Dear Girlfriends and followers: I was scheduled to post on the 1st anniversary of my father's death. I have asked my dear friend, and honorary girlfriend (okay, he's male) to step in for me.
Guest blog by Jon
Jefferson, bestselling author of The Inquisitor’s Key, due out May 8 from William Morrow.
I write murder mysteries; forensic thrillers. My pages are populated
by corpses and skeletons; rivers of blood run from my scenes. Imagine my
surprise, then, to find myself devoting many chapters of my latest novel to one
of the most famous romances of all time. How the hell did this happen?
Well, one thing leads to another; take enough steps, and you’ll
walk a thousand miles, even if they’re meandering miles rather than crow-flight
miles. My first step was deciding to set a crime novel in Avignon, a beautiful,
walled city in Provence that was the seat of the popes for most of the 14th
century.
To do justice to Avignon, I realized, I needed both a
modern-day murder and a medieval mystery, one set during the lavish heyday of papal
Avignon. (The court of Pope Clement VI – “Clement the Magnificent” – cost 10
times as much to maintain as the court of the French king!) Not surprisingly,
medieval Avignon boasted a fascinating cast of characters. One of them was
Jacques Fournier, a heretic-obsessed Inquisitor (he of the book’s title) who
tortured and burned his way all the way up to the papal throne, becoming pope
in 1334. Another was Petrarch, a wonder-boy cleric who wrote history,
philosophy, and poetry – reams of poetry – on the Church’s dime. In Avignon, Petrarch
fell famously in love with a beautiful young countess – a married young countess – named Laura de Noves. Apparently Laura was
more committed to her marriage vows than Petrarch was to his chastity vows, for
she refused to be wooed. Petrarch worshiped her from afar … and yet from near
enough that his broken heart could be seen by Laura and everyone else in Avignon. He
channeled his love into sonnets – hundreds of sonnets – extolling her beauty
and virtue. He even hired a prominent Avignon painter, Simone Martini, to paint
a miniature portrait of Laura, one he could gaze at whenever he wished to
refresh his memory or rebreak his heart. So far, mind you, we’re squarely in
the realm of historical fact.
All that unrequited, sublimated passion set my fiction-brain
to thinking: What would it be like for the painter, Martini – to follow the
young woman, secretly observing her in the streets or at church, sneaking
glimpses of her in profile, in half-profile, full-face? Gradually, as I began mentally pursuing the lovely
Laura, I realized that it would be easy for Martini to become obsessed: infatuated
with the subject of his artistic observation, his painterly voyeurism. Then I
thought, And what if she one day she
catches him, confronts him, demands to see the surreptitious portrait? My
next step was to write this:
One
Sunday as she kneels, he sees her head slump and her shoulders slacken; then,
with a jerk, she awakens, wide eyed, and suddenly he hears her laugh—in
church!—when she realizes what she has done. The matron beside her gives a
sharp, reproving look, and she forces her face back into its mask of composed
piety. But Martini has now seen something else behind the church-face mask, and
his curiosity is aroused.
That night, as he lies beneath the covers before going to sleep,
he plays a painter’s game with himself, imagining how he might paint her face
in various scenes, with various expressions and emotions: worry, gratitude,
tranquility, terror, irritation, delight, lust. And then, when Giovanna rolls
her body against his in the dark, and her fingers seek him out, stroke him to
hardness, and guide his flesh into hers, it is Laura’s face, and Laura’s
breasts, and Laura’s moans that he imagines, and that make him gasp and shudder
with a fiery passion that Giovanna’s simple, honest love has never managed to
ignite.
The next Sunday, she is not there. He checks her usual
stations—the side chapels where she always pauses to light candles—scanning the
congregation with confusion and growing dismay. Somehow, because she has always
been here, he has taken it for granted that she always would be here. His surprise gives way to another
feeling, one he recognizes as fear—no, as panic! What if she’s gone for
good—moved away to Paris, or killed by a sudden fever? How can he possibly finish
the portrait until every detail of her is etched in his mind? How will he
explain his failure to Petrarch? And then: How will he fill his Sunday
mornings, and the other hours of his days and nights that she has come to
occupy? Good God, he thinks, I am worse than the poet. I have a good wife, a
sweet and faithful woman who loves me, and yet I am turning into
a schoolboy over this woman—this girl—who is thrice forbidden to me: She is
married, I am married, and she
is beloved by my friend Petrarch.
In a state of consternation, he stumbles over the feet of worshipers,
turns up the side aisle of the nave, and makes for the door. Just before he
reaches it, he feels a tug on his sleeve. He turns, and there—hidden by a
pillar—is the woman herself, a sight so unexpected he almost cries out in
surprise. She watches him regain control of himself, then says, “Monsieur,
vous me cherchez?”: Sir, are you looking
for me?’’
For a startled medieval painter named Simone Martini, that
encounter will change things forever. Who knows: perhaps it’s also a turning
point for an equally surprised, meander-prone writer of crime fiction … or is
it historical romance?
# # #
Jon Jefferson writes
in Tallahassee, Florida, where he lives with his wife, the peerless Jane McPherson
– to whom he was introduced three years ago by Sheila Curran, blogger, novelist
and matchmaker par excellence. For
more on The Inquisitor’s Key, visit JeffersonBass.com and Jon's
author blogspot. And check out
the book’s high-octane, 30-second YouTube video trailer.
Jon, I love the title and predict a rollicking success. A la Dan Brown or the Borgias, but more delightfully written.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sheila -- and thanks for the chance to be a Girlfriend for a day!
DeleteThanks for sharing Nice notepad
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