How a Message from the Past Became my Muse

by Amanda Geard

High in the beams of the derelict Georgian house my husband and I renovated in southwest Ireland we discovered a hidden message – obscured by lime and horse hair – left by a long-dead carpenter. When this comes down, pray for me. Tim O’Shea, 1911. It was 2018, and we took that slip of still-resinous Pitch pine (imported from the New World in the 1820s) and put it in the cold and unfinished sitting room so that when we huddled by the fire at night the words were always with us. Tim O’Shea. Tim O’Shea. Tim O’Shea. We wondered who this man had been, and what he was like when he’d worked on the roof above us a century before we arrived. Most of all, we imagined what had happened to him since.

Time. It follows us everywhere, but as I held that piece of timber in my hands, dust thick in the air, the woollen insulation that we were laying laboriously, strip by strip, clinging to my paint-stained clothes, I felt humbled that a person’s fingerprint could, in a thousand ways, transcend it. And in fact, it told me something entirely new, something I’d never considered before: here, in this house, the decades weren’t all that mattered … place also gathered the threads of time together.

And so, the fictitious Blackwater Hall was born: a dilapidated manor in southwest Ireland holding secrets that someone like me – someone who hadn’t grown up in the house, who didn’t know what skeletons hid in the closet – could begin to peel away. Enter our modern-day protagonist, Ellie Fitzgerald; a woman seeking solace in County Kerry, who stumbles across a message of her own (not a slip of timber for Ellie, but a letter) that leads to the unravelling of a mystery eight decades in the making. So, the scene for The Midnight House was set, and all I needed was a secret for her to uncover. Something delicious, something scandalous, an event that rippled through the ages to imprint on the generations to follow. But that piece of the puzzle I already had.

Charlotte Rathmore, the true heroine of The Midnight House, had walked many miles with me, moving into my imagination some years before and making herself comfortable. At the time, I was working as a geologist, a modern nomad, never long enough in one place to call it home. But somewhere along the line the idea of Charlotte appeared: a young woman standing by a lake, a battered suitcase in her hand, a coat so obviously oversized that it couldn’t have been her own. It seemed she planned to run away, but from what or to where I had not known. The landscape was sparse: just that lake, black as midnight, and a dilapidated house set back from its wild shore.

Here in southwest Ireland, I found that landscape. We had arrived on a visit which turned into an idea to renovate an old house that hung on the edge of the Atlantic. Behind that house was a mountain, and on that mountain was a lake. And the first time I hiked to its gorse-rimmed shore I saw the fading image of twin concentric rings marring its surface, as though two feet had stood at the water’s edge. Charlotte had been there, I was sure of it. And behind her? I imagined a large Anglo-Irish manor, its sash windows open to let in the breeze.

On Europe’s westernmost reaches where claws of purple sandstone grip an angry froth of ocean, both my story and I found a home. County Kerry, Ireland. The pull of the place is magnetic. While writing the novel, I cleared my head with icy dips in the winter sea, then I’d walk home across emerald-green fields where sheep grazed lazily at the base of a two-thousand-year-old ringfort that stood as proud as the day it was built. Deer came to raid our garden, foxes screamed in the night like the much-feared banshee, and all the while wicked weather whipped off the Atlantic, only sometimes disappearing to leave soporific sunshine that made diamonds dance on the sea.

And so, that landscape, that place, become a defining feature of The Midnight House. I wanted to capture it, to evoke the same feeling that it conjured in me, that it has conjured in a thousand generations before. Weaving it – and my old friend, time – into the story was as simple as stepping outside my front door, bringing the novel’s characters with me. In 1958, I held a young girl’s hand as she met a gardener by the still waters of the lake where he’d left a thousand posies to mourn his life’s long-lost love. In 2019, I stood beside Ellie, wind dancing across the white sands of Derrynane Beach as she gnawed at her doubts and grief, her anguish eased as a new friend came to stand by her side. And in 1939, I walked with Charlotte, step by step, as she turned and started over the mountain and away.

Author’s note: We eventually found Tim O’Shea’s descendants and return the one-hundred-year-old Pitch pine message to them. It was a magic moment.

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Bio Amanda Geard is a geologist who was inspired by her life in County Kerry, Ireland to pick up the pen and start writing fiction. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Irish Times, The Journal, Nordic Reach and writing.ie. Her debut novel, The Midnight House, will be published by Headline Review in May 2022.

Instagram: @amandageard

Twitter: @amandageard

Website: www.amandageard.com

THE MIDNIGHT HOUSE

People disappear. Secrets remain…

‘A wonderful tale of family secrets. Compelling, intriguing, and brimming with lush historical detail’ HAZEL GAYNOR, New York Times bestselling author of The Bird in the Bamboo Cage

‘I really, really loved it. Written in that old-school, descriptively beautiful way I just love and adore. A wonderful mystery, and then another mystery thrown in, totally atmospheric and just wonderfully escapist’ LORNA COOK, USA Today bestselling author of The Girl from the Island
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My Dearest T, Whatever you hear, do not believe it for a moment…

1940: In south-west Ireland, the young and beautiful Lady Charlotte Rathmore is pronounced dead after she mysteriously disappears by the lake of Blackwater Hall. In London, on the brink of the Blitz, Nancy Rathmore is grieving Charlotte’s death when a letter arrives containing a secret that she is sworn to keep – one that will change her life for ever.

2019: Decades later, Ellie Fitzgerald is forced to leave Dublin disgraced and heartbroken. Abandoning journalism, she returns to rural Kerry to weather out the storm. But, when she discovers a faded letter, tucked inside the pages of an old book, she finds herself drawn in by a long-buried secret. And as Ellie begins to unravel the mystery, it becomes clear that the letter might hold the key to more than just Charlotte’s disappearance.

An unforgettable and spellbinding story of secrets, war, love and sacrifice, perfect for readers of Kate Morton, Eve Chase and Louise Douglas.
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YOUR FAVOURITE AUTHORS HAVE LOST THEIR HEARTS TO THE MIDNIGHT HOUSE…

‘A gorgeous setting, wonderful characters and secrets that kept me glued to the pages. It’s a beauty’ JENNY ASHCROFT

‘An intriguing multi-layered mystery spanning generations, evocative and beautifully written’ TRACY REES

‘I was pulled in from page one. It’s beautiful and I love it’ LIZ FENWICK

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