This first "blooper" really isn't. I made a conscious decision to fudge a bit. Marrow-bone pie is such a great name that I was determined to use it in a story set in 1559, even though the earliest recipe I've found so far dates from the following century. It is likely a variety of this dish did exist in the sixteenth, but I had to make certain adjustments. The seventeenth century recipe included potatoes. These came from the New World and were rare in England before the 1590s. Eryngo root would also have been a more common ingredient in the seventeenth century. It was candied commercially after 1620. In addition to potato and candied eryngo, marrow-bone pie contained edible bone marrow, artichokes, currants, and dates. Artichokes were more usually eaten raw, with pepper and salt. They were grown in English gardens by the early 1500s and by 1569 they were being exported to Germany from London. Dates and currants were imported from the Levant by way of Portugal. At this time the word currant referred to a raisin, not a black currant. The entire pie was "spiced" with sugar, which came in loaves. I confess I do not know what it looked like. The artist's interpretation on the cover is one possibility. Another is that it resembled an apple pie. It definitely had a crust and was baked. Keep in mind that the cook who made it for John Bexwith had never heard of this dish before, either. She had only a list of ingredients to go by.

Recipe for Marrow-Bone Pie
from Gervaise Markham's The English Housewife (1615)
(McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986, edited by Michael R. Best)

Mix the crusts and raise the coffin in such manner as you please
Lay in the bottom thereof a course of marrow of beef mixed with currants
Upon it layer of the souls of artichokes, after they have been boiled and divided from the thistle
Cover them over with marrow, currants, and great raisins, the stones picked out
Layer a course of clean-peeled potatoes cut in thick slices after they have been boiled soft
Cover them with marrow, currants, great raisins, sugar, and cinnamon
Layer candied eryngo roots mixed very thick with slices of dates
Cover with marrow, currants, great raisins, sugar, cinnamon, and dates, with a few damask prunes
Bake it
After it is baked, pour into it as long as it will receive it white wine, rose-water, sugar, cinnamon, and vinegar, mixed together
Candy all the cover with rose-water and sugar only
Set it into the oven a little, and after serve it forth.

The second case is, indeed, a blooper. I have Susanna calling a poison associated with the Medici family Aqua Toffana. Four to six drops in water or wine resulted in a painless death within a few hours. It was a solution that contained arsenic and in the seventeenth century it was bottled in special phials and took its name from a person, oneToffana . . . who lived in the 1650s! I did not discover that I'd used an anachronism until my book was already in print. The information on Toffana comes from Poisons and Poisoners by C.J.S. Thompson (New York: Macmillan, 1931) .

Although I try in later books to give an accurate regional flavor to my characters' speech, I did not attempt do much with this in the first one. In actual fact, natives of Kent would have had as distinctive a dialect as those from Lancashire and we'd have trouble understanding either one today. Listen to a native Yorkshireman speak in All Creatures Great and Small and you'll get an idea what I mean.

I did make one unforgiveable error. Sir Robert Appleton makes the comment that Northumberland and his eldest son were executed by Queen Mary. In actual fact, the eldest Dudley son, John, died of natural causes shortly after being released from the Tower of London. It was Guildford Dudley, a middle son, who was executed, along with his wife, the Lady Jane Grey. And one more minor faux pas: Grizel, the servant girl in the first scene, is described there as a buxom lass with a nicely rounded bottom. This is in August. In October, she's become "scrawny" and although she did have a shock, seeing that ghost and all, I think I may have overdone the change in her physical appearance.

Bloopers in Face Down Upon an Herbal

Gilbert, while serving in Lord Madderly's household, should not have been wearing a hat indoors. This was another fact I discovered, in Phillis Cunnington's Costumes of Household Servants from the Middle Ages to 1900, after my novel was already out. Head coverings were worn indoors by most people. The exception--liveried servants. Not even a high ranking servant was allowed to have his head covered when indoors in attendance on his master.

In talking about codes and ciphers, Susanna suggests using a book by John Knox to send messages. Robert says he'd rather use her herbal. I don't actually say which one they end up using in this book, but in a later book, it is the "Knox Code" she says they've used in the past. Is that a blooper? Probably only an "oops."

Possible blooper in Face Down Among the Winchester Geese

The portraits in the whorehouse are a bit of descriptive detail I got from a source I consider very poorly documented. However, since I invented my own reason why there might have been portraits, I look at this as creative licence rather than a true blooper.

Bloopers in Face Down Beneath the Eleanor Cross

Nick Baldwin, first seen in my short story, "Lady Appleton and the London Man," appears in this book. Nick is a merchant who spent the last six and a half years traveling in Muscovy and Persia. Since Nick is fictional, so are his travels. The Muscovy Company was in Russia at this time, and some members were trying to reach Persia, but I have Nick get there first. I recently came across a story about the "first" English representative of the Muscovy Company, one Arthur Edwards, meeting the shah in the spring of 1569. Reportedly, the shah did not recognize the word "England," although "Londro" and "Inghliterra" were familiar to him. In actual fact, representatives of the Muscovy Company reached the court of Shah Tahmasp in 1561, and it is that date I used in creating my fictional situation. The nice thing about writing fiction is that when there are two versions of history, the author gets to pick the one that works best for the story! In another area, however, my research into Persia in the sixteenth century did not go quite far enough. It seems that "Persian" cats (which originally came from Turkey!) did not at that time have the flat-faced characteristic we associate with them today. I'm grateful to Ken Sherman of Mysterious Women for this information and will make this correction in the paperback edition.

Some others I caught before the paperback went to press are:

What I refer to as the first floor of a house should be, since this is England, the ground floor.

I refer to mushrooms in a meat pie. In general, Elizabethans scorned mushrooms as a food.

Ballad singers (Chapter 8) should be ballad sellers.

I refer to an event as being 17 days after Easter in Chapter 9 and say the same event was 15 days after Easter in Chapter 32. 17 is correct and that's been corrected in the paperback.

I say events in Chapter 4 take place two hours after those in Chapter 2 and events in Chapter 5 take place less than an hour after those in Chapter 1. Since Chapters 1-3 are supposed to be taking place at the same time, I can only suppose that folks in Kent were using different clocks than those in London.

But the top blooper in this book comes at the beginning of Chapter 38. According to the hardcover, the year is 1965!

Bloopers in Face Down Under the Wych Elm

I must have had elm trees on the brain when I wrote this book. Even though I'd already said, in "Lady Appleton and the London Man," that the tree in Susanna's garden was an oak, somehow it turned into an "ancient elm" in this one. This probably wouldn't matter, except that Book Eight in the series, Face Down Below the Banqueting House, makes use of the tree again, and this time it is definitely an oak.

Bloopers in Face Down Before Rebel Hooves

In this one, Susanna is under the impression that the devil's turnip is black on the outside, thus making it necessary for a villain to peel one in order to hide it among regular turnips. In fact, the poison plant, white bryony, has a light colored root and can easily be mistaken for a parsnip as well as a turnip. Susanna obviously got it confused with black bryony, a mistake also made by other early herbalists. Kathy just plain goofed.

Bloopers in Face Down Across the Western Sea

Thanks go to a sharp-sighted reader who spotted two places where I used the word "flaunted" when I meant "flouted." Flaunt means to exhibit ostentatiously. Flout means to defy openly. Ooops! The specific references are on page 15: "Authority must not be flaunted with impunity." and on page 160: "Bartholomew Fletcher had repeatedly flaunted Walter's authority." Neither I nor my copy editor spotted this one. For all I know, it occurs elsewhere in the books as well.

And while we're on the subject of usage errors, a somewhat similar mistake, made in The Writers Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England, was my use of hung for hanged. Fellow historical mystery writer Sharan Newman pointed this one out to me. My only consolation, though it isn't an excuse, is that other writers seem to get this wrong, too. Is there a simple method to keep the difference straight? Oh, yes. Just visualize the difference between "the man was hanged" and "the man was hung."

Face Down Across the Western Sea was published in 2002. In 2007, when a fan caught the next blooper, it took me a little while to figure out what it was that didn't make sense about the situation. She pointed out that my use of the word "Amerindians" for native Americans was anachronistic, since it did not come into use until the early twentieth century. I was certain I'd deliberately chosen that word because it had been used at the time (in the 16th and 17th centuries) but I couldn't find "Amerindians" in my notes. Now it isn't always easy to find things in my notes. There are lots of them, in various file folders. But finally the light dawned. The word I intended to use, the word I'm 99% positive I DID use in the original manuscript, was not "Amerindians" at all. It was "Aberginians." This is a name I found in contemporary documents. How did one word turn into the other in the published book? I still don't have an answer for that. An overeager copy editor? That annoying feature on some word processing programs that corrects things whether you want it to or not? It's also possible I did it myself, substituting the incorrect word for the correct one in a moment of confusion, thinking that the other sounded more accurate. In any of those cases, I still should have caught it during proofreading and changed it back. It is also wrong in the ebook version but it will be corrected when the large print copy comes out. Unfortunately, since we only do one large print book a year, that won't be until 2011.

Although the reader who caught "Amerindians" assures me she enjoyed Face Down Across the Western Sea, this is the one book in the series that more people seem to hate than any of the others. A recent blog recommended reading all the other books in the series except this one. A reader review at one of the online bookstores suggested I just cranked this one out for the money. Now, in general, it is a waste of time to respond to comments like that, but here on the Bloopers Page is where I'm supposed to own up to my own shortcomings. Not that one! For a mid-list author such as myself, and even more so if we're talking about the books I've written that have been published by small presses, "the money" doesn't have much to do with anything. Given the time it takes to do research, write, then revise multiple times, I make only pennies per hour. If I didn't love the process of creating my characters and my plots, and love each book I've worked on, I couldn't do it. Face Down Across the Western Sea in particular was a project close to my heart, since it allowed me to combine so many of the legends about early voyages to Norombega with one of Lady Appleton's adventures. Some critics have also expressed the opinion that there was too much in this book about the personal lives of the characters and not enough mystery. Perhaps these two elements were not as evenly balanced as in other books in the series, but I don't think I was too far off the norm. I always deal with a "personal issues" subplot, usually involving a romance between two characters. In this case it was the relationship between Eleanor and Walter, who just happened to already be married. The Face Down books are a cozy historical mystery series. Most readers of such books are interested in the personal lives of continuing characters and expect story arcs that go from book to book to have to the loose ends tied up at some point.

Okay, enough said. Read the book and decide for yourself. Read the Author's Note at the end, too.

Bloopers in Murders and Other Confusions

A thank you goes to another reader for noticing that I wrote Gloucester when I meant Glastonbury on p. 149 of this collection of short stories. It's in "Lady Appleton and the Bristol Crystals" which takes place in Glastonbury and the Mendip Hills but goes nowhere near Gloucester.

Bloopers in Face Down Below the Banqueting House

Very sharp-eyed readers may have noticed, although no one has written to say so, that there is no reference in this one to the "attic dormitory" mentioned in Book One. What can I say? After visiting so many real manor houses in England I changed the design of Leigh Abbey. And, truthfully, I forgot all about Jennet's reference to this as the place where she slept with the other maids.

Bloopers in Face Down Beside St. Anne's Well

When I revise, I often add more historical details to the story. In this case, what I added contradicted what I'd already set up and I never caught it in any of my read throughs or proofreading. My bad, and Face Down fan Lin Jenkins caught me on it. This is from her email: "At the end of Chapter 15, Will produces the note that he thought was from Rosamund, described as a page torn from a commonplace book. Such books were around at the end of the 16th century and were full of blank pages, and I suppose a dastardly villain wouldn't mind ripping out a page! They were printed on cheap paper and you describe the page as "paper" both on that page (102) and again at the top of 107 when it is missing. But in the next paragraph on 107, you describe it as parchment, and mention in an aside how parchment was often scraped and re-used. True, but paper wasn't. The cheap paper used in commonplace books, which was also very soft because of its high linen rag content, would have just shredded. Parchment, on the other hand, was made from animal hide, was much tougher, and so was often used several times over. But it wasn't bound in commonplace books---and if it had been, our villain would have had a heck of a time ripping a page out for a message!"

Miscellaneous Bloopers

the current in the river in Winter Tapestry~I have a character trying to swim after a barge. According to someone who has actually visited Strasbourg, if he'd tried it at that particular spot, he'd have drowned.

the presence of pears and perry in Lancashire in Unquiet Hearts~This is pretty far north to be growing pears, at least in the 16th century. A few anachronistic words also crept into this book, although none, I hope, that will pull the reader out of the story.

I have floor to ceiling bookcases in The Green Rose~While there were certainly shelves upon which books were stored, the bookcase as we know it was not yet in use.

the calico cat in Hearth, Home and Hope~Without thinking, I made a neighbor's cat, a calico, a male named Theodore. I got a letter from a fan about this, telling me there are no male calico cats. Well, in fact, there are. They're rare (which is why they're known as "money cats" here in Maine) but they do exist. In fact, one won first place in a cat show back at the turn of the century. If I'd been thinking, I'd have avoided controversy, however, and said the cat was another Maine Coon. In the e-book version of this novel, retitled The Rapunzel Trap Theodore is buff-colored.

the Pulitzer building in Making Headlines: A Biography of Nellie Bly~I repeated Nellie Bly's story of getting a job at the New York World without checking my facts. The "gold-domed" Pulitzer Building was still under construction at the time Nellie arrived in New York. No dome yet.

NEWSLETTER BLOOPERS

I recently ended up having a newsletter contest to "find the typo" because in proofreading the pages I'd already printed I discovered an error. I'd meant to type diarist and ended up with dairist. However, as fan response quickly proved, I am an even worse typist than I imagined. In addition, readers found two other typos, one redundant phrase, one case of incorrect usage and an out-and-out misspelling! Ouch! click on the quill to connect with excerpts from past copies of Face Down Update (corrected versions!):

Anachronisms--or are they?

I use the term "study" for a room that really would have been called a "closet." This seemed less confusing somehow.

I use the word "solar" to mean a lady's withdrawing room, even though the term more properly belongs to the middle ages. A copy editor objected to this and, indeed, John Schofield in Medieval London Houses (1994) says that this term for a private room on an upper floor "had largely died out by 1400," replaced by the word chamber. But just as the term "parlor" is Victorian and we no longer put them in our houses, we do, on occasion, still use the word as an alternative for a living room. At least folks here in Maine do! I believe, especially in an older house, there would still have been a room referred to as a solar.

Click here to go to corrections and additions to Wives and Daughters: The Women of 16th Century England (1984)

© 2008 Kathy Lynn Emerson. All rights reserved.
Last updated 2/2/08