How do you survive something like the Black Death when everybody else is dying? I decided that the only way to do it was to show these people working as a team.
Author Minette Walters on her new novel, The Last Hours,
The Last Hours Minette Walters HarperCollins
WHITCOMBE, ENGLAND Every time Minette Walters wanders the Dorset countryside around her exquisite 18th-century home, she knows she may be walking over a plague pit.
That awareness haunted this bestselling novelist for years — so much so that it finally compelled her to turn her back on crime fiction and embark on a massive historical work about the Black Death, the fearsome plague that killed more than half of Britain’s population in the 14th century.
The evidence of what happened is all around her.
“We’re in this tiny little hamlet of Whitcombe and there’s this church 500 yards from our house in the middle of our field,” she tells Postmedia.
“There’s a plague pit by the church. The original village was completely wiped out.”
These mass emergency graves for plague victims are silent presences under the green and leafy beauty of this southern county. And they play a grisly role in The Last Hours, a 550-page novel. The book arrives with a ringing endorsement from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes — “an enthralling account of a calamitous time, and above all a wonderful testimony to the strength of the human spirit.”
Several factors forged the 68-year-old novelist’s determination to write about this catastrophe.
One was the eerie experience of having the past so firmly embedded on the family’s own property.
“It’s where the village once was, and the mounds around the church show you where the foundations were,” she says. Both the mounds and the church itself are listed as scheduled monuments by the authorities. “We’re not even allowed to install fencing. To be told there was a plague pit there brought everything home to me.”
A further trigger for the novel exists in the coastal town of Weymouth. That’s where Walters and her husband discovered a plaque on the harbour wall recording that this was where the Black Death entered England in June 1348. Days later, corpses were rotting in the streets — evidence, it was believed at that time, of God’s judgment on sinners.
“As the crow flies, we’re about four miles from Weymouth, which was called Melcombe in those days,” Walters says “Only one in 10 Dorset people survived. People were unprepared. They didn’t see it coming and didn’t know what to do. Dorset was decimated.
“One contemporary chronicler described the plague as moving at the speed of a galloping horse. I became interested in the few who did survive. I just had to write their story.”
For Walters, now hard at work finishing a sequel, the novel’s success vindicates her decision to abandon contemporary crime fiction. Apart from a short novella called The Cellar, published a couple of years ago, Walters — hailed by one critic as “the queen of the psychological thriller — had remained silent for a decade. Her earlier thrillers continued to sell, now topping 25 million copies worldwide, but the prolonged absence of anything new in bookstores sparked all manner of speculation among fans. Surely, it was assumed, the author of spectacular sellers like The Sculptress or Acid Row must be suffering from writer’s block.
Not so. Walters was simply pursuing her new commitment to historical fiction while also trying to convince publishers it was a good idea — “not the easiest thing in the world if they want you to write crime novels,” she told an interviewer last November.
Walters also wanted to escape her celebrity status as a hugely popular crime writer. She’s on record as saying she envies writers like Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier, both bestsellers in their own day, for largely being able to escape the glare of publicity — and in particular the onslaught of the social media.
“Social media is the death of free speech ... it’s absolutely outrageous. Free speech is dying by a yard a day, simply because of Twitter. That’s why I’ve gone back to the 14th century.”
The focal point of her story is the private land of Develish, a small estate whose brutal overlord is an early victim of the plague. His resourceful widow, Lady Anne, is determined to protect the estate and its population from the pestilence. She is prepared to overturn the existing social order by bringing 200 bonded serfs inside a protective moat, sharing limited food supplies with them and choosing a bastard slave named Thaddeus to act as her steward and to lead a dangerous expedition into the putrefying horrors of the outside world in search of urgently needed supplies.
Walters in her crime fiction has always revealed a tough-minded feminism and a dislike of class divisions. But Lady Anne, a compelling creation, is not some transplanted 21st-century fantasy. Walters is quick to argue that medieval England did produce some formidable women — for example, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
“How do you survive something like the Black Death when everybody else is dying from it? I decided that the only way to do it was to show these people working as a team. So I have this manor house with serfs.
“I have a lady of the manor who actually seeks to protect her people rather than to slam the door on them and say — I don’t care if you die, we need to live. A very utopian view of life can actually mean you survive. That’s how our species survives — not through hate, but through love.”
Even so, hatred is not banished from this book. Dangerous conflicts surface — some emanating from marauding bands of survivors, others erupting within the estate after murder is committed, others happening at a painfully personal level because of Lady Anne’s viciously spiteful daughter, Eleanor, who is showing all the trappings of a sociopathic disorder.
As a novelist, Walters has never viewed the world through a rosecoloured lens.
“I don’t believe human nature changes,” she says.
“We’ve just become more civilized. But all the anger and jealousy in someone like Eleanor whose pampered world suddenly turns upside down — that never goes away. We still feel it. Cain still wants to kill Abel.”