The publication of my novel Four Spirits this month is the fulfillment of a promise I made to myself long ago. Back in the 1960s, witnessing the civil rights struggle in my home city of Birmingham, Alabama, I promised myself that if I ever did become a successful fiction writer I would write about the courage and pain, the unspeakable cruelty and abiding love of those transformative times.

It took nearly 40 years and the publication of five earlier books for me to have the confidence to try to tell the civil rights story as I had lived it, observed it, heard stories and read about it. In a number of ways, the character of Stella Silver in Four Spirits replicates some of my own experiences. My own idealistic family were educated, liberal, loving people. For a long time, I was sheltered from the racial fear and hatred in my city and the South, but, while I was a freshman at Phillips High School, the Rev. Mr. Fred Shuttlesworth, while attempting to enroll his children in an all-white school, was beaten with chains and brass knuckles in front of the building and his wife was stabbed.

Like Stella, the scales fell from my eyes as an impassioned high school teacher from the North spoke to my class of racial prejudice as a mark of ignorance. Soon, I was hearing and reading with horror of beatings, of castration, and of more than 40 homes and businesses of blacks destroyed by dynamite in Birmingham. However, like many citizens of Birmingham and of the nation, it was when I learned that four young girls of the bombed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been killed that I made a new commitment to work to overcome racial prejudice in my city and in America.

Joined by a disabled friend in a wheelchair, I began teaching on the campus of all-black Miles College. I began to know personal fear. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, I witnessed widespread joy in the populace of Birmingham because a rising champion of integration was dead. As I worked the switchboard of a major department store that Friday night, my own isolation and alienation from a city I truly loved increased my resolve to some day tell the truth, through fiction. I believe triumph can be wrung out of tragedy. Largely through nonviolent political action rooted in love, the South has been transformed, if not utterly changed, and the whole of America has made a greater legal and moral commitment to racial justice.

While my novel Four Spirits truthfully suggests something of the violence, sacrifice and heartbreak of those times, it is a positive book and celebrates courage, friendship, family and community.

Sena Jeter Naslund lives with her husband in Louisville, Kentucky. Her new novel, Four Spirits dedicated to the victims of the Birmingham church bombing is being published by William Morrow.

<B>The top-secret battles that threatened America’s shores</B> I am a lucky man and I know it. I’ve managed to have two interesting careers, one as a NASA engineer and another as an author of memoirs and novels. Most of my fans assume I transitioned from NASA to writing but the truth is I’ve been a writer nearly all of my life. Mrs. Laird, my third grade teacher, told me someday I’d make my living as an author and was mightily disappointed when I decided some years later to become an engineer. My training in the sciences, however, never stopped my love of the written word. I first broke in as a freelance writer for a variety of scuba diving magazines during the 1970s. After being certified as a diver in 1972 and then as an instructor in 1973, I began to write for <I>Skin Diver, Sport Diver, Aquarius</I> and other magazines dedicated to the sport. My specialty was stories about diving on sunken wrecks. This would lead to a most remarkable adventure and, to my surprise (and Mrs. Laird’s joy), my first book.

My adventure began in 1975 when a fisherman off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, saw something long and narrow on his depth recorder. Curious, he invited some local divers to dive on the thing, whatever it was. At a depth of 110 feet, the divers found what they believed to be a submarine. Before long, I got a call from one of them. Would I come up and perhaps write an article about it? I jumped at the chance.

When I dived on the wreck, I recognized it immediately as not only a submarine but a World War II German U-boat that had been sunk in battle. There were torpedoes and 88-millimeter shells strewn about, and its deck gun was blown away. In its conning tower I found a human skeleton. What had sunk this submarine and when? Whose body was in the conning tower? And what in heaven’s name was a German <I>Unterseeboot</I> doing in American waters, anyway? The answers to those questions and so many others would not come easy. After digging, I discovered that nearly all the records of World War II German U-boat activity off the American east coast were still classified. Fortunately, being the lucky guy I am, the Freedom of Information Act was passed shortly afterwards. This allowed me to be one of the first researchers to look at a treasure trove of documentation. I was astonished to learn of a battle within sight of our shores that had not only sunk this particular U-boat (the U-352) but six others along with over 400 American and allied ships in a nine-month period. It was, in fact, one of the greatest and longest battles of the war, yet was virtually unknown. Soon, I tracked down American, British and German sailors who had fought in the bitter contest. After writing a number of articles about my findings, I realized I had enough for a book. My military history best-seller <I>Torpedo Junction</I> (Naval Institute Press, 1989; Dell, 1991) was the result.

After <I>Torpedo Junction</I> was published, I began to receive many letters from folks who had lived on the North Carolina Outer Banks during the war. They thanked me for writing about the battle and then continued with their own eyewitness accounts. One man wrote to tell me about his mother who was living at the time on Hatteras Island. One day, she’d been hanging out the laundry when what should motor by but a U-boat with its crew sunbathing on deck? They had waved at her and she’d waved back before recalling they were the enemy. She retrieved her husband’s rifle and began shooting! Wildly ducking, the Germans had immediately scrambled inside their U-boat and submerged. Other letters I received were more ominous in nature, stories of saboteurs off U-boats who had been met by the local citizenry with shotguns. Although these accounts were not verifiable, I came to believe there was more than a kernel of truth to them. Eventually, I knew I had to write a novel that would encompass not only the research I’d done for <I>Torpedo Junction</I> but the unique people of the Outer Banks. <B>The Keeper’s Son</B> is the result.

Nearly all of my books have been about small towns, and so I was pleased to write about another, this one set on the fictitious island of “Killakeet, south of Hatteras, north of Lookout,” a place of “fishermen, clam-stompers, oyster-rakers, Coastguardsmen, and lighthouse keepers.” The Keeper’s Son is a novel of the Thurlow family, keepers of the Killakeet lighthouse. The Thurlows must endure a great tragedy when Jacob Thurlow, only 2 years old, is lost at sea due to an error of judgment by Josh, his older brother. Seventeen years later, after a self-imposed exile, Josh returns to the island as a Coast Guard officer. When the marauding U-boats arrive, Josh and the crew of his tiny patrol boat are all that can stop the destruction of the people of Killakeet. What Josh cannot imagine, however, is that one of the U-boats is harboring a secret that might tell him the fate of his baby brother.

Although there are more than a few stirring battle scenes in my novel and also the mystery of the lost son to unravel, there are also several romantic subplots, one of which includes Dosie Crossan, a lusty young horsewoman who sets her sights on Josh. It’s always been my belief that it isn’t plot that makes for the good story but, perhaps more importantly, the people in it. It was a lot of fun to create Dosie and all the colorful characters who populate Killakeet and the U-boats offshore. I hope my fans will enjoy reading <B>The Keeper’s Son</B>, a novel of high-spirited adventure and love in a time of war. The Keeper’s Son <I>is the first work of fiction by Homer Hickam, a former</I> NASA <I>engineer who first won a wide audience with</I> Rocket Boys<I>, a memoir of his West Virginia boyhood that was made into the movie</I> October Sky. <I>Hickam, who has also written two other volumes about his small-town upbringing, lives in Huntsville, Alabama.</I>

Arthur Phillips' critically acclaimed debut, Prague, was a bestseller in 2002. His inventive second novel, The Egyptologist, takes readers into the competitive world of post-World War I Egyptology, where a glory-seeking young archeologist bets his career and his fiancée's fortune on the discovery of the tomb of an apocryphal pharaoh. Phillips, who studied at Harvard and is a five-time "Jeopardy!" champion, explains here what prompted his interest in this unusual subject. We'll leave it to readers to decide just how much to believe.

Readers often challenge authors to identify the myriad streamlets that flowed together to form the river of a novel: How did you think of that? How much is true? How did you research it? To the best of my recollection, here are the tributary events that led to The Egyptologist.

Several years ago, I was at a Kinko's in Sink, Oklahoma, bored, photocopying my remarks for The Sink Literary Festival's panel on The Self in Flight from Itself: Understanding the Author as Pathological Liar when, in the blue recycling bin at my feet, I noticed the distinct first page of a handwritten letter. Despite the poor toner quality, I could make out a date from 1952 and a series of lovelorn complaints. The writer accused Beloved, hated Doris of any number of violations of his love. Oddly, among the other crimes, the writer's wrath was most righteous over a betrayal of some obscure academic debate: But, Doris, your decision to side with the know-nothings of Egyptology in denying the historical veracity of King Atum-hadu has wounded me more than all your petty cruelty, your crude tauntings, your low-cut End of page, and none beneath it. I didn't know anything about Egyptology (I still don't) but the idea of a lover enraged over such a dusty topic caught me.

I certainly didn't have a novel, just a sniff of something, and I didn't smell it again for two years until, at a museum in Thailand, battling the heat and jet lag while walking through an exhibit on the 18th-century Siamese Queen Shlipralithpur, I was bored again. I noticed four young women speaking a Slavic language, maybe Polish. I recognized only two accented words: Shlipralithpur and Atum-hadu. The coincidence awoke me, and I recalled Doris' love-shattering controversial position. What possible relationship could that ancient king have to this opium-gobbling girl-queen of Siam or to these sun-burnt Slavic beauties (who spoke not one word in common with any language I could sputter, but one of whom, when I repeated Atum-hadu, smiled broadly and slowly drew in my notebook a series of the most exquisitely vulgar hieroglyphs)? I was hooked; I smelled the simmering stock of a novel. The process of inspiration is impenetrable, at least at the time, but I remember that I was fiercely determined (in a way I rarely am, as laziness is my ruling humor) to learn about Atum-hadu.

My research took a year. The only public documents even mentioning Atum-hadu were located in the People's Library of Ancient Cultures, a squat 1970s concrete lump in a Beijing neighborhood split between lesser university disciplines and adult-video importers. It took some finagling, but I was permitted a scant 90 minutes of supervised access to the archives. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I found it at minute 86: the same series of obscene hieroglyphs I had last seen 13 months earlier in Bangkok. I began feverishly copying everything, though of course I couldn't understand the symbols. I managed to scribble only one paragraph in my four minutes. And then the document was snatched away.

Home a week later, I went in search of an Egyptologist to translate the paragraph for me. A cosmic sigh: the very first Egypt scholar I found at my local community college was a young, sun-burnt Russian emigre named Doris. Her translation:

The invaders cut through Atum-hadu's defenders. Their faces spattered with the blood of a decade's slaughter, their howls ringing out as they reached at last for their prize, maddened by their strict diet of war, promised blinding plunder and terrified victims, they poured into Atum-hadu's court. There they gaped at the defiantly exuberant courtiers of Atum-hadu: feasting, dancing to the intricate music of their king's composition, riding trained camels and, along the defenses, on the floors, and on tables engaging one another in combinations and postures the invaders could never have conceived of, even after a decade of desert isolation where their thoughts had nowhere to turn but upon the faraway pleasures of the flesh.

Doris read the translation to me in her lilting accent as a dusty sunbeam alit on her face, and soon after I began work on the novel which is now The Egyptologist.

When I started my first novel, A Sudden Country, in 1990, I thought it would take a year. Through my ancestry, I'd always felt linked to the story of westward migration. But when I was growing up in the 60s, the story of Oregon emigration had faded into a hazy foundational myth: corny or romantic or shameful, depending on your demographic. I knew it had been none of those. It had been a real event in which real people had taken an incredible leap of faith. What had made them leave safe homes for the unknown? What had they found? I could only guess. But just knowing their stories had given me a willingness to take risks and to endure life's inconveniences, to value survival skills.
As a teacher, I took teenagers into the wilderness and saw how many had no idea what humans were capable of. I told stories of explorers and emigrants and Native Americans how they'd lived and what they'd done. These stories had the power to change their outlooks, too. This history seemed too important to forget, to laugh at or dismiss. That's not to say I wasn't uncomfortable with my colonial legacy. My college years had been informed by the new environmental movement, by AIM, by the rage of historical revisionism that cast Americans not as victims or heroes but as monstrous aggressors. But I knew, again, that the people in conflict at the time had seen a much more complex picture, different from any historical recasting.

I never expected to exorcise my conqueror's guilt, but it did seem necessary to understand this story from the ground from inside those who'd been there. So I wrote, and when the year was out, I realized my presumption. Grand intentions had done nothing but produce a fiction, as absurd as any other, and I was expecting a first child. I put the project away, resolved to make better use of my time. Then, with no less presumption, my husband and I quit our jobs and moved to an Idaho farm. With no money or work to fall back on, driving a trailer full of goats and horses, cats and hens, we arrived on 50 acres and soon had to fix tractors, build barns, dig cellars, grow food. What had we been thinking? Six years passed. I had a girl, then a boy. Each winter I tried to write. By then I'd ridden country once mapped by Hudson's Bay fur traders, snowshoed through winters so long and bleak that I'd come to see how color vermilion or a string of beads could become currency. Now a mother, I'd wondered how one eloquent trader had endured a winter in which his whole family died of smallpox. I'd stood on old village sites, pondered churches built by rival missionaries, learned to butcher deer and split cordwood from a Nez Perce neighbor. Summer days of hoeing and diapering had taught me things I'd never guessed about poverty. Each month brought some new lesson, and for a writer, the most important one was this: that facts and ideas were not enough to write from. Only by feeling a life could I understand it. Only by living could I feel it. Then I was given an account handed down by a true ancestor. Emma Mitchell was 11 when she crossed to Oregon in 1847. Desperate toward the journey's end, her family won permission to winter at the Whitman mission. A month later, the Cayuse massacred the mission's American men, took the women and children hostage. From my farm I could almost see that place, but never imagined my connection. Or guessed that but for a pair of stolen stockings, I might well not exist.

To take up those dry husks of words and know a woman who once woke from dreams, pressed her lips to an infant's hair, found her courage, kept a secret; to know a man who had split wood, built barns, lost love to know these things was to know my new ability to speak for those whose lives had been reduced to names in the backs of Bibles, a saved lock of hair, old pages lit to fire kindling. I abandoned years of drafts, everything I'd done, and began again, hoping (with less presumption now), to honor them.

Karen Fisher now lives with her husband and three children on an island in Puget Sound.

Though it’s a novel, Galway Bay is based on the life of my great-great-grandmother, a story I only discovered after years of research. I didn’t even know her name on that October morning in 1979 when my dad and I walked into the office of the Galway City Clerk—two more Irish-Americans looking for their ancestors.
“My name is Michael Kelly,” my father said.

“We’ve a county full of Michael Kellys,” the man replied. Wasn’t Kelly the second most common name in Ireland, right there next to Murphy, and wasn’t Galway “Kelly Country”?

What details did we have about our Kellys? Townland? No. Parish? No. Dates? Only that our ancestors left Ireland in the 1840s or ’50s.

“Along with two million others,” the clerk said.

My dad raised his eyebrows at me. He’d been skeptical about “this whole roots thing” anyway. He was very proud of being Irish. We all were. But Ireland itself didn’t really come into it.

We were Chicago Irish with roots in Bridgeport. “The Cradle of Kings,” my dad only half-jokingly called the neighborhood that gave our city its mayors, beginning with his own cousin Ed Kelly, and continuing through Mayor Daley.

I’d been visiting Ireland off and on for 10 years and I was fascinated by the place. I longed to show him a country richer and more complex than the land he’d seen on a one-week tour with my mom and friends from Chicago. I planned to spend the fall studying in Ireland. Would he travel with me for the first two weeks? “Go on, Mike,” my mom said and surprising himself, he agreed.

We were having a great time. He enjoyed the landscape, the music, the people. My dad delighted in the conversation, enjoyed the turns of phrase and the humor that was so like his own. Though he did comment on the low voices, the guardedness. “A nation of conspirators,” he said.

But the tangible connection to “our Kellys” that I wanted seemed impossible. The town clerk shook his head, sad for us. The Diaspora. Cut off forever. But then he smiled. He held up a wonderful old-fashioned fountain pen.

“Pope John Paul II used this to sign our visitors book when he was here last week. Two hundred and eighty thousand went to the Mass he celebrated on the Galway Race Course.” Then the clerk raised the pen and used it to make a quick sign of the cross on my father’s forehead. A papal blessing once-removed.

Then he handed my dad the pen. “Here. Now you sign your name in the book.” So there on the page facing the pope’s signature, my father wrote: Michael J. Kelly, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

“There,” the clerk said. “You are entered on the official rolls of the county of your ancestors. Welcome home.”

The men shook hands. Perfect.

My dad had always been impatient with details. “Summarize,” he’d say to my sisters and brother and me when we’d start rambling through some story. Get to the point. And now he had. He had reconnected to the 2,000-year history of the Kellys in Ireland. Officially. Done.

We continued our trip, driving along Galway Bay and through Connemara. Somehow we felt less like tourists.

For me the search had only begun. I went back to the U.S. and did my homework, cranking through microfilm census rolls, calling relatives I didn’t know, hunting for death certificates, checking cemetery records. Anyone who does genealogy knows what it’s like—two steps forward, one step back. Right name, possible date—oops, not related. And then the joy when our ancestors emerge. I searched libraries in the U.S. and Ireland, and then the Irish computerized their church records, and the floodgates opened.

Genealogy is called a hobby, but that word can’t convey how soul-sustaining the information gathered can be. All of our ancestors endured so much—war, famine, pogroms, genocide, the middle passage, slavery. Yet they survived, because here we are. Our lives are their victory.

“Thank you,” I said to Honora Keeley Kelly when I stood where she’d been born in 1822, in the village of Bearna/Freeport, right on the shores of Galway Bay.
I wish my dad were still alive to read Galway Bay. He’d say that there are a lot of pages. But I’d assure him it moves fast. I didn’t cover all 2,000 years. I summarized.

Galway Bay, the story of one family’s Irish American experience, is the second novel by Mary Pat Kelly, a former television producer who has written several nonfiction books. She lives in New York.

I have never been very good at coming up with ideas for stories and novels. When I was in graduate school, they encouraged us to scan the obituaries for stories. I could never do this! Aside from the fact that I'm a Southerner and have a deep respect for the deceased, I often take ideas to my desk and find they don't work. I don't know your experience, but I've found that most ideas aren't viable ideas.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez was born and raised in Memphis and graduated from Harvard University. She teaches creative writing at the University of Puget Sound and has had stories published in The Kenyon Review and Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2009. Wench is her first novel. Visit her website for more information.

Pearl Buck and I have a long history together, and in some sense that story is at the heart of my novel, Pearl of China. I was ordered to denounce Pearl Buck in China, where I lived for 27 years. The year was 1971. I was a teenager attending middle school in Shanghai.

I was raised on the teachings of Mao and the operas of Madam Mao. I became a leader of the Little Red Guards in elementary school. My mother had been a teacher—she taught whatever the Party asked, one semester in Chinese and the next in Russian. My father was an instructor of industrial technique drawing at Shanghai Textile Institute, although his true love was astronomy. My parents both believed in Mao and the Communist Party, just like everybody else in the neighborhood. I became a Mao activist and won contests because I was able to recite the Little Red Book. In school Mao’s books were our texts.

I finished reading The Good Earth on the airplane from Chicago to Los Angeles. I broke down and sobbed. I couldn’t stop myself because I remembered how I had denounced the author.

Trying to gain international support to deny Pearl Buck an entry visa (to accompany President Nixon to China), Madam Mao organized a national campaign to criticize Buck as an “American cultural imperialist.”

I followed the order to denounce Pearl Buck and never doubted whether or not Madam Mao was being truthful. I was brainwashed at that time and had learned never to question anything. And yet I do remember having difficulty composing the criticisms. I wished that I had been given a chance to read The Good Earth. We were told that the book was so “toxic” that it was dangerous to even translate. I was told to copy lines from the newspapers: “Pearl Buck insulted Chinese peasants therefore China.” “She hates us therefore is our enemy.” I was proud to be able to defend my country and people.

Pearl Buck’s name didn’t cross my path again until I immigrated to America. It was 1996 and I was giving a reading at a Chicago bookstore for my memoir, Red Azalea. Afterward, a lady came to me and asked if I knew Pearl Buck. Before I could reply, she said—very emotionally and to my surprise—that Pearl Buck had taught her to love the Chinese people. She placed a paperback in my hands and said that it was a gift. It was The Good Earth.

I finished reading The Good Earth on the airplane from Chicago to Los Angeles. I broke down and sobbed. I couldn’t stop myself because I remembered how I had denounced the author. I remembered how Madam Mao had convinced the entire nation to hate Pearl Buck. How wrong we were! I had never encountered any author, including the most respected Chinese authors, who wrote about our peasants with such admiration, affection and humanity.

It was at that very moment that Pearl of China was conceived.

I continued reading Pearl’s own writing and continued to be amazed at her perspective, how well she knew the Chinese. Pearl not only grew up in China, but grew up with the people, whom she loved and didn’t feel separate from. One of the most important things I did to prepare for writing my novel was to spend time in the town where Pearl Buck grew up. It was the town Pearl called “Chin-kiang,” which we call “Zheng Jiang” today.

I wanted to know who her childhood friends and neighbors were and how those folks thought of her. She stayed in contact with some of her friends for over 40 years—some of the same people that refused to denounce Pearl during the Cultural Revolution. But people were afraid to talk to me at first. The memories of the brutal persecution during the Cultural Revolution were still fresh. I kept returning until one day I was referred to a dying pastor. The local man who introduced me said that “the pastor is ready to open up because he was told by the doctor that he has only few days left to live,” which meant that he, the pastor, could afford to tell the truth and escape punishment. I felt terrible stealing the dying man’s last moments, but the pastor insisted that he see me.

When I went looking for confirmation about who had denied Pearl Buck a visa to China in 1972, I also got lucky. I suspected Madame Mao was behind the rejection but had no proof. So I was thrilled when I met Pearl Buck’s daughter Janice at the Pearl Buck House in Pennsylvania in 2007. Janice told me that her mother believed that it was Madame Mao, and she listed the reasons, all of which made sense to me. Janice also shared with me some wonderful details about her mother, for example, about the Chinese pond Pearl created in her backyard and Pearl’s passion for Chinese camellias.

I could have written this story only now and only in America. Here, I can write without worry of being persecuted for what I write. And I wrote about Pearl at the right time in my own life—I was born and lived in China for 27 years, and I have lived in America for 26 years. I truly can comprehend Pearl Buck as a “person of two worlds.” I have begun to understand how an author’s background decides, if not dictates, what she writes. In some sense, I could not have written this book until now, because it has taken me this long to truly understand the American side of Pearl Buck’s character.

Pearl of China is the seventh book by Anchee Min, who has been published in 32 languages and many countries. Her 1992 memoir, Red Azalea, contains more details of her coming-of-age in Communist China. Pearl of China imagines the 40 years author Pearl S. Buck spent in China during the Communist regime.

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A trailer for Pearl of China.

One of the benefits of writing a novel based on a well-documented historical figure is the wealth of material available to help with character development. My first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, was based on Martha Carrier, my grandmother back nine generations—an accused witch hanged in 1692 who Cotton Mather referred to as The Queen of Hell—and the stories my family had been passing down for 300 years.

There were court transcripts, depositions, arrest warrants and contemporary essays detailing some of Martha’s deeds (or misdeeds in the eyes of her accusers) chronicled by the magistrates, neighbors and family who knew her, all of which I was able to use in creating the narrative.

It was quite a different experience developing the character of Thomas Carrier, Martha’s husband, for my second novel, The Wolves of Andover. In Massachusetts there were only a few tax records that I could find, and a petition by him following the witch trials that he be compensated for his wife’s unjust death. And yet, Thomas was a man who Carrier family legend claimed had lived to 109 years of age, was seven feet tall, and was one of the executioners of King Charles I of England. I had grown up hearing stories of Thomas from my grandparents, but I had assumed for a long time that these tales were like the proverbial fish stories: stories that had grown in size over time.

While researching The Wolves of Andover, I was able to substantiate his age and height. The New England Journal of 1735 reported that Thomas, at that time living in Colchester, Connecticut, had died at age 109; was over seven feet tall with a full head of hair; and had walked several miles with a bag of grain over his back a few days before his death. The Journal reported that he was still, at that advanced age, “fleet of foot.” When I travelled to Connecticut to visit his gravesite, I marveled at the numbers carved into the headstone: AE 109 Yrs. According to the local stories, two coffins had to be fitted together to bury him.

Proof of his being one of the two executioners of King Charles I may never be substantiated. It is widely believed that the official executioner at the time refused absolutely to cut off the head of an anointed king, and that Cromwell at the last minute had to find two willing axmen. This story, in the form of local gossip, seemed to follow Thomas throughout his life, both in Massachusetts and Connecticut. According to a Connecticut historian I spoke to while doing research, Thomas even gained a reputation in Colchester as a ferocious Indian fighter, continuing to protect the homes he had built for himself and family well past 70 years of age.

In the past few years I have spoken to fellow descendants, from different branches of the Carrier line, who heard the same stories I was told, not only of Martha and the witch trials, but of Thomas, who was the giant who killed a king.

Here’s what I was able to establish through research: He never abandoned his family during the witch trials and helped rally his neighbors to raise funds to free some of the children accused of witchcraft from prison. He kept his farm going in Andover until 1711, when he was compensated by the Crown for his wife’s death, and then he left for Colchester, with all his surviving children and grandchildren. There he built three homes and a blacksmith forge, and the bag of grain he was carrying the few days before he died was for an ailing widower in the neighboring town of Glastonbury.

Sometimes, though, it’s what is not in the historical records that gives an intriguing glimpse at a character’s inner life or purpose. Thomas, who was 48 years old when he married Martha, never married again after her death—a highly unusual and even scandalous position for a single male in Puritan society. As the writer of the story, I got to make the call as to his reasons for never again taking a wife. I believe it was because Martha Carrier, his wife, was a remarkable woman, a woman he stood by no matter what, a woman whom he appreciated for her independent nature, with whom he was able to share his darkest secrets, a woman who was irreplaceable. As much fun as it was to write a story about Thomas’ adventures in England and the mystery surrounding his work for Cromwell, it was even more satisfying to pay homage to the love story of these two remarkable people.