish nationalists in 1950, you get a hint of what the stonemason knew about history adding worth. The Courier in Scotland wrote that Gray, now-deceased, never revealed whether the returned (repaired) Stone was genuine. The framed fragment went under the hammer at Lyon & Turnbull’s Sale of Scottish Silver and Applied Arts in 2018. I searched the sold registry, but could find no proof of sale of the sandstone piece he certified was taken by him.To the best of my knowledge, it probably sold for that at Edinburgh auction. If not, I’d buy it, given enough fluid cash.

Well, Kenna, my redheaded Southern heroine and I have chased the Stone for some years now. Its first theft was in 1296 from Scone Abbey by King Edward. Even then major figures contested whether or not it was the real stone, at least a look-alike was taken back to England as a coronation stone until now. Their return of the stone to Scotland in 1996 is token, since the crown contracted to have it back in England on the occasion of Britain’s next ascending royal to the throne.

But the real Stone of Destiny, the one that cries out when the rightful king sits on it like happened when Scottish kings sat on it–its whereabouts are hotly contested, even today.