The Darkening Globe locations with Naomi Kelsey

On location with The Darkening Globe

Welcome Naomi Kelsey to The BookTrail today. Talking about globes and maps….

I’ve always been fascinated by maps – whether floorplans of Agatha Christie’s country houses, or the elaborate realms of Middle Earth. Real world maps are no less intriguing. For historical novelists, maps are so much more than directions – they’re how the people of the past understood their world.

Naomi Kelsey

My gothic Elizabethan thriller, THE DARKENING GLOBE, was inspired by a map: that adorning the Molyneux Globe.

Molyneux Globe (c) Wikipedia

Location map for The Darkening Globe

Now in the collection of Petworth House in Sussex, Emery Molyneux’s globes were presented to Queen Elizabeth I in 1597. In a masterful marketing stroke, they came in pairs: terrestrial, and celestial. The latter is an elaborate confection of gods and goddesses cavorting among constellations. Meanwhile, the terrestrial globe doesn’t just contain borders, rivers, mountain ranges, but illustrations – ships, mermaids, sea monsters. “HERE BE DRAGONS!” it seems to pronounce. Well, there might not be dragons in THE DARKENING GLOBE, but there are certainly monsters – including the globe itself.

Petworth House in Sussex

Location map for The Darkening Globe

The explorers of the so-called Golden Age are well-known. Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins – knights gallivanting off to the “New World”, with a bit of royally-condoned piracy on the way, and some highly questionable colonising of already-occupied lands. But far less is known about their wives. Were they content to raise children and run households while their husbands sailed off to unknown lands for months on end, possibly never to return? How did they feel when their husbands came home and took back their roles as heads of the households they were so rarely in?

Location map for The Darkening Globe

Although my central characters, Beatrice and Hugh Radclyffe, are fictional, I couldn’t resist including real historical figures in THE DARKENING GLOBE. Raleigh, Bess Throckmorton, the Earl of Essex, and his sister Penelope Rich all play vital roles. As wealthy nobles, they owned many houses – but it’s their riverside mansions along the Thames that captured my attention.

Somerset House, of Courtauld Institute

Location map for The Darkening Globe

There was a whole row of these mansions – Essex, Arundel, Somerset, the Savoy, Burghley, Bedford, Worcester, Salisbury, Durham, York, Northumberland. Behind the elaborate exteriors and the vast gardens containing tennis courts, bowling alleys, and boathouses, treason was more often brewing than not. None survive today, although Somerset House, of Courtauld Institute and ice-skating fame, is built on the site of Edward Seymour’s home, where a young Princess Elizabeth lived briefly.

Like many of these riverside mansions, Seymour’s transferred ownership when he met a sticky end at the headsman’s axe. The climactic siege that thwarted the Earl of Essex’s fateful rebellion of 1601 was his riverside mansion. If you walk along the Embankment today, you’ll be following in the footsteps of spies, traitors, and double agents – an intriguing thought!

Embankment

Location map for The Darkening Globe

My heroine, Beatrice, dwells upriver in Chelsea. In Henry VIII’s reign, this area was on the up: Thomas More kept a vast menagerie in his mansion, and also allegedly tortured heretics there. Katherine Parr resided in Chelsea after the king’s death. However, Elizabeth preferred Whitehall and Greenwich, so Chelsea became less fashionable. In my novel, this symbolises Beatrice’s isolation, and the ostracism she, as a mere merchant’s daughter, faces from the likes of Lady Penelope Rich. For the interiors, I drew on Hardwick Hall for inspiration: this Derbyshire mansion’s long gallery is the setting I visualised for the room where the globe lurks…

Hardwick Hall

Location map for The Darkening Globe

The Thames was a hub of trade in Elizabethan London, thronged with ships and wherries. But it was very different then: only one bridge spanned the river, and the rapids beneath it were treacherous. Only foolhardy youths attempted to ‘shoot’ these, and mudlarks today may well discover the remnants of these youths’ pockets, or their wrecked wherries.

The Thames

Location map for The Darkening Globe

I couldn’t resist including a frozen River Thames in my novel: the idea of frost fairs sparkling beneath London Bridge is so outlandish to modern minds. When the river freezes in THE DARKENING GLOBE, it traps Beatrice in her home – a place that is no longer safe, thanks to the turning globe…

Keep that globe spinning….erm…

BookTrail Boarding Pass: The Darkening Globe

Twitter: @naomikelsey_