Worldly things will sink and stagger. So wrote the medieval clerk, Nicholas Grantham. He was tasked with copying the records of London a hundred years after the city had been wracked with plague. The task of putting pen to paper calls to mind this fact.
He was right. This novel has sunk and staggered many times. Thanks are due to the numerous people who lent their support when it did: Sally Harding, Ron Eckel, and the whole team of Cooke McDermid Literary Management, who threw their weight behind it; Amanda Betts and Anne Collins of Random House Canada, who shepherded me through the editorial phase with wisdom and forbearance; Vince Haig, who has been tireless and kind and quick to bring chocolate; Nina Allan, Chris Priest, Rob Shearman, M. Huw Evans, Nathan Ballingrud, Bryan Camp, Laura Friis West, Greg West, Carlie St. George, Georgina Kamsika, Sarah Dodd, Henry Lien, Blythe Woolston and Tiffani Angus, all of whom offered valuable feedback, sometimes at length, sometimes more than once; my colleagues and students at Anglia Ruskin University; Sandra Kasturi, Brett Savory, Simon Strantzas, Gemma Files, David Nickle, Michael Kelly and the whole Canadian gang; Peter Buchanan, Alex Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin for helping with my own period of transition; and, of course, my family—especially my sister, Laura, to whom this book is dedicated, who never let me stop.
The Canada Council supported a draft of this novel through the Grants for Creative Writing Program as did the Ontario Arts Council with their Writers’ Reserve. I could not have written this without them. I’d also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their support of my academic research through a Canada Graduate Scholarship, a Michael Smith Foreign Supplement for travel to Oxford and for a postdoctoral fellowship.
A number of historical quotations have been included in this book. The first appears in the epigraph to section one, taken from J. F. C. Hecker and B. G. Babington’s The Black Death in the Fourteenth Century (1833). A number of others are drawn from Rosemary Horrox’s brilliant edited collection of eyewitness accounts and source materials, The Black Death (Manchester University Press, 2007). These include passages from Bengt Knutsson’s A Little Book for the Pestilence in chapter two, Robert of Avesbury’s De Gestis Mirabilibus in chapter three, from John of Reading’s Chronica in chapter sixteen, from the anonymous A disputation betwixt the body and worms quoted as the epigraph for section three, and from a manuscript by Geoffrey de Meaux in chapter twenty-eight. In chapter seventeen Sophie reads a passage from The Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. 9 (John William Parker, 1846).
The novel begins with an epigraph from Wolf Erlbruch’s astonishing picture book Duck, Death and the Tulip (Gecko Press, 2007). In chapter two Sophie reads from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine). In chapter seven she remembers a line from “Buffalo Bill’s” by E. E. Cummings, first published in Tulips and Chimneys (Thomas Seltzer, 1923). Lastly, in chapter sixteen she reads to Kira from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (Hodder and Stoughton, 1911).
This novel is more dream vision than fact. At times I’ve run roughshod over history. Excuse me, if I’ve spoken amiss. My intent was good.
Hoc opus est scriptum magister da mihi potum; Dextera scriptoris careat grauitate doloris.