Revenant

by Kat Richardson

  In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, if you didn’t have a Portuguese chart and navigator on board, the chances of your ship returning home from a transatlantic voyage were small. And you’re going to say, “Yeah, well, what about the English?” The English had access to Portuguese charts because they had a treaty with Portugal—the longest still-standing political alliance in Western Europe. It started when a group of English crusaders stopped in Portugal in 1147 to break the Siege of Lisbon, and it became an official relationship with the Treaty of Windsor in 1386 when the first Duke of Lancaster married his daughter Philippa to John I of Portugal. It was an uneasy relationship once England became Protestant, but it stuck and was still in effect during the Second World War—which was one of many reasons Portugal remained neutral during that war. It’s still in effect today and it’s the reason that Britain first became involved in the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon, but that’s another story.

  When Carlos talked about the families that were wiped out after the Tavora Affair (the supposed plot to kill the king of Portugal and replace him with the Duke of Aveiro in 1758), you might have noticed the name “Lencestre.” That was the Portuguese spelling of the family name of the Duke of Aveiro, who was accused and later executed as one of the conspirators in the Tavora Affair, along with the Count of Alvor and his wife, the Marchioness Leonor of Tavora, and the Count of Atouguia. And yes, that was the same Lancaster family that established the long-reigning Plantagenet dynasty of England that started with Edward III and continued through Elizabeth I. The duke was a direct descendant of the kings of Portugal and England. It took some serious confidence and a lot of gall for the Marquis of Pombal to point a finger at three of the most important and ancient noble houses of Portugal and say, “They tried to kill the king” and then have all the men killed—most of the women and children were spared by the intervention of the queen of Portugal and the crown princess. Things didn’t go so well for the Tavora family, which was wiped out completely and its estates in Lisbon torn down, plowed under, and the earth salted. There’s still a memorial obelisk at the location in the Belém district with an inscription that reads:

  In this place were razed to the ground and salted the houses of José Mascarenhas, stripped of the honours of Duque de Aveiro and others, convicted by sentence proclaimed in the Supreme Court of Inconfidences on 12 January 1759. Brought to Justice as one of the leaders of the most barbarous and execrable upheaval that, on the night of 3 September 1758, was committed against the most royal and sacred person of the Lord Joseph I. On this infamous land nothing may be built for all time.

  Of course, the obelisk is now lost in a sea of twentieth-century housing and used as a pissoir. But in spite of the housing crisis, Pombal really did have the brass balls to take out three of the most influential noble families in Portugal—only two of the ancient families survived: the de Melo family (funny that . . .) and the Bragança family (directly descended from the ruling family of Portugal by—surprise!—a bastard son).

  Every biographical article I was able to find about Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the first Marquis of Pombal, mentions his distrust and dislike of the ancient nobility of Portugal and most speculate that the Tavora Affair was a convenient excuse for him to take them down. While he did a lot of great things for the country during his tenure as secretary of state (a post we’d now equate with prime minister), and he was probably a genius, he was universally acknowledged as a cold-blooded intellectual, an ambitious politician, a hard-ass, and a right bastard (but not an illegitimate one). He did attend the venerable University of Coimbra and he was distantly related to the noble Ataíde family—his father, a member of the landed gentry, was Manuel de Carvalho e Ataíde. Any living descendants of the first Marquis of Pombal may wish to argue with me, but the historic record is fairly clear—he was a great man, but not a nice one (although I doubt he ever threw anyone out a window).

  And speaking of bastards, while it’s true that Europe—and Portugal in particular—had a history of acknowledging the illegitimate sons of influential families, there’s no evidence that there ever was anyone like Carlos in the Ataíde family. The Count of Atouguia may have had a few by-blows—it was quite common—but to the best of my knowledge, none of them were necromancers. I’d picked Carlos’s family name out of a hat back in an earlier book and, when I mixed the name with the earthquake and what happened later, I found myself with a really interesting backstory. Sometimes I have writer serendipity and this was one instance of random information coming together to make my life both harder and more interesting. The House of Atouguia became extinct with the execution of the eleventh count, but the family name, Ataíde, remained. I apologize to any living descendants for sticking them with a monster in their midst.

  Portugal has a history of conflict with Spain and, of course, there were also the Napoleonic Wars and several civil wars with which to haunt the landscape. The country really does have Europe’s highest number of ossuaries and they are unusual in that they are small but frequent. There are certainly more famous collections of bones—the spooky and bizarre Sedlec chapel in the Czech Republic being one of the most famous—but nowhere else will you see one used as a garden shed or plunked down in a seawall facing a popular tourist beach. I didn’t have the room to write these particular ossuaries in, but they do exist in the Algarve, the southern coastal area of Portugal.

  I had to resort to Panaramio, Google Maps, and Google Earth frequently and to translated blogs by Portuguese residents and English-language tourists passing through to get background, flavor, and the relationship of buildings and streets and even the general layout of areas like the ruins of the Carmo Convent—I looked for hours to find that side door.

  I found the “Little Sawtooth Dolmen” through a blog called The Little Black Pig. I never did figure out the name of the woman who compiled it, but her excited discovery of the standing stones in a field near Monforte sent me all over the Web looking for more information until I finally found the name—in Portuguese—attached to someone else’s photo. The stones do appear to change character drastically, depending on the lighting. I saw several photos online that were obviously the same stones, but strikingly different depending on the angle of the sun at the time. The legend of the Devil’s Pool, however, I made up.

  I also made up the fairy tale of the ghost bone, because, oddly, the Portuguese do not have a lot of ghost stories. I really needed a creepy tale to support the little magical detail upon which so much hinges, and I drew on the Baba Yaga stories to come up with one. Coca, however, is the real deal. There is an annual festival in Monção, Portugal, where a papier-mâché dragon, operated by several people inside, battles a knight on horseback. Coco/Coca is also a legendary “boogeyman” throughout Portugal, described as an evil ghost sporting a pumpkin head. It’s that creature that was the subject of the seventeenth-century rhyme Sam says she sings to Martim. It’s also the origin of the word “coconut.”

  My friend Jane Haddam sent me a lot of information about her tour of the Capela dos Ossos in Évora that didn’t make it into the book, but her thoughts on the medieval nature of the cult of bones and her notes on the form of Catholicism in Portugal, as well as the practice of crawling to the shrine of Fátima, the angle of the roads in Lisbon, and the insanity of the city’s drivers, did. I also got some excellent help from Reverend Richenda Fairhurst about the memorial day of Saint Jerome and saints’ days in general, as well as the difference between a “feast” and a “memorial,” which was very helpful. The doll hospital in Lisbon I found for myself. And I found the information about shipping bodies on the National Funeral Directors Association’s Web site—who knew there was a special box?

  I had to fake it with a lot of information, since I was writing as fast as I could and quite a few things got cut from the initial draft—like the history of Lisbon during the Second World War, references to the film Casablanca, the writers and publishers of Crimespree as incid
ental characters, and the revelation of Quinton’s favorite superhero. I didn’t remember to ask my mother-in-law about field amputations while she was visiting for Christmas, and ended up relying on the story my dad had told me about accidentally cutting off his own fingertip when he was a young man working in a factory in Oklahoma City for the instance of Harper losing hers. Gruesome, but survivable. And I relied heavily on Google Translate and some other online references for my initial translations of the Portuguese, since I dropped out of Portuguese language class to look after my mom and a dog. The translations were cleaned up later by a friendly expert to whom I owe anonymous thanks.

  Carlos makes two Mark Twain references in this book—his quote to Maggie Griffin is from The Mysterious Stranger, and Twain was incorrectly reported to have said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” I couldn’t resist, since Samuel Clemens was my great, great uncle and I’m a huge book geek. I’m also very glad my friends at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop recommended A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson, The Lisbon Crossing by Tom Gabbay, and Five Passengers from Lisbon by Mignon G. Eberhart for local color and top-notch writing. Wilson’s book in particular was a great help in getting a better idea of the terrain and weather in Alentejo. Neil Lochery’s nonfiction book Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939–1945 was also of help with political and social reference, and Lonely Planet Portugal had a lot of useful details about getting around and where to stay and what each area was like. I also read many online pages about Portugal from the CIA’s The World Factbook as well as terrible translations of city information guides for Carcavelos, Monforte, Campo Maior, Évora, Lisbon, and Vila Viçosa. And I spent a ridiculous amount of time culling the Internet for the worst possible news stories to come out of Europe from 2012 through early 2014 as background for the activities of the Ghost Division. Ugh. Truth is not only stranger than fiction; it’s more depressing.

  Casa Ribeira and the Vale de Oliveiras are fictitious, but there are real turihabs in that part of Alentejo, facing tiny rivers that feed into the headwaters of the Tagus near the Spanish border. By all accounts it’s a hot, dry area of rolling hills covered in cork oaks, olives, vineyards, wheat fields, and marble quarries that, to my California-girl brain, sounded a lot like the high chaparral and high desert on the extreme eastern edge of my home state. I hope I got that right.

  I apologize to the residents of Monforte and its surrounding area for fictionally setting their town on fire.

  On a different note, my friend Maggie Griffin asked to be in the book and after reading the first draft she said, “I love it, but people will think you hate me!” So let me reassure anyone who thinks otherwise that I am very fond of Maggie and deeply in her debt for letting me turn her into the most evil mage in history. Yes, Maggie, Carlos has your heart, but you have a little piece of mine.

  I’ve tried to catch all the mistakes and clean up the messes, but I’m sure I didn’t catch them all. Any errors remaining are all mine and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is unintentional (except where they said, “Sure, why not?”).

  And now we’re done. This is the last Greywalker novel, at least for a while. It’s been a hell of a ride and I hope I haven’t left you too upset. Sorry about the leg, but I leave it up to you and your imagination to fill in the blanks as to what Harper and Quinton got up to next (until I can come back to this bit of my writerverse). Thanks for coming along on these adventures with me. I hope I’ll see all of you on whatever creative journey I take next.

  If you would like photo links or more information about the locations and research I did for this book, I’ll be posting some on my Web site: katrichardson.com.