Other historically based groups and events mentioned in the novel include the Ligue Nationale Antisémitique de France, as well as the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s and the lynchings of Italians in New Orleans in 1891. The Center for Peace and Justice has documented that the 1890s saw more lynchings of African Americans and all groups in the United States than any other single decade.
The Biltmore Estate, still owned by George Vanderbilt’s descendants, remains the largest private residence in the United States and has become one of the largest employers and tourist destinations in the Asheville, North Carolina, area.
Just for fun, as a kind of shared wink with the savvy reader, I included some addresses with historical and literary significance. The boardinghouse where Kerry visits Dearg Tate at 48 Spruce Street, for example, was indeed owned at the time by Mrs. Alice Reynolds but was later where the writer Thomas Wolfe lived as a boy, and is the boardinghouse at the center of his novel Look Homeward, Angel. Ling’s fictional shop at 55 Haywood Street is the address of what is now the much-loved Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café.
Dog-loving readers will be pleased to learn that the four-legged character Cedric, the faithful, drooling Saint Bernard, is based on the historical canine, and was beloved by George Vanderbilt. A pub in Antler Village on Biltmore Estate is named in Cedric’s honor.
Acknowledgments
I always come to the task of listing those to whom I’m indebted with an overwhelming sense of gratitude—like being reminded that, while I’ve been doggedly swimming along, I’ve been held up less by my own strokes than by wave upon wave of friends, family, and incredibly talented fellow writers and publishing professionals.
I’ve often listed friends and family individually in the past, but part of the richness of living and writing for increasing years is having a longer and longer list of folks who deserve naming—which also makes it more treacherous if you can’t stand the thought of leaving someone out. Please know I’m so grateful for you friends who make life rich and challenging and good—and that I’m thinking of your faces and names as I type. Enormous thanks as always to my family: my husband, Todd Lake; my kids, Jasmine, Justin, and Julia Jordan-Lake; my mother, Diane Jordan; my brother, David Jordan; my sister-in-law, Beth Jackson-Jordan; their kids, Olivia, Catherine, and Chris Jackson-Jordan; my mother-in-law, Gina Lake; my brother-in-law, Steven Lake; my kids’ godparents, Ginger and Milton Brasher-Cunningham, also a writer; and a host of treasured cousins and cousins-by-marriage all over the United States.
As with every book, I’m so grateful to my agent, Elisabeth Weed of The Book Group, for being wise, encouraging, savvy, and generally fabulous. At Lake Union, I continue to be grateful for editorial director Danielle Marshall’s being willing to take a risk on my last novel, A Tangled Mercy, and for being intrigued by the idea behind this one, even in the roughest of early forms. Danielle, I am so thankful for your support, your insights, your strength, and the way you ferociously champion the books you care about. On the editing front, I’ve never yet had an editor on any book whom I didn’t like and appreciate for the ways in which he or she was helping my writing be better than I knew how to do alone, but developmental editor David Downing is among the very best out there, from giving an insider’s view of quail hunting and shotgun handling to helping judge whether a particular character was too saintly, too sinister, or just plain dull. Erin Calligan Mooney provided invaluable insights on the manuscript, as did Blake Leyers. In copyediting and proofreading, Emma Reh, Lindsey Alexander, and Carrie Urbanic kept me honest on all sorts of details I’d have missed. Graphic designer Rex Bonomelli designed a cover that somehow beautifully suggests the tension between Gilded Age wealth and Appalachia culture, as well as the mystery I was hoping for. From author relations manager Gabriella Dumpit to PR gurus Dennelle Catlett and Maggie Sivon and so many others, the entire Lake Union/Amazon Publishing team has been such a pleasure to work with.
I feel fortunate to get to learn from, laugh with, and vent alongside a multitude of writer friends, including those in the fabulous Dutch Lunch writer tribe, the NINC 4Ever group, Lake Union Authors, the SCBWI Mid-South group, the Historical Novel Society of the Midsouth, and individual writer-colleague buddies, including Suzanne Robertson, Susan Bahner Lancaster, and early reader and giver-of-feedback Elizabeth Rogers. Novelist Bob Dugoni and the multitalented Cristina Dugoni became encouragers and friends of Todd’s and mine at a time when my writing life badly needed an extra shove. It’s a privilege to ride the crazy writing life roller coaster with all of you writer friends. Thank you for the times you’ve been vulnerable about your disappointments and struggles, as well as for letting me celebrate your triumphs with you.
Sometimes as an author, you look back—way back—and realize you were doing research on a book long before that novel ever came to be plotted or pitched. In my early twenties—quite some time ago now—I was able to spend several summers working for two different and equally beautiful summer camps in western North Carolina, Camp Rockmont in Black Mountain and Camp Gwynn Valley in Brevard. Those long, lovely summers helped solidify my enthusiasm for the Blue Ridge Mountains and my respect for the culture that has grown and evolved there.
One of the summers I worked for Camp Rockmont, some of us on camp staff—all of us sunburned and sweaty—were invited to a home on the grounds of Biltmore Estate belonging to a young woman my age, Dini Cecil (later Pickering), who was connected to Rockmont through a young man she was dating and would eventually marry. Dini, whom I remember as gracious, down-to-earth, and unassuming, turned out to be the person, along with her brother Bill, who would later inherit Biltmore. This seemed a fitting place to thank her again after all these years for the hospitality and pizza that night, and to thank the current staff of Biltmore Estate, who’ve unfailingly responded to all my questions with patience and interest.
I should admit that I began research on George Vanderbilt fully prepared to depict him as merely a background, one-dimensional character, nothing more than the privileged benefactor of his robber baron relatives. But the more I read, the more intrigued I became by the actual man’s complexity: his love for art and the outdoors, his voracious reading, his desire early in life to become an Episcopal priest, his ongoing interest in matters of faith, his contributions to forestry and sustainability, his hospitality, his generosity, and his commitment to bring hundreds of new jobs, as well as training and schools, to western North Carolina.
Thank you to the owners and staff of Parnassus Books, my local independent bookstore, so committed to writers and readers alike.
Thank you to Bryan Stevenson and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It was through your work that I discovered the historical Robert Bratchett of North Carolina and created the character in his honor.
Thank you to the keepers of the Asheville Public Library Archives, where, close to closing time one night, I found Ling Yong (or Gunn) in one of the thick stacks of newspaper clipping folders an uncomplaining archivist brought, even though I looked like just the sort of scatterbrained researcher who loses all track of time and stays up till the last nanoseconds of closing.
Like all historical novels, a significant amount of research went into the writing of this book. I’d particularly like to thank the following authors for their books, which were among the most helpful: Denise Kiernan for The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home; Ellen Erwin Rickman for Biltmore Estate (Images of America); Emma Bell Miles for The Spirit of the Mountains; Drema Hall Berkheimer for Running on Red Dog Road and Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood; Jerry E. Patterson for The Vanderbilts; Witold Rybczynski for A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century; John Alexander Williams for Appalachia: A History; Arthur T. Vanderbilt II for Fortune’s Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt; Sean Dennis Cashman for America in the Gilded Age; and last, but decidedly not least, the Foxfire series on Southern Appalachian life. Jonathan Peter Spiro’s biography Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant was enormously helpful in sparking my imagination about the complex and appalling Grant. (More on him in Historical Notes.)