⭐ Release Day Book Spotlight ⭐
The Silken Knot
by Liz Harris
Publication Date: September 4th, 2024
Publisher: Heywood Press
Pages: 319
Genre: Historical Fiction
The Silken Knot is Iris’s story.
Dinan, 1947
Out of options, Iris Hammond makes the difficult decision to marry Pierre Rousseau, a man she’d never met until they stood together in front of the priest. Pierre, too, has his reasons for marrying Iris, a woman he doesn’t know.
Taken by Pierre from Jersey to his close-knit community in Brittany, France, Iris faces him at the end of the first day of a marriage she hadn’t wanted, and determines that, nevertheless, she will make their marriage a success.
Unsuspected by either Iris or Pierre, Marcel Pascal, the brother of Pierre’s late wife, and Elodie Vidal, Pierre’s shop assistant, each have a hidden agenda for wanting to destroy Pierre’s marriage as soon as they possibly can, and to see him alone and unhappy.
With Iris and Pierre completely unaware of the underhand scheming by people they think of as friends, Marcel and Elodie’s cruel plans stand a very good chance of bearing fruit.
THEN IS THERE A TAXI, I PLEADED!
I’ve written before about the importance of research for establishing the accuracy of the historical background against which a story is to be set, and just as I went on a research trip to Jersey before writing The Loose Thread, Rose’s story, which is the first of the Three Sisters’ trilogy, I went to Brittany before embarking upon The Silken Knot, Iris’s story, which was to be set in 1947, in the medieval town of Dinan in Brittany.
When writing a trilogy, each of which tells the story of one of three sisters, the characters of each of the sisters would quite likely be established in the first novel in the trilogy, even though the novel is about only one of the sisters. Iris was seen in The Loose Thread to be creative, excellent at sewing, not particularly interested in world affairs, and as being somewhat flighty. It wasn’t difficult for me, and for readers, too, I imagine, to predict what was likely to happen to her.
It isn’t a spoiler as it appears in the blurb to tell you that Iris ended up marrying Pierre, a man she had never met before the wedding, which means that Pierre, a widower with a 12 year old daughter, ended up marrying a woman he’d never met. Pierre, who came from Granville in Normandy, had reasons for wanting to move to Dinan, so that was where Iris’s story was to take place.
I knew from the outset that this would be a different sort of research trip. Whereas The Loose Thread was set during the German Occupation of Jersey, 1940-1945, just about every aspect of which was documented in the letters and diaries written during those years, and from which there were many period items in the museums that focused on the Occupation, the research for Iris’s story, which was set a couple of years after WW2 had ended, and was in a different country, wouldn’t be a fact-finding research trip.
Before I went to Dinan, I’d seen that there was only one museum there for me to visit. It was the Maison de la Rance, which focused on the flora and fauna of the area. La Rance is the peaceful river that flows uphill from Dinan into the large estuary between the cities of Dinard and Saint Malo.
In the absence of any airport sufficiently close to Dinan, I had decided to drive to Portsmouth and take the car ferry to France. I’d seen a Dinan hotel on the Brittany Ferries’ website, and booked it. By a tremendous stroke of luck, the hotel proved to be in the Port de Dinan, next to the Maison de la Rance. I couldn’t have been better placed!
In the absence of museums to visit, I knew my trip would be about getting the feel of the area. I had intended to locate Pierre and Iris in the heart of Dinan itself, but I knew also that I wanted them to be able to access one of the loveliest walks from Dinan, which featured in all the books about the area. It was the 2km walk along the bank of the river to the village of Léhon, and doing the walk was on my list.
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| On the walk to Léhon. Photo (c) Liz Harris. |
I arrived in Dinan on a Wednesday. I knew that every Thursday, there was a large market in the centre of the town, which Iris would have visited. As the museum didn’t open until the Thursday afternoon, I decided to walk up into the town on the Thursday morning, have a look around the market, and then come back in time for the museum’s opening.
I set off for the rue du Jerzual (‘rue’ (street) in French is written with a small ‘r’. Throughout the book, I’ve kept to the French way of doing things) which I knew would take me into the heart of Dinan. A few minutes from the hotel, I crossed the old bridge that spanned the river and came to the foot of rue du Jerzual.
I stopped, aghast. I hadn’t expected such a steep hill!
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| Looking down the steep hill. Photo (c) Liz Harris. |
I dashed into the crêperie on the corner of the street, and asked if there was a bus that would take me up the hill. Or a taxi, I pleaded. There wasn’t. I started walking.
Fortunately, there were stone benches at frequent intervals up what felt like a never-ending climb up a vertical stone wall. By the time I reached the top, totally out of breath and desperate for coffee, I had re-thought the location of Iris and Pierre’s house.
While there was a road round the hill upon which Dinan was built, down which they could have driven to the port area or back up from it, it was very unlikely that they’d habitually do so in 1947, and even more unlikely that Iris would have driven.
While I realised that people who lived at such a time and in such a place would be used to walking everywhere rather than driving, which included walking up that hill, and that such a steep slope wouldn’t seem so formidable to them as it did to me, I couldn’t see Iris and Pierre moving in and out of the town with the frequency I’d originally intended, especially as the hill was paved with uneven cobblestones that would make pushing a pram difficult, so I decided that they must live somewhere else in the area.
But where? They had to be able to access Dinan. It’s a truly lovely medieval town. There’s a genuine sense of history everywhere you go, but it’s not at all touristy. I absolutely loved the town, and was determined that in some way it would feature in the book.
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| Half-timbered houses in Dinan. Photo (c) Liz Harris. |
Later that evening, having eaten in a restaurant on the other side of the river, which I’d easily reached by crossing the old bridge, I was looking at the lovely view from my hotel window, wondering where to put Iris and Pierre’s house, and I realised that the answer was staring me in the face – on the opposite side of the river from my hotel!
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| View from hotel window. Site of fictional family home. Photo (c) Liz Harris. |
The following day, I did the walk to Léhon, and knew I’d made the right decision. By locating Iris and Pierre in the port area, there were various locations in which to house my other characters, which was important as among those characters were some whose friendship was feigned, whose hidden agenda was to destroy Iris and Pierre’s marriage.
My research trip, therefore, had taken the form of a terrain-related trip rather than a fact-finding one. Both are equally important. Had I not gone to Dinan in person, I would have underestimated the steepness of the hill, and in The Silken Knot, I would have had characters doing things they’d have been highly unlikely to do, making the book flawed in the eyes of anyone who knew the area.
Liz Harris
Born in London, Liz Harris graduated from university with a Law degree, and then moved to California, where she led a varied life, from waitressing on Sunset Strip to working as secretary to the CEO of a large Japanese trading company.
Six years later, she returned to London and completed a degree in English, after which she taught secondary school pupils, first in Berkshire, then in Cheshire and finally in Oxfordshire.
In addition to the 19 novels she’s had published since her debut novel The Road Back, Liz has had several short stories in anthologies and magazines.
Liz lives in Windsor, in Berkshire. An active member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Historical Novel Society, her interests are travel, the theatre, reading and cryptic crosswords.
To find out more about Liz, visit her website at: www.lizharrisauthor.com
Many thanks for allowing me to speak to your readers, Cathie. I'm delighted with the promotion for The Silken Knot. xx
ReplyDeleteThank you, Liz. You're always welcome here at The Coffee Pot Book Club. Enjoy your special day! xx
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